Editorials & Actions

The Iraq War Disastrous Surge

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A note from Tom Engelhardt, the editor of Tikkun’s  media ally TomDispatch.com where this article appeared orignally. Every now and then, I think back to the millions of people who turned out in this country and across the globe in early 2003 to protest the coming invasion of Iraq.  Until the recentWomen’s March against Donald Trump, that may have been the largest set of demonstrations in American history or, at the very least, the largest against a war that had yet to be launched.  Those who participated will remember that the protests were also a sea of homemade signs, some sardonic (“Remember when presidents were smart and bombs were dumb?”), some blunt (“Contain Saddam — and Bush”), some pointed indeed (“Pre-emptive war is terrorism”). In one of those demonstrations, I was carrying a sign which read “The Bush administration is a material breach” (a reference to that crew’s insistence that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was in “material breach” of a U.N. resolution for not fully disclosing its efforts to produce weapons of mass destruction… you know, those non-existent nukes that were slated to create future mushroom clouds over American cities). There was even one humorous sign I noted then that seems relevant to our Dystrumpian moment and the president’s stated wishes to “keep” Iraqi oil: “How did USA’s oil get under Iraq’s sand?”

Editorials & Actions

Trump’s Greatest Allies Are the Liberal Elites (NY Times, etc)

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By Chris Hedges

March 06, 2017 “Information Clearing House” –  “Truth Dig” – The liberal elites, who bear significant responsibility for the death of our democracy, now hold themselves up as the saviors of the republic. They have embarked, despite their own corruption and their complicity in neoliberalism and the crimes of empire, on a self-righteous moral crusade to topple Donald Trump. It is quite a show. They attack Trump’s “lies,” denounce executive orders such as his travel ban as un-American and blame Trump’s election on Russia or FBI Director James Comey rather than the failed neoliberal policies they themselves advanced. Where was this moral outrage when our privacy was taken from us by the security and surveillance state, the criminals on Wall Street were bailed out, we were stripped of our civil liberties and 2.3 million men and women were packed into our prisons, most of them poor people of color?

Editorials & Actions

Response to Martha Sonnenberg’s Kaddish for Che

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March 6, 2017

Reader response to Martha Sonnenberg’s Kaddish for Che:

 
Querido Che: Che está Presente
by Nancy Scheper-Hughes

 

The spiritual and political afterlife of Che, like the afterlife of Jesus of Nazareth, begins with their brutal torture and deaths at the hands of ignorant soldiers, colonizing forces, and local collaborators. Both faced their capture and deaths with equanimity, gentleness, and love. Both were given opportunities to surrender and save themselves, but  both acquiesced to their fate, remained true to their beliefs, and faced their executions with words of comfort and of love. Che: “I know you are here to kill me. Shoot, you are only going to kill a man… please, tell my wife to remarry and try to be happy.” Jesus: “Father forgive them for they know not what they do”.

Editorials & Actions

Anti-Semitism is Back…and Wont Go Away

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Tikkun  to heal, repair and transform the world

 

By Rabbi Michael Lerner

 

Suddenly anti-Semitism is back. Over one hundred headstones in a Jewish cemetery in Philadelphia were overturned in a hate act early Sunday February 26, a week after a similar assault on a Jewish cemetery in Missouri.  Since the election of Donald Trump there have been hundreds of incidents of bomb threats to Jewish institutions, 20 more on Monday February 27th, along with college campuses reporting a dramatic rise in anti-Semitic graffiti.  

President Trump is reported to have followed alt-Right conspiracy theorists in suggesting in an off-the-record briefing that these might be false flag operations coming from Jews who are seeking to build sympathy and reclaim our victim status.  

Jewish leaders around the country are calling upon President Trump to order a full-scale investigation of this surge in acts designed to frighten Jews. Unfortunately, they have been facing some indifference from a media and public which have been overdosed with cries of anti-Semitism.

Editorials & Actions

Trump Using Typical War Propaganda

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Trump’s Use of Navy SEAL’s Wife Highlights All the Key Ingredients of U.S. War Propaganda

http://portside.org/2017-03-02/trumps-use-navy-seals-wife-highlights-all-key-ingredients-us-war-propaganda 

PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION

This is standard fare in U.S. war propaganda: We fixate on the Americans killed, learning their names and life stories and the plight of their spouses and parents, but steadfastly ignore the innocent people the U.S. government kills, whose numbers are always far greater.  

Glenn Greenwald

The Intercept

March 1, 2017

 

During his Tuesday night address to the U.S. Congress, President Trump paid tribute to Ryan Owens, the Navy SEAL killed in the January commando raid in Yemen that Trump ordered. As he did so, television cameras focused for almost four full minutes on Owens’s grieving wife, Carryn, as she wept and applauded while sitting next to and periodically being touched by Trump’s glamorous daughter Ivanka. The entire chamber stood together in sustained applause, with Trump interjecting scripted, lyrical expressions of support and gratitude for her husband’s sacrifice. It was, as intended, an obviously powerful TV moment.

Editorials & Actions

Uri Avnery– The Great Rift Between the 2 Jewish Peoples

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Editor’s note: Though I fully agree with Uri Avnery’s depiction of 2 Jewish peoples, I disagree that it can be understood best in terms of ethnic background. Rather, it reflects two different worldviews, delineated in my book The Left Hand of God, and applied specifically to Israel in my book Embracing Israel/Palestine. That same split is reflected in the 70% of American Jews who voted for Hillary and the 20% who voted for Trump.  Many of the fearful, the haters, the traumatized and retraumatizing from the 1800 years of powerlessness and the oppression they experienced in Christian Europe and to a lesser but still real extent in Muslim countries, have become “modern Orthodox” rightwing on politics and also on Jewish practice, but secular neo-cons follow the same path of indifference to the suffering of others. The West Bank settlers are led by Ashkenazim, and if the Israeli left was not so much in bed with upper middle class economic privilege, they would have created a left party that was not only for peace and the rights of minorities, but also for economic and social justice for the working class and economically deprived.

Editorials & Actions

The Fear and the Passion

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Editor’s note: Here is a perspective from the U.K. which presents an overview of how some British Muslim progressives are trying to make sense of Trumpism, the British exit from the UK’s previous integration into the Common Market, and the growth of right-wing movements manipulated by elites of wealth and power.  

The Fear and the Passion

By Tahir Abbas

Since the inauguration of President Trump, barely a month ago, many people around the world have been deeply disturbed by his many negative utterances, provocative put-downs of other countries, and by the people he has appointed to run major elements of the American government. The result has been a global outcry among women, the young, minorities and liberal-minded people at the narcissism and self-centred nature of much of President Trump’s limited but impactful words. Right-wing extremists have felt empowered by a form of triumphalism reflected in Trump’s repeated theme ‘to make America great again’. The impact this has on minority communities of all backgrounds, but especially among Muslim and Jewish groups, are painfully felt. In this short essay, I explore the depth of this upset and discuss what it means for communities with shared norms who would otherwise not be allied.

Editorials & Actions

Trumpaclysm

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From our media ally TomDispatch.com
The Art of the Trumpaclysm 
How the U.S. Invaded, Occupied, and Remade Itself 
By Tom Engelhardt
It’s been epic! A cast of thousands! (Hundreds? Tens?) A spectacular production that, five weeks after opening on every screen of any sort in America (and possibly the world), shows no sign of ending. What a hit it’s been! It’s driving people back to newspapers (online, if not in print) and ensuring that our everyday companions, the 24/7 cable news shows, never lack for “breaking news” or audiences.

Editorials & Actions

Inequality

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INEQUALITY IS NOT JUST AN ECONOMIC ISSUE, BUT A HUMAN RIGHTS ISSUE. EXTREME INEQUALITY IS THE ANTITHESIS OF HUMAN RIGHTS(Philip Alston)
[Taken from ‘From Disparity to Dignity: Tackling Economic Inequality Through the SDGs’, Human Rights Policy Brief, CESR, November 2016. I found this briefing to be a gold mine of what I call iron laws. I wanted to share them with you in case you have not had the opportunity to read the full document –which I highly recommend. I do apologize for the length and compactness of this Reader].

US_Politics

A Cry of Pain From Standing Rock

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Introductory note From Rabbi Michael Lerner, Editor, Tikkun:

Last night I received an urgent call from a spokesperson for the courageous Water Protectors at Standing Rock. In pain and shock, they reported vicious assaults on them even as they planned to depart their camp where they held their months-long attempt to protect the waters near their homes from corporate forces who decided to build a pipeline that will likely pollute the Native Americans’ water supply. As I listened, my eyes filled with tears and my heart ached as I recognized that we in the U.S. are once again betraying Native Americans, remnants of a people who were the victims of US genocide for the past several hundred years. The media has been largely ignoring their ongoing efforts and current atrocities. We spiritual progressives need to insist that US and global media give much more attention to this story, even as we recognize that the level of outrageous actions and positions taken by the Trump Administration have unleashed violent acts by individuals against people of color, Muslims, and Jews that rightly commands media attention as well.

Editorials & Actions

US Hypocrisy on Yemen

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By Jonathan Marshall

Only a few months ago, interventionists were demanding a militant response by Washington to what George Soros branded “a humanitarian catastrophe of historic proportions” — the killing of “hundreds of people” by Russian and Syrian government bombing of rebel-held neighborhoods in the city of Aleppo. Billionaire currency speculator George Soros. (Photo credit: georgesoros.com)
Leon Wieseltier, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and former New Republiceditor, was denouncing the Obama administration as “a bystander to the greatest atrocity of our time,” asserting that its failure to “act against evil in Aleppo” was like tolerating “the evil in Auschwitz.”

How strange, then, that so many of the same “humanitarian” voices have been so quiet of late about the continued killing of many more innocent people in Yemen, where tens of thousands of civilians have died and 12 million people face famine. More than a thousand children die each week from preventable diseases related to malnutrition and systematic attacks on the country’s food infrastructure by a Saudi-led military coalition, which aims to impose a regime friendly to Riyadh over the whole country. “The U.S. silence has been deafening,” said Philippe Bolopion, deputy director for global advocacy at Human Rights Watch, last summer.

Editorials & Actions

Pence at Dachau Concentration Camp: Not Merely Hypocritical

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Editor’s Note:  The Israeli right and their allies in the U.S. have used the technique of bringing young people to Nazi concentration camps as a way of communicating them the message “this is why Israel must be given blind support–because without it, we will again be mass murdered.” Now will Netanyahu’s American allies in the Trump Administration follow Vice President Pence and use supposedly pious visits to concentration camps to legitimate their oppressive policies–meanwhile not publicly chastising their own supporters who have engaged in antiSemitic, racist, homophobic, Islamophobic, sexist,  and xenophobic acts and discourse (how could they chastise these when the former publisher of our country’s most open to these attitudes alt-right  Breitbart News media is now Trump’s primary White House advisor?). We in the liberal and progressive world should hold our own commemorations of the Holocaust, and talk honestly about the causes that led to the Holocaust and the ways that the memory of the Holocaust is now being misused by the elites of power and their favorite bullies and contemporary inheritors of Hitler’s logic: the belief in power over ethics, which is really a way of saying, the overthrow of God or spiritual and religious consciousness and embracing the notion that might makes right (alas, already flourishing in some corners of the religious world). So we at Beyt Tikkun Synagogue-Without-Walls will sponsor such a gathering in the San Francisco Bay Area Sunday April 23rd, 2017–and if we can find someone who will live-stream it, we will make it available to you for whatever it costs us to do that. Meanwhile, please read Warren Blumenfeld’s powerful article below on Pence’s visit to Dachau.

Editorials & Actions

Trying to take down Trump for his failure to support a new Cold War with Russia. Why?

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https://consortiumnews.com/ 2017/02/15/progressives-pile- on-flynns-ouster/

Consortium News       February 15, 2017

Progressives Pile on Flynn’s Ouster

President Trump is so despised by progressives that many are rallying behind neocon-driven demands for a New McCarthyism to silence those who object to a costly and dangerous New Cold War. They are in effect making an alliance with the most war-mongering parts of the U.S. establishment. They are, in effect, buttressing incredibly dubious notions of U.S. victimhood and demonizing official enemies with the result of increasing U.S. militarism and the likelihood for confrontation with the other nation that could destroy the planet a hundred times over. By Sam Husseini

Many liberals and so-called progressives are stoked that President Trump’s National Security Advisor, Michael Flynn, resigned over accusations surrounding his discussions with a Russian ambassador while Trump was president-elect. Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-California

Congressional Democrats want to use this to go after Trump. Rep. Nancy Pelosi: “After Flynn resignation, FBI must accelerate its investigation of the Trump Administration’s Russian connection.” Even before Flynn’s resignation, Rep. Maxine Waters did a segment on “Democracy Now:” “Trump Should Be Impeached If He Colluded with Russians Ahead of Election.”

There’s certainly reasons to want to see Flynn go — he recently put Iran “on notice” while the White House tried to gin up the case against Iran.

Editorials & Actions

Trump as Narcissist

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Editor’s note: The article below by MIchael Brenner, cleverly presenting an argument for why Trump should be analyzed as a clinical narcissist,* is not atypical of the kinds of analyses that have been floating around on the internet. Brenner is obviously a talented thinker and  his reasoning at many points is solid.     Nevertheless, I believe the direction of this and other similar responses to Trump is deeply misguided, even if 1000% accurate, for the following reasons:

1. . I strongly oppose attempts by people to use psychiatric diagnoses to stigmatize the public actions of public figures.

Editorials & Actions

The Case for a Progressive Version of Patriotism while Fighting Trumpism

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Editor’s Note:  From the start of Tikkun magazine close to 31 years ago, we’ve been trying to convince people on the Left that we should be embracing and celebrating all that is good in the U.S. even as we critique what is not. Lets understand its appeal both in the U.S. and around the world as a compensation for what is so hurtful in the global impact of capitalist consciousness. The center of capitalist ideology is its self-justifactory fantasy that the system is based on a meritocracy, so that those who are making it are successful solely because they deserve that success. The hurtful consequence is that most people who haven’t “made it” are taught that this is their own fault–and that causes great deal of pain for a large swath of people who end up blaming themselves, not understanding that it is the whole class structure that guarantees that only a small section of people will ever move up the class ladder. No wonder that they turn to right wing forms of  religion and nationalism, because in those communities they are accepted as valuable just because they are a creation of God (in the religious world) or as a member of nation x, y or z (in the world of nationalism).