(Cross-posted from New America Media)

Daniel Rodriguez has been a part of the immigrant rights movement for as long as he can remember. He is gay, 27 and a law school student who hopes to become an immigration attorney one day.

Rodriguez has no doubt that LGBT rights should be part of comprehensive immigration reform. But these days he finds himself in an uncomfortable position.

“This is one of those times in which our community has to sacrifice something to have a win,” said Rodriguez.

In the coming days, the Senate could consider an amendment to the “Gang of Eight” immigration bill that would allow U.S. citizens to sponsor their same-sex partners to get a green card.

Credit: http://thesceneinto.com.

Interfaith dialogue between people of widely divergent faiths is challenging enough, but the tougher assignment is encountering a member of your own religion with whom you profoundly disagree. When that happens, knowing you share a common faith and tradition offers little if your vastly divergent beliefs appear irreconcilable. Perhaps you are secretly wondering if both of you are from the same planet. That is the precise moment – if you have experience as an interfaith activist – that you will want to apply the wisdom you have learned from encounters with people of other religions to deal with the real and present differences of someone from your own faith.

In some cases, you might be facing a member of your own family, making the situation more potentially explosive; even when the religious conflict retreats or is temporarily shelved, the personal relationship you have with that person is bound to be affected. Parents and children, brothers and sisters, husbands and wives have sometimes parted company for a lifetime because they could not find a way to reconcile their religious or political differences. Whether religious or political though, it is this clash in belief systems that we need to surmount.

If the day comes when the two-state solution collapses, and we face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights (also for the Palestinians in the territories), then, as soon as that happens, the State of Israel is finished.
- Ehud Olmert, former prime minister of Israel

While international attention has shifted to the war in Syria, little media focus is given to the recent successful initiative at Blair House in Washington, D.C., between Secretary of State John Kerry and Qatar’s Foreign Minister Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim al-Thani on behalf of Arab League states. Sheikh Hamad agreed with Secretary Kerry to endorse the American backed proposal for a two-state solution that partitions Israel in order to create a new Palestinian state. As Arab state representatives retreated from their prior demands that Israel return to its pre-1967 borders, the Arab League initiative represents progress toward a peaceful resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Graffiti marks the wall dividing the Palestinian city of Bethlehem from Israelis in the West Bank. Credit: Creative Commons/Montecruz Foto.

Currently, Israelis and Palestinians live interspersed together within non-contiguous borders. However, the problem with partition is that it divides the population based upon ethnic, racial, religious, or linguistic characteristics. Partition actions use types of profiling to assign people to states based upon their human characteristics. The use of profiling contradicts human rights because equal treatment requires that people be recognized as individuals irrespective of their ethnic, racial or religious identity. So, Israelis and Palestinians must reject obnoxious forms of human profiling should they agree on a partition plan. This poses a particular challenge for Israel because it is the homeland of the Jewish peoples who are themselves a persecuted religious group.

(Cross-posted from New America Media)

Self-immolation isn’t what it used to be.

This ultimate form of protest became global news in 1963 when the venerable monk Thich Quang Duc set himself ablaze in the middle of Saigon, Vietnam, protesting religious oppression. Doused in gasoline, the monk sat serenely in lotus position and lit a match. A bird of paradise thus blossomed and bloomed, and quickly charred his body.

The photographer Malcolm Browne captured Thich Quang Duc’s fiery renouncement of the mortal coil, the image quickly becoming an icon of the Vietnam War era. The term “self-immolation,” in fact, entered into common English usage after his death, which led to a coup d’etat that toppled the pro-Catholic Ngo Dinh Diem regime.

On March 21, 2013, President Obama delivers a speech at the Jerusalem Convention Centre to the Israeli public. Credit: Creative Commons/Pete Souza.

“Put yourself in their shoes,” said President Obama. “Look at the world through their eyes.”

Good idea. And easily the best lines in his Jerusalem speech delivered on 21st March.

Put yourself in their shoes.

It was a direct challenge to Jewish Israelis (and Diaspora Jews too).

Look at the world through their eyes.

But how hard is it to imagine the world of the Palestinian ‘other’?

Today – May 15 – marks the 65th anniversary of the Palestinian Nakba – ‘Catastrophe’. The date follows one day after the anniversary of Israel’s Declaration of Independence in 1948. What better moment to take seriously the Obama shoe-swapping challenge.

Tucsonans arrive in the International Airport of Tel-Aviv. Credit: Paul Afek.

Last November a group of us from Tucson, Arizona, went on a trip to Israel/Palestine. For the last four years I have been a member of a local Tikkun discussion group. Before that I had not known much about Zionism or the foundation of Israel, or the condition of the Palestinians. I became impressed with people who were assertively Jewish, but equally passionate about questioning the policies of the state of Israel. And so I became invested in learning about the Israel/Palestine situation, and when the occasion presented itself, I decided to undertake this trip, which brought together participants in the Jewish-Muslim Peace Walk of Tucson, members of the International Center for Peace and Justice, and our Tikkun discussion group.

The ancient religious aura of Jerusalem and the rest of “The Holy Land” can be felt everywhere. To enter the Holy Sepulcher which encloses Golgotha, the mountain where Jesus is said to have been crucified, and which was founded by Emperor Constantine in the fourth century, or to gaze at the magnificent Dome of the Rock, or to watch Orthodox Jews praying so fervently at the West Wall is to witness a place where people strive to touch the immaterial, where, perhaps, they long for immortality.

In Israel, the Masada Desert overlooks the Dead Sea. Credit: Creative Commons/Steve Drasco.

There have been a few times in my life when the kindness shown to me from a stranger has humbled me deeply. The immense feeling of gratitude served to restore my faith in humanity, when ‘life’ happened and I had forgotten.

One such moment occurred during my time as a volunteer activist in Ramallah, Palestine. Visiting the territories had become an obvious next step after having dedicated a year of my life to the Palestine cause in Australia where I volunteered with three organizations spanning media, the refugee issue and advocacy. Prior to going to Palestine, I had been living in Egypt and had just finished a three month scholarship I had been awarded from university to study Arabic in Cairo.

During a national strike in Bangladesh, workers protest the deaths of workers in a garment factory fire. Credit: Creative Commons/Derek Blackadder.

I learned a new term from my chiropractor: antalgic lean. He explained that antalgic means “holding oneself away from pain.” I just love that there’s a word for that and it’s a perfect descriptor for what’s going on in our world today. Avoiding pain is something that most of us do as a matter of course, not just in our bodies but in our lives generally. But in the chiropractic definition, and in life generally, there are unintended consequences to holding oneself away from pain. When you lean away from pain in your right hip, pretty soon your sacrum is askew and your spine is awry and your left knee starts hurting because the pain gets deferred in a domino misalignment of the whole body. The pain is still there; it’s just borne somewhere else. And isn’t that the way it always is? In the body that is our world, until and unless you resolve the source of the pain, it’s always still there; it’s just borne somewhere else.

In Rana Plaza, in Bangladesh, where over 700 garment workers died in a building collapse a couple weeks ago, the pain of inexpensive clothing was felt acutely. The workers had been ordered to continue working in a building deemed dangerous because production simply had to continue. They were not in a position to refuse. Back in November, a fire at a garment factory in Dhaka, Bangladesh was virtually the same story.

At Guantanamo Bay, detainees are held without trial (or charges). Credit: Creative Commons, Petty Officer 1st class Shane T. McCoy, U.S. Navy

Ahmed Rachidi, a native of Morocco who has been a British resident since 1985, was held in extrajudicial detention in Guantanamo from March 2002 to May 2007, when he was released without charge. Now 47, he is the author of a memoir about his experiences in Guantanamo, called The General: The Ordinary Man Who Challenged Guantanamo, co-authored by Gillian Slovo and published in March 2013.

Here, New America Media editor Sandy Close interviews Mr. Rachidi by phone in his home in Tangier, Morocco, where he lives with his wife, mother and three children.

Q: Why did you call your memoir “The General”?

A: Because I was one of a limited number of prisoners at Guantanamo who spoke English, I was often forced to be an “unofficial leader” by guards and interrogators. They nicknamed me “the general.”

Q: How were you released?

A: I was released in May 2007. I was on the “cleared for release” list for one year before I was released. Although I was a British resident and had worked as a chef in London for 16 years, I was repatriated to Morocco. I was never allowed to regain my passport so I was unable to return to London even for the release last March for my memoir.

When asked if she believed in God, Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir responded "I believe in the Jewish people." Credit: Creative Commons/Marion S. Trikosko.

“All the calculated dates of redemption have passed and now the matter depends upon teshuvah and mitzvahs.”
- Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 97b

I am grateful to belong to a people, a culture, and a community that embrace a spectrum of religious backgrounds and beliefs. When asked if she believed in God, Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir responded “I believe in the Jewish people.” Questioning and struggling with the concept of God are deeply ingrained in Judaism and literally part of the word Israel, the community of Jews, from which the country takes its name. Therefore, atheism is kosher and I am proud to be an “atheist of the book.”

Spiritually and intellectually, I believe that complex questions are almost always better than simplistic answers. Faith, whether in God or anything else, is not necessarily important; what is important is community and action, that is, doing Jewish stuff separately and together, doing good deeds. With or without God, there can be and is Judaism, reverence, spirituality, awe, the sacred, transcendence, radical amazement, mystery, miracles, community, ethics, gratitude, compassion, kindness, education, wisdom, justice, mentshlikhkayt, and so on.