Egyptian athlete takes photo with Israeli flag, sparks outrage
Twelve days after Egyptian judoka Islam El Shehaby refused to shake the hand of his Israeli opponent, the country is again up in arms over one of its Olympic athletes, and Israel is again the reason.
This time, after recently participating in a beach volleyball match in Rio, female athlete Doaa Elghobashy photographed herself posing with a fan draped in an Israeli flag.
The photo was posted to the Facebook page of the Israeli Embassy in Egypt, and to the web page of pro-Israel organization Stand With Us, which reported that it received the photo from one of its members in Brazil.
The 19-year-old Elghobashy, who had already made headlines at the Olympics for playing in a hijab (a veil that covers the head and chest), responded by saying she did not notice the Israeli flag. She told reporters: "This is a conspiracy against me. If I had known that flag would be in the picture, I would not have taken it."
She also suggested that "it's possible this picture was edited in Photoshop and the flag was inserted there to try and hurt me."
Several commenters on social media sites in Egypt vilified Elghobashy, but there were those who came to her defense.
Where are the Palestinian Gandhis?
The spate of “lone wolf” terrorism against Jews that began last October has further eroded our dream of living in peace with our Arab neighbors. It is easy to scoff at anyone who suggests that we need to continue pursuing peace. Nevertheless, we need to ask ourselves if it is possible to prevent future tragedies without establishing peace. A few decades ago, the Lubavitcher Rebbe proclaimed that Israel must establish unquestioned military superiority over the Arabs so they wouldn’t even contemplate fighting us. But he said that was only the first step to creating peace.Muslims and Jews must combine to champion tolerance and stop the Isil-inspired hatred across the Middle East
Since making Aliya a year-and-a-half ago for the second time in my life, after 27 years in the U.S., I have made “peace” my hobby. I have spoken to many Jews and Arabs (admittedly more of the former than the latter), and almost all of them say they want to live in peace with the other. However, they almost all say they have become disillusioned. They believe that the other side doesn’t really want peace but rather to engage in murder.
There is no need to argue to this readership that Jews want peace. We are a nation of שלום רודפי. But I have heard many Jews ask, “Where are the Palestinian Gandhis?” The belief is that if such figures existed, we would have achieved peace by now. This is also the question posed by Julia Bacha, a documentary filmmaker, in her excellent Ted Talk titled, Pay Attention to Nonviolence.
The answer to Bacha’s rhetorical question is that there are Palestinian Gandhis – many of them. But we don’t know of them because the media doesn’t pay attention to them. I will be informing you here about one of such individual, Ali Abu Awwad. Before I discuss him, a little background.
Christianity has been part of the essential fabric of the Middle East for two thousand years. Far from being a Western import as some, incredibly, now seem to suggest, it was born here and exported as a gift to the rest of the world. Christian communities have been intrinsic to the development of Arab culture and civilisation.
This central role in our region and civilisation is why it is abhorrent to us, as a Muslim and a Jew, to see Christianity and Christians under such savage assault across our region.
We are appalled not only by the sickening attacks on our fellow human beings. We also know that to lose Christianity from its birthplace would be to destroy the richness of the tapestry of the Middle East and a hammer blow to our shared heritage. The reality is that we are all one community, united by shared beliefs and history. But this is increasingly denied, with Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, or Daesh as it is known in our region, taking the lead both in justifying and carrying out these attacks. The most recent issue of its publication Dabiq, headlined “Break the Cross”, explicitly rejects the fundamental belief that we are all People of the Book.
Fighters from al-Qaeda linked Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) marching in Raqqa, Syria
Daesh peddle an apocalyptic vision that harks back to a mythic Golden Age which is solely the creation of the warped minds of today’s jihadists. They are in the same mould as those whose misguided zeal turned Christian Europe in the Middle Ages into a byword for fanaticism and oppression. Daesh want to take us to a new Dark Age, an age made even darker by the dangers that the gifts of science and technology pose in their hands.
It is not just Christians, of course, who they have made targets for their hate. The search for religious purity poses a universal threat. As we have seen all too often, fundamentalists display a particular loathing for co-religionists whose views do not conform to their own. Daesh has shown itself as prepared to slaughter indiscriminately other Muslims as it has Jews, Christians and others, whatever their nationality: Jordanian or Egyptian, American, British or European.
HRH Prince Hassan of Jordan, is the founder and president of the Royal Institute for Inter-Faith Studies
Dr Ed Kessler is director of the Woolf Institute