Solidarity After the Massacre of Jews in Pittsburgh….and How Best to Defend Ourselves

By |

On Saturday, October 27th, shortly after the largest massacre of Jews in U.S. history took place in Pittsburgh, I received a message from the leadership of the largest African American Baptist Church in Oakland, California. Recalling that we at Tikkun had brought dozens of our subscribers and members  to their church on several occasions when African Americans had been murdered by white racist fanatics, they asked me when Beyt Tikkun would be having a service to which they could attend to show their solidarity with us. As one of their leaders put it, we “are praying for the Jewish community that is under violent assault from White Supremacy just like African Americans. You have stood with the Black community without hesitation in the past. We stand with you today! Please let us know how to be good allies in this troubling time.”

That was soon followed by messages from a range of Muslim organizations with essentially the same message: the attacks on Jews are no different from attacks on Muslims. We need to all stand together.

Articles

Daniel Ellsberg’s The Doomsday Machine (a review by Bill Roller)

By |

Review by Bill Roller of Daniel Ellsberg’s book The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner    
 
                  It’s Midnight in America
 

 

            There was a game that children in the southern Midwest played

during the early days of the Cold War. It was called, “What Time is it Mr. Fox?”  It was a version of “tag” and went something like this. We children gathered at the brick wall in the school yard. One of us was given the role of “Mr. Fox”, and that child faced the brick wall, hands on the wall and eyes closed. As the rest of us approached the wall slowly, one step at a time, we asked, “What time is it, Mr. Fox?”  Mr. Fox replied

“Five-thirty” and we took another step forward.

Editorials & Actions

The American War in Yemen by Rajan Menon

By |

[Thanks to our media ally TomDispatch.com for sharing this article with Tikkun readers on yet another sin of the U.S. government–our participation in the mass killing of Yemenites. –Rabbi Michael Lerner  rabbilerner.tikkun@gmail.com ]
The American War in Yemen
by Rajan Menon

Introduction by Tom Engelhardt: It was the rarest of graphics in the American news media: a CNN map in which recent Saudi air strikes in Yemen were represented by little yellow explosions. Below them were the number of civilians killed (“97,” “155,” “unknown casualties”) and, below those, the names of the makers of the weapons that had done the killing (Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics). In fact, in the nearly three decades since the Soviet Union imploded, U.S. weapons makers have had a remarkable grip on the global arms trade (latest figure: 34% of all arms sales) and regularly sold their weaponry into places that were hell storms of conflict, particularly the Middle East. Nonetheless, remarkably little thought is given here to how snugly death and destruction in distant lands fit with these glory days of U.S. weapons makers, their soaring profits and rising stock prices.