Love and Peace

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My guess is that Israel and Palestine receive all this attention because a great many people, outside the conflict itself, have used this conflict for their own purposes, and have therefore flooded each and every aspect of the conflict with an excessive amount of symbolism. As an example, if Arab leaders want to deflect attention from the weaknesses of their own regimes, then casting undo attention on Israel is a good way of doing that. Or Jews, in some circles, may cast aspersions against Palestinians, as a way of supporting thier belief in illegal settlements or a Greater Israel.

Of course, the Holy Land is holy to a great many people, and what happens there is necessarily of consequence to people all over the world. But it comes to a point when the symbolism of it all can be a bit stifling, to say the least, and can paralyze the key players from doing what they need to do to point to the possibility of peace.

What is the solution? We may well have to look at what we believe through the filter of common sense. Instead of jumping to false belief and then rationalizing why we’re right, why not use rationality in the first place to bring us to what is worth believing in? Just because you believe in something, doesn’t make it true.

I also disagree with the other commentors that seem to accuse Esra’a of saying that the Holocaust it wasn’t terrible. On the contrary, to me her point is that is not the only case of horribleness in our world and that she’s very frustrated those other cases of horribleness also don’t get similar levels of attention.

As for my freedom of speech comment, I am trying to get at what defines, for you, freedom of speech. I have come across many people who define this extremely differently.

Freedom of speech does not mean freedom from being insulted. So, therefore, a parent and school board that called you a terrorist was exercising their freedom of speech. This is also not a case of censorship, contrary to Wladimir’s comment – censorhip implies an action by a official government body not a private citizen. Clearly, this parent couldn’t actually censor Esra’a since Esra’a returned from the US and blogged about it here.

we are living hard times with people trying to full the arb-isreali conflict,muslim-rest of the world conflic, iran -arab conflict ,sunni-shiaa conflict , racism has reached new levels ,no more white man-black man ,but we-them level ,and we most fight it every were and in every nationality

Esra’a keep the good work ,my idea is the bad people are big,rich and powerful ,but we can make a great fight against them ,so they will not enjoy their powers

Your experiences only prove to me that human rights are used for political goals only.

Wladimir of all the commenters here (who are either Israeli or Jewish and therefore appear to be very defensive) you are the only one who actually got my point, so thank you. No one is better than abusing human rights or taking advantage of defenders of human rights for self-serving goals than Israel and Iran, and my experience proved this spot on, from start to finish of this Summit. People can defend their ideologies all they want, but none of them were actually there, where the agenda and terminology was definite and clear which disturbed several of us independent activists who found this appalling.

not to mention what happened to Azmi Bishara.

Freedom of speech is one thing, but talking to the enemy (hizbulla) during war, accepting campaign money from them and telling them to shoot further inland where there are less Arabs and more Jews (since about half of the injured on the israeli side were israeli arabs) goes way beyond free speech, not just for an ellected government official, but for anyone be he muslim or jewish.

Azmi Bsara should have been shot on grounds of treason or maybe beheaded as they tend to do in Arab countries over less acite crimes