Blessed Are (Some of) the Peacemakers

Elie Wiesel, world leader of the S. S. (Sensitive Survivors), has found a new cause. Rummaging among the victims of Hitler's regime, he's come up with Carl von Ossietzky, Weimar leftist and “pacifist” par excellence, who died in a Berlin hospital after several years in a German concentration camp. Wiesel is agitating for the overturn of Ossietzky's conviction for treason, and there hangs a tale.

The fact is that Ossietzky was convicted for revealing national military secrets under Germany's short-lived Weimar democracy–he published top-secret info regarding Germany's clandestine efforts to build up an air force (banned at Versailles) in cooperation with Stalin's Russia. After Hitler came to power Ossietzky was rearrested and sent off to the camps—just on general principle, it seems.

For once, today's German government seems to be hanging tough: the fact the conviction took place during the Weimar Republic allows the argument that Ossietzky' might have been guilty.

But wait, Elie! Don't despair–there's a live prisoner of conscience you can intercede for, right in your beloved Israel. His name is Mordechai Vanunu. He's a former worker at Israel's closely guarded nuclear works at Dimona, and a few years ago he leaked photos and descriptions of Israel's top-secret atomic arsenal to the world–after which he was kidnapped from London by the Mossad, rushed through a hasty trial while swathed in gags and restraints, for all the world like Claude Rains in the Invisible Man, and sentenced to life imprisonment.

Surely Elie can see the parallels between Ossietzky's tipping the world off to the budding Luftwaffe (come to think of it little more than a few gliders and biplanes in 1929) and Vanunu's blowing the whistle on Israel's atom bomb stash (which can probably wipe out the Mideast several times over).

Elie should say something about this. Elie’s a Nobel Peace Prize winner, after all.