By Abraham Cooper and Alfred Balitzer
June 27, 2007
The Straits Times

The tsunami of violence and terror swamping the Middle East is propelled by threats from leaders justifying hate in the name of God. The headlines keep tumbling out with horrific consistency.

In the midst of the din of extremism and hate, where are moderate leaders of Islam?

Well, last week we found a few, and in the world's most populous Muslim nation, Indonesia.

Under the patronage of Indonesia's former president Abdurrahman Wahid, the Simon Wiesenthal Centre's Museum of Tolerance and the LibForAll Foundation convened 100 imams and Islamic and Hindu students to interact with Muslim, Hindu, Jewish, Buddhist and Christian theologians in Bali - site of one of the bloodiest suicide bombing attacks on civilians - to confront religion-sanctioned terror and hate.

Dispensing with the usual Orwellian political correctness, Mr Abdurrahman publicly condemned the Iranian leader: 'President Ahmadinejad is a friend, but when he lies about the Holocaust he is wrong and I say so publicly.'

In an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal, which Mr Abdurrahman co-authored with former Israeli Chief Rabbi and Holocaust survivor Israel Lau, the leader of 40 million Muslims went further.

'By lying about the events of the past, the deniers are paving the way toward the crimes of the future...Let us be clear: The real purpose of Holocaust denial is to degrade and dehumanise the Jewish people.

'By denying or trivialising the murder of six million Jews by the Nazis and their Allies, the deniers are seeking to advance their notion that the victims of the 20th century's greatest crime are, in fact, that century's greatest victimisers...Indeed, the deniers are perpetrating what is, in effect, a second genocide.'

'Extinguished as they were from the ranks of the living, Hitler's Jewish victims are now, in effect, to be extinguished from the ranks of the dead,' wrote Mr Abdurrahman and Rabbi Lau.

Ironically, Rabbi Lau was refused a visa for the gathering because he carries an Israeli diplomatic passport. Indonesia does not recognise the Jewish state.

But Jerusalem's Rabbi Daniel Landes was permitted to attend and, along with Mr Abdurrahman and Hindu leader Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, was first to sign a 'Call to Action' condemning the linkage between religion and violence and the justification of violence by religious leaders.

Some crucial milestones were achieved that day in the world's largest Muslim nation. Members of the Jewish religion, including a rabbi from Israel, were invited to the table as equals. They and religious figures from four other faiths openly interfaced with young Indonesians and the media.

We heard Muslim leaders explicitly condemn suicide terror and Holocaust denial, while openly weeping with survivors of suicide bombings in Indonesia and Israel and embracing a Jewish survivor of the Nazi Holocaust.

As the world keeps score of the madness spawned by religion, let us give echo to the words of popular Indonesian cleric Yusuf Chudlori. A member of one of the world's largest Muslim organisations, Nahdlatul Ulama, he heads an Islamic boarding school with more than 4,000 students.

'I previously thought that Jewish people were not good for the way they treat Palestinians, but after listening to the rabbis here, I am beginning to see that our ideas are actually very similar,' he told the International Herald Tribune.

'I hope that from this conference my students will learn that all religions have the same goals and that being good to each other is the most important thing.'

'The reason prejudice exists is because there is no communication between different people.'

Rabbi Abraham Cooper is associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre. Dr Alfred Balitzer is senior fellow at Claremont Graduate University and chairman of Pacific Research & Strategies, Inc. They served as co-moderators of the religion summit in Bali.

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