Dr. Martin Luther King III at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Dr. Martin Luther King III spoke at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem as part of a symposium entitled “Realizing the Dream in the Middle East.” The title of his talk was “Can the dream be applied in the Middle East?” The event was held under the auspices of the Harry S. Truman Research Institute for the Advancement of Peace at the Hebrew University and the Religious Actors in Conflict Areas Research Group (RACA). “I am speaking of realizing the dream, because dreams have their own, innate power, but one needs to take concrete steps in order to realize them,” he said. He added that while not every person can be a Martin Luther King, “everyone can educate his children towards non-violence.” Dr. King III leads a non-profit coalition force called Realizing the Dream that continues the humanitarian and liberating work of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. through specific, sustainable initiatives in economic development, non-violence and conflict resolution training, and targeted leadership development for youth.

http://www.huji.ac.il/cgi-bin/dovrut/dovrut_search_eng.pl?mesge118829091632688760

http://truman.huji.ac.il/upload/MartinLutherKingIII270807.pdf

“I have the reputation of being a friend of Israel, and it's true”, Nicolas Sarkozy, President of France

In a welcome break with his predecessors, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, in his first major foreign policy speech, reiterated his friendship for Israel. In spite of his pro-US and pro-Israel stance, Nicolas Sarkozy’s approval ratings remain exceptionally high at over 70%. JTA reports:

“Nicolas Sarkozy reaffirmed his affection for Israel and hostility toward Hamas.

“I have the reputation of being a friend of Israel, and it's true. I will never compromise on Israel's security,” the French president said Monday in his first foreign-policy speech since taking office in May.

While he said France would continue to cultivate rich ties with the moderate Arab world, Sarkozy drew a line at engaging Hamas or allowing Iran to procure nuclear weaponry.

He described the Gaza Strip as “Hamastan” - a term seldom heard outside Israeli political circles - and said the Islamist Palestinian group must be curbed lest it take over the West Bank as well.

Sarkozy, who was speaking to French diplomats, further urged Iran to abandon its nuclear program or for effective international sanctions to be imposed on Tehran. Otherwise, he hinted, there could be military intervention.

“This tactic is the only one that allows us to escape from a catastrophic alternative: an Iranian bomb, or the bombing of Iran,” he said.”

http://www.jta.org/cgi-bin/iowa/breaking/103848.html

“Our own history as a nation and Israel’s have many parallels”, John F. Kennedy

“Before he became president, John F. Kennedy visited Palestine and Israel twice -- once in 1939 and again in 1951. He wrote about the trips in his 1960 collection of speeches entitled The Strategy of Peace.

“In 1939 I first saw Palestine, then an unhappy land under alien rule, and to a large extent then a barren land... In 1951, I travelled again to the land by the River Jordan, to see firsthand the new State of Israel. The transformation that had taken place was hard to believe.

For in those twelve years, a nation had been born, a desert had been reclaimed, and the most tragic victims of World War II... had found a home.”

Kennedy used that recollection to introduce his February 9, 1959 speech to the Golden Jubilee Banquet of B’nai Zion in New York City.

“[O]ur own history as a nation and Israel’s have many parallels - in the diversity of their origins, in their capacity to reach the unattainable, in the receptivity to new ideas and social experimentation...

History records several… breakthroughs - great efforts to which spiritual conviction and human endurance have combined to make realities out of prophecies. The Puritans in Massachusetts, the Mormons in Salt Lake City, the Scotch-Irish in the Western territories were all imbued with the truth of the old Jewish thought that a people can have only as much sky over its head as it has land under its feet...

I would like to... dispel a prevalent myth... the assertion that it is Zionism which has been the unsettling and fevered infection in the Middle East, the belief that without Israel there would somehow be a natural harmony throughout the Middle East and Arab world. Quite apart from the values and hopes which the State of Israel enshrines... it twists reality to suggest that it is the democratic tendency of Israel which has injected discord and dissension into the Near East. Even by the coldest calculations, the removal of Israel would not alter the basic crisis in the area... The basic rivalries within the Arab world, the quarrels over boundaries, the tensions involved in lifting their economies from stagnation, the cross pressures of nationalism - all of these factors would still be there, even if there were no Israel...

Israel, on the other hand, embodying all the characteristics of a Western democracy and having long passed the threshold of economic development, shares with the West a tradition of civil liberties, of cultural freedom, of parliamentary democracy, of social mobility...

The choice today is not between either the Arab states or Israel. Ways must be found of supporting the legitimate aspirations of each. The United States, whose President was first to recognize the new State of Israel, need have no apologies – indeed should pride itself – for the action it took...

The Jewish state found its fulfilment during a time when it bore witness, to use the words of Markham, to humanity betrayed, “plundered, profaned, and disinherited.”But it is yet possible that history will record this event as only the prelude to the betterment and therapy, not merely of a strip of land, but of a broad expanse of almost continental dimensions... [A]s we observe the inspiring experience of Israel, we know that we must make the effort...””
Rick Richman in Jewish Current Affairs
http://jpundit.typepad.com/jci/2006/04/response_to_ton.html

Apology of evil, by Pilar Rahola

“I want to shatter the core of the lie”, stated the elated Robert Faurisson, cheered loudly with passionate applause. The well-known French negationist Faurisson had just been sentenced in his country for having denied the Nazi extermination against Jews. Yet, this did not prevent him from enjoying a pleasant holiday in the Iranian paradise, and from participating as a speaker in the congress on the Holocaust organised by Iranian fascists. In the corridors of the congress, David Duke, ex leader of the Ku Klux Klan, expressed his satisfaction to the few European journalists that covered the event, and took advantage to talk about the western “shame”, that represses freedom of speech… Of course, Iran was, for the well-known American racist, a model of freedom.

... It means that the Iranian Congress on the Holocaust was a great show of hate and disdain for the Jewish victims of the Shoah, funded by a member state of the UN, whose influence in Islam, in the Middle East and the world, is more than notorious. Obviously, once again President Ahmadinejad threatened Israel, called for its disappearance and encouraged all Muslims to take part in its demise. In conclusion: an apology for hate, a war threat on another country, a public show of Anti-Semitism, without complexes an Anti-Semite orgy, and lastly, the notorious inaction and indifference of the world, perfectly demonstrated in the perverse silence of the Organization of the United Nations. If the Iranian Congress served any purpose, unfortunately it was to confirm what we already knew. It proved that the apology for Nazi negationism can be made without suffering any consequences.

I have dozens of friends who have been victims of the terrible disaster of the Holocaust; I remember my Colombian friend, whose grand-mother had completely lost her mother tongue, Polish, when she, at 13, was rescued from Auschwitz, having lost her whole family. I remember the trembling look of a Chilean survivor telling me, in tears, that a European had never apologized. I remember a sad man that I met in Santiago whose father, working as a musician, was forced to play the violin as his family was executed. There were more than 1 million children, two thirds of the European Jewish population disappeared; dozens of villages with their centuries of Jewish life, poets, school teachers, peasants, traders, doctors, children and grand-parents, men and women, all were wiped off the map. Smoke, only smoke, and some do not even want them to be remembered. Smoke and oblivion.

For such pain, for such evil, for such a tragedy that is such burden to carry, with centuries of guilt in Europe, I feel a profound sadness, I feel profoundly lost and profoundly defeated.

It is true. Duke the racist has reasons to feel exultant, feeding the hate for Jews and laughing at the extermination of six million people, it does not cost anything. Who cares? Which country has expelled the Iranian ambassador from its territory? Who has demanded an explanation at the United Nations General Assembly? Who is going to send to prison those who participated in this apology for evil? Who is moved by this horror?

Having written a number of times that Jews stand alone in their misfortune and that Israel faces survival alone, this occasion gives me the most evidence to be sure of the fact. I wonder whether the world would have allowed an official congress, public and legal, in favour of racism. Would there not have been all kinds of protest and acts of solidarity? Wouldn’t they have envisaged an economic boycott, military intervention? Wouldn’t the route of diplomacy have been exhausted first? Wouldn’t left-wing organisations have taken to the streets, indignant about the apology of evil that racism represents? Wouldn’t SOS Racism have been outraged? Wouldn’t those like the writer Saramago have expressed their profound rage? Yet, when racism is perpetrated against Jews, the victims of the greatest extermination of all times, the world considers that this is not its problem, as it has never been.

Impunity gives rise to hate, raging and reinforced, and, with hate reinforced, all the doors of evil are opened.

As an old saying puts it: “When your enemy assures that he wants to kill you, believe him”. What should the Israelis think confronted with the reiterated threats of destruction by Iran, a country that will have nuclear weapons without being punished? What can the Jews think around the world? They think that they stand alone. That they always stood alone in the face of the anti-Semitic hate.
December 14, 2006
Translated by Margarita Estapé.
Pilar Rahola comes from a republican and anti-fascist family. She is a Catalan writer, journalist and former parliamentarian of the republican left.
http://www.pilarrahola.com/

Lessons to Learn From Israelis, by As'ad Abdul Rahman

In a column in Gulf News, Professor As'ad Abdul Rahman, Chairman of the Palestinian Encyclopedia, has harsh words on the state of disunity and internal conflict in Palestinian society. He praises Israel’s "political system [which] is designed to accommodate its political and ethnic contradictions. Hence the Israelis are all concurrent on important issues, and ultimately unified in face of what they call external threats". He adds that there are "no fundamentally controversial issues internally. The Israelis only differ on means of realising their goals." "In spite of being brought to believe there is nothing positive about Jews, we must take the example of Israel and review the values that govern Palestinian (and Arab) society in dealing not only with political issues, but also our day to day lives. That would enable us underline many a flaw and heel many a wound. Divisions and differences are so abundant in our life that some of us cannot tolerate others. We forget that pluralism is actually desirable. How long will we be content with words and slogans while the Palestinian people are being slaughtered daily by their own people in both the West Bank and Gaza Strip? How long will the mentality of exclusion and non-engagement persist? Do a few conspirators within Hamas and Fatah aim to transform us into the new aliens in this land? … we have found shelter in illusions, and have killed each other in the name of freedom and the homeland, and ultimately lost even more through the Hamas-Fatah fighting. … Let's differ, but in the "Jewish manner" this time: when killing a Jew is forbidden for another Jew. Whereas Israel was fortunate in bringing Jews together, inside and outside Israel, we have failed to unify the Palestinians inside the homeland itself. While the Jewish state has adopted pluralism, we are still addicted to tribalism, factionalism and blind partisanship. While every corrupt leader in Israel, including its head of state, is brought to justice, we've rejected a necessary building process based on transparency and democracy. And finally, whereas the Israeli public go to the street demanding the punishment of every erring official, we have refused accountability and collective examination. Jews were the "aliens" in the past, and today we are how they were. Can we accept that?" http://www.gulfnews.com/opinion/columns/region/10148928.html

Le Pen is neither an Atlanticist nor a Zionist

While on holiday in Morocco this summer, Jean-Marie Le Pen, the French National Front Leader, a far right political party, granted an interview to La Gazette du Maroc. Asked for his views on President Nicolas Sarkozy, Le Pen stated their differences : "He is an Atlanticist, a Zionist and pro-European. I am neither of these." http://www.20minutes.fr/article/175547/Politique-Le-Pen-fait-front-avec-les-Arabes.php

European Parliament to host controversial anti-Israeli conference

The European Parliament will be hosting later this month a highly controversial conference under the auspices of a UN committee for Palestinian rights. All pointers indicate that the conference will turn into a platform for the demonisation of Israel. The leader of the Conservative group in the European Parliament, Timothy Kirkhope, as reported by The San Diego, indicated that he is concerned that the Hamas, which is considered a terrorist organisation by the European Union might be represented at the conference. "'I am always very nervous when I hear of these conferences ... I do not like them, particularly if they are sponsored by a narrow political pressure group,' he said." UN Watch asks: "Who was behind the European Parliament's decision to play host to this poorly disguised hate-fest? With the conference façade removed, who in Europe will now have the courage to speak out?" The Jerusalem Post leader reports that Polish MEPs have condemned the initiative: "Polish members of the European Parliament deserve credit for showing the way by announcing their refusal to participate in the Brussels conference. As Bronislaw Geremek, a Polish MEP, was quoted as saying by the web site Europa21: "Although there is no official statement that Israel must be pushed down to the sea there, the choice of subjects ... shows that it will be a biased, conflict generating conference. Actually we can call it anti-Israeli." MEP Konrad Szymanski stated, "I am astonished that the European Parliament allowed such activity in its building." This is a time when UN and European claims to be honest brokers and even friends of Israel will be put to the test. It is not possible to press for peace and to sponsor and participate in the fomenting of hate. It is not enough to retroactively express "regret" at outcomes that were foregone conclusions. The time to stop Durban II is now."

http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/world/20070813-0601-eu-palestinians-israel.html
http://www.unwatch.org/site/c.bdKKISNqEmG/b.1317481/k.96E7/View_From_Geneva/apps/nl/newsletter2.asp
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1187779137328&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull