Wise Men and Their Tales – Portraits of Biblical, Talmudic, and Hasidic Masters by Elie Wiesel

I am not sure what to say about this book. I am plodding my way through and reading about each person. I am learning new things and perspectives.

I have not stopped reading but I am not getting inspired. I have not had many “ah ha” moments. I think that is what I want right now and I am not seeing it here.

Elie Wiesel has some great thoughts about our Biblical family. He has an interesting perspective and a wealth of knowledge to bring to each.

Has anyone else read this? What do you think?

United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has designated Grammy Award-winning songwriter and musician Stevie Wonder as a United Nations Messenger of Peace with a special focus on people with disabilities.

A Messenger of Peace for the UN is a high-profile entertainer, sportsperson, leader of academia, or literature who is charged with making international public appearances to promote the public understanding of improving the quality of life on planet Earth. Big job, big responsibility, and hugely important.

Stevie’s no stranger to reaching out–he is a participant in so many campaigns and projects for others, from hit fund-raising songs “We Are the World” and “That’s What Friends Are For” to numerous campaigns for people with disabilities. In selecting Stevie Wonder for this designation, the Secretary-General said, “Our newest Messenger of Peace is someone who is admired by millions of people and has given back to millions of people. I recognize that he has consistently used his voice and special relationship with the public to create a better and more inclusive world, to defend civil and human rights and to improve the lives of those less fortunate. Stevie Wonder is a true inspiration to young people all over the world about what can be achieved despite any physical limitations.”

Of course, Stevie is in good company. Other Messengers of Peace include, among others,  George Clooney (for peacekeeping), Paulo Coelho (for poverty and intercultural dialogue), Michael Douglas (for disarmament), Jane Goodall (for conservation and environmental issues), Yo-Yo Ma (for youth), Charlize Theron (for ending violence against women), and Elie Wiesel (for human rights).

From yesterday’s poll, it was Eminem who said: 

“My brain just doesn’t know when to shut off. When I do something I have to do it all the way — that goes for music … everything. I have to push it to the extreme. That’s how I realized I have an addictive behavior. Somebody told me this once, that the thing that makes me bad is the same thing that makes me good at other things.”

 It’s comforting to know that there are other people who get the addiction struggle and can relate – this has been one of the most comforting things about talking to others who have prevailed over the grips of addiction.  Those who have always been moderate users don’t seem to understand and too often see it as a moral failing or a lack of willpower – you know, something easily remedied.  Just pull yourself up by your bootstraps.  One of my favourite experiences was when I was released from the hospital for alcohol poisioning a couple of years ago.  On my release form it stated the doctor’s recommendation at the bottom of my page for good health.  “Quit drinking.”, it said. 

As you can imagine, the clouds parted and angels immediately began singing.  Gee, why hadn’t I thought of that.  Brilliant.  Problem solved.

The truth is that addiction is extremely complex and mysterious.  I don’t profess to have the answers or the magic key but I do know that addiction is a soul-sucker and something that is put in our path (we all have addictions of some kind) in order to overcome.  Great men are not really made by their accomplishments or what they have achieved, but by what they have overcome.  Ask any now-liberated addict, ask Elie Wiesel, ask cancer survivors who were told by the doctor they had 6 months to live to which they responded, “F— off.” and are proudly walking down the street 10 years later.   I have always known I was a strong person at my core, but the test of addiction is not for pussies.  It is human nature to want to take the easy pill or the most comfortable route.  When we rely on substances to soften the blow or to escape parts of ourselves that we don’t accept (shyness, insecurities, anger, anxiety) we might be numbing or escaping some kind of momentary pain, but we are disconnecting from ourselves little by little and stunting growth.  Addiction is like putting the pause button on life.  I like to think of this life as school and a place where we come temporarily to learn lessons.  So if we’re just holding court or treading water, running to substances every time we don’t want to walk through something, what’s the point of being here?  That line from the Bob Dylan song bears repeating:  “He not busy being born is busy dying.”   It takes an enormous amount of bravery to be relentless about overcoming addiction – the grasp of which often eludes all rational thought.  There are armies of people who have tried intellectualizing their way out of the problem and it doesn’t seem to work.   All we know is that in many times it is so powerful that the gravest negative consequences are not remedies.  I remember in the early ’90s seeing Robert Downey Jr. on TV standing in the courtroom speaking to the judge about his multiple visits back to the courtroom.  I’ll never for get what he said. This poor guy, so bright and sensitive said to the judge:

“Your honor, I feel like I have a loaded gun in my mouth and I know it’s loaded but I can’t take it out.”

My heart went out to him then – I really felt his pain and frustration from a place of non-judgment and that was many years before I even had a thought about or experience with anything addictive.  I never could have imagined he might be foreshadowing my struggles to come.

A friend once told me when I was in the throes of the negative consequences and ill health of drinking, “You will always want to drink, but I promise you things will get better.”  Difficult to disagree with such logic, but 90% of the time not being able to rely on alcohol for relief  has been akin to taking a noonday stroll across hot coals.  This constant presence forces me to live in reality  rather than to keep running from it; and for extremely sensitive and aware individuals who feel things a little more deeply than they would like, reality isn’t always so bearable or as easy to rite off as just a bad day.  I know there are those who can relate. Choosing to walk through the pain of reality is a gift though.  It forces you to actually deal with or walk straight through things you are afraid of or don’t want to see or feel, which paradoxically disempowers them.

Band-aids are no longer an effective means of coasting through life.   I miss choosing the easy-way-out at times, but it’s too hard not to notice how the universe aligns to support you when you stop abandoning yourself.  Eminem and Robert Downey Jr. are both clean now and surely have different demons with which to deal, but the path they have chosen to take (the harder one) is nothing short of heroic.  I can say this because I am intimately connected with the struggle, the spirit required and the refusal to give up after repeatedly hitting wall after wall.  In fact, I have more respect for someone who has truly plummetd the depths and come out of challenges triumphant through their own mettle and perserverance over someone who has had a relatively easy life, not been forced to grow or transform and just glides along being a ’good’ person.  One of the gifts of addiction, I think, is that the warning to pay attention often becomes so loud that it forces you to take that journey deeper into yourself.  Unless there is a huge reason or pressing need to do so, most people won’t take that journey. 

So in the words of our dear friend Ali G,  Mad Respek to those fighting the hard fight. 

Day by Elie Wiesel is another WWII book that participants have read this year.

Check out the excerpt below and click on the link for a full review.

Books ‘N Border Collies said:

Day is much more subtle than the previous two books in this trilogy, Night and Dawn . In fact, it would be very easy to breeze through these 120 or so pages and end up wondering what the big deal is.

**Attention participants:  Remember to email us a link to your reviews, and we’ll post them here so we can see what everyone is reading!**

The following is my response to Gil Bailie, who posted this video of a representative from UN Watch addressing the UN Human Rights Council. Gil Bailie’s post is here.

Gil, the point of this speaker’s message was that the UN Human Rights Council (formerly the UN Commission on Human Rights) has been selective in its condemnation of human rights violations and that it has shown a strong bias against Israel and in favor of Hamas and Hezbollah. I can’t judge the truth of his claims on the basis of this video, but I would strongly agree with the principle in question—i.e., that the Council’s response to human rights violations such as torture, persecution, and violence against women should never be one of silence and indifference. I would even broaden the principle so that it holds every citizen of Western liberal democracies to the same standards of justice and fairness.

Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel wrote, “I swore to never be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides, Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim, silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.”

I’ve noticed your support of the Bush-Cheney administration over the years, and your obvious dissatisfaction with our current president. I don’t recall your speaking out against those responsible for the prison abuses at Abu-Ghraib and Guantanamo. One of these, of course, is former Vice-President Cheney, who admitted—and then defended—his role in allowing those abuses. I would have expected to hear an outcry from every American at every point in the political spectrum. Instead, the response from the right was…. yes, silence and indifference.

President Obama has ended most of these abuses, but there are reports that the extraordinary renditions are still going on and that prisoners are still being mistreated. Can you join me in congratulating Obama for what he has done but demanding that he do more to end these abuses? And can you join me in demanding that those responsible for the Abu-Ghraib human rights violations be brought to justice?

Doughlas Remy

source: YouTube

Le 13 avril 1945, les soldats américains de la 80ème Division arrivent au camp de concentration de Buchenwald (Allemagne) afin de libérer les prisonniers juifs qui y sont détenus. Les soldats obligeront les habitants de la région à visiter le camp pour qu’ils voient les horreurs qui y avaient été commises.

photo: (inconnu)

Le sénateur Alben William Barkley, du Kentuky (États-Unis), membre de la commission d’enquête parlementaire sur les atrocités nazies, vient en personne voir les preuves dans le camp de concentration de Buchenwald, le 24 avril 1945.

photo: (inconnu)

photo: H. Miller

Prisonniers juifs réduits à l’esclavage, du camp de concentration de Buchenwald, près de Iéna (Allemagne), photographiés au moment de la libération de ce camp par les troupes américaines de la 80ème division. Les prisonniers vivaient à trois par case. Le septième homme au second rang est Elie Wiesel, qui a consacré le reste de sa vie à l’étude de la Shoah.

photo: Jules Rouard

Une évasion ratée. Les Nazis l’ont laissé aux barbelés et l’ont laissé y mourir. Photo prise à la libération du camp.

article sur Buchenwald dans Wikipédia (en français) ici
article sur Buchenwald dans Wikipedia (en anglais) ici
article sur Elie Wiesel dans Wikipédia (en français) ici
article sur Elie Wiesel dans Wikipedia (en anglais) ici

I caught myself watching Holocaust – a mini-series from 1978 on Fox Classics (it’s continuing tomorrow night if anyone’s interested). Meryl Streep and that lovely actress that plays Aunt May in the recent Spider Man movies. They’re both so very believable. And Nigel Hawthorne (of Yes Minister fame) makes a surprise appearance as one of the upper-echelon type Nazis tasked with murdering Jews at every town and village they enter. It shows how they scoff at this ridiculous order from Hitler y’s’v – but they still carry it out. It’s interesting that like in Star Wars, the ruthless, efficient bad guys are also here played by English actors by and large, whereas the good guys are American-accented.

It was of course difficult to watch.

It’s hard to believe that I’m what they were after, only 60 years ago.

I thought a number of things. I’ve dreamt about being hunted by Nazis.

In real life, there were actually helicopters outside my parent’s place tonight for a few hours- search and rescue. I said a prayer to G-d that whoever was being looked for would be found safe and sound. I thought of what it would be like with choppers chasing me with spotlights (yes, I guess I’ve seen too many movies – the Nazis wouldn’t have used them much, if at all). But I did recall the words to one song that ‘gets’ me every time I hear it, I Was Only Nineteen:

“And can you tell me, doctor, why I still can’t get to sleep?
And why the Channel Seven chopper chills me to my feet?
And what’s this rash that comes and goes, can you tell me what it means?
God help me, I was only nineteen.”

As one can tell, it deals with a war veteran’s ongoing trauma, decades after. It was on one of my Dad’s famous (to us kids) compilation tapes from when we were young; it had a major impact on me growing up.

That’s certainly what it is like to be a Holocaust survivor too. The dreams haunt you every night. My own grandmother has suffered this especially in recent years.

Part of the curse in the Torah, should we stray from its dictates, is that when the night time comes, we will say ‘please give back the day’, and when the day comes, we will beg for the night. How can a survivor close their eyes comfortably for sleep, and how can they open them in the morning? Hope? Forgetfulness? – I’m sure such things play a part.

A friend from work told me about an Andrew Denton interview she watched with her Mum on ABC’s Elders. A Holocaust survivor, Helen Bamber, was the interviewee. One thing Bamber laments is that humanity is so terrible at learning. She says the stories have to be told over and over again, and less and less people want to endure the pain of listening. She is a ‘witness to the vulnerability of humanity’, and what else is protection against such vulnerability than the inoculation of moral education? My colleague said she and her mother were so greatly unsettled by Bamber’s harrowing story. And it is – they all are, unsettling stories.

I just keep wondering, after all we’ve been through as a people, how come every Jew doesn’t cry for a few minutes each and every morning when they wake up? I’m just amazed that we all don’t ‘have it out’ every morning a little, before we put on a face for the world and everyone in it, pretending everything’s alright, and that we aren’t changed, and that we can still smile brightly, and certainly the world has progressed and isn’t after us anymore? (Because we know it’s not so).

And now I remember, there is a law, that every Jew is to awaken at midnight almost every night, and sit on the floor, put ashes on their head, and weep and mourn like we do on the 9th of the Jewish month of Av (over the loss of our Temples, and all the tragedies that have happened to us over our long history). It is codified, but few people I know actually do it. It’s called Tikkun Hatzot – the Rectification at Midnight. Rectification of our actions, of the world around us and so on.

With just a few tomes and movies and such produced, I think I’ll leave the bulk of this particular task to Elie Wiesel and others. They are eminently more capable. But these were some of my thoughts tonight. Perhaps they are indicative of what many of us – Jew and Gentile alike – think about and feel from time to time.

Only $999.99 on Amazon.com

1. Michael Collins Piper deeply believes that Israel was intimately involved in the assassination of JFK. Unfortunately, his book on the subject, which I highly recommend everyone buy and pass around, is temporarily out of print. You can still get a one brand new copy for $999.99 dollars at Amazon, and used copies for around $840.00. I’d say it’s a steal at any price.

BTW, could you imagine an out of print book by Elie “the Fraud” Wiesel having a price like that? It shows that not all of us are complete total Zionist stooges. Maybe there is hope. But I digress.  Hold on, I want to keep digressing. Elie Wiesel is an absolute one hundred percent piece of Zionist Bullshit. There, I feel better now. Read this one too.

Anyway you might still be able to get Piper’s book for a reasonable price from WingTV – Victor Thorn and Lisa Guliani’s site if the book is still in stock. [Turns out they are out of copies.] You can read about the book here and here.   Also, Amazon does have copies at reasonable prices – thanks to John in the comments section for pointing this out.  Search on “Final Judgment Piper” and you’ll find it. I addition, Michael Collins Piper himself just now sent me an email and notes that the Ebook version of Final Judgment is available here: http://www.michaelcollinspiper.com/

Back to Elie Wiesel for a minute. You know, it makes me sick to think that pigs like this:

Elie "the Fraud" Wiesel

Might have had something to do with murdering this guy:

No, I don’t mean Elie did it himself, he would not have the guts. Of course he does have the Nobel Prize for being a flaming asshole or something.

You know, if they did murder JFK, it would not be the last time the Israelis would deliberately kill people with US Navy service.

Anyway, it’s 46 years to the day of his assassination so here’s the Zapruder film for you all.

2. For reasons not all of which are entirely clear to me, I think the picture below fits nicely into this post.

The caption reads "Captain McGonagle shaking hands with the crew"

This picture is of the USS Liberty Memorial Public Library in Grafton, Wisconsin. Click on the picture to see more photos along with a very nice essay about the event. Click here and  here more info about the USS Liberty.

Captain McGonagle earned the Congressional Medal of Honor for his bravery and leadership under terrible circumstances. He wasn’t invited to Monaco to big gala diners. He was treated like a Palestinian.

Something’s coming soon folks. Yes indeed.

Eric Hunt is suing [see PDF of complaint] über-Holohoaxers Irene Weisberg Zisblatt (Chana Seigelstein; actually, she’s more of a sad old lady who just needs attention; perhaps her family treats her like an oxygen thief and are just waiting for her to die so they can grab her royalties, so she needs attention … I really don’t know; but what kind of sickos would use this poor old lady’s delusions for profit?) and Stevie “Schwindler’s Mist” Spielberg, producer of The Plucky Duck Show and director of Hook, for their hate-propaganda.

Elie Wiesel, King of the Holoaxers, who sought refuge from the Red Army with his Nazi protectors, accused Eric Hunt of assault, after Hunt tried to ask Wiesel some embarrassing questions about his infamous atrocity-porn. So Auschwitz inmate Nikolaus Gruner [video] came to Hunt’s defense in the following letter. Since the vermin Wiesel is so close to the grave, I pray that he’ll come clean and atone for his crimes before he has to face the dread judgement seat of Christ. May God have mercy upon him.

ZÜNDEL:

A SKEPTICAL LOOK AT ‘SCHINDLER’S LIST’ | Part 1 | Part 2

From back when Canada was relatively free.

From Dissecting the Holocaust:

Feature films such as Holocaust, Shoah and Schindler’s List…naturally have no evidential value whatsoever, but their psychological impact on the masses is immense and powerful. Even though the establishment historians’ assessment of the movie Holocaust – namely, that it is factually untenable – applies equally to the other movies as well, they are nevertheless gladly received for the welcome effect they have on “public education and opinion steering”! One example shall suffice to demonstrate the historically unacceptable nature of such movies. Illustration 19 shows a scene from Schindler’s List where Camp Commandant Göth, standing on the balcony of his house, takes random potshots at the inmates of the Plaszow Camp. Air photos from that time, however, reveal that the Commandant’s house was located at the foot of a hill, while the camp itself was on top of that hill. The scene shown in the movie…was thus impossible, if only for geographical reasons. And this is certainly not Steven Spielberg’s sole forgery.

Schindler’s List, which is based on a novel going back to historical events, was deliberately filmed in black-and-white and with unsteady camera work in order to convey to the audience the false impression that the film is a documentary; contributors to the movie have freely admitted this. This clearly shows the intentions of the film-makers and of those who take school classes and even entire schools to see this movie, and not only in Germany and Austria. What is particularly perfidious about this film is that whenever German soldiers or SS-men give orders, yell and scream and engage in any kind of violence, this is not shown in English or in whichever other language the film is dubbed, but in German. In this way the entire world is made to feel that German is the language of cruel subhumans. And the German viewing public is the only one not to notice this, because in Germany, Schindler’s List is dubbed entirely in German. In this way, underhanded psychological tricks incite the peoples of the world against the Germans, their language and their culture, and the Germans themselves never even notice what is going on.

Besides of this, Spielberg is hiding the fact that the commander from Plaszow concentration camp was prosecuted by the SS:

“Individual criminal acts – in these cases having broad implications – included: the assumption of a license to kill by commandants and subordinates concealed through falsification of medical death certificates.

“Arbitrary conduct, chicanery, unlawful corporal punishments, acts of brutality and sadism, liquidation of no-longer-convenient accomplices, theft and black-market profiteering.

“All of these offenses were committed both alone by prisoners as well as by personnel of the SS, most however in conspiracy between SS personnel with Kapos (Jewish concentration camp guards).

“The intervention of SS jurisdiction in the concentration camps commenced with the initiation of my investigations in July 1943 and lasted until the conclusion of the war. It could not have started sooner, because there were no suspicions in this regard.

“Arrested were the commandants of Buchenwald, Lublin, Warschau, Herzogenbosch, Krakau-Plaszow.”

“Spielberg certainly wished to conceal these investigations and punishment of perpetrators from his gullible movie audience since he was and is not interested in an historically accurate film, but rather in molding public opinion to accept the establishment Holocaust ideology. Audiences may be gullible and dumb, but Spielberg is a deceiver and denier of historical reality.”

[Affidavit SS-65 by SS Judge Konrad Morgen, IMT, vol. 42, p. 556. -Udo Walendy]

Wiesel: “Don’t fuck with us! We got all these niggaz in line.”

The Mercy Seat by Nick Cave

It began when they come took me from my home

And put me in Dead Row,

Of which I am nearly wholly innocent, you know.

And I’ll say it again

I..am..not..afraid..to..die.

I began to warm and chill

To objects and their fields,

A ragged cup, a twisted mop

The face of Jesus in my soup

Those sinister dinner meals

The meal trolley’s wicked wheels

A hooked bone rising from my food

All things either good or ungood.

And the mercy seat is waiting

And I think my head is burning

And in a way I’m yearning

To be done with all this measuring of truth.

An eye for an eye

A tooth for a tooth

And anyway I told the truth

And I’m not afraid to die.

Interpret signs and catalogue

A blackened tooth, a scarlet fog.

The walls are bad. Black. Bottom kind.

They are sick breath at my hind

They are sick breath at my hind

They are sick breath at my hind

They are sick breath gathering at my hind

I hear stories from the chamber

How Christ was born into a manger

And like some ragged stranger

Died upon the cross

And might I say it seems so fitting in its way

He was a carpenter by trade

Or at least that’s what I’m told

Like my good hand I tatooed E.V.I.L. across it’s brother’s fist

That filthy five! They did nothing to challenge or resist.

In Heaven His throne is made of gold

The ark of his Testament is stowed

A throne from which I’m told

All history does unfold.

Down here it’s made of wood and wire

And my body is on fire

And God is never far away.

Into the mercy seat I climb

My head is shaved, my head is wired

And like a moth that tries

To enter the bright eye

I go shuffling out of life

Just to hide in death awhile

And anyway I never lied.

My kill-hand is called E.V.I.L.

Wears a wedding band that’s G.O.O.D.

‘Tis a long-suffering shackle

Collaring all that rebel blood.

And the mercy seat is waiting

And I think my head is burning

And in a way I’m yearning

To be done with all this measuring of truth.

An eye for an eye

And a tooth for a tooth

And anyway I told the truth

And I’m not afraid to die.

And the mercy seat is burning

And I think my head is glowing

And in a way I’m hoping

To be done with all this weighing up of truth.

An eye for an eye

And a tooth for a tooth

And I’ve got nothing left to lose

And I’m not afraid to die.

And the mercy seat is glowing

And I think my head is smoking

And in a way I’m hoping

To be done with all this looks of disbelief.

An eye for an eye

And a tooth for a tooth

And anyway there was no proof

Nor a motive why.

And the mercy seat is smoking

And I think my head is melting

And in a way I’m helping

To be done with all this twisted of the truth.

A lie for a lie

And a truth for a truth

And I’ve got nothing left to lose

And I’m not afraid to die.

And the mercy seat is melting

And I think my blood is boiling

And in a way I’m spoiling

All the fun with all this truth and consequence.

An eye for an eye

And a truth for a truth

And anyway I told the truth

And I’m not afraid to die.

And the mercy seat is waiting

And I think my head is burning

And in a way I’m yearning

To be done with all this measuring of proof.

A life for a life

And a truth for a truth

And anyway there was no proof

But I’m not afraid to tell a lie.

And the mercy seat is waiting

And I think my head is burning

And in a way I’m yearning

To be done with all this measuring of truth.

An eye for an eye

And a truth for a truth

And anyway I told the truth

But I’m afraid I told a lie.

Miracles

For 15 months Chana re-swallowed and re-defecated her diamonds over and over again. She was a favorite of Dr Josef Mengele, who performed experiments and surgeries on her and other prisoners without anesthesia. Mengele injected chemicals into her eyes in an attempt to change their color. He removed the ID-number-tattoo on her to find a way to remove the numbers tattooed on her arm. He ordered a nurse to administer a lethal injection, but the nurse worked for the underground and was able to free her. She survived the gas chamber, and just missed being turned into a lampshade.

“Mengele was the most good-looking man,” she said. “He could have been the one scientist in the world who could have developed extraordinary things for humanity, but he became a murderer. He would look at me and smile and at times I could not believe this man could ever hurt me, he could be so charming. But the next minute, he was cutting me up into little pieces.”

Mengele had given her watery soup filled with chemicals to destroy her reproductive organs, but she miraculously gave birth to a son and a daughter in the 1960s.

She vowed that if she survived, she would be a voice for her fellow prisoners. “For 50 years, I didn’t say a word.” she said.

Michael A. Hoffman, from “The Psychology and Epistemology of ‘Holocaust’ Newspeak”

“It is not a matter for the public to debate the literal truth of Jewish beliefs. Every religion has a right to its own story. It only becomes a public matter when Jews attempt to establish as criteria for human decency, good citizenship and public morals, the demand that non-Jews must believe Jewish fables and accept them as a matter of scientific historiography.

“It is a telling commentary on the modern era that the apocryphal and expiational langauge and agenda of partisan religious dogma has been enthusiastically embraced as the objective description of an entire epoch of world history in public newspapers and airwaves and the lecture halls of secular universities.

“It is an apparent, though not widely admitted fact, that Judaism, through the “Holocaust” cult, has become the informal state religion of the West, with the distinction of being the last truly believed religion in the otherwise agnostic West; the end-result of this reactionary hegemony being the same as that of the Big Brother party in Orwell’s 1984, “to extinguish once and for all the possibility of independent thought.”"

Holoco$t Accounting

Regarding the Holohoax profits that Wiesel claimed fellow Jew Madoff scammed off of him: were these funds he’d collected “on behalf of” H-Survivors, and then allowed Madoff to launder, and then they split the proceeds?

Wiesel Fraud

By Nikolaus Gruner in Sweden

In 1958 history tells us, that 50 years ago in Paris, the writer and Nobel Laurate Francois Mauriac, discovered a Jewish survivor’s autobiography, written in Yiddish and entitled ‘Un di velt hat gesvign’, copyright 1955, Paris.

He decided to get into the Holocaust business by using this story, written from the beginning by survivor Lazar (Eliezer) Wiesel. Mauriac translated the book into French between 1955 and 1958, making substantial alterations to it and created a new book called ‘Le Nuit’.

The alterations were in order to introduce Christian theology into the narrative. The book, called ‘Night’ in English, was then given to his partner, a new persona called “Elie Wiesel”. They kept the second name Wiesel, but were forced to change the first name from Eliezer, the Yiddish for Lazar, for copyright reasons and in 1958 invented the new name “Elie Wiesel”.

Now, in the year of 2008, the same man who advanced to Nobel [Peace] Prize Laureate, “Elie Wiesel”, has been exposed by the under signed survivor, A-11104, from the former labor camp “Buna” (a sub-camp to Auschwitz), I claim that “Elie Wiesel” has never been a prisoner of Auschwitz. Further I the undersigned A-11104, claim that they stole Lazar Wiesel´s manuscript with Lazar’s identity A-7713, in order to change the message by mixing in Christian theology, in order to suit his own and Mauriac’s purposes. This was to convert young Jewish survivors coming from the camps into good Catholic souls.

It is of historical evidence that should be mentioned here, that the Nobel Peace Prize winner “Elie Wiesel”, was honored with the “Great Cross of Hungary”, in New York in 2004 (probably for being a self-appointed spokesperson and spinner of tales about the extermination camps), and even dared to maintain in public that he is the original owner of the tattooed number A-7713. However the evidence shows, that neither in the archives of Auschwitz, nor in Buchenwald, has the name “Elie Wiesel” any connection what so ever to Lazar Wiesel´s tattooed number A-7713. Regarding his identity, I can vouch for his own privately produced DVD, entitled “Elie Wiesel Goes Home”. The movie was filmed in Maramorossziget and Auschwitz-Birkenau, reveals that on his left lower arm, there is no trace of the tattooed number he claims to have, namely A-7713. If he did have one, then it would cover approx. 9 cms in length, and 10 millimeter in height on the surface of his skin. In the film his arm has nothing on it.

When it comes to “Elie Wiesel´s” birth date, he has three, and the fourth one is known only to himself. The archives of Buchenwald confirm that: Lazar Wiesel who was born on the 4th of Sept.1913, left Buchenwald for Paris with the HIAS transport S-414, carrying 675 Children on the 19th of July 1945. On his transport document he appears under the running number 405 named Wiesel Lazar, born 4.10.1928 Maramorossziget. He is the same Lazar Wiesel who is registered at Yad Vashem as an inmate of Buchenwald, who perished in the Shoah. Regardless of his death, he is still on the lists of the perished at Yad Vashem, though his details have been altered illegally recently.

Perjury: Elie Wiesel appeared as plaintiff on Monday July 7, 2008, in the Court of San Francisco, USA, Department No. 23. Court No. 2315810. He lied when he gave his testimony under oath. He alleged that his original tattooed number on his left lower arm was A-7713 and that his father’s was A-7712. I here state that all my accusations against “Elie Wiesel”, are based on my personal contact with my old friend Lazar Wiesel, from the former labor camp “Buna” and are from verified official documents, from the state archives of both Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps.

With the evidence above, I represent myself as being a heavily affected and racially abused survivor A-11104. My last wish in life is to present the truth, including my bitter past to those who want to listen and to learn about the cannibalized and exterminated Jewish brothers, likewise the 6 million martyrs, who were slaughtered with modern efficiency and bestial cruelty. With the evidence in my possession, I am able to prove, that “Elie Wiesel’s” crime against my friend Lazar Wiesel (4. 9.1913), to whom I have an eternal debt for protecting me from a certain death, most likely occurred in Europe. Therefore I demand for myself, and for all of us survivors and martyrs, that the European Court of Human Rights, without pity, malicious interest, nor political profit, should examine the case of “Elie Wiesel’s” real identity and if possible his supposed religious leanings.

I enjoyed James Poniewozik’s interesting piece, “Polarized News? The Media’s Moderate Bias” in Time last week. Though I’ve been aware of what Poniewozik calls “moderate bias” for years, it really hit home just last year when I studied global climate change and the media in my Creation, New Creation, and Ecology course at Columbia Seminary.

Turns out, the same folks used by the tobacco company’s in the 80s and 90s to suggest smoking wasn’t bad for you have been hired by big oil to suggest global climate change isn’t occurring. The moderate media has to / loves to cover two sides of a story, so even if international scientistic bodies publish reports on the ill effects of climate change, and there’s a tiny minority of scientists (or talking heads) questioning their findings, the news story can often become a simple: scientists disagree on climate change.

Poniewozik also mentions “status quo bias.”

Moderate bias also grows from a related phenomenon: status-quo bias. Journalists, like anyone, have a built-in bias toward believing that what was true yesterday will be true tomorrow. Establishment news outlets grow cozy and comfortable with other establishments. One reason some journalists insufficiently questioned the run-up to the Iraq war and underestimated the housing bubble was that they listened to their usual, credentialed sources — and the history of the past decade is the history of the experts being wrong.

Anyways, that’s just something to think on because moderate bias affects us all, and a whole lot. It’s probably not always bad, but I do wonder how we’d read the Bible without moderate bias or status quo bias. Or, further, how we’d love our neighbor.

Then again, I usually take Elie Wiesel’s perspective pretty seriously and he doesn’t mince words about taking sides:

I swear never to be silent whenever and wherever human lives endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourage the tormenter, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere when human life are endangered. When human dignity is in jeopardy, that place, at that moment, must become the center of the universe.

Too tough?  I don’t know.  With Wiesel’s holocaust experience as background it’s hard to call for folks to back off from taking sides.  But one also doesn’t want to polarize unnecessarily.  Hmm, I guess the point is to take Poniewozik’s basic perspective and always watch for bias since even moderate bias is sinister enough.

image by Robert Linder

Wiesel, a survivor of the Holocaust, took issue with the Teabagger movement’s disgusting comparisons of health care reform to Nazi death camps. The ‘Baggers responded with typical class: “The jews need to clam up and accept the fact that they are in a Christian country.” “This hollowcost thing is totally overblown by the jewish.” Disgusting.

Source:
http://www.americablog.com/2009/11/teabaggers-attack-holocaust-survivor.html

Teabaggers attack Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel
Ugly, ignorant replies to Elie Weisel who criticized a Teabagger protester in Washington, DC this week who held up a sign showing dead bodies from the Dachau concentration camp stacked in a pile, and compared this to the Democrats’ health care reform plan.

In general, big news shouldn’t break on Saturday night. It’s not fair. Weekends are for kicking back, not serious stuff. But late on Saturday night, November 7, the House passed its version of healthcare reform legislation, its quite progressive bill – something no one has been able to do since Harry Truman started trying in the late forties in any form, and certainly what the Clinton administration once botched, big time. It was historic.

But then again, it may be futile – an historical curiosity. The legislation must go to the Senate, where they will have to pass their own version of the House bill, which may not be recognizable after they’re through with it, if they pass anything at all – and their not passing anything at all is a real possibility. And then, hypothetically, the two House and Senate bills would have to be reconciled in joint committee, and then the reconciled final version approved by both houses, and then sent to the president to sign into law. So while the vote was historic, this is the halfway point in a voyage that may or may not reach any particular destination. All the crowing about what an achievement this was for Obama and the Democrats is kind of like the crew cheering Columbus somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic, halfway to the New World. Making it halfway there is cool, but it is only making it halfway there. Or there’s another metaphor. It seems odd to be celebrating your unexpected lead at halftime. The game’s not over. And some teams you face always seem to be able to pull off that come-from-behind win in the finals seconds of play – you know, the good teams.

It’s just a structural thing, as Matthew Yglesias explains:

It’s worth taking a moment to appreciate the fact that in a unicameral United States of America, we would now have passed both a comprehensive health care reform bill and also the most important piece of environmental legislation in the history of the world. Now that’s not the world we live in. Instead we live in a world where neither of those things has passed and where their prospects aren’t clear. But think back on this point the next time you hear someone say Obama is struggling with his agenda because he’s not centrist enough, or else that Obama is struggling with his agenda because he’s not left-wing enough.

The reality is that he’s struggling with his agenda because of the way our political institutions are structured.

But this was a bit of a win, or a big deal in the history of such efforts, and the best compact account of what happened my actually be from Sioux Falls, South Dakota:

The President called it “historic”, Republicans called it “unconstitutional.” Saturday night the Democratic-controlled House passed a far-reaching health care reform bill. Now the issue goes on to the Senate.

President Obama hailed the passage of the bill and praised those who supported it: “Given the heated and often misleading rhetoric surrounding this legislation, I know that this was a courageous vote for many members of Congress.”

The measure passed the house late Saturday by a narrow margin. Only one Republican voted for the measure – Joseph Cao, from an overwhelmingly Democratic district in New Orleans.

And the basics:

The House bill requires everyone to have health insurance. Individuals will be required to buy it, employers will be required to provide it or pay a penalty. The bill offers tax credits to allow low and middle income people to afford insurance and the plan will be paid for in two ways. First, with a surtax on people making more than 500-thousand dollars, and families making more than a million dollars. Second, with about 400 billion dollars in Medicare cuts.

In addition, the bill says that a person can’t lose their insurance if they lose their job, and that someone can’t be denied health insurance for a pre-existing condition. But to get all that, Democratic leaders had to yield to conservatives from both parties and accept an amendment that imposes tough new restrictions on abortion coverage in insurance policies.

And of course it contains the dreaded public option – if no for-profit insurance company wants to cover you for some reason, or you can prove you can’t find anyone to cover you at any price, and if your employer just won’t cover you at all in those circumstances, there’d be a Medicare-like thing you could buy into – a government plan that would act just like an insurance company, collecting premiums and paying providers, except it wouldn’t be run for profit, just set up to cover the few million who got left out.

That was the killer of course, or what will kill the bill in the Senate. How can the insurance cartel compete with that? And what does it mean to America that anyone would think that providing healthcare isn’t where corporations should be thinking about making big bucks? It’s the desire to make scads of money that that made America great, and gave us everything from Pet Rocks to Guitar Hero to Viagra. And what if people liked it too much and everyone wanted in? People would think that organizations that weren’t set up to make enormous profits growing exponentially year-after-year were just fine. Then where would we be? Innovation would stop.

That’s why Lindsey Graham, the Republican Senator from South Carolina, says the House bill is “dead on arrival” in the Senate.

But none of it was pretty, as the opening of this editorial in the San Francisco Chronicle explains:

The U.S. House of Representatives overcame a disinformation campaign that clouded the health care reform debate in the summer, and a Republican roadblock that forced Democrats to scrap for every last vote, to pass legislation of vital importance to individuals and the economy.

Passage of the most significant expansion of health care coverage since Medicare was established in 1964 was an enormous first-year milestone for President Obama and a tribute to the blend of persuasion and steel in the leadership of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a San Francisco Democrat who had to bring along a legion of balking moderates to secure the votes needed for passage.

One of the regrettable concessions required to win over moderates was an amendment that further tightened restrictions on federal funding for abortions. Federal law already prohibits direct government funding of abortions. The amendment added to the health care reform bill would prohibit abortion coverage on any insurance plan that is purchased with government subsidies.

The anti-abortion language put a new twist in the health care debate, threatening to drive a wedge into a fragile coalition in support of a 2,000-page bill that attempted to balance the concerns of myriad interests. The National Organization for Women signaled Sunday that it could not support legislation that dealt the “worst blow to women’s fundamental right in order to buy a few votes for reform of the profit-driven health insurance industry.”

But it’s in there – if you buy any insurance from any carrier, and you accept one dime of any government subsidy to do so, know that all carriers nationwide will have removed abortion coverage from all their plans, in order to get you onboard as a paying customer. That would be the law. Find a coat hanger or a back-alley doctor who takes cash.

But that was what had to be in there to get this passed. It’s back to the days before Roe v Wade – and getting there without all that pesky Supreme Court nonsense. There’s the law that makes some things legal. Fine – but there’s also the regulated marketplace, where what is allowed to be sold can restricted to those who have the extensive means to exercise their legal rights, and to no one else. This is no small matter, but it had to be done.

As for other reactions, the top three New York Times on the matter were typical. Obama Presses Senate to Act Quickly on Its Health Bill – good luck with that. News Analysis: The Medical Industry Grumbles, but It Stands to Gain – yeah, they bitched, but even with a public option for the dogs they didn’t want to insure anyway, they get tens of millions of new customers paying them whatever they choose to charge with money provided by the government. And this – If Anything, the Senate’s Task is Trickier. It’s always trickier in the second half of the game.

But it’s the first half of the game that was fascinating, as the Thursday before the vote there was this – Tea-baggers descend on Congress today to ’scare’ them out of passing health care reform. Yes, Minnesota Republican House member Michele Bachmann called on the tea-bagging protesters to descend on the Capitol building t to “scare” Members of Congress into not passing health care reform. Bachmann said that Democrats got “scared” by the August tea-bagging protests and that all the protesters needed do is “scare” the Democrats again. She told them to bring video cameras – the Democrats would cave, just like they did in August.

But it seems they brought more than video cameras:

The angry folks at the protest – which attracted several thousand conservatives – held up signs with messages of hate: “Get the Red Out of the White House,” “Waterboard Congress,” “Ken-ya Trust Obama?” One called the president a “Traitor to the U.S. Constitution.” Another sign showed pictures of dead bodies at the Dachau concentration camp and compared health care reform to the Holocaust. A different placard depicted Obama as Sambo. Yes, Sambo. Another read, “Obama takes his orders from the Rothchilds” – a reference to the anti-Semitic conspiracy theory holding that one evil Jewish family has manipulated events around the globe for decades.

Some of this was a bit much for Holocaust survivor and Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel – it was the sign showing dead bodies from the Dachau concentration camp stacked in a pile, and compared that to the Democrats’ health care reform plan, prompting this statement from the Elie Wiesel Foundation – “This kind of political hatred is indecent and disgusting.”

He really shouldn’t have said that, considering the responses to Wiesel posted on Politico (unedited):

Rothschilds nothing! Everyone knows that Obama is George Soros sock puppet. Wasn’t Soros Jewish once upon a time? May the Schwartz be with you!

The jews need to clam up and accept the fact that they are in a Chritian country.

This hollowcost thing is totally overblown by the jewish.

Eli Wiesel should just go back to Indonesia. I don’t see him condemnig the terrorist shooter at Fort Hood.

Elie is a whiner. She should stop her whining. You didn’t not complane when the libs were calling Bush Hitler.

You know what? The fact is that at a time in history, The Rosthchild family controlled practically everything. This is a fact. Not anti semitic. I resent the Jewish outrage at everything. I am a tea partier. obama is a Marxist and takes his orders from George Soros… it is similar and these people need to get a life., Why any Jew would support the Obama administation is a mystery anyway. He is a Muslim sympathizer and the greatest threat to Israel ever to sit in the White House. Wake up Jewish community. Take off the blinders.

There are more of those but these stand out:

Elie Wiesel: Newest, most current tool of the sick, perverted, racist, anti-semetic Democrap party. Have you no shame Democraps?

Elie Weisel is disgusting PR-seeking profiteering demagogue who has made a fortune off playing on the world’s guilt trips about the what happened to the Jews during WW2. Most objective WW2 researchers agree now that the beastial Nazi’’s, who happened to be anti-capitalist Socialists, killed even more Slavs and Gypsies in their concentration camps than Jews, but you don’t see the Slavs and Gypsies trying to profit off the “Holocaust” like some of the shameless powerful Jews in the media.

I sometimes wonder what has happened to the Jewish people?. The Bible says that they are GODs’ people and Israel is their home land. I see so many Jews seem to have abandoned their faith and I think this has to sadden our Father in Heaven. I see many Jews that are homosexual-actively promoting it as a “normal” lifestyle. I see many Jews involved in the ACLU – which I call the “Anti Christian Liberal Union”, this bothers me as how can one be against their Father and Son in Heaven who are for Life??. I see many Jews in Hollywood making filthy, sinful movies – what happened to the good, Family movies??. I see many Jews full of Greed in Hollywood, Wall Street,etc. I see many Jews involved in abortion groups- how can one support the killing of human fetuses??, especially people who have suffered through the Holocaust??. I am not anti-semitic, I know many will come on here and attack me. I am simply stating what I see and I believe our Father in Heaven is wondering what is happening to his “chosen” people?. He sent his only son to Earth to die for our sins and I think He is wondering the direction our Country is taking??. I am praying for our Country and all the Jews in our Country and pray that our Father will forgive us all for our sins. I hope I have stated what GOD would have wanted me to say?. GOD Bless and Pray for our Country.

Maybe this was never about healthcare reform, as one of Andrew Sullivan’s readers says this:

I don’t know why the bone deep and deliberate ignorance of some people still shocks me, but it does.

I’ve been to Dachau. I have walked through the gates with the words “Arbeit Macht Frei” and looked at the showers and the cramped bunks and the ovens. I have seen the dusty yard where prisoners mustered every morning. I now know that a place can retain horror and despair in its soil. You can feel the evil in the air even fifty years later. I have no idea how anyone survived with their sanity.

There are things for which there are no comparison, things like the Holocaust, rape, the death of one’s child, and yet they are used with frightening regularity. ‘This is like the holocaust’. ‘He is like a Nazi’. ‘This is akin to rape’. No. No. And no. There is no like or akin to these things and using them as political hyperbole shows a breathtaking lack of humanity. Not to mention an inability or disinclination to formulate a reasonable argument.

So the Dems’ health insurance reform plan is equivalent to the poor, tortured souls who lost their lives in Dachau and the survivor who protests the comparison is the “Newest, most current tool of the sick, perverted, racist, anti-Semitic Democrap party.”

There are no words.

Sullivan adds this – “And the GOP leadership, with the sole exception of Eric Cantor, says nothing.”

Of course everyone is as how long it will take Eric Cantor to apologize:

“The Republican Party in its roots is a party of inclusion and we ought to be promoting that and making sure that voices are heard,” Cantor, of Virginia, said in an interview on Bloomberg Television’s “Political Capital with Al Hunt,” airing today.

Cantor, when asked about Limbaugh’s comments that “Adolf Hitler, like Barack Obama, also ruled by dictate” and his comparison of the administration’s health-care logo to a swastika, said Limbaugh was wrong.

“Do I condone the mention of Hitler in any discussion about politics?” Cantor said. “No, I don’t, because obviously that is something that conjures up images that frankly are not, I think, very helpful.”

He’s toast. Limbaugh will eat him alive.

But the relationship of the right and the Jews is a tricky business, as Andrew Sullivan also notes:

Because of my horror at the inhumanity of, the Gaza assault, my support for a two-state solution soon enough to rescue Israel from becoming South Africa, and my desire to see the US-Israel alliance become less suffocatingly one-sided, I am deemed an anti-Semite. This is the fate of most goyim who question the Israeli government on any grounds in Washington, so I cannot complain (at least I am not called a self-hating Jew as most Jewish American critics of Israel’s government are).

But when real anti-Semitism emerges, it is hard not to miss it. And if American Jews do not see it in the current Populist right, a faction that loves Israel primarily to bring about the Apocalypse, they need to open their eyes.

Well, the big news on Sunday after the House vote was Joe Lieberman, the one Jew the conservative right just loves, saying two things.

First, he announced he will personally lead the filibuster in the Senate to stop all healthcare reform because someone has to be the hero who stops all this madness. It the public option thing – if a government plan is part of the deal, “as a matter of conscience, I will not allow this bill to come to a final vote.” It is somehow immoral to take the profit motive out of the equation, even for a small bloc of the uninsured. It’s un-American.

Second, he announced his Homeland Security Committee – the Democrats let him keep his chairmanship even after he campaigned for McCain – will, under his orders, open hearings on the Fort Hood shootings, because it was obviously part of the 9/11 thing, and obviously a well-planned plot to infiltrate the military and kill our guys, and not one crazy guy. He will uncover the plot. It was a terrorist attack you see, no different than 9/11.

Well, the guy was trouble:

…a day after classmates who participated in a 2007-2008 master’s program at a military college said they complained to superiors about Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan and what they considered to be his anti-American views, which included his giving a presentation that justified suicide bombing and telling classmates that Islamic law trumped the U.S. Constitution.

“If Hasan was showing signs, saying to people that he had become an Islamist extremist, the U.S. Army has to have zero tolerance,” Lieberman, an independent from Connecticut, said on “Fox News Sunday.” “He should have been gone.”

There’s no question about that, but that doesn’t make it the terrorist attack Lieberman posits, and Army Chief of Staff George Casey warned Sunday against reaching conclusions about the suspected shooter’s motives until investigators have fully explored what the heck happened – “I think the speculation (on Hasan’s Islamic roots) could potentially heighten backlash against some of our Muslim soldiers.” In short, Joe, you’re making trouble, and making things worse.

But there was this NPR piece:

…he psychiatrist [who worked alongside Hasan] says that he was very proud and upfront about being Muslim. And the psychiatrist hastened to say, and nobody minded that. But he seemed almost belligerent about being Muslim, and he gave a lecture one day that really freaked a lot of doctors out.

They have grand rounds, right? They, you know, dozens of medical staff come into an auditorium, and somebody stands at the podium at the front and gives a lecture about some academic issue, you know, what drugs to prescribe for what condition. But instead of that, he – Hasan – apparently gave a long lecture on the Koran and talked about how if you don’t believe, you are condemned to hell. Your head is cut off. You’re set on fire. Burning oil is burned down your throat.

And I said to the psychiatrist, but this could be a very interesting informational session, right? Where he’s educating everybody about the Koran. He said but what disturbed everybody was that Hasan seemed to believe these things. And actually, a Muslim in the audience, a psychiatrist, raised his hand and said, excuse me. But I’m a Muslim and I do not believe these things in the Koran, and then I don’t believe what you say the Koran says. And then Hasan didn’t say, well, I’m just giving you one point of view. He basically just stared the guy down.

Sullivan comments:

So he was actually challenged on these grounds in public and yet no one monitored him or disciplined him for this. He may not have been in any way connected to al Qaeda. But the point is: he didn’t have to be. This kind of Jihad requires no sleeper cell – just a murderous, fundamentalist psyche.

But Jeffery Goldberg has some warnings about that:

Elite makers of opinion in this country try very hard to ignore the larger meaning of violent acts when they happen to be perpetrated by Muslims. Here’s a simple test: If Nidal Malik Hasan had been a devout Christian with pronounced anti-abortion views, and had he attacked, say, a Planned Parenthood office, would his religion have been considered relevant as we tried to understand the motivation and meaning of the attack?

Of course. Elite opinion makers do not, as a rule, try to protect Christians and Christian belief from investigation and criticism. Quite the opposite. It would be useful to apply the same standards of inquiry and criticism to all religions.

And Sullivan leaps back in:

I did not leap to that conclusion in this case as the primary reason for the attack because we didn’t fully know the entire picture – and still don’t. But as the pieces fall into place, it seems increasingly clear that Nidal Hasan’s faith – and the conflicts it presented in the context of the war on Islamist terror – was absolutely relevant in this horrifying massacre of service members. It may well have been combined with individual stress, exposure to others with PTSD, fear of deployment, psychological disturbance, etc. But that it was a critical factor seems to me important to note.

But every case is unique.

If the man is not part of any wider conspiracy or terror group, it is silly to treat him the way we would a Qaeda cell, for example, as Lieberman seems to want to do. And the random murder spree was not designed to wound the US militarily in any strategic way. But religion is poisonous when it fuses with politics and deploys violence to control or punish others – and Hasan’s increasingly Wahabbist version of Islam is about as crude a conflation of religion, certainty and violence as one can imagine.

So maybe Lieberman should look into the crude conflation of religion, certainty and violence everywhere, even on the right:

This applies to the extremes of Christianity and Judaism as well, of course. I do not think you can understand the assassination of abortion doctor George Tiller without grasping the religious motivation of his killer, just as I think a brutal gay-bashing by a thug with Leviticus tattooed on his arm gives you a good idea of the religious motivation for the beat-down. Ditto, I might add, when we discover that it was a fanatical Jewish settler – transposed from America – who gunned down people at a gay walk-in center in Jerusalem.

Religious fanaticism – in Texas or the West Bank or in Gaza – is a dangerous, dangerous impulse in an increasingly fundamentalist age. …

Maybe this one weekend’s news was ever about healthcare reform. The general consensus seems to be that the House bill will die in the Senate, and that everyone will agree Lieberman and the Fox News folks, that what happened in Texas wasn’t one mad man – that’s just politically correct fools’ wishful thinking – but Islam itself out to kill us all, scheming and plotting, scheming and plotting, scheming and plotting.

None of this is very cheery, and it seems that Joe Lieberman wants to prove he, not anyone else, is the key guy who controls America, for the Likud Party or something. It’ll be interesting to see how the Democrats react. Take his chairmanships away? Boot him out of the party? He may switch parties in a day or two anyway. Stay tuned.

But some of us have this uncomfortable feeling that soon there will be a third political party in America – Palin-Bachmann led, with the full support of Beck, Limbaugh and Murdoch’s Fox networks and his Wall Street Journal, with Joe Lieberman as elder statesman. And they’ll call themselves the American Likud Party – nuke Iran to protect Israel, one of the original thirteen states of course, to bring on End Times and the Rapture, and also, in any spare moments, eliminate capital gains taxes and privatize Social Security. And stop healthcare reform at all costs.

How did Joe Lieberman become the most powerful man in America? On the other hand, it really is only halftime.

Elie Wiesel on Forgiveness, just before his 80th birthday at a Jewish Values Network Fundraiser on 10/05/2008 at the Steinhardt Estate in NY.

Elie Wiesel is one of the 3 most important people in the world today, along with Nelson Mandela, and Dalai Lama, according to Rabbi Shumuley Boteach.

I always appreciate the message of Elie Wiesel; he is a person of exceptional depth and authenticity. Here are a few brief notes I jotted down while watching this video.

We ask God to forgive us. But God needs some of us to forgive him. I believe in questions more than answers. As a child he was never asked by his mother: “Did you have a good answer in school today?” Rather, she asked me, “Did you have a good question today in school?” In our tradition, what we try to show is a question, and questing. A philosopher once said: “Always seek truth, but beware of the one who found it.” Death is the question of everything—why did God create everything so it will die? Why create us humans because we shall die? Even though we die, we have to live, and therefore we need to do something with our lives.

Charity saves you from dying while you are alive. Charity is compassion for those who need you—they have no basic necessities, of even no hope. Our purpose is to give them these things; otherwise we’re not fully human.

Importance of asking for forgiveness from the person that one has hurt/sinned against. How long do we go back? Should we Jews have to forgive the Egyptians for the pyramids we built? Children of assassins and not assassins of children—problem of collective guilt, Wiesel does not believe in collective guilt. Each person must forgive the person who sinned against them directly; no one else can do that.

Jewish values, concepts, philosophies: Mine is the more Jewish is a Jew, the more universal one is. I cannot believe the Jewish person, or Jewish religion is superior to any other person or religion. I don’t like fanatics who tell me I don’t have the right to believe what I believe.

The Dalai Lama asked Wiesel to teach him the art of survival because the former said his people will need to learn it as it will likely be some time before they gain any kind of independence or autonomy for their homeland of Tibet and the exiles shall be safe to return. We can teach the non-Jew, the Muslim, Christian, and others if we live authentic Jewish lives.

Question time: I believe in memory. I don’t believe in hatred, anger yes. Memory, learn from it, say: “I don’t want my past to become someone else’s future.”

Question: Is Wiesel optimistic about the Jewish future? Yes, he said. Memory transcends future. Never before now have there been so many courses, books, etc., on the Holocaust. So I am optimistic about our people, that we shall survive.

Question of Jewish view of forgiveness, when do you forgive? Jewish law requires an individual to forgive their perpetrator, only if the latter asks for it. Wiesel told the story of a German government leader—I think it was Chancellor Kohl—who, after listening to Wiesel’s view on forgiveness, travelled to Israel and publicly in the Knesset asked for forgiveness from the Jewish people.

May God continue to grant health and blessings to his faithful servant, Elie Wiesel.

At that moment in time, all that mattered to me was my daily bowl of soup, my crust of stale bread. The bread, the soup — those were my entire life. I was nothing but a body. Perhaps even less: a famished stomach. The stomach alone was measuring time.

+ Elie Wiesel, Night

In Night, Elie Wiesel describes how a father and a son fight each other to death for a piece of bread:

(The old man) collapsed. His fist was still clenched around a small piece. He tried to carry it to his mouth. But the other one threw himself upon him and snatched it. The old man again whispered something, let out a rattle, and died amid the general indifference. His son searched him, took the bread, and began to devour it. He was not able to get very far. Two men had seen and hurled themselves upon him. Others joined him. When they withdrew, next to me were two corpses, side by side, the father and the son.
I was fifteen years old.

Wiesel reflected later:

Deep down, I thought, man is not only an executioner, not only a victim, not only a spectator: he is all three at once.

Elie Wiesel, In his novel The Town Beyond the Wall.

Quoted by Elie Wiesel, All Rivers Run to the Sea (pgs. 354-55); I read it in Walter Brueggemann’s Theology of the Old Testament (pg. 403 n. 6):

What is the difference between Jews and Christians? We all await the Messiah. You believe He has already come and gone, while we do not. I therefore propose that we await Him together. And when He appears, we can ask Him: “Were you here before?”… And I hope that at that moment I will be close enough to whisper in his ear, “For the love of heaven, don’t answer.”

Nothing justifies Auschwitz. Were the Lord Himself to offer me a justification, I think I would reject it. Treblinka erases all justifications and all answers.

The barbed-wire kingdom will forever remain an immense question mark on the scale of both humanity and its Creator. Faced with unprecedented suffering and agony, He should have intervened, or at least expressed Himself. Which side was He on? Isn’t He the Father of us all? It is in this capacity that He shatters our shell and moves us. How can we fail to pity a father who witnesses the massacre of his children by his other children?…

…by allowing this to happen, God was telling humanity something, and we don’t know what it was. That He suffered? He could have–should have–interrupted His own suffering by calling a halt to the martyrdom of innocents. I don’t know why He did not do so and I think I never shall. Perhaps that is not His concern. But I find myself equally ignorant as regards men. I will never understand their moral decline, their fall. There was a time when everything roused anger, even revolt, in me against humanity. Later I felt mainly sadness, for the victims.

Elie Wiesel, Memoirs, vol.1, p.105