U.S. police arrest Holocaust denier suspected in Elie Wiesel attack
Eric Hunt, 22, sought on charges including attempted kidnapping, false imprisonment and battery.
By ReutersNew Jersey police have arrested a man suspected of accosting Holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel in the elevator of a San rancisco hotel earlier this month.
A spokesman for police in Montgomery Township in central New Jersey said officers arrested Eric Hunt, 22, without incident at the Carrier Clinic, a substance abuse treatment center, where Hunt was a patient.
Hunt was being sought on charges of attempted kidnapping, false imprisonment, elder abuse, stalking, battery and the commission of a hate crime, according to the warrant issued by San Francisco police on Friday.
Wiesel, 78, was attending the World Forum, an interfaith conference on non-violent conflict resolution, when he was accosted on February 1 at the Argent Hotel, according to police. The suspect got into an elevator with Wiesel and insisted he accompany him to his room for an interview. At the sixth floor, the suspect forced the author into the corridor and ran away when Wiesel began to yell, the authorities said.
A Holocaust denier who gave his name as "Eric Hunt" wrote in a February 6 posting on an anti-Semitic Web site about why he had confronted Wiesel, who has written extensively on the Holocaust. "I had planned to bring Wiesel 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," the writer said.
Attempts to reach the writer for comment were unsuccessful Saturday.
Wiesel was 15 years old when his Jewish family was deported by the Nazis to the Auschwitz concentration camp. He lost his parents and younger sister in the Holocaust.
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The story says that it was the case of 'accosting'. The headline says it was an 'ATTACK'. The charges are: attempted kidnapping false imprisonment battery etc. I am confused.
The trouble tht Israel is having with the Palestinian Liberation Organization is not a news flash for me. I got into a heated argument with a Knesset Member named Benito Timkin (he was originally from Mexico) at the Jewish Community Center of Houston, Texas, during the beginning of the Oslo Accords period (1993-1994.) I wish that I could have been wrong, and that peace could have arrived for the Israeli people. Somehow, I just did not trust Yasser Arafat. At any rate, I am very pleased that the attacker of Elie Wiesel has been arrested, and like many young Americans, he appears to be "spaced out" on drugs. Elie Wiesel does not need this aggravation at this stage of his tragic life.
for all the defenders of human-garbage like zundel who say it's wrong that he was given a sentence of 5 years because and hide behind the "free speech" argument, it is because of sub-humans like zundel and the hatred he spews that serve as an example to the younger generation of sub-humans like hunt who go out and commit violent acts against aging Survivors. lock them all up.
". . . You declare, my friend, that you do not hate the Jews, you are merely 'anti-Zionist.' And I say, let the truth ring forth from the high mountain tops, let it echo through the valleys of God's green earth: When people criticize Zionism, they mean Jews--this is God's own truth. "Antisemitism, the hatred of the Jewish people, has been and remains a blot on the soul of mankind. In this we are in full agreement. So know also this: anti-Zionist is inherently antisemitic, and ever will be so. "Why is this? You know that Zionism is nothing less than the dream and ideal of the Jewish people returning to live in their own land. The Jewish people, the Scriptures tell us, once enjoyed a flourishing Commonwealth in the Holy Land. From this they were expelled by the Roman tyrant, the same Romans who cruelly murdered Our Lord. ---Let my words echo in the depths of your soul: When people criticize Zionism, they mean Jews--make no mistake about it.From M.L. King Jr., "Letter to an Anti-Zionist Friend," Saturday Review_XLVII (Aug. 1967), p. 76. Reprinted in M.L. King Jr., "This I Believe: Selections from the Writings of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr."
That's the basis of the Holocaust denying - not disputing the facts but de-legitimizing of the Jewish people and the state of Israel. This guy is clearly a lunatic but he is influenced by extreme left and right-wing ideologies and people like David Irving, David Duke and Ahmadinejad.
By using my website Eric Hunt makes this whole thing look suspiciously like a hoax. And he still owes me money.
Actaully jonny the Israeli / Palsentinian is far from being resolved and lets face it theres not much chance of that in our life time either.
... to visit Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland where even the remnants of the immense tragedy from over 60 years ago still impacts one to the point of feeling unwell! There Eric could have stood before the large mounds of cut ladies' braided hair, men's shaving brushes, peoples' prostheses, and also knelt down to scoop up dirt from the walking paths and see the burnt remains of peoples' bones, and also run his fingers in the scratches on the concrete walls of the crematoria where dying people attempted to claw their way out when being gassed. Perhaps then Eric could have pondered "Night" and thanked G-d that he was not Jewish and living back there even when it was day!
I thought that I read somewhere that anti-Semitism was supposed to disappear when the Israel-Palestine conflict was resolved. The real answer is that anti-Semitism will never disappear, and will be transferred from generation to generation.