Middle East and North Africa

Lord Sacks Excerpts

Thursday 30th October 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Sacks (CB)]

My Lords, I, too, thank the noble Lord, Lord Risby, for initiating this important debate. At the outset I declare an interest: I am a Jew. Israel is therefore for me the place where my people were born almost 4,000 years ago; the place to which Abraham and Sarah travelled; where Amos voiced his vision of social justice and Isaiah dreamt of a world at peace; where David composed the Psalms and Solomon built the Temple. This had consequences not only for Jews but also for Christians and Muslims, who claim Abraham as their ancestor in faith, and whose God they take as their own.

This had tragic repercussions throughout the Middle Ages, because Christians and Muslims claimed, each in their own way, to have replaced Jews as the people of God and thus as heirs to the Holy Land. The otherwise saintly Augustine declared that Jews were cursed with the fate of Cain, destined to be restless wanderers on earth without a home. Islam held that any land that ever came under Muslim rule was henceforth and forever Dar Al Islam: that is, land that rightly belongs to the Umma, the Muslim people, with any other rule being illegitimate. On both of these theologies, Jews had no right to their ancestral home.

A half-century ago, these theologies would have been considered irrelevant. The West had moved on. After a century of religious wars following the Reformation, it recognised the need for the secularisation of power. This allowed the United Nations, in the partition vote of 1947, to grant Jews the right to a nation state of their own after 2,000 years of exile and persecution. Eventually, there were peace agreements with Egypt and Jordan and an intensive process with the Palestinians. When power is secularised, peace is possible.

Today, though, throughout the Middle East and parts of Asia and Africa, a seismic shift is taking place in the opposite direction. People are desecularising. They feel betrayed by secular nationalist Governments who failed to deliver prosperity and national pride. They consider the national boundaries imposed by colonial powers to be artificial and obsolete. They are uninspired by the secular culture of the West, with its maximum of choice and minimum of meaning. They have come to believe that salvation lies in a return to the Islam that bestrode the narrow world like a colossus for the better part of 1,000 years.

Although their faith is hostile to modernity, they sometimes understand modernity better than its own creators in the West. They know that because of the internet, YouTube and the social media, communication —indeed politics—has gone global; they also know that the great monotheisms are the most powerful global communities in the world, far broader and deeper in their reach than any nation state. The religious radicals are offering young people the chance to fight and die for their faith, winning glory on earth and immortality in heaven. They have started recruiting in the West and they have only just begun.

When ancient theologies are used for modern political ends, they speak a very dangerous language indeed. So, for example, Hamas and Hezbollah, both self-defined as religious movements, refuse to recognise the legitimacy of the state of Israel within any boundaries whatever and seek only its complete destruction.

The Islamists also know that the only way they can win the sympathy of the West is by demonising Israel. They know that you cannot win support for ISIS, Boko Haram or Islamic Jihad, but if you can blame Israel you will gain the support of academics, unions and parts of the media, and you will distract attention from the massacres in Syria and Iraq, the slow descent of other countries into chaos and the ethnic cleansing of Christians throughout the region. They are thus repeating the very failure of the regimes they have risen against, which for 50 years suppressed dissent by demonising Israel as the cause of everything wrong in the Arab or Islamic world. When you blame others for your failures you harm not only those others but yourself and your people. To be free, you have to let go of hate. If you let hate speech infect the West, as has already happened in some of our campuses, prisons and schools, then our freedom, too, will be at risk.

I and the vast majority of the Jewish community care deeply about the future of the Palestinians. We want Palestinian children, no less than Israeli children, to have a future of peace, prosperity, freedom and hope. That is why we oppose those who teach Palestinian children to hate those with whom they will one day have to live. We oppose those who take money given for humanitarian aid and use it to buy weapons and dig tunnels to take the region back to a dark age of barbarism.

More generally, we say in the name of the God of Abraham—the almighty, merciful and compassionate God—that the religion in whose name atrocities are being carried out, innocent people butchered and beheaded, children treated as slaves, civilians turned into human shields and young people into weapons of self-destruction, is not the Islam that once earned the admiration of the world: nor is its God the God of Abraham. It was Nietzsche, not the prophets, who worshipped the will to power. It was Machiavelli, not sacred scripture, who taught that it is better to be feared than to be loved.

Every religion must wrestle with its dark angels, and so today must we: Jews, Christians and Muslims alike. For we are all children of Abraham, and only when we make space for one another as brothers and sisters will we redeem the world from darkness and walk together in the light of God.

Religion in the United Kingdom

Lord Sacks Excerpts

Thursday 22nd November 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Sacks]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Singh, for initiating this important debate, for his wise and gentle contribution to the religious life of this country and for the part he has played as a founding member and vice-chair of The Interfaith Network for the UK, which this year celebrates its 25th anniversary. It has helped to ensure that religious groups that may elsewhere find themselves in conflict meet here in Britain in friendship and peace. This is a great blessing to us all.

Religion is often misunderstood in secular times. It is seen as a strange set of beliefs and idiosyncratic rituals, both of which we could lose without loss. A better way of understanding religion, even from the outside, is as a sustained education in a life lived beyond the self. Many—perhaps all—of the world’s great religions teach their adherents the importance of making sacrifices for the sake of others, through charity, hospitality, visiting the sick, helping the needy, giving comfort to those in crisis and bringing moments of moral beauty into what might otherwise be harsh and lonely lives. Religion is the redemption of our solitude.

Long before these functions were taken over by the state, religious groups, here and elsewhere, were building schools and hospitals and networks of support. According to the extensive research carried out by Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam, regular worshippers today, in America and Britain, are more likely than others to give to charity—regardless of whether the charity is religious or secular—do voluntary work, give money to a homeless person, donate blood, help a neighbour with the housework, spend time with someone who is feeling depressed or help someone find a job. They are more active citizens and significantly more likely to belong to community organisations and neighbourhood groups. They get involved, turn up and lead.

Not for a moment do I say that to be good you need to be religious. However, religiosity as measured by attendance at a house of worship turns out to be a better predictor of altruism and empathy than education, age, income, gender or race. If this is so, the social implications are immense. Just as religions were building a welfare state before there was a welfare state, so now, and in the future, they may help sustain a welfare society in areas where the need for help is greater than the ability of Governments to provide it. They act as a counter voice to the siren song of a culture that sometimes seems to value self over others, rights over responsibilities, getting more than giving, consumption more than contribution, and success more than service to others. I therefore commend the Government for their support in bringing Britain’s many faiths together in acts of volunteering. I urge them to consider further ways of valuing the formidable altruistic energies of our faith communities for the good of all of us together.

Christians in the Middle East

Lord Sacks Excerpts

Friday 9th December 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Sacks]

My Lords, I must begin with an apology for the fact that I must infringe the convention of this House by not being here at the end of this debate. As darkness falls early in these winter months, the Jewish Sabbath enters very early and I must have ceased work in time to observe it. I hope that your Lordships will understand that, given the topic, I felt it important to be here in support of the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury, and to thank him for his wise and moving words.

It was Martin Luther King who said:

“In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends”.

That is why I felt that I could not be silent today. As a Jew in Christian Britain, I know how much I, my late parents and, indeed, the whole British Jewish community owe to this great Christian nation, which gave us the right and the freedom to live our faith without fear. Shall we not therefore as Jews stand up for the right of Christians in other parts of the world to live their faith without fear?

And fear is what many Christians in the Middle East feel today. We have already heard today about the plight of Coptic Christians in Egypt, of Maronite Christians in Hezbollah-controlled areas in Lebanon, of the vast exodus of Christians from Iraq and of the concern of Christians in Syria as to what might happen there should there be further destabilisation. In the past year, we have heard of churches set on fire, of a suicide bombing that cost the lives of 21 Christians as they were leaving a church in Cairo, of violence and intimidation and of the mass flight of Christians, especially from Egypt. I believe that we must all protest this series of assaults—some physical, others psychological —on Christian communities in the Middle East, many of which, as the most reverend Primate has reminded us, have long, long histories. I, and I hope all other Jews in Britain, stand in solidarity with our Christian brothers and sisters, as we do with all those who suffer because of their faith.

I have followed the fate of Christians in the Middle East for years, appalled at what is happening and surprised and distressed by the fact that it is not more widely known. We know how complex are the history and politics of the Middle East and how fraught with conflicting passions, but there are two points that I wish to make that deserve reflection.

First, on the Arab spring, which has heightened the fear of Christians in many of the countries affected, we make a great intellectual mistake in the West when we assume that democracy is, in and of itself, a step towards freedom. Usually, that is the case, but sometimes it is not. As Alexis de Tocqueville and John Stuart Mill pointed out in the 19th century, it may merely mean the “tyranny of the majority”. That is why the most salient words in the current situation are those of Lord Acton, in his great essay on the history of freedom, who said:

“The most certain test by which we judge whether a country is really free is the amount of security enjoyed by minorities”.

That is why the fate of Christians in the Middle East today is the litmus test of the Arab spring. Freedom is indivisible, and those who deny it to others will never gain it for themselves.

Secondly, religions that begin by killing their opponents end by killing their fellow believers. In the age of the Crusades, Christians fought Muslims. Between the Reformation and the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, Christians fought Christians—Catholic against Protestant. Today, in the Middle East and elsewhere, radical Islamists fight those whom they regard as the greater and lesser Satan, but earlier this week we mourned the death of 55 Shia worshippers at a mosque in Kabul and another 28 Shia who were killed in a terror attack in Iraq. Today, the majority of victims of Islamist violence are Muslim, and shall we not shed tears for them, too? The tragedy of religion is that it can lead people to wage war in the name of the God of peace, to hate in the name of the God of love, to practise cruelty in the name of the God of compassion and to kill in the name of the God of life. None of these things brings honour to faith; they are a desecration of the name of God.

May God protect Christians of the Middle East and people of faith who suffer for their faith, whoever and wherever they are.

Human Rights

Lord Sacks Excerpts

Thursday 2nd December 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Sacks]

My Lords, I, too, thank the noble Lord, Lord Alton, for initiating this important debate, which touches the very core of our humanity, transcending all differences of colour, culture, class or creed and sets moral limits to the use of power. It took great crises to make people aware of human rights. The wars of religion in the seventeenth century which led Milton and Locke to formulate the doctrine of the rights of man proclaimed, in the next century, the American and French revolutions. It was sustained reflection on the Holocaust and on the Nazi programme to eliminate whole classes of humanity—the physically and mentally handicapped, homosexuals, Roma and Sinti, and Jews—that led to the great 1948 United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It was a way of saying that what happened in the Holocaust should never happen again, and that those who died should not have died in vain.

It remains a testament to the human spirit that, at that time of Cold War and tense conflict in the Middle East, the nations of the world were none the less able to come together in collective affirmation, whether through religious faith or human reason, of the inherent dignity, and the equal and inalienable rights, of all members of the human family. That remains—despite the genocides and abuses that have happened since, of which we have heard so powerfully today—a signal of hope and a template of aspiration that must continue to protect us against cynicism and despair.

On this vast subject I wish to make just one point. Rights depend not only on declarations but on education. Rights are lost when one group within a society, usually the dominant group, sees another group as a threat to its freedom and its own dominance. Threat becomes fear, fear becomes hate, and hate becomes dehumanisation. The Nazis called Jews vermin and lice. The Hutus of Rwanda called the Tutsis inyenzi, or cockroaches. When this happens—when we dehumanise the other—evil follows, as night follows day. The only way to stop this is through education. I am deeply concerned at the teaching of hate that exists in some parts of the world and among some groups today. That teaching is poisoning the minds of young children and other vulnerable individuals, condemning them to a future of conflict and hostility from which they themselves will lose. Hate harms the hater no less than the hated; and when I diminish others, I am myself diminished.

Article 26 of the universal declaration covers education. Paragraph (2) states that it should,

“promote understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations, racial or religious groups”.

How good it would be if we could find ways to make that a reality and not just a pious hope. Today, as the noble Lord has mentioned, is the first day of the Jewish festival of Hanukkah—the anniversary of the time 22 centuries ago when Jews fought and won their right to religious freedom. Shall we not work together—Jews, Christians, Muslims and those of all faiths—to teach the world's children to see God's image in people who are not in their image, whose colour is not theirs, whose language is not theirs, whose face is not theirs? The principle is shared, if differently expressed, by secular humanists of all kinds, for human rights begin with the way in which we teach our children to recognise the humanity of others and the dignity of difference. The rights of tomorrow are born in the education of today.