Editorials & Actions

Why the Nuclear Agreement with Iran is a Good Deal

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 A Good Deal, a Long Time Coming  by Scott Ritter

Posted: 04/02/2015 7:29 pm EDT Updated: 2 hours ago

The deal recently concluded between Iran and the so-called “P-5 plus 1” nations (the United States, Great Britain, France, Russia, China and Germany) is designed to prevent Iran from being able to rapidly acquire fissile material in quantities suitable for use in a nuclear weapon. According to President Obama, the agreement is a “good deal” that “shuts down Iran’s path to a bomb.” The devil is in the details, of course, which won’t be finalized until June 30, but at first blush the deal emerging out of Switzerland accomplishes that which it was intended to. Critics maintain that Iran will be able to readily defeat restrictions imposed by the deal in order to realize its nuclear aspirations. The key to any agreement will lie in the verification measures implemented to ensure compliance.

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The Tikkun Passover Seder Supplement

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We understand God in part as the Transformative Power of the Universe – the force that makes possible the transformation from that which is to that which ought to be, the force that permeates every ounce of Being and unites all in one transcendent and imminent reality. And you are welcome at our Seder even if you think all of this makes no sense and there is no God.

Editorials & Actions

Henry Giroux on Hysterical Authoritarianism: Terrorism, Violence and the Culture of Madness

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Editor’s Note:

Henry Giroux’s picture of America presents a society that would be rather depressing if it were the whole picture. What it leaves out is the irrepressible desire of human beings to live in a world of love and generosity, kindness and environmental sanity. While he talks of Americans’ attraction to violence as an entertainment, I think of it more likely as a response to the frustration of their desires for a different kind of world, anger at themselves for allowing themselves to even think about an alternative given the constant preaching of everyone to everyone that one must be “realistic” and accept that the exploitative, materialistic and selfishness oriented social world cannot be changed or transcended, and then relieving that self-punishing anger by externalizing it against societally-sanctioned targets,  namely the “others” who the society finds convenient to disempower and oppress. This othering can be challenged, but only by a movement that does not deal with the American public as hopelessly bamboozled by the existing entertainments, but as themselves suffering and deserving of empathy as a first step toward a process of liberation from the dominant consciousness and opening toward an alternative. That development of a counter-consciousness is precisely the goal of The Network of Spiritual Progressives, and the point of the Global Marshall Plan www.tikkun.org/gmp, the ESRA Environmental and Social Responsibility Amendment www.tikkun.org and the “New Bottom Line”  www.tikkun.org/newsite/yearning-for-a-world-of-love-and-justice-2 is to provide us with concrete ways to raise this new consciousness through struggles that can only be won when people become attracted to the idea of breaking through the repressive consciousness of contemporary political reality and embracing the seemingly utopian visions inherent in the Tikkun/NSP programs. Yet so much of what Giroux points to is true that it is important to read this article, and then re-read this introduction to see where you end up in this discussion.

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“Let the Palestinian People Go”: What Younger Jews Will Be Asking of Israel at Passover Seder This Year

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What makes this year’s Passover Seders unlike any others is that a majority of American Jews have been forced to face the fact that Palestinians today are asking Jews what Moses asked Pharaoh: “Let my people go.” The Israeli elections, and subsequent support for Prime Minister Netanyahu’s open racism and obstinate refusal to help create a Palestinian state, is not playing well with many younger Jews, and they will be challenging their elders to rethink their blind support for Israeli policies.

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A Palestinian is “Relieved” that Netanyahu Won–it Helps BDS

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ALI ABUNIMAH’S BLOG

Why I’m relieved Netanyahu won

Submitted by Ali Abunimah on Wed, 03/18/2015 – 12:59

netanyahu-congress.jpg

Benjamin Netanyahu speaks to the US Congress, 3 March. (Caleb Smith/Flickr)

Many had hoped that Benjamin Netanyahu would be defeated in yesterday’s Israeli election. I was not one of them. Many had already written him off – pre-election polls showed his Likud Party lagging behind the allegedly center-left Zionist Union, headed by Yitzhak Herzog and Tzipi Livni. But I kept in mind the 1996 election where Netanyahu was universally thought to be the loser well after the votes had been cast.

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By Separating Nature from Economics, we have walked blindly into tragedy– by Jeffrey Sachs

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By separating nature from economics, we have walked blindly into tragedy

Jeffrey Sachs           March 10, 2015

Recent news brings yet another example of hubris followed by crisis followed by tragedy. The hubris is our ongoing neglect of human-induced climate change, leading to climate disruptions around the world. One of the many climate crises currently under way is the mega-drought in São Paulo, Brazil. The recent tragedy is an epidemic of dengue fever in the city, as mosquitos breed in the makeshift water tanks that have bought in to maintain supply through the drought. Welcome to ‘the age of sustainable development’.

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Benjamin Netanyahu’s Fantasy World

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Netanyahu’s speech to Congress was brilliantly deceitful because it played to the fantasies that Israeli propaganda and right wing militarists in the US have been popularizing for the past thirty years. The biggest fantasy: that we can coerce others through power over them to do what we consider in the best interests of the U.S. or Israel.

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Benjamin Netanyahu’s Fantasy World: A response to Netanyahu’s address to Congress

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You can read this online on Huffington Post’s home page Tuesday evening, March 3rd, here. Benjamin Netanyahu’s Fantasy World

by Rabbi Michael Lerner

“If you take out Saddam, Saddam’s regime, I guarantee you that it will have enormous positive reverberations on the region.” ~ Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu urging the US to invade Iraq in 2002. Netanyahu’s speech to Congress was brilliantly deceitful because it played to the fantasies that Israeli propaganda and right wing militarists in the US have been popularizing for the past thirty years. * The biggest fantasy: that we can coerce others through power over them to do what we consider in the best interests of the U.S. or Israel.

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Why Netanyahu is the Right Man to Address the U.S. Congress on Iran–by Yakov M. Rabkin

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by Yakov M. Rabkin, Netanya, Israel, March 2, 2015

Israel’s Prime Minister is well-placed to explain to the U.S. Congress the alleged danger of a nuclear Iran. After all, it was Israel and its allies in Washington who fabricated this issue to begin with. It is thus incumbent upon Mr. Netanyahu to try to give credence to that allegation even as U.S., European – and even Israeli – intelligence agencies agree that Iran is not trying to produce nuclear weapons. Some may remember that the claims that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction had come largely from the same people close to Israel’s right-wing Likud party.  

The role of this Likud lobby has been seminal in stirring the campaign against Iran.

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Revenge–the Unconscious Subtext of the Scroll of Purim by Michael Kagan, Jerusalem

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Revenge – the Unscrolling of Purim

MICHAEL KAGAN
February 24, 2015,  (reprinted with permission from The Times of Israel)

Michael Kagan
Michael Kagan is the author of the Holistic Haggadah (Urim), God’s Prayer (Albion-Andalus) and The King’s Messenger (Albion-Andalus Books)… [More]

What you’re about to read does not make pleasant reading. It defies the usual acceptance of Purim as the forces of good overcoming the forces of evil, of us against them, of the imminent destruction of the innocent by the wicked. It may appear that what I am about to describe comes from a desire to ruin the Purim spirit in a similar way that post-modern accounts of the Zionist endeavor have undermined the stories that we have grown up with. But my exploration is motivated by three simple questions that arose while listening to the recitation of the Megillah; questions that I had never asked before; questions that arise from the p’shat (literal) meaning of the text; questions that do not rely on imaginative midrash to answer; questions that bother me. Here they are:

Why does Mordechai refuse to bow down to Haman?

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NO, Mr. Netanyahu! We Will NOT Let You Drag the U.S. Into a Proxy War for Israel Against Iran — Sign the NY Times Ad

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We invite you to sign and contribute financial support to make this New York Times ad possible (go to tikkun.org/peaceproject to sign and donate to make this ad possible). Would you join us as a signer of the proposed full-page New York Timesad below? If so, please give us your name as you wish it to appear. You may also include a short institutional or organizational affiliation (for identification purposes only). This ad will only be possible if you and others donate generously (please stretch a little) to make it possible. Donate Now.

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Between Madness and Truth

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Between Madness and Truth:

 

What our inner trickster can teach us. From HaAretz By Gabriel Bukobza
Our socialization requires that we tame our impulses, but we pay a price for this suppression. That’s why cultures have created characters that live outside the conventions – for us to learn from. A fundamental stage in a child’s development is the ability to regulate bodily wastes. Understanding that the place for this is the toilet bowl and not the bed or elsewhere shows acceptance of the principles of reality. Being weaned from soiling and wetting symbolizes the onset of the internalization of the rules of culture – and particularly of the recognition of one of culture’s essential distinctions: between dirt and cleanliness. Anthropologist Mary Douglas noted in her book “Purity and Danger” that dirt is “matter out of place”: An egg on your plate is breakfast, but on your tie it is dirt.

Editorials & Actions

Uri Avnery on the Israel Elections in March

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Uri Avnery
February 7, 2015
                                                            Over Bottled
EVERYBODY KNOWS what the Israeli elections are about. The choice is stark: on the one side, the dream of a Greater Israel “from the sea to the river”, which would in practice be an apartheid state; on the other side, an end to the occupation and peace. Some would add a social choice: on the one side, the existing neoliberal state with the widest inequality in the industrialized world; on the other side, a social-democratic state of social solidarity. So is the country plastered with posters about war and peace, occupation and settlements, wages and the cost of living? Are TV programs full of them?