Holocaust survivor pities anti-Semites who ‘waste life’ hating
Facing a world where anti-Semitism is resurgent again, Holocaust survivor Edith Eger, who watched her mother be marched to the gas chamber, said she pities those who “waste” their life hating.
Seventy-five years after arriving at Auschwitz, where she was forced to dance for the notorious Nazi doctor Josef Mengele, Eger told AFP that she of course felt sorry for the victims of rising hate speech and violence.
But the 91-year-old said she was especially distressed by those consumed by bigotry who really “do not acknowledge that [they] are one of a kind.”
You should “not really waste your life hating,” she said in an interview on the sidelines of a conference on compassionate leadership at the IMD business school in Lausanne.
Eger certainly knows what hatred can lead to.
The practicing clinical psychologist, professor and author was just 16 when she and her Jewish family arrived at the Nazi death camp.
Islamophobia - A Weapon to Silence Our Freedom of Speech
Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia are often framed as equivalent phenomena and equal dangers. But these are two very different phenomena and should not be lumped together. A phobia is a strong, irrational fear of something that poses no real danger. Judeophobia is an irrational fear of Jews. Islamophobia is an irrational fear of the Islamic religion or Muslims generally. Anti-Semitism is a race-based ideology rooted in stereotypes - not based on fear, but ancient hatred.Book excerpt: Israel's mission to destroy Syria's nuclear reactor
Islamophobia became prominent in 1989 when Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa, following the publication of Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, which imposed a death penalty on Rushdie and also criminalized all the publishers and translators of the book. Since then, the Islamophobic label has been used increasingly to deter any scrutiny of any groups or individuals who happen to be Muslim, even when they are advancing radical or harmful ideas.
The sword of Islamophobia is wielded to deliberately chill discourse and narrow the public marketplace of ideas. Today, the unfortunate reality is that any time somebody is brave enough to critique a dangerous ideology, the government of a Muslim country or even a terrorist network, they're silenced, shut down and stigmatized for engaging in Islamophobia.
In 1998, George W. Bush made his first trip to Israel. He had just been reelected governor of Texas – the first governor to win back-to-back terms in the Lone Star State – and he was already plotting his presidential bid.
During the visit – together with a few other Republican governors – Bush made the standard gubernatorial stops: a meeting with then-prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a tour of the Knesset, the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum and the Western Wall. He then took a helicopter ride up to the Golan Heights. His guide for the flight was none other than Ariel Sharon, the fabled IDF general who was serving at the time as Israel’s foreign minister.
Little did the two know that in just three years they would meet again, although this time as president and prime minister. The helicopter ride sparked a mini-crisis between Israel, the US and the Palestinians. Sharon wanted to land the helicopter in the West Bank to show Bush the reality on the ground, but the Palestinians objected.
They feared that Israel would use the visit to try legitimizing the settlement enterprise, which Sharon had long championed. In the end, Israel compromised. The helicopter didn’t land but it flew low enough for Bush to see Jerusalem’s ancient rooftops, the ridges overlooking the Jordan Valley, the red-roofed stucco homes in the Israeli settlements and the densely populated Palestinian cities. Sharon and Bush wore headphones so they could communicate over the noise made by the Black Hawk helicopter’s rotors.
The former IDF general shared with the Texas governor his own personal story, pointing along the way at hills and valleys where he had waged battle in past Israeli-Arab wars. When Sharon told Bush that at its narrowest point Israel was just 10 miles wide, the future president joked that some driveways in Texas are longer.