Editorials & Actions

American Power at the Crossroads: a Snapshot of a Multipolar World in Action

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American Power at the Crossroads
A Snapshot of a Multipolar World in Action
By Dilip Hiro   and sent to us by our ally TomDispatch.com

In the strangest election year in recent American history — one in which the Libertarian Party’s Gary Johnson couldn’t even conjure up the name of a foreign leader he “admired” while Donald Trump remained intent on building his “fat, beautiful wall” and “taking” Iraq oil — the world may be out of focus for many Americans right now.  So a little introduction to the planet we actually inhabit is in order.  Welcome to a multipolar world.  One fact stands out: Earth is no longer the property of the globe’s “sole superpower.”

If you want proof, you can start by checking out Moscow’s recent role in reshaping the civil war in Syria and frustrating Washington’s agenda to overthrow President Bashar al-Assad.  And that’s just one of a number of developments that highlight America’s diminishing power globally in both the military and the diplomatic arenas.  On a peaceable note, consider the way China has successfully launched the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank as a rival to the World Bank, not to speak of its implementation of a plan to link numerous countries in Asia and Europe to China in a vast multinational transportation and pipeline network it grandly calls the One Belt and One Road system, or the New Silk Road project.  In such developments, one can see ways in which the previously overwhelming economic power of the U.S. is gradually being challenged and curtailed internationally. Moscow Calling the Shots in Syria

The Moscow-Washington agreement of September 10th on Syria, reached after 10 months of hard bargaining and now in shambles after another broken truce, had one crucial if little noted aspect. For the first time since the Soviet Union imploded, Russia managed to put itself on the same diplomatic footing as the U.S. As Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov commented, “This is not the end of the road… just the beginning of our new relations” with Washington. Even though those relations are now in a state of suspension and exacerbation, it’s indisputable that the Kremlin’s limited military intervention in Syria was tailored to achieve a multiplier effect, yielding returns both in that war-ravaged, devastated land and in international diplomacy.

Editorials & Actions

Jacob Neusner: In Memoriam by Shaul Magid

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Jacob Neunser: In Memoriam

Shaul Magid,

Indiana University/Bloomington

Jacob Neunser (1932-2016) died early shabbat morning of Shabbat Shuva, the Shabbat between Rosh Ha-Shana and Yom Kippur. The New York Times called him the most published individual in history. In his excellent book, Jacob Neusner: An American Jewish Iconoclast (NYU Press, 2016) Aaron Hughes suggests he is the greatest Jewish scholar of Judaism born in the United States. Whether either of these claims are true, and they are certainly reasonably so, he was surely one of the most towering figures in the study of Judaism in the past half century. An irascible and often difficult personality, Jacob Neusner could also be extremely generous toward those with whom he shared mutual interest.

Editorials & Actions

Philip Cushman on Rosh Hashanah 2016

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Rosh Hashanah, 2016

Philip Cushman

 
       The Akedah, the Binding of Isaac, is one of the most disturbing stories in the Hebrew Bible.  In it, Abraham was instructed by what he thought was God’s voice to make a human sacrifice of his son, Isaac.  At the last second, God interceded, speaking through a malach, an angel, to stop him.  Predictably, the midrashic rabbis of late antiquity devoted many stories to its interpretation.  What are we to make of it?  And why was this passage of all passages chosen, on this the beginning of the Days of Awe, for us to read and wrestle with?          Erich Fromm, a 20th century philosopher and psychoanalyst ¾ and not coincidentally a former yeshiva buchar ¾ reminds us that the stories in the Hebrew Bible are not prescriptive, they are descriptive; they describe and demonstrate understandings of God, humans, and the relation betweeen the two.  For instance, the Garden of Eden story is not in Jewish tradition a theory about Original Sin, and it is not thought to be a Fall (as it is in Christian traditions).  Instead, Fromm teaches, it is a story about how animals became human: in some mysterious way, humans gained the capacity to be conscious, to know the difference between good and evil, thus aquiring the ability to notice the separateness between people, feel vulnerable, and make moral choices.  Similarly, the Akedah can be interpreted as a story about how humans came to confront and then forbid  the hideousness of human sacrifice.   There are, of course, many many prescriptions in the Torah, but for the most part, mercifully, the mythopoeic stories in Beresheet are not.          The Akedah to this day has much to teach us about the folly of communities and parents who sacrifice their children because of some well-meaning but tragically flawed fantasy.

Editorials & Actions

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.

Editorials & Actions

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.

Editorials & Actions

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.

Editorials & Actions

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?”

Editorials & Actions

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.

Editorials & Actions

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.

Editorials & Actions

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.

Editorials & Actions

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!

Editorials & Actions

Bombs Åway: The Continuing Impact of 9/11

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Bombs Away! 
Their Precision Weaponry and Ours 
By Tom Engelhardt    Thanks to TomDispatch.com our ally

On the morning of September 11, 2001, al-Qaeda launched its four-plane air force against the United States. On board were its precision weapons: 19 suicidal hijackers. One of those planes, thanks to the resistance of its passengers, crashed in a Pennsylvania field.  The other three hit their targets — the two towers of the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. — with the kind of “precision” we now associate with the laser-guided weaponry of the U.S. Air Force. From its opening salvo, in other words, this conflict has been an air war. With its 75% success rate, al-Qaeda’s 9/11 mission was a historic triumph, accurately striking three out of what assumedly were its four chosen targets.  (Though no one knows just where that plane in Pennsylvania was heading, undoubtedly it was either the Capitol or the White House to complete the taking out of the icons of American financial, military, and political power.)  In the process, almost 3,000 people who had no idea they were in the bombsights of an obscure movement on the other side of the planet were slaughtered.

Editorials & Actions

Preparing to Repent?

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Elul, the month before Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, has traditionally been a time to prepare for teshuva (repentance, self and world transformation, returning to one’s highest self). In preparation, we will be providing a variety of “takes” on this process. We also invite those who do not have a spiritual home to consider attending Rabbi Lerner’s High Holiday services–info available at www.beyttikkun.org/highholidays.  And if you have a poem, prayer, or thought piece that you feel would benefit others in this process, send it to RabbiLerner.tikkun@gmail.com (he might use it at the Beyt Tikkun service or, space allowing, on our website).  
Ron Hirsch

Reflections on Yom Kippur and Mideast Peace

As Jews around the world observe Yom Kippur, at levels of ritual observance ranging from the Haridim at the Wailing Wall to a reform temple in the U.S. Midwest to those who do not go to synagogue but in some way observe the Day of Atonement, it is important for each individual, for Israel, and for the world that the observance go deeper than even the most fervent practice of ritual and belief.  

For Yom Kippur to have its intended impact, each person must understand and experience the spiritual lessons and meaning of Yom Kippur.  What are those lessons?

Editorials & Actions

Interview with Jill Stein, Green Party Candidate for U.S. President

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Conducted by Tikkun Editor Rabbi Michael Lerner and Tikkun Managing Editor Ari Bloomekatz in August, 2016. __

JILL STEIN

I’m feeling so much appreciation for your work here as I look over some of your website and some of the really important things you’ve been talking about forever.  

RABBI LERNER

Thanks you, Jill. As you know, Tikkun is a 501-c-3 nonprofit, and contributions to make Tikkun able to continue to function are tax-deductible. So we are not allowed by IRS rules to endorse a candidate or be identified with a candidate or, a political party.

Editorials & Actions

Leonardo Boff on the Brazilian Impeachment–what it’s all about

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The impeachment of a dignified and innocent President by a mentally and financially corrupt pack 

Leonardo Boff

   Theologian-Philosopher
          Earthcharter Commission 

Once upon a time there was a nation that was great in terms of her territory and her cheerful people who, nevertheless, were unjustly treated. The people suffered misery mostly in the great peripheries of the cities and deep in the interior of the country. For centuries it had been governed by a small wealthy elite, who never cared about the fate of the poor. As a mulatto historian put it, the people was socially«castrated and castrated again; bled and bled again». But slowly Brazil’s poor began to organize, in every type of movement, accumulating social power and nourishing a dream of a different Brazil.