August 18, 2010 – News of Abrahamic Interest
We are sending one of our rare special editions of the AFR biweekly Newsletter because we believe the story in this week’s Forward is so significant for the American Jewish-Muslim relationship. The visit of eight of the most influential leaders of the American Muslim community to Dachau and Auschwitz August 8 – 10, organized by an Orthodox Jewish professor of law at Catholic University in Washington, DC was, in our opinion, a brilliant initiative. It’s practical benefit was obvious. By bringing the Muslim leaders to the death camps, Marshall Breger allowed them to see for themselves the concrete reality of the Holocaust and to equip them to deal definitively with such members of their community who are Holocaust deniers. Second, the depth of sorrow the Muslims showed and the prayers for the souls of the Jewish dead they offered were a major cognitive counter-assault on the extreme right wing line of polemics that Muslims are the permanent organic enemy of the Jewish people and, of course, the Christian people. The sweet irony here is that Marshall Breger is also a conservative Republican who has nonetheless been persistent and courageous in reaching out to Muslims in the U.S. and abroad, including Iran in the early days after 9/11. He’s a self-loving, Republican Abrahamic Jew.