Tikkun Daily Blog Archive (https://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/category/politics/peacemaking/page/51/)
About war and efforts to bring about peace. About changing a foreign policy of domination to one of generosity.
This makes my week.
It turns out that some key right-wing bloggers (including Seth Mandel of Commentary) have been on the payroll of the anti-Semitic, gay-baiting and repressive government of Malaysia.
Douglas Bloomfield, who served as AIPAC’s chief lobbyist for more than a decade, reports this week that the lobby intends to insist that the United States not include Israel’s $3 billion grants package in the sequester that goes into effect today. Writing in the New York Jewish Week, Bloomfield says:
At a time when sequestration is about to take a big bite out of the Pentagon budget, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) will be sending thousands of its citizen lobbyists to Capitol Hill next week to make sure Israel is exempted from any spending cuts.
I saw “Zero Dark Thirty” a few weeks ago and then consumed the whole first season of “Homeland.” Don’t tell me what happens in season two. I love the suspense.
Sunday’s New York Times features an important piece that will serve to alert progressives and Democrats to the latest brand of right-wing provocateur: young zealots who are not “movement” conservatives but who move from pro-Israel activism to the right at large. Although they ally themselves with more traditional right-wingers, their central concern is Israel, and not so much Israel per se as supporting Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and the Israeli right. Although they stridently adopt traditional right-wing stands on the usual litmus issues, those are just window dressing. Their driving issue is Israel. The Times piece was occasioned by Goldfarb’s central role in promoting the line that Chuck Hagel is hostile to Israel.
Shout out, don’t hold back. Lift up your voice like a trumpet. The U.S. empire is the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today!
It took three vehicles to get to Jenin. The first and last were shared taxis that played pop music the whole way; the one in the middle was a bus driven by a handsome and solemn man with a big, religious beard, whose television played music videos memorializing martyrs. If the West Bank is shaped like an hourglass, Jenin is at the top of the upper bulb, where the sand is when it’s full. Thousands of years ago, the dusty city was named after its gardens, but more recently Ariel Sharon called it a “hornet’s nest of terrorism.”
I have to thank the National Jewish Democratic Council for enabling me to see the humor in the Israel lobby’s scorched earth campaign against the nomination of former Senator Chuck Hagel to be Secretary of Defense .Yes, I know that the lobby has officially declared itself neutral in the Hagel fight but (1), it is the source of all the propaganda being used against Hagel and (2), if it did not want thisunprecedentedattack against him to continue, it could just order its Senate cutouts to cease-and-desist just as it dictates the positions they take on any and all matters relating to the Middle East.
I swore I was not going to write about the gun debate that has followed the latest mass murder. It seemed an exercise in futility. Trying to convince people that they are wrong on gun control is like trying to influence their views on abortion. Attitudes and opinions are fixed on the issue. There is little chance that one more opinion will change them. Recently, the conversation took an interesting turn, one that is new to the ongoing debate on gun control. The idea that we have to have personal weapons to fight our own government went from being a fringe idea to a mainstream argument, defended by conservatives and many pro-second amendment liberals.
When the Gaza war began in November 2012, American Jews’ lack of an embracing moral language, a language that could acknowledge all viewpoints, sufferings, terrors, humanity, became painfully obvious. To speak of the civilians dying in Gaza was, to many American Jews, to attack Israel and deny its legitimate rights to exist and defend itself from missiles. We seemed to have no language in which we could speak both of Israeli families huddling in bomb shelters as far north as Jerusalem and children crawling through Gaza rubble. Indeed, to judge by the anguished, enraged Facebook and Twitter exchanges I saw, we didn’t even have a language in which we could acknowledge and address the feelings and perspectives boiling among American Jews.
The movie title, “Lore,” refers to the eponymous strong-willed but idealistic teenager, who tries to lead her four young siblings to safety at their grandmother’s house, through the lawless, war-ravaged landscape of a German nation totally defeated in 1945. Her physical trek triggers an inner journey of an impressionable young person on the edge of adulthood who suddenly confronts a brutal reality denied her previously by die-hard Nazi parents. We gradually see her shed the Nazi faith she grew up with, and recoil against the ugly hatefulness of the people around her.