Tikkun Daily Blog Archive (https://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/category/politics/page/164/)
Posts about politics and social change, from a spiritual progressive perspective
At President Obama’s United Nations General Assembly address today, much attention was paid to his overtures toward Iran. However, his pointed comments directed toward Israel – which placed resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on equal footing with Iran – were just as significant.
Many Syrian refugees choose to flee their home country because they feel they have no other choice. But from the outside looking in, they face insurmountable grief as they worry for loved ones who stayed behind. Depressed at their lack of options, resources, and assistance programs, most agree that U.S. military intervention would do more harm than good and instead hope for humanitarian aid.
Many are complaining about mixed moral messaging coming from Pope Francis, including on the subject of abortion. Is it not better to ask if Pope Francis and Spiritual Progressives can find common ground to that assert all human beings are made in the image of God?
Michael Bloomberg’s legacy was written this week by Mireya Navarro of The New York Times. Her painful profile of New York City residents who are both employed (some with multiple jobs) and living in homeless shelters revealed the narrative, human costs of the nation’s worst income inequality gap.
On Friday, Israeli soldiers threw sound grenades at a group of European diplomats trying to deliver emergency aid in the occupied territories, pulled a French diplomat, Marion Castaing, from a truck and threw her upon the ground. The image below, of Israeli border police surrounding Castaing as she lay on her back, was taken by a human rights activist as other journalists, including those from Reuters, looked on.
A Palestinian village home to 120 people had its houses, kindergarten and shepherding stables demolished this week by Israeli authorities. This came after the Supreme Court ruled its inhabitants – some of whom have lived on the land for generations – didn’t have proper building permits.
The rights of immigrants, LGBT communities, and women are intrinsically connected. And for all groups there has been a recent uprise in the amount of laws and resolutions being passed on a State level, with local communities taking the lead and making their own example of what they want to see happening in Washington.
As Bashar al-Assad proves, dictators who gas people to death still exist. So does a complacent international system. Why are some on the left, like Ian Lustick, more concerned with making sure a Jewish state doesn’t exist?
I had never told our young children about the terrorist attack that nearly took their mother’s life before they were born. Whenever they asked about her barely-visible scars, my answers were always vague, using the words accident and explosion to explain their existence.
They didn’t know this “accident” occurred in Israel. They didn’t know it was associated with a war, with a conflict.
However, with the publishing of my book – What Do You Buy the Children of the Terrorist Who Tried to Kill Your Wife? – I knew it was time to tell them. Better to hear from me, I thought, than from someone at school.
Is Syria simply ‘stage 2’ in a neoconservative plan to bring about regime change, with Iraq as stage one and Iran as stage three? William Beeman discusses how a war on Syria would exacerbate violence rather than bring the world closer to peaceful resolution of the tensions in the region.