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By David Harris-Gershon (@David_EHG)
Yesterday, an Israeli man indiscriminately killed four people at a local bank before shooting himself, shocking a nation not used to such lone gunman incidents.
One day later, government officials responded by enacting tighter gun control measures:
One day after a Be’er Sheva man shot dead four people in a local bank before turning his gun on himself, the Public Security Ministry on Sunday announced new rules to limit the number of guns in circulation. School security guards will have to turn in their weapons, which guarding firms will reissue at the start of the new school year. Licensed gun owners will have to store their weapon in a safe at home. Security companies must obtain special exemptions from being required to store a weapon when its bearer is off duty, only one gun license will be issued to any single individual and anyone applying to renew a gun license must show why they need a weapon.
In addition, a panel will be appointed to consider administering mental and physical examinations to license applicants.
While Israel doesn’t have to contend with the Second Amendment, and doesn’t suffer from such a hyperbolic gun culture as ours, it is a country full of armed soldiers. A country with citizens who carry guns for real and conjured security reasons. A country with leaders who continuously place their fingers on the trigger, particularly when targeting Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.
In short, this is a militaristic society. A society that understands conflict. A society that understands what it means to grip the barrel of a rifle and take aim.
However, despite this – or perhaps because of it – it is also a society that has generally treated gun ownership quite delicately. It is a country that, despite its own security concerns, stands in complete opposition to the U.S. when it comes to gun control.
Permit requirements are strict and tend to be rather narrow, unless you are a Jewish settler or work in a proven, high-risk profession. Which is why gun ownership rates in Israel are among the lowest in the Western world, and is one thirteenth that of the U.S. (In a country of over 7,000,000 residents, there are currently about 160,000 legal gun permits.)
Why? Put simply: Israel chooses to leave security to its professionals. And not to a gun-wielding citizenry.
Which is why after a lone-gunman shooting, such as the one which happened yesterday, Israel’s response was not an NRA style call to “Arm the victims!” Rather, it was a call to get more guns off the streets.
It’s a call America would do well to heed.
Follow me on Twitter @David_EHG
Author’s Note:
Those who know my writing understand my critical take on the occupation, the settlement enterprise, and the unequal treatment Palestinians receive in many arenas. This inequality obviously extends itself to gun ownership in Israel – Jewish settlers are granted firearm permits precisely because they live amidst Palestinians.
However, I’m intentionally not making this aspect a focus of this piece, as my primary purpose is to contrast Israel’s response to a mass shooting with our own – not to engage in a meta-analysis of the conflict.
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By David Harris-Gershon (@David_EHG)
Empathy is destroying us. Allow me to explain:
One of our most powerful, affective emotions is our ability to feel or relate to the condition of another. While emotions such as grief and guilt often lead to paralysis, empathy leads us to action. We witness the suffering of someone in our community, read an emotive Facebook post of a friend in need of help, or hear the pained cries of our child and are moved to act. (We donate money to a personal cancer fund, offer advice, and comfort our child.) Why? Because we, in part, are able to personally feel the experience of that person standing outside ourselves. We are hit by an emotional wave that is personal, and that wave pushes us forward.
And this is a beautiful human characteristic – a trait that evolution has bestowed upon us, this instinctive, emotional pull to help others by feeling their pain and suffering. It’s an emotion cognitive neuroscientists are currently researching, trying to understand how it works. For if we learn how empathy truly functions, perhaps we can evoke with greater regularity this beautiful, moral emotion.
However, this beautiful human characteristic – beneficial when the world is small, say a family or a village – has become a liability and, in some cases, a destructive force in our world.
In some ways, empathy is killing us.
This is the case Paul Bloom makes in The New Yorker, where he explores how the parochial and narrow borders that define empathy are working against us in a global world where we affect not just those around us, but those across this planet.
This becomes remarkably clear with regard to climate change, where opponents of environmental regulations can prey upon our empathetic responses by coaxing us to feel for the business owner who will suffer if carbon emission restrictions are tightened.
Here’s Bloom:
Consider global warming…opponents of restrictions on CO2emissions are flush with identifiable victims – all those who will be harmed by increased costs, by business closures. The millions of people who at some unspecified future date will suffer the consequences of our current inaction are, by contrast, pale statistical abstractions.
The government’s failure to enact prudent long-term policies is often attributed to the incentive system of democratic politics (which favors short-term fixes), and to the powerful influence of money. But the politics of empathy is also to blame. Too often, our concern for specific individuals today means neglecting crises that will harm countless people in the future.
We cannot possibly feel emotionally the lives of those who do not yet exist, nor can we emotionally absorb the staggering numbers of those who will suffer and perish as a result of climate change. But we can feel for a business owner whose family may suffer under the weight of government regulations. We can see it. And in this context, empathy fails us.
Empathy is failing us on a global scale. It often fails us domestically in the political sphere as well. Opposition to Obamacare or gun control can be attributed to political ideologies which sublimate empathy. However, such opposition can also be attributed the “politics of empathy” in which each side vies for an empathetic response. While progressives (such as myself) point to the children at Sandy Hook as clear evidence for our need to tightly regulate firearms, conservatives (backed by gigantic sums of NRA-funded money) point to those helpless, unarmed victims. And America empathizes.
Empathy is also why we, as a society, can become obsessed by a kidnapped girl or trapped coal miners, but barely blink when told that a veteran in America commits suicide, on average, every day or that approximately 30,000 incidents of gun violence occur in the U.S. every year.
It’s not that we’re callous. It’s that we can only empathize with or truly feel what is personal and recognizable.
Here’s Bloom again:
The key to engaging empathy is what has been called “the identifiable victim effect.” As the economist Thomas Schelling, writing forty-five years ago, mordantly observed, “Let a six-year-old girl with brown hair need thousands of dollars for an operation that will prolong her life until Christmas, and the post office will be swamped with nickels and dimes to save her. But let it be reported that without a sales tax the hospital facilities of Massachusetts will deteriorate and cause a barely perceptible increase in preventable deaths – not many will drop a tear or reach for their checkbooks.”
Now, this isn’t an argument against empathy. We need it in our world, in our lives, if we are to help others and care for those outside ourselves. Indeed, we need more of it, in many respects.
However, if we are to survive as a society, if our planet is to survive, we are going to somehow have to become smart enough to rely on reason, and not empathy, to make our most important decisions. Yes, we will always be moral. And empathy will always, as an emotion, focus our attention on the personal stories we encounter. As it should.
But our survival depends, paradoxically, on our ability to overcome our emotionally-informed morality. On our ability to look at climate change statistics and say, “Yes, I must act. Immediately.”
Follow David Harris-Gershon on Twitter @David_EHG
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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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Crossposted on Tikkun Daily
By David Harris-Gershon (@David_EHG)
Over 10,000 Israelis took to the streets of Tel Aviv this evening to protest new austerity measures in the country’s budget, echoing (and perhaps renewing) Israel’s historic social justice protests from two years ago.
Many activists who played a central role in those protests were involved in this evening’s renewed call for Israelis to march in the streets against Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, Finance Minister Yair Lapid and their budget, which proposes cuts in social welfare programs and raised taxes on lower- and middle-income workers.
One of those activists, Itzik Shmuli, is now a Knesset Member and marched this evening. He told Ha’aretz:
“Lapid’s financial plan will severely hurt the working man and will trample the weak sectors. To block it, we will wage a persistent battle on the streets and in the halls of the Knesset. Israelis don’t expect their finance minister to be a socialist, but they don’t expect him to be a populist, either.”
Another protester echoed Shmuli’s sentiments in less measured terms:
Alon Lee-Green, one of the activists heading the renewed round of protests, accused Netanyahu and Lapid of choosing Israel’s rich over the middle class.”Bibi and Lapid had all the options on the table,” he said on Saturday. “They made their choice… So we say here tonight: The tycoons should pay, and not us. The awakening is palpable.”
While the protests – also held in Jerusalem and Haifa – were sparked by unpopular austerity measures, Israelis brought a diverse array of messages to the streets, some of which directly challenged geo-political issues, such as Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian Territories.
A sign reads "The occupation is draining our wallets" as Israelis return to Rothschild Boulevard, the site of Israel's historic tent city during the social justice protests of 2011. Photo by Camilla Schick.
An Israeli flag with Palestinian national colors is flown during the Tel Aviv protest. Photo by @yair.
While it remains to be seen whether these protests will spark the types of historic marches Israel witnessed in 2011, it’s clear that those in the streets have been noticed. Lapid released a Facebook post just before the protest, assuring Israelis that the budget can be revised.
However, it may take more than a Facebook post to quell the beginning of what some hope will be a new round of social protests in Israel.
Follow David Harris-Gershon on Twitter @David_EHG
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Crossposted on Tikkun Daily
By Lynn Feinerman
Wonder of wonders, President Obama has publicly acknowledged that there are over 100 desperate men starving themselves to death in the Guantánamo detention facility — rather than endure the misery of torture and indefinite imprisonment without trial.
In my most recent post on Tikkun Daily, I’d made an effort publicly to support the hunger strikers in their heroic action, but I figured the Obama administration would ignore the desperation and courage of the Guantánamo prisoners.
Obama didn’t bring up the subject himself — unless his press conference was staged, and he expected the CBS reporter to question him about the crisis in the Guantánamo facility. But given his voluble response, with all his stock phrases and excuses neatly in place, one might suspect he knew the question was coming.
The CBS reporter even took the trouble to frame the question from the viewpoint of humanitarian concerns, saying, “Is it any surprise really that they would prefer death rather than have no end in sight to their confinement?”
The reporter might have editorialized a bit further and said, “That’s to say nothing, of course, about the fact that their detention without trial is entirely unconstitutional and entirely contrary to U.S. ideas of freedom, democracy and justice.”
Did Mr. Obama mention the despair and misery of the men detained and striking in Guantánamo, in any part of his response? Was there any sort of real feeling of horror at what’s happening there, in his words? No.
Did he mention that the facility’s policy and programs of torture and secrecy are cruel, immoral, and illegal from the point of view of international law as well? No.
Did he give us the usual pat phrases like “Guantánamo is not necessary to keep America safe,” and “It is expensive,” and “It is inefficient”? Oh yes.
Yes. Let’s make sure that when we torture, insult, violate, and confine innocent people, we do it efficiently. No muss, no fuss, no bother.
In any case, even though Obama took small pains to assure us all that he wants to close the Guantánamo facility, the truth is that in January 2013 the Obama administration closed the office in the U.S. State Department in which officials were working to repatriate or resettle the great majority of the remaining Guantánamo prisoners — almost all of whom have been found innocent of any wrongdoing.
The truth is that according to the executive options in the National Defense Authorization Act, Obama could have initiated the release of the remaining prisoners at Guantánamo years ago. He could have ordered the Secretary of Defense “in concurrence with the Secretary of State and in consultation with the Director of National Intelligence, to certify detainee transfers and issue national security waivers.”
In fact Obama issued a moratorium on releasing Yemeni prisoners. Ninety of the 166 remaining prisoners in Guantánamo are Yemeni.
The Yemeni government has demanded the Yemeni prisoners be returned to Yemen. Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi, president of Yemen, has stated, “We believe that keeping someone in prison for over 10 years without due process is clear-cut tyranny.”
Yes, Mr. Mansour Hadi, once upon a time Americans also believed that, and wrote that belief right into the US Constitution. How about that!
Someone else has contributed eloquently to the public discussion of this issue. Former U.S. soldier Brandon Neely worked as a guard at Guantánamo for 6 months in 2002. He has become a spokesperson for shutting down the prison.
In a recent interview with CBC TV in Canada, Brandon described the many things he saw at Guantánamo that drove him to call for its closure. He talked of unsafe living conditions, outside cages, of seeing guards “beat some of these detainees to a bloody pulp…”
In spite of the risks he faces in speaking out publicly about Guantánamo, Brandon urges others to speak out. He lauds the striking prisoners for their bravery and says, “Now it’s time for the people to put the pressure back on the government. We talked the talk, now it’s time to walk the walk.”
Can you hear that, Mr. Obama? Do you care enough about this glaring moral crisis, this deeply rooted American problem, to move forcefully to do what you promised to do in 2009?
Walk the walk. Close Guantánamo. Repatriate and rehabilitate those destroyed by it.
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Crossposted on Tikkun Daily
The Pew Research Center this week revealed another extensive and newsworthy piece of research: The World’s Muslims: Religion, Politics and Society. The results of the survey, which consisted of more than 38,000 interviews of Muslims in Africa, the Middle East, Europe and Asia in approximately 80 languages, reveals many things on many topics. Some revelations are interesting, others curious, and a few even downright alarming. As an American Muslim, though, I was mostly interested in the appendices, which discuss the attitudes of U.S. Muslims and compared them to similar themes among Muslims of other countries. Here’s my take:
First and foremost I was happy to read that American Muslims are some of the most moderate and peace loving in the world. For instance, 81% American Muslims say suicide bombings and other forms of violence against civilian targets are never justified. That’s not to say Muslims of other countries overwhelmingly agree with violence, in fact most Muslims worldwide also reject this type of violence, but have a lower rate of rejection than Americans. Interestingly, it seems that America Muslims also are more moderate in cultural and societal aspects of their lives. 63% say there is no inherent tension between being devout and living in a modern society; nearly identical proportion of American Christians (64%) agree. On the other hand, fewer worldwide Muslims share the view that modern life and religious devotion are not at odds (global median of 54%).To me, that’s a telling comparison, because modern culture is often cited as pulling people of all faiths away from religious practices. That Muslims in the United States are able to balance their American experience with their religious traditions says much about their resilience, flexibility and open minds.
For those curious about the reasons for these differences between Muslims here and abroad, I think the survey itself points out to a critical one: interaction with other faiths. The surveys reports that although almost half of U.S. Muslims say that all (7%) or most (41%) of their close friends are other Muslims, another half say that some (36%) or hardly any (14%) of their close friends are Muslim. I believe that we as American Muslims receive a huge benefit from befriending and ultimately learning from other religious groups. Whether you talk about religion or not, having a friend, neighbor or acquaintance who believes differently from you will factor enormously in your world view. People who have multicultural friendships also have fewer stereotypes and fewer negative feelings about other religious groups. By contrast, the surveys showed that Muslims in other countries nearly universally report that all or most of their close friends are Muslim (global median of 95%). Even Muslims who are religious minorities in their countries are less likely than U.S. Muslims to have friendships with non-Muslims. For example, 78% of Russian Muslims and 96% of Thai Muslims say most or all of their close friends are Muslim.
It’s no surprise to interfaith activists such as me that interfaith dialogue and relationship building between groups can pave the way towards peace and prosperity. Americans of all faiths would do well to remember this important fact: ignorance breeds hate, and who wants to be ignorant? Look outside your own social circle, make a new friend, one who looks and prays differently. Join or start an interfaith discussion group, such as a book club or a student’s study group. Read a book about another faith, ask questions, understand and celebrate each other’s differences. In the long run, we will all be better off with an open mind and an inclusive attitude.
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Crossposted on Tikkun Daily
By David Harris-Gershon (@David_EHG)
Jason Collins today became the first active NBA player to reveal his gay identity in the league’s history. And he did so on the pages of Sports Illustrated with the grace and stoicism befitting an accidental activist, which indeed is what Collins has become: a brave activist determined to combat the homophobia and hatred rife in American sports.
Not because he set out for this to be his mission. But because nobody else has done so.
I’m a 34-year-old NBA center. I’m black. And I’m gay.
I didn’t set out to be the first openly gay athlete playing in a major American team sport. But since I am, I’m happy to start the conversation. I wish I wasn’t the kid in the classroom raising his hand and saying, “I’m different.” If I had my way, someone else would have already done this. Nobody has, which is why I’m raising my hand.
Collins has received a tremendous amount of support today, from Bill Clinton and the White House to Kobe Bryant and other sports figures. However, predictably, he has also been the target of vicious, personal attacks.
Attacks questioning his manhood. His morality. His humanity. They are attacks I have chosen not to reproduce here, not to promote. You know their tenor. You know their trope.
You know the fundamentalist rage that is brewing today, the self-proclaimed religious amongst us who hide their homophobic prejudices under the veil of Biblical doctrine, under the veil of God’s will. They can’t handle the prototypical, stereotypical man revealing himself to be gay. They can’t stomach such a world.
And so the bible-driven filth is being directed at Jason today. It’s as ugly as it is expected. However, the one difference — perhaps the most important one to consider today — is that while Jason was born to be a gay man, was bequeathed this identity, those on the religious right calling him filthy names learned their hatred.
They were not born to hate. They did not come out of the womb hating those men who deeply love other men. They were taught it.
And, in all honesty, only someone taught to hate could possibly feel such hatred for Jason. Seriously. Listen to him:
I realized I needed to go public when Joe Kennedy, my old roommate at Stanford and now a Massachusetts congressman, told me he had just marched in Boston’s 2012 Gay Pride Parade. I’m seldom jealous of others, but hearing what Joe had done filled me with envy. I was proud of him for participating but angry that as a closeted gay man I couldn’t even cheer my straight friend on as a spectator. If I’d been questioned, I would have concocted half truths. What a shame to have to lie at a celebration of pride. I want to do the right thing and not hide anymore. I want to march for tolerance, acceptance and understanding. I want to take a stand and say, “Me, too.”
The recent Boston Marathon bombing reinforced the notion that I shouldn’t wait for the circumstances of my coming out to be perfect. Things can change in an instant, so why not live truthfully? When I told Joe a few weeks ago that I was gay, he was grateful that I trusted him. He asked me to join him in 2013. We’ll be marching on June 8.
This is a beautiful man. A beautiful man born beautiful.
Follow David Harris-Gershon on Twitter @David_EHG
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By Lynn Feinerman
On April 20, 2013, days after the bombs went off at the Boston Marathon event, President Obama asked: “Why did young men who grew up and studied here as part of our communities and our country, resort to such violence?”
Media reported that on April 22, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the younger of the two brothers accused in the bombings, answered Obama’ s question. He stated they bombed the event in reaction to U.S. attacks on Islam.
Is Obama listening to that answer? How does he interpret it? Are the mainstream media, and in particular Fox News’ Erik Rush, listening to that answer?
I don’t think Erik Rush is listening. I doubt, in fact, that the Obama administration is listening to that answer… heeding the message. And innocent U.S. citizens are paying the price.
There is an old saying, from the Taoist book the I Ching: “He who will not heed will be made to feel.” In what way might we understand that the U.S. government, and this president at this time, have not heeded?
Before we conclude that speculation such as this is blaming the victim, let us review recent U.S. behavior toward the very large Muslim community worldwide.
It is clear from the chronicles of Bagram, Abu Ghraib, and other prison sites worldwide that U.S. operatives have been in the habit of pissing on Qur’ans, flushing them down toilets, insulting the dignity of Muslim prisoners, torturing them and detaining them without trial – in some cases for over a decade – in what appear, in retrospect, to be deliberate provocations of Muslim rage.
Let us examine the situation at the Guantanamo detention facility – currently the most glaring case in point. In this facility, which Obama vowed to close back in 2009, reside 86 men who were cleared for release from that hellhole three years ago. Almost all of them Muslim. Under the provisions of the National Defense Authorization Act the President can release these men and get them repatriated. Instead, he abruptly closed the office that was arranging their repatriation – and left them in a limbo of indefinite detention.
I repeat: These men have been cleared for release – years ago. One of them, Adnan Latif, died last September after eleven years of imprisonment without trial. He had been cleared for release. He was totally innocent of any crime.
In desperation these men have gone on hunger strike, and have refused to eat or drink for months. The U.S. response? To force these innocent men to submit to searches of their Korans, and to force feed them. Read the editorial published nationwide from Samir Naji al Hasan Moqbel, one of the hunger strikers, to get an idea of how these prisoners are force fed – with tubes that are too large for the job, in abject misery and pain.
Then the U.S. military raided the Guantanamo prison and attacked the men, who reportedly fought back with improvised weapons. What weapons?! Brooms? Plastic bottles? And how much damage could the prisoners have done in their weakened states?
The cruelty of U.S. policy and actions toward these Muslims is beyond reckoning. Clearly the U.S. is not listening to any sort of moral voice in its execution of such policy and action. Clearly the U.S. is not heeding the misery of these prisoners.
We know quite well from the reportage that the same kind of cruelty was customary in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. We know that drone attacks have caused horrific death and injury in Pakistan. Do we heed the mass demonstrations in Pakistan against drones?
Do we heed the heroic efforts of the Guantanamo prisoners and their lawyers, to wrest a shred of justice from the U.S. government?
The answer is no. The U.S. government and military complex is unwilling to listen, to listen deeply, to the cries of those whom it has slaughtered, wounded, detained, tormented and ruined.
From this willful deafness come the retaliations, and the acts of vengeance against the U.S. Then the sick mainstream media, Fox in particular, twist the facts and blubber about how “they envy our lifestyle.” Feh! What a disgrace Fox News is.
Let me say this one more time, Mr. Obama: Close Guantanamo and all other such facilities worldwide and bring justice and healing to all whom the U.S. has detained without trial and tortured. End the policy of hateful insult and injury to Muslims.
Will these words, this advice, be heeded? I doubt it.
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Crossposted on Tikkun Daily
By David Harris-Gershon (@David_EHG)
In a new arms deal reached on Monday, the United States has agreed to sell Israel mid-air refueling tankers. The sale of such tankers, which will make it possible for Israeli planes to reach Iran, was refused by the Bush administration.
The arms deal, which also included specialized missiles for demolishing air defense systems, was praised in public by Defense Secretaries Chuck Hagel and Moshe Yaalon – both of whom mentioned the importance of curtailing Iran’s nuclear capabilities.
The Obama administration, however, refused to sell Israel bunker-busting bombs that could penetrate some of Iran’s deeply-embedded nuclear sites.
Per The New York Times:
The new weapons sale package includes aircraft for midair refueling and missiles that can cripple an adversary’s air defense system. Both would be critical for Israel if it were to decide on a unilateral attack on Iran.
But what the Israelis wanted most was a weapons system that is missing from the package: a giant bunker-busting bomb designed to penetrate earth and reinforced concrete to destroy deeply buried sites. According to both American and Israeli analysts, it is the only weapon that would have a chance of destroying the Iranian nuclear fuel enrichment center at Fordow, which is buried more than 200 feet under a mountain outside the holy city of Qum.
While the arms deal contains what The New York Times described as a “mixed message” regarding an Israeli strike on Iran, one thing is certain: as a result of the deal, Israel will have an increased logistical capacity to strike Iran if it so chooses.
With this increased capacity came Hagel’s strongest statement to date on Iran with Israel in mind:
“Iran will not be allowed to develop a nuclear weapon,” Mr. Hagel said. “Period.”
It’s clear that the Obama administration is bending with regard to an Israeli strike on Iran. Time will tell how far the U.S. is willing to bend as Israel continues to press for such a strike.
Follow David Harris-Gershon on Twitter @David_EHG
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Crossposted on Tikkun Daily
By David Harris-Gershon (@David_EHG)
In the wake of a tragedy, we are often compelled to do the only thing we can to regain control in the wake of total chaos: name and classify the trauma. We feel a need to rationally understand what is, in truth, beyond comprehension.
Which is one reason why we have collectively rushed to categorize the tragedy that occurred at the Boston Marathon as “terrorism.” Our elected leaders (from President Obama to city councils) have done so, our media elite have done so, and most Americans have done so.
However, without knowing a motive – and we don’t yet know what the motive was – can we truly classify the horrors that happened in Boston as terrorism? My answer is an unequivocal no.
And a look at U.S. code and varying U.S. classifications reveals that our government indeed requires a known motivation in order to classify a violent act as terrorism.
Title 22 of the U.S. Code, Section 2656f(d) defines terrorism as:
“premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents, usually intended to influence an audience.”
In this definition, violence must clearly be “politically motivated” in order to be classified as terrorism.
According to the F.B.I., it is defined as:
“the unlawful use of force or violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives.”
So too the F.B.I. defines terrorism as something that is meant to further “political or social objectives.” While methods are emphasized in the F.B.I.’s definition, a motivation must be present in order to classify what happened in Boston as terrorism.
Why does it matter? Classifying the bombing doesn’t bring back the dead; it doesn’t mitigate the suffering of the living, of the bereaved.
But it does matter for public policy and for how law enforcement treats those who are involved. Much controversy emerged when it was learned that the Department of Justice was withholding Miranda protections from Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the 19-year-old bomber still clutching to life.
Why was he not read his Miranda rights when Wade Michael Page, who fatally shot six people at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin, was presented with such rights?
Does it have to do with our post-9/11 prejudices? Does it have to do with the fact that immediate assumptions were made that Tsarnaev, who is Muslim, must have committed a politically-motivated act of terror?
A look at his Twitter feed reveals nothing but a (shockingly) normal teenager, and news that Tsarnaev “partied” after the bombing certainly doesn’t fit any radical profiles.
Which is why, in our rush to classify the horrors which occurred in Boston, it’s premature to label it – in my eyes – as terrorism. It’s too early to assume that, based on Tsarnaev’s religion and ethnic background, his actions were motivated by anything but pure madness.
It’s not too early to name it for what it definitely is: an unspeakable tragedy.
Follow David Harris-Gershon on Twitter @David_EHG
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