By Debbie Schlussel

I have mixed feelings about Elie Wiesel, the Holocaust survivor and author who died Saturday. While he was pro-Israel when it was convenient (especially when he needed money), he mostly used his soapbox and forum to speak out for Muslims but not their victims.

There’s been a lot of gushing over Wiesel over the last few days since he died. But Elie Wiesel was not the most well-spoken or effective spokesman about the tragedy of the Holocaust. He was just the most arrogant and the most preferred by the liberal left because he was fond of comparing the Holocaust to the experience of militant Muslims and other preferred “minorities.”

I always viewed his elevation as similar to that of Rosa Parks. There were many Blacks who refused to sit on the back of the bus before her. But none were as well-connected to or as calculatingly promoted by the NAACP as Parks, and because of that she gained a lot of fame and made a lot of money (all of which she squandered). Similarly, there are and were many more effective Holocaust memoirists better than Wiesel, and better speakers. I have many of their books on the shelves of my library, and many of those books are far more touching and moving than “Night,” the Wiesel book that millions of students (including me) were forced to read in school (making him incredibly wealthy). For instance, there is author Primo Levi, whose writing is more moving. He ultimately committed suicide because he felt guilty for having survived while six million were murdered. In contrast, Wiesel was arrogant and believed he should have survived to become the unelected spokesmodel for the Holocaust.

Wiesel was the chosen one by the far-leftists who had chosen and continue to choose themselves as the unelected, unrepresentative “leaders” of the Jewish community–those from the Muslim-friendly ADL, from the self-hating Jewish Welfare Federations now known as the United Jewish Communities and so on. And Wiesel was the chosen one because he used the Jewish tragedy of the Holocaust mostly NOT to help the Jews fighting for their survival in Israel but to make outrageous comparisons with the plight of dangerous, jihad-supporting Muslims in places like Bosnia. And because he was close with leftists like Obama and the Clintons and Oprah Winfrey–none of whom is particularly fond of Israel or the plight of the stabbing victims on the streets of Jerusalem and in the homes of Kiryat Arba and Judea and Samaria a/k/a “the West Bank.”

And like Rosa Parks, because Wiesel was the “chosen Holocaust survivor” of the left, he, too, garnered endless fame (a whole Oprah episode) and millions. He, too, squandered most of his millions, albeit not through profligate spending or mismanagement, but via greedily investing them with Bernie Madoff. Although many credited Wiesel with being “pro-Israel” in their obituaries for him, it was only after he was Madoffed and needed the dough to sustain his extravagant lifestyle that he was suddenly pro-Israel . . . and received $500,000 for a speech before the pro-Israel Pastor John Hagee and who knows how much to participate in pro-Israel events by endless self-promoting Kosher Sex Rabbi Shmuley Boteach (Michael Jackson’s and Al Sharpton’s rabbi). It is because of his pro-Israel appearances and statements when he was cash-starved late in life that have led to outrageous criticism this week from Jew-haters and Israelophobes.

But when he was still in the money and Israel and the Jews really needed Wiesel, he was more concerned with Muslims and dead Jews and with mamby-pamby moral equivalence statements about supporting a “two-state solution.” And with refusing to recognize the Armenian Holocaust perpetrated by Muslims.

I’ll never forget the two major times that Elie Wiesel spoke out to U.S. Presidents. Neither time was on behalf of the Jewish people who, again, were and are today fighting for survival in Israel. Instead, he used the 1993 opening of the U.S. National Holocaust Memorial Museum to lecture President Bill Clinton that he should use American troops and weapons to help the Bosnian Muslims against the Christians of the region. How the heck was that in America’s best interests? How the heck was that in the Jewish people’s interest? And how the heck was that anything like the Holocaust? It wasn’t any of these.

The Bosnian Muslims were in a civil war with Christian Serbians and Croatians. This was a fight between the survival of a Western Christian culture and a Bosnian Muslim jihadist one. Because of Wiesel’s urging that day–with his absurd comparison to the Bosnian situation with Jews in the Holocaust–Clinton sided with the Muslims, and they’ve now taken over. Bosnia is now a region where jihadist training camps are thriving, and we know that Bosnian Muslims have joined and fought for ISIS, Al-Qaeda, and other Islamic terrorist groups all over the world. While Wiesel spoke of what was being “done” to Bosnian Muslims by the Christians, the Bosnian Muslims raped, tortured, and murdered their fair share of Christian men and women. We should have fought for the Christians, not the other way around. Or at the very least, we should’ve stayed out of it.

Wiesel could and should have used the Holocaust Museum speech to castigate Bill Clinton for not protecting the Jews of Israel, down whose throat Clinton was shoving myriad dangerous “peace” treaties that resulted in many bloody Muslim terrorist attacks and murders of Jews.

But that was typical of Wiesel. The tax-funded U.S. Holocaust Museum he founded makes the weaselly Wiesel-esque comparisons between the Jewish Holocaust and the “oppression” of Muslims frequently. It’s disgusting. Muslims fighting Muslims, Muslims mass-murdering Christians and Jews, and Muslims wreaking deadly bloody havoc all over the world is more similar to the Nazi experience, not the Jewish one at the hands of their Nazi tormentors (which included two Muslim Bosnian Nazi divisions).

And yet, when it came to one of the real other Holocausts–at the hands of Muslims–he refused to recognize it: the Armenian Holocaust perpetrated by Turkish Muslims. That was real genocide. But Wiesel refused to say so, despite being asked.

The other time Wiesel popped off to a President was when he urged President Reagan, at a White House ceremony, not to go to the Bitburg cemetery in Germany where Nazis were buried. While Reagan’s trip was ill-advised and he shouldn’t have gone to that cemetery (a trip orchestrated by Jew-hating half-German Pat Buchanan), Wiesel seemed to care more about the dead Nazis than he’s ever cared about live Jews. He could have spoken out to Reagan against the anti-Isreal adviser James Baker’s detrimental policies or something else. But he didn’t.

Wiesel spent more than a day with Oprah at Auschwitz-Birkenau (he was a prisoner at a sub-camp nearby). And Oprah spent a whole show without commercials on that experience. Then, she had an essay contest where students were encouraged to write about how they overcame their own personal tragedy similar to the Holocaust. It was laughable because students actually wrote about overcoming their own “personal Holocausts” of doing poorly at school or being bullied. But the reason that happened is Elie Wiesel. He spent that hour on Oprah comparing the Holocaust to a zillion dissimilar tragedies in the world. But he didn’t dare mention a word about Jews fighting HAMAS and other terrorists in Israel, Jews being stabbed or otherwise murdered by those malefactors on a daily basis. Wiesel, as he often did, refused to connect the dots.

And this was Oprah who regularly used her daytime TV show and namesake magazine to pillory Israel and the Jews and lionize and feel sorry for Muslim extremists. Wiesel never spoke out about this. And he never told Oprah to retract the show she did spreading the Nazi-esque blood libel that Jews sacrifice their firstborn children. It’s a show that White supremacists and other anti-Semites still quote to this day as proof of an ugly lie that has been used to vilify us for centuries. But Wiesel said nothing. Because that’s how Elie Wiesel was. He liked to ingratiate himself and hang out with the glitterati and the elites. And he liked that above all else.

It was reported that Wiesel told Oprah she should visit Israel, and that she committed to do so. Yet, in the decade since, he never ever pressed her on that promise. Given her track record, we probably should be happy he did not.

As I noted, for most of the last two decades, Wiesel was a “moral equivalence” guy, who equated Jews and Palestinians and praised the “two-state solution” which isn’t a solution at all but a furthering of the end of Israel via violent jihad. Again, it was only recently that Wiesel had begun to make some more pro-Israel statements because he needed money.

I’m glad he finally came out vigorously for Israel, but it was never with the vigor that he came out for Muslims and others. And his vigor was selective. He was tight with the Clintons and with Obama. And he didn’t lecture them against the horrible Iran nuclear deal, of which Hillary was the architect and Obama was the “leader.” He never once asked them to stop their verbal and diplomatic attacks against the Jewish State. Not ever. (If only he had the guts to rebuke them with even an iota of the energy with which he attacked Reagan at the Reagan White House.)

And that’s why, upon Wiesel’s death a few days ago, many of the leftists, including Obama and Oprah, mourned his death the most.

Elie Wiesel was tight with Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, and Hillary Clinton. You know what they say about the company you keep. And he never once rebuked them publicly for their horrible policies which will harm the Jewish people and Israel (and other victims of Islam) irreparably and forever.

And that is how he should be remembered. Not for having the “courage” to speak out against the Holocaust, which is long past and almost universally condemned, while he made millions off of it.

But for never having had the courage to speak out to his high-placed friends about what mattered.