RIGHT AND LEFT IN GERMANY
by Victor Grossman
Yes, Bernie won in Wisconsin. He also won in Berlin, Germany!
Editorials & Actions
Destroying the Remaining Decency in the Israeli Army by Uri Avnerygues
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Uri Avnery
April 9, 2015
The Case of Soldier A
IT SEEMS that everything possible has already been said, written, proclaimed, asserted and denied about the incident that is rocking Israel.
Everything except the main point.
THE INCIDENT revolves around “the Soldier of Hebron”. Military censorship does not allow him to be called by his name. He may be called “Soldier A”.
Editorials & Actions
Uri Avnery on the Shifting Alliances in the Middle East
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Editor’s Note: Once again Avnery gives us the larger view of the conflicts in the MidEast
and helps us understand how distorted the framework that the Western media presents
about what is actually happening and the impact of the West in that area. Is the idea
that the U.S. should stop trying to be the policeman of the world really so crazy, given the actual realities of what we’ve been doing and how destructive our impact has been? –Rabbi Michael Lerner, Editor Tikkun rabbilerner.tikkun@gmail.com
Uri Avnery on The New Alliances in the Mideast as the US Shifts Sides (Maybe)
April 2, 2016
Under the Lime Trees
ONE OF the most famous lines in German poetry is “Don’t greet me under the lime trees.”
The Jewish-German poet Heinrich Heine asks his sweetheart not to embarass him in public by greeting him in the main street of Berlin, which is called “Unter den Linden” (“Under the Lime Trees”).
Israel is in the position of this illicit sweetheart.
Editorials & Actions
Israeli Products from the West Bank
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Products from West Bank Settlers or non-Palestinian Companies Operating from the West Bank
Note from the Network of Spiritual Progressives: People who do not wish to boycott Israel itself, but do wish to avoid purchasing goods and services from the Israeli settlers in the Occupied West Bank and those who are supporting the Occupation, have often been told that it is hard to tell which companies are involved. The Israeli peace movement Gush Shalom, whose leader Uri Avnery often appears on the Tikkun website www.tikkun.org, has prepared the detailed information on what companies are in fact operating is or through the settlements. Tikkun wishes to see a strong and thriving Israel, and the best way to achieve that is engage in nonviolent protests and activities aimed at ending the Occupation of the West Bank and creating a Palestinian state living in peace with Israel. The terms of creating such a state that would work for both Israelis and Palestinians is described in Rabbi Michael Lerner’s book Embracing Israel/Palestine, which you can purchase from Amazon for Kindle, or in print version from Tikkun: www.tikkun.org/eip. Please circulate this information as widely as possible on your websites and social media.
Settlement Products Wiki – a systematic informational research about businesses in the settlements and their products; businesses that have left the settlements and relocated to within the Green Line; and the misleading tactics with which businesses attempt to cover up and conceal their location in the settlements.http://settlement-products.wikia.com/
“In recent years the settlers have been portraying themselves as the patrons of the Palestinian workers.
Editorials & Actions
Are We In a New World? Tom Engelhardt on American politics 2016
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Entering Uncharted Territory in Washington
Are We in a New American World?
By Tom Engelhardt
The other week, feeling sick, I spent a day on my couch with the TV on and was reminded of an odd fact of American life. More than seven months before Election Day, you can watch the 2016 campaign for the presidency at any moment of your choosing, and that’s been true since at least late last year. There is essentially never a time when some network or news channel isn’t reporting on, discussing, debating, analyzing, speculating about, or simply drooling over some aspect of the primary campaign, of Hillary, Bernie, Ted, and above all — a million times above all — The Donald (from the violence at his rallies to the size of hishands). In case you’re young and think this is more or less the American norm, it isn’t. Or wasn’t.
Editorials & Actions
Clinton, Sanders, Trump and Cruz on Israel and US Foreign Policy
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Editor’s Note: It’s important for us to know what the foreign policy of the next President is likely to be. Since the wars we in Western countries helped create or finance in the Middle East, our interventions in Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine,etc for the past fifty years, and the fallout from those wars and interventions, will inevitably play a significant role both in foreign policy and in domestic policies concerning “homeland security,” it’s worth our time to study carefully what the leading candidates are saying on these issues. The talks below given on March 21, 2016, are worth reading and re-reading to get the feell and direction you can expect should one of these people be the next president of the U.S.
For a Tikkun Network of Spiritual Progressives approach to foreign policy, please read our proposed Global Marshall Plan at www.tikkun.org/gmp and for our specifc plan for how to bring peace to the Middle East, please order our book Embracing Israel and Palestine at www.tikkun.org/eip. Hillary Clinton
It is wonderful to be here and see so many friends. I’ve spoken at a lot of AIPAC conferences in the past, but this has to be one of the biggest yet, and there are so many young people here, thousands of college students…
(APPLAUSE) … from hundreds of campuses around the country.
Editorials & Actions
Rabbi Dev Noily and others on the Book of Esther
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A note from Rabbi Lerner: We have been struggling internally about how to deal with the Jewish violence and revenge that is part of the Purim story. Should we boycott this holiday entirely? Is there a way to challenge its hurtful parts without discrediting the legitimate joy our people feels when it is saved from the intended violence against us? These are some of the issues raised in the articles below. They were dealt with beautifully at the Purim celebration held at Urban Adamah March 23, 2016, in Berkeley, in an intro to the last chapters of the Megillah of Esther where the acts of mass killings by Jews against our supposed enemies is recounted with nary a word of regret or sadness that we have at the Passover seder when we dip from the cup of joy when naming the plagues visited on the Egyptians–a symbolic way of saying that we cannot be fully happy when our own liberation comes at the expense of the suffering of others (in that case, including the death of the first born children of Egypt, few of whom had anything to do with the oppression of Israelite slaves).
Editorials & Actions
What Can We Learn from the Presidential Race?
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What Can We Learn from The Presidential Race? Michael N. Nagler
I have never voted Republican, but I stand with those Republicans today who are aghast at what Donald Trump has done to the level of political discourse in this country and the future of their party. I also stand with the smaller number – but I will have more to say on this in a second – who realize that Mr. Trump did not spring from nowhere but is in fact the logical extension of the direction in which this party has been going for some time. After all, as Rosalyn Carter said astutely of then-Governor Reagan when her husband was running against him, “The trouble with that man is that he makes us feel good about our prejudices.” Is this not exactly what Mr. Trump is doing? The only thing different now is the greater openness of the appeal to egotism and prejudice. And therein lies its value as a teaching moment. A number of people, most recently the President of Mexico (of whom I’m not otherwise an admirer) have compared Mr. Trump to Hitler. Well, to use an important term in the field of peace studies and nonviolence, Hitler inadvertently did one useful thing: he delegitimized racism by carrying it out on such a scale that the world was shocked. To delegitimize is not necessarily to eliminate – that takes a bit more work; but the possibility here, if we would only make use of it, is that this year’s campaign could delegitimize prejudice, vulgarity, and incivility (they’re closely connected). As conservative columnist E.R. Dionne writes (March 7, 2016), “the crudest, most vulgar, and most thoroughly disgusting campaign in our nation’s history.” It has therefore created an opportunity for us to restore some dignity to our political culture.
To do that, however, we have to get deeper into what is driving this race to the bottom that has made this year’s campaign a national disgrace.
Editorials & Actions
Juan Cole: Hillary goes full Neocon at AIPAC– suggesting Trump isn’t militaristic enough
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Hillary Clinton goes full Neocon at AIPAC, Demonizes Iran, Palestinians
By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | March 22, 2016
I once heard Hillary Clinton give her AIPAC speech at a university. It doesn’t change much, just as US policy toward the Mideast doesn’t change much. She was still a senator then. Much of the audience was Middle East experts, who could barely keep themselves from gagging. Clinton used her speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee meeting, the gathering of some of the most powerful lobbyists in Washington, to lambaste Donald Trump for saying he’d try to be neutral in heading up negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians.
Editorials & Actions
Gideon Levy on Israel’s Influence on America
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In his keynote address to the March 18 “Israel’s Influence: Good or Bad for America?” conference, Israeli journalist Gideon Levy described where he would take, and what he would say to, a U.S. congressional delegation to Israel. He would take them, Levy said, to meet the Abu Khoussa family in Gaza, whose 6-year-old daughter and 10-year-old son were killed in an Israeli missile strike on their home. He would tell them about 16-year-old American Mahmoud Saalan of Tampa, Florida, who had been shot dead at a military checkpoint by Israeli soldiers, allegedly for carrying a knife. And, Levy said, he would also take the American legislators to Hebron, because “I never met an honest human being who had been to Hebron and didn’t come back after a few hours in shock.”
Days later and blocks away, members of Congress and three of the four remaining presidential candidates were professing their undying allegiance to Israel at the yearly policy conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), Israel’s Washington, DC lobby. Aware of this annual parade of elected U.S. officials, Levy knew that, in his remarks at the National Press Club, he was describing a “virtual tour of those congressmen who would never come to listen to me and will never let me take them around.”
Levy’s presentation at the 2015 conference “The Israel Lobby: Is It Good for the U.S.?
Editorials & Actions
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Duty to Warn
by Dr. Gary Kohls
The Execution of Berta Caceres, the United Fruit Company and the US Military: A Historical Timeline Identifying Some of the Perpetrators
By Gary G. Kohls, MD
THE FOLLOWING QUOTES (EXCEPT AS NOTED) ARE FROM:HTTPS://NEWREPUBLIC.COM/ARTICLE/120559/HONDURAS-CHARTER-CITIES-SPEARHEADED-US-CONSERVATIVES-LIBERTARIANS
“In the early 1950s the United Fruit Company hired legendary public relations expert Edward Bernays to carry out an intense misinformation campaign portraying then-Guatamalan president Jacobo Arbenz as a communist threat.” — Scott Price, IC Magazine
“Between the time of the (Honduran) coup (June 2009) and February 2012, there were at least 59 politically motivated assassinations of civilians associated with the resistance movement. This is a low estimate, as intimidation and fear of reprisal prevents communities and family members from reporting many such deaths. There were at least 250 violations of human rights in the military junta’s first three months alone.” — Committee of Family Members of the Disappeared of Honduras (COFADEH), respected human rights organization. “I’ve seen all sorts of horrific things in my time. but none as detrimental to the country as this.”
Editorials & Actions
AIPAC influence Bad for Israel and for America
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AIPAC Influence Bad for the US and Israel
By Allan C. Brownfeld
WASHINGTON, March 21, 2016 — The annual conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) has attracted almost 20,000 people to the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in the nation’s capital. Every presidential candidate except Bernie Sanders appeared as a speaker, as did Vice President Joe Biden. AIPAC is considered Washington’s second most powerful lobbying group after the National Rifle Association. Israel has received more foreign aid from the U.S. than any other country, more than $235 billion so far. With its friends at AIPAC, it is asking for more.
Editorials & Actions
Philip Roth’s Warning About US Fascism
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Philip Roth’s warning
by Arthur J. Magida
Posted on Mar. 16, 2016 at 8:43 am
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Cover of Roth’s “The Plot Against America”
Slightly more than a decade ago, Philip Roth warned how fascism would come to America – legally, of course, since we’re a nation of laws, and attached to a hero, a legend, a star: the aviator ex machina himself, Charles Lindbergh, since Roth was writing about the U.S. in the late 30’s and early 40s, the years when Lucky Lindy’s popularity peaked. Roth cautioned about all this in his 2004 novel, The Plot Against America — an almost plausible schematic of a Nazi takeover of the United States. We foolishly paid no heed to Roth’s prophecy because we’re supposedly too smart, too wedded to democracy, too cynical of salesmen pitching quickie panaceas, and too… well, too gosh darn decent to let that Nazi stuff sully our certainty that we’re a beacon for the world, a gleaming city on a hill. No way, we crowed, thumping our chests in pride: it can’t happen here.
Editorials & Actions
The Alzheimer’s Party by Trish Vradenburg
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A third party the Dems and GOP can get behind: Alzheimer’s Party
UsAgainstAlzheimer’s, a nonprofit devoted to stopping the progression of Alzheimer’s by 2020, is calling to unify around the “Alzheimer’s Party.” (NJ Advance Media wire services)
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updated March 17, 2016 at 12:37 PM Reprinted with author’s permission from the New Jersey STAR LEDGER
By Trish Vradenburg
My role in life has been to cancel my husband’s vote. George grew up in Colorado – God’s country as he calls it – where being a Republican is served with mother’s milk. I, on the other hand, was raised in New Jersey, the Garden State, populated with people who, after hearing both sides of every argument, chose to be Democrats. And then we met each other and, well, somehow in the heat of passion I forgot to ask about party affiliation. Not that it would have been a deal breaker since I assumed that once we married I could break George’s silly habit of voting with the elephants.
Editorials & Actions
The U.S. Role In Honduras by Stephen Zunes
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The US role in the Honduras coup and subsequent violence
People carry the coffin of indigenous leader and environmental activist Berta Caceres after a five-hour autopsy at the Forensic Medicine Center in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, March 3. (CNS/EPA/Stringer)
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Stephen Zunes | Mar. 14, 2016NCR Today
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On March 3, Berta Cáceres, a brave and outspoken indigenous Honduran environmental activist and winner of the Goldman Environmental Prize, was gunned down in her hometown of La Esperanza. Erika Guevara-Rosas, Americas director for Amnesty International, noted how “For years, she had been the victim of a sustained campaign of harassment and threats to stop her from defending the rights of indigenous communities.” She is just one of thousands of indigenous activists, peasant leaders, trade unionists, journalists, environmentalists, judges, opposition political candidates, human rights activists, and others murdered since a military coup ousted the democratically elected president Manuel Zelaya in 2009. Despite being a wealthy logger and rancher from the centrist Liberal Party, Zelaya had moved his government to the left during his four years in office.