Tikkun Daily Blog Archive (https://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/category/politics/page/92/)
Posts about politics and social change, from a spiritual progressive perspective
So, Rudy, let’s break down your statement. When you say that “I do not believe that the president loves America,” what indication do you have or what criteria are you using? I really want to know…
At least one explanation is obvious. Few industries are more lucrative than firearms. According to the Nations Shooting Sports Foundation, the gun industry is worth $32 billion per year. Moreover profits on handgun sales are surging according to Bloomberg Business Week—43% for the first quarter of 2014.
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.
From saving water, to helping animals, to decreasing our carbon footprint, the single most effective change we can make is to eat a more plant-based diet. Just as Esther took action to save the Jews, so we can take action to save animals and our planet from extermination.
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.”
It is 2015 and I could list so many names. I would pray, but I am not a believer, as people call us now, but I do believe in action, in what has always been called struggle, in what I insist on calling faith in the human capacity and responsibility to know and feel another human story. I witness my son, now a man of 40, marching from Washington Square Park up Fifth Avenue, across 34th Street, downtown on Sixth, long renamed Avenue of the Americas, to One Police Plaza. He marches and shouts with colleagues and friends: I can’t breathe! Black lives matter!
Patrick Chappatte in The New York Times has destroyed Israel’s Prime Minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, in his latest political cartoon. The piece, entitled “Mr. Netanyahu Goes to Washington,” plays upon Netanyahu’s continued expansion of Israel’s West Bank settlements in critiquing his upcoming speech before Congress on March 3.
But it’s just a movie, right? Your favorite shoot-em-up makes no claims to being a documentary. We all know one American can’t gun down 50 bad guys and walk away unscathed, in the same way he can’t bed 50 partners without getting an STD. It’s just entertainment. So what?
That summer my Palestinian-Jordanian Arabic teacher and closest confidant asked me, seriously, as many cynics told me she would, if the Holocaust actually happened. That summer I summoned up all the grammar and honesty I could find to say “Yes. And to admit that it happened does not excuse what has been done to the Palestinians. It’s not Jewish history, or Zionist history; it’s human history. Just like the Nakba is human history.”
Du Bois and Rai struck a friendship based on the mutual ideals of American civil rights and Indian sovereignty. But Rai’s conversations about race struck Du Bois, who, up until that point, had not devoted much more than a passing interest in anti-colonial struggles abroad.