Sunday, March 27, 2011
Wednesday, March 23, 2011
Unmasking the World
This week, as the Muslim world trembles and regimes fall one after the other like flies the Jewish citizens of Israel celebrated Purim. Huge festive parades marched through the streets. From school children to working adults from kindergartens to offices through every street in the city, it seemed that everywhere everybody was dressed in customs and masks.
This age old tradition began long ago in Persia, as recorded in the Esther Scroll After Jews got the upper hand and escaped persecution, winning the favor of king Xerxos. it was hip to be a Jew. Many of the local non-Jews dressed up as Jews in the hope of escaping punishment.
Esther 8:17:
And in every province, and in every city, wherever the king's commandment and his decree came, the Jews had joy and gladness, a feast and a good day. And many of the people of the land behaved as Jews; for the fear of the Jews fell upon them.
This ancient tale is a wonderful example of the fickleness of public opinion and its hypocrisy and is a stark reminder that things are not always as they seem.
Nobody knows today what the shift in the Arab world will bring but there is no doubt that many of our past conceptions about the Arab world and about western foreign policy have been debunked. Perhaps the Arab world and western policy never changed but their true nature was unmasked for all to see.
The recent events have managed to unmask the poverty, lack of rights and despotism, so wide spread in Arab countries. The western world's dependency on oil and its effect on foreign policy have been unmasked by the unbalanced stances regarding the Egyptian, Libyan, Tunisian and Baharanian civil unrests.
The Arab League's unity was unmasked as nothing but empty rhetoric. Iran's invisible hand in Middle Eastern politics became very apparent. But most importantly Arab governments around the world have been unmasked for what they are, terror-based dictatorships, travesties of human rights, corrupt and unjust.
Unmasking the villain has allowed Arab citizens to fight for their rights for the first time, to fight for democracy. Their success will depend largely on their ability to spot hypocritical villains and unmask them, to see thing for what they are, Then they too will be able to parade proudly and unafraid in the streets of their cities.
Tuesday, March 15, 2011
War of Words, War of Worlds
Saturday's gruesome murder in Itamar, an Israeli West Bank settlement, horrified Israelis. A Palestinian perpetrated a violent murder killing a mother, a father and three children, the youngest of whom was a three-month-old infant.
As opposed to other terrorist attacks this attack did not yet instigate a war of weapons but rather a War of Words.
Israel is demanding an apology from CNN over its coverage of Saturday's terrorist attack in Itamar claiming it was "tendentious and deceptive."
The CNN report stated: "Five members of an Israeli family were killed in the West Bank early Saturday morning in what the Israeli military is calling a 'terror attack.'" Israeli officials contested the quotation marks around the term terror attack stating that there should be no argument on the fact that this is a terrorist attack.
The report went on to say: "According to a military spokeswoman, an intruder entered the Israeli settlement of Itamar near the northern West Bank city of Nablus around 1 am, made his way into a family home and killed two parents and their three children."
The report rephrased the IDF's official statement that noted forces were searching for a "terrorist" using instead the words "intruder" and "assailant". I myself remember many articles that called a suicide bomber, a freedom fighter.
Why is terminology such a controversial issue? Or as Shakespeare put it "What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet."
To answer this question we should consider another article that hit the wires recently.
In Rome Pope Benedict XVI has made a sweeping exoneration of the Jewish people for the death of Jesus Christ. He deconstructs one particular Biblical account which has the crowd saying, "His blood be on us and on our children" — a phrase frequently cited as evidence of the collective guilt Jews bore and the curse that they carried as a result.
The phrase, from the Gospel of Matthew, has been so inflammatory that director Mel Gibson was reportedly forced to drop it from the subtitles of his 2004 film "The Passion of the Christ," although it remained in the spoken Aramaic.
The reason for Pope Benedict's interest in this debate could be traced to his childhood, when he was forced to join the Hitler Youth. As an adult he has made improving relations with Jews a mission and has visited the Auschwitz Nazi death camp in Poland and Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial.
Years of blaming the Jews for the death of Jesus along with newer anti-Semitic propaganda may have led to the extermination of Jews in World War II.
Words and terminology motivate people to action. Language has cultural and practical consequences. The Pope understood this. Israel has become aware of this and is now asking the world media as well as global leaders to unequivocally denounce these most recent attack.
One of the workshops we run on our tours is an exercise in the vocabulary of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. What is the language used in your local media to describe the conflict? How do you reconcile between terms such as apartheid wall and separation fence, terrorist and freedom fighter, targeted killing and assassination?
At the end of the workshop we show a clip and deconstruct the phrasing of each sentence. By choosing our words we choose our moral ground, our social values and our identity – In effect our world is made up of words.
How were the Itamar "killings" reported in your part of the world?
As opposed to other terrorist attacks this attack did not yet instigate a war of weapons but rather a War of Words.
Israel is demanding an apology from CNN over its coverage of Saturday's terrorist attack in Itamar claiming it was "tendentious and deceptive."
The CNN report stated: "Five members of an Israeli family were killed in the West Bank early Saturday morning in what the Israeli military is calling a 'terror attack.'" Israeli officials contested the quotation marks around the term terror attack stating that there should be no argument on the fact that this is a terrorist attack.
The report went on to say: "According to a military spokeswoman, an intruder entered the Israeli settlement of Itamar near the northern West Bank city of Nablus around 1 am, made his way into a family home and killed two parents and their three children."
The report rephrased the IDF's official statement that noted forces were searching for a "terrorist" using instead the words "intruder" and "assailant". I myself remember many articles that called a suicide bomber, a freedom fighter.
Why is terminology such a controversial issue? Or as Shakespeare put it "What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet."
To answer this question we should consider another article that hit the wires recently.
In Rome Pope Benedict XVI has made a sweeping exoneration of the Jewish people for the death of Jesus Christ. He deconstructs one particular Biblical account which has the crowd saying, "His blood be on us and on our children" — a phrase frequently cited as evidence of the collective guilt Jews bore and the curse that they carried as a result.
The phrase, from the Gospel of Matthew, has been so inflammatory that director Mel Gibson was reportedly forced to drop it from the subtitles of his 2004 film "The Passion of the Christ," although it remained in the spoken Aramaic.
The reason for Pope Benedict's interest in this debate could be traced to his childhood, when he was forced to join the Hitler Youth. As an adult he has made improving relations with Jews a mission and has visited the Auschwitz Nazi death camp in Poland and Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial.
Years of blaming the Jews for the death of Jesus along with newer anti-Semitic propaganda may have led to the extermination of Jews in World War II.
Words and terminology motivate people to action. Language has cultural and practical consequences. The Pope understood this. Israel has become aware of this and is now asking the world media as well as global leaders to unequivocally denounce these most recent attack.
One of the workshops we run on our tours is an exercise in the vocabulary of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. What is the language used in your local media to describe the conflict? How do you reconcile between terms such as apartheid wall and separation fence, terrorist and freedom fighter, targeted killing and assassination?
At the end of the workshop we show a clip and deconstruct the phrasing of each sentence. By choosing our words we choose our moral ground, our social values and our identity – In effect our world is made up of words.
How were the Itamar "killings" reported in your part of the world?
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