Hate, like many other vices, is a learned behavior -- it is a choice, a bad choice, but a choice nonetheless. And yet, I believe -- I know -- that forgiveness works the same way.

Is it easier to control a disease than a person? There are some diseases which don't respond to anything and simply progress along their deadly course. But most diseases respond to medicines.

Without absolving or equivocating on America's hypocrisy on matters of race, racism and abuse of civil rights, it is ironic and equally hypocritical that Africans, who have little compunction about hacking one another to death because of differences, physical or perceived, are some of the loudest decriers of racism and bigotry in America.

All the media attention to the 20th anniversary of the slaughter in Rwanda reeks of irony. If only we had paid as much attention before the blood flowed.

Where on the African continent can you find a Seder this week? Try Rwanda. As in years past, we're looking at a standing room only list for ours (and we're not the only ones!).

They are 5,250 miles apart, one in Asia, the other in Africa. But in each, huge piles of human skulls bear mute witness to the genocidal horrors of the last quarter of the 20th century when the world should already have learned better from the enormity of the Nazi Holocaust.Once the Chao Ponhea Yat High School, Pol Pot turned it into Security Prison 21 (S-21), where of the nearly 20,000 who passed through its satanic doors only a dozen survived. It was just one of scores of such hellholes where prisoners were beaten, tortured with electric shocks, burned with searing hot metal and water-boarded among other torments.