Elie Wiesel z"l (of blessed memory) and Mickey Mark HY"D (May God Avenge his blood): United in life and in death
On Friday afternoon Michael 'Mickey' Marc HY"D was
murdered while driving his car near his home in Otniel. He is being buried today.
On Saturday night, Elie Wiesel z"l
passed away.
If Marc and Wiesel meet on their way up to Heaven, perhaps they will recognize each other, for
they have met before.
An eerie photo has surfaced of Elie Wiesel hanging a mezuzah in
Otniel. Next to him in the photo stands Michael Mark (gesturing with his
hand).
Michael was murdered on Friday,
when a terrorist sprayed more than 20 bullets at his car. Killed
instantly, his car flipped, with his wife and children inside. His wife
is still on life support, although his son Pedaya is set to be released
today, while another daughter is awake in the hospital.
In a strange parallel, Elie Weisel passed away on Saturday,
at the age of 87. Weisel, a Holocaust survivor known for personifying
"Never Again," fought to represent the Jewish nation reborn, stronger
than ever.
In the picture, they were together at the dedication of a new Beit
Midrash (Torah study hall) in the town of Otniel, where Marc lived and
close to where he was murdered on Friday.
Then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is standing behind Wiesel in the picture above. Marc is the man with the jacket and the white shirt without a tie. Here is a picture of the actual mezuzah hanging.
If I'm not mistaken, the man with the large white kipa and the longish white hair in the back (better seen in the top photo with his hands on Wiesel's shoulders) is Yitzchak (Ira) Rennert, a well-known American Jewish philanthropist. If I'm wrong, someone will correct me and I will delete this.
Labels: Ariel Sharon, Elie Wiesel, Otniel, terror victims
There is no anti-Semite like a Jewish anti-Semite: Meet Max Blumenthal
Shavua tov, a good week to everyone.
On Saturday night, Elie Wiesel z"l passed away. Wiesel, who survived the Holocaust as a teenager, spent the rest of his life trying (among other things) to chase down the Nazi scum that systematically murdered six million Jews during the years of the Second World War. Even Haaretz published a
sympathetic obituary.
But alas, there are some Jews for whom nothing is holy - not even the memory of the six million Holocaust victims. We know them as Jewish anti-Semites. Meet Max Blumenthal (if you haven't had the 'pleasure' already).
And there are many more anti-Semitic tweets about Wiesel - from himself and from others - on
Blumenthal's timeline.
For those of you who are voting in the US election, here's another tidbit to keep in mind:
I'd love to see an intrepid reporter ask Hillary what she thinks of Max's disgusting comments. But I'm not holding my breath - it's highly unlikely to happen.
Labels: Elie Wiesel, Hillary Clinton, Holocaust, Jewish anti-Semitism, Max Blumenthal, US presidential campaign 2016
Democrats boycott Cruz, Wiesel panel
Rabbi Shmuely Boteach held a panel in a Senate office building on Monday, which featured Ted Cruz and Elie Wiesel. The panel addressed Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons and was intended to be bipartisan. Unfortunately, the Democrat who was supposed to be on the panel
didn't show up.
The Cruz-Wiesel event was intended as a bipartisan dialogue. But Rep.
Brad Sherman, D-Calif., pulled out after the host, Rabbi Shmuley
Boteach, ran a full-page ad in The New York Times accusing White House
national security adviser Susan Rice of turning a blind eye to genocide.
The ad featured a photo of Rice looking away from a stack of human
skulls. Sherman called it vulgar, and Boteach opened the event by
apologizing, insisting his disagreements with Rice are strictly over
policy.
Because after all, what's more important: Stopping an Iranian nuclear weapon or defending what's left of Susan Rice's honor?
Labels: bipartisan, Brad Sherman, Elie Wiesel, genocide, Iranian nuclear threat, Rabbi Shmuely Boteach, Susan Rice, Ted Cruz
Scared by BDS'ers, al-Guardian rejects Dershowitz ad on Hamas tactics
Al-Guardian has rejected an ad on Hamas tactics by Harvard University law professor Alan Dershowitz because, among other things, it called into question the status of Gaza as '
the most densely populated area on earth' (Hat Tip:
Haaretz).
“The British media is divided,” Dershowitz said in an interview. “But The Guardian,
which holds itself out to be a purveyor of diverse truth, clearly
reflects a bias against Israel on its editorial pages, as well as in its
presentation of the news. Now that bias has spread to the advertising
pages.”
The advertisement was based on an older editorial written by
Dershowitz for the Gatestone Institute and was sponsored by the Wechsler
Family Foundation, which had offered The Guardian
approximately $21,000 to run the piece, a New York City-based agency
specializing in overseas advertisement placements confirmed.
Dershowitz told JNS.org that newspapers “have a right to decide which ads to accept and reject,” but questioned The Guardian’s decision not to run his advertorial.
“My column was factually sound and not a personal attack on anybody.
It simply laid out the geographic facts of the Gaza Strip and its
implications,” he said.
“Dershowitz was presenting a new point of view in this article,” Harry Wechsler of the Wechsler Family Foundation told JNS.org in an email.
“Hamas was not forced into shooting their rockets from pads located
in urban areas, thereby leading to unavoidable civilian deaths,” wrote
Wechsler. “They were not shooting from some of the densest population
centers anywhere because they had no other choice. No—the choice was
there. Though not large, Gaza had ample space that was not densely
populated—farm land, empty spaces where rockets could have been stored
and shot from. Furthermore, the U.N. could easily have developed
temporary quarters in these same spaces for the sheltering of civilian
refugees, far away from the sites of battle.”
The editorial board of The Guardian, which screens political
or issues-based advertisements before they are published in the
newspaper, “turned us down and refused to take our ad, even after
working with their people for several days,” according to Wechsler.
In response to a comment request by JNS.org regarding The Guardian’s decision not to publish the Dershowitz advertisement, a spokesperson for the newspaper said, “The Guardian reserves the right to reject any advertisement.”
You might recall that last week, al-Guardian
ran an ad by Eli Wiesel which had been
rejected by the Times of London. What you may not know is that as a result of running that ad, al-Guardian received 140 complaints and felt obligated to issue a
clarification related to that ad.
A spokesperson for Guardian News & Media, which owns the
Guardian, said: "The decision to run any display advertisement in the
Guardian is made on a case-by-case basis and there was a full discussion
about accepting the advert in question.
"However, the acceptance of advertising
from any organisation does not equate to support or endorsement for the
views expressed in that advert. The Guardian is fully committed to
reporting from the Middle East and our coverage will continue to be
independent and robust."
Who says writing letters to the editor doesn't make a difference? It scared the Guardian out of making the same 'mistake' with Dershowitz that it made with Wiesel.
Read the whole thing.
Labels: al-Guardian, Alan Dershowitz, civilian casualties, Elie Wiesel, Gaza, Hamas, human shields, Times of London
Guardian runs Wiesel ad against Hamas' child sacrifice
This is a bit of a surprise. The Guardian has run an
ad against child sacrifice by Elie Wiesel and Rabbi Shmuely Boteach. The ad had previously been
rejected by the Times of London. This is from the first link.
The ad was rejected by The Times, which claimed by way of
explanation "that the opinion being expressed is too strong and too
forcefully made and will cause concern amongst a significant number of Times readers'."
The advert has already run in a number of major US publications, including The Times' sister publication, the Wall Street Journal, as well as The New York Times and The Washington Post.
But the decision to run it in the Guardian - which is
well-known for its hostile editorial line towards Israel - will come as
particularly surprising, and raises further questions about The Times' decision not to run it.
Condemning the decision by The Times to reject the ad, Rabbi Boteach accused the paper of "catering to bigotry."
The Guardian and the Independent are the last two British papers I would have expected to run that ad.
Labels: al-Guardian, British anti-Semitism, civilian casualties, Elie Wiesel, Gaza, Hamas, human shields, Palestinian children, Rabbi Shmuely Boteach, Times of London
Times of London rejects ad from Elie Wiesel
A full-page advertisement from Elie Wiesel and Rabbi Shmuly Boteach, which calls on Hamas to reject child sacrifice, and which has run in several newspapers in the United States, has been rejected by the Times of London, which claimed that the ad was '
too strong and forceful.'
The ad sponsored by The Values Network, which was founded by Rabbi
Shmuley Boteach, has run in The New York Times, Washington Post and
The Wall Street Journal, among other U.S. newspapers. The rejection was
first reported by the New York Observer.
The London Times refused the ad because “the opinion being expressed
is too strong and too forcefully made and will cause concern amongst a
significant number of Times readers,” according to a statement from a representative of the newspaper, the Observer reported.
...
Headlined “Jews rejected child sacrifice 3,500 years ago. Now it’s
Hamas turn,” the ad began running last week. It reads, in part: “In my
own lifetime, I have seen Jewish children thrown into the fire. And now I
have seen Muslim children used as human shields, in both cases, by
worshippers of death cults indistinguishable from that of the
Molochites.
“What we are suffering through today is not a battle of Jew versus
Arab or Israeli versus Palestinian. Rather, it is a battle between those
who celebrate life and those who champion death. It is a battle of
civilization versus barbarism.”
Countering the London Times statement, Boteach said in his own, “Elie
Wiesel is one of the most respected human beings alive, a Nobel Peace
Laureate, and is the living face of the Holocaust. No greater expert on
genocide exists in the whole world. His call for the end of child
sacrifice by Hamas, who use children as human shields, and a stop to
their genocidal charter, which calls for the murder of Jews everywhere,
could only offend the sensibilities of the most die-hard anti-Israel
haters and anti-Semites.”
I can't envision a single newspaper in the the UK (other than the local Jewish newspaper) running an ad like this. Maybe the Telegraph or the Mail, but I doubt they would run it either. Who says there's media bias out there?
Labels: British anti-Semitism, civilian casualties, Elie Wiesel, Gaza, Hamas, human shields, Palestinian children, Rabbi Shmuely Boteach, Times of London
Elie Wiesel's full-page ad in today's New York Times against Iran remaining nuclear
Labels: Elie Wiesel, Iranian nuclear threat
Elie Weisel puts Obama in his place
Benny Weinthal reports that on Monday, at Washington's Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel - knowingly or unknowingly -
put President Obama in his place.
For the Nobel Peace Prize winner and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, who also spoke at the Washington event, the meaning of remembrance is not to remain stuck in the past. He said, “So in this place we may ask: Have we learned anything from it? If so, how is it that Assad is still in power? How is it that the number one Holocaust denier [Iranian president Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad is still a president? He who threatens to use nuclear weapons to destroy the Jewish state.”
To date, the U.S. and its allies have taken no meaningful action against the Syrian regime for killing as many as 11,000 of its people. A handwritten sign plastered on a U.N. car in the city of Arbeen captured the painful frustration of international inaction: “The butcher keeps killing, the observers keep observing and the people keep up the revolution.”
“Remembrance without resolve is a hollow gesture,” Obama noted. “Awareness without action changes nothing.” Yet it took military power to stop Slobodan Milošević in Serbia, and it could take the same to stop Assad in Syria.
I wonder whether President Obama even noticed the juxtaposition of his words with Wiesel's.
Read the whole thing.
Labels: Barack Hussein Obama, Elie Wiesel, Holocaust Museum
Prominent supporters of Israel back removing MEK from terror list
Some prominent supporters of Israel, including Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz, former Canadian Justice Minister Irwin Cotler and Nobel Prize winner Elie Wiesel, have called for
removing Iranian opposition group Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK) from the list of designated terror groups.
On the record, the people involved insist there is no Israel element to what they say is a humanitarian endeavor to remove the movement’s followers from danger.
“I don’t see any Israel issue at all,” Dershowitz told JTA in an interview, instead casting it in terms of Hillel’s dictum, “If I am only for myself, who am I?”
Off the record, however, figures close to the campaign use another ancient Middle Eastern dictum to describe the involvement of pro-Israel groups: “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.”
A source close to the effort to bring pro-Israel voices into the initiative cited reports that Israel has allied with the MEK, which reportedly maintains agents in Iran and in the past has published details of Iran’s nuclear weapons program.
The organized pro-Israel community, however, has been reluctant to sign on. One official at a pro-Israel group said pushing to de-list MEK without a full review could undercut efforts to keep groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah on the list.
“They're listed as a terrorist group, and until the U.S. government says otherwise, we’re not going to deal with them,” said the official, whose group otherwise counsels a tough posture against the Iranian regime.
The MEK, an Iranian exile group that some accuse of being a cult, has maintained a presence in Iraq since 1986, when Saddam Hussein welcomed it as a useful thorn in the side of his deadly enemy. From its border encampment, Camp Ashraf, it conducted operations against the theocracy in Iran. The MEK claims to have ended military activities in 2001.
Subsequent to the 2003 U.S.-led invasion that removed Saddam, Camp Ashraf disarmed as a condition of maintaining its presence in the country.
Read the whole thing. Supporters of delisting the MEK include John Bolton, Rudolph Giuliani, former Attorney General Michael Mukasey and many others.
Labels: Alan Dershowitz, Elie Wiesel, Iranian nuclear threat, Irwin Cotler, MEK
