Dealing with genocide and Holocaust across religious lines: What’s politics got to do with it?
By Wayne Slater | [email protected]
9:35 am on January 25, 2014 | Permalink
http://religionblog.dallasnews.com/2014/01/dealing-with-genocide-and-holocaust-across-religious-lines.html/
—
Mike
Ghouse is frequently introduced as ‘the first Muslim guy to commemorate
the Holocaust” with an appeal across broad religious lines. The idea is
to recognize what people have in common, regardless of their
differences as a way of lessening the conflicts, prejudices and
intolerance that has produced genocide. And to go beyond politics to
find common ground. On Sunday, a program attracting disparate groups
around the idea “Never again” is scheduled for Unity Church on Forest
Lane in Dallas, sponsored in part by Ghouse’s organization, the
Foundation for Pluralism. The event is entitled Holocaust, Genocides of
Native Americans and Gujart Massacre.The theme: Sparks of hatred and how
to extinguish them.
Mike Ghouse, speaker, writer and advocate of pluralism across religious lines
Ghouse
says he hopes attendees will walk out better appreciating the
sufferings of others and seeing “the perpetrator in us” as a way of
building trust across social and religious lines.
“I called
on my friends with the idea of commemorating the event, and thus began
this journey,” said Ghouse. “Education is the purpose; we have to learn,
acknowledge and reflect upon the terrible things that we humans have
inflicted upon each other, and we have to understand that our safety
hinges on the safety of all others around us.”
Ghouse says the
conference is designed as a comprehensive event where various human
failings, massacres, genocides and the murder of 6 million Jews in the
Holocaust will be addressed. The conference begins at 3 pm with an
American Indian genocide museum exhibit, then a program between 4-6 pm.
“I
have always believed, and I read the assessments of some of the best
brains, that if we can resolve the Jewish-Palestinian conflict, i.e.,
security to Jews and justice to the Palestinians, most of the world
issues will collapse and a period of peace on earth will begin,” said
Ghouse.
“There is a shameless cruelty in us, either we shy away
or refuse to acknowledge the sufferings of others, worrying that it will
devalue our own or somehow it amounts to infidelity to our own cause,”
he said. “Shame on us that we justifying massacres by believing and
propagating that the victims deserved it or asked for it.”
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