UNMIA

US Rabbi leads delegation to Iran
Jerusalem Post, Apr. 28, 2008

For the first time, an American rabbi will be traveling to Iran Tuesday on a mission of interfaith dialogue and understanding.

Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb, one of the early forces behind the Jewish Renewal movement in America, will co-lead a delegation of 21 peace activists to the Islamic Republic on a mission “to humanize the face of Iran, lest we end up with a disaster of global proportions we cannot imagine,” she told The Jerusalem Post by phone on Monday.

Gottlieb, a longtime peace activist and recent cofounder of the Shomer Shalom Institute for Jewish Non-Violence, said her participation in the mission came out of Tuesday’s threat by Democratic presidential contender Hillary Clinton that an Iranian assault on Israel would be met with an American response that would “obliterate” Iran.

“It is important to negotiate and not threaten obliteration,” Gottlieb believes, “in particular because there are between 30,000 and 40,000 Jewish people living in Iran, the oldest extant Jewish community in the Middle East, which has been there since the first exile in 586 BCE.”

The mission, the fifth “friendship and solidarity delegation” to Iran of the New York-based Fellowship of …

Khaled Abu Toameh, award winning Israeli-Arab journalist, will be coming to speak in Santa Fe and Albuquerque .
He will speak at Woodward Hall, room 101 on the main campus of UNM in Albuquerque on Monday, April 7 from 6:00 pm -7:30 pm.

Khaled Abu Toameh will speak in Santa Fe at the St. Francis Auditorium from 3 - 5 p.m. on Sunday, April 6. The St. Francis Auditorium is located at 107 West Palace Avenue in Santa Fe.

Both events are free to the public.

On Tuesday, October 16 at 7:00pm, the local “Justice First” group, which is dedicated to helping implement the Arab solution to the Jewish problem, will be holding a discussion at the “Peace and Justice” center at 202 Harvard, SE.

From the calendar listing on the “Peace and Justice” website, the event will be a “Discussion of the pro-Israel lobby and how it affects US foreign policy in the middle east, sponsored by Justice First!. Two new books by ADL director Foxman and political scientists Mearsheimer & Walt have just been published - what are their arguments? Info: JusticeFirst.info”

While UNMIA won’t be attending this event in any official capacity, local supporters of Israel and the “Israel Lobby” might be interested in attending and rounding out a discussion that promises to be very lopsided, otherwise.

To join the discussion in a constructive way, it’s naturally necessary to know at least a little about the views of the two sides. Both books are available for sale, of course, and there is quite a bit about both books and the authors on various websites and magazines. As a starting point, we are including the authors’ statements about their own work.

Abe Foxman writes …