Formerly Imprisoned American Peace Activist Shares His Captivating True Story
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In 2018, Dr. Frank Romano stood in front of an Israeli bulldozer that was preparing to destroy a Bedouin village — Al Khan al Ahmar in the Jericho Valley, West Bank. He was promptly arrested and imprisoned in Jerusalem.
His harrowing true story, Love and Terror in the Middle East (5th Edition), recounts this last voyage to the troubled Holy Land. It covers his arrest, his experiences in jail, his living underground in Palestine, and then his second arrest and subsequent deportation.
After his arrest in Jerusalem, he was thrown into a cell with four hardened Israeli criminals who immediately attacked him, striking and stabbing him with a sharp object. Bloodied and injured, he broke away from the onslaught and pounded on the door. After the guards saw the dripping blood, they pulled him from the cell and locked him in solitary confinement.
The following day, Romano was to stand trial in Jerusalem. The police, instead of taking him to court for the trial, drove him to the airport after an Israeli Military Court convicted him of a felony and ordered his deportation. When the judge became aware of the police duplicity, she ordered them to return Romano to Jerusalem to stand trial. After the trial, he was acquitted and released, but the court ordered him to leave Israel and Palestine.
Romano disobeyed a court order to leave Israel and Palestine. Preferring to continue his work in Palestine, he went underground in Palestine to avoid arrest.
While he was hiding from Israeli police, Romano worked with a team of lawyers in Ramallah, West Bank, preparing a case against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Secretary of Defense Avigdor Lieberman and American authorities, before the International Criminal Court for War Crimes, Crimes Against Humanity and other serious international offenses. He filed that ICC brief in August 2021.
For a decade, through interfaith grassroots efforts, Frank Romano has brought Jews, Muslims and Christians together from all corners of the world in support of peace. The story he shares in Love and Terror in the Middle East was a voyage into a tense war zone, the first time defending Palestinian Bedouins, and it is a powerful story of courage, resilience and Romano’s dedication to world peace.
He presently lives and works teaching French in the Sabra and Chatilla Palestinian and Syrian refugee camps in Beirut, Lebanon.
Love and Terror in the Middle East Publisher: AB Film Publishing ISBN-10: 0990485234 ISBN-13: 978-0990485230 Available from BarnesAndNoble.com and Amazon.com
Trish Stevens Kelly Freeman Ascot Media Group, Inc. Post Office Box 2394 Friendswood, TX 77549 [email protected] www.ascotmedia.com 281.333.3507 Phone
Chasm Between Father and Son at Center of Compelling Story of Love, Loss and Forgiveness
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Bill Smith’s father is an enigma. Could his praying and preaching the wholesomeness of Christianity be a cover for something unspeakably dark in his past? Each man’s lifelong struggle to retain his own integrity while learning to respect the other forms the foundation of The Home Stretch, a compelling exploration of a difficult father-son relationship and the complexity of bridging seemingly unbridgeable differences.
Award-winning author Wayne M. Johnston’s thoroughly absorbing, reality-based story is presented through the voice of everyman Bill Smith (loosely based on Johnston himself) who, throughout his life, is confronted with extraordinary circumstances. Raised in a religious cult, Bill’s unconventional upbringing and strained relationship with his father inform his life experiences and underwrite his formidable urge, from a young age, to simply escape this life altogether.
Bill struggles with depression and suicidal thoughts, and embarks upon a career navigating the rough waters of the Pacific on a tugboat. His tales of weathering gale-force winds and violent storms at sea provide metaphorical undercurrents for Bill’s fraught relationship with his father, his failed early marriage, his father’s descent into Alzheimer’s and his own battle with leukemia, which he is told will kill him.
Just when Bill has come to believe he has put the worst of it to rest, he learns something more about his father that opens everything up again, except this time, Bill’s sister is the victim.
Ultimately, The Home Stretch is a powerful coming-of-age story for grownups that poignantly captures the unresolved emotions that surface when our past and present selves collide. Johnston gives readers candid glimpses into life-defining moments of reckoning that many of us will have to face head-on, such as retiring from a career that defines us, becoming a caregiver to a parent and contemplating our own mortality. The Home Stretch serves as a stark reminder that the peace we hope for as we age is often shoved aside to make room for another crisis, but it is also an inspiring tale woven with themes of forgiveness and survival.
Wayne M. Johnston taught English, Creative Writing and Publications at La Conner High School for 19 years. Prior to that, he worked on tugboats for 22 years, usually as chief engineer, towing freight barges between Canadian and West Coast American ports. In 2011, he won the Soundings Review First Publication Award for his essay, “Sailing,” and has published other essays locally. For his debut novel, North Fork, he drew from years of experience reading student journals to reproduce the way kids voice serious matters to a trusted adult. North Fork was released in 2016 as a YA novel. The story is told through the voices of three 17-year-olds as journal entries for their English class. Bill Smith, the protagonist in The Home Stretch, is their English teacher, and The Home Stretch (book two in a planned trilogy) is his back story.
Johnston lives with his wife, Sally, on Fidalgo Island in Washington State where he is working on another book.
The Home Stretch Publisher: Black Heron Press ISBN-10: 1936364344 ISBN-13: 978-1936364343 Available from Amazon.com, BN.com, Target.com and anywhere books are sold
Trish Stevens Stephanie Williams Ascot Media Group, Inc. Post Office Box 2394 Friendswood, TX 77549 [email protected] www.ascotmedia.com 281.333.3507 Phone
Trish Stevens Ascot Media Group Post Office Box 2394 Friendswood, TX 77549 281.333.3507 office [email protected] www.ascotmedia.com
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Love And Terror: A Peace Activist Enters A War Zone To Help Stop The Conflict And Bring Peace In Israel And Palestine.
Paris, France & Houston, TX – Frank Romano, PhD, has just returned from a one month stay in Israel and Palestine, in the midst of an Inifada, or war between Israelis and Palestinians. For a decade, through interfaith grassroots efforts to open up communication, he has brought Jews, Muslims and Christians together from all corners of the world in support of peace.
However, this is his first voyage into a war zone and he has a story to tell.
Romano tells the remarkable story of his journey in Love and Terror in the Middle East (AB Film Publishing). A 4th edition of the book, it includes a new chapter dedicated to a recent event where he was trapped in the middle of rioting Palestinians, following the killing of a Palestinian youth by Israeli soldiers, and barely escaped with his life.
Constantly surrounded by war, his journey has been fraught with sacrifice. Friends and fellow activists have been arrested and brutally murdered. He has been attacked by settlers, harassed and arrested by the Israeli and Palestinian police. In his personal life it has cost him his marriage, another long term romantic relationship, and impacted his role as a father. In spite of the danger and sacrifice, Dr. Romano – lawyer, author, speaker and professor of law, literature, history and philosophy of law at the University of Paris, France- continues to be an advocate for peace in the Middle East.
For more information on Dr. Romano’s book or his ongoing drive for peace, please visit: http://www.frankromano-loveandterror4.com (book) http://www.frankromano363.blogspot.com/ (blog) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwQ-TYRDIVI (Interview)
Available at Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, and major online outlets Love and Terror in the Middle East, 4th edition By Frank Romano AB Film Publishing ISBN-13: 978-0989706865
