On January 23, 2017, during the third annual symposium on The Role of Religion and FaithBased Organizations in International Affairs at the UN Headquarters in New York, the UN officially mandated the fight against genocide (or the intentional action to destroy people, usually defined as an ethnic, national, racial, or religious group). The UN highlighted the issue, saying that religious leaders and faith-based organizations have a responsibility to contribute to peaceful societies, and that the international community must support these grassroots peacemakers in their daily activities.
Addressing the symposium, Adama Dieng, the UN Special Advisor for Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect, said that religious leaders “have a responsibility to contribute to the building of peaceful, inclusive and cohesive societies that are resilient to conflict, violent extremism and atrocity crimes.” He added that religious leaders “provide support during emergencies, respond to the needs of marginalized communities, as well as address grievances as soon as they emerge and advocate for the rights of their communities.”
Inter-Religious Organisation, Singapore
The Inter-Religious Organisation, Singapore (IRO) was officially launched on March 18, 1949. Since its humble beginning, IRO has worked quietly to promote peace and religious harmony in Singapore.
The idea for establishing IRO sparked when Maulana Abdul Aleem Siddiqui, a well-known Muslim missionary, visited Singapore in 1949 and received an interfaith reception. Sir Malcolm Macdonald, then the British Commissioner General for Southeast Asia, helped propel this vision into reality.
With the passage of time, IRO organized and participated in many local and international forums to learn more about what is being done in the region to promote religious harmony. It networked with organizations such as the World Council on Religion and Peace and the Asian Council on Religion and Peace.
Today, ten major religions are represented in the IRO. IRO organizes events such as offered prayers for the victims of the 9/11 terrorist attack in the U.S., prayers for the Bali bombing victims, prayers for peace in Iraq and other countries afflicted by war, and prayers for victims of natural disasters, such as the earthquakes in India and China and the cyclone in Myanmar. IRO has published several books, including Religions in Singapore and Religious Customs and Practices in Singapore.
Institute for Religious Tolerance, Peace and Justice (IRTPJ)
IRTPJ, founded in 2011, is a non-profit organization, incorporated in California under state and federal non-profit laws. They work with the mission to promote religious tolerance, interfaith dialogue, and education about religions of the world as a pathway to world peace. By promoting interfaith dialogue and universal respect for different faiths, the Institute seeks to minimize the conflicts that are shaped by religion and people who employ religion as their excuse.
They educate the public through a variety of methods on the diversity of religious beliefs worldwide in an attempt to combat religious oppression, intolerance, and violence. Some of the programs conducted by IRTPJ are as follows: panel discussions and public lectures, interfaith solidarity marches, Interfaith Ambassadors Program, The Religion Matters Show, and Our Muslim Neighbors Forum.
Employing strategically interwoven programs, IRTPJ implements interfaith education and collaboration to promote cross-cultural understanding and realize universal religious tolerance.
IRTPJ highlights the commonalities shared by people as a stepping stone to the peacemaking process. By tackling religious intolerance as the root problem of many of our modern difficulties, we will be better able to handle them.
Intolerance on the Rise
A diverse country, India is home to many expats from the Gulf. I myself have had a wonderful experience visiting there, but issues like people clamoring for intolerance have upset me greatly. On June 13, 2017, I was reading the Times of India, and a news title got my attention: “Intolerance on the rise, defend the spirit of Constitution.” After reading further, I learned that 65 former bureaucrats in India, who had worked with central and state governments for decades, wrote an open letter stating that they decided to speak out in view of “a sense of deep disquiet at what has been happening in India,” claiming no political affiliation. They issued a direct appeal to public authorities and constitutional bodies to take corrective action to defend the spirit of the constitution.
The former officers lamented a “growing climate of religious intolerance that is aimed primarily at Muslims,” tracing it to the prime minister’s controversial remarks on “burial grounds and cremation grounds” and power supply outages during religious festivals in different communities. The letter also pointed out that banning slaughterhouses targets the livelihoods of minorities besides breeding communal violence.
I know it is hard to be patient; I can only wish to lessen intolerance not only in India but worldwide.
Charter for Compassion
While doing my research on global activities toward tolerance, I came across Charter for Compassion. On February 28, 2008, acclaimed scholar and bestselling author Karen Armstrong received the TED Prize and made a wish: to help create, launch, and propagate a Charter for Compassion. After much work and the contribution of thousands of people, the Charter was unveiled to the world on November 12, 2009, with the vision of a world where everyone is committed to living by the principle of compassion.
The organization, Charter for Compassion, was created by Karen Armstrong with the Council of Conscience in 2009. It inherits a confluence of contributions made by TED.com, Compassionate Action Network, Fetzer Institute, and many others. Charter for Compassion provides an umbrella for people to engage in collaborative partnerships worldwide.
Aware that our world is deeply troubled and polarized, the Charter for Compassion is committed to making the world a better place. They work to establish and sustain cultures of compassion locally and globally through diverse sectors: arts, business, education, the environment, health care, interfaith communities, peace, restorative justice, science and research, social justice, social services, science and research, and women and girls. At the heart of their work is working with cities to identify issues of concern that make communities uncomfortable places in which to live.
Charter for Compassion supplies resources, information, and communication platforms to help create and support compassionate communities, institutions, and networks of all types that are dedicated to becoming compassionate presences in the world. They believe that a compassionate world is a peaceful world, and that a compassionate world is possible when every man, woman, and child treats others as they wish to be treated: with dignity, equity, and respect.
Genocide of Myanmar’s Muslims
On September 4, 2017, tens of thousands of people gathered in the streets in the capital of Chechnya to protest the “genocide of Muslims” in Myanmar. More than 400 people were killed in the week prior during clashes between the Rohingya Muslim minority and Myanmar’s military.
According to the news posted by the Guardian on September 5, 2017, the United Nations Secretary-General, António Guterres, appealed to Myanmar to end the violence that forced more than 120,000 Rohingya people to flee in the preceding two weeks, which he warned was “creating a situation that could destabilize the region.”
The unrest raised fears of a humanitarian crisis in overstretched border camps; another 400,000 of the Muslim ethnic minority were estimated to be trapped in conflict zones in western Myanmar as more “clearance operations” by security forces in Rakhine State began in the previous month.
Malala Yousafzai, the youngest person to win the Nobel Peace Prize, also urged Myanmar’s leader, a fellow Nobel laureate, Aung San Suu Kyi, to condemn the violence against the Rohingya minority.
During the annual UN Human Rights Council held in Geneva in 2017, Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, the top UN human rights official, denounced the “brutal security operation” against the Rohingya. Zeid said, “I call on the government to end its current cruel military operation, with accountability for all violations that have occurred, and to reverse the pattern of severe and widespread discrimination against the Rohingya population. The situation seems a textbook example of ethnic cleansing.”
House of Worship
Armed with an AR-15-style assault rifle and at least three handguns, a man shouting anti-Semitic slurs opened fire inside a Pittsburgh synagogue (a Jewish house of worship) on October 27, 2018, killing at least 11 congregants and wounding four police officers and two others. As Pittsburgh reeled from a tragic weekend, a Muslim-led effort began a crowdfunding campaign to raise money for the victims of the synagogue shooting.
Posted on LaunchGood, a global crowdfunding platform to support Muslims launching good across the world by helping them raise funds for their campaigns, the effort aimed to help support the short-term needs of victims and their families by raising money for medical bills, funeral costs, and other expenses after a gunman stormed services at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Synagogue, before being captured by police.
The charity drive was a success, with organizers claiming to have raised an average of USD 2,000 per hour since the launch of the effort. Within six hou
