My International Audience

March 8, 2015


I have been keeping statistics for about a year on how many readers I have and where they live. Sometimes the readership on a daily basis has been as high as the 70s, and sometimes as low as ten or less. Most often it is in the twenties to thirties. They come from a wide range of European countries and some in Asia. Fewer are in South America or Africa. A few have come from Saudi Arabia. The UK has always been represented, but not in great numbers. For a mysterious two to three weeks there was a contingent of thirty or so in Malaysia, and then suddenly they all fell away. That was before the airline crash occurred last year, so I was at a loss to explain it. A few have come back recently.

For a couple of weeks or so there was a group of around twenty in Russia, and then – when the passenger plane was shot down over Ukraine – all of my Russian readers also disappeared overnight. There has been a constant presence, sometimes under five a day, and other times in the twenties, in Ukraine and just this last week one reader in Moldavia has joined me. I had to look it up on Wikipedia – it is beside Ukraine. Eastern Europeans may be curious to see what American think, and possibly are in sympathy with our views.

One woman in the Ukraine actually sent me two emails. I wish more would write me. I really do like people from other countries. The G+ symbol on the day's blog will bring you to a site where I and others who are in circles together can be reached. There's a lively interaction there every day, including very nice photographs and news articles, and very few “trolls.” I have also put my personal email there for those who wish to use it in a proper and respectful manner. If you leave me an email offering a wonderful financial deal or a proposition of some more offensive kind, I will move your email over to my SPAM folder. Otherwise, I would really enjoy hearing from you. Bless you all!

Indian Widows 2015


The lives of many widows are hard in India, from this article. Society blames them for their husband's death? Bizarre and so unfair! Yet it hasn't been many years since suttee was outlawed in India. Thank goodness these women have a place for widows where they can live and enjoy life at least to a certain degree. The photographs in this article, unfortunately, can't be reproduced in this blog program, so go to the website below and look at the color shots. It's spectacular.




http://www.npr.org/2015/03/06/390973373/for-india-s-widows-a-riot-of-color-an-act-of-liberation

For India's Widows, A Riot Of Color, An Act Of Liberation
Julie McCarthy
MARCH 06, 2015

"I have no one. I've lost everything. My children are gone, my parents are gone. My husband's family doesn't ask about me. They don't even look for me, they don't even know if I eat," says Manu Ghosh, 85.

That's her above, seen before and after the Hindu festival of Holi at her ashram in northern India.

Manu was married at age 10 and found her way to the northern city of Vrindavan at 37. By that time, she was already widowed and had lost three children, who she says all died prematurely. Manu is one of many widows among the ashrams of Vrindavan whom I met covering this year's Holi festival.

Holi is the festival of colors, culminating in the riotous tossing of powder and water balloons meant to herald the arrival of spring. Bonfires on the eve of this ancient celebration mark the triumph of good over evil and are seen as a chance to forgive. It's celebrated wherever there are people of Indian descent — Bangladesh, Nepal, Guyana, South Africa — but here the celebrations take on the hue of liberation.

Hindu tradition frowns on widows celebrating at such festivals. In some parts of the culture, the women are seen as the cause of their husband's death and relatives believe they should be cast out. The segregation of widows can be so extreme that in some places they are prevented from attending family gatherings, including weddings. Many poor widows are abandoned by their families and left to fend for themselves. According to census data, India is believed to have tens of millions of widows. Thousands live out their lives in the ashrams in the ancient temple-filled city of Vrindavan, popularly known as the City of Widows.

But when the widows of Vrindavan ignore the social taboo and join in the fun, Holi takes on a whole new dimension. Cavorting in the chaos of color, women young and old stand in showers of rose petals and marigolds and playfully smear each other with fuchsia, green and gold powder. With this act of joy, the women fight back against restrictions that have ostracized them.

Photographer Susannah Ireland and I spent two days with the widows as they went through their morning rituals, nimbly preparing blossoms that perfumed the celebrations and shopping for new saris. Widows traditionally wear white, but breaking the mold, they go for a splash of color.


Widows are reclaiming their "womanhood," says Annapurna Sharma, 38, seen fixing her hair in the image above. She traveled 400 miles from Varanasi for her first Holi since her husband died six years ago, and she took the daring step of applying makeup for the occasion.

Urmila Sarkar, 73, balancing blossoms on her head in the image above, says her family wants her to come home, but she prefers to stay at the ashram. "My husband is now Lord Krishna," she says, flashing a coquettish smile.


It's not just color that is tossed around. Petals of roses, marigolds and daisies are meticulously gathered to be thrown into the air marking the beginning of festivities. For the third consecutive year, Sulabh International, an Indian nonprofit group, has helped the widows stage the festivities inside the Meera Sahbhagini Ashram, where they live.


Dancers perform Raas Leela, re-enacting Lord Krishna's playful teasing of Radha, a gopior female devotee who is said to have loved him unconditionally. The ashram widows are often described as Krishna's gopis, having made him the governing force of their lives.

Here's the climax of all their work: the widows reveling in the shower of powder that turned the courtyard a cloud of pink. Some are octogenarians, but these spry widows played pranks that could rival any teenager. They have dance moves to match. They ambush the unsuspecting with the eye-stinging powder. More than once, I missed them coming straight for me. Bam! Another pigment pie in the eye. I worried they'd get sick and that all their frolicking would end badly. But these women are made of sterner stuff, having weathered abuse, rejection, isolation and worse. A little powder was not about to stop them.


Before they played Holi in Vrindavan, there were plenty of tears. Women told me of how their lives broke down, recounting the in-laws who discarded them, the threats of violence from their own sons, and husbands who sold them off to other men. Basana Dasi, 42, was widowed by the age of 15. Dabbing her eyes and nose with her brand new sari, she recalled her mother-in-law saying, "My son is no longer here. What do I do with a daughter-in-law?"

The celebrations are ephemeral. The wounds these women carry will last a lifetime.

During this festival, however, those wounds don't weigh so heavily. For Shakuntala Devi, 65, it was her first Holi in 27 years. Drenched in color, she beamed, "I was remembering the way we used to play Holi in my family." Then she adds, "Today, this is my family."





http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/575795/suttee

Suttee
Hindu custom
Written by: Wendy Doniger
Last Updated 3-2-2015

Alternate title: satī
Suttee, Sanskrit sati (“good woman” or “chaste wife”),  the Indian custom of a wife immolating herself either on the funeral pyre of her dead husband or in some other fashion soon after his death. Although never widely practiced, suttee was the ideal of womanly devotion held by certainBrahman and royal castes. It is sometimes linked to the myth of the Hindu goddess Sati, who burned herself to death in a fire that she created through her Yogic powers after her father insulted her husband, the god Shiva—but in this myth Shiva remains alive and avenges Sati’s death.

The first explicit reference to the practice in Sanskritappears in the great epic Mahabharata (compiled in its present form about 400 ce). It is also mentioned by Diodorus Siculus, a Greek author of the 1st century bce, in his account of the Punjab in the 4th century bce. Numerous suttee stones, memorials to the wives who died in this way, are found all over India, the earliest dated 510 ce. Women sometimes suffered immolation before their husbands’ expected death in battle, in which case the burning was called jauhar. In the Muslim period (12th–16th century), the Rajputspracticed jauhar, most notably at Chitorgarh, to save women from rape, which they considered worse than death, at the hands of conquering enemies. The hardships encountered by widows in traditional Hindu society may have contributed to the spread of suttee.

The larger incidence of suttee among the Brahmans of Bengal was indirectly due to theDayabhaga system of law (c. 1100), which prevailed in Bengal and which gave inheritance to widows; such women were encouraged to committ suttee in order to make their inheritance available to other relatives. In the 16th century, steps to prohibit suttee were taken by the Mughal rulers Humayun and his son Akbar. Suttee became a central issue under the British Raj, which first tolerated it, then inadvertently legalized it by legislating conditions under which it could be done, and then finally, in 1829, outlawed it—using the condemnation as one of its justifications for continuing British rule of India.

Suttee was sometimes committed voluntarily, but cases of compulsion, escape, and rescue are known. Scattered instances of it continue to occur, most notoriously in the case of Roop Kanwar, an 18-year-old widow who committed suttee in 1987. The incident was highly controversial, as groups throughout India either publicly defended Kanwar’s actions or declared that she had been murdered.

Wendy Doniger

The Pentagon And Climate Change 2015
The Rolling Stone
From The Archives Issue 1229: February 26, 2015

“IN 25 YEARS, OPERATIONS AT MOST OF THESE BASES ARE LIKELY TO BE SEVERELY COMPROMISED. WITHIN 50 YEARS, MOST OF THEM COULD BE GONERS. IF THE REGION GETS SLAMMED BY A BIG HURRICANE, THE RECKONING COULD COME EVEN SOONER. "YOU COULD MOVE SOME OF THE SHIPS TO OTHER BASES OR BUILD NEW, SMALLER BASES IN MORE PROTECTED PLACES," SAYS RETIRED NAVY CAPT. JOE BOUCHARD, A FORMER COMMANDER OF NAVAL STATION NORFOLK. "BUT THE COSTS WOULD BE ENORMOUS. WE'RE TALKING HUNDREDS OF BILLIONS OF DOLLARS."... WHENEVER ANOTHER OFFICER OR A CONGRESSPERSON CORNERS WHITE AND PRESSES HIM ABOUT WHY HE SPENDS SO MUCH TIME THINKING ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE, HE DOESN'T EVEN TRY TO EXPLAIN THERMAL EXPANSION OF THE OCEANS OR ICE DYNAMICS IN THE ARCTIC. "I JUST TAKE THEM DOWN TO NORFOLK," WHITE SAYS. "WHEN YOU SEE WHAT'S GOING ON DOWN THERE, IT GIVES YOU A SENSE OF WHAT CLIMATE CHANGE MEANS TO THE NAVY — AND TO AMERICA. AND YOU CAN SEE WHY WE'RE CONCERNED."... THOSE WHO TALK MOST ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE — SCIENTISTS, POLITICIANS, ENVIRONMENTAL ACTIVISTS — TEND TO FRAME THE DISCUSSION IN ECONOMIC AND MORAL TERMS. BUT LAST MONTH, IN A DRAMATIC TURN, PRESIDENT OBAMA TALKED ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE IN AN EXPLICITLY MILITARY CONTEXT: "THE PENTAGON SAYS THAT CLIMATE CHANGE POSES IMMEDIATE RISKS TO OUR NATIONAL SECURITY," HE SAID IN HIS STATE OF THE UNION ADDRESS. "WE SHOULD ACT LIKE IT." ….”

“AT SOME POINT, CLIMATE DENIALISM WILL FLIP INTO CLIMATE PANIC, AND THE DEMAND FOR LAW AND ORDER AND STABILITY WILL PREVAIL (AS WILL THE CALLS FOR QUICK AND DANGEROUS TECHNO-FIXES LIKE GEO-ENGINEERING TO COOL DOWN THE PLANET AND STOP THE RISING SEAS). AS ONE MILITARY ANALYST HAS POINTED OUT, THE U.S. MILITARY IS THE ONLY FORCE ON EARTH WITH THE ABILITY TO POLICE, PROCESS, HOUSE, FEED AND MOVE REFUGEES ON A MASS SCALE. BUT YOU CAN SEE HOW THIS PICTURE COULD TURN DARK FAST — ONE OF THE BIGGEST LONG-TERM THREATS CLIMATE CHANGE POSES COULD BE TO CIVIL LIBERTIES AND FREEDOM. "IT'S NOT A QUESTION OF WHAT THE MILITARY CAN DO FOR CLIMATE CHANGE," SAYS ONE FORMER PENTAGON OFFICIAL. "IT'S WHAT CLIMATE CHANGE WILL DO TO THE MILITARY AND ITS MISSION." ….”

This article is easily readable and needs no explanation. Just read it and try to decide what we can do about this situation. Write your Congresspeople about the need for more, not less, government support for alternative energy techno companies. Give them the tax benefits and financial aid that we are now giving to the coal and oil industries.

Climate change is happening much faster than I, personally, expected. I was taught in grade school in my “Weekly Reader,” about the need to slow down on the use of coal and oil, not because it caused CO2 emissions – that concept simply hadn't become a part of the public discussion in those days – but because our supplies were thought to be too limited. Now kids are being taught about global warming, and the right leaning people are complaining about it, saying it is causing the kids to be fearful. The attempt to regulate societal trends in this country by the expedient of watering down the content of the high school curricula and the propagandizing of American and world history classes makes me furious.

The last few years new articles are already showing global warming. The severe droughts across the nation last year and the year before are one problem, but the rising ocean may be the worst. The thawing of Alaska and other parts of the Arctic is another. If the ice melts, causing the Atlantic to become less saline, it can cause the flow of currents from north to south to cease and as a result the Gulf Stream may not be as warm, thus causing a colder climate – a new “ice age.” That is theoretical, but the logic of it makes sense and many scientists agree with it. This article describes not only the need for a restructuring of our present military technology to include a fleet of icebreakers if we are going to be able to compete with Russia in the Arctic. Within the last year, Vladimir Putin did make a teasing comment that he may be after Alaska for Russian domination in the future. Judging from what's going on in Ukraine and also in other parts of Europe – as well as the US – with Russian war planes flying and “war games” being conducted too close to national borders, he is already sizing up our defenses. Russia actually planted a Russian flag on the ocean floor of the Arctic in 2007.

It's no wonder the military is concerned about this complex problem. Not only will they have to build new military bases in safer areas, they may well be needed to maintain public order if our society falls apart. Meanwhile, we can kiss freedom and civil rights goodbye. Perhaps it will happen slowly and we will be able to adjust to the changing situations. I don't for a moment believe that Climate Change is “God's plan,” but man's apparent stupidity and his lazy unwillingness to use common sense. As more and more Americans move to the comforting feeling that God will protect us somehow if we take the Bible literally and “believe” rather than thinking, they espouse the story of the creation of the earth in 7 days, an approaching Apocalypse or “end of days,” and man's birthright – our “dominion” over the earth and its creatures. This means that we have a perfect right to cause Global Warming by our industrially caused CO2 and methane emissions and cause the extinction of most animals in the wild.

The driving force behind the radical right's positions, however, is the domination of the Republican party by the Koch brothers, who are driven by their endless greed. Their wealth comes from coal, which will have to be phased out as fast as possible in order to reduce the CO2 in the atmosphere, and as a result they have backed the radical right in elections all over the US in order to prevent the mere discussion of scientific studies that say the things they wish to deny, and especially the development of alternative energy technology. After all, though they would still make money, less coal would be used so they would make a smaller income. If they were as smart as they are rich, they would jump into the alternate energy tech field and make money on that instead of fossil fuel.

In spite of the Koch brothers' hostile interference in Congress on the subject of sponsoring new energy forms, however, solar and wind energy facilities have become an increasingly familiar part of the American landscape. I think it is a trend “whose time has come.” That is reassuring, if possibly short-lived. I want to believe that the “Marketplace” will take care of the global warming problem by the simple fact that as the Middle Class continue to put solar panels on their rooftops, farmers lease their land for the placement of windmills, and the city power plants themselves continue to incorporate solar and wind energy into their power grids, our society will pull out of this emergency situation that we are in. Maybe the “Marketplace” will chew the Koch brothers up and spit them out. It is, after all, possible to be too clever for ones own good!

I may be dead before these climate disasters totally destroy the environment, but it still grieves me to think of the destruction of habitat and food sources and eventually of life as we know it. We'd better go back and study the ways that people survived before electricity. Read the very interesting nonfiction “Foxfire” series of true stories from the lifestyles of poor farmers in the early 1900's in the US. I remember stories my grandparents told of those days. She told me how to make soap and hominy. Daddy talked of trapping animals for their pelts and hunting not for sport, but for food. It was a hard life, but people were an integrated part of their environment, rather than living an artificially luxurious life as we do today. Our lifestyle makes us feel that we are superior to the very poor and, even worse, essentially invulnerable. That is a terrible mistake. The Bible has something to say about that, too – Pride goeth before a fall!




http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-pentagon-climate-change-how-climate-deniers-put-national-security-at-risk-20150212
The Pentagon & Climate Change: How Deniers Put National Security at Risk

The leaders of our armed forces know what's coming next – but deniers in Congress are ignoring the warnings

BY JEFF GOODELL 
February 12, 2015

Naval station Norfolk is the headquarters of the U.S. Navy's Atlantic fleet, an awesome collection of military power that is in a terrible way the crowning glory of American civilization. Seventy-five thousand sailors and civilians work here, their job the daily business of keeping an armada spit-shined and ready for deployment at any moment. When I visited in December, the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt was in port, a 1,000-foot-long floating war machine that was central to U.S. military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Cranes loaded equipment onto the deck; sailors rushed up and down the gangplanks. Navy helicopters hovered overhead. Security was tight everywhere. While I was checking out one of the base's massive new double-decker concrete piers that's nearly as big as a shopping-mall parking lot, I wandered over to have a closer look at the USS Gravely, a guided-missile destroyer that has spent a lot of hours on watch in the Mediterranean. Armed men on the deck watched me warily — even my official escort seemed jittery ("I think we should step back a bit," he said, grabbing my arm).

Obama and Climate Change: The Real Story »

You can't spend 10 minutes in this part of Virginia without feeling the deep sense of history. The Battle of Hampton Roads, a famous naval showdown between two Civil War ironclads, occurred just offshore. The base was a key departure point for thousands of sailors during World War II, many of whom never returned. Their ghosts still haunt the place. Everyone's aunt or uncle has a story to tell about a night in a port in Brisbane or Barcelona or about the way their ears rang the first time they heard a cannon firing from the deck of a ship.

But within the lifetime of a child growing up here, all this could vanish into the Atlantic Ocean. The land that the base is built upon is literally sinking, meaning sea levels are rising in Norfolk roughly twice as fast as the global average. There is no high ground, nowhere to retreat. It feels like a swamp that has been dredged and paved over — and that's pretty much what it is. All it takes is a rainstorm and a big tide and the Atlantic invades the base — roads are submerged, entry gates impassable. A nor'easter had moved through the area the day before my visit. On Craney Island, the base's main refueling depot, military vehicles were up to their axles in seawater. Water pooled in a long, flat grassy area near Admiral's Row, where naval commanders live in magnificent houses built for the 1907 Jamestown Exposition. "It's the biggest Navy base in the world, and it's going to have to be relocated," says former Vice President Al Gore. "It's just a question of when."

There are 29 other military bases, shipyards and installations in the area, and many of them are in just as much trouble. At nearby Langley Air Force base, home to two fighter wings and headquarters for the Air Combat Command, base commanders keep 30,000 sandbags ready to stack around buildings when a big storm comes in. At Dam Neck, another Navy base, they pile old Christmas trees on the beach to keep it from eroding. At NASA Wallops Flight Facility, NASA armored the shoreline with 3 million cubic yards of sand to protect its launchpads from sea surges. "Military readiness is already being impacted by sea-level rise," says Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine, who mentions that with all the flooding, it's becoming difficult to sell a house in some parts of Norfolk. If the melting of Greenland and West Antarctica continues to accelerate at current rates, scientists say Norfolk could see more than seven feet of sea-level rise by 2100. In 25 years, operations at most of these bases are likely to be severely compromised. Within 50 years, most of them could be goners. If the region gets slammed by a big hurricane, the reckoning could come even sooner. "You could move some of the ships to other bases or build new, smaller bases in more protected places," says retired Navy Capt. Joe Bouchard, a former commander of Naval Station Norfolk. "But the costs would be enormous. We're talking hundreds of billions of dollars."

Rear Adm. Jonathan White, the Navy's chief oceanographer and head of its climate-change task force, is one of the most knowledgeable people in the military about what's actually happening on our rapidly heating planet. Whenever another officer or a congressperson corners White and presses him about why he spends so much time thinking about climate change, he doesn't even try to explain thermal expansion of the oceans or ice dynamics in the Arctic. "I just take them down to Norfolk," White says. "When you see what's going on down there, it gives you a sense of what climate change means to the Navy — and to America. And you can see why we're concerned."

Those who talk most about climate change — scientists, politicians, environmental activists — tend to frame the discussion in economic and moral terms. But last month, in a dramatic turn, President Obama talked about climate change in an explicitly military context: "The Pentagon says that climate change poses immediate risks to our national security," he said in his State of the Union address. "We should act like it."

Global Warming's Terrifying New Math »

On one level, this is just shrewd politics, a way of talking about climate change to people who don't care about extinction rates among reptiles or food prices in eastern Africa. But it's also a way of boxing in all the deniers in Congress who have blocked climate action — many of whom, it turns out, are big supporters of the military. The Senate Armed Services Committee is made up of characters like James Inhofe of Oklahoma, Ted Cruz of Texas and Jeff Sessions of Alabama, and is headed by John McCain of Arizona, who, before he ran for president in 2008, had been an outspoken advocate for climate action, but has been silent on the issue in recent years. The House Armed Services Committee is now chaired by Rep. Mac Thornberry of Texas, who argued in a 2011 op-ed that prayer is a better response to heat waves and drought than cutting carbon pollution.

Any official who draws a link between climate change and national security is guaranteed a rabid reaction from right-wingers. Outgoing Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel recently called climate change "a threat multiplier" that "has the potential to exacerbate many of the challenges we are dealing with today — from infectious disease to terrorism." In response, The Wall Street Journal editorial page blasted Hagel as a delusional tree-hugger: "Americans who might die at the hands of the Islamic State won't care that Mr. Hagel is mobilizing against melting glaciers." In a speech in Jakarta last year — a city of almost 30 million that is sinking rapidly — Secretary of State John Kerry called climate change "perhaps the world's most fearsome weapon of mass destruction" and likened it to terrorism, epidemics and poverty. McCain immediately dismissed Kerry's concerns and accused him of "butterflying around the world, saying all kinds of things"; former Republican leader Newt Gingrich tweeted, "Every American who cares about national security must demand Kerry's resignation. A delusional secretary of state is dangerous to our safety."

Before climate change became taboo for Republicans, it was possible for even conservative politicians to have rational discussions about the subject. In 2003, under Donald Rumsfeld, former President George W. Bush's defense secretary, the Pentagon published a report titled "An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for United States National Security." Commissioned by Andrew Marshall, who is sometimes jokingly referred to within the Pentagon as Yoda — and who was a favorite of Rumsfeld's — the report warned that threats to global stability posed by rapid warming vastly eclipse that of terrorism. Some of the climate science in the report was flawed, but the broader conclusions were not. "Disruption and conflict will be endemic features of life," the report stated. "Once again, warfare would define human life." 

Once a leading voice on the climate, Sen. John McCain, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, now rarely mentions the issues. 

Even McCain, now firmly in the denial camp, didn't hesitate to draw the connection between climate change and national security. "If the scientists are right and temperatures continue to rise," he said on the Senate floor in 2007, "we could face environmental, economic and national-security consequences far beyond our ability to imagine."

This kind of talk vanished from the party after 2008, when the GOP turned into a subsidiary of Koch Industries. Since then, Republicans have worked hard to undermine any connection between climate and national security. Case in point: In 2009, then-CIA director Leon Panetta quietly started the Center on Climate Change and National Security. It was a straightforward attempt by the intelligence community to gather a better understanding of the changes to come. Among other things, the Center funded a major study of the relationships between climate change and social stress, under the auspices of the National Academy of Sciences, one of the most respected scientific organizations in the country. Climate deniers in Congress didn't like it, especially Republican John Barrasso of Wyoming, a Big Coal state. By the time the report was completed, Panetta had left the CIA and his successor, Gen. David Petraeus, let it wither. "We felt constant pressure to water down our conclusions," says one of the co-authors of the National Academy report. The day the report was released, the press conference was suddenly canceled, and the report was buried. A few weeks later, the Center on Climate Change and National Security was disbanded.

Barrasso has also been a key figure in derailing Senate hearings on the connection between climate and national security. Last year, Daniel Chiu, one of the Pentagon's top strategists, testified intelligently about the national-security implications of climate change. But in the Q&A period that followed, Barrasso disappeared into fantasyland, quizzing Chiu about "global international crime syndicates" that are manipulating European environmental policies "to aid and support terrorist organizations and drug cartels that wish to do us and our allies harm."

Deniers in Congress have gone after the Pentagon where military officials feel it most: their budget. Last year, House Republicans tagged an amendment onto the defense appropriations bill that prohibited the Pentagon from spending any money implementing recommendations from the latest report of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. "The amendment had no effect on the defense budget, since the IPCC's recommendations don't really apply to us," one Pentagon insider told me. "But the intent was clear: This is going to be war."

The scale of military assets that are at risk due to our rapidly changing climate is mind-boggling. The Pentagon manages more than 555,000 facilities and 28 million acres of land — virtually all of which will be impacted by climate change in some way.

Nearly every naval and Air Force base on the East Coast is vulnerable to sea-level rise and storm surges, including Eglin Air Force Base, the largest Air Force base in the United States, which is on the low-lying Florida Panhandle, and Patrick Air Force Base on Florida's Atlantic Coast. In the West, the problem is often drought and flash flooding. Fort Irwin, a seven-square-mile Army base in Southern California, on the edge of the Mojave Desert, has troubles with both. California's epic drought has put the base's long-term water supply into question. Fort Irwin is one of the only bases in the U.S. with the space and the isolation to allow full-scale mock tank warfare. At the same time, the base has been pounded by extreme rain events. In August 2013, when a year's worth of rain fell in 80 minutes, flooding caused $64 million in damages on the base.

Up in Alaska, the problem is thawing permafrost and coastal erosion from stronger storms and higher tides. The Air Force's early-warning radar installations, which help the U.S. keep a close watch on anything lobbed our way from North Korea or Russia, have been hit particularly hard. At one installation, 40 feet of shoreline have been lost, endangering the reliability of the radar. At other installations, thawing permafrost has caused the radar to tilt and fall out of alignment.

In some places, these impacts are little more than expensive nuisances. But in others, the future of entire installations, many of them virtually irreplaceable due to their geography and strategic location, is in question. The U.S. naval base on Diego Garcia, a small coral atoll in the Indian Ocean, like the nearby Maldives, is sure to vanish. Built during the Cold War, Diego Garcia gave the U.S. military a footing from which to counter Soviet influence in the region, as well as to protect shipping lanes out of the Middle East. In more recent years, this rare strategic asset has become a crucial logistics hub for sending supplies to joint forces in the Middle East, the Mediterranean and Southern Europe. It also houses Air Force Satellite Control Network equipment used to control GPS. The ships and equipment can be moved easily enough, but giving up a military toehold in a vital but flammable part of the world is not something the military likes to do. "To the Navy, presence matters," says retired Rear Adm. David Titley.

The Pentagon is examining its 704 coastal installations and sites in a big study to try to figure out which bases are most at risk. Eventually some tough decisions will have to be made about which ones to close, relocate or protect. Even speculating about the number of possible closures is too hot a topic for anyone in the Pentagon to touch right now. But the process can't be put off much longer. The next meeting of the Base Realignment and Closure Commission could occur as soon as 2017. "In BRAC, all of the decisions are based on the military value," says John Conger, the deputy undersecretary of defense, who is responsible for BRAC. "Will climate change affect the military value of the installation? Well, sure it will. The question is, does it dominate the equation? And I don't think it does — yet." 

Just as there are climate-change hot spots, there are also climate-denial hot spots — and Virginia is one of them. The Republican-dominated Virginia General Assembly has been hostile to discussion of climate change — one legislator called sea-level rise "a left-wing term." Instead, the politically acceptable phrase in Virginia is "recurrent flooding." 

This makes it hard for the Navy to deal with the most immediate problem Norfolk faces: keeping its roads open. One study by the Virginia Institute for Marine Science identified nearly 300 miles of flood-vulnerable roads in the Norfolk area. "If people can't get to work on the base because the roads are flooded out, we have a big problem," says Capt. J. Pat Rios, who is in charge of Navy facilities in the mid-Atlantic region. But roads in Norfolk are the state's responsibility, and rebuilding them is not a priority right now. Because a number of the men and women in the Virginia Legislature don't believe climate change is an urgent issue, they don't want to spend much money addressing the threat it poses. "They find roads to fix in other parts of the state," says Joe Bouchard.

For now, the Navy's strategy is just to buy time. In the late 1990s, Navy engineers realized that the 13 piers at the base, some dating back to World War II, were reaching the end of their life spans. Because they had been built at a time when nobody gave a thought to sea-level rise, the piers were relatively low to the water. At high tide, the utilities that ran along the underside of the pier decks — electrical, steam, phone, Internet — were often immersed in water, rendering them unusable. "It was not a nuisance problem — it was not a minor operational issue," says Bouchard. "Sea-level rise was interfering with combat readiness for the Atlantic fleet."

So far, four new piers have been built, which are higher, stronger and better-designed than the old piers. Bouchard, who was commander while the first new piers were constructed, says "they were built with sea-level rise in mind." But out on the base, nobody wants to talk directly about spending money to deal with sea-level rise, mostly because they are worried about drawing scrutiny from climate deniers in Congress, who are happy to redline any expenditure with the word "climate" in it. Instead, many people in the military end up talking about the climate similar to the way eighth-graders talk about sex — with code words and suggestive language.

"We didn't raise the piers because of climate change," Capt. Rios tells me during my visit to the base. He doesn't quite wink, but almost.

"Then why did you raise them?" I ask.

"Because we needed new piers. And as long as we were building them, it didn't cost much more to build them higher."

But building higher piers is not going to save the base in Norfolk. No matter how much money the Pentagon spends, it won't matter if people can't get to the base because roads are underwater or nobody wants to live in the area because the value of their homes is spiraling down. "To save the base, you have to save the region," says Bouchard. With the help of the White House, state and local officials recently set up an innovative two-year pilot project with the Navy to begin to address these problems. But right now, solutions are a long way off.

Sea-level rise is only one of the climate-driven threats that are making the world more dangerous and volatile. Drought contributed to the escalating food prices that triggered the Arab Spring revolt in Egypt, in 2011; it also helped trigger the civil war in Syria. In northern Nigeria, a region destabilized by extreme cycles of drought and flooding, Boko Haram is terrorizing villages and killing thousands of Nigerians.

Climate change is also reshaping the boundaries of the continents. Nowhere more so than in the Arctic, which is likely to become a major flashpoint in the territorial disputes and resource wars of the future. "The melting ice is opening a new ocean," says Adm. Gary Roughead, who was U.S. chief of naval operations from 2007 to 2011. "It's a once-in-a-millennium event." Thirteen percent of the world's undiscovered petroleum lies beneath the Arctic, as does 30 percent of the undiscovered natural gas and more than $1 trillion of mineral wealth. "The best way I've heard it explained," says Rear Adm. Daniel Abel of the U.S. Coast Guard, "imagine if you have the Panama Canal and Saudi Arabia's worth of energy show up at the same place in your area of responsibility. How would you embrace that?"

You can already see glimpses of a militarized future in the Arctic. In 2007, Russian soldiers dived 14,000 feet beneath the North Pole in a minisub and planted a Russian flag in the seabed, marking it as their turf. "This isn't the 15th century — you can't go around the world and just plant flags" to claim territory, Canada's minister of foreign affairs, Peter MacKay, said dismissively. Last September, six Russian jet fighters were detected near Alaska; when U.S. and Canadian fighters intercepted the Russian planes about 55 miles off the coast — still outside of American airspace, but closer than they usually fly — the Russians turned around and headed home, but it was a close encounter and one that has been happening with increasing frequency in recent months. In November, a Russian sub in the Barents Sea near Greenland test-fired a Bulava intercontinental missile — the Bulava is Russia's latest and most deadly nuclear weapon. The missile has a range of about 5,000 miles and can be loaded with up to 10 nuclear warheads, each of which can be individually maneuvered. A Bulava launched from a sub in the Arctic could easily reach Boston, New York or Washington, D.C.

Within the Pentagon, these provocations were seen as more than old Cold War game-playing. In the eyes of some planners, Putin was sending a not-very-subtle message that he thinks of the Arctic the same way Americans once thought of the West: a vast, uncivilized landscape of resources that will be dominated by whomever stakes the first claim.

After the Cold War, the U.S. military largely forgot about the Arctic. It was too hostile, too forbidding, too expensive to operate there, and without the Soviets to worry about, there was little reason to. In the 1990s, as Big Oil developed plans to explore the region for oil and gas, the Navy's concern grew — Roughead says a big blowout on an offshore drilling rig in the Arctic "would make Deepwater Horizon look like a cakewalk." But given the complexities of drilling in the Arctic, that seemed like a distant-future threat. 

Naval leaders began to think differently about the region in 2007, which, when the history of climate change is written, will go down as one of the turning points. That summer, scientists were stunned by an unexpected vanishing of sea ice that exposed 1 million square miles of open water — six Californias — beyond the average since satellites started measurements in 1979. Roughead assembled a special Navy task force to figure out what was going on. "I wanted to really understand the long-term trends so we could begin to think strategically about the challenges we might face in the Arctic, and what we needed to operate up there," Roughead says. "The idea was to be more thoughtful about this than to just run around the Pentagon shouting, 'Hey, everybody, climate change is a big deal!' "

Navy scientists estimate that by 2025 the summer ice melt in the Arctic will be big enough to allow transpolar shipping to expand on the Northern Sea Route, which passes through the Barents Sea along the Russian coastline and cuts the transit time between Asia and Europe by a third. As the ice thaws, there will be more tourists sailing in the Northwest Passage along the Canadian coast. There will be more drilling in the Chukchi Sea west of Alaska. There will be more traffic to Greenland, where mining companies are already lining up to extract minerals that will be made accessible by the retreating ice sheets. With all this new maritime traffic, it's inevitable that the Navy will have to respond to more and more incidents up there, from search-and-rescue missions to possibly countering the aggressive actions of the Russian navy. Or, nearly as likely, from the Chinese, who are eager to tap into the rich oil and gas reserves in the Arctic. "The U.S. Navy doesn't cede an ocean to anybody," Titley argues. "We are a great power."

But the U.S. Navy is also, according to Roughead, "woefully unprepared" to operate in the icy, unforgiving Arctic. The Navy doesn't have good weather-forecasting ability there; satellite communications are unreliable; only about 10 percent of the seabed has been surveyed, so navigators are unaware of undersea obstacles. Submarine missions have also become more dangerous due to unpredictable sea ice-freezing patterns. Most important, because nobody in the Navy was prioritizing the need to operate in the Arctic, few Navy ships are prepared for cold weather. Their water and ventilation systems don't work properly in freezing temperatures, their hulls are not hardened against ice. As Titley puts it, "Every Navy commander's nightmare is that something happens in the Arctic — a ship full of tourists going down, a terrorist attack, an encounter with Russian military — and having to pick up the phone and say, 'I'm sorry, Mr. President. We'd like to do something about this, but we simply don't have the equipment to allow us to respond to the situation.' "

When it comes to safety and security in the Arctic, no piece of equipment is as important as an icebreaker. Virtually every nation with a claim to the Arctic knows this: Russia has 43 icebreakers (six of them nuclear-powered); Canada has 13; Finland has nine. The U.S. has one, the Polar Star, which is operated by the U.S. Coast Guard. It's nearly 40 years old. Within a decade, it will be scrapped, and there are no plans to build another one. "By not funding them," says Titley, "we telegraph to the rest of the world that we don't care about the Arctic."

The price tag for a new icebreaker is $1 billion — not cheap, but about one-third the price of a destroyer. And not something Rep. Duncan Hunter, the San Diego climate denier who chairs the House subcommittee that oversees Coast Guard affairs, wants to hear about. (Although he does seem to be in favor of an ice-free Arctic: "Thousands of people die every year of cold, so if we had global warming it would save lives," he told a group of Californians in 2009.) In the view of one Pentagon watcher, the problem is not just that deniers like Hunter don't see the need for icebreakers, "they don't see the need for any kind of strategic thinking about the Arctic at all." Without active icebreakers, California Rep. John Garamendi, the ranking Democrat on Hunter's subcommittee, told the Associated Press that "the control of the Arctic is in the hands of Russia."

The other issue is the lawlessness of the new ocean, especially when it comes to oil and gas exploration under the retreating ice. Every nation enjoys sovereign rights 200 miles off its coastline — but what about beyond that? How should it be divvied up? In 2010, a Chinese admiral claimed that since China has 20 percent of the world's population, it should have 20 percent of the Arctic's resources. Fair or not, that is surely not a view that Russia — or the United States, for that matter — is likely to endorse.

To resolve these sorts of claims, as well as to give legal structure to the rights and responsibilities of countries with respect to the oceans, United Nations members spent decades negotiating an agreement, formally known as the United Nations Convention on Law of the Sea. Among other things, UNCLOS recognizes that nations have a right to claim resources along what is known as their "extended continental shelf," which basically means any recognizable land features that extend underwater beyond the 200-mile border. The agreement was finalized in 1982 and now has been agreed to by more than 60 countries, including Russia and every other Arctic nation — except the U.S. Although the agreement is widely supported by Big Oil, U.S. military leaders and every American president since Ronald Reagan, opponents like Sen. Inhofe, dean of the congressional climate deniers, and Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan have been able to block U.S. participation by claiming the agreement infringes on American freedom and that royalty provisions in the agreement would allow a corrupt "U.N.-style bureaucracy" to divert billions of dollars from the U.S. economy by "taxing" corporate profits.

The resources that the U.S. could justifiably claim if it recognized the Law of the Sea are vast. In Alaska alone, the continental shelf extends 600 miles from the coast, with an estimated 73 billion barrels of oil and oil-equivalent natural gas. Supporters of the agreement estimate these resources could generate more than $193 billion in federal, state and local revenue over a 50-year period.

Setting aside the economic consequences, from a national-security perspective, it's foolish to exempt ourselves from the one international agreement that can resolve disputes over territorial claims before they escalate. "I believe our being in the treaty would make for greater stability and security, and not just in the Arctic," Roughead argues. "It will also allow our claims to the extended continental shelf to be recognized internationally." As for the argument advanced by Inhofe and others that by joining the treaty we would weaken the powers of the U.S. Navy and Coast Guard and turn authority over to the United Nations, Roughead is immediately dismissive: "That is simply not the case."

As the world warms, the U.S. military will inevitably be called upon to conduct more disaster relief and humanitarian-aid missions. The U.S. military, of course, is not a polar-bear rescue operation. "The military has many important roles," says Sharon Burke, a former assistant secretary of defense. "But the main job is to fight wars. That means breaking things and killing people." But the military also prides itself on its practical-mindedness, both in times of war and of peace. Military leaders embraced desegregation long before the rest of the nation, in part because they wanted the best people they could find, no matter what color. "It's our job to deal with the world as it is, not as we wish it could be," says Robert Freeman, a meteorologist and member of the Navy's climate-change task force.

Adm. Samuel Locklear III, who is in charge of all U.S. armed forces in the Pacific, is one of the most respected men in the U.S. military — and the one with the toughest job, with both China and North Korea to watch over. "The political and social upheaval we're likely to see from our rapidly warming planet," Locklear told The Boston Globe in 2013, "is probably the most likely thing that . . . will cripple the security environment, probably more likely than the other scenarios we all often talk about.''

Soon afterward, Locklear was summoned before the Senate Armed Services Committee, where Inhofe asked him to "clarify" his remarks. And he did, calmly and forcefully, schooling the senator in how steadily increasing populations in Asia would only put more people at risk from storms and other climate-related disasters. "OK, I'm going to start to interrupt you here," Inhofe said, realizing it was a losing battle. He quickly changed the subject. 

What Locklear correctly foresees is that a world of climate-driven chaos is already upon us, and it's only going to get worse. And we need to start talking about it now, because not only will the threats multiply, so will the questions we have to address. It's one thing to plan for the invasion of Normandy Beach or the siege of Fallujah — it's quite another to plan for being the rescue squad for the entire planet. We have already spent more than $1 trillion in Iraq and Afghanistan, with no measurable success. How much more can we afford to do? "I think we have to make some strategic choices," says Roughead. "Which parts of the world do we care about most? What are the strategic flashpoints? Do we want to be able to operate in the Arctic or not? What kind of world are we preparing for?" Some intelligence analysts argue that U.S. military superiority will be the least significant asset in the future because no one will attack us with massive conventional force. Instead, we will be pulled deeper and deeper into smaller conflicts driven by terrorism, failed states and natural disasters. "When oceans rise, instability follows," says Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus.

Ashton Carter, Obama's pick for secretary of defense, is not known to Pentagon insiders for his focus on the threats of climate change. And the chances of any significant action in Congress before 2016 are close to zero. But as chaos rises, it is inevitable that we will ask our military to do more. At some point, climate denialism will flip into climate panic, and the demand for law and order and stability will prevail (as will the calls for quick and dangerous techno-fixes like geo-engineering to cool down the planet and stop the rising seas). As one military analyst has pointed out, the U.S. military is the only force on Earth with the ability to police, process, house, feed and move refugees on a mass scale. But you can see how this picture could turn dark fast — one of the biggest long-term threats climate change poses could be to civil liberties and freedom. "It's not a question of what the military can do for climate change," says one former Pentagon official. "It's what climate change will do to the military and its mission." It's a scary notion, but that's where we are headed. In the end, it doesn't matter how many climate-adaptation road maps the Pentagon puts out. We are now committed to a future of disorder and conflict — one in which today's emergencies will always interrupt tomorrow's plans.

One White House staffer recalls walking into the Pentagon office of an Army general not long ago. "I'd like to talk to you about climate change," the staffer told him. The general didn't even bother to look up. "I'd like to," he said. "But I have to write a letter to a family whose son has died."

Antisemitism Today


The Merry Minuet
Dave Schuler March 16, 2006
They’re rioting in Africa,
They’re starving in Spain,
There’s hurricanes in Florida,
And Texas needs rain
This whole world is festering with unhappy souls
The French hate the Germans, The Germans hate the Poles
Italians hate Yugoslavs, South Africans hate the Dutch
And I don’t like anybody very much
But we can be tranquil and thankful and proud
For Man’s been endowed with a mushroom-shaped cloud
And we can be certain that some lovely day
Someone will set the spark off…and we will all be blown away
They’re rioting in Africa, There’s strife in Iran
What Nature doesn’t do to us will be done by our Fellow Man


Schuler: “That was written by Sheldon Harnick more than 40 years ago. No, it wasn’t the Kingston Trio or Tom Lehrer.”




This little poem made me laugh and at the same time, feel anxiety, when I first heard it at the age of 15 or so sung by the Kingston Trio. Now with the recent news articles, I think of it as a way to lighten up the situation around the world. I do hate the human tendency to foster group hatred, even though it is obviously a human instinct and probably aided their survival over bigger and meaner animals. When we lived in small groups of 50 or a hundred, this unification mechanism helped us fight off marauding enemies. Unfortunately what began as a way to improve the cohesiveness of the “in group,” may end up killing us all. This is a time that the human race desperately needs to work together worldwide rather than in our small groups. We just can't embrace the big picture and the human race as a whole as well as we need to, as long as we maintain this mindset. Heaven help us all.




ANTISEMITISM ON THE RISE


http://www.cbsnews.com/news/1000-people-join-muslim-ring-of-peace-outside-oslo-synagogue/

Hundreds join Muslim "ring of peace" at Oslo synagogue
CBS/AP
February 21, 2015

OSLO, Norway -- More than 1,000 people formed a "ring of peace" Saturday outside Oslo's main synagogue at the initiative of a group of young Muslims.
The event in the Norwegian capital follows a series of attacks against Jews in Europe, including the killings of 17 people in Paris last month and two fatal shootings in Copenhagen, Denmark a week ago.

One of the eight independent organizers of Saturday's event in Oslo, Hajrah Arshad said the gathering shows "that Islam is about love and unity."

"We want to demonstrate that Jews and Muslims do not hate each other," co-organizer Zeeshan Abdullah told the crowd, standing in a half-circle before the white synagogue. "We do not want individuals to define what Islam is for the rest of us."

"There are many more peace-mongers than warmongers," he added.

Norway's Chief Rabbi Michael Melchior sang the traditional Jewish end of Sabbath song outside the synagogue before the large crowd holding hands.

Co-organizer Hassan Raja said it was the first time he heard the song.

Ervin Kohn, head of Oslo's Jewish community, called the gathering in sub-zero temperatures "unique."

Several European countries have seen an increase in anti-Semitic incidents recently, starting when the conflict between Israel and Palestinian militants in Gaza intensified last year.

"Europe is facing an unprecedented, diverse and serious terrorist threat," Gilles de Kerchove, the European Union's counter-terrorism coordinator, told EU member governments in a report last month.

In Paris, three Muslim gunmen killed 17 people at a kosher grocery, the offices of weekly Charlie Hebdo and elsewhere in early January.

Last week a single assailant in Copenhagen killed a Jewish security guard outside a synagogue and a Danish filmmaker attending a free speech event.

Hundreds of graves were vandalized at a Jewish cemetery in eastern France on Sunday, some painted with Nazi swastikas.

Hundreds of Jewish graves defaced today in a cemetery in the town of Sarre Union in northeastern France. (AFP Pic)pic.twitter.com/jfyRJlBkos
— Breaking News Feed (@PzFeed) February 15, 2015

In an interview Tuesday, a Swedish Radio reporter asked Israeli Ambassador Isaac Bachman about the causes of anti-Semitism and whether Jews themselves had any responsibility. Bachman rejected the question, saying it was like asking whether a rape victim was to blame for what happened to her.

The public radio network later apologized for the question, saying it "is misleading and blames both individuals and a vulnerable group. The Jewish community has experienced horrific terror and has all of our sympathy and condolences."

Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has encouraged Europe's Jews to leave.

"Again, Jews were murdered on European soil just because they were Jews," Netanyahu said at the start of his Cabinet meeting on Sunday. "This wave of attacks is expected to continue, as well as murderous anti-Semitic attacks. Jews deserve security in every country, but we say to our Jewish brothers and sisters, Israel is your home."




CBS – “More than 1,000 people formed a "ring of peace" Saturday outside Oslo's main synagogue at the initiative of a group of young Muslims. The event in the Norwegian capital follows a series of attacks against Jews in Europe, including the killings of 17 people in Paris last month and two fatal shootings in Copenhagen, Denmark a week ago.... "We do not want individuals to define what Islam is for the rest of us." "There are many more peace-mongers than warmongers," he added. Norway's Chief Rabbi Michael Melchior sang the traditional Jewish end of Sabbath song outside the synagogue before the large crowd holding hands.... Several European countries have seen an increase in anti-Semitic incidents recently, starting when the conflict between Israel and Palestinian militants in Gaza intensified last year. "Europe is facing an unprecedented, diverse and serious terrorist threat," Gilles de Kerchove, the European Union's counter-terrorism coordinator, told EU member governments in a report last month..... Hundreds of graves were vandalized at a Jewish cemetery in eastern France on Sunday, some painted with Nazi swastikas.... In an interview Tuesday, a Swedish Radio reporter asked Israeli Ambassador Isaac Bachman about the causes of anti-Semitism and whether Jews themselves had any responsibility. Bachman rejected the question, saying it was like asking whether a rape victim was to blame for what happened to her. The public radio network later apologized for the question, saying it "is misleading and blames both individuals and a vulnerable group. The Jewish community has experienced horrific terror and has all of our sympathy and condolences."

Spontaneous demonstrations of this sort lead by Islamic young people are heartwarming and encouraging. Unfortunately a Jewish graveyard was desecrated in France on the other hand, one of many such incidents. The Swedish radio reporter asking the Israeli Ambassador whether he thought the Jews had been partly to blame for antisemitism was yet another incident indicative of religious and ethnic bias. See the following articles for commentary on the new rise of Anti-Semitism in the US and Europe.

The articles discuss a recent Swedish Public Radio interview, Jews as Liberals, a Jewish voice from The Scroll on recent anti-Semitic events in Europe, a philosophical discussion of Judaism in the modern world which appeared in The Jewish Daily Forward, and complaints against Israel by some left leaning voices. I myself have spoken out against some Israeli actions against Palestinians as going over the line of simple self defense, especially under Netanyahu. I firmly believed that the colonization beyond the borders of Israel in the Left Bank and the Gaza Strip should by all means be stopped, and likewise the terroristic attacks by Palestinian groups such as Hamas on Israel and its citizens.

I do not, however, think this perhaps overly strong stance that Israel has assumed is "the cause of anti-Semitism." The cause is the instinct to persecute "the Other" by the more numerous and dominant group, who in this case are Christians and Arabs. It's the same reason that one group of chimpanzees under the observation of Jane Goodall "went to war" with another group of chimps in a nearby territory. Chimpanzees were earlier thought to be vegetarian, but these chimps would regularly catch and eat both monkeys and chimps. Our intelligence doesn't get rid of that characteristic. Religion claims to pacify and ennoble the human animal, but when the religions become dogmatic they do exactly the opposite of that. It makes me tired to think about it.

Unfortunately, both the Jews and the Palestinians have a reasonable claim on the Holy Land as their homeland. Europe as a whole and the US followed England's lead in establishing a Jewish nation there, but the Palestinians never accepted their presence in modern times. I agree with the move to set up the Jewish state, but I disagree with the ongoing polemics against Palestine's claim of land there which is basic to forming a peaceful region and, it seems to me, clearly in Israel's best interests. It should be said, however, that the Palestinians as well have not followed though on the various peace plans that have been proposed with the help of American and European ambassadors. See “Intercommunal conflict in Mandatory Palestine, From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia for a history of the conflicts and claims by both parties.

The following is from that article, which I suggest you read completely for its historical information. -–

“Ussishkin and Borochov, Zionist leaders in the Diaspora and according to Anita Shapira unfamiliar with true Arab attitudes, expressed their belief that the Palestinian Arabs would be assimilated by the Jews. Since the Jews were further developed they would take the lead in the development of the country and the Arabs would subject themselves to Jewish cultural influence and assimilate. Borochov also said that the Arabs were a "people akin to us in blood and spirit", and embraced the concept of the brotherhood between all the descendants of Shem as the basis of his outlook. According to Shapira this approach was part of a campaign of self-persuasion that the Arabs would not threaten the realisation of Zionist aims.[5]

According to Frankel the immigrants of the Second Aliyah had a strong secular and nationalist ethos. The attitude towards the Arabs took many forms however. On one pole there were those like Yitshak Epstein and Rabi Binyamin who held that Zionism should not antagonise the Arabs. Epstein advocated settlement only in areas unworked by the Arabs. Rabi Binyamin held that modern education, full equality and modernisation would bring the Arabs to accept massive Jewish immigration. On the other pole there were those who assumed that in order to reach their goal the Zionists would have to defeat violent Arab resistance. Brenner wrote "There is now, there is bound to be, hatred between [Jews and Arabs], and it will exist in the future too.". "Blood and soil" mythology was often a theme for them. For instance K.L. Silman wrote:

'We shed our blood and we live here. Our life is the continuation of the past and so too is the spilt blood. A nation does not build its life except on the foundations of its past and blood is joined to blood.'

The Arab response to Zionism[edit]

Under the Ottomans, Palestine's Arab population mostly saw themselves as Ottoman subjects or as Moslems and, when they concerned themselves with Zionists, they generally assumed the movement (whose objectives they feared) would fail. After the Young Turk revolution in 1908, Arab Nationalism grew rapidly in the area and most Arab Nationalists regarded Zionism as a threat, although a minority perceived Zionism as providing a path to modernity.[7]

In 1856 the Ottomans issued the Hatt-i Humayun, guaranteeing equal rights for all Ottoman subjects. Despite this, Muslims kept viewing Jews as dhimmi's: people protected by, but subordinate to Muslims. This changed when, due to Jewish immigration and land purchase, they realised that Zionism wanted to make a Jewish homeland in at least part of Palestine. Both Christians and Muslims were worried.[8]”





http://tabletmag.com/scroll/189064/swedish-public-radio-asks-are-jews-responsible-for-anti-semitism

THE SCROLL
Swedish Public Radio Asks: Are Jews Responsible for Anti-Semitism?
By Yair Rosenberg
February 18, 2015

There have been many reactions to the recent deadly violence against Jews in European capitals, from Paris to Copenhagen. Some have expressed solidarity with the Jewish community. Others have worked to reaffirm the European values of tolerance and pluralism. And then there’s Helena Groll, a presenter on Sweden’s public broadcast Sveriges Radio, who suggested yesterday that Jews are to blame for their own persecution.

In an interview with Isaac Bachman, Israel’s ambassador to Sweden, Groll asked: “Do the Jews themselves have any responsibility in the growing anti-Semitism that we see now?” Bachman, naturally, was taken aback. “I reject the question altogether,” he said. “The question of how a woman contributes to the fact of being raped is irrelevant altogether. I don’t think there is any provocation that Jews are doing–they just exist.”

But Groll wasn’t finished attempting to pin the blame for European intolerance on its victims, and proceeded to suggest that Jews in Europe might have it coming due to the actions of completely different Jews in the Middle East. “But a lot of people would look at the Middle East today and say there are various conflicts that we know between the Israelis and the Palestinians,” she went on, “and a lot of people might say, ‘we see the Gaza war, we see things that have been happening, that Israel and Jews in Israel have a responsibility to reactions that are coming?'”

After outrage on Swedish social media, Sveriges Radio apologized for the interview and purged it from the episode’s online recording. But while the station’s move is commendable, erasing the evidence of bigotry does not actually amount to confronting the bigotry. After all, if Groll is right that “a lot of people” think European Jews should be held accountable for the actions of Israel, Sweden has a much bigger problem than one blithely bigoted radio presenter.

Indeed, the fact that a respected host on Sweden’s public radio could so nonchalantly give voice to the oldest of anti-Semitic tropes–that Jews cause themselves to be hated, and that Jews anywhere are responsible for the actions of Jews everywhere–without any awareness of the bigotry of her comments suggests a much deeper societal failure. Especially because this is far from an isolated incident.

According to the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, 50 percent of Sweden’s 18,000 Jews fear to publicly identify as Jewish. A glance at the past year explains why:

March 23, 2014: A youth center in Jönköping in southern Sweden is vandalized with anti-Semitic slurs, including “Jewish pigs,” “you’ll burn in hell,” and swastikas.
March 27, 2014: Malmö police arrest two teenagers, out of a gang of five, who attempted to break into the local Jewish community center. When they were stopped by security at the gate, they voiced anti-Semitic slurs, according to the police. They were also seen filming and taking pictures of the building before their arrest.

April 8, 2014: An 18-year-old Jewish student in Gothenburg speaks out about anti-Semitic abuse in her high school, reading aloud the slurs she’s received on social media, including “Go gas yourselves, you Jew bastards,” and death threats from classmates. “I have been in hell,” she tells a local TV station. “I feel bad, can’t sleep, and have nightmares.”

June 17 and 25, 2014: A synagogue in Norrköping, south of Stockholm, is attacked twicein the span of two weeks, its windows repeatedly shattered by rocks. The police first decline to view the damage, then visit and decline to classify it as a hate crime due to the absence of anti-Jewish slogans.
July 6, 2014: A 38-year-old man is beaten in Malmö by a gang with iron pipes for flying an Israeli flag from his window. After sustaining heavy injuries, he is found by police in the street and taken to the hospital.

July 21, 2014: Adrian Kaba, the Malmö city council representative of Sweden’s ruling Social Democrats party, writes on Facebook that “ISIS is being trained by the Israeli Mossad.” When pressured to recant, he offers a non-apology, saying, “If there is evidence that this is an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory, then I reject it unreservedly.”

August 3, 2014: Jewish marchers in Stockholm’s annual gay pride parade are asked “why they are killing Palestinian children.”
August 10, 2014: Organizers cancel a planned rally in Gothenburg against anti-Semitism because Jewish participants are too afraid to attend. On the same day, popular Swedish hip-hip artist Jacques Mattar tells his followers on Instagram, “The same people who created ISIS control the media: Senior Zionists.”

September 14, 2014: The Swedish Democrats, a far-right party with neo-Nazi roots, take13% of the vote in the national elections and become the country’s third largest party.

January 21, 2015: A documentary airs featuring a non-Jewish journalist going undercoverdressed as a Jew in Malmö. He is verbally and physically assaulted, called a “Jewish devil” and “Jewish shit,” and told to “get out.” He is ultimately forced to flee after being surrounded by a dozen men shouting anti-Semitic slogans and being pelted from nearby apartments with eggs. On the same day, The Local reports that authorities have recorded 137 anti-Semitic incidents in Skåne, Sweden, over the last two years–and that none have been prosecuted.

So far, much of Europe’s intellectual and political elite has been slow to confront the continent’s rising anti-Semitism, only reacting when it explodes into murderous violence. Clemens Wergin, the Washington bureau chief of Die Welt, recalls how, “when I asked then Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt more than a year ago about anti-Semitism in Scandinavia, he didn’t even understand the question.” More recently, when the Jewish community in Denmark requested increased security outside Copenhagen’s synagogue and school last month, in light of the Paris kosher market attack, the authorities refused to commit.

There are many reasons why European elites have had trouble acknowledging and combating anti-Jewish sentiment. Interviews like the one conducted by Groll–and like that conducted by the BBC’s Tim Willcox, who also suggested European Jews were accountable for Israel’s actions–suggest another: that there is much latent acceptance of arguments that blame Jews for their own predicament, even among enlightened and educated professionals.

Until such debilitating assumptions about Jews, which have bedeviled the European mind for centuries, are exposed and expunged, the continent will have little chance of meeting the challenge of protecting its Jews.

Previous: Nearly 25 Precent of European Jews are Afraid to be Jewish
BBC Anchor Suggests French Jews to Blame for Palestinian Suffering
Related: Sweden’s ‘Damn Jew’ Problem





http://forward.com/articles/153882/why-are-american-jews-so-liberal/?p=all

Why Are American Jews So Liberal?
Enduring Political Message of the Passover Seder
The Jewish Daily Forward
By Jay Michaelson
Published April 03, 2012, issue of April 06, 2012.

Why are Jews so liberal?

Every few years, the question gets asked, often with the unspoken follow-up “… and what can we do to change that?” This year, Republican super PACs are drooling with anticipation. If you think the attacks on Mitt Romney by Sheldon Adelson — I mean Gingrich — I mean a Super-PAC that theoretically doesn’t co-ordinate with Gingrich — were mean, just wait until the general election. Israel! The war on religion! The Ground Zero mosque! Anything to wake up the Jews and get them to vote Republican.

What’s more, Jews have every reason to vote Republican. In a series of studies, political scientist Sam Abrams (together with Steven M. Cohen and others) has shown how American Jews’ views on helping the needy, on diplomacy versus war, and on other litmus test issues actually line up with the center, maybe even the center-right, rather than with the left.

Moreover, Jews are, on average, more affluent than most Americans, and political scientists tell us that the more affluent you are, the more likely you are to vote Republican. (More on that below.) When Jews were hawking pickles on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, our Democratic politics made sense. But not now, when we live in gated communities.

Related
Obama Riding High With Jewish Voters
Conservatives Have Jewish Values, Too
Why Does the Heckler Get a Veto?

And yet, since Ronald Reagan, no Republican presidential candidate has gotten more than 30% of the Jewish vote. It’s an anomaly.

Abrams has suggested that Jews vote Democrat largely out of identity. Judge Jonah Goldstein, a 1940s Republican from New York, said famously, “The Jews have three veltn (worlds): di velt (this world), yene velt (the next world) and Roosevelt.” No doubt, that is in large part true. But in light of the Passover holiday, I want to suggest a different, perhaps complementary, view: It’s in our religion.

The Torah says, many times, that our experience of oppression is meant to lead to ethical political action. “The stranger that dwells with you shall be to you as one born among you, and you shall love him as yourself; for you were strangers once in the land of Egypt” (Leviticus 19:34). “You shall not mistreat a stranger, nor oppress him, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” (Exodus 22:21) “You must open your hand to your poor and needy brother in your land… and you must remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt.” (Deuteronomy 15:11–15)

These are clear, powerful texts. It’s only human that when we have plenty, we lose our sense of empathy for those who have little. So, religion comes to remind us not to do that — in the Jewish case, by remembering the narrative of the Passover story and our shared experience of oppression.

Now, let’s go back to that political science point from a moment ago, about how wealth and voting Republican tend to correlate. This is a telling point. Republicans tell us that they, too, are living out the mandates of the Bible — this was part of my point in an earlier column, that conservatives also say they have Jewish values. They just say that the best way to help the poor is to get government out of the way, let rich people make more money and then assume that those same rich people will generously make up the difference.

But then, if Republican policies were really for the benefit of everybody, why do wealthy people disproportionately vote Republican? Is it that the richer you get, the more you care about the poor?

No, of course not. Conservative politics are not for the benefit of everybody; that’s just spin. Trickle-down economics, for 30 years a pillar of Republican policy, doesn’t work. A little spending trickles down, but mostly, capital enriches itself. The wealth gap widens. The super-rich take bigger and bigger risks, and are then declared too big to fail. Trickle-down rhetoric — that tax cuts for the rich promote jobs, that taxing millionaire’s estates would hurt small businesses — is just a cover for rich people to pay fewer taxes and keep more of their money.

Which is why rich people vote Republican. Because we are selfish animals, and we want more stuff.

Except when we remember. We remember, because of the Passover story, that we were slaves in Egypt: slaves, with no freedom, no property and no ability to look the other way from whatever we found unpleasant. And we remember, more recently, our Diaspora Jewish experiences, whether in the Holocaust or during times of anti-Semitism. Or, not too long ago, when we were disempowered peasants in Eastern Europe and new immigrants to America — just like the new immigrants that today’s Republicans want to keep out.

Jews are predominantly liberal because we are still mindful of being outsiders, even when we are insiders, and because we have a tradition that, right at this time of year, reminds us that we should not oppress anyone and must remember that we were once oppressed.

This is the Jewish equivalent of German pastor Martin Niemoller’s famous “First they came for the Jews…” speech. Today, we may be free people, unworried by the wealth gap, or the threats to the social safety net, or people of color being racially profiled and attacked, or the Republican war on women (since, after all, we’re rich enough not to need publicly funded contraception anyway). But tomorrow we might not be. And so we are enjoined to act responsibly now. This is the lesson of Passover, observed by more than 75% of American Jews (second only to Hanukkah).

Of course, the memory of victimhood can also be very harmful. For many Jews, the lesson of anti-Semitism is that we must always be tougher, stronger and meaner than our enemies, and it colors how we understand Middle East politics. And so, cynical conservatives, interested in their own power and wealth, have begun manipulating these Jewish traumas to their own ends. Bomb Iran! Support Israel all the time! Obama is a Muslim! These cries, too, speak to Jewish experiences of victimhood. They, too, can draw nourishment from the lessons of the Seder.

But they don’t have the support of the tradition itself. Apart from isolated cases (such as the law to annihilate Amalek), you won’t find these kinds of warmongering, greed-maximizing and fear-stoking messages in Torah. Do the aforementioned passages, or the rabbinic commentaries, say, “Treat the stranger roughly, because you were once strangers in Egypt, and you don’t want to slide back there, now do you?” Of course not. They say, “Do not oppress, because you were once oppressed.” They say, “You must rise above the all-too-human inclination to essentialize and demonize the Other, because you were once that Other.”

Yes, there is a Jewish consciousness that holds that in order to survive, you have to be tough, and take every advantage. Screw the other guy before he screws you. Let the poor get sick. And hit first, because might makes right (or because “Force is all the Arabs understand”). Some of it has filtered right into the Passover liturgy, like the pogrom-inspired prayer for God to pour out His wrath on the nations. Our tradition is complicated.

But religion’s role is to harness these human instincts, take us to something at once higher and deeper, and help us to be less nasty to one another. Sometimes it backfires, and the nastiness creeps back in. But the whole point is to get beyond the merely human, to aspire to a liberation that makes the Festival of Freedom worthy of its name.




http://www.jewishbookcouncil.org/book/the-resurgence-of-anti-semitism

The Resurgence of Anti-Semitism: Jews, Israel and Liberal Opinion
Bernard Harrison
Review by Michael N. Dobkowski

A good deal of attention has been focused in recent years on the resurgence of anti- Semitism in Europe, the United States, and the Middle East. Since the collapse of the Oslo peace accords in 2000 and the launching of a terrorist war against Israel by Hamas and other Palestinian groups, hostility to Jews and especially to the Jewish state has escalated in ways that few foresaw. The resurgence of anti- Semitism may not have been caused by these events, but it has been fueled by them and has intensified since the 9/11 strikes in New York and Washington, D.C. and the wars that have followed in Afghanistan and Iraq.

This persistent prejudice is clearly brewing in the world again. Across Europe there have been a series of violent assaults against Jews and Jewish institutions on a scale not seen since World War II. Anti-Semitism can be detected on the political right, and as Bernard Harrison so ably demonstrates on virtually every page of his important book, it has also found a home on the political left in a fierce anti-Zionism that negates the very right of Israel to exist and resembles traditional anti-Semitism at its worst. The charge often heard in Europe, and to some degree in America in the press, among academics and senior intellectuals and politicians, during protests, equating Israelis with Nazis and Zionism with Nazism and racism is emblematic of these shrill attacks. In the Muslim world, particularly in its Jihadist versions, there is a hatred of Jews that seems to be at the core of its ideology and world view. The belief in an international Jewish conspiracy is only one of the several classic myths about Jews that are currently widely believed in the Muslim world. Jewish-Zionists are behind much of what ails Islam today, this irrational theory claims, and alarmingly “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” is now enjoying a new popularity and is reaching millions of new consumers.

The three books reviewed here provide some welcome light and analysis on this murky, but alarming problem. Kenneth Stern, the American Jewish Committee’s expert on anti-Semitism since 1989, offers Anti-Semitism Today, a concise account and analysis of the new global anti-Semitism. He writes with the confidence and commitment of someone who has been on the frontlines of the fight against anti-Semitism, but his passion is tempered by reflection and evidence. In addition to describing what is happening in the world, his most important contributions are his chapters on the challenges being faced on the American campus, and his suggestions for combating anti- Semitism and the need to develop new strategies and early warning measurements. The book is a primer for that struggle.

In an exceptionally well-crafted book, The Resurgence of Anti-Semitism: Jews, Israel, and Liberal Opinion, Bernard Harrison, a distinguished British philosopher, examines why the political left has become so comfortable with anti-Semitism newly dressed up as anti-Zionism. He demonstrates how it has spread to infect “left-liberal” discourse on many other levels and he explores how the anti-racist left finds itself, ironically, in the thick of fomenting one of the earliest forms of racism. As Andrei Markovits does as well in Uncouth Nation, Harrison shows that anti-Semitism in Britain and in Europe generally is connected to anti-Americanism and is gripped by an obsession with anti-Zionism which helps foster European identity, assuage old guilts about historic European anti-Semitism and has the added benefit of being cloaked in the rhetoric of moral virtue itself.

Britain is today second only to France as the site of the most numerous anti-Semitic incidents. In addition to the hundreds of annual assaults and desecrations, Britain has been at the forefront of the anti-Israel boycott and divestment campaigns led by the Church of England and the country’s largest teachers’ union. Harrison spends much of the book debunking the false charges levied against Jews and Israel and exposing the bogus nature of the accusatory rhetoric now commonly employed against Israel such as “apartheid,” “racism,” “fascism,” “genocide,” and “colonialism.”

Harrison, Markovits, and Stern reveal the nature of contemporary anti-Semitism, the groups and cultures most susceptible to these ideas, what function they play for them, and why anti-Semitism is emerging in force now. They are required reading for all who fear that the threat is real and who want to help devise the best strategy to fight it.

The Fifth Column

By Lucy Warner
February 27, 2015



Text from:
N Or M?
By Agatha Christie
1941
Published by permission of G P Putnam's Sons,
a member of Penguin Group (USA)


“Grant said:
'You've read in the newspapers of the Fifth Column? You know, roughly at any rate, just what that term implies.'

Tommy murmured:
'The enemy within.'

'Exactly. This war, Beresford, started in an optimistic spirit. Oh, I don't mean the people who really know – we've known all along what we were up against – the efficiency of the enemy, his aerial strength, his deadly determination, and the coordination of his well-planned war machine. I mean the people as a whole. The good-hearted, muddleheaded democratic fellow who believes what he wants to believe – that Germany will crack up, that she's on the verge of revolution, that her weapons of war are made of tin, and that her men are so underfed that they'll fall down if they try to march – all that sort of stuff. Wishful thinking as the saying goes.

'Well, the war didn't go that way. It started badly and it went on worse. The men were all right – the men on the battleships and in the planes and in the dugouts. But there was mismanagement and unpreparedness – the defects, perhaps, of our qualities. We don't want war, haven't considered it seriously, weren't good at preparing for it.

'The worst of that is over. We've corrected our mistakes, we're slowly getting the right men in the right place. We're beginning to run the war as it should be run – and we can win the war – make no mistake about that – but only if we don't lose it first. And the danger of losing it comes, not from outside – not from the might of Germany's bombers, not from her seizure of neutral countries and fresh vantage points from which to attack – but from within. Our danger is the danger of Troy – the wood horse within our walls. Call it the Fifth Column if you like. It is here, among us. Men and women, some of them highly placed, some of them obscure, but all believing genuinely in the Nazi aims and the Nazi creed and desiring to substitute that sternly efficient creed for the muddled easygoing liberty of our democratic institutions.'”






http://www.cnn.com/2015/02/24/politics/supreme-court-hearing-abercrombie-fitch/

Supreme Court to hear religious freedom case
By Ariane de Vogue, CNN Supreme Court Reporter
Thu February 26, 2015

Washington (CNN)Samantha Elauf was apprehensive to interview for a sales job at retailer Abercrombie & Fitch in 2008 because the 17 year old wore a headscarf in accordance with her Muslim faith. But a friend of hers, who worked at the store, said he didn't think it would be a problem as long as the headscarf wasn't black because the store doesn't sell black clothes.

Ultimately Elauf failed to get the job, and her story has triggered a religious freedom debate regarding when an employer can be held liable under civil rights laws. The Supreme Court heard arguments in the case on Wednesday.

READ: Ginsburg and Scalia on parasailing, elephants and not being '100% sober'

Like many retailers Abercrombie has a "look policy" aimed to promote what it calls its "classic East Coast collegiate style of clothing."

When Elauf sat down with assistant manager Heather Cooke to formally interview for the job, neither the headscarf nor religion ever came up. Cooke did refer to the policy, however, telling Elauf that employees shouldn't wear a lot of make up, black clothing or nail polish.

Cooke thought Elauf was qualified for the job, but after the interview sought approval from her district manager regarding the headscarf. She says she told the manager that she assumed Elauf was Muslim and figured she wore the headscarf for religious reasons. The manager told her that Elauf should not be hired because the scarf was inconsistent with the "look policy."

A federal agency, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission sued on Elauf's behalf saying the store had discriminated on the basis of religion in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

The law makes it illegal for an employer to "fail or refuse to hire" an individual because of an individual's religion unless an employer demonstrates that he is unable to reasonably accommodate a religious observance or practice "without undue hardship on the conduct of the employer's business."

Abercrombie does not dispute that Elauf was not hired because of her headscarf. The company says its "look policy" is neutral on religion, but that employees are not allowed to wear headgear.

Although Elauf won at the district court level, a federal appeals court ruled in favor of Abercrombie holding that the employer could not be held liable because Elauf never informed the company that she wore the scarf for her religious beliefs and that she need an accommodation because her headscarf conflicted with the store's clothing policy.

In court briefs, lawyers for Abercromie say that they their audience are "tough customers" in part because the stores must retain their business "through the vicissitudes of teen and young adult fashion."

"Messages that deviate from a brand's core identity weaken the brand and reduce its value," said lawyer Shay Dvoretzky .

The company prohibits facial hair, obvious tattoos and long fingernails. Caps are not allowed to be worn on the sales floor. The store says it has granted religious exemptions that have been requested over the years to employees -- some of them Muslim -- after evaluating them on a case-by-case basis. In this instance, Elauf never asked for such an exemption.

"At its core, this case presents the question of when an employer must initiate a dialogue with its employee or prospective employee about any possible religious accommodations that may be necessary under Title VII.," lawyers for the libertarian Cato Institute argued in court briefs in support of Abercrombie.

"The answer is that the employer must have actual notice of a potential conflict between an employee's religious practices and the employer's workplace rules and policies -- and that the employee bears the burden of providing that notice," they wrote.

But the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, a nonprofit group with an interest in religious freedom, has filed a friend of the court brief supporting Elauf.

"Abercrombie's claim is both absurd and a dangerous precedent for all people of faith seeking an exception," Eric Baxter, a lawyer for the group, "We want the court to recognize that the notice requirement has to be flexible," said Baxter. "There can't be some strict requirement that an employee has to say certain words before the employee's religion is protected."

The case will be decided this spring.




http://www.publiceye.org/christian_right/dominionism.htm

Christian Right And Theocracy
Political Research Associates


When Michelle Goldberg wrote “A Christian Plot for Domination?” for the Daily Beast she chose her terms carefully. The subhead stated “Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry aren't just devout—both have deep ties to a fringe fundamentalist movement known as Dominionism, which says Christians should rule the world.” Within hours both critics and supporters of Goldberg’s thesis littered the Internet with posts that drew no distinctions among the Christian Right, Dominionism, and Christian Reconstructionism. There are important differences, and this essay seeks to explain them. PRA takes no position on the 2012 elections, but we do take a position supporting the accurate use of language.

PRA's definition since 2005:

Dominionism: The theocratic idea that regardless of theological view or eschatological timetable, heterosexual Christian men are called by God to exercise dominion over secular society by taking control of political and cultural institutions. Competes in Christianity with the idea of Stewardship, which suggests custodial care rather than absolute power. Used here in the broader sense, some analysts use the word only to refer to forms and offshoots of Reconstructionism.

Inside the Christian Right Dominionist Movement That's Undermining Democracy

Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann and Sarah Palin have all flirted with Christian Right Dominionism, but there's lots of misinformation about just what that means.

Dominionists want to impose a form of Christian nationalism on the United States, a concept that was dismissed as eroding freedom and democracy by the founders of our country. Dominionism has become a major influence on the right-wing populist Tea Parties as Christian Right activists have flooded into the movement at the grassroots.

At the same time, legitimate questions have been raised about whether or not potential Republican presidential nominees Rick Perry, Michelle Bachmann, or Sarah Palin have moved from a generic form of Christian Right Dominionism toward the more totalitarian form know as Dominion Theology.

Clueless journalists and crafty Christian Right pundits have mocked the idea that Dominionism as a religiously motivated political tendency even exists. Scholars, however, have been writing about Dominionism for over a decade, some using the term directly, and others describing the tendency in other ways. Many articles on Dominionism can be found on Talk to Action, especially by authors Rachel Tabachnick, Bruce Wilson, Frederick Clarkson. Several of the authors who pioneered the discussion of Dominionism have written for the Public Eye Magazine.

Dominionism is a broad political impulse within the Christian Right in the United States. It comes in a variety of forms that author Fred Clarkson and I call soft and hard. Fred and I probably coined the term "Dominionism" back in the 1990s, but in any case we certainly were the primary researchers who organized its use among journalists and scholars.

Clarkson noted three characteristics that bridge both the hard and the soft kind of Dominionism.

Dominionists celebrate Christian nationalism, in that they believe the United States once was, and should again be, a Christian nation. In this way, they deny the Enlightenment roots of American democracy.
Dominionists promote religious supremacy, insofar as they generally do not respect the equality of other religions, or even other versions of Christianity.
Dominionists endorse theocratic visions, believing that the Ten Commandments, or "biblical law," should be the foundation of American law, and that the U.S. Constitution should be seen as a vehicle for implementing Biblical principles.

At the apex of hard Dominionism is the religious dogma of Dominion Theology, with two major branches: Christian Reconstructionism and Kingdom Now theology. It is the latter's influence on the theopolitical movement called the New Apostolic Reformation that has been linked in published reports to potential Republican presidential nominees Perry, Bachmann or Palin. All three of these right-wing political debutantes have flirted with Christian Right Dominionism, but how far they have danced toward the influence of hard-right Dominion Theology is in dispute. It would be nice if some "mainstream" journalists actually researched the question.

"While differing from Reconstructionism in many ways, Kingdom Now shares the belief that Christians have a mandate to take dominion over every area of life," explains religion scholar Bruce Barron. And it is just this tendency that has spread through evangelical Protestantism, resulting in the emergence of "various brands of `dominionist' thinkers in contemporary American evangelicalism," according to Barron.

The most militant Dominion Theologists would silence dissenters and execute adulterers, homosexuals and recalcitrant children. No...seriously. OK, they would only be executed for repeated offenses, explain some defenders of Christian Reconstructionism. Even most Christian Right activists view the more militant Dominion Theologists as having really creepy ideas.

Much of the controversy over the issue of Dominionism is caused by writers who use the term carelessly, often conflating the broad term Dominionism with the narrow term Dominion Theology. Some on the Left have implied that every conservative Christian evangelical is part of the Christian Right political movement; and that everyone in the Christian Right is an active Dominionist. This is false. Some critics even state that the Christian Right is neofascist. Few serious scholars of fascism agree with that assessment, although several admit that if triggered by a traumatic societal event, any contemporary right-wing populist movement could descend into neofascism.

Advocates of Dominion Theology go beyond the democracy eroding theocracy of Dominionism into a totalitarian form of religious power called a "theonomy," in which pluralistic democracy and religious tolerance are seen as a problem to be solved by godly men carrying out God's will. Karen Armstrong calls Christian Reconstructionism "totalitarian" because it leaves "no room for any other view or policy, no democratic tolerance for rival parties, no individual freedom." Matthew N. Lyons and I call Christian Reconstructionism a "new form of clerical fascist politics," in our book Right-Wing Populism in America, because we see it echoing the religiously based clerical fascist movements that existed during World War II in countries including Romania and Hungary.

According to Fred Clarkson:

Reconstructionists believe that there are three main areas of governance: family government, church government, and civil government. Under God's covenant, the nuclear family is the basic unit. The husband is the head of the family, and wife and children are "in submission" to him. In turn, the husband "submits" to Jesus and to God's laws as detailed in the Old Testament. The church has its own ecclesiastical structure and governance. Civil government exists to implement God's laws. All three institutions are under Biblical Law, the implementation of which is called "theonomy."

Christian Reconstructionists believe that as more Christians adopt Dominion Theology, they will eventually convert the majority of Americans. Then the country will realize that the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights are merely codicils to Old Testament biblical law. Because they believe this is God's will, they scoff at criticism that what they plan is a revolutionary overthrow of the existing system of government. Over the past 20 years the leading proponents of Reconstructionism have included founder Rousas John (R.J.) Rushdoony, Gary North, Greg Bahnsen, David Chilton, Gary DeMar, and Andrew Sandlin. Kingdom Now theology emerged from the Latter Rain Pentacostal movement and the concept of Spiritual Warfare against the literal demonic forces of Satan. It has been promoted by founder Earl Paulk as well as C. Peter Wagner, founder of the New Apostolic Reformation movement.

For many, President Obama and the Democratic Party are among these "demonic forces." This has real world consequences.

In 2006 former Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris told thousands of cheering Christian Right activists that beating the Democrats in the upcoming elections was a battle against "principalities and powers," which many in the audience would hear as a Biblical reference to the struggle with the demonic agents of Satan. Harris (who played "ballot bowling" in Florida to elect George W. Bush in 2000) told the audience at the annual Values Voter Summit in Washington DC that she had studied religion in Switzerland with the godfather of the Christian Right, theologian Francis A. Schaeffer. Her speech there, which I witnessed and wrote about, qualifies her as a Dominionist.

In 2004 Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell, another Dominionist, oversaw the election apparatus giving his favored candidate George W. Bush a boost into the Oval Office.

Religion scholar Bruce Barron explains that "unlike the Christian Right, Reconstructionism is not simply or primarily a political movement; it is first and foremost an educational movement fearlessly proclaiming an ideology of total world transformation." According to sociologist Sara Diamond, Christian Reconstructionism spread the "concept that Christians are Biblically mandated to `occupy' all secular institutions" to the extent that it became "the central unifying ideology for the Christian Right."

William Martin is the author of the 1996 tome With God on Our Side, a companion volume to the PBS series of the same name (Martin and I were both advisers to the PBS series). Martin is a sociologist and professor of religion at Rice University, and he has been critical of the way some critics of the Christian Right have tossed around the terms "dominionism" and "theocracy." According to Martin:

It is difficult to assess the influence of Reconstructionist thought with any accuracy. Because it is so genuinely radical, most leaders of the Religious Right are careful to distance themselves from it. At the same time, it clearly holds some appeal for many of them. One undoubtedly spoke for others when he confessed, `Though we hide their books under the bed, we read them just the same.'

Martin reveals that "several key leaders have acknowledged an intellectual debt to the theonomists." The late Christian Right leaders Jerry Falwell and D. James Kennedy "endorsed Reconstructionist books" for example. Before he died in 2001, the founder of Christian Reconstuctionism, R. J. Rushdoony, appeared several times on Christian Right televangelist programs such as Pat Robertson's 700 Club and the program hosted by D. James Kennedy.

"Pat Robertson makes frequent use of `dominion' language," says Martin. Robertson's book, The Secret Kingdom, "has often been cited for its theonomy elements; and pluralists were made uncomfortable when, during his presidential campaign, he said he `would only bring Christians and Jews into the government,' as well as when he later wrote, `There will never be world peace until God's house and God's people are given their rightful place of leadership at the top of the world.' "

Martin also pointed out that Jay Grimstead, who led the Coalition on Revival, "brought Reconstructionists together with more mainstream evangelicals." According to Martin, Grimstead explained "`I don't call myself [a Reconstructionist]," but "A lot of us are coming to realize that the Bible is God's standard of morality...in all points of history...and for all societies, Christian and non-Christian alike....It so happens that Rushdoony, Bahnsen, and North understood that sooner."

Then Grimstead added, "there are a lot of us floating around in Christian leadership--James Kennedy is one of them--who don't go all the way with the theonomy thing, but who want to rebuild America based on the Bible."

So let's choose our language carefully, but let's recognize that terms such as Dominionism and Theocracy, when used cautiously and carefully, are appropriate when describing troubling tendencies in the Christian Right that are helping push the current political scene toward confrontation and intolerance.

More background articles on the roots of Dominionism:
The Roots of Dominionism





http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Becket_Fund_for_Religious_Liberty

Becket Fund for Religious Liberty
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty is a non-profit organizationbased in Washington, D.C. that describes itself as "a non-profit, public interest law firm defending the freedom of religion of people of all faiths." The Becket Fund operates in three arenas: in the courts of law (litigation), in the court of public opinion (media), and in the academy (scholarship).

The Becket Fund's stated mission is to "protect the free expression of all religious traditions." Clients have included Buddhists, Christians, Hindus, Jews, Muslims, Sikhs, and Zoroastrians. The organization maintains that "freedom of religion is a basic human right that no government may lawfully deny; it is not a gift of the state, but instead is rooted in the inherent dignity of the human person. Religious expression (of all traditions) is a natural part of life in a free society, and religious arguments (on all sides of a question) are a normal and healthy element of public debate. Religious people and institutions are entitled to participate in public life on an equal basis with everyone else, and should not be excluded for professing their faith."[1]

Litigation activities[edit]

The Becket Fund has represented groups and persons from many different religious traditions in litigation, pre-litigation, and appeals, including Buddhists, Christians,Hindus, Jews, Muslims, Native Americans, Santeros, Sikhs, and Zoroastrians.

Notable clients include the nation's oldest Hindu temple, the Hindu Temple Society of North America, in Flushing, New York City, Prison Fellowship International, Muslim students in Richardson, Texas, seeking to pray the dhuhr prayer on the campus ofLloyd V. Berkner High School, and a Zen Buddhist silent meditation center in New York state that neighbors claimed would make too much noise.

The Becket Fund was counsel for the Petitioner church in Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School v. EEOC. As a result of the case, theUnited States Supreme Court recognized for the first time the ministerial exceptiondoctrine. They also served as the counsel to Hobby Lobby in its case to be exempt from covering drugs it viewed to be abortifacients. Among cases they have currently slated to be heard by the Supreme Court is one in which they represent a Muslim prison inmate seeking the right to grow a beard.[2]

Previous clients also included the City of Cranston[3] in the attempt to preserve the Prayer Banner at Cranston High School West.

The Becket Fund represented Sacramento-area public school students who sought to continue reciting the current form of the Pledge of Allegiance (including the words "under God") in Newdow v. Carey, the second case brought by Michael Newdowseeking to remove the words "under God" from the Pledge of Allegiance. The Becket Fund also represented intervenors in the challenge to the Pledge of Allegiance inHanover, New Hampshire public schools.[4] Both cases were resolved in favor of the current Pledge language.

Another Becket Fund client is a mosque in Murfreesboro, Tennessee that was denied the right to use its building by a local court after complaints that the mosque was promoting terrorism.[5]

Among the Becket Fund's governmental clients have been the states of Colorado,Kansas, New Mexico, and Oklahoma, the city of Jersey City, New Jersey, and Spartanburg County School District No. 7.

The Becket Fund has also litigated on behalf of prisoners who seek to continue following their beliefs in prison. The Becket Fund has sought to ensure that observant Jewish prisoners are provided with kosher food in every prison in the United States. Currently pending is the case of Moussazadeh v. Texas Department of Criminal Justice, which seeks kosher food for the Becket Fund's client Max Moussazadeh. The Becket Fund is also representing a prisoner seeking kosher dietary accommodations from the Florida Department of Corrections.

Another significant area of litigation for the Becket Fund has been religious land use. The Becket Fund brought the first case under the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA), and has been involved with RLUIPA litigation throughout the United States.[6]

The Becket Fund has also represented a number of amici curiae at the United States Supreme Court in appeals related to religious liberty, including various civil and religious liberties organizations, such as the American Jewish Congress, the Hindu American Foundation, the General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists, United Sikhs, the Unitarian Universalist Association, the American Civil Liberties Union andPeople for the American Way.

International activities[edit]

The Becket Fund advocates on behalf of religious liberty in international fora. It has represented Muslim clients in the European Court of Human Rights, and has assisted in pre-litigation and litigation in Europe, Asia, and Australia.[7] As a non-governmental organisation in Consultative Status with the United Nations Economic and Social Council, the Becket Fund has also made annual presentations on religious liberty issues of concern at meetings of United Nations Commission on Human Rights, and since 2006, at the United Nations Human Rights Council. The Becket Fund also operates the Becket Institute, an academic center focusing on religious liberty issues.

The Becket Fund has been a strong opponent of the concept of "defamation of religion" as it has been presented at the United Nations and elsewhere. The Becket Fund has argued that protecting religions against defamation puts governments in the position of deciding which religious concepts are valid and thus worthy of protection, and would lead to the suppression of both religious and non-religious speech.





I believe strongly in the freedom of religion and the freedom from a required religious participation or belief. This modern trend toward Dominionism is a direct threat to our democratic principles and must be fought at every turn. When the radical right began winning elections I was disturbed, but it has taken a very dangerous direction on all civil rights issues in the last decade. Until recently I dismissed far right viewpoints as being a distinct minority in our country, but as more and more states make new laws to disable our Constitutional principles – women's rights in all ways, freedom of religion including Atheism or Agnosticism, oppression of racial and ethnic minorities, legal oppression and economic abuse of the poor, the elimination of the Social Security and medical care systems, the propagandizing of the public school system and even its entire defunding – I have decided that it's time for all people who believe in the Constitution of the USA, as it has been written and amended over the last 150 years, to form a new political unit that guarantees these rights. I would like to see a well informed and very active energizing of the Democratic Party.

I do believe that the Koch brothers et al set aside, the real force behind this new Right is the rise of religious fanaticism and the continued taint of racism. Reconstruction just didn't carry us all the way past the Civil War. Part of the problem with racial integration on the social level in this country is the fact that the Protestant churches have never been integrated, partly due to the differences in style of worship between the black and white Protestant churches. The Catholic Church, however, has never been segregated doctrinally from the Vatican, though I found Internet articles on the subject. The US and Ireland were mentioned.

I asked a black woman I knew if she wanted to go to my UU church and she said “It sounds too quiet for me.” The UU church is too quiet for the white Dominionists also. The Religious Left, of which we are a member, advocates quiet, deep thought, championing ethical political beliefs, non-literal reading of religious materials and social activism. My church does have several black members, and is one of the churches that have married gays and lesbians in the last decade and welcomed their membership. The United Methodist Church, the Friends, and many Catholics are also liberal on civil rights, though the Vatican still forbids homosexual and lesbian sexual activity. I think those things promote the message of Jesus when he taught so long ago; but fanatical beliefs from the very beginning have been a part of Christianity when it became an established religion – by Emperor Constantine in the Roman Empire and then again during the Reformation in Europe. There is a basic flaw with a mandated and established national religion -- it cannot exist alongside a free citizenry. I put the freedoms in our culture above any one religious viewpoint. We are still, thank God, free to follow our own spiritual paths. That may not continue for much longer.

In the US we have had freedom of religion (except under the Puritans) as one of our most prized basic rights. Right wing voices were loud recently, however, when President Obama quietly made the point that the Crusades, pogroms against Jews, and the slaughter of many believers on both sides in the Reformation in Europe, happened under the Christian Church, not just the present appalling human rights violations under Islamic fundamentalism. Sharia Law would be equally evil. Whenever religion becomes not a spiritual path, but a system of societal control it is not only “off on the wrong footing,” but literally polluted by evil.

“Absolute power corrupts absolutely,” is a phrase that should be remembered in all places and times. It doesn't come from the Bible, but it is very true. It is a statement by John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton,or Lord Acton— who was an English Catholic historian, politician, and writer. His words were “ "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men." See Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Dalberg-Acton,_1st_Baron_Acton for his biography. He was in favor of the states rights cause of the Confederacy as he feared the strongly centralized federal government, however, so he possibly wouldn't have approved of our modern Civil Rights viewpoints. England itself took a position with the Confederacy at that time.

This Wikipedia biography is very interesting. He was a devout Catholic, but wrote about “Papal inconsistency” and opposed the infallibility of the Pope. He was a great scholar who examined issues closely and came to his own conclusions. He wouldn't approve of a doctrine that requires all people to think alike or follow a party line. See the following from http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Dalberg-Acton,_1st_Baron_Acton, which is an excellent article giving some of his quotations on government:

Letter to Mary Gladstone (24 April 1881); later published in Letters of Lord Acton to Mary Gladstone (1913) p. 73 – “The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern. Every class is unfit to govern. The law of liberty tends to abolish the reign of race over race, of faith over faith, of class over class.”

Letter (23 January 1861), published in Lord Acton and his Circle (1906) by Abbot Francis Aidan Gasquet, Letter 74 – “There are two things which cannot be attacked in front: ignorance and narrow-mindedness. They can only be shaken by the simple development of the contrary qualities. They will not bear discussion.”

"Nationality" in Home and Foreign Review (July 1862); republished in The History of Freedom and Other Essays (1907), p. 288 – “Whenever a single definite object is made the supreme end of the State, be it the advantage of a class, the safety of the power of the country, the greatest happiness of the greatest number, or the support of any speculative idea, the State becomes for the time inevitably absolute. Liberty alone demands for its realisation the limitation of the public authority, for liberty is the only object which benefits all alike, and provokes no sincere opposition.”

At this time in our history when we are threatened by a bizarre group of Islamic extremists who have more than once succeeded in a terroristic attack on our native soil, it is easy to make an extreme mass movement toward a greater sense of safety which can unfortunately threaten our most precious liberties and intellectual attainments. I am referring to the oppressive new laws such as the Patriot Act and the Fundamentalist Protestant intellectual war against scholarly and rational thought in general – especially on Evolutionary and Environmental issues and science of all kinds, the teaching of a truthful rather than sanitized version of the history of our society, and anything which tends to prevent the dominion of a religion, class structure, or political extremism of all kinds from gaining a foothold here. At this point, I fear we are losing this important battle.