Our Israel Horizons contributing writer, Doug Chandler, has followed preparations in the Jewish community for months and written on last Sunday’s Darfur rally in Washington, DC, in the latest issue of New York’s Jewish Week.
It was he who alerted us about the NY Sun editorial that attacked the rally organizers as liberals who are doing the right thing in calling for military intervention in Darfur but opposed the war to “liberate” Iraq. Personally, I was sympathetic to the overthrow of Saddam Hussein (even wrote a “Liberal Case for War” in the Sun over three years ago), but opposed a unilateral US invasion in the face of vehement international opposition — especially after the UN Security Council voted against war. I share Doug’s outrage at this scurrilous attack against the humanitarian impulses of rally organizers and applaud the mobilization of so many American Jews against the systematic assault on the people of Darfur.
Similarly, I am outraged by the extreme left-wing and anti-Semitic attack on the rally as a new Jewish effort to get the US into a war, as discovered the other day and documented by Arieh Lebowitz.
Speaking of past and ongoing horrors, as well as triumph, our friend and Israel Horizons contributing editor, Hillel Schenker, has written his latest blog entry for the Guardian (the British daily) on his sentiments this season:
Is Israel the only country that insists on combining sadness with celebration…?
Yesterday was the annual memorial day for the accumulated 22,123 soldiers and civilians who have died in Israel’s wars since 1948, and today is Israeli Independence Day, marking the 58th anniversary of Ben-Gurion’s declaration of an independent state back in 1948.
For the first time, I found myself in (Palestinian) East Jerusalem, at the office’s of the Palestine-Israel Journal when the memorial siren sounded. It was an eerie feeling, standing with my Israeli colleague Avi Hoffman in memory of the fallen soldiers. I told the Palestinians, Najat and Rena, that I didn’t expect them to stand, understandably. Particularly in Najat Hirbawi’s case, since her grandfather was killed at Dir Yassin by the Irgun forces in April, 1948. Part of the Palestinian Nakba (Disaster)…. Read on at the Guardian Weblog, “Comment is free.”
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