Not in God's Name (28 page)
Authors: Jonathan Sacks
Terror is not a justifiable means to an acceptable end, because it does not end. Terrorists eventually turn against their own people. Walzer again: ‘The terrorists aim to rule, and murder is their method. They have their own internal police, death squads, disappearances. They begin by killing or intimidating those comrades who stand in their way, and they proceed to do the same, if they can, among the people they claim to represent. If terrorists are successful, they rule tyrannically, and their people bear, without consent, the costs of the terrorists’ rule.’
9
There is no route from terror to a free society.
Nor is it the cry of despair of the weak. The weak have different weapons. They know that justice is on their side. That is why the prophets used not weapons but words. It is why Gandhi and Martin Luther King preferred non-violent civil disobedience, knowing that it spoke to the world’s conscience, not its fears. True need never needs terror to make its voice heard.
The deliberate targeting of the innocent is an evil means to an evil end, to achieve a solution that does violence to the humanity and integrity of those we oppose. To give religious justification to it is to commit sacrilege against the God of Abraham, who is the God of life. Altruistic evil is still evil, and not all the piety in the world can purify it. Abraham’s God is the power that rescues the powerless, the God of glory who turns the radiance of his face to those without worldly glory: the poor, the destitute, the lonely, the marginal, the outsiders of the world. God hears the cry of the unheard, and so, if we follow him, do we.
Now is the time for Jews, Christians and Muslims to say what they failed to say in the past: We are all children of Abraham. And whether we are Isaac or Ishmael, Jacob or Esau, Leah or Rachel, Joseph or his brothers, we are precious in the sight of God. We are blessed. And to be blessed, no one has to be cursed. God’s love does not work that way.
Today God is calling us, Jew, Christian and Muslim, to let go of hate and the preaching of hate, and live at last as brothers and sisters, true to our faith and a blessing to others regardless of their faith, honouring God’s name by honouring his image, humankind.
1
1.
Joint report by the BBC World Service and the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation (ICSR), King’s College London, December 2014.
2.
‘Islamic State Crucifying, Burying Children Alive in Iraq’, Reuters, Geneva, 5 February 2015.
3.
Lord Alton, speech, House of Lords, 24 July 2014. I am indebted to Lord Alton for many of the examples cited here.
4.
Angela Shanahan, ‘No Going Back for Egypt’s Converted Copts’,
The Australian
, 21 May 2011.
5.
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-30883058
.
6.
Aid to the Church in Need,
Religious Freedom in the World Report 2014
.
7.
Sunday Times
, 16 November 2014.
8.
Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679),
Of Man, Being the First Part of Leviathan
, Part 1, ch. 11, ‘On the Difference of Manners’, Harvard Classics, 1909–14.
9.
C. Phillips and A. Axelrod,
Encyclopedia of Wars
, New York, Facts on File, 2004.
10.
G. Austin, T. Kranock and T. Oommen,
God and War: An Audit and an Exploration
, BBC, 2003.
11.
See H. Tajfel and J.C. Turner, ‘The Social Identity Theory of Intergroup Behaviour’, in S. Worchel and W.G. Austin (eds.),
Psychology of Intergroup Relations
, Chicago, Nelson-Hall, 1986, pp. 7–24. See also Donald M. Taylor and Janet R. Doria, ‘Self-serving and Group-serving Bias in Attribution’,
Journal of Social Psychology
, 113.2, April 1981, pp. 201–11.
12.
Moisés Naím,
The End of Power
, New York, Basic Books, 2013, p. 5.
2
1.
Charles Darwin,
The Descent of Man
, vol. 1, London, John Murray, 1871, p. 163.
2.
Richard Sosis, ‘Religion and Intragroup Cooperation: Preliminary Results of a Comparative Analysis of Utopian Communities,’
Cross-Cultural Research
, 34.1, 2000, pp. 70–87; Richard Sosis and Candace Alcorta, ‘Signaling, Solidarity, and the Sacred: The Evolution of Religious Behavior’,
Evolutionary Anthropology: Issues, News, and Reviews
, 12.6, 2003, pp. 264–74; Richard Sosis and Eric R. Bressler, ‘Cooperation and Commune Longevity: A Test of the Costly Signaling Theory of Religion,’
Cross-Cultural Research
, 37.2, 2003, pp. 211–39.
3.
Nicholas K. Rauh,
The Sacred Bonds of Commerce: Religion, Economy, and Trade Society at Hellenistic Roman Delos, 166–87
BC
, Amsterdam, J.C. Gieben, 1993, p. 129.
4.
Cited in Ara Norenzayan,
Big Gods: How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict
, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 2013, pp. 66–7.
5.
Ronald Inglehart and Wayne E. Baker, ‘Modernization, Cultural Change, and the Persistence of Traditional Values,’
American Sociological Review
, 65.1, 2000, pp. 19–51.
6.
John Locke,
Letter Concerning Toleration
, Indianapolis, Hackett, 1983, p. 51. Note that Locke would also have denied granting civil rights to Catholics, on the ground that their loyalty lay elsewhere (to the Pope), a charge similar to that raised by some antisemites today against Jews, in relation to the State of Israel.
7.
Jonathan Haidt,
The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion
, New York, Pantheon Books, 2012, p. 151.
8.
Norenzayan,
Big Gods
, p. 153.
9.
Eric Hoffer,
The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements
, New York, Harper and Row, 1951; Scott Atran,
Talking to the Enemy: Violent Extremism, Sacred Values, and What It Means to Be Human
, London, Allen Lane, 2010.
10.
Michael Ignatieff,
The Warrior’s Honor: Ethnic War and the Modern Conscience
, New York, Metropolitan Books, 1997, p. 188.
3
1.
Sam Keen,
Faces of the Enemy: Reflections of the Hostile Imagination
, New York, HarperSanFrancisco, 1992.
2.
Jeffrey B. Russell,
The Prince of Darkness
, Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 1989, p. 20.
3.
Ibid., p. 19.
4.
Richard Dawkins,
The God Delusion
, London, Bantam Press, 2006, p. 31.
5.
Richard Beck and Sara Taylor, ‘The Emotional Burden of Monotheism: Satan, Theodicy, and Relationship with God’,
Journal of Psychology and Theology
, 36.3, 2008, pp. 151–60.
6.
On this, see e.g., Claudia Koonz,
The Nazi Conscience
, Cambridge, MA, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003, pp. 46–68.
7.
Ingo Müller,
Hitler’s Justice: The Courts of the Third Reich
, trans. Deborah Lucas Schneider, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1991, pp. 92–6.
8.
See Robert Jay Lifton,
The Nazi Doctors
, New York, Basic Books, 1986, p. 18.
9.
John Weiss,
Ideology of Death: Why the Holocaust Happened in Germany
, Chicago, Ivan R. Dee, 1996, p. 296.
10.
Mark Roseman, The
Villa, the Lake, the Meeting: Wannsee and the Final Solution
, London, Allen Lane, 2002, p. 67.
11.
George Browder,
Hitler’s Enforcers
, New York, Oxford University Press, 1996, pp. 136–8.
12.
Julian Benda,
The Treason of the Intellectuals
(
Le Trahison des Clercs
), trans. Richard Aldington, New York, Norton, 1928, p. 27.
13.
Jeffrey Herf,
The Jewish Enemy
, Cambridge, MA, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008, p. 38.
14.
Ibid., p. 121.
15.
Koonz,
The Nazi Conscience
, p. 20.
16.
Ibid., p. 24.
17.
Ibid., p. 25.
18.
Ibid., p. 130. Note that the mass killing began with the murder of the handicapped – people suffering from what were literally mental or physical defects, and who were therefore regarded as ‘useless eaters’ and
lebensunwertes Leben
. This idea was not invented by the Nazis but taken up by them after its invention by ‘progressive’ figures such as Karl Binding and Alfred Hoche in their 1920 book,
The Permission of
Destroying Lives Unworthy of Life
. (I am grateful to Robert P. George for this note.)
19.
Lifton,
The Nazi Doctors
, p. 16.
20.
Primo Levy,
If This is a Man
, London, Abacus, 1987, pp. 111–12.
21.
Koonz,
The Nazi Conscience
, p. 137.
22.
Cited in Weiss,
Ideology of Death
, p. 325.
23.
Herf,
The Jewish Enemy
, p. 5.
24.
Vamik Volkan,
Blind Trust
, Charlottesville, VA, Pitchstone Publishing, 2004, p. 136.
25.
Ibid., p. 49.
26.
Herf,
The Jewish Enemy
, p. 152.
27.
Ibid., p. 87.
28.
Ibid., p. 131.
29.
Wolff Heinrichsdorff,
Die Judenfrage
, 18 September 1939.
30.
Herf,
The Jewish Enemy
, p. 69.
31.
Ibid., p. 77.
32.
Ibid., p. 121.
33.
Ibid., p. 98.
34.
Max Domarus (ed.),
Hitler: Reden und Proklamationen
, vol. 2, Neustadt, Schmidt, 1962, p. 1055.
35.
Joseph Goebbels, ‘Wer will den Krieg’,
Die Zeit ohne Beispiel, Reden und Aufsatze aus den Jahren 1939/40/41
, pp. 93–5.
36.
Herf,
The Jewish Enemy
, p. 64.
37.
Ibid., pp. 255–6.
38.
Mein Kampf
, ch. 2, quoted in Koonz,
The Nazi Conscience
, p. 17.
39.
Cited in, e.g., Lucy Dawidowicz,
A Holocaust Reader
, New York, Behrman, 1976, pp. 120ff.
40.
Dov Shilansky,
Musulman
, Tel Aviv, Menora, 1962. I am indebted for this reference to Emil Fackenheim,
To Mend the World
, New York, Schocken, 1982, p. 186.
41.
Herf,
The Jewish Enemy
, pp. 261–2.
42.
E.H. Gombrich,
Myth and Reality in German War-Time Broadcasts
, London, Athlone, 1970, p. 23.
4
1.
http://www.memri.org/clip_transcript/en/4641.xhtml
.
2.
http://www.memri.org/clip/en/0/0/0/0/0/0/4666.xhtml
.
3.
http://www.memritv.org/clip_transcript/en/4498.xhtml
.
4.
Jakarta Globe
, 21 January 2010.
5.
Tarek Fatah,
The Jew Is Not My Enemy
, Toronto, McClelland and Stewart, 2010, p. xxi.
6.
Reported in Turkish daily paper
Aksam
, 12 September 2004.
7.
Quoted in Gabriel Schoenfeld,
The Return of Anti-Semitism
, San Francisco, Encounter Books, 2004, p. 13.
8.
Bernard Lewis, ‘The Roots of Muslim Rage’,
The Atlantic
, 1 September 1990.
9.
Voltaire,
Oeuvres Complètes
, 1756, vol. 7, ch. 1; text in Paul R. Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz (eds.),
The Jew in the Modern World: A Documentary History
, New York, Oxford University Press, 1980, pp. 252–3.
10.
Immanuel Kant,
Streit
, in
Werke
, 11:321, cited in Paul Lawrence Rose,
Revolutionary Antisemitism in Germany from Kant to Wagner
, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1990.
11.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel,
Early Theological Writings
, p. 201, cited in Rose,
Revolutionary Antisemitism
, p. 111.
12.
Johann Gottlieb Fichte, ‘On the French Revolution’, in Mendes-Flohr and Reinharz (eds.),
The Jew in the Modern World
, p. 257; Poliakov,
The History of Antisemitism
, p. 180.
13.
Accounts can be found in R. Po-chia Hsia,
The Myth of Ritual Murder: Jews and Magic in Reformation Germany
, New Haven, CT, Yale University Press, 1988; Hermann Strack,
The Jew and Human Sacrifice; Human Blood and Jewish Ritual, an Historical and Sociological Inquiry
, trans. Henry Blanchamp, New York, Blom, 1971; Joshua Trachtenberg,
The Devil and the Jews: The Medieval Conception of the Jew and its Relation to Modern Antisemitism
, Philadelphia, Jewish Publication Society, 1993; Alan Dundes (ed.),
The Blood Libel Legend: A Casebook in Anti-Semitic Folklore
, Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 1991; Ronald Florence,
Blood Libel: The Damascus Affair of 1840
, Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 2004.
14.
They include a work by a French cleric, Abbé Barruel, blaming the French Revolution on the Order of Templars; a second written by a German, E.E. Eckert, about Freemasons; and the third, a fictional dialogue between Montesquieu and Machiavelli, written by Maurice Joly in 1864.
15.
The classic historical account is Norman Cohn,
Warrant for Genocide
, London, Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1967. See also Hadassa Ben-Itto,
The Lie that Wouldn’t Die: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
, London, Vallentine Mitchell, 2005.
16.
Goebbels, entry for 13 May 1943,
Die Tagebucher von Joseph Goebbels
, 11/8, pp. 287–91.
17.
Robert Wistrich,
A Lethal Obsession
, New York, Random House, 2010, p. 792.
18.
Judith Apter Klinghoffer, ‘Blood Libel’,
History News Network, 19
December 2006.
19.
A survey of reactions can be found in MEMRI
Inquiry and Analysis Series, No. 114
, ‘Arab Press Debates Antisemitic Egyptian Series “Knight Without a Horse” – Part III’, 10 December 2002.
20.
MEMRI
Inquiry and Analysis Series, No. 610
, 18 November 2003.
21.
http://www.centerforsecuritypolicy.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Explanatory_Memoradum.pdf
. The document is cited in Andrew C. McCarthy,
The Grand Jihad
, New York, Encounter, 2010; Lorenzo Vidino,
The New Muslim Brotherhood in the West
, New York, Columbia University Press, 2010; Jan McDaniel,
Irredentist Islam and Multicultural America
, 2008; Thomas M. Pick,
Home-grown Terrorism
, Amsterdam, IOS Press, 2009; and Zeyno Baran,
Citizen Islam
, New York, Bloomsbury Academic, 2011.
22.
Bernard Lewis,
Semites and Anti-Semites: An Inquiry into Conflict and Prejudice
, New York, Norton, 1986, p. 259.