OPINION

New weapon to fight religious extremism

America has a new weapon in the war against religious extremism. It’s not a drone, and it’s not some space weapon. It’s a rabbi. And I’m not talking about Jesus but about a living, breathing, walking-around-in-his-yarmulke rabbi. David Saperstein was just sworn in as America’s newest ambassador for international religious freedom.

I bet you didn’t even know we had one. We do. And it’s this person’s job to identify, spotlight and, ultimately, try to root out religious persecution and intolerance wherever he finds it. This ambassador is most famous for his annual report listing all of the world’s bad guys along with an outline of their nefarious acts.

Of course, finding the bad guys is hardly a challenge. They’re on the Internet, lopping off heads and burning people alive. There are even reports of entire villages being exterminated by some of these self-righteous theocrats. But finding religious intolerance is not the same as stopping it.

And it’s not as simple as calling in the Marines. Iraq and Afghanistan have taught us at least that. For every terrorist killed militarily, we seem to create two more. After billions of bullets, bombs and black-op raids, does anyone really believe there are fewer extremists today than there were 10 years ago? Just look at the Islamic State, Boko Haram and the growing number of freelancers in Europe and Canada. The lesson is writ large. “We cannot kill our way out of this war,” as Marie Hart, a U.S. State Department official, recently put it.

The real battle is one of ideas, and we must persuade — that is, educate — our way to victory. It is not a battle over whether there is one god, no gods or whose god is right. Not really. The question is whether one believes in liberty of conscience. Freedom of the mind. The right to choose for or against religious faith and the willingness to defend that right for all others.

Yes, the founding fathers enshrined liberty of conscience in our Bill of Rights, but this is not simply an American idea. Ambassador Saperstein’s challenge will be to go behind the First Amendment to the universal rights and responsibilities that underlie it. Young Muslims — like young Christians and Jews — must be convinced that one’s “yes” to Allah is meaningless unless one is also free to say “no,” and that one’s freedom to choose for or against a god is best guarded by protecting that right for all others. To paraphrase Martin Luther King, a denial of freedom anywhere is a threat to freedom everywhere.

But even that is not enough.

There is the matter of civility. How we contend with one another is as important as what we contend. This is the flip side of the Charlie Hebdo massacre. We must convince Muslims that violence is not the answer when their faith is insulted, but we must also convince Westerners not to insult their faith. Conscience is more than personal taste. People are willing to die for it. It’s like calling a Southern boy a son of a bitch back in the 1950s. If you did it, you had insulted his mother, and he had no choice but to fight. Such antiquated notions of honor are foreign to postmodern Western ears, but that’s basically what we’re dealing with here. So, freedom? Yes. But insult? No. Incivility has nearly ruined Washington. We must not let it ruin the world.

The challenge facing Ambassador Saperstein is formidable, but so are his talents.

Newsweek identified him as the most influential rabbi in America a few years ago. The director of religious freedom programs at the Newseum, Charles Haynes, calls Saperstein a “national treasure.” He has extensive contacts throughout the world and chaired America’s first commission on international religious freedom. As Congress begins the debate over whether to authorize ground troops in the nettlesome war against the Islamic State, the most important theater in that war may be opening in a small suite of offices across town at the State Department, where a diminutive rabbi begins his new work.

Oliver Thomas is a member of USA TODAY’s Board of Contributors and author of “10 Things Your Minister Wants to Tell You (But Can’t Because He Needs the Job).”