Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel said Americans must face a battle against indifference which is making our society unconcerned about the plight of others.

“Indifference to life means to be blind to all magic,” he said.

Wiesel spoke on campus last week in the continuing series of the “Bridges to the Future” program that was begun in September and will continue into next year.

His lecture revolved around values as well as the examination of the epidemic of indifference.

Wiesel said that indifference is different from neutrality. Many people hide their indifference to what is happening around them or to other people behind the facade of neutrality.

Wiesel said that the appropriate commandment for Americans should be, “Thou shall not stand idly by.”

He said, “Ultimately, we are our own judge, but we are each other’s witness.”

Though many organizations as well as many people claim that involvement and intervention are out of place, that people and governments should not butt into others’ business, Wiesel said such a position is out of place.

He said, “We have the right and duty to interfere” This is especially true when we see oppression being committed against a helpless person or a helpless people.

He said that the attacks of Sept. 11 showed the terrorists’ indifference to human life.

“We live now in an age of terror,” said Wiesel. “We know the name of the danger. We know the name of the enemy…Those suicide hijackers did something no generation of terrorists has done: they left no message. It’s like they said, “‘You deserve no language. Death is our language.'”

Although the 20th century was filled with great moments, such as the end of apartheid, yet it is overshadowed by two World Wars, Totalitarian regimes, such as fascism and communism, that took the lives of millions of helpless people.

The violence of the 20th century has raised the question, which Wiesel posed, “What is it in our culture, in our society that one must express through violence?”

He concluded with, “I am not here to give despair” but suggest a way out. He warned that history repeats itself and will repeat itself unless we consciously alter its course. America, the strongest country on earth, has “the honor and responsibillity to influence, to reincarnate compassion, to bring forth ethics and humanity while casting out abandonment and betrayal.”

Wiesel is a survivor of the Holocaust. Wiesel was born in 1928 in Romania. He and his family were deported to German concentration camps, where his parents and younger sister perished. Wiesel and his two older sisters survived.

Liberated from Buchenwald in 1945, he was taken to Paris where he studied at the Sorbonne and worked as a journalist.

Wiesel, now a U.S. citizen, has been a visiting scholar at Yale University, a distinguished professor of Judiac Studies at the City College of New York, an Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities at Boston University and chairman of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council.

Wiesel recounted his experiences in Auschwitz in his memoir, Night, written in 1958. Since then he has written 40 books.