Category Archives: Terrorism

Rohina Malik Unveils Our Common Humanity

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Last night JRC was honored to host a performance of the one-woman show “Unveiled,” by Rohina Malik. Breathtaking.

Rohina is a playwright, actress and solo artist of South Asian heritage who was born in London and emigrated to Chicago when she was 15.  She is an impressive and important contemporary artist – and her identity as an American Muslim woman clearly plays an important role in her art.

“Unveiled” is constructed around five monologues by five Muslim women. During the course of the play, each of them greets the audience in turn, “welcoming” us with tea.  Each woman tells the story of their lives, explains their Muslim culture and shares the experience of living as a Muslim woman in the post 9/11 world.

For her appearance at JRC last night, Rohina performed three monologues: “Maryam,” a Pakistani-American who has a dress making shop on Chicago’s Devon Avenue; “Shabana,” a young rapper of South Asian descent who was born and raised in London; and “Layla,” a Chicago restaurant owner from the Middle East who lost a brother to the fall of the twin towers.

It’s difficult to convey the cumulative effect these women had upon the audience. Rohina’s performances cut to the heart of painful and complicated political issues – but even more profound was the immediately empathy Rohina was able to conjure for us through these remarkable women. In a relatively short amount of time, she was able to bring us through an entire gamut of emotions – and in the end, the common humanity we shared with these women was palpable to everyone in the room.

Following the play we had an equally powerful post-performance discussion facilitated by the play’s director, Ann Filmer. Nearly 250 people were in attendance – including many members of the Chicagoland Muslim community – and it was truly a tribute to Rohina’s art that so many members of this large and diverse group were inspired to share deeply personal comments about their own lives and struggles.

If you live in the Chicago area, you should know that “Unveiled” will be starting a run at the Victory Gardens Theater on March 24. Highly, highly recommended.

In Memory of Howard Zinn, z”l

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I’ve been reading and listening to Howard Zinn’s work since learning of his death last week – and I’m become increasingly saddened at just what we’ve lost in his passing.  Here are just a few pieces that have moved me tremendously:

– Click above to see a clip in which Zinn  shares his thoughts on human nature and aggression.

– My friend Mark Braverman has posted a powerful and important piece by Zinn on the legacy of the Holocaust. An exerpt:

I would never have become a historian if I thought that it would become my professional duty to go into the past and never emerge, to study long-gone events and remember them only for their uniqueness, not connecting them to events going on in my time. If the Holocaust was to have any meaning, I thought, we must transfer our anger to the brutalities of our time. We must atone for our allowing the Jewish Holocaust to happen by refusing to allow similar atrocities to take place now—yes, to use the Day of Atonement not to pray for the dead but to act for the living, to rescue those about to die.

– One of his many columns for The Progressive, this one published four days after 9/11:

We need to imagine that the awful scenes of death and suffering we are now witnessing on our television screens have been going on in other parts of the world for a long time, and only now can we begin to know what people have gone through, often as a result of our policies. We need to understand how some of those people will go beyond quiet anger to acts of terrorism.

We need new ways of thinking. A $300 billion dollar military budget has not given us security. Military bases all over the world, our warships on every ocean, have not given us security. Land mines and a “missile defense shield” will not give us security. We need to rethink our position in the world. We need to stop sending weapons to countries that oppress other people or their own people. We need to decide that we will not go to war, whatever reason is conjured up by the politicians of the media, because war in our time is always indiscriminate, a war against innocents, a war against children. War is terrorism, magnified a hundred times.

Our security can only come by using our national wealth, not for guns, planes, bombs, but for the health and welfare of our people – for free medical care for everyone, education and housing guaranteed decent wages and a clean environment for all. We can not be secure by limiting our liberties, as some of our political leaders are demanding, but only by expanding them.

We should take our example not from our military and political leaders shouting “retaliate” and “war” but from the doctors and nurses and medical students and firemen and policemen who have been saving lives in the midst of mayhem, whose first thoughts are not violence, but healing, not vengeance but compassion.

Zichrono Livracha – may the memory of this righteous man be for a blessing.  And may we continue his work of bearing witness through our words and deeds…

Nurit Peled Elhanan’s Cry from the Heart

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Dr. Nurit Peled Elhanan is an Israeli woman whose 13 year old daughter was killed by a Palestinian suicide bomber in 1997. Shortly after, she helped found the Bereaved Parent’s Circle, a courageous Israeli-Palestinian coexistence group about which I’ve frequently written. It’s not an exaggeration to say that over the past two decades she has become one of the most important and eloquent members of the Israeli peace activist community.

On January 2, Peled Elhanan gave an emotional speech in Tel Aviv at a rally commemorating the one-year anniversary of Israel’s military assault on Gaza. I don’t know how else to describe it but as a primal scream – a cry from deep within the reaches of her heart.  It is a gut-wrenching read, but also, in its way, enormously edifying.  More than anything else I’ve read lately, it addresses head-on the poison that has been spreading through Israel’s soul – a phenomenon many fear to be true, but few are willing to identify out loud.

Please make sure to read all the way to the end, including the footnotes, which will help you to better understand her references, as well as the Jewish soul that throughly permeates her words.

Continue reading →

Parsing Ft. Hood

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I’ve been voraciously reading the various editorial reactions to the Ft. Hood shooting – and have found much of it to be confused at best and patently offensive at worst. If you’re eager for some intelligent commentary, I recommend this post from my friend Rabbi Nancy Fuchs-Kreimer, who took NY Times columnist David Brooks to task for his recent piece that explored the nature and causes of religious extremism, focusing exclusively on Islam.

Nancy writes:

Yes, there is evil in human hearts. Yes, religion can be the carrier of malevolent narratives. But it is both historically and ethically flawed to write a whole column devoted to this theme and never once even mention that Islam is not the only tradition that has this problem. Brooks speaks about suicide bombers and terrorists but he does not mention that we have seen these troubled tales of “us and them” played out by many other religious folks.

As a Jew, David Brooks might have had the grace to remind us that in 1994 an orthodox Jew,  Baruch Goldstein,  killed 29  Muslims and wounded 150 while they prayed in Hebron.  Like Dr. Hassan, Dr. Goldstein, also a physician,  was both a deeply troubled individual and a product of a deeply problematic version of his faith tradition.

Another adherent to a deeply problematic version of our faith tradition is Rabbi Yitzhak Shapira, head of the Od Yosef Chai Yeshiva in the West Bank settlement of Yitzhar, who recently published a book in which he opined that gentile babies and children can be killed if they pose a threat to the Jewish nation. This followed on the heels of the arrest of Jewish terrorist Yaakov Teitel, a West Bank settler who was charged with murdering two Palestinians in 1997 and bombing the home of a prominent Israeli professor last year.  (Teitel reportedly had this to say when arraigned in an Israeli courtroom: “It was a pleasure and an honor to serve my God. I have no regret and no doubt that God is pleased.”)

Intolerance is intolerance, regardless of the faith tradition to which it is attached.  As Nancy correctly points out, all religions can be carriers of malevolent narratives. And when deeply disturbed individuals such as Teitel and Hassan attach themselves to these toxic world views, we can predict all too well the tragic results.