Subject: Clinton remarks at WH Hate Crimes Event
From: [email-masked]
Date: Tue, 6 Apr 1999 11:52:01 -0400

THE WHITE HOUSE

                    Office of the Press Secretary
______________________________________________________________
For Immediate Release                          April 6, 1999

                      REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT
                     AT HATE CRIMES ANNOUNCEMENT

                        The Roosevelt Room

10:51 A.M. EDT

             THE PRESIDENT:  Thank you.  Senator Leahy, Senator
Specter, Congressman Cardin and Delahunt, Secretary Riley, Acting
Assistant Attorney General Bill Lann Lee; to our D.C. Police Chief
Charles Ramsey, and the other distinguished guests in the audience
who are in support -- broadened support of the Hate Crimes Prevention
Act.  Let me begin by thanking Attorney General Ketterer and Bishop
Jane Holmes Dixon for being here.

             I want you to know that the Attorney General got up at
3:00 a.m. this morning to drive down here from Maine.  And of course,
he got up that early so he could stay lawfully within the speed limit
-- (laughter) -- coming down here.  And he set a good example, and he
was wide awake and very persuasive on the law.

             Bishop, we thank you for your very moving remarks.
Remind me never to speak behind you again.  (Laughter.)  It was -so
much of what the Bishop said about the setting of this is many things
that I have thought.  I think she and I and those of us who grew up
in the segregated south are perhaps more sensitive to all these
various hate crimes issues because we grew up in a culture that was
dominated for too long by people who thought they only counted if
they had somebody to look down on, that they could only lift
themselves up if they were pushing someone else down; that their
whole definition of a positive life required a negative definition of
another group of people.  That's really what this is all about.

             And if you -- as she said, if you look at the whole
history of this violence we see in Kosovo, what we went through in
Bosnia, this, the fifth anniversary of the awful Rwandan genocide,
that I regret so much the world was not organized enough to move
quickly enough to deal with it before hundreds of thousands of lives
were lost -- with the oppression of women in Afghanistan, with the
lingering bitterness in the Middle East -- you see all these things.
When you strip it all away, down deep inside there is this idea that
you cannot organize personal life or social life unless some group
feels better about itself only when they are oppressing someone else.
Or people at least believe that they ought to have the right to do
violence against someone else solely because of who they are, not
because of what they do.  Now, at the bottom, that's what this is all
about.

             And I have said repeatedly since I have been President
that one of the things I have sought to do in our country is to
bridge all these divides, and to get all of our people not to
agree with one another, not to even like one another all the time
-- goodness knows, we can't like everybody all the time -- but to
recognize that our common humanity is more important than these
categorical differences.  And also to recognize that over the
long run, America will not be able to be a force for good abroad

unless we are good at home.

          If you think about the brave men and women who are
working with our NATO allies today in Kosovo, and you remember
that this basically all started 12 years ago, when Mr. Milosevic
decided to rally the support of his ethnic Serbian group by
turning their hatred against the Kosovar Albanians, and later the
Bosnian Muslims and the Croatian Catholics, and the others -- it
is very important that we deal with these challenges here at
home, even as we continue to support the work of our people in
uniform in this Balkans.

          I want to say again, the United States would never
choose force as anything other than a last option.  And Mr.
Milosevic could end it now by withdrawing his military police and
paramilitary forces, by accepting the deployment of an
international security force to protect not only the Kosovar
Albanians, most but not all of whom are Muslims, but also the
Serbian minority in Kosovo.  Everybody.  We're not for anybody's
hate crimes.  And by making it possible for all the refugees to
return and to move toward a political framework based on the
accords reached in France.

          Now, as I said, we can't continue to organize ourselves
to try to stand against these things around the world -- which I
firmly hope we will.  I applaud the women in America who have
done so much to bring to the world's attention the terrible
treatment of women in Afghanistan, for example.  And we have
worked hard in Africa to work with other African forces to build
an Africa Crisis Response Initiative so that something like the
Rwanda genocide cannot happen again.  We have to keep working on
these things.

          But first of all, we must always be working on
ourselves.  That's really what this is about.  Because we know
this is more the work of the Bishop than the President, but we
know that inside each of us there are vulnerabilities to
dehumanizing other people simply by putting them in a category
that permits us to dismiss them, or that permits us to put them
in a category so that on a bad day, when we're feeling especially
bad about something we've done, we can say, well, thank God I'm
not them.  And it is a short step from that -- a short, short
step from that -- to licensing or even participating in acts of
violence.

          As I said, it may be -- I was standing here looking at
Secretary Riley, and Bishop Dixon; I was thinking about all the
years that Secretary Riley and I worked together.  It may be that
the three of us are more sensitive to this because we grew up in
the segregated South, but it is very easy to get into a social
system where you always get to think a little better of yourself
because you've always got someone that you can dehumanize.

          And that's really what this whole issue with gays is
today in America.  We're not talking about everybody agreeing
with everybody else on every political issue.  We're talking
about whether people have a right, if they show up and work hard
and obey the law, and are good citizens, to pursue their lives
and dignity without -- free of fear, without fear of being
abused.

          And this should not be a partisan issue.  I want to
thank Senator Specter for showing up here today.  This ought not
to be anything other than a basic, simple statement of American
principle.

          But I would like to say one other thing, just as a
practical matter.  Isn't it interesting to you that we are on the
eve of a new century and a new millennium -- which will be
largely characterized by globalization, the explosion of
technology, especially information, and the integration of people
-- and the number one security threat to that is the persistence
of old, even primitive, hatreds?  Don't you think that's
interesting?

          So what I worry about all the time is whether
terrorists can get on the Internet and figure out how to make
chemical and biological weapons to pursue agendas against people
of different ethnic or religious groups.  And so it's very
humbling, I think, for those of us who think we have brought the
modern world, and prosperity and rationality to all of human
affairs, to see what is going on in the Balkans, and to see these
terrible examples of violence here in our own country.  It's very
humbling.  We should remember that each of us almost wakes up
every day with the scales of light and darkness in our own
hearts, and we've got to keep them in proper balance.  And we
have to be, in the United States, absolutely resolute about this.

          That's why I think this hate crimes issue is so
important.  That's why I convened the first White House
Conference on Hate Crimes a year and a half ago.  Since then, I
would like to say, we have substantially increased the number of
FBI agents working on these crimes.  We have successfully
prosecuted a number of serious cases.  We have formed local hate
crimes working groups in U.S. Attorney's offices around the
country.

          But this is a significant problem.  In 1997, the last
year for which we have statistics, over 8,000 hate crime
incidents were reported in the United States.  That's almost one
an hour.  Almost one an hour.

          So, what are we going to do about it?  I would like to
mention -- we've already talked about the law and I'll say more
about that in a minute, but first of all, let me mention three
other things.  I've asked the Justice Department and the
Education Department to include in their annual report card on
school safety crucial information on hate crimes among young
people both at and away from schools -- not only to warn, but to
educate.

          Secondly, I'm asking the Department of Education to
collect important data for the first time on hate crimes and bias
on college campuses.  Another cruel irony, isn't it -- college,
the place where we're supposed to have the most freedom, the
place where we're supposed to be the most rational, the place
where we're supposed to think the highest thoughts with the
greatest amount of space.  We have significant hate crime
problems there, and we need to shine the light on that.

          Third, I'm very pleased about this -- we are going to
have a public-private partnership to help reach middle school
students to discuss this whole issue with them and talk about
tolerance -- why it is a moral, as well as a practical
imperative.  And the partnership includes AT&T, Court TV -- good
for them -- (laughter) -- the National Middle School Association,
the Anti-Defamation League, Cable in the Classrooms, as well as
the Departments of Education and Justice.  I would like to thank
them all, because we have to not only punish bad things when they
happen, the larger mission is to change the mind, the heart, and
the habits of our people when they're young -- to keep bad things
from happening.

          Finally, let me join the others -- the Attorney General
and the Bishop -- in saying, Congress should pass this law this
year.  The federal laws already punish some crimes committed
against people on the basis of race or religion or national
origin, but as the Attorney General made so clear, not all crimes
committed for that purpose.  This would strengthen and expand the
ability of the Justice Department by removing needless
jurisdictional requirements for existing crimes, and giving
federal prosecutors the ability to prosecute hate crimes
committed because of sexual orientation, gender or disability,
along with race and religion.

          Now, again I say, when we get exercised about these
things -- in particular, when someone dies in a horrible incident
in America -- or when we see slaughter or ethnic cleansing
abroad, we should remember that we defeat these things by
teaching and by practicing a different way of life, and by
reacting vigorously when they occur within our own midst.  That
is what this is about.  And we should remember, whenever we,
ourselves, commit even a small slip, where we dehumanize or
demonize someone else who is different from us -- that every
society must teach, practice, and react, if you want to make the
most of the world toward which we are moving.

          Our diversity is a godsend for us, and the world of the
21st century.  But it is also the potential for the old, haunting
demons that are hard to root out of the human spirit.  The Hate
Crimes Prevention Act would be important, substantively and
symbolically, to send a message to ourselves and to the world
that we are going into the 21st century determined to preach and
to practice what is right.

          Thank you very much.  (Applause.)

             END                      11:08 A.M. EDT