Editorials & Actions

The New Israeli Government: It’s Worse Than You Think

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The new Israeli government is a total victory for the most extreme elements in the extreme Right in Israel. The overtly racist party HaBayit HaYehudi, the party of the West Bank settlers, will control the Justice Dept. , the Education Dept. , and almost all important government offices concerned with the Occupation of the West Bank. And they have secured a promise from Likud to bring forward a proposed law that would make it illegal for any nonprofit to receive funds from a foreign government without approval from the government.

Editorials & Actions

“Fire at Every Person You See”–an order to Israeli soldiers in Gaza last summer

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“Fire at every person you see” :  Israeli soldiers reveal they were ordered to shoot to kill in Gaza – even if the targets may have been civilians

Israeli campaign group Breaking the Silence interviews more than 60 members of the Israeli army, air force and navy, including soldiers and officers

ALISTAIR DAWBER 

Monday 04 May 2015

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The Israeli military deliberately pounded civilian areas in the Gaza Strip with incessant fire of inaccurate ordinance during last year’s war against Hamas and was at best indifferent about casualties among the Palestinian population. Those are the conclusions of a report complied by Breaking the Silence, an Israeli group that has spent the eight months since the end of the war, known as Operation Protective Edge,interviewing more than 60 members of the Israeli army, air force and navy, including soldiers and officers up to the rank of major. The service personnel paint a picture that runs counter to official Israeli military claims that the surgical operation – which became a full-blown conflict after three Israeli teenagers were kidnapped and murdered in the occupied West Bank – took great care to avoid civilian casualties and that Gaza’s already fragile infrastructure was not unnecessarily targetted. International critics of Israeli tactics during the seven-week conflict have argued that the army, the IDF, and the country’s other forces, responded disproportionately to rocket attacks from groups such as Hamas. This, they say, led to 2,220 Palestinians being killed, according to UN figures, the vast majority of them civilians.

Editorials & Actions

Baltimore Riots Against Police Violence –Tikkun and the Baptist Response

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The anger underlying the violence in Baltimore is understandable. Living in neighborhoods where there are no jobs, no quality education, no livable wage, and the resurgence of racism all leads to a sense of hopelessness and despair. “Silence in the face of evil is itself evil: God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.”

Editorials & Actions

Yearning for a World of Love and Justice: An introduction to the Ideas of Tikkun and the Network of Spiritual Progressives (NSP)

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by Rabbi Michael Lerner, editor, Tikkun Magazine and chair of the NSP      rabbilerner.tikkun@gmail.com  November, 2016

We live in a world filled with loving and caring people. We all crave a world filled with love and care. Yet most of us doubt that we can experience a loving and caring world beyond our own private lives and homes. Why? Because the ethos of the capitalist marketplace, which places greatest value on money and power, has infiltrated our personal lives, shaping our unconscious and conscious beliefs about “human nature.”

In the economic marketplace we are taught to look out for ourselves, maximize our profits, and do what we need to do to get ahead, even at the cost of people we care about.

Editorials & Actions

Spend a weekend with Rabbi Lerner and Cat Zavis at ESALEN in Big Sur, California

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Come spend a weekend with me (Rabbi Michael Lerner) and Cat Zavis June 12-14 (with a very small group of people).  Cat and I will have just gotten married and will be celebrating our honeymoon at Esalen, in part by leading a workshop on The Jewish Path to Liberation and Transformation–NOT JUST FOR JEWS. (Please read the description of the workshop we will be offering–below). I wish it could be for free, but since it is at one of the most beautiful places in the world, Big Sur, Ca.  (which is where the Esalen Institute has its campus) it’s worth the trip (even from abroad or from the East Coast) and the cost.

Editorials & Actions

Responding to Michael Dyson’s Attack on Cornel West

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APRIL 27, 2015

Rethinking Michael Eric Dyson’s Attack on Cornel West
The Perils of Being a Public Intellectual
by HENRY A. GIROUX

Michael Eric Dyson has launched in the New Republic a bitter attack on Cornel West.[1] At the heart of Dyson’s critique is a discourse that engages in character assassination but not before he makes clear what is really at stake in his attack. Dyson resents West’s critique of Obama’s domestic and foreign policies. But rather than judiciously and analytically weigh such criticisms, hardly confined to West, he positions him as a spurned lover, angry and bitter because among other things, he did not get a ticket to Obama’s 2008 inauguration. Dyson expands his critique by claiming that West is not a scholar, who has lived up to the standards of decent scholarship, bolstering his case by quoting among others, Larry Summers, the irrepressible apostle of neoliberalism and unbridled finance capital. It never occurs to Dyson that Summers’ critique of West may be more political than anything else.

Editorials & Actions

The World Happiness Report

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The Path to Happiness: Lessons from the 2015 World Happiness Report
by Jeffrey Sachs
April 23, 2015

Getting richer but not happier: It’s a familiar story, for people and for nations. The purpose of the World Happiness Report, now in its third edition for 2015, is to remind governments, civil society, and individuals that income alone cannot secure our well-being. True happiness depends on social capital, not just financial capital. The evidence is straightforward. Around the world Gallup International asks people about their satisfaction with life.

Climate Change

A Real Solution to Environmental Sustainability

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As long as corporations have a fiduciary responsibility to maximize the investments of their stockholders, they have no choice but to make profits their “bottom line.” But we are promoting a New Bottom Line, so that every corporation, government policy, our legal system, health care system, educational system, and every other major system is judged efficient, rational and productive to the extent that they maximize love and caring, environmental sustainability and responsibility, ethical behavior and generosity, and our capacities to respond to the Earth with radical amazement, of which we are an important part.

Editorials & Actions

Only a sweeping Constitutional Amendment Can Save the Environment–Here IT IS

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A Real Solution to Environmental Sustainability

by Rabbi Michael Lerner

 

Only a sweeping Constitutional amendment can save us from a global environmental disaster beyond our imagination. It’s time to sweep aside all the illusions:

* The illusion that the national environmental organizations have a secret plan to save the environment but just haven’t told us yet. * The illusion that local acts of environmental sanity in a few dozen urban areas will make a dent on the global degradation of the life-support-system of the planet. *  The illusion that “new technologies” will solve the problem. *  The illusion that individual acts of recycling and “conscious consumerism” will change what is being produced.

Editorials & Actions

Calling for a boycott of goods from the Israeli settlers is now against Israeli law

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Uri Avnery
April 18, 2015
 
                             “There Are Still Judges…”                                         
 
THIS WEEK I won a dubious distinction: a groundbreaking Supreme Court judgment has been named after me. It is an honor I would have gladly dispensed with. MY NAME appeared at the head of a list of applicants, associations and individuals, which asked the court to cancel a law enacted by the Knesset. Israel has no written constitution. This unusual situation arose right from the beginning of the state because David Ben-Gurion, a fierce secularist, could not achieve a compromise with the orthodox parties, which insisted that the Torah already is a constitution.

Editorials & Actions

This time it is not Israel responsible for Palestinian suffering–see the situation in Yarmouk, Syria

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Palestinians trapped dying in Yarmouk, Syria – a test for the left

If, as progressives, we truly care about injustices done to Palestinians, if our goal as leftists goes beyond expressing fury toward Israel, we must raise our voices every bit as forcefully, right now, to try to help the people of Yarmouk. By Bradley Burston

It was once the largest Palestinian community in Syria. Situated barely a few miles from President Bashar Assad’s palace in Damascus, the two square kilometers of the Yarmouk district were a de facto refugee camp, home to well over 100,000 people. But that was before the Syrian civil war made the camp into a battleground four years ago, before the Assad government besieged the camp for more than two years, and, most recently, before ISIS invaded it as a strategic prize, Syrian aircraft barrel-bombed it, and the 18,000 Palestinians left there have been trapped, slowly starving, vulnerable to disease, deadly crossfire, and the horrifying prospects of ISIS rule. Read Brad Burston’s insightful column in Ha’aretz at:  http://www.haaretz.com/blogs/a-special-place-in-hell/1.650850

2015

Human Evil

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Evil must be understood as the inability to see the humanity of others. Americans often justify our violence toward others by emphasizing their evil while ignoring our own.

Editorials & Actions

Islamic State Is the Cancer of Modern Capitalism by Nafeez Ahmed

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Islamic State is the Cancer of Modern Capitalism 

 
Nafeez Ahmed
March 27, 2015
Middle East Eye

The brutal ‘Islamic State’ is a symptom of a deepening crisis of civilisation premised on fossil fuel addiction, which is undermining Western hegemony and unraveling state power across the Muslim world. In Iraq and Syria, where IS was born, the devastation of society due to prolonged conflict cannot be underestimated. , AA,

Debate about the origins of the Islamic State (IS) has largely oscillated between two extreme perspectives. One blames the West. IS is nothing more than a predictable reaction to the occupation of Iraq, yet another result of Western foreign policy blowback.

Editorials & Actions

Uri Avnery from Tel Aviv: So What if the Iranians Got Nuclear Weapons?

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Editor’s Note: This thought experiment by Uri Avnery raises an important question for all those who are driven by fear of Iran having nuclear weapons, a fear that seems to increase precisely when Iran is negotiating a path to assure the West that it will not use its nuclear capacities to develop such a bomb. Uri Anveri, leader of the Israeli peace movement Gush Shalom, imagines the situation if the worst fears were true and this whole deal was a way to fool the West while Iran secretly developed its nuclear weapons. O.K. imagine if Iran had nuclear weapons. So what? His reasoning reminds us of how the West managed to marginalize those who called for an assault on Stalinist Russia once it had nuclear weapons.