Bill Clinton travels the world with purpose

CNT: One of the five pillars of Islam is the practice of philanthropy. Do you see a possibility for the United States to find more common ground with Muslim countries through shared humanitarian endeavors?

Clinton: Yes. You know that the Koran has a very specific set of obligations. There's mandatory giving, which is more or less two percent of cash income, and then if you have jewelry and other things. It actually prescribes how much you're supposed to give every year of the value of your physical possessions, which goes up above two percent. And then there is, over and above that, voluntary but morally compulsory giving for people who are more fortunate, once they've taken care of their own families, when there are community needs that are not met. So there has been a huge tradition of charity. It has been underappreciated in America, because some of the charities have been conduits for transfer of funds which have been used for terrorist activity; so we have underappreciated what is a very legitimate and big part of being a devout Muslim. And I see it because we have so many Islamic organizations and Muslims who participate in the Clinton Global Initiative every year, who come here and make commitments. I see it when I look in the Middle East and I see in the Gulf all these new universities being built in partnership with American universities. Or the young Arab leaders going out there and training people to try to be successful businesspeople so they'll sell products instead of hate ideology, and I think it could be a basis of genuine cooperation. I see it in America: A lot of the mosques in America have charitable outreach programs that benefit not just Muslims but other people in their community, so I see this as something we ought to try to do more of together.

CNT: In light of that, what steps is the Clinton Global Initiative taking to encourage philanthropic commitments conceived and directed by Muslims, especially at the grassroots community level?

Clinton: I can give you a couple of examples. You know we have Ibi Patel, an Indian-American Muslim who has an NGO that has worked with Queen Rania in Jordan to bring young Jordanians together with American Jews, Christians, and Muslims—do a lot of travel back and forth, get together, work together, be together. It's called the Interfaith Core. It's the idea that the core of your being can be faith-based, but it doesn't have to be exclusive. We've just had our midyear meeting kind of see how we're doing, on people coming next time, how we're doing on people keeping their commitments from last time. And Ibi brought to this meeting a young American Jewish woman and a young Jordanian man, and they talked about how wary they were of each other in the beginning, and how they got to know one another. And then the young Jewish woman talked about how she'd gotten sick in Jordan and how she'd been taken in by a Muslim family and how desperately sick she was.

And then after a day she felt better. And they asked her, when she felt better, if she'd come back the next night and come to dinner, because they felt that because they'd allowed her the privilege of tending her when she was sick, she'd almost become like a member of their family. And it was a totally shocking thing to her. She couldn't imagine being treated in that way, because bad events are more highly publicized than good ones. We tend to identify each other by extremes unless we actually know each another. That's one example. There's a program called Playing for Peace where an American has gotten together boys and girls, Palestinian-Arabs, Israeli-Arabs, and Israeli-Jews, to play in mixed basketball teams. They had a Desert Classic last year, and all these kids played together. And then they elaborated. They built other programs on it, and they've taken in more and more age-groups, with the idea that the more people were actually doing things together in a way that they could form a different identity (not to reject their ethnic or religious identity but to layer it with other kinds of things—in this case, being on a team), that it would give them a basis on which they could have positive rather than negative relations.

And of course, my favorite old standby, which has also participated in the Clinton Global Initiative, is the Seeds of Peace program, which I've supported for years. I had the Seeds of Peace kids on the White House Lawn in September of '93; they were Israel-Arabs, Palestinian-Arabs, Muslims, Jordanians, Egyptians, there were Israeli-Jews, together. They go to summer camp together; they have a meeting place now in the Middle East on the border near the Arab's Crossing; they do things together. One of the young Palestinians who was killed in the second intifada by an errant shell, was killed wearing his Seeds of Peace T-shirt. And he had twelve underneath the bed; he was trying to convince other Palestinians to go and make friends with the Israelis, and they buried him in his T-shirt. So those are three examples I think are very important.

CNT: Anything yet along the lines yet of a shared institution, like a hospital?

Clinton: Well, the main thing that's being done—there's always been a lot of care across religious lines in the Middle East: Palestinian doctors working in Israel, Jewish-Israeli medical physicians taking care of wounded Palestinians even if they were wounded by Israeli soldiers. There's a lot of that. There's a new photography book just out that you ought to get—I'm trying to remember the name of it—where an American Jewish woman went to Israel, into the territories, and photographed people who've been scarred by the intifada and the constant conflict. It's breathtaking. I'm embarrassed—it's right on my ... We could call Oscar. He could find it—the title of it. It's right on my counter in the kitchen. I showed it to Hillary when she got home last night. So you open it to any page and here's a young Israeli who is in the IDF who got his leg blown off, and here is a beautiful young Palestinian family who lost two limbs or something. And you go to the next page and you see the same thing. There's a tradition there that health care will not be denied because of faith or politics. There are a lot of hospitals where you have both Muslim and Jewish people working together. I would like to see more of it. I think it's a good thing to do. My mother, who had not a lot of formal education, was always very liberal on civil rights. She wasn't even political until I got interested in politics. I once asked her why she was an intuitive—why she favored all these human rights movements and integration, and she said, "Once you've seen people bleed, you know that our blood is the same." She said it has an incredible impact. She said, "I don't know anyone in my hospital who's a racist." It's an interesting insight. So I think we could probably do more there.

CNT: The Clinton Foundation concerns itself with four main aims: climate, HIV/AIDS, childhood obesity, and one focus of interest that changes every year. Can you draw a picture of the foundation for us?

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