Elie Wiesel's Shocking Stage Appearance With Mad Preacher and Anti-Semite John Hagee

The controversial Christian right figure baselessly trashed Obama, and Nobel laureate and Holocaust survivor Wiesel calls him "dear pastor." What gives?

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Michael Goldfarb, a former spokesman for the McCain-Palin campaign, who blogs at the neoconservative Weekly Standard , called the blogger panel "clownish." He reported on my remarks: "Elie Wiesel Mocked At J Street Conference." Goldfarb omitted the facts I introduced about Hagee's anti-Semitism. Once again, ideology demanded forgetting history.

Jeffrey Goldberg, a writer for the Atlantic, also called the panel "clownish," attacking me for criticizing Wiesel.

"Here's a tip," Goldberg wrote on his blog. "Criticizing public figures who survived the Holocaust is permissible, of course. But mocking them is disgraceful. It's also not going to win you too many Jewish friends." Goldberg also excommunicated me as one of the "anti-Zionists with Jewish parents."

Why is Wiesel palling around with Hagee? Why did I "mock" Wiesel? Both Goldfarb and Goldberg refused to address these questions and neglected to quote the facts I offered on Hagee.

While Goldfarb assailed a J Street donor for controversial statements on Israel, they have never addressed Hagee's anti-Semitic rants. Goldberg has not addressed the issue of Hagee either. The two present their opinions conveniently without the facts.

But the absence of the facts from their blog posts does not allow them to evade the issue. Do they, like Wiesel and Oren, approve of Hagee? In defending Wiesel from criticism for his relationship with Hagee, they are also defending the relationship. Is this what they really mean to do?

Then they must also disagree with McCain's severing of his ties with Hagee. What is it about Hagee that Goldfarb and Goldberg find acceptable, as Wiesel and Oren find him acceptable? Unless, of course, they don't approve of Hagee or association with him at all and were using criticism of those embracing him as a cudgel to beat up on J Street. Send in the clowns.

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Watch Max Blumenthal's video from a recent Christians United for Israel Summit in Washington.