Opinion: In today’s pages: Mideast Talking Points, help for families of those who serve, the slave trade’s legacy, and more
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The Times editorial page celebrates the opening of the latest Fisher guest house for the families of wounded American military men and women, this one next to the Veterans Administration’s West Los Angeles medical center. It’s the nation’s 43rd, but the first in L.A. It’s a terrific project, started in 1990 when New York developer Zachary Fisher and his wife decided to build ‘comfort homes’ next to military hospitals to give relatives a free place to stay when family members went in for treatment.
Backed by tens of millions of dollars in private donations and a sprinkling of government funding, the foundation has built Fisher Houses at the major Defense Department medical centers. The main task now is to do the same for VA hospitals, dozens of which have asked for at least one home. The foundation has broken ground on six additional houses and is developing plans for eight or nine more, with a total price tag of nearly $70 million.
Also on the editorial page, the Times looks at the Obama version of the ‘faith-based initiative’ and is not cheered. The new president’s program fails to make a clear statement that faith-based services that accept federal money may not discriminate in hiring on the basis of religion.
The page also calls for bilateral talks with China to reduce that nation’s burgeoning contribution to greenhouse gas emissions.
On the Op-Ed side, Marjorie Miller continues her series on Mideast Talking Points, this time talking with Israelis and Palestinians about the state of the conflict and the prospects for peace. In the paper, Miller speaks with Uzi Dayan, retired Israeli major, general and member of the Likud Party; Efraim Halevy, former Israeli Mossad chief and head of the Shasha Center for Strategic Studies at Hebrew University in Jerusalem; Salam Fayyad, Palestinian Authority prime minister; and Sari Nusseibeh, president of Al Quds University in Jerusalem. Online, she adds Uri Dromi, former spokesman for Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin; Ahmed Yousef, Hamas spokesman in Gaza; and Khalil Shikaki, director of the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research.
And columnist Gregory Rodriguez examines the legacy of mistrust in Africa that persists in the wake of the slave trade, hundreds of years later. He cites work by economists Nathan Nunn and Leonard Wantchekon, who find that slavery still causes people in Africa to mistrust not just outsiders, but each other.
So what’s the first stage in healing? The media and early childhood education, Wantchekon suggests, could help eradicate mistrustful preconceptions.
Illustration by Anthony Russo, for the Times