I caught just a brief excerpt of Elie Wiesel’s remarks at Buchenwald with President Obama and Chancellor Merkler of Germany. The man’s impressive humanity emanates from him; with every word gently spoken he touched us. No soaring rhetoric, just simple belief and statements that reached his audience. He said. “We have not learned.” For anyone who knows his story, we know he speaks the truth.
We have not learned, not the past generation that so bravely fought in World War 2, or my generation, the baby-boomers who they fought to protect. We have not learned to stop hating what is different. We have not learned to seek peace. Instead we automatically wage war when we could have chosen peace. We want our truth to be the only truth. It isn’t enough that we just defend our right to believe our way of life is right, we want to make others live as us.
When President Obama talked of his grandfather who helped liberate Buchenwald and mistakenly used the German word for Auschwitz instead, the conservative right labeled him a liar, a pretender.
“The President is not only the descendant of crazed fire-breathing muslims from Africa, but also from at least one military serving American who was there to offer water and comfort to the fortunate (can one even use that word) souls who manage to survive a concentration camp.”
The right wants to deny President Obama his heritage, the nobility and sacrifice of his very own Grandfather who saw these types of atrocities up close, in action, like this photo of Elie Wiesel at age 16 at Buchenwald.
We carry the banner of democracy as though America has all the answers, instead of admitting we are humans who have not learned. I know we want to believe that we have, but the truth speaks loudly in the millions of lives damaged by the Iraq war. We can stand with hands on our chest at D-Day and applaud our grandfathers, commemorate their service with pride. They fought to defend freedom. But then we try to extend that same sense of justice to every misguided instance of US military poweress, including Viet Nam, Iran Contra and now Iraq.
But the images speak louder of our truth…those images from Abu Greb prison or perhaps the images of the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children killed or injured in the Iraq war.
In Afghanistan, our young men and women are fighting to defend freedom and so we should back them with all the fervor of World War 2 pride. But, when we, on our own shores, claim moral superiority over the citizens of Palestine, who are fighting for their right to exist, we must question that moral superiority. My dtr-in-law is Jewish, from Israel, and I support the rights and claims of Israel to their land. But, as President Obama so bravely spoke of in Cairo, we must support the right of the Palestinian people to have their own state, and we must insist that Israel’s right wing leaders find a way to bring that about in our time, now.
The time is now, as Elie Weisel so clearly stated. The time is now for Americans and citizens of the world to demand the same justice for Palestinians as Israelites. To fail to do so, endorses a way of treating people that does not fit our high ideals, our stated beliefs. The same justice that we demand Pakistan and Afghanistan offer it’s citizens, we demand of Israel in its treatment of the Palestinians. Why is that so hard to understand? I get it, and I’m just a simple housewife in America.
The Writestuff 