The attacker was a blogger

Which obviously explains everything:

Elie Wiesel, the renowned Holocaust author and Nobel Peace Prize winner, was attacked and dragged out of a San Francisco hotel elevator last week, possibly by a Holocaust denier who claims to have stalked Wiesel for weeks, police said.

Wiesel, 78, was at the Argent Hotel Feb. 1 for a conference on "Facing Violence: Justice, Religion and Conflict Resolution" when he was confronted in an elevator by a man insisting that he wanted to interview the author, according to San Francisco Police Department Sgt. Neville Gittens.

Wiesel said he would do so in the hotel lobby, but the man insisted on going to Wiesel's room. The man then stopped the elevator at the sixth floor and tried to force Wiesel into a room there.

"That's when the victim started yelling," Gittens said.

Wiesel escaped unharmed, made his way down to the lobby and called police.

A man calling himself Eric Hunt and claiming to be the attacker posted an account of the incident on a virulently anti-Semitic Web site. The account, posted Tuesday, matches the description of the attack police later released.

Gittens said police were aware of the Web site and that there is a suspect being sought. However, he would not say whether the suspect is the person who posted the Web account.

In his posting, Hunt said his goal was for Wiesel, a Holocaust survivor and author of more than 40 books, to renounce the Holocaust.

"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.

The site is registered to a Sydney, Australia, man who also writes on the site. A phone call and e-mail to the domain name owner were not returned.

Update 2/13: Police think they have the attacker:

(02-12) 17:31 PST -- San Francisco police say they have located a suspect in the attack in a hotel elevator on Holocaust survivor and author Elie Wiesel.

"We have a suspect on the East Coast," police spokesman Sgt. Neville Gittens said Monday. He described the suspect as a man in his 20s.

"He has not been arrested, and the investigation is still ongoing," Gittens said.

Wiesel, 78, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986, was dragged out of an elevator at the Argent Hotel on Feb. 1, possibly by a Holocaust denier who claims to have stalked Wiesel for weeks, according to police.