Mazel tov and kol hakavod to Parent’s Circle, an Israeli-Palestinian group of bereaved parents of victims of ethnic violence, which won the European Union Solidar medal for its work:
The Israeli-Palestinian Parents Circle – Families Forum is to receive the SOLIDAR organization’s Silver Rose Award for 2007. The award will be given in the International Peace and Reconciliation category.
Louisa Morgantini, deputy president of the European Parliament, known for her activism for human rights and social justice, submitted the Forum’s candidacy for the prize.
The prize will be awarded to the Families’ Forum at a ceremony in October at the European Parliament in Brussels. In addition to the ceremony, SOLIDAR will hold meetings between the award winners and leading decision-makers in Europe, members of the press, and representatives of peace organizations.
In the announcement of the award, SOLIDAR wrote: “…The judges were impressed by the devotion of and excellence of the candidates this year and the Israeli-Palestinian Parents Circle – Families Forum stood out, thanks to its tireless dedication to peace and reconciliation.”
In my experience, Parent’s Circle is one of the finest groups, with one of the most powerful missions among all those working on behalf of Israeli-Palestinian peace. If I were a Nobel Peace Prize nominator they’d be one of my first picks.
Click here to donate to, or purchase fine prodcuts offered by Parent’s Circle.
I attended a Parent’s Circle session in the spring at Brandeis.
Robi Damelin tried to impress us with how important it was for Palestinian to visit Yad Vashem and gave us a brief introduction to the ethnic Ashkenazi pogrom and persecution version of Jewish history by discussing the expulsion of Jews from England in the 13th century.
The usual history of Jews in the medieval period describes increaing strictures and persecution until the expulsion, but the hostility may have been tied to the slave trade in which English Jews were involved with the connivance of the king.
Yad Vashem must be considered an institution of propaganda because it provides no contextualization of the role that Soviet Ashkenazim played in mass murder, ethnic cleansing and genocide during the Russian Revolution and during the first decades of the Soviet Union.
Until ethnic Ashkenazim fully acknowledge and show remorse for their role in mass murder, ethnic cleansing, and genocide from the late 19-teens and through the 20th century and into the 21st century, the value of an organization like the Parents’ Circle is questionable.
Joachim: I don’t subscribe to your views of Parents Circle nor Yad Vashem.
I do not necessarily mind Parents’ Circle because it provides an opportunity for dialogue., Damelin may have been having a bad day, but the stuff she brough up about England was completely inappropriate, and Jews generally do not react very well when one challenges the quite often demonstrably false narratives with which they have indoctrinated themselves.
I also have met Nadwa Saranda as well and spent some time reading through all the reports of her sister’s murder in English, Hebrew and Arabic. I suspect the police investigation was botched (something not unusual in cases involving Arabs), but the real story probably does not involve Jewish settlers in any major way.
If Yad Vashem is a memorial, it belongs in E. Europe. If it is supposed to show us history, it is completely misguided because one cannot make sense of the Holocaust without knowing that Soviet Ashkenazim were up to their eyeballs in mass murder, ethnic cleansing and genocide by the 1930s.
Yad Vashem like Schindler’s List is part of the Zionist system of legitimation of the theft of Palestine from the native population, and it serves as distraction from the genocide that Zionists have committed and continue to commit in Stolen and Occupied Palestine.
Is this Joachim for real? What has medieval slave trade to do with this ? Jews as slave traders in Medieval England? when? where? documentation please. What is known about slave trading by Jews in Medieval England? What is ethnic Ashkenazim? what ethnos it is? what is the dif. between Ashk. and plain Jews? Is this for real? are they teaching this in USA Universities? can I have a citation from a peer rev. journal?
Joachim has some wild theories which I don’t subscribe to in any way whatsoever. Saying that Russian Jews had extermination coming to them because they somehow engaged in genocide themselves is outrageous & beyond the pale. Keep that stuff out of this blog. If you continue to publish these views here I’ll have to consider banning you.
Please take a look at Alex Chaihorsky’s comment on Mundoweiss ( http://www.philipweiss.org ).
http://www.philipweiss.org/mondoweiss/2007/06/re_joachim_mart.html#comment-74495332
and perhaps read the whole discussion.
After the fall of the Soviet Union, I was doing some work in the Ukraine and found more or less the same situation Alex describes.
My experience was partial inspiration for writing the following short article.
http://eaazi.blogspot.com/2007/02/pattern-of-ethnic-ashkenazi.html
As I remember Alex’s comments, he also connected Zionist barbarism with Soviet barbarism, and I believe of the participants on that blog, Alex, Alan, Arie, Philip and I all came to our current positions on Zionism and the State of Israel after spending time among Palestinians in either pre-1967 Israel or in the Palestinian Occupied Territories.
Because tonight starts Yom Kippur when the Jewish community is supposed to atone, it is probably a good idea to read this material through and reflect on it from sundown today until sundown tomorrow.
During the early middle ages Jews from Spain through India seem to have been heavily involved in the Slavic slave trade. It is interesting that at this time period, Rabbinic Jewish sources call Eastern Europe Knaan and not Eastern Ashkenaz, which became the later nomenclature among Rabbinical Jews. Rabbinical Jews called Slavs Knaanim, which is often also the word at this time period for a non-Jewish slave. During this time period variants of the word Slav became the word for slave from Spain through India.
The role of Jews in the slave trade may be the main reason why modern Judaism is mostly Rabbinical and not Karaite because the Geonim seem to have been more willing to accomodate the slave trade than Karaite sages.
The early medieval slave trade may be root of Jewish involvement in the banking because slave purchases often needed to be financed and debtors often became slaves to discharge their obligations.
The slave trade may also have provided the initial impetus for growing Jewish involvement in tax farming, estate management and medicine. Slavery connects to medicine because only slavers typically had enough cash to support the medical trade.
It is hard to find documentation of the Jewish involvement in the slave trade in English. Amitav Gosh translated a lot of Geniza documents written by or about a Jewish slaver in India. The book is called In an Antique Land, and Gosh is somewhat diffident about describing his subject’s source of income.
And before all the ethnic Ashkenazim that read this blog get uptight and freak out, I am talking about a time period before the Eastern European Ashkenazi ethnic group came into identifiable existence.
If you wish to learn more about the involvement of Jews in the early Medieval slave trade, you may have to visit England and study original sources.