America to Working Class Whites: Drop Dead! by Barbara Ehrenreich December 1, 2015.
Editorials & Actions
Top Ten Differences Between White Terrorists and Others
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Juan Cole on the Top Ten Differences Between White Terrorists and Others
1. White terrorists are called “gunmen.” What does that even mean? A person with a gun? Wouldn’t that be, like, everyone in the US? Other terrorists are called, like, “terrorists.”
2. White terrorists are “troubled loners.” Other terrorists are always suspected of being part of a global plot, even when they are obviously troubled loners. 3. Doing a study on the danger of white terrorists at the Department of Homeland Security will get you sidelined by angry white Congressmen. Doing studies on other kinds of terrorists is a guaranteed promotion. 4. The family of a white terrorist is interviewed, weeping as they wonder where he went wrong. The families of other terrorists are almost never interviewed. Advertisement
5. White terrorists are part of a “fringe.” Other terrorists are apparently mainstream.
Editorials & Actions
Bernie Sanders’ Immigration Plan
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Editor’s Note: Tikkun does not endorse any candidate or political party–we are not allowed to do so as a 501-c-3 nonprofit. But we do from time to time present alternative perspectives on candidates or parties and on the stances that they take on various pressing issues. The New York Times recently praised the immigration ideas of Bernie Sanders, a U.S. Senator seeking the Democratic Party nomination for President. So we went to his website to get the following version of that plan.–Rabbi Michael Lerner
A Fair and Humane Immigration Policy
BACKGROUND
We are a nation of immigrants. I am proud to be the son of an immigrant.
Editorials & Actions
Has the US Been Responsible for Millions of Deaths Since World War II ?
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Editor’s Note: In the article below, the author claims that the U.S. has been responsible for 20 millions deaths since World War II. I’m doubtful about this claim, but also believe that we all have a responsibility to do the research to find out what part of this claim is true and what part an unfair extension of U.S. responsibility. If the claim extends to giving the U.S. responsibility for every death caused by a country to which the U.S. gave arms and military support, there may be a stronger case than I’d care to believe. On the other hand, I do believe that we in the U.S., by allowing the almost unchecked spread of weapons inside the U.S., have some level of responsibility when a small percentage of our citizens use those arms against each other to wound or kill. Extending this principle internationally may extend the area of our responsibility.
Editorials & Actions
How Canadians are Dealing with the Refugee Crisis
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How Canada is Dealing with the Refugees
by John Trent
A little while ago, Rabbi Michael Lerner wrote to U.S. citizens via Tikkum to encourage them to:
“Please call your Senators to tell them you Welcome Syrian Refugees and urge them to vote “NO” if a bill comes to the Senate for a vote to make it more stringent to accept refugees from Syria and Iraq to the US. Refugees coming to the US are already subject to lengthy, stringent clearance requirements. In the busyness of preparing for the holidays, let us not forget these are people who have lost everything. Imagine being bombed and having no place to go, and one after another country saying “we do not want you.” It is winter, it is cold, and many are sleeping outside, waiting at the borders of several European countries …and we live in the wealthiest country in the world and can afford to take in a significant number of the homeless. And “no,” these refugees do not present a danger to the general public–we already have careful policies in place to ensure that we would not be accepting people who are ISIS operatives intent on hurting us.”
So, for the sake of comparison, what is going on with the neighbours in Canada? During the past 10 years, the Conservative Government of Stephen Harper had gradually cut back the number of refugees accepted by Canada. In the past few years it accepted very few Syrian refugees. They seemed to have some reason for disliking them, because each year Canada takes in more than 200,000 immigrants and refugees.
Editorials & Actions
Syrian Refugees and the Holocaust: a discussion to enliven your Thanksgiving celebration
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Editor’s Note: Want to energize the discussion at whatever Thanksgiving celebration you are having or are attending? here’s a conversation piece you could read or send out in advance along with the piece I sent you Tuesday evening about how to make your Thanksgiving more meaningful spiritually.And I can’t help but feeling proud of American Jews who seem to be overwhelmingly rallying against the xenophobia that has swept much of America in the form of wanting to block Syrian refugees from coming to the U.S. From the Holocasut Museum and the Orthodox Union to Tikkun and the Jewish Renewal movement, Jews are strongly lining up against the xenophobes and supporting the opening of our doors ot Syrian refugees. Here is an important discussion piece for Thanksgiving by Elizabeth Heineman that shows the complexities involved in invoking the Holocaust to make one’s points about any particular contemporary reality. –Rabbi Michael Lerner
When Holocaust Memory Misfires
by Elizabeth Heineman
They splash up on my Facebook feed with predictable regularity: reminders of the link between anti-refugee sentiment and the Holocaust. The story of the MS St. Louis, which carried Jewish refugees across the Atlantic only to be turned back to Europe, where many of its passengers were slaughtered.
Editorials & Actions
How YOU Could Help the Syrian Refugees
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Please call your Senators to tell them you Welcome Syrian Refugees and urge them to vote “NO” if a bill comes to the Senate for a vote to make it more stringent to accept refugees from Syria and Iraq to the US. You can call the Capitol Switchboard but do it soon at 202 224-3121. If you do not know the names of your two senators, just give the Capitol operator your state and you will be connected. You can also call their state offices by googling them to get the phone number. Many of them will be in their home states over Thanksgiving and might be in their state offices on the Friday after Thanksgiving.
Refugees coming to the US are already subject to lengthy, stringent clearance requirements. In the busyness of preparing for the holidays, let us not forget these are people who have lost everything. Imagine being bombed and having no place to go, and one after another country saying “we do not want you.” It is winter, it is cold, and many are sleeping outside, waiting at the borders of several European countries.
Editorials & Actions
Free Leonard Peltier
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Editor’s note: President Obama, you freed Jonathan Pollard, as we at Tikkun had been calling for for several decades though we oppose his politics and worry that he may someday turn violent against us in the peace movement. There is no such danger from Leonard Peltier. Please free him now as a Thanksgiving gift to the world–Rabbi Michael Lerner
Free Leonard Peltier
by John Iverson
This Thanksgiving Day there will be prayers and a rally at the White House for Leonard Peltier. We ask Obama review the case for clemency of Anishinabe-Lakota political prisoner Leonard Peltier. If the President can pardon a turkey he can surely look at facts and free Leonard
In 1973 I participated in the Wounded Knee occupation for seven weeks.
Editorials & Actions
After Paris: A World That Has Lost Its Ethical Direction
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AFTER PARIS: A World That Has Lost Its Ethical Direction & Spiritual Foundation and a Media that Cheerleads for Fear and Militarism
By Rabbi Michael Lerner
For many years, we at Tikkun and the Network of Spiritual Progressives have warned that the domination and power-over strategies to achieve “homeland security” have been tried for over 7,000 years and all they have produced is more wars and violence, interspersed with short periods of peace that have, with the help of the sensationalist and natioanlist media and professional apologists for the existing inequalities, managed to hide from public view the degree of covert structural violence that every system of inequality and domination embodies. (Please read Cynthia Moe-Lobeda’s important study Resisting Structural Evil–Love as Ecological-Economic Vocation published by Fortress Press to get a full understanding of how deeply our own daily lives in Western societies are built on the exploitation and impoverishment of people around the world). We have called for a new approach to “homeland security”—the Strategy of Generosity, as manifested in part in our proposed Global Marshall Plan (please download the full version and read it at www.tikkun.org/gmp). Until the powerful countries of the world are seen as mainly driven by a desire to care for the well-being of everyone else on the planet and the wellbeing of the planet itself, and care not only out of self-interest but also out of a new consciousness in which we all come to truly understand our mutual interdependence and oneness, what we saw in Paris this past week is destined to be an increasing reality in the coming decades. The Global Marshall Plan we support would have the U.S. take the leadership with the advanced industrial countries of the world in working with local communities throughout the developing world, donating 1-2% of our Gross Domestic Product each year for the next twenty to once and for all end (not must ameliorate) global poverty, hunger, homelessness, inadequate education, and inadequate health care–and repair the damage done to the environment of 150 years of irresponsible forms of economic development sponsored by colonial and imperialist and materialist oriented capitalist, socialist and communist societies alike.
Editorials & Actions
Kissinger the War Criminal
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Editor’s Note: From time to time I will be posting articles here from TomDispatch. http://www.tomdispatch.com, a very wonderful website run by Tom Engelhardt who works with The Nation magazine. Sometimes I will include commentary from Tom Engelhnardt about the piece he has chosen to highlight, sometimes just the article itself. In the article on Kissinger below, you will first find Engelhardt’s comment, then the article about Kissinger by Greg Grandin. This piece seemed particularly appropirate to put on our Tikkun website on Kristallnacht annviersary–the anniversarly of the 1938 assault on Jews by Nazis that moved the fascist attack from racist discrimination to widespread violence against Jews in Germany on November 9-10 1938. Henry Kissinger wears his Jewish identity proudly, yet played an important role in the genocidal war against the Vietnamese, a war that I personally struggled aginst (eventually ending up in federal penitentiary for my non-violent role the anti-war movement).
Editorials & Actions
Hillary Clinton on the Need to Reaffirm Unbreakable Bond With Israel
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Editor’s note: Not everyone is rejoicing at Hillary Clinton’s choice to embrace the Israeli government
at the moment when Prime Minister Netanyahu meets with President Obama. See below Hillary’s statement the statement from one prominent Israeli critic of the Occupation. How I Would Reaffirm Unbreakable Bond With Israel — and Benjamin Netanyahu
Hillary Clinton
November 4, 2015
We have recently marked the 20th anniversary of the assassination of then Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, a good friend, a courageous warrior and a great statesman. This somber anniversary, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to Washington on November 9, is an opportunity to reaffirm the unbreakable bonds of friendship and unity between the people and governments of the United States and Israel. The alliance between our two nations transcends politics.
Editorials & Actions
Dissecting Obama’s Most Recent TPP Lies
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Dissecting Obama’s Most Recent TPP Lies
EDUCATE! BARACK OBAMA, TPP
By Dean Baker, www.cepr.net
October 21st, 2015
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Above Photo: From PopularResistance.org. The early signals from the Obama administration are that the nonsense will be flowing fast and thick in its effort to push the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). We got an indication of the level of the nonsense factor in a CNN article reporting on the administration’s efforts to promote the still secret agreement. CNN cites a column that President Obama had in a New Hampshire newspaper that told readers:
“…trade is a substantial driver of New Hampshire’s economy. Over 20,000 American jobs are currently supported by goods exports from New Hampshire, with 32 percent of Made in New Hampshire goods exports shipped to TPP partners.”
What exactly does it mean for over 20,000 New Hampshire jobs to be supported by exports?
Editorials & Actions
The Assault on Youth in the U.S.
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Henry Giroux on:
Youth in an Authoritarian Age: Challenging the politics of disposability:
Following the insight of Hannah Arendt, a leading political theorist of mid-20th century totalitarianism, a dark cloud of political and ethical ignorance has descended upon the United States. (1) Thoughtlessness, a primary condition of authoritarian rule, now occupies a privileged, if not celebrated, place in the political landscape and the mainstream cultural apparatuses. A new kind of infantilism now shapes daily life as adults gleefully take on the role of unthinking children, while children are pushed to be adults, stripped of their innocence and subject to a range of disciplinary pressures that saddle them with debt and cripple their ability to be imaginative. (2)
Under such circumstances, agency devolves into a mind-numbing anti-intellectualism evident in the banalities produced by Fox News infotainment and celebrity culture, and in the blinding rage produced by populist politicians who support creationism, argue against climate change and rail against immigration, the rights of women, public service workers, gay people and countless others. There is more at work here than a lethal form of intellectual, political and emotional infantilism. There is also a catastrophe of indifference and inattentiveness that breeds flirtations with irrationality, fuels the spectacle of violence, creates an embodied incapacity and promotes the withering of public life. To read more articles by Henry A. Giroux and other authors in the Public Intellectual Project, click here.
Editorials & Actions
Michael Nagler on the Gun Culture
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A Very Convenient Truth
by Michael N. Nagler
Modern scientists recognize the potency of thought…as a man thinks so does he become. MK Gandhi
THERE ARE TIMES when you can see a familiar scene with fresh eyes. I had just returned to the U.S. when I found myself in a definitely familiar scene: a local shopping center. The night before I had been on a transatlantic flight where I kept catching glimpses, despite myself, of four private viewing screens shimmering in front of my nearest fellow passengers on the long flight home. They sat there watching ten hours of uninterrupted violence: fights, machine guns, wild explosions – all four of them. You have to wonder, what does that do to a person’s mind? You have to wonder, exactly, because in the barrage of detail that floods over us in response to “the latest massacre” you will never hear it mentioned.
2015
The Problem is that Life is Imperfect
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The best way to achieve Mr. Gabel’s noble goals is, first, to recognize what can and cannot be accomplished by the various decision-making institutions in our society, and then to try to equip them to perform optimally in their areas of influence.