Not At Our Photo Op!

The President of Iran wanted to lay a wreath at the sight of the Twin Towers terrorists attacks on 9/11, affectionally referred to as “ground zero”. The Iranian President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is scheduled to address the UN General Assembly and wanted to express the condolences of the Iranian people. It appears that the sympathy of the Iranian people is not welcome here in America. We wonder why we are losing the hearts and minds of the Arab peoples of the world when we do things like this. This is an affront to Muslims everywhere and will be used for political gain by those who advocate more radical positions against America.

NEW YORK -- A request by Iran's president to lay a wreath at the World Trade Center site next week has been turned down by police and blasted by U.S. diplomats as an attempt to turn ground zero into a "photo op."[1]

Regardless of the political climate with Iran, to disrespect their people in this way is a slap in the face. To not accept the tribute of the Iranian people for the attacks, which they had nothing to do with is again grouping all Muslims together as being guilty for the attack, which many in this country continue to insist on doing.

I am not a big fan of the Iranian President, but in this capacity he is representing the people of Iran, who should be allowed to acknowledge their respect for the victims of the attack. How can we cultivate closer relations with the Arab world if we continue to treat them with disdain? It seems that the only Muslim countries we are interested in cultivating relationships with are the ones willing to do our bidding. Continuing to demonize and label those who disagree with us maybe good for internal consumption, but in the world community that strategy has not played well. There are many in the world who see us as the biggest threat to peace and not those we have labeled as such, so somewhere there has been a disconnect between what we are saying and what the world is believing.

If I remember correctly Iran was one of the Muslim countries that rallied behind the US after 9/11 and condemned the attacks, but obviously this administration still suffers from the same short-sightedness that led us to attack Iraq and lay the groundwork for attacking Iran.

The rationale for the denial of the request is that the Bush Administration did not want to allow Mr. Ahmadinejad an opportunity to have photos taken at the scene of the attacks. Here is the part that kills me, we don’t want to allow him the opportunity to exploit the victims, but yet we have allowed every American politician with a pulse to exploit them. There is a quote in the Bible the reads:

To the pure all things are pure,
But to those who are defiled and unbelieving nothing is pure
But even there mid and conscience are defiled.[2]

I quote this verse to say that if one’s motives are wrong, then they assume everyone’s motives are wrong. If I am a thief then I think that all people are thieves and act accordingly. If the Iranian President is looking to exploit this tragedy then that will be revealed and he will be treated accordingly, but to make that assumption, especially by the same people who arranged photo ops in Iraq, Ground Zero, and aboard an aircraft carrier is pathetic.

The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Zalmay Khalilzad, told reporters Wednesday that the United States would not support Iran's attempt to use the site for a "photo op."[3]

So, let’s keep the site of the attack clear of foreigners so that it can remain pristine for our pandering politician’s photo ops. Warning to the rest of the world’s politicians, we can use your countries memorials for photo ops, but don’t even think about trying that here.

[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/20/AR2007092000207.html
[2] Titus 1:15
[3] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/20/AR2007092000207.html

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Could This Happen Here?

COLOGNE, Germany — In a city with the greatest Gothic cathedral in Germany and no fewer than a dozen Romanesque churches, adding a pair of slender fluted minarets would scarcely alter the skyline. Yet plans for a new mosque are rattling this ancient city to its foundations.

Cologne’s Muslim population, largely Turkish, is pushing for approval to build what would be one of Germany’s largest mosques, in a working-class district across town from the cathedral’s mighty spires.[1]

As I was reading this story, I was troubled by the underlying message from the people who were opposed to the mosque. I am still amazed that many people have the false belief that democracy cannot withstand the integration of Islam. All over the world there appears to be this undercurrent of fear and mistrust of the Islamic faith. I would be the first to admit that there have been zealots who have committed many atrocities in the name of Islam, but have there not also been Christians and Jews who have done likewise. The idea that only Muslims are capable of misusing religion is preposterous and foolhardy. It is this simplistic view of the world that continues to feed the radicals with fuel to espouse their teachings of a religious war against the Muslims.

I wonder what would be the sentiments if Muslims attempted to build a similar structure here in the states. Is our religious tolerance only for those religions we like? Those religions that mimic our own are tolerable, but those we don’t understand are not? With the 4^th of July just passed I wonder what is really being celebrated on Independence Day. Is it democracy and freedom or is it majority privilege? Unless we are willing to extend these freedoms to everyone then they are false freedoms. The problem with the founding fathers of this nation is that they didn’t have the strength of their convictions to make democracy real for all. Freedom was only offered to a select few and to this day we are struggling with the aftermath of their fateful decisions. This thing called freedom and democracy is not some static event housed in some musty museum, it is living and breathing like the people it is suppose to include and whenever through our short-sightedness, as humans are prone to be, we find it does not include some, we need to amend it so it does. The problem is amending a document is a lot easier than amending hearts and minds. It’s funny, but whoever gets to an event first automatically believes that they are the only ones worthy of the event. That whoever comes later is not as entitled to be there as they are. There is an ancient story about it here.

Mr. Giordano, a Holocaust survivor, has been sharply criticized, by fellow Jews, among others, and has even received death threats. But others say he is giving voice to Germans, who for reasons of their past, are reluctant to express misgivings about the rise of Islam in their midst.

Germany’s “false tolerance,” he said, enabled the Sept. 11 hijackers to use Hamburg as a haven in which to hatch their terrorist plot. Cologne, too, has struggled with radical Islamic figures, most notably Metin Kaplan, a militant Turkish cleric known as the caliph of Cologne.

“I don’t want to see women on the street wearing burqas,” said Mr. Giordano, a nattily dressed man with the flowing white hair of an 18th-century German romantic. “I’m insulted by that — not by the women themselves, but by the people who turned them into human penguins.”

Such blunt language troubles other German Jews, who say a victim of religious persecution should not take a swipe at another religious minority. Henryk M. Broder, a Jewish journalist who is a friend of Mr. Giordano’s, said he should have avoided the phrase “human penguins.”

But Mr. Broder said that his underlying message was valid, and that his stature as a writer gave him the standing to say it. “A mosque is more than a church or a synagogue,” he said. “It is a political statement.”

For Mr. Alboga, though, the line between frank debate and racist demagoguery is not so clear. “This is like thinking from the Middle Ages,” he said, “and it is sending the racists to the barricades.”[2]

Centuries later we see how that ancient story plays out in that a witness to some of the worse persecution of one man to another is willing to persecute others who are different. Mr. Giordano is supposed to have survived the Nazi persecution by hiding in a cellar, but it appears more like he survived it by collaborating with them. If we believe in religious freedom it must be extended to all. Democracy does not survive because of us; it survives in spite of us. The more we try to limit its scope, the more we limit ourselves and our world. There is a growing trend to reverse many of the gains to this document that we hold reverently, to go back to the “good ole” days. Those days were only good if you were white and a male, instead of reversing our direction we need to be blazing new directions in human tolerance and understanding.

Jesus wasn’t surrounded by the politically connected or the religious leaders; he was surrounded by those that were considered less than others. He was surrounded by those that needed understanding and tolerance. I don’t have to agree with someone to offer comfort and love; I just need to recognize that they like me are just human.

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[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/05/world/europe/05cologne.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

[2] Ibid.

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What Happened in Israel in 1967?

Can the turmoil in the Middle East be traced back to the events in 1967? There are many who believe that they can be. It was at that time, 40 years ago that the Israelis were beginning and ending the Six Day war. Some say it was at this moment that the fate of Israel and the Palestinians were both sealed with the fateful decisions made following this war. Have those decisions led to a safer Israel? That is hard to say, but what we do know is that those decisions have fed an ongoing cycle of violence that has no end in sight.

Although there were lots of discussions concerning the disposition of the newly occupied territory, one that is not mentioned in the all the papers is the legality of it. So, either it wasn’t discussed or was removed from the archives. However, there was a legal opinion given which until now has remained secret.

“By September, Eshkol was seriously considering settlements in the Golan and Kfar Etzion. He was no doubt influenced by the Khartoum Arab summit which had responded to the Israeli Cabinet's secret offer, agreed within a fortnight of the war, of a negotiated withdrawal from most of the territories, with a resounding "no" to talks. In hindsight, it is possible to see the Khartoum declaration as a heavily coded concession to some form of indirect negotiation on recognition, in return for withdrawal from the territories occupied in the war. But Israel, whose position was anyway hardening, wanted direct negotiations and explicit recognition if it was going to pull back.

In all the debate – within the public and, it appears, in Cabinet – one highly significant aspect of settlement policy was barely, if at all, discussed: whether it was legal. Since then Israel has never accepted the argument, ratified by successive UN resolutions, that civilian settlements violated international law. Which makes it all the more interesting that Theodor Meron, the then-36-year-old legal adviser at the Foreign Ministry, was asked to deliver an opinion on just that issue. Meron, a Holocaust survivor, had been a member of Israel's delegation to the UN during the June war. "It was a very traumatic period because in New York things looked terribly ominous," he recalls today.

But the secret memorandum he wrote three months later – initially only for the eyes of his boss, the Foreign Minister Abba Eban, but then sent to Eshkol's office – was clearsighted and unequivocal. The document, written after the Khartoum summit when he knew settlement in the Golan and the West Bank was very much in the air, was unknown until it was unearthed from the Israel State Archives and brought to light by Gorenberg last year. In it, Meron wrote that "my conclusion is that civilian settlement of the administered territories contravenes the explicit provisions of the Fourth Geneva Convention." The Convention prohibits deportation or transfer by the occupying power of its own civilian population into the territories it occupies. The official Red Cross commentary explains that this prohibition was "intended to prevent a practice adopted during the Second World War by certain Powers, which transferred portions of their own population to occupied territory for political and racial reasons or in order, as they claimed, to colonise those territories." Meron's crisp recommendation was that the prohibition was "categorical and aimed at preventing colonisation of conquered territory by citizens of the conquering state." That was not all. Even when establishing military posts, Israel, he was clear, had also to respect the 1907 Hague Convention on Laws and Customs of war on land, which stated that "Private Property cannot be confiscated" . This has been little discussed in the Israeli-Palestinian context but its lasting pertinence was underlined last November when Peace Now, on the basis of leaked data from the military's Civil Administration in the West Bank, revealed that 15,000 acres, or 40 per cent of the West Bank settlements, were on privately owned Palestinian land, often by military order.

This could be dismissed as no more than an interesting historical footnote, except for one thing. Theodor Meron, now an American citizen, went on to become one of the world's most eminent international jurists, if not the most eminent. Until 2005 he was president of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. Moreover, as a law professor at New York University, he published much of the theoretical work which led to the establishment of the tribunal, on which he now sits as an appeals judge, and of the International Criminal Court. The Government was not choosing to ignore the opinion of some obscure legal maverick.”[1]

So, it appears that the Israeli government which has since the war’s end refused to accept international law concerning the occupied territories and settlements, has known from the beginning that the settlements were illegal. So why would they continue to build settlements and occupy the land knowing that it is illegal? The answer lies in the desire of many in the government and religious movements who wanted to see Israel expanded to the Mediterranean Sea. With the ease at which the Arabs were defeated many were heady with the taste of victory and I’m sure had attributed their victory to the Divine Will of God. Hadn’t God promised them this land?

The decisions on the disposition of these lands, has led to 40 years of strife and occupation and have made Israel no safer. Israel has gone from a fledgling democracy supported by most of the international community to a pariah. Because of this occupation they have lost any moral high ground they may have received from the holocaust. That doesn’t stop them though from continuing to portray themselves as the victims in a global anti-Semitism conspiracy. The occupation and settlements of these lands was illegal and wrong then and it still is today. Israel has a right to exist, but so do the Palestinians. It is time to stop the cycle of violence that has fueled the Middle East powder keg for all these years. It is time for all peace loving people to embrace peace. A good place to start is the Saudi peace plan, give peace a chance…

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[1] http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article2582180.ece

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