| SIMON WIESENTHAL CENTRE Wallenberg Weeps on a Paris Street Corner: A Wiesenthal Centre Comment Almost sixty-two years after his disappearance, the City of Paris, this Saturday, named a street in honour of this"Righteous Gentile" who, as a Swedish diplomat in wartime Budapest, rescued over 35,000 Hungarian Jews from Nazi deportation to the death camps. Due to the ceremony being held on a Sabbath morning, the official Jewish institutions and the Embassy of Israel wereunrepresented. The invitation listed Sweden's Ambassador to France among the speakers. This visit may be viewed as a slap to the memory of Wallenberg for, by implication, it endorses the Hamas Charter whichcalls for the extermination of the Jewish people, including the descendants of those saved by a truly just son of Sweden. Rue Raul Wallenberg runs along a short stretch of dingy tenements leading into the ring road expressway at the very edgeof Paris. Without GPS, several taxi drivers were unable to even find its cross streets. The plaque on the site is most intriguing: The words "Jew" and "Holocaust" are marked by their absence. Perhaps the oversight considered the sensitivities ofputative Islamist radicals in the neighbourhood. As Wallenberg weeps on a Paris street corner, one wonders what was the point of this sad exercise. |