[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: WILLIAM J. CLINTON (1999, Book II)]
[October 29, 1999]
[Pages 1929-1934]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



[[Page 1929]]


Remarks at an Anti-Defamation League Dinner in Atlanta
October 29, 1999

    The President. Thank you so much.
    Audience member. I came to kiss you, Mr. President!
    The President. Well, if you came to kiss me, if you'll wait until I 
finish, I'll be right down there. [Laughter] Don't you go anywhere. I'll 
be right there. [Laughter] That sort of cuts the atmosphere, doesn't it? 
That's great. [Laughter] What was I going to say? [Laughter]
    Howard, thank you for your 
introduction and for your many years of friendship and support and for 
your leadership. Abe Foxman, thank you for 
your long leadership of the ADL. Glenn Tobias, 
thank you for your service.
    I know the president of the city council, President Pitts, is here; and De Kalb County Chief Executive 
Levetan is here. I thank them for their 
presence. And I'm especially grateful to be here with my friend and I 
believe one of the greatest living Americans, Congressman John 
Lewis. And Lillian, 
hello. Lillian, it's nice to see you. Thank you.
    More than anything else tonight, except to get my kiss--[laughter]--
more than anything else tonight, I came here to say thank you. Thank you 
for nearly 7 years of working with me and Hillary and the Vice President 
and Mrs. Gore, year-in and year-out. Thank you for your commitment to 
genuine peace in the Middle East. Thank you for fighting anti-Semitism 
and terrorism and for promoting religious freedom throughout the world. 
Thank you for developing a model hate crimes statute, which is now the 
law in 40 of our 50 States. Thank you for helping us to organize the 
first-ever White House Conference on Hate Crimes. Thank you for standing 
with us to promote excellence and diversity and equal opportunity with 
the appointments of people like Bill Lann Lee 
and Jim Hormel. Thank you for your pioneering 
work to filter out hate on the Internet, which lamentably was a part of 
the poison that led to the tragedy of Columbine High School. Thank you 
for making a world of difference, through your World of Difference 
Institute, to teach tolerance on campuses and to law enforcement 
officials across our land. I thank you for all that.
    The Talmud says, ``Should anyone turn aside the right of a stranger, 
it is as though he were to turn aside the right of the most high God.'' 
Well, that passage carries special meaning in the world in which we 
live, because the great irony of this time is that we stand on the 
threshold of unbelievable discoveries in science and technology, amidst 
the greatest revolution in telecommunications the world has ever known.
    I was in Silicon Valley the other night with a bunch of people that 
started this great company, eBay. You ever buy anything on eBay? Nearly 
everybody has now. What you might find interesting is that over 20,000 
Americans, including many former welfare recipients, are now making a 
living on eBay, not working for the company but trading on eBay.
    I was talking the other night, just a few months ago, at one of the 
millennial lectures that Hillary put 
together, with the brilliant Cambridge physicist Stephen 
Hawking, who wrote a book called, ``A 
Brief History of Time'' which I pretended to read. [Laughter] And we 
were talking about how the new century will bring with it the discovery 
of millions, perhaps even tens of millions of new galaxies, and perhaps 
the capacity to pierce the black holes in the universe, to see what is 
there.
    We had an evening the other night, about which I'll say more later, 
a fascinating evening at the White House that Hillary sponsored, with a man named Vint Cerf, who essentially developed the architecture of the Internet 
and gave the first E-mail, 18 years ago, to his profoundly deaf wife--he thought about the E-mail as a way to 
communicate with his wife while he was at work, because she was so deaf 
even hearing aids could not help her; she now hears, by the way, because 
of deep implanted computer chips in her ear canals--and Professor 
Lander from Harvard, one of America's most 
prominent scholars of the human genome. And they were saying that in a 
matter of a few years, children will come home from the hospital with a 
genetic map and with the genuine prospect of a life expectancy of 100 
years or more.
    Isn't it interesting that in this most modern of all imaginable 
worlds, with even more breathtaking discoveries just around the corner--
that

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I believe will also include cures for many of the most severe forms of 
cancer and the ability to give people with severed spinal cords the 
capacity to walk again, all these miracles--that the biggest problem the 
world faces is the oldest problem of human society, the fear of the 
other? We all still continue to turn aside the rights of a stranger, 
people we do not know, therefore we do not understand, therefore we 
easily fear, therefore we easily dismiss and pretty soon dehumanize them 
after that. How easy it is to justify violence.
    And so, the most urgent task, as we stand on the threshold of the 
new millennium, is not to plumb the depths of outer space or the inner 
depths of the human gene, but to follow the oldest admonitions of our 
Scriptures, and to build what Congressman Lewis, 
in his marvelous autobiography, and before him, Dr. King, called ``the 
beloved community,'' one in which we genuinely love those even with whom 
we disagree because we do not fear those who are different. The ADL has 
always stood for that. And most of all, I say thank you.
    You know, I've spent a lot of time now going around to political 
events to try to stir the party faithful, and I feel like a beast of 
burden since I can't run for anything anymore doing that. I kind of hate 
that. But I do it--[laughter]--but I do it happily because I want to say 
to people, I think we're leading the country in the right direction. And 
it's nice for me, after these years of work and labor and often bitter 
disputes, to say to the American people that we have the longest 
peacetime expansion in history, 19\1/2\ million new jobs, and highest 
homeownership ever, and a 29-year low in unemployment, a 30-year low in 
welfare rolls, and a 30-year low in the crime rate and a 30-year low in 
inflation and a 20-year low in the poverty rate and the first back-to-
back budget surpluses in 42 years achieved by the smallest Federal 
Government in 37 years. That's pretty good, and I like saying that.
    This week I was able to say we had gone from a $290 billion deficit 
to a $123 billion surplus. In the last 2 years, we paid $140 billion 
down on our national debt. That's the most we've ever done on that. I 
like saying that.
    But what I want to say to you tonight is that the real issue is not 
the marvelous way America has come in the 7 years that I've had the 
privilege to be President. The real issue before the American people is, 
what are we going to do with this moment of great good fortune? And 
again, you can plumb the depths of our Scriptures to find ample evidence 
that sometimes a good time can be a great hazard to people.
    A nation is no different from a family or an individual or a 
business. Sometimes you're most prone to mess up when things are going 
well. And I often think that some of the bitter partisanship and sort of 
shortsightedness we've seen in the last 2 years have occurred because 
people think they have the luxury to do that, because things are going 
so well, they can't imagine there could be any adverse consequences to 
not paying the U.N. dues, or contributing our fair share to the 
alleviation of the debt of the poorest countries in the world, or 
adopting the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, or moving to clean up the 
environment, or any of the number of other issues.
    And what I have tried to say to the American people is I think this 
is an enormous responsibility that we have, not just me as President or 
the Democrats and Republicans in Congress, but as a people. I'm 53 years 
old. And in my lifetime, not once, not even once, have we had the 
combination of prosperity, social progress, and the absence of emergency 
necessary to allow a people to literally imagine the future of their 
dreams and build it for their children.
    We had an economy maybe almost this good in the sixties, but we had 
to deal with the awful realities of the civil rights revolution and then 
with the burden of the Vietnam war. Before that, it was the cold war; 
and before that, World War II; and before that, the Depression. We have 
never had a time like this in my lifetime.
    And I have asked the American people to meet the challenge of the 
aging of America, save Social Security, save Medicare, add a 
prescription drug benefit to it; meet the challenge of the largest and 
most diverse group of schoolchildren in our history, give them all a 
world-class education, turn the failing schools around or shut them 
down, but give the kids the after-school programs, the summer school 
programs, the modern schools, the Internet, the small classes they 
deserve; to meet the challenge of--now that we have a 30-year low in the 
crime rate, no one thinks it's as safe as it ought to be in America--
make our country the safest big country in the world.
    And do the things we know will help us to do that: do more to keep 
guns out of the hands

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of criminals and children; do more to put police on our streets in the 
most violent neighborhoods; do more to make our communities more livable 
and meet our international environmental responsibilities and still grow 
the economy; do more to bring economic opportunity to people in places 
left behind.
    The other day, I was in South Dakota, where the unemployment rate is 
2.8 percent, on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, where the 
unemployment rate is 73 percent. I think we ought to give all of you the 
same incentives to invest in poor areas in America we give you to invest 
in poor areas in Latin America, or Africa, or Asia, because if we don't, 
if we can't bring enterprise and opportunity to our poorest Americans 
now, we'll never get around to dealing with it.
    That's why I've asked America to guarantee our long-term prosperity 
by adopting a long-term plan for the budget that by the year 2015 will 
have us completely out of debt for the first time since Andrew Jackson 
was President in 1835, because I believe it'll bring long prosperity to 
us.
    But I would say to you all, as important as those things are, there 
are two things that relate to the irony I mentioned at the beginning: 
the fact that we enter a new millennium with all these modern 
possibilities bedeviled by the oldest failing of human society. But 
there are two other issues without which we cannot proceed successfully.
    One is to meet our responsibilities around the world as the world's 
leading force for peace and freedom and reconciliation, against terror 
and the other forces of destruction, including proliferation of nuclear 
and chemical and biological weapons. That's why we ought to pay our debt 
to the U.N. That's why we ought to make our contribution to alleviate 
the debt of the poorest countries in the world. That's why we ought to 
continue to fund the program begun by former Senator Sam Nunn from Georgia, to take down these nuclear weapons in 
Russia, that they want us to help them destroy. And that's why we ought 
to pay our commitment, made at the Wye peace talks pursuant to 25 years 
of bipartisan--bipartisan--efforts for peace in the Middle East, to 
contribute to the success of the Wye talks, and the modified efforts 
under Barak and Arafat.
    On Sunday night I will leave for Oslo to honor the memory of my 
friend Yitzhak Rabin and to continue his mission. We're now at a 
critical moment in the peace process. Prime Minister Barak and Chairman Arafat have made 
some real movement forward. They've made some hard decisions. They're 
working hard on preserving security and fighting terrorism, and they're 
making progress in implementing the provisions of the Oslo agreement.
    We actually have a chance within the reasonably near future for 
peace for Israel and its neighbors, for security so necessary for 
progress and prosperity and freedom and justice all across that region.
    But like all chances in life, it is fleeting. It will require hard 
choices and hard work within a short timeframe. And it cannot be done 
without the support of the most determined friends of peace, like those 
of you in this room.
    I still believe that we're either going to go forward or drift 
backward. We can't just freeze this moment. The region could reverse 
course. There's still plenty of extremists and terrorists out there. 
There's still people all over the world who represent the forces of 
destruction and the enemies of the nation-state--not simply Israel, but 
everywhere--working to develop weapons of mass destruction that can be 
miniaturized and carried around and used at a moment's notice. And the 
same technology that gives you a tiny, tiny cell phone that guys with 
big fingers like me can hardly dial these days will lead to the 
miniaturization of weapons in the 21st century.
    Make no mistake about it. Our problems with the enemies of peace, 
with the terrorists, are far from over. And I'll make you a prediction. 
Within 10 years, it will be normal to see a very sophisticated alliance 
all around the world between terrorists, drugrunners, and organized 
crime, maximizing the same modern technologies that we all seek to 
access to do good.
    This is the moment that we must seize. It is so important for 
America to support the peace process and to provide the resources to 
make peace work. I don't know how many times I have heard one of my 
leaders at the Pentagon say, ``Mr. President, the most expensive peace 
is far, far cheaper than the cheapest war.'' It is inexcusable that we 
would not fund a national security budget for peace, necessary to meet 
our responsibilities in the Middle East.
    Congress sent me a foreign aid bill without the $800 million I 
requested this year, or the $500 million for next year to fund our part 
of

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the Wye River agreement. The bill sent a terrible signal to our friends 
in the Middle East, the strongest possible encouragement to the enemies 
of peace that there will be no immediate rewards for peace. That's why I 
vetoed it, and I'll veto it again if it doesn't provide for the funding 
of our obligations around the world.
    I ask you to support the other provisions of the bill, the funds 
necessary to reduce the nuclear threat from Russia, to provide debt 
relief to the poorest countries as the Pope and so many others have 
asked us to do in the millennial year, to meet our obligations to the 
United Nations, to do the other things that promote democracy and 
opportunities for trade and investment.
    We must sustain America's leadership. I want you to know, on a 
subject I know you care a lot about, I have urged the Russian leadership 
not to allow the current challenges they face to undermine respect for 
human rights and individual liberty and opposition to anti-Semitism in 
Russia. If we want--I will say again, if we want to have influence with 
other countries, none of them are asking us to buy our way into their 
favor. But as the wealthiest, most powerful country in the world at the 
moment of our greatest success, for us not to even pay our fair share 
when already we spend a smaller percentage of our income on nonmilitary 
national security measures than any major country in the world is 
inexcusable.
    So for all of those other challenges I mentioned, we must be a force 
for good around the world. And we cannot do that for free. We get a lot 
out of our interdependence with others. We contribute to the United 
Nations so that when something happens like Kosovo--yes, our planes flew 
the bulk of the mission, and yes, we bore the bulk of the financial 
burdens to save those 800,000 people from ethnic cleansing, and I'm glad 
we did it.
    But today, as they work to rebuild, the bulk of the burdens in 
manpower and in money is being borne by our allies in Europe. Yes, it 
was necessary for the United States to take a strong position on the 
problem in East Timor to stop the terrible slaughter there as a result 
of their vote for independence. But now the bulk of the load is being 
carried by our friends, like Australia and Malaysia and others there, 
because we live in an interdependent world where we share 
responsibility.
    Yes, we spend some money in Africa to train troops, but that means 
the next time a horrible slaughter like Rwanda comes along, it can be 
handled by the Africans and we can give them support, and they won't 
have to look at us and say, ``Why didn't you send 100,000 Americans to 
stop this before it started?'' We get a lot out of being good neighbors 
and responsible parties, and we need to continue to do it.
    The last point I want to make is one the ADL well knows. We can't be 
a force for good abroad unless we are a force for good at home. And 
while, thank God, we have been spared the ravages in the modern age of 
mass conflict based on religion as in Northern Ireland, or religion and 
ethnic differences as in the Middle East or the Balkans, or tribal 
bloodshed as in Rwanda, Burundi, and other places in Africa, we see in 
these hate crimes--the murder of young Matthew Shepard in Wyoming, the 
horrible dragging death of James Byrd in Texas, the killing of the 
postman, the Filipino postman; and the shooting of the children at the 
Jewish community center in Los Angeles, the murder spree in the Midwest 
that took the lives of the African-American basketball coach outside 
Chicago and a young Korean Christian as he walked outside his church, 
those perpetrated by a man who claimed he belonged to a church that did 
not believe in God, but did believe in white supremacy--we see that we 
are not immune from this. And why is that? Because it is a part of human 
nature. Why was it in the Torah in that provision I read earlier? 
Because of the knowledge from God that in us, there is all the tendency, 
in all of us, to turn away from the right of a stranger.
    Every one of us, I believe--maybe you don't; maybe you guys are 
perfect--I wake up every day, and I know--I sort of think of my life and 
my attitude toward the world and of its people as being governed by an 
internal scale, and on one side of the scale there is light and on the 
other side there is darkness, and you always want it tilting toward the 
light, but not so much as to be naive, but enough to have a genuine 
charitable view toward others, a genuine respect, a genuine humility, 
and understand that you may not always be right but you have an 
obligation to recognize the integrity and the common humanity of others.
    But it's easy to get that scale out of balance. Even all of us have 
our good days and our bad days. When it gets badly out of balance,

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then the fear and the dehumanization of the other drives people to these 
terrible, tormented acts of slaughter. Sometimes there's a political 
patina on it, so people can actually act as if it's justified. Sometimes 
it's just some poor, demented, twisted soul, acting out of pain and fear 
and anger and blindness. Nothing is more important to our future than 
flushing that not only from the killers but flushing that feeling in its 
less violent manifestations from all of our hearts.
    If I could leave America after my Presidency with one wish, it would 
be to be one America, to revel in our diversity, to respect it, to 
celebrate it, to enjoy it, to make it interesting.
    It can only happen--you can only have fun--in a diverse country. You 
can only find it interesting to examine whether someone else's religious 
perspective or cultural heritage has some validity for you, something 
you can learn. You can only really revel in it if you believe that our 
common humanity is more important than the things which make us 
different.
    Now, that means, it seems to me, we need to stand against 
manifestations of our inhumanity, and we need to do more to reaffirm our 
common humanity. That's why I was so disturbed when the Republican 
majority on the relevant committees of Congress took out the hate crimes 
legislation in the form of the bill that had already passed the Senate. 
I vetoed the bill that came to me, in part because it didn't contain 
those hate crimes provisions.
    And I think it's very important that we say, ``Look, it's not that 
the victims of these hate crimes''--you know, the people that say we 
don't need these things are saying, ``You're saying those victims are 
more important than other victims.'' That's not true. What we are saying 
is that hate crimes victimize not only the victim but they victimize 
society as a whole in a special way, because they contradict the very 
idea of America we are trying to build. We're not letting somebody else 
off the hook. We're saying we want a clear and unambiguous stand against 
things that contradict the very idea of the America we want to build.
    The other point I'd like to make is, it's not enough just to be 
against things. We need to be for things that will enable us to live up 
to our full potential. That's why I'm also for strengthening the equal 
pay law, for the employment nondiscrimination act or the so-called 
Kennedy-Jeffords bill to let people with disabilities go into the 
workplace and keep their Government health care through Medicaid, so 
that they can work and be a part of our society. We need to be for 
things that bring us together.
    I want to close with these two stories. I told you earlier we had 
this millennial evening at the White House, with the genome 
scholar from Harvard and Vint Cerf, who was one of the architects of the Internet. And we were 
talking about--they were talking about how the mysteries of the human 
gene could not have been solved without the advances in computer 
science. And then they put them all up on the screens, the formula for 
what our genes look like. And I pretended to understand that. [Laughter]
    But I did understand the point they were making. So I said to them, 
I said, ``Look, with these 100,000 sequences and all the possibilities 
and permutations, how much are we alike or different?'' And Professor 
Lander said, ``The truth is that all people, genetically, are 99.9 
percent the same.'' That confirms your philosophy, right?
    Here's the next point he made, which is more interesting to me. He 
said if you were to get groups of people together by ethnicity or race--
let's suppose you've got 100 European Jews together, and you've got 100 
Arabs, and you've got 100 Iranians, and then you've got 100 people from 
the Yoruba Tribe in Nigeria, and you've got 100 Irish people together--
and you put them all in a room with their groups, here's what they said. 
They said the genetic differences among the individual groups--that is, 
among the Yorubas, among the Irish, among the Jews, among the Arabs--the 
genetic differences within the groups would be greater than the genetic 
differences between any one group and any other group. Now, think about 
that.
    When you look at a profile of any sizeable ethnic group--Hispanic, 
African, you name it--the genetic differences of the individuals within 
the group are greater than the group genetic profile of one group as 
compared with another. In other words, the most advanced scientific 
knowledge confirms the wisdom of the Torah and tells us not to turn 
aside a stranger. Because it turns out a stranger is not so strange 
after all.
    In the summer of 1994, as I remember, it was just before we went to 
the Wadi Araba to sign the peace agreement between Israel and Jordan. 
The late Prime Minister Rabin and the

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late King Hussein addressed the United States Congress. Near the end of 
his speech, Rabin turned to Hussein and said, and I quote, ``We have 
both seen a lot in our lifetime. We have seen too much suffering. What 
will you leave to your children? What will I leave to my grandchildren? 
I have only dreams,'' he said, ``to build a better world, a world of 
understanding and harmony, a world in which it is a joy to live. That is 
not asking for too much.''
    That dream has united those of you in this organization for 85 years 
now. That dream in our time requires us to build one America and 
requires America to be a force for peace and harmony in the world. Think 
of it: Rabin gave his life so that we might build a world in which it is 
a joy to live. It is not asking for too much, but it will require all we 
can give.
    Thank you, and God bless you.

Note: The President spoke at 9:25 p.m. at the Grand Hyatt Hotel. In his 
remarks, he referred to Howard P. Berkowitz, national chairman, Abraham 
H. Foxman, national director, and Glenn Tobias, national executive 
committee chairman, Anti-Defamation League; Atlanta City Council 
President Robb Pitts; De Kalb County Chief Executive Liane Levetan; 
Representative John Lewis' wife, Lillian; Vinton G. Cerf, senior vice 
president of Internet architecture and technology, MCI WorldCom, and his 
wife, Sigrid; Eric Lander, director, Whitehead Institute/MIT Center for 
Genome Research; Prime Minister Ehud Barak of Israel; Chairman Yasser 
Arafat of the Palestinian Authority; and Pope John Paul II.