Winter 2006-07
Lehman Emissary of Peace
Mel Lehman with the Grand Mufti of Syria
Mel Lehman ‘71, who has arranged for excellent Syrian musical groups to perform on campus, has worked on several occasions with former Harvard oncologist Princess Dr. Nisreen El-Hashemite, who is descended from Mohammed, the prophet of Islam, and from Faisal I, King of Iraq from 1921 to 1933.
In one project, Lehman delivered medical textbooks to Iraq which were donated by El Hashemite. Lehman, previously employed for 20 years by Church World Service, began making trips to Iraq in 1996 (ignoring the official ban on travel to Iraq by the U.S. government) to study the effects of sanctions upon the Iraqi people.
He has made seven trips to Iraq and led a team of doctors to teach medicine.
On Aug. 17, 2006, the Newark, N.J., Star- Ledger (daily circulation of over 400,000) contained an op-ed piece by Lehman in which he described a recent visit to a mosque in Damascus, Syria, where worshippers reverently approached a shrine to St. John the Baptist.
"Why do we never see this Other Middle East?” he wrote. “We see instead only the negative side of the Middle East, an unending series of images of violence and intolerance.”
He continued:
The question is ultimately a spiritual question, for we need to see ourselves and the Middle East in the honest fullness of our humanity, not just as the caricature that we see now.
Before we continue on our disastrous course of arrogantly trying to remake the Middle East in our own image, we would do well to learn about the rich history and culture of the Other Middle East. Its people are glad to share their culture and their humanity with us... It’s the politics of our country that they don’t like, and after the war in Lebanon they have come to dislike our politics and distrust our leaders even more intensely. Until we enter into an honest dialogue with this Other Middle East – which is the real Middle East for the majority of the people there – we will never find peace. We ignore that dialogue at our spiritual peril.
Read Mel Lehman’s op ed:
http://www.nj.com/news/ledger/index.ssf?/news/ledger/stories/lehman08172006.html