Part 2 : Eric Lichtblau on "The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler’s Men"

We continue our conversation with Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Eric Lichtblau about his new book detailing how America became a safe haven for thousands of Nazi war criminals. Many of them were brought here after World War II by the CIA, and got support from then FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: We continue our conversation with investigative reporter Eric Lichtblau, author of a new book that unveils the secret history of how America became a safe haven for thousands of Nazi war criminals. Many of them were brought here after World War II by the CIA and got support from the FBI’s director, J. Edgar Hoover.

AMY GOODMAN: Eric Lichtblau’s book is called The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler’s Men. You can read the prologue on our website at democracynow.org.

Eric, we left the first part of the interview by you talking about those held in the concentration camps under the Nazis. Once the Allies won, the U.S. and Allies took over these camps.

ERIC LICHTBLAU: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: And the Jews and others were kept there, often under the supervision—if you could call it that—of the Nazi POWs who were put in these camps, as well.

ERIC LICHTBLAU: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: The people who had killed and murdered and maimed them.

ERIC LICHTBLAU: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you take it from there and talk about General Patton and, ultimately, President Truman, as well?

ERIC LICHTBLAU: Sure, yeah, yeah. It’s a remarkable saga and a fairly shameful period in postwar history. We sort of think of the concentration camps, you know, being liberated at Dachau, at Bergen-Belsen, at Auschwitz, by the U.S. and Britain and Russia. But liberation for the survivors who were left in the camps meant staying in those same camps, behind barb wire, under armed guard. And remarkably, sometimes they were supervised by the same Nazis who had lorded over them when the Germans were still in charge.

And there was a report to Truman from the dean of the University of Pennsylvania Law School, a guy named Earl Harrison, that compared the camps to the Nazi concentration camps, except that, Harrison wrote, the only difference is we’re not exterminating the Jews. And General Patton, who ran the camps as the supreme Allied commander for the United States after the war, was furious when he read Harrison’s findings to Truman. And he wrote in his own journal—and I looked at these. I found the remarks so troubling and so jarring, I thought maybe at first they were a forgery, but it turned out to be true. He wrote in his own journal that what Harrison doesn’t understand, he thinks that the displaced persons in the camps are human, and they’re not. The Jews, he wrote—this is General Patton speaking—are worse than human, they’re locusts, and they have no respect for human dignity. And he recounted taking General Eisenhower, soon to be President Eisenhower, on a tour of the displaced person camps, and he said that Eisenhower didn’t really understand how loathsome the displaced persons were, and he thinks that they have some human dignity, when really they don’t.

Patton, it turns out, was not only a virulent anti-Semite, but also held the Germans in a weird sort of place of respect. I also tell the story in the book about, in those displaced person camps, Patton went to the holding cells for the German POWs, the German scientists, and he sought out one in particular, General Walter Dornberger, who oversaw the production of Hitler’s V-2 rockets, which had been phenomenally successful and destructive in bombing London and Antwerp. And Patton brings him out of the cell and says, "Are you Dornberger? Are you the guy who ran the V-2 program?" And Dornberger said to him, "Jawohl, Herr General." And Patton pulled out three cigars from his pocket and handed them to the Nazi general and said, "Well, congratulations. We couldn’t have done it." And it sort of epitomized this attitude that he had towards the Nazis. He even defied an order from Eisenhower at one point, General Eisenhower, and maintained the Nazis as supervisors in the DP camps, because he saw them as the most competent group that the Allieds had. So, I think you need to understand how horrific the conditions were for the survivors to understand how it was that so many Nazis made it into the United States.

AMY GOODMAN: Explain the—

ERIC LICHTBLAU: I think there was—yes.

AMY GOODMAN: —the V-2 factories, just to explain the significance of what happened—

ERIC LICHTBLAU: Sure.

AMY GOODMAN: —in these rocket factories.

ERIC LICHTBLAU: Sure. These rocket factories were basically torture chambers. These were places where 10,000 prisoners—not most of them Jews, but most of them POWs from France, Poland, Russia and elsewhere—were building on an assembly line—an assembly line of death, basically—hundreds of rockets each month for Hitler. And if they did not meet their quotas, if they did not work up to standards, if they were suspected of sabotaging the rockets, as some tried to do, they were hanged from a giant crane, and all the other prisoners would be gathered around to watch them. And those who weren’t intentionally killed, thousands of them died just from disease and malnutrition and exhaustion, kept in these horrible, horrible conditions literally inside a mountain in Nordhausen, where the factory was held.

So, this was the production facility that Dornberger and Wernher von Braun, who went on to become even more famous, ran. And there was a guy who—physically at the mountain factory, named Arthur Rudolph, who was the production head at the Mittelwerk Nordhausen plant, he came to the United States, along with Wernher von Braun and Dornberger and the others, and Rudolph became almost as famous, as one of the geniuses behind the Saturn space program. And their Nazi legacies were basically erased.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Eric, the government files and records that tell this story were kept, obviously, from the public for decades. Could you talk about the importance of those files finally being released to be able to put together this story?

ERIC LICHTBLAU: Sure, sure. Well, the CIA, especially, and other intelligence agencies really went to enormous lengths to conceal their ties to the Nazis. They had had all these relationships, beginning immediately after the war through the ’50s, the ’60, in some cases even the ’70s, with Nazi spies and informants and scientists. And they went to great lengths to cleanse the records of a lot of the Nazis who came to the United States, removing material that showed their links to Nazi atrocities. Now, I found cases even in the 1990s, believe it or not, where you had the CIA actively intervening in investigations. By the 1980s and 1990s, the Justice Department was going after a number of these guys, was trying to deport them, for their involvement in war crimes, belatedly, I think.

And the CIA—in the case of a Lithuanian security chief who was involved in the massacre of about 60,000 Jews, the CIA tried to kill that investigation in 1994 and '95. And they told Congress, yes, this guy was a CIA spy for us, this former Nazi collaborator, but we knew nothing of his wartime activities, is what they said. And, in fact, in their own files, in their own postwar files, it showed that they knew that this Lithuanian was under—quote, "under the control of the Gestapo and was probably involved in the murder of Jews in Vilnius." So, this was—again, this is not the 1950s we're talking about; this is the 1990s, where people at the CIA were actively trying to conceal their ties.

And some of these documents, as you suggested, only became available beginning in the 1990s, the late 1990s, when Congress ordered the declassification of war crime files. The CIA really resisted that at first. It took years for the historians to get at the war crime files. But beginning in around 2003, 2004, a lot of these files became declassified, and they really painted a pretty troubling picture.

AMY GOODMAN: But even the piece that started you on this journey, Eric Lichtblau, in 2010 was about a report coming out that had been censored right until most recently.

ERIC LICHTBLAU: Sure.

AMY GOODMAN: Explain why right through until these last few years the U.S. has refused to give this out? And the man who had campaigned to his death bed to have it released—it was a CIAreport?

ERIC LICHTBLAU: True. No, it was a Justice Department report. But as you say, it was kept under wraps for about five years. It was written in the mid-2000s. And I first got onto this, and really what started the book was that I got a tip that there was this exhaustive internal report at the Justice Department that looked at the efforts to go after the Nazis, and the Justice Department was sitting on the report. They had refused to release this publicly for very mysterious reasons. And I was able to get a hold of it and did a story on that. And I think even before I finished writing the story, I thought, you know, the material was so rich and so troubling that I wanted to try and do a book on it, because it really—it exposed both the successes of prosecutors in later years in going after these guys, but also really the just perverse relationships that the government had with a lot of these guys going back to the 1950s and 1960s. And that was something that the Justice Department did not want out there publicly.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the anti-Semitism also of President Truman and then this issue of the scientists? What, 1,600 scientists were brought into the United States, many others, but at the same time, how many Jews were held in these camps, millions of them, not allowed to come into the United States? This is after the war.

ERIC LICHTBLAU: Right, right. You know, I think the anti-Semitism really did play a part in the immigration policies after the war, which had the dual effect of both keeping out Jews—I mean, there were documents that I looked at from Senate immigration lawyers who actively said they didn’t—they thought Jews were lazy and not hard-working enough and didn’t belong in America. And so, it was very difficult. Only a few thousand Jews got into the United States in the immediate aftermath of the war.

And you had something like 400,000 Eastern Europeans who, because of the, quote, "immigration quotas," were allowed in in those years from places like Lithuania and Latvia and Estonia and Ukraine. And many of those, probably the vast majority of those 400,000, were in fact legitimate war refugees. These were people who were victims of Nazi occupation and were about to be taken over by the Soviet Union and were exiles. They really were. But among those 400,000 were many, many, probably several thousand or more, Nazi collaborators, and they came in with the group as—disguised basically as refugees and POWs. I mean, these were people who ran, for instance, a Nazi concentration camp in Estonia. There was—the head of that camp lived on Long Island for about 30 years. There were people who were prison camp guards. There were people who were the heads of Nazi security forces all throughout Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe. And it was very easy for them to basically fade into the larger group of war refugees and become Americans.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Eric Lichtblau, we want to thank you very much for being with us

ERIC LICHTBLAU: Thank you. Appreciate your interest.

AMY GOODMAN: Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The New York Times. The new book, out this week, The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler’s Men. You can read theprologue at democracynow.org. Thanks so much.

GUEST

Eric Lichtblau, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The New York Times. His new book is The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler’s Men.

http://www.democracynow.org/blog/2014/10/31/part_2_eric_lichtblau_on_the

Part 1 : The Nazis Next Door / Eric Lichtblau on How the CIA & FBI Secretly Sheltered Nazi War Criminals

The Nazis Next Door: Eric Lichtblau at Amy Goodmanon How the CIA & FBI Secretly Sheltered Nazi War Criminals

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rCbCswT0CZs

- Investigative reporter Eric Lichtblau’s new book unveils the secret history of how the United States became a safe haven for thousands of Nazi war criminals.

- Many of them were brought here after World War II by the CIA and got support from then FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.
- Lichtblau first broke the story in 2010, based on newly declassified documents.
- Now, after interviews with dozens of agents for the first time, he has published his new book, "The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler’s Men."

Image Credit: flickr.com/pingnews

TRANSCRIPT

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: We end today’s show with investigative reporter Eric Lichtblau, author of a new book that unveils the secret history of how America became a safe haven for thousands of Nazi war criminals. Many of them were brought here after World War II by the CIA and got support from FBIDirector J. Edgar Hoover. Lichtblau first broke the story in 2010, based on newly declassified documents.

AMY GOODMAN: Now, after interviews with dozens of agents for the first time, he has published his new book. It’s called The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler’s Men. You can read the prologue on our website. Eric Lichtblau was last on Democracy Now! in 2008, after he and fellow reporter James Risen won the Pulitzer Prize for exposing the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping, despite White House pressure to kill the story. He joins us now from the New York Times D.C. bureau.

Welcome back, Eric, to Democracy Now! This is—it is a fascinating book. You open the book by telling us the story of a man in New Jersey. Why don’t you tell us about him?

ERIC LICHTBLAU: Sure. His name was Tom Soobzokov. He was a guy who had many bosses over the years. He worked for the FBI. He worked for the CIA. And before that, he worked for the Nazi SS. And that opening scene that you’re talking about takes place in the mid-1970s, when people at the Justice Department were starting to first become aware that there were ex-Nazis in the United States. And Soobzokov was one of the people who had come under investigation. He had been living in the United States for 20 years at that point. And he went back to his old handlers at the CIA, somewhat frantically, because the heat was really being put on him over his past and these accusations that he was in fact a Nazi, which he vehemently denied. And in the declassified documents that I looked at from the CIA, there’s memo after memo where the CIA is recounting these frantic phone calls and conversations with Soobzokov, where he’s saying, you know, "What am I going to do?" And the CIA is almost as frantically then meeting amongst themselves to say, "We’ve got a little problem on our hands here, and it’s going to get worse."

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Eric, talk about the CIA head, Allen Dulles, brother of John Foster Dulles, the secretary of state under Eisenhower, and his role in shaping this policy.

ERIC LICHTBLAU: Right, right, yeah, Dulles was one of the intelligence titans of the 1950s, one of the original cold warriors. And he was someone who believed that there were, quote-unquote, "moderate Nazis," his words, who the U.S. could use to its advantage in the Cold War. And he actively recruited them himself and, in a number of cases, intervened on their behalf when they were facing accusations about their past, about their involvement in Nazi war crimes. And he and J. Edgar Hoover were really the two linchpins in this, in developing this strategy of recruiting ex-Nazis as cold warriors, as anti-Soviet assets who, they believe, could gather intelligence for the U.S.

Now, the irony is that a lot of these guys, a lot of these ex-Nazis used as spies by the CIA, by theFBI, really turned out to be bad spies. There are all sorts of files that I examined showing that they—not shockingly in hindsight, that the Nazis were found to be liars and cheats and embezzlers, and in a couple cases they were even found to be Soviet double agents. So, not only do they have the incredible baggage of being Nazis, but they were not even good spies.

AMY GOODMAN: I mean, the story you tell of Allen Dulles meeting with Nazi General Karl Wolff in Switzerland—

ERIC LICHTBLAU: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: He was the number two man, right, for Himmler. Explain the deal that they were making, and then talk about the scientists that were recruited. I just flew back from Austria and sat next to a man who lives in Vienna, who grew up in northern New Jersey, and he said his father was brought from Germany by the CIA to northern New Jersey because he was a scientist, and they wanted him here, not in Russia.

ERIC LICHTBLAU: Right. Well, starting with the scientists, we brought over, under something called Program Paperclip, like 1,600 Nazi scientists. These were engineers, doctors, jet propulsion experts, things like that. The most famous among them was Wernher von Braun, who was one of the guiding hands in getting us to the moon in 1969. And officially, under the policies put in place by Truman and Eisenhower after the war, these were not supposed to be, quote-unquote, "ardent Nazis," whatever that may mean. But, you know, in fact, these were people who were directly involved in, for instance, running slave labor factories, where thousands and thousands of people died in making Hitler’s rockets. These were doctors who were involved in medical atrocities. They then found homes in the United States as American scientists. Many of them became U.S. citizens. Many of them became honored for their work in the United States.

As far as Allen Dulles, who you asked about, yeah, his role in having negotiations and conversations with Nazis began even before the war was over, believe it or not. A few months before the war [ended], there was a meeting that I talk about in the book where he met at a safe house in Zurich with Himmler’s ex-chief of staff, who was trying to save his own skin. He realized the war was about to be over in a few months, and he was understandably afraid of being charged in all sorts of war crimes.

This was Himmler’s chief of staff. He was involved in setting up the train network that led millions of Jews and others to their deaths. And Dulles thought that this general, General Karl Wolff, could help end the war earlier. As it turned out, they ended the war maybe two weeks earlier in the region in Italy that Wolff controlled. But as part of these negotiations, they were sipping Scotch over a lovely fireside in Zurich.

For months and months after the war, even for the first couple of years, Dulles really effectively protected General Wolff, Himmler’s ex-chief of staff, from war crimes charges. And Wolff went from being a chief defendant, one of the top Nazi defendants at Nuremberg, to being merely a witness, and served virtually no time in prison. In fact, even when he was nominally a prisoner as a POW, he was allowed to wear a gun. He went boating on the weekends in Austria. He led sort of a charmed life after the war, thanks to the help of Allen Dulles, who went on to become the first director of the CIA.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Eric, one of the heroes of your stories is—of your book is a reporter named Chuck Allen—

ERIC LICHTBLAU: Yeah.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: —who first began exposing this underground railroad of evildoers into the United States, but who was, at first, for many years, ignored. Could you talk about him?

ERIC LICHTBLAU: Right, right. I had never heard of Chuck Allen when I started my research, but he became sort of a hero of mine as I was writing this book. He was a left-wing journalist in the early 1960s, writing for obscure Jewish publications, sometimes communist-leaning publications. And he started writing exhaustively in the early 1960s about the fact, which was really unknown at the time, that there were Nazis and Nazi collaborators living openly in the United States. He wrote in 1963 an exhaustive, 40-page piece for a magazine called Jewish Currents, which was affiliated with the Communist Party. And in it, he documented the role of, for instance, a bishop in Chicago and a State Department analyst who had clear ties to the Nazis in atrocities.

And he was not only ignored, as you say, sort of written off as some left-wing kook, but at the FBI, they started paying attention, to the point that J. Edgar Hoover ordered him to be wiretapped for a number of years. And you had FBI agents trailing him as he would try and gather evidence on Nazi atrocities by people inside the United States. So he was seen as a subversive, as a communist plant, and was either ignored or shunned or actually retaliated against for writing these things in the 1960s. And this was a time when really no one else noticed or cared that there were, at that point, hundreds, thousands of Nazis living openly in the United states.

AMY GOODMAN: So he was being—while he may have been ignored by the public, he was being harassed by the FBI—

ERIC LICHTBLAU: Absolutely.

AMY GOODMAN: —at the same time that the FBI and the CIA were protecting these Nazis. Another amazing part of the story is how so many of those in the concentration camps afterwards, the Allies were running these concentration camps—

ERIC LICHTBLAU: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: —and the Jews were there. And often, the Nazi POWs in these camps would be put in charge of them—by the United States.

ERIC LICHTBLAU: Right, right. No, I’m glad you asked about that. I mean, that was probably the single most striking thing to me in my research. There were a lot of alarming things that I came across that I didn’t know when I started writing this book. But I think the most repugnant of all the repugnant things was the treatment of the survivors, not just Jews, but communists, gays, Roma and others who survived the Holocaust, but for months, and in some cases a couple of years, after the end of the war were still kept inside the concentration camps themselves, under—behind barbed wire, under armed guard, sometimes under the supervision of other Nazi POWs.

And it was—I learned it was General Patton, a war hero, "Old Blood and Guts," they called him, who oversaw the camps. He was the supreme Allied commander after the war. And he—I looked at his journals. He was a virulent anti-Semite. And there was a scathing report to Truman by an emissary of Truman’s from the University of Pennsylvania, Earl Harrison, that compared the camps that the United States was running after the war to the Nazi concentration camps. Harrison wrote that the only difference is that we’re not exterminating the Jews, which, you know, think of that in hindsight. Patton—

AMY GOODMAN: Eric—

ERIC LICHTBLAU: Yes?

AMY GOODMAN: Eric Lichtblau, we have to end the show, but we want to—

ERIC LICHTBLAU: Sure

http://www.democracynow.org/blog/2014/10/30/friday_the_nazis_next_door_how

READ-Prologue to "The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler’s Men" by Eric Lichtblau

Excerpted from THE NAZIS NEXT DOOR: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler’s Men by Eric Lichtblau. Copyright © 2014 by Eric Lichtblau. Used by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

THE NAZIS NEXT DOOR
How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler’s Men
By Eric Lichtblau

Prologue

A Name from the Past                 

July 12, 1974
Langley, Virginia

The old man sounded panicked. He was normally so cocksure and crafty, but now, as he related the strange events of the last few weeks, there was the squall of desperation in a voice left raspy by too many Marlboros. He was in trouble, Tom Soobzokov was telling his long-ago friend John Grunz on the other end of the phone line. Exactly why was still not clear; the words were tumbling out so furiously in Soobzokov’s thick Slavic accent that Grunz could scarcely follow his helter-skelter story.

Crazy refugees from the old country were out to destroy him, the old man was saying. There was something about libelous stories in the newspaper. A hell-bent congresswoman was somehow involved, too. And did Grunz hear his old friend Tom right? Did he just say something about Nazi war crimes?

Slow down, slow down, Grunz urged. Whatever’s going on, he said, we can deal with it. The assurances did nothing to calm Soobzokov.

You don’t understand. My life is in danger.

Typical Soobzokov. He inevitably seemed to cloak himself in some bit of drama or other; there was always that element of intrigue. He was, as his secret psychological workups had concluded years earlier, a bold and impassioned man, “a leader type who can get things done,” but volatile and scheming, too; “a skillful manipulator of people.” His outsize, fill-up-the-room personality had defined him for as long as Grunz had known him. But had his old friend, still rambling on the phone about Nazis and government probes, now turned delusional, too?

The two men, their lives once so tightly intertwined, had lost touch in recent years. Then came the cryptic message that an intermediary had passed along to Grunz just a few days earlier: someone named Soobzokov was looking for him. He wanted him to call as soon as possible. It sounded urgent.

Tom Soobzokov? Looking for him? It had been many years — fifteen, maybe twenty — since they had last spoken. What could he want after all this time?

Soobzokov, nothing if not resourceful, had gotten a friend in Congress to find Grunz’s unlisted line and get the message to him. That wasn’t as simple as it sounded, since Grunz had a way of making himself hard to find. He was, after all, a CIA spy.

Soobzokov knew a bit about spying, too. That was how he knew Grunz. Soobzokov had once been a spy himself for the CIA — not a particularly good one, but a spy nonetheless. Grunz had been his handler in the Middle East two decades earlier as they chased intelligence on the Soviets in the crazy Cold War days of the 1950s. Soobzokov’s main mission was to recruit Russian émigrés and fervent anti-Communists — people like him — who might be willing to spy on their former homeland for America. He was always on the verge of turning the next big Russian agent, or so he claimed. It was in the Middle East that Soobzokov had picked up his CIA code name: Nostril, an unflattering allusion to his prominent hooked nose. If he minded the moniker, he never let on. He loved the cloak-and-dagger intrigue of the spy business. He also liked to brandish his agency credentials to friends and acquaintances, with a reckless bravado — not a good quality in a spy. As his handler, Grunz was sometimes forced to clean up the mess left by Nostril’s indiscretions in far-flung places.

Now, so many years later, a frantic Soobzokov had put out word — through a congressman, no less — that he was looking for Grunz. No, don’t give him my phone number, Grunz told the congressman’s office. I’ll contact him.

Whatever was going on, Grunz figured it couldn’t be good.

He picked up the phone and dialed a 201 area code: northern New Jersey, where, if he recalled right, Soobzokov had settled when he emigrated from Europe after World War II among a mass of war-torn refugees.

Pleasantries were few, despite their long estrangement. Soobzokov needed help, and he needed it now, he told Grunz. His life — the American life he had cultivated so assiduously for himself, his wife, and his five children in the hardscrabble town of Paterson, New Jersey — was collapsing around him. Amid the flurry of wild-sounding events, Grunz was finally able to parse out enough of the details to fully appreciate his panic.

Maybe he wasn’t so delusional, after all. People really were after him.

It had started with the whispers. For years, a bunch of Soobzokov’s fellow immigrants who, like him, hailed from Russia’s rugged western borderland in the North Caucasus, between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, had been spreading malicious talk about him, he said. He practically spat the words. They were obviously jealous of him — jealous of the political connections he’d built among state Democrats; jealous of the plum county job he’d landed; jealous of the reputation he’d earned in the immigrant community as a leader and fixer, a man who could make problems go away. When he walked into a room, people stood up out of respect. He was a man of stature, a man of influence, and his rivals in New Jersey obviously resented him for it.

Now their envy had turned truly vile. The outrageous things they were saying about him! That back in the old country, he had become the Germans’ henchman in his village after Hitler’s 1942 invasion. That he had turned on his own people. That he had worn the reviled Waffen SS uniform. That he had led roaming Third Reich “execution squads” that gunned down Jews and Communists.

That he was, in short, a Nazi.

http://www.democracynow.org/blog/2014/10/30/friday_the_nazis_next_door_how

Prominent U.S.-born right-wing activist seriously wounded in Jerusalem shooting

Likud MK Feiglin says gunman was Arab man who deliberately targeted Yehuda Glick, an advocate for greater Jewish access to Temple Mount.

By Nir Hasson and Haaretz | Oct. 29, 2014 | 10:40 PM

Yehuda Glick Photo by Emil Salman

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Menachem Begin Heritage Center in Jerusalem.Photo by Eyal Warshavsky

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Heightened Jewish activism on Temple Mount may spark widespread conflict

By Amos Harel and Nir Hasson

Nov. 2, 2013 | 9:28 AM |  58

Prominent U.S.-born right-wing activist Yehuda Glick was seriously wounded in a drive-by shooting Wednesday night outside the Menachem Begin Heritage Center in Jerusalem.

The gunman was an Arab man who intentionally targeted Glick, said MK Moshe Feiglin, who leads the far-right segment of Likud and said he witnessed the shooting.

"The attempted murderer turned to him and confirmed in Hebrew, in a heavy Arabic accent, that it was Yehuda," Feiglin told reporters. He said Glick was in the middle of loading equipment into his car after attending a conference about the Temple Mount that was held at the Begin Center.

Glick, a spokesman for Israeli groups advocating greater Jewish access to the Temple Mount, was shot by a gunman on a motorcycle who opened fire about an hour after the close of the conference.

Police did not immediately say whether they considered the shooting a terrorist attack, saying they were investigating all possibilities.

Glick, who often led groups of Jews to visit the Temple Mount, founded an organization advocating for Jews to be allowed to pray at the Temple Mount, which would mark a highly charged change to the delicate status quo.

He was undergoing surgery for chest and abdominal wounds at Shaare Zedek Medical Center in Jerusalem, hospital director general Dr. Jonathan Halevy said around midnight. Halevy said Glick was in serious but stable condition.

Glick predicted last week that the situation on the Temple Mount would change only after an act of violence against Jews.

"When will the change take place?" he told Haaretz. "As soon as the Arabs harm someone on the Temple Mount, the prime minister will wake up and it will be too late."

"Violence is escalating every day, and the police are simply helpless," Glick said last week. "Police impotence leads to violence."

The shooting, which Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat referred to as a terror attack, comes amid unrest in the capital.

Arab youth in East Jerusalem have been repeatedly clashing with police. Arab residents say the police are using riot control arbitrarily as a means of collective punishment.

After the shooting, Barkat called for a reduction of "incitement" on the part of Arab residents over the past few weeks and especially over the past few days.

If Feiglin's account of Glick's shooting is accurate, it would not be the first time a high-profile right-wing Israeli figure was targeted by a Palestinian gunman.

In October 2001, Hamdi Qur'an, an operative for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, shot and killed right-wing Minister Rehavam Ze'evi at a hotel in Jerusalem. He was sentenced in 2007 to two life terms and an additional 100 years for separate bombing and shooting attacks.

http://www.haaretz.com/news/national/1.623487