Tikkun (https://www.tikkun.org/category/politics__society/page/29/)
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.
Pentagon Excess Has Fueled a Civil-Military Crisis
How Civilian Control of the Military Has Become a Fantasy
By Gregory D. Foster
Item: Two U.S. Navy patrol boats, with 10 sailors aboard, “stray” into Iranian territorial waters, and are apprehended and held by Iranian revolutionary guards, precipitating a 24-hour international incident involving negotiations at the highest levels of government to secure their release. The Pentagon offers conflicting reports on why this happened: navigational error, mechanical breakdown, fuel depletion — but not intelligence-gathering, intentional provocation, or hormonally induced hot-dogging. Item: The Pentagon, according to a Reuters exposé, has been consciously and systematically engaged in thwarting White House efforts to close the Guantanamo Bay detention facility and release cleared detainees. Pentagon officials have repeatedly refused to provide basic documentation to foreign governments willing to take those detainees and have made it increasingly difficult for foreign delegations to visit Guantanamo to assess them. Ninety-one of the 779 detainees held there over the years remain, 34 of whom have been cleared for release.
Let’s stop talking about whether Trump will, has or should disavow the KKK and start asking who will disavow the policies that perpetuate racial disparities and prevent us from achieving freedom and justice for all.
Here’s the story of one of the many “solidarity with American Muslims” events that the NSP has been supporting around the country. It appeared today, Monday Feb 29th, in the San Jose Mercury. I thought you might want to see it to know that your voice is being heard–because it is your support of Tikkun and the NSP that makes alot of these kinds of events to happen. The story is not bad for mainstream media–about half right which ismore than most mainstream media stories in my experience. At the bottom, I’ll tell you what I really said in the 3 minutes that I got to speak.
Editor’s Note: Whenever we paste articles on our home site, we do so because the perspective is one that is rarely discussed in the mainstrean media–NOT because we necessarily agree with it. This particular perspective is given little attention because to do so would be to weaken one of HIllary Clinton’s claims to the presidency–that she has the experience in foreign affairs that Bernie Sanders does not and strengthen Sanders claim that having the experience does not equate with having the wisdom, since it was during her time as Secretary of State that this huge mess developed in large part because of US policy (or at least that it the allegation by Sacks). But there is a problem that the Sacks perspective needs to address. The nonviolent demonstrations against Assad were met with violence and repression. What exactly are people around the world supposed to do in such circumstances?
Dr. Shaik Ubaid:
The irony that the Rise of Trump Can Be Good for American Pluralism
I dislike Donald Trump. Yet I am grateful to him. No not because I believe in his particular philosophy of making America great again but because he can save America from people like him. Islamophobia has been on the rise for many years and it had become politically acceptable. But before the bombastic and narcissistic Mr. Trump joined the race to lead this nation, the media and the political leaders including Mr. Obama, were not paying much attention to it. Like an insidious cancer, this poison was spreading in the body of our great nation. Mr. Trump was a symptom that finally led the physicians to take notice. Trump is not the pain of hemorrhoids but of the deadly and insidious pancreatic cancer.Before Mr. Trump, Congressman Tancredo of Colorado had suggested that America should bomb the holy cities of Mecca and Medina.
by Leonardo Boff
Theologian-Philosopher
Earthcharter Commission
If it is true that climatic disturbances are anthropogenic, that is, that they have their genesis in the irresponsible behavior of humans (less of the poor, but much more of the great industrial corporations), then it is clear that the issue is more an ethical than a scientific one. This is so because the quality of our relationships with nature and with our Common Home were not, and they still are not, adequate and positive. Pope Francis says in his inspiring encyclical letter, Laudato Sii: on the caring of the Common Home, (2015): «Never have we mistreated and hurt our Common Home so much as in the last two centuries…These situations provoke the howls of Sister Earth, joining the wails of the abandoned of the world, with a cry that demands that we take a different path» (n. 53). That different path urgently implies a regenerative ethic for the Earth.
Editor’s note: Henry Giroux, a frequent contributor to Tikkun, highlights some of the destructive tendencies in American and global capitalism, in this introduction he wrote to a new book on inequality. At times he may be going beyond what I could agree to. For example, his discussion of American democracy doesn’t give adequate credit to the way the system does in fact allow for an insurgency by a democratic socialist like Bernie Sanders. If African Americans, Latinos, and other minorities do not massively vote for him, it is not only because they don’t have adequate information, it is also because their own leadership has overwhelmingly sided with Hillary Clinton. Sanders has been able to raise more money than Hillary–from ordinary citizens.
Editor’s Note: Just as we are prohibited from endorsing candidates, so we are also prohibited from critiquing them. But as a 1st amendment protected 501-c-3, we can priint the wide variety of views held by our readers (hey, that’s YOU). So far, most of what we’ve gotten from our readers has been pro-Bernie. Now finally we get something that is a critique of Bernie. We are still looking for readers to submit pro-Hillary articles, or pro-some Republican party candidates for the presidency, or pro Jill Stein of the Greens, or pro any other 3rd party candidates.
Editor’s Note: I once again want to encourage those who support Hillary, or Jill Stein, or other candidates, to write articles for us about why they do so. We don’t endorse any candidate or political party–can’t because we are a non-profit–but we will publish smart articles from many different perspectives on the election. If we keep on getting mainly pro-Bernie, we may have to stop publishing anything because this tilt may give the appearance of us endorsing a candidate, which we don’t do. –Rabbi Michael Lerner, editor Tikkun, RabbiLerner.tikkun@gmail.com
Hillary Clinton’s Record on Foreign Policy
by Stephen Zunes
Despite being an icon for many liberals and an anathema to the Republican right, former U.S. Senator and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s positions on the Middle East have more closely resembled those of the latter than the former. Her hawkish views go well beyond her strident support for the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 and subsequent occupation and counter-insurgency war.
Editor’s Note: I once again want to encourage those who support Hillary, or Jill Stein, or other candidates, to write articles for us about why they do so. We don’t endorse any candidate or political party–can’t because we are a non-profit–but we will publish smart articles from many different perspectives on the election. If we keep on getting mainly pro-Bernie, we may have to stop publishing anything because this tilt may give the appearance of us endorsing a candidate, which we don’t do.–Rabbi Michael Lerner, editor Tikkun RabbiLerner.tikkun@gmail.com
52 Righteous Reasons to Support Progressive Bernie Sanders Over Establishment Hillary Clinton and the Regressive Republicans
Dan Brook
There are many vast and critical differences when you compare progressive Bernie to moderate Hillary and the regressive GOP. Here are 52 righteous reasons to support Bernie Sanders for President. There are undoubtedly others.
Editor’s note:
Tikkun magazine does not endorse any candidate or political party. But as I’ve said in several previous emails, we will send out articles that have a serious or substantial intellectual content challenging the ideas of any of the candidates, or supporting those ideas. I had expected to get lots of serious submissions, but so far I’ve only gotten critiques of Hillary Clinton. We will share those, but again want to make clear that we’d also share serious critiques of the policy positions of Senator Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, Senator Marco Rubio, the Green party presidential candidates, etc. You can also send rebuttals to this or anything else we send out! At this point, we really want to encourage those who support Hillary or Jill Stein of the Greens or any of the Republican candidates to send us their arguments, because otherwise we are going to be perceived as supporting a candidate, and we don’t intend to be doing that.
Israel shoots the messenger: An open letter to Ban Ki-Moon
Richard Falk
Saturday 6 February 2016
While I was special rapporteur for Palestine, you chose to attack me in public on several occasions. Now Israel has turned its fire on you. Dear UN Secretary-General,
Having read of the vicious attacks on you for venturing some moderate, incontestable criticisms of Israel’s behaviour, I understand well the discomfort you clearly feel. Not since Richard Goldstone chaired the group that released the report detailing apparent Israeli war crimes during its massive attack on Gaza at the end of 2008 have Israel’s big political guns responded with such unwarranted fury, magnified as usual by ultra-Zionist media commentary. Netanyahu has the audacity to claim that your acknowledgement that it is not unnatural for the Palestinians oppressed for half a century to resist and resort to extremism is tantamount to the encouragement of terrorism, what he described as giving a “tailwind to terrorism.”
The fact that your intention was quite the opposite hardly matters.
In this essay I explain how I moved from a critique of a metaphor of two worlds, America and Europe, to a critique of a metaphor of two worlds, modern and traditional. I also now see America and the modern as symbolic representations of a limitless frontier. I see Europe and the traditional as symbolic representations of a limited home. Once I saw Europeans leaving home to come to an American frontier; now I see modern people leaving traditional homes to come to a universal frontier/marketplace. And I see this powerful modern prophecy of an exodus from a limited old world to a limitless new world as the major cause of our dangerous environmental crisis. We do not nurture our earthly home because we believe we are going to a frontier of unlimited resources.
Editor’s Note: Tikkun and our interfaith and secular-humanist-welcoming Network of Spiritual Progressives supports the work of Tamera and the Institute for Global Peace Work. –Rabbi Michael Lerner
Refugee Aid: A Vision of International Solidarity
Statement following reports from our co-workers in Lesbos
by Dieter Duhm
The people were driven from their home countries by unspeakable suffering and it was unspeakable suffering which they encountered on their way into an allegedly better world. Even winter did not stop the wave of refugees. Carrying their children with nothing to eat, no blankets, no place to stay, no medical assistance, suddenly they faced barbed wire. Thousands arrived on the island of Lesbos almost frozen to death, having nearly drowned; some had lost their families on the way.