Navigation:
Reporting on the Middle East, Science, and Education for October 5, 2008 - ו' תשרי תשס"ט
Pages
Archives
Toward a better future through tolerance and mutualism
Sponsored By:
Recent Comments:
Richard on Hamas Occupies Palestinian Lands.
Comments RSS
What can save Israel and Iran from destroying each other? Only the seeds of peace lying dormant in both countries. These seeds lie in the Iranian and Israeli people. They need to be cultivated with civil society exchanges – between students and intellectuals, scientists, doctors, engineers, university professors, and even clerics – where both sides share their experiences in fighting common challenges.
WASHINGTON – On its 60th anniversary, Israel is still concerned about survival. Even with nuclear weapons and the strongest military in the Middle East, the Jewish state remains anxious. Iranian leaders are similarly concerned about the future of their administrations, even as the country approaches the 30th anniversary of its Islamic Revolution.Israel fears any potential threat, whether it comes from Hamas, Hezbollah, or political Islamic groups. Israel also has begun to fear its shifting demographics, where birth rates are significantly higher among Palestinians than Jews. But above all, Israel perceives a threat from Iran
In a similar vein, Iran is threatened by an outside force that would roll back its revolution. The religious conservatives in Iran are resistant to perceived reformists, which at various times have been supported by the United States, and stands alone as one of the only Shia majority countries in the region.
Yet the conservatives of Iran, heirs to Ayatollah Khomeini’s Islamic Revolution, also face the possibility of seeing their regime replaced by the followers of former Iranian president Mohammad Khatami.
Iran and Israel share a sense of isolation: Israel is comprised of an ethnic and religious minority (Jewish) in a largely Arab and Muslim Middle East. Likewise, Iran’s government is an ethno-religious minority (Shi’a Persians) surrounded by Sunni countries. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by CNP Webmaster as Education Report, Islam, Judaism, Middle East, Middle East Report, Monotheistic Religions, Opinion, Recent Posts on October 5, 2008 - ו' תשרי תשס"ט at 10:39 am
Comments Off
By Karin Kloosterman, Israel 21C, October 02, 2008
The cost of housing in Israel’s capital city Jerusalem is soaring, the disparity between rich and poor is growing wider, while the trust between Arabs and Jews remains thin.
The issue of poverty is especially dire for Jerusalem’s poorer Orthodox Jews and religious Muslims who are gearing up for major holidays at this time of the year. The Jews are already making advance preparations for the Jewish New Year in late September, while the month-long half day of fasting - and then feasting - for the Muslim holiday of Ramadan is underway.
Like in America during Thanksgiving and Christmas time, it’s easy to see in Israel how the poor suffer during holiday time. There are reports of food insecurity in the local newspapers and food banks beg for donations. Charitable acts take on a deeper meaning for those that have the means to give - and they do give. But what about the rest of the year? Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by CNP Webmaster as Business and Commerce, Islam, Judaism, Middle East Report, Monotheistic Religions, Recent Posts on October 2, 2008 - ג' תשרי תשס"ט at 9:50 am
Comments Off
By Ray Hanania , YNet News, September 25, 2008
In the backdrop of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that dominates everyone’s attention and the news, another fight for the protection of children, families and Christian education is taking place in the Middle East.
It is being waged by an Arab-Israeli woman named Nadia Hilou who has bucked the systems in Israel and in the Palestinian community to do what some thought impossible.
A long time advocate of children and family rights, Hilou is a citizen of Israel and ran for the Israeli Knesset so she could advocate for the rights of all people in Israel, Arab and Jewish.
Instead of running on one of the Arab Israeli party lists only to see her message drown in the “us against them” fight for Palestinian rights, Hilou ran on a mainstream list with the Israeli Labor Party. This way she would make sure her message reached everyone and change would follow.
The only Arab Christian Woman in the Knesset - one of 17 women and one of only two Christians - Hilou will not stop fighting for family services and the rights of children even when everyone else has. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by CNP Webmaster as Christianity, Islam, Middle East Report, Monotheistic Religions, News Articles, Recent Posts on September 25, 2008 - כ"ה אלול תשס"ח at 12:12 pm
Comments Off
by Bret Stephens, Commentary Magazine, September 2008
Effective policy depends above all on a correct understanding of the people, places, and things toward which it is being applied. To speak of an Islamic civilization is to speak in error. Rather, there is a Muslim world. It is fractured, and fractious.
“Islam has bloody borders.” So wrote Samuel Huntington in “The Clash of Civilizations?,” his 1993 Foreign Affairs article later expanded (minus the question mark) into a best-selling book. Huntington argued that, eclipsing past eras of national and ideological conflict, “the battle lines of the future” would be drawn along the “fault lines between civilizations.” Here, according to Huntington, was where current and coming generations would define the all-important “us” versus “them.”
At the time of its writing, “The Clash of Civilizations?” had, beyond the virtues of pithiness and historical sweep, something to recommend it on purely empirical grounds. It seemed especially plausible as applied to the “crescent-shaped Islamic bloc” from the Maghreb to the East Indies.
In the Balkans, for example, Orthodox Serbs were at the throats of Bosnian and later Kosovar Muslims. In Africa, Muslims were either skirmishing or at war with Christians in Nigeria, Sudan, and Ethiopia. In the Caucasus, there was all-out war between Orthodox Russia and Muslim Chechnya, all-out war between Christian Armenia and Muslim Azerbaijan, and violent skirmishes between Orthodox Ossetia and Muslim Ingushetia.
In the Middle East, some 500,000 U.S. troops had intervened to expel Iraq from Kuwait. Israel had just endured several years of the first Palestinian intifada, soon to be followed by a fraudulent peace process leading, in turn, to a second and far bloodier intifada. Further to the east, Pakistan and India were at perpetual daggers drawn over Kashmir. There were tensions—sometimes violent—between the Hindu majority and the large Muslim minority in India, just as there were between the Christian minority and the Muslim majority in Indonesia.
For Huntington, all this was of a piece with a pattern dating at least as far back as the battle of Poitiers in 732, when Charles Martel turned back the advancing Umayyads and saved Europe for Christianity. Nor was the pattern likely to end any time soon. “The centuries-old military interaction between the West and Islam is unlikely to decline,” he wrote. To the contrary: “It could become more virulent.”
Posted by CNP Webmaster as Islam, Middle East Report, Opinion, Recent Posts on September 20, 2008 - כ' אלול תשס"ח at 8:57 pm
Comments Off
While the latest video-game craze, “Spore,” touts the theory of evolution, taking gamers from a single-celled organism to complex civilizations, some say it also promotes God and intelligent design.
By Katherine T. Phan, Christian Post Reporter, Sep. 14, 2008
While the latest video-game craze, “Spore,” touts the theory of evolution, taking gamers from a single-celled organism to complex civilizations, some say it also promotes God and intelligent design.
The traditionally contrasted themes are both represented in the game, according to game innovator Will Wright, the creator of the wildly popular "Sims" game.
"In Spore, basically, the theme of it is the complete view of life – from its early origins through evolution. But at every level, the player is creating something," Wright told ABC News.
In an interview with USA Today, meanwhile, Wright said the world created by players is "definitely not a creationist universe," but admitted the game had "aspects of intelligent design" because it puts the gamer in the "role of an intelligent designer."
Posted by CNP Webmaster as Christianity, Evolutionary Biology, Monotheistic Religions on September 14, 2008 - י"ד אלול תשס"ח at 10:51 pm
Comments Off
Reprinted from Herald Sun, September 2, 2008
MUSLIMS around the world this week begin the fasting and feasting month of Ramadan amid hopes of violence easing in some of the Islamic world’s conflict hotspots.
The start of the ninth and holiest month in the Muslim calendar is determined by the sighting of the new moon, which means Muslims in various countries begin Ramadan at dawn either on Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday.
Followers are required to abstain from food, drink and sex from dawn to dusk - and ideally violence - during the lunar month while gorging on sunset "iftar" meals rendered difficult for many by the global food crisis.
Pakistan marked Ramadan by halting a major military campaign against Taliban rebels on its border with Afghanistan, launched after intense pressure from Western nations.
Taliban militants freed six Pakistani soldiers of the 30 they are holding after they drew lots, with the insurgents pledging not to attack others in a "goodwill gesture".
But in Somalia Islamist militia commander Yusuf Mohamed Siad said that his fighters will intensify attacks against government and Ethiopian forces.
Posted by CNP Webmaster as Islam, Middle East Report, Monotheistic Religions, News Articles, Recent Posts on September 1, 2008 - א' אלול תשס"ח at 9:36 pm
Comments Off
Largest mosaic wall to be built at Gilboa Coexistence Festival; head of regional council wants Guinness Company to declare unique feat a world record
By Yuval Amir, YNet News, Agust 21, 2008
A mixed group of young Jewish and Arab children will try to enter the Guinness Book of World Records, together.
On August 26 the first-ever Gilboa Coexistence Festival will open. As part of the festival, a seven-foot high by 32-feet long, huge mosaic wall will be constructed. Jewish, Arab artists are to perform in the three-day August festival in north. Program includes: Performances, trips, family activities, food market and open houses. Full story
Lines from John Lennon’s song, “Imagine” in Hebrew, Arabic and English will be included in the work of art. The creators, who have been working on the project for the past two months are Jewish children from the Gan-Ner camp and Arab youngsters from the Maayan-Harod camp with the assistance of a professional studio.
The piece will be displayed by the festival’s participants at Maayan Harod, the Gilboa’s Taibe village and at the opening ceremony at Kibbutz Ein Harod Meuhad in northern Israel’s Jezreel Valley.
Posted by CNP Webmaster as Middle East Report, Monotheistic Religions, News Articles, Recent Posts on August 21, 2008 - כ' אב תשס"ח at 6:58 am
Comments Off
By Jihad el-Khazen, Al-Hayat, August 20, 2008
I need to tell such readers that at the root of the current Arab crisis lies the rejection of other people’s opinion, the rejection of other communities, and the attempts to deal with people of different opinions as outlaws or violators of divine law.
If Arab problems do not suffice to cause a nervous breakdown, not just depression, some readers, not all, push me, after decades of working as journalist, to look for another job, such as selling falafel.
Last week, I received letters on all the issues I have raised. But most had to do with intra-Palestinian fighting and with my suggestion to transform Arab republics into kingdoms so that both rulers and ruled can rest.
Regarding the kingdoms, some letters were painfully honest. A regular reader says these are not kingdoms or republics, but farms. Another suggests, the colonel Qaddafi way, to call the new type of regimes "repdoms" or "kingpublics." A third refers to a third type of regimes of unknown identity, similarly to the third sex of newborn babies (neither male nor female).
Posted by CNP Webmaster as Islam, Middle East Report, Monotheistic Religions, Opinion, Recent Posts on August 20, 2008 - י"ט אב תשס"ח at 7:32 am
Comments Off
By R. Scott Hanson, America.gov., August 19, 2008
There are more than 200 places of worship in the Flushing neighborhood of the borough of Queens in New York City, a community about 10 miles from Manhattan. R. Scott Hanson has noted that within Flushing there are “half a dozen Hindu temples, two Sikh gurdwaras, several mosques, Japanese, Chinese and Korean Buddhist temples, Taoist temples, over 100 Korean churches, Latin American evangelical churches, Falun Gong practitioners, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons … as well as some of the oldest churches and synagogues in the city.” The community is immensely proud of its heritage of religious freedom, and in 2007-2008 the citizens celebrated the 350th anniversary of the Flushing Remonstrance, one of the earliest documents in defense of freedom of worship in the United States. Join Scott Hanson for an online discussion on how the American value of religious freedom is exemplified in Flushing and the entire county of Queens, which the U.S. Census Bureau identifies as the most ethnically diverse county in the United States.
Posted by CNP Webmaster as Monotheistic Religions, Recent Posts on August 19, 2008 - י"ח אב תשס"ח at 6:10 am
Comments Off
By Rafael D. Frankel, The Christian Science Monitor, August 12, 2008
MAWASSI, Gaza - Three years have passed since Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip, and in that time the economy of this coastal territory of 1.4 million people has gone from bad to worse.
Gas and food shortages are now being compounded by cash shortages as tens of thousands of people were unable to withdraw money from banks on Monday.
Still, despite their economic hardships, most Gazans insist that they prefer life here without the Israelis.
But in Mawassi – a mixed ethnic Palestinian and Bedouin town that was completely isolated from the rest of Gaza inside a Jewish settlement enclave – it’s a different story.
Posted by CNP Webmaster as Middle East Report, Monotheistic Religions, News Articles, Recent Posts on August 12, 2008 - י"א אב תשס"ח at 9:31 am
Comments Off
