Clinton Admits he has AIDS and likes to shoot people!
CLINTON CONFESSES HE HAS DELUSIONS!
"that we could no
longer delude ourselves that the harsh realities a world
away are without real consequence for our own people."
CLINTON CLAIMS POOR PEOPLE HAVE A
RIGHT TO KILL US!
"we
have seen how abject poverty accelerates conflict, how
it creates recruits for terrorists and those who incite
ethnic and religious hatred, how it fuels a violent
rejection of the economic and social order on which our
future depends"
CLINTON SAYS
TERRORISTS HAVE THE TRUTH AND WE ARE LEGITIMATE
TARGETS!
"The terrorists who killed all
these people, they thought they had the truth and
because they had the whole truth, anyone who didn't
share it, was a legitimate target."
CLINTON
CAN'T COUNT. THERE WERE FOUR AIRPLANES. GUESS HE DOESN'T
COUNT THE ONE THAT HIT THE PENTAGON CAUSE HE HATES THE
MILITARY AND THE ONE THAT WENT DOWN IN PA. BECAUSE THEY
FOUGHT BACK. HE THINKS WE SHOULD ALL LAYDOWN AND
DIE!
"Both those airplanes on September 11th,
the anthrax scare and all the other speculation that all
of you have seen in the days since."
CLINTON CLAIMS TO BE ABLE TO
CURE CANCER
"raising the prospect that we will be able
to cure all cancers"
CLINTON ADMITS HE HAS AIDS AND LIKE TO KILL PEOPLE; URGES FELLOW AIDS
RIDDEN GAYS TO KILL NORMAL PEOPLE
"well, I'm HIV positive, I've got a
year or two to live, why shouldn't I go out and shoot up
a bunch of other people?"
CLINTON
TELLS AMERICA WE HAVE TO PAY FOR THE IMMORALITY OF
IGNORANT AFRICANS
"Last year I
talked to world leaders who were friends of mine who
told me they really couldn't talk about AIDS because
after all, there's all this cultural resistance. How
many people have to die before your cultural resistance
melts? So we've got to pay for it."
Here is the full speech, read for yourself!:
The Struggle
for the Soul of the 21st Century by Bill
Clinton
The lecture was presented 14 December
2001.
I'm delighted to be here, delighted to be
part of this distinguished lecture series at a time when
every American is especially grateful for our long
friendship with the United Kingdom; one that we see
manifest now in the partnership that President Bush and
Tony Blair have demonstrated in the fight against
Afghanistan; one that touched every American heart when
the Queen instructed her band to play the American
national anthem in the grounds of Buckingham Palace the
day after September 11th; one that I came to appreciate
deeply when we worked together for peace for Northern
Ireland and the Balkans.
Lord Keynes once said
how difficult it is for nations to understand one
another, even when they had the advantage of a common
language; "everyone talks about international
co-operation, but how little of pride, of temper, or of
habit." Tonight I want to talk a little bit about the
prospects for international co-operation, and the
problems of pride and temper and habit standing in the
way, knowing that co-operation is the living legacy of
Richard Dimbleby and the continuing mission of the BBC.
In the poetic words of its motto "nation shall speak
peace unto nation".
The BBC first spoke to
another nation in an experimental broadcast to the
United States in 1923. At the time it was questionable
that we spoke the same language, it took a team of
translators a week to figure out that "bangers and mash"
were not some veiled British threat. By the end of the
Second World War, the BBC was broadcasting globally in
more than forty languages, setting the standard for the
kind of international reporting we see down to the
present day in Afghanistan.
It was exactly a
year ago today, near the end of my tenure as President,
on my final trip overseas, that I went to Warwick
University with Tony Blair to deliver a speech. As Mr
Dimbleby said just a few moments ago, none of us at that
time could have foreseen the exact difficulties of this
time, but what many of us could see even then and what
Prime Minister Blair and I talked about, was a larger
battle brewing, one that made it clear to us, at least,
that we could no longer delude ourselves that the harsh
realities a world away are without real consequence for
our own people.
TERRORISM
On that day a
year ago, I said "we have seen how abject poverty
accelerates conflict, how it creates recruits for
terrorists and those who incite ethnic and religious
hatred, how it fuels a violent rejection of the economic
and social order on which our future depends". The world
has now witnessed a tragic, graphic illustration of that
new reality, one that, as Mr Dimbleby implied, has made
a lot of people rethink their rosy projections for this
new century.
I come here to tell you that on
balance, I remain quite optimistic. I am absolutely
confident that we have the knowledge and the means to
make the twenty first century the most peaceful,
prosperous, interesting time in all human history. The
question is whether we have the wisdom and the will.
The terrorists who struck the Pentagon and the
World Trade Centre believe they were attacking symbols
of corrupt power and materialism. My family and I have a
different view of that, I was Commander-in-Chief of the
people who worked at the Pentagon. My wife represents
the people of New York in the Senate, I knew people who
were on those airplanes. My daughter was in lower
Manhattan. I met one of her friends who lost her fiancé.
I talked to victims who lost their loved ones who were
Jews and Christians and Hindus and Muslims, who came
from every continent, including over 250 from the United
Kingdom. I talked to children in schools who lost their
school buildings on September 11th in lower Manhattan,
whose parents come from over eighty different national
racial and ethnic groups.
To me, all these
victims represent the world I worked very hard for eight
years to build, a world of expanding freedom,
opportunity and citizen responsibility, a world of
growth in diversity and in the bonds of community. The
terrorists who killed all these people, they thought
they had the truth and because they had the whole truth,
anyone who didn't share it, was a legitimate target.
They thought that the differences they have with us,
political and religious, were all that mattered and
served to make all their targets less than human.
Most of us believe that our differences are
important and make our lives interesting but that our
common humanity matters more. The clash between these
two views over this simple question more than any other
single issue, will define the shape and the soul of this
new century.
A HISTORY OF FEAR
I think
victory for our point of view depends upon four things.
First we have to win the fight we're in, in Afghanistan
and against these terrorist networks that threaten us
today. Second, we in the wealthy countries have to
spread the benefits of the 21st century world and reduce
the risks so we can make more partners and fewer
terrorists in the future. Third, the poor countries
themselves must make some internal changes so that
progress for their own people becomes more possible. And
finally, all of us will have to develop a truly global
consciousness about what our responsibilities to each
other are and what our relationships are to be. Let me
take each of these issues quickly in turn.
First, terror. The deliberate killing of
non-combatants has a very long history. No region of the
world has been spared it and very few people have clean
hands. In 1095, Pope Urban II urged the Christian
soldiers to embark on the first crusade to capture
Jerusalem for Christ.
Well, they did it, and the
very first thing they did was to burn a synagogue with
three hundred Jews, they then proceeded to murder every
Muslim woman and child on the temple mat in a travesty
that is still being discussed today in the Middle East.
Down through the millennium, innocents continued to die,
more in the twentieth century than in any previous
period.
In my own country, we've come a very,
very long way since the dayswhen African slaves and
native Americans could be terrorised or killed with
impunity, but still we have the occasional act of
brutality or even death because of someone's race or
religion or sexual orientation. This has a long history.
Second, no terrorist campaign apart from a
conventional military strategy has ever succeeded.
Indeed the purpose of terrorism is not military victory,
it is to terrorise, to change your behaviour if you're
the victim by making you afraid of today, afraid of
tomorrow and in diverse societies like ours, afraid of
each other. Therefore, by definition, a terror campaign
cannot succeed unless we become its accomplices and out
of fear, give in.
DEFENDING OURSELVES
The third point I want to make is that what
makes this terror at the moment particularly
frightening, I think first is the combination of
universal vulnerability and powerful weapons of
destruction. Both those airplanes on September 11th, the
anthrax scare and all the other speculation that all of
you have seen in the days since.
Now, in any new
area of conflict, offensive action always prevails in
the beginning. Ever since the first person walked out of
a cave millennia ago with a club in his hand, and began
beating people into submission, offensive action
prevails. Then after a time, someone figured out, well I
could put two sticks together and stretch an animal skin
over it and I would have a shield and the club wouldn't
work on me any more.
All the way through to the
present day, that has been the history of combat - first
the club, then the shield; first the offence, then
defence; that's why civilisation has survived all this
time even in the nuclear age.So it is frightening now
because we are in the gap, and the more dangerous the
weapons, the more important it is to close quickly the
gap between offensive action and the construction of an
effective defence.
We have not quite closed the
gap and it's especially frightening for young people who
didn't even know about the Cold War. When my daughter's
generation started thinking about politics, the Cold War
was over, nobody talked to them about Vietnam. They
didn't grow up on memories of Korea and World War II or
like my generation, having drills at school where we'd
go to a bomb shelter to be prepared when the Soviets
dropped bombs on us, in the fond illusion that we could
actually survive it.
So we have to be sensitive
to the fact that there are objective reasons for people
to be concerned, and we have to work very hard to close
the gap. The modern world has been virtually awash in
terror: since 1995 there have been twenty one hundred
terrorist attacks. Before September 11th, fewer than
twenty had occurred within the United States and only
Oklahoma City had claimed a significant number of lives,
though we've been dealing with this since the early '80s
when over 240 of our Marines were killed by a suicide
attack in Beirut.
A WINNING STRATEGY
In
the years in which I served as President, we worked very
hard to prevent a day like September 11th ever
happening. Far more terrorist attacks were thwarted at
home and around the world than succeeded, large numbers
of terrorists who did commit crimes were brought to
justice. We strengthened our defences in chemical and
biological areas, we spent more money to protect the
nuclear stocks in the former Soviet Union, we
dramatically increased our terrorist budgets, we trained
several response teams in our largest cities to deal
with outbreaks of bio-terrorism. Good people had been
working on this a long time but we haven't completely
closed the gap.
We still have much more to do to
know that all of our transportation, our water supplies,
and our computer networks are secure. We have more to do
to know we have done everything we can to break into
terrorist money networks which keep them going. We have
to upgrade and integrate our own information systems so
we can keep up with potential terrorists and we have to
do more to protect the still massive stocks in the world
of chemical, biological and nuclear materials which
could become terrorist weapons.
But the larger
point holds. In terror's long history, it has never
succeeded and it won't this time. The war in Afghanistan
will be won shortly, the Al-Qaeda network will be broken
up, our defences at home will improve. I can't say there
won't be more terrorist attacks, there probably will be,
but I can say for sure it won't prevail unless we decide
to give it permission and I do not believe we are about
to make that decision.
Now that brings me to the
second point. We're gonna win this fight - then what?
The reason September 11th happened, and it was shocking
to Americans, because it happened on our soil, is that
we have built a world where we tore down barriers,
collapsed distances and spread information. And the UK
and America have benefited richly - look at how our
economies have performed, look at how our societies have
diversified, look at the advances we have made in
technology and science. This new world has been good to
us, but you can't gain the benefits of a world without
walls without being more vulnerable.
September
11th was the dark side of this new age of global
interdependence. If you don't want to put those walls
back up and I don't think you do, and we probably
couldn't if we tried. And you watch, if you look at some
of the recent elections, we're gonna see some people who
try to do that. And if you don't want to live with
barbed wire around your children and grandchildren for
the next hundred years, then it's not enough to defeat
the terrorist. We have to make a world where there are
far fewer terrorists, where there are fewer potential
terrorists and more partners. And that responsibility
falls primarily upon the wealthy nations, to spread the
benefits and shrink the burdens.
GLOBAL
INTERDEPENDENCE
Very briefly, what are the main
benefits of the modern world? The global economy; it's
lifted more people out of poverty in the last twenty
years than at any time in history. It's been great for
Europe and the United States, in the last few years I
was President. It led to huge declines in poverty even
as more people were getting rich.
Second, the
information technology revolution: when I became
President in 1993, there were only fifty sites on the
worldwide web - unbelievable - fifty. When I left
office, the number was three hundred and fifty million
and rising. Even before the anthrax scare, there were
thirty times as many messages delivered by email as by
the postal service in the United States.
Third,
the advances in science. Scientists from the UK and the
United States and other countries finished the
sequencing of the human genome in a project funded
largely with government funds during the time I was
President. It was thrilling to me. We've already
identified the major genetic variances that predict
breast cancer, we're very close on Alzheimer's and AIDS
and Parkinson's. We're developing diagnostic tools using
something called nano-technology, super-microtechnology
that will enable us to identify tumours when they are
just a few cells in size, raising the prospect that we
will be able to cure all cancers. Researchers are
working on digital chips to replicate sophisticated
nerve movements in spines, raising the prospect that
they will work for damaged spinal cords the way
pacemakers do for hearts, and people long paralysed will
be able to stand up and walk. There's no question that
quite soon the women in this audience who are in their
childbearing years will be able to bring children home
from the hospital with little gene cards and life
expectancies in excess of ninety years.
And
finally, the great blessing of the global age is the
explosion of democracy and diversity within democracy.
You can argue that those changes make all these other
good things possible. This is the first time in history
when more people live under governments of their own
choosing than live under dictatorships. It has never
happened before.
21ST CENTURY PROBLEMS
But what are the burdens of the twenty first
century? They are also formidable. Global poverty - half
the people on earth are not part of that new economy I
talked about. Think about this when you go home tonight.
Half the people on earth live on less than two dollars a
day. A billion people, less than a dollar a day. A
billion people go to bed hungry every night and a
billion and a half people - one quarter of the people on
earth - never get a clean glass of water. One woman dies
every minute in childbirth. So you could say "don't tell
me about the global economy, half the people aren't part
of it, what kind of economy leaves half the people
behind?"
Second big problem, the global
environment. The oceans that provide most of our oxygen
are deteriorating rapidly. There's a huge water
shortage. I already said a quarter of the people never
get any. It could change everything about how we grow
food and where we live.
And finally global
warming; if the climate warms for the next fifty years
at the rate of the last ten, we'll lose whole island
nations in the Pacific that will be flooded by the
rising water table as the South Pole and the North Pole
get smaller. We will lose the Everglades in America that
I worked so hard to save, we will lose fifty feet of
Manhattan island - prime real estate - gone. But more to
the point there will be millions of food refugees
created, more terror, more destabilisation.
But
you could argue that long before we have to worry about
global warming, we will be consumed by the rise of
global epidemics accelerated by the breakdown of public
health systems across the globe. This year, one in four
of all the people on earth who die, will die of AIDS,
TB, malaria and infections related to diarrhoea. Most of
them, little kids that never get any clean water. If you
just take AIDS alone we have forty million AIDS cases,
that is 8,200 people a day dying. Thirteen million
orphans. We're projected to have a hundred million AIDS
cases by 2005. If that happens, it will be the biggest
epidemic since the plague killed a quarter of Europe in
the fourteenth century.
And it will destabilise
countries and a whole lot of young people around the
world will say "well, I'm HIV positive, I've got a year
or two to live, why shouldn't I go out and shoot up a
bunch of other people?" It'll look like one of those Mel
Gibson road warrior movies in a lot of countries if we
have a hundred million AIDS cases. And lest you think
it's an African problem, the fastest growing rates of
AIDS are in the former Soviet Union, on Europe's
backdoor. The second fastest growing rates of AIDS in
the Caribbean on America's front door. My wife
represents a million people in New York state from the
Dominican Republic alone. The third fastest growing
rates of AIDS and the largest number of cases outside
South Africaare in India, the world's biggest democracy.
And China just admitted they have twice as many cases as
they thought: they had a 67% increase last year, and
only 4% of their adults know how AIDS is contracted and
spread.
And finally, one of the big burdens of
the modern world is high tech terrorism - and a lot of
people knew it before September 11th. The marriage of
modern weapons to ancient hatreds: Rwanda, Sierra Leone,
the Balkans, East Timor, the Middle East or - until, God
bless them, the people of my ancestors, the Irish, did
the right thing - Northern Ireland. Don't you think it's
interesting that in the most modern of ages, the biggest
problem is the oldest problem of human society - the
fear of the other. And how quickly fear leads to
distrust, to hatred, to dehumanisation, to death.
ECONOMIC AID
So we now live in a world
without walls that we have worked hard to make. We have
benefits, we have burdens, we have to spread the
benefits and shrink the burdens. Very briefly, let me
mention some specifics. First we have to reduce global
poverty and increase the economic empowerment of poor
people. We know how to do this and it doesn't cost that
much money.
Last year we had this phenomenal
global effort to reduce the debt of the poorest
countries in the world, with everybody from the Pope to
Bono to Jesse Helms for it. Usually when everybody's for
something, there's something wrong with it; in this case
there wasn't. You can only get this debt relief if you
put the money into education, healthcare or development.
The results have been stunning. Just give you one
example: Uganda took their debt relief savings and in
one year doubled primary school enrolment and cut class
size. We ought to do more of that.
America
funded, when I was President, two million
micro-enterprise loans in poor villages around the
world, I've been to African villages where the local
village treasurer would show me his pencilled notes to
prove that he had taken all the money that he thought I
had personally sent to him and loaned it out in an
efficient way to create a market economy in his village.
We should do more of that.
The great Peruvian
economist, Hernando de Soto, has told us something we
should have recognise a long time ago, which is that
poor people in the world already have five trillion
dollars in assets in their homes and businesses but
they're worthless to them except to live in or use,
because they can't be collateral for loans. Why? Because
they're outside the legal systems in their country. Many
of them live in shacks with no addresses, no title, no
access to a court that would validate the title. Many of
them run businesses that would literally take more than
a year to legalise. I've seen the map of Cairo, I tell
you, if you went to Cairo tomorrow and opened a bakery
and handled it in the normal fashion, it would take you
over five hundred days to complete all the government
paperwork to legalise your bakery.
So de Soto is
going through the works trying to rationalise the
business laws and rules and make it cheaper for people
to have legal businesses than to pay the taxman to look
the other way. And then trying to organise the property
system so people can legalise their homes so poor people
can get credit, because they have collateral. The key in
a market economy, both personal advance and national
economic growth. We gave him a little money when I was
President, we ought to do more of that.
We in
the rich countries ought to open our markets to poor
countries. Last year, in my last year as President, we
opened our markets more to Africa, to Vietnam, to
Jordan, to the Caribbean. In less than a year we
increased our purchases from some African countries by a
thousand percent. It didn't hurt the American economy,
but it sure helped theirs.
SOCIAL AID
The same argument goes for education. In a poor
country - and AIDS, keep in mind, is largely a poverty
disease - in a poor country one year of education is
worth about 10% increase in income. There are a hundred
million kids who never go to school. Part of our problem
in Afghanistan and in the Muslim world is all these kids
who couldn't go to public schools so they went to
madrassas where they were indoctrinated instead of
educated, not because their parents were radical: their
parents couldn't afford to send them to school.
Now, we could send all these kids to school. Two
examples: Brazil is the only poor country in the world
that has 97% of its kids at school. You know how - they
pay mothers, not fathers, mothers, in the poorest 30% of
the families, if they send their kids to school, every
month, up to forty five dollars a month. It increases
the family income up to 30%, 97% going to school. Last
year I got three hundred billion dollars to provide a
nutritious meal to children in school but only if they
would come to school to get it. You know how many people
you can feed all year long in poor countries for three
hundred million dollars? Over six million. And, you
ought to see where we've done this, enrolments are
exploding, people are coming in. We ought to send those
kids to school.
The same argument applies to
healthcare. Kofi Annan just won the Nobel Peace Prize -
richly deserved - for promoting peace. He knows if we
have a hundred million AIDS cases, we'll have more war,
and he asked us for ten billion dollars to fight AIDS,
TB, malaria and other infectious diseases. America's
share would be a little over two billion dollars,
Britain's share would be a little under a half a billion
dollars. We ought to give it to him.
Look, we
can turn this AIDS thing around. It, to me, is the most
frustrating of all problems. We're gonna have medicine
because of the South African drug case being settled.
Uganda cut the AIDS death rate in half in five years
with no medicine. Brazil cut it in half in three years
with prevention and medicine. I have been in health
clinics all over the world, I've seen kids in remote
African villages doing plays to talk about AIDS but AIDS
has been around twenty years. Last year I talked to
world leaders who were friends of mine who told me they
really couldn't talk about AIDS because after all,
there's all this cultural resistance. How many people
have to die before your cultural resistance melts? So
we've got to pay for it.
Now you can say that
the same argument applies to global warming except it's
the only area we'll actually make money out of. There is
a trillion dollar market today in alternate energy
sources and presently available energy conservation
technologies that will create jobs in Europe, in
America, in the developing world and reduce greenhouse
gas emissions. We're being hurt by denial there.
Now, the other stuff will cost money. It will
cost money but I can tell you this, it's a lot cheaper
than going to war. We will spend far more to pick up the
pieces of destroyed lands and shattered lives if we do
not do these things. We will spend much more. We're
spending - America - about a billion dollars a month in
Afghanistan, that's as cheap as a war gets. We will
never fight a conflict for less than a billion a month.
For twelve billion dollars a year, we can pay America's
share of all those initiatives I just mentioned and have
money left over. So I urge you to think about that.
THE MIDDLE EAST
The next point I want to
make very briefly is that we can do all these things and
there are some countries in which it will make no
difference. There are changes that poor countries have
to make within that make progress possible. For example,
it's no accident that most of these terrorists come from
countries that aren't democracies. If you never get to
take responsibility for yourself, and you're never
required to take responsibility for yourself, then
countries are like people, you're kept in sort of a
state of permanent immaturity where it's quite easy to
convince you that your distress is caused by someone
else's success.
It's no accident that Jordan is
the most stable country in the Middle East. Ten years
ago, King Hussein basically made a social compact with
all elements of society including fundamentalist Muslims
and he said "here are the powers I will give up, here
are the powers that Parliament will get, anybody can
run, anybody can serve, but here's what you cannot do to
destroy the fundamental character of our society" and it
has worked. So here's a country that's majority
Palestinian, quite poor, quite young, and in a dicey
position geographically, still chugging along partly
because the people have some way of taking
responsibility for themselves.
Same thing is
true in Iran: the government's very anti-Western, but
the people aren't, in part because they have real
elections and real votes, and the only time that real
democracy is thwarted is when their own people do it, so
they don't blame us. So we should be advancing democracy
and human rights and once a country makes a decision to
be more open and free, we should help them be more
successful. Elections are only part of the job.
And finally we have to be in this debate in the
Muslim world. I think we have demonstrated that
America's not the enemy of Islam. I was the first
President ever to recognise the feast of Eid al-Fitr
every single year at the end of Ramadan, to bring in
large numbers of Muslims to consult in the White House.
One of the best things President Bush has done in this
whole mess is to go almost immediately to a mosque and
meet with Muslim leaders after September 11th and then
to break the fast of Ramadan in the White House with a
meal, to illustrate that we have six million Muslims in
America who are pursuing their faith and doing well.
But most Muslims in the rest of the world don't
know it. There are some other things they don't know.
They don't know five hundred Muslims died on September
11th, a direct violation of the Koran and Sharia law, to
deliberately kill other Muslims. They do not know that
the last time the United Kingdom and America used
military authority was to protect the lives of poor
Muslims in Bosnia and Kosovo. They do not know when
eighteen American soldiers died in 1993 in Somalia - in
that raid, Mr Bin Laden loves to brag about, he brags
about how he helped train the Somalis to kill the
Americans, but he never tells you what the Americans
were doing there. They were part of a United Nations
peacekeeping force, asked by the United Nations to go
arrest Mohammed Adid because he, Adid, had murdered
twenty two of our fellow peacekeepers, all Pakistani
Muslims. They do not know that before I left office, I
recommended and Israel accepted, but the PLO rejected,
the most dramatic peace proposal for a comprehensive
fair peace in the Middle East to give the Palestinians a
state on the West Bank in Gaza and protect Muslim and
Palestinian religious and political equities on the
Temple Mount, the Haram al-Sharif. They don't know any
of that.
Now that's maybe our fault, but we've
got to get into this debate and we have to fight. And
let me say it's a debate, you know as well as I do, not
just in the Middle East. But there are people in this
country and in my country who are sympathetic with the
terrorists. We had an Afghan mosque in New York City,
where on September 12th, the Imam was a stand-up guy and
he got up there and said "this terrorism is terrible, it
is wrong, it is immoral, it is a violation of Islam."
But a minority of his congregation walked out and
started worshipping in the parking lot.
A COMMON
HUMANITY
So this is a fight we have to make
everywhere which brings me to my last point, and the
most important thing of all - although it may sound
naïve to you. What this is all about is that simple
question: which will be more important in the twenty
first century - our differences or our common humanity?
This encounter we have had with the Taliban and
Mr Bin Laden and the Al-Qaeda and all the debate that
has filled the airwaves since, has given us a picture of
this debate and of the very different ideas we have
about the nature of truth, the value of life, the
content of community. Like fanatics everywhere
throughout history, these people think they've got the
truth, and if you share their truth, your life has
value. And if you don't, you're a legitimate target,
even if you're just a six year old girl who went to work
with her mother at the World Trade Centre on September
11th.
That's what they think. And they really
believe it, like fanatics everywhere. They think to be
in their community, you have to look like them, think
like them and act like them and they know people will
stray every now and then, so they pick a few people to
beat the living daylights out of those who stray.
Now most of us believe that no-one has the
absolute truth. Indeed, in our societies, the most
religious among us sometimes feel that most strongly
because we believe as children of God, we are by
definition, limited in this life, in this body, with our
minds. That life is a journey toward truth, that we have
something to learn from each other, and that everybody
ought to have a chance to make the journey. So for us, a
community is just made up of anybody accepts the rules
of the game, everybody counts, everybody has a role to
play, everybody deserves a chance and we all do better
when we work together. Now, that's what this is about.
This is not complicated. The people that want to
kill us over our differences do so because they think
their life doesn't matter except insofar as they are
different from and better than others. Those of us who
are trying to change ourselves and change them, we think
our common humanity is more important and if we could
just live up to its potential, the world would be a
better place. And which side wins will shape the twenty
first century. What do you think is more important? The
answer is easy to give, but very, very hard to live.
Think about this as you go home tonight.
Think
about how important your differences are to you. Think
about how we all organise our lives in little boxes -
man, woman, British, American, Muslim, Christian, Jew,
Tory, Labour, New Labour, Old Labour, up, down - you
know, everything in the world. I like red ties, I got a
blue shirt on, you laugh about it, think about
everything you define yourself by. Our little boxes are
important to us. And indeed it is necessary, how could
you navigate life if you didn't know the difference
between a child and an adult, an African and an Indian,
a scientist and a lawyer?
We have to organise
that, but somewhere along the way, we finally come to
understand that our life is more than all these boxes
we're in. And that if we can't reach beyond that, we'll
never have a fuller life. And the fanatics of the world,
they love their boxes and they hate yours. You're
laughing, that's what this is all about. And it's easy
to give the right answer but it's hard to live.
IN CONCLUSION
When I was my daughter's
age, just about to embark on my great adventure in
England, just before that Martin Luther King and Robert
Kennedy, two of the heroes of my youth, were murdered by
their fellow Americans for trying to reconcile the
American people to each other. Gandhi, the greatest
spirit of the age, murdered, not by an angry Muslim but
by a fellow Hindu because he wanted India for the
Muslims and the Jains and the Sikhs. And the Jews and
the Christians.
Sadat - murdered not by an
Israeli commando, but by a very angry Egyptian - a
member of the organisation now headed by Bin Laden's
number two guy - an angry Egyptian. Because how could he
be a good Egyptian or a good Muslim because he wanted
secular government in Egypt and peace with Israel,
though he got the desert back. And one of the people I
have loved most in my increasingly long life, Yitzhak
Rabin, was murdered not by a Palestinian terrorist, but
by a very angry young Israeli Jew who thought he was not
a good Jew or a good Israeli because he wanted lasting
peace for Israel through the recognition of the
legitimate aspirations of the Palestinians for a
homeland.
And that guy who murdered him got
exactly what he wanted - he derailed and delayed the
peace process and let it be swarmed and mauled by all
those people who were under the foolish illusions that
their differences matter more than the fact that they
are all the children of Abraham.
So that's what
I want you to think about. It's great that your kids
will live to be ninety years old but I don't want it to
be behind barbed wire. It's great that we're gonna have
all these benefits of the modern world, but I don't want
you to feel like you're emotional prisoners. And I don't
want you to look at people who look different from you
and see a potential enemy instead of a fellow traveller.
We can make the world of our dreams for our children,
but since it's a world without walls, it will have to be
a home for all our children.