"All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing." Edmund Burke
And so, ASimplePeace was born.

ASimplePeace is a not-for-profit organization that was created out of a need to do something to staunch the flow of hate-tainted blood that is flooding the earth. We are Jews, Christians, Muslims, Hindus and even atheists who have come together for the purpose of "thinking outside the box" for a solution to the radicalism and fanaticism that is being ingrained into the psyches and souls of a large percentage of the world’s population; especially the children who will grow to be tomorrow’s terrorists. We see the primary requirement for peace to be the ability to defuse or neutralize the fanatic hate groups that use the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as their raison d’être. We invite you to join our effort.

Our founder is Gregory Olinyk, a venture capitalist and Managing Partner of Point-of-Reference, LLC, a venture management-consulting firm that helps new companies to start and existing companies to expand or restart. ASimplePeace is an extension of a long history of civic and humanitarian service. He has been a volunteer firefighter, coach and treasurer of Pop Warner football (despite not having a child in the program) and past member of Rotary and the National Exchange Club. In 1994 he was selected as Exchangite of the Year for a tireless 16 month effort culminating in the co-founding and funding of a highly successful child abuse prevention center.

A message from Gregory Olinyk:

In August of 2001, after reading of yet another cycle of killing and retaliation amongst Israelis and Palestinians, I decided to ask both countries the reason for this perpetual cycle of violence and what really happened when Israel was formed in 1948. I was told that I needed to put my request in writing. Well, as you can probably appreciate, life got in the way and the next thing I knew it was September 11th.

Before I share with you how I came to create ASimplePeace, I would like to state, up front, that I am a Christian who had never met a Palestinian; I did not know anyone of the Islamic faith; my ratio of Jewish to Christian friends is 50/50; and one of the finest people I have ever met is a Jew and staunch supporter of Israel. My sole motivation for creating ASimplePeace is to get answers to serious questions so that we can stop the killing that is spreading across the earth. Fearing that my efforts might antagonize friends or bring harm to myself, I agonized over asking these questions but, if the answers will prevent a repeat of the national tragedy of September 11th and the recent suicide bombings in Israel, then it will be worth it.

Last September, after many sleepless nights trying to understand how God could have permitted such a criminal tragedy, I asked a highly respected 77-year old historian and political science scholar, who also happens to be an Orthodox Jew, a holocaust survivor, and one of the original settlers of the State of Israel. His response was not what I expected.

He stated his belief that, "God is benign at least in the sense that, when He gave us freewill it, by definition, had to include the power to choose between doing good or evil. Sooner or later we are either rewarded or punished for our deeds and decisions." As he watched the World Trade Center Towers collapse he attributed it to "bad Karma (‘what goes around comes around’) that has been building to a crescendo for years."

"This all started over Palestine," he said. After "years of soul-searching," he has concluded that Great Britain and the U.S. treated the Palestinian people like American Indians by forcibly confiscating their land and property, and that the United States is now paying for its ongoing support of that "crime" (his word, not mine). "This was what catalyzed the radical Islamic movement and what feeds its fires to this very day," he said.

While he was quick to assert that he did not condone such terrorism, he stated that, "53 years of US obduracy caused this bad Karma to build to the bursting point on September 11th and, until we undo this ‘offense’ by returning Palestinian land and making reparations, more bad Karma and similar tragedies will follow."

In the Socratic manner of teaching, he posed the following questions: "If the United States and Britain led a coalition that invaded your country, told you to get out and then gave your home and belongings to people who you hate and who hate you, how would you respond?"

"Would you fight with all of your heart and soul for as long as it takes? If you believed that the people who took your home were of a religious faith diametrically opposed to yours, could your fight be called a "Holy War?" If you could not hope to marshal a military force sufficient to challenge the superpowers who took your land, how would you conduct that fight? Would you march into opposing fire standing straight up, or would you resort to guerilla tactics?"

"Who is a ‘guerilla fighting for what is rightfully theirs’ and who is a ‘terrorist?’" he asked. "Other than by highly creative attacks on its infrastructure and its people, how else do you wage war against a powerful nation 5,000 miles away?" How does what happened on September 11th differ from what we did at Hiroshima and Nagasaki?"

He opined that "Those who say, ‘Well, it’s too late to change something that happened 50-years ago; Israel is now permanent so we can’t give the land back to the Palestinians,’ are only perpetuating a wrong. By virtue of the fact that it [this wrong] has gone on for so long, it is no longer just about the return of Palestinian land; it is about destroying the economic lifeblood (capitalist or not) of all who act in an arbitrary and imperial manner. The US is caught in a self-inflicted trap: our leaders support Israel not because it is right but because that’s where the votes are. Religious fanatics are using American support of Israel as their rationale for existence."

He went on to say that, "As terrorists like Osama Bin Laden are taken out, others will replace him because this is about principle and obsession with principle; not about a particular group or person." He stressed that, "This does not mean we should not send a clear message by taking out Bin Laden and others like him; but that will simply be part of a greater solution. It’s like stamping out cockroaches: they keep coming back, but you’ve got to try."

"The United States and its allies cannot bomb away principle. The fanatical aspects of the Islamic fundamentalist movement would never have been able to grow roots in places like the Middle East and Chechnya if the Allies had not physically dropped the Jewish State of Israel into an open sore where its perceived persecution of Palestinians keeps that wound open and festering with hatred. We’ve been thinking about this backward. The US and Britain must undo what they did: the Israelis are the ones who need to be relocated or at least disarmed. Until they are, we can expect more fanatical soldiers committing grave acts against their perceived oppressors."

He stated that while the world sympathizes with what happened on September 11th, many people find it ironic to hear U.S. leaders compare Israel’s retaliation against Palestinian violence with the acts of Bin Laden and his cohort. "Israel is not fighting to get its country back; Palestinians are. In the court of world opinion, Israel is perceived as the interloper."

I asked how a devout Jew like himself could advocate such a position; especially being that he was one of the State of Israel’s original settlers. He replied, "I was in my 20’s. I have seen and learned much since then."

His words resonated within me for months. They presented me with the choice to do nothing or something. As Edmund Burke so eloquently put it: "All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing." And so, ASimplePeace was born.