Tikkun (https://www.tikkun.org/category/other_voices/editorials__actions/page/55/)
Note from Rabbi Michael Lerner: We at Tikkun hate violence from whatever source, so naturally we’ve been extremely critical of Hamas through the years both for its violence and its glorification of violent acts of terror against Israeli civilians. We’ve similarly been critical of Israeli violence which is built into the very structure of the Occupation.
Editor’s Note: I received this information from a homeless woman named Bobbie. It reminds us of why the GMP is so important and why the budget reductions of help to those suffering from poverty is such an immoral reality. “Poverty is the worst form of violence.” –Mohandas Gandhi
NEED VS SUPPLY
Funding
•In 1978, HUD’s budget was over $83 billion. •In 1983, HUD’s budget was only $18 billion. Demolition
• In the last several years, HUD has been tearing down thousands of low-income units across the country. • From 1996 on, HUD has spent $0 on building low-income housing while thousands of units have been demolished.
Any doubt about how the United States makes its policies on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict should be dispelled by the Obama administration’s near-instant reaction to the Fatah-Hamas reconciliation announcement: it is determined to be fully in sync with Prime Minister Netanyahu.
What Israel and the Palestinians really need from the US and the Quartet is some parameter-setting.
Reposted from the Progressive Christian Alliance. American motivational speaker Denis Waitley said, “There are two primary choices in life: to accept conditions as they exist, or accept responsibility for changing them.” I am convinced that Rabbi Jesus refused to accept the conditions of the corruption of Judaism by the Temple rulers. He also refused to accept the brutality of the Roman occupation. In these refusals he accepted the responsibility to try to change those conditions for the better and especially for the benefit of the poor and exploited. In this process Rabbi Jesus set his face to go to Jerusalem.
Sleepwalking into the Imperial Dark
This can’t end well. But then, how often do empires end well, really? They live vampirically by feeding off others until, sooner or later, they begin to feed on themselves, to suck their own blood, to hollow themselves out. Sooner or later, they find themselves, as in our case, economically stressed and militarily extended in wars they can’t afford to win or lose. Historians have certainly written about the dangers of overextended empires and of endless war as a way of life, but there’s something distant and abstract about the patterns of history. It’s quite another thing to take it in when you’re part of it; when, as they used to say in the overheated 1960s, you’re in the belly of the beast. I don’t know what it felt like to be inside the Roman Empire in the long decades, even centuries, before it collapsed, or to experience the waning years of the Spanish empire, or the twilight of the Qing dynasty, or of Imperial Britain as the sun first began to set, or even of the Soviet Empire before the troops came slinking home from Afghanistan, but at some point it must have seemed at least a little like this — truly strange, like watching a machine losing its parts. It must have seemed as odd and unnerving as it does now to see a formerly mighty power enter a state of semi-paralysis at home even as it staggers on blindly with its war-making abroad. The United States is, of course, an imperial power, however much we might prefer not to utter the word. We still have our globe-spanning array of semi-client states; our military continues to garrison much of the planet; and we are waging war abroad more continuously than at any time in memory. Yet who doesn’t sense that the sun is now setting on us?
Here are some reflections from Christian thinkers on Easter From Rev. Brian McLaren’s blog (Rev. McLaren is one of the most exciting contemporary Christian theologians):
Holy Week: Meditation 7 … Easter
Fr. Richard Rohr celebrates the holy resurrection of the Lord like this:
Christ Crucified is all of the hidden, private, tragic pain of history made public and given over to God. Christ Resurrected is all of that private, ungrieved, unnoted suffering received, loved, and transformed by an All-Caring God. How else could we believe in God at all?
I’d like to share an annual Passover message from the courageous leader of Rabbis for Human Rights in Israel, Rabbi Arik Aschermann of Jerusalem. On this Passover holiday I invite you to become our fellow provocateurs by making a generous donation to Rabbis for Human Rights. Passover/Shabbat HaGadol Thoughts
by Rabbi Arik Ascherman
On Saturday night a Ta’ayush activist called me right after Shabbat ended. In a choked up voice he told me about the day’s events I had not witnessed because of the fact that I am Shabbat observant. Thanks to the work of our OT legal staff the valley of T’wamin was filled with Palestinian shepherds and their flocks for the first time in over ten years.
The budget is an ethical and spiritual issue–it is the concrete manifestation of our values both as individuals who vote for the candidates who shape the budget, and as a society. Below a few progressives make sense of the budget battles we are facing in the coming months. Budget Battles: Sound, Fury and Fakery
by Richard D. Wolff
Weeks of highly publicized debates — some in Congress, more in the mass media — brought Republicans and Democrats to a budget deal. To maximize public attention, they threatened a possible government shutdown. Both parties said that large government deficits and accumulated debt were “serious problems.”
Who started the deadly tit for tat? To the Israelis it is clear − it started with the abominable fire on the school bus. To the Palestinians it is clear − it started with killing a senior Hamas official. And before that it was … and before that it was …
THE REAL question about Cast Lead is not whether individual soldiers did commit such crimes. They sure did – any army is composed of all types of human beings, decent youngsters with a moral conscience besides sadists, imbeciles and others suffering from moral insanity. In a war you give all of them arms and a license to kill, and the results can be foreseen. That is one reason why “war is hell”.
In light of the recent Washington Post op-ed in which Goldstone seemed to be retreating on some of what his UN report on Israeli and Hamas human rights violations took place during Israel’s invasion of Gaza in Dec. 2008 and Jan. 2009, Tikkun author Mitchell Plitnick provides us with a way to think of what we like to call our “progressive middle path” that is both pro-Israel and pro-Palestine, and critical of both sides as well.
It’s not enough to oppose violence. That’s the deep weakness of an anti-war movement that focuses only on what it is against. The world needs to hear what we are for.
Compare and contrast
Progressives have sharp differences with each other on whether the Libyan intervention by the United States and other Western countries is morally justified. Here we present a variety of such perspectives.