Editorials & Actions

Uri Avnery on the War Netanyahu Almost Started Five Years Ago

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Uri Avnery
August 29, 2015
                                                The Molten Three

I MUST admit that Moshe “”Bogie” Ya’alon did not top the list of my favorite politicians. The former army Chief of Staff and present Minister of Defense looked to me like a mere lackey of Netanyahu and a one-dimensional militarist. Many people call him a “bock”, a non-complimentary German-Yiddish term for billy goat. Yuval Steinitz, the present minister for I-don’t-know-what, was also not at the top of the list of politicians I admire. He, too, seemed to me one of the servants of Netanyahu, without a recognizable personality of his own. 

Even the former army Chief of Staff, Gabi Ashkenazi, was not one of my ultimate heroes.

Editorials & Actions

A cry of outrage at ISIS by one of the many Muslims speaking out for human rights

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Editor’s note:  There have been frequent communications to us at Tikkun claiming that ISIS reveals “the truth about Islam.” This is as big a slander as saying that Netanyahu and the racist remarks of some of the people in his cabinet reveals “the truth about Judaism.” We have seen many many public statements from Muslim leaders condemning ISIS. Obviously those that come from Saudi or Iranian leaders are a bit hard to take seriously, given their own repression of human rights. But there are many other wonderful Muslims speaking out, and the one below is quite typical of many that we’ve received over the course of the past two years.

Editorials & Actions

Israel update Aug. 28, 2015

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Editor’s note: In reporting on Israel’s latest outrages I do not mean to suggest that Israel is worse than many many other countries in regard to its abuses of human rights, but only that as a rabbi and champion of Jewish values it is particularly painful to me to witness Judaism being associated with such unjust and outrageous behavior. I feel the same way about the attempts by Donald Trump and many others to send back 12 million “undocumented” refugees in America to the countries from which they fled –mostly because of oppressive conditions created by American trade agreements that impoverished much of their countries or the police and army abuses (that American-trained at Ft. Benning Georgia’s School of the America ) officers organized against their own people. It is precisely because I care so much about the U.S. and about Israel that I feel the need to focus on behavior that so violates what most Americans and most Jews believe to be the realities of American and Israeli life. I have met those who hate the US or hate Israel, and they joyfully expose abuses.

Editorials & Actions

Noam Chomsky on “The Iranian Threat”

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Editor’s note: Noam Chomsky’s analysis (read below after reading this) is an important counter to the endless drum of US propaganda from both parties about the threat from Iran. So much self-deception is thrown at Americans that we are not to blame when even the best among us begins to repeat analyses that forget or obscure the actual role that the US plays in the world today, as Chomsky begins to outline (though he doesn’t really explore the more powerful distorting role of global capitalism, which is not to be blamed solely on the US). Unfortunately, Chomsky underplays the anti-Semitism that the Iranian mullahs have fanned in Iran. They may never have explicitly called for Israel’s physical destruction, but they had plenty of time to clarify what they’ve meant by what seems like code language with such destruction in mind – all they needed to do to eliminate what Chomsky considers an unfair charge would be to publicly affirm that they don’t intend or seek to eliminate the state that was created as a refuge for Jews. We atTikkunhave sent that request to Iranian leaders, but they haven’t responded.

Editorials & Actions

Socially Engaged Mysticism to Heal the World

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Where are the missing mystics of the revolution? ERIKA SUMMERS-EFFLER and HYUNJIN DEBORAH KWAK 11 August 2015

Mysticism can undermine the social and political order in fundamental ways. Dorothy Day and Mother Teresa at the Maryhouse office in New York City on June 17, 1979. Credit: Bill Barrett/ http://www.onbeing.org. Hermits in caves or yogis on mountaintops: that’s how mystics are usually depicted.

Editorials & Actions

The Sum Stratagem–a strategic plan for the remnants of the Occupy movement by Zevin X Cruz

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Editor’s note: this strategy does not capture the strategic ideas we’ve develop in Tikkun and in The Left Hand of God book, in the NSP strategy paper “Yearing for a World of Love and Justice, we’ve developed at www.spiritualprogressives.org/covenant  and in our trainings for spiritual progressives. Nevertheless, it is a strategy that  has some serious thinking behind it, and that is very rare these days among secular progressive activists, so it deserves our attention.–Rabbi Michael Lerner
The Sum Strategem
by Zevin V. Cruz
“Zevin X. Cruz” <zevinxcruz@gmail.com>
“We’re not going to change the world one person at a time. We’re not going to clean up our ghettos one block at a time or save our national debt one dollar and one balanced budget at a time, or solve the crime problem in America one criminal at a time. It’s a nice fantasy, but that’s about all it is—a fantasy. “Economies of scale make a difference.

Culture

Why I’m Not Going to Burning Man This Year by Daniel Pinchbeck

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WHY I’M NOT GOING TO BURNING MAN THIS YEAR
by Daniel Pinchbeck (from Reality Sandwich)

I have gone to Burning Man 15 years in a row. When I went the first time, back in 2000, I was a journalist on assignment for Rolling Stone. That was an amazing introduction to the event, as I was able to go “back stage” and meet the organizers, artists, and geniuses behind the sculptures, lasers, and camps. I was immediately hooked. I couldn’t believe such a place existed – that tens of thousands of people shared the same ideals, and worked together to realize their visions.

Editorials & Actions

Change the Conversation about Justice by Rabbi Rachel Mikva

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Throw the [Good] Book at Them: Changing the Conversation about Justice
by Rabbi Rachel Mikva
 
Romain Dukes says President Obama has given him his life back.  Expecting to spend the rest of his years in prison after being convicted in 1997 of distribution and conspiracy to distribute crack cocaine, Dukes is among the forty-six individuals who recently had their sentences commuted. Jason Hernandez says the same thing; sentenced at age fifteen to life without parole for his part in a drug conspiracy, he’s been out since 2013 after the president commuted his sentence. Hernandez works as a welder (a trade he learned in prison), and mentors juvenile offenders at Café Momentum in Texas, eager to make a difference in the lives of these teens:

I hope one of these days when they ask the president, “What were some of your greatest decisions?” And when he names the Affordable Care Act and the other accomplishments that he has done, that he also says, “You know what? There’s also the Clemency Initiative and that one Mexican kid, named Jason Hernandez. I’m glad I let him out because he has done so much for the community.” That’s kind of how I live my life.

Editorials & Actions

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I Worked at AIPAC 6 Years…But Now It Shames Me As an American Jew
by M.J. Rosenberg
August 6, 2015 mjayrosenberg

President Obama’s speech at American University defending the Iran agreement against charges made by the Israeli government and its lobby in the United States (along with the lobby’s wholly owned subsidiaries in Congress) was, for me, the worst moment yet in my long history with the lobby in general and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) in particular. I saw something I never expected to see, something that appalled and offended me more than anything the lobby has done before. I saw the President of the United States brought to the point where he felt it necessary to give a major foreign policy address defending his foreign policy against Netanyahu and AIPAC. Every charge Obama felt the need to rebut was a charge made by Netanyahu or the lobby. Obama himself conceded that when he noted that Israel is the only country in the world that opposes the Iran agreement.

Editorials & Actions

Two Apologies from Rabbi Lerner

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Two apologies from Rabbi Lerner  a minor one and a major one

1) The minor apology is that the mailing of the Summer issue of Tikkun was delayed by something going wrong at the printers. That issue should have been mailed in mid-July and instead is coming sometime in mid-August. So sorry. As you probably know, the print issue of the magazine is only available to subscribers and members of the Network of Spiritual Progressives and is not the same as the articles you find on line at tikkun.org or the Tikkun Daily blog. If you haven’t subscribed yet, please do so now at that website.

Editorials & Actions

Firebombing of Palestinian Homes & Murder of Palestinian Child, plus Murder at Gay Pride Demo

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Editor’s Note:

Faced with the horrendous crimes of an ultra-orthodox Jew stabbing participants in a gay pride demonstration in Israel, and the firebombing of Palestinian homes and resulting burning to death of an 18 month old Palestinian baby while others in the family are in critical condition and may not survive, many Israelis and American Jews denounced these horrendous acts. Netanyahu and his government ordered a few Israeli settlers arrested in “administrative detention,” the polite word to describe the practice which till now has been used against thousands of Palestinian civilians–arrest without formal charges, often held in detention for months or more without trial, and in the case of Palestinians often tortured. The Israeli settlers arrested did not face what most Palestinians “suspected” of terrorist acts usually suffer: the homes of the family of the suspect are immediately blown up by the occupying Israeli Army in the West Bank. That no such punishment was immediately meted out to the Israeli settler suspects was not surprising, but just another manifestation of the racist treatment Palestinians in the Occupied territory face (though of course we don’t support this tactic against settlers or Palestinians). As many Israeli human rights and peace advocates point out, the firebombing of Palestinian homes is just one of many variants of violence visited upon Palestinians in the Occupied West Bank, the goal being to make life so difficult that Palestinians will eventually be “ethnically cleansed” and Israel can make the West Bank a fully Jewish-majority part of Israel.

Editorials & Actions

Israel’s “Divide and Conquer” Strategy for Palestine–by Uri Avnery

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Uri Avnery

August 8, 2015

 

                                                Divide et Impera

 

BINYAMIN NETANYAHU is not known as a classical scholar, but even so he has adopted the Roman maxim Divide et Impera, divide and rule.  

The main (and perhaps only) goal of his policy is to extend the rule of Israel, as the “Nation-State of the Jewish People”, over all of Eretz Israel, the historical land of Palestine. This means ruling all of the West Bank and covering it with Jewish settlements, while denying any civil rights to its 2.5 million plus Arab inhabitants.  

East Jerusalem, with its 300,000 Arab inhabitants, has already been formally annexed to Israel, without granting them Israeli citizenship or the right to take part in Knesset elections.  

That leaves the Gaza Strip, a tiny enclave with 1.8 million plus Arab inhabitants, most of them descendents of refugees from Israel.

Editorials & Actions

Readers Respond to Our Conference Call with Obama

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On July 30th, the Tikkun and Network of Spiritual Progressives (NSP) community, along with a variety of other groups, was invited to a conference call with President Obama. During the call he spoke about the nuclear agreement reached with Iran and urged us to become active in supporting that deal in light of the ferocious opposition of the Republicans, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, and many national American Jewish organizations. President Obama referenced the failure of peace-oriented people to stop the disastrous war in Iraq and urged us to become visibly engaged in supporting this agreement, which he said would prevent the only other possible alternative for those who want a denuclearized Iran, namely a war with Iran. Of course, I had hoped that there would be a chance to engage directly with Obama, but he simply continued to do what he has done ever since we helped to elect him, namely talk to us but not with us. Still, many members of our Tikkun and NSP community tuned in for the talk and then sent their responses to me.

Editorials & Actions

The Pope’s Anti-Capitalist Message

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Will Pope Francis’ strong message meet resistance in US? Michael Sean Winters  |  Jul. 31, 2015

Francis in the United States

Print  email  ANALYSIS   WASHINGTON

Those looking for clues of what to expect from Pope Francis when he visits Cuba and the United States at the end of September should study his trip to Latin America. Francis’ eight-day trip to Ecuador, Bolivia and Paraguay July 5-12 accentuated almost every theme of this pontificate. At a large prison in Bolivia, he told the prisoners, “I could not leave Bolivia without seeing you.”