J Street Jerks Manipulate Wiesel’s Words

by Phyllis Chesler

On Monday, a J Street and Democrat party operative posted a piece at her Substack. I am choosing not to name her or to link to the piece because I don’t want even more people to read it. The piece is titled in this way: “Elie Wiesel on indifference. A child killed in Gaza every 15 minutes. Two mothers every hour. Seven women every two hours. Are you OK with that?”

The piece then proceeds to trot out a series of mainly fake news talking points about the deaths of women and children in Gaza, hour by hour, day by day. How many J Streeters have expressed similar moral outrage about the much larger body counts in Ukraine (an estimated 30,457 civilians and 31,000 combatants, or 61,500 all together) and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (an estimated 5 to 6 million civilian deaths thus far)? We cannot trust the estimates of civilian and/or combatant deaths in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, Iraq, China, North Korea, Sudan, Somalia, and so on.

To the best of my knowledge, few J Street–style journalists have presented the much larger body count in Ukraine and warned us against being indifferent to it — at least, not again and again, day after day.

The above-mentioned Substack piece is in gruesome lockstep with the New York Times, which, on the very same day, had five full pages of photos of murdered Gazans, all identified by age, name, and profession. In the paper’s pages, murdered Israelis rarely appear, nor do the many hundreds of thousands of displaced Israelis. They remain nameless and faceless, as do the Israeli hostages who’ve been hidden in Gaza for five months while they’ve been beaten, raped, tortured, starved, and murdered.

I sometimes wonder whether both the New York Times and J Street are on the Hamas/Iran payroll, whether they are simply funded by Soros — or whether they are true-believing Jew haters. One damning piece of evidence that they are Jew haters is their refusal to acknowledge Hamas’ complicity in civilian deaths. Hamas doesn’t just hide behind civilians when they are available; Hamas operates and maneuvers mostly in civilian areas, a clear violation of international law. Given this, and despite Israel’s almost suicidal efforts to prevent civilian deaths, J Street argues that Israel has no right to fight back against those trying to destroy them.

The piece up at Substack essentially dares to turn Elie Wiesel’s moral authority into a sock puppet in order to use his Holocaust-era perspective to condemn Israel and to warn us against our own “indifference” to Gazan civilian suffering. What Wiesel said, however, was far more relevant than the phrase quoted at Substack. Please allow me to quote from an interview given by him to Merle Hoffman in 1991, as reported in On the Issues magazine (full disclosure: I was the magazine’s editor at large at the time):

HOFFMAN: You have been severely criticized for not condemning Israel about the intifada. What is your current position on the Palestinian situation?

WIESEL: I have been criticized for many things… Yes, I refuse to systematically condemn Israel.

H: For anything?

W: There are certain red lines that I will not cross. If I had known at the time that Israel was involved in torturing I would have spoken out, but it was too late. When I found out, a commission had already been formed and justice prevailed, but I don’t feel I have the right to apply public pressure on Israel.

H: But you have the moral authority.

W: But what if I’m wrong?

H: Can’t you afford to be wrong?

W: Yes, but only if I pay the price. What if I am wrong and they pay the price? What if I apply such pressure on a decision and that decision may bring disaster or at least tragedy to Israel? Do I have the right to do this? It is their children who will pay the price, not mine. I do go to Israel and speak to the leaders there[.] I can say what I feel. But here, especially here, I have no right to speak out publicly…. I am offended when I see Jewish intellectuals who all of a sudden remember their Jewishness only to use that Jewishness to attack Israel. These are men and women who have never done anything for Israel [and] all of a sudden they remember they are Jews.

I hope and pray that J Streeters and Democratic Party operatives pay attention to these words of Weisel as well as to those they manipulate in order to condemn Israel.

First published in the American Spectator.