by Rebecca Foust and Lorna Stevens

It was in San Rafael, in a tiny subterranean artist studio with walls of thickly plastered brick that I made my acquaintance with New Zealand’s huia bird, meeting it in my friend Lorna’s intricate twig sculptures and an altered artist’s book whose pages had been painstakingly excised, erased, and inked with images of haunting delicacy. I learned how the bills of males and females (his squat cudgel for shredding bark, her curved needle for finding insects) had evolved so as to make them mutually dependent mates-for-life. I also learned that the huia had recently become utterly, unalterably extinct, so that not only would I never see it with my own eyes, but neither would my children, nor my children’s children, nor their children and so on and on down the long, bitter corridors of never.

The Perils of Privilege

At the college where I teach, I get free parking: prime spots right on the edge of campus. Should my designated places fill up, I can help myself to any student space. Nice deal. For me.

How is student parking? Well, I don’t know exactly. They pay for parking and it’s farther away, but I’m hazy on the details. Unless they speak up, I won’t know how often they circle for half an hour or how long it takes them to walk from class to where they parked. Even if they do speak up, might I dismiss it? Might I think they’re just complaining to cover up a lack of effort?

This, in microcosm, is the peril of privilege. Those with even small amounts of power, education, and wealth can remain ignorant and unmotivated to change an unjust situation. We owe a great debt to the privileged who seek out the truth and act on it and to the unprivileged who dare to step into the light and speak: canaries in the coal mine we all inhabit.

Entitlement, Self-Blame, and Injustice

What if the aforementioned students shrug about parking injustice and suck it up?

As I followed the events on February 11, 2011 in Egypt, a day that no doubt will be considered Egyptian Independence Day, I heard an Egyptian say: “This is ours. We own it.” That observation crystallized much of what I had been thinking about the character of this regime change in contrast to the regime change that the United States brought to Iraq at the point of a gun. This was a just peace revolution.

Security, truth and respect are three important values of my interpretation of just peace theory. Just peace theory, the middle way between pacifism and just war theory holds that while nonviolent means bring nonviolent ends, the hard power of military force is sometimes needed for the sake of security. Former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak had used the argument of security and stability to justify his brutal and kleptocratic governance of Egypt. The United States, including the Obama administration, had used this logic to justify the money this government sent to Egypt over the years. The United States trained the Egyptian military, and significant personal relationships developed over the years between individuals in the Egyptian military and individuals in the United States military. It seems that those relationships may have made an important difference in bringing about the end of Hosni Mubarak’s rule.

The Egyptian military provided security for the protesters during most of the 18 days of revolution. There was a moment when the military stood by and watched while so called pro-Mubarak demonstrators engaged in violent conflict with the anti-Mubarak protesters. But the cries of outrage from the international community brought the end of that kind of intimidation. God only knows what kind of person-to-person communication was happening military to military. God only knows what subtle effects time spent in classrooms in the United States had on the Egyptian military to help them see the advantages of civilian control of a democratic government.

Jews and spiritual progressives of every religious community are rejoicing at the triumph of the democratic uprising in the streets of Cairo and other Egyptian cities and at the resignation of President Mubarak. But we have no illusions that the struggle for democracy has been won.

We are fearful that the United States and others who seek “stability” rather than democracy may accept a new autocratic regime under the leadership of Vice President Omar Suleiman (the U.S. ally who played a significant role in the torture operations in Egypt) or under the leadership of a “soft” military coup in which the Army becomes the primary force in Egypt. Nor would we welcome a government dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood, though they have a legitimate role to play in any new government. It remains to be seen if a genuine democratic process takes place, or merely a process controlled by the military and security forces resulting in elections that reflect the desires of the military, which might continue to control the media.

Here is what we would look for to see if this is really a democratic transformation:

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. declared that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” In this struggle for justice, Massachusetts-based artist Pamela Chatterton-Purdy sees godliness made manifest. Godliness is reflected in the actions of individuals who protect the weak from the strong, who maintain innocence in an evil world, or who fight for the dignity of being a human being. The arc is bent through the struggle and sacrifice of innumerable individuals, only some of whom will be named in a place of honor in the pages of history. Chatterton-Purdy has devoted the last seven years to a project called “Icons of the Civil Rights Movement … Connecting the Dots,” that venerates these heroes — both the known and unknown.

MLK - I Have a Dream

To see more of Pamela Chatterton-Purdy’s work, visit the Tikkun Daily Art Gallery and visit the artist’s website.

(a new People's History poster by Tim Simons)

The Egyptian Revolution is the latest, and most important of a new type of revolution that originated in the 1960s: spontaneous, bottom-up, decentralized, youth-dominated, non-ideological, non-violent, fueled by new media, and profoundly generative of dignity, media, social theory, and new moral practices. Predecessors include the French May of 1968, the Philippine Revolution of 1986, the East European and Chinese Revolutions of 1989, the Palestinian intifada of 2000 and the Tunisian Revolution of 2011. Unlike previous revolutions, made by parties and states, no one owns this new type of revolution, which is anti-authoritarian, anti-patriarchal, and even anti-organizational, at root.

Barack Obama’s presidential campaign in 2008 was another example of this new, post-Marxist revolutionary wave. It seemed to come from nowhere, to be coordinated in new, polymorphous ways, and to represent the deepest instincts of youth. The median age in the Middle East is 22; overwhelmingly, most people in the world are young. Added to that, most are people of color. Given Obama’s place as the anti-war candidate, the person who called not just for a changed policy but a changed mind-set, those who supported Obama hoped that he represented this coming wave in global politics. No one could have predicted the wonderful news from Egypt but anyone who traveled and read and followed the media must have known that this sort of shift was in the works, and it remains in the works, for the rest of the Middle East, for Iran, for Thailand, for Burma, for Mexico, for Colombia and elsewhere.

Photo by Patricia Smith Melton (Independence Day celebration, 2008) www.PeaceXPeace.org

When addressing the World Union of Meretz about five years ago, the dovish Israeli writer A.B. Yehoshua argued a truth that should be better known than it is: that Zionism is not a single movement or ideology but a common platform or framework shared by political parties and philosophical currents from widely divergent places along the ideological spectrum.

Zionism was a grassroots Jewish reaction to the most pervasive and pernicious bigotry of recent Western history. Nineteenth century nationalist movements in much or most of Europe reignited virulent antisemitism, which eventually culminated in the slaughter of a majority of Europe’s Jews and one-third of all Jews worldwide.

Credit: Flickrcc/bsolah

Recently a pro-gay ad from Israel popped up on my Facebook feed. It used the metaphor of the closet to push Israeli parents to accept and support their queer kids. I’m queer. I’m Jewish. And I care deeply about queer issues. So why didn’t the ad spark even an ounce of excitement in me? Because I am wary of my queerness being used by Israel. For some time now, Israel has been promoting gay rights to “pinkwash” its image in an attempt to divert attention away from its treatment of Palestinians.

Why Brand Israel? Why Make It Gay?

As Israel’s reputation becomes more and more unpopular around the world because of its increasingly publicized violations of Palestinian human rights, the Foreign Ministry and other Israel advocacy organizations have been attempting to bolster its image with a “Brand Israel” campaign that promotes Israel’s innovation, culture, and tourism. In the last few years, this effort has started including Israel’s support for gay rights as part of its “cosmopolitan” culture.

While emphasizing the thriving gay community in cities such as Tel Aviv in order to portray Israel as an oasis of gay freedom and democracy in the Middle East, Israel advocacy groups use colonialist language to suggest that Israel is surrounded by “backwards” homophobic, uncivilized Arabs, including Palestinians. Blaming “fundamentalist Islamic beliefs,” groups such as Stand With Us (SWU), a Right Wing Israeli advocacy organization highlights the violence that gay Palestinians face from their families and authorities in Palestine. Of course, they never mention the violence all Palestinians, whatever their sexual orientation, face from the Israeli government.

Israel, they proclaim, is a sanctuary for the LGBT community because of its gay pride parades, LGBT themed TV shows (seriously?), and civil rights. Gay Palestinians, according to SWU, find “refuge” in Israel; however, Palestinians living under Occupation are specifically ineligible for asylum under Israeli law. Claiming that Israel is the only country in the Middle East that supports gay rights, SWU explicitly asks gays around the world to support Israel. SWU and other advocacy groups attempt to recruit gays by creating concern for some universal category of GLBTQ folks. Queer Palestinians can only be a part of this category if they disavow half of their identity; as queers, they can be oppressed by homophobic Palestine, but as Palestinians, they cannot mention oppression by the Israeli government. SWU never acknowledges the work queer Palestinians are already doing as they simultaneously fight homophobia and Israeli oppression.

Al Jazeera headquarters, Doha, Qatar. Creative Commons/Laika Slips the Lead.

The protests in Egypt have captured the world’s attention since tens of thousands of protestors began gathering in Cairo’s Tahrir square on January 25th. Footage of the sheer numbers of protestors in the square has provided a sense of both how widespread and how peaceful is popular opposition to the Mubarak regime. Millions of viewers have seen these images thanks to the reporting of Al Jazeera’s English-language service. American news anchors preface news on Egypt with “Al Jazeera reports,” and those who want live, streaming footage can get it online at Al Jazeera English’s (AJE) Live Stream or on Al Jazeera’s YouTube channel.

Jeff Jarvis writes at The Huffington Post that “vital, world-changing news is occurring in the Middle East and no one — not the xenophobic or celebrity-obsessed or cut-to-the-bone American media — can bring the perspective, insight, and on-the-scene reporting Al Jazeera English can.” The quality and depth of Al Jazeera English’s reporting on Egypt has brought it a chorus of accolades, but despite this, it remains impossible for Americans to watch Al Jazeera English outside of a few small markets.

Fires Set on Vehicles Outside House

I watched in horror as the scene unfolded before me. My friend had contacted me on February 6th to tell me about a brutal attack against Ahmadiyya Muslim Community members in a village in Banten Province west of Jakarta, Indonesia. According to reports, hundreds of people descended upon a house in that village, began attacking the structure and setting vehicles ablaze, and then went inside. Lifeless bodies were soon dragged out of the house and beaten mercilessly by the crowd while police stood by and did nothing. My friend implored me to get the word out about the attack.

I hesitated. At first, because I couldn’t believe my eyes. Then, believing them, I worried about the reaction people would have when they saw these atrocities. I also had no clue what call to action I could share. Now I do. Read on.

To mostly positive media reviews, President Obama yesterday addressed the Chamber of Commerce in Washington. Though a number of stories describe the reception afforded the president as rather chilly, the coverage tends to present him as focused on the economic recovery, and reaching out to his political opponents in order to spark job creation.

Egyptians Demand Democracy in Tahrir Square. Creative Commons/Ahmad Hammoud.

With the political crisis unresolved in Egypt, the volume of U.S. media coverage continues to dwindle — but remains considerable. For the first time since the protests began, not all three networks led with the story, which continues to receive coverage on the front pages of major dailies.

Reports and analyses agree that the Obama administration, after what the AP describes as “several days of mixed messages about whether it wants to see [Hosni] Mubarak stay or go,” yesterday “conceded Monday that it will not endorse the demands of Egyptian protesters” for the “embattled” president Mubarak “to step down immediately, saying a precipitous exit could set back the country’s democratic transition.” The administration “coalesced around a position that cautiously welcomes nascent reform efforts begun by newly appointed Vice President Omar Suleiman that may or may not result in Mubarak’s resignation before September.”

For most of the country, last week’s winter storm is old news. But for residents of Rio Arriba County, one of the nation’s top gas-producing counties, last week’s storm has not passed. Residents of Rio Arriba County remain without natural gas for cooking and heating in frigid weather nearly a week later.

And another Arctic front is on its way.

Last night, the Board of Rio Arriba County Commissioners summoned Governor Susana Martinez to explain the debacle. My video of the event is shown below.

All one need do to understand the Obama effect is to imagine that George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, and Dick Cheney are still running the country.

Egypt, the oldest continuous civilization in the world, mounts one of the largest and most amazing outbursts of democracy that the world has ever seen. The United States — which has supported a police state and a military dictatorship in Egypt since the late nineteen seventies, to the tune of about one and a half billion dollars a year — hijacks the revolution by bonding with the dictator, his chief henchman, and both the police and the military. The usual means of dealing with revolutions are mobilized. For a few days there are gangs of thugs, a few leaders are jailed for a while, but mostly just stall them off, buy out a few leaders, talk a good line about reform, count on the inertia and fear and daily pressure that people face — half the country makes under two dollars a day — and just wait them out.

Do you think that American leftists and progressives would allow Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld to so obviously deny a popular and inspiring revolution in one of the most important spots in the world? Or would they not recognize that what Bush and his gang were doing was nothing more than continuing America’s disgusting, anti-democratic support for police regimes? Would they not call the former president out?

Harriet Fraad forwarded us this beautiful email from someone she knows in New York this week:

I experimented yesterday with a Steve Colbert-like agitprop stunt, the purpose of which was to mock the absurdity of Bloomberg’s and Cuomo’s refusal to tax the rich and their preference for budget cuts that penalize working people and ordinary citizens in the city and the state. I wrote up a text, which I attach, which I then performed three times in subway cars. The results were quite encouraging. People laughed, and my girlfriend, who was with me at the time, was impressed by people’s receptiveness, their attention, and the fact that they accepted and carefully read the text of the speech, which I distributed after I was done. The text is a bit long, so my performance usually omitted the middle paragraphs. In any case, it can be changed in the future and I will probably make some further changes myself. In any case, it occurred to me that if fifty or a hundred activists were to do this on the same day throughout the subway system, it might receive some attention and cause a bit of a stir. What do people think?
Best,
Costas

Good morning my friends. Don’t worry, I’m not gonna ask you for money. I do, for the time being, have a job and an income. I do, however, want to give you a message from our mayor and our governor. You see, our city and state are in crisis. The reason for this is that you, I and all other working people in this great city and state of ours are too rich and greedy. The rich, on the other hand, are suffering the poor things. This is why all of us, working people, have to sacrifice for our suffering brothers and sisters in Wall Street. This is why our governor and mayor, bless their soul, want to cut wasteful spending on education, on health care and other social services. These cuts are inevitable. The only alternative would be to tax the bonuses of our suffering brethren in Wall Street. We can’t do that to them. They deserve their bonuses 100% and that’s why our mayor and governor rightly refuse to raise their taxes. Besides, our brethren in Wall Street are such honest and good people, we can’t possibly deny them their hard earned millions. After all, they are the reason we have such a strong economy. I ask you, where would we be without them?

Protesters call for democracy in Cairo's Tahrir Square. Creative Commons/Nasser Nouri.

As the popular revolt in Egypt surges toward an uncertain future, world leaders, particularly in the U.S. and Israel, are expressing fears about what democracy in Egypt might bring. Those anxieties make it abundantly clear that, contrary to popular American political rhetoric, promoting democracy around the world is not an absolute American value. American-interest-friendly dictators often seem to serve American interests more than the uncertainty and instability of democracy.

Like many progressives, I am disappointed – when I’m not appalled – by the gulf between the short-term realpolitik of American diplomacy and American democratic ideals. But the public hand-wringing over whether the U.S. should support the democratic revolution in Egypt gives us an opportunity to reflect on how we really feel about democracy – not as an abstract universal value, but as a down-to-earth process of picking policies and leaders.

Democracy as an ideal – the election of leaders by a majority of equally enfranchised voters – sounds clean and simple, democracy as an actual process is always messy and often downright ugly. Hitler’s Nazis won elections; so did Hamas; and many Americans, both on the right and the left, passionately object to elections that don’t produce the outcomes we believe are “right.” Even in well-funded, law- and precedent-governed American elections, parties work hard to game the system, from gerrymandering “safe” legislative districts to limiting the number of polling places in areas dominated by opposition voters. And even before the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision gutted restrictions on corporate political activities, the American electoral process was at least as much about who could fund the most political advertisements as about which candidates offered the best ideas or qualifications. When countries with fewer resources, weaker infrastructure, and less-developed democratic laws, institutions and traditions hold elections, the battle for votes – or rather, for the power that comes of claiming victory at the ballot box – can get even uglier.

Lilly Rivlin

Lilly Rivlin is a New York-based filmmaker who tirelessly works against the odds to create documentary films that illuminate her passions for women’s rights, peace, and a secure, progressive Israel. She combined these concerns several years ago in a work narrated by Debra Winger, Can You Hear Me? Israeli and Palestinian Women Fight for Peace. (I know Lilly from Meretz USA, which she continues to serve, after taking her turn as president a few years ago.)

In The Tribe (1983), she documented a reunion of 2500 members of her enormous extended family in Jerusalem, where many have lived for generations. She, herself, was born in pre-State Jerusalem. Among her many distinguished relatives is Ruby (Reuven) Rivlin, the Likud politician who is currently Speaker of the Knesset. They joust (generally in good humor) on peace issues from opposite perspectives, but he is one of the old-line Likudniks who have expressed alarm at the growing anti-democratic atmosphere in Israel.

Lilly’s latest creation is Grace Paley: Collected Shorts, an uplifting portrait of the late writer and peace activist. In a Q & A after its local debut at Lincoln Center at last month’s New York Jewish Film Festival, Lilly asked for members of the audience to share their personal remembrances of Paley. I was too shy then, but here is mine now:

“If I were there [meaning in Germany, during WWII, I would likely be one of those who would go along without asking questions until it was too late.” So began an extraordinary conversation with a woman I recently met when I was in England. I had never imagined hearing anyone say this, so I had nothing but respect for her. “How can you know this about yourself?” I continued. Her answer amazed me even further. She told me she knew herself not to ask many questions, to go along with things. She could see how one little step could lead to another, and by the time you had an inkling of what was actually going on, you would be too entangled to back up. Your family and kids would depend on your income, or your standing in the community would be too precarious anyway. I am wondering if she is ultimately right about herself. After all, she is reflecting on these issues, and with such self-honesty. Wouldn’t that kind of courage give her a moral compass?

The Challenge of Taking a Moral Stand

In an earlier post about these kinds of moral dilemmas I described an extraordinary film I watched when I was in Israel that looks exactly at the challenge of standing up when the cost is high. While still in Israel, I saw Saviors in the Night, another astonishing film that directly bears on this question. The movie depicts a true story of a family of farmers in Westphalia that hid mother and daughter during the war under immensely difficult conditions and at high risk to themselves in a small community replete with Nazis. At first not even the entire family knew that their “guests” were Jews, and the teenage daughter was completely identified with the Nazis. One of the most extraordinary scenes in the movie shows the father taking the teenage daughter, after she discovered the truth, to hear some stories that would finally open her heart to the humanity of the Jews. I have rarely seen on screen someone’s heart cracking open to truth, and I sense we can all learn from the choices the father made for how to reach people who are elsewhere.

Church of the Pilgrims, Washington DC (photo by Drama Queen)

Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad says that homosexuality is “against the human spirit” even as several Iranian men are hanged for “sexual offenses.” A gay activist is murdered in Uganda and Christian preachers disrupt his funeral so viciously that the townspeople won’t bury his body. A Utah legislator introduces a state bill that would require all publicly funded programs, laws, and regulations to exclude families headed by same-sex couples; his reasoning is based overwhelmingly on his religious values. On a different but not entirely unrelated topic, Roman Catholic bishops strip hospitals of their Roman Catholic affiliations because the hospitals are willing to perform abortions to save the mothers’ lives. Less related but still painful to me, a Huffington Post columnist points out that many conservative Christians see Obama’s health care plan as the work of the devil.

How does one even begin to respond to the above list? Religion is not supposed to be death-dealing; it is supposed to be life-giving. If the only way it can be experienced as life-giving by some people is to deal death to others, whether social death or physical death, something is very wrong with that religion. The blame cannot lie entirely with sacred scriptures; every major world religious tradition, after all, has a version of the golden rule. No, this must be human frailty at work, painfully stripping people of their life chances and even their lives.

An article by Daniel Ming and Aaron Glantz in yesterday’s (San Francisco) Bay Citizen, also in the New York Times Bay Area edition:

A Jewish Group Makes Waves, Locally and Abroad

Some Bay Area activists hope a new Egyptian government will lead to an end of Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories

Hundreds of people, mostly Arab-Americans, are expected to gather Saturday in downtown San Francisco to support anti-government protests in Egypt, and a large contingent of Jews representing a Bay Area peace-advocacy group will join them, one of its leaders says.

“We are deeply inspired by their push for democracy and freedom,” said Cecilie Surasky, deputy director of Jewish Voice for Peace, based in Oakland….

The unrest in Egypt is merely the latest issue to pit a number of Bay Area activists against prominent Jewish organizations, as well as against some Israelis who have come to see the Bay Area as a locus for Jewish opposition to Israel’s government….

The divisions have heightened tensions among Bay Area Jews. During one altercation last year, a pro-Israel activist attacked two representatives of Jewish Voice for Peace with pepper spray. Last March, Rabbi Michael Lerner, the editor of Tikkun, a bimonthly Jewish magazine based in Berkeley, received death threats, and his home was plastered with signs accusing him of “Islamo-Fascism,” after he announced that he planned to give an award to a United Nations official who led an investigation into Israel’s 2008 invasion of Gaza.

And if you are in the Bay Area come to our 25th Anniversary celebration when we will give six people including that official, Judge Richard Goldstone, the Tikkun Award! We’re happy that they picked up on this as well: