…it is not Islam per sebut the very restraints on print and the idolization of language, among other factors, that are responsible for the benighted state of intellectual achievement in that orbit.
Peretz has mastered the art of turning a seemingly highly culturally-aware observation into a complete non-fact uninformed by, well, anything (and certainly lacking any understanding of basic cultural relativism). Perhaps he’s forgotten that the Islamic world gave us, you know, the foundations of algebra and chemistry. Those are kind of important.
The rest of the article is similar. Peretz says lots of things I agree with, lots I don’t, and still manages to come off sounding like a pretentious Western intellectual supremacist.
The Berman Jewish Policy Archive @ NYU Wagner hosted PLO Representative Maen Areikat at a luncheon on March 2nd to discuss the role of American Jews in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.
A mix of professors, students, Jewish communal leaders, journalists and others came to listen to Representative Areikat discuss the situation between the Palestinian leadership and the Israeli government, and what needs to happen for the peace process to move forward. As the JTA noted, this appearance is part of a larger effort on the part of the PLO “to open dialogue with the Jewish community.”
“Time is not on either side,” said Areikat, but he emphasized that it is of the essence. He stated that Israel has the opportunity to work with a willing Palestinian government who is committed to peace. Palestinians are frustrated, however, with the fact that Israel continues to build settlements while also claiming to want peace, he said. Areikat held firmly to the stance that “peace negotiations and settlements cannot go hand in hand” and contended that it is necessary to find a new approach.
Perhaps a new approach is on its way; in an article about the event, Haaretz noted that Prime Minister Netanyahu “is considering a plan to cooperate with the Palestinians on the establishment of a Palestinian state with temporary borders, as part of an interim peace agreement”. As that story had not yet broken widely in America while the event proceeded, no one asked Ambassador Areikat during the Q&A whether this idea would be acceptable to the PLO.
This discussion built up to the main point of the event—what American Jews should do. On this Areikat was clear: “Don’t blindly just support Israel. Do not abandon [it], but…look beyond tomorrow.” Practically speaking, he stated that American Jews should support their government’s efforts to end this conflict. Many Jews are reluctant to criticize Israel or support anyone who does, he argued, but a successful peace process requires recognizing positive steps from both sides, and condemning those who won’t cooperate—including Israelis.
The Jewish leaders in the audience for this event showed no signs of “blindly” supporting Israel. Every Jewish questioner during the Q&A voiced support for a Palestinian State. This may be because those who chose to attend this event were those who were most inclined to this position, but it may also indicate how marginal the position against Palestinian self-determination has become in contemporary American Jewish discourse. A few decades ago, opposition to any form of Palestinian nationalism was well within the American Jewish mainstream (see this piece by Avraham Weiss, and this by Richard Cohen.) But at Wednesday’s event, this perspective was not evident.
The content of the discussion was hardly surprising, but the fact of the discussion is still noteworthy. While the event began with the formality of a diplomatic speech, by the end, when the Q&A broke down the wall between speaker and audience, it was a lively conversation over lunch.
Watch the video below:
Crossposted to BJPA Blog. Written by: Seth Chalmer, Director of Communications for the Berman Jewish Policy Archive @ NYU Wagner & Aimee Gonzalez a project assistant at BJPA and a Master’s candidate in Politics at the NYU Graduate School of Arts and Science.
Update: videos are now embedded in the post. Enjoy!
As I mentioned in my brief first-day J Street conference round up post, I secured interviews with Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf of the Cordoba Initiative (best known for the Ground Zero Mosque, which is neither at Ground Zero nor a mosque), and Mona Eltahawy, the Egyptian journalist and activist who rocked the socks off the J Street conference. Those videos are now online; the YouTube playlist is here. There are three videos – Mona Eltahawy on social media in the Jasmine Revolution and its potential in the future of the Arab and Muslim world, my question for Imam Rauf on the religious justification for his work, and footage of a few other press-folk asking him questions. Check them out!
Mona did a superb job of addressing the straw man argument made by most of the prominent critics of the social-media-as-organizing-tool theory (Malcolm Gladwell, Evgeny Morozov, etc.). That is, she made a strong case for how Twitter and Facebook were essential in helping garner support for a mass meeting and demonstration of a kind that was quite rare under Mubarak. Notably, she doesn’t claim that it was Twitter or Facebook that toppled the regime. No, that distinction belongs to the brave Egyptians who risked their lives to claim their basic human rights of freedom of speech and assembly. But if you look closely, most of us arguing for social media’s importance in democratic movements aren’t saying that it’s the Internet itself that overthrows regimes, just that it’s a tool for those who desire to do so. The key to any organized resistance movement, especially one that aspires to nonviolence, is organization. Today, the Internet is often one of the last places where free exchange of ideas can take place. Its fast pace and adaptability mean that dedicated users can often stay one step ahead of those trying to shut down the flow of information. This is what makes it important and in some ways game-changing.
Imam Rauf, who’s been one of my personal heroes for a long time, spoke beautifully about the religious underpinnings of his peace work. I hadn’t planned to ask him about this – the question came about as a result of a topic of discussion on the panel on Jewish-Muslim community relations on which he’d just spoken. One Jewish community leader explained a program called “Iftar in the Sukkah,” in which local Muslims and Jews gathered at an Orthodox shul to share the evening break-fast meal during Ramadan, which for the past few years has overlapped with Sukkot. The image of Muslims and Jews taking part in this ritual together was, for me, amazing, and reminded me of the phrase “ufros aleinu sukkat shlomecha” – “spread over us your sukkah of peace.” This is pretty much one of my favorite liturgical lines ever, and I felt that I just had to ask Imam Rauf about it. So I mentioned that connection, and asked him what scriptural or Islamic theological justification he found for his work. His answer, that it’s rooted in the very word “Islam,” coming from “Salaam,” was completely in line with his messages of peace and mutual understanding.
I continue to be inspired by the work that both of these courageous activists do every day. Mona Eltahawy speaks truth to power, and Imam Rauf (and the Park 51 project overall) has handled himself with incredible grace in the face of one of the worst smear campaigns I’ve ever seen, and more generally in a climate of increasing American Islamophobia. May they both continue their work and dedication, and may their efforts be rewarded.
Part of the belief in democracy is that it is by nature a moderating force (one can even see this with Hezbollah in Lebanon). We cannot support democratic change contingent on what democracy will bring; even if it may not serve our interests in the short run, it’s still the best alternative human beings have come up with. In this case, one can certainly understand Netanyahu’s concern; Mubarak is “the devil he knows.” But it’s often the case that autocratic rulers are easier to deal with since they typically answer to no one. Yet, while they appear more stable in the short run, more dictatorships have been overthrown by democratic movements than the other way around. And when that uprising comes, supporting a dictator against the populace is not the best role for an elected leader.
Jerusalem’s problem is also Jerusalem’s opportunity. It can have a role to play in this transition that may impact what most hope will be a democratic Egypt, and the Arab street is watching closely. Israel’s problem, even according to some of its supporters, is that it has never had a long-term plan in regard to the Palestinians, leading to actions that are largely reactive and myopic. Perhaps these events can convince Israel that it has to act and not simply react, for it will soon no longer be the “the only democracy in the Middle East.”
So with our eyes wide open, it is important to assert that Israel’s vision of its future cannot be premised upon an eternity of Arab authoritarianism and an eternity of Palestinian statelessness. Such a vision is wrong, and it will not work. It is painful, for someone who admires the Jewish state for its democratic character, to see it emerge as an enemy of democratization. Jews should not rely on Pharaohs.
One interesting side effect of the situation in Egypt has been to force defenders of Israel (I use this to mean anyone who doesn’t solely blame Israel for the perpetuation of the conflict) to decide where their sympathies lie: with people struggling for democracy against their own Pharoah, or with Netanyahu’s initial position of support for the Mubarak regime, which he’s since walked back (like the US). Israel is now coming into the phase of its nationhood where it has to grapple with the real issues that calling yourself a democracy brings – namely, supporting democracy in other places (something that modern democracies have in general been pretty bad at). This is to say nothing of the profoundly undemocratic nature of the occupation, but the situation in Egypt is a lot more visible, and poses more immediate diplomatic questions to the Israeli leadership.
Without time to report a full analysis, I instead link you to the relevant NY Times’ archives of U.S. State Department diplomatic cables obtained by WikiLeaks. Most of the documents are from the past three years, although some are as old as 1966, and only 220 of a quarter million have been released. The documents lend behind-the-headlines reality to the sausage-making of foreign diplomacy and the business of getting America’s way in the world. They report everything from Page 6-like gossip of lavish weddings attended by the head of Chechnya to a 1990 report on the release of Nelson Mandela.
The Daily Beast has the top nine shocking revelations — meaning those most likely to reap repercussions in diplomatic relations. Meanwhile, Peter Beinart points out that while detrimental to certain diplomatic relations, the information is largely not new:
The latest WikiLeaks dump is to American foreign policy what the Starr Report was to presidential politics—fun, in a voyeuristic sort of way, revealing, but not about important things, and ultimately, more trouble than it is worth.
I anticipate the Israel war boosters will use this information to ramp up their “bomb Iran” campaigns, but I’m heartened to see overwhelming evidence that Obama’s diplomacy has accomplished what Bush’s sword rattling could not: a united and expanded global coalition against Iran’s nuclear proliferation. This involved everything from removing a Poland-based anti-missile system to win Russia’s support, to leveraging Saudi oil at cheap to wean China off Iranian energy dependence.
But at the very least, a cursory read of the summaries and source documents reveal a Middle East that is very unlike the version peddled by the right-wing. Instead of hostile Arab dictators fomenting hatred of America, we read reports of Arab nations clamoring for American action to halt an Iranian nuke. We read Israeli praise of Palestinian development and hopes of boosting their self-confidence. We remember that Pakistan has the nuke and is possibly the most unstable Muslim country near extremist take-over, not Iran.
The world is a more complicated place than the talking points provided by AIPAC. Add it to your recommended reading list this week.
My rabbi made a bold move during his d’var Torah on the first day of Rosh Hashanah services this year. After a brief word on Park 51 earlier in the service, in which he condemned the bigoted opposition in the strongest terms I could have imagined, I wasn’t expecting too much more fire and brimstone, especially on Israel-Palestine. And he looked sort of nervous to me – who wouldn’t, facing such a large crowd (this is Rosh Hashanah, mind you, so we’re talking every Jew in town) that was by and large far more conservative than you. Yet he called for an end to the Gaza blockade and asked congregants to write a letter to Netanyahu’s office urging him to fully engage in the peace talks and bring home results. Strong stuff.
Nine years after the attacks of 9/11, I want to stop and think about framing. How we frame conflicts, both in our mind and externally, has a lot to do with more concrete things like foreign policy, or the nature of the domestic discourse on an issue. 9/11 was an attack on the core of Americanism, and not only because of the physical spectacle of the WTC being leveled by a bunch of reclusive angry dudes. It represents the clash of two worldviews – an American constitutionalist perspective in which personal freedom is of the highest importance, and a religious fundamentalist one (which religion it is is completely irrelevant) in which those who think wrong, believe wrong, act wrong, are to be punished by those who know better. It’s disgusting no matter who it comes from.
In that bin Laden most likely knew what the U.S.’ response to 9/11 would be (“We have raced to Afghanistan and Iraq, and more recently to Yemen and Somalia; we have created a swollen national security apparatus; and we are so absorbed in our own fury and so oblivious to our enemy’s intentions that we inflate the building of an Islamic center in Lower Manhattan into a national debate and watch, helpless, while a minister in Florida outrages even our friends in the Islamic world by threatening to burn copies of the Koran,” says Ted Koppel), he made a masterful calculation in goading us into it. But I can’t help but think that he also gave us the greatest opportunity ever to definitively rise above the war-on-terror paradigm. It’s not too late to change course and stop trampling on the mangled remains of the constitutional freedoms (see above links, courtesy of Koppel) bin Laden sought to demonstrate the inferiority of, an effort for which we’ve done far more than he ever could have. This would take a reframing at the national level, something Obama did a bit of in his Cairo speech, but, more importantly, it would also take people of conscience standing up to bigotry at every level. Park 51 is the starkest example we’ve seen so far that this society has yet to move past the paralyzing ethos of American vs. un-American. Or, in simpler terms, a lot of people in this country are still racist.
And so, G()d’s children are still drowning. And until we end the war on terror abroad and the war on Islam at home, and until we, as my rabbi urged, truly walk in the other’s shoes and know their pain as we do our own, the water rises higher. May the memories of the 3000 innocents who died on 9/11, and the thousands more who have died since in Afghanistan, Iraq, Gaza, and more, not be forgotten.
As a member of this blogging community, a fairly lefty one at that, I am sure I am the only person who got the hard-copy of the Wall Street Journal today. So I am taking on a personal responsibility to report to all of you that the Simon Weisenthal Center has provided all WSJ readers with a very important supplement to their papers:
“2010 Top Ten Anti-Israel LIES”
You can download the seven page document for yourself, but here are some of the highlights. More »
I wanted to write something witty about the parallels of chauvinism and machismo in the Middle East and professional kitchens but I just am totally baffled by the fact that Lebanon and Israel are fighting each other by cooking obscene amounts of falafel.
Lebanese chefs load up with falafel for Israel food fight
(AFP)
BEIRUT — A day after firing a 10-tonne hummus broadside in a food fight with Israel, chefs in Lebanon weighed in with another first for a Guinness record on Sunday — five tonnes of falafel.
More than 300 chefs mixed a ton of chickpeas with an equal portion of broad beans, adding onions, garlic, coriander, onion, pepper and cumin to concoct 5,173 kilos (11,381 pounds) of falafel, a deep-fried patty popular in Lebanon and many parts of the Middle East. More »
Alan Dershowitz, professional Israel apologist and demonizer-of-those-who-disagree-in-the-slightest, has done it again, with a new article over at FrontPage Magazine. It’s a pretty standard condemnation of Israel Apartheid Week (that is, for all the wrong reasons). Right off the bat, it starts off with this gem:
Every year at about this time, radical Islamic students—aided by radical anti-Israel professors—hold an event they call “Israel Apartheid Week.”
Does Prof. Dershowitz seriously believe that Israel Apartheid Week is only run by “radical Islamic students”? And what does that even mean? Does he think that the people staffing the BDS tables are all Al-Qaeda members? For crying out loud, this isn’t just stupid and biased, it’s stupid, biased, and wrong. More »
With all the unrest in Iran, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad needs to escape for a while. What better place to go than Israel! Will Birthright Israel help him get there?
Full text of Obama’s speech to the Muslim world below the jump, here is the clip about Israel and Palestine. (Note how “Palestine” and not “the future state of Palestine” is used conclusively.) Mr. President, we applaud you.
Below the speech is a letter from Hamas to Obama on the occasion of his visit, delivered via Medea Benjamin of the US-based CODEPINK.
Then a band launched into a rousing rendition of Am Yisrael Chai…A group of young men in their 20′s with kippot and tziztzit were right in front of me dancing in a frenzy. But they alternated the verse that meant “the people of Israel lives” with “all the Arabs must die.” It rhymed with the Hebrew. Given the way all joined in, it was clear that this was not the first time it was sung.
I leaned over to a young man who was next to me, also wearing a kippah and tzitzit. I nodded at the dancers and asked: “Does this song bother you?” He looked at me with a suspicious look and replied: “This is Zionism.”
Rabbi Sid’s well-chosen final word on the matter: “Islam is not the only religion that is in danger of being hijacked.”
In an expansion of the racist rhetoric and legislation put out by Avidgor Lieberman of the Yisrael Beiteinu party, it has been announced that in the coming week the party plans to present legislation to the Knesset to ban the marking of al Nakba, or “the Catastrophe”, the term designated by the Arab community in Israel and Palestine for the destruction and expulsion experienced leading up to and during the war in 1948 when Israel declared its independence. It is no coincidence that this announcement comes today, May 15, the Gregorian date of Israel’s independence which is annually commemorated by Arab communities and those in solidarity with them.
According to the Reuters report anyone caught participating in the commemoration of al Nakba will be arrested and sentenced to a three-year jail term.
During the campaign in February Lieberman made himself internationally known by demanding that any citizen of Israel who votes in future elections must submit to a “loyalty pledge,” which the 20% Arab minority claimed was leveled specifically at them to deny their right to vote. In addition, considering the Netanyahu administration has been cold, if not outright hostile, towards the establishment of a Palestinian state in the occupied territories, this type of legislation does not bode well for encouraging peaceful coexistence.
What Lieberman is attempting to do here is to not only undermine peoples’ right to freedom of expression, but even their basic human right to freedom of thought. Freedoms such as these are at the core of democratic society. To infringe on the ability to freely express one’s opinion is, itself, undermining democratic institutions. Between the demand for loyalty pledges and the banning the ability of a minority population to remember their experience and their history, Lieberman is aiding the further erosion of any moral upper-hand the Jewish state may have at one time held. Legislation such as this further entrenches the cultural mindset of occupation, and brings that worldview from the territories deeper into Israel proper.
Amidst illegal housing evictions in East Jerusalem, settlement expansion in the occupied territories inside and outside of settlement blocs, a government coalition that denies the right to a Palestinian state while demanding the recognition of a Jewish one, and now parliamentary legislation dictating how people remember their personal narrative, the future for Israeli democracy looks bleak.
There are Jewish organisations, including the JCCs of North America and HUC, offering scholarships to American rabbinical students who wish to become military chaplains. The US Army’s chaplain recruitment webpage states,
“Army Chaplains are expected to observe the distinctive doctrines of their faith while also honoring the right of others to observe their own faith. The Army is a pluralistic environment. “
Honouring the right of others to observe their own faith. That seems key to me. Both for the individuals in the armed forces, and the citizens on the countries they invade. If chaplains from different faiths are expected to work side by side, and serve that “pluralistic environment” of different faith soldiers, how can the following be permitted?
U.S. Soldiers have been encouraged to spread the message of their Christian faith among Afghanistan’s predominantly Muslim population, video footage obtained by Al Jazeera appears to show.Military chaplains stationed in the U.S. air base at Bagram were also filmed with Bibles printed in the country’s main Pashto and Dari languages.
In one recorded sermon, Lt. Col. Gary Hensley, the chief of the U.S. military chaplains in Afghanistan, is seen telling Soldiers that as followers of Jesus Christ, they all have a responsibility “to be witnesses for him”.
“The special forces guys — they hunt men basically. We do the same things as Christians, we hunt people for Jesus. We do, we hunt them down,” he says.
“Get the hound of heaven after them, so we get them into the kingdom. That’s what we do, that’s our business.” [read more.]
Unacceptable. The army’s mandate is not to convert, not to be missionaries, not to proselytise. If a military chaplain of a different faith were to encourage soldiers to act on a similar mission (say, convert everyone to Judaism, Islam, or Hinduism), this would be a giant story, with the majority of Americans angrily protesting. But converting to Christianity? No one makes a stir.
Okay, okay, not “no one.” “Some of the Soldiers” were reprimanded, and the army confiscated some of the Bibles that had been printed in Pashto and Dari (Afghanistan’s main languages). We know that this is bad for US diplomacy, it’s unconstitutional, and the Army doesn’t allow it… So why isn’t it being fully investigated? Why aren’t all of the soldiers being reprimanded? How come this was allowed to happen in Iraq as well? And why does hasn’t that chaplain been reprimanded?
Reps from eighty countries met this past Wednesday at the UN to discuss religious tolerance at a conference sponsored by Saudi Arabia. I’m sure many will invariably claim there is no small measure of hypocrisy when a Wahabi Islamic regime that outlaws all other forms of religion convenes a conference on religious tolerance. For their part, however, many of the speakers from Islamic countries decried the hypocrisy of Western nations preaching individual freedom of religion while promoting social and economic policies that bias against non-Western faiths.
I often wonder if our respective cries of hypocrisy really only mask our inability to break free of our own inbred biases. It’s just so complicated. As a Westerner, I make no apologies in my advocacy for individual civil and human rights – but I will also admit that I will too often stand in judgment of other cultures before trying to understand their cultural viewpoints and their profound frustrations with the prejudices of the West.
That’s why, though I’m sure many in the will be cynical about such a conference, I am heartened that it happened at all and I truly hope it will lead to yet more dialogue. And I am particularly heartened that Israeli President Shimon Peres, a participant in the conference, commented afterward Israeli President Shimon Peres that the event was “unprecedented,” adding that it would have been impossible just a decade ago:
“What we are witnessing today is a new beginning,” Peres said at a press conference. “What was today demonstrated was the will. We now have to work for the way.”
If you’re interested in further reading, check out these articles in Yahoo News and The Daily Star
For the times, they are a-changin’. Obama Schmobama, here’s some more change for you reported in Ha’aretz.
Ismail Hanyieh, yeah, that Ismail Hanyieh, the leader of Hamas has announced Saturday that the organization will accept a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders. Uhm, what now? Come again?
JERUSALEM (AFP) – Some 300 rare and valuable books confiscated from Iraq’s Jewish community by Saddam Hussein’s regime have been secretly spirited into Israel, an Israeli newspaper reported on Friday.
The books include a 1487 commentary on the biblical Book of Job and another volume of biblical prophets printed in Venice in 1617, the Haaretz daily said… Many volumes were damaged during the bombing of government buildings in the opening weeks of the war, and after the fall of Baghdad most of the books were sent off to be temporarily stored at the Library of Congress in Washington.
In an expansion of the racist rhetoric and legislation put out by Avidgor Lieberman of the Yisrael Beiteinu party, it has been announced that in the coming week the party plans to present legislation to the Knesset to ban the marking of al Nakba, or “the Catastrophe”, the term designated by the Arab community in Israel and Palestine for the destruction and expulsion experienced leading up to and during the war in 1948 when Israel declared its independence. It is no coincidence that this announcement comes today, May 15, the Gregorian date of Israel’s independence which is annually commemorated by Arab communities and those in solidarity with them.
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