Tikkun (https://www.tikkun.org/category/politics__society/war__peace/page/11/)
Germany – Aggrieved about Grass
Victor Grossman, Berlin (Victor Grossman has written for Tikkun from Germany for many years)
It’s rare that poems cause such anger and excitement. The only other case I can recall was Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass” which once “awoke a perfect storm of derision and abuse”.
In “The Death of Christianity,” Lawrence Swaim argues that the doctrine of substitutionary atonement “makes God out to be a vengeful, homicidal deity who can be satisfied only with the death of his son.” He eloquently elaborates how the doctrine of blood atonement is a product of Roman imperial power, injustice, and terrorism, and presents the cross as a sign of conquest that has shaped Christian identity and ecclesiastical might throughout the centuries. Urging us to embrace a counterstory of Jesus’s life, Swaim goes on to suggest that we replace the symbol of the cross with the image of “a woman holding a child.”
Ignorance of major world religions comes in many forms today, but Lawrence Swaim’s particular version is still stunning. It is almost as if Swaim skimmed pop or even comic books on Christian theology and early church history and fashioned a reckless rant from their raw materials. Of the many historically and argumentatively strange things in his essay, his call for Christians to get rid of the symbol of the cross is the most bizarre. Getting rid of the cross is tantamount to getting rid of Jesus—which is to say, of Christianity itself.
There is at the heart of Christianity a disturbing doctrine that has the uncanny ability to overwhelm cognition, and—when internalized by the believer—the ability to traumatize. I refer to the belief, held by most Christians, that Jesus Christ, the prophetic figure of Christianity, was crucified to redeem the world, and that this plan originated with God.
The mainstream media have frequently framed their discussions about U.S. and Israeli policy toward Iran as a debate between U.S. President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu about whether to strike Iran immediately or to wait to see if sanctions work. This narrative has set the framework for a march toward war by excluding from the discourse the nonviolent option: that we not use coercion to achieve our ends.
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.
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.
It feels like war against Iran grows incrementally closer each day. Yet websites like Israel Loves Iran, Facebook pages like Israelis Against the War, and Twitter accounts are filled with a message sorely discomfiting Israel’s leaders. How does American presidential politics feature in the run-up to war?
Wednesday, March 7, 2012
Today, our ad saying “No” to a first strike (preemptive attack) by either Israel or the U.S. on Iran, appeared in the New York Times (in the National Edition it is on page A19). The media has distorted what has been going on between Obama and Netanyahu, representing it as Obama standing up to Netanyahu and being a hero for peace. But actually what happened is that Obama legitimated a first strike and preemptive attack on Iran, arguing with Netanyahu about the timing of such an attack, seeking to allow coercive economic sanctions to work first, but stating explicitly that Israel should not be constrained in any way to follow what it decides to be in its best national interest in regard to a strike on Iran. That’s why AIPAC gave him a standing ovation when Obama addressed them a few days ago. Obama has now fully embraced the militarist position of George W. Bush who argued that it was legitimate for the U.S. to take a preemptive attack on Iraq based on the suspicion that they had nuclear weapons, just as Obama two months ago gave the green light to legislation that allows the US to imprison for life without a trial U.S. citizens the govenrnment suspects to be cooperating in some way with terrorists, and just as he has taken the lead in developing drone technology aimed at civilians (which Pentagon militarists say may soon be used inside the U.S.).