The passing of Nobel Peace Laureate, Holocaust survivor and internationally-renowned author Elie Wiesel was met on social media by torrents of antisemitic comments.
Wiesel, a survivor of both Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps, died on 2nd July in his home. Various international figures showed their respect for Wiesel, including U.S. President Barack Obama, who aptly described Wiesel as ‘one of the great moral voices of our time’. However, many people ignored Wiesel’s achievements, instead choosing to use his death as an opportunity to push antisemitic conspiracy theories. One commenter on the BBC Facebook post reporting Wiesel’s death asked ‘is BBC as Jewish controlled as the rest of the British/US private media?’.
Others defamed Wiesel personally; commenting on Obama’s praise for Wiesel on Facebook, one man wrote “The bigest liar and crook never exist on the surface of the earth, all what he write s a pure fiction, and the worst he has stollen the name of a person with a same name realy exist in the camp and died there , fu…liar zionist, even my dog don’t be sad of his died (sic)”, referencing a malicious conspiracy theory that Wiesel was never deported to Auschwitz or Buchenwald. Others simply commented ‘fraud’, described him as a ‘deceiving, rotten cretin’ or remarked that it was ‘about time as well, for too long we’ve had to listen to his crap’. Perhaps most shockingly, one woman commented that he ‘shoulda (sic) been gassed’ on the BBC coverage.
Many comments drew attention to the fact that Wiesel was a Zionist. Perhaps most notably, Max Blumenthal, son of former Clinton adviser Sidney, accused Wiesel of being a ‘supporter of those who commit’ war crimes, comments that Hillary Clinton has condemned. On Facebook, comments suggested that Wiesel supported the ‘daily murder of Palestinians’, or outright accused him of supporting their ‘genocide’, this despite the fact that the Palestinian population has increased steadily, with over a million Arab residents of Israel with full political and civil rights, and with Wiesel never having made any statements supporting violence against Palestinians. Others described the United Nations as ‘Zionist little sheep’ and ‘american Zionist puppets’ for their praise of Wiesel, despite the fact that there is evidence that the UN is very strict in its treatment of Israel, which some have considered unfair towards the Jewish state.
Various others also espoused Holocaust denial. One twitter user described Wiesel as a ‘holo hoaxer’ responsible for ‘extortion and lies’, whilst another replied to Politico’s coverage by telling them not to ‘spread the Auschwitz lie’. Another simply tweeted ‘The Holocaust never happened’. One man argued that the Holocaust was ‘garbage’ because the ‘clinical and efficient’ Germans left ‘2.3 million Holocaust survivors’ alive, concluding that the Nazi’s brutality must have been exaggerated if so many people survived.
Our archive of the comments mentioned, as well as several others, can be viewed here. It is worth noting that these comments have not been dug up from far-right websites, but instead represent attitudes that were pervasive enough to have appeared prominently in the reactions to coverage of Wiesel’s death from prominent media outlets.