A Prayer to St Jude This blog is not usually about me, but since I, a confirmed heretic and occasional blasphemer, am offering a prayer to heaven, I thought I would make an exception. And besides, it's actually not about me, it's about my friend Daoud and his grandfather's farm.

My prayer is to the patron saint of hopeless causes, St Jude. Together I hope that St. Jude and I (and certain other persons) can change the way the people of America view the people of Palestine.

For me, and for many other Americans, that would have to start with the 1972 Munich Olympics, where the Palestine Liberation Organization, thinking to advance their cause, shot eleven unarmed Israeli athletes.

My friend Daoud didn't shoot any athletes, but he and his family and friends have surely paid the price of that criminal atrocity, through no fault of their own.

America cannot resolve any important issues with the Islamic world until the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is resolved. But turn that around: if this one tiny sectional conflict were resolved, it would inestimably advance the cause of world peace.

And for you business majors out there, that would mean an enormous, almost incalculable, peace dividend compounded quarterly for generation after generation. This is the stuff of which great fortunes are made.

Daoud is the guy who can actually bring this about, because he is a man who refuses to hate. When his gun-toting neighbors, who claim that god has given them his family's land, tore up 250 olive trees, he still refused to hate.

That would have done it for me. I would have hated those SOBs, and the cause would have been lost.

Daoud wants to found an international peace center, the Tent of Nations. He has a singularity of vision that reminds me of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King.

I think this guy deserves a hearing by the American People, don't you?  ¶ 8:11 PM