Video of the Omar Faruk & Aisikides concert

With this video of the closing music performance i am wrapping up my participation in this blog. Thank you, ALF, for demonstrating how music bridges cultural gaps.

Carmel Vaisman

Videos from the session on Media representation

For those of you who missed and those who wanna re-watch and share, here are the presentations of Lisa Goldman and Ethar El-Katatney from Friday’s fascinating session on media representation and the roles of new media in that. happy women day!

Carmel Vaisman

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A Dialogue-breaker

Everyone talks about dialogue here, but what is the meaning of dialogue? Is dialogue even happening when the parties come with their fixed agenda and just wanna be heard?

I must confess I’m not much of an activist or a political person so I only had 3 genuine conversations with Palestinians in my life (2 of them in ALF) but all 3 left me with little hope of peaceful coexistence in the horizon. Last night at dinner it finally caught up with me: A dialogue cannot happen when there is no real listening. Obviously we grew up on very different narratives we both perceive as the complete truth, and probably both of them aren’t the whole truth. But as long as every Palestinian I meet thinks his narrative is the only truth, how can there be dialogue?

Oppertunities and challanges of social media and blogs

We are live blogging from room 127 where blogging toolkit is being discussed, but bloggers are not people who stay up on a stage, we turned the entire audience into bloggers and we thought together in small groups about the topic. this is what we´re saying.

A community of those who have nothing in common

1000 people are gathered to share and explore ways for all of us to engage in a dialog that respects our differences. Most of the speakers stress our common humanity and common needs we share as a basis for such a peaceful tolerant global community, but here’s the problem: it’s in people’s nature to seek the common and group themselves by commonalities.

But the emergent human knowledge we’re acquiring in this era is how to love and share and commune with DIFFERENT people. NOT by stressing the thing we DO have in common but by learning to be ourselves and let others be themselves and still be together.To me this is the new stage in human evolution and that is the true meaning of living in diversity, not searching common ground but truly loving that otherness and sharing ours. Being special among specials IS being together.