Uri Avnery
September 9, 2017
A Confession
TODAY IS the last day of the 93rd year of my life. Ridiculous.
Articles
Israel Update mid September 2017
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FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 8, 2017
An enemy image is a vital munition of war
1) A shooting in Hebron shakes the Israeli society
The following article is due to be published in German by Internationaler Versoehnungsbund, the Austrian branch of the International Fellowship of Reconciliation (IFOR). On March 24, 2016, a young Palestinian named Abdel Fattah al-Sharif tried to stab the soldiers guarding an enclave of extreme-right Israeli settlers in the heart of the city of Hebron on the West Bank. The soldiers shot and severely wounded him. Eleven minutes later, another Israeli soldier arrived on the spot, named Elior Azaria. A medic by training, Azaria did not try to give medical help to the severely wounded man lying on the ground.
Articles
High Holidays with Rabbi Michael Lerner & Beyt Tikkun
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The spiritual task of the ten days that start the eve of Rosh Hashanah, Wednesday Sept. 20 (10 days from now) and continue to its climax on Yom Kippur is to delve seriously into what changes we need in the way we conduct our own lives and changes that our society needs. Beyt Tikkun provides a support system for taking this task seriously. Our services have all the elements of the Jewish tradition including the traditional prayers and music, but we combine those with deep inner reflection, mediation, and inner work because the goal is “t’shuvah” (returning to our hightest selves in every dimension of our lives). Info and to Register: www.beyttikkun.org/hhd
Toward that t’shuvah goal and reflection, participants in our High Holiday services are given a work book to use in the intervening days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.
Articles
The U.S. Military Role in the World
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(Editor’s Note: This article, coming to us from our media ally TomDispatch.com, should give us some perspective on the U.S. military role in the world. Perhaps it might even awaken us to another important question: why exactly are we risking nuclear war with North Korea in order to achieve what end? –Rabbi Michael Lerner rabbilerner.tikkun@gmail.com)
Worth Dying For?
When It Comes to the War in the Greater Middle East, Maybe We’re the Bad Guys
By Danny Sjursen
I used to command soldiers. Over the years, lots of them actually. In Iraq, Colorado, Afghanistan, and Kansas. And I’m still fixated on a few of them like this one private first class (PFC) in Kandahar, Afghanistan, in 2011.
Editorials & Actions
Ralph Nader on the Republicans and Dems
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[Editor’s Note: I still wish Nader had taken my advice in 2000 and told his voters in states where the election was close to not vote for him but vote instead for Nader. I also urged him to introduce spiritual progressive ideas and discourse into his public talks, but he didn’t, perhaps could not because it would take him so far from the narrow economism that is his worldview. But with all his limitations, he often speaks deeper truths than one hears even from some of the most “progressive” of liberal Democrats, and it is in that spirit that I invite you to read his latest thinking. –Rabbi Michael Lerner ]
Photo: Stephen Voss/Redux
RALPH NADER: THE DEMOCRATS ARE UNABLE TO DEFEND THE U.S. FROM THE “MOST VICIOUS” REPUBLICAN PARTY IN HISTORY
From TheIntercept.comJune 25 2017, 8:17 a.m.
THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY is at its lowest ebb in the memory of everyone now alive. It’s lost the White House and both houses of Congress.
Editorials & Actions
What the Media isn’t Telling You About North Korea Missile Tests
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[Editor’s Note: We Americans have barely a clue about the mischief the U.S. military has been up to for most of the past decades. It has often been provocative when it hasn’t gone the full length of military interventions, sometimes carefully hidden to the U.S. public. On the other hand, we have no sympathy for the repressive regime in North Korea, which in comparison makes the U.S. regime look almost humane. But before thinking that maybe the U.S. is motivated by good values, remember the massive U.S. sales of arms to Saudi Arabia while it continues its near genocidal war against Yemen, and its attempts to build a justification for a future intervention in Venezuela–and these were both part of U.S. policy under Obama.–Rabbi Michael Lerner]
9/4： What the Media isn’t Telling You About North Korea’s Missile Tests
By Mike Whitney
https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/09/04/what-the-media-isnt-telling-you-about-north-koreas-missile-tests/
September 04, 2017 “Information Clearing House” – Here’s what the media isn’t telling you about North Korea’s recent missile tests. Last Monday, the DPRK fired a Hwasong-12 intermediate-range ballistic missile over Japan’s Hokkaido Island.
Articles
We can’t transform American politics till we understand the psychodynamics at play
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I’m republishing this article I wrote a few months before the 2016 election because it contains an analysis which is absolutely essential for anyone who wishes to participate in transforming American political, economic, social, cultural and intellectual reality. Some of it might feel a bit dated, but most of it is as true now as it will be in years to come until liberal and progressive forces really absorb its message and make fundamental changes in the cultural and political assumptions that limit their effectiveness.–Rabbi Michael Lerner
IT’S NO SECRET that the past several decades have witnessed growing economic inequality and deepening economic insecurity for a very large section of working people both in the U.S. and other capitalist countries around the world. Yet what most analysts miss are the hidden injuries of class that become dramatically intensified when the underlying psychological and spiritual dysfunction of global capitalism interacts with economic insecurity. Right-wing, ultra-nationalist, fundamentalist, and/or racist movements gain support as more people begin to lose faith in the efficacy of democratic governments and turn to authoritarian leaders in the hope that their own fears and pain can be alleviated. This has been happening around the world, not just in the U.S. As a nonprofit we are prohibited from endorsing any political candidate or party, so the reflections here are not meant to influence your voting in 2016, but to shape an agenda for how to build a healthier and more just society in the coming decades.
Editorials & Actions
Berkeley needs a Non-Violent Containment Squad by Jo Freeman
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What Berkeley needs is a Non-Violent Containment Squad
November 20, 1964: March to Regents’ Meeting; L to R: Mona Hutchin, Ron Anastasi, … John Leggett, John Searle, Michael Rossman, Jack Weinberg, Sallie Shawl, Mario Savio, Ken Cloke. Bob Johnson photo ©FSM Archives All rights reserved
by Jo Freeman, A.B.’65
As an alumnus of the 1964 Free Speech Movement and a veteran of the civil rights movement, I was appalled to read about the recent violent confrontations in Berkeley. Those reports took me back to the 1960s when I was doing voter registration for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and marching against segregation in Birmingham and Mississippi. Then we were the equivalent of the “fascists” that Antifa and the black bloc are beating up in Berkeley. They called us Communists, not fascists, but like Antifa they believed we were invaders who held them and their Southern values in contempt.
Articles
Awe Trumps Polarization
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(Editor’s Note: When we’ve talked about a New Bottom Line as a central part of Tikkun’s message, some people react negatively to the last few words where we call for “awe, wonder and radical amazement at the universe.” What they tell me is that this sounds like a slippery slope to religion which they believe must necessarily be either reactionary or at least irrational. Kirk Schneider’s approach to awe should reassure them, both in its focus on how it might be helpful in healing our world and in his use of awe devoid of any automatic theological consequences. Please read it and read his book which gives a fuller picture of awe!–Rabbi Michael Lerner). AWE TRUMPS POLARIZATION
Kirk J. Schneider, Ph.D.
The sense of awe–or humility and wonder, sense of adventure toward living–is becoming a cherished value in our emerging age.
Articles
Profound Rethinking by Muslims of The Meanings of Their Holy Texts and Traditions
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{Editor’s Note: Most of us in the West have very little familiarity with the complexities of sophisticated intellectual and theological debate that takes place in the Islamic world. Just as in the Jewish world a tradition of interpretation developed which takes harsh or even cruel elements in our Torah and reinterprets them to “really mean” something more in tune with the subsequent development of Jewish ethical consciousness (e.g. “an eye for an eye” reinterpreted to mean financial compensation for the losses experienced by someone who has lost an eye or the injunction to wipe out Amalek later understood to refer to wiping out the kind of hurtfulness that Amalek had engaged in toward the Israelites), so in the world of Islamic theologians there has been a constant process of reinterpretation and contextualization of parts of the Koran and other holy texts to reflect the ongoing spiritual and ethical growth of Islamic teachers and scholars. And of course, just as we in the Jewish world find ourselves challenging extremists among the West Bank settlers and their cheerleaders in many synagogues around the world as they seek to justify through reference to Torah or other holy texts their occupation and cruelty toward the Palestinian people, our Muslim allies are engaged in a similar struggle to challenge those who, like , Isis, the Taliban, and the Saudi Arabian Wahabi interpreters of Islam, have appropriated the Koran and subsequent elements of their holy tradition to justify terrorism, murder, rape of captive women, and more. In each case, the struggle is of great importance to the extent that it wins people to a worldview of love and generosity. I invite you to read the two articles in discussion below by two inspired Muslim thinkers.
Articles
Grassroots Venezuelans in the Midst of the Economic War
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https://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/11177
The Real Price of Trump’s Venezuela Sanctions
https://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/13332
By RYAN MALLETT-OUTTRIM, August 25th 2017
TAGS
economic crisis 2017
U.S. sanctions
Five hundred and sixty seven thousand dead children. That was the death toll of international sanctions on Saddam’s Iraq, according to a 1995 study published in The Lancet by researchers from the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organisation. The conclusions of the study were shocking: five years after sanctions had been first implemented, UN humanitarian workers found a once rich, oil producing nation wracked with famine. The sanctions were aimed at pressuring Saddam, though in reality their impact was felt most by the poorest Iraqis. One researcher found that around a third of children under the age of 10 in Baghdad showed signs of stunted growth, while 12 percent were in urgent need of immediate medical attention due to extreme malnutrition.
Articles
Jews Staying with Trump Disgrace Themselves
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We received this from our media ally Portside:
The Trump Administration’s Most Prominent Jews Disgrace Themselves
Dana Milbank
August 18, 2017
Washington Post
What Gary Cohn, Steven Mnuchin and Jared Kushner did – or, rather, what they didn’t do – is a shanda. They’ll know what that means, but, for the uninitiated, shanda is Yiddish for shame, disgrace. All three let it be known through anonymous friends and colleagues that they are disturbed and distressed by what Trump said after the white terrorist demonstration and attack in Charlottesville. But not in public. White House senior adviser Jared Kushner in July., credit: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post,
The three men, the most prominent Jews in President Trump’s administration, could have spoken out to say that those who march with neo-Nazis are not “very fine people,” as their boss claims. Mnuchin, the treasury secretary, and Cohn, the chief economic adviser, were actually standing with Trump when he said it.
Editorials & Actions
Charlottesville: Where Do We Stand by Arthur Green
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WHERE DO WE STAND? by Rabbi Arthur Green
American Jews looked on with horror at the events unfolding in Charlottesville – and elsewhere – over this past weekend. Indeed, we have felt a shudder ever since the awful campaign of 2016 and much that has followed it, while our communal leadership has remained mostly silent. There were, after all, some Jewish voices in the White House, and it was best not to alienate the Republicans. “And who knows?” it was whispered, “maybe this crazy guy could do something for Israeli-Palestinian peace.”
But in Charlottesville the masks were off. Neo-Nazis with their swatstika flags were a welcome part of the celebration. You heard the k-word along with the n-word quite frequently, we are told. There was no longer any hasty “Judeo” hyphened on to the calls for a Christian America. Not among these folks.
“Blood and Soil!” they were calling out in repeated marching chant. Hitler’s Blut und Boden, which meant, of course, that only “Aryan” blood truly belonged to the sacred German soil. Can you imagine the nerve of these people, saying that the beautiful God-given landscape of America belongs to white Anglo-Saxons, not to the native peoples whose blood indeed soaked the land as they were displaced and slaughtered by European invaders? Can they really claim that this soil belongs to the slaveowners whom Robert E. Lee was defending (his statue was the center of these events) and not to their victims, the poor slaves who died anonymously, so many of beating and lynching, pouring their own blood into the American earth? How dare they!
I was proud that there were rabbis and rabbinical students (including some of my own) present in the line of clergy who stood as the voice for human decency and sanity on that terrible morning. Yes, even though it was Shabbat, I am glad that some made that decision, one I would not permit myself to do. Shabbat was given us, we are told in the second version of the ten commandments, to help us recall that we were slaves in Egypt. That is a message too often forgotten by many achievement-driven (and often success-drunk) American Jews.
Charlottesville forces us to take a stand. It reminds us that we are a minority in American society, a religious and ethnic community that chooses to maintain a distinct identity. There is a price to be paid for that, one forgotten amid the great wave of acceptance into “whitehood” that has engulfed us in most American circles since the 1960’s. We need to remember how recent that acceptance was, and how it took the horrors of the Holocaust and the battle against Hitler to push most American Christians across the finish line of opposing anti-Semitism. Moments like Charlottesville remind us that we are a minority among minorities, and that a threat or an insult to any minority – African-American, Muslim, Latino, LGBT, or any other – is a threat to us all. To be a proud American Jew is to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with those who defend diversity and equality in our country.
Editorials & Actions
Jews Are NOT “White” in 21st century USA
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Take a look at the alleged white privilege of Jews in Charlottesville, Virginia
At Congregation Beth Israel in Charlottesville, VA, we are deeply grateful for the support and prayers of the broader Reform Jewish community. Our thoughts and prayers are with the families of Heather Heyer and the two Virginia State Police officers, H. Jay Cullen and Berke Bates, who lost their lives on Saturday, and with the many people injured in the attack who are still recovering. The loss of life far outweighs any fear or concern felt by me or the Jewish community during the past several weeks as we braced for this Nazi rally – but the effects of both will each linger. On Saturday morning, I stood outside our synagogue with the armed security guard we hired after the police department refused to provide us with an officer during morning services. (Even the police department’s limited promise of an observer near our building was not kept — and note, we did not ask for protection of our property, only our people as they worshipped).
Editorials & Actions
Racism After Charlottesville
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Rabbi Michael Lerner writes: “…at a vigil to honor the Charolttesville victims I attended last night in Berkeley where the fascists promise to hold their next large rally August 27th, I encountered not only sadness, but fear and confusion as many yearned for a coherent strategy that the American Left sorely needs.”