We all know that no child is born with hate.
Hate is taught.
We must pay attention to hate speech.
What it can do.
Its capacity to completely destroy,
its capacity to completely dehumanize.
We need to understand that no society in the world
is immune from hate speech.
I've just come back from Cox' Bazaar in Bangladesh,
and I spent a lot of time among the Rohingya people.
Hate speech was employed
to dehumanize the Rohingya,
referring to them as subhuman,
referring to them as fleas
referring to them as thorns that needed to be removed.
And ultimately, that is precisely what happened.
By the time they arrived in Bangladesh,
they had gone through decades of torture,
decades of displacement,
decades of dehumanization
and this hate speech that has been employed
is something that we must pay attention to.
There's a lot of information on Bosnia-Herzegovina,
on what happened in Srebrenica.
The hate speech that preceded and accompanied
the killing of the men and boys in Srebrenica.
There's a lot of information on the Tutsi
in Rwanda, and the moderate Hutu,
and the hate speech that was used to describe the Tutsi,
how they were dehumanized.
We need to look at what happened to the Jews during the Holocaust.
We need to see how much hate speech was employed
to the extent that propaganda really was just spewing out hate speech
against the Jews, describing them in ways
that were designed to make it possible
for the ordinary person on the street
to just get out and participate in either killing the Jews
or reporting on them or getting rid of them.
So my message really to everybody
is that genocides happen within communities.
Genocides happen to you and me.
When a genocide unfolds, the people targeted are people who are ordinary.
And we must keep paying specific attention to
the narratives that we pass on
from one generation to the other.
They are narratives in which communities share
the trauma they experienced
and they pass it on to their children.
We all know that no child is born with hate,
that hate is taught.
And we know that the first step of socialization for a child is the family.
The child begins to hear about hate from parents, from siblings,
They begin to about stereotypes, about other ethnic communities,
about other racial, religious communities,
and they begin to understand
that there is something called 'an other'
that there is us, and then there is the other.
We then move to the schools
and then we keep being socialized this time by the media, by religious organizations
by political issues that we see happening.
At this point, the child is now probably getting into university
and they've begun to internalize hate.
They have the stereotypes in place.
They have the prejudices in place.
Then what that means is that
that adult who was a child born without hate
becomes the person who continues
the next cycle of socialization.
And ultimately, what happens is that when people begin
to fight each other, especially at the local level,
then we'll have a war on our hands.
And we know how difficult it is to stop wars.
So what that means is that we must find ways to keep interrupting
that cycle of socialization through education, through knowledge,
through having friends from different ethnic, racial, religious communities
And what I've learned is that the same tools
that are used to spread hate
often turn out to be the best tools
to counter hate speech.
So, for example, the cell phone,
it's become a tool that's almost indispensable to many people.
And it's also become a tool in which hate speech is spread through social media,
The same tool can be used to counter hate speech
Social media is still an extremely useful tool of engagement.
We just need to know how to
speak to the issues that people need addressed.
We must have conversations with our children
and tell them not to fear difference.
And tell them that difference is a really good thing.
It's the perspectives that each brings to the table
are perspectives that you would never hear
if you just stayed with people who look and speak like you.
We must look at new ways that the world can engage on the issue of hate.
Those instances are mentioned.
We are genocides have taken place in the past.
Teach us is that you cannot control his fate.
Once you begin to stereotype
and to be into to act
on your stereotypes through prejudice.
And then of course, when you have power, once you begin to discriminate,
there is no way we can then begin to stop you
because then we will have a war on our hands.
And we know how difficult it is to stop wars
His speech may be seen as stereotypes
and prejudices that are seem to be harmless.
But as soon as any human being has power
to act on the stereotypes
and the prejudices that they have,
that those prejudices and stereotypes become discrimination.
And from discrimination, it becomes very easy to move somebody
who is discriminating into the space of actually killing a human being.
It all begins with his speech.
And we must not allow Holocaust and genocide deniers
to get us to the point where hate speech
won in getting people to get killed and then hit speech wins again.
In denying that the Holocaust
and the Srebrenica and the genocide against the truth in Rwanda happened.
You sit at your dining table
in your father and mother are describing a racial or ethnic or religious community
as cockroaches, as phones that need to be removed,
as weeds, that need to be uprooted as cancers that need to be removed.
Then it's difficult to get that out of your mind.