Tikkun (https://www.tikkun.org/category/other_voices/editorials__actions/page/35/)
ALI ABUNIMAH’S BLOG
Why I’m relieved Netanyahu won
Submitted by Ali Abunimah on Wed, 03/18/2015 – 12:59
netanyahu-congress.jpg
Benjamin Netanyahu speaks to the US Congress, 3 March. (Caleb Smith/Flickr)
Many had hoped that Benjamin Netanyahu would be defeated in yesterday’s Israeli election.
Still Crying in Gaza’s Wilderness
James S. Gordon, M.D.
Raed Taleb-Gdeh’s narrow, tired face is looking up into mine. His long nose is inches from my own, but he is shouting. “I believe in the prophets Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed! All teach us peace. I open my hands in peace.
By separating nature from economics, we have walked blindly into tragedy
Jeffrey Sachs March 10, 2015
Recent news brings yet another example of hubris followed by crisis followed by tragedy. The hubris is our ongoing neglect of human-induced climate change, leading to climate disruptions around the world. One of the many climate crises currently under way is the mega-drought in São Paulo, Brazil. The recent tragedy is an epidemic of dengue fever in the city, as mosquitos breed in the makeshift water tanks that have bought in to maintain supply through the drought. Welcome to ‘the age of sustainable development’.
Every week the Truthdig editorial staff selects a Truthdigger of the Week, a group or person worthy of recognition for speaking truth to power, breaking the story or blowing the whistle. Read why this week they chose our own Rabbi Michael Lerner!
You can read this online on Huffington Post’s home page Tuesday evening, March 3rd, here. Benjamin Netanyahu’s Fantasy World
by Rabbi Michael Lerner
“If you take out Saddam, Saddam’s regime, I guarantee you that it will have enormous positive reverberations on the region.” ~ Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu urging the US to invade Iraq in 2002. Netanyahu’s speech to Congress was brilliantly deceitful because it played to the fantasies that Israeli propaganda and right wing militarists in the US have been popularizing for the past thirty years. * The biggest fantasy: that we can coerce others through power over them to do what we consider in the best interests of the U.S. or Israel.
by Yakov M. Rabkin, Netanya, Israel, March 2, 2015
Israel’s Prime Minister is well-placed to explain to the U.S. Congress the alleged danger of a nuclear Iran. After all, it was Israel and its allies in Washington who fabricated this issue to begin with. It is thus incumbent upon Mr. Netanyahu to try to give credence to that allegation even as U.S., European – and even Israeli – intelligence agencies agree that Iran is not trying to produce nuclear weapons. Some may remember that the claims that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction had come largely from the same people close to Israel’s right-wing Likud party.
The role of this Likud lobby has been seminal in stirring the campaign against Iran.
Revenge – the Unscrolling of Purim
MICHAEL KAGAN
February 24, 2015, (reprinted with permission from The Times of Israel)
Michael Kagan
Michael Kagan is the author of the Holistic Haggadah (Urim), God’s Prayer (Albion-Andalus) and The King’s Messenger (Albion-Andalus Books)… [More]
What you’re about to read does not make pleasant reading. It defies the usual acceptance of Purim as the forces of good overcoming the forces of evil, of us against them, of the imminent destruction of the innocent by the wicked. It may appear that what I am about to describe comes from a desire to ruin the Purim spirit in a similar way that post-modern accounts of the Zionist endeavor have undermined the stories that we have grown up with. But my exploration is motivated by three simple questions that arose while listening to the recitation of the Megillah; questions that I had never asked before; questions that arise from the p’shat (literal) meaning of the text; questions that do not rely on imaginative midrash to answer; questions that bother me. Here they are:
Why does Mordechai refuse to bow down to Haman?
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Between Madness and Truth:
What our inner trickster can teach us. From HaAretz By Gabriel Bukobza
Our socialization requires that we tame our impulses, but we pay a price for this suppression. That’s why cultures have created characters that live outside the conventions – for us to learn from. A fundamental stage in a child’s development is the ability to regulate bodily wastes. Understanding that the place for this is the toilet bowl and not the bed or elsewhere shows acceptance of the principles of reality. Being weaned from soiling and wetting symbolizes the onset of the internalization of the rules of culture – and particularly of the recognition of one of culture’s essential distinctions: between dirt and cleanliness. Anthropologist Mary Douglas noted in her book “Purity and Danger” that dirt is “matter out of place”: An egg on your plate is breakfast, but on your tie it is dirt.
Uri Avnery
February 7, 2015
Over Bottled
EVERYBODY KNOWS what the Israeli elections are about. The choice is stark: on the one side, the dream of a Greater Israel “from the sea to the river”, which would in practice be an apartheid state; on the other side, an end to the occupation and peace. Some would add a social choice: on the one side, the existing neoliberal state with the widest inequality in the industrialized world; on the other side, a social-democratic state of social solidarity. So is the country plastered with posters about war and peace, occupation and settlements, wages and the cost of living? Are TV programs full of them?
Love can triumph–but only if we militantly pursue a society based on love. By militantly I mean, without apology and without self-doubt, but fully committed to changing every economic, political and social institution with The New Bottom Line: love, kindness, generosity, environmental sanity and justice, and awe/wonder/and radical amazement at the grandeur and preciousness of every human being and all of Nature. This thought stimulated by the horrible killings in the Middle East and the ongoing agony of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and blockade of Gaza while hundreds of thousands of people remain homeless and hungry, and the daily use of drone attacks and bombings by the US government around the world. So, I thought to reprint an article I got on email today from Alistair McIntosh from Scotland, along with the author’s note. -Rabbi Michael Lerner
Dear Michael, the following, which promotes your work at Tikkun as an example of hope, will be appearing this afternoon on a Scottish website, Bella Caledonia.
My name is Yitzhak Frankenthal, and I’m a religious, Israeli Zionist. On July 1994 my eldest son Arik died in combat with Hamas. Since then I have worked to promote peace and reconciliation. In early 1995 I was chosen as the secretary-general of the religious, Zionist movement “Oz VeShalom – Netivot Shalom,” which I managed for 3 years. That same year I established the “Parents Circle – Families Forum” for bereaved Israeli and Palestinian families that support peace and reconciliation, which I managed for 10 years.
an introduction to the ideas of Tikkun and the NSP–Network of Spiritual Progressives
by Rabbi Michael Lerner, editor, Tikkun Magazine and co-chair of the NSP with Vandana Shiva
We live in a world filled with loving and caring people. We all crave a world filled with love and care. Yet most of us doubt that we can experience a loving and caring world beyond our own private lives and homes. Why? Because the ethos of the capitalist marketplace, which places greatest value on money and power, has infiltrated our personal lives, shaping our unconscious and conscious beliefs about “human nature.”
In the economic marketplace we are taught to look out for ourselves, maximize our profits, and do what we need to do to get ahead, even at the cost of people we care about.
Mourning the Parisian “Humorists” Yet Challenging the Hypocrisy of Western Media
by Rabbi Michael Lerner
As the editor of a progressive Jewish and interfaith magazine that has often articulated views that have prompted condemnation from both Right and Left, I had good reason to be scared by the murders of fellow journalists in Paris. Having won the 2014 “Magazine of the Year” Award from the Religion Newswriters Association, and having been critical of Hamas’ attempts to bomb Israeli cities this past summer (even while being equally critical of Israel’s rampage against civilians in Gaza), I have good reason to worry if this prominence raises the chances of being a target for Islamic extremists. But then again, I had to wonder about the way the massacre in Paris is being depicted and framed by the Western media as a horrendous threat to Western civilization, freedom of speech and freedom of the press, I wondered about the over-heated nature of this description. It didn’t take me long to understand how problematic that framing really is. When right-wing “pro-Israel” fanatics frequently sent me death threats, physically attacked my house and painted on the gates statements about me being “a Nazi” or “a self-hating Jew,” and called in bomb threats to Tikkun, the magazine I edit, there was no attention given to this by the media, no cries of “our civilization depends on freedom of the press” or demands to hunt down those involved (the FBI and police received our complaints, but never reported back to us about what they were doing to protect us or find the assailants).
The Tragedy of “Selma”
URL: http://www.truth-out.org/buzzflash/commentary/selma-is-a-brilliant-riveting-film-but-racism-is-still-a-powerful-force-in-the-us
STEVEN JONAS FOR BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT
(Photo: Peter Pettus)
The “Tragedy of Selma?” you might ask. Wasn’t it a triumph for the civil rights movement? Did it not lead to further advances in that struggle? And if you are referring to the movie, is it not a triumph as well, getting a film that portrays one of the signal struggles of the Movement during the 60s with such searing honesty, no holds barred in dealing with the “Which side are you on?” question, applied to this event? Well, yes, the Selma March was a triumph for the civil rights movement. It played a very important role in getting/helping Lyndon Johnson to support what became the Voting Rights Act. (More on the “role-of-LBJ” controversy later.) It did lead to further advances in that struggle. The movie is a triumph as well, a brilliantly staged and acted docu-drama which, among other things, uses the real Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, AL as the setting for the real march that took place across it in 1865. (One has to wonder if the photographer, Peter Pettus, see above, was a relative of Edmund Pettus.)
Ironically enough, the bridge is named for a Confederate Brigadier General, who later, operating out of his law office(!), became the leader of the Alabama Ku Klux Klan in Selma and went on to become a U.S. Senator from Alabama. This is particularly ironic in the context of the Voting Rights Act and the struggle to enact it. The Ku Klux Klan was founded very shortly after the end of the First Civil War by an association of ex-Confederate generals, planters, certain Democratic politicians, and other white leadership who wanted to return the civil society in the South as much as possible to what it had been before the First Civil War, with the exception of not having the institution of chattel slavery in place. (On the Klan, see also pp. 425-44 in Prof. Eric Foner’s magnum opus,Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, Harper and Row, 1988.)
One of the principal objectives of the Klan, from the earliest days of its founding, was to prevent the newly freed slaves from the exercising the right to vote that had been granted to them by the 14th (1868) and 15th(1870) Amendments to the Constitution. The language of the latter is particularly instructive: “1. The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. 2. The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.” But with the power first of the Klan, with the ever-spreading denial of the vote to African-Americans, and then with the institution over a period of some years of what was called the “Jim Crow” laws by the Democratic Party in the South, African-Americans were indeed systematically denied the right that had being guaranteed to them by the 15th amendment.