It may seem idealistic, but the campaign Israel Loves Iran claims that peace in the Middle East is just a friend request away.
Ronny Edry, an Israeli citizen and founder of the campaign, started Israel Loves Iran by posting a picture of himself and his daughter with the message “Iranians, we will never bomb your country. We (heart) you.”
He soon received hundreds of submissions from both Israel and Iran. People who would have otherwise never met connected and began to talk.
A central premise of the Israel Loves Iran campaign is that merely becoming friends with people from other countries – seeing their statuses, knowing their birthdays – shows people they are not all that different. And with this discovery may come an increased willingness to make peace.
UCLA students with particular interests or opinions about the Middle East often get their information from traditional media outlets they seek out and actively read.
We tend to learn about the Middle East by watching Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu display a crude drawing of a bomb to the United Nations or former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad threaten to wipe Israel off the map. We primarily hear about violent altercations and contentious policy, and rarely about the daily lives of common people.
But through social media, we have access to a much more powerful and much more wide-reaching pool of information.
Polarized students should use social networking sites to start conversations with friends of different political and cultural backgrounds. As long as these conversations remain constructive, they can bring together students who are passionate about the same topics, even though they fall on different sides.
As it stands, campus conversation features signs and slogans more prominently than faces and people. But on social media, profile pictures and personal information are prominently displayed.
We all have that Facebook friend who posts incessantly about the latest Middle East headline. Many students have seen, or even participated in, the angry and often hateful online arguments that ensue from these kinds of posts.
Although we do not have the same physical borders of the Middle East at UCLA, political boundaries can be just as divisive.
Emulating the “Israel Loves Iran” model by using social media for constructive conversation would connect students who otherwise might not speak to each other about politically charged topics.
Social media can be used not only to humanize the conversation, but also to direct it toward tangible solutions.
Yala Young Leaders is another movement that uses social media to shift the conversation from the one-liners of politicians to real interaction between people.
Housed in the Peres Center for Peace, the organization has over 400,000 followers on Facebook. It uses the forum to encourage young people from all over the Middle East to engage in productive dialogue and to develop a stronger sense of community.
The Peres Center also hosts Google+ Hangouts between Arab and Israeli high schoolers. The students have the opportunity to find their common interests and work together on different projects with people who they might never meet in person.
These different forums have bridged the very solid physical boundaries between people of different religious or ethnic groups in a highly politicized region. While Israelis and Iranians cannot travel to each others’ countries, they can now engage in conversation, and present a different image to the world to each other than what their newspapers reflect.
UCLA students can create those same kinds of connections by consistently and respectfully engaging with their online community and at the very least keeping those Facebook friends who disagree with them.
Ronny Edry is changing the conversation in one of the most contentious and divided regions in the world, simply by posting a picture online. UCLA, which is not riddled with contentious borders or at risk of war, can surely do the same.
Maia, being an idealist is so damn easy. It is so damn comfortable to say “I am
for equal rights” or “I am for social justice.” Who could argue with that? Problem is it’s a stupid cop-out showing no real understanding of mankind.
The problem is, Maia, we live in the real world not in your fantasy world of what might be if, if, if, if, if….
There were Jews just like you in the late 1930s and early 1940s who were
liberals. They supported Neville Chamberlain who told them “Hitler was a man we can work with.”
Those Jews did not buy guns, or leave Germany, but fooled themselves into thinking the world could be a better place despite over two thousand years of the opposite being true.
Well, Maia, you know how that story ended. And it was not with an if, if, if…
Now Jews are telling themselves we can work with the Palestinians. Even though Palestinian
leaders – religious and otherwise – all call for the destruction of Israel (at
least they do so in private at the bare minimum) yet Jews like you, Maia, believe
this time it will be different. Impressive. Impressively naive, that is.
My advice to you, Maia: Live in the real world, not some fantasy world afforded you by your
cushy background. Buy a gun. Learn how to use it. It wasn’t that long ago that six million Jews
wished they had done so.
Sometimes leaving the world a better place means destroying
the world’s Hitlers before they destroy you as ugly (and as real) as that might sound.
Arafat,
You’ve entirely missed the point of this article. The writer acknowledges that the organization’s mission could be interpreted as idealistic and doesn’t attempt to negate that idea in any deliberate manner. She isn’t a proponent of that idealism as you’ve insisted; she’s a journalist who reported on the efforts of a specific organization and used that story as a platform for related, insightful examinations of how “traditional media outlets” depict Israeli-Iranian relations and how the evolution of social media can/does affect our opinions of cultures and people beyond our conventional networks. Your response lacked critical thinking and character respectively.
P.S. Rather than guns, consider what impact social media could have had in the 1930s.
“P.S. Rather than guns, consider what impact social media could have had in the 1930s.”
That’s a good one, Kyle.
Google social media and anti-Semitism and you won’t need to imagine a thing. The ugliness, cruelty and horrible underbelly of social media is there for all to see. Goebbels could not have imagined it.
Kyle and Maia,
I agree that social media can be used constructively but believe to do so one must be painfully honest.
The PC approach – which I believe is yours – does not work, in my opinion. Suggesting that we can build bridges with a people (Muslims) whose religion makes it clear that Jews are beneath contempt is not all that different than trusting Chamberlain could change Hitler’s stripes.
To change the conversation by using social media we need to take off our gloves and expose the 800 pound gorilla in the room. This means stop the PC roller coaster, the diversity drink the kool aid game and start being honest.
Specifically we need to speak truth to Islam. We need to expose the fact that Islam looks down upon all other religions, that it is a supremacist religion founded by a sadistic megalomaniac. That the Quran and Hadiths and Sunna are overflowing with information, anecdotes and enticements about and for Muslims to practice aggressive Jihad until all people belong to Islam.
Pretending that we can use social media as a Kumbaya love fest would be nice but it’s a fairy tale not fit for adults or the problems facing Israel, Kenya, Sudan, Somalia, Nigeria, Thailand, Kashmir and all the other places where Muslims are destroying other people’s lives.
The only way to change this equation is through education and enlightenment and honesty; and social media could be a fabulous medium to bring this to life. Using it to educate and enlighten ourselves and others about Islam would be a start.
And just as importantly using social media to encourage Muslims to leave their repressive, individual-crushing faith for something better would be a great positive. Unfortunately most Muslims are afraid to leave their faith for fear of being apostates and suffering the fate of apostates: family abandonment, outcast status and not infrequently death.
So you two can play your feely-good approach but don’t tell the Kenyans who know the real Muslim jihadist way, or the 44 college kids in Nigeria killed yesterday by Muslims, or the 40 Shiites killed by Sunnis at a funeral in Iraq yesterday, or the 42 killed at a market in Peshwar two days ago. Your advice would be about as real to them and their relatives as the tooth fairy is to people over eight years old.
Since the horrors in Kenya in which 68 innocents were killed and 175 injured (nine days ago) here are a couple of examples of what the religion of peace has accomplished. Please take note that those who carried out these attacks were devout Muslims who understood their religion intimately.
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72 killed and 120 wounded at a Shiite funeral in Sadr City, Iraq.
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81 killed and 110 wounded at a church service in Peshawar, Pakistan.
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16 killed and 34 wounded at another funeral this time in Adhamiyah, Iraq.
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20 killed and 71 wounded at another market this time in Baghdad.
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27 Christians killed and 0 wounded in a village in Gamboru, Nigeria by men fighting for an Islamist state.
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19 killed and 46 wounded in Peshawar, Pakistan by Islamists fighting for a pure Islamic state.
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These are simply the larger jihadist attacks. There have also been something like two dozen smaller attacks since the Kenyan massacre including the killing of an Israeli soldier and murders in Somalia, Yemen, Dagestan, Philippines, India, Kenya (again), Libya and elsewhere.
All of these jihadist attacks are listed on the website “The Religion of Peace”. In addition that website offers ample information useful for understanding the true nature of Islam including hundreds of Quranic, Hadith and Sunna quotes providing ample evidence as to Islam’s true nature. All of these verses and stories from Islam’s holy books were no doubt intimately familiar by those who carried out these murders.
Read it and learn, and then use social media as a medium for enlightened, educational and honest discourse instead of as a another PC exercise that fools only the naive.
I apologize if I offend but there it is.