{"id":3446,"date":"2011-10-19T17:11:22","date_gmt":"2011-10-19T16:11:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.raymondcook.net\/blog\/?p=3446"},"modified":"2011-10-19T17:11:22","modified_gmt":"2011-10-19T16:11:22","slug":"gilad-shalit-and-the-muslim-newsagent","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.raymondcook.net\/blog\/index.php\/2011\/10\/19\/gilad-shalit-and-the-muslim-newsagent\/","title":{"rendered":"Gilad Shalit and the Muslim newsagent"},"content":{"rendered":"
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My wife shops near her school Fridays to get bread and stuff for Shabbat from the Jewish baker.<\/p>\n

She then goes next door to the newsagent to get her Jewish papers.<\/p>\n

The owners are devout Muslims.<\/p>\n

They are always friendly, polite, respectful.<\/p>\n

However, you never really know what they think of their Jewish clientele, after all, business is business, no?<\/p>\n

Today I drove my wife to collect the bread and get the papers.<\/p>\n

I stood beside her as she took the local Jewish paper to the counter where the young (20 something) son of the owner was serving.<\/p>\n

On the front page was a huge picture of Gilad Shalit.<\/p>\n

This is what the young man said, verbatim, unprompted:<\/p>\n

\u201cThank God he is home safe\u201d.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t know why but I fill up just thinking about that.<\/p>\n

We were both speechless. We expected a polite ignoring of this story, after all, why should he care? We always presume that the sympathy would be only with the Palestinians.<\/p>\n

I was reluctant to tell this story that had moved me.\u00a0Was it patronising or discourteous to Muslims to somehow believe they would not be relieved at the release of a young man? A Jew. An Israeli. \u00a0Did it say more about my prejudices than those I am subscribing to them?<\/p>\n

A Muslim friend advised me that it was a good story to tell. It shows us that if we really spoke to each other more, we might surprise each other.<\/p>\n

Chag Sameach.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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My wife shops near her school Fridays to get bread and stuff for Shabbat from the Jewish baker. She then goes next door to the newsagent to get her Jewish papers. The owners are devout Muslims. They are always friendly, polite, respectful. However, you never really know what they think of their Jewish clientele, after […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[133,42,802,196],"class_list":["post-3446","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-gilad-shalit","tag-jews","tag-muslims","tag-peace","post-preview"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.raymondcook.net\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3446","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.raymondcook.net\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.raymondcook.net\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.raymondcook.net\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.raymondcook.net\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3446"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.raymondcook.net\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3446\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3448,"href":"https:\/\/www.raymondcook.net\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3446\/revisions\/3448"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.raymondcook.net\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3446"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.raymondcook.net\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3446"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.raymondcook.net\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3446"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}