New Horizons by Max Roy

            Making Peace With Palestinians? Have you had the chance to see how prisoners and hostages are treated by those who insist they want to, have a right to, establish a state living side by side with Israel? Can you picture yourself as helpless confronted with the barbarity of Hamas gunmen as happened in southern Israel? Would you like these people as your neighbors? Could they ever be peaceful neighbors when they question the right of any Jews to live on any of the territory they control.   After seventy-five years as a state, and with a Palestinian Authority established to offer Palestinians a political voice, and establish self-government, has there been any evidence that such an entity could be anything but a failed state. Like regular elections, anybody, like promoting economic opportunity? Rather spend money paying financial incentives for killing Israelis! Many Arabs even question the right of any Jews to exist in the Middle East. Since day one there has been violent

           The Indispensable Nation-ISRAEL* It will seem to many a contradiction in terms when there is so much around us in the media world decrying the existence of Israel, so much in the media regarding its impact on world affairs, so little information regarding this nation, just turned 75 years old, is available in the media about its contribution to the welfare of humanity. It may be the time to spread a little light around about that. Born as an independent nation on a tiny scrap of land with roughly 650,000 Jewish inhabitants, in May 1948, it now has ten times that of Jewish population. Its total population is almost ten million. It survived three wars and invasion by its neighbors aimed at stifling it at birth. It has succeeded in capturing about twenty percent of the territory of the British Mandate that was established for the creation of a Jewish National Home in 1921 by the League of Nations, but only by force of arms. Israel has gone from strength to strength and is

                                 Hungry For Positive Leadership What a pickle we are in! Events taking place around us bring home to us the reality that the ordered international society we believed we inhabited under the Pax Americanus is over. America, the superpower victor of WWII, faced down Russian aspirations to hegemony. China’s communist power was still struggling to digest its gains. Japan was under American tutelage. The European Union was created to end all wars on that continent. The UN was still reined in and directed by the democracies. America was the world’s peacekeeper and was ready to spend blood a treasure to work its will. Now, today, we have war on the European continent, undeterred by NATO. Are we seeing Russia in its death throes, flailing about, trying to pretend to great power status. Democracies have rallied, but the leader is in disarray.. Who could have believed we would see America, the most powerful country in the world, exhibit such failures of lead

                       Surviving! Life is full of potentialities for pleasure and pain. Getting on with life is something we do without too much thought. We are here and we go on with the things on our agendas. But, none of us who have been around for a while can have failed, at one time or another, to question what we are doing here. We read about people who have, almost carelessly, thrown away their lives seeking some nirvana, a drug high, climbing the highest peak, engaged in life-threatening pursuits. Is this exercising some kind of hidden death wish? Are they unable to bear life unless they are in danger of losing it? Have those who take their own lives found survival just too painful to bear? What agonies they must have faced to prefer the course they have taken. Let’s not be Pollyanna! Surviving takes a willingness to face some stuff we wouldn’t wish on our worst enemies. Or maybe having to face stuff we would wish on our worst enemy, stuff we definitely would not want to