Tel Aviv (Israël), 1 februari 2011. En wat denken de Israëlische Arabieren en Palestijnen over de huidige ontwikkelingen in Egypte? Op het plaatje organiseerden een groep Israëlische Arabieren en Palestijnen afgelopen dinsdag een demonstratie voor de Egyptische ambassade in Tel Aviv. Het evenement werd gehouden in solidariteit met de opstanden in Tunesië en Egypte.
I always say if we want peace in the Middle East to stand a chance we have to tell our politicians to back off, or better yet, Muslims and Jews would need to get together and tell the rest of the world to back off and let them make peace amongst themselves all on their own. Sure they can do it!
If you look back in history, whenever Muslims and Jews lived together in harmony, their combined forces, with knowledge, science and commerce made their communities thrive.
Sadly in our lifetime, it's almost as if they are purposely being manipulated to be at odds with each other, living in constant turmoil and kept apart only to serve other people's political and economic agendas.
Jewish businessman Robert Harush who grew up in Ashkelon spends fortune on renovation of large Muslim house of worship in Montereau, in effort to promote co-existenceAn unlikely benefactor. An Ashkelon resident who made a fortune in the European real estate business has decided to pay for the construction of a mosque in France for the benefit of the local Muslim community.
Father of four Robert Harush, 58, grew up in Ashkelon and having completed his military service tried his luck in the real estate business in Europe. His success has won him many hotels and buildings and he is estimated to be worth hundreds of millions of shekels.
In other news....
(JTA) -- A practicing Muslim and an Orthodox Jew have been chosen to run a New Jersey city.
Mohammed Hameeduddin was chosen last week by the Teaneck, N.J. township council to serve as mayor and Adam Gussen was chosen as deputy mayor. The sitting councilmen were appointed by the township council each for a two-year term.
The men attended middle school together in Teaneck and both attended Rutgers University, according to ABC News.
Oddly enough I'm starting to see a pattern lately where Democrats and Republicans are uniting their voices more and more against Obama's policies.
WASHINGTON (AFP) – Eighty-seven of the US Senate's 100 members have voiced support for Israel's right to self-defense in the face of threats from Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran, the Senate said Wednesday.
The lawmakers wrote in a letter to President Barack Obama that they "fully support Israel's right to self-defense.
"In response to thousands of rocket attacks on Israel from Hamas terrorists in Gaza, Israel took steps to prevent items which could be used to support these attacks from reaching Gaza," they said, referring to Israel's four-year naval blockade of the Palestinian territory.
Israel last week announced it was easing its siege to allow all strictly "civilian" goods into Gaza, after a crisis exploded when Israeli forces killed nine activists during a May 31 raid on a flotilla of aid ships attempting to run the blockade.
The lawmakers, from both sides of the political aisle, also stressed that "it is our national interest to support Israel at a moment when Israel faces multiple threats from Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the current regime in Iran."
"Like most things in life, morality unfortunately is a little more complex than some would have you believe. Presently, morality is sinking into oblivion deep into the Eastern Mediterranean and all that remains is some soggy, discarded flotsam bobbing up and down in a magnifying pandemonium of hysterical, biased tropism."
For that same reason I always refused to take sides on the Israel/Palestine issue and reject our pathetic self-serving politicians who insist on ruling our world with manipulating people into blind emotion and wild fury, keeping the fires burning, while holding the world community hostage and forcing the issue to become the center our universe, or more or less as a convenience store or drug dealer they can always run to if they need a fix to feed their bad habit. All of them can collectively move over to make room for Dr Qanta Ahmed, who does an amazing job offering crucial insights and reasoning on not just what's actually wrong with our world today, but how to fix it as well.
I recommend you read the entire article, but here's the part that speaks to me most:
At one stage, a spokesperson for Hamas appeared on the BBC citing that Gazans have no need for aid, adding " we do not need to fill our bellies". Well, the world thinks otherwise. In his astonishing defiance revealed by a casual, throwaway comment, the spokesperson revealed the prime goal of the Flotilla's mission, as he perceived it: to run the gauntlet against the blockade, not to alleviate material needs of his suffering electorate. The Flotilla was a bald and blatant political move designed to humiliate and provoke.
His remarks reveal the extent to which Palestinians are now objectified political pawns, rather than a people. While we are comfortable with the longstanding objectification of Palestinians by Israelis as the 'other' in the form of a security threat (after all Israel must balance a constant struggle to determine the needs of a terrorized Israeli citizenship over the needs of an exploding ever-younger ever impoverished, increasingly radicalized Gaza population) we fail to encounter our own sinister objectification of the Palestinians which we accomplish so effectively all by ourselves. This objectification is not only held by their revolving, corrupt leadership, but also by an objectifying Muslim world. We the Muslims need the Palestinians to remain locked in their plight so that they might continue to serve as the Ummah's scotoma (a blindspot) which literally prevents us from seeing our own more immediate distresses, distresses which might demand our attention and perhaps even require societal interventions . We would be lost, disarmed, and stunned without an external locus for our rage which is so piercingly trained on Gaza and the West Bank, so piercing in fact that Darfur barely warrants a sidelong glance.
Does this exonerate Israel? No. Does this implicate Muslims? You bet.
Let me continue the self-flagellation.
During this same period of Flotilla Face-Offs with the IDF, Pakistan, my nation of matrilineal and patrimonial heritage has witnessed the extraordinary massacre of 120 moderate, pacifist Muslims, followers of the Ahmadiyyah movement that subscribes to peaceful, pluralistic Islam. Specifically, they embrace non-violence, condemning violent jihad. They were massacred, in cold blood, in worship, by fellow citizens, fellow Pakistanis, fellow Muslims. Most of the murdered were elderly, and male. Hundreds more were injured, some of whom are still dying this week. Emergency services did not arrive for over two hours. Pakistani police stood back, apparently allowing the carnage to occur, supposedly too afraid to engage. Awaiting special operations commandos to intervene, in their uncertainty, perhaps their tacit tolerance, Pakistani police became silent accomplices to the massacre. Many of the pacifist Muslim worshipers died of uncomplicated hemorrhagic shock within mere minutes of advanced medical care.
Where has been the subsequent national and international outrage at the death of these Muslims? Where is the Muslim world now? Where are the Muslims calling for War Crimes to be investigated within the inert and increasingly fractious Pakistani 'leadership'? We, the Muslims find ourselves suddenly voiceless, tongue tied, jaded and unmoved, yet somehow Gaza stokes our bald fury.
So, against this deafening silence, when six passengers on the ship were regrettably killed during a confrontation with the Israeli Defense Force, this bloodshed became sufficient to call for investigations of war crimes by an elected government in charge of their military at work enforcing a public, long standing naval blockade, one which has been tacitly accepted in the region, irrespective of the ethics of this blockade. It wasn't just a member of the IDF, who was thrown overboard in the on board skirmish it would seem, it was morality.
Apparently, other than in Morocco and Tunisia, most people in the Arab world have never heard of "The Diary of Anne Frank".
This is kind of surprising to me, especially when, in most cases, the book is banned for political or ideological reasons. You would think that's the more reason people would want to get a hold of it and pass it around, even if it's just out of curiosity, no? Plus the fact that it's one of the most read books in the world! I guess that's possible, but it looks like that's going to change now.
They say thousands of copies have been downloaded in Arab countries since it's been made available online free of charge by Aladdin Library about a year ago.
"Aladdin is the first multilingual, free online library in the world that offers
its subscribers 24/7 access to an online collection of books translated for the
first time into Arabic and Persian with the aim of enhancing mutual knowledge
among peoples of different cultures and rejecting conflicts of memory, including
all forms of Holocaust denial and trivialization. You can read every book cover
to cover and – for the first time in an online library – you can download the
entire book free of charge. The library allows subscribers to search each and
every word of all of the books and articles in the collection.
The library is the result of a partnership that aims to create a network of non-governmental organizations, intergovernmental institutions and private publishers in Europe and in the Muslim world with the objective of providing a multilingual, reliable and free source of knowledge and information easily accessible on the Internet."
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