Elie Wiesel and the Issue of Indifference

Dr. William O’Neal,
Director of Graduate Studies
Chair, Department of History
University of Toledo
Toledo, Ohio 43606-3390

26 October 2008

Dear Dr. O’Neal:

I am informed that on 30 October the University of Toledo's College of Arts and Sciences will host a talk by Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel on "What the Ancient Masters Can Teach Us About Confronting Fanaticism and Building Moral Unity in a Diverse Society." It’s an interesting idea for a talk, though looking around the world from the point of view of UNESCO, it does not seem they have taught us much.

In the Toledo Blade Mr. Wiesel addresses a simpler issue, one he has addressed before, the issue of “indifference.” We read again where he argues that “the opposite of love is not hatred, but indifference.” That the opposite of education, beauty, and life itself is indifference. That “indifference is what permits evil to be strong …” Which brings me to the matter to hand.

Professor O’Neal, do you believe Toledo's College of Arts and Sciences has prepared its students in any way whatever to understand the issue of “indifference” with regard to Mr. Elie Wiesel himself?

Do UT students understand that for decades Elie Wiesel has shown himself to be indifferent to the fate of writers and publishers who question the orthodox Holocaust story and are arrested, tried, and imprisoned for such thought crimes in Germany, France, Austria, Switzerland and other European nations?

With regard to confronting “fanaticism,” have your students been prepared to understand that Elie Wiesel is the best known Holocaust fanatic in America? That he has spent his entire adult life forwarding with an unequaled fanaticism the charge of “unique monstrosity” against the Germans, including the charge that they used weapons of mass destruction (“gas chambers”) for mass murder at Auschwitz, and that even though he was interned there, after more than half a century he is unable to name, with proof, one person who was killed in a gas chamber at that camp?

Are UT students prepared to question Elie Wiesel’s indifference to “Building Moral Unity” when he writes "Every Jew, somewhere in his being, should set apart a zone of hate - healthy, virile hate - for what the German personifies and for what persists in the German.”? A remark that for forty years he has refused to recant?

Have UT students been prepared to understand the sheer silliness of a man like Elie Wiesel who will claim that when he was struck by a taxicab in mid-Manhattan in New York, he flew an “entire city block” before coming down to earth again – that is, about two thirds the length of a football field?

Will the UT College of Arts and Sciences begin to promote a free press and a free flow of ideas about the Holocaust question and its agents such as Elie Wiesel, or will you, with indifference, continue to act out the role of being mere stenographers for a massive, multi-billion dollar Holocaust Industry?

Do you not agree that “indifference,” as Elie Wiesel has it, “is what permits evil to be strong”?

Thank you for your attention.

Bradley R. Smith
Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust
PO Box 439016
San Ysidro CA 92143
Desk: 209 682 5327

Note: This inquiry will be copied to your colleagues.

Continued in the November 2008 issue of Smith’s Report 155. (http://www.smithsreport.com)