New York – Nobel Peace Prize laureate Elie Wiesel says he’s repudiating a Hungarian award he received in 2004 because top officials from Budapest recently attended a ceremony for a Nazi sympathizer.
I am not Elie Wiesel. None the less, I remember the complicity of millions of Germans in the atrocity of the Third Reich and our own, American, complicity in Jim Crow and the ethnic cleansing of the Native Americans. It is all to easy t see oneself as a small cog, to go along in the mass phenomena that provide the necessary support for Hitler, McCarthy, Jefferson Davis, Mao, Andrew Jackson, or Ferdinand and Isabella.
Today’s ordinary folks, like those I met at the recent Republican Convention, are no different. To rephrase Goldwater, Tolerance of fanatics is wrong, Acquiescence in the current Republican extremism is worse.
So here is my problem. I am invited t attend a session at a Temple. The speaker is a hate filled, failed US general who sees Islam as a demonic plot. What should I do?