Tikkun (https://www.tikkun.org/category/politics__society/page/31/)
Editor’s Note: Tikkun does not endorse any candidate or political party–we are not allowed to do so as a 501-c-3 nonprofit. But we do from time to time present alternative perspectives on candidates or parties and on the stances that they take on various pressing issues.
Editor’s Note: In the article below, the author claims that the U.S. has been responsible for 20 millions deaths since World War II. I’m doubtful about this claim, but also believe that we all have a responsibility to do the research to find out what part of this claim is true and what part an unfair extension of U.S. responsibility. If the claim extends to giving the U.S. responsibility for every death caused by a country to which the U.S. gave arms and military support, there may be a stronger case than I’d care to believe. On the other hand, I do believe that we in the U.S., by allowing the almost unchecked spread of weapons inside the U.S., have some level of responsibility when a small percentage of our citizens use those arms against each other to wound or kill. Extending this principle internationally may extend the area of our responsibility.
Uri Avnery
November 28, 2015
The Reign of Absurdiocy
There is no such thing as “international terrorism”.
To declare war on “international terrorism” is nonsense. Politicians who do so are either fools or cynics, and probably both.
Terrorism is a weapon. Like cannon.
How Canada is Dealing with the Refugees
by John Trent
A little while ago, Rabbi Michael Lerner wrote to U.S. citizens via Tikkum to encourage them to:
“Please call your Senators to tell them you Welcome Syrian Refugees and urge them to vote “NO” if a bill comes to the Senate for a vote to make it more stringent to accept refugees from Syria and Iraq to the US. Refugees coming to the US are already subject to lengthy, stringent clearance requirements. In the busyness of preparing for the holidays, let us not forget these are people who have lost everything. Imagine being bombed and having no place to go, and one after another country saying “we do not want you.” It is winter, it is cold, and many are sleeping outside, waiting at the borders of several European countries …and we live in the wealthiest country in the world and can afford to take in a significant number of the homeless. And “no,” these refugees do not present a danger to the general public–we already have careful policies in place to ensure that we would not be accepting people who are ISIS operatives intent on hurting us.”
So, for the sake of comparison, what is going on with the neighbours in Canada? During the past 10 years, the Conservative Government of Stephen Harper had gradually cut back the number of refugees accepted by Canada. In the past few years it accepted very few Syrian refugees. They seemed to have some reason for disliking them, because each year Canada takes in more than 200,000 immigrants and refugees.
Johan Galtung
Violence In and By Paris: Any Way Out? EDITORIAL, 23 November 2015- TRANSCEND Media Service
Atlanta, Georgia, USA
The atrocity in Paris seems to trigger the word “terrorism” with a higher frequency than ever, in the media, from the politicians. Doing so, they sign their intellectual capitulation: trust me, I am not going to try to understand anything. Watching politicians on 56 US TV channels in Georgia there was not a single word analyzing why?; like underlying conflicts and traumas. Nor conciliation and solution.
Editor’s Note: Want to energize the discussion at whatever Thanksgiving celebration you are having or are attending? here’s a conversation piece you could read or send out in advance along with the piece I sent you Tuesday evening about how to make your Thanksgiving more meaningful spiritually.And I can’t help but feeling proud of American Jews who seem to be overwhelmingly rallying against the xenophobia that has swept much of America in the form of wanting to block Syrian refugees from coming to the U.S. From the Holocasut Museum and the Orthodox Union to Tikkun and the Jewish Renewal movement, Jews are strongly lining up against the xenophobes and supporting the opening of our doors ot Syrian refugees. Here is an important discussion piece for Thanksgiving by Elizabeth Heineman that shows the complexities involved in invoking the Holocaust to make one’s points about any particular contemporary reality. –Rabbi Michael Lerner
When Holocaust Memory Misfires
by Elizabeth Heineman
They splash up on my Facebook feed with predictable regularity: reminders of the link between anti-refugee sentiment and the Holocaust. The story of the MS St. Louis, which carried Jewish refugees across the Atlantic only to be turned back to Europe, where many of its passengers were slaughtered.
Please call your Senators to tell them you Welcome Syrian Refugees and urge them to vote “NO” if a bill comes to the Senate for a vote to make it more stringent to accept refugees from Syria and Iraq to the US. You can call the Capitol Switchboard but do it soon at 202 224-3121. If you do not know the names of your two senators, just give the Capitol operator your state and you will be connected. You can also call their state offices by googling them to get the phone number. Many of them will be in their home states over Thanksgiving and might be in their state offices on the Friday after Thanksgiving.
Refugees coming to the US are already subject to lengthy, stringent clearance requirements. In the busyness of preparing for the holidays, let us not forget these are people who have lost everything. Imagine being bombed and having no place to go, and one after another country saying “we do not want you.” It is winter, it is cold, and many are sleeping outside, waiting at the borders of several European countries.
Challenge a Neo-Con Foreign Policy for the Middle East
November 23, 2015
By Robert Parry
As the Islamic State and al Qaeda enter a grim competition to see who can kill more civilians around the world, the fate of Western Civilization as we’ve known it arguably hangs in the balance. It will not take much more terror for the European Union to begin cracking up and for the United States to transform itself into a full-scale surveillance state. Yet, in the face of this crisis, many of the same people who set us on this road to destruction continue to dominate – and indeed frame – the public debate. For instance, Official Washington’s neocons still insist on their recipe for “regime change” in countries that they targeted 20 years ago [ https://consortiumnews.com/2015/11/09/how-israel-out-foxed-us-presidents-4/ ]. They also demand a new Cold War with Russia [ https://consortiumnews.com/2014/03/02/what-neocons-want-from-ukraine-crisis/ ] in defense of a corrupt right-wing regime in Ukraine [ https://consortiumnews.com/2015/11/13/carpetbagging-crony-capitalism-in-ukraine/ ], further destabilizing Europe and disrupting U.S.-Russian cooperation in Syria.
Editor’s note: President Obama, you freed Jonathan Pollard, as we at Tikkun had been calling for for several decades though we oppose his politics and worry that he may someday turn violent against us in the peace movement. There is no such danger from Leonard Peltier. Please free him now as a Thanksgiving gift to the world–Rabbi Michael Lerner
Free Leonard Peltier
by John Iverson
This Thanksgiving Day there will be prayers and a rally at the White House for Leonard Peltier. We ask Obama review the case for clemency of Anishinabe-Lakota political prisoner Leonard Peltier. If the President can pardon a turkey he can surely look at facts and free Leonard
In 1973 I participated in the Wounded Knee occupation for seven weeks.
A Post-Paris “Clash of Civilizations”?
It’s the Islamic State’s Dream and Marco Rubio Agrees
By Tom Engelhardt
Honestly, I don’t know whether to rant or weep, neither of which are usual impulses for me. In the wake of the slaughter in Paris, I have the urge to write one of two sentences here: Paris changed everything; Paris changes nothing. Each is, in its own way, undoubtedly true. And here’s a third sentence I know to be true: This can’t end well. Other than my hometown, New York, Paris is perhaps the city where I’ve felt most at ease. I’ve never been to Baghdad (where Paris-style Islamic State terror events are relatively commonplace); or Beirut, where they just began; or Syria’s ravaged Aleppo (thank you, Bashar al-Assad of barrel-bomb terror fame); or Mumbai (which experienced an early version of such a terror attack); or Sana’a, the capital of Yemen, now partly destroyed by the U.S.-backed Saudi air force; or Kabul, where Taliban attacks on restaurants have become the norm; or Turkey’s capital, Ankara, where Islamic State suicide bombers recently killed 97 demonstrators at a peace rally. But I have spent time in Paris. And so, as with my own burning, acrid city on September 11, 2001, I find myself particularly repulsed by the barbaric acts of civilian slaughter carried out by three well-trained, well-organized, well-armed suicide teams evidently organized as a first strike force from the hell of the Islamic State (IS) in Syria and Iraq. The Paris attacks should not, however, be seen primarily as acts of revenge from a distinctly twisted crew, even though one of the murderers reportedly shouted, “You killed our brothers in Syria and now we are here.” Instead, they were clearly acts of calculated provocation meant to reshape our world in grim ways. Worse yet, their effectiveness was pre-guaranteed because, as has been true since 9/11, the leaders of such terror groups, starting with Osama bin Laden, have grasped the dynamics of our world, of what makes us tick and especially what provokes us into our own barbarous acts, so much better than our leaders, our militaries, or our national security states have understood them (or, for that matter, themselves). Here in a nutshell is what bin Laden grasped before 9/11: with modest millions of dollars and a relatively small number of followers, he and his movement couldn’t hope to create the world of their fervid dreams. If, however, he could lure the planet’s “sole superpower” into stepping into his universe, military first, it would change everything and so do his work for him. And indeed (see: invasion of Afghanistan, invasion of Iraq), an operation mounted for an estimated $400,000 to $500,000, using 19 dedicated (mostly Saudi) followers armed only with paper cutters, did just that. And it’s never stopped since because, just as bin Laden dreamed, Washington helped loose al-Qaeda and its successor outfits from the constraints of a more organized, controlled world. In these last 14 years of failed wars and conflicts of every sort, American military power, aided and abetted by the Saudis, the British, the French, and other countries on a case-by-case basis, essentially fractured the Greater Middle East. It helped create five failed states (Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Yemen), worlds in which terror groups could thrive and in the chaos of which they could attract ever more recruits.
AFTER PARIS: A World That Has Lost Its Ethical Direction & Spiritual Foundation and a Media that Cheerleads for Fear and Militarism
By Rabbi Michael Lerner
For many years, we at Tikkun and the Network of Spiritual Progressives have warned that the domination and power-over strategies to achieve “homeland security” have been tried for over 7,000 years and all they have produced is more wars and violence, interspersed with short periods of peace that have, with the help of the sensationalist and natioanlist media and professional apologists for the existing inequalities, managed to hide from public view the degree of covert structural violence that every system of inequality and domination embodies. (Please read Cynthia Moe-Lobeda’s important study Resisting Structural Evil–Love as Ecological-Economic Vocation published by Fortress Press to get a full understanding of how deeply our own daily lives in Western societies are built on the exploitation and impoverishment of people around the world). We have called for a new approach to “homeland security”—the Strategy of Generosity, as manifested in part in our proposed Global Marshall Plan (please download the full version and read it at www.tikkun.org/gmp). Until the powerful countries of the world are seen as mainly driven by a desire to care for the well-being of everyone else on the planet and the wellbeing of the planet itself, and care not only out of self-interest but also out of a new consciousness in which we all come to truly understand our mutual interdependence and oneness, what we saw in Paris this past week is destined to be an increasing reality in the coming decades. The Global Marshall Plan we support would have the U.S. take the leadership with the advanced industrial countries of the world in working with local communities throughout the developing world, donating 1-2% of our Gross Domestic Product each year for the next twenty to once and for all end (not must ameliorate) global poverty, hunger, homelessness, inadequate education, and inadequate health care–and repair the damage done to the environment of 150 years of irresponsible forms of economic development sponsored by colonial and imperialist and materialist oriented capitalist, socialist and communist societies alike.
The New Abnormal–Reflections on Paris
Posted on November 14, 2015by Prof. Michael Nagler
We are hearing expressions of shock and sympathy for Paris on all sides, which is appropriate as far as it goes – but it’s not nearly enough. It is clear now that instead of lurching from crisis to crisis, we need to get off this disastrous path. After expressing our condolences we should be saying, “Let us now pledge ourselves to get to the root of this problem” – and have the courage to follow that inquiry wherever it leads. When Mahatma Gandhi wrote Hind Swaraj or Indian Home Rule in 1909, as it were firing his first shot across the bow of the empire that he would finally sink, he addressed the now classic essay not to the British (the original was published in Gujarati; only when the British banned it did he bring out the English translation, ironically, and reach a vastly greater audience) but to his own countrymen. And he told them, “The British did not take India; we gave it to them.” His purpose was not to offend but to awaken them, namely to the fact that they were not helpless, as they supposed.
J
Jay Janson says: Veterans Day: Honor Capitalism’s Genociders Assassins Invaders Bombers of Children? Hell No! November 10, 2015
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Editor’s Note: In sharing articles in Tikkun, we often print articles with which we don’t agree
to make Tikkun a lively forum for ideas
. This
article
is a classic case. Though Jay Janson has a very strong point in critiquing the way that veterans lives have been sacrificed to serve the imperial goals of America’s elites (as has been true for veterans in almost every war in history as people died to serve their own country’s elites), it is not true when thinking about the veterans who served the North in the Civil War nor those who fought the Second World War.
Editor’s Note: From time to time I will be posting articles here from TomDispatch. http://www.tomdispatch.com, a very wonderful website run by Tom Engelhardt who works with The Nation magazine. Sometimes I will include commentary from Tom Engelhnardt about the piece he has chosen to highlight, sometimes just the article itself. In the article on Kissinger below, you will first find Engelhardt’s comment, then the article about Kissinger by Greg Grandin. This piece seemed particularly appropirate to put on our Tikkun website on Kristallnacht annviersary–the anniversarly of the 1938 assault on Jews by Nazis that moved the fascist attack from racist discrimination to widespread violence against Jews in Germany on November 9-10 1938. Henry Kissinger wears his Jewish identity proudly, yet played an important role in the genocidal war against the Vietnamese, a war that I personally struggled aginst (eventually ending up in federal penitentiary for my non-violent role the anti-war movement).
Editor’s note: Not everyone is rejoicing at Hillary Clinton’s choice to embrace the Israeli government
at the moment when Prime Minister Netanyahu meets with President Obama. See below Hillary’s statement the statement from one prominent Israeli critic of the Occupation. How I Would Reaffirm Unbreakable Bond With Israel — and Benjamin Netanyahu
Hillary Clinton
November 4, 2015
We have recently marked the 20th anniversary of the assassination of then Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, a good friend, a courageous warrior and a great statesman. This somber anniversary, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to Washington on November 9, is an opportunity to reaffirm the unbreakable bonds of friendship and unity between the people and governments of the United States and Israel. The alliance between our two nations transcends politics.