ANALYSIS/OPINION:
The coronavirus pandemic and its quarantine are taking a huge toll on our lives. The freedom of worship, association, movement and expression — basic freedoms engrained in who we are as Americans – have all been stifled.
Yet, we hold onto the hope that those basic freedoms and comforts in life will return some day. But for hundreds of millions around the globe, who suffer religious persecution and violence, such luxuries and normalcy are as foreign to them as the coronavirus-induced interruption of daily life is to us.
Simply because they believe differently, extremists and governments persecute, imprison and kill people of faith on a daily basis. Even neighbors, with whom we take comfort in these times, pose a threat to people of different beliefs across the globe.
Sadly, this pandemic of religious intolerance and persecution is growing — spreading faster and further every year. More than 8 out of every 10 people live in a place where governments put severe restrictions on freedom of religion and belief. In the last decade, social hostility against religious communities has almost doubled globally.
In Communist China, the government controls what people can believe and even how they can worship. Dissenters are sent to forced re-education through labor camps where they face torture and organ harvesting.
Since 2011, the Nigerian Islamic terror group, Boko Haram, has killed more than 37,000 people and displaced 2.5 million more. Christian villages are attacked and churches bombed regularly — sowing fear among weekly worshippers as they gather and move from village to village.
Recently, sectarian violence in India saw neighbors turn on neighbors. In New Delhi, riots killed dozens of Indian-born Muslims and forced hundreds to flee with all of their possessions. One Muslim victim said, “We will never come back here to live among Hindus … The divide between Hindus and Muslims is unbridgeable now.”
But this bloodshed, fatalism and distress does not have to be. Religious persecution and violence should rightly be treated like a public health campaign. The fastest way to end it is to prevent it in the first place.
Too much of the world’s response to these crises — like the expulsion of the Rohingya in Burma, Uighurs in China or Christians and Yezidis in Iraq — is to engage in collective hand-wringing or to deploy military force or humanitarian assistance. It is like placing Band-Aids over bullet wounds — a temporary and utterly ineffective fix to a much deeper problem.
Instead, we should adopt a response like the one for a public health crisis such as we face today, wielding prevention and education instead of dollars and bombs.
Educating for religious liberty and against extremism can and does work to stem the virus of hate. We have proof.
In 2015, when ISIS controlled large swaths of Iraq, my non-profit education group, Hardwired Global, sprung into action. Partnering with Iraqi teachers in areas previously occupied by ISIS, Hardwired developed lessons and activities for children who had escaped to teach them about human dignity and the freedom of religion and belief.
The curriculum we developed and implemented yielded astounding results. After only a few short lessons, more than 75 percent of students surveyed who initially held discriminatory views toward others became willing to defend their rights. Over half of students who embraced violence and extremism renounced their hateful views.
Partnering with the British Foreign Office and foreign ministries of education, the program expanded to Lebanon, Morocco, Kosovo and Jordan, where we saw similarly impressive impacts on the views of student participants.
Last month, leaders from several countries gathered in Morocco at the invitation of the king’s senior adviser, a Moroccan of Jewish descent. They were introduced to Hardwired’s educational model for pluralism and building resiliency against extremism. And they vowed to share these lessons in more countries — from Pakistan to Mali.
Hardwired is now expanding the work in Mosul, Iraq, which was once the epicenter of the Islamic State’s power, to transform the hearts and minds of children brainwashed by the group to hate and kill to reject terrorism and embrace pluralism and freedom for all.
The root of our success is attacking the problem at its source — not treating the symptoms and triaging the afflicted. We are affecting change more deeply too because those who finish our curriculum are just as contagious in their tolerance and respect as the hateful and extremist views of others.
This approach is also much more cost effective, integrated into existing education systems and adapted to local needs, than putting out genocidal fires with bombs and bailouts. Study after study has shown that religious freedom and pluralism promote other freedoms and greater economic prosperity as well, further easing tensions as societies become wealthier and more content living alongside people of different beliefs who each bring unique contributions to their communities.
If this generation of youth comes to see their fellow countrymen and neighbors as possessing dignity, it follows that future crises and wars may be averted as common ground and mutual understanding grow.
Our greatest lesson from the coronavirus should be that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. That should inform our approach to combatting religious hate, too.
• Tina Ramirez is the president and founder of Hardwired Global, and former founding staff director of the Congressional International Religious Freedom Caucus.
