Editorials & Actions

Refugee Aid: A Vision of International Solidarity and Love

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Editor’s Note: Tikkun and our interfaith and secular-humanist-welcoming Network of Spiritual Progressives supports the work of Tamera and the Institute for Global Peace Work. –Rabbi Michael Lerner

 

Refugee Aid: A Vision of International Solidarity

Statement following reports from our co-workers in Lesbos

by Dieter Duhm

 

The people were driven from their home countries by unspeakable suffering and it was unspeakable suffering which they encountered on their way into an allegedly better world. Even winter did not stop the wave of refugees. Carrying their children with nothing to eat, no blankets, no place to stay, no medical assistance, suddenly they faced barbed wire. Thousands arrived on the island of Lesbos almost frozen to death, having nearly drowned; some had lost their families on the way.

Editorials & Actions

David Swanson on World Beyond War argues that Jill Stein’s Platform is more viable than Bernie’s

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Editor’s Note: As we’ve noted each time we post something about the election, we are NOT endorsing any candidate or party, but allowing members of our community to explain why they have chosen who they’ve chosen to support. JANUARY 29 ,2016
BY DAVID SWANSON

Jill Stein’s platform more viable than Bernie’s
David Swanson conducted this exclusive interview with Jill Stein for American Herald Tribune. 5.1K SHARES

I asked Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein about her platform this week and came away believing it had a better chance of winning than Bernie Sanders’. I know that platforms don’t run, people do, and they do so within a two-party dominated system. But this already crazy presidential election could turn into a crazier five-way race.

Editorials & Actions

Uri Avnery on the Current Reality of the Israeli Peace Movement

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Uri Avnery
January 30, 2016
 
                     The Pied Piper of Zion

HAMELIN, A small town in Germany (not so far from where I was born), was infested with rats. In their despair, the burghers called upon a rat-catcher and promised him a thousand guilders for liberating them from this plague. The rat-catcher took his pipe and played such a sweet melody that all the rats came out of their holes and joined him. He marched them to the Weser river, where they all drowned. Once freed from this plague, the burghers saw no reason to pay.

How Change Happens

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The last thing America needs is another “realist” or liberal compromiser as President. You never know what is possible until you fight for what is desirable. The realists are almost always wrong.

Editorials & Actions

Some Arab regimes have Black Slaves

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Editor’s Note: Tikkun believes in the free exchange of ideas ala John Stuart Mill’s brilliant defense of free speech and the marketplace of ideas. For that reason we sometimes publish articles that are certain to offend a significant section of our readership. We welcome serious responses to this article and all other articles, sent to Letters@tikkun.org. It was published by a source, the Israeli settler magazine Arutz Sheva that regularly demeans all of us liberals and progressives, particularly those of us who support Palestinian rights. We as a magazine do not have the resources to hire fact-checkers, so we have no way to check the facts that they assert in this article.

Editorials & Actions

Take Action to Save the Bedouins–appeal from Rabbi Arik Ascherman

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Editor’s note: Rabbi Arik Ascherman is one of our great contemporary heroes. His work to save the Israeli Bedouins from being obliterated by the Israeil government deserves your fuill support. Please read his call to you below! Standing up for the humanity of everyone on the planet is part of the goal of Tikkun magazine and our interfaith and secular-humanist welcoming Network of Spiritual Progressives. To keep up with developments in the US and around the world, you are invited to receive (for FREE) updates through our Tikkun Daily Blog at
 www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/join-tikkun-daily/– Rabbi Michael Lerner
 
Please Take action to Save the Bedouins 
by Rabbi Arik Ascherman

 

As you read this, JNF bulldozers are preparing the first stage of building the Jewish community of “Hiran” on the rubble of the Israeli Negev Bedouin community of “Umm Al-Hiran.”

Beyond the 2016 Ballot Box: Why We Need a National Organization on the Left – And How to Build It

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As a nonprofit, we at Tikkun are barred from endorsing candidates and political parties (though you, our readers, are not, and we are not barred from printing your responses and letters on our website). But we can talk about the issues. Many of our readers have been delighted to witness and support Senator Bernie Sanders’s candidacy for the Democratic Party presidential nomination. Some have made the argument that even if Sanders could never defeat a corporate-financed Republican candidate who harped on the senator’s radical past, simply having Sanders’s ideas presented to the American public during presidential debates in the fall will do more good and make more progress toward changing the American political consciousness than would eight years of a Hillary Clinton presidency. Her administration, some progressive critics believe, would inevitably be run by the same people who controlled the economic, political, foreign, and military policies of the Clinton and Obama presidencies: people who effectively erased most progressive ideas from public consciousness.

Editorials & Actions

Failed States–“We Destroyed the Cities to Save Them and Other Future Headlines

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Failed States and States of Failure 
“We Destroyed the Cities to Save Them” and Other Future Headlines
By Tom Engelhardt

One of the charms of the future is its powerful element of unpredictability, its ability to ambush us in lovely ways or bite us unexpectedly in the ass. Most of the futures I imagined as a boy have, for instance, come up deeply short, or else I would now be flying my individual jet pack through the spired cityscape of New York and vacationing on the moon. And who, honestly, could have imagined the Internet, no less social media and cyberspace (unless, of course, you had read William Gibson’s novel Neuromancer 30 years ago)? Who could have dreamed that a single country’s intelligence outfits would be able to listen in onor otherwise intercept and review not just the conversations and messages of its own citizens — imagine the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century — but those of just about anyone on the planet, from peasants in the backlands of Pakistan to at least 35 leaders of major and minor countries around the world?  This is, of course, our dystopian present, based on technological breakthroughs that even sci-fi writers somehow didn’t imagine. And who thought that the Arab Spring or Occupy Wall Street were coming down the pike or, for that matter, a terror caliphate in the heart of the former Middle East or a Donald Trump presidential run that would go from success to success amid free media coverage the likes of which we’ve seldom seen?

Editorials & Actions

Bill McKibben on The Real Zombie Apocalypse

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Editor’s note: If you are going to any environmental event in the next few months, (e.g. a Tu B’shvat seder this coming weekend) please ask the attendees to read this very important article by Bill McKibben. Unfortunately, though McKibben recognizes the urgency and to some extent the futility of trying to stop the fossil fuel industry one struggle at a time, he eschews any national strategy. The rest of us need to do better–by insisting that any candidate we vote for any public office in 2016 (from Bernie or Hillary to…well, whoever,in any political party or independent) commit to supporting a mandatory ban on extracting more fossil fuel from the earth than we are already extracting now (which is way too much). This is also where we should be insisting on our elected officials taking steps to pass the ESRA–Environmental and Social Responsibility Amendment to the U.S. Constitution–because although a constitutional amendment may take years to pass, it is the only solution that could bypass the pro-business decisions of a Supreme Court that will declare unconstitutional any legislation that impedes the ability of corporations to maximize their profits. Please re-read it ( www.tikkun.org/esra)  and start getting your state and federal legislators (and your city councils and county governments) to endorse it and start the process of amending the constitution, else we are stuck with the hapless task of thousands of battles, some of which will be won but many of which will not.

Editorials & Actions

Hillary is far More Dangerous Than the Neo-cons by Steve Weissman

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Editor’s note: Tikkun as a 501-=c-3 non profit does not take stands in support of candidates or political parties. But our readers do have positions and we are happy to put any coherent and insightful piece of writing about the elections, candidates (for president) and political parties up on this website and/or to send it out to our broad readership. But what we put up here or send out does NOT represent Tikkun’s position though it may represent the position of some of the members of our editorial board, but may not. Meanwhile, Steve Weisman, whom I haven’t seen for many decades, was one of the brightest leaders of the Free Speech Movement. It was he who asked me (21 years old and in my first year as a graduate student in philosophy at U.C. Berkeley), on December 2nd, 1964,  to lead the Chanukah service at 1 a.m. in Sproul Hall during the FSM sit-in to shut down the university, and then around 6 a.m. he asked me to climb down a rope with him from the second story of the building so we could explain to the thousands of students standing outside what we were seeing as the police arrested and brutally hurt many of the nonviolent demonstrators who had taken the nonviolent resistance pose sitting on the floors of the hallways of this University of California administration building.

Editorials & Actions

12 of the 18 Former Military Arrested in Guatemala are US Trained

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Editor’s Note:  We at Tikkun have been involved for the last decade in supporting the important work of the SOA, the religious progressive organization that challenges the U.S. government to shut down its school (formerly known as the U.S. Army’s  School of the Americas, and operating out of Fort Benning in Georgia) that trains torturers and murderers who go back to Central and South America and uses the latest techniques and equipment that they’ve learned at the School of the Americas to intimidate, torture or murder those whom they consider a threat to the oligarchs whose oppressive rule they are asked to protect. The SOA organization brings thousands of people to Ft. Benning the weekend before Thanksgiving each year to protest and demand that this horrific school be closed by the US Army.  The demonstration also mourns the thousands of people killed by the actions of the graduates of this horrific institution.–Rabbi Michael Lerner

Twelve of the Eighteen Former Military Arrested in Guatemala are SOA Graduates

Michael,

Last week, eighteen former military officials were arrested on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity in one of the largest mass arrests of military officers Latin America has ever seen. Twelve of them were trained at the SOA. The arrests happened one week before the January 14th inauguration of newly elected President Jimmy Morales, of the National Convergence Front (FCN). Morales, whose party has close ties to the military, faces pressure in the face of the current developments. Morales’ right hand man, Edgar Justino Ovalle Maldonado, who is also the FCN party co-founder, newly elected congressman, and retired colonel, is also facing similar charges, though he was not arrested because of his immunity as a congressman.

Editorials & Actions

Scholarship and Provocation: A Response to Arthur Green’s Review of Hasidism Incarnate

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Scholarship and Provocation: A Response to Arthur Green’s Review of Hasidism Incarnate
bu Shaul Magid,

 

 

I, Arthur Green, recently published a review of my recent book Hasidism Incarnate in Studies in Jewish-Christian Relations. The review raises some important issues in regards to the study of Hasidism and Hasidic literature more generally, and the nature of comparison in the study of religion. It also gestures toward the complex relationship between scholarship and theology that many of us, both in Jewish Studies more generally, and Jewish mysticism in particular, traverse in our work. I begin my discussion of the larger questions raised in the review with Green’s claim of omission. In his review Green notes that it is surprising that I chose not to invoke Psalm 90:1 A prayer to Moses, man of God (ish ha- Elohim) in my study as it would ostensibly support my basic contention about incarnational thinking.

Editorials & Actions

The World’s Most Enlightening Region

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Review of the documentary:

The World’s Most Enlightening Region 

by   Rev. Ray Wade, Birmingham

I witnessed people being moved by this film when shown at the Parliament of World’s Religions. Like the saying “a picture is worth a thousand words,” a real historical example of 2000 years of ongoing religious harmony in one region is worth dozens of emotional or rational arguments supporting religious peace. This documentary provides such an example and shows peaceful transformation of extremism.  This region is in Kerala, India. Caution: unless you have a special reason to know the names of the locations [except Kodungallur and Kochi] and people in the film, ignore them and focus on the themes. The producer, N. S. Xavier, who grew up in Kerala has been practicing psychiatry in the U.S. since 1979.

Editorials & Actions

Candidates Compete to Promise the Most Torture and Slaughter

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America Revisits the Dark Side
Candidates Compete to Promise the Most Torture and Slaughter
By Rebecca Gordon

They’re back! From the look of the presidential campaign, war crimes are back on the American agenda. We really shouldn’t be surprised, because American officials got away with it last time — and in the case of the drone wars continue to get away with it today. Still, there’s nothing like the heady combination of a “populist” Republican race for the presidency and a national hysteria over terrorism to make Americans want to reach for those “enhanced interrogation techniques.” That, as critics have long argued, is what usually happens if war crimes aren’t prosecuted. In August 2014, when President Obama finally admitted that “we tortured some folks,” he added a warning.

Editorials & Actions

The New Normal by Amitai Etzioni

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Editor’s note: Amitai Etzioni’s article below is a powerful critique of approaches we often take in Tikkun magazine. We welcome this kind of challenge to the vision we put forward, particularly at www.spiritualprogressives.org/covenant. Please read that along with this article.  One question we have to ask Etzioni: what level of consumption reduction would be sufficient to prevent humanity living in capitalist socieites around the globe  from continuing the destruction of the life support system of the planet that is a regular feature of the capitalist marketplace’s endless search for profits–and how could that search be stopped as long as capitalism depends on private investment to fuel its bottom line and meet the growing demands from all around the world for a standard of living comparable to that in the U.S. Middle class? The New Normal
Amitai Etzioni
 

 

If the people of the world cannot return to what is being called the ‘old normal’ (paid for by strongly growing economies), what will the new normal look like?