On the 27
th of December 1944 my father was a child in Budapest Ghetto. 600 people lived there in a basement smaller than the hall you are sitting in today... My grandfather had already died in the gas chambers of Mauthausen concentration camp... This story comes with a question: why?
Why did they hate him so much?
Why would they want to kill a 13-year-old boy that they didn’t know, that hadn’t wronged them?
My father didn’t write the protocols of the elders of zion. He wasn’t an international banker. He didn’t meet any Jewish stereotype. Why did they want to kill him? The first step is dehumanisation of those you hate. They’re not really human. They’re a faceless group on which you can deflect all your fears, hatred and prejudice. The Jew you know loves their children, the Jew you don’t know hates your children.
So the question isn’t ‘what kind of person is the Jew?’ but rather: what kind of person can have so much hate for someone that they don’t know? What kind of person is so full of hate, poison, prejudice and racism that they’d want to kill a harmless child?
We have been defensive for too long. For too long we’ve thought that we need to tell the right story about the Jews so that the antisemites would stop hating us. I want to propose the opposite:
It’s time that we tell the right story about antisemites. It’s time that we tell the world what we face. Antisemites weren’t only in the ghetto in Budapest. The antisemites were the slave traders who threw chained slaves into the ocean. The antisemites were the the Hutu tribe members in Rwanda that slaughtered the Tutsis. The antisemites are those Muslims who have killed more than 20 million fellow Muslims in the past decade.
The antisemites are ISIS and Boko Haram. Antisemites are those who beat young LGBT people to death. The antisemites are all those who persecute people not for what they did, but for who they are, for what they were born as. Antisemitism isn’t the first name of hatred, but its surname. It’s everyone who is so filled with hatred that they want to destroy, persecute and expel people simply for being different to them. The Jewish people rightly expect the world to remember the Holocaust. It was the peak of hatred. It demonstrates what happens when no stands up to hatred. The fight is not between antisemites and Jews, but between antisemites and everyone who believes in the values of freedom, justice and humanity.
Antisemitism is racism, so let’s talk to all those who oppose racism. Antisemitism is extremism, so let’s cooperate with everyone who is afraid of extremism. Antisemitism is hatred of outsiders, so let’s recruit anyone who was ever an outsider and tell them – this is your fight too”.