Tag: Middle East

SED Student Helps Bring Israeli, Palestinian Youth Together

Posted on by kathiemm

by Joel Brown

Dana Dunwoody (SED’19) (above) spent part of her summer using disc games to bring Israeli and Palestinian youth together at the Ultimate Peace camp in southern Israel. Photos courtesy of Ultimate Peace.

By Joel Brown

Just about everyone has tossed around a Frisbee for fun. Dana Dunwoody is doing it for peace. At a summer camp in an Israeli desert, she is using the flying discs to bring together Israeli and Palestinian youth—and maybe change the world, one toss at time.“As youths, we get inundated with information about who we are and what our cultures are, and when there’s a lot of violence and hostility going on, there’s a lot of misinterpretation,” says Dunwoody (SED’19), a doctoral candidate in applied human development. “To be able to come together and realize, I can have a say in changing that narrative, is a very empowering experience.”This is Dunwoody’s second stint as a volunteer counselor at the Ultimate Peace camp. Using the grounds of an Israeli boarding school for a week each summer since 2007, the organization strives to build ties between Israeli and West Bank youths. It does that with Ultimate, a game that’s extremely competitive, but depends heavily on teamwork and sportsmanship. The 200 or so 10-to-16-year-old campers come for the hours of practice and games each day. They have some fun away from the burdens of daily life in that conflict-wracked corner of the world, and if things go the way they are supposed to go, they begin to see one another differently.“We encourage conversation and sharing of culture,” says Dunwoody, who has a bachelor’s in psychology from Temple University and a master’s in athletic counseling from Springfield College. “We have a lot of different activities the kids do together to create safe spaces to share their identities and explore other cultures.”

Dana Dunwoody speaking with camper

Dunwoody uses her skills as an educator and athletic coach to help campers find ways to get along.

Mostly, though, there is Ultimate.

Flying-disc sports are a lot more organized than they were in the peace-and-love days of the 1960s. Millions of people in the United States regularly play Ultimate, which is not officially called Ultimate Frisbee because Frisbee is a Wham-O trademark. Long Island native Dunwoody picked it up as an undergrad and quickly became an avid player.

“You hear about these opportunities to use Ultimate culture as a way to connect people,” she says. Ultimate Peace, created by Ultimate-loving Americans and one Israeli, also offers a year-round program that brings Israeli and Palestinian youth together to play the game.

In Ultimate, the disc is advanced only by passing—players cannot run with the disc—and a team scores a point when one of its players catches the disc in the other team’s end zone. Most important, as far as Ultimate Peace is concerned, there is no referee, so players must call their own fouls.

According to USA Ultimate’s “Ultimate in 10 Simple Rules,” “Ultimate stresses sportsmanship and fair play. Competitive play is encouraged, but never at the expense of respect between players, adherence to the rules, and the basic joy of play.”

“The spirit of the game infiltrates all parts of your being,” says Dunwoody. “For me it feels like it’s alive. Every person manifests it in the way they communicate with you on and off the field. At Ultimate Peace, it’s mutual respect, but it’s also integrity and collaboration and cooperation.”

“The Ultimate Peace project is an example of sport for good, or sport for development, which is kind of an emerging field,” says Dunwoody’s faculty advisor John McCarthy (SED’98, SED’04), a School of Education clinical associate professor and director of the Institute for Athletic Coach Education. “These projects hold so much promise in areas where a lot of people have struggled and there are some really deep societal problems.”

“Dana’s very committed to social justice,” McCarthy says. “This project brings together a lot of her passions: social justice and her energy for using sport and exercise as a vehicle for positive change and just her kind of caring for other people.”

None of which surprises McCarthy. Dunwoody is SED’s first Holmes Scholar, and was elected national president of the program for 2017 to 2019. The Holmes Scholar Program, which is overseen by the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education provides mentorship, peer support, and professional development to students from historically underrepresented backgrounds.

“She’s a bright light,” McCarthy says. “She can do a lot of good for a lot of people.”

Will memory serve us right?

Posted on by kathiemm
America Remembers 9/11 Memorial in Eastlake, Ohio. This work has been released into the public domain by its author, Pbalson8204.

9/11. It’s that time of year again. The amount of attention given to the events of 2001 is declining, but a few voices still exhort us: “Remember 9/11!”

There are some memorable questions here: WHAT should we remember? Or perhaps, better yet: What lessons should we have learned?

Regarding lessons to be learned, I vote for: Violence breeds violence.

The attacks on U.S. soil on September 11, 2001, did not come out of nowhere. Contrary to popular beliefs, fueled by the popular media, 9/11 followed  a long history of  United States government-sponsored  military aggression in the Middle East; you can make a lot of enemies through violence–especially when you smugly preach liberty, justice and freedom for all while killing and maiming wives, children, and thousands of other innocent civilians.

For a not so brief summary of recent U.S. violence in the Middle East, read this . For a very readable essay on the cycle of violence in which the U.S. military-industrial complex has embedded the nation at great profit, read this .

There probably are always some people who gain something they want through the use of violence. Certainly the U.S. military-industrial complex and the U.S. corporate media have benefitted greatly from the violence perpetrated by the government in the name of freedom, democracy, and, Heaven forgive them, God. But perhaps they have not gained as much as right-wing extremist groups in the Middle East such as ISIS, whose ranks have swelled since 9/11. There are a lot of arguments concerning the US role in the evolution of the Islamic State—for a broad sample, see these articles in the New Yorker,  The Atlantic , and Counterpunch .

The message in all these articles is that US government policies have contributed to the recent growth in terrorist groups. So, perhaps  the things we should remember about 9/11 should NOT include belief in the claim that the US was the gentle giant good guy viciously attacked for no reason by utterly vicious and psychotic bad guys.

Perhaps, if we truly want to move ahead towards peace and security, we would benefit more by remembering that the US government should not create power vacuums in places where imperialism has left behind  a lot of righteous anger and, more importantly, that it should not send Americans off to die in other lands so that it can increase its control of oil or terrify other people.

What I remember most about 9/11 is the compassion, the empathy, the bravery of the many American first responders and civilians who risked all to help the innocent civilians targeted in the 9/11 attacks. And what I want to remember each 9/11 in my future is: 1) Rewatch this video. 2) Learn everything I can about anyone who seems to be using 9/11 for political gain, and 3) Spend the next year speaking out against the ongoing US governmental aggression that continues to kill innocent children and others .

 

 

 

Can generals sometimes be right?

Posted on by kathiemm
Israel-Palestine handshake symbol. licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. Author: Wickey-nl.

by Kathleen Malley-Morrison & Ed Agro

Monday’s engagingpeace post discussed the opposition of General Dwight D. Eisenhower to the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Although it is easy to stereotype military commanders as always believing that the only tools available in their fight against designated enemies are death and destruction, there are other recent examples of leaders who do not promote endless war.

In a recent (June 29, 2016) Associated Press article by Dan Perry and Joseph Federman, we learn that “An extraordinary array of former top commanders are now criticizing Netanyahu in increasingly urgent terms, accusing him of mishandling the Palestinian issue and allying with extremists who are bent on dismantling Israel’s democracy.”

More specifically, and more dramatically, “a group representing more than 200 retired leaders in Israel’s military, police, Mossad spy service, and Shin Bet security agency presented a plan to help end the half-century occupation of the Palestinians through unilateral steps, including disavowing claims to over 90 percent of the West Bank and freezing Jewish settlement construction in such areas.

The movement, called Commanders for Israel’s Security, reflects an increasingly widespread assessment that Israel is drifting catastrophically toward permanent entanglement with the Palestinians and conflict with the world community.”

These courageous and long-overdue recommendations of the Commanders would move Israel in the direction of compliance with the UN General Assembly Resolution 181 (Partition Plan) of November 29, 1947,  and away from the violence that continues today.

We have one point of disagreement with the Perry and Federman article.  They state: “Complicating the picture is that the Gaza pullout ended badly from Israel’s perspective: Hamas militants took it over, leading to three wars between the sides.”

This assertion misses the fact that Hamas was elected in a process all observers considered to be fair; it was only after Israel, with American help, declared that election to be illegitimate that Hamas returned to armed resistance.  Another thing that’s not well known is that Hamas was formed years ago with the help of Israeli fifth-columnists as a way to weaken the Palestinian Authority and render rational discussion impossible.

Overall, the Perry and Federman article is excellent, very informative and heartening! It’s taken years to reach recognition that Israel cannot continue its current policies, even with the self-serving military and economic assistance of the U.S. government.   Let’s hope reason and humanity prevail. Let’s hope the wrong-headed Netanyahu government falls and Israel finally joins the Middle East. And not to forget, the Israeli/Palestinian anti-Apartheid (for want of a better word) activists have been working against insuperable odds for many many years.

 

 

WHOSE CHILD IS THIS?

Posted on by kathiemm

By Anthony J. Marsella

Photo: Courtesy of Dr. Amer Hosin

Whose Child is This?  Whose child is this?  Is this child an Iraqi . . . an Israeli . . .  a Chechnyan . . . an Afghani . . . a Kurd . . . a Nigerian?   Is she or he English, Indonesian, Spanish, Lebanese, Turkish, Congolese, Bosnian, Persian?   Does it matter?  Is this child not a daughter or son to each of us?

Is this child not a human being born of a union of a man and woman whose intimacy, whose passion, whose very breathe yielded a life that sought only to live . . . to enjoy some moments of laughter and delight, some moments of comfort and calm . . . to make yet another life.

Now this child rests amidst the dust and debris of war . . . lifeless . . . torn and shattered . . . killed by someone whom she or he never knew, and would likely never meet.  Death from a distance. . . a bomb from a plane, a shell from a mortar, a strap of explosives . . .  intentional and willing, calculated and planned, a measured effort to destroy.

The Source:  an agent of death and destruction, a pilot or soldier, an insurgent or terrorist . . . does it matter? They have killed their own child . . . they have killed our child.  And in doing so, they have diminished each of us as human beings, each of us as creatures of consciousness and conscience, each of us as reflections and carriers of life.  Words cannot console her or his parents, if they, indeed, survived this horror. They are left with only endless pain . . . memories of a child eating, sleeping, playing . . . a reminder of a tragic moment inscribed in mortar and blood.

Enough!  Enough!  Stand, speak, write, act against those who advocate violence and hate no matter the source — be they presidents, prime ministers, generals, terrorists, mullahs, rabbis, dictators, ministers, true believers . . .  tell them that we do not share their quest for power and greed.   Tell them we do not share their hate, nor their blindness and indifference to suffering.  Tell them we do not share their empty post-tragedy rhetoric designed to keep us mired in the fulfillment of their selfish needs. We are not pacified and contented by their explanations and assurances. We challenge and contest their motives!  We resent and resist their excuses. How shallow their words in the face of dying or dead child.

THIS IS OUR CHILD!  Today, we claim this child as our own, too late to keep her or him alive, too late to know her or his hopes and dreams, too late to know the promise and possibilities of their life had it been given the chance to be lived free of oppression, abuse, and indignity.

But we are not too late to affirm to all living children that we will try to protect you, to guard you, and to shelter you from the terror of war and violence, and from an untimely, painful, and meaningless death, by choosing peace over war, compassion over violence, voice over silence, and conscience over comfort.

Note:  I first wrote this brief appeal in July, 2005, following a conference in Savannah, Georgia, in which Dr. Amer Hosin shared photos of death and suffering in the Middle East.  I emailed this appeal in the December holiday season, when the poignant holiday carol, “What child is this?” is played endlessly on radio and television, testimony to Christian faith, but indirectly testimony to the consequences of violence against children, and the reality our hope for recovery and redemption reside in children – all children!

Today, as I viewed the now iconic photo of the stalwart Syrian boy, covered in dust, his mind and body shattered by bombs he could never fathom, and I recalled the iconic photo of the naked Vietnamese girl escaping napalm.  I decided I must share this appeal today.  It is upon all of us. What can we do to stop the destruction of life? What can we do end the reflexive response of violence and hate toward those we deem enemies.

I say to you, I plead with you now: “Hate begets violence, and violence begets hate, and always innocents become the victims.” We use the word “hate” daily, casually expressing our so often disgust or revulsion with something as benign as broccoli, or an athletic team.  “I hate __________!

The powerful emotion of “hate” has escaped our conscious awareness! We “hate” too much, too often, too easily; the consequences of the word and the behaviors it implies are lost to us.  Ask: Do I have a right to “hate?” Is “hate” a choice? What do I mean when I say I “hate”!  Stare at the image of a dead Iraqi child? Embed the image of the struggling shocked Syrian boy in your mind. Make room for it!  It is more important than so many other images you hold.

Ask: Whose child is this? He or she is your child! If you deny this reality, then await the day the face returns to remind you of your failure, to haunt your minds as you look at your child.

Anthony J. Marsella, August 19, 2016