Rush Limbaugh has gone on the warpath over the VA’s advanced-care directives planning booklet, Your Life Your Choices. He’s describing it as a “death book” designed to kill off our veterans, when in fact, it is a quality of life tool that empowers veterans to clearly articulate their wishes. Without advanced-care directives, our veterans and their families would suffer, either from being forced to undergo treatments they didn’t want, or by being denied treatment that they did want.

I was on a radio show in Ottawa yesterday opposing the decision by the administration of Carleton University to fire Hassan Diab. There were several challenges involved for me, both with deciding to appear on the Gerry Cammy Show and with the opposition to Diab’s dismissal.

Gerry, who is a friend of mine in spite of the fact that he is a conservative, invited me to appear on the show two weeks ago. I initially refused. Rania Tfaily, Hassan Diab’s wife, later asked me to do so. I appeared with two other guests. Eric Vernon is a senior staff member for Canadian Jewish Congress in Ottawa. Ian Lee is Director of MBA programs at Carleton University.

Today after returning from a delightful vacation in the Adirondacks, I’ve been immersing myself in the Sunday NY Times Magazine. This week to my utter astonishment, the entire magazine section of the Sunday Times has been devoted to the international issues surrounding women’s rights. It’s entitled “Saving the World’s Women.”

The cover story, “The Women’s Crusade” by husband-and-wife team Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, begins by enumerating several of the causes for women’s oppression in China, South Asia, and Africa — sexual slavery, lack of employment opportunities, lack of education, even lack of food and medicine for girls (but not for boys) — and how some of the women affected by these issues have turned their lives around through microfinance. These are wonderful stories, inspiring and perceptive about women’s situation in the developing world.

But soon Kristof and WuDunn move on to what they consider the more important issues: that educating and empowering women undermines extremism and terrorism; that aid to women in the Third World is the key to ending global poverty; that gender inequality hurts economic growth; and quoting Larry Summers (chief economist of the World Bank in the 1990s) that “Investment in girls’ education may well be the highest-return investment available in the developing world.” Even the aid organization Care, the World Bank, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Kristof and WuDunn tell us, are beginning to focus on women’s empowerment as an antidote to poverty and extremism.

It saddened me to see women once again viewed from an instrumental perspective and reduced to tools for the improvement of the world. Instead of looking at women’s stories and what they tell us about women’s rights, this NY Times duo seems interested in how helping women ultimately fights poverty or how empowering women fights terrorism, i.e. how women can be used for the betterment of society. I don’t understand why people don’t realize that the issue of women’s rights is important in and of itself. We don’t have to justify it by showing its geopolitical or economic significance. Women’s rights are human rights.

I’ve been on vacation for ten days and apart from one post about the netroots and health care have given not a thought to Tikkun Daily. So it’s great to be back and to get a press release like this one in my inbox. I am posting it whole. It’s from Physicians for Human Rights, a great group.

Rights Group Applauds Appointment of Prosecutor in CIA Torture Cases

Health Professionals Must Also Be Investigated, Says PHR

Cambridge, MA — Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) welcomes actions taken which demonstrate that the Obama Administration is committed to ending the use of abusive interrogation techniques and to initiating a process of holding accountable those responsible for the regime of torture. However, PHR urges the Administration to pursue any investigation up the chain of command to those officials who authorized and supervised the use of illegal techniques.

“Attorney General Holder’s decision to appoint a special prosecutor to re-examine a number of cases of alleged torture and abuse is another sign that the Administration’s ‘don’t look back’ policy is being reassessed,” said Frank Donaghue, PHR CEO.

Despite the fact that some individuals have shown up at the town hall meetings literally armed, left progressives need to continue to seriously identify and attack the strongest links (not the weakest) in the ideological repertoire of those who are so rabid in their opposition to the Obama healthcare plan. This means that focusing on the “will my granny be put to death” argument is only a distraction. This is not among the strongest arguments that congeal whatever opposition to this healthcare plan emanates from the broadly defined right-wing. It is definitely the strangest, perhaps.

Anyway, focusing on the strongest link is what the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci languishing in Mussolini’s prison wrote in his Prison Notebooks as the strategy in an ideological struggle as different from a military struggle. For Gramsci, whereas in the latter kind of war one has to attack the weakest link of the enemy, in the former kind of war one needs to attack the strongest link. This is because of the power of ideas which is not only of a longer durability than a military formation, but is also of a different quality – ideas when developed into beliefs and then upheld through rituals (customs, traditions) that reinforce beliefs – have a way of digging themselves very deep into psyches and collective consciousness. In this sense, the television shows we see are of course all living room war-games of the ideological kind.

Kathryn Bigelow’s film THE HURT LOCKER is an explosive device buried deep in a somnolent country. Marketed as an action movie (“As tense and compelling an action drama as you are likely to see all year,” claims critic Eric Snider in his review on films.com), this intense on-screen portrait of a three-man Explosive Ordnance Disposal unit in Iraq is actually a subtle critique of a deadening and unendurably trivial stateside culture, and it raises some questions we need to be asking ourselves.

I had the pleasure of attending the recent Woodstock Peace Economics Forum, held in the town of Woodstock NY (yes, it’s THE Woodstock) on the 40th anniversary of the original Woodstock concert. The theme seemed to be “Turning Swords into Wind Turbines.” There was a lot of interesting talk about the impact of the military on our economy, environmental issues, and the state of activism in general.

While some participants seemed to have been stuck in old arguments and rhetoric that hasn’t changed much since the 1969 concert, there were some interesting new facts and approaches. Economist Robert Pollin gave the following information from a recent study about the impact of federal spending on job creation. If $1 million were spent by the government in various different ways, the study concluded how many jobs would be created. As usual, the real figures are very eye opening. How many jobs would be created if the government spent $1 million on:

The Military – 11 jobs
The Green Agenda – 17 jobs
Education – 23 jobs
Child Care – 40 jobs

These are only the immediate impacts. The long term benefits on job creation for spending money on better education could be fairly dramatic, but that was not projected in this study.

There was some interesting historical discussion refuting the idea that the military spending in WWII was necessary to pull us out of the Great Depression. Some economists have convincingly argued that government spending such massive amounts of money as they did during WWII would have pulled us out of the Great Depression almost no matter what it was spent on. In fact, there were many other projects where the money spent would have produced much bigger economic benefits.

So if anyone still tries to claim that massive military spending is needed for the economy and for job creation, you can tell them that the facts just don’t support that.

“A woman who loses her chastity is worthless,” lectures the sermon-giver at Asra Nomani’s mosque in Morgantown, West Virginia. Nomani carefully jots down this statement in her notebook, right alongside the speaker’s other assertion that “Jews are the descendents of apes and pigs.” Nomani, a former Wall Street Journal correspondent who came face-to-face with extremism when her colleague and close friend, Daniel Pearl, was murdered in Pakistan, is certain that these statements of intolerance in her local mosque are intrinsically related to acts of violence. Thus begins Nomani’s “struggle for the soul of Islam,” a struggle showcased by Brittany Huckabee in her recent documentary, The Mosque in Morgantown.

As Huckabee’s movie follows Nomani’s fight for women’s rights, it shows how her struggle against conservatism becomes intertwined with her repugnance with extremism. The film focuses on how Nomani ends up conflating the two, explaining time and again that there is a “slippery slope” between intolerance and violence. Nomani’s protest goes from wanting to give women a space in the main prayer hall to wanting women to stand beside men in prayer and to lead mixed-gender prayer. Any other view of gender organization in the mosque is, according to Nomani, a sign of extremism, akin to the type practiced by Pearl’s murderers. Yet, as one of the conservative women from her mosque notes, what does extremism have to do with women-led prayer?

One of the better aspects to living in the global village is how it provides us with a pleasingly wide range of radio stations. A new discovery I’ve made is the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) program Tapestry. Its basic focus is on spirituality, in the widest possible sense, with guests ranging from rabbis and roshis to rock stars and writers. Mary Hynes is the host, and she is adept at not getting in the way, gently helping her guests to share their fascinating explorations of how we can best align with the Mystery, through the wide range of perceptions that they bring of what It might be.

You’re probably either familiar with Tapestry, or thinking what a shame it is you can’t pick up CBC. That’s the global village part: you don’t have to. You can listen to it on computer by going to the CBC website, which features years of archived shows, or go to iTunes and download it as a podcast. That allows you to listen to shows on an iPod, or burn a CD for playing on your next boring long drive. All of this is both free, and legal, just like our medical system. (Oops…sorry. Don’t know how that sneaked in.)

Wm. Lyon MacKenzie King, 10th prime minister of Canada. He was PM three times over 21 years.

In 1936 the government of Canada appointed Frederick Charles Blair as the director of the Immigration Branch. Blair was appointed assistant deputy of immigration in 1924, under the Liberal government of MacKenzie-King.

The Liberals had been in and out of power twice in the intervening years but were elected again in 1935. Blair was promoted in 1936 to become director of the Immigration Branch.

Blair responded to the question of how many Jews would be admitted to Canada with the remark “None is too many”.

The ghost of Blair remains a powerful force in the government of Canada, even as the face of Canada has coloured significantly in the past 65 years. I can think of no other reason for the shameful targeting of six Arab-Canadian citizens by three successive government administrations since 2001.

Helen Keller dances with Martha Graham, circa 1954. Photo courtesy of the American Foundation for the Blind.

I stumbled on a moving story the other day — a story that disrupted my humdrum mood and reminded me of the radical wonder of life in this world.

At the time I was searching for videos of Merce Cunningham, the brilliant and playful modern dance choreographer who passed away on July 26. Having trained seriously in Martha Graham’s modern dance technique as a teenager, I’ve always thought of Cunningham as some sort of immortal uncle. I was feeling sad about his death.

Here’s the story:

The religious community had high expectations for the conference call with President Obama today, but the call itself was a disappointment.

Obama himself was only on for about seven minutes (to hear his bit, download the podcast and scroll to 30:29). He restated why it is urgent for people to let their elected representatives know their concerns about health care and why we need health care reform. He took on some of the popular misconceptions that the Right has been spreading and showed why they were wrong.

What he did not do is answer the challenges from the Left — e.g. those articulated by Dennis Kucinich on Tikkun‘s website or Bob Herbert’s piece yesterday in the New York Times arguing that the Obama plan, as now whittled down, would actually be a give-away to the insurance industry and forestall serious reform. Such a plan would raise everyone’s taxes or health care premiums and likely lead right-wing people to say: see how government screws everything?

Criminal conduct in Canada is normally prosecuted by a Crown counsel representing the formal person of the Canadian state, this being The Queen.

This time the situation is reversed — it is The Queen on trial, and the prosecutor is a remarkably foolish young man named Omar Khadr, who is the last prisoner of a western nation at Gitmo. Omar Khadr was 15 years old when he allegedly threw a grenade and killed a US soldier fighting in Afghanistan.

Precisely why Omar Khadr is the last western prisoner at Gitmo is a tale that will come to define Canada in the 21st century. Barely 10 years into the century and Canada has used the ship of state to ram the lifeboats of six Canadian citizens. All of them are Arabs.

I cannot claim that the ship of state was steered politically. The Canadian citizens in question were victmised under both Conservative and Liberal administrations.

Today a faith-based coalition will host a nationwide telephone call-in with President Barack Obama about health insurance reform. Participating in this gathering — by telephone or online — is an important opportunity to show your support for patient’s rights.

You can join the national call-in with President Obama today — Wednesday, August 19th — at 5:00 pm Eastern Daylight Time. 2 p.m. Pacific Daylight Time. Simply log on to faithforhealth.org in the minutes approaching the call, or dial 347-996-5501 (no pass code, long-distance charges may apply). Because of the large call volume expected, listening online is the preferred way of participating. And if you log in, they will also ask you for your question or point to be made to the president.

If your question is called, please urge President Obama to move his goal post to the left by supporting Medicare-for-Everyone (which is essentially the plan introduced into Congress by Congressman John Conyers and is popularly called Single Payer).

Father Gino distributes communion wafers to parishioners during Sunday Mass.

Julia Dean and A. Jay Adler have been traveling across the country for the last eight months telling the story of life on Native American reservations through photography and writing. “It seems to us that Native Americans don’t get talked about a lot in America unless you live next to a reservation or have anything to do with Native Americans,” Dean says. “As journalists, we are just trying to do a little something about it.” You can read more about their project in my previous blog post on their work and on their blog, The Sad Red Earth.

This week we’re featuring another of Dean’s photo essays, The Catholic Church.

(I’ve been away for a month, and it’s great to be back. One place I was was at my annual family meeting, and that seemed a story that belonged here)

In the beginning it all seems the same. As a child, I thought all families were like my family. They all celebrated birthdays. My friends all had parents like mine, and (as this was the 1950s) all the parents I knew were a mother and a father. My grandparents visited us occasionally, or we would visit them, and we would see various aunts and uncles scattered around North America. And pretty regularly we’d go to our annual family meeting, which is now into its third century.

Family meetings, I learned when I talked to my friends, weren’t universal to all families. Families had parties, usually at Easter, or Christmas, or St Jean Baptiste Day in Québec (Christmas’ summer mirror). But my family had meetings, not parties, and they were held elsewhere, in the US in November. Gradually I came to understand my family’s mythology, and the central role that our family meetings held and hold in that mythology.

All mythologies start with a creation myth, which might involve seven days, a manger, a turtle, or Coyote. My family’s mythology starts in Vienna, where my great-grandparents Simon Marmorek (born in 1845) and Rosa Marmorek (1855) lived.

Just imagine how it would affect this country if Religious Left radio became as popular as the many broadcasts of the Religious Right …

I know it’s unlikely, but I let myself envision that scenario for just a second after meeting radio host Chuck Freeman, a minister from the Live Oak Unitarian Universalist Church in Austin, Texas. As the co-founder of the Austin chapter of the Network of Spiritual Progressives and the founder of the Free Souls Project (a nonprofit organization that aims to use mass communication tools to open new conversations about spirituality, democracy, and ethics in the public square), Chuck is on fire with excitement about creating new spaces for spiritual progressive speech. I just listened to his interview with Islam Mosaad and I’m looking forward to checking out more podcasts from his radio show (click on “free podcasts”). Here’s a bit of text from his website about the mission of Soul Talk Radio:

We live in a culture where words, and specifically religious teachings, are often used to harass and bludgeon us, thus slamming the door of “the kingdom” in our faces. We will offer a distinct contrast to this style of engagement; restoring joy, play, and expansion to the spiritual mix. In lieu of fear, manipulation, and judgement, Soul Talk Radio aims to traffic in openness, and wonder; reveling in the myriad expressions of the Divine Source.

At the Netroots Nation conference, Chuck and I talked about the possibility of creating a massive online portal to bring together links to all the various radio shows, podcasts, blogs, magazines, websites, online social communities, etc. that form the rag-tag reality of the Religious Left. Perhaps we should start this project as a Wiki so that the community as a whole can collectively aggregate these links. Let me know if you have any ideas about how best to proceed!

This week’s spiritual wisdom is from Jalal al-Din Rumi’s Mathnawi story of the man who swallowed a snake, in a version by Coleman Barks:

Jesus on the lean donkey,
this is an emblem of how the rational intellect
should control the animal-soul.
Let your spirit
be strong like Jesus.
If that part becomes weak,
then the worn out donkey grows to a dragon.

Be grateful when what seems unkind
comes from a wise person.
Once, a holy man,
riding his donkey, saw a snake crawling into
a sleeping man’s mouth! He hurried, but he couldn’t
prevent it. He hit the man several blows with his club.

On Nov 11, 2008 (just a few days after the historic win of Barack Obama) the German paper Der Speigel interviewed Professor Niall Ferguson, a historian at Harvard to discuss among other things, Obama’s historical election victory. Fergusen said: “Yes, it was a very moving moment. It was similar to the release of Nelson Mandela. When Obama was born, in 1961, mixed marriages between blacks and whites were still illegal in one-third of the American states…It is astonishing that the transformation from a racist America to an America that elects a black man to the White House was possible within that period of time. Even the world’s most dogmatic conservative ought to be moved.” (click here for the interview) Fergusen initially supported McCain but then became “a convert in the last six months because of Obama’s extraordinary combination of rhetorical genius, coolness under fire and organizational skills.” Asked to say what the election meant, Fergusen then said: “What it means is enough: the death of racism, the end of the original American sin and, most of all, the right reaction to end the economic crisis. Obama can stimulate self-confidence because he is so calm and collected. He will not simply put an end to the crisis or ensure that banks lend money again. He is a politician, not the Messiah. But he can change the national mood.”

Prof. Fergusen’s interview is very illuminating for understanding at least one aspect of the public display of “vile and bile” whenever Obama is mentioned on news channels like Fox (I watch this whenever I feel like I need to challenge my ability for suffering pain while maintaining some inner calm).

Every time a journalist refers to “post-racial America” and our “post-racial age,” a wave of anger and sadness hits me. How can they say the United States has moved beyond race in this age of anti-immigrant violence, racial profiling, residential segregation, school funding disparities, and the mass incarceration of black and Latino men?

We aren’t going to make any progress in fighting racism if we aren’t able to acknowledge that it continues to exist on both the interpersonal level and the structural level.

Overt, interpersonal racism is on the decline in many places, but it’s far from dead. At a recent Netroots Nation panel on this topic, blogger Annabel Park shared the following video about anti-immigrant organizing in Manassas, Virginia. I’m worried that overtly hate-filled scenes like this may increasingly erupt across the country as demographics shift and white folks find themselves suddenly in the minority in certain areas. Please share this video with anyone who thinks this kind of racism never happens anymore: