Tuesday, November 1, 2005
This sounds like an activism success story.
JTA: As Iran calls to destroy Israel, new look at 'holiday' with same goal
As Iran’s president was calling for Israel to be wiped off the map, members of Together Against Political Islam and Anti-Semitism were busy calling for "Al Quds Day" to be wiped off calendars — and the campaign is paying off.
Institutions on both sides of the Atlantic, from Harvard University to Northumbria University in England, have announced that they are deleting Al Quds Day, or Jerusalem Day — a holiday that focuses on the destruction of Israel — from calendars where it had been listed as a religious holiday. Al Quds Day fell this year last Friday.
The point is not just to clean up calendars, political scientist Arne Behrensen, a co-founder of the activist group, told JTA, but “to engage the political left in confronting Islamism and Islamist anti-Semitism.”
Members of the pro-democracy group include people of Iranian, Kurdish and Turkish background. Many of the Iranian and Kurdish members are refugees from their homelands.
The annihilation of Israel is the raison d’etre of the “holiday” that the late Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini created after the 1979 Islamic Revolution. It is marked with anti-Israel demonstrations in some Islamic countries, as well as in cities with large Muslim populations outside the Islamic world...
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