Kaj Pedersen & Aisha Kabani
Kaj Pedersen, offered the following invocation:
- The paths of our lives are filled with peaks and valleys. When we are on the top of our peaks, we become so self satisfied that we tend to ignore the things of importance. When we are in a valley, we feel a sense of abandon and again can focus only on what is directly ahead. Remind us, as You do in nature, that above the tree line the mountain-tops are barren and only in the valleys can we find the opportunity for true growth.
Aisha Kabani introduced several visiting Rotarians and guests.
Jim Owens
Jim Owens announced that we have $17,000 to give away this year, including grants of $3,500-$5,000 for capital projects in community service. The District committee meets on October 19, which is the deadline for submission of grant aplications. Next meeting of our BBRC Grants Committee is next Friday, September 11. We need nominations for worthy causes to give our money to.
John Martinka
John Martinka showed a video of a newscast from Antigua that highlighted our BBRC Computers for the World gift to that island nation. The gift included 225 computers and 1,000 dictionaries (from England), and the project was covered on four local newscasts. More videos will be shown in future meetings, including a 15 minute documentary about the project.
Jenny Andrews
Jenny Andrews asked all who had done a Rotary International Service Project to raise their hands. Many have been to Ethiopia, and Jenny described for us an orphanage called A Hope that works with HIV-positive kids. Jenny said that the orphans essentially had been warehoused as they waited for death, but now the kids are alive and well and expecting a reasonably normal life, due to antiviral drugs. She is giving personally, and her husband and Ercan are giving along with the Microsoft matching funds. Others are welcome to join them to help buy a couple of much-needed laptop computers for the staff of the orphanage.
Curtis Cummings
Sergeant at Arms Curtis Cummings announced there would be no fines today. Instead, he said, “We’re going to have fun.” Ten little brown bags were provided on our tables, and each table took the contents of the bag (graham crackers, marshmallows, and nutella) and built something with it.
The winners!
After two minutes, a celebrity judged entered the room, Judge Jenny. She circulated around the room in her judicial robes, issuing harsh critical comments on the hastily contrived structures. The winner was “Modern Cinderella”—a pedestal with a pink shoe on it. The prize for the contest was chocolate.
The Ringer!
Rourke O’Brien was accused of breaking child labor laws by involving his elementary school-aged son in the project, but apparently there was no controlling legal precedent for action against him.
District 5030 Recruiting GSE Team Leader and Members for a 4-week 2010 Exchange with Bolivia, South America
Rotary District: 4690
Dates: April 11 — May 8, 2010
Cities include: La Paz, Cochabamba, Sucre, Potosí, Tarija, and Santa Cruz
The District 5030 outbound GSE Team and its Rotarian Leader will have a very valuable life and career enhancing educational and cultural experience. Our Bolivian Rotary hosts are known for opening their hearts and homes to visiting GSE Teams sharing professional and cultral similarities and enjoying our differences — and learning from each other.
Applications are now being received for a Team Leader who is an experienced Rotarian; preferably a Rotary Academy graduate or a club leader proficient in the Spanish language of host district. Team Leader Applications are being accepted now with interviews on September 22nd.
The four (4) team members must work or live in District 5030; they are non-Rotarians (25-40 yrs). They must be employed in their profession more than 2 years, have their employer's consent for a 4-week leave, be proficient in speaking Spanish, be able to participate in all preparations for the GSE Exchange, and understand that there is no spouse or partner accompaniment on the trip. Team member applications are being accepted now through October 4th. Interviews will be held the week of October 20th.
If you are interested and would like more information, contact Bob Kaercher, GSE Committee Chair, or BBRC Member John Armenia, Rotary District 5030 Eastside GSE Coordinator.
Howard Johnson announced that the Rotary First Harvest work party is September 12. The BBRC had 16 participants in the July and August parties, so we’re ahead of last year’s pace. HoJo urged, “Let’s keep it up and win the Golden Donut Award.”
Chuck Kimbrough announced that drivers are needed for the adoption party. We also need about 20 people to do other tasks in September, to prepare for the party on October 3. The party will start in morning and be done by 2:00 p.m.
"Holy Land, Whose Land? Modern Dilemma, Ancient Roots," Dorothy Drummond, Author, a discussion of the Israeli/Palestinian controversy and the reasons both parties have for their positions
Dorothy Drummond
According to Bill Brooks, who introduced the speaker, Drummond spent most of her life as freelance writer for geographical publications. She began as an assistant editor for Geographical Review. Geography has been an important part of her life story, as she has a masters degree in geography from Northwestern University, and her husband was a professor of geography at Indiana State University (ISU). She taught geography at ISU for 20 years. As Bill quipped, “She knows where it’s at.” Her book is an outgrowth of extensive travel and study in the Middle East. Now a proud grandmother of two, she has retired from teaching, dividing her time between traveling, writing and speaking.
Drummond began by describing her third visit to Israel in 2000. “It was a nice time to be there,” she said, noting that the Pope was there at the same time. “The peace was kept, and it was a lovely time, but the military was in evidence.” As she toured Israel, she began to ask herself how it happened that “in this small country—the size of New Jersey—two peoples, Jews and Arabs, or if you prefer, Jews and Palestinians, want the same territory so passionately.” She felt that she should have known, but had too many gaps in her understanding. She did know that the land was central to the scriptures of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. As she travelled, she kept a journal for her children and their friends to report her travels and studies. Her kids insisted that she get it published, now it’s in its second revised edition.
According to Drummond, “Every teacher at every level has the same job—to make the complex understandable.” That’s what she tries to do in her writing, since she is and will always be a teacher.
The book was ready to go to press, when September 11, 2001, brought the importance of her question into stark view. Drummond noted that the infamous Osama Bin Laden has said that 9/11 occurred because of the existence of the state of Israel and US support for it.
Drummond went on to assess the efforts of recent U.S. presidents to bring peace to the Holy Land. “Clinton tried hard and thought he had come close to getting a settlement, but it fell apart. Bush came in and tried to ignore the situation, but after 9/11 he could not. He and Rice tried hard to solve the problem, but he didn’t succeed either. The current president believes we can do it and has made peace in the Holy Land his #1 foreign policy commitment. He has sent George Mitchell over as his envoy.” She noted that Mitchell has great credentials after negotiating the Northern Ireland peace, so she is hopeful that he may be effective.
While 4000 years of history are reported in her book, she opted not to talk about that. She also said she was “not going to tell why the Arabs have antipathy toward the Jews. It’s in the book.” Rather she chose to concentrate on the modern period. Calling attention to the images of four people projected on a screen, she went on to talk about Yassar Arafat, Mahmoud Abbas, Ariel Sharon (who is now brain-dead from an aneurism), and Sheik Ahmed Yassin.
“Yassar Arafat is the father of his country,” she said. “He brought awareness of the Palestinian cause to the world.” Arafat was an engineer, the son of people who had opposed Jewish settlers long before Israel was founded. He took up arms against both British colonizers and Jewish settlers in his youth. According to Drummond, Arafat hated the jews, and he and Sharon hated each other and wouldn’t speak.
When Israel came into being, she said, the world rejoiced, but people didn’t know about the displaced Arabs. How were they displaced? She explained that “the Arab nations attacked Israel in 1948, inviting refugees to come to their lands for safety temporary. Those refugees were not the only ones who fled. Some Arabs were thrown out by the Israelis in order to settle Holocaust settlers. That was ugly. Over 800,000 refugees either fled or were thrown out. Now they are 4 million and they want their land back.”
“Arafat wanted to gain attention for the refugees, so he resorted to terrorism,” explained Drummond. The terrorist attack on the Olympic games in Munich in 1972 were a result. Arafat also led the highjacking of TWA planes on the tarmac of the Beirut airport, in which passengers held hostage for weeks on four occasions. These events, she said, drew the world’s attention to the “Palestinians.” (She explained that before the Palestinian Arabs adopted this name, both Jews and Arabs in Israel were called Palestinians.) Arafat went to the UN, promising to no longer engage in terrorism and calling for two states, and “the UN made him a statesman. According to the Oslo accords, Israel was to stop settlements, and Arabs were to stop terrorism.” The result was a Nobel Peace Prize for Arafat. He became president of the Palestinian Authority, she said, “but he was a failure, very corrupt. He stole millions for his Swiss bank accounts.”
“The Intifada (a new Palestinian uprising led by Arafat) started with stone throwing and turned to suicide belts,” she continued. Many Israelis were killed, “but Israeli retribution took 4,000 Palestinian lives. So the Palestinians asked what the Intifada had gained them.” Mahmoud Abbas won the presidency on a peace platform, but Sharon never talked to him, because terrorism continued. His position was “unless you disarm your people, we won’t talk to you,” Drummond said. “Abbas couldn’t get it done. He was weak, and Sharon took advantage of that and decided to create a Palestinian state on Israeli terms, building a barrier to separate Israel from Palestine.” The security barrier Sharon built encompassed 1,400 square miles of Palestinian territory, but “Israel is a democracy where rule of law prevails. The courts made them move the barrier back, and now it encompasses only 6% of Palestinian territory.” She added that “a contentious [Israeli] people is united on only one topic, the security barrier. The wall seems to be working, as violence has decreased.”
Drummond stated that in 1967, when the 6-Day War occurred, the Israelis took everything from the Suez Canal to Mt. Herman and the West Bank. Knowing that the Arab armies were amassing and that they were going to be attacked, Israel struck first, wiping out the Egyptian air force. Arab forces, having no air cover, were doomed. “Some said, ‘let the Palestinians govern themselves,’ but religious voices claimed divine right to the land and there are now many religious settlers in Palestinian territory. Israel tried to give the Gaza strip back to Egypt, but they wouldn’t take it. It’s just desert. Half the Arabs there are still refugees supported by the UN. More than 8,000 Jewish settlers entered, taking the best land.”
As time expired, the meeting was formally adjourned, but extra time was allowed by President Margie Burns for wrap-up and questions. Drummond went on to discuss matters such as Sharon’s decision to dismantle settlements and his subsequent aneurism, the rise of Sheik Ahmed Yassin and the Islamic Brotherhood, the assassination of Anwar Sadat, and the birth of Al Qaeda. Ahmed Yassin, she said, “bought the whole Muslim Brotherhood line.” Their number one priority is to abolish the state of Israel. “Although the Muslim Brotherhood usually doesn’t involve itself in politics, they entered the Palestinian politics and won 65% of the seats in the Palest Parliament. Iran has gotten involved in helping Hamas get better weapons. And that’s how we got where we are.”
AMA on the Stimulus Package
Courtesy of Wally Mahoney
The American Medical Association has now weighed in on the new economic stimulus package:
- The Allergists voted to scratch it, but the Dermatologists advised not to make any rash moves.
- The Gastroenterologists had sort of a gut feeling about it, but the Neurologists thought the administration had a lot of nerve.
- The Obstetricians felt they were all laboring under a misconception.
- Ophthalmologists considered the idea shortsighted.
- Pathologists yelled, "Over my dead body!" while the Pediatricians said, "Oh, Grow up!"
- The Psychiatrists thought the whole idea was madness, while the Radiologists could see right through it.
- Surgeons decided to wash their hands of the whole thing.
- The Internists thought it was a bitter pill to swallow, and the Plastic Surgeons said, "This puts a whole new face on the matter."
- The Podiatrists thought it was a step forward, but the Urologists were pissed off at the whole idea.
- The Anesthesiologists thought the whole idea was a gas, and the Cardiologists didn't have the heart to say no. In the end, the Proctologists won out, leaving the entire decision up to the a**holes in Washington.
