Tikkun (https://www.tikkun.org/category/politics__society/war__peace/page/5/)
Editor’s Note: the following analysis gives us a perspective on the contradictions in American policy in Syria. Sadly, it remains in the discourse of “Security Through Domination” and hence leaves out of the equation what would happen were the U.S. to launch the Global Marshall Plan within a framework of Tikkun’s proposed “Strategy of Generosity.”
But, Mr. Putin, You Just Don’t Understand
By David Swanson
http://davidswanson.org/node/5238
Once in a while one of the videos somebody emails me a link to turns out to be well worth watching. Such is this one. In it a former U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union tries to explain to Vladimir Putin why new U.S. missile bases near the border of Russia should not be understood as threatening. He explains that the motivation in Washington, D.C., is not to threaten Russia but to create jobs. Putin responds that, in that case, the United States could have created jobs in peaceful industries rather than in war.
“Pow, Pow, Yous Are Dead!”
Children, Toy Guns, and the Real Thing
By Frida Berrigan
[From our ally TomDispatch.com]
It was a beautiful evening and the kids — Madeline, two; Seamus, almost four; and Rosena, nine — were running across a well-tended town green. Seamus pointed his rainbow flag with the feather handle at his sisters and “pow-powed” them, calling out, “Yous are dead now, guys. I shot yous.”
Madeline and Rosena laughed and just kept on running, with Seamus at their heels. I hid my face in my hands. It wasn’t just that he was playing guns, but that he was using a Pride flag as his gun at a vigil to mourn those killed at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida.
An Illegal Military Strategy Disguised as Technological Advance
By Rebecca Gordon
(originally published at TomDispatch.com)
Think of it as the Trojan Drone, the ultimate techno-weapon of American warfare in these years, a single remotely operated plane sent to take out a single key figure. It’s a shiny video game for grown ups — a Mortal Kombat or Call of Duty where the animated enemies bleed real blood. Just like the giant wooden horse the Greeks convinced the Trojans to bring inside their gates, however, the drone carries something deadly in its belly: a new and illegal military strategy disguised as an impressive piece of technology. The technical advances embodied in drone technology distract us from a more fundamental change in military strategy. However it is achieved — whether through conventional air strikes, cruise missiles fired from ships, or by drone — the United States has now embraced extrajudicial executions on foreign soil.
In case you who missed it, here’s Rabbi Lerner’s talk at Muhammed Ali’s funeral. His vision is all the more relevant given the horrific killings in Orlando and the way it is being used to promote fear, hatred and Islamophobia. It has gone viral on social media and inspired over a million people already. If it inspires you as well, please read below for how to be an ally with Rabbi Lerner to help build the world he describes.
The Refugee Crisis
WHO IS TO BLAME, May 12 2016
Back in 1963 Bob Dylan (soon to be 75) wrote a bitter song; Pete Seeger also sang it often. It asks, after the death of a young boxer: “Who killed Davey Moore? How come he died, and what’s the reason for?” Then came the alibis of all those responsible, from the manager and media to the boxing crowds: “Not I… Don’t point your little finger at me.” Europe today, though not dead, is in deep disarray, heart-rendingly for very many and menacingly for the world. Here, too, one might inquire: How come? Who is to blame?
Pratap Chatterjee, Inside the Devastation of America’s Drone Wars
Posted by Pratap Chatterjee on Tikkun’s media ally: TomDispatch.com
A note from Tom Engelhardt: In our part of the world, it’s not often that potential “collateral damage” speaks, but it happened last week. A Pakistani tribal leader, Malik Jalal, flew to England to plead in anewspaper piece he wrote and in media interviews to be taken off the Obama White House’s “kill list.” (“I am in England this week because I decided that if Westerners wanted to kill me without bothering to come to speak with me first, perhaps I should come to speak to them instead.”) Jalal, who lives in Pakistan’s tribal borderlands, is a local leader and part of a peace committee sanctioned by the Pakistani government that is trying to tamp down the violence in the region. He believes that he’s been targeted for assassination by Washington. (Four drone missiles, he claims, have just missed him or his car.) His family, he says, is traumatized by the drones. “I don’t want to end up a ‘Bugsplat’ — the ugly word that is used for what remains of a human being after being blown up by a Hellfire missile fired from a Predator drone,” he writes. “More importantly, I don’t want my family to become victims, or even to live with the droning engines overhead, knowing that at any moment they could be vaporized.”
Normally, what “they” do to us, or our European counterparts (think: Brussels, Paris, or San Bernardino), preoccupies us 24/7. What we do to “them” — and them turns out to be far more than groups of terrorists — seldom touches our world at all. As TomDispatch readers know, this website has paid careful attention to the almost 300 wedding celebrants killed by U.S. air power between late 2001 and the end of 2013 — eight wedding parties eviscerated in three countries (Iraq, Afghanistan, and Yemen). These are deaths that, unlike the 14 Americans murdered in San Bernardino, the 32 Belgians and others killed in Brussels, and the 130 French and others slaughtered in Paris, have caused not even a ripple here (though imagine for a second the reaction if even a single wedding, no less eight of them and hundreds of revelers, had been wiped out by a terror attack in the U.S. in these years). Any sense of sadness or regret for Washington’s actions, when it comes to the many killed, wounded, or traumatized in its never-ending, implacable, and remarkably unsuccessful war on terror, is notable mainly for its absence from our world. So it’s an extraordinary moment when any Americans — no less a group that has been deeply involved in prosecuting the drone war on terror — publicly expresses empathy for the “collateral damage” inflicted in that ongoing conflict. Pratap Chatterjee brings genuine news today from the heart of America’ s drone wars, from those who should best be able to assess the grim reality of just what Washington has been doing in our name. Tom
Drone Whistleblowers Step Out of the Shadows
In Washington’s Drone Wars, Collateral Damage Comes Home
By Pratap Chatterjee
In a trio of recent action-packed movies, good guys watch terrorists mingling with innocent women and children via real-time video feeds from halfway across the world. A clock ticks and we, the audience, are let in on the secret that mayhem is going to break loose. After much agonized soul-searching about possible collateral damage, the good guys call in a missile strike from a U.S. drone to try to save the day by taking out a set of terrorists.
Hillary Clinton goes full Neocon at AIPAC, Demonizes Iran, Palestinians
By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | March 22, 2016
I once heard Hillary Clinton give her AIPAC speech at a university. It doesn’t change much, just as US policy toward the Mideast doesn’t change much. She was still a senator then. Much of the audience was Middle East experts, who could barely keep themselves from gagging. Clinton used her speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee meeting, the gathering of some of the most powerful lobbyists in Washington, to lambaste Donald Trump for saying he’d try to be neutral in heading up negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians.
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?
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.
Failed States and States of Failure
“We Destroyed the Cities to Save Them” and Other Future Headlines
By Tom Engelhardt
One of the charms of the future is its powerful element of unpredictability, its ability to ambush us in lovely ways or bite us unexpectedly in the ass. Most of the futures I imagined as a boy have, for instance, come up deeply short, or else I would now be flying my individual jet pack through the spired cityscape of New York and vacationing on the moon. And who, honestly, could have imagined the Internet, no less social media and cyberspace (unless, of course, you had read William Gibson’s novel Neuromancer 30 years ago)? Who could have dreamed that a single country’s intelligence outfits would be able to listen in onor otherwise intercept and review not just the conversations and messages of its own citizens — imagine the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century — but those of just about anyone on the planet, from peasants in the backlands of Pakistan to at least 35 leaders of major and minor countries around the world? This is, of course, our dystopian present, based on technological breakthroughs that even sci-fi writers somehow didn’t imagine. And who thought that the Arab Spring or Occupy Wall Street were coming down the pike or, for that matter, a terror caliphate in the heart of the former Middle East or a Donald Trump presidential run that would go from success to success amid free media coverage the likes of which we’ve seldom seen?
Kids’ Questions on a Lockdown Planet, Thinking the Parentally Unthinkable
Dealing with your child in the world of San Bernardino hysteria, the Islamic State, and Donald Trump — by Frida Berrigan,
— Frida Berrigan,
Fear? Tell me about it. Unfortunately, I’m so old that I’m not sure I really remember what I felt when, along with millions of other schoolchildren of the 1950s, I ducked and coveredlike Bert the Turtle, huddling under my desk while sirens howled outside the classroom window. We were, of course, being prepared to protect ourselves from the nuclear obliteration of New York City. But let me tell you, I do remember those desks and they did not exactly instill a sense of confidence in a child.
The US and the Rise of ISIS
by Prof. Stephen Zunes
The rise of ISIS (also known as Daesh, ISIL, or the “Islamic State”) is a direct consequence of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. While there are a number of other contributing factors as well, that fateful decision is paramount. Had Congress not authorized President George W. Bush the authority to illegally invade a country on the far side of the world that was no threat to us, and to fund the occupation and bloody counter-insurgency war that followed, the reign of terror ISIS has imposed upon large swathes of Syria and Iraq and the recent terrorist attacks in Paris, Beirut, the Sinai, San Bernardino and elsewhere would never have happened. Among the many scholars, diplomats, and political figures who warned of such consequences was a then-Illinois state senator named Barack Obama, who noted that a U.S. invasion of Iraq would “only fan the flames of the Middle East, and encourage the worst, rather than best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of al-Qaeda” and other like-minded extremists. It is ironic, then, that most of those who went ahead and supported the invasion of Iraq anyway are now trying to blame him for the rise of ISIS.
America’s Reckless War Against Evil
Why It’s Self-Defeating and Has No End
By Ira Chernus
Oh, no! Not another American war against evil! This time, it’s the Islamic State (IS). After the attacks in Paris, Barack Obama, spokesman-in-chief for the United States of America, called that crew “the face of evil.” Shades of George W. Bush. The “evildoers” are back.
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.