Loading ...Palestinian doctor brings his healing message to Sarasota
Barbara Peters Smith
Herald-Tribune
Palestinian medical doctor and peace activist Izzeldin Abuelaish has visited Sarasota before on behalf of the foundation he started, Daughters for Life, which gives scholarships to young Middle Eastern women to study at places like New College of Florida.
But his visit Wednesday, to speak at Pine View School and Sarasota Memorial Hospital, was his first trip here as a Canadian citizen. And he has noticed the difference.
“Of course! I am happy for it, but I feel angry about others,” he said. “As a Palestinian in this world, the people don’t deal with me, who I am as a human. They treat me according to the color of my passport. Nothing has changed, only this travel document, the color which it has.”
On Saturday Abuelaish will mark exactly seven years since the Israeli tank shelling of his Gaza home that took the lives of three of his daughters and his niece — Bessan, Mayar, Aya and Noor. Addressing Pine View School students, he spoke aloud to his daughters, noting how old they would be if they had lived, and imagining the women they might have become.
“I raised them to be educated, to be strong advocates of peace and human rights, and to care about others,” he told the high school students. “I learned from them. They were killed for nothing they did.”
In response to his loss, Abuelaish wrote a 2010 memoir, “I Shall Not Hate: a Gaza Doctor’s Journey.” From his post at the University of Toronto, he now travels to spread his message of peace through healing, using a rhetoric that shifts easily from medical to mystical. He urged the Sarasota students to “immunize” themselves from the bitterness that “killing, violence, hatred and disease” can generate.
“Anything that is a straight line has no meaning, but ups and downs — it means that we are alive,” he said in a talk arranged by the school’s PeaceJam chapter. “Everything starts in one place and goes in different directions. Each of you can take this message and spread it elsewhere.”
Sarasota Memorial chief of staff Karen M. Hamad helped arrange for Abuelaish’s appearances, which included a reception for health care providers Wednesday night and tour of the hospital’s emergency care center for maternity patients. Abuelaish told staffers there he estimates that he has delivered at least 7,000 babies.
“It can sometimes be uncomfortable to identify myself as an Arab-American,” said Hamad, whose parents met at the University of Cairo. “But becoming involved with Daughters for Life has shown me how important it is to let people know who I am.”
In an interview, Abuelaish explained that the mission of Daughters for Life is to help girls and women in the Middle East counter the political realities that limit their influence outside the home.
“We don’t want to empower women; we want to give them the opportunity to use the power that they have,” he said. “We need to give them the right means, which I fully believe is the education, the respect and the role.”
Now that the rise of ISIS has inflamed American fears of Islam and hostilities toward people of Middle Eastern descent, he said, it is more important than ever to distinguish between politics and religion.
“It’s time to avoid misinterpreting and blaming religion for the failure of political leaders,” he said.
Despite setbacks following the destabilization of regimes in the Middle East, his hopes for peace and prosperity there remain alive — and anchored by his medical training.
“Go to intensive care unit in this hospital,” Abuelaish suggested. “You will see that nothing is impossible in life.”
Source: www.heraldtribune.com