c. 2000 Religion News Service

(Rabbi Rudin is the Senior Interreligious Adviser of the American Jewish Committee.)

(UNDATED) Some unsolicited advice for our next president:

Dear Al and George W.:

Because it’s the end of a tough campaign, and you are currently focusing with laserlike intensity on the remaining undecided voters, it’s easy to overlook the most important issue you will face as president: the extraordinary challenge of Islamic extremism here in the United States and throughout the world.

I deliberately choose the term “extremism” to distinguish between the millions of law-abiding, peaceful Muslims who represent the best aspects of their faith from the radicals who systematically use Islam as a means to express hatred of the West, including Judaism and Christianity, and as a holy vehicle for achieving political power.

This is a complete reversal from the 20th century when your parents’ generation heroically defeated political tyrants and dictators who cynically expropriated authentic religion to buttress their own totalitarian regimes.

Never forget the wretched record of the Nazi-dominated “Deutsche Christen” churches in the 1930s and 1940s in Germany when some Protestant and Catholic leaders perverted their Christian faith and surrendered it to Hitler’s evil political program. We are still repelled by photographs from that horrific period featuring Christian clergy proudly wearing the swastika on their ecclesiastical garments and offering the stiff-armed Nazi salute.

The Communist leaders of the former Soviet Union also attempted to destroy or control religious institutions to enhance their political power. We recall with deep pain how Joseph Stalin, a former Orthodox Christian seminarian, corrupted and exploited the Russian Orthodox Church for his own wicked purposes.

Al and George W.: Just the opposite is now taking place in many parts of the world. Islamic extremist leaders are corrupting and threatening the political systems of their countries in a violent effort to impose their own kind of totalitarianism upon society. But unlike the past horrors of Hitler and Stalin, this time the desired totalitarianism is a ruthless religious dictatorship.

Always remember brutal suppression of independent thought and belief and physical assaults upon the innocent do not always emerge from a political despotism. These abuses can and do emerge from the religious community as well. The quest for religious purity in a nation is as dangerous as previous quests for racial or political purity in Germany and the USSR.

Unfortunately, this menacing trend among Islamic extremists is growing in ferocity and power.

Terrible cries of religious certainty are being heard: “Error has no rights!” and “God wills it!” Moderate Muslim leaders including Presidents Hosni Mubarak of Egypt and Abdurraham Wahid of Indonesia are under growing pressure from Islamic radicals who seek the overthrow of both men. Hezbollah, the Islamic extremist group based in Lebanon, is attracting many young Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank who have become alienated from Yasser Arafat. They are transferring their allegiance from the PLO leader to extremists like Hezbollah’s Sheik Hassan Nasrallah.

The lethal terrorist attack on the U.S.S. Cole and the bombing of the British Embassy in Yemen, the 1993 bombing of New York City’s World Trade Center, the 1998 murderous attacks on American embassies in Africa, and the unrelenting drumbeat of Iranian Islamic propaganda urging physical violence against the “great Satan,” the United States, must become an indelible part of our next president’s memory bank.

Recent ominous reports from Indonesia, the world’s largest Islamic country, describe gangs of young thugs who roam Jakarta’s airport and threaten to kill any Israeli who enters Indonesia. During a street demonstration in Jakarta, Islamic extremists slaughtered a “scapegoat” wrapped in the national symbols of America and Israel.

Anti-Christian attacks led by Islamic extremists are commonplace in East Timor and there are reports of ugly conflicts between Protestants and Muslims in the Moluccas, another part of Indonesia.

The rector of Indonesia’s Institute for Islamic Studies sadly declared: “The average Indonesian does not agree with these hard-line tactics or this radical mind set, but no one is willing to step forward and oppose them.”

For all these reasons, and there are many other examples, it is imperative that political leaders like yourselves, “step forward and oppose” the dangerous phenomenon of Islamic extremism. If we permit Islamic radicals to gain political power in Indonesia, Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and then passively watch them join with Muammar Kadaffi’s Libya and ayatollah-led Iran, your administration will be judged harshly by voters and by history for failing to respond to the central danger of our generation.

Al and George W., you neglect Islamic extremism at your own peril.

DEA END RUDIN