[GJM] Fwd: Fw: AN OPEN LETTER TO THE WORLD
Muhammad Mukhtar Alam
mukhtaralam2000 at yahoo.com
Thu Jul 20 00:57:00 MDT 2006
Dear Norm and all friend in GJM,
Please do something for stopping the generation of new reasons for hatred in Israel and Lebanon.
Dr.Muhammad Mukhtar Alam
Norman Kurland <thirdway at cesj.org> wrote:
Thanks, Bob, for the thoughtful response in a tipping point of world history where lines must be drawn between right and wrong. The creative tension that servants of justice have been seeking is mounting at an accelerating pace. As threats to survival of global civilization open the minds of ordinary people who preceive that their so-called leaders have no answers, certainly no moral answers, the ideas of the American Revolutionary Party will move forward like a tsunami. Here's another quote from Emile Zola that I like: "When truth is buried underground, it grows, it chokes, it gathers such an explosive force that on the day it bursts out, it blows up everything with it." The late Father Ferree would have added a more moderate tone by suggesting that revolutionary ideas are best implemented in an evolutionary way, to minimize violence and allow the social order to be transformed as quickly as people can clear the mental cobwebs out of their minds. There's still time
to follow Ferree's wise advice.
Let's hope that those who receive this exchange and have not yet enlisted in the cause will want to sign up as participants to automatically keep up with our progress by clicking on http://listserv.kent.edu/archives/kelso_binary_economics.html. Whatever time it takes to participate in our movement they can count as their "social justice tithing time." Justice is not advanced by those who sit on their hands.
Ptwcj,
Norm
Robert Crane wrote:
Harriet,
Your letter below makes an essential point in a very telling way. There is a history that precedes 1896, 1929, and 1948. The solution for the Jews to fulfill their divine mandate of justice, however, does not consist in competing at the level of state sovereignty, even though once one is caught in this trap, one must extricate oneself from it slowly. The solution is the spiritual power of Judaism as a religion and of the spiritual Jews who embrace it, because this same power can be embraced by everyone else in the world.
As a footnote to the writer's history that you bring to our attention, we should note that the intifadas of 1921, 1929, and the first great intifada of 1936-39 were against Western imperial oppression, not against Jews. Unfortunately, the mass riots targeted everything and everyone indiscrimately, just as did the riots in Watts and in Washington in 1968 and as riots stemming from intolerable frustration over insults to human dignity always do.
The strategic error of the Jews over the past century or two has been to abandon their religion and rely on competition at the secular level, just as the radical Muslims are doing all over the world (usually in the name of a perverted parody of religion), and as a goodly number of Patriotic Americans are also doing today. This can result eventually only in mass suicide by all concerned, including America.
Norm's reply is a frontal attack on the false premises of extremists in both the Israeli and Palestinian governments. Perhaps the most hopeful aspect of this is that the people who are motivated by religion should be the first to see the error of their ways. The solution to peace through justice in the Holy Land will come only from the "Orthodox" within the three Abrahamic religions, not from those who no longer care about or even understand their heritage.
Peace through wisdom, courage, and justice,
Bob
Harriet,
This is a wonderful letter. It justifies, with facts pre-dating the Zionist and the American neoconservative movements and the formation in 1948 of a Jewish State, the natural law rights of Israelis to defend themselves with all the military might at their command against any forces that would otherwise destroy them. It throws out a challenge to the civilized world to support the suppression of terrorism from non-state actors and to demand that all states suppress terrorists within their borders and immediately cut off any form of support to terrorism against Israeli civilians or in any nation-state.
However, contrary to the overtly nationalistic tone of the writer, Israel is not alone today. The unamimous vote yesterday in the U.S. Senate to support Israel's right of self-defense demonstrates that the American people strongly support Israel's right to exist as a sovereign state within the global nation-state system, a system that is structurally incapable of achieving a sustainable peace in today's troubled world. Without US support at the UN in 1947 Israel would never have existed, and without massive financial and technological aid from the US since the artificial "two-state solution" was imposed on the Holy Land, Israel would have been destroyed years ago.
Israel's continued existence would be better secured if Israelis, political Zionists and neoconservatives recognized the inherent divisiveness of Israel remaining a "Jewish state", thus implicitly justifying such Jew-hating and Western-hating theocracies within such "Islamic states" as Iran and Saudi Arabia as well as a rallying call for the "global Caliphate" envisioned by such non-state Jew-hating terrorist groups as al-Queda and the Taliban. Any nation-state whose policies are dictated by any religious or ethnic majority threatens the freedom of thought and spiritual beliefs, equality of opportunity and other inalienable human rights of minorities and individual citizens and is therefore fundamentally unjust, exclusionary and therefore a continuing root cause of internal disorder, rebellion and external condemnation. This necessarily includes by its nature the "Jewish State of Israel."
Not immediately but in the long-run, Israelis would be vastly more secure, in my opinion, moving toward a secular constitutional democracy that protects the God-given sovereignty of every human person, even over the will of the majority or the force of the state. I can think of two long-term options (there may be more) for the survival and well-being of Jews in a democratically governed Holy Land: (1) the Israelis could apply to become the 51st state of the United States, where any "established religion" is wisely forbidden but every person is free and protected to follow any religion or spiritual belief system that does not infringe on other people's rights; or (2) Israelis could, assuming a suppression of all terrorist activities by Hamas and Hetzbollah, support the phased evolution of a religiously pluralistic Abraham Federation approach, starting in the pre-1968 West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem, as described in
http://www.cesj.org/homestead/strategies/regional-global/abrahamfederation-nk.html.
What's missing in today's struggle is an awareness of options more powerful than, but would reinforce, the use of military force or conventional nation-state diplomacy. The cry for Justice from alienated have-nots of the world and the Abraham Federation solution are still below the radar screens of Israeli leaders, their American supporters or their nation-state allies. But as Emile Zola said, "I do not despair in the least of ultimate triumph. I repeat with more intense conviction: the truth is on the march and nothing will stop it."
In Peace, only through Justice,
Norm
Harriet M. Epstein wrote:
v\:* { BEHAVIOR: url(#default#VML) } o\:* { BEHAVIOR: url(#default#VML) } w\:* { BEHAVIOR: url(#default#VML) } .shape { BEHAVIOR: url(#default#VML) } st1\:*{behavior:url(#default#ieooui) } Another letter from Israel.
Dear World, I understand that you are upset with us, here in Israel.
Indeed, it appears that you are quite upset, even angry. (Outraged?)
Indeed, every few years you seem to become upset by us. Today, it is the "brutal repression of the Palestinians"; yesterday it was Lebanon; before that it was the bombing of the nuclear reactor in Baghdad and the Yom Kippur War and the Sinai campaign. It appears that Jews who triumph and who, therefore, live, upset you most extraordinarily.
Of course, dear world, long before there was an Israel, we - the Jewish people - upset you.
We upset the German people who elected Hitler and upset the Austrian people who cheered his entry into Vienna and we upset a whole slew of Slavic nations - Poles, Slovaks, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, Russians, Hungarians and Romanians. And we go back a long, long way in the history of world upset.
We upset the Cossacks of Chmielnicki who massacred tens of thousands of us in 1648-49; we upset the Crusaders who, on their way to liberate the Holy Land, were so upset at Jews that they slaughtered untold numbers of us.
For centuries, we upset the Roman Catholic Church that did its best to define our relationship through inquisitions, and we upset the arch-enemy of the church, Martin Luther, who, in his call to burn the synagogues and the Jews within them, showed an admirable Christian ecumenical spirit.
And it is because we became so upset over upsetting you, dear world, that we decided to leave you - in a manner of speaking - and establish a Jewish state. The reasoning was that living in close contact with you, as resident-strangers in the various countries that comprise you, we upset you, irritate you and disturb you. What better notion, then, than to leave you (and thus love you)- and have you love us and so, we decided to come home - home to the same land we were driven out 1,900 years earlier by a Roman world that, apparently, we also upset.
Alas, dear world, it appears that you are hard to please.
Having left you and your pogroms and inquisitions and crusades and holocausts, having taken our leave of the general world to live alone in our own little state, we continue to upset you. You are upset that we repress the poor Palestinians. You are deeply angered over the fact that we do not give up the lands of 1967, which are clearly the obstacle to peace in the Middle East.
Moscow is upset and Washington is upset. The "radical" Arabs are upset and the gentle Egyptian moderates are upset.
Well, dear world, consider the reaction of a normal Jew from Israel.
In 1920 and 1921 and 1929, there were no territories of 1967 to impede peace between Jews and Arabs. Indeed, there was no Jewish State to upset anybody. Nevertheless, the same oppressed and repressed Palestinians slaughtered tens of Jews in Jerusalem, Jaffa, Safed and Hebron.Indeed, 67 Jews were slaughtered one day in Hebron in 1929.
Dear world, why did the Arabs - the Palestinians - massacre 67 Jews in one day in 1929? Could it have been their anger over Israeli aggression in 1967? And why were 510 Jewish men, women and children slaughtered in Arab riots between 1936-39? Was it because Arabs were upset over 1967?
And when you, dear world, proposed a UN Partition Plan in 1947 that would have created a "Palestinian State" alongside a tiny Israel and the Arabs cried "no" and went to war and killed 6,000 Jews - was that "upset" caused by the aggression of 1967? And, by the way, dear world, why did we not hear your cry of "upset" then?
The poor Palestinians who today kill Jews with explosives and firebombs and stones are part of the same people who ­ when they had all the territories they now demand be given to them for their state -attempted to drive the Jewish state into the sea. The same twisted faces, the same hate, the same cry of "itbach-al-yahud" (Massacre the Jew!) that we hear and see today, were seen and heard then. The same people, the same dream - destroy Israel. What they failed to do yesterday, they dream of today, but we should not "repress" them.
Dear world, you stood by during the holocaust and you stood by in 1948 as seven states launched a war that the Arab League proudly compared to the Mongol massacres.
You stood by in 1967 as Nasser, wildly cheered by wild mobs in every Arab capital in the world, vowed to drive the Jews into the sea. And you would stand by tomorrow if Israel were facing extinction.
And since we know that the Arabs-Palestinians dream daily of that extinction, we will do everything possible to remain alive in our own land. If that bothers you, dear world, well ­ think of how many times in the past you bothered us.
In any event, dear world, if you are bothered by us, here is one Jew in Israel who could not care less.
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