Quell the fire of hate

The Montreal Gazette
Friday, April 09, 2004

The Western world has come by hard roads to the practice of religious liberty and mutual acceptance. As recently as 450 years ago, the Peace of Augsburg decreed that the local prince would decide, for each little German statelet, which religion everyone would follow, Lutheran or Roman Catholic. There was little room for dissent, and even less for nonofficial faiths.

Before that treaty, and after it, great sections of Europe were repeatedly ripped apart by merciless wars between factions of the Christian religion. Elsewhere around the world, too, men heard God tell them to kill those who worshipped differently.

But slowly, painfully, with many reverses, a new approach evolved. Increasingly, minority faiths were tolerated. Religion came to be seen as a private matter. By staying mum about it, increasingly important governments could claim the allegiance of all. By the time of the American Revolution, far-sighted statesmen saw the wisdom of flatly forbidding the idea of any official religion.

In Montreal this week, we were painfully reminded that this great march of human enlightenment is in no way unstoppable. The firebombing of a Jewish school's library, a glimpse into the pit of sectarian hatred and violence, made Montrealers recoil in anguish and alarm. Anti-Semitism, that ancient evil, defies the progress we have made, over the centuries, in learning to live together.

Through those centuries is woven the thread of the Jews, a majority nowhere, controlling no government, sometimes tolerated but often used as scapegoats, taxed and pillaged and expelled and slaughtered at the whim of rulers and underclasses alike.

Bit by bit, law and social practice in Western countries became more open. By 1900, in Canada as in the United States, Catholics and Protestants dominated society, and Jews were the only other substantial religious group.

Anti-Semitism was still common, but by this time was more often sly than violent.

The horror of Nazi Germany's insanely systematic slaughter of 6 million Jews made clear to the whole world just how shameful was the long, dark history of anti-Semitism. More and more voices rose against anti-Semitic acts and tracts and speech and attitudes. Slowly again, and with more setbacks, tolerance - with its overtones of condescending superiority - gave way to the more welcoming concept of pluralism, in religion and also in culture and language and more. These liberating tools of coexistence have come steadily closer, since the Second World War, to being the norm in our society. They work, assuring each individual the optimum free choice in life.

And so the firebombing at United Talmud Torahs school this week, coming as it did on the eve of the Jewish holy days of Passover and the Christian Easter week, was doubly shocking, reminding us sharply of the religious differences that for so long were the reason, or the pretext, for so much harm.
Anti-Semitism, like any prejudice, is a repudiation of the hard-won wisdom of religious (and cultural) pluralism. But anti-Semitism is also unlike other prejudices: because Jews have been the targets of so much hate over the centuries, anti-Semitism has come to embody, for many people, the depths of human weakness and evil.

Headlines from around the world remind us daily that there are still people eager to kill in the name of religion or to express political grievances through religious hatred. The virus of violent bias may never leave the human bloodstream. To keep it under control, even, demands unceasing vigilance and constant reaffirmation of the equal dignity of every individual, every faith, every culture.

This week's crime has brought our city an opportunity to make that reaffirmation, and Montrealers of all kinds have done just that. The Gazette shared fully in that rejection of violence and hate in an editorial Wednesday, and we do so solemnly again today.

Now, daily, let us all support, and live, these values Montrealers share. Because if we can't go forward together, we are doomed to go backward.