Kindness Amid Chaos - Good News from the Middle East

noreply@blogger.com (David Calder) — Fri, 27 Dec 2013 09:54:00 +0000

Hello Visitor and Welcome!

This blog is about good things in the Middle East, read, the Israeli - Palestinian conflict mostly, because that's the space my novel 'THE CHILDREN OF THE NAKBA' lives in.

It truly is.

But let's dip down in the abyss a moment.

Hold your hands up anyone who doesn't know what the Nakba was?

Ok, respectfully, you over there, I'm certain you have had a busy, centric life, but imagine like, Indiana; and everyone hates Kentucky and that's not far south, and suppose you have a reconstruction government (imagine the Civil War reached the far north and west) and suddenly you find all the churches have formed armies and want to attack east and overwhelm Ohio, and they want to stage a 1 million man army in your state, plus have another 3 million coming from Canada, and tell you to get out of the state while they do it. Plus they say if you do, you can come back in 3 months and have all the land you want. So you move to Illinois to get out of the way.

But Ohio doesn't lie down. They get volunteers from Quebec, and Jamaica and South Africa and they win and seize Indiana and all of Michigan, and dig in, armed by France with nukes! And 10 million people are displaced. Forever.

And Illinois can't handle the refugees so they expel them to Lapland, Argentina, St Thomas, and Guam, where they fester.

Multiply 5 fold, and that's the Nakba. The great displacement of souls, forever from their lands. But not their dreams.

My novel 'THE CHILDREN OF THE NAKBA' is about, literally, the children of the displaced, and the carnage they have wrought.

Something to ponder :-

Have a great New Years :)

David

noreply@blogger.com (David Calder) — Sat, 21 Dec 2013 23:18:00 +0000

Hello Visitor and Welcome!

My forthcoming novel 'THE CHILDREN OF THE NAKBA' deals with some stereotypes that have tainted relationships between Israel and its neighbors for eons. Under the surface you learn that in the end these were just children acting out what they'd been conditioned to do. Nothing else makes sense, or we are just animals frolicking on a Pliocene landscape, waiting for T-Rex to ruin our day.

For instance:

MYTH: The united Arab community hates the Jews, who in turn feel unloved (to put it mildly) and hunker down within the bastions of their military industrial complex, play with their deadly toys and sulk, except for the occasional pat on the back, or wagged finger from big brother America, after which they zig or zag to retain their massive US support. Their motto? Screw em all!

REALITY: People are conditioned not to expect the good works Israel does, and I am in turn conditioned not to believe and certainly not to perpetuate blatant propaganda, of which there is far too much on both sides.

But the following struck me as both verifiable and powerful, in the big scheme of things. Thank you to the relentlessly positive but in this case I believe right on the money, 'United with Israel'' site, December 18, 2013, for the following:

Israeli Aid Workers Trapped in Sudan

Israeli aid workers and hundreds more citizens of the Jewish state were caught up in the hostilities that broke out on Sunday night in the capital city of Juba.

IsraAid worker Ophelie Namiech (L) (Like they had to point that out)

“IsraAID, founded in 2001, is a non-profit, non-governmental organization committed to providing life-saving disaster relief and long term support,” its website explains. “For over a decade, IsraAid has been helping people all over the world overcome extreme crises and has provided millions with the vital support needed to move from destruction to reconstruction, and eventually, to sustainable living.”

In South Sudan, IsraAID is supporting “efforts to fight gender-based violence through professional capacity-building and cooperative programming with the government, the police, and local organizations.”

Ask yourself.

If this is an evil regime as the equally relentlessly Palestinian propaganda machine would have us believe, what are they doing in Sudan, where a Jew would stand out like graffiti?

This seems to me pure good works. Israel has no dog in that tragic fight.

If someone out there does know an ulterior motive, please comment at the bottom of this blog.

Till then, credit where it's due.

David

noreply@blogger.com (David Calder) — Sun, 15 Dec 2013 01:31:00 +0000

Hello Visitor and Welcome!

My forthcoming novel 'THE CHILDREN OF THE NAKBA' deals with an atrocity. Probably modern Israel's most famous one with; I think: the most interesting players ever in the whole Israeli-Palestinian conflict

But still an atrocity. That's plain and simple.

I should say up front that I'm not Jewish and I don't have a dog in the Middle East fight. I'm just a passionate writer with a sense of what I consider fairness. And there is plenty of blame to go around. But there are also many examples of un-self-serving kindness, even heroism related to that part of the world. True, you have to look beyond the propaganda on both sides to verify them, but I have created this blog to highlight those. Let the examples speak for themselves.

Myth: Arabs hate Jews and have done so since the First Aliyah, the 'farmer's settlement' of what was then Turkish Ottoman Palestine, beginning in 1882 and continuing off and on till 1903.

Fact: Israel recently awarded its 'Righteous Among the Nations' honor at its Holocaust memorial 'Yad Vashem', to Egyptian doctor Mohamed Helmy, for hiding a Jew named Anna Boros in Berlin during wartime. The award is the highest Israel can bestow upon a non-Jew in recognition for helping people to survive the WWII genocide.

Helmy lived in Berlin and hid several Jews during the Holocaust. Born in 1901 in Khartoum to an Egyptian father and a German mother, he went to Berlin in 1922 - 11 years before the Nazis came to power - to study medicine.

In 1938 the Nuremberg Laws, intended to remove Jews from all spheres of public life, were enacted against him when he was banned from his medical practice because racial quacks said he was not considered 'Ayran' - the term Nazis used to denote those they considered unworthy of equal status with Germans.

When the war began the regime started to systematically deport the capital's Jews to destinations in occupied Poland for extermination, including Auschwitz and Treblinka. Dr Helmy hid 21-year-old Boros, a family friend, at a cottage on the outskirts of the city, and provided her relatives with medical care against the strict instructions of the Nazi high command.

After Boros’ relatives admitted to Gestapo interrogators that he was hiding her he arranged for her to hide at an acquaintance’s house. Anna and four family members eventually escaped to Israel.

'The Gestapo knew that Dr Helmy was our family physician, and they knew that he owned a cottage. He managed to evade all their interrogations,' Boros, later Mrs Gutman, wrote after the war, according to Yad Vashem’s citation. 'Dr Helmy did everything for me out of the generosity of his heart, and I will be grateful to him for eternity.'

And the kicker?

Dr. Helmy's say they want nothing to do with it.

'If any other country offered to honor Helmy, we would have been happy with it,' said Mervat Hassan, the wife of Helmy’s great-nephew. 'But not from Israel. I do, however, respect Judaism as a religion, and I respect Jews. Islam recognizes Judaism as a heavenly religion.'

Until this kind of resistance to simple acts of kindness among the chaos is broken down, the world will stay a lesser place.

Thanks to the http://www.dailymail.co.uk/online for text for this posting.

David