By DANIEL LOVERING, Associated Press Writer
PITTSBURGH - It was a serious contribution to the electronic lexicon.
:-)
Twenty-five years ago, Carnegie Mellon University professor Scott E. Fahlman says, he was the first to use three keystrokes — a colon followed by a hyphen and a parenthesis — as a horizontal "smiley face" in a computer message.
To mark the anniversary Wednesday, Fahlman and his colleagues are starting an annual student contest for innovation in technology-assisted, person-to-person communication. The Smiley Award, sponsored by Yahoo Inc., carries a $500 cash prize.
Language experts say the smiley face and other emotional icons, known as emoticons, have given people a concise way in e-mail and other electronic messages of expressing sentiments that otherwise would be difficult to detect.
Fahlman posted the emoticon in a message to an online electronic bulletin board at 11:44 a.m. on Sept. 19, 1982, during a discussion about the limits of online humor and how to denote comments meant to be taken lightly.
"I propose the following character sequence for joke markers: :-)," wrote Fahlman. "Read it sideways."
The suggestion gave computer users a way to convey humor or positive feelings with a smile — or the opposite sentiments by reversing the parenthesis to form a frown.
Carnegie Mellon said Fahlman's smileys spread from its campus to other universities, then businesses and eventually around the world as the Internet gained popularity.
Computer science and linguistics professors contacted by The Associated Press said they were unaware of who first used the symbol.
"I've never seen any hard evidence that the :-) sequence was in use before my original post, and I've never run into anyone who actually claims to have invented it before I did," Fahlman wrote on the university's Web page dedicated to the smiley face. "But it's always possible that someone else had the same idea — it's a simple and obvious idea, after all."
Variations, such as the "wink" that uses a semicolon, emerged later. And today people can hardly imagine using computer chat programs that don't translate keystrokes into colorful graphics, said Ryan Stansifer, a computer science professor at the Florida Institute of Technology.
"Now we have so much power, we don't settle for a colon-dash-paren," he said. "You want the smiley face, so all these chatting softwares have to have them."
Instant messaging programs often contain an array of faces intended to express emotions ranging from surprise to affection to embarrassment.
"It has been fascinating to watch this phenomenon grow from a little message I tossed off in 10 minutes to something that has spread all around the world," Fahlman was quoted as saying in a university statement. "I sometimes wonder how many millions of people have typed these characters, and how many have turned their heads to one side to view a smiley, in the 25 years since this all started."
Amy Weinberg, a University of Maryland linguist and computer scientist, said emoticons such as the smiley were "definitely creeping into the way, both in business and academia, people communicate."
"In terms of things that language processing does, you have to take them into account," she said. "If you're doing almost anything ... and you have a sentence that says 'I love my boss' and then there's a smiley face, you better not take that seriously."
Emoticons reflect the likely original purpose of language — to enable people to express emotion, said Clifford Nass, a professor of communications at Stanford University. The emotion behind a written sentence may be hard to discern because emotion is often conveyed through tone of voice, he said.
"What emoticons do is essentially provide a mechanism to transmit emotion when you don't have the voice," Nass said.
In some ways, he added, they also give people "the ability not to think as hard about the words they're using."
Stansifer said the emoticon was part of a natural progression in communication.
"I don't think the smiley face was the beginning and the end," he said. "All people at all times take advantage of whatever means of communication they have."
___
On the Net:
Carnegie Mellon University's smiley page: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/smiley/
Source
Tuesday, September 18, 2007
Thursday, September 13, 2007
Israeli Textbooks and Children’s Literature Promote Racism and Hatred Toward Palestinians and Arabs
By Maureen Meehan
Israeli school textbooks as well as children’s storybooks, according to recent academic studies and surveys, portray Palestinians and Arabs as “murderers,” “rioters,” “suspicious,” and generally backward and unproductive. Direct delegitimization and negative stereotyping of Palestinians and Arabs are the rule rather than the exception in Israeli schoolbooks.
Professor Daniel Bar-Tal of Tel Aviv University studied 124 elementary, middle- and high school textbooks on grammar and Hebrew literature, history, geography and citizenship. Bar-Tal concluded that Israeli textbooks present the view that Jews are involved in a justified, even humanitarian, war against an Arab enemy that refuses to accept and acknowledge the existence and rights of Jews in Israel.
“The early textbooks tended to describe acts of Arabs as hostile, deviant, cruel, immoral, unfair, with the intention to hurt Jews and to annihilate the State of Israel. Within this frame of reference, Arabs were delegitimized by the use of such labels as ‘robbers,’ ‘bloodthirsty,’ and ‘killers,’” said Professor Bar-Tal, adding that there has been little positive revision in the curriculum over the years.
Bar-Tal pointed out that Israeli textbooks continue to present Jews as industrious, brave and determined to cope with the difficulties of “improving the country in ways they believe the Arabs are incapable of.”
Hebrew-language geography books from the 1950s through 1970s focused on the glory of Israel’s ancient past and how the land was “neglected and destroyed” by the Arabs until the Jews returned from their forced exile and revived it “with the help of the Zionist movement.”
“This attitude served to justify the return of the Jews, implying that they care enough about the country to turn the swamps and deserts into blossoming farmland; this effectively delegitimizes the Arab claim to the same land,” Bar-Tal told the Washington Report. “The message was that the Palestinians were primitive and neglected the country and did not cultivate the land.”
This message, continued Bar-Tal, was further emphasized in textbooks by the use of blatant negative stereotyping which featured Arabs as: “unenlightened, inferior, fatalistic, unproductive and apathetic.” Further, according to the textbooks, the Arabs were “tribal, vengeful, exotic, poor, sick, dirty, noisy, colored” and “they burn, murder, destroy, and are easily inflamed.”
Textbooks currently being used in the Israeli school system, says Bar-Tal, contain less direct denigration of Arabs but continue to stereotype them negatively when referring to them. He pointed out that Hebrew- as well as Arabic-language textbooks used in elementary and junior high schools contain very few references either to Arabs or to Arab-Jewish relations. The coordinator of a Palestinian NGO in Israel said that major historical events hardly get a mention either.
“When I was in high school 12 years ago, the date ‘1948’ barely appeared in any textbooks except for a mention that there was a conflict, Palestinians refused to accept a U.N. solution and ran away instead,” said Jamal Atamneh, coordinator of the Arab Education Committee in Support of Local Councils, a Haifa-based NGO. “Today the idea communicated to schoolchildren is basically the same: there are winners and losers in every conflict. When they teach about ‘peace and co-existence,’ it is to teach us how to get along with Jews.”
Atamneh explained that textbooks used by the nearly one million Arab Israelis (one-fifth of Israel’s population) are in Arabic but are written by and issued from the Israeli Ministry of Education, where Palestinians have no influence or input.
“Fewer than 1 percent of the jobs in the Education Ministry, not counting teachers, are held by Palestinians,” Atamneh said. “For the past 15 years, not one new Palestinian academic has been placed in a high position in the ministry. There are no Palestinians involved in preparing the Arabic-language curriculum [and] obviously, there is no such thing as affirmative action in Israel.”
In addition, there are no Arabic-language universities in Israel. Haifa University, Atamneh points out, has had a steady 20 percent Arab student population for the past 20 years. “How can that figure have remained the same after all these years when the population in the north [of Israel] has grown to over 50 percent Arab?”
Answering his own question, Atamneh rattles off statistics that reflect excellent high school scores among Arab students which he contrasts to their subsequent lower-than-average performance in Hebrew-language college entrance exams given by the state.
“No major scholarships have ever been awarded to an Arab; there are no dorms for Arabs and no college-related jobs or financial aid programs. They justify this legal discrimination by the fact that we do not serve in the army. There are numerous blatant and official methods used to keep Palestinian Arabs out of the universities.”
Absence of Palestinian Identity in Schoolbooks
Dr. Eli Podeh, lecturer in the Department of Islamic Studies and Middle East History at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, says that while certain changes in Israeli textbooks are slowly being implemented, the discussion of Palestinian national and civil identity is never touched upon.
“Passages from ‘experts’ about the existence of a Palestinian identity were introduced, but in general it appeared that the textbook authors were not eager to adopt it,” said Dr. Podeh, adding that “the connection between Palestinians in Israel and Arabs in Arab countries is not discussed. Especially evident is the lack of a discussion on the orientation of Palestinians to the [occupied] territories.
“While new textbooks attempt to correct some of the earlier distortions, these books as well contain overt and covert fabrications,” said Dr. Podeh. “The establishment has preferred—or felt itself forced—to encourage the cover-up and condemn the perplexity.”
One Israeli public high school student told the Washington Report that the contents of the schoolbooks and the viewpoints expressed by some teachers indeed have a lasting negative effect on youngsters’ attitudes toward Palestinians.
“Our books basically tell us that everything the Jews do is fine and legitimate and Arabs are wrong and violent and are trying to exterminate us,” said Daniel Banvolegyi, a 17-year-old high school student in Jerusalem.
“We are accustomed to hearing the same thing, only one side of the story. They teach us that Israel became a state in 1948 and that the Arabs started a war. They don’t mention what happened to the Arabs—they never mention anything about refugees or Arabs having to leave their towns and homes,” said Banvolegyi.
Banvolegyi, who will be a high school senior this fall, and then will be drafted into the Israeli army next summer, said he argues with his friends about what he regards as racism in the textbooks and on the part of the teachers. He pointed out a worrisome example of how damaging the textbooks and prevailing attitudes can be.
“One kid told me he was angry because of something he read or discussed in school and that he felt like punching the first Arab he saw,” said Banvolegyi. “Instead of teaching tolerance and reconciliation, the books and some teachers’ attitudes are increasing hatred for Arabs.”
Banvolegyi spoke about his schoolmates who, he says, “are dying to go into combat and kill Arabs. I try to talk to them but they say I don’t care about this country. But I do care and that’s why I tell them peace and justice are the only ways to work things out.”
Racist Israeli Upbringing
Considering what the schools have to offer, both Banvolegyi and Atamneh agree that the oral tradition is one of the few ways to get the story straight.
“Unfortunately Israeli children’s books are not an option for promoting equality in this society,” said Atamneh, citing a book written by Israeli writer/researcher Adir Cohen called An Ugly Face in the Mirror.
Cohen’s book is a study of the nature of children’s upbringing in Israel, concentrating on how the historical establishment sees and portrays Arab Palestinians as well as how Jewish Israeli children perceive Palestinians. One section of the book was based on the results of a survey taken of a group of 4th to 6th grade Jewish students at a school in Haifa. The pupils were asked five questions about their attitude toward Arabs, how they recognize them and how they relate to them. The results were as shocking as they were disturbing:
Seventy five percent of the children described the “Arab” as a murderer, one who kidnaps children, a criminal and a terrorist. Eighty percent said they saw the Arab as someone dirty with a terrifying face. Ninety percent of the students stated they believe that Palestinians have no rights whatsoever to the land in Israel or Palestine
Cohen also researched 1,700 Israeli children’s books published after 1967. He found that 520 of the books contained humiliating, negative descriptions of Palestinians. He also took pains to break down the descriptions:
Sixty six percent of the 520 books refer to Arabs as violent; 52 percent as evil; 37 percent as liars; 31 percent as greedy; 28 percent as two-faced; 27 percent as traitors, etc.
Cohen points out that the authors of these children’s books effectively instill hatred toward Arabs by means of stripping them of their human nature and classifying them in another category. In a sampling of 86 books, Cohen counted the following descriptions used to dehumanize Arabs: Murderer was used 21 times; snake, 6 times; dirty, 9 times; vicious animal, 17 times; bloodthirsty, 21 times; warmonger, 17 times; killer, 13 times; believer in myths, 9 times; and a camel’s hump, 2 times.
Cohen’s study concludes that such descriptions of Arabs are part and parcel of convictions and a culture rampant in Hebrew literature and history books. He writes that Israeli authors and writers confess to deliberately portraying the Arab character in this way, particularly to their younger audience, in order to influence their outlook early on so as to prepare them to deal with Arabs.
“So you can see that if you grew up reading or studying from these books, you’d never know anything else,” said Atamneh.
“But in the case of Palestinians, we grow up 500 meters away from what used to be a town or village and is now a Jewish settlement. Our parents and grandparents tell us all about it; endlessly they talk about it. It’s the only way.”
Maureen Meehan is a free-lance journalist who covers the West Bank and Jerusalem.
SIDEBAR
www.stopmoskowitz.org
Now it is possible to keep abreast of all the legal loopholes and money shuffling Irving Moskowitz is doing daily simply by checking out the following Internet address: <http://www.stopmoskowitz.org>. The Web site is sponsored by the Coalition for Justice in Hawaiian Gardens and Jerusalem.
The statement of purpose on the Web site deals with Moskowitz’s financial maneuvers to buy Arab properties in East Jerusalem with profits made from a “non-profit” bingo club in Los Angeles County’s smallest and most impoverished city, Hawaiian Gardens.
There are press releases and letters the coalition has sent to State Attorney General Bill Lockyear which question the legality of Moskowitz’ manipulation of Redevelopment Agency Funds to expand his gambling facilities in Hawaiian Gardens.
Another section deals with news stories from the U.S. and Israeli press which examine the danger the Florida millionaire poses to Israeli citizens with his schemes to buy or confiscate Arab land for “Greater Israel.” One quote from the Meretz Party’s Ornan Yekutieli states: “The investments of Moskowitz in the city [Jerusalem] are blood money. We and our children will pay for it in blood, while he sits in his bingo mansion in Miami and throws lit matches onto the Jerusalem gunpowder keg.”
Rabbi Haim Dov Beliak, a co-founder of the coalition, alleges that the Poland-born Moskowitz and his non-profit foundation are impoverishing Hawaiian Gardens and exploiting the Latino “volunteers” who work 363 nights a year in the bingo club for tips only.
The real nightmare, Rabbi Beliak predicts, would occur if California permits Moskowitz to open the Hawaiian Gardens Card Club, which could bring an additional $100 million a year in profits for him to siphon to extremist right-wing Jewish organizations in Israel.
Blog: A textbook case of Israeli propaganda
by Ali Abunimah, The Electronic Intifada, Jul 8, 2002
A new Israeli army 'study' charges that Palestinian school textbooks contain 'systematic education to delegitimise the existence of the state of Israel, fanning the flames of hatred and violent revenge to destroy the country' ('Palestinian schoolbooks fan the flames of hatred,' Haaretz, June 28, 2002).
Such claims, which have been made by Israel and its extremist supporters in the United States for years, are simply an attempt by Israel to find some alternative explanation to the understandable rage felt by Palestinians who have suffered through decades of continuing dispossession, occupation, disenfranchisement, violence, torture and humiliation at the hands of Israel.
An independent study of Palestinian textbooks by Professor Nathan Brown of George Washington University in Washington, DC, notes that "virtually every discussion in English on Palestinian education repeats the charge that Palestinian textbooks incite students against Jews and Israel". Brown states that: "It may therefore come as a surprise to readers that the books authored under the PNA are largely innocent of these charges. What is more remarkable than any statements they make on the subject is their silence -- the PNA-authored books often stubbornly avoid treating anything controversial regarding Palestinian national identity, forcing them into awkward omissions and gaps."
Brown, while not uncritical of the Palestinian textbooks, concluded that "the Palestinian curriculum is not a war curriculum; while highly nationalistic, it does not incite hatred, violence and anti-Semitism. It cannot be described as a peace curriculum either, but the charges against it are often wildly exaggerated or inaccurate." (Democracy, History and the Contest over the Palestinian Curriculum, an independent report prepared for the Adam Institute, 2002) Nationalism, whatever its drawbacks, underpins almost every country's school curriculum, not least in the United States and Israel.
How can we explain the glaring discrepancy between Brown's findings and those of the Israeli army propaganda unit?
According to Haaretz, the Israeli study claims that the Palestinian textbooks "express a lack of recognition of Israel, not even according to the 1967 borders, alongside adamant claims to Palestinian rule of all the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea." Another complaint is that the books mention that Israel has "exploited" and "degraded" Palestinians "by changing the names of Arab villages and cities, and by defacing and stealing Arab manuscripts". The Israeli reviewers are outraged that in one book there is a story of a Palestinian girl visiting her family's original home in the city of Jaffa which is now in Israel. Their biggest complaint is perhaps that there are maps which show "Palestine" as it once was, covering land that is now in Israel. Hence, even an historically accurate map showing where major Palestinian population centres actually were prior to their destruction in 1948, constitutes for Israel "an adamant claim to rule" the whole country. Referring to Israel's systematic effort to erase Palestinian history in Israel prior to 1948 (something very well documented by Israeli geographer Meron Benvenisti in his book `Sacred Landscape', 2000) is taken as a "desire for revenge". Anything short of total amnesia about Palestinian history and complete devotion to Zionism's official mythology constitutes "hatred". Only people who are in neurotic denial could indulge in such absurdities.
Yet, let us accept, only for the sake of argument, that the Israeli claims are true and that they constitute some form of "incitement". Why should Israel complain that Palestinians do not respect the 1967 borders on their maps, when it has been Israeli policy since 1967 to erase those borders on the ground, using extreme violence to confiscate Palestinian land and implant Jewish-only colonies everywhere Palestinians live? You need only go to the "Israel Map", on Israeli Ministry of Tourism's official website, to see the Golan Heights and the West Bank depicted as part of Israel (the latter being labelled "Judean Desert" and "Shomron" [Samaria], while the Palestinian city of Nablus is given only the Hebrew name "Shechem").
Why should Palestinians express unconditional recognition of the legitimacy of the state of Israel and its historic claims when Israel has not recognised a Palestinian state, and its officials and many of its academics deny the undeniable -- that nearly three quarters of a million Palestinians were expelled or fled from their homes so that Israel could rise on the ashes of Palestinian society? Of course, the fact that the Palestinian leadership has explicitly recognised Israel -- repeatedly and formally -- and that Palestinian policy is to seek a state within the 1967 borders does nothing to blunt the constant Israeli charges. This is because the purpose of the accusations is not to produce more friendly school curricula but to justify Israel's own refusal to recognise the 1967 borders, to provide cover for the continued colonisation of the occupied territories and to blame the Palestinians for all the violence resulting from this colonisation.
Even without Brown's commendable study it should be obvious that the constant Israeli refrain that textbooks are responsible for the violence is ridiculous on its face. Are we to believe that if Palestinian textbooks were written by the Israeli Ministry of Education, Palestinian children would be happy to live under the brutal foreign military dictatorship that is the Israeli occupation, to see their parents and friends killed and humiliated, their houses demolished and their land seized for Jewish-only settlement? If Palestinian youths were to read from Israeli textbooks, would they greet invading Israeli troops with showers of rose petals instead of stones? If Palestinian students could actually get past the roadblocks, curfews and gunfire to reach their schools in order to read Israeli-approved books, would they feel less hostility towards Israel?
And, perhaps Israel would be in a better position to lecture Palestinians about what they should do in their classrooms if Israel had not constantly shelled school buildings and used Palestinian schools as detention camps for thousands of men and boys rounded up during "Operation Defensive Shield", when they were forced to strip, and lie for hours and days on cold, concrete floors, sometimes with numbers written on their arms.
Indeed, for decades, Palestinian citizens of Israel ("Arab Israelis") have studied from textbooks written by the Israeli Ministry of Education, they stood to attention in front of the Israeli flag and sang the Israeli national anthem. And yet, despite their "good behaviour", their simmering and growing discontent is caused not by an insufficiently Zionist school curriculum but by the constant and increasing discrimination against them in every possible sphere of life by Israeli government and society. This discrimination reached the breaking point in October 2000 when thirteen Palestinian-Israeli youths protesting in solidarity with Palestinians in the occupied territories were shot dead by Israeli police. Such casual brutality is entirely unheard of against Jewish citizens.
Israel is further marginalising its own Palestinian citizens by cutting payment of child benefits to Arab, but not Jewish, citizens. Arab Knesset members are being persecuted: Azmi Bishara is on trial for making a speech, and Ahmed Tibi's parliamentary freedom of movement was recently revoked by a vote of his own Knesset colleagues. This discrimination cannot but produce anger and resentment, and making the textbooks more Zionist is not going to assuage it.
So if this is the situation inside Israel, what can one expect in the occupied territories, where the repression is infinitely greater, and where hundreds of unarmed Palestinian children have been shot dead by the Israeli army since October 2000? The Israeli occupation clearly does not need any help from textbooks to incite against itself. With all this, one can easily find ugly expressions by Palestinians both about Israelis and Jews, but these are exactly mirrored by frequent statements from Israeli cabinet ministers, rabbis and others, calling for the ethnic cleansing or annihilation of all the Palestinians, and other all too frequent expressions of racial hatred. These expressions on both sides are symptoms and not causes of the conflict. When the gross and real injustices that fuel the conflict are removed, then they will begin to disappear and messages of hatred will not resonate as they do today.
Only those who want the conflict to continue will maintain the lie about Palestinian textbooks and find in them non-existent excuses to continue the oppression and dehumanisation of the Palestinian people while what little is left of their country is stolen from under their feet.
Related links:
Special report: Israeli Textbooks and Children's Literature Promote Racism and Hatred Toward Palestinians and Arabs, by Maureen Meehan, Washington, Report on Middle East Affairs, September 1999, pages 19-20.
A campaign against 'incitement', by James J. Zogby, Arab American Institute, 9 July 2001.
The Politics of Palestinian Textbooks, by Fouad Moughrabi, Journal of Palestine Studies, Col. XXXI, No. 1, Autumn 2001, Issue 121.
A new Israeli army 'study' charges that Palestinian school textbooks contain 'systematic education to delegitimise the existence of the state of Israel, fanning the flames of hatred and violent revenge to destroy the country' ('Palestinian schoolbooks fan the flames of hatred,' Haaretz, June 28, 2002).
Such claims, which have been made by Israel and its extremist supporters in the United States for years, are simply an attempt by Israel to find some alternative explanation to the understandable rage felt by Palestinians who have suffered through decades of continuing dispossession, occupation, disenfranchisement, violence, torture and humiliation at the hands of Israel.
An independent study of Palestinian textbooks by Professor Nathan Brown of George Washington University in Washington, DC, notes that "virtually every discussion in English on Palestinian education repeats the charge that Palestinian textbooks incite students against Jews and Israel". Brown states that: "It may therefore come as a surprise to readers that the books authored under the PNA are largely innocent of these charges. What is more remarkable than any statements they make on the subject is their silence -- the PNA-authored books often stubbornly avoid treating anything controversial regarding Palestinian national identity, forcing them into awkward omissions and gaps."
Brown, while not uncritical of the Palestinian textbooks, concluded that "the Palestinian curriculum is not a war curriculum; while highly nationalistic, it does not incite hatred, violence and anti-Semitism. It cannot be described as a peace curriculum either, but the charges against it are often wildly exaggerated or inaccurate." (Democracy, History and the Contest over the Palestinian Curriculum, an independent report prepared for the Adam Institute, 2002) Nationalism, whatever its drawbacks, underpins almost every country's school curriculum, not least in the United States and Israel.
How can we explain the glaring discrepancy between Brown's findings and those of the Israeli army propaganda unit?
According to Haaretz, the Israeli study claims that the Palestinian textbooks "express a lack of recognition of Israel, not even according to the 1967 borders, alongside adamant claims to Palestinian rule of all the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea." Another complaint is that the books mention that Israel has "exploited" and "degraded" Palestinians "by changing the names of Arab villages and cities, and by defacing and stealing Arab manuscripts". The Israeli reviewers are outraged that in one book there is a story of a Palestinian girl visiting her family's original home in the city of Jaffa which is now in Israel. Their biggest complaint is perhaps that there are maps which show "Palestine" as it once was, covering land that is now in Israel. Hence, even an historically accurate map showing where major Palestinian population centres actually were prior to their destruction in 1948, constitutes for Israel "an adamant claim to rule" the whole country. Referring to Israel's systematic effort to erase Palestinian history in Israel prior to 1948 (something very well documented by Israeli geographer Meron Benvenisti in his book `Sacred Landscape', 2000) is taken as a "desire for revenge". Anything short of total amnesia about Palestinian history and complete devotion to Zionism's official mythology constitutes "hatred". Only people who are in neurotic denial could indulge in such absurdities.
Yet, let us accept, only for the sake of argument, that the Israeli claims are true and that they constitute some form of "incitement". Why should Israel complain that Palestinians do not respect the 1967 borders on their maps, when it has been Israeli policy since 1967 to erase those borders on the ground, using extreme violence to confiscate Palestinian land and implant Jewish-only colonies everywhere Palestinians live? You need only go to the "Israel Map", on Israeli Ministry of Tourism's official website, to see the Golan Heights and the West Bank depicted as part of Israel (the latter being labelled "Judean Desert" and "Shomron" [Samaria], while the Palestinian city of Nablus is given only the Hebrew name "Shechem").
Why should Palestinians express unconditional recognition of the legitimacy of the state of Israel and its historic claims when Israel has not recognised a Palestinian state, and its officials and many of its academics deny the undeniable -- that nearly three quarters of a million Palestinians were expelled or fled from their homes so that Israel could rise on the ashes of Palestinian society? Of course, the fact that the Palestinian leadership has explicitly recognised Israel -- repeatedly and formally -- and that Palestinian policy is to seek a state within the 1967 borders does nothing to blunt the constant Israeli charges. This is because the purpose of the accusations is not to produce more friendly school curricula but to justify Israel's own refusal to recognise the 1967 borders, to provide cover for the continued colonisation of the occupied territories and to blame the Palestinians for all the violence resulting from this colonisation.
Even without Brown's commendable study it should be obvious that the constant Israeli refrain that textbooks are responsible for the violence is ridiculous on its face. Are we to believe that if Palestinian textbooks were written by the Israeli Ministry of Education, Palestinian children would be happy to live under the brutal foreign military dictatorship that is the Israeli occupation, to see their parents and friends killed and humiliated, their houses demolished and their land seized for Jewish-only settlement? If Palestinian youths were to read from Israeli textbooks, would they greet invading Israeli troops with showers of rose petals instead of stones? If Palestinian students could actually get past the roadblocks, curfews and gunfire to reach their schools in order to read Israeli-approved books, would they feel less hostility towards Israel?
And, perhaps Israel would be in a better position to lecture Palestinians about what they should do in their classrooms if Israel had not constantly shelled school buildings and used Palestinian schools as detention camps for thousands of men and boys rounded up during "Operation Defensive Shield", when they were forced to strip, and lie for hours and days on cold, concrete floors, sometimes with numbers written on their arms.
Indeed, for decades, Palestinian citizens of Israel ("Arab Israelis") have studied from textbooks written by the Israeli Ministry of Education, they stood to attention in front of the Israeli flag and sang the Israeli national anthem. And yet, despite their "good behaviour", their simmering and growing discontent is caused not by an insufficiently Zionist school curriculum but by the constant and increasing discrimination against them in every possible sphere of life by Israeli government and society. This discrimination reached the breaking point in October 2000 when thirteen Palestinian-Israeli youths protesting in solidarity with Palestinians in the occupied territories were shot dead by Israeli police. Such casual brutality is entirely unheard of against Jewish citizens.
Israel is further marginalising its own Palestinian citizens by cutting payment of child benefits to Arab, but not Jewish, citizens. Arab Knesset members are being persecuted: Azmi Bishara is on trial for making a speech, and Ahmed Tibi's parliamentary freedom of movement was recently revoked by a vote of his own Knesset colleagues. This discrimination cannot but produce anger and resentment, and making the textbooks more Zionist is not going to assuage it.
So if this is the situation inside Israel, what can one expect in the occupied territories, where the repression is infinitely greater, and where hundreds of unarmed Palestinian children have been shot dead by the Israeli army since October 2000? The Israeli occupation clearly does not need any help from textbooks to incite against itself. With all this, one can easily find ugly expressions by Palestinians both about Israelis and Jews, but these are exactly mirrored by frequent statements from Israeli cabinet ministers, rabbis and others, calling for the ethnic cleansing or annihilation of all the Palestinians, and other all too frequent expressions of racial hatred. These expressions on both sides are symptoms and not causes of the conflict. When the gross and real injustices that fuel the conflict are removed, then they will begin to disappear and messages of hatred will not resonate as they do today.
Only those who want the conflict to continue will maintain the lie about Palestinian textbooks and find in them non-existent excuses to continue the oppression and dehumanisation of the Palestinian people while what little is left of their country is stolen from under their feet.
Related links:
Sunday, June 03, 2007
Pictures from Nahr el Bared: Saturday June 2, 2007
(AP Photo/Hussein Malla)
Lebanese army soldiers from navy commandos units, atop their armored personnel carrier, wave to colleagues on their way to replace another unit at the Palestinian refugee camp of Nahr el-Bared during clashes with fighters from the Fatah Islam militant group, in the northern city of Tripoli, Saturday June 2, 2007. Lebanon's army suffered more casualties as it pressed ahead with an offensive to uproot al-Qaida-inspired militants, pounding their hideouts in a Palestinian refugee camp with artillery a day after sending tanks and armored vehicles to seize positions in the camp's outer neighborhoods.
Saturday, May 19, 2007
When Does Genocide Purify? - Ask Pope Benedict!
By ADAM JONES
Pope Benedict XVI's recent trip to Brazil seems to have done little to shore up the Catholic Church's declining power in its Latin American heartland. It went a long way, however, towards confirming Benedict's reputation as a reactionary bigot.
Benedict, of course, is the former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger. Throughout the 1980s, he was Pope John Paul II's enforcer in the campaign to expunge the dangerously progressive ideals of Catholic "liberation theology" from Latin American soil. What could not be accomplished by state terrorists, who killed thousands of members of Christian "base communities" in the 1970s and '80s, Ratzinger and John Paul sought to engineer by installing conservative bishops who would stem the progressive tide. Fortunately, they seem to have failed. An account by Larry Rohter in the New York Times (May 7) notes that the movement which Ratzinger "once called 'a fundamental threat to the faith of the church' ... persists as an active, even defiant force in Latin America," with some 80,000 base communities operating in Brazil alone. It is fuelled, as it always has been, by the "social and economic ills" that pervade the region, and that have only "worsened" under the neoliberal prescriptions of the past two decades.
This time around, Ratzinger/Benedict's bile was directed not at liberation theology, but squarely at the historical memory of the serial genocides -- probably the most destructive in human history -- inflicted upon the indigenous peoples of the Americas. On the last day of his visit, in the city of Aparecida, the Pope "touch[ed] on a sensitive historical episode," in the blandly understated language of an Associated Press dispatch (May 13). In other words, he ripped the bandages off a still-suppurating wound. According to the official text of Benedict's comments on the Vatican website, the Pope declared that "the nations of Latin America and the Caribbean" were "silently longing" to receive Christ as their savior. He was "the unknown God whom their ancestors were seeking, without realizing it ..." Colonization by Spain and Portugal was not a conquest, but rather an "adoption" of the Indians through baptism, making their cultures "fruitful" and "purifying" them. Accordingly, "the proclamation of Jesus and of his Gospel did not at any point involve an alienation of the pre-Columbian cultures, nor was it the imposition of a foreign culture."
So there we have it. The invasion and conquest of the Americas, which caused the deaths of upwards of 90 percent of the indigenous population, was something the Indians had been pining for all along. They weren't just "asking for it," as sexist cranks depict women as complicit in their own rapes. They were actually "longing" for it, since salvation and "purification" came with it.
Actually, genocide came with it, as Raphael Lemkin knew. Lemkin is the Polish-Jewish jurist who, having fled the Nazi invasion of Poland for refuge in the U.S., coined the word "genocide" in 1943. He defined genocide as "a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves. The objectives of such a plan would be the disintegration of the political and social institutions, of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups, and the destruction of the personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and even the lives of the individuals belonging to such groups." His framing became the foundation of the United Nations Genocide Convention of 1948, and of the academic field of comparative genocide studies. Lemkin himself was keenly aware of the devastation of the indigenous people of the Americas, and considered it basic to his understanding of genocide, though most of his writings on the theme remain unpublished. (See the text of John Docker's excellent February 2004 talk at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, "Raphael Lemkin's History of Genocide and Colonialism".)
Benedict's astounding comments attracted barely a flicker of media attention in the West -- almost all of it on the wire services, and some of it problematic in itself. A May 13 Reuters dispatch noted blithely that, contrary to Benedict's claims, "many Indian groups believe the conquest brought them enslavement and genocide." This is rather like writing that "many Jewish groups believe that the Nazi Holocaust brought Jews enslavement and genocide." The reality exists independently of the belief. As blogger Stentor Danielson points out: "In the real world, it's a basic historical fact that the Indians were enslaved. It's a basic historical fact that entire tribes were wiped out. The reason [that] 'many Indian groups believe' these historical facts is because people like Reuters' craven reporters won't admit when there's a fact behind the claims."
Indian organizations and spokespeople expressed outrage at Benedict's statements, calling them "arrogant and disrespectful." Sandro Tuxa, leader of a coalition of Indian tribes in Brazil's impoverished northeast, declared: "We repudiate the Pope's comments. To say the cultural decimation of our people represents a purification is offensive, and frankly, frightening" (Reuters, May 14).
Frightening indeed. Genocide scholar Greg Stanton describes denial as the final stage of genocide: "The perpetrators of genocide dig up the mass graves, burn the bodies, try to cover up the evidence and intimidate the witnesses" (see Stanton's "Eight Stages of Genocide" on the Genocide Watch website). Genocidal perpetrators, and those who inherit their mantle, also seek to "purify" historical memory -- as Turkish authorities unceasingly, but so far unsuccessfully, have sought to do in the case of the Armenian genocide.
Stanton also reminds us that denial is "among the surest indicators [that] further genocidal massacres" may lie ahead. That's a thought worth pondering, as the reinvigorated indigenous movement in Latin America confronts a renewed neo-colonial assault on its culture, health, and means of subsistence.
Adam Jones, Ph.D., is the author of Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction (Routledge, 2006) and editor of Genocide, War Crimes and the West: History and Complicity (Zed Books, 2004). Email: adamj_jones@hotmail.com
Source
Pope Benedict XVI's recent trip to Brazil seems to have done little to shore up the Catholic Church's declining power in its Latin American heartland. It went a long way, however, towards confirming Benedict's reputation as a reactionary bigot.
Benedict, of course, is the former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger. Throughout the 1980s, he was Pope John Paul II's enforcer in the campaign to expunge the dangerously progressive ideals of Catholic "liberation theology" from Latin American soil. What could not be accomplished by state terrorists, who killed thousands of members of Christian "base communities" in the 1970s and '80s, Ratzinger and John Paul sought to engineer by installing conservative bishops who would stem the progressive tide. Fortunately, they seem to have failed. An account by Larry Rohter in the New York Times (May 7) notes that the movement which Ratzinger "once called 'a fundamental threat to the faith of the church' ... persists as an active, even defiant force in Latin America," with some 80,000 base communities operating in Brazil alone. It is fuelled, as it always has been, by the "social and economic ills" that pervade the region, and that have only "worsened" under the neoliberal prescriptions of the past two decades.
This time around, Ratzinger/Benedict's bile was directed not at liberation theology, but squarely at the historical memory of the serial genocides -- probably the most destructive in human history -- inflicted upon the indigenous peoples of the Americas. On the last day of his visit, in the city of Aparecida, the Pope "touch[ed] on a sensitive historical episode," in the blandly understated language of an Associated Press dispatch (May 13). In other words, he ripped the bandages off a still-suppurating wound. According to the official text of Benedict's comments on the Vatican website, the Pope declared that "the nations of Latin America and the Caribbean" were "silently longing" to receive Christ as their savior. He was "the unknown God whom their ancestors were seeking, without realizing it ..." Colonization by Spain and Portugal was not a conquest, but rather an "adoption" of the Indians through baptism, making their cultures "fruitful" and "purifying" them. Accordingly, "the proclamation of Jesus and of his Gospel did not at any point involve an alienation of the pre-Columbian cultures, nor was it the imposition of a foreign culture."
So there we have it. The invasion and conquest of the Americas, which caused the deaths of upwards of 90 percent of the indigenous population, was something the Indians had been pining for all along. They weren't just "asking for it," as sexist cranks depict women as complicit in their own rapes. They were actually "longing" for it, since salvation and "purification" came with it.
Actually, genocide came with it, as Raphael Lemkin knew. Lemkin is the Polish-Jewish jurist who, having fled the Nazi invasion of Poland for refuge in the U.S., coined the word "genocide" in 1943. He defined genocide as "a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves. The objectives of such a plan would be the disintegration of the political and social institutions, of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups, and the destruction of the personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and even the lives of the individuals belonging to such groups." His framing became the foundation of the United Nations Genocide Convention of 1948, and of the academic field of comparative genocide studies. Lemkin himself was keenly aware of the devastation of the indigenous people of the Americas, and considered it basic to his understanding of genocide, though most of his writings on the theme remain unpublished. (See the text of John Docker's excellent February 2004 talk at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, "Raphael Lemkin's History of Genocide and Colonialism".)
Benedict's astounding comments attracted barely a flicker of media attention in the West -- almost all of it on the wire services, and some of it problematic in itself. A May 13 Reuters dispatch noted blithely that, contrary to Benedict's claims, "many Indian groups believe the conquest brought them enslavement and genocide." This is rather like writing that "many Jewish groups believe that the Nazi Holocaust brought Jews enslavement and genocide." The reality exists independently of the belief. As blogger Stentor Danielson points out: "In the real world, it's a basic historical fact that the Indians were enslaved. It's a basic historical fact that entire tribes were wiped out. The reason [that] 'many Indian groups believe' these historical facts is because people like Reuters' craven reporters won't admit when there's a fact behind the claims."
Indian organizations and spokespeople expressed outrage at Benedict's statements, calling them "arrogant and disrespectful." Sandro Tuxa, leader of a coalition of Indian tribes in Brazil's impoverished northeast, declared: "We repudiate the Pope's comments. To say the cultural decimation of our people represents a purification is offensive, and frankly, frightening" (Reuters, May 14).
Frightening indeed. Genocide scholar Greg Stanton describes denial as the final stage of genocide: "The perpetrators of genocide dig up the mass graves, burn the bodies, try to cover up the evidence and intimidate the witnesses" (see Stanton's "Eight Stages of Genocide" on the Genocide Watch website). Genocidal perpetrators, and those who inherit their mantle, also seek to "purify" historical memory -- as Turkish authorities unceasingly, but so far unsuccessfully, have sought to do in the case of the Armenian genocide.
Stanton also reminds us that denial is "among the surest indicators [that] further genocidal massacres" may lie ahead. That's a thought worth pondering, as the reinvigorated indigenous movement in Latin America confronts a renewed neo-colonial assault on its culture, health, and means of subsistence.
Adam Jones, Ph.D., is the author of Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction (Routledge, 2006) and editor of Genocide, War Crimes and the West: History and Complicity (Zed Books, 2004). Email: adamj_jones@hotmail.com
Source
Wednesday, May 09, 2007
Einstein et al on Begin
Albert Einstein with many prominent Jews (list below) signed onto this letter published in the NY Times on Dec. 2, 1948
Qumsiyeh comment/update: Herut is the precurser for the Likud Party of Israel (following on the ideology of Vladimir Jabotinsky). Begin (a wanted terrorist) later became Israel Prime Minister (Likud) and under his rule, tens of thousands of Lebanese and Palestinian Civilians were killed in the 1980s. Menachem Begin's successors in Likud (and as Israeli Prime Ministers) include Netanyahu and Sharon who are responsible for countless other civilian deaths. While the authors mention the apology from the Jewish Agency "sent to King Abdullah" who is not even Palestinian, later research shows involvement of the Hagannah and teh Jewish agency in the Deir Yassin massacre as well as JA/JNF involvement in ethnic cleansing.
TO THE EDITOR OF THE NEW YORK TIMES:
Among the most disturbing political phenomena of our time is the Emergence in the newly created state of Israel of the "Freedom Party" (Tnuat Haherut), a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties. It was formed out of the membership and following of the former Irgun Zvai Leumi, a terrorist, right-wing, chauvinist organization in Palestine.
The current visit of Menahem Begin, leader of this party to the United States is obviously calculated to give the impression of American Support for his party in the coming Israeli elections, and to cement political ties with conservative Zionist elements in the United States. Several Americans of national repute have lent their names to welcome his visit. It is inconceivable that those who oppose fascism throughout the world, if correctly informed as to Mr. Begin's political record and perspectives, could add their names and support to the movement he represents. Before irreparable damage is done by way of financial contributions, public manifestations in Begin's behalf, and the creation in Palestine of the impression that a large segment of America supports Fascist lements in Israel, the American public must be informed as to the record and Objectives of Mr. Begin and his movement.
The public avowals of Begin's party are no guide whatever to its actual character. Today they speak of freedom, democracy and anti-imperialism, whereas until recently they openly preached the doctrine of the Fascist state. It is in its actions that the terrorist party betrays its real character; from its past actions we can judge what it may be expected to do in the future.
Attack on Arab Village
A shocking example was their behavior in the Arab village of Deir Yassin. This village, off the main roads and surrounded by Jewish lands, had Taken no part in the war, and had even fought off Arab bands who wanted to use the village as their base. On April 9 (THE NEW YORK TIMES), terrorist bands attacked this peaceful village, which was not a military objective in the fighting, killed most of its inhabitants - 240 men, women and children - and kept a few of them alive to parade as captives through the streets of Jerusalem. Most of the Jewish community was horrified at the deed, and the Jewish Agency sent a telegram of apology to King Abdullah of Trans-Jordan.
But the terrorists, far from being ashamed of their act, were proud of this massacre, publicized it widely, and invited all the foreign correspondents present in the country to view the heaped corpses and the general havoc at Deir Yassin. The Deir Yassin incident exemplifies the character and actions of the Freedom Party. Within the Jewish community they have preached an admixture of ultra-nationalism, religious mysticism, and racial superiority.
Like other Fascist parties they have been used to break strikes, and Have themselves pressed for the destruction of free trade unions. In their Stead they have proposed corporate unions on the Italian Fascist model. During the last years of sporadic anti-British violence, the IZL and Stern groups inaugurated a reign of terror in the Palestine Jewish community. Teachers were beaten up for speaking against them, adults were shot for Not letting their children join them. By gangster methods, beatings, window-smashing, and wide-spread robberies, the terrorists intimidated the population and exacted a heavy tribute.
The people of the Freedom Party have had no part in the constructive achievements in Palestine. They have reclaimed no land, built no settlements, and only detracted from the Jewish defense activity. Their much-publicized immigration endeavors were minute, and devoted mainly to bringing in Fascist compatriots.
DISCREPANCIES SEEN
The discrepancies between the bold claims now being made by Begin and His party, and their record of past performance in Palestine bear the imprint of no ordinary political party. This is the unmistakable stamp of a Fascist party for whom terrorism (against Jews, Arabs, and British alike), and misrepresentation are means, and a "Leader State" is the goal.
In the light of the foregoing considerations, it is imperative that the truth about Mr. Begin and his movement be made known in this country. It is all the more tragic that the top leadership of American Zionism has Refused to campaign against Begin's efforts, or even to expose to its own constituents the dangers to Israel from support to Begin.
The undersigned therefore take this means of publicly presenting a few salient facts concerning Begin and his party; and of urging all concerned not to support this latest manifestation of fascism.
ISIDORE ABRAMOWITZ, HANNAH ARENDT, ABRAHAM BRICK, RABBI JESSURUN CARDOZO, ALBERT EINSTEIN, HERMAN EISEN, M.D., HAYIM FINEMAN, M. GALLEN, M.D., H.H. HARRIS, ZELIG S. HARRIS, SIDNEY HOOK, FRED KARUSH, BRURIA KAUFMAN, IRMA L. LINDHEIM, NACHMAN MAJSEL, SEYMOUR MELMAN, MYER D. MENDELSON, M.D., HARRY M. ORLINSKY, SAMUEL PITLICK, FRITZ ROHRLICH, LOUIS P. ROCKER, RUTH SAGER, ITZHAK SANKOWSKY, I.J. SHOENBERG, SAMUEL SHUMAN, M. ZNGER, IRMA WOLPE, STEFAN WOLPE.
New York, Dec. 2, 1948
Qumsiyeh comment/update: Herut is the precurser for the Likud Party of Israel (following on the ideology of Vladimir Jabotinsky). Begin (a wanted terrorist) later became Israel Prime Minister (Likud) and under his rule, tens of thousands of Lebanese and Palestinian Civilians were killed in the 1980s. Menachem Begin's successors in Likud (and as Israeli Prime Ministers) include Netanyahu and Sharon who are responsible for countless other civilian deaths. While the authors mention the apology from the Jewish Agency "sent to King Abdullah" who is not even Palestinian, later research shows involvement of the Hagannah and teh Jewish agency in the Deir Yassin massacre as well as JA/JNF involvement in ethnic cleansing.
TO THE EDITOR OF THE NEW YORK TIMES:
Among the most disturbing political phenomena of our time is the Emergence in the newly created state of Israel of the "Freedom Party" (Tnuat Haherut), a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties. It was formed out of the membership and following of the former Irgun Zvai Leumi, a terrorist, right-wing, chauvinist organization in Palestine.
The current visit of Menahem Begin, leader of this party to the United States is obviously calculated to give the impression of American Support for his party in the coming Israeli elections, and to cement political ties with conservative Zionist elements in the United States. Several Americans of national repute have lent their names to welcome his visit. It is inconceivable that those who oppose fascism throughout the world, if correctly informed as to Mr. Begin's political record and perspectives, could add their names and support to the movement he represents. Before irreparable damage is done by way of financial contributions, public manifestations in Begin's behalf, and the creation in Palestine of the impression that a large segment of America supports Fascist lements in Israel, the American public must be informed as to the record and Objectives of Mr. Begin and his movement.
The public avowals of Begin's party are no guide whatever to its actual character. Today they speak of freedom, democracy and anti-imperialism, whereas until recently they openly preached the doctrine of the Fascist state. It is in its actions that the terrorist party betrays its real character; from its past actions we can judge what it may be expected to do in the future.
Attack on Arab Village
A shocking example was their behavior in the Arab village of Deir Yassin. This village, off the main roads and surrounded by Jewish lands, had Taken no part in the war, and had even fought off Arab bands who wanted to use the village as their base. On April 9 (THE NEW YORK TIMES), terrorist bands attacked this peaceful village, which was not a military objective in the fighting, killed most of its inhabitants - 240 men, women and children - and kept a few of them alive to parade as captives through the streets of Jerusalem. Most of the Jewish community was horrified at the deed, and the Jewish Agency sent a telegram of apology to King Abdullah of Trans-Jordan.
But the terrorists, far from being ashamed of their act, were proud of this massacre, publicized it widely, and invited all the foreign correspondents present in the country to view the heaped corpses and the general havoc at Deir Yassin. The Deir Yassin incident exemplifies the character and actions of the Freedom Party. Within the Jewish community they have preached an admixture of ultra-nationalism, religious mysticism, and racial superiority.
Like other Fascist parties they have been used to break strikes, and Have themselves pressed for the destruction of free trade unions. In their Stead they have proposed corporate unions on the Italian Fascist model. During the last years of sporadic anti-British violence, the IZL and Stern groups inaugurated a reign of terror in the Palestine Jewish community. Teachers were beaten up for speaking against them, adults were shot for Not letting their children join them. By gangster methods, beatings, window-smashing, and wide-spread robberies, the terrorists intimidated the population and exacted a heavy tribute.
The people of the Freedom Party have had no part in the constructive achievements in Palestine. They have reclaimed no land, built no settlements, and only detracted from the Jewish defense activity. Their much-publicized immigration endeavors were minute, and devoted mainly to bringing in Fascist compatriots.
DISCREPANCIES SEEN
The discrepancies between the bold claims now being made by Begin and His party, and their record of past performance in Palestine bear the imprint of no ordinary political party. This is the unmistakable stamp of a Fascist party for whom terrorism (against Jews, Arabs, and British alike), and misrepresentation are means, and a "Leader State" is the goal.
In the light of the foregoing considerations, it is imperative that the truth about Mr. Begin and his movement be made known in this country. It is all the more tragic that the top leadership of American Zionism has Refused to campaign against Begin's efforts, or even to expose to its own constituents the dangers to Israel from support to Begin.
The undersigned therefore take this means of publicly presenting a few salient facts concerning Begin and his party; and of urging all concerned not to support this latest manifestation of fascism.
ISIDORE ABRAMOWITZ, HANNAH ARENDT, ABRAHAM BRICK, RABBI JESSURUN CARDOZO, ALBERT EINSTEIN, HERMAN EISEN, M.D., HAYIM FINEMAN, M. GALLEN, M.D., H.H. HARRIS, ZELIG S. HARRIS, SIDNEY HOOK, FRED KARUSH, BRURIA KAUFMAN, IRMA L. LINDHEIM, NACHMAN MAJSEL, SEYMOUR MELMAN, MYER D. MENDELSON, M.D., HARRY M. ORLINSKY, SAMUEL PITLICK, FRITZ ROHRLICH, LOUIS P. ROCKER, RUTH SAGER, ITZHAK SANKOWSKY, I.J. SHOENBERG, SAMUEL SHUMAN, M. ZNGER, IRMA WOLPE, STEFAN WOLPE.
New York, Dec. 2, 1948
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