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• Wednesday 4 November 2009 - As the founder of The Christian
| As the founder of The Christian Science Monitor, Mary Baker Eddy, once wrote: "Never breathe an immoral atmosphere, unless in the attempt to purify it." Obama is trying to inflatable purify one group, the UN Human Rights Council. The body has long reflected the interests of its most autocratic nations, such as Cuba, China, and Saudi Arabia. He decided to let the US be elected to the body by the UN General Assembly this year, the first time for the US. If the Nobel committee is correct, Obama is on track to reform this Council and perhaps finally get it to act on the pearl jewelry human rights abuses of many of its own members. Can he do it? Or will the US instead be associated with the Council's soft touch for dictators? And it's not only on human rights where the US and most other nations may differ. Washington is also often at odds with its European allies over the issue of promoting democracy in countries such as Georgia, Burma (Myanmar), and Ukraine. Democracy and freedom are wholesale pearl earrings core values for the US. And after 9/11 especially, promoting those values in Muslim lands has become a stronger national interest. (Woodrow Wilson, champion of democracy promotion, is the last sitting US president to receive the peace prize.) But Obama won't find the majority of nations backing that ideal. In fact, only 46 percent of UN member states are full-fledged democracies. So more power to the new US president in earning this prize and as he tries to more closely engage with rogue states and wobbly allies. He is in a delicate dance between get-along and go-along, between good tactics and bad strategy. Perhaps the Nobel committee might have waited a couple years to see the measure of Obama's actual success in blazing a new world order. But at the least, it has added momentum to this president's worthy hopes. |
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• Wednesday 4 November 2009 - by any peace agreement
| It happened in the 1980s, when the US balked at recognizing the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and hesitated to freshwater pearl jewelry seek a resolution to the Middle East conflict through the creation of a Palestinian state. Those long delays helped propel the rise of the hard-line Islamist party Hamas. Today, the lack of US dialogue with Hamas and the group's moderation are leading to the formation of new, more dangerous rejectionist groups. If the US were serious about engaging Hamas, it would acknowledge three things: 1. By agreeing to accept a state in the West Bank and Gaza, Hamas is demonstrating de facto recognition of Israel. 2. Hamas has said Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas can continue negotiations with Israel, and that it freshwater pearl jewelry would abide by any peace agreement he signs if it is ratified by a referendum of the Palestinian people. 3. Hamas has observed several cease-fires with Israel and has offered decades-long truces in exchange for an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza. In December 1988, President Reagan authorized dialogue between the US government and the PLO – 14 years after the Arab League designated the PLO the "sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people," and 13 years after the United Nations General Assembly made the PLO an observer organization. Even Mr. Reagan's step conferred no official US recognition, though the PLO had some form of relations with at pearl jewelry wholesale least 70 countries and was widely recognized by the Palestinians as their legitimate political leadership. Reagan's decision came one year after the founding of Hamas, established as an Islamic armed force to counter Israel at the beginning of the first Palestinian uprising in 1987. Hamas's political platform calling for the destruction of Israel was in part a response to the gradual moderation of the PLO, which adopted the position of accepting a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza in 1988. |
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• Wednesday 4 November 2009 - their numbers are few.
Back then, Hamas gave new voice to the rejectionists, while centering itself ideologically in the budding Islamic political revival that flowed from the Iranian revolution and the successes of inflatable tent the mujahideen in Afghanistan. And now it appears that though Hamas's charter remains the same, like the PLO before it, Hamas has moderated its views substantially. In a July 31 interview with The Wall Street Journal, Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal reiterated acceptance of a Palestinian state in the pearl necklace West Bank and Gaza on the 1967 lines. "This is the national program. This is our program."
But, as with Hamas's rise to the right of the PLO in the late 1980s, new rejectionist groups are springing up with ideologies far more dangerous and fundamentalist than those of Hamas. On Sept. 6, the Saudi newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat reported on a Palestinian, Mahmud Talib, who is on the run from Hamas security forces inside Gaza. According to the article, Talib had been a leader in the Hamas military wing, but split from the organization in 2006 when Hamas decided to participate in Palestinian elections, a key signal of its new openness to a two-state solution. Hamas accuses Mr. Talib of masterminding recent bomb attacks in Gaza targeting Hamas security forces. Talib and his supporters report planning to pledge their allegiance to Osama bin Laden. Talib also claims to have been involved in alleged assassination attempts in Gaza against former President Jimmy Carter and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, now Quartet Middle East Envoy. In recent months the freshwater pearl jewelry Israeli press has also reported on defections from Hamas and the formation of Al Qaeda-inspired organizations in Gaza. Such groups have claimed responsibility for attacks against Israeli forces on the Gaza border, at a time when Hamas is observing a de facto cease-fire.
While Palestinians attacking Israel is not new, the rise of groups in the Palestinian territories espousing a Salafist (fundamentalist Sunni) ideology is. Though Hamas initially attempted to accommodate these freshwater pearl organizations, relations have clearly soured. On Aug. 14, clashes between Hamas security forces in Gaza and another Al Qaeda-inspired faction, Jund Ansar Allah, left 24 people dead. The distinction between Hamas and Al Qaeda is significant. Both have been responsible for horrific acts of terrorism, but Hamas is a domestic Palestinian organization, which has consistently avoided attacking non-Israeli targets. Its ideological roots are less conservative than Al Qaeda's, and, since 9/11, Hamas has distanced itself from Al Qaeda's rhetoric and global attacks. In the past few years, Hamas has also shown substantial willingness to compromise; Al Qaeda has not. The US should not overestimate support in Gaza for these more radical organizations. Compared with members of Hamas or the PLO factions, their numbers are few. Gaza is not a new base for global Al Qaeda attacks.
But the longer Gaza is left isolated and impoverished, the longer the Hamas government cannot provide hope for the people of Gaza, the more likely it is that Al Qaeda's ideology will gain support. The long delay in US outreach to the PLO contributed to the rise of Hamas, and now the delay in engaging Hamas is encouraging the growth of Al Qaeda-inspired organizations on the eastern Mediterranean. This is yet another reason for the West to talk to Hamas. |
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• Wednesday 4 November 2009 - In order to bridge this gap
Glen Ellyn, Ill. - Oct. 12 is the important anniversary of the opening of the Americas to settlers, and one that merits celebration, but by commemorating it as inflatable tent Columbus Day, Americans stand to ignore part of the past that deserves to be remembered. While the holiday has been used to teach ideals of patriotism, and Christopher Columbus has been used as a symbol of an immigrant's right to citizenship, the other side to the discovery of the new country is death and destruction. To many native Americans, Columbus symbolizes slavery.
In order to bridge this gap, perhaps the government should take a cue from Hawaii and call the day Discover's Day? Though it's been more than 500 years since Columbus found the Americas, consider the story of Mary Black Bonnet. She was born a Sicangu Lakota on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota in the early 1970s, when some 80 percent of pearl necklace the approximately 9,000 residents were unemployed and almost 50 percent were alcoholics, including her mother. Mary's father left when she was 2 months old,
eventually leading to the court-ordered placement of her and her sister in a foster home. There, white foster parents adopted them, and until the time she was 10 years old, she was raped repeatedly. The abuse mercifully stopped when the adoptive parents divorced, but she had to contend with resultant nightmares and suicidal inclinations. Therapy helped Ms. Bonnet recover, as did her eventual return to Rosebud and reunion with her birth father. But her struggle as a member of one of the smallest ethnic minorities in America is mirrored in the experiences of native Americans across the country.
Unemployment is still around 74 percent at Rosebud Reservation. One of every 3 residents there is homeless. More than 95 percent live below federal poverty levels. And the number of deaths from alcohol-related problems is reported to be three times more than that of the rest of the US population. It was Columbus who pearl jewelry wholesale opened the way for European colonizers, whose wars and infectious diseases wiped out massive numbers of native Americans. They set the standard by exiling the rest to rural, out-of-the-way reservations. The "reservation" solution did not work very well back then, nor does it work very well today, as Bonnet's case shows. |
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• Wednesday 4 November 2009 - By changing the name
Granted, Columbus was not the sole precipitator of the displacement and suffering imposed on native Americans for the freshwater pearl next half millennium, and certainly his navigational, scientific, and sheer physical accomplishment, which rank him with or above such figures as Marco Polo, Ferdinand Magellan, and Lewis and Clark, cannot be denied. Yet Columbus was more than just an inevitable cog in history's colonial machine. His own words survive in his letters as proof of his dehumanization of the indigenous people, whom he considered the property of Queen Isabella. He enslaved many of the Tiano Indians, while the rest he subjected to war and destruction. Often, the first step to healing is recognition of a problem. By changing the name of this holiday we will draw attention to the plight of the native
Americans, not so they can be pitied, but in order that their situation, which freshwater pearl began with Columbus, can be addressed. Perhaps replacing Columbus Day with "Discover's Day" would stretch Americans to recognize where we have come from. It would also give a nod not only to what led to the influx of ideas and people on which this nation was founded, but to some abuses that the United States must remember to avoid. In so doing, we gain intellectual honesty. Another solution would be to replace the adulation for Columbus with a native American hero.
Crazy Horse's monument is already in pearl necklace place near Mount Rushmore. Chief Joseph might be more politically acceptable, though. The great savior of the Nez Perce tribe had the wisdom of President Lincoln and the inclination toward nonviolence of Martin Luther King. His recorded reflections are an inspiration for all patriots: "Let me be a free man, free to travel, free to stop, free to work, free to trade where I choose, free to choose my own teachers, free to follow the religion of my fathers, free to talk, think, and act for myself – and I will obey every law or submit to the penalty." What's more American than that? The prospect of swapping Columbus for an Indian chief, in one fell swoop, may be a hard sell, especially in view of the paucity of political influence wielded by American Indians. But the first step, and one everyone can embrace right now, is to honor the truth by terminating the celebration of Christopher Columbus, while commemorating the importance of this historic day in all its implications. It might just help with the healing of all America. David McGrath is emeritus professor of English and of Native American Literature at College of DuPage. |
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