The Link Archives

Volume 24 , Issue 5
November -December  1991
The Comic Book Arab by Jack Shaheen

Item: The average comic book reader is 21 years old.

Item: The average comic book reader spends $10 a week on his or her consumption of comics.

Item: There has never been a major study of Arab stereotyping in comic books.

Now there is.

Volume 24 , Issue 4
September -October  1991
Visitation at Yad Vashem by James Tunstead Burtchaell

When this Link issue was written by Father Burtchaell in 1991, he was a professor of theology at the University of Notre Dame. When he visits Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Israel, he reflects on the parallels between what he sees inside those walls and what has befallen the Palestinians.

“I pressed on in my dark and painful walk through Yad Vashem,” writes Father Burtchaell, “and was presented with repeated evi-dence of the consistent determina-tion of the Nazis to obtain legal cover for their most ruthless acts. The legitimacy, however, was of the kind that would always be established in the absence of the victim.

At the Munich meeting on 29 September 1938 between Germany and Italy on the one hand and Britain and France on the other, in the absence of representatives of Czechoslovakia, the Western Powers continued their policy of concessions to and appeasement of Germany, and they signed a treaty ceding the Sudeten territory of Czechoslovakia to the Reich, thus opening the way to the extinction of the State of Czechoslovakia six months later.

“To a Palestinian this assignment of sovereignty, not by a land's own people but by foreign powers, would evoke the Sykes-Picot treaty whereby Britain (acting with the morality of any European power at the time), having promised self-determination to the Arabs in return for joining World War I on their side and revolting against Turkey, simultaneously signed a secret treaty with France to carve up the Middle East between them.

“Palestine was subsequently assigned as a Mandate territory under Britain by the League of Nations, with the explicit charge to establish there a a 'national homeland' for the Jewish people. [This League of Nations assignment] made the occupation seem legal, perhaps, to everyone except the Palestinians, who would be at a loss to understand who had conferred upon the League the authority to establish another people on their homeland."

Volume 24 , Issue 3
August -August  1991
A New Literary Look at the Middle East by John F. Mahoney [compiler]

In 1977, The Link devoted an entire issue to “A Literary Look at the Middle East.” Fourteen years later, we’re back for an update.

The contents of this issue are available by download (pdf), which provides a graphic image of each page. If additional funds for this archive project become available, we will scan and/or re-key the text to make it available on-line. Photocopies of the complete 16-page Link are available by mail from AMEU for $3.00 each.

Volume 24 , Issue 2
April -May  1991
Beyond the Jewish-Christian Dialogue: Solidarity with the Palestinian People by Marc H. Ellis

Jewish theologian Marc Ellis begins this Link issue pondering just what words he might use in fulfilling his promise to a young Jewish progressive to speak at a commemoration of the eighth anniversary of the massacres at the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila in West Beirut.

He concludes the issue with these words:

Several years ago I lectured at a conference celebrating the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Eugene Rosenstock-Hussey, a German Jew who had converted to Christianity and who through dialogue challenged Franz Rosenzweig, another German Jew, to retain his Jewishness. Since both figures were German, a fairly large percentage of the conference attendees were German.

After my talk, I was startled when a German woman, unused to public expressions of grief, took my hand and began to cry. In broken English, her words interrupted by sobs, she repeated over and over again her sorrow for what had happened to Jews and her inability to undo what had been done. As I held her hand, shaken myself, with little to do but to stand with her, another German came up to us and said, “You do not understand what it is for us to hear a Jewish voice.”

Later that night, trying to make sense of the tears and these parting words, I realized its underlying meaning: history had gone too far, there was no way back and no way to heal because the Jewish presence had been removed forever from Germany. The implications of this encounter for Jews and Palestinians are obvious, and this is what shook me when I was invited to speak on the subject of Sabra and Shatila. Will Jewish children tomorrow, when meeting and hearing a Palestinian, voice the same regret, utter the same cry, a cry which cannot be satisfied because history has gone too far? Unlike the Germans, the horror has yet to be fully-or irreparably-realized.

The hour, though, is very late.

Volume 24 , Issue 1
January -March  1991
The Post-War Middle East by Rami G. Khouri

Four weeks after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour featured an extensive interview with Rami Khouri, a highly regarded Jordanian journalist. The interview generated so many calls the NewsHour had to engage additional operators. Subsequently, the interview led to a book contract, an op-ed piece in The New York Times, and to this issue of The Link.

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