A Call for Love in the Face of Hatred: Rabbi Michael Lerner’s Talk at Muhammad Ali’s Memorial

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El maley rachamim, shocheyn ba’meh’romeem. Master of compassion, God of compassion, send your blessings to Muhammad Ali, send your blessings to all who mourn for him, and send your blessings for all the millions and millions of people who mourn for him all over this planet. I come here speaking as a representative of American Jews—and to say that American Jews played an important role in solidarity with African-American struggles in this country and that we today stand in solidarity with the Islamic community in this country and all around the world.

2017

Coercive Deference and Double Bind Politics on the Left (a response to the 2016 election)

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I SHARE WITH I’m sure virtually all of Tikkun’s readers a feeling of pain and horror at the acts of racial and ethnic violence that have occurred since the election of Donald Trump. And I of course agree that the rhetoric of Trump’s campaign has had the effect of stirring up and legitimizing the expression of these racist and xenophobic impulses in terrible and alarming ways. But it does not help our efforts to respond to and counter these realities to simply denounce the Trump campaign or Trump supporters as “being” racist or xenophobic as if their violent and cruel behavior were just an expression of their evil essence or brainwashed minds. Instead, we must look deeply into the impacted conditions of their psychological, spiritual, and economic lives to see what in their experience has led them to burst out by the millions in response to Trump’s message.

Editorials & Actions

The Clear and Present Menace of SciLence

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The Clear and Present Menace of SciLence

David L. Katz, MD, MPH, FACPM, FACP, FACLM
FollowDavid L. Katz, MD, MPH, FACPM, FACP, FACLM 

Founder, True Health Initiative

 

I heard from a public health colleague this week, whose work and time are partly funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, that the CDC did not want to be acknowledged as a funding source in a research paper addressing gun violence. Apparently, CDC scientists have marching orders to be more concerned about unflattering facts about gun violence, than about gun violence itself. That’s ideology 1, epidemiology 0. The score does not improve after that. In high-profile media coverage you have likely seen, we learned that the Trump Administration had, in an early indication of its ominous priorities, effectively issued gag orders to the USDA and the EPA. Apparently, we the people are to be kept uninformed not only about guns, but also about such matters of minor importance as our food supply, and the environment. And perhaps everything else, too, since the White House message to the press was: just keep your mouth shut. The new normal, apparently, is to stand our ground- except where facts are concerned. We want no part of those. Let’s be clear, silence where science ought to be is a grave threat to us all. Those of you who are avowed fans of science as I am need no convincing. To anyone else: well, there is no one else. Just about everyone is a fan of science, it’s just that some don’t realize it. Everyone using the Internet; everyone who has ever flown on a plane or driven across a suspension bridge; anyone who has ever gone out to enjoy the spectacle of a perfectly predicted eclipse or meteor shower…is a fan of science. So, too, is everyone who has ever thrown a light switch. Apparently, the switch is being turned off in the White House to keep disquieting facts in the shadows. The EPA, for instance, told us about lead in the water in Flint, Michigan. In a world where the EPA is muzzled, we might still be in the dark about that. The USDA tells us about food-borne outbreaks, and recalls. Silence, in this case, aids and abets the designs of salmonella.

Editorials & Actions

Against Amnesia: the American Empire Under Obama

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Against amnesia: The empire under Obama

There is already nostalgia for the Obama years among people who care about justice and peace. But we should question the rosy picture, writes Khury Petersen-Smith. President Barack Obama speaks to U.S. soldiers

EVEN BEFORE Barack Obama left office, an effort was underway to secure his legacy as a progressive and an idealist. And now that Trump has taken the throne of American power, the mythology surrounding the Obama years will only grow. The myth presents Obama as a tragic figure: committed to a progressive agenda, but more committed to national unity.

Editorials & Actions

Who Trump Wants on the Supreme Court

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Editor’s note:  Judge Pryor is one of the 3 top candidates Trump is said to be considering for the Supreme Court.  The Freedom From Religion Foundation has issued a report on him which we are reprinting below. We support a strong “separation of church and state” (we put the quotes because we mean to include separation of the public arena from all religions, not just Christianity, and because we hold that not just for the U.S. but for Israel, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Italy, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, India, Pakistan, and the list  goes on to include every country where religion is being forced upon people by the state. At the same time, we believe that religious values have the same right as other values to contend for support in the public sphere (some of which we support, others of which we don’t support). The big mistake of the separationists is that they have confused these two things, and in their desire to keep religion out of the public sphere they’ve often pushed religious values or any other kinds of values out of the public arena or our educational system.

Editorials & Actions

Avoidable tragedy in Israel

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אם אינך רואה אימייל זה כראוי לחץ/י כאן
If you have trouble reading this newsletter, view the web version here

Haqel: Jews and Arabs in Defense of Human Rights
An Eyewitness Account of The Preventable Tragedy in Umm Al Hiran

Dear Friends and Supporters,

On Wednesday I was an eyewitness to an unnecessary tragedy, fueled by a series of wrong decisions and indifference. Two Israelis are dead, one a Bedouin resident of Umm Al HIran and the other a Jewish police officer. Homes have been demolished, two MK’s and others have been injured. Mutual anger and distrust threatening the very fabric of Israeli society has been increased. We need you to respond by sending a letter to your nearest Israeli embassy and donating to our Bedouin campaign.

Editorials & Actions

Abby Caplin: The Day America Killed Itself

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THE DAY AMERICA KILLED ITSELF
 

by Abby Caplin

 

 

The day America killed itself,

I watched reruns of What’s My Line,

where Dorothy, Bennet, Martin,

and Arlene sat blindfolded, trying to decide

who the mystery guest was. I stared at the Worchestershire sauce

in the fridge thinking,

Of course it has expired. I bought it

years ago, a carbon copy

of petroleum in a bottle.  

When America killed itself, the talkers

on TV couldn’t figure what happened

to all their fine-tuning,

all the polls that said

otherwise. But I’ll tell you what happened—

the guy said

the election was rigged,

rigged,

didn’t say how

exactly, but he let the message hang

 

like a dagger thrown

between a woman’s legs, and then

he won.

Editorials & Actions

Obama’s last killings in Iraq and Syria: 450 civilians

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Former U.S. President Barack Obama spent the last months of his term leading a coalition in Syria and Iraq that killed hundreds of civilians. As liberals mourn the end of the Barack Obama administration, a monitoring group reported that the U.S.-led coalition killed 450 or more civilians in Syria and Iraq since October. 70% Spike in Civilian Deaths by US-Led Coalition in Syria, Iraq
“With reported fatalities from coalition strikes at record levels we would have expected significant media engagement,” said Chris Woods, director of Airwars, a London-based monitoring group that has been tallying the death toll of coalition strikes by compiling official and local reports. “Instead, anything beyond local reporting has been almost non-existent.”
The count begins from and largely includes casualties from the intense operation in Mosul, which the U.N. says is the largest such offensive since World War II. Most of the rest of the remaining deaths are from the Raqqa governorate but do not include fatalities from the Iraqi Security Forces or Air Force.

Editorials & Actions

A note to spiritual activists of the Buddhist or meditative variety

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Why Do We Turn Off Unneeded Lights Before We Leave a Room, or Before We Sit? by Dale Pendell

The Case:

When, fundamentally, there are no lights. Why would (almost) any of us stoop to save a sentient being, when, fundamentally, there are no beings to save?  

The Poem:

As the World Burns

 

The old masters, we hear,

avoided challenging

the status quo,

as they also

avoided contact

with women,

and refrained from

social activism. Considering

the crimes of history,

the Buddha wondered

what to do.

Editorials & Actions

Charles Eisenstein on The Election of Hate, Grief and a New Story

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Editor’s note:  This was written after the election in November but before we knew with whom Trump would surround himself in his Cabinet and key government positions. So Eisenstein’s optimism about what might happen can be forgiven. But much of what he says is nevertheless quite important, and a useful framework for understanding the limitations of what the liberals seemed to be offering the country as the alternative to Trump. –Rabbi Michael Lerner   RabbiLerner.tikkun@gmail.com

 http://charleseisenstein.net/hategriefandanewstory/

The Election: Of Hate, Grief, and a New Story

We’ve got to stop acting out hate. There is no less of it in the liberal media than there is in the right-wing media.

Editorials & Actions

2/3 of Israelis support Two States

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Last week, J Street commissioned a new poll of Israeli public opinion, conducted by a respected Israeli pollster. The poll posed a series of questions about Israelis’ views on the Obama administration and US policy toward Israel and the Palestinians. We wanted to explain for you why we felt it was important for us to launch this poll right now, and to lift up some of its topline findings. Following the flurry of hotly debated activity by the US and the UN in the past month, we wanted to take the political temperature of Israelis on key questions related to the conflict and the peace process. Secretary Kerry’s speech, which laid down an important marker for the Obama administration’s eight years of work to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, followed close on the heels of the administration’s abstention on UNSC Resolution 2334.

Editorials & Actions

Henry A. Giroux on Militant Hope in the Age of Trump

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Editor’s note:

We are proud to announce that Professor Henry A. Giroux has just joined Tikkun’s editorial board as a Contributing Editor. You can read his amazing article on education at https://www.tikkun.org/newsite/defending-educators-in-an-age-of-neoliberal-tyranny-2 (it appears in the Fall, 2016 issue of Tikkun magazine). We at the Network of Spiritual Progressives are building the kind of broad based movement that Giroux calls for in this article, though we call it a movement for a world of love and justice (read about it at www.tikkun.org/covenant) and put great emphasis on our commitment to nonviolence because the means must be as ethical as the ends we seek. But nonviolence does not mean passivity, as MLK jr demonstrated so powerfully in the 1960s. — Rabbi Michael Lerner  rabbilerner.tikkun@gmail.com

 

by Henry A. Giroux

The United States stands at the endpoint of a long series of attacks on democracy, and the choices faced by the American public today point to the divide between those who are committed to democracy and those who are not.

Editorials & Actions

Obery Hendricks on MLK jr. and His Legacy

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 Editor’s note:  Having just returned (Monday, Jan. 16, 2016) from participating in a demonstration and march in Oakland, Ca. today in honor of the birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr, I was glad to receive this submission to Tikkun  (below) by African American studies professor (and Tikkun magazine author) Obery Hendricks. It is an important counter to the kind of rhetoric and tone I heard at today’s demonstration. At the rally before the march began  I heard one of the M.C.s ask the crowd to repeat “we will win by ANY MEANS NECESSARY” — a slogan I first heard from the Black Panther Party in 1968 — in clear attempt to repudiate King’s message both then and now about how to fight racism.

Editorials & Actions

Juan Cole: Is MLK’s Legacy Being Reversed

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Editor’s Note: Some of us are reacting to Trump as though he had emerged from nowhere with his reactionary agenda. Actually, the movement that came to his aid has been seeking for several decades to undo much of the liberal and progressive accomplishments of the past 80-some years. And they’ve often succeeded, in part thanks to liberals in Congress who confirmed for the Supreme Court seats truly reactionary justices appointed by Republican presidents (lacking the backbone to do what Republicans did to Obama’s appointment to replace Scalia, namely refusing to even consider those appointments even when the Democrats had majorities in the Senate). But part of that success has come from the rest of us shrugging our shoulders at the march toward reaction that has been happening in the U,.S. at the national level these past several decades, immersed as we’ve been in “local organizing” without any national strategy and often in “silos” of activism (as in “don’t try to get me involved in some larger transformation of the U.S.–I’ve got this one issue and I’m working on it locally, and I don’t want to get involved in some ideology, because we have to be realistic and pragmatic and all we can accomplish is x in my localiity”).

Editorials & Actions

Obama’s Farewell

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Editor’s Note:  As is my custom in many of the articles I put up on this section of the website, I try to provide you with analyses that you are not likely to read in the mainstream media. In this case, I disagree with the tone and some of the substance both of the introduction by one person and the analysis of the other. In my own time, I’ll try to present a more balanced assessment of the Obama presidency. Yet there are important points mixed in with exaggerations in what is written below, so despite its being framed in utlra-leftie discourse which is at points really over the top, I thought I’d share it with you. But please remember, I DID NOT WRITE THIS–I’m just bringing it to your attention!