Battleangel

Here is some flamebait that I think could entice people. As politicians, opportunists and clueless pundits around the globe have been falling over themselves to bless the recently departed Simon Wiesenthal, there are those that tell a different story. And it is a story that needs to come out among the onslaught of shallow journalistic hacks who seldom research a story beyond the PR release.

The best way to start is probably with professor Norman Finkelstein and what he has to say about the Centers and ipso facto about the man himself.

Question: One extraordinary fact that I learned in your book was that former President Reagan, and his UN ambassador Jean KirkPatrick, received the Simon Wiesenthal Center humanitarian of the year award (for their staunch support of Israel) despite providing political, financial and military support to extreme Right terrorist groups in Central America. Do you agree that it is an incredible perversion of history that the racism and violence of the Nazi holocaust, is now used to justify turning a blind eye to racism and violence?

Norman Finkelstein: Well that is what you would expect from the Simon Wiesenthal Center. This is really a gang of heartless and immoral crooks, whose hallmark is that they will do anything for a dollar. As I point out in the book, the guy who runs their headquarters in Los Angeles, runs it as a family business, and in the mid 1990’s they were collectively raking in $525 000 a year.

More by Norman Finkelstein, excerpt from his “Holocaust Industry.”

Its solicitude for ‘needy Holocaust survivors’ notwithstanding, the World Jewish Congress wants nearly half the Swiss monies earmarked for Jewish organisations and ‘Holocaust education’. The Simon Wiesenthal Centre maintains that if ‘worthy’ Jewish organisations receive monies, ‘a portion should go to Jewish educational centres’. As they ‘angle’ for a bigger share of the loot, reform and orthodox organisations each claim that the 6m dead would have preferred their branch of Judaism as financial beneficiary.

The Centre is renowned for its ‘Dachau-meets-Disneyland’ museum exhibits and ‘the successful use of sensationalistic scare tactics for fund-raising’.”

And after aforementioned book was published, Finkelstein faced a law suit in a French court and the local Wiesenthal Centre of course jumped at the chance to testify to the trumped-up charges.

One of the Wiesenthal Centre’s many fund raising projects is ironically selling CD-ROM collections with problematic “websites, portals, online games, blogs, forums and videos.” For only $20 you get a CD that “exposes the growing use of the Internet as a key propaganda weapon, marketing tool and fundraising engine by terrorist and extremist groups.” Kind of like the Wiesenthal Centre then?

There are a lot of things to be said about Wiesenthal. The Frank Walus case. The Mauthausen inconsistencies. Eli Rosenbaum’s telling description of Wiesenthal as “pathetically ineffective.” The search for Joseph Mengele, where Rosenbaum again aptly noted that he “had all these reports placing Mengele in almost every country in Latin America except the one he was in — namely, Brazil.”
His own claim to fame was the information that allegedly led to the capture of Adolf Eichmann in Argentina in 1960. The only problem is that history doesn’t support the fact. Isser Harel, who headed the team to bring Eichmann in and was in fact director of the Mossad (and the Shin Bet) at the time, denies that Wiesenthal was involved. In fact, he claimed Wiesenthal had endangered the operation. He noted that “All the information supplied by Wiesenthal before and in anticipation of the [Eichmann] operation was utterly worthless, and sometimes even misleading and of negative value.”
IHR carries more on Wiesenthal and while many will find the site controversial, even over the top, I encourage people to try and refute the facts.

Bruno Kreisky was quoted noting that:

The engineer Wiesenthal, or whatever else his title is, hates me because he knows that I despise his activity. The Wiesenthal group is a quasi-political Mafia that works against Austria with disgraceful methods. Wiesenthal is known as someone who isn’t very careful about the truth, who is not very selective about his methods and who uses tricks. He pretends to be the “Eichmann hunter,” even though everyone knows that this was the work of a secret service, and that Wiesenthal only takes credit for that.

Bruno Kreisky and Isser Harel were easily Wiesenthal’s biggest detractors and he never managed to produce one iota to counter any of the claims. Another problem is Wiesenthal’s persistence with the human soap myth. Being an intelligent person and one who had been to 5 (or was it 12?) concentration camps, you’d think he would have a clue. And he never to my knowledge retracted his inaccurate comments. Though denial wasn’t a problem otherwise. It has been documented on at least one occasion how he denied another story he had himself written because it had started to circulate among revisionists. Holocaust historians in general have been very lax in their efforts to spread the truth, because of political pressure and because many fear that this exposed lie may force people into cognitive dissonance and may even force them into Holocaust “denying” as the Holocaust Industry itself likes to portray it. The doctrine is well known by now and shared by, for instance, the US government when it comes to abuse carried out by its troops abroad. They figure that if people know the truth, they will be worse off, but of course such people never imagine the day when their house of cards starts to crumble and truth and falsity alike are just swept away, often causing a bigger backlash than coming clean. It’s the tactic of people who either have more to hide or are in an untenable position.