Please take the time to write Oprah!

Please take the time to write Oprah!

Subject: Fw: Oprah to visit Israel
Date: Fri, 25 May 2007 21:11:45 +0300
I just got this email forward from an important friend of mine - below the alert
I've shared what I wrote to The Oprah Show.
This is an opportunity to have balance revealed and all sides of the story told -
if anyone can, it's Oprah.

Celeste

> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> Subject: Action Alert: Re Oprah to the Unholy Land

Greta Berlin, a member of Women in Black in Los Angeles, has initiated a campaign to urge Oprah Winfrey to visit the West Bank and Gaza when
she visits Israel and to see the Palestinian side of the issue.
..
Bon Voyage, Oprah!
Here's her address:
http://www2.oprah.com/email/reach/email_reach_fromu.jhtml

Oprah Winfrey is an international figure, and it's important that her producer is flooded with invitations.

She's is going to Israel, invited by Elie Wiesel. She says she's going in solidarity with the terrorized Israelis.

Many of us have already written to her producer encouraging Oprah to go...visit the occupied West Bank...talk to the
Palestinians...see the wall for herself. If you're living in Israel, invite her.
Ask her to please come and visit, and that you'll be happy to take her to the weekly nonviolent demonstrations in Bil'in, for example.
We need as many emails from around the world as possible, inviting her to come see the occupied territories for herself.
Please send her a short note and encourage her to go to the West Bank.
Then, post to your lists and ask them to do the same thing.

Greta Berlin
Women in Black Los Angeles


Dear Oprah,
I have long been a fan and religiously use your shows in my urban high school classroom.
Today I heard that you would be heading to Israel to be in solidarity with the "traumatized" Israelis at the invitation of Elie Wiesel.
I too sobbed to the story of Dr. Wiesel's life - his story and so many like his are horrific.

But, PLEASE, before buying the media spin of today's Israel also read Moghrabi's Olives (I sent a copy to your producers as a suggestion for your book club) and understand the other side of the Israeli/Palestinian story. Hamzi Moghrabi is an honorable, dear, sweet man who has become to me what I perceive Elie Wiesel has become to you.

I went to Israel last fall for a program organized by a Jewish American woman - The Compassionate Listening Project. What I saw there curdled my blood - I stayed in a West Bank refugee camp; I saw the ethnic cleansing in Hebron; I listened to activists - Israeli Jews and Palestinians - who tell the truth of a story that I saw with my own eyes. Read The Lemon Tree - I had Shabbat with the Jewish protaganist and cried when she wrote in an inscription to her Palestinian counterpart "Please forgive us." Please make your trip balanced. Please work to see what so many Americans don't or won't see. Please be the one who gives perspective and truth. I have no Arab heritage - I'm a southern white Christian girl whose family can't figure out why this has become so important to me. You'll be entering a holy spot that somehow grabs your soul - it is nothing like what I would ever have thought I would want to visit - now I'm working very hard to be able to take American teens there to see what I saw so that somehow we can begin to reveal the truth there and find healing - that region is important to the world. We need peace and truth there. Please allow your credible voice to be the one who speaks it.

And, look at the children - it will break your heart. They deserve our balanced voice - they need it. See the wall ("security fence") and see how it is The Berlin Wall that is destroying families and businesses and villages. Be open to the parallels in the stories that have horrified us out of the Holocaust. Be careful, for me it has been a long road to recover - I lost so much trust on that trip and am still trying to understand how and why history keeps repeating itself when we all know so much better.

I am begging you to please heed these pleas - and I know so many others are sending them too - because as silly as it sounds even as I write it to someone I don't know, I just can't stand the idea of losing one more figure of trust (and that's what you are to so many) because they didn't do the right thing to know the other side. The other side isn't hard to find or see - it will hit you like a brick wall and there are many who will be willing to show you. Start with The Hope Flowers School near Bethlehem, for that matter go to Bethlehem - be stunned and then visit The Bethlehem Peace Center.

Your leadership and example are so needed here - I pray that we can trust your sense of justice to prevail.

Peace, Shalom and Salaam,
Celeste Archer