In Memory of a Freedom Fighter: Yasser Arafat

 
Arafat's legacy will be written and rewritten by those who believed in his vision of Palestinian legitimacy, sovereignty and national independence, says Leila Diab.

 
With an olive branch held in his hand, and a memorable trademark vision of a Palestinian freedom fighter that so proudly wore a black and white checkered Palestinian keffiyeh, the President of Palestine, Yasser Arafat reached his journey's end. Upon his passing on November 11, 2004, President Arafat, better known as Abu Ammar, symbolized an eternal life struggle of liberation, Statehood, hope and peace for the Palestinian people and their neighbors.

In a life filled with many obstacles and struggles to survive, Abu Ammar's intelligent skills of extinguishing internal and external circumstances were innate gifts of a skillfully statesman. He had won the hearts and minds of the international community's world leaders, and the Muslim world. While the Palestinian people trusted his determination to achieve a Palestinian State, on November 15, 1988, the Palestinian National Council in Algiers adopted a Declaration of Independence of the State of Palestine. Despite Arafat's years of exile outside and inside Palestine; and his caged presence in Ramallah as the President of Palestine, he never faltered or abandoned his will to fight for the rights and independence of the Palestinian people. Arafat lived his life with the belief that 'through many great struggles comes victory.'

Arafat's legacy will be written and rewritten by those who believed in his vision of Palestinian legitimacy, sovereignty and national independence. Unfortunately, there will be those who ascribe to the destruction or denial of all of the above.

President Arafat's undeniable genius legacy and the heroic quintessence of the Palestinian people's will to resist oppression and an illegitimate occupation of its people and land, has endured in the struggle to triumph, as well as, to survive antagonistic foes, foes who are on the wrong side of international law and covenants.

Arafat's life was fraught with its ups and downs, calculations and miscalculations. However, his compassionate message and ability to extend his hand in peace, friendship and welcome people from all over the world to see, listen and hear the injustices of the Palestinian people in an effort to revive an eluding peace, were endless.

Arafat's legacy will hopefully be remembered as his undying connection to the Palestinian people, their identity, and to the land of Palestine. And as a man who wanted peace, but never lived to fulfill his dream.

The befallen Palestinian revolutionary leader, Abu Ammar, will be remembered as the 'ruhms' (symbol) of self-determination, the father of the revolution, and the President of Palestine. His roots and the olive tree are still alive.

When Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian leadership were exiled in Lebanon from 1970 to 1982, many prominent world leaders, African Americans, Native Americans, congressmen, and delegations of peacemakers would travel to Lebanon on fact finding group missions to visit the Palestinian refugee camps and hold special meetings with Chairman Arafat, in search of peace. The first thing they noticed when they walked into Arafat's Beirut office was a large bright green banner outlined in a gold fringe, with an embroidered written message on it. It said, "One does not live twice to see glory."

President Yasser Arafat saw glory more than once. May he rest in peace.

  Saturday 22 January 2005

  Senior scientific advisers to the World Health Organisation (WHO) have recommended the creation of a genetically modified version of the smallpox virus to counter any threat of a bioterrorist attack.

  Permitting researchers to engineer the genes of one of the most dangerous infections known to man would make it easier to develop new drugs against smallpox, the scientists said. But the man who led the successful global vaccination campaign to eradicate smallpox from the wild said he opposed the move on the grounds that the scientific benefits were not worth the risks to public health.

  Professor Donald Henderson, of the Centre for Biosecurity at the University of Pittsburgh, said he feared that tinkering with the genetic makeup of the variola virus - which causes smallpox - might accidentally produce a more lethal form of the disease.

  "What I worry about is that there is rather too much done in this area and the minute you start fooling around with it in various ways, I think there is a danger," Professor Henderson said. "I'd be happier if we were not doing it and the simple reason is I just don't think it serves a purpose I can support. The less we do with the smallpox virus and the less we do in the way of manipulation at this point I think the better off we are."

  Laboratory stocks of smallpox are stored at only two locations - one in America and one in Russia - but there are fears that samples of the virus may have fallen into the hands of terrorists.

  Scientists advising the WHO believe that creating a GM form of the virus would accelerate research into developing new antivirals. The WHO is due to consider the recommendations of its scientific committee at the world health assembly in May.

  Four years ago, scientists in Australia genetically modified a mousepox virus and inadvertently created a highly virulent strain that could not be stopped by vaccination. But the WHO insisted the latest proposal to engineer the human smallpox virus was inherently safer.

  Professor Geoffrey Smith of Imperial College London, who chairs the WHO committee for variola virus research, said American scientists simply wanted to insert a jellyfish gene, which produced a glow under fluorescent light, in order to see the virus better under the microscope.

  "The reason why the proposal was made and the reason why the committee was prepared to consider it was that it is clear that there is a need to develop drugs against the virus," Professor Smith said. "The quickest way to screen a large database of compounds is to have an automated way and if you have a virus that expresses the green fluorescent protein you can do the drug screening in a much more rapid and automated way."

  It is understood there are seven recommendations in the proposal, including permission to allow relatively large fragments of the virus - up to 20 per cent of its entire genome - to be shipped from the two secure laboratories to other research institutes in the world. Another recommendation allows Russian and US laboratories to snip small fragments of the virus and insert them into other members of the same pox-virus family.

  Smallpox is one of the biggest killers in the history of infectious diseases. At least 300 million people died of it in the 20th century alone. It was eradicated in 1977.

    Friday 21 January 2005

Every individual soldier has the moral right to decide whether he will put his life on the line.

    Earlier this week, I came out publicly against the war in Iraq. I'm not the only member of the Labour Party to be opposed to our military participation in this American-led adventure, nor am I the only soldier. In fact, there growing vocal minority within the Territorial Army that is against the war. Nonetheless I am the first one to make it clear, in public, that if called to serve in Iraq, I will refuse.

    This has not been a decision arrived at impulsively. I have never believed in the rightness of this war; in fact I was on the big anti-war March in February 2003. Even then - before the absence of the weapons of mass destruction that Prime Minister Blair and President Bush cited as the principal reason to rush to war was admitted by all - I was astounded that they could take us to war when it was clear the majority of the population was opposed. Members of the Labour Party at the time were talking about practicing an "ethical foreign policy", and yet there was nothing ethical about the way this was being planned and sold to the public.

    It was not as though there was no alternative at the time. Hans Blix, the chief UN weapons inspector, and UN Secretary General Kofi Annan had both pressed for more time before the final decisions were taken. And much of the rest of the world, both governments and their peoples, were saying, "Let's get this investigation sorted before we start blowing up human beings."

    I could have quietly left the Army then, without fuss; you can resign from the Territorial Army if you've not actually been called up to serve in action. But from boyhood I had wanted to be a soldier; in fact, when I was 22 I had taken advantage of my dual Cypriot-British citizenship, and done national service for the Greek army in Cyprus. Later I had joined the TA, as a medic, and I was proud to be a part of that institution, and bound to my friends and comrades there, some of whom agreed with me about the futility, immorality and illegality of the war. None of us had been called up yet, so we succumbed to the all too human temptation to put off the evil day until it was upon us. In the end, quite a few did resign, and others who were called up deliberately failed their medical examinations.

    But although I stayed on a while longer, in the last year, when two of my comrades returned wounded, I began thinking seriously about what I could do to help end this continuing war. I began to do a lot of research, learning everything I could about the illegality and immorality of our occupation of Iraq. And I started to go on the anti-war demos that continue around the country. I listened to peace campaigners and soldiers who had been out there, and MPs like George Galloway. I would recommend similar research to any soldier who is having doubts about the war.

    Finally, one day about a month ago, I stood up at a demo in my local London borough of Hackney and just said "I want to get out of this, but what can I do?" It became clear that working with Military Families Against the War, I could make public my despair, my anger and my intention to refuse any call-up to serve in Iraq.

    I wanted to leave the TA in the public way I have because, although so many solders are against this war, they don't have a rallying point. There has to be someone who is the first to go. After that, there will be another and another and another. They're out there, the soldiers who want to make plain their refusal to part of this illegal war - I know, I've talked to them.

    Many people, even those who agree with my views on the war, will say that it is not the place of soldiers to decide which wars they will fight; that decision must be taken by their senior officers, and ultimately by the government of the day. But you should only obey orders that are morally right. The WMD claims were untrue, and so many other lies were told in the pursuit of this war. Every individual soldier also has the moral right to decide whether he will put his life on the line. After all, it is his flesh and blood that gets wounded; that gives him the right to an opinion.

    And in the modern army, not every opinion will be the same. No longer do soldiers come from a uniform cultural background. The Army wants lots of ethnic groups, and now that they've got them, they have to accept that there will be different points of view. Think of the position of Muslims in the Army. My own background as Greek Cypriot has made me aware of some distasteful things that the British military did in Cyprus in the Fifties; so I too have a different perspective. If the Government wants their soldiers to fight, they will have to be clear and honest about what they are asking them to do.

    I'm proud to be part of the military family that is against the war. There will be more soldiers coming out soon, and I'll be proud to stand next to them on 19 March at the anti-war demo in London. We can help stop this illegal and immoral war, and that is our duty now.

    If any soldier would like to contact George Solomou or Military Families Against the War, they can do so at the Military Families Against the War Website.

By: Bill McKibben

Have you ever been in a hopeless situation? Perhaps it seemed that nothing good could come out of what was happening. If you have been there, you can empathize with those who experience the helpless feeling that comes at such a time.

Acts 27:18-20 is part of an account written by Luke about a sea journey that came to a point where the situation looked hopeless. He wrote, “And we being exceedingly tossed with a tempest, the next day they lightened the ship; And the third day we cast out with our own hands the tackling of the ship. And when neither sun nor stars in many days appeared, and no small tempest lay on us, all hope that we should be saved was then taken away.” It seemed things could not possibly get any worse.

Paul the Apostle had appealed his case to Caesar and was being taken to Rome. After the ship set sail, there were problems—the weather turned against them. The ship floundered in the tempest, and all hope of rescue or of safely making it to land was gone. There was nothing left to do but wait for the end. However, though the men on board that ship were certainly helpless in the face of such a storm, they were not hopeless. You see, God was aware of their situation. With God, we are never hopeless.
A number of accounts in the Word of God illustrate this. In Mark 5, we read of the man who lived among the tombs of Gadera. A demonic spirit possessed him, and that spirit had such power that when the people tried to bind him with chains, he broke the fetters. No doubt it seemed like a hopeless situation to the people in the town of Gadera—but it was not. One day Jesus made His way into the region, and when He came upon this poor, tormented man, He told the evil spirit, “Come out of him.” Just a short time later, the people of Gadera came and found that man clothed and in his right mind, and seated at the feet of Jesus. There are no hopeless situations with God!

In 2 Chronicles we read of a king named Jehoshaphat. He was confronted by a military situation that appeared to be desperate. His enemies, the Moabites and the Ammonites, had decided to come down and destroy his land, and destruction was imminent. He looked at all the resources at his disposal, and realized that they were insufficient—they were going to lose the battle. Jehoshaphat took the right steps. He went to God and told him the situation, saying, “Neither know we what to do . . . our eyes are upon thee.” In what seemed like a hopeless situation, he turned to God for hope, who intervened on his behalf. God always has the answer, even when it seems there is none! We serve a God in whom all hope dwells.

I recently heard a story about a man, in a country overseas, who had spent his life building a home, a little business, and an orphanage next to the business. He was trying to do his best to win people in his area to Christ. His country was engaged in a civil war, and one day soldiers came through and completely destroyed the orphanage, his business, and his home. As he sat there and watched the smoke going up from his life’s work, someone came to him and said, “It’s hopeless; it is all gone.” The man looked up and said, “But we still have Christ!” What inspiring words! When all is gone, if we have Christ, we are not hopeless.

When Luke penned the words about his sea voyage with the Apostle Paul, he was looking back at quite a momentous journey. They were in a tempest like none they had ever seen before. They had given up every hope of being saved. An interesting thing happened about that time, though. The Apostle Paul appeared on deck. He said to the people on the ship, “And now I exhort you to be of good cheer.”

Speculate for a moment how those people might have reacted to Paul’s words. Don’t you love it when people come to you and say, “Cheer up!” when you are going through a trial? Oh, we may smile and say, “Thank you,” but what we would like to say to them is, “You don’t have a clue as to what is happening. You don’t know the pain I’m going through. You don’t know how hard it is on my job, in my family, with my children. You don’t understand!”

But maybe they do understand! Maybe they know the God who brings hope. Maybe they know that God can take a seemingly impossible situation and turn it around through His power. Paul told the people that day, “Be of good cheer: for there shall be no loss of any man’s life among you, but of the ship. For there stood by me this night the angel of God, whose I am, and whom I serve, Saying, Fear not, Paul; . . . lo, God hath given thee all them that sail with thee. Wherefore, sirs, be of good cheer: for I believe God.” Situations are not hopeless if we believe God!

Several years ago, I was pastoring a small church in central California. My wife and I had two children, and life was going smoothly. Then we found that we had another child on the way, and that was a blessing. Early one Thanksgiving morning, we took a trip to the hospital and a little girl was born. Even when it is your second or third child, birth is such a miracle. We were in awe and so happy as we prepared to take our new little daughter home.

As we were packing to leave the hospital, the doctor came in and said, “I would like to take an X-ray of your baby. I heard something funny with her heart.” They did the X-ray and the doctor said, “There is nothing to worry about.” I was relieved, but then he added, “However, you should bring her in tomorrow.” The next day, we did so. He listened to her heart and said, “There is nothing to worry about, but I would like for you to make an appointment with a specialist at the children’s hospital about an hour from here.”

We went home and made the appointment, and about one week later we made the trek to the city of Fresno, to the office of a pediatric cardiologist. He listened to her heart, and finally said, “I don’t think there is anything to worry about, but I would like to schedule her for a test at the hospital.” I was getting tired of hearing that there was nothing to worry about but that more tests were needed.

I still remember driving down Highway 384, looking at the fruit trees on both sides. The trees had no leaves, and that is how I felt—a sort of dead feeling. Our baby was in a car seat in the back, and my wife was sitting next to me. I looked over at her and saw the tears running down her face. Finally she took my hand and said, “What are we going to do?” I did not feel very brave, and my words seemed a bit hollow, but I said to her, “I guess we will do what we have always done—we will just trust God.” I did not have a lot of faith that day, but I did not know what else to do. I felt so helpless.

We went home and laid our little girl in her cradle. We knelt down next to it and prayed, “God, we gave her to You before she was born, and she is still Yours. You take care of her.” On the scheduled day, we went to the hospital, and there the doctor told us that our daughter had something wrong with a heart valve. He drew pictures and said, “I can hear a noise and see what is happening. There is no back pressure. This situation always creates certain problems, but it is not creating these problems this time. We will need to watch it.” Well, Someone was watching the situation long before the doctor began watching it. We now have a healthy daughter who can keep up with anyone. She may need testing later, but we are not without hope.

Whatever your situation, God has the answer. If you are living without Christ in your heart, you might think your life is a mess and that it can never be unraveled. You might think the devastation in your situation is unfixable. However, though you might be helpless, you are not hopeless. Jesus is here to make a difference in your life like He did for the man in the tombs of Gadera, for King Jehoshaphat, and for my family.

Perhaps you serve the Lord and have not told anyone that the storms have been raging in your life, that the tackling has been thrown overboard, and that you have not seen the stars for many days. Be of good cheer. The God you serve is on the scene of your life today! God can make a way when it seems there is none. Toss your helplessness at His feet, and hope in Him. God will make a way for you!

And remember, whatever your state is today, you can have a hope of eternal life—a hope that someday all tears will be gone, all suffering will be over, and you will spend eternity with God. What a glorious hope is ours!

Bill McKibben is the pastor of the Apostolic Faith Church in Richmond, California.

Back to the Brothel

Naka Nathaniel/NYTimes.com Srey Mom.

Two Misplaced Souls Decide They Might as Well Live

Strand Releasing Birol Unel and his bride, Sibel Kekilli, in "Head-On," a German film set among immigrants in the gritty reaches of working-class Hamburg.

ove doesn't just hurt in the jagged German romance "Head-On"; it cuts and bleeds and even kills. A story about a lonely man and a still-lonelier woman fighting against their worlds and what often seems like their own best interests, the film has caused a stir in Germany for the murky, troubling light it sheds on the lives of the country's Turkish immigrants. Its popularity made it a fleeting social phenomenon and a minor cultural footnote. But it doesn't explain why this film about two strangers with suicidal tendencies and a deep commitment to self-aggrandizing drama is the first very good movie of this very young year.

One of the truisms about romances, even those shaded pitch black and set to banging rock music, is that you have to fall in love with the characters when they're falling for each other. It takes a long time for Cahit (Birol Unel) and Sibel (Sibel Kekilli) to get inside each other's heads, much less anywhere else.

The couple meet in a nasty, classically punk fashion at a mental institution, where they have both landed after trying to commit suicide. Cahit drove a car into a brick wall; Sibel slit her wrists, and probably not for the first time. He is dying for a drink and likely dying from drink. Meanwhile, what Sibel needs more than anything else, more than a nip or a prescription for Zoloft, is a Turkish husband.

The only daughter in a strict German-Turkish family, Sibel has a broken nose and scarred arms, and is living a life of everyday brutality.

The character was born in 1980's Hamburg, but for Fatih Akin, who both wrote and directed "Head-On," she might as well be living in another century or any cloistered society where women are kept captive by their fathers and brothers and called whores for wearing short skirts. Sibel's father happens to be a conservative Muslim. Yet for Mr. Akin, the son of Turkish guest workers who immigrated to Germany and ended up in Hamburg, where he was born, religion is not specifically, or at least exclusively, the problem. The problem is how faith becomes dogma, a prison sentence and worse.

For Sibel, the solution to that problem is a husband who can pass muster with her father, which is how she and Cahit end up under the same roof. Movingly played by both Mr. Unel and Ms. Kekilli, the couple enter the arrangement with no illusions, their relationship developing in reverse of the typical romance: they start off steeped in cynicism and doubt, and in separate beds. Cahit, who's on a long downward spiral, betrays little interest in Sibel and the world from which she comes, and it soon becomes clear why. During the couple's wincingly comic courtship, when Cahit is playing nice and sober opposite Sibel's sanctimonious father, her thuggish brother sneers about the suitor's fumbling Turkish, asking what he did with it. Cahit answers coolly, "I threw it away."

In time, Mr. Akin reveals why Cahit lets this lost lamb into his fold, though he doesn't really try to explain the character's rationale or go spelunking in the darker recesses of his mind. People are strange and filled with contradictions, and sometimes that's all you need to know.

Cahit is as haunted by the past as Sibel is plagued by the present. Both are slaves to loves: he of heartbreak, she of her father and his God. For his troubles, Cahit wears the mantle of tragic hero, a role the charismatic Mr. Unel embraces with exuberant, tangible heat. Sibel, meanwhile, embodies the film's divided conscience. Split between two cultures, yearning for life and for death, the character is struggling to declare not just her independence, but her very being.

"Head-On" may offend those who endorse cultural relativism, no matter how noxious its consequences, or forget that freedom from religion is as essential as freedom of religion. Mr. Akin's commitment to his characters is uncompromising, as is his humanity, which makes a mockery of the kind of politically correct pieties that often plague stories about cultural outsiders. Unlike, say, Ken Loach in his last film, the nauseatingly smug "Ae Fond Kiss," Mr. Akin doesn't presume to know how to tie up religious, cultural and sexual differences in a neat package.

Germany, it emerges, is no more hospitable to Cahit and Sibel than the couple's own family and background. It also isn't any better for non-Turkish Germans. That's tough on this unlikely pair, but it's not the end of them, either.

Despite the tears, the blood and the booze, "Head-On" is a hopeful film, if for no other reason than Cahit and Sibel can't be sized up or pinned down, their troubles filed under immigration and assimilation. Their tribulations are at once specific and universal, by turns grimly funny and darkly ironic. Set principally against the grubby environs of working-class Hamburg, in dives and derelict apartments, the film has a terrific sense of place. The city's grubbiness works a vivid contrast to the visions of Turkey that flicker throughout the film. Istanbul looks beautiful, but then so, too, does Cahit's wreck of an apartment, where anarchy and the freedom it promises linger as stubbornly as the smell of stale beer and cigarettes.

'Head-On'

Opens today in Manhattan.

Written (in German and Turkish, with English subtitles) and directed by Fatih Akin; director of photography, Rainer Klausmann; edited by Andrew Bird; artistic director, Andreas Thiel; produced by Ralph Schwingel, Stefan Schubert and Wüste Filmproduktion; released by Strand Releasing. At the Angelika Film Center, Mercer and Houston Streets, Greenwich Village. Running time: 118 minutes. This film is not rated.

WITH: Birol Unel (Cahit), Sibel Kekilli (Sibel), Catrin Striebeck (Maren) and Guven Kirac (Seref).