All religions and their leaders must own up to extremist activities within their faith and examine which of their traditional teachings enable followers to commit evil, the Archbishop of Canterbury has said.

The Most Rev Justin Welby, the figurehead of the worldwide Anglican Church, told interfaith leaders in Sri Lanka that accepting responsibility is key rather than disavowing an extremist.

Mr Welby arrived in Sri Lanka on Thursday and first visited St Sebastian’s Church near the town of Negombo to pay homage to those killed in the Easter suicide bomb attacks blamed on extremist Muslim groups.

On Friday, he told religious leaders that discussion among faiths has become more difficult in the last 30-40 years and in every faith, including in Christianity, extremist attitudes have grown.

“It is the duty of every religious tradition, for its leaders, to resist extremism and to teach peaceful dialogue,” he said.

“So the first challenge to all of us is take responsibility.

“If a Christian does something evil, it is not for me to say ‘well they are not a real Christian’. I have to ask myself ‘what is within my faith tradition, our historic teaching, that makes it easy for them to do that?’

“The second challenge in dialogue is honesty. Dialogue is where we are honest, where we open the door of our heart and say it is this that frightens me about you or this that I disagree with you about.

“Whether Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, whatever faith, society calls us to account and I believe that God calls us to account at the end of time. Have you been builders of peace or builders of pain?”

In the Easter attacks, more than 260 people died in six co-ordinated bombings of churches and hotels.

Seven suicide bombers from two local Muslim extremist groups who had pledged allegiance to Islamic State carried out the attacks, which also left some 500 people injured.

Other suspects killed themselves by exploding bombs, some with their families, as police and military closed in.

Islamic clerics expressed outrage at the attacks and did not allow the suicide bombers and those who killed themselves to avoid capture to be buried in Islamic burial grounds, having declared that they do not belong to the Muslim faith. Their children were buried with Islamic rituals.

British singer and actor Sting called world leaders “half men and cowards” on Saturday for their inability to solve the refugee crisis.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has already played down expectations of a breakthrough at hastily-arranged talks among EU leaders on Sunday on the migration dispute dividing Europe and threatening her own government.

Austrian Vice Chancellor Heinz-Christian Strache said on Saturday he expects a chain reaction across the European Union if Germany closes its borders to refugees.

Migration policies in the U.S. have also been in the spotlight.

“Thank God for Greece because you have shown the way,” said Sting, whose real name is Gordon Sumner, at an Amnesty International event in Athens.

“You have shown how to treat refugees when other people are building walls. When children are being taken from their mothers and put in cages, you are acting with compassion and generosity and commonsense,” he said.

“Because our so-called leaders, a sad parade of half-men, cowards, have not got the solutions … Once again Greece has shown us how to be civilized.”

Nearly a million refugees passed through and got support from Greece in 2015, as the country was dealing with its own major financial crisis.

U.S. President Donald Trump on Wednesday abandoned a policy of separating migrant children from their parents on the U.S.-Mexico border, after images of youngsters in cages sparked outrage at home and abroad.

Sting told Reuters the family separation policy was “brutal” and “barbaric”.

The former frontman for The Police was in Athens for two concerts as part of world tour.

Muslim leaders have joined the concern expressed over new EU regulations which mean Kosher and Halal meat will be labelled “meat from slaughter without stunning”.

The European Parliament voted in favour of the amendment to the provision of food information to consumers last month, just two weeks after New Zealand banned the kosher slaughter of animals.

The decision, which only applies to food killed by religious slaughter, was widely condemned by the Jewish community with Henry Grunwald, chairman of Shechita UK, calling it “discriminatory”,

Now, in a joint statement, the rabbis and imams advisory group of the Chief Rabbi’s Office , and the inter-faith organisation, Faith Matters, said: “We support the concept of fair and universal labeling but believe that such an amendment is naked discrimination.

“It singles out religious communities who have been extremely careful to undertake humane food preparation for hundreds, if not thousands, of years.”

Source: Jewish Chronicle By Robyn Rosen, July 15, 2010