Saturday, February 18, 2012
A Palestinian boy waves a Palestinian flag during a rally calling on Egyptian authorities to end the power crisis, near Rafah crossing with Egypt in the southern Gaza Strip February 18, 2012. The Gaza Strip's only power station, which supplies the Palestinian enclave with up to two-thirds of its energy needs, was shut down last Tuesday because of a shortage of fuel smuggled in from neighbouring Egypt. REUTERS/ Ibraheem Abu Mustafa (GAZA - Tags: POLITICS)
An Egyptian woman walks by a mural at Tahrir Square, Cairo, Egypt, Thursday, Feb. 16, 2012. The mural reads in Arabic: "We bring them their rights or we die like them". (AP Photo/Nasser Nasser)
Friday, February 17, 2012
The New York Times's new Jerusalem correspondent has faced criticism for sending tweets to 'the wrong people'.`
"... Such tactics are meant to intimidate and paralyse, choke and divert the discussion over Israel's occupation and policies in the Middle East. But for every person silenced, there are growing numbers who, surveying the quality of the argument, will dismiss the pro-right Israel lobby solely on the basis of the bullying. It isn't just the nature of the bashing, but its compulsive frequency, especially when set against the paucity of actual arguments presented.
Photograph: Bernat Armangue/AP guardian.co.uk, Friday 17 February 2012
As more commentators are now saying: the trouble with this rightist campaign over Israel is in the content, which always trumps the delivery system. Incidentally, this is the theme of one of the articles that Rudoren was lambasted for tweeting, which quotes Beinart, from the book she wasn't supposed to like: "Israel does not have a public relations problem; it has a policy problem." "Rachel Shabi
Photograph: Bernat Armangue/APFalse accusations of antisemitism desensitise us to the real thing
Attacks on the New York Times's new Jerusalem correspondent undermine the credibility of Israel's rightwing defenders
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/feb/17/antisemitism-new-york-times-jerusalem-correspondent
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My letter to my local paper The Patriot News RE There can be a path to true peace in the Middle East by Jordan's Prince El Hassan bin Talal
RE: AS I SEE IT: There can be a path to true peace in the Middle East by Jordan's Prince El Hassan bin Talalhttp://www.pennlive.com/editorials/index.ssf/2012/02/there_can_be_a_path_to_true_pe.html
Dear Editor,
"So far, the Israelis’ emphasis has been on security for Israel and insecurity for others. It is about time it accepted that security through weapons cannot bring peace: Only peace based on justice can bring real security for us all. " Jordan's Prince El Hassan bin Talal The Patriot News AS I SEE IT There can be a path to true peace in the Middle East February 17, 2012
Thank you so much for publishing Jordan's Prince El Hassan bin Talal's inspiring op-ed: I was totally surprised and delighted to see that in our local newspaper!
I very much believe that working toward "turning the Middle East, Israel, the Indian subcontinent and indeed North Korea, into a WMD-free zone" is an excellent idea- for everyone's sake. Much better that limited funds and resources here, there and everywhere be put towards education and infrastructure and the ecological challenges ahead, rather than foolishly exasperating an arms race and escalating angry rhetoric.
Jordan has been at the forefront of intelligent and compassionate efforts to help Palestine and Palestinians for decades. Jordan made official peace with Israel years ago, but it is a very fragile peace due to the ongoing Israel/Palestine conflict. The current status quo is not sustainable for long. Right now there is still a chance and a golden opportunity to really believe in and build support for official negotiations to shape a fully secular two state solution to once and for all end the Israel-Palestine conflict- for everyone's sake. But only if negotiations are firmly based on full respect for international law and universal basic human rights... and we all must do our part to help calm down the conversation so that reasonable people can be heard- and understood.
The Golden Rule is an easy to remember reminder of the basic logic necessary for calming down the situation with compassion, diplomacy and an investment in real justice so that everyone (regardless of religion and/or nationality and/or gender) can have their fair share of creating and benefiting from the three baskets of the Helsinki process — economy, security and human dignity —.... and peace. Yes it is possible, and it really is the best way forward.
Sincerely,
Anne Selden Annab
American Homemaker & Poet
NOTES
- Arab American Institute's Omar Baddar: In Defense of Hamza Kashgari
- Israel's +972's Noam Sheizaf: "Leaving a place doesn’t make someone a refugee. It’s forbidding him or her from coming back that does it."
- The Year of Reading Dangerously ...Charter for Compassion calls for stories
- Ibtisam Barakat's Valentine
- UNRWA film competition for young Palestinian refugees... This year’s theme is: My Spring is Coming.
- House of Stone: A Memoir of Home, Family, and a Lost Middle East by Anthony Shadid
- Anthony Shadid Times Correspondent Dies: Ending One Of The Most Storied Careers
- Congressman Keith Ellison Discusses Defunding Palestinian Sesame Street
- At Ben Gurion, Learn to Fight the Fear
- Storm Over Hebron...
- Baltimore Sun letters: The Palestinian Catch-22
- Hamas & The Arab Spring
- Setting Our Moral Compass Straight by Joharah Baker for MIFTAH, the Palestinian Initiative for the Promotion of Global Dialogue and Democracy
- Marshall Breger : Why Jews Can’t Criticize Sharia
- [Palestinian] Neighborhood pays price of being on wrong side of Israel's wall
- MOST RECENT POLL: A majority of Palestinian youth express their support for a two-state solution (Israel and Palestine within the 1967 boarders).
- The Middle East's "invisible refugees"
- Time Magazine: “The People Are Suffocating”: West Bank Economy Struggles Under Pressure From U.S. Congress
"Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home - so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world. Yet they are the world of the individual person; the neighborhood he lives in; the school or college he attends; the factory, farm, or office where he works. Such are the places where every man, woman, and child seeks equal justice, equal opportunity, equal dignity without discrimination. Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere. Without concerted citizen action to uphold them close to home, we shall look in vain for progress in the larger world."Eleanor Roosevelt
Arab American Institute's Omar Baddar: In Defense of Hamza Kashgari
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Kashgari’s tweets caused a major uproar all over social media, with tens of thousands of people joining a Saudi Facebook group calling for Kashgari’s punishment, and many calling for his head. Kashgari deleted the tweets, apologized and repented, but the virtual mob was not satisfied. A widely-shared video online was that of a religious leader weeping over Kashgari’s offence before declaring his repentance futile and demanding his execution. In fear for his life, Kashgari fled his country and headed to New Zealand, but was caught by the Malaysian police on the way and was extradited back to Saudi Arabia where he will now face trial.
It's one thing for some mob of fanatics to be making threats, and it's something else entirely for there to be international police cooperation, potentially involving Interpol, to capture and assist in the punishment of an individual whose "crime" is exercising his right to free speech. To be a proponent of free speech is to respect people’s right to self-expression, no matter how distasteful or offensive their views may be. And Kashgari's case is notably mild, as his language, while lacking the veneration widely expected in his society, wasn't even extreme in any way that indicated he was deliberately seeking to infuriate. If there is to be international cooperation, it should be in defense of Kashgari's right to speak his mind without fear of death, not cooperation to assist in bringing him closer to that potential fate. The international community should not be silent in the face of international accommodation of mob-inspired "justice," it should be raising its voice in defense of elementary human rights.
"Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers." -- Article 19 of the UN Declaration for Human Rights****
The Arab American Institute (AAI) is a nonprofit organization committed to the civic and political empowerment of Americans of Arab descent. AAI represents the policy and community interests of Arab Americans throughout the U.S. through two primary focus areas: campaigns and elections, and policy formulation and research. The Arab American Institute Foundation (AAIF) was founded by the Arab American Institute in 1995. AAIF supports programs that promote greater awareness of Arab Americans in the U.S., demographic research and international outreach. AAIF serves as the primary national resource on the Arab American experience for the media, academia, government agencies and the private sector.
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Israel's +972's Noam Sheizaf: "Leaving a place doesn’t make someone a refugee. It’s forbidding him or her from coming back that does it."
"Sheizaf wrote about the Nakba (catastrophe), as Palestinians refer to the 1948 war, commonly called in Israel the War of Independence. “Even after the New Historians of the nineties made the term Nakba a part of modern Hebrew and proved that in many cases, Israel expelled Palestinians from territories it conquered in ‘48, we were engaged in the wrong kind of questions, such as the debate on whether more Palestinians were expelled or fled,” he wrote. “The important thing is that they weren’t allowed to come back, and that they had their property and land seized by Israel immediately after the war (as some Jews had by Jordan and Syria, but not in substantial numbers). Leaving a place doesn’t make someone a refugee. It’s forbidding him or her from coming back that does it.”" Israel's New Left Goes Online
http://www.thenation.com/article/166264/israels-new-left-goes-online
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The Year of Reading Dangerously ...Charter for Compassion calls for stories
Charter for Compassion: What are the keys to a successful Reading Group or Book Club? Has such a group had an impact on you or your community? Congrats to the Seattle Reading Group that finished "Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life" by Karen Armstrong this week! They shared this short but intriguing homemade video with us. Please send your own stories to contact@charterforcompassion.org. Thanks!
The Year of Reading Dangerously from FiatLuxMedia on Vimeo.
A Seattle Reading Group meets once a month to explore the book "Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life" by Karen Armstrong. This video offers a quick sneak peak into one meeting to hear the discussion, find out how the members take action, and learn how the experience has changed the participants.
Compassion is not a lightweight topic. It can feel a bit dangerous to share deep personal experiences and discuss important questions, such as "how do we talk with people who seem very different from us?"
The paperback version of "Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life" is now available in the U.S. and Canada. The hard cover version is available around the world. You're welcome to download a free "Reading Group Guide" at charterforcompassion.org/learn/readinggroups.
This homemade video was created by a Seattle Reading Group member.
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Ibtisam Barakat's Valentine
Ibtisam Barakat is the author of Tasting The Sky, A Palestinian Childhood (Multi-Award Winning International Book)
UNRWA film competition for young Palestinian refugees... This year’s theme is: My Spring is Coming.
United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees announces third annual film competition
Searching for a relation between the Arab Spring and Palestinian refugees situation, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA) announced theme for its 3rd annual short film competition "My Spring is Coming."
UNRWA accepts submissions from all young Palestinian refugees complying with the rules set by the competition organisers, which can be found here.
Submission deadline 18 May 2012
17 February 2012 Are you a young Palestinian refugee? Do you have an idea for a short film? We are now accepting submissions for our 3rd annual film competition. This year’s theme is: My Spring is Coming.
One year on, where has the “Arab Spring” left Palestine refugees?
Requirements
- 2 - 5 minute film
- Film must reflect on this year’s theme in an original and creative way
- Filmmaker must be younger than 25 years
- Closing date for submissions is 18 May 2012
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House of Stone: A Memoir of Home, Family, and a Lost Middle East by Anthony Shadid
http://anthonyshadid.com/house-of-stone-a-memoir-of-home-family-and-a-lost-middle-east/[AS ALWAYS PLEASE GO TO THE LINK TO READ GOOD ARTICLES IN FULL: HELP SHAPE ALGORITHMS (and conversations) THAT EMPOWER DECENCY, DIGNITY, JUSTICE & PEACE... and hopefully Palestine]
Last spring, when Anthony Shadid—one of four New York Times reporters captured in Libya as the region erupted—was freed, he went home. Not to Boston, Beirut, or Oklahoma where he was raised by his Lebanese-American family, but to an ancient estate built by his great-grandfather, a place filled with memories of a lost era when the Middle East was a world of grace, grandeur, and unexpected departures. For two years previous, Shadid had worked to reconstruct the house and restore his spirit after both had weathered war. Now the author of the award-winning Night Draws Near (National Book Critics Circle Award finalist, Los Angeles Times Book Prize) tells the story of the house’s re-creation, revealing its mysteries and recovering the lives that have passed through it. Shadid juxtaposes past and present as he traces the house’s renewal along with his family’s flight from Lebanon and resettlement in America. House of Stone is an unforgettable memoir of the world’s most volatile landscape and the universal yearning for home.
Publication Date: March 27, 2012 [Houghton Mifflin Harcourt]
“House of Stone takes the reader to the heart of the Middle East and all its conflicts: the core question of what gives people a sense of who they are and what they are. In this deeply personal but deeply relevant memoir, he looks at the way family, place, history and faith work their way into a people’s blood, determining not only how they look at their past, but how they go about trying to build a future.” – Christopher Dickey, Middle East Bureau Chief, Newsweek
***********************
“In rebuilding his family home in southern Lebanon, Shadid commits an extraordinarily generous act of restoration for his wounded land, and for us all.” — Annia Ciezadlo, author of Day of Honey
“In rebuilding his family home in southern Lebanon, Shadid commits an extraordinarily generous act of restoration for his wounded land, and for us all.” — Annia Ciezadlo, author of Day of Honey
AMAZON pro-order
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OR help support your local economy & your local book store- buy it locally
Barnes & Noble
or Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company
OR help support your local economy & your local book store- buy it locally
Anthony Shadid Times Correspondent Dies: Ending One Of The Most Storied Careers
“Some suffering cannot be covered in words,” he wrote. “This had become my daily fare as reporter in the Middle East documenting war, its survivors and fatalities, and the many who seem a little of both. In the Lebanese town of Qana, where Israeli bombs caught their victims in the midst of a morning’s work, we saw the dead standing, sitting, looking around. The village, its voices and stories, plates and bowls, letters and words, its history, had been obliterated in a few extended moments that splintered a quiet morning.”
Anthony Shadid
1968-2012
Anthony Shadid 1968-2012
Jill Abramson, the executive editor, informed the [New York Times] newspaper’s staff Thursday evening in an e-mail. “Anthony died as he lived — determined to bear witness to the transformation sweeping the Middle East and to testify to the suffering of people caught between government oppression and opposition forces,”
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http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/17/world/middleeast/anthony-shadid-a-new-york-times-reporter-dies-in-syria.html?_r=1
Anthony Shadid, center, with residents of Cairo last February.At Work in Syria, Times Correspondent Dies
Anthony Shadid, a gifted foreign correspondent whose graceful dispatches for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe and The Associated Press covered nearly two decades of Middle East conflict and turmoil, died, apparently of an asthma attack, on Thursday while on a reporting assignment in Syria. Tyler Hicks, a Times photographer who was with Mr. Shadid, carried his body across the border to Turkey.Mr. Shadid, 43, had been reporting inside Syria for a week, gathering information....READ MORE
Thursday, February 16, 2012
8 Palestinian children die in West Bank bus crash
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JERUSALEM (AP) — Israeli police say at least eight Palestinian schoolchildren died in a bus crash in the West Bank.
The children were killed when a truck careened into their schoolbus on Thursday morning. The bus overturned and caught fire.
Israeli police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld says the children were taken to Israeli and Palestinian hospitals and that at least eight died. Palestinian police say the death toll was 10.
There were no signs of foul play. The truck driver was said to be an Arab Israeli citizen who may have lost control in heavy rains and slick roads.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas declared three days of mourning and ordered flags flown at half staff. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also expressed sorrow.
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