Complete video at: http://fora.tv/2009/07/27/Elie_Wiesel_What_Makes_Us_Moral

Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel argues that war is inherently immoral because of the suffering and destruction it entails. Weisel recalls how, in the run-up to the Iraq war, he counseled President Bush against an invasion.

-----

Humanitarian and Night author Elie Wiesel lectures on the theme "What Makes Us Moral: An Abrahamic Perspective."

Wiesel draws on his experience as a survivor of the Nazi concentration camps as well as contemporary global issues for evidence of what makes a moral or immoral society. - Chautauqua Institution

Elie Wiesel was born in 1928 in Sighet, Transylvania, which is now part of Romania. He was fifteen years old when he and his family were deported by the Nazis to Auschwitz. His mother and younger sister perished, his two older sisters survived. Elie and his father were later transported to Buchenwald, where his father died shortly before the camp was liberated in April 1945. After the war, Elie Wiesel studied in Paris and later became a journalist. During an interview with the distinguished French writer, Francois Mauriac, he was persuaded to write about his experiences in the death camps. The result was his internationally acclaimed memoir, La Nuit or Night, which has since been translated into more than thirty languages. In 1978, President Jimmy Carter appointed Elie Wiesel as Chairman of the President's Commission on the Holocaust. In 1980, he became the Founding Chairman of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council. He is also the Founding President of the Paris-based Universal Academy of Cultures and the Chairman of The Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity, an organization he and his wife created to fight indifference, intolerance and injustice. Elie Wiesel has received more than 100 honorary degrees from institutions of higher learning.