Archive for the ‘Doing the Right Thing’ Category
Tuesday, August 31st, 2010
By: Rabbi Jack Bemporad, Center for Interreligious Understanding
Professor Marshall Breger, Catholic University of America
Suhail A. Khan, Institute for Global Engagement
The Very Reverend Dr. James A. Kowalski, Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine
We are here as a single voice that comes from the three Abrahamic faiths, because we are seeing a new slogan ripple from downtown Manhattan across the US. Its timing particularly resonates as some of us have just returned from an unprecedented tour of concentration campsin Europe, where we stood side by side with a delegation of the most influential US Imams and Muslim leadership. Together, those of us who are Jewish and Muslim, came face-to-face with the unambiguous lesson that religious demonization can and does lead to unimaginable violence and horror.
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Posted in Analysis and Opinion, Antisemitism, Bullying, Civil Rights, Crimes Against Humanity, Democracy, Doing the Right Thing, ETHICS, FREEDOM OF SPEECH, Hate Speech, History, Holocaust Denial, Human Rights, Human Rights Abuses, Interfaith relations, RELIGION-BASED MURDERS, Righteous People of All Faiths, words that wound | No Comments »
Friday, August 20th, 2010
By Lawrence Rubin, Ph.D. on July 29, 2010
Imagine Jay Leno, during one of his ‘Jaywalking” adventures asking people on the street “Who was Kitty Genovese?” Would they know? Would You? Maybe, maybe not; but rest assured that most Intro and Social Psych students are well aware that on March 13, 1964, Catherine Susan Genovese, aka Kitty, was brutally murdered in a Queens, New York…in either plain sight or earshot of numerous neighbors and residents of the aprtment building in which she lived. While Kitty is no doubt remembered by friends and family, her legacy has seen fruition in decades of psychological research into what has come to be called ‘the bystander effect’ and ‘diffusion of responsibility. Simply stated, these phenomena refer to the likliehood that bystanders to a crime or wrongdoing, are likely to resist taking action if they believe others will do so.
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Posted in Doing the Right Thing, ETHICS, the by-stander effect | No Comments »
Tuesday, August 17th, 2010
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, August 17, 2010; 9:36 AM
On Dec. 8, 2009, the New York Times published a story about a planned development in lower Manhattan:
“The building has no sign that hints at its use as a Muslim prayer space, but these modest beginnings point to a far grander vision: an Islamic center near the city’s most hallowed piece of land that would stand as one of ground zero’s more unexpected and striking neighbors.
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Posted in Analysis and Opinion, Civil Rights, Commemorations, Democracy, Doing the Right Thing, ETHICS, FREEDOM OF SPEECH, Hate Speech, Human Rights, Interfaith relations, Museums and Memorials, NEWS, POLITICS, Propaganda, Stereotyping, Stopping Hate, Terrorisim, United States, journalism, words that wound | No Comments »
Monday, August 16th, 2010
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LONDON: Amnesty International urged Pakistan on Monday to tackle human rights violations ahead of a visit to Britain by President Asif Ali Zardari, which has become clouded by a diplomatic row over terrorism. On the eve of President Zardari’s arrival in London, Amnesty International said the worsening security situation in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa had left thousands of civilians dead and over a million displaced, and urged Islamabad to take action. “The conditions are right for Pakistan to show it is serious about political solutions to the human rights violations, poverty, and a constitutional rights vacuum in the northwest,” said Amnesty International Asia-Pacific head Sam Zarifi. “President Zardari should take this opportunity to announce specific, major reforms, like the abolition of the Frontier Crimes Regulations (FCR) that treat northwestern Pakistan like a human rights-free zone,” he said. The FCR is a colonial-era law that applies only to the Federally Administered Tribal Areas. afp |
Posted in Civil Rights, Democracy, Doing the Right Thing, Human Rights, Human Rights Abuses, POLITICS | No Comments »
Monday, August 16th, 2010
Even 65 years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the world’s suffering does not end
By Neri Livneh
Even before the real-life model for Don Draper of “Mad Men” arrived on the scene, the Americans were already displaying their genius as copywriters. After all, you have to be thinking out of the box in order to come up with the name “Little Boy” – the essence of pure innocence – for the atom bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, killing an estimated 140,000 people within four months and injuring tens of thousands more. No one would have imagined that “Fat Man,” an inherently grotesque figure, was anything other than a character invented to promote sales of donuts, hot dogs or any of the other delicacies that have turned America into an obese, fast-food nation, rather than the pet name for the bomb that was dropped three days later on Nagasaki, killing more than 74,000 people.
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Posted in Analysis and Opinion, Democracy, Doing the Right Thing, ETHICS, Education | No Comments »
Saturday, July 31st, 2010
Like many countries in Eastern Europe, Poland is dotted with hundreds of Jewish cemeteries left behind when the country’s Jewish population was decimated during World War II. But Poland’s Jewish community and its Prison Service are teaming up to care for the grave sites and combat anti-Semitism at the same time.
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Posted in Doing the Right Thing, Europe, History, In Memoriam, Interfaith relations, Poland, Stopping Hate | No Comments »
Saturday, July 31st, 2010
Gallery
Teens learning history’s lessons are reminded that “racism and anti-Semitism are really alive and well,” program manager Arthur Brown says.
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, July 25, 2010 When Wendy Holland heard that a security guard was gunned down at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum last June, she didn’t think much of it. She saw the clip on the evening news and went back to life as a 17-year-old in Prince George’s County: advanced classes, sports practices, hanging out with friends–
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Posted in Doing the Right Thing, ETHICS, Education, Hate Crimes, Heroism, Human Rights, In Memoriam, Museums and Memorials, Student Projects, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum | No Comments »
Saturday, July 31st, 2010
By ALICIA RANCILIO (AP)
NEW YORK — A new show on MTV attempts to help students look past school stereotypes.
Each episode of “If You Really Knew Me” focuses on a different school, where students go through a program called Challenge Day. They share their experiences with each other in exercises designed to cut down on bullying and gossiping.
The cameras follow five students before, during and after the program.
One student who was filmed, Leiken (LIK’ in) Poppino, says the experience “changed people for the better.”
Poppino says her school, Freedom High School in Oakley, Calif., had a “miraculous change” for about a week after Challenge Day last year. After that, students who took part worked to keep the momentum going.
“If You Really Knew Me” airs Tuesdays at 11 p.m. Eastern.
Posted in Bullying, Doing the Right Thing, Education, Stereotyping, Stopping Hate, Student Projects, The Arts | No Comments »
Saturday, July 31st, 2010
By Marvin Hier
Earlier this year, eighteen Catholic scholars from the United States, Germany, and Australia, took the unprecedented step of writing a letter to Pope Benedict XVI, urging him to slow down the canonization process that would designate Pope Pius XII a saint of the Catholic Church, until more evidence could be found to defend the action against charges that he failed to do enough during the Nazi Holocaust. Pope Benedict inherited the Pius XII dossier from his predecessors but angered critics, including the Simon Wiesenthal Center, when he issued a decree in December 2009, recognizing Pius’s “heroic virtues,” moving him one step closer to Sainthood.
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Posted in Analysis and Opinion, Doing the Right Thing, ETHICS, Europe, Heroism, History | No Comments »
Sunday, July 25th, 2010
TAMPA – During the four days Dontae Morris was on the run after police say he fatally shot two officers, Lucy Mills watched coverage of the manhunt with special interest.
Each time searchers came up empty, the bad memories bubbled up.
In 2007, her 17-year-old grandson C.J. Mills – a football star at Jefferson High School – was gunned down in his driveway.
People saw the murder. People know who did it. But three years later, no one has come forward with definitive information for police, and his case remains unsolved.
As she followed accounts of the four-day manhunt for Morris, Lucy Mills seethed at what she sees as a no-snitch culture that still pervades some neighborhoods. She says someone had to know where Morris was during the manhunt and should have told police but didn’t.
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Posted in Doing the Right Thing, ETHICS, snitching, the by-stander effect | No Comments »
