Statement of Some Denver-Boulder Jews In Support of the Boulder-Nablus Sister City Project
Downtown Nablus
The following letter, originally signed by 11 local area Jews, has been submitted to the Boulder Daily Camera:
(Note: Although the letter has already been submitted, more names of people willing to sign keep coming in and as they do, I will post ALL of them here at the blog site which is also posted on Facebook; We are now up to 40 Jewish signers and two supporters with names still coming in)
To the Boulder Daily Camera:
We, the undersigned, members of the Boulder – Denver – Longmont more broadly based Jewish Community of Colorado, want to express our support for the current proposal being placed before the Boulder City Council, for Boulder to establish a `Sister-City’ relationship with the city of Nablus, West Bank, Palestine. People-to-People projects such as the “Sister City” program are highly effective in increasing good will, dialogue and open communication between and among communities. To this end we want to encourage the Boulder City Council to pass this resolution
Some of us who have signed this letter are religious Jews, some not, but we all believe such People-to- People initiatives are important and within Boulder’s long tradition of humanism and empathy for people everywhere. We see such a gesture very much as `a Jewish thing’ to do, to express our sympathy for a people who has long suffered and who deserves the justice and dignity long denied it. There is nothing anti-Semetic, anti-Jewish, or quite frankly, even anti-Israel about such an initiative as some have suggested. To the contrary, it is, instead, a gesture of friendship.
We urge the Boulder City Council to support this initiative.
Signed (in alphabetical order)
Members of the Jewish Community:
Bob Bronstein, Sonia Bronstein, Les Canges, Ira Chernus, Nancy Commins, Ami Dayan, Michael Dayan, Joel Edelstein, Melodye Feldman, Zhenya Gallon, Alan Gilbert, Joan Graff, Irving Greenbaum, Karla Horowitz, Cheryl Kasson, Jennifer Klein, Henry Kroll, Randall Kuhn, Leslie Lomas, Pat Madsen, Tom Mayer, Barbara Millman, Rabbi Adam Morris, Charles Nadler, Danny Postel, Abbie Prince, Mollly Prince, Rob Prince, Doug Reichlin, Dr. Ilene Naomi Rusk, Sheldon Sands, Miriam Schiff, Ruth Seagull, Lynn Segal, Barry Sharoff, Rob Smoke, Elissa Tivona, Evan Weissman, Juliet Wittman, Betty Zeitman
Supporters:
Arnie Carter, Pete Peterson
The Fey – Princes join about 125 others – half of them at least young Palestinians living in the Denver area, to protest the Israeli carpet bombing of Gaza. Nancy’s sign says `End the Occupation’, Molly’s says “Calling for Wisdom and Human Decency”
February 28, 3013
Boulder Colorado – Nablus, West Bank, Palestine Sister City Project: ADL Tried To Derail (What A Surprise!)
Palestinian Youth Arrested in West Bank for protesting Israeli bombing of Gaza…Jan, 2013
The Boulder-Nablus Sister City Project has been functioning out of Boulder Colorado for several years now. I don’t work with them, but have met and had coffee with a few of the key players in that organization and very much like the tone and the content of what they are trying to do – essentially build – if you like – `people to people’ relationships between Boulder Colorado and Nablus, West Bank, Palestine.
I would hope that the city of Boulder, with its humanistic, environmentally friendly traditions would not give into such pressures that they are now experiencing that would torpedo the project and that they, the city council, evaluate the Boulder-Nablus sister city project on its own, very considerable merits.
If, on some vague level, the project is – as the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) suggests – `political’, it is so in the sense that any and all human relationships are, on some level political, either for their direct political program or lack there of.The work of this project is thoughtful, carefully thought out and within a generically humanistic tradition of building non-governmental human bridges between Boulder, Nablus and the people in both places.
Actually it is not the project itself that is political so much as the Anti-Defamation League’s, brain-dead, narrow-minded, bullying and typically bigoted (when it comes to anything having to do with Middle East oriented peace activities) approach that has politicized the issue and made it into a political football that it shouldn’t be. Read more…
“I get by with a little help from my friends” lyrics to an old Beatles song.
Tunis Brique a l’oeuf maker…
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News reports suggest that Tunisia and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) are `very close’ to coming to terms over a $1.78 billion loan to the North African country to help navigate it through the current stormy economic seas. In the short term, there is no doubt that an accord of such a large amount to such a small country will help the country get through the next few years, and help stabilize what has been an unstable and increasingly unpopular transitional government. But at what price to the country’s medium and long term future? Rosy IMF projections that with the loan’s help, the Tunisian economy will grow by 4.5% next year are hardly credible.
There seems to be something of a `rush to the finish’, an effort on both the IMF’s and Tunisian government’s part to wrap up the negotiations as soon as possible. It is as if they are looking over their shoulders nervous that, as the agreement’s terms get out, opposition could grow among the Tunisian people, thus the mutual effort to get the whole thing over with as soon as possible. There is mounting concern within Tunisian civil society about the agreement, both in terms of the process which has been typically secretive and the “structural adjustment conditions” that the country will be forced to submit to in order to fulfill the Tunisian part of the deal.
In traditional IMF fashion, – the negotiations were very much `under wraps’ with virtually no input from anyone other than one member of the Tunisian Central Bank and another from the finance ministry. But in this post Ben Ali age of Tunisian freedom of speech, it turned out to be difficult to impossible to hid the agreement terms, which several talented Tunisian researchers have been able to unearth. Read more…
The Bread Machine Gunner Takes On Ben Ali’s Security Force…
(Note: This also appears at the Foreign Policy In Focus Website;
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Faced with a deepening socio-economic crisis that has only intensified since the collapse of the Ben Ali government in January, 2011, it appears more than likely that Tunisia is about to enter into a major agreement with the International Monetary Fund – IMF – for a $1.78 Billion loan. As is almost always the case, the loan is conditionally based upon Tunisia fulfilling what the IMF calls structural adjustment criteria, a part of which has already been implemented – eliminating the subsidies on fuel which has increased their cost.
All this is being done in the classic IMF fashion – with as little public discussion as possible either with the Tunisian government – its Constituent Assembly – or with Civil Society, which have had no input whatsoever into the process. For an international organization that talks the talk about `transparency’ its long held traditions of secrecy, especially where it concerns granting sizable loans to semi-peripheral and peripheral countries, is much more the norm.
That said, in this new post-Ben Ali era, confused and directionless as it is economically and politically, one thing that the Tunisian people have won is their freedom of speech. As a result, alas, (for IMF, Tunisian Central Bank and Finance Ministry bureacrats) it has more difficult to hide the details and conditions for this loan as in the past. A growing number of Tunisia’s talented political and economic researchers have been able to break through the traditional wall of silence to unearth the details of the loan and press the Tunisian government to do what it really seems to want to avoid – engage in a public, wide scale discussion on the loan itself, and more basically, on the direction of the economy itself.
Many of the revelations about the loans have appeared in Arabic, French and English at the Tunisian alternative media website, Nawaat.org., which has broken key elements of the story to the Tunisian public, enough so that government has been pressed to publicly respond. It is precisely this kind of discussion which has been missing from the Tunisian public since the Ennahdha-led government came to power in the October, 2011 elections.
The Imrali Promise and the New Middle East by Ayoub Massoudi
Kurdistan
(originally published at Nawaat.org)
(translated from the Arabic by Ibrahim Kazerooni and Rob Prince)
From all appearances, nothing short of the cornerstone for a regional Middle East civil war was laid on Imrali, a Turkish island in the southern region of the Sea of Marmara. Those who do not understand how to read history always fall behind. And those who are not acquainted with Abdullah Ocalan, the Kurdish leader and the message he sent out to his people on March 21, are not in a position to comprehend the depth and the enormity of the threat directed toward the Arab world and Middle East in general that this communication represents. Read more…
Guest Blogger: Molly Prince: Sand Creek and Suncor
Suncor, Commerce City, Colorado
by Molly Prince
Last April I read an incredible, beautiful book: The Spell of the Sensuous. It ends with a call from the author to KNOW your local environment and its issues. Well, that sounds nice I thought but I have no idea how to go about doing that. Researching it on-line makes my eyes glaze over.
In Denver this the past week, there have been three protests/marches about environmental issues. I wish there had been no need for them, but since there was a need, I was grateful to the organizers for making them happen. Among other things, these events served as a gateway for learning more about current local and global issues Read more…
