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| President Paul Kagame |
At New York’s Cooper Union, where Abraham Lincoln launched his presidential campaign, I witnessed pro-Israel Republican billionaire Sheldon Adelson laud the “military genius” of Rwandan strongman Paul Kagame while a crowd consisting mostly of Jewish Americans cheered. Organized by Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, the popular TV personality and failed New Jersey congressional candidate whose hapless campaign was bankrolled by Adelson, and hosted by NYU’s Bronfman Center for Jewish Life, the bizarre event centered a discussion of the “strong protecting the weak” from genocide.
The evening’s guest of honor was Elie Wiesel, the 85-year-old Nobel
prize winning author who Boteach compared to Nelson Mandela and hailed
as “the prince of the Jewish people.” Wiesel joined Adelson in
celebrating Kagame, lending his reputation as the world’s most famous
Holocaust survivor to a man accused of propelling the worst genocide
since World War Two and described by leading Rwanda expert Philip Reyntjens as “probably the worst war criminal in office today.”
When Wiesel urged the audience to speak up against injustice, a young
human rights activist named Rob Conrad rose from the crowd, attempting
to interject facts about Kagame’s role in supporting the M23 rebel militia
that has fueled the genocide in the Congo, relying on child soldiers in
a conflict that has left millions dead. Wiesel watched in silence as
Kagame’s personal security detail ripped the protester from his seat,
covered his mouth and manhandled him all the way to the exit door. The
Congolese human rights activist Kambale Musavuli told me he was removed
from the event by Rwandan security before it even began, raising
questions about whether NYU’s Bronfman Center shared its list of
attendees with Kagame’s personal detail.
After Boteach delivered a lengthy treatise on shared Israeli-Rwandan
values, highlighting countless UN condemnations of both nations’ human
rights violations as a positive trait, me and Alex Kane of Mondoweiss
attempted to question him and his fellow panelists (no questions were
allowed from the crowd during the event). Besides being the man Boteach
described as “the very conscience of the six million martyred in the
Holocaust,” Wiesel has been the chairman of Elad,
a pro-settler organization that is orchestrating the demolition of
Palestinian homes in occupied East Jerusalem to build a biblical theme
park. And Adelson was perhaps the most generous patron of Israeli Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s political career. We wanted to know what
could be done to protect Palestinians from the individuals and ventures
they supported. Naturally, they did not want to answer, though Adelson
volunteered a dark fantasy to Kane: “You should have your mouth duct
taped!”
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