Editor’s Note: The sad reality of racism in Israel has been known to many of us for decades–a tragedy for a people which has suffered so much from the racism directed against us. Its first manifestation was in the scorn and discrimination with which Sepahrdic/Mizrachi Jews escaping from Arab countries were treated by Ashkenazi Jews who shaped the Yishuv (the pre-1948 Jewish settlements in Palestine).
Editorials & Actions
Dissecting Obama’s Most Recent TPP Lies
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Dissecting Obama’s Most Recent TPP Lies
EDUCATE! BARACK OBAMA, TPP
By Dean Baker, www.cepr.net
October 21st, 2015
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Above Photo: From PopularResistance.org. The early signals from the Obama administration are that the nonsense will be flowing fast and thick in its effort to push the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). We got an indication of the level of the nonsense factor in a CNN article reporting on the administration’s efforts to promote the still secret agreement. CNN cites a column that President Obama had in a New Hampshire newspaper that told readers:
“…trade is a substantial driver of New Hampshire’s economy. Over 20,000 American jobs are currently supported by goods exports from New Hampshire, with 32 percent of Made in New Hampshire goods exports shipped to TPP partners.”
What exactly does it mean for over 20,000 New Hampshire jobs to be supported by exports?
Editorials & Actions
The Assault on Youth in the U.S.
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Henry Giroux on:
Youth in an Authoritarian Age: Challenging the politics of disposability:
Following the insight of Hannah Arendt, a leading political theorist of mid-20th century totalitarianism, a dark cloud of political and ethical ignorance has descended upon the United States. (1) Thoughtlessness, a primary condition of authoritarian rule, now occupies a privileged, if not celebrated, place in the political landscape and the mainstream cultural apparatuses. A new kind of infantilism now shapes daily life as adults gleefully take on the role of unthinking children, while children are pushed to be adults, stripped of their innocence and subject to a range of disciplinary pressures that saddle them with debt and cripple their ability to be imaginative. (2)
Under such circumstances, agency devolves into a mind-numbing anti-intellectualism evident in the banalities produced by Fox News infotainment and celebrity culture, and in the blinding rage produced by populist politicians who support creationism, argue against climate change and rail against immigration, the rights of women, public service workers, gay people and countless others. There is more at work here than a lethal form of intellectual, political and emotional infantilism. There is also a catastrophe of indifference and inattentiveness that breeds flirtations with irrationality, fuels the spectacle of violence, creates an embodied incapacity and promotes the withering of public life. To read more articles by Henry A. Giroux and other authors in the Public Intellectual Project, click here.
Editorials & Actions
Stop the Killing in Israel and Palestine: A Prayer, Analysis, and Strategy
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Stop the Killing in Israel and Palestine: A Prayer, Analysis & Strategy… plus an article from AlJazeera giving some voices of Palestinians
A prayer and an analysis from Tikkun/NSP (please post this on your social media and your web page, tweet about it, and circulate it widely–you have our permission)
THE PRAYER:
As we watch in horror as violence in Israel and Palestine escalates and there continues to be needless and senseless killings, we offer a prayer of love, compassion and strength. May Israelis and Palestinians find the love that resides deep in their hearts and pulses through all of us, the love that cries to us from the loving energy of the universe to love the “Other,” the “Stranger.” This is a love that can be hard to access and find and yet it is a never-ending, all pervasive love that encourages and calls us to stand-up for the well-being of each other, for the security of all, for justice for all, for peace. May the Israelis and Palestinians use this well-spring of love to overcome their fears and stand for a new future. May the Israelis and Palestinians find the compassion that lives in each person but that is often suppressed in times of fear and anger and learn to ask the questions that so many seem afraid to ask.
Editorials & Actions
Michael Nagler on the Gun Culture
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A Very Convenient Truth
by Michael N. Nagler
Modern scientists recognize the potency of thought…as a man thinks so does he become. MK Gandhi
THERE ARE TIMES when you can see a familiar scene with fresh eyes. I had just returned to the U.S. when I found myself in a definitely familiar scene: a local shopping center. The night before I had been on a transatlantic flight where I kept catching glimpses, despite myself, of four private viewing screens shimmering in front of my nearest fellow passengers on the long flight home. They sat there watching ten hours of uninterrupted violence: fights, machine guns, wild explosions – all four of them. You have to wonder, what does that do to a person’s mind? You have to wonder, exactly, because in the barrage of detail that floods over us in response to “the latest massacre” you will never hear it mentioned.
Editorials & Actions
Marwan Barghouti on No peace until Israel’s occupation of Palestine ends
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Editor’s note: Sadly, though Marwan Barghouti is right in almost everything he says here, as long as he and the Palestinian people insist on “return” as an indispensable part of a peace agreement, there will be no agreement. I’ve proposed that Israel agree to take 20,00i0 Palestinians a year for the next 30 years, a level that acknowledges Israel’s part in helping create the Palestinian refugee catastrophe. But a general “right of return” is read by Israelis to mean a defacto end of a state in which Jews have a majority, and given the experience of two thousand years of never having the protection of a state, there is little chance Israelis would accept that anytime in the next 40 years, which in effect means that this element in Barghouti’s plan is a guarantee for no end to the horrible reality of Israeli occupation of the West Bank. From the Israeli standpoint, a general “right of return” means that there would be two Palestinians states, one in the West Bank and one in what is now Israel as the Palestinian people becomes a majority through return of the 4 million people who now are the current generation of Palestinian refugees. Including that demand is an unfortunate part in what is otherwise a sane and strong statement from a much respected Palestinian leader who still languished in an Israeli prison.
Editorials & Actions
Israel/Palestine Update Oct. 9 from Uri Avnery
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Editor’s note: Uri Avnery, the widely respected leader of Israel’s peace movement Gush Shalom, may be a bit too generous about Mahmoud Abbas. In our view, Abbas (aka Abu Mazen) never tried to do what Gandhi did–explicitly commit himself and his movement to nonviolence and seek to teach his people the centrality of nonviolence in winning a struggle against a domineering external nation that seeks to control you while simultaneously pretending to care about democracy and human rights. Nor did he ever seriously commit to changing the perception that the Palestinian Authority and its leading supporters were beneficiaries of special economic and political advantages under the Israeli occupation. Nevertheless, Avnery’s article should be read primarily because of its useful presentation of the present reality for Palestinians under Israeli occupation. It is a heart-breaking analysis.
Editorials & Actions
Reading the Beginning of the Torah and a note on Why We do Hakafot (circle dancing with Torah) on Simchat Torah
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A Kavannah for Reading the Beginning of the Torah
– B’reishit 1:1-2:3 (Genesis chapter 1 sentence 1 to chapter 2, sentence 3)l
by Rabbi Diane Elliot Simkhat Torah 2015 / 5776
On Simkhat Torah we read the very end of the Torah, in which Moses– our faithful shepherd through so much of the Khumash (The Five Books of Moses, a.k.a. Torah)– dies by God’s kiss and is mourned by the people. And then we roll the scroll back to the very beginning, to the Book of Genesis, B’reishit, which might be translated: “in a beginning,” or “with a beginning.” Not “in the beginning,” but “in a beginning”: just one out of the many possible places our story could begin. What kind of beginning will we have this year? What Torah will unfold for you, for each of us, this year? Will it be a Torah of justice or of injustice?
Economy/Poverty/Wealth
Uncovering the Truth About Global Poverty
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Beyond the Sustainable Development Goals: uncovering the truth about global poverty and demanding the universal realization of Article 25 and the adoption of a Global Marshall Plan www.tikkun.org/gmp
[Note from Tikkun: The report below from Share the World’s Resources, http://www.sharing.org/ shows that “The Sustainable Development Goals” promoted by the United Nations and by many countries around the world – despite their positive and progressive rhetoric – by no means constitute a transformative agenda for meeting the basic needs of all people within the means of our shared planet. Reading this report in all its details will give you a full understanding of how serious the global crisis of poverty (including in the U.S.) really is and why it must be confronted now. And as we have argued in Tikkun magazine, without dealing with poverty there is no way to solve the global environmental crisis, because people’s desperation to feed their families and provide shelter and health care force many around the globe to engage in environmentally destructive behaviors which can’t be stopped without dealing immediately with their survival needs. This report argues that we may never see an end to poverty “in all its forms everywhere” unless ordinary people unite in their millions and demand the universal realisation of fundamental human rights through huge, continuous and worldwide demonstrations for economic justice. Now more than ever, we need a movement to demand a Domestic and Global Marshall Plan as outlined at www.tikkun.org/gmp. Please go to that site and download the full 32 page color pamphlet and read it carefully–it is the outline of a plan for how to deal with the problem as described above.
Editorials & Actions
Challenge the Media Trivialization of the Pope’s Radical Message
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Save the Pope’s Radical Prophetic Message from Media Trivialization
By Rabbi Michael Lerner
The recent national conference of the Religion Newswriters Association in Philadelphia focused on preparing the several hundred media attendees for how to cover the Pope’s visit to the U.S. this week. But in panel after panel, we were presented with leaders of the Catholic Church who were unsympathetic to the Pope’s message. Too smart to directly critique the Pope, in session after session they presented a single message: the “real story” about Pope Francis is what a great guy he is, how caring he is personally for the poor and the downtrodden. The Pope, they insisted, has no politics—he’s above politics and only a humble servant of Jesus.
Apparently the right-wingers in the Church hope that the media doesn’t know that Jesus himself was a revolutionary with a powerful call to challenge the way official Judaism at that time, represented by the priests of the Temple, had become assimilated to the values of the Roman occupiers of Judea rather than articulators of the prophetic message of the Torah to “love the stranger” and pursue justice and caring for all.
Editorials & Actions
Mazal Tov on Overcoming the Fearful & the War Mongers on the Iran Nuclear Deal
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Thank you so very much for your help in making it possible for the the major powers of the world, the U.N. and most of the people of the world to confirm the deal with Iran which will prevent them from developing nuclear weapons for the next ten to fifteen years. Your support for the Tikkun position, (a position we articulated in full page ads we bought in the NY Times, the Hill magazine read by most Congressional people and staffers), plus your willingness to share your reasons for supporting the nuclear deal, eventually became part of a powerful surge of voices that created the context critical to the ability of Democratic Senators to feel that they could reject the pressure from the right-wing of the Jewish world, represented by AIPAC, The Conference of Presidents of Major (sic) Jewish Organizations, the American Jewish Congress, and many local Jewish Federations and synagogues and instead embrace a deal which, while flawed in some ways, was far better than any achievable alternative. (See, sometimes us little guys can make a difference if we pool our energies and resources.)
It was sad for us to see the Reform movement in Judaism unable to take a stand on this issue–the movement that had once proudly proclaimed itself a voice for tikkun olam, but we can have compassion for the leadership that feared it might lose some of its support in being in favor of a deal that raised fears among many Jews who had been influenced by Prime Minister Netanyahu’s manipulation of PTSD flashbacks from the Holocaust. Yet this is the same reason why so many Jewish leaders and rabbis fail to take courageous stands countering Israel’s horrendous treatment of the Palestinian people, behavior in sharp violation of the Torah’s commands “Do Not Oppress the Stranger/the Other.” The excuse of fear of breaking your organization apart or losing some of their supporters starts to wear thin, don’t you think, as we approach the 50th year of Occupation (in 2017)?
Editorials & Actions
The Best Way to Deal with ISIS
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Editor’s note: The two perspectives articulated by Uri Avnery and Rabbi Arthur Waskow below deserve to be well known and discussed. We at Tikkun have a slightly different approach: we believe that the hate-filled and barbarous approach of ISIS will continue to manifest in a world that is fundamentally unjust, creates huge amounts of suffering in daily life for at least 2 of the 7 billion people on the planet, and privileges military power over kindness in its expenditures of money and in the organization of nation states. We have long argued that what we need is to convince the Western powers to privilege generosity over domination, and to launch as a first step in this process a Global Marshall Plan to once and for all eliminate global poverty, hunger, homelessness, inadequate education and health care, repair the global environment, resettle refugees, and eliminate the unjust global trade arrangements (read our proposed version at www.tikkun.org/gmp). Yet Uri Avnery and Arthur Waskow, both strong allies of Tikkun, have proposals which differ from our approach and from each other, though because they fit into the “realistic” dialogue of power politics both might be achieved sooner than our plan, though Arthur’s seems much closer to us precisely because it does not envision the direct use of force but only the power of the US to implement it. In my view, it is more likely to get the US population behind a fundamental change in worldview called for by the Strategy of Generosity than to get a piecemeal acceptance of Iran as an ally in the Middle East reconciled to Israel, unless we were simultaneously challenging the notion that their security depends on power over enemies (the Strategy of Domination).
Editorials & Actions
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The exchange below between Uri Avneri and Rabbi Arthur Waskow reflects the complicated issues raised by ISIS and how to respond to its barbarous behavior. We at Tikkun believe in a nonviolent response, which will take longer but is ultimately more likely to last–a change in US and Western countries from their current strategy of domination to a strategy of generosity reflected in a Global Marshall Plan which could transform the way the world perceives the West and open the mind of even the most cynical to the possibility that love could triumph over fear, slowly melting away thousands of years of conditioning to the idea that only power over others gives us safety or security. . Both Uri Avneri and Arthur Waskow support that kind of approach in the long run, but here present shorter-run ideas that deserve to be discussed widely.–Rabbi Michael Lerner
Uri Avnery
September 12, 2015
The Real Menace
I AM AFRAID.
I am not ashamed to admit it.
Editorials & Actions
Donald Trump and the Ghost of Totalitarianism
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Editor’s note: As a non-profit, Tikkun does not take stances on candidates or political parties during election periods, but our authors and readers are welcome to do so! Henry Giroux is one of the most creative theorists on the Left these days, so it is an honor to publish him here. Donald Trump and the Ghost of Totalitarianism
Henry A. Giroux
In the current historical moment in the United States, the emptying out of language is nourished by the assault on the civic imagination. One example of this can be found in the rise of Donald Trump on the political scene. Donald Trump’s popular appeal speaks to not just the boldness of what he says and the shock it provokes, but the inability to respond to shock with informed judgement rather than titillation.
Editorials & Actions
All Should Be Repenting for the Suffering of the Refugees
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Most Americans seem completely blind to the way that we have played a major role in creating the problem of millions of refugees struggling to survive and to how we have a major responsibility to fix it. Few Americans realize that there was no major refugee problem until the 1990s. Here’s what happened since then to change the world.