A hero passes.

Via the Chicago Tribune:

From the Los Angeles Times
Simon Wiesenthal, 'Conscience' of Holocaust, Dies


By Henry Weinstein
Times Staff Writer

September 20, 2005, 2:56 AM CDT

Simon Wiesenthal, who survived a dozen concentration camps, then spent his life bringing Nazi war criminals to justice and searing the Holocaust into the conscience of the world, died Tuesday. He was 96.

Wiesenthal died in his sleep at his home in Vienna, according to Rabbi Marvin Hier, the dean and founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles.

…

Wiesenthal's biographers credited him with ferreting out 1,100 of Adolf Hitler's major and minor killers and other Nazi war criminals since World War II. He was instrumental in bringing to justice well-known figures such as Adolf Eichmann -- the Nazi bureaucrat who implemented Hitler's "Final Solution," the state-sponsored extermination of millions of Jews -- and lesser-known officials like Franz Stangl, commandant of the prison camps at Treblinka and Sobibor, in German-occupied Poland, who had a role in at least 900,000 deaths.

But Wiesenthal's contribution to history was far more complex. For years, especially during the height of the Cold War, when many wanted to forget or evade the horrors of Hitler and his followers, Wiesenthal was an insistent reminder that their evil acts must be remembered and accounted for.
…

"In one sense, the entire quest for justice in the aftermath of genocide is futile, because you cannot punish all the killers, and the punishment itself is incommensurate with the nature of the crime," Berenbaum said. "And yet the need for the illusion of justice is so essential to the task of rebuilding that we need to go forward on it.

…

Fifty years later, on the anniversary of Austria's liberation, Wiesenthal was such a symbol of justice in the postwar world that he was asked to address thousands from the same Vienna balcony where Hitler stood in 1938 when he took over Austria.

Amid triumphs and acclaim, Wiesenthal also faced controversy, rancor and setbacks. He failed to find Josef Mengele, the physician who had conducted brutal experiments on prisoners at Auschwitz. He was called a bully and a zealot by friends and relatives of Nazis he pursued, sometimes well into the quarry's later years.

He was excoriated by an Israeli intelligence official who said Wiesenthal had claimed too much credit for the 1960 capture of Eichmann. He was severely criticized by fellow Jews for refusing to condemn former Austrian President Kurt Waldheim as a war criminal.
…

I don’t give a shit what was on the other side of the ledger; If your Page in the “Book of Life” reads, “Survived a dozen concentration camps” and then spent the remainder of your life hunting Nazis, everything else is blahblahblah.

Chin music.

Nothing.

Meanwhile, a certain Vice President...


begins to pack his Sunday Tailgatin’ Best…






…the give the world another big, wet, Fuck You at yet another solemn occasion marking the defeat of the Third Reich and the long quest to bring Nazi war criminals to book.

Which is kinda funny until you remember that Cheney is the Sekrit Preznit of a party completely run by Fundies who firmly believe, as the President of the Southern Baptist Convention proudly and publicly declared twenty years ago, that, "God does not hear the prayers of a Jew." The same people called on their zombie army to pray for the nine hundred million Hindus who “worship gods which are not God.” (Both citations courtesy this site.)

If Heaven is zoned under a "special covenant" only for degenerates like Cheney and Falwell, Dobson and DeLay then pre-book me a room in the Low Dark Place right now. I'll bell-hop for Gandhi and be on 24/7 shoe-shine call for Wiesenthal and call it the noblest work I've ever done.

It would be my deepest honor to call such men as these neighbors, regardless of the temperature or the combustibility of the immediate vicinty.