Peace activists and cultural critics yesterday urged the government to establish peace and human rights as its guidelines when formulating its position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
"The most advantageous angle for Taiwan would be to condemn those who trigger wars -- from the human rights point of view -- regardless of how powerful the parties are or how strong the ties between Taiwan and these parties are," said Lu Ping (路平), a renowned cultural critic and Taiwan's ambassador-at-large.
"We should condemn violence in all conflicts -- whether between the US and Afghanistan, or whether one party is Israel, and the other is Palestine," Lu said. Lu expressed her view yesterday in a panel discussion organized by the Peacetime Foundation of Taiwan (台灣促進和平文教基金會), a local non-governmental organization.
The panel discussed the Israeli-Palestinian conflict after watching an acclaimed documentary entitled Promises. The documentary focuses on portraying the conflict's effect on the innocence of children in the Middle East by interviewing seven kids from both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian divide about their lives. It won several international awards.
Reflecting on the film, Chien Hsi-chieh, director of the foundation, lamented the checkpoints that have separated children from the two sides over the years.
Fresh from his trip to China in April, the former DPP legislator also drew an analogy between the distrust between the two sides and the distrust between Taipei and Beijing that he felt during his trip to the mainland.
"The Taiwan Strait is just like a checkpoint where you have the two sides separated -- and each full of misgivings about the other," Chien said. "Some mainlanders I've met simply told me, `You as a DPP member simply advocated peace as a way to disguise your support for Taiwan's independence.'"
The foundation also issued a petition calling for the peaceful settlement of the complicated Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which has killed at last 2,000 people over the past 18 months of escalating tension.
Edmund Ryden, Director of the Fujen Peace Institute at the Fujen Catholic University, proposed some solutions to the unsettled conflict in the Middle East.
"The Israelis should try to understand that they would not be able to obtain the peace they are longing for by utilizing military force, whereas the Palestinians should also try to gradually make contacts with and accept the Israelis," Ryden said.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
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Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching