The Research Forum: Obama raises stakes in Bibi feud.

Saturday, 21 March 2015

Obama raises stakes in Bibi feud.

The White House is escalating its feud with reelected Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, suggesting the United States might make a significant change in its stance at the United Nations.

President Obama on Thursday called to congratulate Netanyahu on his victory, but also chided the Israeli leader for declaring just days before his election he would not support the creation of a Palestinian state.

Obama told Netanyahu the U.S. would “need to reassess our options” regarding relations with Israel, according to a White House official. He also took issue with Netanyahu’s warning to his supporters about Arab-Israeli citizens voting in high numbers, the official said.

The White House has called those comments “cynical” and “divisive.” In multiple interviews, Netanyahu has walked back his comments about Palestinian statehood. It remains unclear how far the White House is willing to go to punish Netanyahu for his campaign, which included a controversial address to Congress that dozens of Democrats boycotted.

The White House has hewed to a tough line, stating repeatedly that the U.S-Israel relationship might be altered by Netanyahu’s remark about a two-state solution. “I think they’re trying to send a very specific and tough message to Prime Minister Netanyahu, which is, ‘We’ve paid attention to the words you’ve used during the campaign and if they are in fact going to be your policy, they will have an impact on our relationship,’” said Daniel Kurtzer, a former U.S. ambassador to Israel under George W. Bush who is now a professor of Middle Eastern policy studies at Princeton University. “It’s a shot across the bow,” added Kurtzer, who said the White House’s warnings “should be taken quite seriously.”

White House officials say no decisions have been made about policy changes with regards to Israel. Press secretary Josh Earnest and others have floated the possibility that the U.S. will not veto some resolutions at the United Nations Security Council that are deemed hostile to Israel. That includes language designed to pressure Israel into accepting a Palestinian state and condemning Israeli settlement activity.

Netanyahu’s comments from before the election show that support for a two-state solution “is a view that’s not shared by the Israeli prime minister, at least it’s unclear whether or not he holds that view anymore,” Earnest said Friday.

The last time the U.S. backed a U.N. resolution against Israel was in 1981, when President Ronald Reagan supported a measure condemning Israel's strike on an Iraqi nuclear reactor.

Obama’s dispute with Netanyahu has angered Republicans on Capitol Hill and put pro-Israel Democrats in a tough spot.

Should the administration change its Israel policy, the backlash from members of both parties could be intense. Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Calif.), a senior member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said he suspects the administration is bluffing about its U.N. threat. If “there’s a resolution hostile to Israel, I would expect that this administration would veto it,” Sherman told BuzzFeed. Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) also said in a statement to The Weekly Standard he “expects” the U.S. to continue backing Israel at the U.N.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said she was “near tears” after Netanyahu’s address to Congress earlier this month, in which he criticized Obama’s efforts to broker a nuclear deal with Iran.

But Pelosi on Wednesday softened her rhetoric, saying she respects the results of Israel’s election and pledged the U.S. would continue to work with the Jewish state. “It doesn’t depend on personalities,” Pelosi said of U.S.-Israel relations. “It’s about values that we share. And we look forward to continuing our work together.”

The White House is not willing to put everything on the table when it comes to re-evaluating its policy toward Israel. Earnest said the reassessment “will have no impact” on security cooperation with Israel. The U.S. has provided almost $100 billion in military aid to Israel over the past five decades.

Pro-Israel groups have urged Obama to put his dispute with Netanyahu to rest. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which has been at odds with Obama over Netanyahu and Iran, urged the president to mend ties with his Israeli counterpart. “Unfortunately, administration spokespersons rebuffed the prime minister’s efforts to improve the understandings between Israel and the U.S,” the group said in a statement. “In contrast to their comments, we urge the administration to further strengthen ties with America’s most reliable and only truly democratic ally in the Middle East.”

White House chief of staff Denis McDonough on Monday will deliver a keynote address to the national conference of J Street, a group that has positioned itself as an alternative to AIPAC and has been critical of Netanyahu. By Jordan Fabian, The Hill - 03/20/15 06:06 PM EDT

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About the Forum

The Forum initially started its work in December 1997 with the intention of promoting research culture and activities among doctoral candidates in one of the British universities in London. The Research Forum convened 8 sessions a year on humanities-related topics between 1997 and 2013.

The Forum now focuses on the production of self-taught courses, articles and commentary on some aspects of the news for students as well as the general public. The last meeting of the Forum took place in July 2015.

Mowlānā Jalāloddin Balkhi, known in Persia as Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Balkhī and in the West simply as Rumi, was born on September 30, 1207 C. E. in Balkh Province, Afghanistan, then on the eastern edge of the Persian Empire. Rumi descended from a long line of Islamic jurists, theologians, and mystics, including his father, who was known by followers of Rumi as “Sultan of the Scholars.” When Rumi was still a young man, his father led their family more than 2,000 miles west to avoid the invasion of Genghis Khan’s armies. They settled in present-day Turkey, where Rumi lived and wrote most of his life.

As a teenager, Rumi was recognized as a great spirit by the poet and teacher Fariduddin Attar, who gave him a copy of his own Ilahinama (The Book of God). When his father died in 1231, Rumi became head of the madrasah, or spiritual learning community. The school reportedly had over ten thousand students, including masons, grocers, weavers, hatmakers, carpenters, tailors, and bookbinders.

Rumi’s oldest son, Sultan Velad, managed to save 147 of Rumi’s intimate letters, which provide insights about the poet and how he lived. Rumi often involved himself in the lives of his community members, solving disputes and facilitating loans between nobles and students. The letters are described as having lines of poetry scattered throughout.

In 1244, Rumi met Shams Tabriz, a dervish “God-man” who had taken a vow of poverty. Their meeting is considered a central event in Rumi’s life. Though accounts of their meeting differ, one story claims that Rumi was teaching by a fountain, and Shams walked up through the crowd of students and pushed Rumi’s books into the water, including his father’s spiritual diary. “You must now live what you have been reading about," Shams told Rumi. Rumi believed both his real life and his real poetry began when he met Shams. “What I had thought of before as God," Rumi said, “I met today in a human being.”

Shams and Rumi were close friends for about four years. Over the course of that time, Shams was repeatedly driven away by Rumi’s jealous disciples, including one of Rumi’s sons, Ala al-Din. In December of 1248, Shams again disappeared; it is believed that he was either driven away or killed. Rumi left the madrasah in search of his friend, travelling to Damascus and elsewhere. Eventually, Rumi made peace with his loss, returning to his home believing Shams to be a part of him: “His essence speaks through me.”

Rumi’s mourning for the loss of his friend led to the outpouring of more than 40,000 lyric verses, including odes, eulogies, quatrains, and other styles of Eastern-Islamic poetry. The resulting collection, Divan-e Shams-e Tabrizi or The Works of Shams Tabriz, is considered one of Rumi’s masterpieces and one of the greatest works of Persian literature.

In his introduction to his translation of Rumi’s The Shams, Coleman Barks has written: “Rumi is one of the great souls, and one of the great spiritual teachers. He shows us our glory. He wants us to be more alive, to wake up... He wants us to see our beauty, in the mirror and in each other.”

For the last twelve years of his life, beginning in 1262, Rumi dictated a single, six-volume poem to his scribe, Husam Chelebi. The resulting masterwork, the Masnavi-ye Ma’navi(Spiritual Verses), consists of sixty-four thousand lines, and is considered Rumi’s most personal work of spiritual teaching. Rumi described the Masnavi as “the roots of the roots of the roots of the (Islamic) Religion," and the text has come to be regarded by some Sufis as the Persian-language Koran.

In his introduction to an English edition of Spiritual Verses, translator Alan Williams wrote: “Rumi is both a poet and a mystic, but he is a teacher first, trying to communicate what he knows to his audience. Like all good teachers, he trusts that ultimately, when the means to go any further fail him and his voice falls silent, his students will have learnt to understand on their own.”

Rumi fell ill and died on December 17, 1273 C. E., in Konya, Turkey. His remains were interred adjacent to his father’s, and the Yeşil Türbe (Green Tomb) was erected above their final resting place. Now the Mevlâna museum, the site includes a mosque, dance hall, and dervish living quarters. Thousands of visitors, of all faiths, visit his tomb each month, honoring the poet of legendary spiritual understanding.

Source: https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/jalal-al-din-rumi

Your Life Discourse!

It is soooo good when you realize that your life and every road you have taken made and makes sense... Even when you feel that the world will not applaud you for what you are doing, you find you have to do it yourself and clap your own hands. Later everything falls into place. In my doctoral thesis, I studied how the self-discourse is constructed along history. It is a fact that we describe our past like a coherent story. Even though we know that the discourse of our life is a construction, our life is actually built by roads and paths we accept, that come and go, and later make all sense because they are part of our own being. Once in a while we feel that our past is actually part of us.

Marcia Neme Buzalaf
marciabuzalaf@gmail.com.

Scholarship and Academia

Benedit Spinoza is one of the original thinkers among Western philosophers. When he was offered a Professorship of Philosophy at Heidelberg University at age of 31, he turned it down arguing that he wanted to be left alone to do his philosophising “in accordance with his own mind”. He proceeded to live a solitary life, earning his living by grinding and polishing lenses for spectacles, microscopes and telescopes – at the time a new profession.

Being a great philosopher and academic is a rare development: Descartes, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Marx, Mill or Nietzsche did not teach philosophy. The exceptions are Kant and Hegel.

Nothing much has changed since: academia is still not the right place for real scholars today. Mottos such as ‘publish or perish’ have mainly resulted in the production of shallow, regurgitated or ego-boosting publications. Universities are also no different from other corporate capitalist entities that seek to maximize their profit at the cost of quality service. They neither provide the scholar nor the student with a conducive environment for their development or self-fulfilment.

Thoughtful Sentences

Integrity: When the thoughts we think are the same as the words we speak, others will feel our integrity.

Enthusiasm: Those who are fired with an enthusiastic idea and who allow it to take hold and dominate their thoughts find that new worlds open for them. As long as enthusiasm holds out, so will new opportunities.

No Task Too Difficult: If you do everything with the feeling of happiness, there will be no task too difficult to perform.

A Long And Healthy Life: There are three ingredients for a long and healthy life: live with attention but without worry, use time in a worthwhile way, keep your thoughts pure, positive and filled with strength.

Saturday, 21 March 2015

Obama raises stakes in Bibi feud.

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