NEW YORK - Violent Muslim, Christian and Jewish extremists invoke the same
rhetoric of "good" and "evil" and the best way to fight them is to tackle the
problems that drive people to extremism, according to a report obtained by
Reuters.
Female Palestinian would-be suicide bombers attend a news
conference in Gaza May 21, 2007. [Reuters]
|
It said extremists from each of
the three faiths often have tangible grievances - social, economic or political
- but they invoke religion to recruit followers and to justify breaking the law,
including killing civilians and members of their own faith.
The report was commissioned by security think tank EastWest Institute ahead
of a conference on Thursday in New York titled "Towards a Common Response: New
Thinking Against Violent Extremism and Radicalization." The report will be
updated and published after the conference.
The authors compared ideologies, recruitment tactics and responses to violent
religious extremists in three places - Muslims in Britain, Jews in Israel and
Christians in the United States.
"What is striking ... is the similarity of the worldview and the rationale
for violence," the report said.
It said that while Muslims were often perceived by the West as "the principal
perpetrators of terrorist activity," there are violent extremists of other
faiths. Always focusing on Muslim extremists alienates mainstream Muslims, it
said.
The report said it was important to examine the root causes of violence by
those of different faiths, without prejudice.
"It is, in each situation, a case of 'us' versus 'them,"' it said. "That God
did not intend for civilization to take its current shape; and that the state
had failed the righteous and genuine members of that nation, and therefore God's
law supersedes man's law."
Common worldview
This worldview was common to ultranationalist Jews, like Yigal Amir, who
killed Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, to US groups like
Christian Identity, which is linked to white supremacist groups, and to other
Christian groups that attacked abortion providers, it said.
"Extremists should never be dismissed simply as evil," said the report.
"Trying to engage in a competition with religious extremists over who can offer
a simpler answer to complex problems will be a losing proposition every time."
Harvard University lecturer Jessica Stern, the conference's keynote speaker,
spent five years interviewing extremists for her 2003 book "Terror in the Name
of God: Why Religious Militants Kill."
She said it was dangerous for US President George W. Bush to use terms such
as "crusade" or "ridding the world of evil."
"It really is falling into the same trap that these terrorists fall into,
black and white thinking," Stern told Reuters on Wednesday. "It's very exciting
to extremists to hear an American president talking that way."
Stern said to compare violent extremists from the three faiths was not to
suggest that the threat was the same.
"These are not equivalent," she said. "The problems arising from Christian or
Jewish extremism are not threatening to the world in the same way as Muslim
extremism is."
Conference organizers say their aim is to develop a nonpartisan strategy to
combat religious extremism.
The guest list includes representatives of the State Department, Homeland
Security, the New York Police Department and the UN missions of Israel, Iraq,
Britain and the Organization of the Islamic Conference.