Before Elie Wiesel’s visit to Chapman last week, some of my students asked me if I would attend. I said no, and explained that though he is a Nobel Peace Laureate, I have some major qualms about the inconsistencies of his moral purview.

My students were baffled, so let me explain.

On more than one occasion, Wiesel has dismissed attempts to compare other genocides with the Holocaust. For example, he declared, “You cannot compare the Holocaust to the massacre of the Armenians by the Turks. The event is unique.”

I do not doubt that he feels very strongly about this matter, given that he is a survivor of one of the most inhumane and murderous acts in modern history. The Holocaust, it should be noted, is one of Western civilization’s contributions to modernity – the ugly underbelly of western high culture.

Regarding the opening of the Washington Holocaust Museum in 1993, Alisa Solomon wrote a painful but poignant report for the New York Village Voice: “The exhibit presents the Holocaust as a discrete event. The Nazis came to power, committed atrocities, and were defeated. The end. We don’t get any information that helps us understand the impulse behind genocide or the human capacity for bigotry and indifference. There is little room for moral complexity…”

As the museum was being constructed, the genocide against the Armenians, in part due to Turkish pressure, received no mention. Solomon concludes: “What was the lesson of the Holocaust again?”

Wiesel, who was involved with this project, remained silent – why? R’aison d’Etat, most likely. His silence is consistent with his understanding that the Holocaust cannot be compared to any other human tragedy. He falls in the trap of creating a hierarchy of human worth.

I am not surprised by Wiesel’s tunnel vision. A few years ago I visited Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem (built on confiscated Palestinian land), where I found glimpses of an answer. Upon entering, I wore a yarmulke and stood silently to contemplate the gravity and burden of this tragic history. The children’s memorial moved me the most. What if my daughter Lara (3 years old at the time) was in one of those pictures? Of the six million who died (including communists and homosexuals), 1.5 million were children. Mothers are portrayed as the protectors.

On one wall, the Nazi commander of Auschwitz is quoted: “Women would hide their children under their clothes, but of course when we found them we would send the children in to be exterminated.”

At the end of the exhibit I encountered the following words: “Forgetfulness leads to Exile. While Remembrance is the secret to Redemption.”

The only moral lesson I could discern from Yad Vashem and the Washington Holocaust Museum is that of remembrance. However, no universal lesson is extracted. Memory of pain is thus used as an ideological affirmation of “Never Again.” The Holocaust is presented as a discrete event, and the ensuing suffering and pain as unique. The privatization of pain prevents victims from imagining, let alone comprehending, that they are capable of heaping pain on another people. Such an ideological interpretation of pain excludes the ability to accept that the victim can victimize others, as in the case of Gaza and the rest of the Palestinian occupied territories. Thus, denial of evil serves as a defense mechanism to shield us from the consequences of our actions.

Before coming to Chapman, Wiesel published and signed a full page advertisement in The New York Times titled “For Jerusalem.” He ends it with, “Jerusalem is the heart of our heart, the soul of our soul.” In the text he claims that “contrary to certain media reports, Jews, Christians and Muslims ARE allowed to build their homes anywhere in the city.”

If this were true it would be wonderful.

Yossi Sarid, former member of the Israeli Knesset, wrote, “Someone has deceived you my dear friend. Not only may an Arab not build ‘anywhere’ but he may thank his god if he is not evicted from his home and thrown out onto the street with his family and property. Perhaps you have heard about residents in Sheikh Jarrah, having lived there since 1948, who are again being uprooted and made refugees because certain Jews are chafing from Jerusalem’s constraints.”

Wiesel has not found a single policy of the Israeli government that he can criticize, including the massacres in Sabra and Shatila of 1982, and the most recent onslaught on Gaza by the Israeli army. He did not have the moral fortitude to defend a fellow Jew, Judge Goldstone of South Africa, who has been vilified for producing the report that found Israel and Hamas to have engaged in war crimes. Wiesel’s bifurcated and compromised moral posture explain this inability. After all, the Holocaust, and by extension Israel, cannot be compared to other worldly realities and experiences. But a moral stance demands that we extract universal and comparable lessons – if there is hope for the human condition.