Friday, April 20, 2012

Why Eli Wiesel is wrong and Netanyahu right

Below is what Weisel wrote disgreeing with what Netanyahu wrote which is posted below that. Weisel's flaw is: Hitler's goal was the elimination of the Jewish people, devised a system to do so and was not stopped until 6 million died. Iran's stated goal by leadership is the death of Jews, the end of Israel and is devising a method to be able to carry it out. If they bomb Israel with nuks and kill 6 million, will Weisel then agree he is wrong? He has been a huge force for teaching about the holocust, but the jews have never faced a threat as they do now, aside from Hitler, and 6 million dead is 6 million dead Jews, be it the Holocaust or Iran's nuks. Just as the world did not take Hitler seriously enough or care enough to save more Jews until too late, so too now the world, (Obama) is not doing enough. Weisel, you are tragically wrong Nobel laureate and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel has dismissed comparisons between Iran’s intentions for Israel and the fate of Jews during World War II. Asked about Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s increasing tendency to invoke parallels between the regime in Iran and the Nazis, Wiesel said the comparisons were out of place. “Iran is a threat, but can we say that it will make a second Auschwitz?” Wiesel said in an interview published in the Hebrew daily Globes on Thursday. “I don’t compare anything to the Holocaust.” Netanyahu made the parallel most recently on Wednesday night, in a speech marking Holocaust Remembrance Day, saying that warning of the Iranian threat was the best way to honor the victims of the Holocaust. “I know there are some who don’t like it when I express uncomfortable truths like these,” Netanyahu said. “They would prefer that we not speak of a nuclear Iran as an existential threat. They claim that this statement, even if it is true, only spreads fear and panic… Those who dismiss the Iranian threat as a whim or an exaggeration have learnt nothing from the Holocaust… The memory of the Holocaust is a command to learn the lessons of the past in order to ensure the future.” Wiesel, in the interview, said he did not approve of the frequency with which comparisons with the Nazis were made, and mentioned isolated incidents in which ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel put on yellow stars in protest at ostensible persecution. “Putting yellow stars on children? And in Israel? What have we come to? The world-renowned concentration camp survivor-turned-educator decried using references to the Holocaust in the political arena and also warned against comparisons to acts of genocide that, aside from being inaccurate, only belittle the Holocaust itself. “Only Auschwitz was Auschwitz. I went to Yugoslavia when reporters said that there was a Holocaust starting there. There was genocide, but not an Auschwitz. When you make a comparison to the Holocaust it works both ways, and soon people will say what happened in Auschwitz was ‘only what happened in Bosnia.’” Wiesel does not believe that, as the generation of Holocaust survivors dies out, the events they experienced will be forgotten. There is more learning, more seminars, and more books published on the subject than ever before, he said. “Anyone who listens to a witness who experienced the Holocaust becomes a witness himself, and today they are listening to us.” www.rabbijonathanginsburg.com

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