An archaic artifact used to transfer text onto another paper, so it may be shared with others. Note:Since I did not pay the extortion that Echo demanded I pay, all comments previous to Jan. 10th 2010 have been lost. If you want to conctact me yo can do so by email hanselfree@yahoo.com
LOVERS, forget your love,
And list to the love of these,
She a window flower,
And he a winter breeze.
When the frosty window veil
Was melted down at noon,
And the cagèd yellow bird
Hung over her in tune,
He marked her through the pane,
He could not help but mark,
And only passed her by,
To come again at dark.
He was a winter wind,
Concerned with ice and snow,
Dead weeds and unmated birds,
And little of love could know.
But he sighed upon the sill,
He gave the sash a shake,
As witness all within
Who lay that night awake.
Perchance he half prevailed
To win her for the flight
From the firelit looking-glass
And warm stove-window light.
But the flower leaned aside
And thought of naught to say,
And morning found the breeze
A hundred miles away.
Robert Frost
The Tikkun Community and the Network of Spiritual Progressives
have to look at the Middle East in a more sophisticated and
complex way than the ideologues on both sides. The Hamas elec-
tion challenges us--and yet it was something we consistently
predicted.
News Release: On the apparent Electoral Victory of Hamas
Rabbi Michael Lerner, editor of Tikkun Magazine: A bimonthly Jewish
Critique of Politics, Culture and Society, and national director of the
Network of Spiritual Progressives, issued the following statement upon
hearing of the electoral victory of Hamas in Palestinian elections:
Just as the election of previously Israeli terrorists Menachem
Begin,Yitzhak Shamir and Ariel Sharon set the backdrop for the
possibiliy of peace negotiations with Israel's enemies in the
past thirty years,the election of the murderous terrorists of
Hamas may ultimately make it more likey that a peace agreement
entered into by a Hamas dominated government would actually
amount to something lasting and substantial.
We at Tikkun have no sympathy for Hamas' terrorism, and we are
distressed that the new government of the Palestinians will be
a govrnment collaborating with those whose hands are drenched
in blood.But this does not distinguish them, for example, from
Ariel Sharon's government or George Bush's government, which
have both been responsible for the deaths of more innocent
civilians than Hamas (though always excusing themselves because
these deathw were "only collateral damage").
So Israel and the U.S. ought to get off of their moral outrage
at Hamas and recognize that this election provides them, in the
long run, with opportunities to make peace with their enemies.
But that will only happen if Israel and the U.S. stop using the
lame excuse that they won't negotiate with terrorists, a position
that would have led the U.S. to remain in Vietnam to this day,
refusing to talk to Vietnamese terrorists.
We'd be even more distressed if we believed that the vote for
Hamas represented a rejection of a two state solution and endorse-
ment of "endless war till Israel is destroyed." But there is little
evidence of that. That was not the central idea put forward by
Hamas in its electoral bid. Rather, it challenged the corruption
in the Palestinian Authority and its failure to have made real pro-
gress in improving the life conditions of the Palestinian people.
Hamas would not have won without the conscious decision of Ariel
Sharon to foster that possibility. From the moment that Sharon
rejected negotiations with Arafat, who had explicitly
recognized the existence of the State of Israel, and ended the
Fatah call for Israel's destruction, Sharon was strengthening
the credibility of Hamas. If Fatah was too radical to be nego-
tiated with, what would the Palestinian people be losing by
voting for Hamas? And then when Arafat was replaced by a Pale-
stinian president Abbas who implemented an end to the Intifada
and preached non-violence and negotations, and he too was rejected
as a viable partner for Israel by Ariel Sharon, and Sharon
instead went ahead and unilaterally withdrew from Gaza
(as opposed to withdrawing in coordination with the Fatah's
Palestinian Authority government) he was clearly sending the
message that the Palestinian Authority could deliver nothing for
the Palestinian people. Some in the peace movement argue that
this was exactly what Sharon was aiming for a victory of terror-
ists that would relieve pressure on Israel to make serious
territorial compromises.
Had Israel wanted a peace-oriented party in control in
Palestine, it would have joined with the Palestinians in a
massive effort to rebuild Gaza and end the near-starvation
faced by close to 60% of the population there, and it would
have dismantled some of the roadblocks in the West Bank to
signal its willingness to ease the life conditions of
Palesitnians. Without being able to provide any reason to
believe that it could deliver an improvement in the condit-
ions of life of the Palestinian people, the Fatah party seems
according to early reports) to have been decisively rebuked
by the Palestinian people. But this was not a vote for
endless war with Israel, but repudiation of the non-performing
government of Fatah.
We continue to believe that a solution is easily at hand--an
accord along the lines of the Tikkun Resolution for Middle
East Peace or along the lines of the Geneva Accord. But, as
we've argued in two recent books (Healing Israel/Palestine,
and The Geneva Accord and other Strategies for Middle East
Peace, both published by North Atlantic Books), no political
arrangement will ever be sufficient unless it is accompanied
by a reconciliation based on a recogntion that both sides
have been unnecessarily cruel and hurtful to the other and
both sides need to do real repentance and atonement.
We believe that such a recognition could be fostered by a Truth and
Reconciliation commission working inside both countries, but that may
require first a withdrawal of Israeli troops to the pre-67 borders with
minor border adjustments outlined in the Geneva Accord. Till then, the
most we can hope for is that both sides stop posturing, and stop
believing that they can teach the other side a lesson through violence.
Such a commission would undoutedly expose not only the immoral acts of
the Israeli government, but those of both Fatah and Hamas as well.
The only way to peace is through non-violence, and we urge that on both
sides of the conflict. Deeply committed to the survival and flourishing
of Israel, Tikkun recognizes that the only path to peace is one that
actively helps secure fore the Palestinian people the same well-being
that Israelis seek for themselves. Indeed, the only way this world will
ever be secure is when we in the countries with greater military and
economic power recognize that our interests will best be served by
ensuring the well-being economically and politically of everyone else
on
the planet as well. WE ARE ONE should no longer be the slogan of the
Jewish people alone, but of all people on the planet--and from that
recognition, and policies that stem from that recognition, we will
achieve peace and social justice for all. Our prayer is that the human
race quickly comes to this recognition, and a beautiful place to start
would be for a transformation in the consciousness of both Palestinians
and Israelis so that both sides could recognize the humanity of the
other. Whatever contributes to that transformation we welcome; whatever
undermines it must be challenged. We pray that the Divine Spirit
quickly
becomes the shaping force in our political consciousness and in the
consciousness of all.
P.S. on Hamas' Electoral Victory
There are three good reasons to bewail the victory:
1. If it leads to greater violence
2. If it leads to an Iranian-style repressive regime for women and for
culture and politics. This is not inevitable--Islamic states like
Turkey
show a very different and more liberal possibiity within the framework
of Islam. It is not yet clear which tendency will predominate in
Palestine.
3. If it leads to Hamas becoming more closely aligned with Iran and
becoming a vehicle for Iranian visions of politics and culture, certain
to produce greater resistance within Israel to making an accommodation
with Palestinians. We are deeply troubled by the Holocaust-denying,
anti-Israel government of Iran, and we wish to see it isolated rather
than duplicated on the West Bank. Hamas rhetoric of the Iranian sort
would almost certainly lead to Israel being harsher toward the
Palestinian people, the opposite of what is needed to build peace.
None of these are inevitable. If the U.S. and Israel act on the
assumption that the Hamas political leadership might be flexible and
shift in relationship to their new power, that might provide a prod for
liberalization. As Palestinian Hanna Siniora, an independent
Palestinian
newspaper publisher told the Jerusalem Post after the election:
"Now that they are in power, Hamas will have to take responsibility for
the future. They will have to become more moderate. Now they are part
of
the democratic game and they will have to play by the democratic
rules,"
Siniora said.
"Once they are in power, the Hamas will have to pay salaries, create
jobs and provide health and education services. They know that to do
all
of this, they need stability. In order to be in charge of the
government, they will have to become responsible leaders, if they want
to stay in power," he predicted.
Siniora said that Hamas has already begun this process of moderation.
"Hamas was responsible during the cease fire with Israel - in fact,
they were in better control of their people than Fatah was. And they
moderated their rhetoric, especially the positions that were anathema
to the United States and Israel, such as calling for the destruction of
the State of Israel."
"Hamas, which was elected fairly by the Palestinian people, has the
legitimate right to lead the Palestinian national council."
The international community and Israel, he continued, can help to
determine Hamas' future directions.
"There are two models of Islamic ruling parties - the radical Iranian
model and the moderate Turkish model. I want to send a message to the
United States, to Europe and to Israel: You have the means to shape
Hamas in a constructive way.
If you act correctly, then Hamas will move in the direction of
moderation. But if you push Hamas into the corner, they will act
irresponsibly and become violent."
In order to make themselves more acceptable to the international
community, Siniora predicted, Hamas will make use of prominent
independent political figures, such as Salam Fayad and, he hopes,
Siniora himself.
Siniora called on Israel to put a stop to unilateral disengagement and
to negotiate directly with the newly-elected Palestinian government. He
called on the European parties to help to normalize relations between
Hamas and Israel.
In order to achieve the stability it needs to rule, Siniora observed,
Hamas will have to confront the militant armed groups that currently
undermine stability in Palestinian society. He fears that some groups,
such as disgruntled groups allied with Fatah, who will now lose their
power, will most likely resort to violence against the Hamas-led
administration.
"Abu Mazen was afraid to disarm the Hamas and the other groups,"
Siniora
observed with irony. "Now, Hamas will have to do the disarming. Hamas
will have to show that they can control the extremists. They will have
to use the big stick that Abu Mazen was afraid to use."
We at Tikkun are not so optimistic about Hamas--their legacy of
violence is deeply troublesome. But then again, we tend to be very critical of
anyone who relies on violence, including the Israeli government and the
United States government, and also the gangsters now running Iran,
China, the Soviet Union, Syria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Sudan
and the list goes on and on and on. It is without compromising our critique
of these governments that we simultaneously support steps for peaceful
accommodation rather than military escalations.
Rabbi Michael Lerner is editor of Tikkun Magazine: A Bimonthly Jewish
Critique of Politics, Culture and Society and author of The Left Hand
of God: Taking Back our Country from the Religious Right
(HarperSanFrancisco, Feb, 2006).
ORIGINAL ARTICLE - tikkun.org/rabbi_lerner/news_item.2006-01-27.9320603870
Yoo: "No treaty"
Cassel: "Also no law by Congress - that is what you wrote in the August 2002 memo..."
Yoo: "I think it depends on why the President thinks he needs to do that."
BRIAN HAWThursday 05 January 2006
On Christmas Eve, I dropped in on Brian Haw, whose hunched, pacing figure was just visible through the freezing fog. For four and a half years, Brian has camped in Parliament Square with a graphic display of photographs that show the terror and suffering imposed on Iraqi children by British policies.The effectiveness of his action was demonstrated last April when the Blair government banned any expression of opposition within a kilometre of Parliament. The High Court subsequently ruled that, because his presence preceded the ban, Brian was an exception.
Day after day, night after night, season upon season, he remains a beacon, illuminating the great crime of Iraq and the cowardice of the House of Commons. As we talked, two women brought him a Christmas meal and mulled wine. They thanked him, shook his hand and hurried on. He had never seen them before. "That's typical of the public," he said. A man in a pin-striped suit and tie emerged from the fog, carrying a small wreath. "I intend to place this at the Cenotaph and read out the names of the dead in Iraq," he said to Brian, who cautioned him: "You'll spend the night in cells, mate." We watched him stride off and lay his wreath. His head bowed, he appeared to be whispering. Thirty years ago, I watched dissidents do something similar outside the walls of the Kremlin.
As night had covered him, he was lucky. On 7 December, Maya Evans, a vegan chef aged 25, was convicted of breaching the new Serious Organised Crime and Police Act by reading aloud at the Cenotaph the names of 97 British soldiers killed in Iraq. So serious was her crime that it required 14 policemen in two vans to arrest her. She was fined and given a criminal record for the rest of her life.
Freedom is dying.
Eighty-year-old John Catt served with the RAF in the Second World War. Last September, he was stopped by police in Brighton for wearing an "offensive" T-shirt, which suggested that Bush and Blair be tried for war crimes. He was arrested under the Terrorism Act and handcuffed, with his arms held behind his back. The official record of the arrest says the "purpose" of searching him was "terrorism" and the "grounds for intervention" were "carrying placard and T-shirt with anti-Blair info" [sic].
He is awaiting trial.
Such cases compare with others that remain secret and beyond any form of justice: those of the foreign nationals held at Belmarsh prison, who have never been charged, let alone put on trial. They are held "on suspicion." Some of the "evidence" against them, whatever it is, the Blair government has now admitted, could have been extracted under torture at Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib. They are political prisoners in all but name. They face the prospect of being spirited out of the country into the arms of a regime which may torture them to death. Their isolated families, including children, are quietly going mad.
And for what? From 11 September 2001 to 30 September 2005, a total of 895 people were arrested in Britain under the Terrorism Act. Only 23 have been convicted of offences covered by the Act. As for real terrorists, the identity of two of the 7 July bombers, including the suspected mastermind, was known to MI5 and nothing was done. And Blair wants to give them more power. Having helped to devastate Iraq, he is now killing freedom in his own country.
Consider parallel events in the United States. Last October, an American surgeon, loved by his patients, was punished with 22 years in prison for founding a charity, Help the Needy, which helped children in Iraq stricken by an economic and humanitarian blockade imposed by America and Britain. In raising money for infants dying from diarrhoea, Dr. Rafil Dhafir broke a siege which, according to Unicef, had caused the deaths of half a million under the age of five. The then-Attorney General of the United States, John Ashcroft, called Dr. Dhafir, a Muslim, a "terrorist," a description mocked by even the judge in his politically-motivated travesty of a trial.
The Dhafir case is not extraordinary. In the same month, three US Circuit Court judges ruled in favour of the Bush regime's "right" to imprison an American citizen "indefinitely" without charging him with a crime. This was the case of Joseph Padilla, a petty criminal who allegedly visited Pakistan before he was arrested at Chicago airport three and a half years ago. He was never charged, and no evidence has ever been presented against him. Now mired in legal complexity, the case puts George W. Bush above the law and outlaws the Bill of Rights. Indeed, on 14 November, the US Senate effectively voted to ban habeas corpus by passing an amendment that overturned a Supreme Court ruling allowing Guantánamo prisoners access to a federal court. Thus, the touchstone of America's most celebrated freedom was scrapped. Without habeas corpus, a government can simply lock away its opponents and implement a dictatorship.
A related, insidious tyranny is being imposed across the world. For all his troubles in Iraq, Bush has carried out the recommendations of a Messianic conspiracy theory called the "Project for a New American Century." Written by his ideological sponsors shortly before he came to power, it foresaw his administration as a military dictatorship behind a democratic façade: "the cavalry on a new American frontier," guided by a blend of paranoia and megalomania. More than 700 American bases are now placed strategically in compliant countries, notably at the gateways to the sources of fossil fuels and encircling the Middle East and Central Asia. "Pre-emptive" aggression is policy, including the use of nuclear weapons. The chemical warfare industry has been reinvigorated. Missile treaties have been torn up. Space has been militarised. Global warming has been embraced. The powers of the president have never been greater. The judicial system has been subverted, along with civil liberties. The former senior CIA analyst Ray McGovern, who once prepared the White House daily briefing, told me that the authors of the PNAC and those now occupying positions of executive power used to be known in Washington as "the crazies." He said, "We should now be very worried about fascism."
In his epic acceptance of the Nobel Prize in Literature on 7 December, Harold Pinter spoke of "a vast tapestry of lies, upon which we feed." He asked why "the systematic brutality, the widespread atrocities, the ruthless suppression of independent thought" of Stalinist Russia was well known in the west while American state crimes were merely "superficially recorded, let alone documented, let alone acknowledged."
A silence has reigned. Across the world, the extinction and suffering of countless human beings can be attributed to rampant American power, "but you wouldn't know it," said Pinter. "It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn't happening. It didn't matter. It was of no interest."
To its credit, the Guardian in London published every word of Pinter's warning. To its shame, though unsurprising, the state television broadcaster ignored it. All that Newsnight flatulence about the arts, all that recycled preening for the cameras at Booker prize-giving events, yet the BBC could not make room for Britain's greatest living dramatist, so honoured, to tell the truth.
For the BBC, it simply never happened, just as the killing of half a million children by America's medieval siege of Iraq during the 1990s never happened, just as the Dhafir and Padilla trials and the Senate vote, banning freedom, never happened. The political prisoners of Belmarsh barely exist; and a big, brave posse of Metropolitan police never swept away Maya Evans as she publicly grieved for British soldiers killed in the cause of nothing except rotten power.
Bereft of irony, but with a snigger, the BBC newsreader Fiona Bruce introduced, as news, a Christmas propaganda film about Bush's dogs. That happened. Now imagine Bruce reading the following: "Here is delayed news, just in. From 1945 to 2005, the United States attempted to overthrow 50 governments, many of them democracies, and to crush 30 popular movements fighting tyrannical regimes. In the process, 25 countries were bombed, causing the loss of several million lives and the despair of millions more." (Thanks to William Blum's Rogue State, Common Courage Press, 2005).
The icon of horror of Saddam Hussein's rule is a 1988 film of petrified bodies in the Kurdish town of Halabja, killed in a chemical weapons attack. The attack has been referred to a great deal by Bush and Blair and the film shown a great deal by the BBC. At the time, as I know from personal experience, the Foreign Office tried to cover up the crime at Halabja. The Americans tried to blame it on Iran. Today, in an age of images, there are no images of the chemical weapons attack on Fallujah in November 2004. This allowed the Americans to deny it until they were caught out recently by investigators using the internet. For the BBC, American atrocities simply do not happen.
In 1999, while filming in Washington and Iraq, I learned the true scale of bombing in what the Americans and British then called Iraq's "no fly zones." During the 18 months to 14 January 1999, US aircraft flew 24,000 combat missions over Iraq; almost every mission was bombing or strafing. "We're down to the last outhouse," a US official protested. "There are still some things left [to bomb], but not many." That was six years ago. In recent months, the air assault on Iraq has multiplied; the effect on the ground cannot be imagined. For the BBC it has not happened.
The black farce extends to those pseudo-humanitarians in the media and elsewhere who themselves have never seen the effects of cluster bombs and air-burst shells, yet continue to invoke the crimes of Saddam to justify the the nightmare in Iraq and to protect a quisling prime minister who has sold out his country and made the world more dangerous. Curiously, some of them insist on describing themselves as "liberals" and "left of centre," even "anti-fascists." They want some respectability, I suppose. This is understandable, given that the league table of carnage of Saddam Hussein was overtaken long ago by that of their hero in Downing Street, who will next support an attack on Iran.
This cannot change until we in the West look in the mirror and confront the true aims and narcissism of the power applied in our name, its extremes and terrorism. The traditional double-standard no longer works; there are now millions like Brian Haw, Maya Evans, John Catt and the man in the pin-striped suit, with his wreath. Looking in the mirror means understanding that a violent and undemocratic order is being imposed by those whose actions are little different from the actions of fascists. The difference used to be distance. Now they are bringing it home.
"The confirmation hearings and debates about Judge Samuel Alito facing the United States in January underscore the immense power of the Religious Right. Fearful that Bush’s nominee Harriet Miers was not sufficiently conservative, the Religious Right created a firestorm of protest that caused Miers to withdraw and forced the Bush Administration to produce a more ideologically appropriate nominee in the form of Alito, a jurist with extremist perspectives. Even if the Democrats succeed in developing the backbone to sustain a filibuster and block this particular nominee, the packing of the courts by reactionary legislators who share the agenda of the Religious Right has become the norm for the Bush White House and will continue for the next several years.
The growing power of the Religious Right requires more than the predictable array of “oy veys” and cries of despair. One reason that I’ve written my new book The Left Hand of God: Taking Our Country Back from the Religious Right (Harper San Francisco, February 7, 2006) and why the Tikkun Community is organizing a second gathering of the Network of Spiritual Progressives (at All Souls Church in Washington, D.C., May 17-20) is precisely because Americans need a coherent strategy to respond to the Right, not just analyses about how dangerous they are. This is a movement that is not just for people who believe in God or who are part of some religious community—it is equally inviting to those who are “spiritual but not religious” and who recognize that a progressive movement today needs a spiritual foundation if it is to take our country back from the Religious Right.
In his book God’s Politics, Jim Wallis did an outstanding and politically important job of showing how far from the teachings of Jesus the Religious Right has wandered. Bill Press’ provocative book How The Republicans Stole Christmas, and Mark Lewis Taylor’s Religion, Politics and the Christian Right have done a similarly impressive job of showing how dangerous the Religious Right has become for our civil liberties, our moral compass, and our democratic values. The Religious Right is a danger to American society and to those of us who are serious about God and religion and do not use either as a vehicle to promote militarist ideology.
Nothing could be more mistaken than the fantasies now growing in liberal circles that the Bush Administration is about to lose power, the Republican Party is in a process of dissolution, and the Religious Right will soon be isolated and relegated to the junk pile of failed movements. It is amazing to see how liberals and progressives, desperate about their own inability to come up with a strategy to counter conservatives, have now begun to clutch at straws to prove to themselves that the Right is about to disappear because of its own contradictions. "
For the rest of the article go here - http://www.tikkun.org/magazine/tik0601/lerner
Goodnight.
A Carbon based life form endowed with enough intelligence to prolong life, promote Peace and encourage others to do the same. I'm a Liberal because the best way I can ensure my Civil Rights is by defending yours.
