Local resident Lee Scanlon, who lived in the Middle East for 5 years and has worked as an Arabic translator, will lead a discussion entitled “The Middle East: Some Facts” at the Wayne County Public Library on Main Street in Honesdale on Tuesday, April 7, beginning at 6 PM.
Here is Mr. Scanlon’s statement describing his presentation:
“United States foreign policy for the Middle East region, especially with regard to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, is designed to perpetuate war. It has not failed, but on the contrary, has succeeded in that aim for many years. Yet that conflict is the major obstacle both to peace in the region and to world peace. It is also by far the greatest cause of what is called ‘terrorism’ and of the consequent loss of our freedom and our civil rights. Do we not have better things to do with our time, our energy and our resources than support this habit? As a first step toward changing this situation, it is essential to understand the facts. I would like to talk about some of those facts.”
Refreshments will be served. Use of Wayne County Public Library facilities by Waynepeace does not imply any endorsement by WCPL of Waynepeace’s opinions or policies.
June 24, 2009 at 10:32 pm
Very Interested in the delicate aspects reflected in the “Middle East: Some Facts”
I would like Mr Lee Scanlon to get in touch with his old friends, Lester and Trudy from his Paris years, trying to locate him for some time now.
Salam alekoum, Harry
June 26, 2009 at 5:08 pm
In connection with these issues and in reply to some who had claimed elsewhere that the Middle East lacked critical importance, I once asked:
By what yardstick can one possibly say that the Middle East is not of importance? The Middle East was the root cause of 9/11 and of most other terrorist attacks at home and abroad. So colossal must have been the importance of the Middle East in the eyes of our administration that it legitimized our killing of hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis and the sacrifice of over 4,000 of our own boys and girls in uniform, not to mention the maiming and crippling of tens of thousands more veterans, and the displacement of millions of Iraqi families. And I won’t go into the significance of Middle East oil supplies for our country’s stability, or the threats to Israel’s very existence. Ongoing debates about continental and offshore oil drilling, fueled by concerns regarding our country’s energy independence, are directly related to the Middle East.
McCain, as I had stated during his presidential campaigning, if he followed or even seemed to be following any of Bush’s policies, would have simply hardened the disastrous legacy of those policies both economically (markets, recession, skyrocketing national debt, gas prices, bank failures, devalued dollar) and geopolitically (diplomatic relations, swelling anti-American sentiment, reinforcement of our Great Satan image, accepting WMD for Israel but not for Iran).
I was accused at one point of being anti-Semitic and nonsensically branded as racist. What I was underscoring was McCain’s thoughtless parading with Joe Lieberman (with all due respect to Joe), a Jew, as if he wished to emphasize America’s stand with regard to the situation in the Middle East. It was already bad enough that he showed he didn’t know who was fighting and training whom or what in Iraq and Iran, walking around with Lieberman was sending the wrong message in that sensitive, war-torn region, suggesting that America was committed to an Israeli/U.S. nuclear-power partnership come hell or high water.
After having mistakenly observed that Iran was aiding and training al Qaeda, golly me what a testament to our war strategy and diplomatic perception, McCain was also publicizing the fact that he lent no credence to the belief (justified or unjustified) held by many that the possible root cause of 9/11 and anti-American sentiment in general was our pro-Israel position in the Israel-Palestine conflict and the anti-Islam, anti-Arab prattle emanating from the United States. He also insisted on his support for the war in Iraq and continued to bash Iran (“bomb, bomb Iran”), a stance that was out of favor in most of the world, riling more particularly the Islamic world, while being welcome by Israelis. In other words, he was proposing no change in the major elements of our foreign policy that have been eroding our image abroad, contributing to the rise in Islamic extremism, and compounding the troubling situation in the Middle East.