Follow Me Online

Making Change Podcast

Facebook

Twitter

Gopin Associates, LLC

YouTube

Month: June 2012

  • Tourism of Destruction, Tourism of Construction: Two Trips to the Holy Land

    This is reprinted from my latest Huffington Post article:

    Tourism is a business involving a billion people a year meeting several other billion people whose lives they profoundly affect economically and socially. The question for the future is whether that effect is going to be negative or positive, peaceful or destructive.

    I want to argue that it is all up to us travelers.

    Recently, in the major Israeli paper Yediot Ahronot, there appeared a picture of a beautiful little girl holding and aiming a machine gun almost her own size, being coached by a smiling soldier in fatigues in a West Bank settlement in the Occupied Territories. The caption mentioned how many foreigners come on tours and are given this kind of exposure.

    This is a very different kind of tourism and educational seminar experience than the kind I and my colleagues have been running for years in Israel …

  • Syria’s Christian Conundrum

    by Hind Kabawat, CRDC Senior Research Analyst and Expert on Conflict Resolution

    This article was originally published by CNN here.

    One of the most perplexing aspects of the Syrian revolution is the deep ambivalence felt by so many of the country’s Christians when faced with the prospect of freedom after four decades of authoritarian dictatorship. Some Christians have enthusiastically embraced the prospect of democratic change and a more open civil society, but many have not.

    As a Christian, this provokes a great deal of sadness in me and others who are committed to transforming Syria into an open, democratic, inclusive, secular and religiously tolerant society. But the problem is that many, if not most, Christians in Syria do not believe that this will be the outcome of changing the regime.

    On the contrary, they believe the present regime — corrupt and repressive as it has been — is the …

  • Losses, Liberia, and the Era of Human Rights

    I think today a great deal about the conviction of Charles Taylor, the first head of state to be convicted by the Hague.

    Mr. Taylor was the first head of state convicted by an international court since the Nuremberg trials after World War II.

    Prosecutors had sought an even longer sentence of 80 years. If carried out, the term decided on Wednesday would likely mean the 64-year-old Mr. Taylor will spend the rest of his life behind bars. Asked to stand as the sentence was read, he looked at the floor.

    At a news conference after the hearing, Salamba Silla, who works with victims groups in Sierra Leone pleaded for more help for former child soldiers, orphans and other victims of the country’s war. “You can see hundreds of them begging on the streets of Freetown,” she said. “Many who suffered horrendously need help to return to the provinces,

    …

Categories