I saw hate in a graveyard - Stephen Fry | UK news | The Guardian 07.01.

23, 10:19

The Observer
UK news
I saw hate in a graveyard 2 Stephen Fry
Actor shaken by anti3semitic outrage as he explored his Jewish
past

David Smith Stephen Fry, the actor, writer and raconteur, has told of his disgust after a
@smithinamerica quest to trace his Jewish ancestry ended with the discovery that his great-
Sun 5 Jun 2005 01.45 BST
grandfather's grave had been desecrated by robbers.

In a village in Slovakia, he found the cemetery had been targeted by anti-

semitic vandals who dug up his great-grandfather's remains to steal gold
from teeth and rings. He described the act as 'a desecration' and 'a kind of
blasphemy', which had made him re-examine his views on whether the law
should recognise blasphemy as a crime.

Fry was speaking at a debate with the journalist Christopher Hitchens at The
Guardian Hay Festival last week. Among the issues raised was the
government's proposed Incitement to Religious Hatred Bill, which has been
criticised by civil liberties campaigners and comedians, including Fry's
friend Rowan Atkinson, who warned that it could be used to ban jokes
poking fun at Islam, Judaism or the Christian church.

Fry, whose films include Gosford Park and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the
Galaxy, admitted: 'I'd never believed that there was any problem with
blasphemy; it was an obvious nonsense to have a law suggesting that
blasphemy be a crime. It's often an offence against good taste, it's often
unkind, as so many things humans do are, but we don't necessarily have to
make them outlawed.

'But I was doing a BBC programme a couple of weeks ago in a small village
south of Bratislava. I was in search of my mother's grandparents and
managed to track down a Jewish graveyard... surrounded by concrete walls
and somewhere apparently my great-grandfather was buried there.

'All the graves were broken and destroyed, and it was a ruinous thing. The
bodies had been disinterred. I discovered they'd been disinterred for two
reasons: one was simple anti-semitism, the other simple greed, trying to get
gold from teeth and rings. This had happened within the last five years: not a
Nazi crime but a recent crime.

'A part of me then, eventually finding my great-grandfather's broken grave,

did think: this is a desecration. If this happened in Britain this would be
covered by laws of racial cruelty or so on. It's also a kind of blasphemy
against something more than the Jewish faith though. It made me question
whether I really was quite so sure that blasphemy was an old-time law for an
old-time statute book.'
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Fry went to Slovakia for a new series of the BBC's Who Do You Think You Kevin McCarthy wins Ho
speaker bid after gruelli
Are?, in which celebrities go in search of their roots. He wrote briefly about 152vote saga
his Jewish heritage in his 1997 autobiography, Moab is My Washpot. His
mother's great-grandfather, a Hungarian Jew named Neumann, lived for a
Six2year2old intentional
time in Vienna 'and it was always said of him that he was the kind of man to shot teacher in Virginia
give you the coat off his back'. school, police say

Fry wrote that his 'blood ran cold' when one day, reading about Hitler, he
Six journalists arrested o
came upon this passage: 'He [Hitler] wore an ancient black overcoat, which footage of South Sudan
had been given him by an old-clothes dealer in the hostel, a Hungarian Jew president wetting himse
named Neumann, and which reached down to his knees... Neumann... who
had befriended him, was offended by the violence of his anti-semitism.'

Fry added in his autobiography: 'I suppose there were many Hungarian Jews
Army veterans criticise
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I saw hate in a graveyard - Stephen Fry | UK news | The Guardian 07.01.23, 10:19

in Vienna in 1910, and I suppose many of them were called Neumann, but Army veterans criticise
Prince Harry’s claim he
one can't help wondering if it really might be true that one's great-
killed 25 Taliban in
grandfather might have befriended and kept warm a man who would Afghanistan
decimate a large part of his family and some six million of his people.'
‘It altered my entire
During the debate in Hay-on-Wye, Fry described his own religious history: worldview’: leading auth
pick eight nonfiction bo
'When I was about 13 I became enraptured by the Anglican church. I was
to change your mind
born technically - if one can be technically - a Jew: that's what I am, because
my mother is all Jewess, with Jewish parents as far as one can tell, and
certainly grandparents.

'I wasn't brought up in the Jewish faith. I was brought up in no faith at all. My
father's a physicist, but not an angrily atheistical one. I became enraptured
by the Anglican communion, as we used to call it, and also by the English
mystics... I don't know why, I can't explain it: I was a child of fads. But
simultaneously I managed to immerse myself in Wagner and PG Wodehouse
and Sherlock Holmes - there is no special pattern that I can discern.

'I've always believed that everything that is said from authority is either the
authority of one's own heart, one's own brain, one's own reading, one's own
trust, but not the authority of someone who claims it because they're
speaking for God and they know the truth because it's written in a book.
That, essentially, is where I come from. In a sense, tolerance is my religion.
Reason is my religion.'

The Incitement to Religious Hatred Bill was announced in the Queen's

Speech last month. Under the proposals, it would become a criminal offence
to use threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour if one 'intends to
stir up religious hatred' or if their conduct is 'likely to stir up' religious
hatred. Prosecutions could be brought only by the Attorney-General and a
convicted person would face up to seven years in prison.

Fry refused to go as far as Hitchens in combatively denouncing the bill, but

made clear he 'couldn't possibly obey a law' that allowed prosecutions of
comedians or writers who caused offence.

He said: 'It's now very common to hear people say, "I'm rather offended by
that", as if that gives them certain rights. It's no more than a whine. It has no
meaning, it has no purpose, it has no reason to be respected as a phrase. "I'm
offended by that." Well, so fucking what?'

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