Segre: “Hatred can only be fought with peace”

"I am a woman of peace, I always have been, all my life. Unfortunately I know hatred, so this day is important to me since we do nothing but talk about how to fight hatred and only with peace can hatred be fought". Senator for life Liliana Segre , on the International Day for the Fight against Hate Speech, participates in a press conference with the President of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), Theodoros Rousopoulos , and delivers her testimony.

“It is not enough to have a family, grandchildren and a lot of love to be able to forget that number written on the left arm and all the hatred that came from that number. Today we mourn the children of all religions,” says Segre: “I saw children like me who could no longer attend school because they were born. It was genocide, but others did not understand and did not want to hear it.”

Senator Segre then recounts the suffering she continued to feel when she returned from the concentration camp: "I didn't feel like going dancing like the other women did, I went for five minutes but it was stronger than me. I had a small room again and I wondered why I was alive, no one listened to me, you can't describe genocide, and you can't think that it ends and you can dance. There, this took my mind away", she adds amidst everyone's emotion.

There is still hate. The Democratic Party senator Francesco Verducci, vice president of the extraordinary commission for the fight against phenomena of intolerance, racism, anti-Semitism and incitement to hatred and violence, underlines that "hate speech is discriminatory speech that undermines our democracies. We need first of all to give strength to the new generations by fighting inequalities, giving emancipation, opportunities. It will be the new generations who give strength to democracy and defeat this poison that corrodes it, which is the hate speech that today on the web without rules is rampant and is a real threat".