Readers have offered suggestions on my bias. Readers of this group are entitled to know the position of their host.
Mr. Malloy's suggests that I am "hammering home my hatred of all things Serbian." I am an American of Serbian background with Serb relatives who have been driven out of the Krajina region by the Croatian army; their fate is presently unknown. Of my Serbian relatives in Bosnia, some have been killed; some are staying in Bosnian government controlled areas; some are refugees in Europe and in North America; some are missing. I am personally aware, on the most intimate level, of the sufferings of innocent Serbs in this conflict.
In addition to my work in the Community of Bosnia Foundation, trying to support Bosnians of all religious groups targeted by "ethnic cleansing," I am involved with my family in trying to support out Serbian relatives. I have recently publicly taken up the case of Gojko Pondurovic, a Serb from the Sarajevo suburbs who was beaten and expelled from his home, and am working to have those responsible arrested and his home returned.
It may surprise some to know that there are Serbs and Americans of Serbian heritage who do not support the actions of Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic that have been labeled by the International War Crimes Tribunal as crimes against humanity and genocide.
There have been some courageous statments by Serbian Americans, such as that by George Mitrovic, condemning the genocide organized and carried out, according to the Tribunal, by Karadzic and Mladic, the true horror and extent of which the world has yet to truly grasp. A living, authentic, and strong tradition is one that can admit and repudiate crimes by those who claim to act on its behalf, and reject those crimes.
Whether Serbia as a whole or the Serbian Orthodox Church in particular will disassociate itself from what Karadzic and Mladic did at Omarska, Keraterm, Brcko, and Srebrenica, and other places of genocide, or accept those acts as a valid or even heroic expression of Serbian culture and Serbian Orthdodox religion, will be decided by the Serbian people and the Serbian Orthodox tradition.
People like Mr. Malloy wish us to believe that anyone who opposes Karadzic, his actions, and his ideology of racial and religious extermination, is either not a true Serb or is "anti-Serb." This is the position of Radovan Karadzic himself: anyone who does not support me is not a "true Serb." Yet, there are untold thousands of Serbs who wish to live in peace with peoples of other religions. Those Serbs have been persecuted by the Karadzic regime. If the Dayton accords were truly enforced, those decent Serbs would have a voice. Right now, they are persecuted under the Karadzic terror.
So let me state my biases:
1) Religious persecution, wherever it occurs, it must be opposed and condemned.
2) The most effective opposition to religious persecutions come from those who are willing to criticize not only persecutions against their own religion, but persecutions by members of their own tradition against others.
3) In WW2, The German theologian Dietrich Bonhoffer criticized the pro-Nazi position of the German Church at a time when many Christian leaders were throughout Europe were either collaborators with the Nazi persecutions of Jews or silent. Bonhoffer was hanged on a meat hook by the Nazis as an anti-German.
Evidence suggests that most Serbian Bishops have supported the Karadzic regime, ideology, and program. But there are Serbian Bonhoffers, Serb priests who hid Muslims or Croats from persecution at the risk of their own lives. One of them was mentioned in connection with trying to save the lives of Muslim victims near the Susica concentration camp. For Susica, see the International Tribunal Indictment of Dragan Nikolic, Commandant of the Susica Concentration camp link at http://www.students.haverford.edu/vfilipov
4) Global generalizations about entire religions are dangerous. As long as there is one member of a tradition who rejects crimes made in the name of that tradition, it is wrong to label the crimes as crimes of a particular religion or people as a whole.
5) With the end of the cold-war, religious militants have justified violence and terrorism: Buddhist militants launching a gas attack on Tokyo, Hindu militants burning a mosque in India, Islamic militants of Hamas engaging in bus bombings, Jewish militants celebrating the murder of Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin and the killing of Muslim civilians at the Hebron shrine,members of the Christian Identity movement plotting race-war in the U.S. and, according to the indictment, blowing up the federal building in Oklahoma City, and self-identified fighters for Christianity engaged in genocide in Bosnia.
6) Religions are faced with those who appeal to religion to justify mass-murder, terrorism, and even genocide against those of other religions. The question now remains: how will those religions respond? Will they support and accept the Bonhoffers in their midst? Or will they renounce their Bonhoffers as traitors and embrace holy war?
7) As to the suggestion that I am "anti-religious" in teaching and belief, the goal of much teaching in most college "religious studies" programs is not to make value judgments on religion as a whole or on particular religions. Any living tradition is engaged in a vital conversation about the meaning and boundaries of that tradition. My goal is to introduce students to the classic, primary religious texts, and to help them gain the tools for understanding the great debates and discussions within those traditions.
It would take several lifetimes to master the issues in a single tradition. How is one then to master one's own tradition and then another tradition, and judge one over the other? In other words, my personal approach is one of deepening one's knowledge about, rather than judging, religions as a whole.
8) For Mr. Stack (who accuses me of bias against religions and against Catholicism and Orthodoxy in particular) and others who might wish to know my views on Greek and Latin Christianity, I refer them to a work I spend much of my adult life writing: Mystical Languages of Unsaying (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). There I examine what I take to be the deepest and most profound elements within Greek, Latin, and Islamic religious traditions that point toward interreligious tolerance and love.
9) I began writing my book on religion and genocide in Bosnia when I found that the subject was being repressed. It is a tragic subject, and one I truly wish from the bottom of my heart did not exist.
Michael Sells