Daniel Lubetzky

We are honored that BusinessWeek chose PeaceWorks among 25 of "America’s Most Promising Social Entrepreneurs."

If you like what we do, we’d appreciate you voting here for us – PeaceWorks Holdings – as the top 5 will be featured in the magazine.

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We are so humbled and honored that, following his meeting with our young Israeli and Palestinian leaders in OneVoice, and following his further learning on our movement over the last few months, including the leadership of our colleagues in OneVoice Europe, Paul McCartney agreed to join the OneVoice Movement’s International Honorary Board.

Sample story follows….

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Here is a link to the Opening Plenary at the Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship where I participated:

http://www.socialedge.org/features/skoll-world-forum

Click on Opening Plenary video

Panel discussion starts around minute 36-ends around min 79. Entire plenary agenda below:

Musical Performance – Taiko Meantime, An enthralling show combining traditional Japanese rythms and techniques with eclectic, original compositions

Opening Remarks – Stephan Chambers, Chairman, Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship

Delegate Address – Jeff Skoll, Founder and Chairman, Skoll Foundation

Framing Power – Roger L. Martin, Dean, Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto

Panel Discussion: Power to the people:Citizen Engagement and Social Transformation

• Ray Suarez (Moderator), Senior Correspondent, The NewsHour, PBS
• Kailash Satyarthi, President, Global Campaign for Education, Chairman, Global March Against Child Labour
• The Honorable Mary Robinson, President, Realizing Rights: The Ethical Globalization Initiative
• Daniel Lubetzky, Founder and President, PeaceWorks Group

Personal Power: A Call to Responsibility – Kenneth S. Brecher, Executive Director, Sundance Institute

Roger Martin, Dean at the Rotman School of Management at University of Toronto, gave an interesting presentation at the Opening Plenary at the Skoll World Forum today:

Whether or not Barack Obama is your President or, as is the case for me, another country’s leader, most of you, I suspect, watched the President’s inauguration speech and did so with rapt attention. It was certainly a lovely, inspiring and motivating speech. I cried a few times, even though guys aren’t supposed to do that. I suspect each listener took away something special and unique to you from the speech. For me, one sentence grabbed my attention; that riveted me:

“As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals.”

I study and write about leadership, which of course makes it a privilege for me to be among all the great leaders in this room. And in my study of highly successful leaders across a wide variety of organizations, I found the most common theme – the most universal characteristic – to be a form of thinking exemplified by President Obama’s quote.

That common theme was when highly successful leaders are faced with an apparent choice between two opposing and unsatisfying options, they show the inclination to refuse to choose and the capacity to instead engineer a course of action that is superior to each of the apparent options.

…

...In my work, I found that great leaders harness the inherent power in the tension between opposing ideas, options or models to forge a new better model. That is the Power of Paradox.

Here is a tidbit that Tom Pickering, the ultimate American Diplomat and member of the PeaceWorks Foundation’s Honorary Board, shared with me last time I met him:

The Israeli-Palestinian peace process is like riding a bike: if you are not going forward, you are falling down.

His face is so calm
Full of love and tranquility
How blessed we are
to have warm shelter and peace for him.

How hard and how painful
for the millions upon millions
who lack peace, or water or heat,
who may not have bread or milk to give their children.

How hard and how painful
for the parents who’d lose a baby to a missile
or the babies who’d lose a parent to a bomb
and the nations who’d lose their innocence along the way.

That juxtaposition gives me anxiety:
the peaceful nap of our little baby
against the horrors and hatred brewing around our world,
whether a few blocks up, or 7,000 miles away.

For my baby’s peace cannot be guaranteed
his Spring cannot be counted upon
so long as babies anywhere else in our globe
are suffering, being targeted or killed.

It is for our baby here
that peace must be waged there.

Nazila Fathi reported in the New York Times that Iran recently executed a man it claimed was a "spy" and has arrested another one also for "spying." 

This second man, Hossein Derakhshan, is among the most famous Persian bloggers.  Hossein is jailed & threatened with the same fate of execution by the Iranian government.

His crime? Trying to humanize Iranians and Israelis towards each other.

A couple years ago, he apparently defied a ban on travel by Iranians to Israel in order to explode stereotypes about Iranians to Israelis, and to report from his blog about ordinary Israelis to Iranians.  As a Canadian-Iranian, presumably he figured he could get away with it – and visited twice, then dared to return to Iran.

According to Abraham Rabinovich who wrote for IHT:

The object of his visit, Derakhshan said, was to show his countrymen Israel’s human face and to detoxify relations between the two peoples after Ahmadinejad called for Israel’s elimination.

"I want to humanize Israel for Iranians and tell them it’s not what the Islamic propaganda machine is saying – that Israelis are thirsty for Muslim blood," he said. "And I want to show Israel that the average Iranian isn’t even thinking about doing harm to Israel. I want them to see Iranians who don’t look like Ahmadinejad."

The Iranian regime accused him of spying, as it conveniently does of any humanist who threatens the Iranian regime.

I felt a lot of anxiety when I first read about this story.  After all, if Hossein indeed took such risks for the sake of humanity (and particularly for the sake of Iranians and Israelis who are turned against each other by divisive politicians), shouldn’t we all (regardless of religion or political orientation) demand his release and stand behind him?

I read Hossein’s blog and was struck at how much it pandered to Ahmadinejad.  It has a weirdly pro-Ayatollah and pro-Ahmadinejad slant lately.

His last post, on October 6th, for example, states:

Ahmadinejad’s brilliant strategy of dismissing Israel and smiling to the U.S. has divided the the U.S. in all levels and that’s a big achievement comparing to Khatami’s weak anf failed U.S. strategy that led to Iran being part of the ‘axis of evil’. Now the same Bush administration has officially opened the diplomatic line. Please get over Ahmadinejad’s scruffy look, prayers, and plain language and see these achievements.

So I am a bit perplexed, with four possible explanations for this:

a) He knew he was visiting Teheran and wanted to ingratiate himself with the Iranian rulers before his arrival;

b) These posts were written under duress by him, or totally fabricated;

c) He is a complex individual who really admires Ahmadinejad and is certainly recognized as an Iranian nationalist, even if he also is a humanist;

d) Nothing is as it seems and there is something else going on.

Initially I thought it my duty (and that of anyone who believes in freedom and justice) to try to bring attention to Hossein’s plight.  To contact every Muslim, Arab as well as Western and non-aligned politician, dignitary, academic, and business leader who has any possible sway over the Iranian government and urge them to release him.  To reach out to Obama to ask him to ask the Iranian rulers for an act of good faith.  To prod the Canadian government to seek the release of their citizen.  To encourage human rights and peace groups to get behind a campaign which could not only achieve freedom for Hossain but also use his story to inspire others to disavow blind hatred of the other.

Does anyone have any thoughts or information?

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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.

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Some powerful precepts from a conversation I had with Chief Rabbi David Rosen, President of the ICJRC and the pre-eminent leader in relations between different faiths:

There is a lot that divides us [of different faiths], but more which unites us [as human beings with a shared destiny].

If we affirm an omnipresent deity that relates to us in all our diversity, then there must be diverse ways of relating to God.

The idea that you can encapsulate the divine within one religious tradition, or that any tradition should have a totality of the truth about the divine, should be absurd.

Not all religious figures agree.  Some insist they have a duty to try to convert you, like an early encounter that Chief Rabbi Rosen had when he was the Chief Rabbi in South Africa.  South African Dutch Reform Church Minister (Doeminee) reacted with disagreement to the above precepts, ardently insisting, "No, it is my role and duty to convert you in order to save you."  To me, this encapsulates the opportunity and challenge that organized religion has for society.

Another important religious precept from the conversation with Rabbi Rosen:

‘be wary of responding to an extreme action with an extreme reaction.’

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.

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