[yshavurah] Dayton area events and this week's snippets
- From: "Cherie Kurland" <kurlandc@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "levinsonj snippets" <levinsonj@xxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 11 Jan 2004 18:14:14 -0500
Dayton, Ohio area events: Thursday, January 15, 2004: Greater Dayton
Interfaith Trialogue monthly meeting, 7:00 p.m., Greater Dayton Christian
Connections, United Methodist Building, 601 W. Riverview Avenue, Dayton.
Guest: Rabbi David Sofian, Temple Israel. For more information, contact Rev.
Kenneth Clark, 937-233-7754 or sclark36@xxxxxxxxx
Bob Simon, CBS foreign correspondent, will speak on "Is Peace Possible in the
Middle East?" 7 p.m. Monday, Jan. 26, 144 Benton Hall, Miami University Oxford
as part of Miami's Grayson Kirk Distinguished Lecture Series. The lecture is
free and open to the public. It is co-sponsored by the international studies
program.
Sunday, February 1, 2004, 9:30AM-11AM (home in time for Super Bowl coverage!):
Israel Task Force featuring Andrew Jaffee, www.netwmd.com creator and
pro-Israel activist, frequent contributor to Dayton City Paper and Dayton Daily
News. Location TBD. Mr. Jaffee will report on recent Palestinian Solidarity
conference at OSU and more.
Sunday, February 8, 2004: ?Judaism, Christianity, and Islam: Can We Build a
Road to Peace??, 4-6 p.m. Free. An interfaith forum of three speakers
sponsored by the Greater Dayton Interfaith Trialogue, UD Department of
Religious Studies, Dayton NCCJ, and the Archdiocese of Cincinnati Office for
Ecumenical & Interfaith Relations. Kennedy Union ballroom, University of
Dayton. For more information, contact Rev. Kenneth Clark at 937-233-7754 or at
sclark36@xxxxxxxxx
and now, this week's snippets:
From
http://www.dailycollegian.com/vnews/display.v/ART/2003/12/11/3fd7f2da3cbbb?in_archive=1:
Bringing back the Truffula Trees by Gilad Skolnick December 11, 2003
Israel: ??one country in the world that ended the 20th century with more trees
than it began with?.Today there are 116 different species of land animals in
the country, compared with 140 in all of Europe, a landmass 300 times bigger.
?. . Species now being raised for future release into the wild include the
White Oryx, Ostrich, Persian Fallow Deer, Roe Deer and Asiatic Wild Ass, a feat
that was once thought to be completely futile?.The world's largest solar power
station is currently under construction here, according to
www.distributedpowersolutions.com , while just about every home sports a solar
panel used to heat water?.
From http://www.jewishjournal.com/home/preview.php?id=11564 : ?Who?s to Blame
for Palestinian Despair?? by Loolwa Khazzoom
Like many hothead progressives around the world, I preach antiracism, teach
multiculturalism and recognize the United States to be a politically and
culturally imperialistic society. Proper revolutionary that I am, I have no
problem with guerrilla warfare against oppressive regimes, and I fully
recognize that ?terrorism? can be a political term used to invalidate the
violent behavior of one group and justify that of another. One might say I?m an
all-around, groovy radical. And yet, I?ve got a major problem with compassion
for Palestinian suicide bombers blowing up Israeli citizens. ?.
Clearly, Palestinians are suffering, and their situation must be remedied ? the
sooner the better. The question is, who was responsible for creating their
situation and who is accountable for remedying it? The Arab world is called
just that for a reason: Beginning in the Arabian Peninsula about 1,300 years
ago, Arab Muslims launched a brutal campaign of invasion and conquest, taking
over lands across the Middle East and North Africa. Throughout the region,
Kurds, Persians, Berbers, Copts and Jews were forced to convert to Islam under
the threat of death and in the name of Allah. Jews were one of the few
indigenous Middle Eastern peoples to resist conversion to Islam, the result
being they were given the status of dhimmi ? legally second-class, inferior
people. In the best of circumstances, Jews were spared death but forced to
endure an onslaught of humiliating legal restrictions ? forced into ghettos,
prohibited from owning land, prevented from entering numerous professions and
forbidden from doing anything to physically or symbolically demonstrate
equality with Arab Muslims.
When dhimmi laws were lax and Jews were allowed to participate to a greater
degree in their society, the Jewish community would flourish, both socially and
economically. On numerous occasions, however, the response to that success was
a wave of harassment or massacre of Jews instigated by the government or the
masses. ?. the current crisis occur in the greater context of a history in
which Arab Muslims have oppressed Jews for 1,300 years. Most recently,
anti-Jewish riots erupted throughout the Arab world in the 1930s and 1940s.
Jews were assaulted, tortured, murdered and forced to flee from their homes of
thousands of years. Throughout the region, Jewish property was confiscated and
nationalized, collectively worth hundreds of millions of dollars at the time.
Yet the world has never witnessed Middle Eastern and North African Jews blowing
themselves up and taking scores of Arab innocents with them out of anger or
desperation for what Arab states did to the Jewish people. Despite the fact
that there were 900,000 Jewish refugees from throughout the Middle East and
North Africa, we do not even hear about a Middle Eastern/North African Jewish
refugee problem today, because Israel absorbed most of the refugees. For
decades, they and their children have been the majority of Israel?s Jewish
population, with numbers as high as 70 percent.
To the contrary, Arab states did not absorb refugees from the war against
Israel in 1948. Instead, they built squalid camps in the West Bank and Gaza ?
at the time controlled by Jordan and Egypt ? and dumped the refugees in them,
Arabs doomed to become pawns in a political war against Israel. Countries such
as Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Libya and Lebanon funded assaults against Israeli
citizens instead of funding basic medical, educational and housing needs of
Palestinian refugee families. In 1967, Israel inherited the Palestinian refugee
problem through a defensive war. When Israel tried to build housing for the
refugees in Gaza, Arab states led votes against it in U.N. resolutions, because
absorption would change the status of the refugees. But wasn?t that the moral
objective?
Israel went on to give more money to the Palestinian refugees than all but
three of the Arab states combined, prior to transferring responsibility of the
territories to the Palestinian Authority in the mid-1990s. Israel built
hospitals and educational institutions for Palestinians in the territories.
Israel trained the Palestinian police force. And yet, the 22 Arab states
dominate both the land and the wealth of the region. So who is responsible for
creating Palestinian desperation? Tragically, the Arab propaganda war against
Israel has been a brilliant success, laying on Israel all the blame for the
Palestinian refugee problem. By refusing to hold Arab states accountable for
their own actions, by feeling sympathy for Palestinian suicide bombers instead
of outrage at the Arab propaganda creating this phenomenon, the ?progressive?
movement continues to feed the never-ending cycle of violence in the Middle
East.
Loolwa Khazzoom is an Iraqi American Jew and an Israel correspondent for the
Jewish Telegraphic Agency. You can find her on the web at www.loolwa.com.
Interesting conclusion to an editorial from the Saudi Arabian Arab News
1/10/04: Wall Is Not the Issue; Peace Is by Abdul Rahman Al-Rashid
??. As for Arabs ? and Palestinians in particular ? the wall is not their
battle, but peace is. They should present a peace plan capable of putting the
Israelis before two extremely dangerous options: a genuine peace that will put
an end to their security torment and meet the demand for establishing the
Palestinian state, or continue live in a constant state of war over or under
the wall.?
From www.jcpa.org/daily for 1/9/04: · Lebanese Chafe under Syria's Quiet
Occupation
Lebanon's devastating civil war ended following the 1989 Taif Agreement, which
gave Syria limited rule over the wrecked country. The agreement called for
Syria to withdraw its troops and hand power back to a reconstructed Lebanese
government after two years. Yet today, 20,000 Syrian soldiers remain in
Lebanon, and Syria's grip on Lebanese politics is stronger than ever. It is an
invisible occupation, in which Lebanon's leaders must seek Damascus's approval
of their policies, and Syrian plainclothes agents roam back streets, ears
cocked for political dissent.
Syria also supports the terrorist Islamic group Hizballah and allows it run
of the Lebanese-Israeli border. Syria has allowed 1 million Syrian workers into
Lebanon (equal to a fourth of Lebanon's population) and flooded the country's
market with cheap Syrian goods. (Christian Science Monitor)
From http://cf.heritage.org/index2004test/countries.cfm and
http://www.globes.co.il/serveen/ : The 10th anniversary of The Heritage
Foundation/Wall Street Journal Index of Economic Freedom has some interesting
rankings - Israel received 2.36 points. The index runs from one to five: one
point means complete economic freedom and five points means no economic
freedom. Israel's score has steadily improved for the past five years?. Israel
was ranked 29th out of 155 countries in [the index], and second, after Bahrain,
among Middle Eastern and North African countries?. The world's freest economy
in [the index] was Hong Kong, followed by Singapore, New Zealand, Luxembourg,
Ireland, Estonia, the UK, Denmark, and Switzerland. The United States ranked
10th.
--- Cherie Kurland
--- kurlandc@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
--- EarthLink: The #1 provider of the Real Internet.
--- Cherie Kurland
--- kurlandc@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
--- EarthLink: The #1 provider of the Real Internet.
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