Elie Wiesel, who else? A recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, along with the likes of Menachem Begin, Henry Kissinger, Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt… Blessed are the peacemakers.
I’ve always loved Elie’s overdone woebegone basset-hound look — a soul filled with Weltschmerz, or at any rate with Weltschmaltz.
He’s weighed in recently with a comparison between the Palestinians and the ancient child-sacrificing Moloch-loving Canaanites. It’s a damn shame Edward Said isn’t still around to comment on this one:
Elie has teamed up on this occasion with that entertaining and indefatigable self-promoter, Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, shown below, author of Kosher Sex, among other notable works of scholarship and divinity. One hopes that coarsely-ground salt is not involved.
Of course one also must respect the very precise dating of Abraham’s father-and-son camping trip to Mount Moriah.
They may be able to very precisely date prehistoric events, but they aren’t fundamentalist fanatics like those child-sacrificing Moloch-worshippers (who, according to the good book, the gentle god of Abraham ordered the Israelites to exterminate).
The 3,500 old “history” being referred to is little more than output of talented screenplay writers:
Edward Said did write about another Weltschmerz laden “moral giant”-cum-con-artist whose specialty as Chomsky noted is to ‘assign a special status to Israel and reconstruct the “moral world” accordingly’:
I’m too boringly literal-minded to comment here any longer. I am tempted to point out however that it is the “creative” targeteers of the IDF who made, quite literally, no place at all safer than any other place in Gaza in this most recent massacre. It seems that the child sacrifice must be theirs rather than, say, the Hamas devils’ or the apolitical moms’ of Gaza scuttling toward the UN school. Child sacrifice doesn’t have to mean the sacrifice of ones own children, despite BIblical precedent.
Elie Wiesel survived a vicious early life, Still, I wearied of his shtick about 25-30 years ago. He used to say that he could never criticize Israel from outside its borders for some very deep reason tinged with great sadness… And as he was never there, it seemed he never got around to unloading on the Zionist state like the gullible assumed he would, once back home. I got tired of waiting, It appears he changed his mind about it or perhaps he never had any problems with the behavior of the state and could have more honestly have said so rather than pretend it was his absence that silenced him.
I think he may be a charlatan.
Must be so hard on Elie, carrying the weight of the world all of these years. Yes, I too figured out he was a charlatan about a quarter century ago. I seem to recall he defended all kinds of neocon nonsense, maybe even support for the contras. Who can keep track after all these years.
My understanding is that some of his fellow Holocaust survivors have said he’s a grandstander and opportunistic blowhard. Though I guess that’s reporting the obvious.
Years ago, I heard him give one of his tortured-soul, weight-of-the-world interviews on an NPR show, “Speaking of Faith” — not a bad show often, but in this instance the host basked in the glow of Elie’s moral awesomeness and self-evident wisdom. In that interview, he justified — with many characteristic sighs, of course — the shelling of Palestinian refugee camps from gunboats.
Never again, my tusch!
I’ll go with the suggested spellcheck correction.
He does have that hangdog look down to a science. Oh, the pain he has to endure as The Moral Conscience of Our Time!
Being able to distinguish between good (Jews) and Ultimate Evil (everyone else) requires a soul of impeccable moral pedigree, which Elie is kind enough to share with the rest of us. Experience watching children being thrown on the fire is a plus, unless that experience was gained as a first-hand witness at the Deir Yassin massacre, where His Immaculacy was a photographer for the Irgun.
Now he has to settle for watching 155mm self-propelled howitzers lob shells at the kindergartens of the Amalekites via CNN, with any shells actually landing in the schoolyards being entirely the result of operator error and the fact Hamas is storing kids there for use as human shields. Hamas needs to store its supply of human shields away from schools and hospitals!