Friday, December 29, 2006

The Jerusalem Summit

From the web-site of the Jerusalem Summit, an international forum seeking to develop moral and efficient strategies against twin dangers facing the mankind:

  1. totalitarianism of the East, as represented by radical Islam, and
  2. moral relativism of the West, aimed at depriving cultures of their spiritual content

[Note that we have a permanent link to the Jerusalem Summit Web site - to the right of the page]....

I. DIPLOMATIC STRATEGY FOR THE DEFENSE OF JUDEO-CHRISTIAN CIVILIZATIONAL VALUES
Gender apartheid and religious intolerance, are the two most objectionable aspects of Islamic radicalism today. These issues should become the target for assertive action by those who feel that their entire system of values and world view are gravely imperiled by the spread of Islamic extremism. For a concerted drive to abolish gender apartheid and religious repression on the one hand, and to enhance the status of Moslem women and install religious pluralism/tolerance in the Moslem world, on the other, would do much to underpin Judeo-Christian values and undermine the cause of Islamic radicalism across the international stage. Indeed, an endeavor of this kind, if successful, could be a major force for promoting positive and moderating change in the very fabric of Islamist regimes.....

II. UPCOMING SUMMIT IN LONDON - from January 28-30/07
This year we, in partnership with the Knesset's Christian Allies Caucus, have made plans to hold the first Jerusalem Summit Europe - in London.
1) The need for UK to lead the European reconcista and Christian revival.discussing:- Practical steps to unite EU Christians against Islamization of Europe and for revival of Judeo-Christian Values - Ways to support Israel in UK and EU, and fight the replacement theology and divestment/boycott initiatives.
2) Joint diplomatic strategy of the West to resist Islamism.Discussing a concrete Strategy for the Diplomatic Defense of the Western Civilization. Conditioning foreign aid, trade and diplomatic relations with Moslem countries on 2 parameters:
1. Women's Rights
2. Religious (Christian) FreedomFor more information-keep checking the site.

III. A 3-D VISION OF PEACE

  • De- politicization of the Problem;
  • De- militarization of PA;
  • De- jihadization of Palestinians
We continue working on an Alternative Plan to the Arab-Israeli conflict which integrates plans and arguments of the best minds connected to the Jerusalem Summit. .....

IV. JERUSALEM ALTERNATIVE
Balfour Books (USA) has published Jerusalem Alternative, a collection of best presentations from the first Jerusalem Summit. The book lays intellectual foundation to the necessity and parameters of the alternative to the failed Oslo process.


On 5 November 2006 the Jerusalem Summit announced that Prof. Kenneth Preiss, a renowned authority on international industrial competitiveness, joined their Advisory Board. He has held leadership roles in defense and industrial projects in Israel and in the United States, which encompassed both management and technology. A civil and nuclear engineer by training, he has held many positions on national advisory committees in Israel regarding structuring of the educational system.

Prof. Preiss has been active in both the Schools of Engineering and Management at Ben Gurion University in Beer Sheba, Israel, and in numerous international professional organizations. His extensive list of published works includes close to 200 original research papers and reports, as well as several books. We post extracts below from his insightful and thought-provoking essay “How Could God and the Jewish Holocause Co-exist?” which reflects upon the pivotal contributions of the Bible and the experience of the Jewish people, for human civilization and the future of mankind .....

Jewish experience brought to humanity, in biblical times, a philosophy of thought, law and action that had a deep and lasting effect. This brief paper points out that Jewish experience again offers humanity an essential message of thought and behavior.

At every annual Passover dinner the Jewish family traditionally reads the exodus story. This....relates primarily the flight to freedom and the building of a community of free people under God-given laws for society and for the individual. ...Emerging from slavery to build a society of free people under God-given law .....

In current human affairs two major and related factors are exponentially expanding technological capability and exponentially expanding population. .... The historical data shows both how large the human population is and how rapidly it is increasing:
  • In 1800 there were 1 billion people on the planet.
  • In 1900 there were 1.6 billion, 15% in cities.
  • In 2000 there were 6.0 billion, 55% in cities.

The 20th century saw a fundamental change in humanity, from being sparsely distributed and rural, to being densely distributed and mainly urban. UN predictions for this century are that by year 2050 human population will be in the range 7.7 to 10.7 billion. By the time a baby born today in a developed country reaches its life expectancy, in the year 2080, the world population will be up to double the year 2000 value.

This increase in population, with all its many implications, will be the principle determinant of 21st century history.The exponential increase in population is accompanied by an exponential expansion of scientific and technical knowledge.

..... We live in an era when exponentially expanding scientific and technical knowledge meets an exponentially expanding human population. The Jewish experience during the 20th century illustrates the two opposite modes of behavior created by this collision.

The conceptual machinery that fueled the enterprise of systematic extermination by the Germans and their allies, of all the Jews they could find, was rational technology based upon scientific knowledge. That effort exhibited all the characteristics of technological planning: scale-up of the capacity of the killing process from Treblinka to Majdanek to Birkenau; experiments in the killing facility of Majdanek to find the dose of a carbon monoxide and hydrogen cyanide mixture and batch size, that would optimize the killing rate of people per day; supply chain scheduling and coordination to bring living raw material to the Europe-wide killing facility at Auschwitz 2 (Birkenau). Jews were bio-mass: useful while alive only as raw material to provide work or experimental media for medical experiments. After death they were processed into industrial products, and the residual bodies, being considered high-volume polluting waste (approximately 50 cubic meters for each 1,000 people), were disposed of by incineration. The Germans and their allies showed one pole of human behavior that derives from the interaction of human scientific knowledge and population. One third of the Jews in the world had been exterminated by the German Nazis and their helpers. Those who survived had been subjected to the most extreme and drawn-out humiliations imaginable. At the personal level their survival required superhuman perseverance, will and luck. At the end of the war hundreds of thousands of Jews suffered individually and collectively from symptoms of the then unrecognized condition known today as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

During the 20th century, the Zionist movement succeeded in harnessing the energies of individual Jews to take their fate into their own hands and reclaim political independence in their ancient homeland. This movement got under way at the end of the 19th century and achieved recognized statehood three years after defeat of the Nazis. In the late 19th century, 30,000 Jews emigrated to Israel from Eastern Europe while 2,000,000 immigrated to other countries. Those 30,000 joined the Jews who had lived for many generations in Palestine, then were later joined by others including many who had survived the Nazis. The efforts of these people changed a country that had been largely desert and malarial swamp, making it fertile, a way station for half a billion birds that now land in Israel twice yearly while migrating between Africa and Europe, a country now rated by a UN survey as 22nd in the world in quality of life, and 8th in life expectancy. This is an achievement of biblical magnitude to which we are still too close to properly appreciate.

Now as in biblical times the Jewish collective faces intense and almost universal hostility. Nevertheless it has established a state based on tradition and governed by law, that is among the world leaders in many aspects of science, technology, high-tech industry, arts and culture. The fact that the future currently faced by the Jews appears uncertain, does not diminish the greatness of these achievements. They are the antithesis of Nazism.

The creation of material wealth, although based upon technology, is primarily a question of societal organization rather than of stand-alone scientific and technological knowledge. ...necessary conditions for prosperity are individual and property rights under law, and absence of predation by corruption or by special-interest groups abusing the legal process. Without respect for the individual and the concomitant balance between the individual and society, as immortalized by the Hebrew bible, countries are dysfunctional and poor, and will never be able to offer their citizens a decent life.

Civilization is based upon a delicate balance between the demands of the individual and those of society, expressed as a system of law and order, which itself is based on biblical teachings. .... In biblical times Jewish experience illuminated the path that led from barbaric slavery to modern civilization.

In the 20th century, that was prelude to our critical 21st century, Jewish experience again illustrated these two poles of choice for humanity. As victims they showed to what depths individuals and society can sink. As inheritors of an ancient culture that fueled the recreation of Jewish sovereignty in modern Israel, they showed to what heights the human spirit can rise.

Humanity today will choose its path, by default or by conscious decision. Under the weight of population and depredation of the environment, humanity will either sink into a new dark age, or will behave collectively in accordance with ancient biblical precepts of justice and societal organization, to provide a reasonable standard of life and health for all the many billions that soon will inhabit this planet.

....That Jewish experience illustrated both poles of human behavior 3,500 years ago and again today, may appear to some people as coincidence. Others may prefer to see this as a demonstration that Jewish experience is God-given, a message that humanity faces an unavoidable choice between the two extremes of human behavior - burgeoning population as biomass or people in the image of God, living under legal precepts that derive from Mosaic law.

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