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Refugees who have fled famine and violence and resettled in the US too often are isolated, disconnected, living in despair. They typically have housing, food, clothing. Yet they miss the large inter-connected families, the all-embracing social fabric, the living culture in which they were raised.
This book tells the unknown story of ordinary Americans who saw a need, created an ingenious solution, worked hard, asked nothing in return—and found that their own lives were uplifted.
Patricia Martin Holt has written a book about “fabric” . . . the fabric of lives in warm, welcoming communities as well as the complex cross-stitched fabrics that she first encountered in Jordan in 1982. When her husband was posted to Amman Jordan, Patricia met a Renaissance woman named Leila Wahbeh and followed her to the local refugee camps. Here, Patricia found women who were creating textiles with intricate designs—and restoring themselves and their families in the process.
Years later in the Atlanta suburbs, Patricia discovered the Peace of Thread movement, which was founded in 2003 by another Renaissance woman—Denise Smith. Here too, Patricia saw that refugee women working with fabric, selling their creations in posh stores and on Esty, were overcoming their isolation, strengthening their families, making some money, and embuing their lives with purpose.
Patricia realized that we can work for world peace without grand gestures, photo ops, or foreign travel. All that is needed is to lend a hand to those in need who live in the same cities and counties where we live.600,960Direct Sale -
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Alex Poppe’s characters celebrate the fragile grandeur of living an independent life in the aftermath of violence. Deeply rooted in place, these stories are about identity, hope, and redemption as fierce and flawed women rebuild their lives in the wake of war. The young women sparking through these pages are surprising, funny, and devastating: the essence of womanhood. The title piece, “Jinwar,” is a funny, yet heartbreaking story of an American woman who survived rape in the military, was denied due process, and found herself selling lunches from a truck shaped like a hot dog. In the evenings, she turned on the news to see the Kavanaugh hearings on every channel. Her struggle to rebuild her life takes her across the globe to the Middle East, to Jinwar, an all-female village in Rojava, northeastern Syria. Here, survivors of war, patriarchy, and genocide un-make violence and search for ways to heal. Timely and prescient, Jinwar is a story for the #YesAllWoman world.600,960Direct Sale -
In The Other Side of the Wall the author recounts his experiences in Palestine as a member of a prominent organization of peace activists called the International Solidarity Movement (ISM). This controversial group, which works on the front lines of the conflict in both the West Bank and Gaza, has been accused of supporting Palestinian terrorism, but it has also been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.
The author witnesses the brutality of the Occupation and the countless forms of humiliations the Palestinians face on a daily basis, such as violence meted out by both soldiers and settlers, long waits at checkpoints, home demolitions, travel restrictions, unfair economic practices, arbitrary detention and arrest, and long prison sentences.
“Richard Hardigan … has written a measured, you-are-here account, a vivid journal that takes us past slogans and ideologies.” – Philip Weiss, editor of Mondoweiss600,960Direct Sale -
Preservation of minority groups. Religious tolerance. Governance of ethnically diverse societies. In the Ottoman Empire Muslims and members of many different faiths lived alongside one another in peace. The Ottoman example debunks the current stereotype of Islamic intolerance and offers a framework for a peace.600,960Direct Sale
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Abu al-Abbas was one of Yasser Arafat’s top generals. His name is forever linked to an operation in 1985 that sparked an international crisis: the hijacking of an Italian cruise liner named the Achille Lauro and the death of Leon Klinghoffer, an elderly American tourist. This memoir by the wife of Abu al-Abbas recalls an era of Palestinian resistance, the hard realities of a cause that faced impossible odds, and the irony that the death of a single man should outweigh all arguments of right and wrong.
"Abu al-Abbas told his wife . . . that his intention was “to carry out an honorable operation against the Israeli Army . . . . I wanted them to reach Ashdod: not to fight the passengers on board [the Achille Lauro].”
[Abu al-Abbas] was to be haunted by the crime for the rest of his life. And when he died mysteriously in US custody in a Baghdad prison camp after America’s 2003 invasion, all the world remembered of Al-Abbas was a crippled man called Leon Klinghoffer. No-one cared how an apparently healthy man would die in American hands."
—Robert Fisk, The Independent600,960Direct Sale -
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A historical novel that brings to life a true story only remembered in outline. In the North Yemen Civil War of the 1960s, two girls whose brothers and fathers had been killed in the fighting believed enough in their cause to join the fight themselves. They dressed as men and reported for duty. This novel uses intuition, imagination, and the author's experience with modern day Yemeni women to fill out this tale of courage, loss, sorrow, and ultimately of disillusion. The author is Carolyn Han, an American woman who earlier had traveled to Asia, married, and taken the name of her Chinese husband. Later, she returned to the US and, after a divorce, sojourned in Yemen for eight years. Here she studied Arabic, got to know women in this traditional society, and traveled alone with Bedouin guides across a forbidding desert (Ramlat as-Sab’atayn). Her prose brings alive the plight of young and old caught in armed conflict. A historical anti-war novel.600,960Direct Sale -
Mats Svensson is a photographer who took 60,000 photos in the occupied Palestinian territories over several years and winnowed them down to the 92 perceptive, nuanced, and ultimately heart-rending images in this volume.
Svensson’s photos are accompanied by pithy and surprising commentary from a wide variety of Palestinian and Israeli figures as well as international voices from Barack Obama and George W Bush to Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu.
Svensson documents Palestinian street scenes, conveying the mannerisms and customs of daily life, as did the humanist photographer Cartier Bresson. Svensson does not display the blood and gore of conflict, yet he shows its precursors and its aftermath in photos that, taken together, are as charged as the war photos of Robert Capa and David Douglas Duncan.
Svensson shows us occupation, expropriation, arrest, and immense concrete barriers encroaching on daily life and asks us to come to our own conclusions. Americans will recognize this use of photos and words in the long tradition of politically committed photojournalists such as Walker Evans and James Agee who depicted the “dispossessed of the earth” in the American south at the depths of the Depression in their classic, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.600,960Direct Sale -
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Professor Tom Gage portrays eight modern educators and links their ideas to those of Fethullah Gülen, a highly influential educator who draws on Islamic traditions.
— Muhammed Cetin, PhD
This sweeping work reminds us of the achievements of the West’s great educational thinkers and connects them to Gülen’s ideas and accomplishments that have arisen in the east and have spread throughout the world.
— Dr Paul M. Rogers
George Mason University
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The modern Middle East often seems like a web of problems none of which has proven more intractable over the last half century than the Israeli-Arab conflict. One of the core issues is the Israeli claim to ownership of modern-day real estate based on ancient stories that have been enshrined in scripture, promoted by politicians, and buttressed by Hollywood.
In Biblical Time Out of Mind, two revisionist thinkers expose what they argue are the tenuous underpinnings of these claims. Was the Exodus of scripture actually a Hebrew exodus? Was the Moses depicted by Charlton Heston actually a Hebrew leader? Or were they echoes of a much earlier exodus of Hyksos, the invasive people to first conquer and reign over Egyptians?
The authors argue that neither Moses nor the Hebrews were in Egypt until around 1000 BCE--500 years after the earlier Exodus is known to have taken place. They go on to sift through research of an Hyksos evacuation of Egypt led by an Eastern leader who is far different than the Moses with whom we are familiar.
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Kisses From A Distance begins in 1895 at a Lebanese mountain convent where a young girl was abducted and given into a marriage that she neither anticipated nor desired. The story exquisitely details the resulting consequences of this event.297,475Direct Sale
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Elizabeth Jenkins, 17, raised on a Congo mission station, is under intense pressure to marry the station doctor, twenty years her senior. Hours before the wedding, Elizabeth flees. She runs toward the wider world beyond the station. She reaches Nairobi, a place of danger for a single woman without a protecting clan. Can she survive?
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The modern Middle East was shaped in conflict between local tribes and Western powers that had crushing, mechanized armies and entitled, obtuse leaders. Against what they perceived as a dense wall of plain stupidity masquerading as real-politik, three British spies threw the power of their idealism and their belief in the humanity of ordinary Arabs. They succeeded in extraordinary ways, and yet paid a heavy price. Two took their own lives. The third raised a son who became a notorious double agent in the Cold War: Kim Philby. Gertrude Bell, Jack Philby, and TE Lawrence show us how to fight wealth and power on one hand and ignorance and violence on the other—how to inject ideals into real world institutions that will improve the lives of ordinary people. Lawrence and Bell accomplished a lot and yet could never do enough and simply could not outlast the national governments who served the interests of first world wealth. Jack Philby, on the other hand, was all too successful. He enabled men in kaffiyehs to become a force in the modern world and to spread their stunning wealth among Arabs—rather than sending it to the West..600,960Direct Sale -
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Told for the very first time – the real story of 93.6 RAM FM, a pioneering English radio station in Palestine/Israel - the building of, in a most difficult geo-political environment, eventual launch, and the impact it made with ‘talk’, by sharing narratives of the other and with ‘music’, by breaking boundaries and unfurling bridges of common ground, at a time when walls of separation were being constructed. Story, which includes author’s return to radio to be the host of the ONLY political talk show that brought both sides to talk on a common platform in a neutral language (English) – a marriage of diplomacy and radio: charting his journey from being an Ambassador to a DJ/Talk show host and eventually a Radio Peace Envoy, is most unique. The story of the huge audience the station built, the positive impact it made, the struggle to remain ‘on air’ and its eventual demise is told for the first time. Selected photographs included. Rising from its ashes is the story of the birth of - Radio Nissa FM, the first women radio station in the Arab world - which today provides a voice to empower women in a male-dominated society in Palestine. .600,960Direct Sale -
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[ Available as Turning Fear into Power. Fall 2022 re-released as AFghanistan & Beyond. Text is the same in both books.]
In the wake of the 9-11 attacks in 2001, Linda Sartor was dismayed to see her country responding primarily with military action and coercive diplomacy. Rather than isolating and defeating the perpetrators, Linda saw US action punishing the innocents in foreign lands, lending credibility to Al Qaeda's depiction of the US as an imperial state and an enemy of Islam, making enemies, and undercutting decades of effort to win the hearts and minds of people around the world.
Linda resolved to do more than complain. For the next decade she engaged in self-styled citizen diplomacy, traveling to six war-torn countries to see for herself, and to do what she could to assist locals in their efforts to attain peace and justice.
Linda traveled to Israel/Palestine, Iraq, Sri Lanka, Iran, Afghanistan, and Bahrain. She traveled with several different Peace and Justice organizations. And part of her story is the work of Americans and internationals to highlight injustice and to make some noise about the need for peace.
Linda Sartor takes us behind the headlines, and she also isolates the idealism of activists from the US and other countries. She hopes that her stories will inspire readers to confront fear, to follow their hearts, and to place a bet that individual protest will, ultimately, undermine and reform the harsh imperial and economic systems that are too often accepted as a baseline "reality" when the nations of the world exercise power.600,960Direct Sale
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