Briefing to the Diplomatic Corps by Dep FM Melchior and Abe Foxman- Director- Anti-Defamation League - 25-Jul-2001

Jerusalem, July 25, 2001

RABBI MELCHIOR: Good morning your excellencies, welcome Mr. Abe Foxman, Director of the ADL, a good friend and someone who has really been a champion in the fight against anti-Semitism, against racism, against any kind of injustice for as many years as I remember, at least in public life. We are honored to have you with us today and to hear your words. I am very honored to have such a distinguished crowd here for this meeting, because the subject we are dealing with is a very, very serious theme.

The State of Israel being the State of the Jewish people has a special obligation to world Jewry, to the history of the Jewish people, to its own future bug also to humankind, to talk about the oldest prejudice, the prejudice which has been most vicious of all prejudices - anti-Semitism, which we have already seen in so many different disguises for the last, at least 2,500 years.

When I talk about the disguises, it is interesting to follow anti-Semitism and to see that every age, every period has had different expressions of anti-Semitism; but the central motive - hatred against the Jews - has always been the same. Always it has expressed itself in what it has seen, what the people around have seen to be the center of identity in the different societies where this form of hatred has come to expression. So when you have had periods when Christianity was the source of legitimization, then you have seen the Christian anti-Semitism which expressed itself in the Jew being the anti-Christ or the Jew being the one who was responsible for the killing of God, of Jesus, and that would be the central motive in the anti-Semitism of that period. You had other periods when people believed less in religions and the central motive was that the Jew was the religious person while the world around was agnostic or atheist. You had periods when nationalism was the essential motive of identity and the Jews were the ones who were not nationalistic, who were cosmopolitan. And on the other hand, you had periods when internationalism was the code word of identity and the Jews were the nationalist and not the ones who believed in internationalism.

In this way, you can go society after society and see what the identity of that society has been and how its expression of hatred against the Jewish people has come to expression. You had periods of racial discrimination, such as the Nazi period. You have had periods and countries that don't at all have Jews, but there was very frequently anti-Semitism in these countries. You had countries with big Jewish populations, which have had strong expressions of anti-Semitism. Jean Paul Sartre, the famous French philosopher, after having gone through all the different reasons for anti-Semitism - psychological, sociological and so on, everything that has been given all through the ages - finally concluded that anti-Semitism was something what could be explained, and he simply explained it is a metaphysical phenomena in humankind.

Unfortunately, what I want to talk to you about this morning is a situation which is blatant today, where we see the anti-Semitism of all the different aspects throughout history being expressed today in a new and a vicious form, which has been strengthened very much since the beginning of the intifada last year. I think that we have to normally take notice of this, but we have to act also accordingly.

I want to here describe a couple of the most serious phenomena that I see in this situation and how this is connected to the upcoming conference against racism and xenophobia in Durban, South Africa.

What makes me most nervous is what is happening today in the Arab world. I must tell you that I think that traditionally the Arab anti-Semitism, the Moslem anti-Semitism, has marked itself very differently from the European anti-Semitism. Jews have been like Christians in Moslem countries as tolerated minorities and we have not seen expressions throughout most of history of the traditional kind of anti-Semitism, which we have seen, first of all, in Europe. There have been not many expressions of that kind of anti-Semitism in the Moslem countries and the Arab countries in the Arab world. Of course there are very famous exceptions and expressions of anti-Semitism and massacres against Jews, but that has not been the traditional order of the day in the Moslem world. This is also true for the last fifty years. I think if anybody had asked me a year ago if there was broad anti-Semitism in the Arab countries I would have said, "Absolutely not."

I also very much want to differentiate between anti-Semitism and being part of the political conflict between the Arab countries and the State of Israel. It is a political conflict, which I went into politics personally to try to put behind us, not with very great success unfortunately, but we will not give up in putting the conflict behind us. But to criticize Israel, to criticize the Israeli government is not, has never been and must never be characterized as anti-Semitism. It is absolutely legitimate to criticize the Israeli government, just as you criticize the Egyptian government and the American government or even the Norwegian government. Any government can be criticized, and to criticize the Israeli government is an exercise which I personally have practiced for many years. It is a little more difficult being in my present position, but it is something which is absolutely legitimate in a democratic framework to criticize governments. Even to criticize very sharply and to use very harsh words, that is not anti-Semitism. We must be very careful here about stamping anybody and anything and any statement as anti-Semitic.

But there is a red line, and this red line has been crossed very dramatically over the years, especially during this past year. Again, if you had asked me a year ago if there was anti-Semitism in the Arab countries as a central, dominant phenomenon, I would have said no. But if you ask me today I really don't know the answer. I don't know the answer because there has been a tornado of hatred, of incitement, of anti-Semitic propaganda, which has used all the classical phenomena of anti-Semitism, everything we have known, including some new phenomena, in this campaign which has gone all over the Arab world and which has been strengthened by modern technology - first of all by commercial television. There are today 30 Arab television stations - some of this television is excellent television, unlike the old-time propaganda television when everybody in the Arab world just turned into any channel. Now, this is very high quality television.

It is also in the newspapers, in a very different way. There were before also classic expressions of anti-Semitism - before the peace with Egypt, for example - even among the leading journalists, but not in the intensity which we have today. Today it's not a question of finding example. The examples are there every single day, every hour, in most of the newspapers, in the editorials, the main writers in the newspapers and the television. You will see there again a classical form of anti-Semitism, which is foreign to the Arab world, but which the Arab world today has adopted from Europe and from other places.

You know the old claim against the Jews, that the Jews were poisoning the wells, for example, which was a Middle Age claim. When the leaders wanted to take away the attention from their failings, they said, "Well, the Jews are the result of all our troubles, you see, they are poisoning the wells," when the hygienic standard was not as it should be. This old anti-Semitic motif comes again today in the Arab world, in article after article, in television programs, in many different forms: the Israelis are spreading drugs; the Israelis are creating special chewing gum which will slowly weaken the Arab population; the Israelis are using poisonous gases; the Israelis are encouraging the Arab nations to gamble; the Israelis are poisoning the food and the water in order to bring sickness to the Palestinian population, slow death.

You will never hear Arafat talking about Israelis shooting the Palestinians; he will always say that the Israelis are shooting uranium bullets, to make this not just a fight, but a crime against humanity. You will hear in the Palestinian press that the Israeli helicopters are spreading chocolates for the young Palestinians to eat so that they will be poisoned by this chocolate; that Israelis are selling belts very cheaply, for just a couple of shekels. Why? Because these belts have radioactive material which will weaken the Arab population from the belt downwards so that the next generation, which is born in the Arab world will be a weak generation, which will not be able to stand up against the Jews. Again, this is one claim, a classical anti-Semitic motif, and it recurs again and again and again in all the forms.

Religious anti-Semitism is another theme which is seen in many forms in the Arab press. You have a motif that Jews do not believe in the world to come and that is why they are so greedy. That is why they have to control this world, they have to control the world press, they have to control the world governments. You have a motif like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which is today in the Arab world considered a valid document. Everybody who has studied this historically knows, of course, that this is a false libel, but in the Arab world this is considered today unfortunately to be a major source accepted as authentic and all the accusations there are spread.

You have also all the traditional pictures of the Jew, of the ugly Jew, of the satanic Jew, of the Jews with the horns, of the cunning Jew, the greedy Jew - all of these pictures you see again and again, and there is no difference today between which Jew: sometimes it is a Jew with no face, sometimes it is the face of Sharon, sometimes it is the face of Peres or the face of Barak. There is no differentiation between right and left in this connection.

What is more serious also is the use of the Holocaust. It is very interesting. The denial of the Holocaust is not something which existed at all in the Arab world. It is a Western world phenomenon, which is spreading with many of the hatreds in the Western world to understand that you cannot today prepare new crimes against humanity or practice racism against anybody against the background of what happened in the Holocaust. Therefore, you first have to deny the Holocaust; or if you don't deny the Holocaust, at least to trivialize or minimalize or relativize the Holocaust before you can prepare your population to new crimes against anybody, against Jews or blacks or Moslems or against anybody else.

This is a phenomenon you will find in different places in the Western world and I know that this is one of the motifs which Abe Foxman has studied very closely. Today this has been translated in the Arab world. It has been translated in the Arab world, I believe, mainly because the Arab world has taken an interpretation of the creation of the State of Israel, which I think is absolutely wrong, but this theory says that the creation of the State of Israel happened because of the bad conscience of the Europeans after the Holocaust. Therefore, if you can take away the Holocaust and say either that it didn't happen or if it did happen, it was one of so many episodes in history, a detail of history, and trivialize the Holocaust; if you can do that, you take away the last shred of legitimacy for the Jewish people and the Jewish people's search for its self-determination.

Unfortunately, these expressions, which have been sporadic for many many years, have become much more concentrated, even in countries like Jordan, which has not seen any official anti-Semitism. Today you can find it in the Jordanian press and many of these articles appear in countries like Egypt and Syria. In some of the countries you will not find these expressions from leaders, and in other countries, especially like Syria and the rogue states, Iraq, Iran, Libya and so on, you will find the leaders themselves expressing these anti-Semitic expressions.

I will just give you a couple of famous examples from Syria. When Bashar Assad received the Pope recently, on May 5, he said that the Israelis are trying to kill all the principles of the monotheistic religions. It is the same kind of mentality which led them to deceive Jesus and to torture him, and it is the same mentality, which tried to kill the Prophet Mohammed. There are many such expressions; I am just giving you a very few examples. There is the statement by the Minister of Defense, who is really a notorious anti-Semite and has even written books about it. He said, for example, on Syrian television on May 6, "There is really no priority of the Israeli problem because if just every Arab will kill one Jew, then there won't be any Jews left. So there is no problem." This says the Minister of Defense in a country which wants to be a part of the Security Council of the United Nations. He says that he will be the first. "When a Jew will stand across from me, I will be the first one to take the step and kill the Jew." He says it publicly on television and nothing to dispute this.

My concern is that this hatred and incitement is something which is creating a movement today in the Arab world, which many of the Arab leaders themselves are not interested in. I am sure that the leaders of such countries as Morocco or Egypt and Jordan and Saudi Arabia are interested in stability, and I think they are interested in finding solutions, but at the same time they are letting this happen. This is creating a new situation on the ground, when you have a deep hatred, people who see this every day. These are not just words, this is something which changes realities. You have to know that all the hatreds started with words, but continued in actions. Auschwitz started with words but continued in actions. Auschwitz did not start in Auschwitz. Auschwitz had a legitimization in the background of so much hatred and incitement. We know from our experience how dangerous this is and, again, this is in countries where very often you will never be able to hear any other opinion about this.

You can, of course, find the examples also in the democratic world, also in Israel, terrible examples and expressions of hatred. You will find it also here with us. We have even some of our leaders and some of our responsible people, supposed to be responsible people - religious leaders, political leaders - who can come up with the same kinds of expressions of hatred. The difference is that when this happens in a democratic country, when it happens in a country like Israel, you will have a population, you will have opinion makers, you will have other leaders who will come out and condemn it for all it is worth, with the full strength of what is right and reasonable.

I am afraid that this will continue, this will develop and will create a totally different Middle East. I am afraid even if we can find some practical solutions for our conflict with the Palestinians, this is turning the conflict from a territorial conflict between two peoples who claim the same territory as theirs, which we can solve with territorial means - I hope, I assume we can solve, by sitting around the negotiation table, like what was started with the visit of President Sadat here and with the peace with Jordan and in the Oslo Agreements and with the proposals in Camp David. You can sit around a table and you can solve it by sharing or by dividing. But you can find political solutions for political issues, for territorial issues.

But, if you turn the conflict into a religious conflict, where it is my God against your God - where it can only be, like the Mufti of Jerusalem said right after the beginning of the intifada: "This is an existential fight between Judaism and Islam"; if you turn it into that and you continue to say, there can be only one survivor of this fight, then you turn this into an existential fight where we can't exist together. We can't have a peace process if this is an existential fight against an absolute evil of the world.

This is what is going on also in the preparations for Durban. Under an initiative of the regional conference held in Teheran, proposals were brought back to Geneva which defined the conflict here into a conflict against the Jewish people. According to the proposals which are now on the table in Geneva and which might be accepted in Durban, if we don't succeed in doing something very serious about this, Israel is the only country in the world which is breaching the principles of world justice and is practicing racism, is practicing genocide, is practicing ethnic cleansing, is practicing new apartheid. It is the only country in the world.

Sure, we have some problems in Israel and we are dealing with them, but you can also put on the table what is going on in all the countries. I think there are a couple of other countries which also have some problems. But not only that, these problems are taken out of context. You can take an issue like settlements. I am taking the most controversial issue on purpose. You can very well say the settlements are an obstacle for peace. You can very well say that settlements are a breach of the Fourth Geneva Convention. We can argue about that. But it is legitimate as a part of a political debate. But that is not what is said in Durban. What is said in the preparation for Durban is that settlements are ethnic cleansing, a genocide, and absolute evils against humanity. An apartment in Gilo is practicing genocide. Zionism - the creation of the State of Israel is created in sin. The ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people. Again, everything is turned into an absolute existential threat to humankind with absolute demonization of Israel and the Jewish people.

To fulfill this, it is also done with the Jewish past. You take an issue like the Holocaust and you say, "It is not the Holocaust, there are many holocausts" - with a small H not a capital H. You trivialize the Holocaust and then you go on to say afterwards that the real Holocaust was not the Holocaust against the Jewish people, it is the Holocaust which is going on against the Palestinian people. If the Jews are such as they can practice the Holocaust against the Palestinian people, then probably what is indicated is that they also deserved the Holocaust against them, because they practice the absolute evils of humankind.

Anti-Semitism, the oldest and most stubborn and most dangerous prejudice which humankind has known, is being turned into a farce. In the proposals in Geneva, anti-Semitism is the phenomenon, whose main expression is the anti-Semitism of the Zionists against the Palestinian Semites. This is, of course, an absolute distortion of truth and is taking the word anti-Semitism - which was a word that was introduced about 130 years ago in Central Europe when it wasn't a decent thing to be anti-Jewish but they wanted to make it decent so they found a new word for being anti-Jewish calling it anti-Semite and that was already then a very decent thing to be, which you could be in the biggest and nicest assemblies of Central Europe. That is the background for the word anti-Semitism. Everybody knows that this is the historic phenomenon of hatred against the Jews. Those who want to play with words can of course say that Semites are not only Jews but are people who belong to all the Semitic language groups, including of course also the Palestinians.

Here the absurdity is turned into a new truth. The real anti-Semitism is what the Jews are doing against the Palestinian Semites. Making a mockery of the Jewish past, making a mockery of Jewish suffering and making a mockery also of any moral lesson which can be learned from these prejudice, which can be learned from the Holocaust, not only towards the Jewish people but against anyone who prepares that kind of crimes against humanity. If you make a mockery then you prepare the ground for being able to attack humanity again in our time.

Now, if what is prepared for Durban succeeds, there will be, I think, four main victims of this. One victim is the Jewish people. Jewish people will somehow survive this also. We have known this for ages and we have traditions of how to survive this kind of phenomena. I just want to remind you what President Sadat said when he came to Israel in November 1977 and was asked by Abba Eban why he came now to Israel. Abba Eban was a little annoyed that he came while the Likud was in power and didn't come when Abba Eban was the Foreign Minister of the State of Israel. Sadat gave the following answer: "Well, I tried to get back what is mine through war. I didn't succeed. I tried to get it back through international agreements." There were then, if you remember, the meetings in Geneva between the United States and the Soviet Union to try to impose an international agreement of peace - it didn't succeed. "I tried to get it back using the automatic majority in the UN and other international assemblies with condemnations of Israel. It didn't work. Now, when I came and met with the Israelis directly face face, I got everything I wanted."

This I say also as a recommendation for Arab states who want to make peace with us. They won't succeed with these condemnations. The Jewish people has been used to condemnations and used to this kind of international hypocrisy. So we will survive this. But there are other sacrifices for this.

Another sacrifice is the fight against racism. Again, you are turning what is supposed to be a major fight against racism, celebrating the victory over apartheid in South Africa, the first time now in 18 years to have the conference against racism; to mobilize the whole world of this real absolute evil, which is disgusting to any decent human being, any believing human being, any humanistic human being, anybody who has some kind of shred of the image of God and who knows that to talk about lower races and upper races and rights for certain races and not for other races is the most disgusting of all phenomena we know. Turning this into an Israel bashing, a Jew bashing, where everybody will forget the real purpose of this event - the fight against racism. Not only that, but in substance, by saying everything is racism and everything is apartheid and everything is ethnic cleansing, then there is no moral value in the fight against racism and ethnic cleansing. The absolute evils are relativized and therefore lose any kind a moral substance.

The third victim of this would be the United Nations. The work of the United Nations will be turned into an absolute farce. What is happening more and more again over the last two years - we know it from the '70s and the '80s - turning everything into an absolute farce. You can't have a conference about anything in the UN where the central motive will not be Israel bashing. We talk of having a conference about children, so you will not be talking about the problem of children who were orphaned because of AIDS, you will not be talking about children who are part of the slave industry of the world or the sex industry of the world. You will only be talking about the Palestinian children. In this way, the UN as a body really fighting for what I believe are the essential values of humankind, the work will be neutralized, will be destroyed by again turning everything into an anti-Israel celebration.

Finally, the last blow if this succeeds will be the blow against the possibility to have a peace process. Because again, if the peace process is about a fight, a dispute between nations over territory, then this is a peace process which can proceed. But if the peace process as presented there is a fight against absolute evils, about the big devil of this world, then how do you make peace with the big devil of this world who is born in sin and practices all the crimes against humanity? How do you make peace with such a nation? How do you make peace with such a country? You can't do that. This is then a question of survival. And then you legitimize the violence against the Jewish people, the terror against the Jewish people, because you are talking about absolute evils.

I am saying this with great pain, because I believe that we have no other option here in this area than to come back to the peace process. We have no other options because we are 9.5 million people living between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River, a very small area. I believe if they, the Palestinians, won't have peace in the future and will not have dignity and will not have self-determination, then also we as a Jewish people of the State of Israel will not have this. That is where all the effort should be placed. But if you demonize, if you use the existential terms of all evils and place Israel and the Jewish people in that box, then it will not be possible.

I think this is where the world ethics should be set in. I hope that we will succeed. The last preparatory conference will start on Monday in Geneva, and we hope that all the countries of the world, where there is some kind of democracy, of decency or fairness or readiness to search for peace - all the countries of the world will gather around other resolutions, which will turn the Durban Conference back into what it was supposed to be: the conference against racism and xenophobia and not make the Durban conference the absolute new code word of the racist conference against the Jewish people. Thank you very much.

ABE FOXMAN: Mr. Minister, your Excellencies, ladies and gentleman, I have prepared an erudite exposition of modern anti-Semitism, but I will not deliver it. If you want it, we can make it available to you through the ADL office in Jerusalem or in Europe. Certainly after listening to Rabbi Melchior, to Minister Melchior, there are very little in terms of exposition and analysis that remains necessary. So permit me for a few moments to speak to you very personally.

As I sat and listened and I looked around the room, I was touched and moved by the meaning of this gathering here this morning. Here we are, assembled in Jerusalem on another morning on another day, when the surrounding neighborhood speaks in the language and in the tone of hate, as Minister Melchior spelled out; when others convert the words of hate into bullets and mortars. And out there somewhere, good people plan to come together as we have turned into the new millennium to learn from the lessons of the past.

What do we have here? This is a democracy. An invitation from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs is not a new cause, is not an order, and is not a command. Three-fourths of the diplomatic corps in this country responded to an invitation on this specific subject of the resiliency of hate, of bigotry, of prejudice, of racism, of anti-Semitism.

While the press can resolve the other elements, it would be nice if the press celebrated your presence here this morning. For, as I say, you didn't have to come, you knew what the subject is all about. That to me is as important and as encouraging as anything I have seen in the last week here in this country. I say so because I personally am a survivor of the worst that humanity has shown that it can achieve with unbridled, unanswered, untempered and uncontrolled hate.

I was born in Poland in 1940 - not a good place to be born a Jewish child - and I survived. I survived because in the midst of that hell and hatred was a human being who could barely read and write - her name is Branislava Korpi - who did not measure the risks or expediency or the comforts of standing up for an individual and a human being because he is an individual and a human being. Because if she had measured the risks and measured the possible consequences, somebody else would be standing here this morning talking to you.

Then there was a priest who had the courage, who had the morality to exercise an act of giving me the protection of the Catholic Church, to give me a false identity, to make it possible for me to survive. As I grew up and matured and began little by little to understand what it is that I had survived as a child, I began to ask some very difficult questions - the questions of why. Why did it happen? Why did the world permit anti-Semitism, ugly words of hate to become the building foundations of the bricks of Auschwitz? Why was the world silent? Why didn't it scream when synagogues were torched? Where was the Almighty and why didn't He intervene? Then some very more painful questions on why: Why did I survive while a million and a half other Jewish children did not? Why I and not they? I have no answers and I don't think in this room, with all the diplomats and all the scholars, we can come up with answers to these haunting universal and personal questions of why.

And so I've turned to ask other questions, the questions of what if: What if there wasn't one Raoul Wallenberg who save 100,000 Jews, but 100,000 Wallenbergs - how many thousands and tens of thousands of Jews would have been saved? What if there wasn't one Oscar Schindler but hundreds of Oscar Schindlers? What if there were more Bulgarians and Albanians who said no? What if America opened up its gates to a ship called the St. Louis? What if the world reacted to the Wannsee Conference? What if the Swiss permitted 20,000 Jewish orphans to cross their frontier, would equality have been destroyed? What if, what if, what if?

We now know two things. We now know that the world knew, it knew - there was no CNN, there was a BBC, but the world knew. We now know that the Allies knew, they knew exactly on what day, how many Jews were slaughtered in Minsk and Pinsk. That should be a haunting lesson to us - they knew. But what did they do?

We have learned something else that wherever and whenever and however people said "no" - people lived, Jews lived. That is the lesson of Albania, Bulgaria and Denmark and Holland and more. What does it mean to us? It means to us that we are gathered here so that future generations never ask that question "what if"? It is a litmus test for the international community. There are all kinds of explanations - Rabbi Melchior mentioned a few. There are all kinds of rationales written why the resolution equating Zionism and racism passed. There was a Soviet bloc and there was an Arab bloc and there were dependencies and there were this and that. But they are not there now. Israel is at peace with Egypt and with Jordan, and has withdrawn from Lebanon. None of these excuses exist anymore.

It has been said that the Jewish people are the canary bird of civilized democratic society. Just like the miners would put a canary on their helmet to see how safe it is as they entered the depths of the mine, so it still continues to be how the world responds to the Jewish people. It is a test of the civility, of the decency, of the democracy in this world. And you know what? It is not looking so good. Yes, as Minister Melchior said, we will survive, but will democracy survive? In this first effort, in this new millennium of the world coming together to strengthen itself against bigotry and prejudice and racism, what will be left out of the two?

My paper talks about the double standard that exists. Mr. Melchior talked about anti-Semitism in the Arab world. I'm not surprised. We have conquered space, we have reached the moon, we have eradicated smallpox. No, we have not found a vaccine, an antidote against hate. We know for 2,000 years the top of the hit parade of hate has been anti-Semitism. It's resilient. You have no Communism, you have no Fascism, no Nazism. You have another "ism" still out there, resilient, and it is called anti-Semitism. The only antidote we have is memory and commitment to decency.

What troubles us in the Arab world is not that it exists. Unfortunately it exists. It exists also in the United States. What troubles us is that there is not one person in Cairo, in Amman and the Palestinian Authority who has the decency, who has the courage to stand up and say "no". I have had the privilege of sitting next to President Mubarak, and I have pleaded with him: I don't question free press, no free press. I said, "President Mubarak, say something." Why is it? Can we demand of democratic nations throughout the world to speak out? We've asked friends in Germany and Austria and Italy and Sweden and Norway, Taiwan, wherever it existed we have asked the leadership and decent people to speak out. Why shouldn't we demand of the decent people in the Arab world to do likewise? Because by their silence they are legitimizing the words that led to bricks in Auschwitz.

So, finally, we the Jewish people have a preoccupation with words. Our tradition teaches us that the power of life and death is in the tongue. Those who pray three times a day as prescribed, three times a day say, "O Lord, keep my mouth from speaking evil." For we know our bitter experience what evil, ugly, wicked, hateful words can do. But we know also something else: that the absence of words - silence, indifference, apathy, rationalization, expediency - permits the ugly words to grow and grow and justify the taking of human life.

I thank you from the bottom of my heart for putting on your schedule and on your agenda to be here this morning, because by your mere presence, by your mere decision to come here to listen and engage with us on this subject, you are trumpeting out there, that we do not have the luxury again, ever again, to be silent in the face of hate, bigotry, prejudice, racism and anti-Semitism. Thank you very very much.