Tikkun (https://www.tikkun.org/category/archive/page/69/)
To the end of his political life, Ariel Sharon sought to foster the idea that he was committed to the roadmap. In his last interview before being felled by a brain hemorrhage in January, Sharon told Japanese journalists that his policy toward the Palestinians was based on it.
What Went Wrong in Ohio: The Conyers Report on the 2004 Presidential Election, edited by Anita Miller. Academy Chicago Publishers, 2005. Black Box Voting: Ballot Tampering in the 21st Century, by Bev Harris. Talion Press, 2004. In Black Box Voting and What Went Wrong in Ohio, Bev Harris and Michigan congressman John Conyers present data that are chilling indictments of our election system.
Why They Don’t Hate Us: Lifting the Veil on the Axis of Evil
by Mark LeVine. One World Publications, 2005.
The Modern Middle East
by Ilan Pappé. Routledge, 2005.
We watch a group of five rappers prepare for their first show in their hometown. Dressed in requisite hip-hop style—football jerseys, baseball caps, and the like—the performers primp nervously and practice their rhymes, while they talk about their pre-show jitters. This could be any crew of kids in the world that’s recently found a voice in the global phenomenon of rap music. But the impact hits as we watch them enter a modest club to their friends’ greetings, and then hit the stage after one of them gets on the mic and announces: “We are PR, the first rappers from Gaza.”
I am firmly convinced that ending the Occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, if done by Israel in a spirit of generosity and open-heartedness, would be the necessary prerequisite for a lasting peace between Israel and the Palestinian people. A plan to achieve that—the Geneva Accord—has defined many of the contours of what that peace could look like. The Tikkun Community was the first national organization to embrace and promote that Accord, though always with the caveat that it is not enough to have a legal agreement unless each side embraces a spiritual consciousness that affirms the humanity of the other, recognizes its own sins in having treated the other side disrespectfully, and seeks genuine repentance and atonement.
The word “Hindu” derives from a Persian way of characterizing the variety of traditions and cultural practices that can be found on the other side of the Indus River, the great Himalayan cascade that now bisects Pakistan. “Hindu” describes persons practicing Vedic ritual or worshiping Krishna. “Hindu” also describes the shared customs of Jains, Sikhs, and Zoroastrians.
There is yet more for us to fear. The burden that debt puts upon the developing world endangers us all in an even more fundamental way. It threatens the air we breathe, the food we eat, the survival of our species. It poses a threat to our very planet.
The strong and vocal presence of the religious Right, with its emphasis on family values and sexual politics, and the virtual absence of any discussion of the environment in the recent U.S. elections, causes one to wonder how much importance religions place on the environment as a moral and spiritual issue. The reports keep pouring in that we are altering the climate and toxifying the air, water, and soil so that the health of humans and other species is at risk.
Arabic-language news network Al-Jazeera has been a hotly contested entity since it first began broadcasting in 1996. Now reaching over 40 million viewers, this Qatar-based and government-funded broadcaster now rivals CNN and the BBC as one of the most influential television news outlets in the world. Due to the attacks of September 11 and the increasingly strained relations between the United States and the Arab world, Al-Jazeera’s status has come under scrutiny—more so in the United States than anywhere else. Famously derided by George W. Bush as “the mouthpiece of Osama bin Laden,” Al-Jazeera has come to be regarded as a distinctly partisan source for news coverage because of its critical treatment of both the Arab-Israeli conflict, and the occupation of Iraq.
The country has changed a great deal since Howard Zinn boarded his “moving train” a half-century ago. It has changed along very different trajectories. Some have been rich in achievement, often exhilarating, and full of promise for a better future. Others, in part in reaction to them, are ugly and ominous in their import. Which will prevail? It’s hard to overestimate the significance of the question. It’s hard to think of a better way to gain a clear understanding of what is at stake, and what can be done about it, than by reading, and pondering, the fascinating story of Howard Zinn’s crucial and intimate participation at every point, in thought and action.
An interview with Adi Ophir, one of the central intellectual figures of the contemporary Israeli Left.
David arrived at the Indian restaurant a few minutes early and made his way past the ceramic statues of elephants and the colorful paintings of women in saris to a table in the rear. He’d chosen this place to meet Maya because it was quiet enough to talk. It had been a year since he’d seen her—and then only at a distance, with her husband—but recently he couldn’t stop thinking about her. Something remained unfinished between them, getting in the way of his closeness with Lee, the woman he now was dating. He’d emailed Maya and she answered right away, saying yes, she’d been thinking of him, too, and shouldn’t they get together.
Barack Obama—the keynoter at the Democratic Convention—is a new political talent with enormous potential. Speaking with striking eloquence of the “politics of hope,” he electrified the Democrats convened in Boston in language appealing to Republicans and non-voters as well.
Not long ago, as I was composting the rinds and peels collecting in my kitchen, my mind wandered to the words of a mystic rabbi who claimed that whenever any event happened in the world, it surely has a reason for existing—that it is up to us to find the spark of holiness even in our greatest mistakes. Those things that we’d like to hide from, tuck away, and forget, he said, must be held up to the light, because there is something in them, some energy which could hold the key to our happiness and fulfillment, that is calling to be redeemed.