Souleiman Ghali was fine with giving blood. But he wasn’t fine with just anyone receiving it.
“I remember I was asked in college to donate blood. And I said to the person, ‘How do I know the blood I donate will not go to a Jew?'”
Ghali’s remark spurred more than a few gasps of shock — after all, his candid recollection was made in front of a packed audience at the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco.
The Lebanese-born Palestinian refugee’s brutally honest retelling of his anti-Semitic upbringing — and his maturation into a more tolerant man — was the most compelling feature of a Monday, Oct. 15 Jewish-Muslim dialogue featuring Ghali, founder of the Islamic Society of San Francisco, and Judea Pearl, an Israeli-born UCLA computer science professor and the father of slain Wall Street Journal writer Danny Pearl.
A capacity crowd of several hundred at the JCC’s Kanbar Hall listened intently as Pearl and Ghali bobbed and weaved between forthright agreement and cordial but marked disagreement — with a few hilarious asides.
Ghali — a short, soft-spoken man who arrived in the United States in 1979 — described himself as a “mainstream Muslim practicing in a mainstream community.”
“In New York, I had my first experience with Chassidic Jews, which was very strange for me and awkward,” he said. “All my life in Lebanon, and this is nothing unique about me, we did not like the Jews. And in many cases, we still don’t.
“At the core of this is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” he continued. “How can we overcome a hatred that sometimes takes the form of religious indoctrination, brainwashing people?”
In Ghali’s case, it took years of personal experience with Israelis and Jews — fatherly advice from bosses, benevolence from the Islamic Center’s first landlord — to change his ways.
Pearl, however, had tolerance drilled into him early on. “We had a teacher and whenever he heard someone make a derogatory statement about Arabs, he used to beat the heck out of you,” he said with a heavy Israeli accent.
The conversation, moderated by Danny Pearl’s former Wall Street Journal colleague Peter Waldman, eventually wound to Pearl’s dissatisfaction with the religious Muslim community’s response to jihadist terror.
Pearl pointed to a 2005 fatwa issued by Spanish Muslim clerics labeling Osama bin Laden an “apostate.” Pearl also wondered why subsequent anti-terror statements made by the American and British Muslim communities were “watered down.”
Ghali countered that Jordan’s King Abdullah and a panel of hundreds of Islamic scholars also issued a fatwa against bin Laden, as did North American Muslims.
“No,” Pearl interrupted. The North American Muslims sidestepped mentioning bin Laden and merely “condemned terrorism as a practice,” he said.
“Maybe you’re right,” Ghali nodded. “We need to be more vocal on this issue. I agree with you on this point.”
Both men voiced disappointment with U.S. media coverage of the Middle East, with Ghali adding that his favorite source of news is Ha’aretz.
As the event, co-sponsored by the local Jewish Community Relations Council, drew to a close, Ghali noted that notions of Palestinian nationalism are not in the Koran, and quipped that he’d like to rename Israel and the Palestinian territories “The Land of Milk and Honey.” He waited for the laughter to subside before acknowledging support for a two-state solution.
Pearl countered that while Palestinian nationalism may not be mentioned in the Koran, Israeli nationalism is a central facet of the Torah. “The coming back of the exile is an inextricable part of Judaism. You have to practice Judaism in the land of our forefathers,” in Israel, he said.
Ghali later asked Pearl if he would prefer a theocratic Israeli state or a democratic one. Pearl responded he would prefer a democracy — a Jewish democracy.
But as Pearl debated that in Israel, Judaism is more than just a religion — and Ghali expressed doubt about the pluralistic intent of fervently religious Jews —Waldman stepped in and insisted that the time allotted for the dialogue had expired.
“Guys,” he joked, “you’re going to have to take this outside.”