It's really amazing -- though not at all surprising -- that when an anonymous Internet user compares Bush to Hitler, the media goes into Full Hysteria Alert, but when the most influential conservative figure in the country does the same thing, they utter barely a peep of recognition. We'll see if that changes as America's leading Jewish groups -- and even some principled conservatives -- issue rather harsh condemnations of Limbaugh's comments.
Essentially, we have not done a good enough job demonstrating to Israelis how our initiative can form part of a peace between equals in a troubled land holy to three great faiths. Others have been less reticent, recognizing that our success would threaten their vested interest in keeping Palestinians and Israelis at each other's throats. They want victims to stay victims so they can be manipulated as proxies in a wider game for power. The rest of us -- the overwhelming majority -- have the opposite interest....
Some Arabs, simplistically equating communication with normalization, may think we are moving too fast toward normalization. But we all know that dialogue must be enhanced for genuine progress. We all, together, need to take the first crucial step to lay the groundwork to effectively achieve peace. So we must all invest more in communication.
So, who's got some stories from the old days, and who's checking out The Dead on their Spring Tour?
]]>Reality Based Community's Jonathan Zasloff reports hearing Palestinian scholar and Peoples' Voice Accord co-author Sari Nusseibeh speak last Monday night,
]]>George Mitchell, Nusseibeh suggested, should take an American peace plan (and he made it clear that it should be the People's Voice framework) to both Netanyahu and Abbas.
He should then publicly challenge Netanyahu to place this plan on the Israeli ballot as a referendum. Netanyahu would not have to endorse the plan, but rather allow the voters to decide whether they would accept it as long as the other side does.
On the Palestinian side, he should publicly challenge Abbas to call for new elections (due in the PA thus year in any event) and run on that platform for his presidential campaign -- accepting the plan as long as the Israeli electorate does.
Nusseibeh believes -- and I agree with him -- that such a public offer would be difficult for either side to refuse. It would not require Netanyahu to endorse the plan, but would undermine him politically if he refuses to allow the voters to decide. It would give Abbas a concrete platform and plan to rid the Palestinians of the occupation.
...
This is worth a try. It is better than anything else yet proposed. Is anyone listening?
When the Algerian diplomat, Idriss Jazairy, argues that anti-Semitism's definition should be expanded to include Arabs, who are a Semitic people, the director of the Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust at Touro College, Anne Bayefsky, shot back. The greatest source of anti-Semitism today operates "under the guise of anti-Zionism and anti-racism activities," epitomized by the U.N. Human Rights Council's disproportionate focus on criticizing Israel, she said.
When Bayefsky spoke, Jazairy immediately raised his hands to form a T - as in "time-out" - and the forum's chairwoman, Libyan Najat Al-Hajjaji, began tapping her gavel, cutting off Bayefsky to permit Jazairy to respond. Bayefsky was allowed to resume, but was interrupted twice more by Al-Hajjaji's gavel and Jazairy's interjections.
Looking forward to the sequal to Durban in Geneva next month....
]]>From Ha'aretz:
]]>Footage of a presenter on the Arabic language television station Al-Arabiya apparently confirms that Hamas fired at least one rocket from close to a building used by journalists during the 22-day conflict between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
The Israel Defense Forces shelled the building, drawing international condemnation, and television networks with offices in the building denied that rockets had been launched from anywhere nearby.
But the recording, filmed by an Israeli and released Tuesday by Israel's Foreign Ministry, shows Al-Arabiya presenter Hanan Al-Masri saying that a Grad rocket had been fired from a location near the studios at Al-Shuruk tower in Gaza City. Al-Masri did not realize that she had been caught on camera.
I believe the vast majority of American Muslims and Arab Americans feel the same way I do about this conflict. They are terribly hurt by the suffering of innocent Palestinians who have nowhere to run from the Gaza onslaught, but they do not think that the appropriate response is to hurl more death and destruction at Israeli civilians in a twisted form of revenge. Like our Jewish counterparts, we also think that "there has to be another way of doing this."
...
President-elect Barack Obama, who, distressingly, long remained silent about the latest crisis, is set to take office in two weeks. He must strive for this "middle way" and work with all of us in the United States - American Jews, American Arabs and Muslims, and many others - who are pro-peace, pro-Israel and pro-Palestine....
Have we deteriorated so much as a people, Jews and Arabs, that we can simply turn away from the suffering of the other, and even justify it when confronted by pointing to the deaths on our sides?
Uglier than the massacres and bloodied scenes filled with body parts are the crowds of people who easily come together in anger and blame the other side while never assuming any blame themselves.
...
As a Palestinian Arab, I'm a willing to stand with any Jew or Israeli who has the courage to stop blaming the other side. Stop defending violence of any kind. Stop the justification. Stop the killing. Stop the violence.
Stand together and focus on one answer. Peace. Respect for life.
We can recognize this is difficult. We can accept we have different views of history. We can accept that peace is not easy. But can we accept that not acting means more death? Can we accept that by pointing fingers of blame at each other, we are accomplices to the hatred that drives the carnage?
Speculation runs rampant over what can possibly account for this. I only slightly regret that the grim idea that crosses mine is that such voices as these cannot drive enough conflict to generate the hitcounts of some of the Cafe's more regular, provacative featured writers.
]]>Meanwhile, one of the philanthropic organizations taken down with the scandal is the Robert I. Lappin Charitable Foundation, a group that Ha'aretz describes as "a charity aimed at reversing assimilation and intermarriage...."
"The money needed to fund the programs of the Lappin Foundation is gone," the Massachusetts-based foundation said on its Web site, adding all staff had been let go. "It is with a heavy heart that I make this announcement," Robert I. Lappin, the foundation's trustee, said in a statement.
Funny, the name Eric Swanson doesn't sound Jewish....
]]>Meanwhile, the news coverage of the coordinated attacks inflames the cynic in me, with its speculations over motivations and identities of the attackers. While it may be "safe" to presume that the attackers come from India's Muslim community, it is no less irresponsible of the multinational news business to speculate ad nauseum in lieu of any confirmed facts. We have learned nothing from Oklahoma City, least of all the similarities in temperament between our own homegrown terrorists with those of the all-purpose Islamist variety as both are prone to spectacular outbursts of violent intolerance toward any and all perceived threats to some Traditional Way of Life.
]]>(Exodus 21:22-25) When two men fight, and one of them pushes a pregnant woman and a miscarriage results, but no other damage ensues, the one responsible shall be fined according as the woman's husband may exact from him, the payment to be based on reckoning. But if other damage ensues, the penalty shall be life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, bruise for bruise.Thus, since the word of God determines that no life (nor eye, nor tooth, nor hand, nor foot) is taken in an induced miscarriage, then life cannot begin with conception, and abortion is not murder, in any so-called "Judeo-Christian tradition." ]]>