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King Abdullah and the Fifty Rabbis

Once, there was a Jordanian king who summoned fifty Talmud scholars and proclaimed…

Muslims from every branch of Islam can now assert without doubt or hesitation that a fatwa calling for the killing of innocent civilians—no matter what nationality or religion, Muslim or Jew, Arab or Israeli—is a basic violation of the most fundamental principles of Islam.

And then he said:

It is my hope that we as children of Abraham can go forth from this gathering with a common mission, to work together towards peace, justice and reconciliation. The point on the religious calendar at which we find ourselves can inspire us in this endeavor. This year marks an unusual concurrence of the High Holy Days on the Jewish calendar and Ramadan on the Islamic calendar, each of which begins next month. These are opportunities for self-examination, reflection, repentance, atonement, forgiveness, and renewal. By embracing the true spirit of these sacred times, conferred by God, we can reaffirm the essential principles of our faiths and apply these principles to the challenges before us all. Just as Isaac and Isma’il were able to put aside the differences that had separated their mothers and come together to honor and bury their father, so too must we put aside the differences that some use to tear us apart. We must honor our common heritage, reaffirming the essential principles that lie at the heart of our faith.

And such things happened just a few days ago at the Ritz Carlton Hotel in Washington DC. You can find the script of the whole speech and event sum up here.
Props to Rabbi Yakov Travis of Ruach for sharing the news.

19 thoughts on “King Abdullah and the Fifty Rabbis

  1. Nice words but, well, to live the message and forcefully communicate it outward to the followers of Islam, that’s another story altogether.
    I’ll believe the words when there’s a structural change in the muslim community, otherwise, they’re just more empty promises.

  2. Hello, this is not related to this particular post, but very interesting nevertheless. One of the participants at the big anti-war rally held a sign that advertised this website: http://www.nowarforisrael.org . This website was actually put up by the neo-nazi National Alliance, though it looks like a typical leftist, israel-hating website. Who would have thought… neo-nazis and marxist revolutionaries sleeping in the same bed.

  3. “Yet, those unsavory people had such a visible presense among the protestors…”
    So one person carrying a sign is “a visible presense [sic]”? If I go to a Ku Klux Klan rally and hold up a sign with the URL of an anti-prejudice site, this changes something about the overall message of the rally?

  4. I doubt you’d survive a KKK rally with a sign like that… You surely wouldn’t be allowed to hold up a sign like that… However, no one told that particular person to stop doing what he was doing… Nobody told him to leave… It seems that both the racists and the “anti-racists” have a lot in common these days, namely their vicious hatred of the Jews. And yes the presense was visible indeed… He was standing right in front of the podium and he and his sign could have been seen numerous times during the coverage of the rally by CSPAN.

  5. Did you expect everyone to be carrying a laptop, checking every URL listed on signs to see whether the carrier belonged to a hate group? And a skinhead to leave when asked, without being physically assaulted, which tends not to look too good in coverage of peace protests?
    Similarly, if your objection is to the sign’s simply stating that the war was “for Israel”, again, how do you expect other protesters to react? People are free to voice their own conspiracy theories; personally, when I see someone with such a sign at a protest I ignore them, because I don’t go to rallies in order to police them to make sure no aspect of them could be open to attack from someone on the internet. For better or worse, a protest is premised on 1st Amendment rights to free speech; unless someone at the protest is hindering others’ rights to free speech, ejecting them could prompt a lawsuit. The hope is that media coverage and passersby will see that the vast majority of protesters were protesting for a very good reason, and that any wackos will be lost in the crowd. Normal protests, you see, are not micromanaged and forcefully kept on message like the America Supports You Freedom March or whatever.
    That said, there is a free speech double-standard: if someone were to carry a sign that actually said “National Alliance” on it, you can be assured that they would find themselves pushed away from the rally and only participating in it from the other side of a few cops. The one time I saw an anti-Semitic sign at a peace protest, it was being torn out of someone’s hands by a number of people, after being raised just seconds before. And I will bet that if your rightwing friends had footage of that happening, they’d still manage to use it to argue against the protesters: “Those hypocrites were violating others’ free speech rights”, etc.

  6. nowarforisrael is run by david duke. it is a traditional experience for detractors to coopt rallies. it’s part of the reason why i stopped attending them. i wanted to march against police brutality and someone was carrying a free palestine banner behind me. it drove me nuts. frankly, i think that with over 150,000 present, they could’ve done a mass direct action like storming the white house and staging a sit in, demanding not to budge until impeachment proceedings began. that would’ve been effective. this is just worthless shit that the right wing will spin to marginalize the demonstrators. just as you’re doing right now, sheikh, and like michelle malkin, political teen, lgf, protest warriors, and all those other fucks do. single out one jackass and paint the entire movement and its message as loony. it’s disingenuous, it’s fucking evil.

  7. “frankly, i think that with over 150,000 present, they could’ve done a mass direct action like storming the white house and staging a sit in, demanding not to budge until impeachment proceedings began.”
    I like to think that this would be possible, but when I imagine it actually happening there are lots of shots fired by Secret Service agents and a scattering of the crowd. I don’t know the rules of engagement for agents protecting the White House but I can imagine them being quickly forgotten during any action that threatened WH security and legitimacy.

  8. If it were that easy (and non-lethal) to storm the White House, it would’ve been done already. Even in the 1960s no one tried it.
    Even if the protesters were able to get in without being shot or immediately dragged out, do you really think, mobius, that the solid Republican majority in both houses of Congress would say, “Oh gee, we’d better impeach our own party’s president even though we agree with everything he’s done”?
    Any “mass direct action” that has a snowball’s chance in hell of working must be done in 2006, at the polls.

  9. Cross posted from Sept 21 comments:
    “While united against the war, political beliefs varied. Paul Rutherford, 60, of Vandalia, Mich., said he is a Republican who supported Bush in the last election and still does — except for the war. ‘President Bush needs to admit he made a mistake in the war and bring the troops home, and let’s move on,’ Rutherford said. His wife, Judy, 58, called the removal of Saddam Hussein ‘a noble mission’ but said U.S. troops should have left when claims that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction proved unfounded. ‘We found that there were none and yet we still stay there and innocent people are dying daily,’ she said” (JENNIFER C. KERR, AP, Sept 24).
    Watch as wingut Bushbots try to marginalize these people and paint them all with the broad brush of Intl.ANSWER, who is already marginalized by genuine liberals. In an ironic twist, wingnut Bushbots finish up just as marginalized as the ANSWER geeks.

  10. Where do statements like
    “they could’ve done a mass direct action like storming the white house and staging a sit in, demanding not to budge until impeachment proceedings began. that would’ve been effective. ”
    fit on your wingnut scale? Come on, let’s hear about the liberal view of mob justice.

  11. Ben R says:
    Did you expect everyone to be carrying a laptop, checking every URL listed on signs to see whether the carrier belonged to a hate group? And a skinhead to leave when asked, without being physically assaulted, which tends not to look too good in coverage of peace protests?
    Well, since the website has been in operation for at least a couple of years, at least ONE of the 150,000 people should have known about it, don’t you think? He didn’t have to be to be assaulted… merely asked to leave. Then whoever organized the event surely could have issued a statement disassociating themselves with this particular person, since he appeared on the screen so many times during the c-span coverage. However, none of this happened, and it is symptomanic of the rampant anti-semitism of the political left.
    Mobius says:
    that would’ve been effective. this is just worthless shit that the right wing will spin to marginalize the demonstrators. just as you’re doing right now, sheikh, and like michelle malkin, political teen, lgf, protest warriors, and all those other fucks do. single out one jackass and paint the entire movement and its message as loony. it’s disingenuous, it’s fucking evil.
    Did you just call me a “fuck”. LMAO As for the rest of your diatribe, read above.

  12. “single out one jackass and paint the entire movement and its message as loony. it’s disingenuous, it’s fucking evil. ”
    Really. What about the recent posts on Jewschool about Norquist and Abramoff?
    -one of the other fucks

  13. King Abdullah is a baller and a real mensch. But he has a very difficult task before him, as Pew polls reveal that Jordan is the most anti-Semitic country in the world (100% held anti-Jew sentiment). I don’t know how true this is (after my one trip to Petra back in ’99, it seems like a load of crap), but he is pretty well respected in Jordan. I hope that people will hearken his message so that a true peace will further blossom between Israel and Jordan, and eventually the entire Middle East. Amen.

  14. J: “…Come on, let’s hear about the liberal view of mob justice.”
    You’re taking issue with a fantasy, J. As Bushbots lose their hold on mainstream public opinion, do you have to lose your grip on reality too?

  15. Read the post I quoted from. It wasn’t in jest (though of course it was a fantasy). My grip on reality is fine, but I wonder about some of your fellow-travelers…

  16. Oh, and speaking of losing grip on reality, where’s your post on Rangel’s Bush/ Bull Connor remark, and the Democrat’s reaction to it? Or do you approve of the comparison?
    I guess you’ll post it right after you get around to the Gloria Wise/ Air America / Al Franken story. Stealing from the little kids…

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