Blogger: Mideast Youth - Thinking Ahead
Article: Stupid Sunday Rally
Originaly Posted On: 2007-06-08 14:45:17

Israel’s Occupation of Palestine must end after 40 years or Israel’s Occupation of Palestine must end after 59 years or Israel wants a Partner for Peace or Palestinians aren’t a real people.
I love anniversaries, don’t you?
Forty years after the Six Day War, millions of would be and real pundits are taking to their Steno Pads and keyboards to pontificate on the real meaning of 40 years.
The one thing I know for sure is that the pundits won’t do anything. We never do. We just talk and use scary words like ubiquitous and lackluster to describe the situation we have very little control over but pretend to dictate. Groups like this US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation or StandWithUs don’t do anything for the benefit of the region, they just yell and scream to have their names in the paper.
Even if Americans wanted to make a difference in the region we couldn’t. (A real message of hope for this Shabbat.) The people that need to change are Israelis, Palestinians and the Arab nations. The United States plays a role but smucks on the National Mall make very little difference in this particular issue. We don’t matter so much on this one because there is no need to make it public; people know generally what is going on in Israel. Additionally, there is a pretty uniform response: Stop the Violence. The radicals on each side can talk all the want, but nothing will come of it.
The fact is the United States government should be more involved in the ending of the Israeli occupation. They should also be more involved with the destruction of Hamas. They should take a leadership role, but they won’t. And a rally of radical idiots in Washington isn’t going to change that.
It has been said time and time again that we need fanatical moderates. It is time of even handed justice to be dished out with a strong hand. The rally this weekend and its counter rally is just an exercise in political masturbation. No one (and I really mean this) cares what a group of wealthy leftist or rightwingers do with their Sunday afternoon.
Do something productive this Sunday. In New York you can join hundreds of thousands at the Puerto Rican Day festivities. Read a book. Talk to someone you disagree with, but stay away from the rallies in DC unless you are looking for a sunburn.
(Cross Posted POLJ)
Blog, Events, Israel, Palestine, USA

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Blogger: Ihsan
Article: Mahmood Mamdani on Darfur on Democracy Now!
Originaly Posted On: 2007-06-04 11:53:00

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/06/04/1334230

In this interview, Professor Mahmood Mamdani expounds on the ideas he expressed in an article entitled “The Politics of Naming: Genocide, Civil War, Insurgency”, which appeared in Vol. 29 No. 5 of The London Review of Books, dated 8 March 2007.

The article accuses the Save Darfur coalition and Nikolas Kristoff of depoliticizing the conflict in Darfur to give Save Darfur campaigners the moral high ground, unify diverse constituencies in a single-issue campaign and to make the Darfur conflict part of the War on Terror.

Blogger: Chaldean Thoughts
Article: The Murder of Fr. Ragheed and Three Deacons
Originaly Posted On: 2007-06-03 17:36:00

Fr Ragheed Ganni
Source:www.ankawa.com

Another day, another act of cowardliness against an Iraqi priest and three deacons. AsiaNews reports:

Baghdad (AsiaNews) – An armed group gunned down and killed Fr Ragheed Ganni and three of his aides. The murder took place right after Sunday mass in front of the Church of the Holy Spirit in Mosul where Father Ragheed was parish priest. Sources told

Blogger: Point of no return
Article: Libyan Jewry conference promotes reconciliation
Originaly Posted On: 2007-06-03 10:28:00

Libyan Muslim scholars from Tripoli and Benghazi and Libyan Jewish scholars and other experts in the history of the Jewish community in Libya met for two days at SOAS (the London School for Oriental and African studies) on 31 May and 1 June to promote dialogue between different communities in Libya. (With thanks for this report to Eric Salerno)

The Jewish community, whose roots go back 1,300 years, formed one of the largest minorities in Libya together with Berbers and Bedouins. They co-existed peacefully in the country and were positively and constructively active in all fields of Libyan society. In the last 60 years, thousands where forced, one way or another, to leave their homeland. The last exodus of 6,500 Jews followed street riots which took place at the beginning of the 1967 Israeli-Arab war.

The presence of Dr. Mohammed Jerary, director of the Libyan studies centre of Tripoli, and two other Libyan scholars, was seen as a very significant beginning in the promotion of dialogue between cross-sections of this North African country. The event celebrated the rich and deep-rooted culture of Libyan Jewry and will hopefully rebuild the confidence to generate goodwill and friendship towards reconciliation. The information and historical facts provided will serve as tools to learn and plan for a better future between Jews and Muslims.

The title of the conference was Coexistence Of Libyan Muslims and Jews: Lessons from the Past and Plans For The Future; Proposal To Create an Organised Platform For Cooperation. The moderator was Mr. Adel Darwish, Journalist & Middle East expert. On the panel were Prof. Maurice M. Roumani (historian and writer), Dr. Faraj Najem (writer and scholar), Mr. Ahmed Rahal (writer and journalist), Prof. Vincenzo Porcasi (economist), Dr. Eric Salerno (writer and journalist), Prof. Salah Al Din H. Al Suri (expert in modern Libyan history) and Dr Khalifa Al Ahwal (expert in History of Jews of Libya).

Blogger: Ihsan
Article: Abu Dharr Al Ghifari
Originaly Posted On: 2007-05-27 00:55:00

Do not please the rulers in a way that incurs the wrath of Allah. And if they come up with innovations of which you know not, stay aloof from them; and remain strong against them, even if you were tortured, deprived or rusticated, so that Allah may be pleased with you! Surely, Allah is Most High and it does not behoove to displease Him, by pleasing His creatures. (Abu Dharr al-Ghifari - may Allah bless him with mercy - attributed in Al-Amail, ch. 20, #4).

This video is an episode on Abu Dharr from the famous series on the last 10 years of Imam Ali (AS) made by Iranian TV - the series is dubbed in Urdu, with English subtitles.

The entire series can be viewed online here.

Blogger: Point of no return
Article: Journey back to my mother’s Baghdad…
Originaly Posted On: 2007-05-31 18:08:00

The son of an Iraqi-Jewish mother, Joseph Braude ’s work took him across much of the Arab world, but it was only when he met two of the last Jews in Baghdad that he felt he could be himself. Sentimental but elegantly-written essay in Best Life magazine.

“Maybe this passion to listen, to understand, to explain is the inevitable fate of a man born into a family whose history straddles the fault lines of today’s sectarian conflicts. Perhaps it all leads back to my mother, who became a refugee from Baghdad at age 5, one of more than 120,000 Iraqi Jews who fled their native soil in 1951 after 2,800 years of continuous history in Mesopotamia. But a refugee never entirely leaves the city of her birth. Memories of the place trail her through life, then live on in her children’s dreams. My brother and I grew up hearing her speak of a Baghdad that no longer exists—a peaceful multiethnic city, once a jewel of the Middle East, which has been fading from the war-torn landscape of Iraq for decades.

“Behind high vine-shrouded stone walls, my mother listened to her nanny tell animal fables under a palm tree’s restful shade. Roses, gardenias, lemons, strawberries, and okra grew in a garden flanked by water fountains. My mother tells me there were family outings in a colorful bustling town, of pastoral scenes at home that changed with the seasons. When winter’s cold crept into her house, the Persian carpets were spread across the chilly tiles on the ground floor, only to be rolled up and transplanted to the rooftop for the summertime, “when the family went up and slept in the open air to keep cool.” The Tigris River, too, brought a welcome breeze during the hot season: “We would take a boat to a little island in the Tigris, and your grandfather and your uncles would catch fish and spit grill them for our picnic.”

“Why, then, did she, her parents, five siblings, and tens of thousands of Iraqi Jews leave this wonderful place—nearly all at once? By the time we’d grown old enough to learn the answer, the sunnier parts of my mother’s youthful Baghdad had seeped into us.

“Even as a 5-year-old, my nose knew the smell of an Iraqi kitchen: Tbeet, a centuries-old Babylonian dish that cooks overnight on the Sabbath, features stuffed chicken quarters and whole eggs in their shells sitting in a reddish-brown cloud of rice, cardamom, diced tomatoes, cinnamon, and onions. This dish, she quipped, sometimes had to serve as a Baghdad mother’s tool of last resort to dissuade her son from leaving Judaism for Islam—not an unheard-of occurrence. “You can abandon our community, but are you ready to give up the eggs in this tbeet?” was supposedly the question that stopped many a prospective convert in his tracks.”

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