Editorials & Actions

Right Wing Forces Gaining Strength in Germany

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From Tikkun’s Berlin Correspondent Victor Grossman

 

BLUE SKY IN HAMBURG AND PIE IN HANOVER
Berlin  June 6  2016

I’ll begin with a happy report. The Hamburg group of “Fighters and Friends of the Spanish Republic 1936-1939” had its annual get-together in late May, again honoring those bravest of the brave men women who risked and often lost their lives fighting for democracy in Spain. Only a handful survive, none at all in the USA, Germany or Austria, but a video greeting from Gert Hoffmann in Vienna, who came to these meetings until shortly before his death, was especially moving. A boat trip around the harbor and a visit to a seaman’s club hidden in the amazing labyrinth of piers and channels in the giant port facilities, with a fine worker’s choir and militant songs, offered chances for German and foreign participants to exchange ideas on past and present. There was a fascinating mix of accents of people from Wales, Scotland, Ireland, various regions of England and the USA and that of the good German translator.

Editorials & Actions

Muhammad Ali Memorial: Rabbi Lerner Invited to Speak

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Rabbi Lerner Invited to Speak at Muhammad Ali’s Memorial Service

It has been several decades since Rabbi Lerner worked with Muhammad Ali in the peace movement challenging the Vietnam War. The US government indicted both of them for their nonviolent actions against that war. But that was many decades ago. So imagine his surprise to receive a call on Sunday morning from Muhammad Ali’s family who invited him to be a speaker at the funeral/memorial ceremony this coming Friday in Louisville, Kentucky. Although Ali was famous as the boxing heavyweight champion of the world, he was most beloved and respected because he gave up that title and refused to serve in the war in Vietnam.

Editorials & Actions

Bernie is Israel’s Best Friend in 2016

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 As a non-profit, Tikkun magazine does NOT endorse any candidate or political party. Nor does Rabbi Lerner. This article is a response to distorted media coverage of  Sanders’ appointment of prominent progressives to the Democratic Party’s Platform Committee whom the NY Times, the Jewish Forward and other media are describing as anti-Israel. Some of our readers support Bernie Sanders, some support Hillary Clinton, some support Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein, and there may be other candidates that some of our readers support. This article is not meant to enter into that debate, but only to challenge the media coverage of Sanders on Israel.

Editorials & Actions

Brazil: How Capitalist Institutions Undermined a Populist Regime

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Editor’s Note: This article shows how near impossible it is to sustain a populist regime without dismantling the institutions of global capitalist society. In sober and careful analysis of what happened in Brazil, the author shows how the compromises and being “realistic” with existing power relations in capitalist society finally undermined the very noble intentions of seemingly radical reformers. Before the Coup: 13 Years Under Lula, Dilma and the PT (Partido dos Trabalhadores), 2003–2015

 

MATTHEW J. MEDRANO·TUESDAY, MAY 24, 2016

 

The following is meant to serve as an exhaustive overview and analysis of what transpired under the PT (Workers’ Party) administrations of Luís Inácio Lula da Silva (2003-06 and 2007-10) and Dilma Rousseff (2011-14 and 2015-2016) prior to the May 2016 parliamentary “soft” coup that removed Dilma from office (the fallout will be covered at the end with updates). With regard to the data included below, one cannot stress enough the fact that both achievements and contradictions should not be underestimated (nor, in the former’s case, exaggerated either). Romanticization is antithetical to properly grasping things at the root.

Editorials & Actions

Victor Wechsler-Grossman on Refugees–our correspondent from Berlin

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The Refugee Crisis
WHO IS TO BLAME, May 12 2016  
Back in 1963 Bob Dylan (soon to be 75) wrote a bitter song; Pete Seeger also sang it often. It asks, after the death of a young boxer: “Who killed Davey Moore? How come he died, and what’s the reason for?” Then came the alibis of all those responsible, from the manager and media to the boxing crowds: “Not I… Don’t point your little finger at me.” Europe today, though not dead, is in deep disarray, heart-rendingly for very many and menacingly for the world. Here, too, one might inquire: How come? Who is to blame?

Editorials & Actions

Anvery and Lerner on Israel Independence Day 2016

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Tikkun  to heal, repair and transform the world

A note from Rabbi Michael Lerner
Join or Donate Now!  

 

Editor’s Note:

It was 47 years ago that Mario Savio (the great orator of the Free Speech Movement) and I chose Israel Independence Day to hold a rally at Sproul Hall on the campus of the University of California in Berkeley, Ca. to release a statement we had just completed calling for the creation of a two state solution (this was two years after Israel had conquered and Israeli right-wing-religious-extremists begun to occupy the West Bank and Gaza after the 1967 “Six Days War”). When Judaism magazine published that statement a year later, the editor Steven Schwarzschild was forced out of his job by the American Jewish Congress which had been a champion of free speech until that free speech included challenging the policies of the State of Israel in its magazine. Today, very few younger Jews in the US celebrate Yom Ha’atz’ma’ut, much less proclaim (as the official prayer for the State of Israel created by the Chief Rabbis of Israel states) that Israel is “the beginning of the flourishing of our redemption.”

Editorials & Actions

Not Another Dark Holocaust Poem (by Renna Ulvang)

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Not Another Dark Holocaust Poem: Chava, Miriam, Auschwitz  
by Renna Ulvang

It is tempting to dredge up ashy metaphors for your last days on earth

To remain riveted, horrified, impaled by thoughts of what it must have been like

Torn away from the comfort of a beautiful room, in your beautiful clothes, your ordinary Jewish lives

Turning away from the gathering gray clouds; the rumors, the stricken faces, the sinking fears pulling you into a reality too dreadful to be faced

And then, too late;

for Chava, for Miriam, too late

 

But wait, here is where I stop being able to go with you, onto that train, towards the sorting desk: live or die,

The barracks, the showers, the endings. Instead I carry you in my arms into the present

Into my music, quilting, cooking, tikkuning, praying and I feel you here in the invisible connections

Great-aunts with large breasts, recipes, laughter, wisdom, sewing machines, struggles: loving life, loving me. I hold you here, in the only life I have, living it in memory of you.  

Renna Ulvang is a long time member of Beyt Tikkun Synagogue; a psychotherapist and certified spiritual director, companioning people in their search for connection to the Divine. (rennaulvang.com)

Editorials & Actions

Daniel Berrigan z’l Dead at 94

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Daniel Berrigan was one of  the most inspiring figures of the anti-war and social justice movements of the past fifty years. He died on Saturday, April 30, 2016, and will be sorely missed by all of us who knew him. I was first introduced to him by my mentor Abraham Joshua Heschel in 1968 when he and Heschel and Martin Luther King had become prominent voices in the Clergy and Laity Against the War in Vietnam. He told me that he had been inspired by the civil disobedience and militant demonstrations that were sweeping the country in 1966-68, many of them led by Students for a Democratic Society (at the time I was chair of the University of California Berkeley chapter). Over the course of the ensuing 48 years I was inspired by his activism and grateful for his support for Tikkun magazine.

Editorials & Actions

Norman Finkelstein on Sanders, the first Intifada, & BDS

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Editor’s note: We thank Phillip Weiss for giving us blanket permission to reprint articles from the website Mondoweiss. Norman Finkelstein has been one of the courageous voices critiquing Israeli policies for several decades. In the conversation below, he makes many important points. But his argument that the Palestinian Authority and the Palestinian people living in the West Bank have said little to defend Gaza solely because they have sold out to Israeli and Western interests in exchange for financial security misses three additional factors.  

First, and far more important, has been the ruthless suppression by Hamas (the Islamic fundamentalist party that rules Gaza) of Palestinians who were identified with the Palestinian Authority.

Editorials & Actions

Threats to Mother Earth and how to confront them by Leonardo Boff

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Threats to Mother Earth and how to confront them
     Leonardo Boff
        Theologian-Philosopher

      Earthcharter Commission

 

There are four threats that our Common Home faces, and which demand from us our special attention. 

The first is how in modern times the Earth is viewed as an object of ruthless exploitation, seeking only the greatest profits, without regard to life or purpose. This vision, that has brought undeniable benefits, has also created a dis-equilibrium in all the ecosystems, which has caused the present generalized ecological crisis. With that vision entire nations were destroyed, as in Latin America, where the Atlantic jungles, and, in part, the Amazon rain forests, have been devastated. 

In January 2015, 18 scientists published in the well known magazine Science, a study on   “The planetary limits: a guide for a human development on a planet in mutation”. They enumerated 9 fundamental aspects for the continuity of life. Among them were climate equilibrium, maintenance of bio-diversity, preservation of the ozone layer, and control of acidity of the oceans. All of these aspects are in a state of decline. But two, that they call the “fundamental limits”, are the most degraded: through climate change and the extinction of species.

Editorials & Actions

American War Crimes That Still Ought to be Prosecuted

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American War Crimes That Still Ought to Be Prosecuted
Let’s take a moment to think about the ultimate strangeness of our American world.  In recent months, Donald Trump and Ted Cruz have offered a range of hair-raising suggestions: as president, one or the other of them might order the U.S. military and the CIA to commit acts that would include the waterboarding of terror suspects (or “a hell of a lot worse”), thekilling of the relatives of terrorists, and the carpet bombing of parts of Syria.  All of these would, legally speaking, be war crimes.  This has caused shock among many Americans in quite established quarters who have decried the possibility of such a president, suggesting that the two of them are calling for outright illegal acts, actual “war crimes,” and that the U.S. military and others would be justified in rejecting such orders.  In this context, for instance, CIA Director John Brennan recently made it clear that no Agency operative under his command would ever waterboard a suspect in response to orders of such a nature from a future president.  (“I will not agree to carry out some of these tactics and techniques I’ve heard bandied about because this institution needs to endure.”)

These acts, in other words, are considered beyond the pale when Donald Trump suggests them, but here’s the strangeness of it all: what The Donald is only mouthing off about, a perfectly real American president (and vice president and secretary of defense, and so on) actually did.  Among other things, under the euphemistic term “enhanced interrogation techniques,” they ordered the CIA to use classic torture practices including waterboarding (which, in blunter times, had been known as “the water torture”).  They also let the U.S. military loose to torture and abuse prisoners in their custody.  They green-lighted the CIA tokidnap terror suspects (who sometimes turned out to be perfectly innocent people) off the streets of cities around the world, as well as from the backlands of the planet, and transported them to the prisons of some of the worst torture regimes or to secret detention centers (“black sites”) the CIA was allowed to set up in compliant countries.  In other words, a perfectly real administration ordered and oversaw perfectly real crimes.  (Its top officials even reportedly had torture techniques demonstrated to them in the White House.)

At the time, the CIA fulfilled its orders to a T and without complaint. A lone CIA officer spoke out publicly in opposition to such a program and was jailed for disclosing classified information to a journalist.  (He would be the only CIA official to go to jail for the Agency’s acts of torture.)  At places like Abu Ghraib, the military similarly carried out its orders without significant complaint or resistance.  The mainstream media generally adopted the euphemism “enhanced interrogation techniques” or “harsh techniques” in its reporting — no “torture” or “war crimes” for them then.  And back in the post-2001 years, John Brennan, then deputy executive director of the CIA, didn’t offer a peep of protest about what he surely knew was going on in his own agency. In 2014, in fact, as its director he actually defendedsuch torture practices for producing “intelligence that helped thwart attack plans, capture terrorists, and save lives.”  In addition, none of those who ordered or oversaw torture and other criminal behavior (a number of whom would sell their memoirs for millions of dollars) suffered in the slightest for the acts that were performed on their watch and at their behest. To sum up: when Donald Trump says such things it’s a future nightmare to be called by its rightful name and denounced, as well as rejected and resisted by military and intelligence officials.  When an American president and his top officials actually did such things, however, it was another story entirely. Today, TomDispatch regular Rebecca Gordon catches the nightmarish quality of those years, now largely buried, in the grim case of a single mistreated human being.

Editorials & Actions

Drone Whistleblowers Step Out of the Shadows

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Pratap Chatterjee, Inside the Devastation of America’s Drone Wars
Posted by Pratap Chatterjee on Tikkun’s media ally: TomDispatch.com

A note from Tom Engelhardt:   In our part of the world, it’s not often that potential “collateral damage” speaks, but it happened last week.  A Pakistani tribal leader, Malik Jalal, flew to England to plead in anewspaper piece he wrote and in media interviews to be taken off the Obama White House’s “kill list.”  (“I am in England this week because I decided that if Westerners wanted to kill me without bothering to come to speak with me first, perhaps I should come to speak to them instead.”)  Jalal, who lives in Pakistan’s tribal borderlands, is a local leader and part of a peace committee sanctioned by the Pakistani government that is trying to tamp down the violence in the region.  He believes that he’s been targeted for assassination by Washington.  (Four drone missiles, he claims, have just missed him or his car.)  His family, he says, is traumatized by the drones.  “I don’t want to end up a ‘Bugsplat’ — the ugly word that is used for what remains of a human being after being blown up by a Hellfire missile fired from a Predator drone,” he writes. “More importantly, I don’t want my family to become victims, or even to live with the droning engines overhead, knowing that at any moment they could be vaporized.” 

Normally, what “they” do to us, or our European counterparts (think: Brussels, Paris, or San Bernardino), preoccupies us 24/7.  What we do to “them” — and them turns out to be far more than groups of terrorists — seldom touches our world at all.  As TomDispatch readers know, this website has paid careful attention to the almost 300 wedding celebrants killed by U.S. air power between late 2001 and the end of 2013 — eight wedding parties eviscerated in three countries (Iraq, Afghanistan, and Yemen).  These are deaths that, unlike the 14 Americans murdered in San Bernardino, the 32 Belgians and others killed in Brussels, and the 130 French and others slaughtered in Paris, have caused not even a ripple here (though imagine for a second the reaction if even a single wedding, no less eight of them and hundreds of revelers, had been wiped out by a terror attack in the U.S. in these years). Any sense of sadness or regret for Washington’s actions, when it comes to the many killed, wounded, or traumatized in its never-ending, implacable, and remarkably unsuccessful war on terror, is notable mainly for its absence from our world.  So it’s an extraordinary moment when any Americans — no less a group that has been deeply involved in prosecuting the drone war on terror — publicly expresses empathy for the “collateral damage” inflicted in that ongoing conflict.  Pratap Chatterjee brings genuine news today from the heart of America’ s drone wars, from those who should best be able to assess the grim reality of just what Washington has been doing in our name. Tom

Drone Whistleblowers Step Out of the Shadows
In Washington’s Drone Wars, Collateral Damage Comes Home
By Pratap Chatterjee
In a trio of recent action-packed movies, good guys watch terrorists mingling with innocent women and children via real-time video feeds from halfway across the world. A clock ticks and we, the audience, are let in on the secret that mayhem is going to break loose. After much agonized soul-searching about possible collateral damage, the good guys call in a missile strike from a U.S. drone to try to save the day by taking out a set of terrorists.

The Empathy Tribe What a Spiritual Progressive Approach to Israel/Palestine Might Look Like

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NO LASTING PEACE will be possible between Israel and Palestine until there is a dramatic change of consciousness comparable in depth to the kind of change that took place in the United States as segregation was dismantled; as the women’s movement put patriarchy on the defensive and dismantled many (but not all) aspects of sexist oppression that predominated for 10,000 years in much of Western society; or, more recently in the United States, as the LGBTQ movement fought to achieve marriage equality—all changes that were dismissed as “unrealistic” in the first decades of those struggles. A similar change of consciousness in Israel-Palestine will require a strategy of nonviolence, compassion, and empathy.

Adapting to the Climate Crisis

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ALTHOUGH THE MEDIA and political leaders want to pretend that what came out of the Paris climate talks is a huge advance, those with more understanding of the actual realities of the environmental crisis facing the human race realize that those steps seem visionary only in comparison with what has been deemed realistic in the past, but not when compared with what actually must be done to prevent global catastrophe by 2070 or 2080.