Category Archives: Islam & Muslims

Gwynne Dyer: Wars in Gaza & Burma—Will They Ever End?

By Gwynne Dyer,  December 21, 2023

#1 – Gaza: The Bombed, the Bombers, The Limits?

Today (or yesterday, or tomorrow), the known death toll of Palestinians in Gaza since October 7th will reach 20,000.

The deaths of Hamas fighters are included in the numbers that the Hamas-run health ministry releases, and in past clashes with Israel the overall statistics have not been inflated. Hamas understands that accuracy builds credibility. So let’s say 5,000 of the dead are Hamas fighters, although it’s an implausibly high number.

Continue reading Gwynne Dyer: Wars in Gaza & Burma—Will They Ever End?

An Israeli-Palestinian Family Faces The War, Clings Together

The Guardian — Dec. 20, 2023

I’m Israeli, my ex-husband is Palestinian – and our union has never been stronger

At this moment, no one understands our pain better than one another. My ex-husband and I are both clinging to what’s most familiar: the two of us, our kids, our family

It’s a Monday afternoon – just two weeks since 7 October – and I’m floating somewhere outside myself as I teach my weekly multimedia class at the university. I hear myself cracking jokes and responding to students’ questions. I feel myself smiling. But when I look down at my arms and hands as I pack up at the end of class, I don’t recognize my own body. There’s that familiar golden peachy tone, that skin that took Tel Aviv’s sun so many years ago, and carried it back with me to the US. And yet, I can’t quitej place these particular arms and hands.

But the phone, the phone is familiar. After I wave my last student goodbye, I pull it from my purse and read the latest messages. My ex-boyfriend in Tel Aviv – an Israeli vegan, anti-Zionist pacifist – tells me he’s now looking for a stun gun for self-protection.

Continue reading An Israeli-Palestinian Family Faces The War, Clings Together

Two by Dyer: A Just War In Gaza? And China: Is A Slow Future of Fizzle Underway?

Gwynne Dyer —

#1- Just War and the Gaza Strip

 December 5, 2023

Augustine of Hippo

“If you (Americans) were OK with us killing 5,000 children, you are OK with killing 10,000 children,” said Daniel Levy, a former Israeli diplomat who helped negotiate the Oslo peace accords in the 1990s. That’s what Israeli diplomats really think of US policy, he says.

This implies that Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) both dismiss US Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s strenuous warnings about the need to avoid high Palestinian casualties in the renewed bombing as just so much hot air.

Continue reading Two by Dyer: A Just War In Gaza? And China: Is A Slow Future of Fizzle Underway?

CNN: “It’s Complicated”— Why Israel’s peace activists are reevaluating their position on the war

CNN: Why Israel’s peace activists are reevaluating their position on the war

By Tara John and Lottie Beilin

Sun Dec 3 2023

Tel Aviv (CNN) — When human rights activist Ziv Stahl was awakened to the booms of rocket fire on October 7, while staying at her sister’s home in Kibbutz Kfar Aza, she did not for a moment anticipate the scale of the terrorist attack unfolding around her. Nor did she imagine the horror she would feel when she later called the police, who “basically told me no one is coming.”

That day saw Hamas militants murder her sister-in-law and several prominent peace activists living in the kibbutz, one of the communities that bore the brunt of the attack on Israel. Continue reading CNN: “It’s Complicated”— Why Israel’s peace activists are reevaluating their position on the war

Justice and “Justice?” in Prisoner/Hostage Swap: More Gaza Bible Study

[NOTE: It is a delicate matter to complain about the Israeli justice system. Was there any justice in the Hamas attacks? (Not a rhetorical question: I say NO.) Any “due process”? Right to an attorney, etc.? Of course not.

And that’s not the only reason for being measured here.  As the New York Times reported in September:
Since 2002, roughly 780 detainees have been held at the American military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Now, 30 remain. Of those, 11 have been charged with war crimes in the military commissions system — 10 are awaiting trial and one has been convicted. In addition, three detainees are held in indefinite law-of-war detention and are neither facing tribunal charges nor being recommended for release. And 16 are held in law-of-war detention but have been recommended for transfer with security arrangements to another country. Continue reading Justice and “Justice?” in Prisoner/Hostage Swap: More Gaza Bible Study