Tikkun (https://www.tikkun.org/category/other_voices/editorials__actions/page/54/)
While the media continually underplays the crimes committed by the United States government both in its daily acts of murder against innocents in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq and in its flagrant disregard for the well-being of the people of the US by ignoring the pain they suffer as a result of inadequate jobs and health care, polluted air and water, homelessness, etc., nothing is ever missed when a political leader does some lewd sexual act.
I must admit that before Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech in Washington, I wasn’t sure whether the Palestinian idea of submitting a UN resolution on recognition is defensible. My grounds were simple: just like Obama, I thought this would not lead to the establishment of a Palestinian State, because the Israeli government is expected to reject the resolution. However, it is precisely Israel’s unilateral position and unwillingness to evacuate the territories which have made a UN resolution so necessary. Netanyahu argues that Israel is not an occupier, and that “Judaea and Samaria” belong to it by virtue of the Jewish nation’s historical attachment to these territories. In that he disregards the military occupation of the Territories and all Israeli steps taken since: the robbery of Palestinian lands, denial of civil and human rights, prevention of economic development and severe restrictions on population movement.
By Rick Wolff
The current capitalist global crisis began with the severe contraction in the housing markets in mid-2007. Therefore welcome to Year Five. This inventory of where things stand may begin with the good news: the major banks, the stock market, and corporate profits have largely or completely “recovered” from the lows they reached early in 2009. The US dollar has fallen sharply against many currencies of countries with which the US trades and that has enabled US exports to rebound from their crisis lows. However, the bad news is what prevails notwithstanding the political and media hypes about “recovery.” The most widely cited unemployment rate remains at 9 % for workers without jobs but looking. If instead we use the more indicative U-6 unemployment statistic of the US Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, then the rate is 15%. The latter rate counts also those who want full-time but can only find part-time work and those who want work but have given up looking.
Last week when Obama seemed momentarily to be taking a stand to push Netanyahu toward a more reasonable negotiating position, I encouraged readers to write to the media and their elected representatives to challenge what appeared at that time to be an overwhelming media and political barrage of pro-Netanyahu rhetoric. No sooner had we written that then Obama “clarified” his position in ways to signal that he had no intention of pressing Netanyahu at all. On the contrary, he was silent as Netanyahu received the overwhelming support of Democrats and Republicans in Congress to a speech in which he revealed his minimal conditions for peace that were obviously impossible for Palestinians to accept. Ha’aretz columnist Akiva Eldar puts forward a very sophisticated analysis of Netanyahu’s triumph after Obama allowed him to return to Israel without having to give anything to make peace possible and with the reward of a defacto promise that Obama would now publicly challenge the Palestinian move to seek UN recognition in the Fall of 2011. In so doing, Obama capitulates to the right-wing pro-Israel Lobby, but betrays the best interests of Israel and the Jewish people.
A three-way conversation about the United States and Pakistan with Shaykh Kabir Helminski, Rabbi Michael Lerner, and Abbas Bilgrami, the director of a natural gas distribution company in Pakistan.
Pre-1967 lines only make sense in the context of a comprehensive settlement that meets both sides’ needs in a spirit of trust and compassion.
by Adam Keller
President Obama has made his long awaited speech and uttered the magic number which some hoped and other dreaded that he would mention – Nineteen Hundred Sixty Seven. And Prime Minister Netanyahu retorted with an angry outburst and total denunciation and rejection of the 1967 borders. Israel’s newspapers all came out with banner headlines proclaiming “Confrontation!” and “Collision Course!”. In the evening, Obama and Netahayhu met at the White House and made a rather pale effort to paper over the cracks and present the TV cameras with a friendly, smiling, hand-shaking façade – what today’s Wall Street Journal called “The most undiplomatic moments of international diplomacy ever offered for cameras”.
Here is what a peace plan must involve for it to have any chance of swaying hearts and minds on all sides:
1. The peace treaty will recognize the State of Israel and the State of Palestine and defines Palestine’s borders to include almost all of pre-1967 West Bank and Gaza, with small exchanges of land mutually agreed upon and roughly equivalent in value and historic and/or military significance to each side. The peace plan will also entail a corresponding treaty between Israel and all Arab states—including recognition of Israel and promising full diplomatic and economic cooperation among these parties—and accepting all the terms of this agreement as specified herein And it should include a twenty-to-thirty-year plan for moving toward a Middle Eastern common market and the eventual establishment of a political union along the lines of the European Union. This might also include eventually building a federation between Israel and Palestine, or Israel, Palestine, and Jordan. 2.
by MJ Rosenberg
This article originally appeared as “The Fake Outrage Of The Israel-Firsters” on TPM Cafe. There was absolutely nothing about President Barack Obama’s Middle East speech to get excited about. (And even less in his statement following Friday’s meeting with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu.) The president did not even attempt to set out an action plan; he offered broad principles, ones that have been offered before by five previous presidents. He delivered the speech in an effort to get the jump on Netanyahu, who is in town to address Congress and AIPAC. Bibi’s goal is to mobilize his followers against any U.S. efforts to promote an Israeli-Palestinian agreement.
Former managing editor Dave Belden, Associate Editor Peter Gabel, and I were honored to receive the Utne Independent Press Award won by Tikkun Wednesday night at a ceremony attended by staff from some of the most significant magazines in the United States (Managing Editor Alana Price was unable to attend but was with us in spirit). The awardees were selected from some 1,300 magazines reviewed. Tikkun won in the category of Best Body/Spirit Coverage. The other nominees were: The Christian Century, Commonweal, Geez, Resurgence, Sojourners, Tricycle, and Yes!Magazine. In accepting the award, we want to acknowledge the excellence of the other nominee magazines as well!
Why the 2012 elections are likely to be the most racist that most of have seen in our lifetimes.
Noam Chomsky offered some interesting reflections on the environment during a speech at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, last September.
Whenever I talk publicly about the way that right-wingers in the Jewish world make it hard for other Jews to speak out against Israel, I’m challenged by some who insist that there is no such climate of repression in the Jewish world. Yet over and over again, I’ve encountered people who have taken Tikkun-like stances, both pro-Israel and pro-Palestine, and paid a high price for it. The impact of the Tony Kushner incident, described below, is not that it will silence Kushner–he has enough social power to resist this kind of attempt to silence him since as the author of Angels in America he has received so much public praise he is not in danger–but that it, like so many other similar acts of repression, gives a stark warning to younger or less economically secure people in academia, the media and in professional lives that they must keep their mouths closed about Israel or face dangers to their careers and futures. Two recent pieces about this incident are particularly worth reading: “CUNY Board Nixes Honorary Degree For Playwright Tony Kushner” in the Jewish Week by Doug Chandler and Tony Kushner’s response to the the CUNY Board Decision. Doug Chandler writes:
In what is believed to be a rare move, the City University of New York has turned down a request by one of its colleges to honor Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Tony Kushner at its commencement ceremony this spring, The Jewish Week has learned.
Chris Hedges’ recent article “The Corporate State Will Continue its Inexorable Advance Until We’re Locked into a Permanent Underclass” is brilliant in its insights. Unfortunately, like most of what Hedges is writing these days, it is missing any picture of hope or possibility. The very existence of constituencies for his thinking, like those who read Tikkun, belies the extreme pessimism and shows that his analysis is too one-sided, ignoring all the factors that have produced him and produced us and produced the tens of millions who voted for Obama precisely because we falsely believed that he would articulate and fight for an alternative to the reality that Hedges so clearly explicates. Because his analysis leaves all of us out of the picture, it is not only depressing but one-sided and therefore inaccurate. And yet, it does describe the massive reality we face and gives us a very good picture of why we are in the mess we are in.
President Obama has done a major disservice to the American people by accepting the right-wing premise that cutting budgets in order to lower the deficit should take priority over creating jobs.