Deputy Minister Georgiev: Ignorance of history is in the basis of hate speech
16 January 2018 News
“Recently, Bulgaria embarked firmly on a new road of addressing anti-Semitism, discrimination and manifestations of intolerance on racial, religious or sexual grounds,” Deputy Foreign Minister Georg Georgiev said at a working meeting in the Foreign Minister with the interinstitutional working group in charge of Bulgaria’s accession to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) and textbook publishers. The purpose of the talks was to discuss the adequate depiction of the Holocaust topic and the saving of the Bulgarian Jews during WWII in the history textbooks.
The new approach includes the adopting of a working definition of anti-Semitism, Georg Georgiev stressed. He was appointed at the newly established position of a national coordinator for fighting anti-Semitism. In his opinion the adoption of this definition will help the country counter even more efficiently the hate speech.
“While at the moment we win the daily fight against manifestations of intolerance and bigotry, there are deeper processes and vandal acts which are mostly due to the lack of knowledge of history and, in particular, of our role in the saving of the Bulgarian Jews in 1943,” Deputy Minister Georgiev added. He stressed that, if the state can build up a legal framework, education can remove ignorance which leads to intolerance. “Let’s overcome ignorance together,” he urged.
Bulgaria has been an observer at the IHRA since 2012 and since last year it has been a liaison at the organization which has 30 member countries. Our country aspires to receive full membership of the organization this year.
The interinstitutional working group includes representatives of the ministries of foreign affairs, education and science, justice and culture, the Archives Agency and the Secretariat of the National Council of Cooperation on Ethnic and Integration Issues, the administration of the President of the Republic of Bulgaria, the Commission for the Protection against Discrimination, the National Ombudsman, the Sofia Municipality and the Shalom Jewish organization in Bulgaria.
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