Tikkun (https://www.tikkun.org/category/politics__society/page/58/)
NY TIMES June 24, 2012
A Cruel and Unusual Record
By JIMMY CARTER
Atlanta
THE United States is abandoning its role as the global champion of human rights. Revelations that top officials are targeting people to be assassinated abroad, including American citizens, are only the most recent, disturbing proof of how far our nation’s violation of human rights has extended.
To a consciousness formed in gentle deciduous lands, the vista is unimaginably bleak: the toxic, colorless void of a Nevada alkali lake bed, a blank white canvas the size of Rhode Island, flat as water and dry as parchment on which there lives nothing visible to the naked eye, remnant of the Pleistocene stretching to a barely visible horizon of tawn and purple mountains. At this moment of the American Empire’s decline, this science fiction setting is home for our premier arts festival, anointed by the Los Angeles Times as the “current hot ticket” for academic study—the landscape of Burning Man.
Drug prohibition is the biggest failed policy in the history of our country. I know that is a strong statement, but once more people realize the unnecessary harms and disasters this policy has inflicted, they will surely start to agree.
If we truly want peace, we must highlight and strengthen solutions to the conflict that instead seek to build thoughtful relationships between Palestinians and Israelis. Programs that bring together Jewish Israeli and Palestinian youth offer such a solution.
In the immediate aftermath of September 11, 2001, it became fashionable to view religion primarily as a source of strife. Future historians may view the rise of an intolerant new antireligious movement, New Atheism, as part of the generalized overreaction to the horror of September 11—an overreaction that also included the use of torture and mass detention, the abandonment of trial by jury, and the misguided American invasion of Iraq.
Editor’s note: In posting this interview of Sami Ramadani by Samuel Groves of the New Left Project, I do not mean to be endorsing the analysis presented here, some of which makes sense to me and some of which is framed in a very rigid anti-imperialist language which misses the experience of people victimized by the regime as well as the complicated role of the U.S. and of Israel. However, there is enough here that merits consideration to have led me to want to call this analysis to your attention! Between Imperialism and Repression
by Sami Ramadani, Samuel Grove
New Left Project
June 12, 2012
http://www.newleftproject.org/index.php/site/article_comments/between_imperialism_and_repression
[Sami Ramadani is a senior lecturer in sociology at London
Metropolitan University and has been an active participant
in campaign’s against Saddam’s regime and anti-imperialist
struggles for many years. In an in-depth interview, he spoke
to Samuel Grove about the dynamics of the conflict in Syria,
arguing that democratic resistance to Assad’s brutal regime
has been eclipsed by reactionary forces, backed by Western
and Gulf states, with potentially momentous implications for
the Middle East.]
The upheaval in Syria is an enormously difficult subject for
Western outsiders to get a handle on. One of the reasons for
this is the sheer number of different interests jostling for
position and power, from both within and outside the
country.
Who has died or been wounded by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs)? Who is being surveilled? Where might drones be used in the future? In this powerful book, Medea Benjamin shows that drones are no different from land mines or weapons fitted with depleted uranium: they are extremely unsafe for civilians and they do not, in fact, differentiate between “noncombatants” and “combatants.”
Review of this book written by:
Lynn Feinerman dvashah@yahoo.com who writes occasionally for Tikkun Magazine
OBEYING A HIGHER LAW: Making the Case Against Drone Warfare
Review of DRONE WARFARE: Killing by Remote Control
by Medea Benjamin
I had already determined I wanted to review Medea Benjamin’s new
book DRONE WARFARE when I encountered three guys on a Bay
Area waterfront test driving a remote controlled miniature drone toy. The drone was about two or three feet in wingspan, styled like an
F16, and had an intrusive, loud, well…. dronelike buzz. It had the rapt attention of everyone on the waterfront. People
walking their dogs stopped to marvel at the drone as it flew over
the Bay, and returned to buzz around, about a hundred feet over
my head.
Thirty years ago this week, the Israeli army crossed into Lebanon and started the most stupid war in Israel’s history. It lasted for 18 years. About 1500 Israeli soldiers and untold numbers of Lebanese and Palestinians were killed.
Please read the Editor’s Note about this article, and click here to see a list of books on or by Gertrude Stein.
In 1934, Gertrude Stein was invited to the White House to have tea with Eleanor Roosevelt. Stein was on a triumphant lecture tour across the United States, following the success of her bestselling Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas and her fashionable opera Four Saints in Three Acts. The American press proclaimed, “Gertie is Gertie is Gertie!” In the thirties, Gertrude Stein was America’s quirky darling. How times have changed. On May 1st, 2012, the celebration of Jewish Heritage Month began with an official statement from the White House: “From Aaron Copland to Albert Einstein, Gertrude Stein to Justice Louis Brandeis, generations of Jewish Americans have brought to bear some of our country’s greatest achievements and forever enriched our national life.” One day later, Stein’s name was no longer wanted in the celebration because of allegations that she survived the Holocaust in France as a Nazi collaborator.
Last month, the Democratic Party aligned with the Republican Party to pass a dangerous piece of legislation that actually undermines the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. This legislation calls to dramatically expand U.S. military aid to Israel while keeping Israel dependent upon the United States. United States military aid to Israel already exceeds the monetary value of all foreign aid programs to sub-Saharan Africa combined, but Congress has voted to revamp it nonetheless.
Webs of blinding irony are being spun around Private First Class Manning, obscuring the military’s methodical denial of Manning’s constitutionally guaranteed right to a fair trial.
For years, we danced with the idea of a bar mitzvah. Thirteen is a milestone for all Jewish children, and I was determined that our son would take part. I knew he could learn a few simple prayers and songs; he has amazing memory skills, not uncommon for children with autism. Still, we worried. What if a large crowd unnerved him?
Excerpts from The Thunder: Perfect Mind
(Translated by Rev. Hal Taussig and others from a text
in Coptic from the Nag Hammadi library,
1st 2 centuries of the Common Era.)
I [in Coptic, Anokh] am the first and the last
I am she who is honored and she who is mocked
I am the whore and the holy woman
I am the wife and the virgin
I am the mother and the daughter
I am the limbs of my mother
I am the sterile woman and she has many children
I am she whose wedding is extravagant and I didn’t have a husband
I am the midwife and she who hasn’t given birth
I am the comfort of labor pains
I am the bride and the bridegroom
And it is my husband who gave birth to me
I am my father’s mother,
My husband’s sister, and he is my child
I am the slave-woman of him who served me
I am she, the lord of my child
But it is he who gave birth to me at the wrong time
And he is my child born at the right time
And my power is from within him
I am the staff of his youthful power
And he is the baton of my old womanhood
Whatever he wants happens to me
I am the silence never found
And the idea infinitely recalled
I am the voice with countless sounds
And the thousand guises of the word
I am the speaking of my name
You who loathe me, why do you love me and loathe the ones who love me? You who deny me, confess me
You who confess me, deny me
You who speak the truth about me, lie about me
You who lie about me, speak the truth about me
You who know me, ignore me
You who ignore me, know me
I am both awareness and obliviousness
I am humiliation and pride
I am without shame
I am ashamed
I am security and I am fear
I am war and peace
…
Why do you despise my fear and curse my pride? I am she who exists in all fears and in trembling boldness
I am she who is timid
And I am safe in a comfortable place
I am witless, and I am wise
Why did you hate me with your schemes? I shall shut my mouth among those whose mouths are shut and then I will show up and speak
Why then did you hate me, you Greeks? Because I am a barbarian among barbarians?
Morris Berman has always been an acute reader of American culture and society, so his warnings here need to be taken quite seriously.–Rabbi Michael Lerner
Slouching Towards Nuremberg
Strange things are happening in the United States these days, and every day seems to bring additional scary news. The similarity to the erosion of civil liberties in Germany during the 1930s is a bit too close for comfort. Many will regard this statement as hyperbole, and, to some extent, it is. But let’s take a close look at what is going on before we dismiss the comparison out of hand.
In terms of the historical record for Germany, legal discrimination against Jews certainly existed before the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, and grew steadily over time.