Arnold Schwarzenegger delivered a powerful 12-minute speech urging anti-Semites to abandon their hateful ideologies and “choose strength”.
On Monday, the former action star and former governor of California shared the impassioned speech via Facebook in a video produced by ATTN, a Los Angeles-based “issue-oriented” media outlet.
“I don’t care how many hateful things you wrote online. I don’t care how many times you marched that hateful flag or what hateful things you said in anger. There is still hope for you,” he said in the video .
Schwarzenegger, California’s youngest Republican governor, began his speech by describing the horrors he encountered while traveling through the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland. He also referred to his father, who was a member of the Nazi party, and his upbringing in Austria after World War II.
“When you walk through a place like Auschwitz, you feel an enormous weight,” he said. “There are reminders of the horrors that happened all over there: the sacks that were never claimed by the prisoners. . . The logs of thousands of names were crossed out as if some cruel accountant had just measured death. The gas chambers with scratches in the walls from the fingernails of people trying to hold on to life. The crematorium where the Nazis tried to erase all their atrocities.”
Schwarzenegger said his remarks are not aimed at people targeted by anti-Semitism, but that he wants to appeal to people fueled by hatred, those who perpetrate anti-Semitism.
“I want to talk to you if you’ve heard conspiracy theories about Jews or people of any race, gender, or sexual orientation and thought, ‘That makes sense to me.’ I want to talk to you if you think someone is inferior because of their religion, race or gender and is out to get you,” he added.
“I don’t know the path that brought you here, but I’ve seen enough people throw away their futures for hateful beliefs, so I want to talk to you before you regret the end of that path.”
The ‘Terminator’ star opened up about growing up surrounded by the men who lost World War II. He described how “their bodies were riddled with wounds and shrapnel.” . . and that “her heart and mind were equally riddled with guilt.” He said he saw the men drinking to numb their pain and how they felt like losers who not only lost the war but fell for “a terrible loser ideology”.
At one point in Schwarzenegger’s speech, the infamous photo of Charlottesville, Virginia, protesters Teddy Von Nukem and Peter Cvjetanovic was shown. The men became two of the most prominent faces of the 2017 far-right rally. Earlier this year, on the day he went on trial for drug trafficking, Von Nukem died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound at his Missouri home.
“Throughout history, hatred has always been the easy way, the way of least resistance . . . It’s easier to find a scapegoat for a problem than it is to fix things yourself…” Schwarzenegger said. “You will not find success at the end of this road… there has never been a successful movement based on hate.”
“I can understand how people can fall into the trap of prejudice and hatred. Whether you grew up surrounded by hate or were drawn to some of Big Tech’s algorithms that push you to your limits.”
“If you spend your life looking for scapegoats, you evade your own responsibility, you take away your own power, you steal your own power.”
According to the Anti-Defamation League, there was a 34% increase in anti-Semitic incidents in 2021 over the previous year. This was the highest number since the Anti-Defamation League began tracking anti-Semitic incidents in 1979.
There has also been a staggering rise in anti-Semitism on Twitter, according to combatantisemitism.org, which said Kanye “Ye” West’s anti-Semitic comments led to a 136 percent increase in hate speech, threats and identity attacks against Jewish people on the social platform .
Late last year, a well-known hate group flocked to a busy 405 freeway overpass in Los Angeles in connection with West’s diatribe against Jews. The demonstrators gave the Hitler salute and displayed a banner reading “Kanye is right about the Jews”.
In the weeks that followed, LA residents found flyers in their homes and cars with conspiracy theories about Jews.
And last month, Jaime Tran, 28, was charged with federal hate crimes after he shot and killed two Jewish men as they left the church in Los Angeles. After his arrest, Tran admitted to police that he had been looking for a kosher market before the Yelp attacks and knew the men were Jewish because of their “head coverings.”
Source: LA Times