[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 36, Number 37 (Monday, September 18, 2000)]
[Pages 2044-2047]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks at the Partners in History Dinner in New York City

September 11, 2000

    Thank you very much. Let me say, first of all, Hillary and I are 
delighted to be here with all of you, and especially you, Edgar, with 
all of your family, including Edgar, Clarissa, and the about-to-be 22d 
grandchild here. They are probably an even more important testament to 
your life than this important work we celebrate tonight.
    I thank Israel Singer and the World Jewish Council leadership, Elie 
Wiesel, my fellow award recipients, especially Senator D'Amato and 
Congressman Leach, without which we could not have done our part, and 
Stuart Eizenstat, without which I could have done nothing. And I thank 
you all.
    I thank the members of the Israeli Government and Cabinet who are 
here and those of you who have come from around the world. But I would 
like to say, not only as President but as an American, a man who studied 
German as a child and went to Germany as a young man in the hopes of 
reconciling my enormously conflicted feelings about a country that I 
loved which had done something I hated.
    Foreign Minister Fischer, I have rarely in my life been as moved as 
I was by your comments tonight. And I thank you from the bottom of my 
heart.
    Edgar once said that, ``In forcing the world to face up to an ugly 
past, we help shape a more honorable future.'' I am honored to have been 
part of this endeavor, and I have tried to learn its lesson. Within our 
country, I have been to Native American reservations and acknowledged 
that the treaties we signed were neither fair nor honorably kept in many 
cases. I went to Africa, to Goree Island, the Door of No Return, and 
acknowledged the responsibility of the United States in buying people 
into slavery. This is a hard business, struggling to find our core of 
humanity.
    As Edgar said, we are here in an immediate sense in part because 
Edgar buttonholed Hillary back in 1996 and said I had to see him the 
next day. And that night, she told me I had to see him the next day, 
because the time for redress was running out. And I did, as he said.
    I do want to thank Hillary for more than has been accounted, because 
I can't tell you how many times she reminded me of her meetings with 
elderly survivors all around the world, and how many times she tried to 
shine a light on the quest for material and moral justice. So thank you 
for helping me be here tonight.
    I would like to say again what I said before, Senator D'Amato and 
Representative Leach made it possible for us to do what we did together 
as Americans, not as Republicans or Democrats but as Americans. Governor 
Pataki and Alan Hevesi marshal city and State governments all across 
America, not as Republicans or Democrats but as Americans. People like 
Paul Volcker, Larry Eagleburger,

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and Stan Chesley, all of whom could choose to do pretty much whatever 
they like, chose instead to spend their time and their talents 
generously on this cause.
    And I would like to thank Avraham Burg, former Prime Minister 
Binyamin Netanyahu, and the current Prime Minister, Ehud Barak, and the 
members of his government who have supported this cause after it had 
begun earlier under a different administration of a different party, not 
out of party reasons but because of humanity. And again, let me say how 
personally grateful I am to the dedication of Stu Eizenstat, who is 
literally unmatched in his commitment to doing the right thing and his 
skill in actually finding a way to get it done.
    I would like to echo what Foreign Minister Fischer said about the 
German Bundeskanzler, Gerhard Schroeder. He showed remarkable 
leadership. He showed a generosity and a courage of memory, and no 
little amount of political prodding could do what his country has done. 
And we are grateful to him, as well.
    Thanks to all of you, humanity begins this new millennium standing 
on higher grounds. Of course, we can never compensate the victims and 
their families for what was lost. It is beyond our poor power to restore 
life or even to rewrite history. But we have made progress towards 
setting history straight and providing compensation for lost or stolen 
assets and forced or slave labor.
    We have an especially sacred obligation to elderly survivors, 
particularly the double victims who endured first the Holocaust and then 
a half century of communism. For their sake, there can be no denying the 
past or delaying the compensation.
    We must also meet our obligations to the future, to seek the truth 
and follow where it leads. That's why it is so terribly important that 
your efforts have led to commissions in the United States and a dozen 
other nations examining their own involvement in the handling of assets 
that rightfully belong to victims of the Holocaust, and why it is so 
important that the horror of the Holocaust never fade from our memories 
and that we never lose sight of its searing lessons.
    We're at the beginning of this new century with all of its promise. 
We still are beset by humanity's oldest failing, the fear of the other, 
the fear that, somehow, people who are different from us in the color of 
their skin or the way they worship are to be distrusted, disliked, 
hated, dehumanized, and ultimately killed. It is a very slippery slope, 
indeed.
    This fear makes us vulnerable in two ways. It makes societies 
vulnerable, as ours have been, to individual crimes of hate by people 
who cannot come to grips with their own sense of failure or rage or 
inadequacy, and so, blame someone else.
    Not very long--a poor demented person blamed a Filipino postal 
worker and killed him dead in California shortly after he tried to blame 
innocent little Jewish children going to their school. A little before 
that, a demented person in the United States, who said he belonged to a 
church that did not believe in God but believed in white supremacy, 
killed an African-American basketball coach walking in his neighborhood 
in Chicago and then shot a young Korean-American Christian walking out 
of his church; James Byrd, dragged to death in Texas because he was 
black; Matthew Shepard, stretched out on the rack of a fence to die 
because he was gay. People still can be quickly brought into the grip of 
that kind of poison hatred. And even more troubling, whole societies 
still can be exploited in their fears by unscrupulous leaders who seek 
to convince them that they should blame their problems on groups within 
or beyond their midst.
    It is unbelievable to me today when German and American and Russian 
and French troops serve together for peace in the Balkans, when Israeli 
rescue teams travel the world to help people of every faith, when Greeks 
and Turks help to dig out one another's dead amid the rubble of 
earthquakes, when the latest breakthrough in genetic science tells us 
that we are all genetically 99.9 percent the same, and that within any 
ethnic group, the genetic differences are greater than they are from 
group to group--still, we have not completely learned this lesson. And 
still, when you strip it all away, at the root of the not-quite-finished 
peace process in Ireland, at the root of the ethnic and tribal wars of 
Africa, at the root of the uprooting of almost a million people in 
Kosovo, and

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at the root of the hard, unresolved questions in the Middle East, is the 
fear of the other.
    Here in our country, we have tried to make great strides, but we 
have a lot to do. One of the reasons I have so strongly supported the 
hate crimes legislation that is pending in the House is that it gives us 
another chance to say in America we are going to let go of the fear of 
the other. And if anybody can't let it go, we are going to take a strong 
and unambiguous stand against it so it will never infect us as a people 
again.
    I just came back from Africa where I went to Arusha, Tanzania, to 
the Peace Center to meet with Nelson Mandela, to meet with all the 
parties, some 20 of them, in the Burundian peace process where, at the 
beginning of the last decade, somewhere between 200,000 and 300,000 
people were killed in the ongoing ethnic struggle between the Hutus and 
the Tutsis, which cost over 700,000 lives in neighboring Rwanda just a 
couple of years later.
    The point I'm trying to make is, it is not enough for us to do 
everything we can to make whole the Holocaust victims, survivors, and 
their family members. What we have to do, all of us, to merit the 
forgiveness of the Almighty, is to root out the cancer which gave it 
life wherever we find it. For it is not something that was localized in 
Germany. How many nations can thank God that at a particularly 
vulnerable point in their history, they did not produce a Hitler, or God 
forbid, they might have done the same thing?
    And so I say to you, we have to fight this everywhere. We can't give 
up on the Balkans and let them go back to slaughtering each other 
because some are Muslim and some are Orthodox Christian and some are 
Catholics. And we cannot give up on the Middle East until the whole 
thing is done.
    Several of you have come up to me tonight and said, ``Well, what do 
you think now? What's going to happen?'' I say, ``Well, I'm pretty 
optimistic.'' The Speaker of the Knesset said, ``Ah, yes, but that's 
your nature. Everyone knows it.'' [Laughter] The truth is, we have come 
to a painful choice between continued confrontation and a chance to move 
beyond violence to build just and lasting peace. Like all life's 
chances, this one is fleeting, and the easy risks have all been taken 
already.
    I think it important to remind ourselves that the Middle East 
brought forth the world's three great monotheistic religions, each 
telling us we must recognize our common humanity; we must love our 
neighbor as ourselves; if we turn aside a stranger, it is as if we turn 
aside the Most High God.
    But when the past is piled high with hurt and hatred, that is a hard 
lesson to live by. We cannot undo past wrongs in the Middle East, 
either. But we are never without the power to right them to some extent. 
And the struggle you have waged and won here for restitution, the 
struggle we honor tonight, shows that the effort is always worth making.
    I thank you for supporting that good work. I salute you for what you 
have accomplished. But I remind you: The demon that has driven so much 
darkness since the dawn of human history has not yet quite been expunged 
from the human soul. And so we all still have work to do.
    Thank you, and God bless you.

Note: The President spoke at 9:38 p.m. in the Grand Ballroom at the 
Pierre Hotel. In his remarks, he referred to Edgar Bronfman, Sr., 
president, World Jewish Congress, his son, Edgar Bronfman, Jr., 
president and chief executive officer, Seagram and Sons, and his 
daughter-in-law, Clarissa Bronfman; Israel Singer, secretary general, 
World Jewish Congress; Nobel Prize winner and author Elie Wiesel; Vice 
Chancellor Joschka Fischer and Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder of Germany; 
Gov. George E. Pataki of New York; Alan G. Hevesi, New York City 
comptroller; Paul A. Volcker, former Chairman, Federal Reserve Board; 
former Secretary of State Lawrence S. Eagleburger; attorney Stanley M. 
Chesley; Speaker Avraham Burg, Israeli Knesset; Prime Minister Ehud 
Barak and former Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu of Israel; and former 
President Nelson Mandela of South Africa.

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