Tikkun Daily Blog Archive (https://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/author/galleryeditor/page/26/)
Donald Trump is revealing inconvenient truths about bullying and American culture.
Adult bullies shape bullying by kids. Political leaders and major national institutions encourage bullying values. Despite the anti-bullying programs in schools, and the controversy about his own bullying, Trump’s success shows how deeply bullying influences kids and resonates among major sectors of the general adult public.
There is a growing movement of applying Boycotts, Divestment, and Sanctions
(BDS) on Israel just like we did to defeat apartheid in South Africa. Zionist apologists are understandably declaring war on this nonviolent and
moral movement. In many countries including several states in the USA,
there are attempts to delegetimize the movement and declare BDS illegal. Of
course this is contrary to the principles of free speech and free
association. People’s right to boycott was recognized in key legal
precedents but more legal challenges are needed to dispel the myth that
engaging in BDS is somehow illegitimate.
Further evidence of this wave of boycott-busting is legislation passed by the New York State Senate on June 15, the day before the end of session, which would prohibit state funds from being awarded to student groups at schools in the SUNY, CUNY, and community college systems that are deemed to be targeting allied nations.
Recent developments in Diab’s case reinforce the need to end his Kafkaesque nightmare. A French judge ordered Diab’s release on baildue to doubts about the evidence in the case. On May 14, 2016, Hassan was released on bail. The prosecutor appealed the judge’s decision and, after spending 10 days out of prison, Hassan was ordered to return to prison. It was an injustice to extradite him in the first place, and it is an injustice to keep him incarcerated while France continues a 35-year investigation.
Since 1983, Sharon Tennison has worked to develop ordinary citizens’ capacities to avert international crises, focusing on relations between the U.S. and Russia. Now, amid a rising crisis in relations between the U.S. and Russia, she has organized a delegation which assembled in Moscow yesterday for a two week visit. I joined the group yesterday, and happened to finish reading Sharon Tennison’s book, The Power of Impossible Ideas, when I landed in Moscow.
An entry in her book, dated November 9, 1989, describes the excitement over the Berlin Wall coming down and notes that “Prior to the Wall’s removal, President Reagan assured Secretary General Gorbachev that if he would support bringing down the Wall separating East and West Berlin, NATO would not move ‘a finger’s width’ closer to Russia than East Germany’s border. With this assurance Gorbachev gladly signed on.
During the G. W. Bush years a friend of mine lamented, “We have a war President, a war economy, and a war culture.” Yes on all three; but he might have gone on to add, the key is culture. If our culture did not promote violence the way it does we would not elect a war president, we would build our economy on very different, sustainable and just principles; we would find ways to avoid conflict and use robust, creative ways of dealing with it when it surfaced. In all this our belief system, or mindset is the key ¾ and there are signs that we’re beginning to notice it.
In his eulogy to Mohammed Ali at the Louisville memorial service, Rabbi Michael Lerner reminded us all of the distinguishing feature of “The Greatest,” that from the start of his career he spoke Truth to Power and paid the price when he was stripped of his heavyweight title for five years.
Like Woolf’s soliloquies, Hoang’s cry out in despair, ranging in topic from the death of her sister to the verbal abuses of her then-boyfriend. And yet, like Woolf’s, her language somehow basks in that despair, flourishing even.
The death of Muhammad Ali strikes at the heart of what it means to lead a life of dignity, unsurpassed skill, and the willingness to step into history and call out its most insidious injustices.
My family and I spent Thursday in Chillicothe, a southern Ohio town (pop. 21,000) bedeviled, as so many are, by the opiate-addiction epidemic.