[Tikkun magazine has no staff capable of verifying the accuracy of this article. So we do not print it as a story that we ascertain to be true.
Editorials & Actions
Join us for a Liberation Passover Seder. With Emma’s Revolution
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Join Us for A Liberation Passover Seder on Tuesday, April 11 (the 2nd Seder night) at 6:00 pm in Berkeley
Special Guests: Emma’s Revolution
Register now: www.beyttikkun.org/seder. Registration closes Monday, April 3rd
We survived Pharaoh in Egypt–we can survive and even triumph over the contemporary Pharaoh’s in Washington D.C. and Wall Street, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Iran, China, Egypt, Gaza, Israel, Turkey, Korea, the Philippines, and many other places around the world! The ancient Israelites didn’t believe salvation was possible, but it was–and so it will be in our own times, though things look dark and discouraging at the moment as we enter another month of the Trump Administration (most recently dismantling the environmental protections that so many of us campaigned for years to get our government to create). Come participate and revive your hopeful energies for the struggles ahead!!!! This Seder is for people of all faith traditions who wish to recommit to the struggles for liberation and re-affirm your commitment to a world of love, generosity, justice, environmental sustainability and nonviolence!
Articles
UN Committee calls Israel an Apartheid State–Discuss
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SUPPRESSING U.N. REPORT ON ISRAEL’S MOVE TOWARD APARTHEID IS DANGEROUS FOR U.S. POLICY—-AND FOR
ISRAEL ITSELF
BY
ALLAN C. BROWNFELD
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In mid-March, a U.N. commission said in a report that Israel practices apartheid against Palestinians. The report was published by the Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCUA). One of the authors of the report was Richard Falk, an American professor at Princeton University. Dr. Falk, who is Jewish, is the former U.N. Human rights investigator. The term apartheid, the institutionalized oppression once practiced against the black majority in South Africa, has been used increasingly by critics of the Israeli government, both within Israel and abroad, to describe its policies toward the Palestijians in territories occupied or controlled by Israel for 50 years. An executive summary of the report was placed on the U.N. commission’s website. It called it a study to examine, “based on key instruments of international law, whether Israel has established an apartheid regime that oppresses and dominates the Palestinian people as a whole.”
Articles
Shaul Magid on Levinas and Zionism
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You can read this online at:
www.tikkun.org/newsite/shaul-magid-on-levinas-and-zionism
Emmanuel Levinas, the Political, and Zionism: Michael Morgan’s Levinas’s Ethical Politics, a Review Essay
by Shaul Magid,
Indiana University/Bloomington
I
When I was a graduate student in Jewish thought and philosophy in Israel and the U.S. in the late 1980s and early 1990s we were all reading Emmanuel Levinas. Some of his major works had recently been translated into English and Hebrew (all were written in French) and his dual commitment to continental philosophy and Judaism made him, for many of us, the Franz Rosenzweig of our generation. Levinas quickly became a cottage industry among American scholars of Judaism, from those interested in Rabbinics who read his Nine Talmudic Readings, to those interested in phenomenology and ethics who read Totality and Infinity, Otherwise than Being and Time and the Other, to those who were interested in a philosophically sophistical apologia for Judaism who read his In the Time of the Nations and Difficult Freedom. Dissertations were written about him, journals were full of essays on his work, and a North American Levinas Society was established in 2006 with conferences and symposia. Levinas stood at the center of Jewish philosophical though for at least two decades.
Editorials & Actions
Andrew Bacevich on the US military strategy
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[editor’s note: Below is an introduction to Andrew Bacevich’s article from our media ally Tom Engelhardt at www.tomdispatch.com]
U.S. Marines are, for the first time, deploying to Syria (with more to come). There’s talk of an “enduring” U.S. military presence in Iraq, while additional U.S. troops are being dispatched to neighboring Kuwait with an eye to the wars in both Iraq and Syria. Yemen has been battered by a veritable blitz of drone strikes and other air attacks. Afghanistan seems to be in line for an increase in American forces. The new president has just restored to the CIA the power to use drones to strike more or less anywhere on the “world battlefield,” recently a Pentagon prerogative, and is evidently easing restrictions on the Pentagon’s use of drones as well. U.S. military commanders are slated to get more leeway to make decisions locally and the very definition of what qualifies as a “battlefield” looks like it’s about to change (which will mean even less attention to “collateral damage” or civilian casualties). President Trump may soon designate various areas outside more or less official American war zones — since the U.S. Congress no longer declares war, they can’t truly be official — as “temporary areas of active hostility.” That will grant U.S. commanders greater leeway in launching attacks on terror groups in places like Somalia. In fact, this already seems to have happened in Yemen, according to the New York Times, opening the way for a disastrous Special Operations Forces raid there that caused the death of a Navy SEAL and possibly nine Yemeni children (the youngest three months old), while evidently accomplishing next to nothing. In other words, in the early months of the Trump era, U.S. wars and conflicts across the Greater Middle East are being expanded and escalated. This isn’t exactly a new process, and isn’t yet at the level of either the failed Iraqi Surge of 2007 or the failed Afghan one of 2010. Still, you might think that the almost instant failure of that Yemen raid would have rung a few familiar warning bells in Washington when it comes to escalating America’s wars in the region. If so, you would evidently be oh-so-wrong. The history of the last 15 years tells us that in Washington such setbacks couldn’t matter less. At the moment, the generals who have headed down these very paths before are evidently recommending to an eager new president that it’s the height of wisdom to head down them again.
Editorials & Actions
Lets Avoid War with Korea
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[A note from our friends at Just Foreign Policy]
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson recently seemed to suggest that a pre-emptive U.S. bombing of North Korea was an option “on the table.” [1] As the Los Angeles Times editorial board stated, such dangerous saber-rattling isn’t the answer to our problems with North Korea. Yet while claiming that “all options are on the table,” Tillerson seemed to be ruling out the only realistic option: negotiations. [2] As the Christian Science Monitor noted, China has made a plausible proposal to re-start negotiations: North Korea would suspend its nuclear and missile tests in return for the U.S. and South Korea halting their annual joint military exercises. Unfortunately, Washington dismissed the Chinese proposal out of hand.
Editorials & Actions
Should Women Be in the IDF Combat Units?
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Editor’s Note: Though this article starts out exploring the debate between secular and religious Israelis about the “right” of women to be in combat units, it turns to the deeper issue–should anyone be in those combat units as long as their major role is enforcing the Occupation of the West Bank. When you start confronting that, your allegiance might switch from opposing the ultra-right-wing religious is Israel who don’t want the women in their community to be influenced by the militarist ethos of the Israeli army. But is it that, or the equality in the Army that really disturbs them? And if it is the latter, but they advocate using religious reasons about “modesty” as their argument, should those who oppose the Occupation side with them or not? Read and reflect on this situation that Israeli peace activist Adam Keller calls “Crazy Country.”
Editorials & Actions
Deportation, Immigration Bans & Racial Cleansing: America and Nazi Germany
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Seeds of Destruction: Deportation, Immigration Bans, and Racial Cleansing in America and Nazi Germany
By John Smelcer
We’ve all read the history with horror and with the certainty that it could never happen to us: The rise of Hitler and Fascism in the mid-to-late 1930s, at a time when Germany was suffering an economic depression; the subsequent rise of the Third Reich buoyed by a popular nationalistic movement that included deportation of immigrants and embracing racial cleansing manifested by the sterilization of hundreds of thousands of German citizens deemed unworthy to participate in the future “Master Race;” the extermination of six million Jews in Hitler’s “Final Solution;” and the invasion and occupation of Europe and Russia that ultimately cost an estimated sixty to eighty million lives. If Germany had conquered Russia, another 140 million people might have been sterilized, enslaved, or exterminated as Hitler planned to use Russia as lebensraum or “living space” for his future Master Race. The history books didn’t tell you the whole story. The seeds of destruction that the Nazi’s sowed were not entirely their own ideas. Many were modeled after American policy and on one American scientist’s research of racial cleansing.
Editorials & Actions
The Iraq War Disastrous Surge
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A note from Tom Engelhardt, the editor of Tikkun’s media ally TomDispatch.com where this article appeared orignally. Every now and then, I think back to the millions of people who turned out in this country and across the globe in early 2003 to protest the coming invasion of Iraq. Until the recentWomen’s March against Donald Trump, that may have been the largest set of demonstrations in American history or, at the very least, the largest against a war that had yet to be launched. Those who participated will remember that the protests were also a sea of homemade signs, some sardonic (“Remember when presidents were smart and bombs were dumb?”), some blunt (“Contain Saddam — and Bush”), some pointed indeed (“Pre-emptive war is terrorism”). In one of those demonstrations, I was carrying a sign which read “The Bush administration is a material breach” (a reference to that crew’s insistence that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was in “material breach” of a U.N. resolution for not fully disclosing its efforts to produce weapons of mass destruction… you know, those non-existent nukes that were slated to create future mushroom clouds over American cities). There was even one humorous sign I noted then that seems relevant to our Dystrumpian moment and the president’s stated wishes to “keep” Iraqi oil: “How did USA’s oil get under Iraq’s sand?”
Editorials & Actions
Trump’s Greatest Allies Are the Liberal Elites (NY Times, etc)
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By Chris Hedges
March 06, 2017 “Information Clearing House” – “Truth Dig” – The liberal elites, who bear significant responsibility for the death of our democracy, now hold themselves up as the saviors of the republic. They have embarked, despite their own corruption and their complicity in neoliberalism and the crimes of empire, on a self-righteous moral crusade to topple Donald Trump. It is quite a show. They attack Trump’s “lies,” denounce executive orders such as his travel ban as un-American and blame Trump’s election on Russia or FBI Director James Comey rather than the failed neoliberal policies they themselves advanced. Where was this moral outrage when our privacy was taken from us by the security and surveillance state, the criminals on Wall Street were bailed out, we were stripped of our civil liberties and 2.3 million men and women were packed into our prisons, most of them poor people of color?
Editorials & Actions
Response to Martha Sonnenberg’s Kaddish for Che
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March 6, 2017
Reader response to Martha Sonnenberg’s Kaddish for Che:
Querido Che: Che está Presente
by Nancy Scheper-Hughes
The spiritual and political afterlife of Che, like the afterlife of Jesus of Nazareth, begins with their brutal torture and deaths at the hands of ignorant soldiers, colonizing forces, and local collaborators. Both faced their capture and deaths with equanimity, gentleness, and love. Both were given opportunities to surrender and save themselves, but both acquiesced to their fate, remained true to their beliefs, and faced their executions with words of comfort and of love. Che: “I know you are here to kill me. Shoot, you are only going to kill a man… please, tell my wife to remarry and try to be happy.” Jesus: “Father forgive them for they know not what they do”.
Editorials & Actions
Anti-Semitism is Back…and Wont Go Away
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Tikkun to heal, repair and transform the world
By Rabbi Michael Lerner
Suddenly anti-Semitism is back. Over one hundred headstones in a Jewish cemetery in Philadelphia were overturned in a hate act early Sunday February 26, a week after a similar assault on a Jewish cemetery in Missouri. Since the election of Donald Trump there have been hundreds of incidents of bomb threats to Jewish institutions, 20 more on Monday February 27th, along with college campuses reporting a dramatic rise in anti-Semitic graffiti.
President Trump is reported to have followed alt-Right conspiracy theorists in suggesting in an off-the-record briefing that these might be false flag operations coming from Jews who are seeking to build sympathy and reclaim our victim status.
Jewish leaders around the country are calling upon President Trump to order a full-scale investigation of this surge in acts designed to frighten Jews. Unfortunately, they have been facing some indifference from a media and public which have been overdosed with cries of anti-Semitism.
Editorials & Actions
Trump Using Typical War Propaganda
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Trump’s Use of Navy SEAL’s Wife Highlights All the Key Ingredients of U.S. War Propaganda
http://portside.org/2017-03-02/trumps-use-navy-seals-wife-highlights-all-key-ingredients-us-war-propaganda
PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION
This is standard fare in U.S. war propaganda: We fixate on the Americans killed, learning their names and life stories and the plight of their spouses and parents, but steadfastly ignore the innocent people the U.S. government kills, whose numbers are always far greater.
Glenn Greenwald
The Intercept
March 1, 2017
During his Tuesday night address to the U.S. Congress, President Trump paid tribute to Ryan Owens, the Navy SEAL killed in the January commando raid in Yemen that Trump ordered. As he did so, television cameras focused for almost four full minutes on Owens’s grieving wife, Carryn, as she wept and applauded while sitting next to and periodically being touched by Trump’s glamorous daughter Ivanka. The entire chamber stood together in sustained applause, with Trump interjecting scripted, lyrical expressions of support and gratitude for her husband’s sacrifice. It was, as intended, an obviously powerful TV moment.
Editorials & Actions
Uri Avnery– The Great Rift Between the 2 Jewish Peoples
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Editor’s note: Though I fully agree with Uri Avnery’s depiction of 2 Jewish peoples, I disagree that it can be understood best in terms of ethnic background. Rather, it reflects two different worldviews, delineated in my book The Left Hand of God, and applied specifically to Israel in my book Embracing Israel/Palestine. That same split is reflected in the 70% of American Jews who voted for Hillary and the 20% who voted for Trump. Many of the fearful, the haters, the traumatized and retraumatizing from the 1800 years of powerlessness and the oppression they experienced in Christian Europe and to a lesser but still real extent in Muslim countries, have become “modern Orthodox” rightwing on politics and also on Jewish practice, but secular neo-cons follow the same path of indifference to the suffering of others. The West Bank settlers are led by Ashkenazim, and if the Israeli left was not so much in bed with upper middle class economic privilege, they would have created a left party that was not only for peace and the rights of minorities, but also for economic and social justice for the working class and economically deprived.
Editorials & Actions
The Fear and the Passion
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Editor’s note: Here is a perspective from the U.K. which presents an overview of how some British Muslim progressives are trying to make sense of Trumpism, the British exit from the UK’s previous integration into the Common Market, and the growth of right-wing movements manipulated by elites of wealth and power.
The Fear and the Passion
By Tahir Abbas
Since the inauguration of President Trump, barely a month ago, many people around the world have been deeply disturbed by his many negative utterances, provocative put-downs of other countries, and by the people he has appointed to run major elements of the American government. The result has been a global outcry among women, the young, minorities and liberal-minded people at the narcissism and self-centred nature of much of President Trump’s limited but impactful words. Right-wing extremists have felt empowered by a form of triumphalism reflected in Trump’s repeated theme ‘to make America great again’. The impact this has on minority communities of all backgrounds, but especially among Muslim and Jewish groups, are painfully felt. In this short essay, I explore the depth of this upset and discuss what it means for communities with shared norms who would otherwise not be allied.