Condoleezza Rice Affirms Support for Israel, Recalls Personal Battle against Intolerance, Terrorism

American Jewish Committee
Friday, 10 May 2002

"We cannot and must not allow the world to drift into what some have called 'a clash of civilizations'," national security advisor Condoleeza Rice said last night at the American Jewish Committee's 96th Annual Dinner. "President Bush will always stand for peace and tolerance and oppose those who take us back into history's nightmares."

"We are engaged in the broadest sense in a clash of ideas about modernity – about tolerance, respect, and tradition," Dr. Rice said. "And we cannot build a stable, more peaceful world if difference is seen as a license to kill."

Dr. Rice, the daughter of a Presbyterian minister, spoke of the racism, the "homegrown terrorism," she experienced growing up in Birmingham, Alabama. "Terrorism, like slavery and segregation, depends on dehumanizing people."

She referred to the 1963 bombing of the Sunday school at Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, an attack that took the lives of four young girls, including one of her friends. "The crime was calculated, not random," said Dr. Rice. "It was meant to suck the hope out of young lives, bury their aspirations, and ensure that old fears are propelled forward into the next generation."

Judaism, Christianity and Islam are all "religions of peace," she said, and that "peaceful heritage must be reaffirmed. It must not be subverted to preach hatred."

For example, there must be an end to school texts "demonizing Israelis and Jews."

"In too many places in the world educational systems fuel old hatreds instead of opening new opportunities," she said. "People are not born to hate. They are taught to hate."

Helping nations and peoples who want their schools to teach less about why to hate the world and more about the tools needed to success in the world "is the work not just of government but the work of all of us, including groups like the American Jewish Committee," she said.

The U.S. and Israel share many values, including a "commitment to life," said Dr. Rice. That commitment ensured Jewish survival for 2,000 years in the Diaspora, gave blacks hope during slavery and what strengthened Jews after the Holocaust to establish the State of Israel. "It is our commitment to life that will lead to peace for all the Children of Abraham."

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