Tikkun Daily Blog Archive (https://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/category/politics/page/98/)
Posts about politics and social change, from a spiritual progressive perspective
Two weeks of Muslims being asked to condemn the terrorists, asked to condemn ISIS and Al- Qaeda, asked to prove that we stand with freedom of speech and not violence and terrorism. It’s an old, tired subject that we have literally beaten to death, yet we continue.
I would like to provide a bit of a historical retrospective as we begin to enter the sweepstakes for the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign. I do this for the purpose of assessing whether Republicans remains attached to the policies of the past or has evolved and moved forward in terms of issues related to LGBT equality.
In times like these, when marginalized communities sense the threat of violence for their own livelihood and well-being, words fail.But, as Audre Lorde so importantly reminds us, our silence will not protect us.
There is a “people’s history” of Selma that we all can learn from—one that is needed especially now.
“The only way I will rest in peace is if one day transgender people aren’t treated the way I was. They’re treated like humans, with valid feelings and human rights. Gender needs to be taught about in schools, the earlier the better. My death needs to mean something”
Here are the five stories you won’t find anywhere else online. Maybe if we had a society based on love and care, we might be reading these kind of stories instead of what is being published today.
For those unaware, the members of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community are persecuted in different parts of the Islamic world for their beliefs. Many clerics in Islamic nations believe that Ahmadi Muslims are a threat to their brand of Islam because millions have joined the Community since its inception in 1889.
When American commentators like Carl Bernstein complain that Muslim authorities have not sufficiently denounced the terrorist attack on the Charlie Hebdo staff in Paris, they show a profound ignorance of the current situation in the Middle East.
Especially in a time like this — when there is so much to mourn, so much to feel enraged about, and so much opportunity to feel small and powerless in relation to the changes needed — I take a good deal of comfort from understanding that inside my own skull, where I control the means of production, there are things I can do to improve my own perception, judgment, and therefore action.
Examination reveals that in communities where incidents of police killings occur most frequently, law enforcement officers come primarily from similar socioeconomic classes (middle and working class) — while not necessarily from similar ethnic, cultural, racial, or gender backgrounds — of the people they patrol. What we are witnessing is an intra-class conflict in the service of the wealthy ruling class.