Police Assaults on African American Women: Close Encounters of a Dangerous Kind by Rev. Daniel Buford

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Close Encounters of the Dangerous Kind :

Unarmed Women, Girls of African Descent and Violent Police Encounters- Arbitrary Punishments, Detentions, Killings, Torture, Extra Judicial Punishments, Summary Executions 1982-2015

Complied by Daniel A. Buford, Executive Director

Meiklejohn Civil Liberties Institute Berkeley, CA

September 3, 2016

The list is a compilation of thirty cases of unarmed African women and female children and the violent encounters they experienced at the hands of law enforcement agencies from every region of the United States. This list is an excerpt of a “Shadow Report” that I am in the process of preparing to be submitted to the United Nations human rights treaty bodies over the next five years of periodic treaty review in New York and Geneva, Switzerland. Cases that are listed here are noteworthy in the current national discussions about the Black Lives Matter movement. While most of the Black Lives Matter discussions and media attention have focused on the foul law enforcement treatment accorded to African American men and boys, very little attention or scrutiny is being devoted to the alarming numbers of African American women and girls who are often treated even worse than Black men in unarmed encounters with police officers. An example of this is the rough physical treatment that mothers, girls, and pregnant women experience.

Obama screws chances for peace with his unprecedented $38 billion military aid package to Israel

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Unprecedented Ten-Year, $38 Billion Military Aid To Israel Is Harmful To Both Countries

THE UNPRECEDENTED TEN-YEAR $380 BILLION MILITARY AID PACKAGE FOR
ISRAEL IS HARMFUL TO BOTH COUNTRIES
                   BY
  ALLAN C. BROWNFELD
———————————————————————————————————–
In September, the U.S. signed an unprecedented pact with Israel that will provide it with the largest amount of military aid ever awarded to any country—-$3.8 billion annually for ten years, with promises of the latest in fighter jets, missile defense systems and cutting-edge technology. All of this comes with no strings attached. The U.S., under both Republican and Democratic administrations, has held that Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem are in violation of international law and an impediment to peace. The U.S. has  always advocated a two-state solution, with the establishment of a Palestinian state in the occupied territories. The Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu has escalated its settlement activity, and prominent voices in the Israeli government reject the two-state solution and call for annexing the occupied territories.

There Oughta Be a Law… Should Prison Really Be the American Way? By Rebecca Gordon

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Editor’s note: Here is another piece from our ally TomDispatch.com by Rebecca Gordon  with an introduction by Tom Engelhardt. To understand America, you have to understand the “friendly fascism” that already exists for a section of the population that regularly rotates through our criminal justice system. –Rabbi Michael Lerner

The figures boggle the mind.  Approximately 11 million Americans cycle through our jails and prisons each year (including a vast “pre-trial population” of those arrested and not convicted and those who simply can’t make bail).  At any moment, according to the Prison Policy Initiative, there are more than 2.3 million people in our “1,719 state prisons, 102 federal prisons, 942 juvenile correctional facilities, 3,283 local jails, and 79 Indian Country jails as well as in military prisons, immigration detention facilities, civil commitment centers, and prisons in the U.S. territories.”  In some parts of the country, there are more people in jail than at college. If you want a partial explanation for this, keep in mind that there are cities in this country that register more arrests for minor infractions each year than inhabitants. Take Ferguson, Missouri, now mainly known as the home of Michael Brown, the unarmed black teenager shot and killed in 2014 by a town policeman.

Henry Giroux on the Pathology of Politics in our Warfare State

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Editor’s note: Living as we do in the 15th year of the war that began with Afghanistan and Iraq and has now spread to Syria, Yemen, Libya, etc. it is sometimes possible for many of us to accept the militarization of our society as just normal. When I first read Henry Giroux’s article sent to Tikkun this morning I thought, “wow, he is over the top this time.” Then I realized that the problem was how much I myself have gotten used to the bizarre develpments that have happened in American politics. In an article I sent out earlier this morning from Tom Engelhardt I read and shook my head at the ways that the Obama administration has moved from its original promise to seek a world without nukes to planning a trillion dollar modernizaiton of our nuclear arsenal and just thought, “oh well, that’s just another part of Obama’s consistent abandonment of the ideals he promised, so why should I be shocked?”

American World of Frustration by Tom Engelhardt

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Editor’s note: As Jews enter the High Holiday season (Rosh HaShanah, Oct 2nd eve,  the beginning of ten days of reflection on our lives and how far we may have strayed from our own highest values), it is also a period of reflection on our communal “sins” (actually, the Jewish concept of “sin” is that of thinking of ourselves as an arrow aimed at a target of being the most loving and compassionate and generous person we could possibly be, but which has now gone slightly off course and is missing the target, so the period from Rosh HaShanah through Yom Kippur, Oct. 12, is one of trying to get that arrow back on course, a mid-course correction, a soul tune-up). Part of that process is getting a clearer sense of where our society has gone astray. In the article below, in a tone that reflects deep frustration, our ally Tom Engelhardt takes on some of the dimensions of where we have missed the mark, by not really holding accountable the political leadership that we helped elect. The point, of course, is not to make ourselves feel bad, but to think of steps that we must take to correct where our society has gone astray.

Berlin’s recent election: Omen of What is to Come?

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Editor’s Note: Our correspondent from Berlin gives us a picture of the dangerous rise of fascistic and racist forces and the problems faced by a splintering Left. Might this be a warning sign for politics in all the capitalist countries in the coming decades?  To understand his analysis, remember that the Linke party is probably the most progressive in Germany, next most are the Greens, and the SPD (social democrats) are much like the Democratic party in the U.S.

BERLIN AND OMENS
Victor Grossman

2016 September 22
There is currently too much dramatic news abroad in the world, mostly bad.  What can an election in one single city mean, far from most fronts? Yet the voting in Berlin last Sunday (September 18th) was full of drama and meaning, also outside Germany. The results caused some to grieve, some to applaud and analysts like soothsayers to turn to arithmetic.

Decoding the Federal Budget by Jeffrey Sachs

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Editor’s Note: So many people avoid thinking about the federal budget because they didn’t do so well in math in high school and so thinking about it brings up feelings of inadequacy. Others avoid it because the details can become so boring and take so much energy. But read this one article by Jeffrey Sachs and you’ll see that a. you CAN understand it, and b. that it is crucial to understand to know what is really going on in American politics. Of course, what is missing so far is a strategy for how to change all this–but that is the focus of our “What Next for Progressives After the Elections?” day at the Tikkun 30th anniversary conference and celebration (more details at www.tikkun.org/30thcelebration  Please do read this article below.

Toward the Next Jewish Rebellion: Facing Anti-Semitism and Assimilation in the Movement

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A brief note to the reader: I’ve been writing this piece for a year and a half. I’ve thought a lot about how complicated it is to share something like this in a time of such upheaval — in a country where an unarmed Black person is murdered by cops practically every day, at a time when our movement is in a period of intense grieving and fierce uprising around this and so many other life and death struggles. What I didn’t expect, however, was that folks would be actively talking about anti-Semitism in the movement at exactly the time I wanted to publish this. The brilliant and powerful Vision for Black Lives and the responses to it from a dozen different directions have put debate about anti-Semitism back on the Facebook feeds of many of my movement partners and friends. It’s important to me to be clear that this piece is not a response to those events or statements.

Now What? After the Presidential Election – The Tikkun Strategy Conference and 30th Anniversary Celebration in Berkeley, Ca. Nov. 12 and 13

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Click here to register. Now What—After the Election? Join Us for Tikkun’s Strategy Conference and 30th Anniversary Celebration

November 12th and 13th in Berkeley, CA (Co-Sponsered by the Metta Center for Nonviolence)!  

What: A two-day strategy conference for liberals and progressives about what direction the left should take after the results of the November election and a ceremony on Sunday to give out the Tikkun Award to a few of the many people whose lives are embodying Tikkun’s message of global healing and transformation. This year’s awards feature noted peace activist and singer Holly Near, award-winning filmmaker Oliver Stone (most recently, the new movie “Snowden”), Rabbi Arik Ascherman (for 21 years chair of Rabbis for Human Rights), Stanford history professor and editor of the Martin Luther King Jr. Papers Clayborne Carson, cultural anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Aaron Davidman (creator of “Wrestling with Jerusalem”), Fania E. Davis (co-founder and executive director of Restorative Justice for Oakland Youth), and more!