The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs is a wonderful magazine with pungent and hard-hitting essays, but as a rule, it dances the famous hapak around the issue of the Holocaust. Only snippets of the topic appear here and there, most often in the Letters to the Editor - and even then we often see the requisite apologetic kneefall right in the following issue.
However, we takes what we gets, as the devil said to the massah.
Here is a semi-Revisionist letter to the Editor, first published in the Jerusalem Post, October 9, 1998, and then pluckily republished by WRMEA in its February 1999 issue. Its title claims that "Wiesel Ignores Palestinians":
In your Oct. 9 article on Elie Wiesel, the American icon of Holocaust survivors, (it is stated that) he is paid a special tribute as a "speaker of truth."
This is the same Elie Wiesel who is continually referred to by Noam Chomsky and others as "a terrible fraud." What can explain such disparity of opinion?
Perhaps it is because Wiesel, who has written literally volumes Against Silence, remains silent when it comes to such issues involving Palestinians as land expropriation, torture and abrogation of basic human rights.
Perhaps it is because Elie Wiesel proclaims with great piety that "the opposite of love is not hate; it is indifference," while he remains totally indifferent to the inequality and suffering of the Palestinians.
Perhaps it is because he enjoys recognition as "one of the first opponents of apartheid" in South Africa, while he remains totally silent and indifferent to the apartheid being practiced today in Israel.
Perhaps it is because he decries terrorism, yet never apologizes for the terrorism perpetrated by the Irgun at Deir Yassin on April 9, 1948. He refuses even to comment on it. He dismisses this act of terrorism in eight short words in his memoirs, All Rivers Run to the Sea.
He remembers the Jewish victims at Kielce, Poland (July 1946) with great anguish, but ignores twice as many Palestinian victims of his own employer at Deir Yassin.
The irony is breathtaking.
It is even more shocking that the world's best known Holocaust survivor can repeatedly visit Yad Vashem and yet keep silent about the victims of Deir Yassin who lie within his sight 1,400 meters to the north.
He bitterly protests when Jewish graves are defaced, but has nothing to say when the cemetery of Deir Yassin is bulldozed.
He refuses even to acknowledge repeated requests that he join a group of Jews and non-Jews who wish to build a memorial at Deir Yassin.
Elie Wiesel may profess modesty and claim he is "not a symbol of anything" but, unfortunately, he has become a symbol of hypocrisy.
Daniel A. McGowan, Director, Deir Yassin Remembered, Geneva, NY
(This letter is archived at <http://www.washington-report.org/backissues/0199/9901055.html>
Thought for the Day:
"He blamed and protested,
but joined in the plan -
He shared in the plunder
but pitied the man."
(William Cowper)
Back to Table of Contents of the June 1999 ZGrams