George Naggiar

Mohandas Gandhi once said that: “We must become the change that we seek in the world.” In Palestine, the change that people of conscience seek is the elevation of justice to the condition of reality. With the rise of the Internet and modern information technology more generally, fewer and fewer individuals, particularly in post-industrial societies, can credibly claim ignorance about the plight of suffering human beings all across this planet. AAPER’s George Naggiar examines the spirit of Rachel Corrie and the call to not just seek, but to become justice.

Edward Said’s life and work is a story of transcendence of the cultural and spatial barriers that so often thoughtlessly divide humanity. Born in Jerusalem, the capital of the three great monotheistic faiths and a city that he once called “a seamless amalgam of cultures and religions engaged, like members of the same family, on the same plot of land in which all has become entwined with all,” he would live most of his late life and finally die in New York City, the capital of the modern world and where men and women from every corner of the earth converge to form a modern amalgam of peoples unlike anything ever known before. There could have been no more fitting places for the beginning and end of the life’s journey of Edward Said. AAPER president George Naggiar remembers Said.