Why do some people see in the attack on the World Trade Centre something different in kind, rather than just in degree, from the suicide bombings that have ravaged life in Israel? And why did they see nihilism in it? The answer to the first question is a partial answer to the second. Many people see in the evil of the suicide bombings against Israeli civilians something as old as politics, namely the suspension of ordinary morality for the sake of a political objective and for a limited period. In the choice by Palestinians of suicide/murder as a political weapon, people see just another, though particularly unnerving, example of commitment to the doctrine that in politics some ends sometimes justify even horrific means. Whatever one thinks of this doctrine, no one can say it is new.

Rightly or wrongly, many people saw something different in the attack on the Twin Towers. They saw religious fundamentalism of a kind that makes morality subservient to religion, not temporarily for the sake of political or worldly objectives, but subservient, period. Writing in the Guardian, a British journalist said that, whereas the suicide bombers in the Middle East acknowledge limits to what they may do, the terrorists who flew the hijacked planes with their passengers into the World Trade Centre respected no limits.

Our graffitist made no attempt to separate the God to whom she addressed her plea from the God belief in whom she feared. There is no suggestion in what she wrote that she pleaded with the true God to be delivered from the consequences of belief in false ones; no suggestion that whereas false religion is to be feared, true religion is a comfort and blessing for humankind. By refusing to draw such distinctions, she threw into question a belief that had become pretty much orthodoxy in the liberal, democratic West, namely that true religion is humane and tolerant. That orthodoxy prevailed, I suspect, not as the provisional result of scholarly, theological and philosophical debate, but as something many people believe must be true. People are now struck by the fact, or perhaps are newly struck by the significance of the fact, that there are too many biblical texts and too many theological utterances in support of those whom we, perhaps unjustly, call fanatics. We call them fanatics because we assume that they are in the grip of pathological dispositions (or, at any rate, of forces that distort their personalities) that cause them radically to corrupt what is respect-worthy in religion. ‘True believers’ we call them, but the pejorative irony of that expression may owe more to liberal distrust of intensity than to an understanding of what constitutes ‘true religion’. Be that as it may: the fear expressed in the graffiti in New York subverts the comfort we have found in the belief that, were we to ameliorate the social and political misery of peoples in the underdeveloped world, we would undermine the forces that generate the pathologies that make ‘true believers’ of an increasing number of them.

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It will not help, I think, to distinguish commitment to religion from belief in God. Tony Kelly once quipped that one could have too much of religion but never too much of God. But leaving mysticism aside, when they try reflectively to distinguish the God they believe to be the true God from false gods, how can Christians, Jews or Muslims do it other than by appeal to their sacred texts? Not only by appeal to them, perhaps, but necessarily by such appeal. How, for that matter, will they distinguish the true God from the devil who surely has what it takes to put on an imitation of the true God that would be convincing to any ordinary mortal. (And what genuinely pious person would take herself to be more than an ordinary mortal?) But, in the sacred texts that are common to Jews and Christians, God commands enough massacres of the enemies of the one true God to make anyone’s hair stand on end. Our graffitist did not contrast religion with God. Her problem was how to recognise the one true God. Can the God who ordered the massacre of women and children and even the animals in Jericho, who spared only a handful of quislings, be the same God who is worshipped in the psalms or who appeared to Job out of the whirlwind? It is an old question, of course, but it now presses urgently and, for some, painfully.

One might put it this way: the dilemma that Socrates posed to Euthyphro in a dialogue of the same name, a dilemma known for the most part only to philosophy and theology students, has now exploded into the political arena. As originally put by Socrates, it went something like this: are acts pious because God loves them, or does God love such acts because they are pious? There are other versions: is something good because God commands it, or does He command it because it is good? Like all serious dilemmas, there is something to be said for either horn, and neither seems entirely deniable.

In the academy, the dilemma is, perhaps, merely fascinating. In religious life, it is, as Kierkegaard insisted, only truly understood ‘in fear and trembling’. To see, as we do now, allegiance to the first horn played out in politics is terrifying. Many of the religious settlers on the West Bank, and, perhaps more significantly from the point of view of politics, many of their supporters in Israel’s minority political parties, press biblical claims to the West Bank quite unconstrained, it would seem, by independently recognisable standards of justice. Outside Israel (and probably within it), what most frightens people is not so much that the settlers are fanatics (though, of course, that is bad enough), but that they seem to have made considerations of justice entirely subservient to their interpretation of God’s commands. The same looks to be true of literally millions of Muslims who appear to hate Jews with genocidal ferocity. Seeing that hatred, who has reason to be confident that it would be assuaged by a twostate solution, or even by a Palestinian state in the whole of mandated Palestine? Never in my lifetime have I seen such hatred, yet there is little public condemnation of it that is adequately responsive to its evil ferocity.

With what right do I say this? I take the question seriously, accepting that it fairly challenges the authority with which I speak so harshly, rather than just the evidence in support of my judgment. Firstly, I am not religious, but I accept that one needs to be inward with religion in order to understand its complexities and the agonies of a believer who, with due moral seriousness, confronts the questions, Who is the true God? and What is true religion? And, as a baby boomer whose formative political and intellectual life was shaped by efforts to understand the horrors of communism and fascism, I do not need to be reminded how murderous secular ideologies can be. Secondly, I am, to the core, a child of the West. But only fifty years after the Holocaust, and with the crimes of the former Yugoslavia still vivid, I understand the derision directed against those who preach, as many now do, the moral superiority of Western civilisation.

All that granted, I believe that it subverts rather than strengthens a sense of common humanity between the peoples of the earth to decline to express, because one is not religious or because one has a justified sense of historical shame, revulsion at the evil done and proposed by Jews and Muslims in the name of religious perspectives that will not acknowledge themselves answerable to independently recognisable standards of justice.

The worry is not about the establishment of theocratic states. They can live comfortably within the community of nations, subject to international law, including, of course, international law on human rights. The worry is about theocratic states or religious claims to territory that do not consider themselves answerable to, but indeed have contempt for, international law and the standards of justice implicit in it — standards we need more desperately now than at any time in the last fifty years. Again, I say that fully knowing that (and understanding why) many Muslims may scorn my words. As I write, it looks as though Western nations will in varying degrees support, or become complicit with, a US administration determined to wage war against Iraq. By insisting that it will, if necessary, wage war alone or together only with Britain, by repeatedly declaring its serious intent to bring about ‘régime change’, by military means, if necessary, and by refusing to be answerable to the International Criminal Court, the USA has shown contempt for international law. For reasons that are not entirely edifying, Europe has resisted treading America’s path to war, but the extent of its determination to stand for international law can be gauged by its cowardly acceptance of the USA’s refusal to submit to the Court’s jurisdiction.

Do I believe, then, that the world has reason to fear some Jews and Muslims but not, for the moment at least, Christians? I do not believe it. Insofar as it still makes sense to talk of Christendom, the waters there look relatively calm, but we do not know what monsters lie not far beneath the surface. Already, only fifty years after the Holocaust, anti- Semitism is again fierce in parts of Europe. True, newspaper reports suggest that attacks on synagogues and Jewish shops, and the desecration of Jewish cemeteries, have mostly been perpetrated by Muslim youths in response to events in the Middle East. But those attacks have occurred within the cultural space of European and Christian anti-Semitism. I shall try to explain what I mean by that.

Recall the scandal that centred on a young writer who called herself Helen Demidenko. She wrote a novel that some people believed was stridently anti-Semitic because it appeared to them to suggest that Jewish Bolsheviks were responsible for the suffering Stalin inflicted on the Ukrainian people and that the Jews therefore deserved pretty much what they suffered at the hands of the Nazis. Those who believed that to be the novel’s polemical intent were understandably scandalised that it should have won the Miles Franklin Award, Australia’s most prestigious literary honour.

Towards the end of the debate, a cartoon depicting Demidenko being roasted above the flames of a menorah appeared in The Australian. It could have come from the pages of the infamous Nazi propaganda rag, Der Stürmer. (A leering stereotypical Jewish face in its corner, delighting in the roasting, would have earned it a place amongst the more obscene of the world’s anti-Semitic cartoons.) There is no reason to believe that the cartoonist who drew it or the editor who published it were anti-Semites. Yet it was an anti-Semitic cartoon, made so not by the intentions of its creator, but by its place in the cultural and historical space of European anti-Semitism. In The Culture of Forgetting, Robert Manne exposed what he took (rightly to my mind) to be the culpable naïveté of many Australians who could not understand how profoundly offensive the book is. In Europe, he thought, it probably would not have been published and certainly not honoured. At the time, I agreed with him. Now I think he was only half-right.

Consider the following. Constantly, in the television and newsprint reports of the recent Israeli siege of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, attention was drawn to the fact that armed Jews were surrounding and despoiling the birthplace of Jesus. Often the tone was of barely suppressed indignation. Entirely absent was the humility one might have expected to accompany even a partial acknowledgment of the implications of centuries of murderous Christian anti-Semitism for an understanding of the siege and of the disposition of avowedly secular people to respond to it with holy indignation. Perhaps even more striking was the failure of the journalists to appreciate that their indignation at the mere fact that a Jewish army should be laying siege to the birthplace of Jesus was not far, in the space of cultural and historical memory, from smears against Jews as Christ killers. But the journalists were no more conscious of this, I suspect, than the Australian cartoonist was conscious of the anti-Semitic associations of his cartoon. Comfort will be found in that only if one forgets that none of it would have been possible five or ten years after the Holocaust, and what dark forces lie just beneath such forgetfulness.

There is another, even more disturbing, example. It is now common in European and British liberal intellectual circles to ask whether Israel has forfeited its right to exist because of the great injustices it has committed against the Palestinians. The thought is in the air that Israel should continue to have a place in the community of nations only on condition that it behaves itself. To my knowledge, this condition is laid upon no other nation. Though it was divided, not even Germany was denied its nationhood after World War II. No one suggests that Iraq should disappear, only that Saddam Hussein should. And not even residual colonial arrogance has tempted people to say that we should reassess the place in the community of nations of some of the murderous African states.

Why the Jews, then? Because, I suspect, many people believe something like this: ‘Overcome (perhaps against our better judgment) with pity after the Holocaust for their suffering, we gave Jews a chance to behave decently and to live with dignity amongst the nations of the world. They have proved a disappointment.’ The same tone infests this question, asked so often: ‘After the Holocaust, how can the Jews who suffered so much inflict terrible suffering on Palestinians?’

The answer is that the Holocaust could not make the Jews a different species. They remain human beings, with ordinary human capacities for good and ill. The Russian people suffered terribly under Lenin and then Stalin, but no one asks how, after suffering so much, they could commit atrocities in Chechnya. That such a question should so often be asked of the Jews, and that the fulfilment of their centuriesold aspiration to nationhood should be thought to be conditional on the behaviour of Israeli governments, is, I believe, the legacy of a Christian anti-Semitism that still runs strongly in subterranean streams not far below the surface of political life in much of Europe.

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To return to the graffiti in New York. Imagine the person who wrote it addressing an ecumenically minded gathering of scholars. She might say something like this. ‘I treasure scholarship. Truly I do. But its place in religion is always problematical. What were simple, pious Jews and Christians to do when their Bible became questionable to German biblical scholars? Were they to give up their faith as a hostage to the debates in the journals of biblical hermeneutics?’ I ask a similar question about the concepts of true religion and the true God. If it is scholarship and hermeneutical analysis, aided by theology and philosophy, that assure you that true religion condemns the evils committed in its name, what should happen if further scholarship puts it in doubt? If it is philosophical or theological argument that convinces you that Euthyphro’s dilemma is to be resolved in a way that renders religion answerable to independently establishable standards of justice and human decency, what happens if the next issue of the journal of religious philosophy should show that you were muddled? It is in the nature of scholarship and philosophical and theological argument to be contestable. Very little counts as proof and, I would suggest, almost nothing that contributes to answering the questions ‘who is the true God?’ or ‘what is true religion?’ is beyond contestation. What then am I to do when I fear those who believe in God? I suspect you will persist in saying that you are certain that true religion is always on the side of decency. But let me ask you: should you ever come to doubt this, will you stand with religion or will you stand with human decency?

Hesitantly (because I am not religious), I offer the best answer I know. It is to be found in Simone Weil’s Notebooks:

It is not the way a man talks about God, but the way he talks about things of this world that best shows whether his soul has passed through the fire of the love of God … If I light an electric torch at night out of doors I don’t judge its power by looking at the bulb, but by seeing how many objects it lights up. The brightness of a source of light is appreciated by the illumination it projects upon non-luminous objects. The value of a religious or, more generally, a spiritual way of life is appreciated by the amount of illumination thrown upon things of this world. Earthly things are the criterion of spiritual things … If on the pretext that only spiritual things are of value, we refuse to take the light thrown upon earthly things as a criterion, then we are in danger of having a non-existent treasure. Only spiritual things are of value, but only physical things have a verifiable existence. Therefore the value of the former can only be verified as an illumination projected on the latter … If a man took my lefthand glove, passed it behind his back and returned it to me as a right-hand glove, I should know that he had access to the fourth dimension. No other proof is possible. In the same way, if a man gives bread to a beggar in a certain way or speaks in a certain way about a defeated army I know that his thought has been outside this world and sat with the Father who is in Heaven.