Editorials & Actions

Meet Violence with Love

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Love can triumph–but only if we militantly pursue a society based on love. By militantly I mean, without apology and without self-doubt, but fully committed to changing every economic, political and social institution with The New Bottom Line: love, kindness, generosity, environmental sanity and justice, and awe/wonder/and radical amazement at the grandeur and preciousness of every human being and all of Nature. This thought stimulated by the horrible killings in the Middle East and the ongoing agony of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and blockade of Gaza while hundreds of thousands of people remain homeless and hungry, and the daily use of drone attacks and bombings by the US government around the world. So, I thought to reprint an article I got on email today from Alistair McIntosh from Scotland, along with the author’s note. -Rabbi Michael Lerner

Dear Michael, the following, which promotes your work at Tikkun as an example of hope, will be appearing this afternoon on a Scottish website, Bella Caledonia.

Editorials & Actions

Yitzhak Frankenthal–an evening with the courageous creator of the Bereaved Parents in Jerusalem

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My name is Yitzhak Frankenthal, and I’m a religious, Israeli Zionist. On July 1994 my eldest son Arik died in combat with Hamas. Since then I have worked to promote peace and reconciliation. In early 1995 I was chosen as the secretary-general of the religious, Zionist movement “Oz VeShalom – Netivot Shalom,” which I managed for 3 years. That same year I established the “Parents Circle – Families Forum” for bereaved Israeli and Palestinian families that support peace and reconciliation, which I managed for 10 years.

Editorials & Actions

Yearning for a World of Love and Justice

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an introduction to the ideas of Tikkun and the NSP–Network of Spiritual Progressives

by Rabbi Michael Lerner, editor, Tikkun Magazine and co-chair of the NSP with Vandana Shiva
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

Updated version of Mourning the Parisian “Humorists” Yet Challenging the Hypocrisy of Western Media

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Mourning the Parisian “Humorists” Yet Challenging the Hypocrisy of Western Media
by Rabbi Michael Lerner
 

As the editor of a progressive Jewish and interfaith magazine that has often articulated views that have prompted condemnation from both Right and Left, I had good reason to be scared by the murders of fellow journalists in Paris. Having won the 2014 “Magazine of the Year” Award from the Religion Newswriters Association, and having been critical of Hamas’ attempts to bomb Israeli cities this past summer (even while being equally critical of Israel’s rampage against civilians in Gaza), I have good reason to worry if this prominence raises the chances of being a target for Islamic extremists. But then again, I had to wonder about the way the massacre in Paris is being depicted and framed by the Western media as a horrendous threat to Western civilization, freedom of speech and freedom of the press, I wondered about the over-heated nature of this description. It didn’t take me long to understand how problematic that framing really is. When right-wing “pro-Israel” fanatics frequently sent me death threats, physically attacked my house and painted on the gates statements about me being “a Nazi” or “a self-hating Jew,” and called in bomb threats to Tikkun, the magazine I edit, there was no attention given to this by the media, no cries of “our civilization depends on freedom of the press” or demands to hunt down those involved (the FBI and police received our complaints, but never reported back to us about what they were doing to protect us or find the assailants).

Editorials & Actions

The Tragedy of Selma

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The Tragedy of “Selma”

URL: http://www.truth-out.org/buzzflash/commentary/selma-is-a-brilliant-riveting-film-but-racism-is-still-a-powerful-force-in-the-us

STEVEN JONAS FOR BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT

(Photo: Peter Pettus)

 

The “Tragedy of Selma?” you might ask.  Wasn’t it a triumph for the civil rights movement?  Did it not lead to further advances in that struggle?  And if you are referring to the movie, is it not a triumph as well, getting a film that portrays one of the signal struggles of the Movement during the 60s with such searing honesty, no holds barred in dealing with the “Which side are you on?” question, applied to this event?  Well, yes, the Selma March was a triumph for the civil rights movement.  It played a very important role in getting/helping Lyndon Johnson to support what became the Voting Rights Act.  (More on the “role-of-LBJ” controversy later.)  It did lead to further advances in that struggle.  The movie is a triumph as well, a brilliantly staged and acted docu-drama which, among other things, uses the real Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, AL as the setting for the real march that took place across it in 1865. (One has to wonder if the photographer, Peter Pettus, see above, was a relative of Edmund Pettus.)

 

Ironically enough, the bridge is named for a Confederate Brigadier General, who later, operating out of his law office(!), became the leader of the Alabama Ku Klux Klan in Selma and went on to become a U.S. Senator from Alabama.  This is particularly ironic in the context of the Voting Rights Act and the struggle to enact it.  The Ku Klux Klan was founded very shortly after the end of the First Civil War by an association of ex-Confederate generals, planters, certain Democratic politicians, and other white leadership who wanted to return the civil society in the South as much as possible to what it had been before the First Civil War, with the exception of not having the institution of chattel slavery in place.  (On the Klan, see also pp. 425-44 in Prof. Eric Foner’s magnum opus,Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, Harper and Row, 1988.)

 

One of the principal objectives of the Klan, from the earliest days of its founding, was to prevent the newly freed slaves from the exercising the right to vote that had been granted to them by the 14th (1868) and 15th(1870) Amendments to the Constitution.  The language of the latter is particularly instructive: “1. The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.  2. The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.”  But with the power first of the Klan, with the ever-spreading denial of the vote to African-Americans, and then with the institution over a period of some years of what was called the “Jim Crow” laws by the Democratic Party in the South, African-Americans were indeed systematically denied the right that had being guaranteed to them by the 15th amendment.

Editorials & Actions

Uri Avneri on What Is Zionism?

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Uri Avnery

January 31, 2015

 

                                    Zionists All

 

MANY TIMES people ask me: “Are you a Zionist?”  

My stock answer is: “Depends on what you mean by Zionism.”  

This is quite sincere. The term Zionism can mean many different things. Like the term socialism, for example.

Editorials & Actions

Reflections on the Movie “Selma”

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Thoughts about the greatness of Selma, truth, black and white unity, King and the clamor of racist patriarchs…  by Alan Gilbert

    The movie “Selma,” directed by Ava DuVernay, is a subtle, restrained account of a period of  the most extreme American violence against black people, focused on the leadership and struggles of Martin and Coretta King as well as the many who joined them in Selma and around the country.   The experience DuVernay conjures, for instance, the horrific shooting of Jimmie Lee Jackson in a restaurant in Selma,  his father’s grieving at the coroner’s office, Jimmie’s body seen through the glass and King’s compassion, is alive today in the movement Black Lives Matter! about the murders of  Eric Garner and Tamir Rice and Mike Brown and Trayvon Martin… ***

      The director sought to capture many people from the civil rights movement.  In immersing herself in the words of the time and employing extras from Selma today, she aimed to find the truth and did.  For the movie vividly captures the greatness and difficulties of the mass nonviolent civil rights movement, the most admirable way of doing social change that America, along with Tolstoy and Gandhi, has yet given to the world (John Brown is, in certain ways, a greater figure than King; King in the final two speeches, one to John Doar, a Johnson attorney, and one at the state capitol in Montgomery, both written for him by DuVernay, insists “Mine eyes have seen the glory.” There is  a resonance of King’s last speech in Memphis about longevity and the mountain top as well as of the original song, the marching song of the North in the Civil War, “John Brown’s Body lies a mouldering in the grave” (the words were written over by Julia Ward Howe – the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” was largely fostered  to tame the memory of John Brown – but the original power still lives in them…)

***

Much pivots today on whether mass nonviolent campaigns from below, revealed in this film, offer a way out for a humanity threatened by endless war and climate change. ***

     Coretta speaks of the death that was  always near. DuVernay, in the second scene in the movie, follows the little girls accompanied by a boy on the steps going down to the Church basement in Birmingham, talking about their hair and the last talking about how Coretta King does hers…

***
     DuVernay is an extraordinary film maker, and this is a woman’s (and a documentarist’s, a  psychologist’s) way of seeing these moments of terrible violence.

Culture

Chris Hedges on the movie “American Sniper”

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Editor’s note: While we at Tikkun do not feel it fair to blame Christianity or imply that all Christians somehow implicitly support the kind of Christianity that leads some American Christians to feel that their murdering of Arabs or Muslims is doing Jesus’ work, and want to remind our readers (before reading Chris Hedges piece below)  of the many progressive Christians who join the Network of Spiritual Progressives and other organization that oppose the US “Strategy of Domination” and instead identify with Tikkun’s Strategy of Generosity (as manifested in our proposed Domestic and Global Marshall Plan (please re-read it by downloading the full version at www.tikkun.org/gmp), we do think that Hedges’ powerful critique of the move American Sniper should be read by those who are too willing to forgive the American media for its implicit and sometimes explicit glorification of the US military. And shame on President Obama and liberal Democrats for not having stopped (what was at first just Bush’s)  war in Iraq when they had control of both houses of Congress and the presidency 2009 and 2010, instead backing a “surge” and providing the background and equipment that eventually led to ISIS and all its cruel perversions and murderous ruthlessness. But since it is always Tikkun’s task to find a compassionate angle from which to view people with whom we disagree, I need to put in a word for the decency and humanity of all the players in this complex picture of humanity that we face today, without letting the compassion stop us from making judgments about the violent behavior and cheerleading for that violence that has become so destructive in the contemporary world. –Rabbi Michael Lerner   rabbilerner.tikkun@gmail.com

 

Killing Ragheads for Jesus

By Chris Hedges

January 26, 2015 “ICH” –   “American Sniper” lionizes the most despicable aspects of U.S. society—the gun culture, the blind adoration of the military, the belief that we have an innate right as a “Christian” nation to exterminate the “lesser breeds” of the earth, a grotesque hypermasculinity that banishes compassion and pity, a denial of inconvenient facts and historical truth, and a belittling of critical thinking and artistic expression. Many Americans, especially white Americans trapped in a stagnant economy and a dysfunctional political system, yearn for the supposed moral renewal and rigid, militarized control the movie venerates.

Christianity

Re-inventing the Church by Berit Kjos

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Below I’m presenting the view of what I take to be a reactionary writer who resists all the changes that have taken place in the Christian world’s thinking in the past 150 years. What I find intriguing is that her arguments are really against ethical relativism–and on that point I agree with her, particularly how that relativism becomes a slippery slope toward subordination to the capitalist marketplace and its ideals (though she doesn’t make that point even while quoting from market mystifiers like Drucker). What she completely misses, and thereby distorts, is that many of the modernizers of the church whom she is resisting were actually doing precisely what Jeremiah (whom he quotes) advocated–a return to the old ways of the Bible. The major critique of liberation theology is that the old fashioned Church that has been under assault in the modern era was itself an abandonment of the Bible and its old ways–its powerful call for social justice and care for the poor that the Church and most other established religions have managed to honor more in solemn intoning of those values than in actually living them. So the modern liberation theologians, and their current embodiment in Pope Francis, are the ones who are rejecting the accommodation of the Church to the realities of the powerful (the principalities) and insisting on a return to the (implicitly) Jewish ethics that call for redistribution of wealth every fifty years (the Jubillee) and forgiving of all debts every seven years, and of “loving the stranger” (which in today’s world means everyone on the planet, not just your own nation or religion).

Editorials & Actions

Internship with Rabbi Lerner at Tikkun

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Heal and Transform the World INTERNSHIP with Tikkun Magazine and the NSP interfaith and secular-humanist and atheist-welcoming Network of Spiritual Progressives a few blocks from the UC Berkeley Campus.  

Are you worried about climate change and upset about how the destruction of our environment is threatening our collective future? Are you outraged by the amount of power that corporations and the top 1% of wealthy people have over U.S. politics and our lives? Do you want to build a future in which “homeland security” is achieved through ending global poverty rather than through the military invasion of other countries? If so, come intern with Tikkun magazine’s Network of Spiritual Progressives (NSP), an interfaith organization that is also welcoming to “spiritual but not religious” atheists and agnostics.

Israel/Palestine

HaTikva slate for the World Zionist Conference

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Editor’s Note: When I received a phone call from my cousin Larry Lerner whom I deeply esteem asking me to be part of the slate of HaTikvah for the World Zionist Conference in Jerusalem, I had to decline. Though I am pro-Israel and brought my son to high school in Israel and supported him by living in Israel while he was serving in the IDF, I am equally pro-Palestine and have never described myself as a Zionist, so how could I become a delegate to this convention? Moreover, upon reading their platform, I know that I’ve been a strong critic of the Israeli Labor Party and its failure to attempt to educate Israelis about what kind of a peace settlement would actually work, much less endorsed anything like the one I’ve proposed in my book Embracing Israel/Palestine (which you can order at www.tikkun.org/eip). I am particularly unhappy with all those Jewish organizations which oppose the Occupation of the West Bank solely on “Jewish self-interest” grounds without ever really addressing the ethical issues involved in that Occupation causing so much pain and violence to the Palestinian people.  When the Torah commands us to “love the stranger” and “do not oppress the stranger,” it must be read today as applying to the Palestinian people—and Meretz and the Labor Party should say that clearly in their platform.

Editorials & Actions

Environmental Crisis Puts Human Life on Earth at Risk

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The ESRA–Environmental and Social Responsibility Amendment to the US Constitution could provide the most effective way to block this environmental destructiveness. Please check it out at www.tikkun.org/esra

Environment

Rate of environmental degradation puts life on Earth at risk, say scientists

The view from the Amazon Tall Tower Observatory in the middle of the Amazon forest. Researchers say that of the nine processes needed to sustain life on Earth, four have exceeded “safe” levels. Photograph: Reuters  

Oliver Mi 

Thursday 15 January 2015 14.00 EST

Humans are “eating away at our own life support systems” at a rate unseen in the past 10,000 years by degrading land and freshwater systems, emitting greenhouse gases and releasing vast amounts of agricultural chemicals into the environment, new research has found. Two major new studies by an international team of researchers have pinpointed the key factors that ensure a livable planet for humans, with stark results.Of nine worldwide processes that underpin life on Earth, four have exceeded “safe” levels – human-driven climate change, loss of biosphere integrity, land system change and the high level of phosphorus and nitrogen flowing into the oceans due to fertiliser use.Researchers spent five years identifying these core components of a planet suitable for human life, using the long-term average state of each measure to provide a baseline for the analysis.They found that the changes of the last 60 years are unprecedented in the previous 10,000 years, a period in which the world has had a relatively stable climate and human civilisation has advanced significantly.Carbon dioxide levels, at 395.5 parts per million, are at historic highs, while loss of biosphere integrity is resulting in species becoming extinct at a rate more than 100 times faster than the previous norm.

Editorials & Actions

Tariq Ali: France Tries to Hide Its Islamophobia Behind Secular Values

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‘France Tries To Mask Its Islamophobia Behind Secular Values’

The Pakistan-born British commentator seldom minces words. PRANAY SHARMA INTERVIEWS TARIQ ALI

 
Pakistan-born British commentator Tariq Ali seldom minces words. As a political activist, journalist, writer and film-maker, he has cou­rted controversy and ruffled many feathers. But over the years he has also built up a huge base of followers and admirers much beyond London, where he stays. The firebrand leader of the 1960s campus movement, now all of 71, shows no signs of mellowing with age.