Objectively speaking, service to humanity has been at the core of all religions. This fundamental truth creates a constant dialogue between civilizations. This also blasts an oft –repeated thesis that suggests a clash between faiths: Hinduism and Buddhism; Judaism and Christianity; Judaism/Christianity and Islam; Hinduism and Islam; and so on. The clash, if any, between two faiths has been the creation of a handful of political crooks and their intellectual and theological accomplices to serve their own interests.
This understanding of history brings me in total agreement with American President Barack Obama when he says Islam is not the only religion distorted by extremists to justify acts of injustice and violence and such heinous distortions have taken place in other faiths as well. In his address to the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington (February 5, 2015) , he has reportedly said : “Lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ…. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ… We see faith driving us to do right… But we also see faith being twisted and distorted, being used as a wedge — or worse, sometimes used as a weapon… No God condones terror….No grievance justifies the taking of innocent lives or the oppression of those who are weaker or fewer in number.”
President Obama rightly lamented, “From a school in Pakistan to the streets of Paris, we have seen violence and terror perpetrated by those who profess to stand up for faith, their faith, professed to stand up for Islam, but, in fact, are betraying it.. We see ISIL (ISIS), a brutal, vicious death cult that, in the name of religion, carries out unspeakable acts of barbarism — terrorizing religious minorities like the Yezidis, subjecting women to rape as a weapon of war, and claiming the mantle of religious authority for such actions.” He has also observed rightly that today sectarian war in Syria, the murder of Muslims and Christians in Nigeria, religious war in the Central African Republic, a rising tide of anti-Semitism and hate crimes in Europe are being “perpetrated in the name of religion.”
Having agreed with President Obama’s diagnosis of the evil, I would like to join him also in his appeal to push back “against those who would distort our religion for their nihilistic ends.” I would, however, have one request to him. As a leader of the world’s only superpower democracy, he should leave teaching the history of religions to professors and thinkers and confine himself to doing what he is supposed to do: acting decisively against obscurantist religious elements wherever they may be.
History bears out that successive administrations in Washington have not been committed to the right to freedom of religion abroad. They have supported, directly or indirectly, such groups and regimes in the Middle East as have suppressed other faiths and practiced hatred and violence against women, minorities, gays, lesbians and conscientious individuals.
Shamefully, today President Obama himself is appeasing radical Islamist Tehran even though its declared agenda remains the destruction of Israel, the only democracy in the region, and the spread of its highly distorted version of Islam the world over . Obama has continued backing the radical Wahhabi regimes in the Middle East. And he is backing Islamabad which still remains friendly to certain Islamist groups that are ideologically as fanatical as their barbaric counterparts in the Middle East?
Dear President, I am sure if you really acted against the real violators of the right to religious freedom, the world would be a much better place to live in.