Moral equivalence has become a moral atrocity

By CAROLINE B. GLICK 
http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/
July 4, 2016

Hallel Yaffa Ariel (L) was killed in a terrorist stabbing in Kiryat Arba, June 30, 2016. (photo credit: Courtesy)

We have reached the point where moral equivalence has become a moral atrocity.

The smart set in the West has insisted for over a generation that Israel and the Palestinians are morally equal. There are extremists, on both sides, they say. Both sides are responsible for the absence of peace.

The first serious outcry against this lie came immediately after the Palestinians began their terrorist war against Israel in September 2000. That war, incited, directed, funded, commanded and celebrated by Yassir Arafat and his henchmen, including his successor Mahmoud Abbas, began two months after Arafat overturned the table at Camp David in response to then prime minister Ehud Barak’s offer to withdraw from 95 percent of Judea and Samaria, all of Gaza and half of Jerusalem to enable the establishment of an independent state of Palestine in the areas.

The areas in question, Barak said, would be handed over to the PLO Jew free. The hundreds of thousands of Jews living in the areas set to become Palestine, would be forcefully evicted from their homes to ensure that the delicate, sensitive Palestinians, wouldn’t be troubled by the Jews with their “dirty feet,” in the words of Abbas.

That, of course, wasn’t enough for Arafat. And it was insufficient not because Barak failed to give him what he demanded. It was insufficient because his demands were insatiable. Arafat was never interested in peace.

As his deputy Faisal Husseini said at the time, the peace process was a “Trojan Horse.” 

Its purpose was to get the PLO bases of operation inside of Israeli territory in order to expand its ability to destroy the Jewish state. This is the reason that despite the fact that the international community has given them more financial assistance than any other people in the history of humanity, the Palestinians have not built a society. They have received tens of billions of dollars in development aid and failed to develop an operating economy.

This failure isn’t due to incompetence or corruption.

It is simply that the Palestinians don’t want those things. They chose not to develop independent institutions.

They do not want to build a state. They have spent the money to transform Palestinian society into the most anti-Semitic society in the world where the vast majority of its people want to kill Jews and destroy Israel. They have transformed Palestinian society into a place where Jews have no right to live – not because of some sort of occupation, but because they are Jews, and Jews, they have been indoctrinated to believe, are an abomination.

Anyone with eyes in his head can see this. It has been obvious for 16 years.

The smart set’s failure to note reality back in September 2000 marked the beginning of its descent into moral oblivion.

Its first step down that road was when its members coined the pernicious term, “cycle of violence.”

“Cycle of violence,” means that there is no moral distinction between a murderer and a policeman, between a society geared toward annihilating its victim and its victim’s actions to prevent that from happening.

The latest consequence of this moral depravity came on Friday with the publication of the so-called Middle East Quartet’s much awaited report that is supposed to show us the way to peace. That report – like its predecessors insisted that a Jewish “settler” is the moral equivalence of a Palestinian murderer.

The day before the report was released, we saw – yet again – the evil empowering nature of that claim.

Thursday morning, a hate-drenched, demonic Palestinian murderer took a knife and stole into the town of Kiryat Arba – a “settlement.”

He broke into the Ariel family’s home. He walked into their children’s bedroom. He found 13 year old Hallel Yaffa asleep in her bed.

He stabbed her repeatedly. When there was no place left to stab her in her face and chest, he turned her over and continued stabbing her in the back.

The murderer set off the sensors in Kiryat Arba’s security fence when he traversed it. It took but three minutes for the community’s security team to get to the house. They shot and killed the Palestinian assailant and so prevented him from moving to the adjacent high school and transforming his slaughter into a massacre.

But Hallel was already gone.

The next day, the Mark family was driving along Highway 60. A Palestinian car carrying murderers drove up beside them and opened fire on Michael Mark, his wife Chavi and their children. Mark was murdered, his wife and daughter seriously hurt and his son was wounded as the car flipped over and over, after Mark lost control of the wheel.

On cue, the Palestinians began celebrating the murders and the murderers. The PLO governor of Hebron paid a condolence call at the home of Hallel’s killer.

The Palestinian media celebrated their crimes. And a new high quality animated film was released on Facebook directing viewers to murder MK Yehuda Glick. The film included driving directions to Otniel, and images of terrorists burrowing under the security fence to enter the community and avoid detection.

Amidst all of this, the Quartet released its report.

And although the report struck the tone of neutrality – both sides need to do this and both sides need to do that, the fact is that after 16 years of Palestinian atrocities against Israelis, the Quartet’s determination that they are the same is a moral atrocity.

The Quartet recommends that both sides “de-escalate tensions.” But of course, only the Palestinians are escalating tensions.

Both sides, the wise men tell us, “should take all necessary steps to prevent violence and protect the lives and property of all civilians.”

But only one side is fomenting violence and deliberately targeting civilians.

Both sides, the Quartet says, should “exercise restraint and refrain from provocative actions and rhetoric.”

But only one side is engaging in provocative actions and rhetoric, unless the Quartet says that Israel responding angrily to the slaughter of its children and families is acting provocatively – which of course is what they are implying here.

And it gets worse. The report includes an empty call for the Palestinians “to act decisively and take all steps within its capacity to cease incitement to violence and strengthen ongoing efforts to combat terrorism, including by clearly condemning all acts of terrorism.”

The Palestinians of course, will do no such thing.

Abbas is the engine of the incitement and the violence.

He always has been. And the fact that he’s been able to get away with this since taking over from Arafat 12 years ago shows that the moral miasma of the West has become a danger to world peace.

After pretending that the people who transformed Palestinian society into the hate-filled, murder applauding mob it has become are interested in doing the opposite, the Quartet turned its guns on Israel.

Israel needs to deny Jewish property rights. Israel needs to expand the powers of the Palestinian death cult into Area C – where all the Israeli communities are located and but two percent of the Palestinians live.

Israel needs to expand its security cooperation with Abbas’s US-trained militias that have been marinated in the same Jew hatred as the rest of the Palestinians, and have often propagated.

Sunday afternoon, hundreds of people stood silently outside the Ariel home in Kiryat Arba, waiting to enter the modest home to console the family. The landscape outside is pastoral.

The Ariels live off of their vineyard and the wine they produce.

Surrounded by the vines, and the hills, the Ariel’s homestead looks like the sort of place where nothing bad can happen. A quiet family of profound faith, the Ariels were just going about their quiet lives, raising their daughters, tending to their vines when the evil beyond their gate entered their home and struck.

That is the difference between the two sides. One wishes to tend his vineyard. The other wishes to destroy it.

It is black and white. It is a clear distinction.

The international community’s pernicious refusal to recognize this basic fact, after so many years, is a major reason that there is no peace, and there is so much bloodshed

General Washington’s Standard

‘To which the wise and honest can repair’

By Kevin D. Williamson — July 3, 2016

http://www.nationalreview.com/

Does not, then, the Almighty clearly impress an awe of the persons and authority of Kings upon the minds of their subjects, hereby proving Government of Divine origin?” So asked the Reverend J. R. Walsh in a pamphlet printed in 1829. “For, otherwise, by what principle could any one mortal command subjection from so many millions of fellow creatures”?

That was a question very much upon the mind of King George IV, whose coronation provided the inspiration for the Reverend Walsh’s essay: That king’s father, George III, had been treated with a notable lack of awe by his American subjects, who gave him the shoe and set up their own republic, without any king at all. This experiment in awelessness, all the smart people of the late 18th century assured one another, was doomed to failure: Awelessness was next to lawlessness, they believed, and a people without a king to tell them how to behave or a king’s church to tell them why to behave were doomed to anarchy.

Here’s to 240 years of glorious anarchy.

Awe was very much on the minds of those early republicans. George Washington, whose name appears frequently in sentences containing the word “awe,” wrote that one of the purposes of our northern fortifications was to “awe the Indians.” Thomas Paine, who had no great awe of the state, wrote of the constitutional right to keep and bear arms: “Arms discourage and keep the invader and plunderer in awe, and preserve order in the world as well as property.” You’ll find a man’s heart where you find his awe: Walter Bagehot, founder of (that other) National Review and later editor of The Economist, lived to learn: “A schoolmaster should have an atmosphere of awe,” he wrote, “and walk wonderingly, as if he was amazed at being himself.” 

Edmund Burke believed that even when addressing the defects of the state, we should treat it “with pious awe and trembling solicitude,” hence his hesitancy about the American Revolution and his detestation of the French one. The libertarian theorist Murray Rothbard would later argue the opposite, that failed revolutions are valuable to the extent that they “decrease the awe in which the constituted authority is held by the populace, and in that way will increase the chance of a later revolt against tyranny.”

When the Reverend Walsh connected awe with divinity in government, he had in mind Paul’s letter to the Romans: “Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God. Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God: and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation.” Burke had in mind a kind of holy terror, too, though one that less closely resembled the apostle’s fear of the Almighty than it did Thomas Hobbes’s fear of bellum omnium contra omnes. But in many ways those come down to the same thing: Without someone to keep them in line — to keep them in awe — what’s to keep the people from running amok?

The American Founders did not contemplate a world without awe of government, but they did intuit that a free, self-governing, democratic republic could get by with a good deal less of it. George Washington famously rejected an offer to make him king and thought that calling the president “Your Excellency” might be a bit much, too. We hear a great deal now about the “dignity of the office” and the need to have “respect for the presidency,” if not for the president himself, but nobody ever really says why. Why should we be awed at the chief bureaucrat of the federal administrative apparatus? Why should we hold in awe our employee? “Only I can fix” is Donald Trump’s illiterate shorthand for the idea that presidents are, like kings, products of divine election. George Washington never said anything like that; he didn’t need to convince anybody that he was the man for the job, and he knew that the job was governing, not ruling.

There is something in us, something ugly and atavistic, that loves a king. Some unhappy people — and they are legion — long for a strong man before whom they can abase themselves, and thereby be relieved of the stress and terror of being responsible for their own lives. Unhappy with the state of your personal finances? Let the Great Father take care of it for you. Burke would have recognized what was going on right now in American politics. He argued that the American colonists had legitimate grievances but that those were married to a “dangerous spirit of disquisition, not in the coolness of philosophic inquiry, but inflamed with all the passions of a haughty, resentful people, who thought themselves deeply injured, and that they were contending for everything that was valuable in the world.”

And they didn’t even have cable news.

It is pleasing and strange that on this Independence Day weekend we Americans are thinking in a special way about our British cousins, who, all these years after their damned stupid tea taxes and quartering troops in our houses, have gotten around to declaring their own independence, not from the Crown (which is now only a kind of Easter bonnet) but from the European Union, which began as a trading bloc and metastasized into another version of the cracked dream of a unitary European state, this one headquartered in Brussels rather than in Paris or Berlin. The European Union has all the usual trappings of awe: a banner, an anthem (from Beethoven’s Ninth), titles, etc. The great political genius of Nigel Farage and his hectoring, insulting EU speeches was his simple refusal to be awed by the European authorities. Perhaps the French, who were on the right side of the American Revolution, will join in next year, and remember who it was they sent us a statue of.

We’ve done pretty well without an overabundance of awe: saved the world from awe-addled Germans — twice — and then went to the moon just to show that we could. Some Rotarians a few years back got together for lunch and decided that what they should do with their spare time is wipe out polio: They’re pretty close. We still have too much awe of the state for my taste, but nobody’s perfect.

When he was named president of the Constitutional Convention, George Washington didn’t set his sights on inspiring awe or on any exercise in political and philosophical grandiosity intended to “command subjection,” in the Reverend Walsh’s words, but instead suggested a much more modest target: “Let us raise a standard to which the wise and honest can repair.”

Good advice then. Good advice now.

— Kevin D. Williamson is the roving correspondent at National Review.

OUR ETERNAL WAR FOR INDEPENDENCE

We are a nation of rebels.

Daniel Greenfield

http://www.frontpagemag.com/

July 4, 2016

How will you celebrate the Fourth of July?

With fireworks and parades, hamburgers and hot dogs, sweating bands playing Sousa marches and parades down Main Street? Will you remember the men who fell in the first war and all the following wars that were fought to preserve our political and personal independence from foreign and domestic tyrannies? Will you consider what you might have done in the days when revolution was in the air?

Those are all good things. They remind us to celebrate and what it is we are celebrating.

I sat on the warm grass beneath the shade of a spreading fig tree listening to a band run through a repertoire of everything from Yankee Doodle Dandy to Over There. An elderly disabled veteran with a flag listened intently to the orchestra and a small child clambered awkwardly up a tree as his father worriedly urged him to climb down. It could have been a scene from any century. The Fourth is timeless.

It is timeless because it is still going on. The War of Independence went on underneath that fig tree, it continues on in your town, your city and in your community on this day and on every day.

Independence Day is a commemoration, but it is not a mere commemoration. The struggle is not over.

America became America out of a hatred of powerful central government. The War of Independence was not a battle between two countries. America’s Founding Fathers started out as Englishmen who wanted to preserve their rights from a distant and out of touch government.

The War of Independence was a civil war between those who wanted a strong central government and those who wanted to govern themselves. The fundamental breach between these two worldviews led to the creation of an independent nation dedicated to the preservation of independence. This independence was not mere political independence. It was personal independence.

America as a separate nation did not yet exist. Even the Constitution that embodies its purpose was a decade, a war, a failed experiment in government and many bitter debates away. 

Nations come and go. Political unions are created and dissolved. There are nations today named Egypt and Greece that have little in common with the historical entities that once bore those names. The Declaration to which those remarkable men pledged their lives, fortunes and sacred honor was not for a flag, which then still bore the Union Jack, or for the invention of yet another administrative body, but for the rights of peoples, nations and individuals to be free to exercise their personal and political rights.

The war for these things was fought, but it has not ended. It began then, but it continues today.

It is not a war against King George III. It is the ongoing struggle between the people and those who would govern them that is at the heart of our independence. 

There are two visions of how men are meant to live today, just as there were in 1776. Revolutions and wars may occasionally clarify these visions, but they do not permanently resolve them. New governments are quick to adopt old tyrannies. Freedom is a popular rallying cry for rebels. But few rebels wish to be rebelled against. That is what made America unique. That is what still does.

We were not meant to be a society of sinecures for public servants. We did not come into being to be ruled by bureaucrats. Our birth of freedom was not meant to give way to the repression of a vast incomprehensible body of regulations administered by an elite political class in Washington D.C.

Americans are rebels. And if we are not rebels, then we are not Americans.

We are not a nation founded by men and women who followed the rules. It is not our capacity for obedience that makes us true Americans, but our capacity for disobedience. 

The Declaration of Independence was a document of rebellion by a band of rebels. “Damned rebels” as the big government monarchists saw them. The men who signed it pledged their lives because they expected to be executed for treason. The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were acts of rebellion against the entire order across what was then seen as the civilized world.

American greatness came about because we were willing to break the rules. It was only when we began following the rules, when as a nation we made the maintenance of the international order into our notion of the greatest good and when as individuals we accepted the endless expansion of government as a national ideal that we ceased to be great.  

When we think of great Americans, from Thomas Jefferson to the Wright Brothers, from Andrew Jackson to Daniel Boone, from Theodore Roosevelt to today’s true patriots, we think of “damned rebels” who broke the rules, who did what should have been impossible and thumbed their noses at the establishments of the day. American greatness is embodied in individual initiative. That is why the Declaration of Independence places at the center of its striving, Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.

It was for these individualistic ends of freedom that government had to be derived from the consent of the governed, that a war was fought that changed the world and it is these ends that we must celebrate.

Rebellion does not always mean muskets and cannon. Long before the War of Independence, we had become a nation of rebels who explored the wild realms of forests and streams, who forged cities out of savage lands, who argued philosophy and sought a higher purpose for their strivings, who refused to bow to their betters out of an accident of birth. And at our best, we are still rebels today.

When we dissent from the system, we rebel. When we refuse to conform, when we think differently, when we choose to live our own lives instead of living according to the dictates of our political rulers and pop culture arbiters, then we are celebrating the spirit of freedom that animates the Fourth.

When we defy the government, when we speak out against Obama and the rest of our privileged ruling class, when we demand the right to govern ourselves, when we fight to hold government accountable, when we question what we are told and the need to be told anything at all, then we are keeping that old spirit of rebellion alive. We are still fighting for our independence from government every day and every year that we choose to live as free people. That is the glorious burden of freedom. 

Freedom is not handed to us. It is not secured for us by politicians. Like the Founding Fathers, we are made free by our fight for freedom. Preserving their legacy cannot be meaningfully recreated through any means other than the committed struggle for the same ideals.

This Fourth of July, celebrate by continuing to be a rebel, question and challenge the left’s worship of government. And don’t stop on the Fifth or in July. Or in any year or any decade or any century. 

We here at the David Horowitz Freedom Center and at Front Page Magazine don’t. 

Our family of writers, activists and commentators, and that includes you, inspired by David’s courageous spirit continue to question authority, challenge government and fight for the independence of the individual against the tyrannies of the radical left and Islamic theocracy, every day, week and month of the year. 

And we welcome you to our revolution.

 Tags: 4th of July, America, Independence Day

Today's Tune: Dave Alvin - Fourth of July (Live From Austin TX)

Elie Wiesel, Auschwitz Survivor and Nobel Peace Prize Winner, Dies at 87

By JOSEPH BERGER
http://www.nytimes.com/
July 2, 2016


Neal Boenzi/The New York Times

Elie Wiesel, the Auschwitz survivor who became an eloquent witness for the six million Jews slaughtered in World War II and who, more than anyone else, seared the memory of the Holocaust on the world’s conscience, died on Saturday at his home in Manhattan. He was 87.

Menachem Rosensaft, a longtime friend and the founding chairman of the International Network of Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, confirmed the death in a phone call.

Mr. Wiesel was the author of several dozen books and was a charismatic lecturer and humanities professor. In 1986, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. But he was defined not so much by the work he did as by the gaping void he filled. In the aftermath of the Germans’ systematic massacre of Jews, no voice had emerged to drive home the enormity of what had happened and how it had changed mankind’s conception of itself and of God. For almost two decades, the traumatized survivors — and American Jews, guilt-ridden that they had not done more to rescue their brethren — seemed frozen in silence.

But by the sheer force of his personality and his gift for the haunting phrase, Mr. Wiesel, who had been liberated from Buchenwald as a 16-year-old with the indelible tattoo A-7713 on his arm, gradually exhumed the Holocaust from the burial ground of the history books.

It was this speaking out against forgetfulness and violence that the Nobel committee recognized when it awarded him the peace prize in 1986.

“Wiesel is a messenger to mankind,” the Nobel citation said. “His message is one of peace, atonement and human dignity. His belief that the forces fighting evil in the world can be victorious is a hard-won belief.”

Mr. Wiesel first gained attention in 1960 with the English translation of “Night,” his autobiographical account of the horrors he witnessed in the camps as a teenage boy. He wrote of how he had been plagued by guilt for having survived while millions died, and tormented by doubts about a God who would allow such slaughter.

“Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed,” Mr. Wiesel wrote. “Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky. Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever. Never shall I forget the nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live. Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God himself. Never.”

Mr. Wiesel went on to write novels, books of essays and reportage, two plays and even two cantatas. While many of his books were nominally about topics like Soviet Jews or Hasidic masters, they all dealt with profound questions resonating out of the Holocaust: What is the sense of living in a universe that tolerates unimaginable cruelty? How could the world have been mute? How can one go on believing? Mr. Wiesel asked the questions in spare prose and without raising his voice; he rarely offered answers.

“If I survived, it must be for some reason,” he told Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times in an interview in 1981. “I must do something with my life. It is too serious to play games with anymore, because in my place, someone else could have been saved. And so I speak for that person. On the other hand, I know I cannot.”

There may have been better chroniclers who evoked the hellish minutiae of the German death machine. There were arguably more illuminating philosophers. But no single figure was able to combine Mr. Wiesel’s moral urgency with his magnetism, which emanated from his deeply lined face and eyes as unrelievable melancholy.

“He has the look of Lazarus about him,” the Roman Catholic writer François Mauriac wrote of Mr. Wiesel, a friend.

President Obama, who visited the site of the Buchenwald concentration camp with Mr. Wiesel in 2009, called him a “living memorial.”

“He raised his voice, not just against anti-Semitism, but against hatred, bigotry and intolerance in all its forms,” the president said Saturday in a statement. “He implored each of us, as nations and as human beings, to do the same, to see ourselves in each other and to make real that pledge of ‘never again.’”

For much of his life, Mr. Wiesel grappled with what he called his “dialectical conflict”: the need to recount what he had seen and the futility of explaining an event that defied reason and imagination. In his Nobel speech, he said that what he had done with his life was to try “to keep memory alive” and “to fight those who would forget.” “Because if we forget, we are guilty, we are accomplices,” he said.

A year earlier, on April 19, 1985, Mr. Wiesel stirred deep emotions when, at a White House ceremony at which he accepted the Congressional Gold Medal of Achievement, he tried to dissuade President Ronald Reagan from taking time from a planned trip to West Germany to visit a military cemetery there, in Bitburg, where members of Hitler’s elite Waffen SS were buried.

“That place, Mr. President, is not your place,” he said. “Your place is with victims of the SS.”

Mr. Reagan, amid much criticism, went ahead and laid a wreath at Bitburg. Paradoxically, the confrontation led to Mr. Wiesel’s first postwar visit to Germany. He said afterward that he had been extremely moved by the young German students he met and the depth of their painful search for an understanding of their country’s past. He urged reconciliation.

“Has Germany ever asked us to forgive?” Mr. Wiesel asked. “To my knowledge, no such plea was ever made. With whom am I to speak about forgiveness, I, who don’t believe in collective guilt. Who am I to believe in collective innocence?”

Mr. Wiesel had a leading role in the creation of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, serving as chairman of the commission that united rival survivor groups to raise funds for a permanent structure. The museum became one of Washington’s most powerful attractions.

“He was a singular moral voice,” said Sara J. Bloomfield, the museum’s director. “And he brought a kind of moral and intellectual leadership and eloquence, not only to the memory of the Holocaust, but to the lessons of the Holocaust, that was just incomparable. There is nothing that can replace the survivor voice — that power, that authenticity.”

Denouncing Persecution

In his 1966 book, “The Jews of Silence: A Personal Report on Soviet Jewry,” Mr. Wiesel called attention to Jews who were being persecuted for their religion and yet barred from emigrating. “What torments me most is not the Jews of silence I met in Russia, but the silence of the Jews I live among today,” he said. His efforts helped ease emigration restrictions.

Mr. Wiesel condemned the massacres in Bosnia in the mid-1990s — “If this is Auschwitz again, we must mobilize the whole world,” he said — and denounced others in Cambodia, Rwanda and the Darfur region of Sudan. He condemned the burnings of black churches in the United States and spoke out on behalf of the blacks of South Africa and the tortured political prisoners of Latin America.

Yet the plight of Jews was foremost. In 2013, when the United States was in talks with Iran about limiting that country’s nuclear weapons capability, Mr. Wiesel took out a full-page advertisement in The Times urging Mr. Obama to insist on a “total dismantling of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure” and its “repudiation of genocidal intent against Israel.”

Central to Mr. Wiesel’s work was reconciling the concept of a benevolent God with the evil of the Holocaust. “Usually we say, ‘God is right,’ or ‘God is just’ — even during the Crusades we said that,” he once observed. “But how can you say that now, with one million children dead?”

Still, he never abandoned faith; indeed, he became more devout as the years passed, praying near his home or in Brooklyn’s Hasidic synagogues. On the airplane that was to take him to an Israel darkened by the Arab-Israeli war in 1973, he sat shoeless with a friend, and together they hummed Hasidic melodies.

“If I have problems with God, why should I blame the Sabbath?” he once said.

Mr. Wiesel had his detractors. The literary critic Alfred Kazin wondered whether he had embellished some stories, and questions were raised about whether “Night” was a memoir or a novel, as it was sometimes classified on high school reading lists.

Mr. Wiesel blazed a trail that produced libraries of Holocaust literature and countless film and television dramatizations. While some of this work was enduring, he denounced much of it as “trivialization.”

What gave him his moral authority in particular was that Mr. Wiesel, as a pious Torah student, had lived the hell of Auschwitz in his flesh.

Eliezer Wiesel was born on Sept. 30, 1928, in the small city of Sighet, in the Carpathian Mountains near the Ukrainian border in what was then Romania. His father, Shlomo, was a Yiddish-speaking shopkeeper worldly enough to encourage his son to learn modern Hebrew and introduce him to the works of Freud. Later in life, Mr. Wiesel was able to describe his father in less saintly terms, as a preoccupied man he rarely saw until they were thrown together in Auschwitz. His mother, the former Sarah Feig, and his maternal grandfather, Dodye Feig, a Viznitz Hasid, filled his imagination with mystical tales of Hasidic masters.

He grew up with his three sisters, Hilda, Batya and Tzipora, in a setting reminiscent of Sholom Aleichem’s stories. “You went out on the street on Saturday and felt Shabbat in the air,” he wrote of his community of 15,000 Jews. But his idyllic childhood was shattered in the spring of 1944 when the Nazis marched into Hungary. With Allied troops fast approaching, many of Sighet’s Jews convinced themselves that they might be spared. But the city’s Jews were swiftly confined to two ghettos and then assembled for deportation.

“One by one, they passed in front of me,” he wrote in “Night,” “teachers, friends, others, all those I had been afraid of, all those I could have laughed at, all those I had lived with over the years. They went by, fallen, dragging their packs, dragging their lives, deserting their homes, the years of their childhood, cringing like beaten dogs.”

“Night” recounted a journey of several days spent in an airless cattle car before the narrator and his family arrived in a place they had never heard of: Auschwitz. Mr. Wiesel recalled how the smokestacks filled the air with the stench of burning flesh, how babies were burned in a pit, and how a monocled Dr. Josef Mengele decided, with a wave of a bandleader’s baton, who would live and who would die. Mr. Wiesel watched his mother and his sister Tzipora walk off to the right, his mother protectively stroking Tzipora’s hair.

“I did not know that in that place, at that moment, I was parting from my mother and Tzipora forever,” he wrote.

In Auschwitz and in a nearby labor camp called Buna, where he worked loading stones onto railway cars, Mr. Wiesel turned feral under the pressures of starvation, cold and daily atrocities. “Night” recounts how he became so obsessed with getting his plate of soup and crust of bread that he watched guards beat his father with an iron bar while he had “not flickered an eyelid” to help.

When Buna was evacuated as the Russians approached, its prisoners were forced to run for miles through high snow. Those who stumbled were crushed in the stampede. After the prisoners were taken by train to another camp, Buchenwald, Mr. Wiesel watched his father succumb to dysentery and starvation and shamefully confessed that he had wished to be relieved of the burden of sustaining him. When his father’s body was taken away on Jan. 29, 1945, he could not weep.

“I had no more tears,” he wrote.

On April 11, after eating nothing for six days, Mr. Wiesel was among those liberated by the United States Third Army. Years later, he identified himself in a famous photograph among the skeletal men lying supine in a Buchenwald barracks.

Only after the war did he learn that his two elder sisters had not perished.

A Postwar Mission

In the days after Buchenwald’s liberation, he decided that he had survived to bear witness, but vowed that he would not speak or write of what he had seen for 10 years. “I didn’t want to use the wrong words,” he once explained.

He was placed on a train of 400 orphans that was diverted to France, and he was assigned to a home in Normandy under the care of a Jewish organization. There he mastered French by reading the classics, and in 1948 he enrolled in the Sorbonne. He supported himself as a tutor, a Hebrew teacher and a translator and began writing for the French newspaper L’Arche.

In 1948, L’Arche sent him to Israel to report on that newly founded state. He became the Paris correspondent for the daily Yediot Ahronot as well, and in that role he interviewed Mr. Mauriac, who encouraged him to write about his war experiences. In 1956 he produced an 800-page memoir in Yiddish. Pared to 127 pages and translated into French, it then appeared as “La Nuit.” It took more than a year to find an American publisher, Hill & Wang, which offered him an advance of just $100.

Though well reviewed, the book sold only 1,046 copies in the first 18 months. “The Holocaust was not something people wanted to know about in those days,” Mr. Wiesel told Time magazine in 1985.

The mood shifted after Adolf Eichmann was captured in Argentina by Israel in 1960 and the wider world, in watching his televised trial in Jerusalem, began to grasp anew the enormity of the German crimes. Mr. Wiesel began speaking more widely, and as his popularity grew, he came to personify the Holocaust survivor.

“Night” went on to sell more than 10 million copies, three million of them after Oprah Winfrey picked it for her book club in 2006 and traveled with Mr. Wiesel to Auschwitz.

Mr. Wiesel wrote an average of a book a year, 60 books by his own count in 2015.

Many of his books were translated from French by his Vienna-born wife, Marion Erster Rose, who survived the war hidden in Vichy, France. They married in Jerusalem in 1969, when Mr. Wiesel was 40, and they had one son, Shlomo Elisha. They survive him, as do a stepdaughter, Jennifer Rose, and two grandchildren.

For Mr. Wiesel, fame did not erase the scars left by the Holocaust — the nightmares, the perpetual insecurity, the inability to laugh deeply. “I live in constant fear,” he said in 1983. In 2007, a 22-year-old man who called Mr. Wiesel’s account of the Holocaust fictitious pulled him out of a hotel elevator in San Francisco and attacked him. (The man was convicted of assault.)

From 1972 to 1976, Mr. Wiesel was a professor of Judaic studies at City College, where many of his students were children of survivors. In 1976 he was appointed the Andrew W. Mellon professor in the humanities at Boston University, and that job became his institutional anchor.

In an effort to promote understanding between conflicting ethnic groups, Mr. Wiesel also started the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity. Through a synagogue acquaintance of Mr. Wiesel’s, it invested its endowment with the money manager Bernard L. Madoff, and his decades-long Ponzi scheme, revealed in 2008, cost the foundation $15 million. Mr. Wiesel and his wife lost millions of dollars in personal savings as well.

Mr. Wiesel lived long enough to achieve a particular satisfying redemption. In 2002, he dedicated a museum in his hometown, Sighet, in the very house from which he and his family had been deported to Auschwitz. With uncommon emotion, he told the young Romanians in the crowd, “When you grow up, tell your children that you have seen a Jew in Sighet telling his story.”

Katie Rogers, Eli Rosenberg and Daniel E. Slotnik contributed reporting.

'Conscience of the World' Elie Wiesel Passes Away at 87

BY BRIDGET JOHNSON

https://pjmedia.com

July 2, 2016

Image Credit : http://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/

Elie Wiesel, who survived the horrors of the Holocaust and became a champion for human rights and the state of Israel, died today at age 87.

The Nobel Peace Prize recipient wrote in his Holocaust memoir Night that “to forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time.” The book has been translated into more than 30 languages.

"Through his unforgettable books, moving words and personal example, Elie personified the triumph of the human spirit over the most unimaginable evil," Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a statement. "Out of the darkness of the Holocaust, Elie became a powerful force for light, truth and dignity."

"His life and work were a great blessing to the Jewish people, the Jewish state and to all humanity. I feel fortunate to have known him and to have learned from his prodigious wisdom... May the memory of Elie Wiesel, a towering spirit who taught us all to remember, be forever blessed."

Wiesel received the Congressional Gold Medal in 1984 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1992.

President Obama called Wiesel "one of the great moral voices of our time, and in many ways, the conscience of the world."

"Like millions of admirers, I first came to know Elie through his account of the horror he endured during the Holocaust simply because he was Jewish.  But I was also honored and deeply humbled to call him a dear friend. I'm especially grateful for all the moments we shared and our talks together, which ranged from the meaning of friendship to our shared commitment to the state of Israel," Obama said.

Wiesel was an open critic of Obama's Middle East policies. In February 2015, he implored Congress to not ditch Netanyahu's address about the dangers of the Iran nuclear deal. In March 2015, Wiesel appeared on Capitol Hill for a briefing urging that the nuclear deal not be approved.

"I learned to rely not on the promises of our friends but the threats of our enemies," Wiesel said. "When our enemies make threats, take them seriously... When evil begins its work don't give it another chance."

Obama noted that Wiesel "raised his voice not just against anti-Semitism, but against hatred, bigotry and intolerance in all its forms."

"We must never be bystanders to injustice or indifferent to suffering. Just imagine the peace and justice that would be possible in our world if we all lived a little more like Elie Wiesel," the president said. "...May God bless the memory of Elie Wiesel, and may his soul be bound up in the bond of eternal life."

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee remembered Wiesel as a "moral witness to evil and an eloquent spokesman for humanity who instructed us all about the profound meaning of the pledge 'never again.'"

"He was a powerful defender of Israel and a proponent of the humanitarian and democratic values that bind together the Jewish state and America," AIPAC said in a statement. "His wise voice will be deeply missed, and all that he taught us must never be forgotten. May his memory forever be a blessing."

In his 1986 Nobel acceptance speech, Wiesel stressed that he had "faith in God and even in His creation."

"Without it no action would be possible. And action is the only remedy to indifference: the most insidious danger of all," Wiesel said.

"...One person – a Raoul Wallenberg, an Albert Schweitzer, one person of integrity, can make a difference, a difference of life and death. As long as one dissident is in prison, our freedom will not be true. As long as one child is hungry, our lives will be filled with anguish and shame. What all these victims need above all is to know that they are not alone; that we are not forgetting them, that when their voices are stifled we shall lend them ours, that while their freedom depends on ours, the quality of our freedom depends on theirs."

Nobel Prize winner and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel dies at 87

By ELLI WOHLGELERNTER
http://www.jpost.com/
July 2, 2016




Elie Wiesel, the venerated Holocaust survivor, novelist, journalist, human rights activist and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, died yesterday in New York after a prolonged illness.

He was 87.

Called “the world’s leading spokesman on the Holocaust” by the Nobel committee, Wiesel dedicated his life to perpetuating the memory of the Holocaust and promoting Holocaust education, as well as “to combat[ ting] indifference, intolerance and injustice through international dialogue and youth-focused programs that promote acceptance, understanding and equality,” according to his foundation.

Wiesel said the fight against indifference and the concomitant attitude that “it’s no concern of mine” was a struggle for peace. “The opposite of love is not hate, but indifference,” he said. “To remain silent and indifferent is the greatest sin of all.”

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu released a statement last night saying Wiesel “gave expression to the victory of the human spirit over cruelty and evil through his extraordinary personality and his fascinating books. In the darkness of the Holocaust, in which our sisters and brothers were killed – six million – Elie Wiesel served as a ray of light and example of humanity who believed in the goodness in people.”

Knesset Speaker Yuli Edelstein said: “The Jewish people all over the world bids farewell this evening with great sadness to Elie Wiesel, one of the central Jewish figures in the last century. There is no doubt that his intellectual and moral contribution will echo for many more years.”

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Opposition leader Isaac Herzog said he had the honor to meet Wiesel as a child, and talk to him over the years about his books, which he said had a great influence on him. Herzog said he hoped the books will be studied at every school in Israel and the world.

“May his memory be a blessing, as one of the great men of the Jewish people throughout the generations,” Herzog said.

Wiesel was the author of some four dozen works dealing with Judaism, the Holocaust and the moral responsibility of all people to fight hatred, racism and genocide.

But it was his first, the memoir Night (1956), which gained Wiesel fame. It tells of his experience with his father in Auschwitz and Buchenwald in 1944–1945, to where he was taken at age 15 from his Romanian hometown of Sighet.

Eliezer “Elie” Wiesel born there into a hassidic family on September 30, 1928. After the war, Wiesel was sent to an orphanage in Écouis, France, where he lived for several years. He became a professional journalist, writing for both French and Israeli publications.

After visiting Israel in 1949 as a foreign correspondent for the French newspaper L’arche, he was subsequently hired by Yediot Aharonot as its Paris correspondent.

The original version of his first memoir was over 800 pages, written in Yiddish and entitled Un di velt hot geshvign (And the World Remained Silent). He wrote a shorter version in French, published in 1958 as La Nuit, which was translated into English as “Night” two years later.

It sold fewer than 2,000 copies in the United States in its first 18 months, but did attract much attention among reviewers and created a higher media profile for Wiesel. It has gone on to sell more than six million copies. Night would form the first part of Holocaust memoir trilogy that would include Dawn and Day.

He received numerous awards and honors over the years, including the Presidential Medal of Honor by Israel, the US Presidential Medal of Freedom, the rank of Grand- Croix in France’s Legion of Honor, and he was knighted as Commander of the Order of the British Empire. Wiesel was also the recipient of over 100 honorary doctorates, and received France’s distinguished Prix Medicis for his 1968 book A Beggar in Jerusalem, describing the Jewish response to the reunification of Jerusalem following the Six Day War.

In 1978, US President Jimmy Carter appointed him as chairman of the Presidential Commission on the Holocaust (later renamed the US Holocaust Memorial Council), a role in which he served until 1986. In that capacity, Wiesel became a driving force behind the establishment of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. His words, “For the dead and the living, we must bear witness,” are engraved in stone at the entrance to the museum.

In 2003, Romanian President Ion Iliescu appointed Wiesel to lead the International Commission for the Study of the Holocaust in Romania. This group, later referred to as the Wiesel Commission, was tasked with setting the record straight regarding the involvement of Romania’s fascist Iron Guard regime in Holocaust atrocities against Jews, Roma and others. The Romanian government recognized the commission’s findings, published in 2004, including the assessment that between 280,000 and 380,000 Jews and more than 11,000 Roma died during World War II as result of policies advanced by the Romanian authorities.

In addition to his writing, Wiesel enjoyed a second career as an academic. From 1972 to 1976 he was professor of Judaic Studies at the City University of New York. Thereafter, he was Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities at Boston University and a member of both its philosophy and religion departments.

Wiesel was Henry Luce Visiting Scholar in Humanities and Social Thought at Yale University (1982-83), and visiting professor of Judaic studies at Barnard College of Columbia University from 1997 to 1999.

In the latter years of his life, Wiesel was in the headlines for an entirely unrelated reason: as one of the more prominent victims of Wall Street financier Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme.

The Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity lost $15.2 million it had invested with Madoff, and the Wiesels lost their own life’s savings, reported to be around $1m. The foundation later managed to raise about one-third of the money it lost to Madoff from sympathetic donors, and to continue to function. When asked to describe Madoff by a New York Times journalist, Wiesel said: “Psychopath – it’s too nice a word for him.”

Wiesel was not without a sense of humor. Upon receiving the World Jewish Congress’s Theodore Herzl Award in 2013, Wiesel said: “There were two great men in Europe at that time: Herzl and Freud. Luckily they never met. Just imagine Herzl knocking on the door of Dr. Freud: ‘I had a dream.’ Freud would have said, ‘Sit down. Tell me about your mother.’”