Tikkun (https://www.tikkun.org/category/other_voices/editorials__actions/page/51/)
Chanukah was the first recorded national liberation struggle against Greek imperialism, and Christmas celebrates the birth of a hoped-for messiah to free the Jewish people from Roman imperialism. Both Judaism born of slaves in Egypt and Christianity born of a movement of the poor and powerless were in their times the “Occupy” movement that confronted the powerful and those who served them.
URGENT Dec. 14
The House is currently voting on the conference report for the National Defense Authorization Act which contains language authorizing indefinite detentions of persons SUSPECTED of terror activities detained on US Soil, including US citizens! Don’t be fooled–a future President or Attorney General could use this against anti-war demonstrators or anyone else they determined was “suspected” of terror activities. We fought the War of Independence from England to protect ourselves from this kind of arbitrary use of power without protection of individual rights. Don’t let them destroy what was best in American freedoms!
Call Mayor Bloomberg of NYC, Mayor Jean Quan of Oakland, or whoever is your mayor and suggest that they support the Occupy movement by providing encouragement to social workers, teachers, clergy and others to go down to the Occupy encampments and volunteer time and energy to help those who badly need this support!! Cities are cutting back on vitally needed social services, while at the same time, buying expensive military gear for their police departments. From AlterNet by Joshua Holland, “What If They Sent in Social Services to Help Occupations Instead of Riot Cops to Bust Heads?”:
Occupations across the country have struggled to feed and shelter the least fortunate among us, and then faced often violent police crackdowns at great taxpayer expense. Pause for a moment and imagine what might result if mayors sent in social workers to help people rather than riot police to bust some heads? In a society that tends to avert its gaze from the homeless, the hungry, the addicted and the mentally ill, the Occupy movement’s compassion has become an albatross around its neck.
Editor’s Note:
The comparison of Israel to South Africa has incendiary elements–and caused Jimmy Carter’s very important book to be dismissed without a serious reading. But this piece is from the publisher of the only liberal newspaper in Israel, and has to be taken very very seriously even by those of us who think that the use of the term “apartheid” is counter-productive and obscures the way in which Israeli
policy toward Palestinians is not only different from apartheid, but in some respects far worse in real life terms. Haaretz newspaper is the equivalent to the NY Times for Israel, the one paper that doesn’t focus on sensationalism, Arab hatred, sex, and gossip, but actually bothers to report the news. So its owner Amos Schocken, of the famous family that created Schocken Books, commands our respect, as well as appreciation for having given our previous managing editor Joel Shalit permission to reprint on Tikkun’s website the articles in Ha’aretz.–Rabbi Michael Lerner
The necessary elimination of Israeli democracy
Haaretz publisher and owner Amos Schocken says there is a difference between the apartheid of South Africa and what is happening in Israel and in the territories, but there are also similarities. By Amos Schocken Tags: West Bank Israel settlements Knesset Yitzhak Rabin
Speaking in the Knesset in January 1993, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin said, “Iran is in the initial stages of an effort to acquire nonconventional capability in general, and nuclear capability in particular. Our assessment is that Iran today has the appropriate manpower and sufficient resources to acquire nuclear arms within 10 years.
When people often say that they are going to reelect Obama as “the lesser evil,” it is important to acknowledge that though lesser evil, the Obama Administration has been involved in considerable evil. By Jeffrey Sachs
Huffington Post
November 25, 201
The wonder of our world is that scientific knowledge is
now so powerful that we can save millions of children,
mothers, and fathers from killer diseases each year at
little cost. The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB, and
Malaria has mobilized that knowledge over the past
decade to save more than 7 million lives and to protect
the health of hundreds of millions more. Yet now the
Global Fund is under mortal threat because of budget
cuts approved by President Obama and the Congress. The Obama Administration had pledged $4 billion during
2011-13 to the Global Fund, or $1.33 billion per year.
Ehud Barak: Iranian Nuclear Program Not Really About Israel
The classic definition of a campaign gaffe is when a politician inadvertently speaks a truth that will hurt him politically. The first George Bush committed a gaffe when he said that the idea that cutting taxes would increase government revenue was “voodoo economics.” Similarly, it was a gaffe when Barack Obama said that insecure right-wingers “cling” to religion and guns. In other words, a gaffe is a politically inconvenient truth. Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak gaffed big time this week.
I think you might find this exchange between a student and me about Occupy Oakland and the Oakland community of some interest. There is a rumor that there may be a new violent confrontation hours from now as the occupiers refuse to leave (the mayor had previously offered for us to be able to stay 24/7 but without tents–in other words, just as people coming to present our ideas, but not as occupiers. Let me hasten to add that I believe that the police riot 12 days ago was totally unjustified, and believe that the police who were involved should be sent to prison like others who violate the law. The violence of Oakland police is a daily reality for people of color in Oakland and many other American cities, and always a shock to everyone else because it is only when it happens to white people that the media stays on the story for more than a day or two! I have also posted some responses from others below the first two. So here is the letter I received on email this morning:
Jordan Ashe wrote:
Dear Rabbi Lerner:
My name is Jordan Ashe and I am a student member of your Tikkun community.
When my teacher and mentor at the Jewish Theological Seminary Abraham Joshua Heschel told me and others that he had been “praying with his feet” when he participated in the Selma Freedom march in 1965, he confirmed for many a way of overcoming the dichotomy between my religious practice and my radical politics. In many ways, the anti-war movements of the Sixties and early Seventies of the last century felt like that kind of community prayer. I had that experience again at my various visits to Occupy Oakland, most intensely this past Wednesday, November 2, 2011.
Read our vision for the Occupy movement and how the Network of Spiritual Progressives is involved.
MJ Rosenberg details how AIPAC is pushing for the US to go to war with Iran, presumably because Iran is Israel’s last militarily viable MidEast enemy. Could the US be that stupid? Or is this just a buildup that Obama needs to convince the military that his Administration would not, if re-elected, abandon them and their desires for endless war or at least endless war-preparation and war-expenditures. Meanwhile Uri Avnery argues that the huffing and puffing about Israel’s “secret plans” for a war with Iran are most likely attempts to achieve other ends without war. Time will tell.
Uri Avnery
October 22, 2011
Everybody’s Son
THE MOST sensible – I almost wrote “the only sensible” – sentence uttered this week sprang from the lips of a 5-year old boy. After the prisoner swap, one of those smart-aleck TV reporters asked him: “Why did we release 1027 Arabs for one Israeli soldier?” He expected, of course, the usual answer: because one Israeli is worth a thousand Arabs. The little boy replied: “Because we caught many of them and they caught only one.”
FOR MORE than a week, the whole of Israel was in a state of intoxication. Gilad Shalit indeed ruled the country (Shalit means “ruler”). His pictures were plastered all over the place like those of Comrade Kim in North Korea.
Here we present some of the views that you may not hear in the mainstream Western media, first from Uri Avnery, chair of Gush Shalom, the Israeli human rights organization, then by two columnists in Ha’aretz, the Israeli equivalent of the NY Times. Then we present a Palestinian activist reflecting on what it means to be a prisoner and how that impacts on the consciousness of those held in Israeli prisons.
This past weekend, Occupy Wall Street demonstrations were held in over 951 cities in 82 countries as people around the globe joined in an international day of solidarity against the greed and corruption of the 1%. The media, trying to discredit all the demonstrators, say we don’t know what we are for, only what we are against. In the NY Times on Tuesday, Oct. 18, a story about Occupy Wall Street claimed that the only thing the demonstrators agreed upon was that they were angry, but not about what much less what they actually wanted. So I believe there is much to be gained were we to embrace the following 20 second sound bite for “what we are for.”
Waking Up from the Nightmare:
Buddhist Reflections on Occupy Wall Street
David R. Loy
In a Buddhist blog about Occupy Wall Street, Michael Stone quotes the philosopher Slavoj Žižek, who spoke to the New York Occupiers at Zuccotti Park on October 9:
They tell you we are dreamers. The true dreamers are those who think things can go on indefinitely the way they are. We are not dreamers. We are awakening from a dream which is turning into a nightmare. We are not destroying anything.
The Congressional Progressive Caucus Identifies more than $4 Trillion in Savings to Create
Jobs and Protect Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid
Washington, D.C. – The Congressional Progressive Caucus
(CPC) today sent policy proposals to Senator Patty
Murray and Congressman Jeb Hensarling, Co-Chairs of the
Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction,
recommending that the work of the committee focus on
creating jobs, raising revenues through fair taxation
and protecting Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. The CPC identified more than $4 trillion in savings,
which would increase to more than $7 trillion if the
Bush tax cuts are allowed to expire on schedule. The
recommendations direct the savings toward job creation,
the single most important means to reduce the deficit. “It’s way past time to talk big or think big – it’s time
to govern big and do what needs doing,” CPC co-chair
Rep. Raúl M. Grijalva (D-AZ) said. “The American people
are sick and tired of feeling too few in the government
are responsive to their needs.