Tikkun Daily Blog Archive (https://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/category/politics/page/111/)
Posts about politics and social change, from a spiritual progressive perspective
On Friday evening, Bill Maher and Sam Harris did what white men in America have been doing for the last twenty-five years: they shielded their racism and anti-Muslim bigotry under the umbrella of liberal values.
Israel’s Prime Minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, told President Obama during a face-to-face meeting on Wednesday that he needed to “study the facts” the next time he, or his administration, planned on critiquing Israel’s settlement expansions. Netanyahu then, with incredible chutzpah, tried to imply that anti-Semitism was behind such critiques by Obama.
Have you gotten a chance to check out Tikkun’s Summer 2014 print issue “Thinking Anew About God”? A significant number of Tikkun readers have told us that they don’t believe in God. No worries! Our managing editor and many of our authors identify as agnostics or atheists too. Check out two free articles from this latest issue!
October is LGBT History Month. Warren Blumenfeld critiques how we can’t just have one month of history, we need a multicultural curriculum in schools that includes LGBT perspectives all year round to help eradicate injustice.
On both sides of the barricades blocking this city’s streets, media pundits from New York and Beijing assert that the protests in Hong Kong arise from demands for greater autonomy. Completely unnoticed is a major demographic shift in the region’s population, which is redefining the issues that motivate the younger generation to shut down this global financial center.
I see the Values Voters Summit more as a train wreck than as a summit, a crew of hate-inspired politicians who sank to the lowest level of their “base” by stereotyping and scapegoating, and by further marginalizing those among us with little economic, social, and political power and those who require basic services from government to survive.
Donna Swarthout attended an a rally against anti-Semitism organized by the Central Council of Jews in Germany. Upon hearing the slogan, “Steh Auf – Nie Wieder Judenhass” (Stand up – Never again hatred of Jews), she writes, “Why couldn’t they have chosen something more positive and inspirational? Yes, there has been a rise in anti-Semitic incidents, but let’s rally for a more just society for Jews, Muslims, and other minorities. Our freedom is intertwined with every legitimate group that encounters hatred.”
At the climate march we multifaith types joined the rest of the people who love the earth enough to march and create a ritual. When a ritual works, people feel something. They are changed. They come in the door one person and go out another.
Corporations can also provide important tools for social change. In the crucial battle to safely manage global climate change, corporations will play the leading role.
“Targeting and blaming Jews living in the United States or Europe for the actions of Israel is blatant anti-Semitism. For as a political state, albeit a ‘Jewish’ one, Israel clearly does not represent all Jews, nor does it embody Judaism. However, many anti-Semites choose to conflate the two — Israel and global Jewry — so that they can use Israel’s actions as an occasion to target, sometimes violently, Jews around the world. This conflation is not just faulty, given the diversity of Jewish opinions on Israel, but dangerous as well.” David Harris-Gershon critiques Israel’s Prime Minister, Binaymin Netanyahu’s, Rosh Hashanah message as a conflation of Israel and Judaism, and not unifying, but hurting Jews across the globe.