Elie Wiesel, attacked in hotel.

The SFGate has the news about the recent attack on Elie Wiesel. Wiesel, Holocaust author and Nobel Peace Prize winner, was in San Fransisco attending a conference on "Facing Violence: Justice, Religion and Conflict Resolution". He was in an elevator at his hotel when a man entered and attempted to drag him from the elevator on the 6th floor and into a room. He fought the man and the assailant fled. Wiesel decided to leave the conference and the city.

From the article:

On Tuesday, a man identifying himself Eric Hunt and claiming to be the attacker posted an account of the incident on a virulently anti-Semitic and anti-Israel Web site.
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"After ensuring no women would be traumatized by what I had to do (I had been trailing Wiesel for weeks), I stopped the elevator at the sixth floor," Hunt wrote. "I said I wanted to interview him. He protested, grabbed at his chest as if he was having a heart attack. He then screamed HELP! HELP! at the top of his lungs.

"I told him, 'Why, you don't want people to know the truth?' " Hunt wrote. "After pulling him about fifteen feet out of the elevator ... I decided that it was time for me to go."
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Hunt said in his posting that he had intended to corner Wiesel and force him to admit that the Holocaust never happened.

"I had planned to bring Wiesel to my hotel room, where he would truthfully answer my questions regarding the fact that his non-fiction Holocaust memoir, 'Night,' is almost entirely fictitious," Hunt wrote on the site.

Just chilling. Chilling and disturbing.

After everything Wiesel has experienced:

Wiesel, a native of Romania, was sent by the Nazis in 1944 to Auschwitz, where his mother and three sisters were killed. His father died on a forced march to Buchenwald, another concentration camp, three months before the camp was liberated in 1945.

Wiesel has written more than 40 books based on his Holocaust experiences. In 1978, President Jimmy Carter named him to lead the effort to build the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. In 1986, Wiesel won the Nobel Peace Prize.

So it is a good reminder to remember that the dangers in this country aren't so easy to profile away. There is always a bigot waiting to jump out at a Holocaust survivor, and a nut job ready to jump out and accost an astronaut over the moon landings.