Tikkun Daily Blog Archive (https://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/author/tikkun-admin/page/17/)
Israel’s Prime Minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, has obliterated what it means to be ‘pro-Israel,’ setting Israel on a course towards national suicide which mainstream American Jewish organizations seem intent on enabling.
Netanyahu’s brand of extremism is a terrible thing for Israel, for the Middle East, and for the world, but not much different from the GOP in the U.S., which also campaigns and rules (not governs) on a platform of hate, fear, and division.
Jonathan Curiel’s new book is a readable and reliable history of the Muslim experience in America. The first waves of Muslim immigrants in the United States were very insular, Curiel writes, but interfaith efforts are one of the new hallmarks of American Islam — and a hallmark that separates American Muslims from Muslim communities in other countries.
Every week the Truthdig editorial staff selects a Truthdigger of the Week, a group or person worthy of recognition for speaking truth to power, breaking the story or blowing the whistle. Read why this week they chose our own Rabbi Michael Lerner!
Is it possible that, like their victims in Pakistan and Yemen who say that they are going mad from the constant buzz of drones overhead and the fear of sudden death without warning, drone pilots, too, are fleeing into the night as soon as they can?
On Tuesday, Israel’s Prime Minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, used the U.S. Congress to stage a most elaborate campaign commercial in the run-up to Israel’s elections in two weeks. He did so at the behest of GOP leaders, and damaged every conceivable metric he claims to be invested in save one: his own suddenly-rising poll numbers back home.
The visit of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the USA while he is in a political campaign in Israel, that does not have the sanction of President Obama, has reminded me of another manifestation of a street corner bit of analysis that I first heard as I was growing up in North Carolina, Texas and South Carolina; “If you are white, you are alright, if you are brown stick around, if you are black, stand back.” The whiteness of Prime Minister Netanyahu trumps the blackness of President Obama, and the assumption of those who invited the Prime Minister is that President Obama must stand back, because he is black.
Netanyahu’s speech to Congress was brilliantly deceitful because it played to the fantasies that Israeli propaganda and right wing militarists in the US have been popularizing for the past thirty years. The biggest fantasy: that we can coerce others through power over them to do what we consider in the best interests of the U.S. or Israel.
Senator Dianne Feinstein today blasted Israeli Prime Minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, for claiming that he will be speaking on behalf of “the entire Jewish people” before Congress on March 3, calling Netanyahu “arrogant.”
An anti-hate campaign launched by Norway’s Muslim community last week, after a tragic attack on a Denmark synagogue, culminated tonight with over 1,000 Muslims forming a ‘ring of peace’ around an Oslo synagogue. Citizens linked hands, chanted anti-hate slogans and offered a show of solidarity with Norway’s Jewish community, one of the smallest in Europe.