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An eye for an eye makes us all blind

There were two brothers, but the older brother considered himself more loved by his father. So he tormented his younger brother at every opportunity, especially when his father was not watching.

The younger brother decided to talk to his father about the bullying.
‘He comes into my room, takes my things and …’
‘Just ignore him’, his father interjected. ‘He’ll grow out of it’.

But the behaviour persisted.

Weeks later, the younger brother again sought help from his father.

‘I don’t want to take sides …’
‘What sides?’
‘Well maybe you provoke him’, shrugged his father.

Months later, the younger brother started yelling at his older brother, hoping that by raising his voice and slamming doors, his father will finally fix the problem. But the problem persisted.

So the exasperated younger brother again complained to his father.
‘Try and make peace. If I get involved, things may get worse.’
‘How much worse?’ the younger brother exclaimed. ‘Can’t you see he broke my tooth! What if I did the same to him …’
‘No, no. As I said, just sit down together and don’t get up until you both shake hands.’
But the older brother laughed at the idea of having a talk. ‘You can’t make me do anything!’
‘I’m not making you, I’m asking you,’ the younger brother pleaded between his broken teeth.
‘I’ve only got one thing to say to you,’ grinned the older brother. ‘You’re just jealous.’
‘Of what?’
‘The older brother put up his middle finger. ‘My father is wrapped around my finger, and you know it’.

A year later, the problem persisted. The straw that broke the camel’s back was when the younger brother sustained a black eye.

‘Dad! Look at this!’ he pointed to his bruised eye.
‘Did he really do that?’ asked the father.
‘No, I did it myself!’ the younger brother snapped sarcastically.
‘Look, it’s his birthday today. Don’t upset him. Today is a special day.’
The younger brother sighed. ‘Today is like every other day. Another day, another bruise. Why do you keep defending him? Why don’t you teach him a lesson?’
‘Look,’ suggested his father, putting his hand on his son’s shoulder. ‘After today, sleep in the spare bedroom, and just keep your distance.’
‘But I love my room …’
‘Do you want to fix this problem?’ his father waved his finger at him. ‘Show some gratitude. At least I’m trying!’
‘If I go to the smaller room, I’m going to avoid him like he doesn’t exist,’ the younger brother declared. ‘And you better stop him if he comes anywhere near me’.

Despite all these promises, nothing changed.

The younger brother noticed that his old bedroom was now occupied by his older brother’s belongings.
‘Hey! What are you doing in my room?’
‘It’s not your room. You left it. It’s my room now.’
‘But you already have your own room.’
‘And I have this one for my things.’

The younger brother stood in the doorway. ‘I didn’t choose to leave. Dad made me do it.’
‘For me. Because he loves me, not you’.

Something snapped. The younger brother snapped his brother’s arm and the screaming echoed throughout the house. Their father came charging in and sheltered his injured son.

‘You will pay for this!’ the father yelled at the younger son. ‘You could have killed him!’
‘He’s been trying to kill me!’ retorted the younger son.
‘Where the hell did you learn to be so … violent? Who taught you this disgusting language?’
The younger brother teared up and pointed to his father.
‘Me?’ his father exclaimed. ‘I never ever taught you to be violent…’
‘Yes you did!’ he insisted. ‘You taught me that this is only language that gets your attention. He screams and you come running. This is not my language. It’s yours.’
‘What?’ his father was perplexed. ‘I taught you to talk, to walk away, to …’
‘To ignore him’, the son continued, rolling his eyes, ‘to make agreements, to shake hands, to offer my room. I did all those things you suggested … but nothing changed. You just kept your distance so I had to fend for myself.’
‘You didn’t try hard enough!’ the father retorted.
‘You didn’t try at all!’ the son interjected.

‘How dare you … God help you, I’m going to break you!’ threatened the father.

‘You can’t’, shrugged the younger brother. ‘I’m already broken.’

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Palestinian unity is path to peace

http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/print.asp?article=16271
http://bit.ly/RlOFu2

Online Opinion, 7 May 2014

If Israeli leaders are worried about a Palestinian unity government, they should look in the mirror. If they are worried about the forbidden apartheid word, they should look out the window.

When Benjamin Netanyahu alleged that ‘Abu Mazen has chosen Hamas and not peace,’ Palestinians enduring daily occupation asked: what peace?
If the continuing construction of Israeli settlements, home demolitions and military raids are ostensibly the hallmarks of ‘peace’, then Palestinians cannot be blamed for seeking alternatives. These actions in themselves have ‘essentially buried’ any remnants of a peace process.

It appears that no matter what Palestinians do, apart from capitulation, they are always the villains, never the victims.

If Palestinians embark on armed resistance or intifada, they are terrorists.

If a non-government movement embarks on a non-violent civil resistance or BDS, they are anti-Semitic.

If Hamas is democratically elected in Gaza as they were in 2006, they are blockaded.

If Fatah rivals Hamas as it did since 2007, it is rendered as impotent and illegitimate.

If Fatah reconciles with Hamas, they are anti-peace.

While the Netanyahu government rejects Hamas for refusing to recognise Israel’s right to exist, it refuses to recognise Palestine’s right to exist along the 1967 borders.

The US has threatened to stop providing aid to the Palestinian Authority unless three conditions are met: recognise Israel, renounce violence and accept previous agreements. The fact that these reciprocal stipulations are not imposed on Israel highlights the bias of the peace broker.

Netanyahu would be hypocritical to threaten a Palestinian national unity government when his own Likud-led coalition announced a similar pact with Shaul Mofaz, chairman of the opposition Kadima party, exactly two years ago.

His current cabinet includes head of the Jewish Home Party, Economy Minister Neftali Bennett, who has publicly called for the unilateral annexation of Area C which is 60% of the West Bank. He has vowed that “a Palestinian state means no Israeli state. That’s the equation … There is not going to be a Palestinian state within the tiny land of Israel.” With these one state solutions declared by Palestine’s peace partner, is there anything left to negotiate? Should Netanyahu be given an ultimatum to choose between peace with Palestinians or these partners: “You can have one but not the other. I hope he chooses peace, so far he hasn’t done so.”

His cabinet also includes Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman who opposed a 2003 amnesty of 350 detained Palestinians: “It would be better to drown these prisoners in the Dead Sea if possible, since that’s the lowest point in the world.”

Apparently, only the Hamas rhetoric is an obstacle to peace, as the national unity governments of Israel are internal affairs.

In Cairo in 2011, an attempt at rapprochement by the two Palestinian factions failed to fulfil the accord. Hamas is now forced into a compromising position because its ally, the Muslim Brotherhood, has been ousted in Egypt and their smuggling tunnels to Gaza have been blocked. The misery and poverty of Gazans has necessitated negotiation and further compromises may follow.

Talking peace with a united and elected Palestinian government is not the beginning of the end. It is the epitome of democracy and the perfect climate for honest dialogue.

With elections in Iraq, Lebanon and Palestine pending, Israel has long lost its monopoly as the ‘only democracy in the Middle East’. While US Secretary of State John Kerry cannot rewind the tape on his ‘apartheid’ slip, it will continue to be a self-fulfilling prophecy if Israel does not rewind the shrinking map of Palestine.

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Rabbi or imam, a threat is still a threat

http://bit.ly/1gk86tz

http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/news/opinion/joseph-wakim-rabbi-or-imam-a-threat-is-still-a-threat/story-fni6unxq-1226833133261

The Advertiser
20 February 2014

“BY the power of our Holy Torah, we admonish you to cease immediately all efforts to achieve these disastrous agreements, in order to avoid severe heavenly punishment for everyone involved.”

In an open letter to US Secretary of State John Kerry, this wrath formed part of a recent statement by Rabbis from the Committee to Save the Land and People of Israel and “hundreds of other Rabbis in Israel and around the world”.

The rabbis were incensed by Kerry’s mediation between Israeli and Palestinian negotiators.

Their statement did not register on our media radar, as such ultra-orthodox voices are treated as atypical of mainstream Israeli society. If the word Torah is replaced by Koran in this statement, the words severe, punishment and everyone suddenly read as a global fatwa.

These rabbis attribute terrorism exclusively to their enemy as they proclaim that Kerry’s “incessant efforts to expropriate integral parts of our Holy Land and hand them over to Abbas’s terrorist gang amount to a declaration of war against the Creator and Ruler of the universe”.

This war-speak reaches the same pitch as their Muslim counterparts who purport to speak for the same deity.
But it is a fallacy to assume that only Muslims execute such threats and take the divine law into their own hands.

In 1994, Baruch Goldstein massacred 29 Palestinian worshippers at a Hebron mosque. He belonged to the Jewish Defence League, which the FBI later classified as a “far right terrorist group”.

He was publicly denounced by mainstream Jewish bodies as a lone madman and an extremist, yet over 10,000 sympathisers visited and venerated his “holy” shrine until it was forcibly removed by the government in 1999.

The growing influence of the 10 per cent of ultra-Orthodox citizens within Israel’s population of eight million continues to create a sectarian-secular divide.

While they may not resort to street violence like Palestinian stone-throwers, they flex their political muscle with violent decisions that suffocate Gazans, expand settlements and segregate the West Bank.

In Australia, the growth of the Muslim presence has seen a growth in Islamophobia. Too often, the extreme actions of an extreme minority are treated as typical and therefore stereotypical.

When the abhorrent placard at a 2012 Sydney rally screamed ‘‘Behead all those who insult the prophet’’, Australians screamed even louder with outrage.

Those responsible for this message were swiftly condemned and written off as unrepresentative by Muslim elders. But the mud stuck on the Muslim name.

When the abhorrent YouTube video by Sheikh Sharif Hussein was falsely attributed to the Islamic Da’wah Centre of South Australia in August 2013, again the elders tried to extinguish the local backlash and gross generalisations.

His “sermon” labelled Australian soldiers in Iraq as ‘‘crusader pigs’’ and beseeched Allah to kill Buddhists and Hindus who have harmed Muslims.

More than anyone, Israelis should understand that hate speech is the ominous precursor to violence, especially when coupled with real power and weapons.

The violent voices of these rabbis deserve the same amplification and accountability as their Muslim counterparts. We cannot keep marginalising them as extremists who don’t count.
They do count, and so will their victims.

Joseph Wakim is the founder of the Australian Arabic Council and author of Sorry we have no space

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Australia must find balance on Palestinians

http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/opinion/australia-must-find-balance-on-palestinians/story-fni0ffsx-1226798510096

http://bit.ly/1cEKfo5

Australia must find balance on Palestinians

Herald Sun

9 January 2014

THE world body that created the state of Israel in 1947 has proclaimed 2014 the International Year of Solidarity with the Palestinian People. Yet Australia was one of the seven opponents of the UN General Assembly vote on November 26, alongside Israel and the US.

Sometimes the best way to bring home the Palestinian plight is to bring it closer to home metaphorically: imagine living in a four-bedroom home with a garden that has been in your family name for many generations. Then, there is a door knock and authorities say you now need to allow refugees to live in one of your bedrooms. You accommodate. You now need to share your kitchen and bathroom.

More refugees and their relatives arrive. Now you need to sacrifice a second bedroom. Your family start to complain that they feel suffocated.

Your tenants are now armed and behave more like landlords. They insist that you now need to squeeze your growing family into one bedroom, or you are free to leave to live with your relatives in another neighbourhood. The new settlers now need priority access to your kitchen and bathroom. When you complain that this is unfair, you are told to use the kitchens and bathrooms of your neighbours.

The locks in the house have been changed, as have the locks to the control room that houses the water and electricity mains. The settlers now wish to demolish the ancestral home and the garden in order to build a larger house. Trees and personal connections to the land are uprooted. You are welcome to stay as a tenant so long as you stay within your confines and obey their landlord rules.

The majority of your neighbours have witnessed this catastrophe and have protested peacefully about illegal expansions. However, a couple of mansions in the neighbourhood have provided armed guards to protect the settlers from unbalanced criticism.

From the confines of your shrinking one-bedroom bunker, you are asked why the two families cannot live in one home as equals in peace and harmony.

Perhaps Prime Minister Tony Abbott and Foreign Affairs Minister Julie Bishop would pose such an absurd question. During the pre-election week, Mr Abbott pledged that “we are firmly committed to restoring the Australia-Israeli friendship to the strength it enjoyed under the Howard government”.

This golden age saw foreign affairs minister Alexander Downer promote an unprecedented allegiance to Israel. After the Israel-Hezbollah war of 2006, he trumpeted that “Australia had been more supportive of the Israelis than 99 per cent of the world” and that “being called pro-Israeli (is not) a badge of shame”.

Is this restoration representative of our Australian population? In November 2011, a Roy Morgan Research poll revealed the majority of respondents surveyed believe Australia should vote “yes” to recognise Palestine as a full member state of the UN. While 51 per cent responded “yes”, only 15 per cent responded “no”.

Before the so-called Arab Spring, Israel was touted as the only democracy in the Middle East. In December, Mr Abbott qualified Israel as “the only mature pluralistic democracy in the Middle East”.

How is it that this “bastion of Western civilisation” that was founded by refugees has now created its own refugees?

By abstaining from rather than supporting UN resolutions to end “all Israeli settlement activities in all of the occupied territories”, the Abbott Government will be voting against the “free world” and relegating itself to a handful of incomparable member states such as Papua New Guinea and South Sudan. It will be voting to sustain human misery and rendering a two-state solution totally unviable.

As more “peace talks” buy more time for more Palestinian land to be settled, there is more imbalance between occupier and occupied. This is best brought home with a floor plan of the shrinking territories in question.

Hence it is ironic that the justification for our policy change is that “Middle East resolutions must be balanced” and based “on its merits”. This wrongly presumes that there are two equal sides and any imbalance is tipped in Palestine’s favour.

The imbalance is evident when only one side deploys unmanned drones for military surveillance. Only one side has the backing of “the most powerful nation on Earth” by US President Barack Obama’s own admission.

The Abbott Government needs to fulfil its loyalty to our own democracy before it pursues loyalty to a foreign democracy.
Given our bipartisan support for a national apology to our dispossessed people, it is highly hypocritical to now cuddle up to those doing the dispossessing.

Joseph Wakim is founder of Australian Arabic Council and author of Sorry we have no space.

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Render unto Caesar: Israel and the Catholic Church must have their day in court

http://bit.ly/UVitY6

Render unto Caesar: Israel and the Catholic Church must have their day in court

Joseph Wakim ABC Religion and Ethics 17 Dec 2012

The public faces of Israel and the Catholic Church in Australia, Pell and Netanyahu, need not to fear the criminal courts. It may earn them greater respect, to replace the suspicion and resentment.

What do abuses of power by church clergy and the Israeli government have in common? Both flirt within civil spheres while they skirt the criminal courts.

Both church and Israeli leadership have portrayed violations against children and Palestinians respectively as anything but criminal. The defence mechanisms deployed by both theocratic institutions bear striking similarities. As their sanctity is subjected to unprecedented scrutiny, they may face unprecedented accountability to the law of the land.

With the Gillard government’s launch of the Royal Commission into “institutional responses to child abuse,” Catholic Cardinal George Pell has had to reconstruct paedophilia more as a crime than a sin. By biblical definitions, sins disobey divine laws and make a “separation between you and your God.”

Under Catholic Canon Law, sins are forgivable through the sacrament of confession and the fulfilment of the prescribed penance. Contrary to popular misconceptions, absolution is neither an absolute guarantee nor a revolving door. If the sin is a crime, the confessor may be told “no absolution without first confessing to the victim, handing yourself in to the police, and treating your addiction.”

The confession can remain confidential, and the sin can remain forgivable, but “conditions apply.” Sacred laws and secular laws are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Sins should be surrendered to God, but crimes should be surrendered to the courts – and the two can be both compatible and concurrent. Enough experienced clergy have declared that child abuse is rarely confessed, as paedophiles tend to be more pathological and do not see themselves as sinners.

In past practice, such perverts were (mis)managed and transferred internally as serial sinners who are forgiven and “will try not to sin again.” Instead, they could have been treated as serial criminals who infiltrated and polluted their holy order and need to be stripped of their collars and cloth then surrendered for punishment as well as penance.

Cardinal Pell should have focused less on the “seal of confession is inviolable” and more on “nobody is above the law of the land.” Even Jesus Christ was subjected to trials in both courts, albeit unjustly. His charge of blasphemy was heard before the Sanhedrin Court under Jewish law, and had this charge upgraded to treason before Governor Pilate under Roman law. Contrary to the false witnesses, Jesus never shunned secular obedience nor the law of the land, but instructed his followers to “render unto Caesar what belongs to Caesar.”

Hence, this does not challenge the theology of forgivable sins, but couches them into dual accountability, which is integral to this message of Jesus.

Criminal courts have never been perfect, but they cannot be skirted. If these institutions and leaders have nothing to hide, then they should have nothing to fear.

Just as the confessional has been exempted from the mandatory reporting of child abuse as a criminal offence, Israel expects to be exempted from the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague. It expects those harmed by its “apartheid policies” to remain silent and relinquish their right to access the ICC, or face further financial bribery from its American accomplice.

Ironically, Prime Minister Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu’s vindictive “talking point” after the recent UN decision was that, “The Palestinians will quickly realize that they made a mistake when they took a unilateral step that violated agreements with Israel.” And yet the only unilateral step is the latest roll out of 3000 Israeli settlements on Palestinian territory. Netanyahu seeks a bilateral solution by pretending that “our conflict with the Palestinians will be resolved only through direct negotiations,” as if they were two equal sides. But the real solution is multilateral by taking the territorial violations, war crimes and crimes against humanity to the ICC.

With some Israeli leaders believing that they have a divine right to all of the Promised Land that was given to Abraham and his “seed,” this would resonate with the defence of some Catholic leaders that Canon Law is above the law of the land. The parallels extend to paradoxes about those skirting the criminal justice system: How can “men of the cloth” who ostensibly represent holiness stoop to such evil acts? How can descendants of Holocaust survivors on the holy land preach “never again” yet practice or condone such inhuman acts? How can authorities charged with the custody of weaker parties, holy lands and minors betray that trust with crimes?

Both authorities may need to literally surrender land for peace. While the church may need to sell estates to pay for civil damages and criminal trials, the Israeli government may need to roll back the settlements so that Palestinians have a viable sovereign state.

There is growing disquiet among both church laity and Israeli citizenry over the skirting of criminal culpability. These voices prefer their leadership to “come clean” so that those corrupting their core values are exorcised: voices like veteran Israeli soldiers who testified against abuses in Breaking the Silence; voices like the Catholic laity who reconcile Canon Law with secular law.

The public faces of these powerful institutions – Cardinal George Pell and Benjamin Netanyahu – do not need to fear the criminal courts. But when they were silent about the unholy atrocities committed by their lower ranks, there were screams by those violated. By facing the law of the land, they are reconciling with the rest of the human family. This may earn them greater respect and openness, to replace the suspicion and resentment.

Joseph Wakim established the Streetwork Project for exploited children in Adelaide in 1986, was appointed Victorian Multicultural Affairs Commissioner in 1991, and founded the Australian Arabic Council in 1992. In 1996, he received the Commonwealth Violence Prevention Award for his anti-racism work. In 2001, he was awarded the Order of Australia Medal (OAM) for his anti-racism campaigns.