Free food at Occupy Oakland. / Photo Courtesy of Wendy Kenin

The messages we take from the stories of homeless people, veterans, women, indigenous peoples, and volunteers involved with Occupy Wall Street demonstrate the keen effectiveness and high spiritual status of the international movement. These points of hope are proof of the positive impact the Occupy movement is having.

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.

Artist Ray Voide -- a former Marine who has been with Occupy DC, living in the park for 11 days -- displays his portrait of the park.

In the aftermath of the eviction of the Occupy Wall Street encampment at Zucotti Park in New York, the OWS protesters at Occupy DC in McPherson Square on K Street in Washington DC remain committed even more resolutely than before.

Rose, a protester who lived at OWS-NYC for a month before moving to Occupy DC three weeks ago, is confident that that evicted Occupations will re-occupy, and that they will continue efforts to model the building of self-sufficient horizontal communities. She finds Occupy DC more suited to that community building because the space is larger, the occupiers fewer, with more grass and less wind. She said a greenhouse is planned and dental care is now available three days a week.

Another more recent occupier, artist Ray Voide who has lived in the DC area for more than 20 years, has been camped at McPherson Square for 11 days. As a former U. S. Marine he says that if any occupation has the right to exist, it is the one here in Washington DC. To break up Occupy DC would send a message to all Americans that their rights don’t mean anything, he added. He believes that the protesters have already accomplished a lot by getting people to talk about issues of inequality and the role oversized corporations play in politics — putting those issues in the public eye and letting people come to their own conclusions.

The Houston Chronicle reports that the ubiquitous hacktivist (dis)organization Anonymous is celebrating Halloween by threatening to expose the members of Zetas, one of the most powerful drug cartels in Mexico.

My little county, Rio Arriba, in northern New Mexico, has long been overrun by drugs because of this cartel. The guys on the left are not drug kingpins. They are ranchers. And they are seriously put out with the cartels.

Rio Arriba County suffers the highest heroin and polydrug overdose death rates in the US. A few months ago, a beautiful local mountain lake was befouled when a plane flying low to avoid being detected by radar crashed into it, spewing cocaine, fuel, and bodyparts into the water. Nobody knows who was in the plane.

Our rural Hispanic and Native American youth are being systematically plied with drugs by Mexican and Californian gangs to entice them to become mules. We have watched our teen drinking rate creep upward. Children as young as 12 are now addicted to heroin.

I couldn’t be happier that Anonymous has taken on the cartel. However, I wonder if bloggers everywhere will suddenly find themselves targets in a new kind of war. I know how quickly those kinds of wars can sneak up on you.

CROSS-POSTED AT Native American Netroots

[UPDATE - On Monday 9/19/11, the clemency board denied Davis a stay. The NAACP is launching a last resort petition to urge the DA to ask the Judge to withdraw the death warrant]

The state of Georgia may take the life of an innocent man on Wednesday.

Troy Anthony Davis

For nearly two decades, Troy Anthony Davis has sat on Death Row for the 1989 shooting of off-duty White police officer Mark MacPhail. Though Davis has maintained his innocence for two decades and built a compelling case for his freedom, he has exhausted the appeals process and is now scheduled to die. The Georgia Board of Paroles and Pardons has the power to grant him clemency and spare his life.

The murder weapon was never found and there is no physical evidence linking Davis to the murder; the case against him was built solely on witness testimony. Of the nine witnesses that testified in Davis’s trial, seven have recanted their testimony, many citing police coercion. Multiple jurors from the original trial have since signed sworn affidavits saying that based on the recanted testimony he should not be executed. New evidence has also emerged implicating another suspect.

This is the fourth time in as many years that a death warrant has been issued for Davis. He was first set to be executed in the summer of 2007, but was granted a stay of execution following the efforts of a grassroots campaign whose supporters included Arch Bishop Desmond Tutu, Pope Benedict XVI, Harry Belafonte, Jesse Jackson, former president Jimmy Carter, representatives of Congress, members of European parliaments, a former FBI director and Federal Judge, and many others. Amnesty International organized the delivery of thousands of letters to the clemency board. Despite the recanting of trial testimony by the majority of the trial’s original witnesses, the Georgia Supreme Court denied Davis’s appeal for a re-trial in the early Spring of 2008.

This is the second half of a two-part series. Read the first part here.

Brian McLaren’s description of the problems humanity now faces is more accurate than we usually get from preachers, politicians and the mass media. But has he adequately clarified the institutional resistance that must be overcome to alter or abolish the Societal Machine that he says has become a Suicidal Machine. His largely realistic description of this Machine has a curious blind spot, which needs correction if we are to develop an effective counter-approach. His Christianity is a source of strength but also of limitation: Jesus lived in a social order radically different from ours, one that prevented him from seeing the problems we face today and developing solutions now open to us, if we can act collectively.

The Core of Jesus’ Vision

Ultimately, Jesus’ vision (and McLaren’s) is based on and limited by the idea of radical generosity. Generosity, like its opposite stinginess, is a question of distribution. It is closely related to (though somewhat different from) distributive justice, which is concerned with fairness in distribution. McLaren hardly mentions production except as the source of the goods we consume. Yet even the first “law” of Theocapitalism, Progress through Rapid Growth, is usually understood in terms of growth of production.

The modern system of production, the capital system, did not exist in premodern society; it did not exist in ancient Palestine, in the Roman Empire, or anywhere else for that matter before 1500.

Spiritual progressives often say they are open to wisdom in other faith traditions. One way we can practice this openness is to appreciate what people operating from other perspectives say when they say it well and then present our differences in the framework of basic respect. Starting a conversation of this sort is a way of strengthening a shared spiritual journey.

In April of this year, members of the Bowling Green community in Western Kentucky had a chance to hear Brian McLaren present his analysis of current global problems and his vision of how to confront them inspired by his interpretation of the message of Jesus. A more elaborate version of his view is found in Everything Must Change: Jesus, Global Crisis, and a Revolution of Hope (Nashville, TN, 2007). McLaren is an evangelical Christian — a fairly radical progressive evangelical, in fact.

I intend to summarize his diagnosis of the problems, then explain how he understands Jesus’ message, which he contrasts with the visions advocated by rival social movements forces in Jesus’ time. I will assume that McLaren accurately gauges the social message of Jesus – if you want to question that assumption, we can take it up in discussion. Then I will indicate how he sees Jesus’ perspective addressing our problems today. Finally, in a second, related post, I will discuss the adequacy of this approach as a strategy for our times.

Four Global Problems

Drawing from public official and theological sources, McLaren identifies four root problems, or global emergencies – the “PPPR” problems: Planet (global environmental issues), Poverty (apparent economic injustice in the absence of opportunities for vast numbers of human beings), Peace (the prevalence of war and all the devastation that it causes), and Religion. Not surprisingly, he thinks that some forms of religion hold out more hope for solving our problems than others.

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.

Parable of the Leaven (etching by Jan Luyken, photo by Phillip Medhurst)

This sermon was preached at the High Plains Church, Unitarian Universalist, on Colorado Springs Pride Day, 2011. The sermon has been modified somewhat to fit the current context.

Luke 13:20-21: And again he said, “To what should I compare the Kingdom of God? It is like yeast that a woman took and mixed in with three measures of flour until all of it was leavened.”

In 2009, I went to theannual conference for my Unitarian Universalist district, where singer and activist Holly Near gave the keynote speech, which was really more of a keynote sing with brief stories between the songs. We all sang along and had a marvelous time. When Holly got to “Singing for Our Lives,” which we often sing during pride services, she introduced it with an explanation for a recent change of words in one of the verses.

Credit: Creative Commons/R!E.

The 66th session of the UN General Assembly opens at 3 PM, September 13th, in New York City. According to my sources, the session will vote to recognize an independent Palestine based on 1967 borders on September 22, 2011, eleven days after the 10th anniversary of 9/11. What follows is a plausible battle plan for peace.

The following day, 9/23/11, is Friday. After prayers, massive peaceful demonstrations will be held in all the major Islamic capitals in the world, calling on Israel and the US to recognize the new Palestinian state. Candlelight vigils will be held at Israeli embassies and consulates around the globe with the same goal. In Jerusalem, huge crowds will march on the checkpoints leading into Jerusalem from both sides of the Green Line for a carefully planned exercise in civil disobedience with the eventual objective of opening the checkpoints. The marches will be led by women and children bearing bouquets of red and white roses which will be inserted into the muzzles of the Israeli M-16s. The marchers will then retreat.

This spring Jewish Voice for Peace (I am a founding member of the Seattle Chapter) is sponsoring a tour of young Palestinian activists to speak in over fifteen cities in the US to discuss the challenges facing Palestinian students who live under Israeli military occupation. I was fortunate to hear Mira Dabit and Hanna Qassis speak in Seattle, and I also got a chance to interview them about right to education issues in Palestine, their lives under occupation, and their hopes for a better future.

Mira Dabit photo by Emma Klein

Mira Dabit, 25, was born in Jerusalem to a refugee family originally from the 1948 city of Al Lod. She has been a youth activist and folkloric storyteller for many years. She received her Bachelor’s degree in Psychology and Sociology from Birzeit University. After graduating, she moved to Ireland where she volunteered with community initiatives for three years. Back in Palestine, Mira is continuing her activism with youth and education, including the Right to Education campaign at Birzeit University.

Hanna Qassis, 27, is from the town of Birzeit, Palestine. He graduated from Birzeit University in 2006 with a BA in Business Administration, and is currently pursuing a Master’s Degree in International Studies. In addition to working for the Academy for Educational Development in the West Bank, Hanna is a political and youth activist who volunteers with several Palestinian civil society organizations.

At a talk at Seattle University on April 11, 2010, they both spoke movingly about the role of education in Palestine. Mira posited that education has been important to Palestinians because the loss of their land in 1948 meant that many Palestinians also lost their homes, businesses, and livelihoods. Education was what they had left, and she sees it as a tool for Palestinians to tell their stories and educate people about their lives.

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).

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.”

Started some 15 years ago after the first conference on The Politics of Meaning in Washington DC, The Project for Integrating Spirituality, Law, and Politics (PISLAP) is a nationwide group of lawyers, law professors, and law students who seek to shift the focus of American law and legal institutions away from the individualism, self-interest, and materialism that undergirds all of American law and toward seeing law as a central cultural arena for fostering empathy, compassion, and mutual understanding.

We have taken to heart Martin Luther King Jr.’s definition of Justice as “love correcting that which revolts against love” and are seeking to build a new movement in law that makes restoring community through understanding and social healing our highest value. Sometimes out-and-out adversarial battles are necessary, but the principal shift that needs to take place in legal culture is toward the new bottom line articulated by the Network of Spiritual Progressives (NSP) — that institutions be valued according to how much love and generosity they generate rather than only focusing on a material war of all against all in a socially separated, self-interested world. That’s why PISLAP is glad to be the “legal arm” of the NSP, serving as its task force in this important professional and cultural arena.

Below is the welcoming letter and agenda for our upcoming gathering in New York, an agenda-building gathering for the coming year among the organization’s leadership group. I’ll post follow-ups in Tikkun Daily, including the final plan we decide upon as we move forward toward fundamentally transforming law and legal culture. You out there in other professions: Why not do the same?

Ninth demolition of Al-Arakib

Israeli government forces have razed Al-Arakib, a Bedouin village in the Negev, eighteen times since last July. The Israeli government does not recognize Al-Arakib and has been coercing its Arab inhabitants to relinquish the land they say they have owned since the beginning of the twentieth century.

The Jewish National Fund (JNF), an Israeli environmental organization that has planted 250 million trees, built over 210 reservoirs and dams, and created more than 1,000 parks in Israel has plans to plant a forest over Al-Arakib, with the assistance of the Israel Land Administration (ILA), once the Bedouin people are forced out. (Refer to Devorah Brous’s widely-read Tikkun Daily blog post, “Where are the Jewish Greens?” Brous argues that it is irresponsible for a non-profit environmental group to plant trees on this contested land.) Ironically, the JNF credits itself with “bringing life to the Negev desert” as it is fomenting the death of a community.

Wisconsin Unions: The destruction of public sector unions in Wisconsin will directly undermine your economic well-being in the years to come. Almost all of us who are not rich have for decades derived hidden benefits from the ability of unions to set wages at a level that makes it possible for a middle class family with two wage earners to make a decent living. Their actions have a ripple effect that goes all the way up and down the class ladder.

If the unions are smashed, don’t be surprised if your job options and pay diminish dramatically in this decade. And that’s only one of many reasons not to allow the forces that wish to take care of the needs of America’s wealthy and powerful elites first before taking care of the rest of us to get away with destroying public sector employees — and these forces are in both major political parties and demonstrably in the Obama Administration as well. There’s also the reason of pure “justice, justice shalt thou pursue.”

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.

As a very young person, the access that I was given to highly classified information was an awesome sign of trust and came with an awesome amount of responsibility. It also came with a lot of training, restrictions from accessing information unless I had a “need to know” and a lot of discussion about “what ifs.” It would have taken an unfathomable “what if” for me to even consider disclosing information to which I had access to the public, as PFC Bradley Manning is accused of having done.

If guilty, he will face severe punishment under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Until he is tried, he deserves to be treated like any other prisoner facing trial, yet reports from his lawyer indicate that his treatment is anything but normal. I may not be able to stand with PFC Manning if he is, in fact, found guilty of leaking classified information, but I and others SHOULD stand up FOR him right now. Why? Read on!

Demonstration Against Mubarak Government in Cairo (Jan. 25, 2011)

2/1/2011 Note from Dave Belden: we are delighted to see this piece by Rabbi Lerner is prominent on the Al Jazeera English website today (permanent link here).

Ever since the victory over the dictator of Tunisia and the subsequent uprising in Egypt, my email has been flooded with messages from Jews around the world hoping and praying for the victory of the Egyptian people over their cruel Mubarak regime.

Though a small segment of Jews have responded to right-wing voices from Israel that lament the change and fear that a democratic government would bring to power fundamentalist extremists who wish to destroy Israel and who would abrogate the hard-earned treaty that has kept the peace between Egypt and Israel for the last 30 years, the majority of Jews are more excited and hopeful than worried.

Crossposted on AlterNet

On Saturday January 8, Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was shot in the head by a 22-year-old man identified as Jared Lee Loughner. Congresswoman Giffords was Arizona’s first Jewish member of Congress. An individual identified as Jared Lee Loughner had recently posted a number of videos on YouTube including one that listed Mein Kampf as a favorite book.

At first glance the videos, which consist of incoherent white text on a black background, appear to be the ramblings of a lone, mentally ill individual. Upon closer inspection however, they spew the rhetoric of an anti-semitic, anti-hispanic, “Christian” right wing confederacy known as “Sovereign Citizens.” This loosely organized, little-known menagerie of militias, miscreants and misfits spawned such violent luminaries as Oklahoma City Bomber Terry Nichols and, more recently, father and son team Jerry and Joseph Kane who gunned down two Arkansas police officers during a routine traffic stop last May.

The Jewish Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center have been tracking the “Sovereigns” for over a decade.

The Southern Poverty Law Center posted this instructional video on YouTube on November 1, 2010 to assist law enforcement officers to identify potentially violent “freemen” on the highway and to take appropriate precautions when approaching them. The video shows Jerry and Joe Kane mowing down two policemen in cold blood. It also shows Jerry Kane threatening to murder government officials prior to the shooting. This video should be shown to every police officer in America.