No Heaven for These Martyrs

As Israel reels from the latest terrorist outrages in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, I recall my last conversation with the late Yitzhak Rabin. It took place at the prime minister’s Jerusalem office on Aug. 21. Earlier that day, a Hamas suicide bomber had blown up a packed city bus virtually within earshot of Rabin’s desk.

The day before, dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center Rabbi Marvin Hier and I met with the grand mufti of Egypt. We were the first Jewish leaders ever to talk with the spiritual leader of 60 million Sunni Muslims. We told Rabin that the grand mufti, who had questioned peace with Israel and derided the Jewish faith in some of his early writings, used our two-hour meeting to speak of tolerance and the need for dialogue.

Rabin, while encouraged by this news, nonetheless pointedly asked, “Do you think he is prepared to issue a public fatwa (a ruling by a religious leader) against suicide killings by Muslims?” Rabin said that Israel had desperately, but unsuccessfully searched for a respected Muslim religious scholar in the region to publicly rebuke the notion that a suicide attack against men, women and children earns the killer martyr status and automatic entrance to heaven.

The much publicized Arab-Israeli territorial negotiations have helped accelerate dialogue between Muslim and Jewish leaders. In the last six months, Rabbi Hier and I have met with the imam of Jericho and the Ayatollah Rouhani, who is the leading Shiite cleric in Europe. Religious leaders from Morocco, at the behest of King Hassan II, attended a Wiesenthal Center sponsored conference in Paris. All indicated a desire to help write a new chapter in Islamic-Jewish relations. Such substantive contacts would have been unheard of a few short years ago and their importance cannot be minimized.

Still, it is the question about the missing fatwa posed by Rabin, who himself would soon be assassinated by a Jewish extremist invoking God’s name, that lies at the heart of the problem. His query speaks to the most intractable and dangerous obstacle to peace: intolerance fueled by religious dogma and personalities. The stakes go way beyond Hamas’ attacks against innocent Israelis. Deadly terrorist attacks by fundamentalists have driven tourism from Egypt; car bombs and bloody attacks on journalists and foreigners in Algeria have helped bring that North African nation to the brink of utter chaos.

While the Jewish world is still reeling from the implications that the Rabin assassination was committed by a religious Jew, at least our religious scholars have openly discussed and publicly refuted Yigal Amir’s attempt to invoke the halacha (Jewish law) to justify his murderous action. Rabbis and Talmudic scholars understood that their silence on this could lead to a breach in Judaism’s firewall between zealotry and murder.

What has been lacking in the Muslim world is a parallel public debate and unequivocal pronouncements by their spiritual leaders. If the leaders would speak out, Islam’s faithful would respond. Anyone doubting the impact of a fatwa should consult Salman Rushdie.

In the meantime, there is plenty that the secular world can do. World leaders should stop invoking the hollow mantra that terrorist attacks should not be allowed to derail peace. Instead, it is time to make the attackers and those who refuse to destroy terrorism’s infrastructure pay a price high enough to change their behavior. Civilized nations would do well to revisit the Rushdie affair. They successfully stared down the radical Mullahs and the powerful regime standing behind their outrageous fatwa. In wake of the horrific scenes on the streets of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, failure to do anything less could help bring closer the fanatic clerics closer to their most cherished dream: the destruction of Israel.