Elie Wiesel flops at Kent State Convocation Center

Published by carolyn on Sun, 2013-04-14 11:31

By Carolyn Yeager

Wiesel demonstrates he has nothing to say to the world when the only news outlet to write anything at all about his speech is the Cleveland Jewish News.

This much-ballyhooed return visit to Kent State University on the April 11 anniversary of the “Buchenwald Liberation” in 1945 proved to be as  “much ado about nothing” as the earlier event 68 years ago really was in retrospect.

Wiesel, 83, looking tiny and munchkin-like sitting in a big yellow chair on the stage, uttered the same phrases we’ve heard for decades and they are sounding more hollow than ever. At kentwired.com, a University website, we find this summing up of the speech:

One of the major themes of Wiesel’s speech was the importance of having hope and his struggle with believing there is such a thing.

“Where there is no hope, our road and our path is to invent it,” Wiesel said. “I am here to teach you my hope because without it, I wouldn’t be here today.”

Invent it. That’s what Wiesel is good at: inventing things. He offered other similar thoughts that Kentwired considered worthy of quoting but are, in my opinion, devoid of any relevance when pondered for a few seconds, such as:

“For every word that a holocaust survivor writes, there are 10 more that haven’t been written,” said Wiesel. “Whoever listens to a witness becomes a witness.”

My comment on the first sentence: This is true of everyone’s written words. On the second: This well-worn phrase of his might be what is engraved on his tombstone-he has used it so often. Of his supposed liberation by U.S. soldiers at Buchenwald, he said:

Continue reading at Elie Wiesel Cons The World

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