COMMENT
UN tackles pillars of intolerance
By Kaveh L Afrasiabi

"Asia is the cradle of great religions that share noble values pursued by all humanity - values such as mercy, justice and peace. And yet, mankind has created so many conflicts in the name of religion ... All the great religions have a role to play in building peace."
- Ban Ki-moon, UN secretary general

NEW YORK - A high-level, two-day conference on the "culture of peace" is being held this week at United Nations (UN) headquarters this week. Attended by some 70 world leaders and senior officials from dozens of nations, including US President George W Bush and Israeli President Shimon Peres, the enlightening initiative come as recent UN reports have highlighted growing levels of xenophobia, gender, ethnic and racial

 

discrimination, and outright cultural intolerance and religious bigotry around the world.

The conference's stated aims are to promote the world's "common humanity" and the "innermost values of tolerance, diversity, and reciprocity", and aims to tackle these notions from the perspective of "faith-based" as well as other "ethical, philosophical traditions", said the head of UN's General Assembly, Miguel d'Escoto. Although he emphasized that the event is not strictly about religion, which he said "can be a very divisive subject".

"Our world is experiencing an extremely difficult period, the worst since the founding of the United Nations," D'Escoto said in his opening remarks. "It is a time of numerous bankruptcies, but the worst is the moral bankruptcy of humankind's self-proclaimed 'more advanced societies', which has spread throughout the world."

The fact that the "faith-based" conference is an initiative of Saudi Arabia, which forbids the public practice of other religious faiths, and which is regularly accused of systematic discrimination against women and religious minorities, has fueled controversy at the UN. The recent news that Riyadh has been brokering dialogue between the Taliban and Afghan government has also not helped, given the Taliban's appalling record of human-rights violations against women and ethnic and religious minorities.

It is also unclear whether the conference will become less of an opportunity to promote global peace than a chance for various governments, including Israel, to expound political propaganda. This especially in light of UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon's severe statement last week "deploring the plight of Palestinians in Gaza". Perhaps after attending this conference, Peres will be more amenable to lifting some of the restrictions in Gaza which cause daily suffering to many of its population of 1.5 million.

As in the case of the Arab-Israeli conflict today, which has lost a lot of its initial secular underpinnings and has increasingly been seen in a Jewish versus Islamist fundamentalism context, most divisions in the world today are increasingly not caused by religion or culture, but are more based on economics and politics. As a pivotal issue in the contemporary, post 9/11 debates on Islam and "Islamic terrorism", the plight of Palestine epitomizes divisions in the Middle East, which has long been a bastion of anti-Americanism due to the widespread perception that the US government has followed unbalanced, pro-Israel policies.

The outgoing Bush, who was due to address the conference on Thursday, may be the wrong US leader to speak there, given his legacy of unilateralism, interventionism and benign neglect of Israeli expansionism - not to mention his administration's past lapses into incendiary rhetoric against "Islamofascism".

The term, which equates Islamism with the European fascist movements of the early 20th century, has often used by pro-Israel pundits in the US, such as Bernard Lewis and Daniel Pipes, when they attempt to promote a culture of intolerance vis-a-vis Muslim-tolerant multiculturalism in the West.

The times are changing, and president-elect Barack Obama's election as the 44th president of the United States may be the harbinger of a more prudent US foreign policy that, in turn, could conceivably translate into a fading of anti-Americanism - not just in the Middle East, but also in Latin America and elsewhere. But for Obama to cause a sea-change in the world's view of America, he must persuade it that Washington's passage to a new post-hegemonic mindset is real and tangible, as opposed to merely cosmetic.

This depends on multiple factors, such as whether the US will be prepared to accept a substantial dose of multilateralism without fearing the loss of its "pre-eminence" in world affairs, and whether or not it will adopt a more balanced approach to the Israel-Arab conflict. It must also push more vigorously for a viable Middle East peace conference, depart from its traditional addiction to hard power - particularly when dealing with adversaries that have challenged US hegemony - and use more soft power diplomacy.

As president, Obama could move quickly to overcome the post 9/11 "West versus Islam" culture of suspicion, by openly refuting the dangerous discourse of "clashing civilizations" that is tantamount to a defamation of Eastern religions. He could also embrace the UN initiative of "Alliance Among Civilizations", which has been created to promote "cross-cultural tolerance" as one of the "pillars of the world today", to paraphrase Ban's recent praise for this initiative. [1]

Certainly, Obama is well pre-disposed to join the UN-led fight against the scourge of racism - that is alarmingly on the rise per the latest reports by UN officials.

The UN's special rapporteur on Contemporary Forms of Racism, Discrimination and Xenophobia, in November pointed out a connection between racism, poverty and rising discrimination against refugees, asylum-seekers and internally-displaced ethnic minorities. Another recent UN report cites the threat of rising neo-Nazism in Europe and Russia.

As for gender- and religion-based discrimination, a new UN report by the special rapporteur on the freedom of religion paints a particularly gloomy picture, especially of negative developments in the Indian sub-continent. Religious minorities there are increasingly finding themselves subject to acts of bigotry, intimidation and violent attacks - often with the tacit assent of government officials, said the UN.

This escalation of "incitement to racial and religious hatred" is not exclusive to India of course, but rather represents a global trend that will likely worsen as the global economic recession hits the developed and the developing nations.

A successful war on poverty is an important precondition of winning the war on intolerance and discrimination, and this was reflected in a new UN survey that found two-thirds of Latin American youth feel they are discriminated against because they are poor. Another prerequisite to victory in the war against intolerance is the cultivation of a UN cosmopolitan culture of peace, a UN-based "identitarian" movement which promotes humanist values enshrined in the UN charter. [2]

The importance of events such as the UN conference, and other similar efforts, like the recent interfaith summit in Istanbul that led to the creation of a new Global Interfaith Network devoted to combating religious intolerance, poverty, AIDS, etc are raising the prominent role that religious groups can play in global affairs.

Another important prerequisite, at least on the part of the world's Muslims, is to deepen their current peace-related efforts and to do a better job in disseminating Islam's message of peace, a message that has been much buried under piles of Western Islamophobia recently.

But, in conclusion, perhaps the real protean value of the Saudi initiative is to highlight the rich sources of a culture of peace in the essential teachings of Islam, including the holy Koran: "If they resort to peace, so shall you."

Notes
1. For more on the Alliance of Civilizations, see Afrasiabi's interview with the former Iranian president Mohammad Khatami: UN Chronicle.
2. See Afrasiabi, Listening, Inclusiveness, Tolerance, Reciprocity: Dialogue Among Civilizations, UN Chronicle.

Kaveh L Afrasiabi, PhD, is the author of After Khomeini: New Directions in Iran's Foreign Policy (Westview Press) . For his Wikipedia entry, click here. His latest book, Reading In Iran Foreign Policy After September 11 (BookSurge Publishing , October 23, 2008) is now available.

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