San Diego Concludes Month-long Global Town Hall Series

San Diego Concludes Month-long Global Town Hall Series on U.S.-Islamic World Relations USD students negotiate diplomacy with Muslims

Payvand, Iran
10/08/04

"Hope not Hate" a night of discussion, celebration and commemoration to be held at UCSD

On Tuesday, October 19th, San Diego will host the final town hall meeting in a series called Hope not Hate, which features open, inclusive conversations between citizens and a bi-partisan coalition of members of Congress, Ambassadors, journalists, military officials, NGO leaders and scholars on U.S.-Islamic relations. Heeding the 9/11 Commission’s recommendation that America must share its “vision of opportunity and hope” with the Muslim world, concerned citizens throughout the U.S. have launched this series of more than thirty town hall meetings on the future of U.S.-Islamic world relations.

San Diego’s town hall meeting will not only coincide with the early days of Ramadan, but it will also conclude this month-long, global series that began on the eve of the third anniversary of September 11th. The San Diego “Hope not Hate” town hall will take place at 5:00 p.m. on October 19th at the Weaver Center (in the Institute of the Americas complex) at the University of California, San Diego. The program will first begin with a powerful presentation of “storytelling” from several local refugee children. The main panel discussion and forum will then follow. The panel consists of: Dr. Miles Kahler, Professor of Political Science at UCSD and former Senior Fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations; Dr. Dipak Gupta, Professor of Political Science at San Diego State University and Director of the Institute of International Security and Conflict Resolution; Mr. Kam Zarrabi, former Director General of the Ministry of Economy of Iran’s former regime, and writer-lecturer on Middle East affairs; Mr. Bachir Idoui, Sociology and Cross-Cultural Studies professor at Grossmont College and member of the Council on American-Islamic Relations and Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee. The discussion will be moderated by N.P.R. member station, KPBS’s Alison St John.

There will be a reception and informal conversations for the audience to speak with the expert panelists directly. In addition, there will also be a photojournalism exhibit of refugees of the Middle East presented by the AjA Project www.ajaproject.org . The event is free and open to the public.

Speakers who have participated in this worldwide series include: James Zogby, President of the Arab American Institute; Nikki Stern, the Executive Director of Families of September 11; Thomas Lippman, former Diplomatic Correspondent for the Washington Post; Ambassador David Newsom, former acting Secretary of State; Charles Hanley, the Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist who broke the Abu Ghraib scandals; and Kenneth Bacon, former Assistant Secretary of Defense.

This town hall series is sponsored by Americans for Informed Democracy, and supported by a coalition of non-profit organizations, including the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and the United Nations Foundation, and a broader initiative called By the People. The town hall series is also being sponsored by the Families of September 11, an independent organization founded by 9/11 families to give a voice to the issues that have come out of September 11, 2001. For more information about this unprecedented series, please visit www.AIDemocracy.org or www.HopeNotHate.org or www.By-The-People.org.