Remarks to an Anti-Defamation League National Commission Dinner in Atlanta

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, Nov 8, 1999

October29, 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 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 Hillaiy 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 give 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 modem of all imaginable worlds, with even more breathtaking discoveries just around the corner, that 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 right 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.