Mr. Wiesel was also speaking as part of a week long commemoration of the Alfred P. Murrah bombing, which occurred ten years ago. As you may know, Elie Wiesel survived a much more profound tragedy - the Holocaust. Two of the four concentration camps at which he and his family were held have significant name recognition — Auschwitz and Buchenwald. His father died at Buchenwald in January, 1945. Four months later, the allies would liberate the camp.
"Those soldiers were fighting to build a society they could be proud of. A society that did not include horrors like the concentration camps. It's said that Dante was the first living man to see Hell. I'm not sure. I know that when we survivors first saw the faces of the Americans entering the camp, we believed we were seeing the faces of the first free men to see Hell."
Here follow rough notes taken during Elie's speech. By no means are these notes thorough. But at least you may get the flavor of his address. The title of the address was "Confronting Fanaticism: Building Moral Unity in a Diverse Society."He began by recognizing the honor paid him to be part of the week-long celebration. "Oklahoma City has become a symbol of man's absurd cruelty and man's compassion." One is led to ask "Why did this happen?" What would lead a person to believe that murdering 168 people would have any effect on the government? After all, any idiot can kill.
What do Timothy McVeigh and the 9/11 highjackers have in common, aside from proximity in time? They shared a culture of death. They also had fanaticism in common.
A fanatic believes he has all the answers. He does not allow any doubt. A fanatic is a lonely person who forges alliances with other lonely people. He would strongly agree with the sentiment, "You're either for us or against us."The fanatic does not believe that the person who disagrees with him as any right to be happy. In fact, the person who disagrees with him does not have a right to live.
The fanatic uses his hatred as a weapon.
Parenthetically, Mr. Wiesel recognized that women may also be fanatical terrorists. But he believes male fanatics far out-number female fanatics.
Elie sponsored a conference sometime in the early 90s, and one of the speakers was a child psychologist. This psychologist report that studies indicate that children do not begin to hate until the age of three. This suggests that, as Oscar Hammerstien wrote in the musical South Pacific, "You've got to be taught to hate."
Well, if people can be taught to hate, surely they can be taught NOT to hate. Which suggests that education is key.
The 20th Century had an impressive record of slaughter. The Turks essentially wiped out the Armenians. Two World Wars. The Holocaust. Stalin's Gulags. Pol Pot. Mai Lai. Legalized racial prejudice in the American South and in South Africa. The list goes on and on. In many ways, it seemed as if the killer had more imagination than the victim.
We believed the year 2000 would usher in a new millennium. We believed were leaving all that horror and cruelty behind when the cosmic odometer rolled from 1999 to 2000. We shot down the old century with our fireworks, and toasted its death with our champagne.
But we were naive. The beast tracked us from one millennium into the next.
In his way, Timothy McVeigh foreshadowed the face of a new type of terrorist for the new century: one who was willing to kill children. But the new enemy for the new century was even more profound than that.
This enemy was even more closely wed to the culture of death than McVeigh was. This enemy was the suicide terrorist.
Up through World War I, the primary people to lose their lives in a conflict were the soldiers on the front lines. Then, in World War II, bombs would be dropped on cities, and civilians would lose their lives. But these cities were still "behind enemy lines".
Today, the average victim is far away from those front lines.
Or, it may be more accurate to say that every city is a front line. And every person is a target.
We must fight terrorism without compromising our ideals. What good is it to be safe if you have no liberty? We must fight, then, in such a way that we maintain a society we may be proud of.
We all know the story of Pandora's box. We remember how curiosity led her to open the box, which released a host of ills on the world - pestilence, famine, and so on. It's said that hope was at the bottom of that box. Does this mean you must go through all those negatives in order to find hope? Or does it mean that hope itself is a kind of curse?
Well, there is such a thing as false hope. This is something the Jewish people are very familiar with. For, time and again, the enemy would use hope to lure them into his trap. Hope would lure the victim into the enemy's machine.
Thus, it may be said that only another human being may drive you to despair. Likewise, only another human may give you hope.
Even on the edge of the abyss, it is possible to dream wonderful dreams of redemption.
"I believe in human beings in spite of human beings. I believe in humanity in spite of what they've done to G-d's image."
As a Jew, Wiesel believes that death is not the answer, but is the question. And, whatever the question, despair is not the answer.
Remember that education is key. "The teacher has faith in the student, just as the student has faith in the teacher. This forges a link which is a work of art."
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