Religious toleration as a foreign-policy aim
اضيف الخبر في يوم الثلاثاء ٠٥ - مارس - ٢٠١٣ ١٢:٠٠ صباحاً.
FOR Katrina Lantos Swett, who chairs one of the two American agencies that are mandated to monitor religious freedom, life is full of pleasant and unpleasant surprises. On a trip to the Middle East a few weeks ago, she had a brusque encounter with a senior member of Egypt’s new administration who adheres to the zealous Salafi reading of Islam. As the daughter of two holocaust survivors, Ms Swett told him of her personal horror over recently unearthed statementsby Egypt’s new President Mohamed Morsi, who in 2010 urged Egyptians to “nurse their children and grandchildren” on hatred for Jews and Zionists.
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Yet American religious freedom-watchers see a perpetual risk of their cause being subordinated completely to other foreign-policy concerns. Some of the most repressive regimes and societies (Uzbekistan and Pakistan, for example) are countries whose help is needed by NATO in Afghanistan; an excessively sharp rebuke to either Egypt or Saudi Arabia would risk disrupting a long-standing strategic partnership.
That is one why reason why campaigners for religious freedom are apprehensive about how much attention, if any, the new secretary of state John Kerry will pay to their cause. “The work of the US Commission has been a model for other Western countries. It would be ironic if the United States were to lose interest in religious freedom just as other countries were starting to imitate us,” says Elizabeth Prodromou, a former vice-chair of the commission and professor at Boston University.
That is one why reason why campaigners for religious freedom are apprehensive about how much attention, if any, the new secretary of state John Kerry will pay to their cause. “The work of the US Commission has been a model for other Western countries. It would be ironic if the United States were to lose interest in religious freedom just as other countries were starting to imitate us,” says Elizabeth Prodromou, a former vice-chair of the commission and professor at Boston University.
Nina Shea, who heads a project on religious freedom at the Hudson Institute, a conservative think-thank, says she will be watching closely to see whether the new Obama administration acknowledges or denies the religious element in some of the world’s bloodiest conflicts. She was dismayed, for example, when a State Department official seemed to ascribe Nigeria’s bomb attacks on Christians more to poverty than to religious zealotry.
Whether they work inside the corridors of power or outside them, all religious-freedom advocates in Washington, DC, find they have to make pragmatic arguments as well as moral ones. “There are good national-security reasons to invest in religious liberty,” insists Ms Swett. “A country’s respect for religious freedom correlates with many other desirable things, like higher living standards, more democracy, greater rights for women…these are the sort of allies we want to have. This is in our hard interest, not just a soft moral imperative.”
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