I was busy in Amherst - having been invited to be a speaker at the Amherst Town Meeting on Nov. 5th on the topic of inviting two Guantanamo detainees to Amherst. Our effort worked and the resolution was passed. Amherst is the first community in the US to declare a willingness to take detainees. The passage of the article has been reported by the BBC, FOX, CNN and a whole host of newspapers.

In my speech I drew a parallel to the Virginia community which in 1938 negotiated with the nazis to secure the release of my great-uncle, Curt Bondy and his students (who had been at an agricultural school he started in Gross-Breesen). They had been taken to Buchenwald on Kristallnacht. The community took him in despite the fact that he was a homosexual which was completely against the law in Virginia at that time. I argued that our obligation to help those that are government mistreated should not be contingent on how the two detainees interpret the impact of their muslim faith on current political issues in the US.