# Conversations at The Carter Center: Harmonizing Religion and Human Rights

**Author:** Dr. Omar Suleiman
**Series:** Lecture
**Published:** 2019-01-30
**YouTube:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRR6ZcK1zaY
**URL:** https://yaqeeninstitute.org/watch/lecture/conversations-at-the-carter-center-harmonizing-religion-and-human-rights
**Topics:** Contemporary Ideologies, Politics & Practical Theology

## Description
How can we align religious life with human rights? What role should spiritual leaders play in promoting human rights? And what can everyday people of faith do to defend human rights and encourage mutual respect between people of different religions? These are a few of the questions that Sh. Omar...

## Chapters
- 0:00 Introduction
- 6:36 Human Rights in Judaism
- 16:52 How can we stand firmly for human rights
- 18:11 We must accommodate changing times
- 22:20 Human rights should be nonpartisan
- 25:23 Authority and morality
- 30:20 Universal Declaration of Human Rights
- 33:11 Rambling Remarks
- 35:53 Freedom for from Fear
- 39:06 Human Rights Discourse
- 44:52 Poverty
- 52:34 Womens Rights
- 55:02 Attitude towards People

## Transcript
**[0:00]** I am Karen Ryan, the Carter Center's Senior Advisor for Human Rights and Special Representative on Women and Girls. And it's my pleasure to welcome you to tonight's conversation at the Carter Center, Harmonizing Religion and Human Rights.

**[0:15]** Thank you so much for joining us tonight. We've got a great program for you and only 75 minutes to get it all in. So I'm going to skip the long introductions. I hope you don't mind. The program has all of the details about our wonderful panelists.

**[0:30]** But I'll just tell you that on our far right, on my far right, your left, is Imam Omar Suleiman of the Yaqeen Institute for Islamic Research. We welcome you. And next to him is Rabbi Jill Jacobs of T'ruah, the Rabbinical Call for Human Rights.

**[0:57]** We welcome you. And the man next to me obviously needs no introduction. Former President Jimmy Carter.

**[1:14]** Well, before I delve into the topics, let me remind you to silence your phone. I'm going to do it. I'm going to lead by example. Everything off. You are free to keep your phones out and tweet and share on social media during the conversation.

**[1:29]** And please use the hashtag Faith and Human Rights. You can also submit your questions for the panel via Twitter. Or if you're here in the audience with us, there will be cards handed out. And as long as you hand them to our staff by 7:40, they'll be collected cards.

**[1:48]** And we'll try to get in as many questions as we can toward the end of the program. So let's get started. Seventy years ago, on December 10th, that's next Monday, the newly formed United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,

**[2:05]** inspired by texts of major world religions, recognizing the equal dignity of every human being. Tonight, we will explore contemporary challenges for the universal pursuit of human rights through the lens of faith.

**[2:24]** Religious faith can be a source of solace and joy, motivating us to work for the betterment of ourselves, our families, our communities, and our nations, and the world at large. But religion has also become more polarized over the last 15 years, with extremist groups in many faiths becoming more emboldened.

**[2:50]** In our secular democracy, we treasure and protect the separation of church and state, but we cannot ignore the influence of religion and religious arguments and movements in our country and in the wider world.

**[3:06]** We will explore both personal faith as well as public expressions of our faith through commitments to improve our world. So I'm going to start with a question for our panelists on personal faith.

**[3:24]** If you could each please speak about the connection between your personal religious faith and your work on behalf of human rights. And I'd like to start with you, President Carter. If you could begin by reflecting on an idea that you addressed in your book.

**[3:43]** I'm not plugging, but yes, I am. Faith, A Journey for All. It's a marvelous book. If you don't have it, you must get it. You address faith. What is faith in that book? Well, I worship the Prince of Peace, Jesus Christ.

**[4:00]** I'm a Christian. I wrote the book about faith because we have so many different kinds of prevailing faiths in our life. We have faith in ourselves. We have faith in each other. We have faith in things like democracy or freedom or human rights.

**[4:16]** We have faith in equality. We have faith in welcoming immigrants. We have faith in the basic principles of our country. We have faith in the, I'd say, the combined teachings of all the major religions, Judaism and Christianity and others, Islam.

**[4:45]** And so I think that only one time in history have we ever gotten together as human beings and said, Why don't we try to resolve the world's problems? And that was right after the Second World War when 60 million people almost were killed.

**[5:04]** We had the horrible Holocaust that let the Nazis assassinate many Jews. I think it's about 6 million Jews. So in compensation for that and to prevent that happening again, we organized the United Nations to try to preserve peace.

**[5:23]** And we organized a Universal Declaration of Human Rights. We wrote that three years later in order to make sure that everybody was treated equally, African-Americans and white people, Jews and Christians and others.

**[5:39]** And we also tried to make equal rights between men and women and equal rights, I would say, in the treatment by government of people who had a disparity in income. The poor protected from the very rich and the people of color in imprisonment.

**[6:02]** Things of all kinds. If you read the human rights, the 30 paragraphs in the Human Rights Declaration that was passed on the 10th of December, you'll see that it was basically designed to guarantee equality of treatment by one another and also by governments to compensate for disparities in treatment.

**[6:25]** So that's the essence of human rights, I think. Thank you. Rabbi Jacobs. Thank you. First of all, thank you to President Carter and thank you to Karen for hosting this conversation here. It's really a privilege to be here. For me, my Judaism is what drives my commitment to work for human rights.

**[6:45]** I direct an organization, T'ruah, that mobilizes more than 2,000 rabbis in the U.S. and Canada to work for human rights, to bring a moral rabbinic voice to human rights, both here at home and also in Israel and the occupied territories. And we do that out of the depth of our Judaism, out of the depth of our Jewish history and text and tradition.

**[7:04]** The very first thing that the Bible tells us about human beings is we're created in the image of God. That's the very first thing that we learn about ourselves. And that means that any injury to a human being is effectively an injury to God and any attack on a human being is an assault on God.

**[7:21]** When the rabbis start talking about what this idea of tzelem Elohim, creation in the divine image, means, in the Talmud and other rabbinic literature, they have this idea that actually when you damage a human being or, God forbid, when you kill a human being,

**[7:40]** you're diminishing God in the world. And that's unfortunately what we're doing all the time in our world, in every place, in every moment. But it's not enough to say that we as human beings, as creations in the image of God, deserve not to be attacked,

**[7:55]** deserve to be treated the way that we would treat and respect God. We also have obligations because it's very nice to say nothing bad should happen to me or to any of us, but somebody has to be responsible for making sure that that is true.

**[8:11]** And so Judaism has the idea of chiyuv, of obligation, which means that we have obligations both toward God and then also toward one another. And the rabbis, again, in later books of law, create whole systems of trying to figure out how to create a just society

**[8:28]** in which everybody has a decent chance of living a dignified and a successful life. A lot of times when people think about Jewish law, they think about ritual law, what you can eat, what you can't eat, what you do on Shabbat, on the Sabbath, what you don't do.

**[8:43]** But actually there's whole areas of Jewish law that deal with every single aspect of what we would now call human rights, whether it's the relationship between workers and employers, whether it's questions of criminal justice. All these very live issues of human rights are debated and discussed,

**[9:02]** and there are many, many attempts to figure out how we can ensure that everybody lives in a just society. So that's the first piece for me. And then second, I want to say a word about history. Judaism has a very long, several thousands of years of history, which for us, we're always living in the present moment.

**[9:20]** History is not something that happened in the past. It's very much alive in my community. And in our history, of course, the core narrative of the Torah is a story of the oppression in Egypt, slavery in Egypt, and the liberation from slavery.

**[9:37]** What's interesting about what happens after the Jewish people experience liberation is that God gives a series of laws, many of which have to do with interpersonal behavior, and some of which have to do with the responsibility toward the ger,

**[9:53]** toward the stranger, the sojourner, somebody who is not from our community but is living among us. And it would be very easy to imagine a situation in which the people said, okay, we just got out of a situation of being oppressed by another people. We were strangers in this land, and so forget everybody else.

**[10:09]** We're just going to protect ourselves. But actually, that's the very moment that God says, no, now that you have experienced oppression, you have to be hyper aware of those who are vulnerable in your own community. And then finally, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as President Carter said,

**[10:26]** was one of the world's responses to the Holocaust and to World War II. And it was the world's attempt at saying that what happened to my community, what happened to others, shouldn't happen again. This is aspirational.

**[10:42]** We have not yet fulfilled the hopes of that declaration. But it really is a sacred document. It's the world coming together and saying, this is what we aspire to. This is what we hope that every nation will live up to. And for my organization in particular, we look to that declaration as a core Jewish document of our time,

**[11:05]** a modern Jewish text, because it was in large part a response to our own tragic experience, and because the experience of our history tells us that that history now imposes obligations, that we have to take that document forward.

**[11:20]** Thank you, Rabbi. Imam Omar. So, I mean, with the personal story in particular, a lot of my work reflects in my own personal journey and trying to struggle not just with faith but with overall identity.

**[11:37]** The institute, the Yaqeen Institute for Islamic Research, focuses on inspiring contribution through conviction. It sort of pushes back on this idea that the more devout you are as a Muslim, the more dangerous you are to your society. But more in the Qur'anic conception, which is that the more devout you are as a Muslim, the more beneficial you are to humanity.

**[11:59]** A conflicted American Muslim identity isn't good for anybody. And a lot of times as we struggle, and I think we'll get to our political polarization, there's this idea that we have to accept either a certain definition of American to be American Muslims,

**[12:17]** a very narrow definition which sets a different threshold for patriotism for us as American Muslims, or that M on Muslim has to be lowercase. So you've got to relinquish a part of your identity because society has derived certain conclusions about Islam

**[12:35]** on the basis of hate-mongering and on the basis of a very targeted campaign that's been particularly vicious after 9/11. So you have to accept those conclusions and relinquish those elements of your faith rather than stick to them. Growing up, it was conflict our entire lives.

**[12:52]** My parents were both uprooted. They were from Palestine. My mother and father actually met at U of H at the University of Houston, so they both had their journeys to Texas, where I live right now, but I'm not a Texan. I'll get to that in a moment, just as a qualification there.

**[13:09]** My parents met at U of H. They both had very unique journeys, but they both really had to fight and to struggle to exist because they had no homeland, or their homeland was taken from them. They had no family to connect to. They had no one to support them in their education.

**[13:25]** My dad literally had the story of showing up on a bus in Houston and getting a graveyard shift at 7-Eleven, not speaking a word of English, and now he's a distinguished professor in chemistry at HBCU. They embodied struggle and being able to overcome any obstacle.

**[13:45]** My mother, may God have mercy on her soul, struggled with a lot of personal issues in terms of health, cancer and the likes. I saw faith power them through that. Not only did it power them through their unique struggles, it made them more loving to each other, it made them more loving to us,

**[14:03]** and it made them better people to humanity. They were able to overcome any struggle or obstacle that came their way. The personal side of this, growing up we had a story of struggle. We had a story of witnessing...

**[14:20]** My dad threw David Duke out of a mosque way back then. It's nice to see him resurface to relevance, but that's another story maybe we get to later on. We had a story of our parents giving away our car to Somali refugees, coming home and finding refugees from Bosnia wielding a hammer for Habitat for Humanity.

**[14:38]** That was our story growing up. What that speaks to in the faith, in particular in Islam, which ties my work in conviction and contribution, is that God describes faith as a tree in the Qur'an. He says that its roots are firm, and its branches are high in the sky,

**[14:56]** and it's in constant production of fruit. What that means is that if faith is rooted deeply in the heart, the greater awareness you have of God, the greater awareness you have of the humanity that's around you. In the Qur'an, there are verses about standing up and praying at night.

**[15:12]** Every time God talks about prayer at night, he immediately connects it to charity in the day. What that speaks to is that if you're paying attention to God when other people are not, then you're paying attention to people when other people are not. Your branches being high in the sky provide shade to humanity.

**[15:27]** What drew me to that was that constant connection, the coherence of understanding the oneness of God and the oneness of humanity, the fullness of the Abrahamic tradition in that sense. God describes the Prophet Abraham (عليه السلام), peace be upon him, in the Qur'an as a nation of good.

**[15:45]** It was as if he was a nation because of the good that came out of that one man. God describes Jesus Christ, peace be upon him, in the Qur'an, or quotes him rather, وَجَعَلَنِي مُبَارَكًا أَيْنَ مَا كُنتُ that he made me blessed wherever I may be, and that he carried with him goodness wherever he was.

**[16:00]** He changed and transformed wherever he was. And finally, the description of the Prophet Muhammad (ﷺ), peace be upon him, as رَحْمَةً لِلْعَالَمِينَ, as a mercy to all of the worlds. And so what drew me to that was that constant connection being made and Islam having a very explicit anti-racism tradition

**[16:17]** that drew in the Malcolm Xs of the world. I did a class on the 40 hadith, 40 sayings of the Prophet Muhammad (ﷺ), peace be upon him, on social justice. And when I covered things like environmental justice or animal rights or human rights or whatever it may be, I never had to struggle to find an explicit text.

**[16:34]** If anything, I had to narrow it down. Because it was so explicit, it is so explicit in the divine revelation that everything around you is assigned a God-given presence. And it's not even spoken about in terms of rights, but a God-given sanctity. And you have to honor that which God honored.

**[16:51]** Thank you so much. Those were beautiful reflections. Yeah, beautiful from both of you, from all three of you. And now I would really like to take the personal and bring it into our public expressions of our commitments to human rights.

**[17:06]** Really, you know, our country is deeply polarized at this time, in politics but as well as religion. You know, and the question really is how can we stand firmly for human rights

**[17:22]** at this time, relying on our faith as a source of authority and moral courage, but also to bring others with us in community. Because do any of us doubt that if the armies of believers were to decide

**[17:37]** that we would have just immigration reform, a just peace in Israel-Palestine, an end to the war in Yemen, universal health care for all, that we would have it? If the armies of believers would reach deep in all of our faith traditions,

**[17:54]** something tells me we could mobilize for those things. So that's my question. How do we, with our faith and bringing others of our faith into this campaign for human rights, how do we do that? How can we do that?

**[18:10]** Well, we have, you know, certain principles that guide us that never change. My high school principal used to say we must accommodate changing times

**[18:25]** but cling to principles that never change. So I think every individual in here and in our country and in the world has certain principles that we cling to, that we choose ourselves. Some of us emphasize truth. Some of us emphasize benevolence.

**[18:42]** Some of us emphasize equality. Some of us emphasize democracy and freedom. Some of us emphasize religious faith as such and belief in God. But we all choose a certain number of those things, and that's what we believe in.

**[18:59]** I would say that our country, which is supposed to be a nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all, has quite often fallen down on that premise. We have, in recent times, at least I'd say in the last 15 years or more,

**[19:18]** departed from some of those principles that used to guide us along with other countries that were basic principles on which the Universal Declaration was founded of human rights. We adopted a policy of being okay to torture people, and we disavowed the Geneva Conventions.

**[19:41]** We began to spy on Americans and do away with some of their privacy. I won't go into detail about that, but we also have seen a tremendous increase.

**[19:56]** Well, since I left public office, we've had a seven-and-a-half times increase in the number of people in prison. We have more people in prison now than any other country on earth, and a lot of that is because the poor people that are in prison are either that, that is poor,

**[20:19]** or they're African American or they're Hispanic or they're mentally retarded or have some mental affliction. These kind of things are very troublesome. We've also determined lately that the truth is no longer a measuring of a human being

**[20:40]** and is no longer to be prided. We've turned against treating immigrants as welcome guests in our country if they come in legally and things of that kind. So we've gone a long way toward violating some of our basic principles,

**[20:57]** and those principles, I think, are based on both democracy and freedom and the principles of the United States of America and on any particular religion that we have. I would be bold enough to say that all of us here on the stage are children of Abraham (عليه السلام).

**[21:14]** When I was at Camp David with Begin and Sadat, all of us were deeply religious. Begin was probably the first prime minister in Israel that was deeply religious, and Sadat had a brown spot on his forehead where he had spent his entire life

**[21:29]** bowing down in prayer with his forehead on the ground. And I think that one reason we were able to reach an agreement there was because all of us had the same basic faith as children of Abraham (عليه السلام). So we have so much in common,

**[21:45]** and I think that what the Universal Declaration of Human Rights has done is kind of encapsulate those in some very simple paragraphs. They're very quick. You could read the whole 30 paragraphs in five minutes, but they show us that the basic principle is to treat each other as equals

**[22:05]** and not as superior people. So I think that's the basic thing is our two. One is religious faith. The other one is faith in certain secular principles like democracy and freedom.

**[22:20]** It's certainly true that our country is more polarized, certainly, than I've seen in my lifetime. And when we think about politics, people usually immediately think about everything that they don't like about politics, whether it's the nasty campaigning or whether it's the kind of politics

**[22:36]** where you're really just screaming slogans at each other. And the thing about human rights is it should be apolitical. It should be nonpartisan, and it should be based on values and morality, and that should be able to cut through particular political positions.

**[22:51]** We should be able to agree, for example, that everybody should have health care, that everybody should be able to make a basic living. Then we can argue about what the details are, but the goal is for us to agree on those basic principles and then figure it out from there. We're not there yet, but that is the goal.

**[23:07]** And in our conversations, I think that it's important to speak from a values perspective, and religion certainly can help with that, that when we speak from religious texts, from our religious traditions, in my experience, certainly people listen and are able to have conversations that they can't have

**[23:23]** when the conversation or so-called conversation is just about screaming political slogans. And as we all know, the power of personal experience and encounters with other people, there's no parallel to that.

**[23:39]** Right now, much of our politics is driven by so much fear and by a sense of scarcity, that if somebody else succeeds, then that must mean that I'm failing, as opposed to thinking about all of us moving forward together. And we know, of course, that when people in our communities

**[23:57]** have experiences with... others who don't look like them, who don't pray like them, who maybe don't have the same first language, that suddenly they're talking to a human being. And we've seen this particularly in the last few years around the issue of immigration.

**[24:14]** Now, of course, there are still many people in this country who want to seal the borders and not let anybody in. We've also seen so many attempts to reach out and try to understand the experiences of people who are coming here as immigrants. So we've seen... at T'ruah, we've seen more than 70 synagogues that have decided to become sanctuaries,

**[24:33]** that they've committed to protecting immigrants who are at risk of deportation. And that's brand new. We've seen the responses to the horrible images of children and families being tear-gassed at the border, that suddenly people who look at those pictures, it's not just the theory of immigration or big questions about what comprehensive immigration reform looks like.

**[24:55]** It's a mother with a baby in her arms, and it's hard to look away from that. And I think that some of those images and even better conversations and relationships that are developing within communities, particularly within faith communities, because so many faith communities have stepped up either as sanctuaries,

**[25:12]** as taking in refugees, working with immigrants and refugees in their own communities, that those relationships can break through much of the rhetoric. So you mentioned authority, and I think that the separation of church and state as a discussion requires a discussion in and of itself.

**[25:31]** But there's a saying from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. that the church is not meant to be the master nor the servant of the state, but its conscience. It's meant to be its guide and its critic, not its tool.

**[25:47]** And so the church, obviously, by extension, religion, what role does religion play in regards to authority? And I think by authority we can also extend that also with political candidates, not just people that are already in office, not to become tools of politicians, whether they are in office or whether they are in candidates, but rather the integrity of religion.

**[26:08]** Well, when you talk about authority and you talk about morality and you talk about where society stands, morality requires a strong definition and it requires a place in society. And religion plays a role in defining what's moral in society.

**[26:26]** But religion has to maintain credibility by not being so blatantly hypocritical. So there is a role. If power does not have the check of morality, then it becomes tyranny. If freedom does not have the check of morality, it risks becoming depravity.

**[26:44]** So it has a role to play. I think that when you talk about the role of religion and power and that independence and religion with political candidates and defining a more comprehensive morality, if we are to say that we have timeless principles,

**[27:01]** principles that can resist temporary shifts of power, principles that can resist temporary shifts in societal trends, truly timeless principles, what does that look like in resisting becoming as polarized as our politics has become?

**[27:19]** Now, there has been an erosion of the religious middle. It's not just the political middle. There has been an erosion of the religious middle because essentially, because religion has become so politicized, you have to make a choice. If you want to stay in your church, stay in your synagogue, stay in your mosque, you have to make a choice.

**[27:35]** And that choice is usually going to be highly partisan. So how do we push back on some of those things? Well, for one, where there is universal good, I think that religion can help us set ourselves apart in terms of the zeal that we bring to working for that universal good.

**[27:52]** So people that rely on faith, that draw from a reservoir of deep faith, work in accordance with that faith in ways that are unique, in ways that are particularly energetic. So I don't think that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would have achieved what he achieved had he not been a person of deep faith.

**[28:12]** I don't think that Malcolm X would have achieved what he achieved had he not been a person of deep faith. I think that Mother Teresa set herself apart because of her faith, or she drew from a place of faith. I think a person who's not as well known, but Abdul Sattar Edhi in Pakistan,

**[28:28]** set himself apart drawing from a place of faith in his humanitarian work. So where there is good, universal good, you set yourself apart by drawing from that reservoir. Where there is evil, you set yourself apart where it's a clear evil and fighting that evil.

**[28:43]** I don't think Muhammad Ali would have stood up the way that he stood up had he not had a place of faith that he could draw from. And then where there is ambiguity, where there is ambiguity, we have to maintain consistency. If we resist the temptation to become drawn into a particular political platform and be values-based,

**[29:04]** then when we talk about morality, we can bring a moral perspective to both how the child in the womb is treated, as well as the child in the cage at the border. We can bring a moral perspective to both pornography and poverty. We can talk about these things that are so divisive, and we can bring that consistency

**[29:24]** and not shy away from offering a comprehensive and consistent answer. If we are consistent on where we stand on something like torture, or war, or militarism, we are not simply going to speak out on those issues when the particular president that's in power is someone we don't like.

**[29:45]** Immigration has been a broken system for a long time. We've had a militarism issue for a long time. So we've had a torture issue for a long time. We still have not resolved Guantanamo Bay. The images of Abu Ghraib in Iraq still never had a true form of reparation.

**[30:03]** So where's the morality on that, and how do we actually maintain a consistency across administrations and across issues, and say we're drawing from timeless principles no matter what issue we are discussing, and they all fall in accordance with the dignity of a human being and how a human being should be honored.

**[30:20]** Well, that's a perfect segue to what we'd like to bring this back to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the idea that this set of principles was, as President Carter said, is one of these moments in human history that we can be so proud of,

**[30:37]** where we said these the state will do and not do. The state will not torture. It will respect freedom of expression. These are commitments. They're very specific. It also includes a right to an adequate standard of living, clean water, housing, etc.

**[30:54]** So these are very specific commitments that were made in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and then again in 1993 at the Vienna World Conference on Human Rights. Many more governments than were there in 1948 with the declaration.

**[31:11]** So this is a consensus among governments, yet we are so far away. So here on the 70th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, since World War II, we have to ask, we're here in America. This is our country. We're all here. We're in this struggle together.

**[31:28]** And the U.S. in the past has influenced the establishment and the enhancement of global norms. It was Eleanor Roosevelt who represented the United States in the negotiation of the UDHR. We have a strong tradition here.

**[31:44]** In fact, the UDHR, a lot of it was based on the American Bill of Rights. So we should have great pride in that document. So now with this erosion of human rights both at home and abroad,

**[31:59]** what do we really need to do to get ourselves and our country back on track? When I say back on track, it's not like human rights was great before 9/11, but after 9/11, it was like we were really trying very hard.

**[32:16]** There were improvements that were coming about. We were committing to end torture. We were committing to bring about equality of women and men. And the end of indefinite detention and all of these terrible abuses. And then after 9/11, it was like a graph was going up,

**[32:32]** and then 9/11 happened and respect for human rights went precipitously down. And now governments around the world have followed the American lead. Torture is back. We even had a journalist brutally murdered inside a consulate, in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul,

**[32:48]** almost just unimaginable a few years ago that this could be countenanced. So how do we get back? Let me say not to where it was perfect before, but back to an upward trajectory where we were increasingly seeing progress on human rights.

**[33:05]** President Carter, do you have any ideas? What can we do? How can we get back on this track? Well, I think I began my rambling remarks tonight by saying that I worship the Prince of Peace. I think the essence of it is peace.

**[33:21]** It's a basic human right. And the United States has been by far the most warlike country in the world. Since the Second World War, we've been in active combat against at least 30 countries. At least 30 countries.

**[33:37]** And since 9/11, we've been involved in Iraq and Afghanistan now for 17 years, I think. It's the longest lasting wars we used to end wars in about four years, no matter how badly they affected people. But we used to get them over early.

**[33:54]** Now they just go on and on. So I think that one of the main things to remember there is that our government wouldn't go to war and stay there unless the people basically supported them. So we need to make sure we implement our basic religious faith in opposing war.

**[34:15]** It has a direct adverse impact on the well-being of people. For instance, China hasn't been to war since 1979. And China has 14,000 miles of high-speed railroad finished.

**[34:33]** We don't have a single mile. China's building new universities every year. We very seldom have started a new university from scratch. That was functional. They have all of their bridges and highways in good shape.

**[34:49]** I'm not bragging on China in particular, but I'm just saying that to avoid war, China has been able to take trillions of dollars that we've spent, say, in just Iraq and Afghanistan, and spend it on their own people's needs.

**[35:04]** In just, I'd say, four or five years, China will do away with extreme poverty in the whole country. That's something that we don't, not even near. I think half the people in the United States are now in poverty, according to the World Bank figures on definitions.

**[35:20]** So I think if we could just commit ourselves as our nation and to implement the teachings of Jesus Christ, and not go to war, and not fight each other, that would open the door to a lot of improvements in basic human rights,

**[35:35]** as far as the rights of women, the rights of poor people, the rights of those in prison, and so forth. So that would be my single contribution. I've been learning a lot by listening to the other two. So freedom from fear and violence.

**[35:54]** Well, maybe I'll start with what you just said about freedom from fear, because as we know, when people are afraid, they're very, very willing to sacrifice other people's human rights and civil liberties. And that's what we've seen after 9/11 and right now,

**[36:12]** that much of the response to immigrants, to refugees, is coming from this place of fear. So we need to figure out how to break through that, which is not easy, but I think it's important that we have a discourse of human rights all the time, not only when things are really bad. As you said, human rights were not perfect under the last administration

**[36:33]** or under any administration before that, but now people are paying more attention, and if there's a silver lining, it's that people are paying more attention. I'll say also that 70 years in the scope of human history is not actually a very long time. So we might look back and say, how come we haven't achieved this beautiful vision

**[36:53]** of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the last 70 years? Well, I come from a tradition where we're mourning the destruction of a temple almost 2,000 years ago as though it happened yesterday. So 70 years is like a minute. It's nothing. And so we shouldn't

**[37:09]** give up after 70 years. We should give it at least another 2,000 or so, see how things go. But we certainly can't give up. And the final thing that I'll say is that when I started as executive director of T'ruah, and I would say to people, we work on human rights issues

**[37:26]** both in the US and Canada and also in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories. People would say, okay, Israel I get, but what human rights issues are there in the United States or Canada? Because a lot of the issues that were on people's minds, many people would classify as social and economic issues, social justice issues, but not necessarily

**[37:47]** human rights issues. Because often we think of human rights issues as Geneva Convention issues, as issues that have to do with war, which of course those issues have always been live in the United States, certainly in the past, what is it, 18 years almost, 17 years.

**[38:08]** But it feels very far away. Most of us aren't grappling with those, aren't seeing what's happening in Iraq and Afghanistan every day. And so we don't think of what's happening in the United States sometimes as human rights issues, but we have to talk about the human rights crises at home and talk about what's happening here as human rights issues and

**[38:26]** also connect it to what's happening in the rest of the world. And that's something else that perhaps is a silver lining right now as we're seeing the rise of autocrats, as we're seeing the attacks in democracy around the world, we can recognize that it's the exact same playbook that's being used here, that's being used by Putin, that's being

**[38:43]** used by Orbán, that's being used by Netanyahu, all of these leaders who are attacking human rights and democracy in their own countries. And we have to recognize that we can, first of all, we can learn from people who are standing up for human rights in different places. And

**[39:00]** second, that we have to address these issues as a worldwide crisis and not just in a vacuum in our own countries. I think I'd like to address it from another perspective. You know, speaking from a very unique vantage point, which is being, you know, from the Muslim world, because every

**[39:18]** Muslim represents all 1.8 billion of us in our actions, everything we do, you know, which really plays out bad with mass shootings in the country, because you get like 380 of them and then one of them is a Muslim. And we're going to be good for one or two idiots a year

**[39:34]** that's going to just, you know, taint the entirety of our body around the world. But I'd like to just speak to about, you know, in this particular regard, how we deal with the rest of the world. When we talk about bridges of understanding, we've spoken about polarization in our politics in regards to the national scene, people becoming more isolated

**[39:53]** and allowing for media and politicians to color the world around them. And the polarization has reached a level to which that means your neighbor who you never talk to now, right? So coloring the world around you through these things. And I want to speak to that element,

**[40:12]** because if we can't even get our neighbors right, how are we going to get people across the world that are some existential threat to our way of life and our civilization right? And human rights discourse in particular, I think, can become problematic in being weaponized

**[40:30]** for imperialistic and capitalistic gains. And I'll talk about that for a moment. A document is important. A document at the end of the day is hostage to those who interpret it and those who implement it. And so if the United Nations is hostage to those who fund it, or

**[40:49]** hostage, you know, to a veto, to an American veto, then it becomes only a branch of American internationalism. And that's deeply problematic, because selectively applying human rights discourse is, you know, is very unfair. And it leads to the constant polarization, not

**[41:07]** just of Democrat from Republican, we're talking about from West from the East, right? You know, polarizing these two worlds and giving into this idea that there's this clash of civilization that exists out there. How we push back on that is very important. I think

**[41:24]** it's important for us to understand that using human rights discourse to continue to feed into this idea that one part of the world is regressive, backwards, in need of taming,

**[41:42]** in need of our saviors to go out there and to free them. And that's why we're going to put trillions of dollars into the Iraq war. Oops, no weapons of mass destruction. But guess what? Now they have movie theaters. So they might have lost hundreds of thousands of people, but we freed them. Freedom in the language of self-determination is being lost.

**[42:04]** And that's actually in the history of the UN Charter, looking at the Atlantic Charter a few years before that, which emphasized self-determination, I think really spoke to something obviously evolved and became part of broader discourse. But this idea of self-determination, this idea of a people being able to define themselves. And sometimes when we try to

**[42:23]** tame the world, we strip national communities, faith communities, people of agency because we project our notions upon them that have very flawed underpinnings, but not the same realities as us. So I think what President Carter wrote in the aftermath of the Iraq

**[42:43]** war in 2003, I thought was very powerful. You said, President Carter, that the Iraq war didn't meet your threshold as a Christian for a just war. Now to the American mind, too often, because freedom to us is restricted to expression as opposed to self-determination,

**[43:03]** which is really what a lot of people are seeking in different parts of the world, and sometimes are suffocated by dictators that we back and that we allow to suffocate those legitimate calls for self-determination. A lot of times to us, we justify some of the harm and the

**[43:20]** damage that we cause in different parts of the world, and that's part of the moral conscience of the state. We have to be willing to tell our country the truth, that we have to do a better job. We cannot absolve ourselves of our own human rights violations. We can't

**[43:36]** talk about freedom when we have the largest incarcerated population in the world without owning up to that. We cannot talk about self-determination or freedom in the language of self-determination when we back dictators and shut down people's legitimate aspirations and then use expression and this idea that we have to save them as a justification for war. That in particular,

**[44:01]** this idea that we can forgive and overlook our own violations at times because we can say, well, at least look, this guy is championing freedom because he opened up movie theaters and guess what? They're playing the Avengers now. Yeah, but he's also acting like the villain off of the Avengers and torturing political opponents and where's the human rights discussion

**[44:21]** in that? Being more wholesome is important and understanding, building bridges of understanding. Let's make a better effort to understand the world around us, to understand their lifestyles, to understand, to give them the agency to explain themselves to us as opposed to always

**[44:39]** portraying them in a certain way that makes it forgivable when we destroy their economic and political infrastructures while we could be spending that money at home on healthcare and on clean water in Flint, Michigan. That's right and President Carter mentioned about half of the country living in poverty.

**[44:58]** There's a new definition or a new expanded report that's been championed by the Poor People's Campaign that raises the number of people in poverty from what was 30, 40 million to 140 million people in the United States. When you slightly enlarge the definition to

**[45:14]** put people who are just a paycheck, just barely away from homelessness and total destitution, 140 million people in our own country. So yes, this and it wasn't at crisis as what you do to the least of these you have done unto me. I mean so I know President Carter

**[45:35]** you have said many times that if you are a Christian you have to take care of the poor. And I think this is a struggle in our society that we cherish capitalism. So we're going

**[45:50]** to have to reconcile the ideas around freedom. What does freedom mean when it comes down to it? And that is challenging in this discussion because it has been much abused. The idea

**[46:05]** of freedom and what we are allowed to do to pursue it. Just one last question before we go to question and answers. You know a few years ago President Carter you raised the issue of women's rights as one of the most serious and unaddressed human rights violations

**[46:25]** through the most. The most. The most. Yes. Not one of the most. The most. And we haven't discussed that tonight but half of the world, a half of the world are deprived and we see it with Me Too movement and so many others that preceded it to address it. Yet another

**[46:44]** book for you to seek out. President Carter wrote A Call to Action Women, Religion, Violence and Power and in here you talk about that. You know and women are a key to peace as well. You write about that in here. When women are included in decision making from the family

**[47:03]** to the community to the world we will see more peace. Can we all just talk for a couple of minutes about how we can really advance this idea of women's equality. Zainah Anwar once said if women are equal in the eyes of God why are they not equal in the eyes of

**[47:23]** man? Do you have any comments on this? Well the Bible says that in the eyes of God there is no difference between men and women. There's no difference between Jews and Gentiles. There's

**[47:39]** no difference between slaves and masters. And that just emphasizes the at least the New Testament commitment to equality of all people and I think that the ones that Jesus championed were the deprived people. The ones who had leprosy. The ones who were crippled.

**[47:59]** The ones who couldn't see. The ones who were despised by society. And he emphasized the fact that all people are equal in the eyes of God. And he included women as well. I still believe that

**[48:16]** that every country on earth, including the United States, severely discriminates against women and girls. For instance, we support slavery in this country.

**[48:31]** Slavery now probably exceeds in monetary value and human suffering what it did during the 17th and 18th, early 19th century. And Atlanta is one of the exchange points for human slavery.

**[48:54]** One reason is that we have the largest airport on earth for passengers. And about 80% of the passengers brought in against their will and to be assigned to slavery conditions and in prostitution and other things

**[49:13]** are women. 80% are women. And whose fault? Especially men's fault. You know, when women are condemned for prostitution, it's the brothel owners and the pimps and the customers

**[49:33]** who make it possible. When women are accused of promoting abortion because they had to have, you know, an end to a termination of a pregnancy that's dangerous to the woman or

**[49:49]** was a result of rape or slavery or incest, men are the ones who caused it. But women always get the fault for it. And as you pointed out, you know, I think there's no doubt that men are the basic originators of almost all the wars in the world. Not every one of

**[50:06]** them, perhaps, but I can't think of any exceptions to that. So, you know, here we blame women for their problem. And one of the basic problems that we've discussed before is a fact that it's men who interpret the meaning of the

**[50:24]** holy scriptures in the Old Testament and the New Testament, in the Hebrew Bible and also in the Christian Bible. The misinterpretation of certain verses deliberately introduced to accommodate men's beliefs

**[50:43]** of what caused women to be deprived of basic principles because people could say, well, if the Bible says so-and-so, it's okay to make a wife subservient to a husband, or it's okay to exclude women from the priesthood and things of this kind. So I think that that's

**[51:02]** some of the things that we need to be worrying about is we could do away with the discrimination against women and the fact that about a third of the women in America are subject to sexual abuse of some kind, and about a

**[51:19]** fourth or fifth of the women who enter college are sexually abused before they graduate. And this is a blight on our country, and women don't have as much pay or anything. And I think, what, five percent or something of the

**[51:35]** of the largest corporations in America have women as CEOs, you know, where they're just as intelligent, just as competent as men. So it's a burning issue, and it should be in the forefront of

**[51:51]** people's minds, including everybody here, by the way. Yes, I think I heard a headline in there that women's rights is a man's issue. It's a man's issue, right? Of course, women are now speaking aloud a little bit more than they used to

**[52:07]** before. I've heard others say that, and I think it's so well said because there would be no unwanted pregnancy if there wasn't, you know, right? If there wasn't a man involved. So, but yet the woman is there holding the burden. Maybe we could solve the abortion issue if we asked

**[52:26]** our fellow men to take responsibility for unwanted pregnancy. There's an action item. Okay, Rabbi Jacobs. Thank you, President Carter. I so appreciate your phrasing and your insistence that women's issues are the human rights issue of our time, and I

**[52:41]** couldn't agree more. And first of all, when we talk about women's issues, sometimes people think about issues that are put in that category of women's issues, whether it's reproductive health, abortion, violence against women, which are clearly

**[52:57]** crucial issues, but actually there's a gender lens on every human rights issue. So in my organization's work, we work, for example, on incarceration, and women who are experiencing incarceration have a different set of issues in addition to the issues that men are

**[53:13]** experiencing. And slavery and trafficking, of course, there are men and women who experience slavery and trafficking in our country and beyond, but their particular experiences, especially around sexual violence, are different. We could go on and on for every issue, there's a particular gender lens that we need to put on it.

**[53:31]** The second piece is that, yes, of course, women's rights are men's issue also for many reasons, but also because if we lose 50% of the voices in the world, and that's 50% of the wisdom,

**[53:47]** that's 50% of the teaching that we could be learning from, so that's a loss for all of us. And certainly when we think about the sphere of religion, that for so many years, we had men, as you said, interpreting religious texts in one particular way,

**[54:03]** and now thankfully we have women who are also religious leaders and teachers and academics. I, for one, am very grateful that that door was opened. I think about it, there's a very famous story in the Talmud in which a particular head of the Beit Midrash, of the study hall,

**[54:19]** had certain requirements for who was allowed to enter and not enter, pretty strict requirements, and then a new head came along and opened it up so anybody could come in. Now, by anybody, it was still men, but still in context. So it said that they had to put out

**[54:36]** hundreds and hundreds of extra benches that day because the place was full, and it said on that day, some of the hardest questions were answered that couldn't have been answered before. So just imagine now that you brought in hundreds more benches for the other half of the people who were previously

**[54:51]** excluded, and now perhaps we can solve everything that we've been struggling with. So that's still something that we have to keep working on, bringing in all of those voices. So the attitude towards people, I think first and foremost,

**[55:09]** many of these things are regional, not religious. You don't really find a great variation between the way that a woman is treated in a neighboring country in a particular region that has similar political and economic conditions. But I think reshaping the attitude towards people,

**[55:25]** there's a very... I had the blessing of co-authoring a paper with a few of my colleagues called Gender Equity and the Advent of Islam. And the title was actually... that was a subtitle, Gender Equity and the Advent of Islam. And the title was, We Used to Have No

**[55:42]** Regard for Women Whatsoever. And it was actually a saying of Umar (رضي الله عنه), the guy I'm named after, who's the second caliph of Islam. He said that we used to have no regard for women whatsoever until God said about them what he said about them and decreed for them what he decreed for them.

**[55:59]** And what he meant by that is our entire attitude towards how we viewed women, how we viewed our mothers, our spouses, our daughters. Of course, in that time, in 7th century Arabia, people used to bury their daughters alive. And that was one of the first things that the Qur'an spoke out against,

**[56:15]** because a girl was deemed as being inherently of less value to her family and to her society. So uplifting and elevating the human spirit and the sanctity of the human. There's a verse in the Qur'an, which I think could be a nice note for us to kind of end off with on these things. But it

**[56:33]** says, يَا أَيُّهَا النَّاسِ إِنَّا خَلَقْنَاكُمْ مِنْ ذَكَرٍ وَأُنْثَىٰ O People, We have created you, male and female, nations and tribes, لِتَعَارَفُوا So that you may get to know one another. And verily, the most noble of you in the sight of God is the most pious. So what that meant was piety, which is the true standard of nobility

**[56:51]** in the sight of God, could be attained by anyone, despite their gender, despite their race. So there's the condition and how we view the woman as a whole. And that's something that Islam emphasized, shifting the attitude towards women. Since we don't have too much time to get into the

**[57:08]** specific rights and really just speaking to the legitimate grievances that women have had, I think that education is something that we should emphasize. And when we talk about women's role in education in both learning and the distribution of knowledge, I don't know if you all know this,

**[57:29]** but the first university in the world was founded by a Muslim woman. And Muslim women's scholarship started with the wives of the Prophet Muhammad (ﷺ), peace be upon him. It was in Islam, at least, the idea of a female scholar teaching, learning, teaching, having just as great of a right or

**[57:48]** obligation and a right to learn. That started off very early on. And so, you know, I hate to break this to you all, but the imam thing doesn't really exist. So we kind of just make it analogous, sort of like when I said I'm not a Texan, but I kind of am a Texan. I'm born in Louisiana, but I'm still a

**[58:04]** Texan in a way. The imam, in Islamic tradition, we don't really have a true clergy class. We have scholars and we have lay people. And if the scholars are endowed with some sort of position by state, they're judges, they're qadis. The imam is the person who leads the prayer.

**[58:19]** All right, so it could literally be if a group of people right now went out and started praying, the imam would be the one leading the prayer. But we use the term imam means leader, obviously, to make it analogous, but really you have scholars and lay people. A great scholar, and I'll end with this, Imam al-Dhahabi, who was 13th century, wrote a book

**[58:39]** compiling the biographies of 10,000 Muslim women scholars over less than a thousand years. And actually, there's a scholar from Oxford University, Akram Nadwi, who compiled those biographies, who's translating that wealth of biographies. And so when you allow for both men and women to have

**[58:56]** equal access and knowledge and learning the tradition and interpreting that was something that was enshrined early on in our faith tradition, then a lot of those discussions do not have to be revisionist, you know, 500, 600, 700 years later, because women have been boxed out.

**[59:13]** And also mention this, we have yet to have a female president in the United States of America. Indonesia, which is the largest Muslim country in the world, not an Arab country, surprise, surprise again. What's that? It's not my fault. It's not your fault.

**[59:31]** We don't blame you, President Carter, for that one. But that's just to say that we've, I think we've grossly misinterpreted the status of women in Islam, and that's part of that Orientalism that has peddled a certain notion of how women are viewed in the Islamic tradition.

**[59:46]** Well, let me say one thing. You know, I think the most surprising and enthusiastic group that we've had to work with around the world on women's rights has been the imams in West Africa and throughout Africa. And Karen can maybe take two or three minutes to testify about how

**[1:00:05]** many of them are so enthusiastic about having explained from the Qur'an how women should be treated equally and fairly. And this has been a very wonderful delight for us and also very gratifying for us. Isn't that right, Karen? That's right. I won't take two or three

**[1:00:22]** minutes. I'll just say that it's really inspiring that when people see how their faith and in this case the Qur'an aligns, and they look at it and they say this is human rights, they become apostles and evangelists for human rights. And this is happening in Nigeria and

**[1:00:39]** Ghana. You can read about it on our website that we have found. And we hope to do more with Christian communities and Jewish communities and others to align human rights per se with faith tradition, because it is very much culture. It's not faith. It's not from the text itself.

**[1:00:57]** It's culture. So helping to bridge those gaps is very, very much part of our work. Thank you, sir. So we only have about 15 minutes for questions, and we do want to get some in. And I wanted

**[1:01:13]** to pick up, Omar, on your last point earlier when you were talking about the weaponization of human rights. So the question then is how, and this is for each of you if you want to,

**[1:01:30]** I'll get it. It's okay. That's all right. How can we balance between human rights and our interests, our national interests, economic, military, to be maintained? To what extent

**[1:01:45]** must the superpowers intervene in a context where huge human rights violations take place? Especially what if this context is in the case of an ally, like maybe you could add several countries in there. So Imam Omar, but also President Carter, I'd like to know,

**[1:02:05]** how do you balance? This is sometimes tricky. I'll be glad to let you go first with change. I've never been in charge of a country, so I've never been tasked with balancing out the interests. I think just the, and I'd love to hear from President Carter what moral leadership

**[1:02:26]** looks like at the state level. As a person that's on the outside of government, it's very easy for me to point to double standards and to speak to the need for moral consistency, whether we're talking about torture, immigration, or mass incarceration, or poverty, or whatever

**[1:02:44]** that may be. I will say this. If it's not, in the case of human rights discourse in particular, the way that it has been weaponized has fed into this notion that we have already mastered

**[1:03:01]** it. That's what I'm saying. We've got to be honest with our own issues, and we have to be willing to look in the mirror and take ourselves to task and say, well, what makes us great as a nation? I found it very ironic that the Iraq war was called freedom. How

**[1:03:22]** do you free a nation when you destroy everything about its infrastructure? When we say they hate us for our freedom, really? What freedom? Are we hated for our freedom, or are we hated because we impede on the freedom of others and the true meaning of self-determination

**[1:03:38]** and the right to come into the fullness of themselves? When we say mutual interests, mutual respect, mutual interest, does that mean as long as your interest aligns with or doesn't undermine our projects, international projects, then we'll let you have your aspirations?

**[1:03:55]** Otherwise, we're just going to let you win these few battles, and we're going to continue to say we are the moral police of the world. I think that it's important for us as Americans to say that we love our country, and that's not to the exclusion of the world. My being

**[1:04:12]** an American does not exclude me from being a global citizen, just as my being a Muslim or a Christian or a Jew does not exclude me from being an American. I will love my country and try to advance my country in ways that will truly make it better, but not conflate

**[1:04:29]** patriotism with nationalism and not do so to the utter neglect of the world and say that, well, we have to protect our borders, and that's why we can morally reason with this idea of dehumanizing people to where we can either bomb them, fund the bombings

**[1:04:45]** of innocent children in weddings or in school buses, or even worse, cage them at our border. So I think that's how we have to reckon with our own cognitive dissonance and do so very publicly as American citizens and say we reject this idea of American exceptionalism. We believe

**[1:05:03]** that the entire world needs to do better, and here is how we're going to try to make our country better and, by extension, our world better. Okay. Sir? I don't think I can improve on that. Well, you know, almost all the wars we've been in for a long time have been unnecessary, including, I think, Iraq and Afghanistan and Yemen and

**[1:05:25]** maybe even Vietnam and Korea. I was in the Navy in a submarine during the Korean War, and I tried very desperately after that to bring a healing process to Korea. I've been

**[1:05:42]** there a number of times, and when I made my inaugural speech, I promised to preserve the peace and to promote human rights, and I tried to, and I was successful in doing that. But I had a lot of chances as president to begin a war, and I would say, in retrospect, that

**[1:06:05]** had I begun a major war, I would likely have been reelected because, you know, there's a lot of difference between an embattled civilian president and the commander-in-chief in charge

**[1:06:22]** of our troops overseas who are dying every day because you caused it and so forth. We don't admit that. But anyway, it's a very difficult choice to make, but I think that the American people have got to be committed to the principles of peace and human rights

**[1:06:41]** and because when we give tacit approval to a leader who goes to war unnecessarily, like we've done so many times, I just mentioned a few of them, I think that's wrong, and we need to correct that problem, but it has to come from within our country itself. I think,

**[1:07:03]** if you'll let me have one more minute, I think our country has, within our genes, I'll say, and included all three of us, a kind of a self-correcting capability because our ancestors

**[1:07:19]** all came here at different times. Mine came early and maybe yours later, and we came with a spirit of adventurism and entrepreneurship. We were able to try new things in a courageous way to come to a different country and start a new life, and we were successful when we

**[1:07:38]** got here by using our own initiative. And over a long period of time, going back to what the rabbi has said, we try to look at things in 70 years instead of 2000 in 70 years. Well, we always finally have corrected our major mistakes in America. It took us a long

**[1:07:59]** time to do away with slavery. It took a long time to get women's rights to vote, and it's taken us a long time to do other things, but we've always been successful eventually. And maybe that's because we have kind of an urge within our genes to correct our mistakes.

**[1:08:16]** Sometimes it takes too long, I have to admit that. But that's one of the saving things about America is that we eventually come out right. And with our Constitution, originally that all, we said men, all people are equal, created equal, and we have the rights that

**[1:08:37]** we've prescribed in our Bill of Rights and so forth. That was a wonderful signal to the rest of the world. That's ancient times, but I think we still have that ingrained in us. And so maybe over a long period of time, we'll be correcting it. My Sunday School lessons

**[1:08:55]** this month are about Isaiah and Jeremiah, when the Israelites were in captivity in Babylon, and they were finally saved by an Iranian, as a matter of fact, in the 60 years of two

**[1:09:14]** generations. But you know, I think that what I try to say to my Sunday School class is we have problems now in the world, a lot of them caused by the United States, but if you wait long enough, we're going to correct them. And I have faith in the future and hope.

**[1:09:31]** Well that's a very optimistic, I think we should end with that, but before we do, because we wanted some optimism, right? But before I do, I wanted to draw all of your attention to a new publication by the Human Rights Program. Today on the anniversary of the 70th Anniversary

**[1:09:49]** of the Declaration, we've published this scripturally annotated Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Each article is accompanied by biblical text and commentary. It does not provide any definitive analysis, but it hopes to encourage people of faith, Christians mainly, but it's both

**[1:10:09]** the Old Testament and the New Testament, to explore conversations and to initiate discussions. And we have gifts for each of you of this new publication, but we hope you in the audience here and online will look for it on the Carter Center's website. And the final, there's a

**[1:10:28]** question but it's really just a request, is there a common prayer of unity that we can use for attaining the peace in our daily work for human understanding and compassion? So I'd ask each of you to think of a prayer of unity, and I guess I'll start with the Bahá'í

**[1:10:51]** prayer, very brief, for America that was revealed in 1912 by 'Abdu'l-Bahá, a central figure of our faith who was a lifetime prisoner of the Ottoman Empire but came here in 1912. He said, O God, let this American democracy become glorious in spiritual degrees, even

**[1:11:11]** as it has aspired to material degrees. Confirm this revered nation to upraise the standard of the oneness of humanity, to promulgate the most great peace, to become thereby most

**[1:11:26]** glorious and praiseworthy among all the nations of the world. I'll start, based on what you offered. I don't think that there's one prayer that we can

**[1:11:47]** or that we should all say. There's something that's very valuable in our diversity, in our different faith traditions, and when we try to have one prayer that all the different faith traditions can say, what ends up being a prayer of unity, it's a prayer of unity that ends up happening is we take out everything that makes each of our traditions special.

**[1:12:04]** I believe that we should each pray in our own way, out of our own traditions. Because you offered this Bahá'í prayer, Jewish communities have, for a very, very long time, been offering prayers for the leader of whatever government we're living under.

**[1:12:22]** We pray that there's different versions of this prayer, but basically we're praying that this leader, whether it's a president or a king or prime minister, whoever it is, that they are going to do what is right and what is just.

**[1:12:40]** There were many conversations in many Jewish communities when the new administration started about how we would go about saying this prayer when we didn't have that faith that this was an administration that would actually carry out justice.

**[1:12:55]** In those conversations, what many of us talked about was the fact that we've said this prayer, or a version of it, under some of the cruelest kings, under czars, under lots and lots of people who had no interest in justice, in mercy, in peace,

**[1:13:12]** and yet we keep praying it. We keep praying that they actually will find some enlightenment. Of course, it's not enough to pray. We also have to be doing the work every single day. We need to keep saying that prayer, whoever our leaders are, in every moment,

**[1:13:27]** and then continue to also do the work so that we're not just relying on those leaders to do the right thing. Do you want to share? I'll try. There's long text, so go ahead. I think one of the things that we might pray for is that the United States be a true superpower,

**[1:13:45]** not based on our military power and not based on our economic influence or even our political influence, but based on the fact that we are champions of human rights and champions of peace

**[1:14:00]** and champion of the environment and champion of equality among people and champion of welcoming foreigners to our shores. Those are the kind of things that we ought to be the champion of in the eyes of the world.

**[1:14:19]** I would like for everybody on earth to say when they have a conflict in that country, why don't we go to Washington and see how they preserve the peace?

**[1:14:34]** If we have a problem with human rights and they have an abuse in their country, why don't we have them say, why don't we go to Washington and see how they deal with human rights? We'd like to do the same thing.

**[1:14:49]** Why don't we protect the environment the way Washington does? That's what I'd like to see our country be, a champion of human rights, and I think that's a good prayer, at least for me.

**[1:15:04]** I was going through all the prayers in my mind, obviously. There are many beautiful scriptures and prayers that could fit the entirety of the Abrahamic scope and by anyone who believes in a creator God.

**[1:15:22]** There's one prayer that I think speaks to something that we've all been hinting, not hinting at, but speaking about, which is that a recognition that our decisions are very consequential, especially when we have positions of power, whether they're political places of power,

**[1:15:37]** whether they're pulpits, places of influence, they're places of power, and they're places that have great consequence. And each one of us has to recognize that our places carry great weights of responsibility.

**[1:15:53]** And the consequences have led to a lot of people in hardship. Man-made created disasters. And that's true whether I'm dealing with a Syrian refugee or someone that's in the streets of Dallas or someone that's in a warehouse at the border.

**[1:16:13]** So one prayer that's very special to me, it's short but it's very comprehensive, the Prophet Muhammad (ﷺ), peace be upon him, used to say, O God, I ask you for the ability to do good, the ability to leave off evil, and for the love of the poor.

**[1:16:31]** So, you know, the love of the poor, the love of the exploited, the love of the oppressed. If there's anything that we can do when we're talking about humanizing people, I think that each one of us needs to reach deeply within ourselves

**[1:16:47]** and then do our part to acquaint ourselves with those that are suffering due to the various injustices that we seek to combat with our different places of influence. So I ask God that he allow us to do good, leave off evil, and that he place within us the love of the poor.

**[1:17:07]** Thank you. Well, that's all the time we have tonight. I hope you'll watch the webcast for our next conversation, The Delicate Art of Conflict Resolution, because we need peace, right? Yeah. This will take place March 15th, March 14th, excuse me, 2019, and you'll find more details online.

**[1:17:26]** My thanks to all of you for being with us tonight. And please join me in a round of applause for our panel. Thank you.

## Other Episodes in "Lecture"
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- [This Is What Made The Prophets Unstoppable | Lecture by Dr. Omar Suleiman](https://yaqeeninstitute.org/watch/series/lecture/this-is-what-made-the-prophets-unstoppable-lecture-by-dr-omar-suleiman.md)
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