Not in God's Name (27 page)

My point is that we still have not understood what antisemitism is and the role it plays in the legitimation of evil. It is the first warning sign of a culture in a state of cognitive collapse. It gives rise to that complex of psychological regressions that lead to evil on a monumental scale: splitting, projection, pathological dualism, dehumanisation, demonisation, a sense of victimhood, and the use of a scapegoat to evade moral responsibility. It allows a culture to blame others for its condition without ever coming to terms with it themselves. The antisemitism flooding through the Arab and Islamic world today is as widespread and virulent as it was in Europe between 1880 and 1945, and it is being disseminated worldwide through the Internet.

Antisemitism is only contingently related to Jews. The real targets of Christians in the age of the Crusades were the Muslims, not the Jews. The targets of Nazi Germany were the European nations that had defeated it in the First World War and humiliated it thereafter. The real targets of the Islamists are secular Islamic regimes and the West, especially those who defeated the Ottoman Empire in 1922 and divided up its spoils.

Jews, however, played an essential function in the group psychology of these movements. By fulfilling the role of the scapegoat, they could be blamed for everything bad that happened to the group. As the mysterious, omnipotent, all-embracing enemy, they united the group, silenced dissent, distracted the mind from painful truths and enabled otherwise utterly incompatible groups to become allies. Today, for example, Islamist groups find it hard to win Western support for the imposition of Sharia law, the beheading of captives, the forced conversion of Christians or
the sentencing to death of blasphemers. But when they criticise Israel, they find they no longer stand alone. This brings within the fold such strange fellow travellers as the far right, the antiglobalisation left, and some notoriously politicised human rights organisations, surely the oddest coalition ever assembled in support of people practising terror to bring about theocracy.

Note that antisemitism, to succeed, must always disguise its motives. It did so in the Middle Ages by accusing Jews of killing Christian children and spreading the plague. It did so in Nazi Germany in terms drawn from medicine. Jews were the cancer in the midst of the Aryan nation. Today it does so by blaming Israel or Jews, in classic Blood Libel/
Protocols of the Elders of Zion
style, for controlling America, dominating Europe, manipulating the economy, owning the media, perpetrating 9/11 and all subsequent terrorist attacks, creating AIDS, Ebola, the 2004 tsunami and global warming.

In the Middle Ages Jews were hated for their religion, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries for their race, and today for their nation state, Israel. In the West, antisemitism is now usually disguised as anti-Zionism. In Arabic, the rhetoric is usually more honest: it speaks openly of Jews. But the targets of Islamist terror in the West – the synagogue guard in Copenhagen, Jewish shoppers in a kosher supermarket in Paris, visitors to the Jewish Museum in Brussels, and so on – were Jewish, not Israeli. The reason is simple.
A scapegoat must be someone you can kill without risk of reprisal
. Israel can respond. Jews outside Israel cannot. Indeed, that is one compelling reason why Israel exists. It is the only thing protecting Jews from being the scapegoat-victims of the world for another thousand years.

No one I know confuses antisemitism with legitimate criticism of Israel. Jews believe that no human, certainly no nation, is above criticism. Judaism is one of the world’s most self-critical cultures. The Hebrew Bible is an extended essay in self-criticism. Antisemitism is not criticism. It is the denial of Jews’ collective right to exist. It changes form over time. In the 1930s,
antisemites chanted ‘Jews to Palestine’. Today they chant ‘Jews out of Palestine’. As Israeli novelist Amos Oz put it: They don’t want us to be here. They don’t want us to be there. They don’t want us to be.

The significance of antisemitism, though, is its effect not on Jews but on antisemites. It allows them to see themselves as victims. It enables them to abdicate moral responsibility. Whatever is wrong in the world, ‘It isn’t our fault, it’s theirs. They did it to us. After all, they control the world.’ The result is that hate paralyses the mind and perpetuates the very failures that caused defeat or underachievement in the first place. Antisemitism did not help Christians win the Crusades, or the Nazis win the Second World War. It will not help Muslims in the Middle East, Africa and Asia build societies that will honour God and his image in humankind. Those who hate Jews, hate freedom. Those who seek to eliminate Jews, seek to eliminate freedom. Antisemitism is a sickness that destroys all who harbour it. Hate harms the hated but it destroys the hater. There is no exception.

Can the world be changed? The answer is yes, and the proof is one of the most uplifting stories in the religious history of humankind: the changed relationship between Jews and Christians after the Holocaust. Here there are many heroes, Christians of moral courage, deep faith and surpassing humanity who realised that, after that terrible denouement, something must change. Among these, special praise must go to a series of popes: John XXIII who began the process leading to Vatican II and
Nostra Aetate
, Paul VI who completed it, and John Paul II and Benedict XVI, both of whom continued it in their own way.

Greater even than these, however, is the current Pope, Francis I. On 12 September 2013, in an open letter to the editor of an Italian newspaper,
La Repubblica
, he wrote, ‘God’s fidelity to the close covenant with Israel never failed, and…through the
terrible trials of these centuries, the Jews have kept their faith in God. And for this we shall never be sufficiently grateful to them as Church but also as humanity.’ This may be the first time that a pope has publicly recognised that in staying true to their faith, Jews were being loyal to God, not faithless to him. That is a statement capable of changing the world. The Church, in the West, has begun to overcome its sibling rivalry with Judaism. If it can happen between Christians and Jews, it can happen between them and Islam also.

Today Jews, Christians and Muslims must stand together, in defence of humanity, the sanctity of life, religious freedom and the honour of God himself. The real clash of the twenty-first century will not be
between
civilisations or religions, but
within
them. It will be between those who accept and those who reject the separation of religion and power. Those who believe that political problems have religious solutions are deluding themselves as well as failing to understand who Abraham was and what he represented. The confusion of religion and politics was what Abraham and his heirs opposed, not what they endorsed.

What then must we do? We must put the same long-term planning into strengthening religious freedom as was put into the spread of religious extremism. Radical Islam was a movement fuelled by Western petrodollars, used by oil-producing countries to fund networks of schools, madrassahs, university professorships and departments, dedicated to Wahhabi or Salafist interpretations of Islam, thus marginalising the more open, gracious, intellectual and mystical tendencies in Islam that were in the past the source of its greatness. It was a strategy remarkable in its long time-horizons, its precision, patience, detail and dedication. If moderation and religious freedom are to prevail, they will require no less. We must train a generation of religious leaders and educators who embrace the world in its diversity, and sacred texts in their maximal generosity.

There must be an international campaign against the teaching and preaching of hate. Most Western countries have anti-racist
legislation that has proved virtually powerless against the vitriol spread through the social media. Education in many countries continues to be a disgrace. If children continue to be taught that non-believers are destined for hell and that Christians and Jews are the greater and lesser Satan, if radio, television, websites and social media pour out a non-stop stream of paranoia and incitement, then Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, with its commitment to religious freedom, will mean nothing. All the military interventions in the world will not stop the violence.

We need to recover the absolute values that make Abrahamic monotheism the humanising force it has been at its best: the sanctity of life, the dignity of the individual, the twin imperatives of justice and compassion, the moral responsibility of the rich for the poor, the commands to love the neighbour and stranger, the insistence on peaceful modes of conflict resolution and respectful listening to the other side of a case, forgiving the injuries of the past and focusing instead on building a future in which the children of the world, of all colours, faith and races, can live together in grace and peace. These are the ideals on which Jews, Christians and Muslims can converge, widening their embrace to include those of other faiths and none. This does not mean that human nature will change, or that politics will cease to be an arena of conflict. All it means is that politics will remain politics, and not become religion.

We need also to insist on the simplest moral principle of all, the first (as we saw in
chapter 2
) to be confirmed by computer simulation: the principle of reciprocal altruism, otherwise known as Tit-for-Tat. This says: as you behave to others, so will others behave to you.
If you seek respect, you must give respect. If you ask for tolerance, you must demonstrate tolerance. If you wish not to be offended, then you must make sure you do not offend
. As John Locke said, ‘It is unreasonable that any should have a free liberty of their religion who do not acknowledge it as a principle of theirs that nobody ought to persecute or molest another
because he dissents from him in religion.’
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This principle alone, properly applied, would have banned at the outset the preachers-of-hate who radicalised so many impressionable minds in the West, turning them into murderers in God’s name.

Wars are won by weapons, but it takes ideas to win a peace. This book has been about one such idea: an alternative to the sibling rivalry that has been a source of fratricide and religious violence throughout history. Sibling rivalry as a contest for divine love is a bad idea and wrongly diminishes Abraham’s God. The truth that shines through the Genesis texts is that we are each blessed by God, each precious in his sight, each with our role in his story, each with our own song in the music of humankind. To be a child of Abraham is to learn to respect the other children of Abraham even if their way is not ours, their covenant not ours, their understanding of God different from ours. We know that we are loved. That must be enough. To insist that being loved entails that others be unloved is to fail to understand love itself.
⁶

It has also been about the dual covenant in Genesis, first with Noah, then with Abraham. This is the best solution I know to the potential violence implicit in the fact that we derive our identities from groups. Groups conflict, so that the altruism we show to the people like us goes hand in hand with the aggression we show to the people not like us, and both are deeply embedded in human nature. That is why the great attempts to escape from identity – into either universalism or individualism – have always failed, whether they were religious or secular. Sooner or later the tribes return, fully armed and breathing fire. The only adequate alternative, proposed by Genesis precisely as God’s protest against violence, is to say that he has made two covenants with us, one in our common humanity, the other in our specific identity. The first is about the universality of justice, the second about the particularity of love, and in that order.
Our common humanity precedes our religious differences
. That must be the basis of any Abrahamic theology capable of defeating the false god of violence and the idolatry of the pursuit of power.

And yes, there are hard texts. There are passages in the sacred scriptures of each of the Abrahamic monotheisms which, interpreted literally, can lead to hatred, cruelty and war. But Judaism, Christianity and Islam all contain interpretive traditions that in the past have read them in the larger context of co-existence, respect for difference and the pursuit of peace, and can do so today. Fundamentalism – text without context, and application without interpretation – is not faith but an aberration of faith.

No soul was ever saved by hate. No truth was ever proved by violence. No redemption was ever brought by holy war. No religion won the admiration of the world by its capacity to inflict suffering on its enemies. Despite the fact that these things have been endorsed in their time by sincere religious believers, they are a travesty of faith, and until we learn this, religion will remain one of the great threats to the peace of the world.

The crimes of religion have one thing in common. They involve making God in our image instead of letting him remake us in his. The highest truth does not cast its mantle over our lowest instincts – the search for power, the urge for conquest, the use of religious language to spread the aura of sanctity over ignoble crimes. These are forms of imperialism, not faith.

Terror is the epitome of idolatry. Its language is force, its principle to kill those with whom you disagree. That is the oldest and most primitive form of conflict resolution. It is the way of Cain. If anything is evil, terror is. In suicide bombings and other terrorist attacks, the victims are chosen at random, arbitrarily and indiscriminately. Terrorists, writes Michael Walzer, ‘are like killers on a rampage, except that their rampage is not just expressive of rage or madness; the rage is purposeful and programmatic. It aims at a general vulnerability: Kill these people in order to terrify those.’
⁷

The victims of terror are not only the dead and injured, but the very values on which a free society is built: trust, security, civil
liberty, tolerance, the willingness of countries to open their doors to asylum seekers, the gracious safety of public places. Religiously motivated terror desecrates and defames religion itself. It is sacrilege against God and the life he endowed with his image. Islam, like Judaism, counts a single life as a universe. Suicide and murder are forbidden in the Abrahamic faiths. Judaism, Christianity and Islam all know the phenomenon of martyrdom – but martyrdom means being willing to die for your faith. It does not mean being willing to kill for your faith.
⁸