21 Quotes by Peter Hayes

In order to obtain any joint statement at all, the U.S. negotiator Christopher Hill shifted from the Bush administration's 'never-again' position to one of avowing 'respect' for North Korea regaining its sovereign right to acquire light-water reactor technology and to discuss such provision at an 'appropriate' time.

I can definitely see why there was a reaction. It's definitely different. I guess it could be called definitely a lot different than the other two (albums). And if you didn't know the band, that would be kind of surprising.

Thus the emergence in February 1879 of Wilhelm Marr and the new word “antisemitism” came as the culmination of a decade of rising reaction against emancipation.

One way of understanding what followed is to recall that Jews were the people who said no. Offered a new form of relationship with God, they said they preferred the one they had, and this rejection set off several hundred years of rivalry and mutual recrimination, as the two groups competed for followers until the fourth century of the common era, when Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire and thus seemed to win the battle.

Although some ancient Egyptian and Greek texts express animosity toward Jews, the rise of intense hostility to and fear of them largely coincides with the rise of Christianity. The relationship between adherents of the two religions always has reflected a paradox: The two faiths were both very similar and very different, which created intense competition.

Christianity declared that Jesus heralded a new Covenant that replaced Moses’s, that the old laws were now obsolete, and that election to the status of Chosen People was now open to anyone who accepted Christ and the teachings of the Bible and the new scriptures.

Why the Jews? Because an ancient tradition of blaming them for disasters, both present and prospective, a tradition deeply rooted in religious rivalry and superstition, persisted into the modern world and even assumed new forms during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Martin Luther gave the most extreme voice to these prejudices when he discovered that Jews were no more willing to convert to his version of Christianity than the one he claimed to have reformed. He urged Christians to burn Jews’ synagogues, schools, and homes and subject Jews who would not convert to forced labor.

The Holocaust was the product of a particular time and place: Europe in the aftermath of the Industrial Revolution and the upheavals of World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution. These were the contexts in which ancient hostilities toward Jews and Judaism, deeply rooted in religious rivalry but updated with the trappings of modern science, turned into a fixation on removing Jews from civil society as a magical solution to all social problems.