New at The Immanent Frame: Talal Asad and Abdullahi An-Na’im both stand at the forefront of the challenging and constructive exchange taking place today between European and Islamic traditions of political, legal, and religious thought. At a recent event organized by Georgetown University’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs, the two scholars traded questions and criticisms concerning the concept of human rights. Moderated by José Casanova, the discussion addressed the intrinsic limitations and historical failures of the language of human rights, as well as its formidable capacity to challenge autocratic and state-centric distributions of power, creating openings for democratic contestation and political self-determination. A short excerpt of the exchange has been posted at The Immanent Frame and a complete transcript is available for download here (pdf). You can also watch video from this event at here & there.

As the famous poem, “Sometimes” (which the author famously doesn’t want her name to be associated with) goes,

Sometimes things don’t go, after all,
from bad to worse. Some years, muscadel
faces down frost; green thrives; the crops don’t fail.

Sometimes — or at least now — tens of thousands of African farmers can eat better, send their kids to school, mend the roof, and have some hope: in this case thanks to a sweet collaboration with some visionary people from our side of the North-South divide. I was just about to celebrate it on this blog when my eye caught another project by American graduates that is really helping.

Selling safou (an African fruit like plums) in Cameroon. Credit: Hannah Jaenicke/World Agroforestry Centre

IF YOU had come here 10 years ago, says Thaddeus Salah as he shows us round his tree nursery in north-west Cameroon, you would have seen real hunger and poverty. “In those times,” he says, “we didn’t have enough chop to eat.” It wasn’t just food – “chop” in the local dialect – that his family lacked. They couldn’t afford school fees, healthcare or even chairs for their dilapidated grass-thatch house.

Salah’s fortunes changed in 2000 when he and his neighbours learned how to identify the best wild fruit trees and propagate them in a nursery. “Domesticating wild fruit like bush mango has changed our lives,” he says. His family now has “plenty chop”, as he puts it. He is also earning enough from the sale of indigenous fruit trees to pay school fees for four of his children. He has been able to re-roof his house with zinc sheets and buy goods he could only dream of owning before. He even has a mobile phone.

Cartoon by Nick Anderson, Washington Post Writers Group

In the New York Times yesterday Frank Rich argued that it would be very bad news for the Democrats if the Republicans recover from their takeover by tea party extremists and this morning Paul Krugman argued the opposite. Krugman warned that an unelectable Republican Party can still be strong enough to stymie good government. In that case the whole country will end up like California: paralyzed. Living in California, I tended to favor Krugman’s take. And, surely, principled conservatism needs to prevail over the fear and hate taking over the Republican Party right now.

The Religious Right is cheering last night’s passage of the Stupak amendment, which threatens women’s reproductive rights by severely limiting insurance companies’ ability to cover the cost of abortions.

“This is a huge pro-life victory for women, their unborn children, and families,” announced the Family Research Council, a conservative Christian public policy group that lobbied hard for the amendment. “We applaud this House vote.”

The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops also played a major role in persuading lawmakers to adopt the amendment, which 64 House Democrats and 176 Republicans voted to attach in their last-minute wrangles over the Affordable Health Care for America Act. John Nichols raised serious concerns about the Catholic bishops’ involvement, writing this in his post for the Nation:

The tortured final negotiations put serious cracks in Thomas Jefferson’s “wall of separation” between church and state, as abortion foes such as Pennsylvania Democrat Jason Altmire openly acknowledged that they would not vote for health-care reform legislation unless they were told it was appropriate to do so by Catholic bishops in their home districts.

The health bill, with Stupak amendment in tow, passed the House last night by 220-215, simultaneously paving the way for the most ambitious expansion of health-care coverage since the creation of Medicare, and for one of the worst federal curtailments of abortion rights since the Hyde Amendment, which has denied abortion access to most Medicaid recipients since 1976.

Many newspaper articles are downplaying the sweeping nature of the Stupak amendment, failing to signal the ways in which it goes far beyond the Hyde Amendment (a version of which is already part of the House bill in the form of an amendment by Rep. Lois Capps, D-Calif.) and could cause masses of women to lose abortion coverage that they already have. Here’s the alarming analysis of the situation that Rep. Jan Schakowksy issued during yesterday’s debate:

Under the misleading title of “Health Care Reform” the Obama Administration and Congressional Democrats have given the insurance companies the biggest boost in history, and screwed ordinary Americans. Congressman Dennis Kucinich has the courage to explain why. Here, in full, are Kucinich’s explanation from his official website and below it an article from The Raw Story that explains his position further.

Dennis Kucinich. Credit: Flickr/Cheshire County Democrats

Kucinich: Why I Voted NO

Washington, Nov 7 -

“We have been led to believe that we must make our health care choices only within the current structure of a predatory, for-profit insurance system which makes money not providing health care. We cannot fault the insurance companies for being what they are. But we can fault legislation in which the government incentivizes the perpetuation, indeed the strengthening, of the for-profit health insurance industry, the very source of the problem. When health insurance companies deny care or raise premiums, co-pays and deductibles they are simply trying to make a profit. That is our system.

I am finding I go first these days to Open Left. In a post by Adam Green:

Tonight was the opposite of a “bold progressive” night. With a huge majority in the House, a vote with only 219 Dems should have been because progressives pushed this bill to the limit. Instead, it was watered-down, watered-down, watered-down. And still, only 219 Dems. This is why we fight. We need to change this.

There is a passionate, beautifully written post, Stealing Women’s Lives by Natasha Chart, against the Stupak Amendment. Of the unpaid labor of love that pregnancy and childbirth are, she writes:

And today, a few too many Democrats are coming out to stand with Bart Stupak and basically say that they’re fine with this unpaid labor of love becoming mandatory for women who can’t pay to avoid it, nor have the patience of saints to be abstinent.

This seems to me to be an expression of unimaginable hatred for women, who literally risk their lives every time they decide to carry a child a term, and the poorer a woman is, the less access to medical care and good nutrition she has, the truer that is. It might not be politic to talk about, considering that it can’t be measured in money, but each of us owes a debt to our mother that can never be repaid and it’s a mockery of the sacrifice of every mother to make motherhood a matter of force.

Green says he spent days knocking on doors for in Charlottesville, Virginia, for Tom Perriello, who let him down by voting for the Stupak amendment. Did you have the same experience? So read Targeting Dems in 2010 in which Paul Rosenberg starts laying plans to replace centrist Dems with progressives.

If it sounds counterintuitive to you to imagine, as Tikkun Daily blogggers have argued here and here, that the Dems would do better electorally if they were more progressive, then check out this news

An example of the genre

This is a long post, occasioned by looking at the lack of progressive influence nationally, and by talks with social change leaders locally.

Can we agree we need more social change leaders today?

We may be the leaders we have been waiting for — it’s a good democratic idea and a challenge to each of us. But if I had no other evidence, just the number of times I have heard that phrase in the last few years tells me that we are all feeling the lack of leaders.

Note: although we progressives may be somewhat OK with the word ‘leaders’ we may not feel so comfortable with the word ‘followers.’ It may sound too much like ‘sheep.’

I’m not sure how many people realize that we have a weekly art exhibit on Tikkun Daily. Our goal is to find and display art that in some way can lift our lives as we struggle to heal and repair ourselves and our world. That opens a huge field of possible artists and types of art. And naturally one person’s tonic is another’s “huh?”

But the search itself is fun and energizing for us here, and we welcome your ideas and comments, which you can put on the exhibit pages on our art gallery (easily found on the navigation bar at the top of this page), or on the posts by Phil Barcio that accompany each exhibit.

You might want to bookmark some of the artists’ websites or sign up for those that will send you an alert when something new goes up. If you enjoyed Barbara Bash’s full body calligraphy exhibit here last week and signed up for her occasional alerts, you would have received one about her latest post on her True Nature blog, where she wrote today:

I pause -
step away from my windy life,
unplug the phone,
to paint these dying leaves. . .

The leaves look bigger and the colors more vibrant on her blog, here. Scroll down and you can join the 221 people who have signed up for her RSS feed, which sends her posts to a blog reader like a yahoo, google or other aggregator that combines posts from your favorite sites all on a single page that you can go to every day; or sign up for her email alert that send the posts to you.

And you can do the same with Tikkun Daily by getting an RSS feed, or a daily or weekly email that gives you our headlines and the first lines of each post, so you can click on the ones you want to read. You can join the more than 750 folks who have signed up for the emails by clicking Join Tikkun Daily on the navigation bar at the top of this page or click here.

One last word: all of Tikkun Daily is free to you, and is financed entirely by subscriptions and donors to Tikkun Magazine (+ bookstores sales and the very little advertising revenue we bring in) and by memberships in the Network of Spiritual Progressives (NSP). If what you are seeing here nourishes you, please nourish us by subscribing to Tikkun, joining the NSP, or giving us a gift (all reachable from our home page, top right). You can even advertise, here. That way we will keep going for a while longer! And our thanks to you if you have done so already.

The twenty-something son of good friends of mine had some scary symptoms with swine flu last week and recovered. My son at college had a mild go of flu, most likely the H1N1. How worried should we be and where’s the best advice?

Swine flu is estimated to have killed 800 people in the US already. This is much less than the 36,000 who are said to die of the flu every winter in the US, so is there little to worry about? What are your feelings about this at the moment?

Is there fear-mongering going on, or is there actually “complacency-mongering?” The first time I’ve seen that word combo in print is in an article in New Scientist this week, that is clearly concerned that people are taking it all too lightly. The piece describes eight “myths” about swine flu and lays out the countering facts as understood by a smart science journalist who has been following the pandemic for a while, Debora Mackenzie.

Of course, as soon as anyone writes about a medical issue on a spiritual and politically progressive website like this, one dives into the heated pool of opinions about holistic vs. western or allopathic medicine.

Is here, on his new blog. We put up a couple of posts about him or by him here already. His opening words:

I’m gonna be real with you — I was excited that J Street invited me to their founding conference. Excited to be part of the conversation of progressive, peace-seeking Jewish Americans that had found a new, stronger voice in Washington. Excited to push conference attendees towards language and policies of real justice and human rights for Palestinians, not just a ‘peace process’ that perpetuates Israeli supremacy. And excited to be pushed back; to challenge and debate about how best to change American foreign policy, how to build multi-ethnic coalitions, how the hell we can resolve this conflict before we’ve all lost what humanity we have left.

So when J Street capitulated to a right-wing smear campaign and dis-invited me and my fellow poets because we had poems questioning the moral purity of Israel, I was disappointed. But not surprised. The more I learned about J Street, the more I realized that their leaders was more conservative than their own energized members, whom had been wooed with promises of “hope” and “change.” Sound familiar?

The rest is here.

The Virginia election signals what has been clear for a while: because of the way Obama has governed, the Republicans and conservative Democrats have the upper hand, and that means that they get to define the dominant narrative. According to that narrative, Obama is in trouble because he went too far to the left. In order to regain his political footing, he has to get back to the center: less government, more emphasis on markets, beef up the military, listen to the generals, take most of the social reform agenda off his plate. Jakob Wasserman’s My Life as a German and a Jew, published in 1921 is a good cautionary tale for those who agree with this narrative.

Jakob Wassermann, by Emil Orlik

In Weimar Germany too, there was a dominant narrative: the German narrative. Most Jews who lived in Germany believed in this narrative. According to them and their German counselors, the closer the Jews came to conforming to the dominant narrative, the closer they would come to being fully accepted, accepted as Germans or, as the language had it, “Germans of Hebrew persuasion.” What Wasserman found, however, was that the more he tried to conform, the more his “Jewishness” came into prominence. The more he tried to dress and behave as the Germans did, the more the Germans looked at his nose or his accent. The result was “life-long and never conclusive examination” and, ultimately, shame. As he wrote, “others enjoyed a credit account…I, however, had to present my credentials every time, to stake my whole fortune.”

In fact, we have already seen that the more Obama tries to move to the center (as defined by the right) the more he is stigmatized as a leftist and, not only a leftist but, like the German Jews, as a chameleon, a Zelig who has no real identity, no lasting values. If Obama returns to the politics that won him the nomination for the Presidency he has a chance to salvage his Presidency. But if he continues to try to establish his bona fides as a centrist, he too will become less and less valued by the country, and fewer and fewer Americans will be concerned about his political fate.

In August, four scholars and a small group of Jewish and Muslim emerging religious leaders met to discuss the story of Joseph in the Qur’an and in the Bible. Here are four reflections, by two Muslim women and two Jewish women, about the significance of Zuleikha in the story and in their respective traditions.

Muslim reflections

I. By Asma T. Uddin

In the Qur’an, Joseph, son of Jacob, had a somewhat dysfunctional relationship with his brothers, who resented him for being the favored, most beloved, son of their father. On one occasion, Joseph’s brothers took him on a picnic and decided to get rid of him by throwing him into a well. After they left, a passing caravan happened to stop at the well, where the caravan’s water-scout found Joseph, and decided to take him to Egypt. Once there, Joseph was sold for a paltry price to a high-ranking nobleman. As the Qur’an tells us, the nobleman who bought Joseph, al-Aziz, said to his wife, Zuleikha, “Tend graciously to his dwelling, he may benefit us, or we may take him as a son.”

From the nobleman’s statements, we are led to believe that the nobleman and Zuleikha did not have any children, and that Joseph could thus have been taken as an adopted son. This is, in fact, the interpretation of many tafsir scholars. The lack of children suggests sexual intimacy may be lacking in the couple’s relationship. With the story framed by Zuleikha and al-Aziz’s relationship, the Qur’an goes on to the widely-known story of seduction and resistance:

Zuleikha felt deeply and passionately attracted to Joseph, and on one occasion, when her husband was out, Zuleikha called Joseph to her room. As soon as he entered, she locked the door and said, ‘Now come to me, my dear one.’ Taken aback by this advance, Joseph told her: ‘God forbid. My master has been generous to me; I cannot betray his trust. Those who do evil can never prosper.’ So saying, he rushed towards the door and tried to unlock it.

Much has been made of a so-called “Republican Comeback” by rightwing pundits and the mainstream media. If they are to be believed, Obama’s overly liberal policies have been rejected by the independent (i.e., suburban and ex-urban white) voters who were responsible for his victory in the first place.

This analysis is blatantly false. And if we fall for it, we will fail to take advantage of a marvelous opportunity to push the White House to the left.

“To me, art is a commitment to asking questions and proposing alternatives to the status quo. Art should be integrated into life. It is empowering to work with your hands, to understand how elements of your surroundings fit together, and to try to use resources more wisely. That opportunity should be more public than elite.” — Alison Wilder

The immediate response I feel to Alison Wilder’s work is one of play. A warehouse full of massive, soft, bright, colorful objects made of reclaimed fabric, metal, and wood. Immense fabric balls large enough to crawl inside. Transmogrifying conflagrations of strangeness and delight hanging from the ceiling and climbing the walls.

(To see more of Alison’s work, visit the Tikkun Art Gallery.)

It seems intended to inspire happiness and experimentation.

A story is being circulated to explain Obama’s political difficulties, especially the losses in Virginia, New Jersey, and New York. According to this story, Obama ran an idealistic campaign, but then encountered the practical difficulties of governing, thereby disillusioning many “independents,” and leaving the way open for the Republican scoundrels to attack him. Like most political spins, this one implicitly portrays “idealists” as naïve, unpractical, and irrelevant. It’s important, therefore, to have a counter-narrative, especially since it also has the merit of being true.

It was, broadly speaking, a center-left politics that underlay the extraordinary enthusiasm of the Obama campaigns. Furthermore, Obama broke with that politics not when he became president but when Hillary Clinton withdrew from her campaign. In the first week after she withdrew, Obama adopted a series of obviously opportunistic positions, regarding the death penalty, gun control, and other matters that showed that his political instincts lay in appealing to the right and not in trying to win the center to a progressive politics.

It is now largely forgotten how decimated the Republicans were in the months after Obama’s election. It was Obama who brought them back to life. He did that by taking their arguments, their underlying view of the world, and making it his own.

This week’s spiritual wisdom is a poem by Jonathan Granoff, the author, attorney, and peace activist whose writing we have featured several times this year:

Birth

we are part of the whole, but who are we

the road we see from the car of our body/mind/sense/intellect/witness continuum
is inside the one who sees

the road is in the car upon which the car travels
but to what destination

A supporter of referendum 71, which won in Washington State, achieving "everything but marriage." Credit: Flickr/sea turtle.

Gay rights in Maine lost. For comment, it’s hard to beat Deborah Haffner, who starts with the good news:

The Good: Voters in Washington State affirmed the rights of same sex couples to “everything but” marriage. In Kalamazoo, voters affirmed a gay rights ordinance. Several openly gay candidates were elected to mayoral positions, several in the south. And the ugly Congressional contest in upstate New York resulted in a pro-choice Democrat being elected.

And goes on to the ugly:

My heart hurt as I learned about Maine earlier this morning. It’s so hard to believe that a majority of Maine voters voted to take the right of marriage AWAY from gay and lesbian people, after it had been approved by the state legislator. I just can’t understand how Americans could go and vote for HURTING people’s ability to have their commitments recognized, their children to grow up in legal families, and their legal rights to health care, survivor benefits, health insurance, and so on stripped…

Many of us pray each day, “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” It’s going to take a few days to forgive voters in some of these states.

But this is also true, from Andrew Sullivan:

A decade ago, the marriage issue was toxic. Now it divides evenly. Soon, it will win everywhere.

What if the central Afghan government suddenly found itself with 100,000 Afghan troops and police officers, freshly trained, fully equipped, and ready to help protect an equally massive surge of rebuilding and other infrastructure projects that would further employ a few hundred thousand more Afghans? Could that be the change we were hoping for? Is it possible?

To quote JP from the film Angels in the Outfield, it could happen!

Yesterday a Tikkun reader asked me for a response to an article in the Washington Post, “Palestinians say new U.S. approach imperils peace,” which started like this:

Palestinian officials on Sunday criticized the United States for what one called “backpedaling” on demands that Israel stop settlement construction in the occupied West Bank, saying the Obama administration’s change of approach on the issue damaged the likelihood of a peace agreement.

Here are my thoughts on this matter:

Obama demanded a settlement freeze as a precondition for any progress on Middle East peace. The world rejoiced that for the first time since George Bush the elder threatened to freeze loan guarantees to Israel unless it stopped expanding settlements, a U.S. government was going to take a serious stand against the expansion of Israelis into Palestine.

The Palestinians, while actually needing more than a freeze — they need a dismantling or making the settlers citizens of the new Palestinian state — climbed on board with Obama’s strategy, and then he abandoned them and said that he now is pushing the Palestinians to negotiations while the settlements continue to expand. That is totally useless for the Palestinians to do — they don’t need to sit at a table with a government that has no intention of ending the Occupation and makes that clear in every possible way.

Planting the future

This is not a historical footnote. This is about next year.

A friend of our family who is, I think, 22 is starting a new anarchist collective in Woodstock, NY, the town where he grew up. Chrisso Babcock just wrote us the email below. There is a new wave of young people drawn to basic human skills of growing one’s own food, building one’s own home, and creating face-to-face communities. I am thrilled to see it. It’s happening all over.

It’s fascinating to me to see what is the same and what has changed since I was immersed in a similar scene in the 1970s. I make some notes on that at the end. Chrisso wrote:

Happy New Years!

For the Celts, Halloween was the start of the new year; at sundown we enter a new year, and two seasons of darkness. I am about to start a big project, and I feel that the beginning of a new cycle is a wonderful time to set my intentions and make something that has been phantasm up to this point begin to become a reality. My plan is this, and I am looking for help from anyone who would like to give their help -

I want to create an anarchist collective/homestead in Woodstock, NY.