Elie Wiesel Does the Right Thing

Back in February we reported on the (ultimately successful) campaign by an organization known as the Institute for the Research of Genocide Canada to keep the historian Srdja Trifkovic from speaking at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.

The IRGC is a front group for radical Bosnian Muslims who aim to perpetuate the narrative of the “genocide” at Srebrenica during the civil war in Bosnia. They don’t take kindly to anyone who interrupts their fantasy with the truth; hence their antipathy towards Srdja Trifkovic.

Dr. Trifkovic’s subsequent research into the background of the IRGC has borne fruit: the renowned scholar and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel resigned last week from the advisory board of the IRGC. Here’s the report from The Lord Byron Foundation:

Elie Wiesel resigns from the "Genocide Institute Canada," dissociates himself from Emir Ramic

Friday, 15 Apr 2011

“Elie Wiesel cannot sit together with Emir Ramic in the same organization. He does hereby resign from the ‘International Team of Experts’ of the Institute for the Research of Genocide Canada. Thank you, and please do confirm receipt of this message.”

This terse note, sent by the Elie Wiesel Foundation to the Bosnian-Muslim “Institute” on April 14, is a welcome and long overdue development. Professor Wiesel is to be commended for dissociating himself from Emir Ramic and all that he and his Jihadist cohorts stand for. This fraudulent disinformation outfit now stands unmasked for what it is and terminally discredited.

JULIA GORIN WRITES: Professor Wiesel and his foundation are to be commended for the integrity and courage they have demonstrated by this act. All the more since the political fallout and pressure against him now — including, potentially, by senior government officials and other prominent types around the world — may be immense. For background on the ghastly Emir Ramic and his Bosnian-Canadian “genocide institute,” please see the summary by Srdja Trifkovic, whose persecution and expulsion from Canada at the behest of Ramic’s institute prompted the latter’s own exposure by me and others, whether it was my Feb. 28th letter to the Wiesel Foundation’s director Daniel Schwartz that called their attention to what was going on and what the Institute was at its core, or whether Professor Wiesel and his staff found out about it from the above-linked articles. But I will reproduce for readers the letter as I’d sent it:

Dear Mr. Schwartz: I’m a Jewish columnist who recently stumbled onto the fact that Mr. Elie Wiesel is indicated as an expert adviser on the website for the Institute for Research on Genocide in Canada (IRGC).Last Thursday, the IRGC accused the scholar and author Dr. Srdja Trifkovic of “genocide denial” and influenced the Canadian authorities to ban him from entering the country. In contrast to Dr. Trifkovic, who has been a keynote speaker at Yad Vashem, the director of IRGC — Emir Ramic, who wrote a protest letter to the Canadian university where Trifkovic was to speak and got the wheels in motion for his removal from Canada — is on the editorial board of an Islamist magazine in Sarajevo called Korak (Step), published in Sarajevo.

This magazine’s issue No. 13 (above link) has an interesting article: “Basic Principles of the Law of War in Islam” (pp. 13-17). The article asserts, among other things, that “Jihad is a just and legitimate fight against aggression and a struggle in protection of human rights and freedoms.” (p. 15) On p. 93 appears the following headline: IZRAELSKI REZIM JE TERORISTICKI, by Fikret Muslimovic. (“Israeli Regime is Terrorist”).

Mr. Schwartz, this is the real face of the so-called “Institute.” In addition to the “Institute’s” director, Mr. Wiesel’s fellow board member Asaf Dzanic is the editor-in-chief of this magazine. Mr. Wiesel is in some interesting company indeed.

In his recent article Canadian former ambassador to Bulgaria, Albania and Yugoslavia, James Bissett pointed out some other problems with the organization — including a rather ironic one, given that the group engages in Holocaust minimization on the subject of the Jasenovac camp (“Auschwitz of the Balkans”), an already minimized and suppressed story.

One trusts that Elie Wiesel Foundation knows some history of the Balkans region, and that the horrific happenings of the 1990s were a direct pick-up of the 1940s — with all the same players on the same sides. In Croatia, President Franjo Tudjman, a Holocaust minimizer, was swiftly establishing a widely noted carbon copy of WWII’s Hitler-aligned Ustasha regime. And Bosnian-Muslim president Alija Izetbegovic, while packaged as a “multicultural democrat” by a credulous West, was revered in the Muslim world as an ideologue of jihad and Islamic revolution, as his own book “Islamic Declaration” openly demonstrates; he was fighting to establish an Islamic regime in Europe (while calling it something else, of course).

Naturally, the Serbs — avidly slaughtered by both of these players in the previous war, in which Serbs died with Jews and Roma at Croatia’s Jasenovac (staffed by Croatian and Bosnian guards and executioners) — weren’t about to consign themselves to the same potential fate when they suddenly found themselves no longer citizens of Yugoslavia, but second-class citizens of a unilaterally declared independent Croatia and a unilaterally declared independent Bosnia. And so there was war. It was not the black-and-white affair that has been presented for Western consumption.

I do not ask that Mr. Wiesel take any new positions or actively start to oppose the Bosnian-Muslim side. I ask only that those who do not know all the facts of the Balkan civil wars — take no sides at all. Especially if they have a name that carries as much weight and legitimizing power as Wiesel. But if Mr. Wiesel chooses to still endorse the Muslim side — as is his prerogative — then at least for decency’s, liberty’s, and history’s sakes, it should not be a difficult decision for him to just disengage himself from IRGC. Yes, he will face some political pressure to reverse that decision, but I am confident that a man like Elie Wiesel still knows how to take a stand.

In the meantime, Efraim Zuroff, Jerusalem director of Simon Wiesenthal Center, has been apprised of the situation and is determining a course of action. Thank you for your prompt attention to this matter.

Julia Gorin

p.s. Here is a link to Thursday’s news broadcast on the deportation of Trifkovic; under the “more info” arrow is this paragraph:

February 24, 2011 (SYL) - Serbian-American professor Dr Srdja Trifkovic was denied access into Canada after being accused of holding a senior position in the Government of Republika Srpska during the Bosnian war by the Vancouver airport immigration authorities. Srdja, who was a foreign affairs expert with links in the Bosnian Serb Government, never held any position in that Government, let alone a senior one. The fabricated reason for deportation was likely the result of lobbying by the extremist organization “The Institute for Research of Genocide in Canada”, which is notorious…

Elie Wiesel has shown character and taken a stand. As Stefan Karganovic, of the Srebrenica Historical Project, wrote me upon hearing the news: “It was clear to me from the start that he was bamboozled by Bosnian Moslems and had no idea what they were doing and advocating over his name.”

I am going to close with an update on some things about Emir Ramic which I found out only after writing my previous article mentioning him and his activities…

Read the rest at The Lord Byron Foundation.