Good news from the Holy Land !!!

[Tom Grainger]

http://www.comeandsee.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&am...

Wonderful to see Holy Land Arabs succeeding in education. Enjoy !

[Marc Peterson]

Micah, with all due respect, you don't seem to have a problem offering constructive criticism to any and all groups, just one. Aren't you worried that your Jewish friends might visit this site and read Rana's letter to Dick Cheney or read one of the posts by Friends of Sabeel? You say you wouldn't know what to say to anyone in the Arab world? Could you tell the truth to someone so eaten up by hate that they were proud that their son was enlisting in Jihad? Most of us have not been in most people's shoes around the world but does that mean we have nothing to say to them? Don't we have the Truth and the ability to discern? Isn't that enough to sometimes speak the hard truths to the world?
I presume you've also never been a diplomat or an IDF soldier or an Israeli settler running for a bunker because another rocket is coming over the hill but you seem to know how you feel about some of their difficult positions and how they've come at them.
You also seem to not grant a whit's difference between someone targeting non-combatants and someone trying to avoid civilian casualties and sometimes failing. I would think that is a rather simple moral equation, but some here have accused me of being too black and white. Sorry to throw this heap at you, but you've got a lot of positions above that I wanted clarification on.

[Micah Schuurman]

You say that I dont make a difference between targetting non-combatants and accidentally hitting them. This could not be farther from the truth. The Israelis have targeted non-combatants repeatedly. The Irgun blew up the King David Hotel. The Stern Gang commited atrocity after atrocity. Ariel Sharon himself stood guard over a massacre at Sabra and Shatila as Palestinian civilians were slaughtered by his allies.
What I am trying to say is that neither side has the moral high ground here.
A student looked me in the eyes today and said, "You dont think Im evil, do you?" I looked back at him and said, "no, I dont." He followed up asking me why my country continues to stereotype him and his people as being violent and bloodthirsty.
Most of the things that have been posted about the Middle East on this website are true in one way or annother. The problem that I have been noticing recently has been that some of the posts come with a half truth that sees only one side of the struggle, the side of the Israelis. Most people at Sabeel are well versed in both sides of the struggle. They see the truths on both sides. From there, they seek to make steps towards a just peace. To my eternal frustration, I see no such awareness among most American Christians. Israel regularly invites Christian Church leaders as well as politicians to come to Israel to see the "truth." The truths that they show are usually half truths at best.
Half truths on both sides of the conflict lead to "Israel bashing" or "Arab bashing" as the case may be. Part of what I want to do (on both sides of the conflict) is to put an end to these half truths.
When I look at the American media, I see only half truths (and crooked ones at that). For this reason, I am quite tollerant of people in America who balance the media by criticizing Israel for a change. Likewise, in the Middle East, I try to balance things in the other direction. Their media is overwhelmingly anti-Israel. I try to help my Arab friends see the broader picture.
So, as I see it, speading truth is the very best thing that I can do. There is no reason to hide truth. The only place where we need to be careful relates to the speculations that we make as to the "rightness" or "wrongness" of actions made by people with whom we have absolutely no connection. It is these types of judgements that allows us to demonize the Islamic extremists and likewise allows them to demonize us.

[Marc Peterson]

Well, Micah. I'll keep this on a civil footing, but maybe we should take it off-line as disagreements are frowned upon here. I'm afraid I have no idea about how you hear a pro-Israeli bias in any media outlet in this country, outside of talk radio. Just one example of anti-Israeli bias in the world community happened this week. The President of the UN General Assembly denounced the policies of a certain Middle Eastern nation. They are "so similar to the apartheid of an earlier era," he said, "that the world must unite against them, demanding an "end to this massive abuse of human rights" and isolating the offending nation as it once isolated South Africa: with a punishing "campaign of boycott, divestment, and sanctions."

Now, any guesses about who he was pointing the finger at?

Was it Saudi Arabia, where public facilities are segregated by sex, and where a pervasive system of gender apartheid denies women the right to drive, to dress as they choose, to freely marry or divorce, to vote, to appear in public without a male "guardian," or to give testimony on an equal basis with men?

Was it Jordan, where the law explicitly bars Jews from citizenship and where the sale of land to a Jew was for decades not only illegal, but punishable by death?

Was it Iran, where homosexuality is a capital crime — at least 200 Iranian gays were executed last year.

Was it Sudan, where tens of thousands of black Africans in the country's southern region, most of them Christians or animists, have been abducted and sold into slavery by Arab militias backed by the Islamist regime in Khartoum?

No, obviously it was Israel they were speaking of. Now, these are all unjust and immoral positions to hold and I think they should be called so on a site dedicated to justice, but I rarely if ever see most of these countries held up for scorn here the way I see Israel chided regularly over some land they held onto after they were attacked so I think Israel may need a little extra support here sometimes.