Jews: want to fight anti-Semitism? Muslims: want to challenge islamophobia? There’s an easy way to do it: have coffee with one another.
Last week, the rabbi and imam of Duke University, did just that. Amidst the tension between Muslims and Jews caused by the violence off the coast of Israel and Gaza, their regular coffee date felt like a political act.
They typically steer their discussion away from politics not because they feel uneasy on that turf; they know that they disagree on many core issues surrounding the Israeli-Palestinian controversy and are quite comfortable with that. They are careful because they know that when political discourse becomes the dominant mode — or the only mode — of interaction something essential may be lost: empathy.
(READ more of the column in the Washington Post)
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation pledged $1.5 billion on Monday in a joint push with the United Nations to improve the health of women and children.
Saddened by what she imagined the oil spill was doing to wildlife near her family’s summer home on the Gulf coast, an 11-year-old began creating pictures of birds to raise money for rescue operations. Since then, totals have climbed into the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim-majority nation, is waging one of the world’s most determined campaigns against terrorism — and much of the credit goes to the country’s American-trained police unit, Detachment 88. The horror and audacity of the Bali bombings proved to be an epiphany for Indonesians, alerting them to the homegrown extremists in their midst and helping forge a national consensus against terrorism. The following year, Detachment 88 was set up with the backing of the U.S. and Australian governments. Today, it numbers 400 personnel drawn from the elite of the Indonesian police’s special-operations forces — and it has built up an extensive intelligence network to nab terrorists.
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