Dave Crabill was our speaker chair for this week and introduced Michael J. Thorpe and Gary Lane as our speakers for this morning. Michael gave a brief overview regarding the organization they were here representing today. The organization is the Daniel Pearl Foundation which was founded in honor of Daniel Pearl who was a Wall Street Journal reporter who was kidnapped and murdered by terrorists in Pakistan back in 2002. Daniel was investigating a link between the “Shoe Bomber” Richard Reid and Al Qaeda when he was kidnapped. Not only was Daniel an excellent journalist, he was also an excellent musician who played the electric violin, fiddle or mandolin. A concert supporting the Daniel Peal Foundation is at the Flint Institute of Music on October 18th featuring Julie Gold who is songwriter and musician. For more information on the Daniel Pearl Foundation go to www.danielpearl.org.
Gary, who is a reporter for CBN News started out by posing this question. “What makes reporters risk their lives to report a story?” Many reasons can come to mind – exposing the truth, present a good story, personal glory, the list goes on. He himself and his family have been threatened. So far in 2015 48 journalist have been killed, France with the highest number at eight. One hundred forty-seven (147) have been put in prison this year. He has just returned from Hungry where he was reporting on the immigration situation involving so many coming in from Syria and other Middle East countries. This is the greatest human rights crisis that has taken place in a long time. One half of the population has been displaced, 7.5 million refugees with no trauma counseling, no education for children, no food or water on a regular basis. ISIS states that they have 4,000 jihadists in the refugee population and are entering Europe with no or very limited background checks. Hungry does not want them to stay there so they can protect their culture. Hungry at this point is a “process location” to direct the refugees to other countries. Gary directed us to the CBN News website where we can review his blog. Go to http://www.cbn.com/cbnnews/blogs/ and scroll down to Global Lane for Gary’s reporting.
A lot of good questions came out of our group to both Michael and Gary. Thank you Dave, Michael and Gary for this insightful program.
President Jeff opened our meeting with Art Ridley leading us in the pledge and Greg Hilliker providing the invocation. Dave Crabill won the bidding war for the crown at $2.00 and proceeded to be are real pain with the number of fines. Art Ridley won the 50/50 again!
Our meeting concluded as usual with the reciting of our Optimist Creed.