Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel arrived in Denver on Thursday, a few hours after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against the secret military courts where the Bush administration planned to try suspected terrorists.
As right-wing radio talk show hosts railed about activist judges, Wiesel, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, put the decision in proper perspective.
By standing up for the legal rights of our worst enemies, he said, this country proves it is “the greatest democracy in the world.”
“You have (the) Supreme Court, where the majority has been appointed by Republican presidents, coming out against the Republican administration,” Wiesel said in an interview before he spoke to a crowd of 1,700 at the Paramount Theatre. “Show me another country where this happens.”
Americans need to wonder why so many of their country’s political leaders think it shouldn’t happen here.
Wiesel lived through Auschwitz. He knows better than grandstanding demagogues the value of moral consistency.
What better time than the days leading up to the Fourth of July for the Supreme Court to renew faith in the bedrock American values of presumed innocence, the prohibition against indefinite detention of people who aren’t charged with crimes, the right to counsel and public
trials.
The Sept. 11 terrorist attacks destroyed Americans’ collective faith in their invincibility. If it destroys our collective humanity too, the war on terrorism is already lost, no matter how many of the enemy we kill.
“I don’t take freedom for granted,” Wiesel told me. “I take it as a noble idea.”
Noble enough that Wiesel expects future court decisions to overturn other American human-rights violations in the war on terrorism.
“I believe you must respect human dignity,” he said. “I have fought all my life for that. I do not believe that the end justifies the means.”
In this case, five Supreme Court justices said the means violated not only the Geneva Conventions but also the Uniform Code of Military Justice.
No one, not even the most jaded kill-’em-all-and-let-God-sort-’em-out nut job, can accuse Wiesel of being a wimp. He knows that Islamic religious fanatics threaten the 21st century the way fascists and communists threatened the 20th.
“They say they do it in the name of God,” Wiesel said of the terrorist attacks. “They turn God into a murderer. A martyr is someone who is ready to die for God, not someone willing to kill for God.”
As a teenager, Wiesel saw plenty of martyrs. He watched men, women and children sacrificed on an altar of racist and religious hatred. He nearly died at forced labor. Freed from Auschwitz, he wandered Europe as an “undesirable.” He settled in France, where he went to college and became a journalist. Or, as he likes to say, “a witness.”
He still sees plenty to be afraid of.
“In 1945, I was convinced there would never be anti-Semitism again because of Auschwitz,” Wiesel said.
Today, at 78, he realizes those were the hopes of an unsophisticated adolescent. Hatred of Jews continues. Holocaust denial thrives. Even the president of Iran tells the world that it didn’t happen.
“These people are sick,” Wiesel told me, “mentally and morally sick. They will not prevail. This is the most documented tragedy in world history. But I can’t imagine what this does to survivors and their children.”
What it does not do is entitle them to abandon their integrity in the name of getting even.
As Wiesel reminded his listeners at the Paramount: “Suffering confers no privileges.”
What’s more, mimicking the excesses of your enemy only places you in his camp.
Hate, Wiesel said, “is an infectious disease.”
Jim Spencer’s column appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday. He can be reached at 303-820-1771 or jspencer@denverpost.com.
