Tikkun (https://www.tikkun.org/category/politics__society/war__peace/page/6/)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
A Short Story
Elena was saying something about how exploited the TA’s were. Maureen, who was also a TA, leaned her head closer, trying to hear her above the din of the students’ chatter in the cavernous auditorium. Then Elena suddenly sat up and pointed toward the front. A short man with long, wavy white hair was rapping a ruler against the podium, attempting to get the students’ attention. He began clearing his throat authoritatively.
The Israeli-Palestinian confrontation has reached the phase where no one seems to care any longer about jus in bello (justice in the course of warfare), let alone reducing the levels of brutality. Restoring trust or fidelity between the belligerents seems irrelevant to the parties concerned—the most we can hope for is restoring sanity, especially with regard to mercy and sensitivity toward human life and suffering. However, such a process requires sincere and honest efforts currently unavailable, so it seems the only way to restore a semblance of restraint is to force both sides to follow the requirements of international law. In this category I include the Geneva Conventions (and their additional protocols), the Hague Conventions, and first and foremost, the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. I concern myself here with one particular example of the aggression and brutality of the conflict: the Israeli accusation that Palestinians used civilians as human shields during “Operation Protective Edge,” the Israeli military’s code name for the confrontation that raged in the summer of 2014.
Now that recent Senate votes have guaranteed that the agreement to curb Iran’s nuclear program will go into effect, what more can America do, beyond the strictest vigilance, to build on this historic breakthrough for peace? Perhaps it is time for the citizens of the United States to experience a breakthrough of their own, to go beyond past prejudices against their enemy and use the occasion to gently plunge into the deepest wells of Persian identity that originate in a civilization preceding ours by many centuries. We can do so by connecting with Rumi, a Sufi master born in 1207, whose luminous, salacious, mystical verses written in Farsi are carried by all Iranians in their hearts, as we do the words of Shakespeare. To read even a small selection of Rumi’s witty poems to his beloved can help shatter the blinding stereotypes that separate us from ordinary men and women in Tehran today, the very clichés of mistrust that the negotiators in Geneva had to overcome in order to reach a solution to what seemed an intractable problem. Indeed, those negotiators may have been listening to Rumi when their positions seemed most conflicting and conflictive.
Thank you so very much for your help in making it possible for the the major powers of the world, the U.N. and most of the people of the world to confirm the deal with Iran which will prevent them from developing nuclear weapons for the next ten to fifteen years. Your support for the Tikkun position, (a position we articulated in full page ads we bought in the NY Times, the Hill magazine read by most Congressional people and staffers), plus your willingness to share your reasons for supporting the nuclear deal, eventually became part of a powerful surge of voices that created the context critical to the ability of Democratic Senators to feel that they could reject the pressure from the right-wing of the Jewish world, represented by AIPAC, The Conference of Presidents of Major (sic) Jewish Organizations, the American Jewish Congress, and many local Jewish Federations and synagogues and instead embrace a deal which, while flawed in some ways, was far better than any achievable alternative. (See, sometimes us little guys can make a difference if we pool our energies and resources.)
It was sad for us to see the Reform movement in Judaism unable to take a stand on this issue–the movement that had once proudly proclaimed itself a voice for tikkun olam, but we can have compassion for the leadership that feared it might lose some of its support in being in favor of a deal that raised fears among many Jews who had been influenced by Prime Minister Netanyahu’s manipulation of PTSD flashbacks from the Holocaust. Yet this is the same reason why so many Jewish leaders and rabbis fail to take courageous stands countering Israel’s horrendous treatment of the Palestinian people, behavior in sharp violation of the Torah’s commands “Do Not Oppress the Stranger/the Other.” The excuse of fear of breaking your organization apart or losing some of their supporters starts to wear thin, don’t you think, as we approach the 50th year of Occupation (in 2017)?
Editor’s note: The two perspectives articulated by Uri Avnery and Rabbi Arthur Waskow below deserve to be well known and discussed. We at Tikkun have a slightly different approach: we believe that the hate-filled and barbarous approach of ISIS will continue to manifest in a world that is fundamentally unjust, creates huge amounts of suffering in daily life for at least 2 of the 7 billion people on the planet, and privileges military power over kindness in its expenditures of money and in the organization of nation states. We have long argued that what we need is to convince the Western powers to privilege generosity over domination, and to launch as a first step in this process a Global Marshall Plan to once and for all eliminate global poverty, hunger, homelessness, inadequate education and health care, repair the global environment, resettle refugees, and eliminate the unjust global trade arrangements (read our proposed version at www.tikkun.org/gmp). Yet Uri Avnery and Arthur Waskow, both strong allies of Tikkun, have proposals which differ from our approach and from each other, though because they fit into the “realistic” dialogue of power politics both might be achieved sooner than our plan, though Arthur’s seems much closer to us precisely because it does not envision the direct use of force but only the power of the US to implement it. In my view, it is more likely to get the US population behind a fundamental change in worldview called for by the Strategy of Generosity than to get a piecemeal acceptance of Iran as an ally in the Middle East reconciled to Israel, unless we were simultaneously challenging the notion that their security depends on power over enemies (the Strategy of Domination).
Next Monday is Rosh Hashanah, and from Brooklyn to Boca Raton, Jewish families will come together to mark the New Year with lavish feasts and stilted conversations. No Jewish holiday ever goes by without a family argument and no Jewish grandchild is in any doubt about this year’s topic: the Iran nuclear deal. With a nationwide run on Prilosec and other excuses to skip this year’s holiday, anxiety in Jewish communities across the country is palpable. But there’s no need to worry—with a little preparation, you can survive the conversation with bubbe and leave her kvelling about her genius progeny. Although it isn’t Passover, if you want to convince her, you’ll need to have good answers to these four obvious questions about the agreement.
The human suffering is monumental. The political consequence was a major rightward turn in Israel that shaped the 2015 Israeli elections.
To understand the rise in terrorism worldwide, we must examine the impact of global consumer culture on communities across the planet.
Nonviolent activists in the Global North have much to learn from their counterparts in Zambia, Ghana, Tanzania, India, and Grenada.
Simply opposing war is not enough—we need to put forward credible alternatives. Nonviolent statecraft is within our reach.