Once again, the myth that gun carriers protect themselves and others has exploded. Two recent shootings at Starbucks, which welcomes guns in its stores, show why responsible corporations ban lethal weapons on their property. In both shooting cases, women were given guns by their fathers to "protect" them, only to drop their purses and shoot, or almost shoot, other customers.

At a Cheyenne, Wyoming Starbucks in 2011, a juvenile girl dropped her purse, discharging her gun. "The bullet missed John Basile, 43, by about 12 inches," reported the Wyoming Tribune-Eagle. The unidentified girl had never taken a hunter safety class or any kind of formal firearms training and had been encouraged by her mother to point the gun at a "bad person" if she were in trouble. Right.

This week, it happened again. Another woman given a gun by her father dropped her purse and discharged her weapon at a Starbucks, this time in St. Petersburg, Florida. The woman said she'd forgotten the gun was in her purse and had never taken it out to clean or service it, reported the Tampa Bay Times.  A customer was shot in the leg.

The women's inability to defend themselves should surprise no one. Despite the bluster of gun rights activists, carriers do not make themselves or others safe. If carrying made someone safe, no one from President Reagan to Chris Kyle to Sean Collier, the officer allegedly killed by the Boston bombing suspects, would be shot. Nor are carriers trained like the Secret Service, Kyle or law enforcement personnel.

Despite fallen officers and carriers whose weapons were used against them, the myth that carriers protect themselves and others continues. When a 20/20 special revealed that trained gun carriers could not stop an assailant they knew would attack, there was a cascade of "yes buts" from gun rights activists, rejecting the terms of shootout. Maybe the assailant should have approached from two blocks away and yelled "draw."

Starbucks has ignored pleas from customers and gun safety advocates to ban lethal weapons in its stores which is the right of property owners. And, in the height of  hypocrisy, it issued a statement following the Florida shooting which said, "At Tyrone Square Mall, our primary concern is always for the safety of our customers and store employees, and we are thankful that the injuries sustained are reported to be non-life threatening." What?

Would a business whose "primary concern is always for the safety of our customers and store employees" allow lethal weapons on its premises?

Meanwhile, gun rights groups, led by radio host Craig Bushon, are hailing Starbucks as "a leading advocate for sane gun laws across America," this week. They are charging that Starbucks "is under attack by the NGVA (sic) because they aggressively support the NRA’s Pro-Gun Stance." National Gun Victims Actions Council, NGAC, called for a boycott of Starbucks because of the likelihood of such shootings. END

Learn more about the Starbucks boycott

Withdraw your support from gun-friendly companies.

Crossposted on Tikkun Daily

By Robert Cohen

Put yourself in their shoes,” said President Obama. “Look at the world through their eyes.”

Good idea. And easily the best lines in his Jerusalem speech deliveredon 21st March.

Put yourself in their shoes.

It was a direct challenge to Jewish Israelis (and Diaspora Jews too).

Look at the world through their eyes.

But how hard is it to imagine the world of the Palestinian ‘other’?

Today – May 15 – marks the 65th anniversary of the Palestinian Nakba – ‘Catastrophe’. The date follows one day after the anniversary of Israel’s Declaration of Independence in 1948. What better moment to take seriously the Obama shoe-swapping challenge.

I thought I’d try the experiment by revisiting that speech in Jerusalem since it contains a near pitch-perfect rendition of the Zionist telling of Jewish history.

Here are a few sentences that now demanded revisiting.

“For the Jewish people, the journey to the promise of the State of Israel wound through countless generations.” said Obama.

So how does that familiar statement seem to me now as I walk around in my borrowed shoes?

Well, I can’t help but spot the verbal sleight of hand as God’s “promise” gets retrospectively upgraded from a biblical homeland to a modern State.

But then I shouldn’t blame Obama for getting confused about this. After all, my fellow Jews from across the globe have also become muddled on the topic. We have happily accepted the fusing together of religious concepts of ‘exile’ and ‘return’ with 19th century ethnic nationalism and then happily bolted on our own special take on European colonialism and justified it all through a clumsy reading of our own prayer book liturgy. With my Palestinian outlook, the consequences of all this start to look much clearer.

Then there was this: “Through it all, the Jewish people sustained their unique identity and traditions, as well as a longing to return home.”

But as a Palestinian would I not question how much ‘return’ actually took place during all those centuries of ‘longing’? My Jewish learning could give my Palestinian alter-ego the explanation for this historical discrepancy.

Wasn’t exile rather more than a geographical condition? Wasn’t ‘return’ a messianic concept that meant even a physical presence in the Holy Land did not guarantee the end of exile. Isn’t that what our rabbis taught us over two millennia, until Zionism took hold of our thinking?

Never mind, Obama was on a roll by now: “…the dream of true freedom finally found its full expression in the Zionist idea — to be a free people in your homeland.”

With my Palestinian eyes this too might jar with me. I might want to ask the president where he thinks this leaves the six million American Jewish citizens who consider the United States to have fulfilled the “dream of true freedom,” giving them self-determination unparalleled in 2,000 years of Jewish history. Why have the vast majority stubbornly stayed there, apparently against their best interests?

After so much flattery about the achievements of the State of Israel (business, cultural and scientific), I would have been pleasantly surprised that Obama finally got around to mentioning the Palestinians.

However, I would have noticed that, unlike the Jewish story, the Palestinians were not accorded the grand sweep of history in the telling of their narrative. And the president’s description of the birth of Israel itself made no mention of terror tactics and murder, the forced expulsion of tens of thousands of families, the deliberate destruction of hundreds of Palestinian villages and the blatant grab of Palestinian land – all carried out under the fog of war and the justification of Jewish national liberation.

The story of the 1948 Nakba was easily available to Obama. And if he could not bring himself to accept Palestinian accounts, or preferred to dismiss them as so much Arab propaganda, he could have flicked through the works of numerous Jewish Israeli historians writing over the last thirty years.

If confronting the truth of the 1948 Nakba isn’t what ‘looking at the world through their eyes’ means, then what’s the point of the exercise?

So finally, we come to the half-dozen sentences that got me started and that gave the speech some political bite and the president a small degree of credibility as a broker for peace.

“Put yourself in their shoes – look at the world through their eyes. It is not fair that a Palestinian child cannot grow up in a state of her own, and lives with the presence of a foreign army that controls the movements of her parents every single day. It is not just when settler violence against Palestinians goes unpunished. It is not right to prevent Palestinians from farming their lands; to restrict a student’s ability to move around the West Bank; or to displace Palestinian families from their home. Neither occupation nor expulsion is the answer.”

With my Palestinian eyes and ears I would probably have thought that this list was not even the half of it. What about the cleansing of Palestinian homes in annexed East Jerusalem? What about the continuing confiscation of Palestinian land in the 60% of the West Bank that Israel controls entirely? What about discriminatory planning regulations, house demolitions, the appropriation of water resources, military courts, the unilateral expansion of Jewish settlements in continuing breach of international law?

And then there’s Gaza.

No mention of the on-going blockade of land, sea and air that stifles any chance of normal economic development.

And did he mention the rights of Palestinians in Israel itself? Immigration laws, marriage laws, employment discrimination, education policies, town planning?

With Palestinian eyes and Palestinian shoes, all of this is what makes the Nakba not just a moment in time but an on-going catastrophe.

And so it becomes clear, as I put my own shoes back on, why Obama’s plea for empathy is such a radical challenge for Jewish Israelis (and certainly for Diaspora Jews as well).

Once you take Obama seriously, and try out the shoe-swapping thought exercise, it becomes clear what is stopping our ethical imagination from understanding Palestinian suffering.

It is the Palestinian story that messes with our sense of identity and the privileged entitlement to what we insist on calling the ‘Land of Israel’. Their counter-narrative to Zionism with its language (and experience) of colonialism, dispossession, exile and apartheid is such a fundamental challenge to our story of eternal victimhood and biblical destiny that it cannot be acknowledged without (as I discovered for myself) everything starting to unravel.

Our national renewal, our redeemed homeland, our resurrection from the ashes of Europe, was paid for not with reparations from post-war West Germany, or arms from the Soviet Union, or aid from America. The invoice was sent to the Palestinians.

But none of this can be accepted into Jewish consciousness. For the Jewish narrative to remain intact, every Palestinian must remain a would-be terrorist afflicted with the latest mutation of anti-Semitism. Even non-violent opposition, from economic boycotts to prisoner hunger strikes, are seen as just another form of terror and an existential attack on the Jewish people.

And if, as a Jew, you do choose to take Obama’s words seriously you soon find yourself in hot water with your own community and your own family. Such has been the success of the Zionist narrative, that to choose to see the world through Palestinian eyes immediately places you at the dissenting margins of the Jewish community, easily dismissed and easily ignored.

For myself, I refuse to accept that my views have disenfranchised me from Judaism or the Jewish community. My position of solidarity with the Palestinian people is not borne out of enmity to my own people but from a commitment to Jewish values and Jewish well-being.

I care about what the Jewish community says and does when it comes to Israel/Palestine. I care about its pronouncements, I care about its silence, I care about its denial and its indifference.

To ‘put yourself in their shoes and see the world through their eyes’ is a huge ask. For me it has meant overcoming my own racism and prejudice to allow myself to hear Palestinian voices and accept the validity of their story. It’s become an exercise in un-installing the cultural software in my head.

As it turns out, I don’t think Obama takes his own words seriously enough.If he did, the first thing he would need to do is to re-write his whole speech to tell a more rounded and truthful story about how Jews and Palestinians have faced each other for the last hundred years and more.

I believe the Jewish future is dependent on us upholding what the Jewish Liberation theologian Marc Ellis describes as: Jewish prophetic consciousness. That can only mean hearing and seeing the Palestinian narrative and allowing it to shape a new post-Zionist Jewish self-understanding. That doesn’t mean supporting a second Holocaust in Israel but it does mean growing beyond an ethnocentric State to a nation that respects the rights and national stories of all of its citizens.

Right now, that looks like the only way to rescue the Hebrew covenant.

An earlier version of this post originally appeared on the author’s blog, Micah’s Paradigm Shift.

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So all hell has broken loose, huh?

This is the Obama administration that we've been warned about for years. The deep rooted, treacherous executive branch headed by the socialist lying Negro has finally been unearthed. Benghazi, AP phone record subpoenas, IRS attacks! Why doesn't Barack H. Nixon just step down from his self-made throne and let America be free!

Or perhaps we could call shenanigans.

My stance is not that of an Obama-bot. I have covered politics these last few years and watched the constant search for the dark underbelly of our supposed illegitimate executive branch. As opposed to level-headed critiques of an administration that has had triumphs and missteps, we are subjected to conservative media's "wondering aloud" style news coverage (© Lizz Winstead) from virtually all spaces. We are subjected to perpetual Republican fear mongering and exasperated Democratic waffling all due to a deficiency of actual dialogue or acknowledgement of situations at hand. It’s easier to yell scandal repeatedly with no sense of the responsibility that comes with being members of the public sphere. We find ourselves waist deep in shit while never acknowledging who’s been taking dumps in our proverbial pool.

I grow weary of all of this.

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And on #amTWiB, political strategist L. Joy Williams and the morning crew discuss the increase of babies born addicted to prescription drugs, activists want Living Social to ban gun and alcohol package deals, and eating insects to stop world hunger.

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President Obama went to Austin, Texas, last week in pursuit of an industrial and employment revival. He wants to launch manufacturing institutes to foster American innovation and job creation.

Republicans responded by ridiculing the President, in the same arrogant way that the blooded aristocrats on the British television series Downton Abbey scorned a chauffeur who sought to marry into the patrician Crawley family.  “No opportunity for the downtrodden!” the GOP and wealthy vow.

Watching Downton Abbey would be pure escapism, a simple respite from the grind of work and duties of home. That is, except for the disquieting reality that Downton Abbey’s classist mores increasingly intrude on American life. The wealth gap between America’s rich and poor has widened to the point where it was in Downton Abbey days. And that is abetted by the GOP practice of continually cutting taxes on the rich while constantly cutting government services that provide opportunity to everyone else.

Income inequality in America is wide and widening. Just get this: while income stagnated for the middle class, the average annual income of the top .01 percent of U.S. households from 2002 to 2007 rose by 123 percent – a gain of $20 million each.

Even after the crash of 2008, the wealthiest .01 percent did just fine. Now, the stock market and corporate profits are soaring.  But only the wealthy are benefitting. The New York Times reported earlier this month that corporate profits in the third quarter of 2012 took the largest share of national income for any time since 1950, while the portion that went to workers fell to the lowest point since 1966.

While making those huge profits, corporations aren’t creating jobs.  For those who do have jobs but aren’t in the top 10 percent income bracket, wages fell 7 percent from 2007 to 2008. Unlike the rich, workers didn’t recover after the crash, with median household income declining 1.5 percent in 2011.

And then there’s the poor. In the richest country in the world, the U.S. Census Bureau found 46.2 million people living in poverty in 2011, the highest number in the 53 years that the Census has collected the statistic. These are America’s economic equivalent to Downton Abbey serfs and servants.

This poverty is by far the highest rate among developed countries, while the rate at which taxes and transfer programs reduce American poverty is the lowest for developed countries. Transfer programs include unemployment compensation, a crucial lifeline for millions when the jobless rate remains above 7 percent.

For those unemployed, for the struggling who saw no benefit from record corporate profits and stock market highs, President Obama went to Texas to announce formation of three manufacturing hubs, where innovation would be nurtured and good-paying industrial jobs created. By executive order, these three will be financed with $200 million from five federal agencies.

The President has asked Congress to dedicate $1 billion to create a network of 15 industrial institutes, but Republicans laughed at the proposal.

Instead of investing in America, they insist on tax cuts for the rich. They demand austerity for the rest. They love the sequester, which cut Head Start for poor children and Meals on Wheels for old folks. They’re fine with the sequester costing 700,000 jobs. All those single mothers thrown out of jobs can always work as prostitutes, like Downton Abbey maid Ethel Parks did after being fired for sleeping with a moneyed patrician, right?

Both private sector and government economists have said unemployment would be significantly lower and economic growth significantly higher if Congress had continued stimulating the economy, as it did when President Obama was first elected and Democrats were in control. Republicans reversed that successful course. When Republicans took control of the House of Representatives and began abusing the filibuster in the Senate, the GOP forced the country onto the austerity path that has devastated Greece, Spain, Portugal, Italy and Ireland.

President Obama continues to push for stimulus and jobs because he believes the American government, founded on the premise that all men are created equal, should promote equal opportunity to achieve.

In the three decades after World War II, the government stimulated the economy by constructing interstate highways, sending veterans to college and supporting home ownership. Taxes on the rich were among the highest in the nation’s history. The economy thrived and income inequality declined. Opportunity for every child increased.

Republicans want to kill the government that accomplished that. They want to go back to Downton Abbey days. The rich stay rich; the poor stay servants. There’s a set of rules for the rich: An unmarried Lady Mary deserves forgiveness for sleeping with a distinguished foreign visitor. But there’s another set of rules for the rest: unmarried Ethel Parks gets fired for sleeping above her station in life. The Wall Street bankers whose gambling took down the economy get a bailout. The Main Street bank robber gets a prison term.

Republicans don’t seem to understand that a political system that favors the wealthy in the 21st century while failing the majority is unsustainable. Americans believe everyone is equal. They believe the system of government that their forbearers created should guarantee equity of opportunity to make a life, get a job, buy a picket-fenced home and raise a couple of kids. The New World rejected the Downton Abbey philosophy of privilege based on blood lines and inherited money.

Turn off the TV, GOP.