photo by Jakub Fulin

A gale force wind always seems to precede dub poet d’bi.young when she enters a room. Her fierce presence and her unstoppable energy are perhaps the most noticeable things about her, but what lingers after the first impression is her overwhelming determination in her mission to spread the word about love, equality and social action.

The first time I met d’bi.young, I had taken a group of students in a college course entitled “Dangerous Acts: Dramatic Literature as a Tool of Social Change” to a production that she had written, performed, and produced with fellow artist Naila Keleta Mae. Both women are Jamaican-Canadians, and their work handled a range of issues including abuse, poverty, racism and social inequity. I had arranged for the artists to have a talk back session after the show with my students, a number of whom were Caribbean – Canadians themselves – and this turned out to be one of the most moving moments I can think of during my teaching career. My students, some of whom were prone to feeling indifferent and powerless in the face of some of the challenges they faced, became animated, engaged and passionate. The performance had managed to reflect back to my students something about their own lives, and this alone was enough for them to elevate their view of who they were and what they could accomplish in their lives. This was, in no small part, thanks to the warmth, the honesty and the strength of the drama, but also of the artists. A pair of students who saw the show that night went on to do their oral presentation on d’bi.young and her work, and they reported feeling that her work touched them in a special way, and made them realize their own power. When an artist manages to bring this passion to the classroom, the effect is tremendous. Since this experience, I have taught d’bi.young’s work in a number of different contexts, and I can say that my students always find that her voice speaks to them in a way that compels not just their intellect, but their hearts.

d’bi.young’s work is fiery. She stares down issues like racism, sexism, homophobia, colonialism, slavery, and the inequities visited upon the world by capitalism, but perhaps her most enduring theme is love. In the video below, d’bi.young elaborates upon her vision of a love that is honest, compassionate, and forgiving.

Courtesy of Copper Canyon Press

Self-taught, internationally acclaimed Palestinian poet Taha Muhammad Ali passed away today at the age of 80. I encourage Tikkun readers to watch this video of Ali reading his poem called “Revenge,” which carries a message that you wouldn’t expect from its title. (The poem is read in Arabic, then in English.) The text of the poem can be found here.

A bit of background on Ali: The Israeli army deported his family from a village in the Galilee during the 1948 War, when he was 17 years old. This trauma and the ongoing plight of Palestinian refugees is a theme that colors his evocative writings. Ali himself was one of the lucky ones. He resettled in Nazareth, Israel one year after the war and spent much of his adult life running a souvenir shop with his children. Despite having received only a fourth grade education, Ali studied Arabic, Hebrew, and American authors and devoted his free time to developing his own writing skills. He began publishing poetry books and short stories in the 1980s. A Jewish American writer published a moving biography of him in 2010.

While Ali’s poetry is written in Arabic and focuses on the Palestinian community, it also vividly humanizes Israelis. Ali once said of his work, “There is no Palestine, no Israel, but in my poetry is suffering, sadness, longing, fear. And this, together, make the results: Palestine and Israel.”

May his words live on.

The massive tent protests currently sweeping Israel, originally triggered by the country’s young, urban middle class over unsustainable housing costs, have morphed into a movement representing a multitude of social justice issues. In fact, during rallies now, one of the most frequent chants is “האם דורש צדק חברתי” – “The People Demand Social Justice.”

On Tuesday, protest leaders officially championed a vast array of social justice causes when they presented Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu with an expansive list of demands – among them lower taxes, health care reforms and the broadening of free, public education.

When I saw Eliaichi Kimaro’s moving and complex documentary A Lot Like You at the Seattle International Film Festival in June 2011, one of my first responses to this film was to recognize it as a model for a personal and family accountability process. Having just finished reviewing The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities for Bitch magazine, I was interested in seeing more concrete examples of community accountability, which the authors define as “any strategy to address violence, abuse or harm that creates safety, justice, reparations, and healing without relying on police, prisons, childhood protective services, or any other state systems.” A Lot Like You brings to life the complicated, messy, beautiful, and liberatory process of addressing harm and seeking healing within a family context.

I sought out Eliaichi, a Seattle filmmaker and activist, for an interview and was excited to learn that she also sees her film as capturing the beginning of a family accountability process. The film was originally titled Worlds Apart, and its change to A Lot Like You reflects the journey that Eliaichi embarked upon while creating this documentary about her relationship to her father’s side of the family – the Chagga tribe in Tanzania, who live on the slopes of Mt. Kilimanjaro. The first cut of the film emphasized the cultural differences in her family, which “spans many different continents and worlds,” but the final version emphasizes Eliaichi’s connection to her Chagga relatives.

After growing up in Tanzania, her father Sadikiel Kimaro earned a scholarship to pursue his PhD in economics in the US where he met his future wife, Young, a student from Korea. While his five siblings remained behind in Tanzania, Sadikiel spent the next forty years or so working for the IMF, while Young worked at the World Bank. They raised Eliaichi and her brother in a suburb of Washington, DC. After her parents retired to Tanzania, Eliaichi and her partner Tom decided to join them with the intention of filming for nine months, partly because Eliaichi felt only a “hazy connection” to her Tanzanian family in spite of having spent every other summer there as a child.

Setting out to portray culture in Tanzania, they interviewed members of Eliaichi’s family and filmed different aspects of Chagga life, but often bumped into cultural disconnect and miscommunication. In the film’s voiceover narration, Eliaichi describes how “everyone around us performed their version of Chagga culture, one they thought that I, as a tourist, wanted to see.” The first cut of the film was focused on Eliaichi’s father’s story, but included interviews with her two aunts who describe, in brutal detail, how their marriage rituals involved violence. Her aunts did not know that Eliaichi was also a survivor of trauma.

Pres. Obama’s much publicized speech on the Middle East at the State Department on May 19th caused a stir by advocating an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement based upon the pre-June 1967 borders (the so-called Green Line), with modifications in the form of “land swaps” negotiated between the parties. This has been the general framework that moderate and pro-peace Israelis and Palestinians have promoted since at least 1995, when it was realized that most West Bank settlers live in thickly-populated “settlement blocs” contiguous with the Green Line. Unfortunately, too many people (most importantly, Prime Minister Netanyahu) seized upon Obama’s statement about the pre-June ’67 lines, disregarding his call for trading territory.

That Netanyahu and so many others found this controversial, illustrates how far we’ve come from a peace agreement almost arrived at in 2008. It also indicates that the US needs to be more assertive in helping the parties finally achieve peace.

Jeremy Ben-Ami

I awoke on Friday morning, May 20, to watch Jeremy Ben-Ami, the president of J Street, on Democracy Now, and I’m glad I did. He performed well under difficult circumstances, being double-teamed by anti-Israel author Norman Finkelstein and Palestinian-American human rights lawyer Noura Erakat, who argued that international law and justice demand that Israel simply withdraw to the pre-’67 lines, without requiring an exchange of territories.

The program led me to some insights. For one thing, although he does not advocate Israel’s destruction (as many assume), Norman Finkelstein seems emotionally consumed by hostility toward Israel. (He’s suffered as a result–e.g., not obtaining tenure at a university–but he is a caustic polemicist and not a fair-minded scholar.) He–along with the very articulate and impressive Ms. Erakat–epitomizes doctrinaire and rigid thinking in insisting that Israel totally withdraw to the pre-June ’67 lines.

When I first picked up Floodlines on assignment to write a review for Bitch magazine, I thought I knew something about what went down in New Orleans after Katrina, but after reading this firsthand account of surviving the storm, I realized I didn’t know much at all. It reminded me of the first time I read a leftist account of the history of Zionism. Only then did I realize how much the US mainstream media had framed my perception of Palestine by focusing on individual acts of violence by Palestinians taken out of context from the larger frame of Israeli state violence.

Similarly, while reading Floodlines, I was forced to confront how my understanding of New Orleans has been shaped by mainstream media reports that focused obsessively on individual acts of violence while ignoring the large-scale state violence imposed on mostly poor communities of color. I was moved by how Flaherty, a white journalist and organizer based in New Orleans, manages to tell a story that encompasses both the staggering injustice of structural racism and the inspiring grassroots activism of New Orleanians.

He juxtaposes first-hand stories of communities helping each other survive the storm with the mainstream media’s racist depictions of their struggles. For instance, while the media portrayed African American men in New Orleans mainly as criminals, Flaherty describes how, in the wake of abandonment by official rescuers, groups of working class African American men travelled through neighborhoods, rescuing people and delivering supplies in the first days after the storm. Meanwhile, African Americans who needed help were treated like criminals: the National Guard placed many of them in militarized evacuee camps and eventually forced them to leave the state.

Flaherty explains how such inequity continued throughout the so-called recovery efforts. Money did not go to the people and local community organizations who needed it. Instead, it flowed to corporations who profited from rebuilding contracts, security firms who made money from criminalizing the victims of the storm, and large-scale corporate charities with high overhead costs. As Flaherty describes, “living in New Orleans in the first years after Katrina, it was as if the sky were filled with money. I imagined it thirty feet up in the air, clearly visible, but out of reach” (121).

It’s a sad day in Wisconsin. Yesterday afternoon in less than two hours, our Republican Senators — after insisting for a month that their union-busting law was needed because the state was broke — separated the collective bargaining sections of the bill from the financial parts and then passed it. They no longer needed a Democratic Senator for a quorum, since the bill was no longer ostensibly about finances! They unmasked themselves with this political maneuver. Now everyone can see that it never was about the money. It was an attack on workers’ rights all along. And despite massive protests last night and today, the Republican Assembly passed the bill as well.

Many of us thought Republican legislators were shoving an undemocratic bill down our throats three weeks ago. But at least they gave us six days (a ridiculously short amount of time) to think and talk about it then. Yesterday’s two hours of discussion breaks that record by a yard. The upshot of all this is that 60 years of workers’ rights have been swept away using undemocratic methods for an undemocratic outcome (there will probably be a lawsuit about the tactics). This is especially hard to take, since polls show that anywhere from 65% – 74% of Wisconsinites believe that public workers should have the right to organize.

This Sunday, I published an editorial in the Albuquerque Journal North explaining why I terminated a pregnancy at 16. I was inspired by Democratic Representatives Gwen Moore (WI) and Jackie Speier (CA) who stood up on the House floor in the middle of an assault on Planned Parenthood and the definition of rape and described their own decisions to end a pregnancy.

I intend to mail a photocopy of my editorial to the Congresswomen.

I hope every woman who has ever faced this decision will do the same. If we refuse to be intimidated or shamed, then we can’t be intimidated or shamed.

My public response, which appeared in the Journal North on March 6th follows below the jump. (Sorry, I can’t link because I don’t have a paid subscription to the Journal online).

Photo from giaitri59

I was at a recent conversation event with 16 reasonably well informed, educated people who came together to discuss the recent political unrest in the Middle East. One interesting thread in the conversation was that most of the people in the group were at a loss to understand why this was happening now or what started it. We realized that we had no cultural narrative or ideology that would explain what was going on, or how it would turn out. Perhaps there was one evolving narrative that explained some of it in hindsight though. When those in power maintain their power through fear, they can be overthrown by the population when people lose their fear. That loss of fear can spread like wildfire fueled by a combination of being inspired by others, and a belief that they have nothing to lose because of a bleak outlook for their current situation. When a system maintained by fear is teetering on the brink in an increasingly unstable situation, the efforts of single individuals can have a major impact on what happens next. That brings me to my two nominations for the Nobel Peace prize for this year.

When I see the crowds protesting against laws that would strip the collective bargaining rights of government employees, I see an apt comparison to the crowds protesting for freedom across the Middle East. Some observers – Jon Stewart of The Daily Show and New York Times columnist David Brooks among them – think that the comparison goes too far. On Meet the Press, Sunday February 27, David Gregory wanted his guests who supported the protesters to denounce the signs that compared Governor Walker to Egypt’s former president Hosni Mubarak and to Hitler. I agree that we ought to just leave Hitler to history, but in many ways the comparison to Mubarak is not incorrect.

It is true that the people of Wisconsin and of the other states protesting similar legislation are not ruled by an autocrat who has held power for thirty years. It is true that they are free to peacefully assemble without worry of police brutality. It is true that their complaint is with governors who have been elected recently. The similarity that I see is that people are taking to the street both in the Middle East and in the Mid-West in the United States for the sake of winning and of keeping their human rights. And human rights are not ends in themselves; rather they are means to an end. The end is a better quality of life.

Credit: Flickrcc/marcin wojcik

Watching NYC’s Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) Center succumb to pressure to cancel a kick-off party for Israeli Apartheid Week, I feel compelled to write an epilogue to my recent post on Pinkwashing.

I am reminded once again that we must be vigilant in refusing to allow queer liberation to be pitted against Palestinian liberation because as we know from our queer Palestinian colleagues, the two struggles are intertwined.

On February 22^nd, Michael Lucas, a right wing Advocate columnist and gay porn entrepreneur, issued a press release calling on the LGBT center to cancel the scheduled “Party to End Apartheid,” which he called anti-Semitic. He threatened to “organize a boycott that would certainly involve some of the Center’s most generous donors.” Infamous for his attacks against Islam, Lucas argued that “Israel is the only country in the Middle East that supports gay rights while its enemies round up, torture, and condemn gay people to death…” Relying on traditional Pinkwashing tactics, Lucas positioned Israel as a liberal democracy in opposition to its backwards and homophobic “enemies.”

Just a few hours later, the LGBT center announced it would cancel the event and bar its sponsors from meeting at the Center in the future. The Center’s executive director Glennda Testone issued a brief statement claiming, “We have determined that this event is not appropriate to be held at our LGBT Community Center, which is a safe haven for LGBT groups and individuals.”

Universal human rights are pesky ideas. They show up wherever and whenever human beings take a hard look at their lives compared to those around them and perceive injustice. They show up in distant foreign capitals. They show up in our own home towns and states. We applaud our sisters and brothers in distant lands standing up for their human rights, and we ought to applaud the government workers in Wisconsin who are standing up for their human rights.

The United States is a plutocracy wearing the garments of a democracy. We have elections. We have a strong civil society. We take the freedoms of speech, assembly, press and religion for granted. However, our government is run by the rich for the rich. Fiscal and monetary policy are made by legislators and appointed officials whose primary concern is pleasing the people who finance their election campaigns. Their policies serve the rich, and they make either/or arguments to persuade the demos, the ordinary people.

Such is the case in Wisconsin. The governor says that he needs public employees to pay more for benefits such as health care and pensions. Beyond this, he wants to take away the right to collective bargaining for anything other than wages from certain state employees. He argues that the fiscal problems of the state demand such sacrifice or the state will fall into a financial abyss that will jeopardize the living standards of generations to come. At the same time, the governor and the Republican controlled legislature have passed tax cuts. The argument is that these tax cuts will attract businesses into the state and create jobs.

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.

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.

Most of us have a moral compass, a rule, a set of beliefs that serves as a North Star to help us find our bearings when we have to decide what is right to do. For some of us it is the Golden Rule: “IN ALL THINGS, do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Many people think of the respect we owe to everyone and everything that carries the image of God. It is the image of God that is the warrant for human dignity. People who do not believe in God may still respect the self evident truth that every human being possesses an inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Some may consider the logic of Ubuntu, an African moral principle teaching that our personal humanity is a function of our own moral evolution as we interact righteously, justly, and generously with Others in the human community.

Our guest post Where Are The Jewish Greens? by Devorah Brous has been widely read in Israel as well as the US. The organization she is with, Bedouin-Jewish Justice, has just sent us this update on the campaign that Tikkun and the NSP have joined. Please sign the petitions to Netanyahu and the Jewish National Fund below.

18 Israeli and American Jewish groups:

• Strongly oppose Beer Sheva District Court’s failure to grant a permanent injunction preventing Israeli Government and Jewish National Fund (JNF) bulldozers from resuming work to plant a JNF forest over Negev Bedouin village of Al-Arakib
• Welcome the court’s recommendation that the Israel Land Administration (ILA) and JNF refrain from planting trees in Al-Arakib and irreversibly altering the status of the land
• Strongly object to Israeli Government and JNF for 9th & 10th Demolitions of Al-Arakib and to ILA announcement yesterday of their intent to ignore Israeli court recommendations in their rush to eliminate the village of Al-Arakib forever
• Call on all who care about Israel to join the over 7,500 who have already signed our two petitions of protest to Prime Minister Netanyahu, Foreign Minister Lieberman, Leaders of the Israel Land Administration and JNF Leaders in Israel and the US

January 25, 2011 – The Beer Sheva District Court, which issued a temporary injunction a week ago stopping all further work by the Israel Land Administration (ILA) and the Jewish National Fund (JNF) in the Negev Bedouin village of Al-Arakib, decided on Sunday, Jan. 23, not to extend the injunction, permitting the village to be permanently destroyed and replaced by a JNF forest. Judge Nechama Netzer “recommended” to the JNF not to “rush” the afforestation of Al-Arakib, but failed to order the Israeli Government, the ILA and the JNF to stop their efforts to wipe out the village.

Courtesy of MachsomWatch.org

What I originally took to be WikiLeaks were actually internal Palestinian documents leaked to Al Jazeera by dissident Palestinians to embarrass Mahmoud Abbas and the PLO leadership who attempted (apparently in good faith) to negotiate a two-state solution with the Kadima-led Israeli government of Ehud Olmert and Tzipi Livni. What the Guardian and Al Jazeera are blasting as a betrayal of Palestinian rights was precisely the kind of deal that could work for both parties in bringing this conflict to an end.

SSgt. Craig Wiesner in 1986 at the Defense Language Institute

In 1987 I left the United States Air Force after serving honorably for eight years. I couldn’t stand the idea of having to hide who I was, having to live a lonely isolated life, and despite being willing to live without love or true companionship, facing the constant threat of being outed and having my career destroyed.

This week, Congress can help to right a wrong that has destroyed lives, careers, and perpetuated prejudice and discrimination against people who simply wanted to serve their country. The military has spoken and those who serve have said that they want an end to “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell.” Let’s show our military that we listen to them and urge Congress to put an end to this stain on our nation’s honor.

Three years ago, Sen. Barack Obama was sharp, forceful and eloquent in his questions to Gen. David Petraeus about the failure of the U.S. occupation of Iraq. In a congressional hearing on Iraq, Obama did not mince words with the general:

This continues to be a disastrous foreign policy mistake. And we are now confronted with the question: How do we clean up the mess and make the best out of a situation in which there are no good options, there are bad options and worse options?

Sen. Barack Obama questions Gen. Petraeus during Iraq hearings, 2007. (Go to 3:00 of this 9:45 minute video for above quote.)

This same candidate Obama was also confidently talking about withdrawing all U.S. troops from Iraq within 16 months during his 2007 interviews. He defended a pull-out to two New York Times reporters, saying it would not “backfire” and discourage the Iraqis to find a political solution involving all sides of the conflict, as the critics claimed.

In case you haven’t see this yet, David Grossman, award-winning Israeli author and peace activist, whose son Uri was killed in the 2006 war in Lebanon, wrote this response to the flotilla attack that happened May 30, 2010:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jun/01/gaza-flotilla-attack-isral-declined