Summary presentation to Benai Zion Congregation
by Jacob Gelt Dekker | March 25, 2006 Key West, Florida

In Indochina, a village committee met with a Western NGO, which planned to build a school for the community.
The village delegation voiced its concerns and kindly asked the Americans to leave and not build the school. Surprised, the NGO delegation sat down with the villagers and tried to find out the reason for their change of heart.

After many cups of tea, the elder finally told them their concerns. The village chief had gone to town to check on the NGO workers and a teahouse owner had put him in front of a television set tuned to CNN-Sports channel. The Chief learned that Westerners like to play golf a lot. Actually, they played all day as it seemed. Naturally the Chief became very concerned that the NGO workers would also like to play golf in his village.

His conclusion was that while building a school, the Westerners would also take away the land of the village rice farmers for their golf course. The village farmers would soon die of hunger.

The Chief also learn watching CNN-Sports Channel that Westerners love to skate on ice and that the climate worldwide was changing. Soon the Chief became convinced that the NGO-ers would change his village climate so that they could skate, and his people would die from the cold.

The rationale of the village chief was perfectly logical but originated from a totally different perspective and reality than that of the NGO workers.

The prayers for world peace can only start to work if we are starting to listen to each other and trying to understand each other's perspectives and reality.

For many years, I traveled with the Anne Frank exhibition through Europe, North and South America and learned many different perspectives. The Holocaust of 6 million Jews was the worst abomination in world history, but let it not blind us to what is happening today.

When I travel in the Middle East, the confrontation with the disappearance of the Ottoman Empire in about 1923, more than 80 years ago, is a stunning reality. The consequent killing fields in the Middle East of, what some claim to be, more than 40 million people under the supervision of France, England and, later, the United States under the commission of the League of Nations and the United Nations, make the numbers of 9/11 pale in comparison.

Yet today in the West, the movie, Laurence of Arabia, which features the killing fields of Jordan, is still one of the most popular films.

We do not mention the killing of 3 million people by Pol Pot in Cambodia in the 1970?s, or the 55 million during the Cultural Revolution in China, or the 2-3 million in Rwanda in the Hutu-Tutsi conflict, or the 2 million in the civil war in Sudan. We suffer from tunnel vision and focus on the deaths at the World Trade Center and The Pentagon as if there is no other life valued more highly than that of Westerners. With such myopic perspectives, and such self-serving arguments, our prayers for peace will never be heard.

Dear Congregation open up your hearts and your minds to the cries of desperation in the world. Every 5 seconds somewhere in the world, a child dies of starvation.

I run out of arguments when people ask me why Americans prefer to spend a hundred dollars on a round of golf rather that feeding the hungry children of the world. The desperadoes are on our doorstep. They come asking, begging us for help, but also in total desperation as suicide bombers with nothing to lose but their lives . . . lives which we in the West do not value at all.

We speak of Human Rights and accuse many nations in the world for not observing these enshrined rights of the People, but at the same time, we allow millions to die , needlessly, from hunger.

Once again, I ask you to join me and help me to wake up the world to this greatest tragedy of injustice ever.

Sabbath Salom