It
is almost impossible to say something about the U.N.-sponsored Conference on
Racism without offending someone. But I am not only going to do just that, with
some trepidation, but to also say something about religious intolerance as well.
The
Racism conference was not about "racism," at least not as we in
America have understood the term for more than half a century. In the U.S.A., we
have defined racism to refer to discrimination within a country against minority
ethnic groups, usually by the majority ethnic group. That is what we mean when
we refer to white discrimination against blacks or Chicanos or American Indians.
The
main subjects of debate at the U.N. conference, by contrast, focused on armed
conflict, such as in the Middle East, and past colonialism and slavery practiced
by the European nations and (former) colonies against African peoples and
nations. The conference thus treated racism as issues between nations, not as
problems within nations. The conference essentially ignored present-day problems
of racism within countries, such as those of minority discrimination in Japan,
European and U.S. discrimination against foreign immigrants, and caste
discrimination in India. And, since this is a column on religion, it should also
be noted that not a breath was uttered about religious intolerance, even when it
combined with racial differences.
The
escalating conflict between the Palestinians and the Israelis provides a case in
point. This decades-old undeclared war consists of two peoples living on and
claiming the same territory. While the two sides nearly reached an agreement a
year ago, which would have resolved many of their disputes and given more
territory to the Palestinians, they failed. Since then, there has been an
escalating tit-for-tat exchange regularly resulting in death or wounded victims.
This conflict, however sad and horrible for both sides, is not racism, it's a
war.
The
grounds for this conflict, however, are both racist and religious. While
conference delegates and the news media frequently pointed to the Holocaust,
Hitler's racist killing of six million Jews (half the world's Jewish
population), as the main factor in the migration of Jews to Israel, the primary
motivation came from Christian theology and centuries of its application.
Many
of the New Testament comments about Jews, particularly those from Paul, assume
that Jews will convert to Christianity en masse, once the truth of Jesus the
Messiah is made known to them. The problem is that such were openly living
within the various Christian empires, nations and cities of Europe. By and large
they lived as foreigners, without legally-defined rights even within nations
where they had resided for centuries. They were subjected to widespread
discrimination and harassment, despite the success of a few individuals, and
often were subject to mob violence. During the Crusades, the Christian crusaders
killed, robbed and raped more Jews in Europe than Moslems in the Near East. So
for centuries, European Christians largely failed to provide for Jews a place
within European society.
So
Hitler's Holocaust was simply the last straw. Although tens of thousands of Jews
had migrated to Israel prior to World War II, the homeless conditions of nearly
all Jews that had been living the in the war area and the allies' inability to
address their situation in many ways forced those Jews still alive to emigrate
to the Israel.
So although we look at the Middle East conflict today and think "those Jews and Arabs just cannot get along," we need to remember that the reason for the conflict is that Christian Europe failed to make welcome the Jews that had lived there for centuries. In the end, European Jews were either killed or exported out of Europe; only a tiny fraction of Jews remain in Europe. Large numbers of Jews went to Israel and became the backbone of the new nation of Israel. But we should also recall that large numbers of them also came to America, where they were welcomed with other immigrants and became valuable members of our nation.