Netanyahu vs. Iran’s Rouhani–Which one do you trust more?

Rabbi Lerner’s comment:  Who do you trust more, Iran’s new President Rouhani or Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu?  Please read the article by my former friend John Judis. Netanyahu Said Something Shockingly Bad at the UN

BY JOHN B. JUDIS

Iran’s new President Hassan Rouhani has revived talks with the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council and Germany over its nuclear program. “Nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction,” Rouhani said in his September 24 speech to the UN General Assembly, “have no place in Iran’s security and defense doctrine, and contradict our fundamental religious and ethical convictions.” In his address today to the General Assembly, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu denounced Rouhani as a “wolf in sheep’s clothing” and threatened to go to war to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons. Over the next year, Netanyahu could be proven correct in his apocalyptical assessment of Rouhani and the Iranians.

Responding to Iran’s President Rouhani–by Uri Avnery

Uri Avnery

September 28, 2013

 

                                                            The Real Bomb

 

YEARS AGO I disclosed one of the biggest secrets about Iran: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was an agent of the Mossad.  

Suddenly, all the curious details of his behavior made sense. His public fantasies about the disappearance of Israel. His denial of the Holocaust, which until then had been typical only of a lunatic fringe. His boasting about Iran’s nuclear capabilities.

Syria: What Obama Should Do

                                            Sept. 9, 2013

Dear Fellow Tikkunistas (those committed to tikkun olam–the healing and transforming of our world),

Aryeh Cohen, a professor of Rabbinics at the American Jewish University (and a member of the Tikkun Editorial Board) and I, wrote an op-ed on what should happen in Syria. Please read it below. And then as chair of the Network of Spiritual Progressives, I participated in an outreach to Congress together with 40 “faith leaders.” I urge you to send both of these (see below) to your elected representatives and to anyone else.

Toward a Non-Binary Discussion of Race: Thoughts on Trayvon Martin, George Zimmerman, and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev

The killing of Trayvon Martin moved me, like so many other Black people, to my core. Americans talk a lot about “race” but are bound up in a highly specious construction of it. We need to have real discussion about our changing ethnoracial order, including religious division, color, class, and imperialism, if we are to survive as a society.

No Borders: Struggling for a Global Commons

What distinguishes a No Borders politics from other immigrant-rights approaches is their refusal to settle for “fairer” immigration laws (higher numbers, access to legal statuses, and so on). Within a No Borders politics, it is understood that the border-control practices of national states not only reflect people’s unequal rights (e.g., whose movements are deemed to be legitimate and whose are not) but also produce this inequality. Thus, their signal demand is for every person to have the freedom to move and, in this era of massive dispossession and displacement, the concomitant freedom to not be moved (i.e., to stay).

Pragmatic Compromises Will Never Yield the World We Seek

The Democratic Party is constantly compromising to placate the Right but almost never seeks to placate the Left. To break free of this cycle, liberals need to question a capitalist assumption that too often finds support in the liberal world: that material well-being is the primary key to happiness.

Convoy

It doesn’t matter if you’re a good soldier; we’ve seen enough burning, mangled truck frames to know that death is completely impersonal here, that these roadside bombs are nothing more than an ominous lottery.

Lost Limbs and New Gestures in the Lao People’s Democratic Republic

People living in contaminated areas collect military waste to melt into household goods: they’re called war spoons, war chopsticks, war knives, etc. Houses are built on stilts made of bomb cases, which don’t rot in the monsoon mud. Householders make bomb gardens, using the largest bomb cases as raised planters. And, of course, bombs also explode and kill or injure more people every year.

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What do you do with your parents’ possessions? With the collections of a lifetime? What do you do with the books?

More Wars for the Middle East?

I pray that voices of sanity will prevail and that, instead of trying to take out Iranian nukes, Israel will concentrate on outstretching its hands in generosity toward the Palestinian people, thereby neutralizing the one card Arab and Muslim extremists have continually used in the past decades to show that the real enemy is not poverty and ignorance, but Israel and the United States.

Inciting Violence in This Culture of Violence

The massacre of the Sandy Hook schoolchildren last month offered yet another painful proof that the creation of violent minds is big business and that, in its many aspects, the business of violence has become a far too accepted part of the fabric of contemporary life in the United States.

Psyche and System: The Peace Movement Evolves

The fact that the streets are not crowded with protest does not mean the peace movement has grown weary or gone to bed. I passionately believe that something far more dynamic is emerging. We are learning that peace is never a quick-fix.