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Addressing the dinner in his honor given last night in connection with the conference called by the National Council of Jewish Federations and Welfare Funds, James G. McDonald, League of Nations High Commissioner for Refugees said:
“Of all the forms of intolerance none seems to me more contemptible than that which roots itself in race or religion. Yet the racial state not only would encourage—it would make a fetish of this sort of intolerance. It would direct the whole paraphanalia of modern science propaganda towards the end that peoples shall be intolerant of racial or religious minority.
“It would utilize the press, the platform, the radio,—all these to breed in adults suspicion and dislike of those who differ from the majority. Nor are the children to be immune, for the absolute state would use the schools to feed the principles of racial superiority. It is difficult to see how propagation of intolerance could go further than this.
A MAD WORLD
“What a mad world this of ours would seem to be to any rational being who could observe it from a neighboring planet. On this tiny globe of ours, where the miracles of science have made all the nations neighbors, men and women everywhere are facing nearly identical dangers—poverty, social demoralization and war.
“In the midst of an abundance which literally crushes the producer, millions of men lack sufficient food. Our most cherished institutions are questioned and attacked because so often they seem to have ceased to serve truly social ends. And only the fatuous optimist would deny that over all hangs the ever present danger of a renewal in our generation of the colossal crime of war.
“In times like this, when the very foundations of western society seems threatened, how mad it is, that men should permit racial or religious intolerance to divide them and thus weaken common effort and social reconstruction. Moreover, these divisions, by embittering personal and group relationships within a nation, tend to spread beyond national frontiers and to confuse and endanger international relations. Nor is this surprising, for intense unreasoning intolerance poisons the very souls of men.”
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
