Daniel Lubetzky

Here is a fascinating story about an Iraqi parliamentarian that broke all taboos to travel to an anti-terrorism conference – in Israel – and warned about Iran’s nuclear threats. What is particularly remarkable is that he had already challenged the taboo in the past, paid for it with the lives of his two sons, and yet continued to preach a message of peace and managed to get enough Iraqis to elect him to Parliament. 

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When the movie Life is Beautiful came out back in 1997, I felt a gnawing guilt at enjoying the movie so much, when the protagonist, as a concentration camp prisoner, found a way to laugh and make others laugh, amidst dehumanizing circumstances.  Could a sense of humor have a place in such a dark episode in humanity?

After overcoming the tears from the final scene, I called my Dad and asked him whether people actually laughed in a concentration camp. I was surprised to learn that indeed, the jokes his Dad told may have been the only thing that kept him and other inmates at their bunker in Dachau going – finding some crumbs of humanity to feed their frail hearts, to keep them going.  In fact, in a weird way, my Dad felt Life Is Beautiful was among the movies that best captured his experience as a kid protected by his father (my grandfather), who refused to give up his ability to smile even in – or particularly amidst – such adverse moments.

This weekend we saw Counterfeiters, and I wish I had my Dad around to ask him what he thought of the movie.

I wish I could ask him how he related to the poignant dilemmas presented in the movie: to sabotage the Nazis and risk your life AND the life of your inmates or loved ones, or to pursue your survival while adding fuel to an evil enterprise?  The movie does an excellent job at providing a nuanced story that avoids black and white heroism and forces us to grapple with questions about the human spirit, about the struggle of accepting the privileges of a rotten apple when others don’t have even that to eat.

If you rent this fast-paced, excellently acted and directed movie, make sure you listen to the interview with the writer, Adolf Burger, whose book "The Devil’s Workshop" this movie is based on.

Quiet for decades about his ordeal, Burger finally forced himself to look back and tell his story when the "Holocaust Denial" movement rose among neo-Nazi youth.  He even describes some of the techniques he used for forging British notes, which the British government never caught.

Almost a year ago, I was so upset at unfair attacks being lobbied at my Palestinian partners at OneVoice. As they were gaining more and more prominence for their work to achieve a two state solution, those who opposed them within Palestine tried to discredit them based on a smear campaign revolving around questioning their patriotism.  I was filled with hatred.

I blogged back then how I realized this and fought it and literally forced myself to disavow that hatred and even work around my emotions to literally stop hating and actually start caring for those who I was most hateful towards.  OneVoice, the Movement, rose to do the same.

If I hadn’t gone through such a tough period, I would never have written these lines, and reading them would have made me gag for their cheesiness.  I don’t consider myself a "leftist" or a "pacifist", just an ordinary human being who recognizes that the betterment of humanity and of one’s ethnic, religious or national compatriots comes from understanding the shared humanity they have with their neighbors and rivals – getting both sides to recognize the essential human needs and rights of the other, and working together to achieve them.

But something happens when you get so close to the abyss, when your anger at a sense of injustice leads you to feel unrelenting hatred that you had not felt before, that you literally discover a new negative dimension you didn’t know you had – and do not like having.  And this scary discovery also affords you the possibility to fight that hatred back, to ensure you don’t become that which you are trying to fight, to grow from the challenge. 

When I meditated back then, I couldn’t put it into words – to be earnest, it certainly was not "love" – but I did achieve a sense of empathy with even these former "enemies" that had attacked my partners.

Earlier today I was struck when Frederic Brenner shared that "compassion is the only antidote to cynicism and cowardice."  Looking back, THIS was the feeling that gave me the strength to find myself again, to extricate myself from within so much hatred I had created, and to rescue the mission.  COMPASSION. 

Indeed, compassion is an antidote to cynicism – and to fear, and to hatred.  It is the antonym of hatred, more than love is.  You don’t need to "love" your "enemy." But if you have compassion towards all others, even those who offend you most – no, particularly towards those who offend you most – then you will be able to find the way.

From a lunch meeting with my friend Frederic Brenner, the photographer, philosopher and social anthropologist, he shared this powerful quote:

Nous sommes tous de lopins et d une texture si informe et diverse, que chaque pièce, chaque moment fait son jeu. Et se trouve autant de différence de nous a nous mêmes que de nous a autruy.

Michel de Montaigne. Essais

Rough translation: we each have within ourselves so much diversity and texture, so many pieces with their own role to play, that the differences we house within ourselves are greater than those between us and other people.

Frederic, who nobody will accuse of being shy, quiet or boring, just completed a 10-day meditation during which he could not speak or write – no interaction or expression with others, for 10 full days, each day with 11 hours of meditation.  Imagine.

Another insight I enjoyed him sharing was about how the three great monotheistic religions have defined much of our world and ourselves into Dualities – Mind vs. Spirit, You vs. The Other – separating in strict binary constructs things that are often far harder to separate in real life.  In the world we live in, he feels we need to better recognize the ambivalence, paradox, and complexity within each of us, within our narratives, and our traditions.

This is not just arm-chair philosophy. It has very practical applications in the work of co-existence, from OneVoice to fostering Universal Values, and simple Kindness to each other.  If we are trained to recognize ourselves in the other, if we are trained to recognize the other within us, we are far more likely to disavow absolutist visions and work harder towards achieving shared human values.

Every person who cares about Israel or Palestine should read this letter.

Israel and Palestine Can Still Achieve Peace

By MAHMOUD ABBAS, Wall Street Journal

This month marks 15 painful years since the Arafat-Rabin handshake on the White House lawn. Palestinian children who started school when the Oslo

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News gathering and the media world did not change much for decades – till the internet started transforming them. 

One of the disadvantages of the old media model is that to get greater revenues through greater circulation, media has favored conflict – blood, controversy, negative news in short.  Positive news, even if truly newsworthy are under-reported.  Stories are less and less deep, and more and more biased – designed to affirm beliefs rather than to inform.

But new forms of journalism and data-gathering promise to re-arrange incentives and market dynamics, and some really cool and creative new models are popping up with a lot of promise to empower ordinary citizens.

Spot.Us is an experimental-phase platform for community-based journalism.  People can suggest stories they want covered, and donate funds to enable an investigative journalist to research the story.  Others in the community who like a proposed pitch can get behind it to fund it – which is referred to as crowd-funding.

Pro Publica, another innovative platform, aims to build an independent roster of investigative journalists who will sell their stories to media organs across the world.

Indeed, in an age where data can be easily aggregated, it is not efficient or natural to have hundreds of redundant journalists reporting on the same story for their respective local communities.  It makes more sense to aggregate their efforts.  That, of course, is part of the premise of agencies like the Associated Press and Reuters, which should at least theoretically gain in prominence as more local news teams get thinned out.

It also explains why it is likely that when the dust settles there will only be a few giant national or international media entities dominating the news (New York Times, USA Today, Wall St Journal, CNN/Time, Sky, Al Jazeerah) – each distinguished by their angle and intended partisan audience.

But with the internet you can create a citizen-driven platform where investigative journalists are accountable directly to the people and their interests – no political, national, ethnic or partisan angles.

Will their interests be enlightened?

Judging from the blogosphere, not always.  But while the internet may also offer much more static and narrow biased coverage, it should also increase variety and provide opportunities for greater depth and nuance – for those who look for it.

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with respect to acting in the face of danger,
courage is a mean between
the excess of rashness and the deficiency of cowardice;

with respect to the enjoyment of pleasures,
temperance is a mean between
the excess of intemperance and the deficiency of insensibility;

with respect to spending money,
generosity is a mean between
the excess of wastefulness and the deficiency of stinginess;

with respect to relations with strangers,
being friendly is a mean between
the excess of being ingratiating and the deficiency of being surly;

and

with respect to self-esteem,
magnanimity is a mean between
the excess of vanity and the deficiency of pusillanimity.

- Aristotle

http://www.philosophypages.com/hy/2s.htm

For a newspaper with editorials as sophisticated and generally on target at least as free markets economics is concerned, it was surprising to read an editorial about "speculators" with such fallacies in logic as the one here. 

Amidst all the finger pointing against speculators, the Wall Street Journal regularly asserts that speculators do not have an impact on the rise in oil prices because they do not hold on to the physical goods and do not play any significant role in setting pricing.

But in an example of an over-reaching argument that undermines its core argument, now they cite evidence that speculators actually did have an impact in reducing prices in the latest period under study. 

Lo and behold, the CFTC found that index traders and swap dealers actually reduced their stake in crude oil futures as prices spiked. The number of contracts held by these investors betting that prices would increase — the net long position — fell by 11%, and more were shorting oil than going long over the six-month period. In other words, index traders and swap dealers were driving the future price of oil down.

But if this is indeed the case, then the possibility that speculators can have the opposite impact is alive and well – and it just so happens that the study and data they analyzed covered a period where speculators started laying off the market!  This coincides with what has actually been happening of late – with prices coming down, and it may buttress the argument that speculators did have a role in the initial astronomical rise of oil prices.

I don’t know if speculators are indeed behind the roller coaster ride of commodity pricing.  And prior posts in this blog have pointed to arguments against blaming them.  I just found it entertaining that the very Wall Street Journal would have such fallacy of logic.

Another argument they make in the same editorial is that because futures contracts are matched – buyer with seller – and one loses if another wins -these contracts have no impact on price. But the fundamental laws of demand & supply remind us that the aggregate of these matches is indeed what creates the balance that sets prices. 

Who is writing these editorials?!

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Here’s an interesting article about mistakes to avoid when trying to teach children to eat healthful foods…

September 15, 2008

6 Food Mistakes Parents Make , NYT

By TARA PARKER-POPE

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Hollywood has for many years taken for granted people who speak languages other than English.  It is the most annoying thing to listen to actors break their teeth as they pretend to speak in "Spanish" – or French, or Hebrew, or Russian – and I gather any other foreign language.  It is bad enough that foreigners tend to be the villains, but at least let them be legitimate sounding villains!

I wonder if this results from carelessness from the Directors, or if desperate actors claim they "speak" a language and nobody bothers to ask a native to check it.

It’s even sillier when movies like Vantage Point (which we just wasted 90 minutes watching) try to philosophize about the arrogance and blindness of American foreign policy, all the while using actors that don’t nearly resemble the nationalities they pretend to represent. I guess Hollywood figures most Americans won’t notice. 

But this is what worries me about America.  As globalization continues, more people across the world are learning English and learning about other cultures, but Americans are not investing enough into learning about other cultures and countries.  This will have very real implications for American competitiveness.