Nobel Laureate and Holocaust survivor, Elie Wiesel, who was recently attacked by a Holocaust denier in San Francisco, responded today in Rome:
Wiesel says attack shows Holocaust deniers are getting bolder
"Until today they used words; now they have switched to violence," Wiesel told Milan-based daily Corriere della Sera. "Their numbers are growing by the day."
The 78-year-old Holocaust survivor said the incident shook him and that, for the first time since World War II, he felt he was being personally targeted.
"I feared for my life in a way that hadn't happened to me since 1945, before the end of the war."
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"I feared for my life in a way that hadn't happened to me since 1945."
Note: For any who might be confused, the attack and this diary have NOTHING to do with the I/P conflict. If you wish to discuss that, please write your own diary.
This diary is about Holocaust denial, a Nazi Holocaust denier, a viscious, old-fashioned fascist, who physcially attacked a 78 year old Nobel Peace Prize recipient who was in San Francsico for a PEACE CONFERENCE.
His reason? Because the nutter accused Elie Wiesel of having lied in his best selling memoir of his Auschwitz experience, NIGHT:
In Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel's memoir Night, a scholarly, pious teenager is wracked with guilt at having survived the horror of the Holocaust and the genocidal campaign that consumed his family. His memories of the nightmare world of the death camps present him with an intolerable question: how can the God he once so fervently believed in have allowed these monstrous events to occur? There are no easy answers in this harrowing book, which probes life's essential riddles with the lucid anguish only great literature achieves. It marks the crucial first step in Wiesel's lifelong project to bear witness for those who died.
Who was this nutter that attacked Wiesel?
Wiesel was attacked in a San Francisco hotel by a Holocaust denier who admitted to having stalked Wiesel for weeks. A suspect, calling himself Eric Hunt, confessed to the attack on an antisemitic website, saying he had tried to drag Wiesel out of the hotel elevator in order to "bring [him] 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."
[snip]
In a posting Tuesday on the anti-Zionist Web site ZioPedia, a writer using the name Eric Hunt takes credit for the attack: "After ensuring no women would be traumatized by what I had to do (I had been trailing Wiesel for weeks)...
Nobel laureate accosted at peace conference
Adam Martin, The Examiner
Feb 9, 2007 6:00 AM
SAN FRANCISCO - In a bizarre attack, a well-known author and Holocaust scholar was dragged out of a San Francisco hotel elevator by an apparent Holocaust denier who reportedly had been trailing him for weeks.
Police escorted Elie Wiesel to San Francisco International Airport on Feb. 1 after a man accosted Wiesel in the elevator at the Argent Hotel[] after Wiesel participated in a panel discussion at a peace conference.
Wiesel, a Holocaust survivor and author of more than 40 books, including the memoir "Night," about his experiences at Auschwitz, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986.
Wiesel, during his interview in Rome today, said:
...he urged countries to take a harsher stance against those who argue that millions of Jews did not die at the hands of the Nazis.
"My incident shows a global trend; if society doesn't act immediately against these individuals it will end up encouraging others to do the same," he said. "Every time I make a speech somewhere in the world there is a group of deniers in that place waiting for me."
A group of deniers; a global trend, waiting for him...
First They Came
Martin Niemöller
When the Nazis came for the communists,
I remained silent;
I was not a communist.
When they locked up the social democrats,
I remained silent;
I was not a social democrat.
When they came for the trade unionists,
I did not speak out;
I was not a trade unionist.
When they came for me,
there was no one left to speak out.
How to fight back?
Truth
There's certain weight in the truth, especially when it adds up to 50 million records. That's how many Nazis' concentration camp records are stored at the archive at Bad Arolsen, which recently opened its doors to the public and here's the State Department Report on Global Anti-Semitism.
There's a certain weight in the truth.