Uri Avnery
January 31, 2015
Zionists All
MANY TIMES people ask me: “Are you a Zionist?”
My stock answer is: “Depends on what you mean by Zionism.”
Editorials & Actions
Reflections on the Movie “Selma”
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Thoughts about the greatness of Selma, truth, black and white unity, King and the clamor of racist patriarchs… by Alan Gilbert
The movie “Selma,” directed by Ava DuVernay, is a subtle, restrained account of a period of the most extreme American violence against black people, focused on the leadership and struggles of Martin and Coretta King as well as the many who joined them in Selma and around the country. The experience DuVernay conjures, for instance, the horrific shooting of Jimmie Lee Jackson in a restaurant in Selma, his father’s grieving at the coroner’s office, Jimmie’s body seen through the glass and King’s compassion, is alive today in the movement Black Lives Matter! about the murders of Eric Garner and Tamir Rice and Mike Brown and Trayvon Martin… ***
The director sought to capture many people from the civil rights movement. In immersing herself in the words of the time and employing extras from Selma today, she aimed to find the truth and did. For the movie vividly captures the greatness and difficulties of the mass nonviolent civil rights movement, the most admirable way of doing social change that America, along with Tolstoy and Gandhi, has yet given to the world (John Brown is, in certain ways, a greater figure than King; King in the final two speeches, one to John Doar, a Johnson attorney, and one at the state capitol in Montgomery, both written for him by DuVernay, insists “Mine eyes have seen the glory.” There is a resonance of King’s last speech in Memphis about longevity and the mountain top as well as of the original song, the marching song of the North in the Civil War, “John Brown’s Body lies a mouldering in the grave” (the words were written over by Julia Ward Howe – the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” was largely fostered to tame the memory of John Brown – but the original power still lives in them…)
***
Much pivots today on whether mass nonviolent campaigns from below, revealed in this film, offer a way out for a humanity threatened by endless war and climate change. ***
Coretta speaks of the death that was always near. DuVernay, in the second scene in the movie, follows the little girls accompanied by a boy on the steps going down to the Church basement in Birmingham, talking about their hair and the last talking about how Coretta King does hers…
***
DuVernay is an extraordinary film maker, and this is a woman’s (and a documentarist’s, a psychologist’s) way of seeing these moments of terrible violence.
Culture
Chris Hedges on the movie “American Sniper”
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Editor’s note: While we at Tikkun do not feel it fair to blame Christianity or imply that all Christians somehow implicitly support the kind of Christianity that leads some American Christians to feel that their murdering of Arabs or Muslims is doing Jesus’ work, and want to remind our readers (before reading Chris Hedges piece below) of the many progressive Christians who join the Network of Spiritual Progressives and other organization that oppose the US “Strategy of Domination” and instead identify with Tikkun’s Strategy of Generosity (as manifested in our proposed Domestic and Global Marshall Plan (please re-read it by downloading the full version at www.tikkun.org/gmp), we do think that Hedges’ powerful critique of the move American Sniper should be read by those who are too willing to forgive the American media for its implicit and sometimes explicit glorification of the US military. And shame on President Obama and liberal Democrats for not having stopped (what was at first just Bush’s) war in Iraq when they had control of both houses of Congress and the presidency 2009 and 2010, instead backing a “surge” and providing the background and equipment that eventually led to ISIS and all its cruel perversions and murderous ruthlessness. But since it is always Tikkun’s task to find a compassionate angle from which to view people with whom we disagree, I need to put in a word for the decency and humanity of all the players in this complex picture of humanity that we face today, without letting the compassion stop us from making judgments about the violent behavior and cheerleading for that violence that has become so destructive in the contemporary world. –Rabbi Michael Lerner rabbilerner.tikkun@gmail.com
Killing Ragheads for Jesus
By Chris Hedges
January 26, 2015 “ICH” – “American Sniper” lionizes the most despicable aspects of U.S. society—the gun culture, the blind adoration of the military, the belief that we have an innate right as a “Christian” nation to exterminate the “lesser breeds” of the earth, a grotesque hypermasculinity that banishes compassion and pity, a denial of inconvenient facts and historical truth, and a belittling of critical thinking and artistic expression. Many Americans, especially white Americans trapped in a stagnant economy and a dysfunctional political system, yearn for the supposed moral renewal and rigid, militarized control the movie venerates.
Christianity
Re-inventing the Church by Berit Kjos
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Below I’m presenting the view of what I take to be a reactionary writer who resists all the changes that have taken place in the Christian world’s thinking in the past 150 years. What I find intriguing is that her arguments are really against ethical relativism–and on that point I agree with her, particularly how that relativism becomes a slippery slope toward subordination to the capitalist marketplace and its ideals (though she doesn’t make that point even while quoting from market mystifiers like Drucker). What she completely misses, and thereby distorts, is that many of the modernizers of the church whom she is resisting were actually doing precisely what Jeremiah (whom he quotes) advocated–a return to the old ways of the Bible. The major critique of liberation theology is that the old fashioned Church that has been under assault in the modern era was itself an abandonment of the Bible and its old ways–its powerful call for social justice and care for the poor that the Church and most other established religions have managed to honor more in solemn intoning of those values than in actually living them. So the modern liberation theologians, and their current embodiment in Pope Francis, are the ones who are rejecting the accommodation of the Church to the realities of the powerful (the principalities) and insisting on a return to the (implicitly) Jewish ethics that call for redistribution of wealth every fifty years (the Jubillee) and forgiving of all debts every seven years, and of “loving the stranger” (which in today’s world means everyone on the planet, not just your own nation or religion).
Editorials & Actions
Internship with Rabbi Lerner at Tikkun
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Heal and Transform the World INTERNSHIP with Tikkun Magazine and the NSP interfaith and secular-humanist and atheist-welcoming Network of Spiritual Progressives a few blocks from the UC Berkeley Campus.
Are you worried about climate change and upset about how the destruction of our environment is threatening our collective future? Are you outraged by the amount of power that corporations and the top 1% of wealthy people have over U.S. politics and our lives? Do you want to build a future in which “homeland security” is achieved through ending global poverty rather than through the military invasion of other countries? If so, come intern with Tikkun magazine’s Network of Spiritual Progressives (NSP), an interfaith organization that is also welcoming to “spiritual but not religious” atheists and agnostics.
Editorials & Actions
Environmental Crisis Puts Human Life on Earth at Risk
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The ESRA–Environmental and Social Responsibility Amendment to the US Constitution could provide the most effective way to block this environmental destructiveness. Please check it out at www.tikkun.org/esra
Environment
Rate of environmental degradation puts life on Earth at risk, say scientists
The view from the Amazon Tall Tower Observatory in the middle of the Amazon forest. Researchers say that of the nine processes needed to sustain life on Earth, four have exceeded “safe” levels. Photograph: Reuters
Oliver Mi
Thursday 15 January 2015 14.00 EST
Humans are “eating away at our own life support systems” at a rate unseen in the past 10,000 years by degrading land and freshwater systems, emitting greenhouse gases and releasing vast amounts of agricultural chemicals into the environment, new research has found. Two major new studies by an international team of researchers have pinpointed the key factors that ensure a livable planet for humans, with stark results.Of nine worldwide processes that underpin life on Earth, four have exceeded “safe” levels – human-driven climate change, loss of biosphere integrity, land system change and the high level of phosphorus and nitrogen flowing into the oceans due to fertiliser use.Researchers spent five years identifying these core components of a planet suitable for human life, using the long-term average state of each measure to provide a baseline for the analysis.They found that the changes of the last 60 years are unprecedented in the previous 10,000 years, a period in which the world has had a relatively stable climate and human civilisation has advanced significantly.Carbon dioxide levels, at 395.5 parts per million, are at historic highs, while loss of biosphere integrity is resulting in species becoming extinct at a rate more than 100 times faster than the previous norm.
Editorials & Actions
Tariq Ali: France Tries to Hide Its Islamophobia Behind Secular Values
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‘France Tries To Mask Its Islamophobia Behind Secular Values’
The Pakistan-born British commentator seldom minces words. PRANAY SHARMA INTERVIEWS TARIQ ALI
Pakistan-born British commentator Tariq Ali seldom minces words. As a political activist, journalist, writer and film-maker, he has courted controversy and ruffled many feathers. But over the years he has also built up a huge base of followers and admirers much beyond London, where he stays. The firebrand leader of the 1960s campus movement, now all of 71, shows no signs of mellowing with age.
Editorials & Actions
Oriental (Mizrachi) Israelis and the Coming Israeli Elections
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Uri Avnery on Oriental Jews in Israel and The Coming Elections
January 10, 2015
Half of Shas
THE SHAS party has split into two. Opinion polls show that both parts are hovering around the 3.12% threshold which is now necessary for entering the Knesset, after the minimum was raised by the last Knesset. Many people in Israel would be glad if both parts do not make it, and Shas would disappear once and for all from our political landscape. Not I.
SHAS IS the party of oriental orthodox Jewish Israelis. It is debatable whether it is foremost orthodox or foremost oriental.
Editorials & Actions
Mourning the Parisian Journalists Yet Challenging the Hypocrisy
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You can also read this article in Rabbi Lerner’s column on the front page of Huffington Post (and if you do go there, please “like it” (if you like it) and add your own comments. 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.
Editorials & Actions
Vandana Shiva is the new co-chair of the NSP! And a request from her…
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We at the Network of Spiritual Progressives are delighted to announce that Vandana Shiva, the internationally acclaimed environmental activist from India has become the international co-chair of the Network of Spiritual Progressives along with Rabbi Michael Lerner. Dr. Shiva has contributed in fundamental ways to changing the practice and paradigms of agriculture and food. Her books The Violence of the Green Revolution and Monocultures of the Mind pose essential challenges to the dominant paradigm of non-sustainable, industrial agriculture. Through her books Biopiracy, Stolen Harvest and Water Wars, Dr. Shiva has made visible the social, economic and ecological costs of corporate-led globalization. In her letter to us accepting the position of NSP co-chair, Vandana Shiva requested that we send out to you her request that you read the information below, and then sign and send the letter included below to President Obama and President Modi.
Editorials & Actions
Dennis Ross, you must Stop Blaming the Palestinians
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DENNIS ROSS: STOP BLAMING THE PALESTINIANS
by Richard Forer
Dennis Ross has done it again. In “Stop Giving Palestinians a Pass” (NY Times, January 4, 2015), he blames the Palestinians for the lack of peace with Israel. Citing “three serious negotiations”– the 2000 Clinton parameters, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s 2008 proposal, and the recently ended negotiations led by Secretary of State John Kerry – Ross implies that Palestinian refusal to compromise spoiled each of these opportunities.
I remember when Ross appeared on the MacNeil Lehrer News Hour in 2000 and claimed that the collapse of that year’s Camp David Summit was due to unreasonable demands Yasser Arafat had made of the Israelis. Ross’s commentary was the decisive advantage that I, an American Jew, seized upon to convince Israel’s critics that the Jewish community’s long-held belief that Israel had always wanted peace but the Palestinians did not was unequivocally true. Years later, I discovered that Ross’s claim was disputed by many observers, including Israeli negotiators, who characterized Ross as more pro-Israel than they were.
Editorials & Actions
A Palestinian’s New Year’s Message
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To all those who yearn for peace with justice
from Prof. Mazin Qumsiyeh
Happy new Year 2015. May it bring all of you peace (internal peace at
least!). We Palestinians have one top wish for 2015 as in every year
since 1917: freedom. Freedom means self determination, it means
refugees will be finally allowed to return home. Freedom means I can
go to my city of Jerusalem without having to hide from checkpoints and
walk around walls.
Editorials & Actions
The Struggle for the Soul of Islam
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Who Is A Muslim? An Intense Struggle within the Muslim World for the Soul of Islam
By Dr Abdul Cader Asmal for New Age Islam
15 Dec 2014
Well before Cheryl Bernard concocted her whimsical compartmentalization of Muslims into arbitrary categories (1), and Nathan Lean cautioned Muslims not to be defined by non-Muslims (2), there was and is an intense struggle within the Muslim world for the soul of Islam. This review attempts to analyze the claims of the various sects and movements within Islam, to find the common denominators that bind them together, to identify the conflicting views that tear them asunder, to acknowledge the heinous acts that cast them outside the pale of Islam, and to end up hopefully with a definition of who really is a Muslim! A Muslim is an adherent of Islam, a monotheistic religion that is the complete universal and final version of a faith that has been revealed through many prophets including Abraham, Moses, Ishmael, Isaac, Jesus and finally Mohammed. “Muslim” is an Arabic word meaning ‘one who submits to God’. Muslims believe that God is eternal, transcendent, and absolutely One.
Editorials & Actions
Uri Avnery update from Israel during Chanukah 2014
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Uri Avnery
December 20, 2015
Splendid Isolation
ALMOST A thousand Israeli personalities have already signed an appeal to European parliaments for their governments to recognize the State of Palestine.
I am honored to be among the signatories, which include former ministers and members of the Knesset, diplomats and generals, artists and businessmen, writers and poets, including Israel’s three outstanding writers Amos Oz, David Grossman and A. B. Yehoshua. We believe that the independence of the Palestinian people in a state of their own, next to the State of Israel, is the basis for peace, and therefore as important for Israelis as it is for Palestinians. This, by the way, has been my firm conviction ever since the 1948 war. The extreme right wing, which has ruled Israel in recent years, holds the opposite belief. Since it wants to turn the entire area between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River into the “nation-state of the Jewish people”, it totally rejects the setting up of a Palestinian state.
Editorials & Actions
Strategy to Deal with Racist Police Forces by Reginald Lyles
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For Whom the Bell Tolls
by John Donne and Reginald Lyles
Reginald W. Lyles is 1. the Senior Advisor for public safety to Oakland Mayor Jean Quan; 2. a retired career law enforcement officer (Command level); 3. a 30+-year Deacon of Allen Temple Baptist Church – one of the largest African-American churches in the country; 4. and a recent Master of Community and Leadership Divinity graduate and Bible Scholar Award-winner of the American Baptist Seminary of the West. Deacon Lyles teaches, trains and advises churches, governmental, and non-governmental organizations locally and across the country on public safety and civil and human rights. No man is an island,
Entire of itself. Each is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.