Jay SilverIa: 'If you can’t treat someone with dignity and respect, then you need to get out', Address to cadets about racism incident - 2017

29 September 2017, Air Force Academy, Colorado Springs, Colorado, USA

Ladies and gentlemen, you may have heard that some people down in the prep school wrote some racial slurs on some message boards. If you haven’t heard that, I wanted you to hear it from me. If you’re outraged by those words then you’re in the right place. That kind of behavior has no place at the prep school, it has no place at USAFA, and it has no place in the US Air Force.

You should be outraged, not only as an airman, but as a human being. And I’ll tell you, that the appropriate response for horrible language and horrible ideas, the appropriate response is a better idea. So that’s why I’m here. That’s why all these people are up here on the staff tower, so let me have everybody who’s up here please pull forward to the rails. Also, there’s so many people here, they’re lining the outsides along the windows. These are members of the faculty, coaching staff, AOC’s, AMT’s, from the airfield, from my staff, from my headquarters, all aspects of the 10th Airbase Wing, all aspects that make up USAFA and the United States Air Force Academy leadership is here. You heard from Brigadier General Goodwin, Brigadier General Armacost is here, Colonel Block from the athletic department is here, Mr. Knowlton is in Washington, DC right now.

That’s why they’re here. That’s why we’re all here, because we have a better idea. Some of you may think that that happened down in the prep school and doesn’t apply to us. I would be naive and we would all be naive to think that everything is perfect here. We would be naive to think that we shouldn’t discuss this topic. We would also be tone-deaf not to think about the backdrop of what’s going on in our country. Things like Charlottesville and Ferguson, the protests in the NFL, that’s why we have a better idea. One of those ideas, the Dean brought people together to discuss Charlottesville because what we should have is a civil discourse and talk about these issues, that’s a better idea.

We received outstanding feedback from that session at Charlottesville, but I also have a better idea and it’s about our diversity, and its the power of the diversity, the power of the 4,000 of you and all of the people that are on the staff tower and lining the glass, the power of us as a diverse group, the power that we come from all walks of life, that we come from all parts of this country, that we come from all races, we come from all backgrounds, gender, all makeup, all upbringing. The power of that diversity comes together and makes us that much more powerful. that’s a much better idea than small thinking and horrible ideas. We have an opportunity here, 5,500 people in this room, to think about what we are as an institution. This is our institution and no one can take away our values. No one can write on a board and question our values. No one can take that away from us.

So just in case you’re unclear on where I stand on this topic, I’m going to leave you with my most important thought today: If you can’t treat someone with dignity and respect, then you need to get out. If you can’t teach someone from another gender, whether that’s a man or a woman, with dignity and respect, then you need to get out. If you demean someone in any way, then you need to get out. And if you can’t treat someone from another race or a different color skin with dignity and respect, then you need to get out.

Reach for your phones. I’m serious, reach for your phones. OK, you don’t have to reach for your phones, I’m going to give you an opportunity to reach for your phones. I want you to videotape this so that you can have it, so that you can use it, so that we all have the moral courage together, all of us on the staff tower lining the glass, all of us in this room. This is our institution, and if you need it, and you need my words, then you keep these words. And you use them and you remember them and you share them and you talk about them. If you can’t treat someone with dignity and respect, then get out.

Yeonmi Park: 'North Koreans are desperately seeking and dying for freedom at this moment', One Young World conference 2014

16 October, One Young World summit, Dublin, Ireland

I have to do this because this is not just I am speaking… This is for the people who want to tell the world what they want to say.
North Korea is an unnatural country. There is only one channel on TV and there is no internet. We aren’t free to sing, say, wear or think what we want.
North Korea is the only country in the world that executes people for making unauthorized international phone calls.
North Koreans are being terrorized today.
When I was growing up in North Korea, I never saw anything about love stories between man and woman, no books, no songs, no press, no movies about love stories. There is no Romeo and Juliet, every stories were propagandized to brainwash about the Kim dictators.
I was born in 1993 and I was abducted at birth even before I knew the words ‘freedom’ or ‘human rights’. North Koreans are desperately seeking and dying for freedom at this moment…
When I was 9 years old, I saw my friend’s mother publicly executed. Her crime? Watching a Hollywood movie!
Expressing doubt about the regime can get 3 generations of whole family imprisoned or executed.
When I was 4 years old, I was warned by my mother, not to even whisper, the birds and mice could hear me. I admitted it. I thought the North Korean dictator could read my mind. My father died in China after we escaped North Korea. And I have to bury him at 3 am in secret. I was only 14 years old. I couldn’t even cry, I was afraid to be sent back to North Korea.
The day I escaped North Korea, I saw my mother raped. The rapist was a Chinese broker. He had targeted me. I was only 13 years old. There is a saying in North Korea, “Women are weak, but mothers are strong”. My mother allowed herself to be raped in order to protect me.
North Korean refugees, about 300,000 are roaming over in China. 70 percent of North Korean women and teenage girls are being victimized and sometimes sold for as a little as 200 dollars. We walked across the Gobi desert following a compass and when it stopped working, we followed the stars to freedom. I felt only the stars are with us. Mongolia was our freedom moment.
Death or dignity; I was with the knife, we were prepared to kill ourselves if we are going to be send back to North Korea. We wanted to live as humans…
People often ask me, “How can we help North Koreans?”. There are many ways but I would like to mention 3 for now.
One, as you care yourself, you can raise awareness about human crisis in North Korea.
Two, help and support North Korean refugees who are trying to escape for freedom.
Three, petition China to stop repatriation.
We have to shed the light in the darkest place in the world. It is not just North Korean human rights, it is our rights!
The North Korean dictators have violated for 7 decades. We need governments all around the world to put more pressure on China to stop repatriation. In particular, Chinese delegates of ‘One Young World’ can play a part by speaking up. North Korea is indescribable… No human deserves to be oppressed just because of their birthplace. We need to focus less on the regime and more on the people who are being forgotten.
‘One Young World’, we are the ones who will make them visible. Please join me as we make this a global movement to free North Koreans. When I was crossing the Gobi desert, scared of dying, I thought nobody in this world cared. It seemed that only the stars were with me…
But you have listened to my story. You have cared… Thank you very much.

Natalie Portman: 'Step by step guide to toppling the patriachy', Variety Power of Women - 2018

12 October 2018, California, USA

We’ve had an incredible week at Time’s Up, the organization I am here to talk about. Because this week, we welcomed our first President and CEO, Lisa Borders, who comes to us after heading the WNBA. Lisa is a brilliant, compassionate and strategic leader with vast experience in business, activism and government, and we are so lucky and grateful to have her come guide our path.

I came to the first Time’s Up meeting, almost exactly one year ago, after the shattering reports by Megan Twohey, Jodi Kantor and Ronan Farrow were published about Harvey Weinstein. I had heard the stories but was horrified to learn the extent of his abuse. However, a part of the story I had never considered before was how many women were forcibly removed from our industry because of his retaliatory behavior.

The articles in the New York Times and the New Yorker, as you all know, detailed his active character assassination of the women he assaulted — telling directors the actresses he had abused, were difficult or crazy and not to work with them. Harvey’s lawyer, David Boies, signed contracts with spy firms to surveil the women who reported his crime — to try to make them out as whores, and track their movements.

He did this, as many harassers and assaulters do, to take power away from their victims, because if they have less work, they have less money, and then they have less power, and eventually they have less credibility and less reputation, and again, less power to get him in trouble for the crimes he committed. And it’s working! Harvey is STILL on the loose and the NY County DA Cy Vance just dismissed one of the cases against him yesterday. Harvey Weinstein, the man whose name has become synonymous with serial rapist, might not ever suffer any legal consequences because our legal system and our culture protect the perpetrators of sexual violence, not its victims.

As Jodi Kantor noted, Weinstein’s abuse was so pervasive, that a whole generation of actresses had been pushed out of our industry and had been deprived of decades of work and the payment that accompanies it. What other women in our industry and in other industries had been silenced and shut out in this way?

I had always wondered why there was still unequal representation in nearly every industry, and particularly in positions of leadership and power, when graduate schools have been consciously enrolling equal amounts of men and women. I wondered why do women graduate 50/50 from law schools and yet make up only 20% of law firm equity partnerships? Why do women graduate 50/50 from all business schools and yet make up only 10.6% of Fortune 500 boards and 4.8% of fortune 500 CEOs? Or that in our industry, women graduate 50/50 from film schools yet only 11% of the top 250 films last year were directed by women?

There’s a theory that’s often cited that women drop out of the workforce to focus on motherhood, or because the workplace isn’t conducive enough to rearing children. And I used to believe that too. But it always seemed suspicious as a reason — like a woman would spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on law school, and all the time and hard work to graduate, and all the hours and stress to pass the bar, and then work for years at a law firm, and then give up her 6 or 7-figure job that she loves and has invested so much into, because she didn’t ever consider she might have to find childcare for her kid? A woman who can probably easily afford childcare? It was confusing, but I bought it, cause, well, I don’t know. I’m a sheep.

Now, I would like to dispel that myth.

First of all, there are too many women who either don’t choose to have children, do not yet have children, or who have grown children, to account for the gaping lack of women in leadership positions in almost every industry, if it was really due to incompatibility with motherhood.

Second, there are many professions that might be considered incompatible with motherhood that are nearly all female. Think about gynecology. Gynecology is one of the most time-consuming, emotionally intensive fields of medicine, and they are on call around the clock. Today, almost all gynecologists are women. And many of them have kids. So what is this oft-repeated rumor about women not being able to do hard jobs with kids at the same time?

In gynecology, there is uniquely a demand for females. Women are asking for other women to be doing the job — so that affects hiring. Also, women are the primary people the doctors have to deal with, so you have to assume that harassment and assault goes way down. If there’s a lesson to be learned from our vagina doctors, it’s that with increased demand for women, and increased physical and emotional safety on the job, women will flock to a field that is emotionally and intellectually intense, and also that is incredibly time-consuming.

Similarly, in our business, people make the argument that we see so few female directors, DPs, camera departments, VFX supervisors, stunt coordinators — wait almost every job — because set life isn’t conducive to family life. Well, what about the hair and makeup and wardrobe departments? They’re almost entirely female. They figure out how to work on movies and take care of their families, if they have chosen to have families.

It’s much more likely for a woman to stay in a job for her children than to leave it. Consider all of the women in the restaurant or domestic industries sometimes work many jobs at once, in order to support their kids. So let’s please stop saying that women are choosing to drop out of the workforce because of their families.

The rumor is wrong.

Of course, many women simply have a personal preference for being full-time parents, and that’s a beautiful and admirable choice — but not ALL of them. Sure, sets and offices and every workplace can improve A LOT when it comes to helping working parents, both male and female — allowing more family leave, creating spaces at work for daycares or preschools, creating reasonable work hours and post-work expectations so people can live their lives. But gynecologists don’t have longer maternity leave or daycare at work, and they’re a nearly all-female profession now. These are not the reasons women are leaving the workforce. Let’s be clear.

The reason women in nearly every industry are not represented in powerful positions is because women are being discriminated against or retaliated against for hiring and promotion. When they do get jobs, they are often being harassed and assaulted, and they are being paid less than their male counterparts — all of which coerce self-preserving women into finding safer options for themselves and different ways to feel valued. Many women are further oppressed by intersections with other marginalized identities — whether by sexual orientation, race, age, class, religion, physical ability — and are subject to multiple avenues of discrimination and harassment at work at once. If they try to report it, there is often a second harassment — their reputations are smeared, their future hiring is jeopardized and they are further harassed.

So that’s part of why our first action at Time’s Up was to start the Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund with the National Women’s Law Center. Because women need to put food on the table. And in order to do so, they need to be able to do their work in a safe, equitable and dignified environment.

In its first year, our Time’s Up legal defense fund has served more than 3500 people from workers at McDonalds, to prison guards, to military personnel, to women in our own industry, who have faced gender-based harassment, discrimination, coercion and assault. Recently, our lawyers helped Melanie Kohler triumph against Brett Ratner and his lawyer, Marty Singer, who tried to use Brett’s enormous financial advantage over her to legally bully her into silence. Melanie did not have to retract her claims of assault against him. And he dropped his case of defamation because he saw that she could not be bullied legally just because he has hundreds of millions of dollars and she does not.

At Time’s Up we want ALL people — men, women and those who identify as neither and both, to lead the charge to make hiring more fair, make wages more equitable, and make the workplace environment safe and dignified for all. We now have Time’s Up chapters in tech, finance, advertising, journalism, medicine, and we have sister organizations among restaurant workers, domestic workers, and farmworkers — we are thousands of women across multiple industries internationally joining together to make the same demands of the world.

What can YOU do?

First, MONEY: You can give or raise money for the Legal Defense Fund.

Second, GATHER: Meet with other women and see what changes you want to make. Through Time’s up, or on your own, gathering has been the central principle of what we do that has created every action we’ve taken.

Third, LISTEN: If any group you’re in has people who only look like you — change that group. It’s an awakening to hear from women who have different experiences of marginalization.

Fourth, DEMAND: The women in this room are the most powerful women in our industry. All you in this room have the power to negotiate for equal pay, or grant equal pay, or popularize equal pay in the culture. Be embarrassed if everyone in your workplace looks like you. Pay attention to physical ability, age, race, sexual orientation, gender identity and make sure you’ve got all kinds of experiences represented.

Fifth, GOSSIP WELL: Stop the rhetoric that a woman is crazy or difficult. If a man says a woman is crazy or difficult, ask him: What bad thing did you do to her? It’s code that he is trying to discredit her reputation. Make efforts to hire people who’ve had their reputations smeared in retaliation.

Sixth, DON’T BE SHY: Don’t shy away from Consequences for those who abuse their power. Those who abuse power are not going to have a change of behavior out of the goodness of their hearts — they are motivated by self-interest and will only change their behavior if they have to worry they will lose what they care about.

Seventh, and this is a united challenge to everyone in this room: TELL A NEW STORY: What if we took a year off from violence against women? What if for one year, everyone in this room does everything in their power to make sure that all entertainment produced just this year will not depict a rape or murder of a woman. In the projects you write, produce, direct, act in, package, market, do not harm women this year, and let’s see how that goes.

I want to leave off with a reminder that our family of animals — mammals — is named after us, women, because of our mammary glands. Yes, the most remarkable thing about our whole type of animal is our boobs. We know that. Men know that. Babies definitely know that. In fact, at our first Time’s Up meeting, I was breastfeeding my daughter during the meeting, in a room that not only allowed it, but welcomed and applauded it. Anyway, our boobs are amazing. But there’s a message in our mammary glands:

Many men are behaving like we live in a zero-sum game. That if women get the respect, access and value they deserve, that men will lose theirs. But we know the message of the mammaries: the more milk you give, the more milk you make. The more love you give, the more love you have. And the same can be said of fire — when you light someone else’s torch with your own, you don’t lose your fire, you just make more light and more heat.

So my last challenge to everyone in this room, is to spread your fire. Use your fire to light other women’s torches and make more light and more heat for all of us. If every powerful woman in this room pledges to hire at least three women in jobs this year that women don’t usually get — directors, cinematographers, VFX supervisors, composers, stunt coordinators, board members — I mean almost all of the jobs are jobs women don’t get. Just pick three jobs you get to choose, and light a woman’s torch. The light will multiply and the heat will intensify for all of us.

Do all of you pledge with me?

Megan Rapinoe: 'Colin Kaepernick is still effectively banned from the NFL', Glamour Women of the Year Awards - 2019

Finally listened to full Megan Rapinoe speech citin Kaepernick. It’s beautiful. My God we need more Rapinoes pic.twitter.com/BifgMWOQd2

— ChuckModi (@ChuckModi1) November 13, 2019

12 November 2019, Lincoln Center, New York City, USA

I first want to thank Glamour for this incredible award, but more than that, for choosing to celebrate a particular kind of strong woman this year, redefining what a ‘glamorous’ woman really means, reflective in all the incredible honorees this year. So thank you so much to Glamour.

And just, like, shout-out to women this year. Every woman! We’re just killing it the the whole year. So shout-out to just women in general.

I feel like I have to take this opportunity to thank the person for whom I don’t feel like I would be here without. Someone whose courage and bravery was so bright and so bold. A person filled with conviction, unafraid of the consequences because he knew, it really wasn't about playing it safe: It was about doing what is necessary and backing down to exactly nobody.

Caring is cool. Lending your platform to others is cool.

So while I’m enjoying all of this unprecedented—and, frankly, a little bit uncomfortable—attention and personal success, in large part due to my activism off the field, Colin Kaepernick is still effectively banned from the NFL for kneeling during the national anthem in protest of known and systematic police brutality against people of color, known and systematic racial injustice, and known and systematic white supremacy. I see no clearer example of that system being alive and well than me standing before you right now. It would be a slap in the face to Colin, and to so many other faces, not to acknowledge, and for me personally, to work relentlessly to dismantle that system that benefits some over the detriment of others, and frankly is quite literally tearing us apart in this country.

While we all have injustices we are facing—for me personally, a very public fight with our [U.S. Soccer] Federation over why we don’t deserve to be paid equally; some people even say we do our job better. I don’t know! It’s crazy!—I still know in my heart of hearts and my bones that I can do more. And that we can do more. And I know that because we just have to. We must. It’s imperative that we do more.

My mom, who's here today, looking stunning, by the way—shout-out to mom—impressed upon me and my twin sister at a very young age, ‘You ain’t shit ’cause your good at sports. You ain’t shit ’cause you're popular. You’re gonna be a good person. You’re gonna be kind. And you’re gonna do the right thing. You’re gonna stand up for yourself, always. You’re gonna stand up for each other, always. And you’re damn sure going to stand up for other people. Always.

She taught us that in kindness and in caring and in giving a shit and sharing—that’s abundance. That’s the kind of culture we want to live in. I feel like we live in this scarcity type culture; one of my best friends always says that. That’s not the world I want to live in. I think we can move on from losing alone to the belief in winning together.

With that abundance in mind, I want to reimagine what it means to be successful, what it means to have influence, what it means to have power, and what that all looks like.

I’ve gained this incredible platform in such a short period of time, but I’m not going to stand on it alone. I refuse to do that. There’s going to be ladders on every side, all over the place. And I’m not going to act like it wasn’t Colin Kaepernick, Tarana Burke and the #MeToo Movement, Patrisse Cullors, Alicia Garza, and Opal Tometi of Black Lives Matter, the women of Time’s Up, Harvey Milk, Gloria Steinem, Audre ‪Lorde, Trayvon Martin, Sandra Bland, and the injustices that so many others face that have put me in this very position. And I’m not going to act like my whiteness has nothing to do with me standing before you now. I don’t want to live in that kind of world. I don’t think that kind of world is the world that suits everybody and is going to move us forward in the direction that we need to go.

We’ve got to switch the game up.

Caring is cool.

Lending your platform to others is cool.

Sharing your knowledge and your success and your influence and your power is cool.

Giving all the fucks is cool. Doing more is cool.

I don’t need to say that to all the other women who are being honored tonight. Everyone is doing that. But to everyone else in this room, we have such an incredible opportunity to redefine what power and influence and success looks like. From the looks of it, this looks like a room full of powerful and influential and successful people. So share that platform. Throw your ladders down. It’s our time. We’re ready for this. And it needs to happen. This is such a pivotal movement for us. There’s so much momentum, but we have to move forward and we have to be better. So everybody: We have to do more. We’re here. We're ready. Everyone’s ready to do more? Good!

Thank you so much for this amazing award. Thank you, everyone.

Karl Heinrich Ulrichs: Congress of German Jurists, first gay rights protest - 1867

29 August 1867, Odeon Theatre, Munich, Germany

This speech by Karl Heinrich Ulrichs is regarded as the first ever gay rights protest speech. It did not achieve any change but as Ulrichs later said:“Until my dying day I will look back with pride when on August 29, 1867, I found the courage to come face to face in battle against the specter of an age-old, wrathful hydra which for time immemorial has been injecting poison into me and into men of my nature.” For his courage and activism, Ulrichs has been called ‘The first gay man in world history’.

Here is the speech:

Gentlemen:
Two years ago Dr. Tewes, professor of law, who resides in Graz, and I, according to regular procedure, proposed a motion as members of the Association; and I wish to make a protest because it has been denied by our committee, namely because it was classified as 'unsuitable for deliberation' by the Association of Jurists and has been excluded from the agenda. I shall establish my protest materially and formally.

I. Material

This proposal addresses the revision of the existing material penal law, especially and finally to repeal a specific unlawful paragraph in the penal code handed down to us from past centuries. It is directed to abolish this paragraph of the penal code which discriminates against an innocent class of people.
It is also a question of preparing to unify the laws of Germany which in these points unity does not exist. Bavaria and Austria both presently condemn prosecution, and their legislation stands diametrically opposed to the remainder of Germany.
Finally, and secondarily, it is also a matter of concern finally to choke the source of abundant suicides, especially those of the most shocking sort.
I believe that these are far more worthy, serious and important questions concerning the penal code and ones that the Association of German Jurists was rightfully and truly called upon to rule on.
Gentlemen, the matter also concerns a group of persons whose size numbers in the thousands in Germany alone. Many of the most eminent and noble persons in our nation and in foreign nations have belonged to this group...
(Apparent amazement and scorn; isolated shouting, "Adjourn!")
...this group of men which is discriminated against for no reason other than the process of an undeserved criminal prosecution...

(Tempestuous outcry, "Adjourn, adjourn!" The presiding privy councillor, von Wächter, wished to call for a vote to close the matter which was being loudly demanded. What do I say? "Under the circumstances I give up the floor and lay my call for justice down on the table of the House." But now outbursts as loud as the previous ones fence forth from the opposite side of the hall, "No, no, continue, continue!" After I began to continue, the words which follow were spoken with heightened emphasis,)

...a group of men which is discriminated against for no reason other than the process of an unjust criminal prosecution because creative nature has implanted in this group a sexual nature which is inconsistent with the common, vulgar one...

(Chaotic uproar and violent interruption. Uncommon excitement in the audience on the side that prevailingly calls for adjournment. The president says, "I request that the speaker continue reading his proposal in Latin!" But I lay my manuscript down on the desk of the president, and I left the speaker's box. To continue, the manuscript went as follows:)

...a puzzling nature which, in fact, an edifying text by Numa Numantius has recently attempted to clarify, and because you yourselves are involved in an error which can be excused, you look at the matter only superficially: what you consider real, that this true and puzzling nature is not considered natural at all, you resolved to consider it as against natureiii and that the only action you initiate is to draw the sword of justice against this puzzling nature, and driven to utter abuse, you slash the Gordian knot.

This abuse has similarities in yet other puzzling phenomena that have also been misunderstood, namely the witch hunts of earlier centuries.

The abuse under question has been plainly abolished from the present penal code book of Bavaria, just as the Code Napoléon earlier did, while Austria, even now in its outlined penal code placed before parliament, prefers similar abolition 'to provide a practical accountability of the results of scientific research,' as the Austrian minister of justice expressly stated on June 26 of this year.

Would it not truly be the most serious and commendable duty of the Association, gentlemen, if the witch hunts were as yet not abolished, to enter the lists against them?

Indeed, even if Bavaria and Austria had not already taken action?

And what is the function of the Association, I ask, if it be deprived of discussing the most serious matters?

II. Formulation.
Formally it appears to me that this committee is so constituted, that, without a resolution from the Association, by its own authority, is out of order when it attempts to restrain a proposal that rightly falls under the jurisdiction of the Association of Jurists.

Whereby, in my own name and in the name of my cosponsor, I hereby make a protest against the restraint of the proposal.

I would now like publicly to repeat this protest that was made, and, as I portrayed, was suppressed.

Likewise, I enter a protest against the Association and its suppression of this protest.

During my entire speech I distinguished between two groups in my audience:

(1) There were the unbiased who were not prepared for my speech (they were to my right), and who challenged me to continue;
(2) Those who called for adjournment were already familiar with the Tewes-Ulrichs Proposal. (They were in front of me and to my left.) Among those were Appellate Court Justice von Groß from Jena and Attorney General Schwarze from Dresden, who both had sat on the committee.

I was already harassed by isolated calls for adjournment on the 27th and 28th when I delivered technical speeches that apparently had nothing to do with the matter concerned.

I want to deal now with the meaning of this behavior toward me and of the calls for adjournment that put a close to my speech on the 29th.

These shouts were not calls for adjournment in the literal sense. It was, rather, as if the sounds were just a disguise of a call to: "Crucify, crucify!"

During and before the beginning of my speech on the 29th, those who called for adjournment were apparently only in the minority. I requested permission in writing from the president to speak before the full assembly and to enter a protest against the omission of a proposal from the agenda and to place it before the president. The president immediately gave expression to one of his wishes, "May the King of Bavaria soon enjoy marital bliss, because it is the ultimate happiness of men," then put it to a vote "whether
Mr. Ulrichs should be allowed to speak to these aims?" To this a few isolated voices called out, "No, no!" Meanwhile, a strong majority called, "Yes!"

At least the large assembly listened to me with an extraordinary attentiveness. Of all the speakers in both full assemblies on the 27th and on the 29th, none enjoyed a similar experience.

When I stepped from the speaker's stand, an indescribable excitement prevailed.

Moreover, there was evident confusion of what the circumstances involved and of what needed to be said, who was to speak, and what was to be decided. After a long pause, the president reached for a manuscript and said, "I will try to continue reading to verify the matter." Another pause. Then the president began to speak, his voice quaking, "The proposal refers to crimes of the flesh." (Did the manuscript say one word about that?) He then turned to me and said, "I would like the speaker to read the proposal according to the letter." I began, "The proposal is lawfully submitted to the committee. It has to be in the hands of the president. It is not in my possession. My personal copy was confiscated in April of this year when I was taken to Minden Castle. I insert it here as follows:

The Association of Jurists may wish to declare a pressing demand for legislative justice by submitting the existing German penal code concerning so-called sins of the flesh to an immediate revision in the following two matters:
(I) That innate love toward a person of the male sex be punishable only under the same provisions that concern love to persons of the female sex; that they remain guiltless as long as:
"no rights have been abused (by force or threat of force, by abuse of minors, unconscious persons, etc.)
"or there was no disturbance of the peace;"
(ii) That the present vague penal regulation concerning 'disturbing the peace because of sexual behavior' be replaced by one that would guarantee protection under the law."]

Now Schwarze from Dresden requested to speak and declared, ”I represent the decision of the committee. The proposal is, if you will, not acceptable; indeed! We decided to restrain it because as it stands it is inconsistent with the present laws.Secondly, because it offends our sense of morality. It would have excited the indignation of the Association even if it were read. Our faces would turn red with shame! Indeed, if we are supposed to be speaking in Latin, then I can be sure to say it is of a sexual nature."

When these gruff words were heard by the groups to my left they shouted bravo, and I expected nothing less than to be personally insulted. I was troubled with fears every second. I could no longer consider answering Schwarze when such a mood was shared by a large part of the Association. I just remained passive. I was certain that I would loudly protest, declare my withdrawal, and exit the hall at the slightest insult.

Following Schwarze, an elderly gentleman with whom I was not acquainted spoke to thank the committee "in the name of the Association," for restraining the proposal in the interest of morality.

(Very loud shouting, although not all had joined in. See below.)

Ulrichs published his account of the event in a small book he entitled “Gladius Furens” (Raging Sword), which he published in 1868. The attached English translation of Ulrichs’ speech was translated and published by Michael Lombardi-Nash in: Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, The Riddle of “Man-Manly” Love: The Pioneering Work on Male Homosexuality Volume I, trans. into English by Michael A. Lombardi-Nash (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1994) pp. 263-265.

Casey Sullivan: ;'Because of her, we can', NAIDOC week - 2018

8 July 2018, Tamworth, New South Wales, Australia

My name is Dr Casey Sullivan. I am a proud Wiradjuri woman. I am a daughter of Debbie Wadwell; also, a proud Wiradjuri woman. I am a granddaughter of Beverly Mclean. She was a beautiful strong Wiradjuri woman. I am great granddaughter of Madeline Davis. She, I am sure was a proud Wiradjuri woman. I am great great granddaughter of Maud .She was a strong indigenous woman. I am great great great granddaughter of Nellie. I know nothing of Nellie, for Maud was taken from Nellie and that line was lost.

Nellie has no last name, no tribe, no siblings, no parents. But with her it all began; my family begins, my story begins, and my life is possible because of her. Because of her I can.

Nellie’s daughter Maud was removed and placed on a property and at some time under the same sky I see she became the mother to Madeline. The property owner Mr Bruce was Madeline’s biological father, and he gave Maud his last name. Maud’s child belonged to a time where she would soon marry and have her own children.

From Nellie, Maud and Madeline my family begins to appear.

Strong, beautiful women.

Strong incredible Aboriginal women.

And through my mum and uncles hard earned research we have confirmed that we are strong Wiradjuri women. We belong. We have history and we have family.

My Family raised me in a small village outside Tamworth called Spring Ridge. I attended Spring Ridge Primary School. There were 3 other children in my year. My mum was a stay-at-home mum and my dad was a stockman at the feedlot. I was very lucky I was given the chance to go to school. I was born in a time when young aboriginal girls were encouraged to go to school. I loved school. I learnt new things every day. I played with my friends every single day.

But it has not always been this way.

Our grandmothers and even mothers grew up in a time where girls stayed home to help care for their siblings or they themselves become mothers. My Nan, Beverly, one of my favourite gifts the universe has offered me, was one of these children. She was a young indigenous girl who did not learn to read. She did not get the chance to go school and learn like the other kids.

So, one of my strongest memories of my Nan is seeing her sitting at the kitchen table, she was in her 50’s. And there was a lady teaching my Nan to read. I was already in primary school and she was learning around the same level as me. I was so proud of her. I’d never seen an adult learning before. She inspired me. Here was my Nan saying it was never too late. She was showing me that education is important no matter how old or young you are. I can still remember her saying to me “Gin a rin you can do anything you want when you grow up”. She always called me her little Gin and I loved her all the more for it.

In 2004 Nan was there with my mum and dad when I graduated from studying medicine at the University of New South Wales as a doctor; and her beautiful big smile still makes me smile when I remember that day.

Because of her I can.

Because of her I did.

I am a doctor because my Nan Inspired me. And that’s what we need more of. We need to be role models for our Indigenous kids. Women are strong matriarchal figures in Aboriginal culture. We all have sisters, daughters, mums, Aunts, Nans – Women who can inspire the next generation to say, “Because of her we can”.

We all have women in our lives that can change our future and plant the seeds that grow strong educated aboriginal women.

Now I am a doctor and i am a bit partial to science. So when i make a statement like “Because of her we can” I like to back it up and prove this with science. So Let me teach you some quick genetics. Inside us all is a special gift. (hold up blue bead) It is called maternal mitochondrial DNA. But don’t worry there won’t be a test. We will call this the “gift”. This gift gives our life energy. It gives us life for without it we cannot exist.

And this gift is given to each and everyone of us from our mother. Now this passes from mother to child completely unchanged. A gift that stays the same. Our dads add in their special gifts too so that each generation benefits from better treasures, (hold up small pale bead) so you might smile like your Dad or play sport like your dad. But with each of you remains this special gift.

This base genetic material given to you by your mother.

And she received it from her mother.

And her mother gave it to her.

A special gift passed down to each and every one of us which means if we look at that genetic material we can tell you exactly who you are, where you and your family came from, right back to your families first country and even past this. Right back until there would eventually be only one woman.

The first woman to ever give this gift.

The first keeper of the gift who began to share this amazing life giving genetic gift with her children.

So far science has uncovered one to the first women to ever exist. Her name was Lucy. She was 3ft tall and her bones were found in Africa. It doesn’t take much to imagine that this first woman, Lucy began to give this gift to her children. She just like my great, great, great grandmother had no last name, no known tribe, no siblings, no parents. And yet with her it too all began. Down through the generations passing her gift, mixing this gift with our fathers until standing here today you have me, we have you, we have us.

Because of her we can.

Beside you right now are strong beautiful women, our sisters, our mothers, our daughters, our grandmothers our Aunts all bearing this gift that can take us back to the beginning of time. And each of them with the ability to pass this gift unchanged onto the next generation.

Sons, husbands fathers- you are who you are because of a great woman, a mother who gave you this gift.

Because of her gift you can too.

Men be proud of your women, be proud of your beginning, adore and respect the gift she has to offer for it is older and more precious than you could ever imagine. So down through the years. (show beaded necklace)

Down through the generations from Nellie to Maud to Madeline.

From Madeline to Beverly from Beverly to Debbie.

From Debbie to me.

And from me to my 4 amazing strong Wiradjuri Children: Jack, Lucy, Mollie and Archie. Goes this gift, that only a woman, that only a mother can give. A beautiful thread through time connecting us each and all. Making a beautiful connection of life so full and precious, so colourful and intriguing. It is a gift of generations that I will continue to wear with great pride humility, care, respect and admiration, because of her it all began.

Because of her each and everyone of her I can.

So, I hold all of them and I thank each and everyone of the women who came before me and made me who I am. So, whomever she is to you. Whomever it is that your “her” is, remember all things are possible because of her.

Because of her you all can, and I thank her for she is a part of all of us.

Jahmal Cole: - 'It's not regular', Martin Luther King Interfaith Brekafast - 2019

22 January 2019, Chicago, Illinois, USA

“So last night I couldn't sleep, and it wasn't because we don't have heat. We just heat the house with the oven. Not having heat on my block, that's regular stuff. I still couldn't sleep last night.

And it wasn't because I heard gunshots. I hear gun shots all the time. I tell myself they're firecrackers, I go back to sleep. Hearing gunshots on my block, that's regular stuff.

I still couldn't sleep last night.

It wasn't even because I saw helicopters. Helicopters fly above my house all the time. They fly in threes. When they go up and down, they float like dragonflies. Rattle the house. It still wasn't why I couldn't sleep.

I couldn't sleep because the lights from the helicopters were shining through my window at 3:00 AM. They had the whole block lit up. You could see every bullet casing on the ground at 3:00 AM, and I couldn't sleep because of it.

I live in a house with my aunt and her husband. Both of them are drug addicts. Nobody says that where I'm from, that's regular stuff.

The last time I seen my aunt, she came into the house. She had a black T-shirt on with a Batman logo on her chest. Actually half of her ear was missing. She got into a fight with a drug addict outside and she laid on the kitchen floor bleeding. It's the last time I've seen her, a couple of weeks back.

My house is ran by my older cousins, both of them are in gangs. They sell drugs, but that's regular stuff. We don't say we're in gangs where I'm from. We say ‘this is my set, these are my friends. I'm a product of my environment. I'm a victim of my circumstances. I'm in the trenches’, it's regular stuff.

I don't care what none of you all say though. I love my cousins. I love my older cousins, and I love them because they tell me I'm smart! They say I would be the next Nino Brown and my teachers don't say I was smart. My cousins, they say I'm smart because I'm the lookout. I know every car that's supposed to be on my block.

There's nine of them. I know it's a Chevy with a black 10, baby blue Cadillac, van with the curtains in it, the man with the motorcycle, the royal blue Acura. There's a Toyota Camry with a city college bumper sticker, there's a lady with a Cherokee, there's all black Charger with silver rims, and there's a brown Honda minivan. Any car pulls up that not one of those nine I say, "Look out, there's danger."

They say I'm smart because I'm the look out on the block.

I order my breakfast every morning at the corner store. I order it through three inch bulletproof glass windows that has mugshots of black faces on it. The windows are so thick I got to yell my order. I said, "Hey man, I want the Doritos. No, I don't want the spicy Nacho. I want the Cool Ranch, the blue bag, the blue bag, the blue bag!." And the guy goes to get it, drops my Doritos in a bulletproof glass jar and he slides it out to me like I'm an inmate in solitary confinement. I'm in the real world though. ShotSpotter sit on top of holes listening to gunshots, blue lights are flashing, boarded up businesses for blocks? Man, if society was a person I wouldn't think society trusted me, so I steal anyway.

I'm looking forward to going to school today, I guess, because I'm a part of the afterschool programme. It's ran by this guy named Jahmal Cole. Jahmal is always telling us that he can't afford to take us to China, so he takes us to Chinatown. He can't afford to take us to Poland, so he takes us to Jefferson Park. He can't afford to take us to India, so he takes us to Divine Avenue. Jahmal is always saying we can travel the world without leaving Chicago. And just last week, Jahmal took us downtown and we went to a museum. But the coolest part wasn't the museum, no. The coolest part was I've never seen anybody wait for a taxi before. And Jahmal let us all get out, we're waiting for a taxi and got to ride a few blocks. I thought that was pretty dope.

Hey, I was telling Jahmal, I don't like to go see my dad. He just got out of jail, he's on house arrest. Every time I see him, he's sending me on errands. But I noticed when my mom posted a picture of her new boyfriend on Facebook, my dad liked that picture. But when my mom posted a picture on Facebook of me having a 3.5 GPA, my dad never liked that picture. That bothered me.”

Hello, my name is Jahmal Cole. I thought it was important to start off and tell that story because the more we're separated as a city, the less empathy we have for each other.

And that when most people hear about something negative happening in another Chicago community, especially where people are a lot different from them, it might as well happen in another country. Well, when you visit different communities and you interact with the residents, it could change all that.

I grew up in a household where all three of my older cousins and brothers, one doing 80 years in Statesville, 40 years, 20 years, same house, man.

And I'll write my brothers, I write my cousins. I always write them by hand, so they know I still love them, you know what I mean? And I ask them, how is it in the Statesville? My older cousin told me, he said, Jamal, you know what? On my block, because in jails it's blocks, A block, B block, C block. He said on my block I'm not in jail with any paedophiles. There's no rapist where I'm at. I'm in here with guys that have sold a little drugs, racketeering, armed robbery, regular stuff. He really said regular shit, you know what I mean? But man, it got me thinking.

It's not regular for German shepherds to be sniffing kids on 79th street.

It's not regular for helicopters to be landing on top of people's houses at night.

It's not regular to have to order your breakfast through bulletproof glass windows every day.

If you all just ate your quiche through a bulletproof glass window right now, you'll be traumatised.

It's not regular to walk inside of a Walgreens and all the costs be locked up. It's not regular for all the billboards in my community to promote cheap divorces and $6,000 tax advances.

All right? It's not regular, man. It's not regular for there to be 15 currency exchanges and no banks. How am I supposed to save?

It's not regular for there to be a liquor store in every other corner. I might as well get drunk!

It's not regular for there to be a holding cell in the basement of a funeral home.

It's not regular for there to be two petty wagons parked outside in front of my high school. That's not regular.

It's not regular for 80% of the kids in my program to know somebody that's been murdered, but only 10% of the kids in my program know somebody that's been to college.

That stuff is not regular. And they say it's regular, they say that I work with at risk youth. Man, the integrity of this city is at risk. If we're not supporting programs like My Block, My Hood, My City.

I want to thank Mayor Emmanuel for the Champion of Freedom Award. I want to thank you all for coming. I want to thank my board, but there aint no freedom on 79th and Cottage, man. It's just the Happy's Liquors. There aint no freedom on Roosevelt and Pulaski. It's just the Mitchell PCS and the bulletproof glass. Freedom without equity is not freedom. That's just a struggle.

Oppression is super real you all. It's a structural part of this country in its history, it was created intentionally. And nowadays it's cloaked up in trumped up laws and false media and we have a hard time recognising how injustice is being sustained.

It's not regular to see the cheap divorce signs, man. It's not regular.

So I want to thank you guys for coming out and I want to charge you with supporting organisations like My Block, My Hood, My City, you can do that easily. You can text message Explore to 55222 and you can sponsor one of our kids to go through our programme for a year. Again, that's Explore at 55222 because it's cool to say, "Oh great speech, great speech." I need support! It's hard to take all these kids around the city. So I charge you guys. If you really want to make a difference text message Explore to 55222 and see how you can get involved.

Dr. Martin Luther King said, "In a real sense all life is interrelated." He says, "All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, bound by a single garment of destiny." He says, "What affects one person directly affects all of us indirectly." He said, "I can't be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can't be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be." That's the interrelated structure of reality.

In this interconnected Chicago that I envision, all 77 community areas need to contribute to the music in the city. The residents of Humboldt Park, they're going to play the timpani, the residents of the Gold Coast, they going to play the cymbals. The residents of Woodlawn will playing with xylophones and Chatham, you're going to play the bass drums. We got the most bucket boys in the city. It just makes sense.

Hey, the point is all 77 community areas contributes to the music of the city. And if one community is struggling and can't play their part, the entire piece is going to suffer and we're all going to be concerned. Thank you guys.

To book Jahmal as a speaker visit his site. To support a kid at My Block, My Hood, My City

Jahmal Cole is a guest on episode 31 of the podcast

Hannah Gadsby: 'All men believe they are good', THR Women in Entertainment - 2018

5 December 2018, Los Angeles, California, USA

I wsant to speak about the good men.

I want to speak about the very big problem I have with the good men, especially the good men who take it upon themselves to talk about the bad men. I find good men talking about bad men incredibly irritating, and this is something the good men are doing a lot of at the moment. Not this moment, not this minute, because the good men don’t have to wake up early for their opportunity to monologue their hot take on misogyny. They get prime-time TV and the late shows.

I’ll tell you what, I’m sick of turning my television on at the end of the day to find anywhere up to 12 Jimmys giving me their hot take. Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with the Jimmys and the Davids and the other Jimmys — good guys, great guys. Some of my best friends are Jimmy. But the last thing I need right now in this moment in history is to have to listen to men monologue about misogyny and how other men should just stop being “creepy,” as if that’s the problem. “If only these bad men just knew how not to be creepy!” Is that the problem? Men are not creepy. Do you know what’s creepy? Spiders, because we don’t know how they move. Rejecting the humanity of a woman is not creepiness; it is misogyny. So why can’t men monologue about these issues? Well they can, and they do. My problem is that according to the Jimmys, there’s only two types of bad men. There’s the Weinstein/Bill Cosby types who are so utterly horrible that they might as well be different species to the Jimmys. And then there are the FOJs: the Friends of Jimmy. These are apparently good men who misread the rules — garden-variety consent dyslexics. They have the rule book, but they just skimmed it. “Oh, that a semicolon? My bad. I thought that meant anal.” Sorry to the vegans in the room.

My issue is that when good men talk about bad men, they always ignore the line in the sand — the line in the sand that is inevitably drawn whenever a good man talks about bad men: “I am a good man. Here is the line. There are all the bad men.” The Jimmys and the good men won’t talk about this line, but we really need to talk about this line. Let’s call it Kevin. And let’s never call it that again. We need to talk about how men will draw a different line for every different occasion. They have a line for the locker room; a line for when their wives, mothers, daughters, and sisters are watching; another line for when they’re drunk and fratting; another line for nondisclosure; a line for friends; and a line for foes. You know why we need to talk about this line between good men and bad men? Because it’s only good men who get to draw that line. And guess what? All men believe they are good. We need to talk about this because guess what happens when only good men get to draw that line? This world — a world full of good men who do very bad things and still believe in their heart of hearts that they are good men because they have not crossed the line, because they move the line for their own good. Women should be in control of that line, no question.

Now take everything I have said up until this point and replace “man” with “white person,” and know that if you are a white woman, you have no place drawing lines in the sand between good white people and bad white people. I encourage you to also take the time to replace “man” with “straight” or “cis” or “able-bodied” or “neurotypical,” et cetera, et cetera. Everybody believes they are fundamentally good, and we all need to believe we are fundamentally good because believing you are fundamentally good is part of the human condition. But if you have to believe someone else is bad in order to believe you are good, you are drawing a very dangerous line. In many ways, these lines in the sand we all draw are stories we tell to ourselves so we can still believe we are good people.

Reese Witherspoon: 'Ambition is not a dirty word', Glamour Magazine, Woman of the Year

9 November 2015, Hollywood, Los Angeles, USA

I can't thank Glamour magazine enough and Conde Nast and Cindi for asking me to be here. You just made this night so amazing. These incredible, inspiring women are doing so many things to change how we perceive women, and I hope Amy Schumer and all the other nominees that when you consider making your biopic, you'll give me the rights first, which would be great. Although Amy, I'll have to play your grandmother in the movie (by Hollywood standards), and you'll probably have to play your own mother.

I'm so excited that so many young women are here tonight.This all started for me when I was a little girl. I was 14 years old when I learned that I love acting, and I still do. Acting allows me to slip into the skin of all kinds of different women, and not in a creepy Silence of the Lambs way…but in a way that lets me explore the full spectrum of humanity. Every woman I've ever played is passionate and strong and flawed, except for Tracy Flick. She's 100% perfect, but she made me say that. But I also learned at 14 years old that I was ambitious. Really ambitious. Did I say that out loud? Let's talk about ambition.

I want everybody to close their eyes and think of a dirty word, like a really dirty word. Now open your eyes. Was any of your words ambition? I didn't think so. See, I just kind of started wondering lately why female ambition is a trait that people are so afraid of. Why do people have prejudiced opinions about women who accomplish things? Why is that perceived as a negative? In a study by Georgetown University in 2005, a group of professors asked candidates to evaluate male efficient versus female efficient in politicians. Respondents
were less likely to vote for power-seeking women than power-seeking men. They also perceived ambitious women as looking out for themselves. They even reported ambitious women as provoking feelings of disgust.

Now, in my life I have always found more comfort in being the underdog. Whether people thought I couldn't do something or they said it was impossible, I always rose to the challenge. I enjoyed reaching for the impossible. I remember when I was 18 years old and applying to
colleges, I had this male college counselor, and he said, "Don't even bother applying to Stanford, sweetie. Your SAT scores aren't good enough." But I did it anyway, and I got in. (But it wasn't because of my SAT scores!

When I got into the film business, I was doing dramas, and casting directors didn't know if I could be funny. So I did a comedy, Legally Blonde, and then my entire career I was pigeonholed. I did comedies, they didn't think I was serious. I did dramas, they didn't think I was funny. And I got older and they didn't think I could still be viable. So about three years ago, I found myself very curious about the state of the movie business. I really wondered how the digital evolution was affecting the landscape of filmmaking and specifically why studios were making fewer and fewer movies. So I started asking questions, and I decided to meet with the heads of each of the different movie studios that I had been friends with for years and I had made many movies with them. Each of the meetings started with something very casual like, "How are your kids?" and "Wow, has it really been that long since Walk the Line?" At the end of the meeting, I sort of casually brought up, "So, how many movies are in development with a female lead?" And by lead, I don't mean wife of the lead or the girlfriend of the lead. The lead, the hero of the story. I was met with nothing, blank stares, excessive blinking, uncomfortable shifting. No one wanted to answer the question because the fact was the studios weren't developing anything starring a woman. The only studio that was was turning a man's role into a woman's role. And the studio heads didn't apologize. They don't have to apologize. They are interested in profits—and after all, they run subsidiary companies of giant corporations.

But I was flabbergasted. This was 2012, and it made no sense to me. Where was our Sally Field in Norma Rae or Sigourney Weaver in Alien or Goldie Hawn in, you name it, any Goldie Hawn movie: Overboard, Wildcats, Private Benjamin? These women shaped my idea of what it meant to be a woman of strength and character and humor in this world. And my beautiful, intelligent daughter, who is 16 years old now, would not grow up idolizing that same group of women.
Instead, she'd be forced to watch a chorus of talented, accomplished women Saran wrapped into tight leather pants, tottering along on very cute, but completely impractical, shoes turn to a male lead and ask breathlessly, "What do we do now?!" Seriously, I'm not kidding. Go
back and watch any movie, and you'll see this line over and over. I love to ask questions, but it's my most hated question.

I dread reading scripts that have no women involved in their creation because inevitably I get to that part where the girl turns to the guy, and she says, "What do we do now?!" Do you know any woman in any crisis situation who has absolutely no idea what to do? I mean, don't they tell people in crisis, even children, "If you're in trouble, talk to a woman." It's ridiculous that a woman wouldn't know what to do.

So, anyway, after going to these studios and telling people about how there's barely any female leads in films and the industry's in crisis, people were aghast. "That's horrible," they said. And then they changed the subject and moved on with their dinner and moved on with
their lives. But I could not change the subject. I couldn't turn to some man and say, "What do we do now?" This is my life.

I've made movies all my life, for 25 years, since I was 14 years old. It was time to turn to myself and say, "OK, Reese, what are we going to do now?" The answer was very clear. My mother, who is here tonight, a very strong, smart Southern woman, said to me, "If you want something done, honey, do it yourself."

So, I started my own production company, Pacific Standard Films, with the mission to tell stories about women. And I was nervous, y'all. I was spending my own money, which everyone in the movie business always tells you, "Don't spend your own money on anything." I was warned that on the crazy chance Pacific Standard would acquire any good scripts we would never make it past our first few years in business because there just wasn't a market for buying female-driven material. But like Elle Woods, I do not like to be underestimated.

I'm a very avid reader. In fact, I'm a complete book nerd. So is my producing partner, so we tore through tons of manuscripts and read so many things before they were published, but we could only find two pieces of material that we thought were right. We optioned them with our own money, and we prayed that they would work. Both had strong, complicated, fascinating women at the center and both were written by women. And lo and behold, both books hit number one on the New York Times bestsellers list. One is called Gone Girl, and the second is called Wild. So we made those two films last year, and those two films rose to over half a billion dollars world wide and we got three Academy Award nominations for women in acting performances. So that is year one. Against the odds, Pacific Standard has had a year two and year three. We bought five more bestselling books.

I think we are in a culture crisis in every field. In every industry, women are underrepresented and underpaid in leadership positions. Under 5 percent of CEOs of fortune 500 companies are women. Only 19 percent of Congress is women. No wonder we don't have the health care we deserve or paid family leave or public access to early childhood education. That really worries me. How can we expect legislation or our needs to be served if we don't have equal representation? So here's my hope: If you're in politics, media, the tech industry, or working as an entrepreneur or a teacher or a construction worker or a caregiver, you know the problems we are all facing.

I urge each one of you to ask yourselves: What do we do now? That's a big question. What is it in life that you think you can't accomplish? Or what is it that people have said that you cannot do? Wouldn't it feel really good to prove them all wrong? Because I believe ambition is not a dirty word. It's just believing in yourself and your abilities. Imagine this: What would happen if we were all brave enough to be a little bit more ambitious? I think the world would change.

Gregg Popovich: 'You’ve got that kind of a lead, yes, because you were born white', White privilege press conference - 2017

25 September 2017, San Antonio, Texas, USA

I don’t think about some platform that I have. I’m an individual. I live in this country. I have the right to say and think what I want. It’s got nothing to do with my position. If it helps someone think one way or another about something, great. But the discussion has to take place.

Obviously, race is the elephant in the room and we all understand that. Unless it is talked about constantly, it’s not going to get better. ‘Oh, they’re talking about that again. They pulled the race card again. Why do we have to talk about that?’ Well, because it’s uncomfortable. There has to be an uncomfortable element in the discourse for anything to change, whether it’s the LGBT movement, or women’s suffrage, race, it doesn’t matter. People have to be made to feel uncomfortable, and especially white people, because we’re comfortable. We still have no clue what being born white means. And if you read some of the recent literature, you realize there really is no such thing as whiteness. We kind of made it up. That’s not my original thought, but it’s true.

It’s hard to sit down and decide that, yes, it’s like you’re at the 50-meter mark in a 100-meter dash. You’ve got that kind of a lead, yes, because you were born white. You have advantage that are systemically, culturally, psychologically rare. And they’ve been built up and cemented for hundreds of years. But many people can’t look at it that way, because it’s too difficult. It can’t be something that’s on their plate on a daily basis. People want to hold their position, people want their status quo, people don’t want to give that up. Until its given up, it’s not going to be fixed.

Again, I'm just one dude walking around and that's how I feel.

...

(from start of video)

There’s a lot involved in that when you say culture and politics and sports. People write books about that. I would hesitate to take that on as a whole. It makes more sense to me to be a bit more specific, and I’ll just tell you what we say to our team.

Each one of them has the right and ability to say what they would like to say, and act the way they’d like to act. They have our full support and no matter what they might want to do or not do is important to them, respected by us, and there’s no recrimination no matter what might take place, unless it’s ridiculous egregious. There’s a line for everything. But we do live in a difficult time and it doesn’t do a whole lot of good ...

We all know the situation and it gets beaten up every day by talking heads, it starts to get personal. I think we all know why, we all know who the source where a lot of the division comes from, but to dwell on that is sometimes I think is the wrong way to go, because it’s so obvious now. It’s boring. The childishness, the gratuitous fear mongering and race baiting, has been so consistent that it’s almost expected. The bar has been lowered so far that I think it’s more important to be thinking about what to do in more organic roots based level. Thinking about the efforts to restrict voter registration, comments that demean cultures, ethic groups, races, women. Those sorts of things. What can be done in an organic way to fight that?

We know how everything happens, we know where the power in the country is, we know the racism that exists. But it’s gone beyond that to a point where I’m more worried about, and confused by, the people around our president. These are intelligent people who know exactly what’s going on. They basically were very negative about his actions but now it seems like it’s condoned. We saw it this weekend with his comments about people who should be fired or people who shouldn’t be allowed to do this sort of thing. I wonder what the people think about who voted for him, where their line is, how much they can take, where does the morality and decency kick in?

I understand very well they didn’t like their choice, economically. A lot of people had a problem. And he was the right guy at the right time to tap into that mood. But people overlooked one helluva lot to pull that trigger and vote in that direction, but it was because they wanted change, they felt ignored, they actually thought something would happen that would aid them. But at what price, is the question.

And as we see the actions over and over again, one wonders what is in their head. Have they come to the conclusion that they had the wrong vehicle? They might have had good ideas, good reasons why they wanted to go the way they went. But someone else that had a little bit more decency about how they approach other people and other groups might have served better. That’s what I worry about in the country.

You wonder about if you live where you thought you live. I just heard a comment this morning from a NASCAR owner and Mr. Petty that just blew me away, just blew me away. Where the owner described that he would get the Greyhound bus tickets for anybody to leave, and they’d be fired, and Mr. Petty, who said people who act the way we saw Sunday, they should leave the country. That’s where I live. I had no idea that I lived in a country where people would actually say that sort of thing. I’m not totally naive but I think these people have been enabled by an example that we’ve all been given. You’ve seen it in Charlottesville, and on and on and on. That’s not a surprise. Get over it. What do we do to get it done. To go to the grassroots and not allow this to happen again.

Our country’s an embarrassment to the world. This is an individual who actually thought that when people held arms during the game, that they were doing it to honor the flag. That’s delusional. Absolutely delusional. But it’s what we have to live with.

So we have a choice. We can continue to bounce our heads off the wall with his conduct, or we can decide that the institutions of our country are more important, that people are more important, that the decent America that we all thought we had and want is more important, and get down to business at a grassroots level and do what we have to do.

I guess that’s enough for now.

Joel Creasey: 'We are not going anywhere', marriage equality rally - 2017

26 August 2017, Melbourne, Australia

Joel Creasey is a comedian, speaking at rally for 'yes' campaign in advance of a marriage equality postal survey being conducted in Australia by the conservative government.

My boyfriend he proposed to me.

He proposed that we see other people ....

But in that moment I realised that I truly do want to get married. It is my basic human right, I know I am such a diva these days ...

Like food, shelter, marriage, what’s next, clean drinking water, I am out of control ...

I heard somebody say the other day that gay marriage affects all Australians, it affects ALL Asutralians

Incorrect. It only affects the two people in love wanting to get married.

The only people being affected by gay marriage today is the Fitness First around the corner, because they are empty while every gay man and lesbian is at this rally.

And while I’m at it, can I just say, no. We do not want to marry THE SYDNEY HARBOUR BRIDGE.

I had a one night stand with it once. It was terrible. Very needy, and stayed for breakfast.

Young people, of whom I am one, thank you Anthony, we need to get out to vote. We saw what happened only too recently in America, when people did not turn out to vote.

Jennifer Hudson was voted off seventh on the third season of American Idol.

I know it takes effort and young people and people of my generation and younger, we hate effort! I haven’t cooked a meal in three years. I won’t watch a youtube ad if there’s not a ‘skip ad’ option at the start of it. And I Ubered tothe gym the other day, and it’s in my building.

But this is one of those moments in our young lives that demands that effort.

Insta-story yourself voting if you must, trust me, it’s going to make great content.

But I’d like to speak directly now to those young people who might be struggling right now with their sexuality, made now only worse by this plebiscite, this amazing, non binding, postal plebiscite ... well it’s a survey really, probably done by the same people who do Family Feud.

Survey says - you screwed up Prime Minister.

And I’d particularly like to talk to those young people who are perhaps living in a smaller town, where being gay isn’t particularly common place. Let me assure you, it does get better.

And to please, stick in there, find an ally, find somebody you can talk to.

To the young people let me assure you, the best part of being an adult is youcan make your own decisions.

You don’t have to be friends with the bullies you share maths classes with.

You don’t have to talk to those family members who don’t accept you for who you are.

Christmas can just be you and a couple of hotties sipping Mai Thais in Hawaii if you want.

You don’t have to hang out with Uncle Peter who constantly asks, ‘when you decided to be gay’ .

The gay community is a family, and we are waiting for you, here in Melbourne, and in Sydney and in Adelaide and there’s three in Perth, we are waiting for you all around the world, waiting to embrace you, and tell you that you are loved, and important, and that there’s absolutely nothing wrong with you.

And if I’m perfectly honest, when you get here, I’ll probably try to crack onto you on the dance floor of the Peel.

That said, we’re talking about small towns as well, if a footy club in the regional town of Hamilton Victoria can paint their fifty metre line rainbow, then anything is possible. And do not lose a skerrick of hope.

Now I know Seb said earlier not to speak directly to the No campaign, but I’m a comedian and I can’t help myself, so I’d just quickly like to talk to those people who printed the laughable ‘STOP THE FAGS’ posters. First of all, hello I’m on the television and I’m famous, so isn’t that exciting. Probably never spoken to one of those people before. And yes, I agree, smoking is revolting. And no I’m sorry, we are not going anywhere. That is not going to happen. We are going to fight. We are going to achieve marriage equality, we are going to be allowed to marry the person we love, regardless of gender and sexuality.

We are going to win, in SICKENINGNESSand in health.

And I’m finally going to be able to sell my ten page bridal spread to New Idea, like I’ve dreamt of all my life.

And finally, PS Stop the Fags, your graphic designer sucks, I’ve made more compelling posters on Microsoft Paint.

Thank you ladies and gentlemen,

Love is love.

Virginia Woolf: 'But this freedom is only a beginning--the room is your own, but it is still bare', Professions for Women, National Society for Women's Service - 1931

21 January 1931, London, United Kingdom

When your secretary invited me to come here, she told me that your Society is concerned with the employment of women and she suggested that I might tell you something about my own professional experiences. It is true I am a woman; it is true I am employed; but what professional experiences have I had? It is difficult to say. My profession is literature; and in that profession there are fewer experiences for women than in any other, with the exception of the stage--fewer, I mean, that are peculiar to women. For the road was cut many years ago--by Fanny Burney, by Aphra Behn, by Harriet Martineau, by Jane Austen, by George Eliot--many famous women, and many more unknown and forgotten, have been before me, making the path smooth, and regulating my steps. Thus, when I came to write, there were very few material obstacles in my way. Writing was a reputable and harmless occupation. The family peace was not broken by the scratching of a pen. No demand was made upon the family purse. For ten and sixpence one can buy paper enough to write all the plays of Shakespeare--if one has a mind that way. Pianos and models, Paris, Vienna and Berlin, masters and mistresses, are not needed by a writer. The cheapness of writing paper is, of course, the reason why women have succeeded as writers before they have succeeded in the other professions.

But to tell you my story--it is a simple one. You have only got to figure to yourselves a girl in a bedroom with a pen in her hand. She had only to move that pen from left to right--from ten o'clock to one. Then it occurred to her to do what is simple and cheap enough after all--to slip a few of those pages into an envelope, fix a penny stamp in the corner, and drop the envelope into the red box at the corner. It was thus that I became a journalist; and my effort was rewarded on the first day of the following month--a very glorious day it was for me--by a letter from an editor containing a cheque for one pound ten shillings and sixpence. But to show you how little I deserve to be called a professional woman, how little I know of the struggles and difficulties of such lives, I have to admit that instead of spending that sum upon bread and butter, rent, shoes and stockings, or butcher's bills, I went out and bought a cat--a beautiful cat, a Persian cat, which very soon involved me in bitter disputes with my neighbours.

What could be easier than to write articles and to buy Persian cats with the profits? But wait a moment. Articles have to be about something. Mine, I seem to remember, was about a novel by a famous man. And while I was writing this review, I discovered that if I were going to review books I should need to do battle with a certain phantom. And the phantom was a woman, and when I came to know her better I called her after the heroine of a famous poem, The Angel in the House. It was she who used to come between me and my paper when I was writing reviews. It was she who bothered me and wasted my time and so tormented me that at last I killed her. You who come of a younger and happier generation may not have heard of her--you may not know what I mean by the Angel in the House. I will describe her as shortly as I can. She was intensely sympathetic. She was immensely charming. She was utterly unselfish. She excelled in the difficult arts of family life. She sacrificed herself daily. If there was chicken, she took the leg; if there was a draught she sat in it--in short she was so constituted that she never had a mind or a wish of her own, but preferred to sympathize always with the minds and wishes of others. Above all--I need not say it---she was pure. Her purity was supposed to be her chief beauty--her blushes, her great grace. In those days--the last of Queen Victoria--every house had its Angel. And when I came to write I encountered her with the very first words. The shadow of her wings fell on my page; I heard the rustling of her skirts in the room. Directly, that is to say, I took my pen in my hand to review that novel by a famous man, she slipped behind me and whispered: "My dear, you are a young woman. You are writing about a book that has been written by a man. Be sympathetic; be tender; flatter; deceive; use all the arts and wiles of our sex. Never let anybody guess that you have a mind of your own. Above all, be pure." And she made as if to guide my pen. I now record the one act for which I take some credit to myself, though the credit rightly belongs to some excellent ancestors of mine who left me a certain sum of money--shall we say five hundred pounds a year?--so that it was not necessary for me to depend solely on charm for my living. I turned upon her and caught her by the throat. I did my best to kill her. My excuse, if I were to be had up in a court of law, would be that I acted in self-defence. Had I not killed her she would have killed me. She would have plucked the heart out of my writing. For, as I found, directly I put pen to paper, you cannot review even a novel without having a mind of your own, without expressing what you think to be the truth about human relations, morality, sex. And all these questions, according to the Angel of the House, cannot be dealt with freely and openly by women; they must charm, they must conciliate, they must--to put it bluntly--tell lies if they are to succeed. Thus, whenever I felt the shadow of her wing or the radiance of her halo upon my page, I took up the inkpot and flung it at her. She died hard. Her fictitious nature was of great assistance to her. It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality. She was always creeping back when I thought I had despatched her. Though I flatter myself that I killed her in the end, the struggle was severe; it took much time that had better have been spent upon learning Greek grammar; or in roaming the world in search of adventures. But it was a real experience; it was an experience that was bound to befall all women writers at that time. Killing the Angel in the House was part of the occupation of a woman writer.

But to continue my story. The Angel was dead; what then remained? You may say that what remained was a simple and common object--a young woman in a bedroom with an inkpot. In other words, now that she had rid herself of falsehood, that young woman had only to be herself. Ah, but what is "herself"? I mean, what is a woman? I assure you, I do not know. I do not believe that you know. I do not believe that anybody can know until she has expressed herself in all the arts and professions open to human skill. That indeed is one of the reasons why I have come here out of respect for you, who are in process of showing us by your experiments what a woman is, who are in process Of providing us, by your failures and successes, with that extremely important piece of information.

But to continue the story of my professional experiences. I made one pound ten and six by my first review; and I bought a Persian cat with the proceeds. Then I grew ambitious. A Persian cat is all very well, I said; but a Persian cat is not enough. I must have a motor car. And it was thus that I became a novelist--for it is a very strange thing that people will give you a motor car if you will tell them a story. It is a still stranger thing that there is nothing so delightful in the world as telling stories. It is far pleasanter than writing reviews of famous novels. And yet, if I am to obey your secretary and tell you my professional experiences as a novelist, I must tell you about a very strange experience that befell me as a novelist. And to understand it you must try first to imagine a novelist's state of mind. I hope I am not giving away professional secrets if I say that a novelist's chief desire is to be as unconscious as possible. He has to induce in himself a state of perpetual lethargy. He wants life to proceed with the utmost quiet and regularity. He wants to see the same faces, to read the same books, to do the same things day after day, month after month, while he is writing, so that nothing may break the illusion in which he is living--so that nothing may disturb or disquiet the mysterious nosings about, feelings round, darts, dashes and sudden discoveries of that very shy and illusive spirit, the imagination. I suspect that this state is the same both for men and women. Be that as it may, I want you to imagine me writing a novel in a state of trance. I want you to figure to yourselves a girl sitting with a pen in her hand, which for minutes, and indeed for hours, she never dips into the inkpot. The image that comes to my mind when I think of this girl is the image of a fisherman lying sunk in dreams on the verge of a deep lake with a rod held out over the water. She was letting her imagination sweep unchecked round every rock and cranny of the world that lies submerged in the depths of our unconscious being. Now came the experience, the experience that I believe to be far commoner with women writers than with men. The line raced through the girl's fingers. Her imagination had rushed away. It had sought the pools, the depths, the dark places where the largest fish slumber. And then there was a smash. There was an explosion. There was foam and confusion. The imagination had dashed itself against something hard. The girl was roused from her dream. She was indeed in a state of the most acute and difficult distress. To speak without figure she had thought of something, something about the body, about the passions which it was unfitting for her as a woman to say. Men, her reason told her, would be shocked. The consciousness of--what men will say of a woman who speaks the truth about her passions had roused her from her artist's state of unconsciousness. She could write no more. The trance was over. Her imagination could work no longer. This I believe to be a very common experience with women writers--they are impeded by the extreme conventionality of the other sex. For though men sensibly allow themselves great freedom in these respects, I doubt that they realize or can control the extreme severity with which they condemn such freedom in women.

These then were two very genuine experiences of my own. These were two of the adventures of my professional life. The first--killing the Angel in the House--I think I solved. She died. But the second, telling the truth about my own experiences as a body, I do not think I solved. I doubt that any woman has solved it yet. The obstacles against her are still immensely powerful--and yet they are very difficult to define. Outwardly, what is simpler than to write books? Outwardly, what obstacles are there for a woman rather than for a man? Inwardly, I think, the case is very different; she has still many ghosts to fight, many prejudices to overcome. Indeed it will be a long time still, I think, before a woman can sit down to write a book without finding a phantom to be slain, a rock to be dashed against. And if this is so in literature, the freest of all professions for women, how is it in the new professions which you are now for the first time entering?

Those are the questions that I should like, had I time, to ask you. And indeed, if I have laid stress upon these professional experiences of mine, it is because I believe that they are, though in different forms, yours also. Even when the path is nominally open--when there is nothing to prevent a woman from being a doctor, a lawyer, a civil servant--there are many phantoms and obstacles, as I believe, looming in her way. To discuss and define them is I think of great value and importance; for thus only can the labour be shared, the difficulties be solved. But besides this, it is necessary also to discuss the ends and the aims for which we are fighting, for which we are doing battle with these formidable obstacles. Those aims cannot be taken for granted; they must be perpetually questioned and examined. The whole position, as I see it--here in this hall surrounded by women practising for the first time in history I know not how many different professions--is one of extraordinary interest and importance. You have won rooms of your own in the house hitherto exclusively owned by men. You are able, though not without great labour and effort, to pay the rent. You are earning your five hundred pounds a year. But this freedom is only a beginning--the room is your own, but it is still bare. It has to be furnished; it has to be decorated; it has to be shared. How are you going to furnish it, how are you going to decorate it? With whom are you going to share it, and upon what terms? These, I think are questions of the utmost importance and interest. For the first time in history you are able to ask them; for the first time you are able to decide for yourselves what the answers should be. Willingly would I stay and discuss those questions and answers--but not to-night. My time is up; and I must cease.

Troye Sivan: 'The difference was that these people were attending a friend’s funeral on a weekly basis', 28th Annual GLAAD Media Awards -2017

1 April 2017, Los Angeles, California, USA

This award is so much larger than me. This moment is about visibility and about representation. What and who we see in the media defines our perception of the world around us. And so, to see ourselves in this picture of what is normal and what is acceptable and what is beautiful is absolutely vital.  In saying that, so much of the work that has contributed to our progress as a community is far less glamorous than the work that I’m being honoured for tonight.

About a year or two ago, I watched a documentary called "How to survive a plague." I highly recommend it to anyone who hasn't seen it. The doc is about the early years of the AIDS epidemic and the efforts of organisations like ACT UP and the Treatment Action Group. Within the characters in the doc, I saw myself, and I saw my friends, and I saw my colleagues, and I saw my boyfriend. These kids were young, smart, active fighters. I saw that wit, and that humour, and that resilience that I’ve grown to love so much about my community.

They were just like my friends and I. I know I'm being super humble. Like this smart and everything, just like me. But I saw myself in these characters, and the difference was that these people were attending a friend’s funeral on a weekly basis. This was in New York City, not ever 40 years ago. They were fighting for medical treatment, they were fighting for visibility and they were fighting for their lives. It was a life or death situation.

It was this kind of sacrifice and activism that paved the way for all of us to be here tonight. While I'm so thankful and fortunate to have this award, I would like to share it with the warriors who made it possible but maybe didn't get one for themselves. This award is for Peter Staley. One of the featured activist in "How to survive a plague." Peter was one of the driving forces behind ACT UP, the founder of the Treatment Action Group, and a personal hero of mine. This is for Marsha P Johnson, and Sylvia Rivera. The Godmothers of the Stonewall Riots, who also founded a transgender rights group, in the 1970s.

This is for ... You can keep going on the teleprompter. This is for Bayard Rustin. Bayard was an openly gay civil rights leader, who worked alongside Martin Luther King Jr, and was largely written out of history as a result of homophobia. This is for Gilbert Baker, the creator of the Rainbow Flag. A symbol of pride. Who we sadly lost yesterday. This is for the Edie Windsors and the James Baldwins and the Frank Kamenys of the world. And the list goes on.

Though times and our needs may have changed, this ethos and spirit still persist in our community today.

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks: 'The appearance of antisemitism in a culture is the first symptom of a disease', Understanding Antisemitism address to European Parliament - 2016

27 September 2016, European Parliament, Brussels, Belgium

The hate that begins with Jews never ends with Jews. That is what I want us to understand today. It wasn’t Jews alone who suffered under Hitler. It wasn’t Jews alone who suffered under Stalin. It isn’t Jews alone who suffer under ISIS or Al Qaeda or Islamic Jihad. We make a great mistake if we think antisemitism is a threat only to Jews. It is a threat, first and foremost, to Europe and to the freedoms it took centuries to achieve.

Antisemitism is not about Jews. It is about anti-Semites. It is about people who cannot accept responsibility for their own failures and have instead to blame someone else. Historically, if you were a Christian at the time of the Crusades, or a German after the First World War, and saw that the world hadn’t turned out the way you believed it would, you blamed the Jews. That is what is happening today. And I cannot begin to say how dangerous it is. Not just to Jews but to everyone who values freedom, compassion and humanity.

The appearance of antisemitism in a culture is the first symptom of a disease, the early warning sign of collective breakdown. If Europe allows antisemitism to flourish, that will be the beginning of the end of Europe. And what I want to do in these brief remarks is simply to analyze a phenomenon full of vagueness and ambiguity, because we need precision and understanding to know what antisemitism is, why it happens, why antisemites are convinced that they are not antisemitic.

First let me define antisemitism. Not liking Jews is not antisemitism. We all have people we don’t like. That’s OK; that’s human; it isn’t dangerous. Second, criticizing Israel is not antisemitism. I was recently talking to some schoolchildren and they asked me: is criticizing Israel antisemitism? I said No and I explained the difference. I asked them: Do you believe you have a right to criticize the British government? They all put up their hands. Then I asked, Which of you believes that Britain has no right to exist? No one put up their hands. Now you know the difference, I said, and they all did.

Antisemitism means denying the right of Jews to exist collectively as Jews with the same rights as everyone else. It takes different forms in different ages. In the Middle Ages, Jews were hated because of their religion. In the nineteenth and early twentieth century they were hated because of their race. Today they are hated because of their nation state, the state of Israel. It takes different forms but it remains the same thing: the view that Jews have no right to exist as free and equal human beings.

If there is one thing I and my contemporaries did not expect, it was that antisemitism would reappear in Europe within living memory of the Holocaust. The reason we did not expect it was that Europe had undertaken the greatest collective effort in all of history to ensure that the virus of antisemitism would never again infect the body politic. It was a magnificent effort of antiracist legislation, Holocaust education and interfaith dialogue. Yet antisemitism has returned despite everything.

On 27 January 2000, representatives of 46 governments from around the world gathered in Stockholm to issue a collective declaration of Holocaust remembrance and the continuing fight against antisemitism, racism and prejudice. Then came 9/11, and within days conspiracy theories were flooding the internet claiming it was the work of Israel and its secret service, the Mossad. In April 2002, on Passover, I was in Florence with a Jewish couple from Paris when they received a phone call from their son, saying, “Mum, Dad, it’s time to leave France. It’s not safe for us here anymore.”

In May 2007, in a private meeting here in Brussels, I told the three leaders of Europe at the time, Angela Merkel, President of the European Council, Jose Manuel Barroso, President of the European Commission, and Hans-Gert Pöttering, President of the European Parliament, that the Jews of Europe were beginning to ask whether there was a future for Jews in Europe.

That was more than nine years ago. Since then, things have become worse. Already in 2013, before some of the worst incidents, the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights found that almost a third of Europe’s Jews were considering emigrating because of anti-Semitism. In France the figure was 46 percent; in Hungary 48 percent.

Let me ask you this. Whether you are Jewish or Christian, Muslim: would you stay in a country where you need armed police to guard you while you prayed? Where your children need armed guards to protect them at school? Where, if you wear a sign of your faith in public, you risk being abused or attacked? Where, when your children go to university, they are insulted and intimidated because of what is happening in some other part of the world? Where, when they present their own view of the situation they are howled down and silenced?

This is happening to Jews throughout Europe. In every single country of Europe, without exception, Jews are fearful for their or their children’s future. If this continues, Jews will continue to leave Europe, until, barring the frail and the elderly, Europe will finally have become Judenrein.

How did this happen? It happened the way viruses always defeat the human immune system, namely, by mutating. The new antisemitism is different from the old antisemitism, in three ways. I’ve already mentioned one. Once Jews were hated because of their religion. Then they were hated because of their race. Now they are hated because of their nation state. The second difference is that the epicenter of the old antisemitism was Europe. Today it’s the Middle East and it is communicated globally by the new electronic media.

The third is particularly disturbing. Let me explain. It is easy to hate, but difficult publicly to justify hate. Throughout history, when people have sought to justify anti-Semitism, they have done so by recourse to the highest source of authority available within the culture. In the Middle Ages, it was religion. So we had religious anti-Judaism. In post-Enlightenment Europe it was science. So we had the twin foundations of Nazi ideology, Social Darwinism and the so-called Scientific Study of Race. Today the highest source of authority worldwide is human rights. That is why Israel—the only fully functioning democracy in the Middle East with a free press and independent judiciary—is regularly accused of the five cardinal sins against human rights: racism, apartheid, crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing and attempted genocide.

The new antisemitism has mutated so that any practitioner of it can deny that he or she is an antisemite. After all, they’ll say, I’m not a racist. I have no problem with Jews or Judaism. I only have a problem with the State of Israel. But in a world of 56 Muslim nations and 103 Christian ones, there is only one Jewish state, Israel, which constitutes one-quarter of one per cent of the land mass of the Middle East. Israel is the only one of the 193 member nations of the United Nations that has its right to exist regularly challenged, with one state, Iran, and many, many other groups, committed to its destruction.

Antisemitism means denying the right of Jews to exist as Jews with the same rights as everyone else. The form this takes today is anti-Zionism. Of course, there is a difference between Zionism and Judaism, and between Jews and Israelis, but this difference does not exist for the new antisemites themselves. It was Jews not Israelis who were murdered in terrorist attacks in Toulouse, Paris, Brussels and Copenhagen. Anti-Zionism is the antisemitism of our time.

In the Middle Ages Jews were accused of poisoning wells, spreading the plague, and killing Christian children to use their blood. In Nazi Germany they were accused of controlling both capitalist America and communist Russia. Today they are accused of running ISIS as well as America. All the old myths have been recycled, from the Blood Libel to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The cartoons that flood the Middle East are clones of those published in Der Sturmer one of the primary vehicles of Nazi propaganda between 1923 and 1945.

The ultimate weapon of the new antisemitism is dazzling in its simplicity. It goes like this. The Holocaust must never happen again. But Israelis are the new Nazis; the Palestinians are the new Jews; all Jews are Zionists. Therefore the real antisemites of our time are none other than the Jews themselves. And these are not marginal views. They are widespread throughout the Muslim world, including communities in Europe, and they are slowly infecting the far left, the far right, academic circles, unions, and even some churches. Having cured itself of the virus of antisemitism, Europe is being reinfected by parts of the world that never went through the self-reckoning that Europe undertook once the facts of the Holocaust became known.

How do such absurdities come to be believed? This is a vast and complex subject, and I have written a book about it, but the simplest explanation is this. When bad things happen to a group, its members can ask one of two questions: “What did we do wrong?” or “Who did this to us?” The entire fate of the group will depend on which it chooses.

If it asks, “What did we do wrong?” it has begun the self-criticism essential to a free society. If it asks, “Who did this to us?” it has defined itself as a victim. It will then seek a scapegoat to blame for all its problems. Classically this has been the Jews.

Anti-Semitism is a form of cognitive failure, and it happens when groups feel that their world is spinning out of control. It began in the Middle Ages, when Christians saw that Islam had defeated them in places they regarded as their own, especially Jerusalem. That was when, in 1096, on their way to the Holy Land, the Crusaders stopped first to massacre Jewish communities in Northern Europe. It was born in the Middle East in the 1920s with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Antisemitism re-emerged in Europe in the 1870s during a period of economic recession and resurgent nationalism. And it is re-appearing in Europe now for the same reasons: recession, nationalism, and a backlash against immigrants and other minorities. Antisemitism happens when the politics of hope gives way to the politics of fear, which quickly becomes the politics of hate.

This then reduces complex problems to simplicities. It divides the world into black and white, seeing all the fault on one side and all the victimhood on the other. It singles out one group among a hundred offenders for the blame. The argument is always the same. We are innocent; they are guilty. It follows that if we are to be free, they, the Jews or the state of Israel, must be destroyed. That is how the great crimes begin.

Jews were hated because they were different. They were the most conspicuous non-Christian minority in a Christian Europe. Today they are the most conspicuous non-Muslim presence in an Islamic Middle East. Anti-Semitism has always been about the inability of a group to make space for difference. No group that adopts it will ever, can ever, create a free society.

So I end where I began. The hate that begins with Jews never ends with Jews. Antisemitism is only secondarily about Jews. Primarily it is about the failure of groups to accept responsibility for their own failures, and to build their own future by their own endeavours. No society that has fostered antisemitism has ever sustained liberty or human rights or religious freedom. Every society driven by hate begins by seeking to destroy its enemies, but ends by destroying itself.

Europe today is not fundamentally antisemitic. But it has allowed antisemitism to enter via the new electronic media. It has failed to recognize that the new antisemitism is different from the old. We are not today back in the 1930s. But we are coming close to 1879, when Wilhelm Marr founded the League of Anti-Semites in Germany; to 1886 when Édouard Drumont published La France Juive; and 1897 when Karl Lueger became Mayor of Vienna. These were key moments in the spread of antisemitism, and all we have to do today is to remember that what was said then about Jews is being said today about the Jewish state.

The history of Jews in Europe has not always been a happy one. Europe’s treatment of the Jews added certain words to the human vocabulary: disputation, forced conversion, inquisition, expulsion, auto da fe, ghetto, pogrom and Holocaust, words written in Jewish tears and Jewish blood. Yet for all that, Jews loved Europe and contributed to it some of its greatest scientists, writers, academics, musicians, shapers of the modern mind.

If Europe lets itself be dragged down that road again, this will be the story told in times to come. First they came for the Jews. Then for the Christians. Then for the gays. Then for the atheists. Until there was nothing left of Europe’s soul but a distant, fading memory.

Today I have tried to give voice to those who have no voice. I have spoken on behalf of the murdered Roma, Sinti, gays, dissidents, the mentally and physically handicapped, and a million and a half Jewish children murdered because of their grandparents’ religion. In their name, I say to you: You know where the road ends. Don’t go down there again.

You are the leaders of Europe. Its future is in your hands. If you do nothing, Jews will leave, European liberty will die, and there will be a moral stain on Europe’s name that all eternity will not erase.

Stop it now while there is still time.