Tuesday, December 15, 2009

No tears in Copenhagen, if Palestinians set fire to a synagogue

From: earthactionnetwork@earthlink.net

http://www.grist.org/article/2009-12-13-no-time-for-tears-in-copenhagen

Hi. Serendipitously, Bill McKibben is featured guest today on
Democracy Now's cast from inside the convention auditorium
at the conference. Amy and he are joined by two women, from
Kenya and one of the Pacific Islands. Very astute, and moving.
ed

No time for tears in Copenhagen

by Bill McKibben
13 Dec 2009 10:16 AM

COPENHAGEN-I've spent the last few years working more than fulltime to
organize the first big global grassroots climate change campaign. That's
meant shutting off my emotions most of the time-this crisis is so terrifying
that when you let yourself feel too deeply it can be paralyzing. Hence, much
gallows humor, irony, and sheer work.

This afternoon I sobbed for an hour, and I'm still choking a little. I got
to Copenhagen's main Lutheran Cathedral just before the start of a special
service designed to mark the conference underway for the next week. It was
jammed, but I squeezed into a chair near the corner. The Archbishop of
Canterbury, Rowan Williams, gave the sermon; Desmond Tutu read the Psalm.
Both were wonderful.

But my tears started before anyone said a word. As the service started
dozens of choristers from around the world carried three things down the
aisle and to the altar: pieces of dead coral bleached by hot ocean
temperatures; stones uncovered by retreating glaciers; and small, shriveled
ears of corn from drought-stricken parts of Africa.

As I watched them go by, all I could think of was the people I've met in the
last couple of years traveling the world: the people living in the valleys
where those glaciers are disappearing, and the people downstream who have no
backup plan for where their water is going to come from. The people who live
on the islands surrounded by that coral, who depend on the reefs for the
fish they eat, and to protect their homes from the waves. And the people, on
every corner of the world, dealing with drought and flood, already unable to
earn their daily bread in the places where their ancestors farmed for
generations.

Those damned shriveled ears of corn. I've done everything I can think of,
and millions of people around the world have joined us at 350.org in the
most international campaign there ever was. But I just sat there thinking:
it's not enough. We didn't do enough. I should have started earlier.

People are dying already. People are sitting tonight in their small homes
trying to figure out how they're going to make the maize meal they have
stretch far enough to fill the tummies of the kids sitting there waiting for
dinner. And that's with 390 parts per million CO2 in the atmosphere. The
latest numbers from the computer jockeys at Climate Interactive - A
collaboration of Sustainability Institute, Sloan School of Management at
MIT, and Ventana Systems, indicate that if all the national plans now on the
table were adopted the planet in 2100 would have an atmosphere with 770
parts per million CO2. What then for coral, for glaciers, for corn? I didn't
do enough.

I cried all the harder a few minutes later when the great cathedral bell
began slowly tolling 350 times. At the same moment, thousands of churches
across Europe began ringing their bells the same 350 times. And in other
parts of the world-from the bottom of New Zealand to the top of Greenland,
Christendom sounded the alarm. And not just Christendom. In New York rabbis
were blowing the shofar 350 times. We had pictures rolling in from the
weekend's vigil, from places like Dhahran in Saudi Arabia, where girls in
burkas were forming human 350s, and from Bahrain, and from Amman.

And these tears were now sweet as well as bitter-at the thought that all
over the world (not metaphorically all over the world, but literally all
over the world) people had proven themselves this year. Proven their ability
to understand the science and the stakes. Proven their ability to come
together on their own-in October, when we organized what CNN called "the
most widespread day of political action in the planet's history," there
wasn't
a movie star or rock idol in sight-just people rallying around a scientific
data point. Now the world's religious leaders were adding their voice.

On one side: scientists. And archbishops, Nobelists, and most of all
ordinary people in ordinary places. Reason and faith. On the other side,
power-the kind of power that will be assembling in the Bella Center all week
to hammer out some kind of agreement. The kind of power, exemplified by the
American delegation, that so far has decided it's not worth making the kind
of leap that the science demands. The kind of power that's willing to do
what's politically pretty easy, but not what's necessary. The kind that
would condemn the planet to 770 ppm rather than take the hard steps we need.

So no more tears. Not now, not while there's work to be done. Pass the Diet
Coke, fire up the laptop, grab the cellphone. To work. We may not have done
enough, but we're going to do all we can.

CommentsBill McKibben, a scholar-in-residence at Middlebury College, is the
author of a dozen books, most recently The Bill McKibben Reader. He serves
on Grist's board of directors and is cofounder of 350.org.

--
This was from Mha Atma's Earth Action Network email list. To subscribe:
earthactionnetwork@earthlink.net. More info: www.earthactionnetwork.org

"The most alarming sign of the state of our society now is that the
leaders have to courage to sacrifice the lives of young people in war but
have not the courage to tell us that we must be less greedy and less
wasteful."

--Wendell Berry

***

From: Sid Shniad
Subject: Try to imagine the reaction if Palestinians had set fire to a
synagogue

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/14/world/middleeast/14mideast.html

West Bank Is Tense After Arson at Mosque

By ISABEL KERSHNER
New York Times: December 14, 2009

YASUF, West Bank — Passions ran high on Sunday in this Palestinian village
in the northern West Bank two days after arsonists, presumed by Palestinians
and many Israelis to be Jewish extremists, set fire to the central mosque.

A delegation of Jewish religious leaders and activists, including some from
West Bank settlements, tried to reach the village to express their
abhorrence of the attack. But the Israeli Army prevented the group from
entering Yasuf for security reasons as enraged villagers proclaimed that the
visitors would not be welcome.

"The people will not allow it," said Wasfi Hassan, a local farmer. "It is
like killing a man, then going to his funeral."

An acrid odor hung in the air outside the mosque on Sunday. Inside, a pile
of cinders marked the spot where holy books had apparently been emptied off
library shelves and burned; words were still legible on some loose, singed
pages of the Koran.

The walls were charred, and a black groove snaked across the carpet of the
prayer hall to a back wall, following the arsonists' gasoline trail. Hussam
Abd al-Fattah, the muezzin at a small nearby mosque, said that worshipers
spotted the fire on Friday as they returned from dawn prayers, and that
neighbors rushed in to help extinguish the flames.

On the front stoop of the mosque, the vandals left graffiti in Hebrew that
read, "Price tag — Greetings from Effi."

Price tag is the name of a provocative policy developed by some radical
settlers last year. It calls for settlers and their supporters to respond to
any move by the Israeli authorities against the settlements or illegal
outposts, usually by attacking Palestinian property. The villagers assume
the attack was meant as revenge for the Israeli government's recently
declared temporary moratorium on new building in Jewish settlements in the
West Bank.

Effi, a Hebrew nickname for Efraim, is also an acronym for a far-rightist
group.

Munir Abbushi, the Palestinian Authority governor of the Salfit region,
which includes Yasuf, a village of about 2,000 people, said there were at
least 23 settlements built in the region. He said the Israeli government
"supports the settlers day and night."

Mr. Abbushi rejected the notion that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict could
turn into a religious struggle. "It is a national conflict. We want an
independent state, without settlers," he said.

But Palestinian schoolchildren brought to demonstrate in Yasuf on Sunday
shouted, "Khaibar, Khaibar ya Yahud," evoking a legendary battle between the
Prophet Muhammad and the Jews of the Khaibar oasis, who were forced to
surrender.

Over the weekend Israeli leaders harshly condemned the attack on the mosque.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said there was "no place for violence of
any sort, neither Jews against Palestinians nor Palestinians against Jews."
He said he had ordered the security services to try to "apprehend the
perpetrators and bring them to justice as quickly as possible."

President Shimon Peres called the arson a "grave act" that "stands against
all the values of the State of Israel."

The chief rabbi of Israel planned to visit Yasuf on Monday.

Mainstream settler leaders also condemned the desecration of the mosque. But
the Samaria Regional Council, which represents the northern settlements,
questioned the widespread assumption that it was perpetrated by Jews.

In Yasuf, villagers recounted years of problems with settlers in the area,
blaming them for a range of ills, including what they said was the poisoning
of a spring and the theft of sheep.

Since the Jewish delegation could not enter the village on Sunday, Mr.
Abbushi, the district governor, went to the nearest army checkpoint to meet
them. Led by Rabbi Menachem Froman of the settlement of Tekoa, a fervent
advocate of Jewish-Arab coexistence, the group sang a traditional song of
Hanukkah, the Jewish festival of lights, which is being celebrated now,
about banishing the darkness.

The Israeli defense minister, Ehud Barak, on Sunday ordered the removal of a
religious seminary in the Samarian settlement of Har Bracha from a
government-approved program that combines army service and Torah study,
because the rabbi of the seminary encouraged his students to refuse any
orders to evacuate settlements.

Also on Sunday, the Israeli cabinet approved a plan to change Israel's map
of national priority areas to include several isolated West Bank
settlements, along with large areas populated by Jews and Arabs in the
country's north and south. The plan has been sharply criticized by the
Israeli left because of the inclusion of the settlements, which will now be
entitled to additional government financing.

Many Israelis saw the adjusted map as an attempt by the government to
appease the settlers, who are furious about the building halt.

Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator, said in a statement that the
new map "serves as a blueprint for future settlement expansion."

He continued: "It reveals the extent to which Israel's 'settlement
moratorium' is a sham."

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