Daniel Lubetzky

Read the entire article pasted below or in this link about Hezbollah’s Boy Scouts – to appreciate the challenge before society: the institutionalized hatred and seriousness of the threat posed by Hezbollah, its backers, and other movements with such nihilistic visions.  It is chilling.  We have no alternative but to counteract this in a smart and tenacious way.

To defeat absolutism and terrorism, force is only a partial answer.  Far more important than force is a better ideology that can trump and expose dark movements as unworthy of the young people they prey upon.   It is not easy, but it can be done.

Like we are doing through OneVoice for millions of Israelis and Palestinians to reframe the conflict and understand the enemy is not each other but violent extremism and militant absolutism that denies the rights of both peoples to a State and Freedom and Security, we need to also build a countervailing movement and philosophy that moves the Mideast (and other regions) away from the us-vs-them hatreds and into the post-Obama world of globally shared human values.

If we are to tackle the challenges that the 21^st century will present to humanity – from climate change to nuclear proliferation, from resource scarcity to nihilism and militant absolutism – we need to ensure that new generations worldwide share this recognition that they have to work together – realizing their shared humanity. 

More on this soon – but in the meantime read this article…

Generation Faithful

Hezbollah Seeks to Marshal the Piety of the Young

New York Times, November 21, 2008, By ROBERT F. WORTH

RIYAQ, Lebanon — On a Bekaa Valley playing field gilded by late-afternoon sun, hundreds of young men wearing Boy Scout-style uniforms and kerchiefs stand rigidly at attention as a military band plays, its marchers bearing aloft the distinctive yellow banner of Hezbollah, the militant Shiite movement.

They are adolescents — 17 or 18 years old — but they have the stern faces of adult men, lightly bearded, some of them with dark spots in the center of their foreheads from bowing down in prayer. Each of them wears a tiny picture of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the Shiite cleric who led the Iranian revolution, on his chest.

“You are our leader!” the boys chant in unison, as a Hezbollah official walks to a podium and addresses them with a Koranic invocation. “We are your men!”

This is the vanguard of Hezbollah’s youth movement, the Mahdi Scouts. Some of the graduates gathered at this ceremony will go on to join Hezbollah’s guerrilla army, fighting Israel in the hills of southern Lebanon. Others will work in the party’s bureaucracy. The rest will probably join the fast-growing and passionately loyal base of support that has made Hezbollah the most powerful political, military and social force in Lebanon.

[Read more →]

Several friends called or emailed to let me know Danny DeVito was hilarious at the Israel Film Festival, where he also encouraged the audience to get involved with OneVoice.  This article will give you an idea…

“Look around. A lot of you are bald,” said the actor, who was introduced by Michael Douglas — DeVito’s oldest show business friend and former roommate in a one-bedroom Manhattan apartment — with a crack about absent hair. DeVito went on to make an earnest plea for support of the grass-roots organization in which he and his wife, actress Rhea Perlman, are involved: the OneVoice Movement, which pushes for peace in the Middle East.

[Read more →]

Ehud Olmert is on his way out.  He was attacked by former supporters who turned on him when his political positions evolved.  Now he has nothing to lose.  And it shows – finally he is standing up to extremists Jewish settlers, freezing funds and deploying legal tools like administrative detentions, arrests, and trials against Illegal settlers.

Israel Will Halt Funds to Illegal Settlements, NY Times, Nov 3, Isabel Kershner

JERUSALEM — Ehud Olmert, the departing prime minister of Israel, announced a series of measures on Sunday in response to a rise in violence by extremist Jewish settlers in the West Bank, including a halt to all direct or indirect government financing of illegal outposts.

[Read more →]

At the onset of the Iraqi war of 2003, Saddam Hussein’s media clamored about the Baathist Army’s impending victory. Its conviction was so strong, you had to wonder if they possessed information the West was not privy to. Then, within hours of the invasion, the house of cards imploded. It was clear that Iraq’s State-run media had broadcast pure propaganda, not news.

Five years later, consider FOX News.

I was in Israel for a week, where the only American news station available on basic cable was FOX (Israel replaced CNN back in 2006 in retaliation from what it perceived as biased coverage of the Hezbollah war) – so this is what I was stuck with to keep up with TV election news.

Watching FOX for a whole week was frustrating to the core, but fascinating as a social experiment.

It truly felt like the Twilight Zone.

On the web, diverse polls and news sources seemed to convey momentum by the Obama campaign and its message. But if all you saw was FOX News, you’d bet McCain – and Palin – would be clear victors. You’d assume nobody in their right mind would ever vote for Obama – the communist, socialist, liar, and terrorist.

As an independent skeptical of all news stations and wanting to understand diverse perspectives, I tend to navigate between CNN, ABC, PBS, MSNBC, NBC, CBS, CNBC, and yes, FOX. On the web, I surf across an even broader spectrum of sources particularly including those I disagree with, to get an insight into the vantage point of viewers of Al Jazeerah, or Egyptian and Lebanese newspapers, then contrast those to Israeli news. I recognize that every station or every show has some slight or pronounced bias.

But FOX has migrated to a different league (closer to government-run propaganda mouthpieces detached from any sense of objectivity). Everyone that is not an ultra-conservative recognizes the irony of FOX’s “Fair and Balanced” moniker, which only accentuates its actual bias.

FOX had until recently been oriented to the right, but it remained a valuable source of information nevertheless. Not anymore.

Just like John McCain threw his lot with the base of the Republican Party by selecting Sarah Palin as his Vice-President, so too FOX seems to have decided it was to appeal, err, pander, to the far right, and give up any effort to appeal to independent viewers.

The transformation has been so deep that an impartial viewer cannot escape the opinion that FOX has given up on broadcasting news and committed to telling its viewers what they want to hear, substituting “information” for “affirmation”, and that the “affirmation” it is going for is of the basest kind, fomenting hatred, stereotypes, suspicions and divisions.

Sean Hannity’s coverage is so appalling, one cannot describe him as anything other than a whacko. A typical show expounded 10 reasons why Obama is unfit to be elected and included the typical innuendos about a “foreign” religion, about associating with terrorists, gangsters, and haters of America, about being a Marxist communist, and any other accusation that ordinary analysts would have rejected as baseless. How bad is he? He made me long for the time when Bill O’Reilly would come on and inject a sense of moderation to the discourse.

Then there is Megyn Kelly, whose cynical bullying of Obama spokesperson Bill Burton was recycled by FOX across all its shows with pride. How mean was she? So mean that an otherwise stunningly attractive anchorwoman appeared downright unattractive and repelling.

So why should this matter, to FOX and its viewers, or to others?

This matters deeply because a pillar of democratic discourse is a well informed electorate and a free and critical media. Critical to civilized discourse is the ability to be self-critical and to demand critical thinking. A failure to question politicians or policies critically tends to result in epic tragedies from the rise of Hitler to the more recent genocide in Rwanda.

America already suffers from a uniformed and increasingly polarized citizenry. FOX seems to eagerly accentuate and bank on this pattern.

This should also matter to conservatives, who are traditionally rigorous and disciplined thinkers. Should they permit FOX to caricature political events and developments, this will cause enormous harm to the conservative movement.

America – and the world – perform best when the marketplace of ideas is vibrant, when opposing ideologies can be debated on their merits, and a common ground can be found.

Part of the harm we are witnessing from the financial crisis right now – and the backlash against capitalism – emanates from unfettered consumerism and knee-jerk commercialization and commodification that have not been counter-balanced by other considerations or ideologies. Communism is of course not an answer. But enlightened capitalism (otherwise known also as social capitalism, socially responsible business behavior, conscientious capitalism, and similar variations) would be a far more balanced and nuanced ideology to pursue.

If FOX as the strategic refuge of conservatives continues to transform itself into an extreme partisan, uncritical pandering machine, it will not just cause harm to the right, but also to American discourse as a whole. It will also eventually become a joke and face desertion from educated conservatives who want to understand what is truly going on.

A friend recently spoke with Rupert Murdoch, who let him understand he is not as conservative as his media outlets – he just saw a business opportunity by appealing to an audience that had been neglected by “liberal” media. That may be fine. But media should have a role and responsibility to report news – for its own sake also.

As elections approach on November 4^th, either we will find out that FOX knew something that other media sources did not understand, or its logic and its house of cards, too, will fall.

My friend Eytan Heller conceived this fantastic inspirational video and campaign (sponsored by PeaceWorks Foundation) allegorically calling for the 2018 World Cup to be co-hosted by Israel and Palestine – to help Palestinians and Israelis visualize what a peace agreement could bring about.  It is part of the Imagine 2018 campaign of the OneVoice Movement.

Now life is moving in the direction of civic activism and art.

Tomorrow for the first time in history, an international match (between Jordan and Palestine) will be held in the West Bank town of Ram, at a Palestinian stadium built to FIFA’s standards, and attended by FIFA’s President Sepp Blatter.

[Read more →]

Is it just me, or are these logos clearly like Hebrew letters?

They are supposed to be icons for Exchange, Powerpoint, Word, and Excel.   But they have very little connection to that.

They are NOT supposed to be connected to hebrew letters – pei, kuf, shin, and alef. But they are identical to that…

And on the very negative side, as reported here, small mistakes led to what is already a tragedy: 3 days of violent attacks between Arabs and Jews in the ancient site of Akko (Acre), within Israel.  If it is not managed through political and communal leadership into an aberration in an area normally known for peaceful relations, it could be an omen for terrible things to come.

[Read more →]

The Associated Press reported that Zakariya Zubeidi, who used to be seen as a major terrorist organizer just two years ago, has been granted full amnesty by the Israeli internal security service, Shin Bet.

This is a major milestone to a significantly underreported transformation of Jenin from a hotbed of extremism into a pillar of progress, thanks to progress by Prime Minister Fayyad and President Abbas, with support from the US Military envoy.  It could be a critical turning point not just in the construction of a vibrant and secure Palestinian State, but of course also in the process of achieving a comprehensive Israeli-Arab agreement – if only more people were informed about these positive developments.

[Read more →]

Further proof about how people themselves are not the problem, but the solution…

Iranian boy gets cancer treatment in Israel

Friday, October 10, 2008

TEL HASHOMER, Israel: (Reuters) A 13-year-old cancer victim from Iran came to Israel for treatment on Friday, the hospital which received him said, attracting media interest in a country used to decades of hostility with Tehran.

The boy, who has an advanced brain tumour, had travelled from Turkey with his parents after undergoing surgery as well as chemotherapy and radiotherapy in Iran that failed to cure him, Chaim Sheba Medical Centre director Zeev Rotstein said.

[Read more →]

Earlier today at a rally when John McCain asked, "Who is Barack Obama?", a supporter shouted back, "Terrorist."

And at a rally led by Sarah Palin, when she mischaracterized a New York Times story as pointing to an alliance between Obama and Bill Ayers, someone screamed "Kill him."

Neither McCain nor Palin have actually advocated such actions or said that Obama himself is a "terrorist," but they and their campaign have certainly engaged in smear campaigns creating enough innuendos to cause an atmosphere where such rants would not be totally unexpected.

This eerily reminds me of the atmosphere before Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated in Israel.  Far-right Israelis had been engaging in a campaign of vilification against Rabin for months.  Right-wing politicians had done nothing to discourage extreme incitement or death threats against Rabin.  Posters filled the walls across Israel with horrifying statements and dehumanizing captions against Rabin.  Extremist Rabbis said Rabin was betraying Jews and was cursed to death.

Then came Yigal Amir, the assassin who shot Yitzhak Rabin at point blank.  When asked, he said he was inspired to kill Rabin to avenge the Jewish people and prevent him undermining Israel.

Suddenly after Rabin’s chilling assassination, everyone was against dehumanization and incitement.  Everyone had condemned such vitriol all along.  Everyone loved Rabin, the martyr and hero.  It was unclear how all those posters got posted on the walls, or who had made all those calls into radio stations with threats against Rabin.

Before Rabin’s fate presages Obama’s, McCain and Palin – and in particularly Sarah Palin, whose hateful accusations earlier today were only little short of the more fanatical ones out there – have the responsibility to draw the line and demand from their followers a civil discourse based on the issues, recognizing the patriotism of their counterpart, instead of raising suspicions about Obama’s commitment to America, as Palin explicitly did throughout her rally earlier today.

If something happens to Obama, not only the McCain campaign but also all the "swift" teams and fear-mongering groups that are crossing the line will share in the responsibility for creating the environment that caused some fanatical follower to avenge the American people.