Tikkun Daily Blog Archive (https://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/author/tikkun-admin/page/73/)
The Mother’s Day that we celebrate now started in West Virginia as a day of reconciliation after the Civil War. Anna Reeves Jarvis wanted a day that would bring together families and neighbors who had fought on different sides during the war. It was considered a “Mother’s Day Friendship Day.”
We now have an MP3 recording of Monday’s Tikkun Phone Forum discussion with Tony Klug available for you to listen to here. Tony Klug wrote the article in the new issue of Tikkun “Are Israeli Policies Entrenching Anti-Semitism Worldwide.” The discussion was between 2 and 3 AM in the night in England but he sounds extremely coherent. Jack Lampl, the volunteer who edited the recording, called it “A really excellent conversation!” So I think you will think so too.
The phones have been ringing off the hook here as word spreads of the threatening intrusion upon our editor’s home. It’s heartening to hear some empathetic voices after weathering the days of hate mail that followed Tikkun’s decision to present an award to Judge Goldstone for standing up for human rights in Israel/Palestine. Sometime late last night or in the wee hours of the morning, vandals glued threatening posters to Rabbi Lerner’s door and around his home. Some posters attacked Lerner personally; others targeted liberals and progressives more generally, accusing them of supporting terrorism and “Islamo-fascism.” Here’s an excerpt from the statement that he and his assistant Will Pasley sent out via email this afternoon:
They posted a printed bumper sticker saying “fight terror — support Israel” next to a caricature of Judge Goldstone whose UN report on Israel’s human rights violations in its attack on Gaza last year has been denounced as anti-Semitic and pro-terror by right wingers in Israel and the U.S. The caricature has Goldstone talking about his being kept from his grandson’s bar mitzvah, and the caricature of Rabbi Lerner responds by saying “any enemy of Israel is a friend of mine” …
UC Berkeley’s student senate is set to vote once more this Wednesday, April 28, on a bill to divest from two companies that materially and militarily support the Israeli government’s occupation of the Palestinian territories. Yesterday Michael Lerner posted on the diversity of opinion among peace activists on this issue. Today I want to share a piece submitted to Tikkun Daily by Matthew A. Taylor, a Peace and Conflict Studies student and member of Jewish Voice for Peace who is currently on leave from UC Berkeley. As a member of Students for Justice in Palestine, the group that is promoting the bill on campus, Taylor argues with urgency and deep emotion for the bill and explains what those in support of the divestment effort can do to help before the vote tomorrow evening. When Will the University of California Stop Funding War Crimes Against Palestinian Civilians?
When it comes to establishing a just and lasting peace in Israel/Palestine, should we let the perfect be the enemy of the good? Does a “good” peace even satisfy minimum human rights requirements? Can and should we negotiate with regimes with despicable human rights records in order to ensure regional peace in the Middle East? I take up these questions–some explicitly, others implied–in what follows, where I call for the Obama Administration to engage in a sustained diplomatic push with Syria and Israel in order to create the conditions for the eventual establishment of a Palestinian state. The Israeli-Arab conflict has inflamed the Middle East for half a century, and negotiations aimed towards the creation of a Palestinian state have stalled.
You’ve probably noticed the absurd spectacle – and resulting media feeding frenzy – of a Muslim “group” in New York making a barely veiled threat to the creators of “South Park” for (almost) portraying Muhammad and causing the episode to be censored.
As Hussein Rashid rightly emphasizes in his observations in Religion Dispatches, these inane provocations don’t come from an Islamic “group”. To hear the breathless media coverage you’d think this a call to arms from jihadi leaders on American soil, when this duo is far more Beavis and Butt-Head than Osama Bin Laden and Ayman Zawahiri.
Herb Kohl has been one of the most influential writers on progressive education during the last forty years. His has been one of the leading voices encouraging teachers to get beyond the stereotypes they may have about the types of children in their classrooms. Here’s an evocative piece he just sent me about connecting with the natural world, and with some people he found himself close to stereotyping. My Blue Heron
By Herbert Kohl
Where I live it is impossible to own the night. It owns you, swallows you, surrounds you outside of the beam of your flashlight, hints at nocturnal life, awakenings, silences punctuated by the last cries of owls and the first of ravens and jays. I love to get up before the sun and walk to my study when it is dark, when there is no moon or when the waxing and waning moon tints the trees silver and yellow.
I need to say more than I said yesterday about what is deeply wrong with this statement of Krugman’s:
If ours were a preindustrial, primarily agricultural society, extreme climate change would be obviously catastrophic. But we have an advanced economy, the kind that has historically shown great ability to adapt to changed circumstances. But first, I don’t want to be a doom-monger or to have Tikkun Daily too associated with predictions of doom. For reasons I don’t understand, but that are deep in Christian culture especially, European cultures have a strong affinity to predictions of doom. These seem to me to be connected to a dark view of human nature, as embodied in the Christian doctrine of original sin (which is not held by Jews or Muslims).
There seems to be general praise from environmental blogs for Krugman’s major article on the economics of dealing with climate change in last Sunday’s New York Times. Krugman accepts the climate scientists’ consensus about the dangers of global warming and argues that it will actually be relatively cheap to prevent the worst of it happening. It’s been a hard week for me to do any research on this, with getting our next issue to press. So I haven’t had time to hunt around much and find anyone else having the same reaction I did to the article. Which was: Do Krugman and I live in the same planet as regards the effects of a nine degree rise in temperature by 2100?
One of the rationales for the war in Afghanistan is that under the Taliban it was a state that oppressed women and denied them their freedoms. Unquestionably, the Taliban government did deny many of the freedoms that women have won in the west and that are now taken for granted: the freedom to vote, to be educated, to dress as they choose. But freedom is a tricky concept: in some countries, such as Australia one isn’t free not to vote – it is compulsory and there are fines if one doesn’t. In all countries children (or their parents) aren’t free to choose to not be educated – up to a certain age they have to be in school. And increasingly, women are free to not wear a niqab (a veil that obscures their faces) – but they aren’t free to choose to wear one. Freedom is peculiar when it only allows you to make whatever choice the state wants.