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A group of rabbis chat during the Second World Congress of Rabbis and Imams for Peace in Seville, southern Spain, Tuesday. (AP)
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A Muslim woman writes an idea on a board during the Congress, Tuesday. (AP)
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| By Associated Press March 22, 2006 |
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Middle East politics intruded loudly and repeatedly Tuesday at an international congress in southern Spain aimed at getting imams and rabbis to talk about peace.
Muslim delegates stood up and shouted when a moderator tried to halt a Palestinian professor from the Gaza Strip, Ziad Abu Alhaj, who said life under Israeli occupation is like being in "a large prison."
Most of the third day of the four-day meeting in Seville was dedicated to small workshops on issues like helping Jews and Muslims understand each other better. But in a prior, plenary session Muslim delegates said peace was impossible unless Israel ends its occupation of Palestinian lands.
"Unless we get to the core of the issue, we are pussyfooting around," said Nazlin Umar Rajput, chairwoman of the National Muslim Council of Kenya. "It is a fight over ownership of land."
The congress was organized by a Paris-based peace foundation called Hommes de Parole and has drawn some 250 imams, rabbis and academics from 31 countries of Europe, Africa, Asia, the Middle East and the United States.
Organizers abruptly changed the schedule of the meeting Monday when a session that was to deal with family issues also turned political and heated, and they again rushed to calm tempers at Tuesday's plenary.
Ari Alexander, an American Jew who works for a New York-based foundation that does Internet education projects for Muslim and Jewish children, said this kind of forum is so new that Muslim and Jewish leaders do not even really know how to talk to each other.
"We are babies in this conversation. This is brand-new stuff," he said in an interview.
The meeting is called the Second World Congress of Imams and Rabbis for Peace. The first edition was held last year in Brussels.
The workshop themes were decided Monday in a brainstorming session in which delegates spontaneously jotted down issues they thought critical to ending antagonism between Muslims and Jews, and posted them on a bulletin board. Attendance was open to anyone.
On the idea of a Palestinian state sharing Jerusalem as its capital with the Israelis, an American Jew who advocates such an arrangement noted that after dinner Monday night, rabbis and imams joined in singing religious verses and even danced together.
"If we can sing and dance together in Seville, why can't we walk together in the land we love?" asked the delegate, Walter Ruby, who runs an educational foundation in New York called Religion in Dialogue.
Chaim Steinmetz, a rabbi from Montreal, said in another workshop that he came to Seville with a very local agenda - seeking nuts-and-bolts talks with other religious leaders on how they try to foster harmony among Jews and Muslims in their cities.
But he quickly realized there was something else on many people's minds. "The guys from Gaza needed to be heard," he said.
"This discussion was global. Global means the Middle East conflict."
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