swissinfo
June 14, 2007 - 12:34 AM

By Claudia Parsons

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Violent Muslim, Christian and Jewish extremists invoke the same rhetoric of "good" and "evil" and the best way to fight them is to tackle the problems that drive people to extremism, according to a report obtained by Reuters.

It said extremists from each of the three faiths often have tangible grievances -- social, economic or political -- but they invoke religion to recruit followers and to justify breaking the law, including killing civilians and members of their own faith.

The report was commissioned by security think tank EastWest Institute ahead of a conference on Thursday in New York titled "Towards a Common Response: New Thinking Against Violent Extremism and Radicalization." The report will be updated and published after the conference.

The authors compared ideologies, recruitment tactics and responses to violent religious extremists in three places -- Muslims in Britain, Jews in Israel and Christians in the United States.

"What is striking ... is the similarity of the worldview and the rationale for violence," the report said.

It said that while Muslims were often perceived by the West as "the principal perpetrators of terrorist activity," there are violent extremists of other faiths. Always focusing on Muslim extremists alienates mainstream Muslims, it said.

The report said it was important to examine the root causes of violence by those of different faiths, without prejudice.

"It is, in each situation, a case of 'us' versus 'them,'" it said. "That God did not intend for civilization to take its current shape; and that the state had failed the righteous and genuine members of that nation, and therefore God's law supersedes man's law."

COMMON WORLDVIEW

This worldview was common to ultranationalist Jews, like Yigal Amir, who killed Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, to U.S. groups like Christian Identity, which is linked to white supremacist groups, and to other Christian groups that attacked abortion providers, it said.

"Extremists should never be dismissed simply as evil," said the report. "Trying to engage in a competition with religious extremists over who can offer a simpler answer to complex problems will be a losing proposition every time."

Harvard University lecturer Jessica Stern, the conference's keynote speaker, spent five years interviewing extremists for her 2003 book "Terror in the Name of God: Why Religious Militants Kill."

She said it was dangerous for U.S. President George W. Bush to use terms such as "crusade" or "ridding the world of evil."

"It really is falling into the same trap that these terrorists fall into, black and white thinking," Stern told Reuters on Wednesday. "It's very exciting to extremists to hear an American president talking that way."

Stern said to compare violent extremists from the three faiths was not to suggest that the threat was the same.

"These are not equivalent," she said. "The problems arising from Christian or Jewish extremism are not threatening to the world in the same way as Muslim extremism is."

Conference organizers say their aim is to develop a nonpartisan strategy to combat religious extremism.

The guest list includes representatives of the State Department, Homeland Security, the New York Police Department and the U.N. missions of Israel, Iraq, Britain and the Organization of the Islamic Conference.

URL of this story:http://www.swissinfo.org/eng/swissinfo.html?siteSect=105&sid=7924183

Just as the extremist religious fundamentalists expend their energy trying to kill one another, people less rigid in their religious views tend to work for peace. People in the scientific community recognize that we humans all share the same ecosystem that transects all religious boundaries..

This from ScienceDaily;

"The cross-border collaboration brings together the scientists to study ways to help maintain shared sustainable grazing and agricultural systems important to the future of both Israel and the Palestinian Authority (PA).

"In the environmental sciences the ecosystem does not function according to political boundaries," says Ben-Gurion University Professor Moshe Shachak, a preeminent desert ecologist who serves as Israeli coordinator for the project. "Therefore, especially in the Middle East we must have cooperation if we are to have a sound environmental program. The goal of the program is to understand the structure and function of water-limited systems and preserve the services they provide for humans."

CMC Program Manager Arian Pregenzer initiated the project on Sustainable Land Use Monitoring in the Middle East while visiting Israel in the spring of 1998. During this visit she met Shachak, who was finalizing plans to establish three International Long Term Research (ILTER) sites in Israel. Pregenzer suggested that joint ecological research could be a productive area for collaboration between Israeli and Arab scientists, thereby furthering the Middle East peace process and ultimately regional security."

article @;
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2000/01/000127082712.htm

We also need to remember that scientists can also veer of the path of ethical behavior, especially when they work for nuclear weapons manufacturers. However, even in these extreme environments many scientists have shown their ethics and suffered at the hands of an extremist government. One example is found in the harsh sentencing given to nuclear scientist whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu, who warned the people of Israel/Palestine of the dangers posed by Israeli nuclear weapons stockpiled in the Negev desert. Following 18 years in prison, Mordechai remains under house arrest an unable to communicate with the outside world. So much for Israeli scientists being rewarded for ethical behavior, EH??

This from Mordechai's website;

"Hi. Here is my message for the 19th year of the sentence against me -

18 years of it in prison, from 1988,

The time has come for U.S. and Europe to inform all the people in the Middle East that Israel has all the Atomic weapons.

It is time to prepare all the states and people for the future NWs. Nuclear war.

Because Israel is not yet ready to respect all the democracy standards, Human Rights, this means Israel is moving toward a nuclear war in the future.

All this talk and the meetings are not going to bring any peace. They are just helping Israelis to cheat themselves. As long as The Wall exists, the occupation, the settlements, the refugees camps, there will never be any peace.

The Jews of Israel must wake up from their Zionism dreams, wake up from the policy of Ben Gurion and Shimon Peres who trust Atomic weapons. They make nuclear war inevitable.

So the U.S. and Europe obligation is to make it very clear and open, that the war is coming.

- vmjc
27 March 2007"

article @;
http://www.serve.com/vanunu/

If only other scientists working in the nuclear weapons realm would cease and desist their activities, the religious extremists who seek to wage war would be left powerless!!

Once again the ecosystem that binds people together may also be central to peaceful relations between neighbors. Instead of IDF bulldozers destroying Palestinian olive trees, multifaith coalitions have gotten together and replanted olive trees previously destroyed..

Palestinian Fair Trade & Trees for Life;

"In partnership with PFTA partners Canada, the US, and Europe, PFTA is launching the Trees for Life campaign. The campaign goal is to plant tens of thousands of olive trees in Palestine. The campaign is part of PFTA and partners efforts to empower Palestinian farmers and enhance their economic and production capacities.

Trees for Life will plant thousands of olive trees in Palestine every year in the period between Tree Day (February 15) and Land Day (March 30). Beside its development aspect, this program helps connect the Palestinian farmers and producers in the fair trade movement in Palestine to the grassroots fair trade
movement in Europe and North America in a meaningful way. It is a medium to connect the Palestinian grassroots to the solidarity they have worldwide. The Trees for Life project is solely funded by grassroots movements abroad and solely invested in the Palestinian fair trade movement in Palestine.

PFTA’s and partners in Europe and North America are committed to finding many ways to benefit farmers in Palestine. This project will help offset the enormous destruction of trees by the Israeli army, Israeli settlers, and the Israeli segregation wall in Palestine in order to keep Palestine livable and keep Palestinian roots alive in the land of Palestine. Trees for Life will provide individual Palestinian farmers with 25 to 50 new olive tree seedlings (3 years old) to plant and nurture in order to renew their decimated groves."

article @;
http://www.palestinefairtrade.org/

Love and respect for the land, water and the trees will overcome all the religious animosity that flames the violence between Israelis and Palestinians. This of course means the end of the Christian Zionists' planned man-made nuclear holocaust thay call "Armaggedon!!

"An Apocalyptic Eschatology

Crucial to the dispensationalist reading of biblical prophecy is the conviction that the period of tribulation is imminent along with the secret rapture of the Church and the rebuilding of the Jewish Temple in place of, or along side, the Dome of the Rock. This will signal the return of the Lord to restore the Kingdom to Israel centred on Jerusalem. This pivotal event is also seen as the trigger for the start of the war of Armageddon in which most of the world's population together with large numbers of Jews will suffer and die.[[23]]

Convinced that a nuclear Armageddon is an inevitable event within the divine scheme of things, many evangelical dispensationalists have committed themselves to a course for Israel that, by their own admission, will lead directly to a holocaust indescribably more savage and widespread than any vision of carnage that could have been generated in Adolf Hitler’s criminal mind.[[24]]"

article @;
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article4531.htm

Here in the U.S. we need to prevent the Christian Zionists from leading Israel/Palestine further down the path of conflict!!