Farhana Khorshed, Executive Director of NEBAF speaking in the seminar at MIT
Staff Reporter: Two separate seminars were held at Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston, Massachusetts, USA, with the aim of ensuring the safety of all Muslim women in the Middle East establishing peace during the Hamas-Israel war. The seminar held on Monday (April 1) afternoon local time demanded peace and security of women and children.
Two seminars were held on Monday afternoon, first at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and later in the evening at Harvard University in Boston. Two women of Bangladeshi origin and two Muslim women from Pakistan and Sri Lanka participated in the seminar. They are AMMWEC Founding President Anila Ali, New England Bangladeshi American Foundation ( NEBAF) Executive Director Farhana Khorshed, Muslim Women Speakers Founding President Soraya Dean and AMMWEC Executive Board member Zebunnesa Zeba Zubair.
Seminars were held at Harvard University
They said, restoring an atmosphere of peace, trust and cooperation within our society is an urgent matter. Through this effort we hope to provide support and cooperation to build a more promising future for all the nations of the region.
The Hamas-Israel war is the strategy of the [Arab] Gulf states going forward, the speakers said. Small countries will start, then big countries will move forward led by Saudi Arabia. While Saudi Arabia is home to the holy city of Mecca, one of the five pillars of Islam, Israel is home to the holy sites of three of the world’s leading religions, with nearly two million Arabs calling Israel home. Although a peace agreement between the two countries has never happened before, we are hopeful.
We visited communities and religious sites like the Western Wall and Al Aqsa, they said. Our only goal was curiosity. This curiosity was made possible in September 2020. When Israel, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain signed a bilateral normalization agreement called the Abraham Accords. Later I joined Morocco in 1998. Speakers felt that we need to cooperate with each other.
Speakers said, we cannot be guided by past conflicts or one-sided perceptions of past conflicts, which hold the region back. So we want to build bridges between Israelis, Bahrainis, Jews and Muslims by advocating for peace. The speakers expressed hope that an immediate end to the Hamas-Israel war would ensure the safety of Muslim women and establish peace during the war. The women leaders answered various questions from the audience about the Israel-Hamas war in the seminar. The organizer of the seminar was B.Collecting.
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