We have just experienced two terrible tragedies. The Moscow Metro tragedy that claimed the lives of 23 people with dosens of wounded happened on the very same day Russian President Vladimir Putin was in Brazil, participating in the formation of the BRICS Bank. The Malaysian airliner MH17 tragic downing in eastern Ukraine, with almost 300 dead, happened at the same exact time Vladimir Putin was flying back home.
As I explained before, and will continue explaining in the following piece: the dollar hegemony has effectively ended, the US has just lost it’s single super-power status. And Putin was the driving force behind all this.
The Russian authorities have ruled out terrorism for the Moscow Metro derailing. But what about sabotage? The details are scant, but it’s very well known…
I can’t help crying when I read this, but my gut feeling and my heart tell me it would work.
The majority of people in both Israel and Palestine are good hearted, caring and spiritual people.
The fear filled warmongers must be isolated by the rest of humanity wherever they reside, so they can no longer take power and subject the rest of us to their insanity and spiritual sickness.
I hope you will all read, share and discuss this essay with everyone you know.
We do have the power each of us, and collectively, as citizens of the Earth to change the dominant paradigm of war, hatred, fear, power over and control, and worship of money to something more real and humane for all.
Blessings,
ohnwentsya
Israel: Stop the Invasion of Gaza, Stop the Bombing of Gaza, Free the Palestinian Prisoners
By Rabbi Michael Lerner
According to Ha’aretz correspondent Amira Hass, the IDF has been conducting mass arrests in the West Bank, between 10 and 30 every day. 24 of the arrested are members of the Palestinian parliament from Hamas’ Change and Reform party. The number of those arrested since the kidnapping and murder of the Israeli teens has already exceeded 1,000. The Palestinians are convinced that most of those detained have nothing to do with the kidnapping and that these are mainly political arrests for purposes of intimidation and revenge.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. Tens of thousands of young Palestinian men have experienced arrest, torture, loss of employment, and have been unable to protect their parents, partners and friends from arbitrary and repressive treatment from IDF Occupation forces. The surprising thing is that despite this inhumane and emasculating treatment, few Palestinians have engaged in acts of violence or desperation.
I’ve argued that acts of desperation can be self-destructive. Many Palestinians will suffer for the acts of the few Palestinian Hamas extremists. But since Hamas activists have come to believe that even if they do nothing they will still be targeted, some are saying that acting out violently against the Occupation is the only thing that can restore their dignity since nothing will restore their land. I think that this is a mistake for Gaza and the West Bank. Sometimes I think that Hamas doesn’t really even care for its own citizens in Gaza-they care more about showing that non-violence will never work to challenge Israel’s occupation, and they are willing to let the people of Gaza pay the price, namely the invasion of Gaza by the Israeli army with the inevitable consequence of many more than the 220 Palestinians already killed in the past two weeks. And yet, it is hard to deny that the Israeli Occupation is so repressive and dishonoring of Palestinians that some young men have taken to violence, while others see those acts as the only thing that can momentarily give people a relief from the emotional depression of years under Occupation generates. Yet the violence against Israeli civilian targets has pushed the politics of Israel even further to the Right.
For those of us like myself who care about the well-being of all people on the planet, not only my own Jewish people, but all peoples. The high toll of Palestinian civilians is horrifying-several thousand civilians already wounded according to Palestinian sources. This will likely lead to more Hamas terrorists. But not only is the war stupid from the standpoint of Jewish self-interest, it is also immoral in the extreme. None of this would have happened if Israel had been serious about negotiating an end to the Occupation. But as Prime Minister Netanyahu made clear in his press conference last week, he never intends to give the Palestinian people an independent state of their own.
Israel must end the invasion, stop its bombing of Gaza, free the Palestinians it has arrested in the past years, and abandon its insane policy of seeking security through domination. This approach may work in a dictatorial regime for a little while, but even in those circumstances, the repression only works for a limited period (ask the former leaders of the Soviet Community party). Instead, Israel needs a generosity strategy, not only agreeing to a Palestinian state in the West Bank, the release of all Occupation-related prisoners, getting the US and its Western allies to provide a massive reparation fund to support the new Palestinian state till it achieves economic and political parity with Israel, share Jerusalem as the capital of both an Israeli and Palestinian state, an end to teaching hatred and racism in its schools and media in exchange for Palestine doing the same, but also agreeing to allow 20,000 Palestinian refugees a year to move to Israel each year for the next forty years in exchange for Palestine allowing Israelis living in the West Bank to stay in their settlements as law-abiding citizens of the new Palestinian state and subject to Palestinian law and court system (just as Palestinians living inside the pro-67 borders of Israel are subject to Israeli law and Israeli courts). If Israel could apologize for its part (partial, not total) in creating the Palestinian refugee population, create jointly with Palestinians a Truth and Reconciliation process similar to that done in South Africa, and accept an international force to police the borders and protect both Israel and the Palestinians from the inevitable extremist attacks by Hamas and Israeli settle fanatics, and most importantly if as the more powerful party in the struggle can act with a genuine spirit of open-heartedness to the Palestinian people in seeking to help rebuild all that it had destroyed in Gaza and the West Bank, its spirit of generosity would within less than ten years undermine the hold of Hamas on a large section of that fundamentalist group’s political base in both the West Bank and Gaza. In the Middle East, particularly among Arab communities, there is no stronger “weapon” than generosity and genuine caring for the well-being of the other. So, yes, Hamas can start to lose its constituency fastest when Israel becomes most generous and caring, or Hamas can grow into a permanent majority the more that Israel relies on its current strategy of domination.
This focus on the psycho-spiritual dimension of the struggle and the need for a strategy of generosity is precisely what Tikkun brings to the table through our Network of Spiritual Progressives and which you’ll find sorely missing in most of the analyses whether from Israeli, Palestinian, European or American political analysts, editorialists, politicians, and media reporters and even leftie protesters. Yet it is this dimension, which is ignored to their peril by all who care about the well-being of both peoples. So, yes, we demand an end to the bombing of Gaza and the invasion of Gaza, just as we have demanded of Hamas that it stop its attempted bombings of Israel. It’s time for a brand new direction, but only you, the reader of this point can make it happen. For more information as to how, please read my book Embracing Israel/Palestine, join our interfaith and secular-humanist-welcoming Network of Spiritual Progressives atcat or atinfo.
Rabbi Michael Lerner is the editor of Tikkun Magazine, chair of the Network of Spiritual Progressives, rabbi of Beyt Tikkun Synagogue-Without-Walls in S.F. and Berkeley, Ca. and author of 11 books incluidng two national best sellers: Jewish Renewal: A Path to Healing and Transformation and The Left Hand of God: Taking Back our Country from the Religious Right. His most recent book is Embracing Israel/Palestine (available as a kindle book from RabbiLerner.Tikkun
Chris Moore-Backman, Truthout: The quest to overturn structural racial and economic injustice in the United States is arguably most powerful in the growing movement to end the racialized system of mass incarceration. Leading the struggle to dismantle the US prison-industrial complex stands the Formerly Incarcerated and Convicted People’s Movement.
Anne Elizabeth Moore and Leela Corman, Truthout: Mainstream media recently witnessed a leading anti-sex trafficking activist, Somaly Mam, get caught in a series of lies. However, the problem does not lie in one woman’s trustworthiness, but in a vast network of media makers, celebrities and professional do-gooders with surprisingly imperialist agendas.
Ugo Bardi, Chelsea Green Publishing: Debates about how to respond to mineral depletion tend to focus on the short term. But let’s try to glimpse a little bit further into the future. We see that we are squeezed between the two complementary problems of resource depletion and ecosystem disruption.
The Daily Take Team, The Thom Hartmann Program: Libertarians have been saying for a long time that if we get rid of government, everything will run better. But then corporations will step in to fill the gap, and corporate bureaucracy is just as bad – or even worse – than any government bureaucracy.
Rick Rowden, Truthout: Overhauling the free-market university curriculum must go further than addressing unemployment, inequality and financial instability – it must also bring back development economics.
Victoria Law, Waging Nonviolence: Despite years of abuse at the hands of jailers, women incarcerated in Alabama’s Tutwiler prison organized, risking their own safety, and sparked a federal investigation.
Rashid Khalidi, AlterNet: In the long run Israel’s current assault on Gaza will backfire, producing another crack in the edifice of its illegal and morally bankrupt project of perpetual occupation and unceasing colonization.
Nikole Hannah-Jones, ProPublica: A federal judge in Alabama has taken the rare step of ruling against a local school board in a desegregation case, rejecting the board’s claims that it had done all it could to end segregation in its schools.
Andalusia Knoll, Fusion Soccer: As Brazil prepares to move on from the World Cup and toward the presidential elections in October and preparations for the 2016 Olympics in Rio De Janeiro, critic and sports writer Dave Zirin gives his take of the tournament and how he thinks history will view Brazil’s 2014 legacy.
Sam Pizzigati, Too Much: The trends that have made our world so unequal don’t reflect some inevitable unfolding of globalization. They reflect wrong-headed political decisions. We can make different decisions.
Liam Barrington-Bush and Jen Wilton, Contributoria: As the Spanish economy continues its post-2008 nosedive, cooperative-centered Marinaleda boasts a modest but steady local employment picture in which most people have at least some work and those that don’t have a strong safety net to fall back on.
Shutting Off Water of Citizens in Detroit: Treating People Like Things and Corporations Like People
Mark Karlin, BuzzFlash at Truthout: Rev. William Barber, president of the North Carolina chapter of the NAACP and a leader of the Moral Mondays movement, recently pronounced: “We’re in a time where corporations are treated like people and people are treated like things.” We are witnessing a glaring example of this injustice in Detroit.
Spirit In Action 