Jews Confront Zionism

Jews Confront Zionism
Daniel Lange/Levitsky

Daniel Lang/Levitsky is a theatre worker and organizer based in New York City, and a co-founder of Jews Against the Occupation/NYC. Current projects include Palestine solidarity work with Adalah-NY: The Coalition for Justice in the Middle East; supporting the Right to the City Alliance with the Rude Mechanical Orchestra (NYC’s radical brass band) and Jews for Racial and Economic Justice; and staging a new queer & gendertreyf production, “Who Loved You Before You Were Mine,” with Killer Sideburns Nepon.

http://www.monthlyreview.org/090622lang.php

One of the main accomplishments of the Israeli government’s bombing and invasion of the Gaza Strip last winter was to inspire new vitality within leftist and peace groups in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle for justice and liberation. This wave of activity has continued after the supposed ceasefire, with demonstrations and direct actions from New York to Los Angeles, Paris, Jaffa, and Tel Aviv. Most noteworthy has been a coming out of sorts of an increasingly large and vocal segment of the Jewish world that is not only opposed to the Israeli government’s wars and military occupations, but critical of Zionism itself.

Blockades of the Israeli consulates in Los Angeles and San Francisco were undertaken in part by members of the recently launched International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network. The occupation of the Toronto consulate was carried out by Jewish Women for Gaza, including members of the Canadian anti-Zionist Not In Our Name network. A seven-hundred-person demonstration in New York City was organized by Jews Say No, an ad hoc group of Jewish activists, many of them longstanding critics of Zionism. The London diasporist group Jewdas used a hoax e-mail to cancel a pro-war rally called by the Board of Deputies of British Jews and received a flood of support. And the Israeli antinationalist direct action group, Anarchists Against the Wall, blockaded an Israeli Air Force base in Tel Aviv. Almost all of the most visible public events showing Jewish opposition to the latest escalation in the war on Gaza were organized and carried out largely by non- and anti-Zionist Jews (as well as those who oppose Zionism but prefer not to define their politics in relation to it).

This is no coincidence. The eight years of the current intifada have also seen the growth of the global Palestine solidarity movement and its current boycott/divestment/sanctions strategy. At the same time Jewish criticism of Zionism has grown more widespread and vocal than at any time since Israel’s founding in 1948, despite the unqualified backing the U.S. government has offered Israel since 1967. That support has been explained by Israel’s advocates and defenders, as well as by Washington, as the result of the overwhelming support of U.S. Jewish communities for Israel. This is, of course, patently untrue. As many analysts have pointed out — most recently Mearsheimer and Walt in their much-attacked The Israel Lobby & U.S. Foreign Policy — U.S. Jewish communities play a rather marginal role in fostering U.S. government support for Israel. Far more significant are the arms industry, which U.S. aid to Israel subsidizes; the oil industry, which sees Israel as a balance to the regional power of oil-rich Arab states; the Christian right, which believes Jewish rule over all of biblical Israel is a prerequisite for the Second Coming; and anti-Arab/anti-Muslim racism and xenophobia, particularly after the September 11, 2001, attacks and the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Where Jewish influence is significant — in the lobbying efforts of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, for instance — it is the influence of a small number of wealthy, right-wing individuals whose politics in no way reflect U.S. Jewish public opinion, even as it is reflected in data collected by conservative pollsters.

The rhetoric of U.S. support for Israel as a response to U.S. Jewish interests and desires has, however, become less and less convincing over time. The recent rise to visibility of Jewish critiques of Zionism has taken place in a context of rising expression and acceptance of criticism of Israel within U.S. Jewish communities. It’s very hard to gauge this in a definitive way, but stories like the following, all of which I’ve heard since the beginning of the most recent Israeli attacks on Gaza, have not been common at any earlier time during the decade I’ve spent working intensively in the Jewish side of the Palestinian solidarity movement:

* The child of an educator at a Jewish private school refuses to join their family and school at a pro-war rally.

* A rabbi’s wife resigns from all congregational activity after an event on nonviolence — unrelated to Palestine or Israel — is canceled by the synagogue’s board.

* A Hillel officer at Columbia University publishes an essay on the contradiction between her desire to appear legitimately progressive and her job “selling” “under duress” (her words) the Birthright Israel program.

One indication of the extent of these critiques is a poll commissioned by J Street, the allegedly liberal Zionist lobby group, which finds U.S. Jews — even with a disproportionately old, wealthy, and religiously affiliated sample — strongly opposed to collective punishment and settlements, hostile to the Israeli electoral right wing, and supportive of a Fatah-Hamas unity government as a “partner for peace.”

This context of comparative openness to criticism of Israel is in large part the result of years of organizing, agitation, and education by groups and networks like Jews Against the Occupation/NYC, Jewish Voices for Peace (nationwide), Jews for Peace in Palestine and Israel (Washington, DC), Jews for a Free Palestine (Bay Area), and No Time to Celebrate (nationwide), all of which have broken with the orthodoxy of the “pro-Israel, pro-peace” position to focus on justice for Palestinians. The Zionist “pro-peace” groups, like Meretz USA, Americans for Peace Now, Tikkun, the Shalom Center, and Brit Tzedek v’Shalom, have been active primarily on paper since 2000 or as conveners of conferences with high registration fees. The “pro-justice” groups, by contrast, have been able to maintain a growing presence on the street and in the media over the nine years of the current intifada. Their structural critiques of Israeli government actions and the Zionist project have opened up space for these moderate criticisms to be spoken openly, as they were not five or ten years ago.

So why now? Why have these more “radical” voices come to the fore so strongly this winter? I believe it is because of shifts in the Palestine solidarity movement as well as in the larger political landscape of the left, and changes in Jewish thinking around identity and politics.

One source is a set of developments within the Palestine solidarity movement which have pushed the movement as a whole toward a structural analysis centered on Zionism. The outbreak of the 2000 intifada sparked a much wider awareness on the left (and beyond) of both the 1967 Occupation of the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem and the realities of the Israeli government’s war on Palestinians. A closer examination of the Oslo Accords and their role as cover for further land theft and as a means of co-optation of parts of the Palestinian leadership soon led to a shift of emphasis within the movement away from a return to the status quo of 1999. Increasing familiarity with the day-to-day experience of Palestinians (under occupation, inside Israel’s 1948 boundaries, and in the diaspora) showed organizers how many elements of the present situation were directly connected, not to the war of 1967, but to that of 1948 (for example, a majority of Palestinians, including a majority of those in the Occupied Territories, are refugees from the Nakba, “catastrophe,” as the 1947-48 ethnic cleansing of Palestine is known in Arabic), or to the pre-state Zionist colonization effort (for example, the role of the Keren Kayemet L’Israel/Jewish National Fund as an agent of displacement and land theft).

As a result, by the end of 2008, a significant part of the solidarity movement began to focus its attention on Zionism as such, and shape its strategy accordingly. This has taken the form of support for Palestinian civil society’s call for a combined boycott/divestment/sanctions strategy, and in a reconsideration (and often rejection) of the partition (“two-state”) model for a long-term solution. These shifts have involved the Jewish participants in Palestine solidarity work no less than anyone else, and have in some cases been driven or supported by their analyses of Zionism as a colonial movement (for a recent example, see Nava EtShalom and Matthew N. Lyons’s 2008 essay “‘Bring on the bulldozers and let’s plant trees’: The Problems of Labor Zionism.”

Another key element in the newly visible surge in Jewish critiques of Zionism, though one that’s rarely remarked on in the liberal or progressive press, is the pivotal role that feminist and queer movements and their analyses have played in its development. This influence is most obvious in the prominence in Jewish (and non-Jewish) Palestine solidarity organizing of groups like Women in Black; Kvisa Shchora (an Israeli queer radical group, known for their eye-catching “No Pride in the Occupation” actions); New Profile (the feminist organization largely responsible for the visibility and growth of the high school conscription resistance movement in Israel); Aswat: Palestinian Gay Women; and the International Women’s Peace Service’s accompaniment project in the West Bank. All of these projects bring to the movement an orientation toward structural analysis, a core antinationalist and antimilitarist position, and an eye to the ways that racial, economic, national, gendered, and sexual structures of power intersect and often support each other. Their sophisticated examinations of Israeli nationalism and Zionism have had an influence beyond their direct contact with other organizations.

Perhaps even more pervasive, however, is the presence of Palestine solidarity organizers in the U.S. Jewish sphere with backgrounds in feminist and queer movements. Veterans of ACT UP, the Lesbian Avengers, riot grrrl, Gay Shame, Fed Up Queers, and a myriad of local reproductive rights campaigns (not to mention specifically Jewish feminist and lesbian projects like Di Vilde Chayes and the Jewish Women’s Committee to End the Occupation) and other specifically Jewish feminist and lesbian projects) play key roles setting the tone and political direction of Jewish Palestine solidarity groups including Jews Say No, Jews Against the Occupation/NYC, and Jewish Voices for Peace. The actions mentioned at the beginning of this article show that influence: office occupations, blockades, hoaxes — all part of the repertoire refined by ACT UP, the Women’s Action Coalition (WAC), Women’s Health Action & Mobilization (WHAM!), and the Lesbian Avengers during the Oslo years. This legacy is also a key source of the willingness of these groups to challenge Zionism directly rather than limiting their critiques of Israel to specific policies and actions. These same organizers are often also involved in Palestine solidarity work that’s not specifically Jewish (Adalah-NY being a particularly notable example because of its wholehearted adoption of ACT UP-descended visibility tactics), further extending the reach of these activist lineages.

This grounding in feminist and queer antinationalism, structural and intersectional analysis, and direct action tactics has been supported by the broad shift among U.S. radicals, especially younger radicals, toward what might be called a new transnationalism, or a transnationalism from below. Beginning to some extent with the campaigns in support of the 1994 Zapatista uprising in Chiapas (though certainly influenced by earlier work in solidarity with revolutionary movements in Spain, Central America, South Africa, and Palestine), radicals in the United States have experimented in many ways to find strategies for carrying on effective international solidarity campaigns. These have varied widely, from the anti-sweatshop efforts of the late 1990s and the summit-targeting mass mobilizations of 1999–2003, to work focusing on Plan Colombia, Plan Puebla-Panama, and other U.S. ventures elsewhere in the Americas. All have shared, I would argue, a general approach which is now clearly visible in the current Palestine solidarity movement, including its Jewish side.

What I’m labeling as a new transnationalism is resolutely anticolonialist and anti-imperialist, ambivalently antinationalist, firmly if often inchoately anticapitalist, generally anti-authoritarian, and in no way organizationally unified. It recognizes the importance of resistance “in the belly of the beast” while affirming self-determination in an array of communities of resistance and the right of liberation struggles to choose the tactics which they find most suitable to that end. If that sounds like a lot of “anti” and not much “pro,” it often is. The best journal to emerge from this part of the radical left so far is the Canadian “journal of theory and action,” Upping the Anti, which provides a much needed space for sustained discussion of revolutionary politics across generations and between movements. The journal chose its name precisely to highlight its mission of moving from these negative positions to a positive strategic vision.

Be that as it may, this shared approach, with all its internal tensions, is deeply inscribed on current Jewish critiques of Zionism as well as the current Palestine solidarity movement more generally. Thus we see a pervasive ambivalence about the value of a Palestinian state (made largely moot by the increasing implausibility of any viable partition plan); a principled refusal to condemn armed self-defense (alongside strong critiques of specific tactics); support for local resistance committees prioritized over attention to the major Palestinian political parties; a clear analysis of Zionism as a colonial project paired with a less coherent take on Arab nationalism; a loose alignment with the Palestinian left and a strong critique of the fiction of “left Zionism,” but no clear vision for a noncapitalist regional economy; and an increasing attention to the parallels between Israeli and U.S. strategies of “security,” “counter-terrorism,” and militarized policing.

Finally, to return to the specifically Jewish sphere, the rise of criticism of Zionism as such is part of a broad shift in Jewish culture and thinking around identity. After over a half-century of Zionist dominance of Jewish education and community institutions, alternative voices are breaking through, in ways that are often unconnected to Palestine but ultimately support Jewish Palestine solidarity efforts. For the past few decades, there has been a steady increase of interest in diasporic Jewish cultures and histories, especially among younger Jews dissatisfied with both the Herzl-and-Hitler view of Jewish life and history presented by “mainstream” Jewish institutions, and the religious fundamentalism that is its main competitor.

This has been most visible in the United States in its Ashkenazi forms: klezmer bands now fill major venues and “Jewish music” has become a profitable and over-marketed sub-genre; the periodic human-interest headline has switched from “Yiddish is Dying!” to “Yiddish Revives!” as interest and class enrollment swells; the flagship yiddishist arts retreat, Living Traditions’ annual KlezKamp, will turn twenty-five in 2009. Other Jewish communities — Sefardi, Arab-Jewish, Beta Yisrael (Ethiopian), African American, etc. — have seen similar assertions of cultural specificity as well, often in opposition to Ashkenazi dominance of putatively all-encompassing Jewish spaces, as, for instance, in the work of Loolwa Khazoom (The Flying Camel [ed.]), Ammiel Alcalay (After Jews and Arabs; Memories of Our Future), Walter Isaac (“Locating Afro-American Judaism”), and Ella Shohat (Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices; Flagging Patriotism).

Along with these cultural shifts, however, has come a new interest in the politics that emerged from these same diasporic communities. Among Ashkenazim, the revolutionary socialist Jewish Workers Union — better known as the Bund — has become a frequent point of reference. In particular, the Bund’s principle of doykayt (here-ness), combining Jewish cultural specificity and inter-ethnic solidarity based on shared class interests — has given definition to the locally focused efforts of Jewish social justice organizations across the country, from Jews for Racial and Economic Justice (in New York) to the Progressive Jewish Alliance (in Los Angeles). Despite the direct link between doykayt and the Bund’s ardent anti-Zionism, however, even the more politicized among the people and organizations involved in this renewed engagement with the diaspora have in general actively refused to engage with the question of Zionism, presented an indistinct “pro-peace” position, or asserted an “art not politics” stance. There have been notable exceptions — from Sefardi and Arab-Jewish viewpoints, Alcalay and Shohat (most strongly in “Sephardim in Israel: Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Jewish Victims”), and from Ashkenazi or Yiddishist perspectives, the poet, activist, and essayist Irena Klepfisz (Dreams of an Insomniac and A Few Words in the Mother Tongue), and the historian of religion and culture, Daniel Boyarin (Unheroic Conduct, Dying for God, and Border Lines).

Nonetheless, these increasingly articulate presentations of the value of diasporic Jewish culture soon come into conflict with many aspects of Zionism. And, in the end, they run directly counter to Zionism as a whole: the project of placing the state of Israel at the center of Jewish life depends on devaluing and erasing diasporic cultures and histories, reducing two millennia of Jewish life to a lacuna punctuated only by mass murder and redemptive nationalism. As central to the Zionist movement as Jewish control over the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea is the imperative of shlilat hagalut (negation or liquidation of the diaspora), which holds that “degenerate” diasporic Jewish cultures should be eliminated in all but the most token bagels-and-Seinfeld forms and replaced by a new, militarized, and nationalist Hebrew culture. As a result, participants in what Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz has termed “radical diasporism” (in her 2007 The Colors of Jews: Racial Politics and Radical Diasporism) are increasingly seeing themselves in opposition to Zionism, standing in solidarity with Palestinians on the basis of a shared enemy as well as in the interest of justice.

“Radical diasporism,” articulated as such, is far from widespread, though its influence can be seen widely in the cultural sphere. Among musicians alone, it is front and center in much of the work of artists as varied as Montréal’s neo-klezmer Black Ox Orkestar, whose haunting “Ver Tanzt” deals directly with the Occupation in its Yiddish lyrics; Berlin-based Dan Kahn, whose “post-dialectic cabaret” tunes “Dumay” and “Nakam (6,000,000 Germans)” both confront the Zionist project from a historical perspective; Detroit hip-hop m.c. Invincible (“Emperor’s Clothes”); New York queer rockers the Shondes (“I Watched the Temple Fall”); Bay Area vocalist and composer Jewlia Eisenberg; and riot grrrl punk legend Nomy Lamm.

The cultural dynamic radical diasporism expresses, however, is pervasive. The ardently Zionist Bronfman Philanthropies’ 2007 report “Beyond Distancing” gives evidence of just how much so. The Bronfman survey looked past majorities that identified themselves as “pro-Israel” and denied the existence of the Occupation, to find young U.S. Jews, regardless of their political opinions, to be less attached to Israel than their elders (with barely 20 percent “highly attached”) and more likely to be actively “alienated” from the Jewish state (11 percent among “left-leaning” respondents under thirty-five, and a surprising 21 percent among the “right-leaning,” evening out somewhat at 19 to 26 percent among those under forty-nine). Perhaps most tellingly, they could not find a majority of respondents under thirty-five who would claim that the destruction of the Israeli state “would be a personal tragedy.” This “distancing,” it seems to me, is in part a result of diasporist cultural work, and certainly a significant element in the story of the current rise to visibility of Jewish opposition to Zionism.

Jewish critiques of Zionism — and Jewish participation in the Palestine solidarity movement more generally — are significant beyond the bounds of Jewish communities themselves chiefly in the United States, and mainly because of the privileges given to Jewish voices in the discussion of Palestine and Israel here. Still, as Esther Kaplan wrote in her essay “Globalize the Intifada” (in Alisa Solomon & Tony Kushner’s Wrestling with Zion), Jews in the United States and beyond have a role to play in the struggle for Palestinian liberation, and in some cases occupy a strategic position, but are in no way at its center. For Jews, as for everyone engaged in that struggle, the task is to work with our Palestinian, Arab, and other friends and comrades to move from our shared opposition to Zionism into strategies of resistance that can, in the end, free Palestine.

ACLU will check Bible use at charter

ACLU will check Bible use at charter

Tabitha Keily

tkeily@idahopress.com

Saturday, July 25th, 2009

http://www.idahopress.com/news/?2009-07-25-ACLU-will-check-Bible-use-at-charter

NAMPA — The American Civil Liberties Union of Idaho will investigate Nampa Classical Academy’s use of the Bible as a classroom text to see if it violates separation of church and state rules.

Monica Hopkins, executive director of the ACLU of Idaho, said the state constitution affords more restrictions on the separation of church and state than those given in federal requirements.

“Our main concern is the separation of church and state, and that the state is not funding or endorsing a specific religion,” she said. “We can’t forecast one way or the other right now what the applicable law would be because we are still gathering all the facts.”

Officials at Nampa Classical Academy maintain they will use religious documents only in a secular manner as an original text in academic studies.

“The purpose of reading about religions is to better understand why a certain culture behaves the way they do,” Kyle Borger, chairman of Nampa Classical Academy, said in a letter to the Idaho Press-Tribune.

The ACLU’s focus will be to collect facts in the situation first and then apply those to see if there will be a case, Hopkins said.

“This case has not been tested by the Idaho Supreme Court and we can’t predict how the Idaho Supreme Court would rule in this case,” she said.

Isaac Moffett, director of operations and a founder of Nampa Classical Academy, cites U.S. Supreme Court rulings in School District of Abington Township v. Schempp and McCollum v. Board of Education as allowing the charter school’s planned use of religious texts.

Borger said the use of original literature would not be specifically biblical in nature.

“Our focus of concern is actually on the use of religious documents in general,” he wrote in his letter. “We will not treat the information within the Bible any differently then we will treat the information in the Quran.”

Some additional points he made:

* The Bible, the Quran and other religious documents do not have to be true in order to be studied to gain understanding why people behave differently based on their beliefs.

* The use of the Bible within the academy would be a small percentage in comparison to the rest of the curriculum.

* In literature and history classes, the Bible is one of 35 books that will be studied and only a small portion of the Bible will be used in older children’s classes.

“Children of all faiths including those who have no faith should feel comfortable in our Academy,” he wrote. “Our dedication is that no student would experience a teacher telling them that their religious belief is wrong. … We are a group of parents who have been searching for an education that will teach our children how to think and will not go against what we teach our children to believe at home.”

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SIDE NOTE:

I went to the homepage of the school mentioned, and did NOT find anything that suggests they would use any one religion as a teaching tool, I came across this quotes when “Charter School” is discribed:

It is a nonprofit, publicly funded and nonsectarian entity.

I did find a few troubling things, but as of now, they are only the schools descriptions of what their school teaches when compared to others. For example under What is classical liberal arts education?:

Classicalism (C) vs. Progressivism (P)

The Classical philosophy conforms to the reality of human nature, it values developing those skills necessary for self-learning, and it strives toward the goal of making the individual intellectually independent, virtuous and self-reliant.’

The Progressive philosophy attempts to mold human nature into a new form; it seeks to instill individuals with a subject/slave mentality, and it has a goal of creating the ideal collectivist society.’

I Disagree. “Reality of Human Nature is a Secular Humanist idea, more Progressive mindset. “Subject/Slave mentality is more a “dogma”, rules to follow, lead and to be lead, more a Christian ideology than Progressive.

C – Tests academic achievement.’

P – Tests value systems.’

I Disagree. VALUE is usually used by “Religious” folks, NOT Progressives

C – Teaches moral absolutes.’

P – Teaches moral relativism’

I Disagree. Using MORAL in anyway poses questions

C – Teaches the logical deduction of values from absolutes.’

P – Teaches self-clarification of values from a limited offering of politically correct options.’

C – Teaches academic skills and seeks the highest individual achievement.’

P – Teaches “social” skills and reduces academics to the lowest common denominator.’

I Disagree, How would Progressive teaching dumb-down anyone

C – Educates for the individual and the family.’

P – Educates for the state.’

I Agree, “Family” again is usually used within Religious centered trachings, and I Disagree that Progressive has anything to do with “state”. Oddly, most “Red” states, predominantly “Christian/Republican, are VERY “state’s-rights” centered

C – based education, in its many forms (Liberal Arts; Grammar, Logic, and Rhetoric; Readin’ ‘Ritin’ & ‘Rithmetic) has been an academic, social and economic success for millennia.

P – based education, in its many forms (Mastery Learning; Value-Added Core Curriculum; Standards Assessment Testing) has been an academic, social and economic failure for decades.

I Disagree, unprovable, and studies can argue for and against both arguments.

When Healers Harm

Dr. Leso, a clinical psychologist trained and licensed in New York, participated in the torture of Mohammed al Qahtani and helped develop abusive interrogation techniques and detention conditions at Guantanamo Bay.

Help pass a NY State bill to stop health professional participation in torture. Submit a letter of support or, if you live in New York, contact your State Senator and Assemblymember and tell them this bill is important to you.

Under New York law, anyone can file a complaint against health professionals licensed in the state. Link to NY professional misconduct law and download the professional discipline complaint form. Information on other states coming soon.

More:

When Healers Harm
http://whenhealersharm.org/

Despite the health professions’ universally recognized duty to do no harm, doctors and psychologists have played a key role in the U.S. government’s policy of torture in its overseas prisons. They crafted and justified torture tactics, inflicted pain, oversaw abuse and enabled, covered up and turned a blind eye to cruel treatment. Yet, in the face of clear evidence, government officials, licensing boards and professional associations defend their failure to take action against these health professionals by claiming that they do not have enough information.

The Center for Constitutional Rights disagrees and, through its When Healers Harm campaign, presents compelling evidence that supports the need for ethical, and in some cases criminal investigations of health professionals complicit in torture and other forms of abuse.

It is time to hold accountable the healers who have harmed. Accountability is vital to survivors of medical torture and to health professionals, most of whom take seriously their commitment to do no harm. It is also necessary for the rest of us – as patients and members of civil society, we have a right to treatment by health professionals who we can trust, and a right to a government that upholds the law.

Men, women and children have been tortured in our name. We have an obligation to show those in power that America refuses to be a torturing society any longer. Join us in making sure that those who choose to cover for torturers as a matter of political expediency will come to see the pursuit of justice as a political necessity.

The "Bipartisan Compromise" Scam

The “Bipartisan Compromise” Scam
7-28-09
Cenk Uygur – Host of The Young Turks
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/cenk-uygur/the-bipartisan-compromise_b_245991.html

So, some of the top corporatist Democrats and Republicans in the Senate sat around a table in the Finance Committee for awhile pretending to sweat out a compromise and then came out with exactly what we thought they would – a health care proposal that benefits the health care companies above all. Shocking. What did we expect?

Max Baucus is the ring leader of this merry band of six senators. Seven out of his top ten donors are … health care companies (he has received close to $4 million from the health care industry). You don’t say? And then he crafts a proposal that screws the average citizen and helps those same companies. I never could have predicted.

Look at the two Democratic proposals they decided to jettison: The public option and employer mandates. The public option would clearly make health insurance cheaper for the average American and for the government overall. But it would also give the private insurance companies real competition – so, we can’t have that.

Employer mandates might bother some of the top corporations in the country, so we can’t have that either. Better to let employees get siphoned off into government subsidies. But wait, wouldn’t that make our budget problem worse and not better? Aren’t all of these senators pretending to care about the budget and deficit? Oh I forgot, as long as the corporations get their way, none of the rest of this really matters.

In fact, if it turns out health care reform costs more in the long run, well, that’s great because then you can kill real reform easier the next time around by pretending it costs too much. Everyone wins – except you.

So, why are the Democratic senators going along with this scam? Because they get paid by the same guys as the Republicans. That’s how life usually works – you follow the orders of whoever paid you. In this case, the politicians get elected by raising more money than their competitors, and they get their money from corporate lobbyists. So, whose orders do you think they’re going to follow?

Given this state of affairs, it’s a minor miracle there are as many Democrats for the public option as there are now. But the ones who actually care to get this done are not the ones coming up with fake compromises with Republicans and the health care industry. They are the ones insisting on a public option. If you negotiate that away, you never had any real interest in reform.

Saying you’re going to do health care reform without a public option is kind of like saying you’re going to fight Al Qaeda in Afghanistan by invading Iraq. It misses the point – on purpose. It promises to do more harm than good. And it’s what was planned all along.

So, will this be our Waterloo if we allow the American people to be tricked into a “bipartisan compromise” that actually compromises real reform?

It will be so easy for the politicians to pretend to be brave and sign on to this as if they are doing something magnanimous by compromising and getting some sort of health care package through. And you can bet your bottom dollar the press will go along with the charade.

So, that only leaves us to object. And we can’t do it meekly. We have to scream it from the rooftops. Otherwise, they will be perfectly happy to ignore us and sign on to this fraudulent proposal as if it’s real health care reform. So, are you going to let them do it? Or are you going to insist on real reform and real change this time around?

Watch The Young Turks on You Tube Here

Follow Cenk Uygur on Twitter: www.twitter.com/TheYoungTurks

Finding Common Ground Between Public Option Advocates and Single Payer Advocates

Finding Common Ground Between Public Option Advocates and Single Payer Advocates
Ian Welsh
Posted: July 28, 2009 02:30 AM
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ian-welsh/finding-common-ground-bet_b_245979.html

A heated argument is going on about the right health insurance model between those those who believe in a public option and those who believe in single payer.

Or perhaps I should say between those who are willing to take what they can get: public option; vs. those who want to hold out for what they consider the best option: single payer.

By way of reconciling what differences can be reconciled, let me ask a question of each side.

A Question for Public Option Advocates

Do you want to eventually have a single payer or a comprehensive system like the French have? If not, why not?

A Question for Single Payer Advocates

Are you willing to fight for a public option which could eventually lead to single payer or a comprehensive system like the French one? If not, why not?

At this point what I’m seeing is both sides retreating into moralistic screaming.

The public option folks are saying: “It is better to save some lives than none, and if you single payer purists don’t support a public option which will save even a few lives, you’re responsible for those deaths.”

The single payer people are saying: “The public option is so watered down that all it will do is discredit real public reform, aka single payer. You public option folks are settling for so little that the few lives you might save are outweighed by all the lives you won’t save and the damage to the chance at real comprehensive health care reform.”

Both sides are assuming the other side is operating in bad faith. The public option folks assume the single payer folks just want to be pure rather than saving lives, the single payer that the public option folks are just sell-outs shilling for a bad bill.

But what I’m seeing, as someone with a foot in each camp, is that both sides are (mostly) sincere.

Now there is one group that can’t be reconciled. People who want a public option so weak it either won’t survive, or can’t be used as the basis for a comprehensive system. The usual suspects like Insurance company executives, for example. But also some people in the Obama administration, such as Health Secretary Katherine Sibelius, the health secretary, who said that the plan would be drafted specifically so that it could never become single payer.

But for everyone else, for those acting in good faith, there should be some common ground from which we can work together. Let’s start by recognizing that the battle over public option vs single payer is a distraction away from what we could accomplish if we worked together.

United we stand a chance. Divided, we will lose our chance at health care reform.

(Originally posted at Open Left)

Why Does Billy Graham Have a Column?

Why Does Billy Graham Have a Column?
7-27-09
http://friendlyatheist.com/2009/07/27/why-does-billy-graham-have-a-column/

I really would like to know why Rev. Billy Graham has a syndicated column. In his latest one, he spends most of the time talking about something that has nothing to do with the letter-writer’s question.

That question is actually a good one:

My 7-year-old son asked me to ask you this question: Do you think there’s intelligent life on other planets?

Does the Bible say anything about this? My son is very curious about things such as this.

Graham answers this in the first couple sentences:

The Bible doesn’t say anything about life on other planets; its focus is on this planet and its need for God. There well may be life on other planets, but the Bible doesn’t say one way or the other.

Not that it matters what the Bible says on this issue anyway… it didn’t have anything to say about DNA or HIV, either, but science has plenty to to say on those subjects. Why not place some trust in the process that produces results?

Anyway, Graham then spends another four paragraphs preaching about anything and everything and nothing all at once:

What the Bible does say about the universe, however, is very important, and I hope you’ll teach it to your son. It’s found in the first verse of the Bible, and it tells us everything in the universe was made by God: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1:1). The galaxies and the stars and the planets didn’t happen by accident; they came into existence because God made them.

…

Be thankful for your son’s curiosity and ask God to help you use it to point him to Jesus…

If the lady’s son is genuinely interested in finding out whether or not there is life on other planets, asking God for help won’t get him any closer to the answer.

Reading a science book that discusses which environments could be hospitable to life may help. Or a book on the universe. Or a book that discusses what we need to look for, exactly.

But not the Bible.

I wonder what would happen to Graham’s faith if we ever did find evolved life on another planet, though. (And what if those beings didn’t believe in Jesus?!) Would we still be considered special?

Denny’s Discount for Churchgoers Only

Denny’s Discount for Churchgoers Only

7-27-09

http://friendlyatheist.com/2009/07/27/dennys-discount-for-churchgoers-only/

Denny’s is just setting itself up for a lawsuit.

JREF Communication Manager Jeff Wagg went to Denny’s recently where he saw the following flyer (1):

IMAGE: DENNY

This isn’t the first time something like this has happened. I mentioned a similar incident (2) on this site a couple years ago — that one also took place in Euless, Texas — and Wagg has a list of several other incidents where non-churchgoers were discriminated against.

You can read Jeff’s account of the story here. (3) The restaurant said this was a corporate policy and Jeff has sent headquarters a polite letter of complaint.

If anyone would like to call the corporate offices in the morning, their number is 1-800-733-6697.

It would be nice if Christians could step up and call, too. Even if the policy benefits you, it’s not right and it’s still discrimination.

On a side note, I wonder why Christians are getting the 10% savings when some of them don’t even tip on Sundays…(4)

1. http://www.randi.org/site/index.php/swift-blog/650-dennys-discount-discriminiation.html

2. http://friendlyatheist.com/2007/06/27/atheists-pay-full-price-at-restaurant-while-churchgoers-get-discount/

3. http://www.randi.org/site/index.php/swift-blog/650-dennys-discount-discriminiation.html

4. http://friendlyatheist.com/2009/01/30/dont-serve-the-christians-on-a-sunday/

Limbaugh Calls for ‘Slut’ Tax: the Politics of Personal Responsibility in Health Care

Limbaugh Calls for ‘Slut’ Tax: the Politics of Personal Responsibility in Health Care
By Joshua Holland, AlterNet
Joshua Holland is an editor and senior writer at AlterNet.
Posted on July 23, 2009, Printed on July 23, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/www.alternet.org/141515/

Your individual rights only go as far as my wallet.

Here’s Rushbo – drug addict, likely third-world sex tourist (1) and self-appointed guardian of America’s moral virtues – working a bit of gratuitous slut-shaming into the health care debate. (2) It’s comedy gold! Rush is up in arms over the fact that smokers buying insurance through the public health exchanges envisioned by

Congressional Dems would have to pay a higher premium. It’s so unfair!

Why? From what I can make out in his “argument,” Rush is saying that smokers make a risky lifestyle choice which results in higher health costs, so why don’t we impose surcharges on other risky behaviors, like women enjoying an active sex life.

It’s a patently silly argument — unless they’ve come up with some kind of a cigarette-condom that makes smoking safe, I don’t see much of a parallel. And, as is the norm with so many of these silly attacks on a public insurance option, Limbaugh acts as if private insurers don’t charge higher premiums for smokers, which is ridiculous. Not only do insurers charge a premium, but many private companies make their employees who smoke pick up higher share of the costs (3) of coverage. And smokers actually pay higher premiums (4) not only for health insurance, but also in many cases for private life insurance, homeowner’s insurance and even auto coverage.

So, a typically dishonest rant, but one that does touch on one of the crucial pivot points in the health care debate — personal responsibility and the mandate that everyone (with a few exceptions) carry insurance.

It’s obviously a fraught issue (despite the fact that most of us take mandates on automotive insurance for granted and the same principle applies). Over in the comments of our Big Bacon story — which details the harms of eating a lot of pork fat — one reader offered up this critique of the health proposals kicking around the halls of Congress:

“That’s one major reason why I don’t support the Obama healthcare plan. There are too many who purposely abuse their bodies and then expect everyone else to pay for their stupidity. If you have your own medical insurance, fine. That only pays for so much, however.

I guess I’m a Social Darwinist in that those who fuck themselves up deliberately truly deserves to die.”

Social Darwinism notwithstanding, this is a common argument. And on the surface a reasonable one — why should I have to pay for your bad decisions (actually, as a smoker who loves him some bacon and rarely drinks the doctor-recommended 4 quarts of water per day, the question is, ‘why should you have to pay for my lack of self-control and destructive stupidity?’).

Well, first of all, mandating that (almost) everyone has insurance spreads the risk over the entire population. By having younger and/or healthier people in the pool, everyone’s premiums are lower than they’d be if the insurance pool only had people who need a lot of health care.

But it goes a step further. We live in a society, and it is simply false to suggest that as members of that society we don’t already pay for people’s personal choices, and nowhere is that more true than when it comes to the uninsured.
Here’s how I responded to the commenter:

… in theory it’s true that people abuse themselves, but the idea that not covering them saves you money is false. When people who lack insurance avoid early intervention that would stave off diseases that are cost a fortune to treat later, the whole system bears the burden, including you.

So, yes, people jam their faces with bacon. They always will. Our national health dollars can pay for diagnosis and early treatment of the pathologies that follow — with a physician explaining to people the consequences of their actions, giving them guidance on how to improve their lifestyle, telling them that they’ll die young if they don’t change their ways and maybe prescribing them, say, statins to lower their cholesterol. Or we can use many, many more of those dollars to treat that person down the road when they develop diabetes or suffer from cardiovascular problems, stroke or whatever. It’s really a no-brainer — and that doesn’t take into account the lost economic productivity or tax revenues when that person who we didn’t treat early becomes too ill to work.

And it’s estimated that every American family pays around $1,000 for the uninsured seeking treatment in ERs or being unable to pay their medical bills.

Notes:

1. http://www.alternet.org/blogs/peek/38192/
2. http://mediamatters.org/mmtv/200907210029
3. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11394043/
4. http://www.ampminsure.org/smoking-premium.html

Testing abc 123

Testing abc 123

Christian right aims to change history lessons in Texas schools

Christian right aims to change history lessons in Texas schools

State’s education board to consider adding Christianity’s role in American history to curriculum

Chris McGreal in Washington, Wednesday 22 July 2009

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jul/22/christianity-religion-texas-history-education

The Christian right is making a fresh push to force religion onto the school curriculum in Texas with the state’s education board about to consider recommendations that children be taught that there would be no United States if it had not been for God.

Members of a panel of experts appointed by the board to revise the state’s history curriculum, who include a Christian fundamentalist preacher who says he is fighting a war for America’s moral soul, want lessons to emphasise the part played by Christianity in the founding of the US and that religion is a civic virtue.

Opponents have decried the move as an attempt to insert religious teachings in to the classroom by stealth, similar to the Christian right’s partially successful attempt to limit the teaching of evolution in biology lessons in Texas.

One of the panel, David Barton, founder of a Christian heritage group called WallBuilders, argues that the curriculum should reflect the fact that the US Constitution was written with God in mind including that “there is a fixed moral law derived from God and nature”, that “there is a creator” and “government exists primarily to protect God-given rights to every individual”.

Barton says children should be taught that Christianity is the key to “American exceptionalism” because the structure of its democratic system is a recognition that human beings are fallible, and that religion is at the heart of being a virtuous citizen.

Another of the experts is Reverend Peter Marshall, who heads his own Christian ministry and preaches that Hurricane Katrina and defeat in the Vietnam war were God’s punishment for sexual promiscuity and tolerance of homosexuals. Marshall recommended that children be taught about the “motivational role” of the Bible and Christianity in establishing the original colonies that later became the US.

“In light of the overwhelming historical evidence of the influence of the Christian faith in the founding of America, it is simply not up to acceptable academic standards that throughout the social studies (curriculum standards) I could only find one reference to the role of religion in America’s past,” Marshall wrote in his submission.

Marshall later told the Wall Street Journal that the struggle over the history curriculum is part of a wider battle. “We’re in an all-out moral and spiritual civil war for the soul of America, and the record of American history is right at the heart of it,” he said.

Dan Quinn of the Texas Freedom Network, which describes itself as a “counter to the religious right”, called the recommendations “troubling”.

“I don’t think anyone disputes that faith played a role in our history. But it’s a stretch to say that it played the role described by David Barton and Peter Marshall. They’re absurdly unqualified to be considered experts. It’s a very deceptive and devious way to distort the curriculum in our public schools,” he said.

Quinn says that the issue is likely to lead to a heated political battle similar to the one in which the religious right tried to force creationism onto the curriculum. While it wasn’t able to inject religious theories in to the classroom, the Texas school board did make changes to teaching designed to undermine lessons on evolution such as introducing views that the eye is so complex an organ it must have involved “intelligent design”.

“I think, as there was with science, there’s going to be a big political battle,” he said.

Social studies teachers will meet shortly to consider the panel’s views and make their own recommendations to the board of education which has the final say. The board is dominated by conservatives who appointed Barton and Marshall to the panel.

Other states will be watching what happens in Texas carefully as the religious right campaign seeks new ways to insert God in to the classroom after the courts limited the extent to which creationist theories could intrude on the teaching of biology. But religion is not kept out of schools entirely. Many children recite the pledge of allegiance in class each morning which includes a reference to the US as “one nation under God”.

The panel made other recommendations.

Barton, a former vice-chairman of the state’s Republican party, said that Texas children should no longer be taught about democratic values but republican ones. “We don’t pledge allegiance to the flag and the democracy for which it stands,” he said.

And while God may be in, some of those he influenced are out.

According to a draft of guidelines for the new curriculum, Washington, Lincoln and Stephen Fuller Austin, known as the Father of Texas after helping to lead it to independence from Mexico, have been removed from history lessons for younger children.

There’s no doubt that history education needs a boost in Texas.

According to test results, one-third of students think the Magna Carta was signed by the Pilgrims on the Mayflower and 40% believe Lincoln’s 1863 emancipation proclamation was made nearly 90 years earlier at the constitutional convention.