TRAC
Interview Transcript

Joseph V. Montville   (cont)

So we've literally had to go back to the founding documents of the prophet in the Koran, and we'll have a major cognitive assault with this book that he's almost finished doing.  And, in addition to introducing it in public caucuses and the Middle East--the Arab countries and Israel--we'll also take it to Britain and France, because Europe and Islam are critical, but we're going to take it to Moscow, with a Russian translation.  And then we're going to take it to Turkey, to Ankara, in a Turkish translation, because this is a very valuable--affirming that there are universal humane values in Islam is very critical in Russian relations with many of the minority groups within Russia.  And, of course, the successor states of the Soviet Union in Asia.  There is a bad history between Islam and the West, in general, between the Christian world, which of course includes Russia (Orthodox Russia).  Sasha mentioned the serious potential of secession by the Turkish Muslim regions of--provinces of Russia itself.  Well, this is simply touching Dagestan.  These all reflect the painful history of the Slavic/Turkish interaction, the Christian, Muslim heritage of brutality.  We've seen it in former Yugoslavia; we've just seen it in the last few weeks in Kosovo, as the Serbs, the Orthodox Serbs, carry out their outrages against the Albanian Muslims, and I'm really annoyed at the Western Christians for making such a big thing out of it, because, haven't the Serbs been in fact the walls protecting Christendom in Europe from the Muslim onslaught.  There's a very ugly history of memory and loss that has to be changed and transformed.  And while it's an exotic approach to the U.S.-Russian relationship, I think it's going to make a serious contribution to allowing Russians to re-evaluate their history with their Muslim populations and perhaps make Muslims feel a little more welcome and appreciated as a people and as a value system; Islam is the value system.

 There's another one even more exotic, and it comes out of work my program's been doing in trying to strengthen the environment of the Middle East peace process.   And this is, of course, a Muslim-Jewish context.  We have a project--I have a rabbi who is in my program as a senior associate also, who'll be a colleague of Sasha's as a senior associate, who's working on the religious-secular split in Israel, which is also pathological.  It created the environment in which the prime minister was assassinated--the leading advocate and leading power in the peace process.  In this great struggle to promote a social contract between Israelis and Palestinians, a heroic endeavor that requires all the moral support that it can get, but we need to help the Jews in Israel, the secular ones who believe their chance of surviving in an enduringly the hostile Gentile world, and the religious ones who are waiting and praying for God to continue to protect them, to revisit their history in the Nineteenth Century as they were dealing with growing Christian anti-Semitism.
 Every one of these programs is designed to go to the core of the historical genesis of conflict and aggression and despair, or aggression in defense of itself.  In fact, it's a very medical approach.  The medical metaphor is something we use a lot; we have to go to the root of the disease and cure it where it lives, and constantly nourishes the surface phenomena of political conflict.  This, again, as I say, is more exotic than the Muslim-Russian endeavor, but Jews are a very critically important  part of the Russian culture--political culture-- and have been.

And I think this could also contribute to a developing of a certain amount of empathy and understanding of the Jewish experience in Europe and in Russia and in the Middle East, and make Jews a less inviting target, a less relevant target, for nationalists and anti-Semites, even though I agree with Sasha's assessment that this is a containable kind of phenomenon.  It still is a vexing and frightening potential there.  And I'm not Jewish, but I know enough that it doesn't take much in the light of the Twentieth Century to make Jews frightened about it happening again.

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