Tina Smith: “I honor him for being down here speaking about an issue that has been a cancer in the human soul for a long time, and…”

“I honor him for being down here speaking about an issue that has been a cancer in the human soul for a long time, and that is anti-Semitism. I learned at my mother's knee to fight against bigotry and discrimination. I am not Jewish. I was born into the Mormon faith to Mormon parents who in our history knew something of persecution. In fact, many of my Jewish families are surprised to learn that extermination orders have actually been ordered before, even before the pogroms that have beset the tribes of Judah. They were once issued by a Governor of Missouri on the Mormon pioneers, and they set about exterminating them and drove them literally from what was then the United States. So as a young boy, I had an interest in history. I would watch newsreels of what had recently happened in Germany to the Jewish people. I had a particular sensitivity to that and, again, learned from my mother to befriend the children of Israel. But what besets the human heart in the form of anti-Semitism is ancient in its origin, even prophesied in Jewish history and Scripture.”