So Much for Peace Conferences…
I spotted this yesterday evening but was hoping that Joe would post on it as he’d do a better job. On Feb 1st Elie Wiesel was a speaker at a ‘peace conference’ in San Francisco but ended up being physically assaulted and almost kidnapped by a Holocaust denier. Elie, please hire a bodyguard and stay away from dubious events.
AP via the Jerusalem Post:
Nobel Peace laureate and Holocaust scholar Elie Wiesel was dragged from an elevator and roughed up, possibly by a Holocaust denier, during a peace conference at a San Francisco hotel last week, police said Friday.
According to San Francisco Police Sgt. Neville Gittens, a man approached Wiesel, the author of Night, a memoir chronicling his time in a concentration camp, in an elevator and requested an interview with the author on the evening of February 1 at the Argent Hotel.
When Wiesel consented to talk in the hotel’s lobby, the man insisted it be done in a hotel room and dragged the 78-year-old off the elevator on the sixth floor, Gittens said. The assailant fled after Wiesel began to scream, and Wiesel went to the lobby and called police.
Gittens said police are investigating the incident as a crime. Wiesel could not be immediately reached for comment at Boston University, where he teaches, or through his institute in New York.
A posting on a virulent anti-Semitic Web site Tuesday by a person identifying himself as Eric Hunt claimed responsibility.
“I had planned to bring Wiesel to my hotel room, where he would truthfully answer my questions regarding the fact that his non-fiction Holocaust memoir, Night, is almost entirely fictitious,” Hunt wrote on the site. The poster also said “I had been trailing Wiesel for weeks” and had hoped to get “Wiesel into my custody, with a cornered Wiesel finally forced to state the truth on videotape.”
Gittens said investigators were aware of the posting and declined to comment further on the investigation.
The anti-Semitic Web site was disabled late Friday. It is registered to Andrew Winkler in North Sydney, Australia.
opinions powered by SendLove.to
5 Responses to “So Much for Peace Conferences…”
Holly, thank you so much for posting this. I was planning on writing something on this, might still do so, but simply am not able to do it right now. Will try to post something later today but these couple of days are extremely busy for me.
Thanks again for posting this Holly.
It is an outrage.
Unbelievably sad. As long as I’m live, I will never understand how hate can so consume human beings that they feel compelled to deny reality and attempt to harm a fellow occupant of this globe. Over words and memories, nonetheless! How does this happen? I’m not naive. I know it happens. But honestly, somebody explain to me the how and why of hate.
Holly – I am a Jew and a great admirer of Elie Wiesel and everything he has accomplished. However, I think it’s important to put it in perspective. Just because some anti-semetic nutcase tries to mug Elie, does not mean the sky is falling. Everyday there are hate crimes occuring(against Jews, Muslims and Christians) many with far worse consequences than befell Elie. Don’t get me wrong, I do not in any way, shape or form condone what happened to Elie, but most hate crimes would never hit the TMV blog pages.
This is horrible, no two ways about it.
Is it just that I’m paying more attention or are hate crimes actually on the rise?
I read that the KKK is rising again, exploiting the immigration anxieties in some border states, for example.
Holly , thank you for the post . I hope you will update us if any new information comes to light . Just a quick observation . I find it interesting that this news is of so little interest in this Blog and in the msm .