Unfortunately for every Rabbi like Lerner, there are hundreds that fully support the slaughter.

what percentage of US Jews have even heard of Lerner, or his Tikkun Magazine and movement?

About as many as the number of US Catholics who have heard of Fr. Roy Bourgeois and the Close the SOA movement.

Probably about as many USAns in general who have ever heard of, say, United for Peace and Justice, or this web site.

The level of mind control and apathy fueled by self absorbtion and TV promoted crap in the US is unbelievable.

How many even give a flying fuck about the gaza slaughter.

Far, far more people poeple go to a Penn State game in one fall weekend than ever engaged in a protest in my state.

Oh well, go Steelers...

---USAn---

Good interview this morning on DemocracyNow: www.democracynow.org transcript online free and show,too. I'm not a religious Jew, I am an atheist, but Lerner made some good points.

I was a proud supporter of Rabbi Lerner and Tikkun until the stance they took on the Iraq War. He tacitly supported that war by saying Americans had a legitimate fear of Saddam Hussein, which was very well documented as rediculous at the time. He referred to the war resisters as communists. He advocated the building of the wall that now traps the Gazans so that a holocaust can rain down on them. He continuously refers to Israel's right to security, which in my opinion is code for we get to kill Arabs because we were tortured by Germans once. He wrote a book full of the right wing facist lies for supporting Israeli aggression and put them next to truths about Israeli actons and said that they were equal. He talks a good line now about being against the slaughter of Gazans but he helped build the unlying support for this massacre with his Zoinist views for the last 6-7 years.

I don't get it. What kind of a truce do those rabbis want?

The U.S. is in a unique position to demand a truce (I like the concept of "just" settlement for both sides). We hold the purse strings of Israel. We are their damned near sole support in the world. All we need is for organizations like AIPAC to have less access to "our" elected officials and us to have more access. Most thinking people in this country undoubtedly believe something is wrong in the Mid-east when there is only one nuclear power (Israel), one country with armed forces capable of taking on all the rest of the Mid-east combined (Israel), one country that has the unquestioning support of the U.S.(Israel), one country (not OPEC affiliated)that the U.S. is intrested in protecting(Israel), one country(nuclear,unquestioning support of U.S.,U.S. protected even if no oil,Most highly militarily in the region)that has herded A poor, starving, homeless nation into a bleak fenced in existance, from which there is no escape, and now is bombarding and attacking with ground forces because they have the nerve to protest by shooting primitive rockets into sparcely populated areas. The first question I ask is: What is wrong with us?????? How can we support this???? It is insane that we continue!!!!! But there is no suprise emanating from Pine Ridge Reservation. They know the deal, first hand!

I think ALL Jews who oppose Israel's brutality towards Palestinians should be supported, commended and given an opportunity to express their point of view in the open. It is unfair to say - look this Jews supported Israel unconditionally in the past so they should not be given a chance to speak now. I personally think Rabbi Lerner is a good man and a kind of person who deserves to be respected.

The article concludes with, "The operation, launched in order to halt cross-border rocket fire, has come under heavy criticism for the high number of civilian casualties".

That's false; it is not the reason for Israel launching this war of aggression on [all] of Gaza, including known UN facilities, medical workers who were easily enough identifiable as medical, esp. when in medical ambulances that couldn't be mistaken in apparence, a university campus building, and so on. That's one set of reasons, while there's more; like Israel had this planned for months and Israel is the party that broke the ceasefire, in addition to having a 61-year history of brutal genocide against Palestinians, forcing them off of their lands and replacing them with white, Eastern European-origin "Jews" who have no lineage at all to Biblical ancient Jews of the Middle East, and so on.

It's also obviously false for if it was true, then Israel surely wouldn't have its brutal naval forces ramming the FreeGaza boat that Cynthia McKinney and plenty of other wholly non-combatant, human rights defending, ... people onboard; in addition to the very recent Israeli gunboats threatening to kill everyone on the FreeGaza ship called the 'Spirit of Humanity', which was sailing from Cyprus to Gaza and after having first made sure to make it known, internationally, that the ship had been checked for clearance in terms of not bearing or bringing anything but humanitarian aid items and non-combatant persons.

"Israel Threatens to Shoot Unarmed Civilians aboard Mercy Ship", by FreeGaza.org, Jan 15 2009

http://www.uruknet.info/?p=m50855

Israel also wouldn't do the following if this war of aggression was due to Palestinian rockets being fired into Israel.

"Video: UN headquarters in Gaza hit by Israeli 'white phosphorus' shells",
by Sheera Frenkel and Philippe Naughton, Times, UK, Jan 15 2009

http://www.uruknet.info/?p=m50857

The video in the above article is from Sky News, UK, and the direct link for the YouTube copy is the following.

"Israel attacks UN aid compound with White Phosphorous Shells: 15 Jan 2009",

http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=iZQ0gwcmv1M

"Israelis 'shot at fleeing Gazans'", BBC, Jan 15 2009

http://www.uruknet.info/?p=m50860

"Day 20: Israeli tanks bombard hospital, UNRWA centre and Media offices, death toll climbs to 1095", Jan 15 2009

http://english.ramattan.net/newsdetails.aspx?news_id=39746

Ramattan News Agency, I learned tonight, is a Middle Eastern news agency that supplies many international news media and is used by many most or all of us know of. It's used by AlJazeera as well as UK news media and CNN, as for what I recall having seen so far, but it's also used by others.

This is just a small sampling of examples of proof that Israel has not been conducting this war of aggression due to Palestinians firing rockets into Israel, which, we additionally know, are only out of retaliation for Israel's criminal aggressions against Palestinians, to begin with.

================

I noticed some readers posted some criticisms of Rabbi Lerner and I agree in the sense that I've noticed him being incorrect or wrong and more than once. He's indicated, to me anyway, that he sometimes, if not more than only sometimes, lacks critical objectivity and/or honesty.

With that said, I guess we can welcome his opposition to Israel's presently ongoing crimes; I think. Am not sure though, for this Haaretz article is very short and perhaps omits more that we would be better informed with, if we had the information. Maybe the article reveals enough of what we need to know in this particular instance though. (?)

I lost respect for Lerner years ago when he thought it was more important to reject the communist foundation of the ANSWER coalition then it was to build a unified front against both the democrats and republicans and their ongoing atrocities in Iraq. I've never found the sectarian qualities of some community organizers more offensive then the living crimes conducted by the empire. The fact that Lerner could, so far as I was concerned, demonstrated to me that he was more interested in kicking the dead carcass of stalinism then he was in taking on the living fiends who fueled a civil war in Iraq for the sake of control of the Middle East. And people who can't make that kind of distinction don't have anything to say about stalinism that I'm intersted in hearing. AFter all, the major crime of stalinism was that it insisted that anything it did was okay, because it was advancing socialism. The people who go soft on U.S. imperialism argue that even though the war on Iraq was a mistake, it was done out of benign interest and should be followed through to the bitter end. It's the same ideological swamp as stalinism, and that's why they've had to help kill so many people over there to keep it intact.

I consider the Tikkun community to be a fringe element of the "new age" movement
To what extent is the Tikkun community "jewish" ?
The reality is that are no people or race "jews". Judaism is a religion and philosophy of living. This is why Zionism=Racism. Zionism has confused race with religion which is a very dangerous thing to do.
This is a small quote from the Tikkun website:
"Dear Barack,
I have faith that you are going to advance the cause of human liberation and act as a faithful servant of God during your presidency."
This is just "new age" pollyanna garbage, and has nothing to do with Judaism.
Its just designed to make us all "feel good" about our continued colonialism.
so "voice of the Jewish opposition to war in Gaza" I think not.
Obviously the concept of Tikkun is a deeply Jewish even mystical and beautiful concept but:
"urges Obama to convene an international Middle East peace conference to "facilitate a lasting and just settlement for all parties."" is this Tikkun ?
The essence of the Tikkun HaKLali The "complete rectification" is keep the covenant which is an agreement to do or NOT DO certian things. Its actually quite simple and requires no "peace conference".
I consider the "new age" movement to be the left psuedo-spiritual wing of fascism itself.
Its job is to make fascists feel good about themselves as they murder people by manufacturing them some "feel good" pollyanna solutions that don't involve the simple act of stopping killing people.

An Open Letter to the State of Israel

Daily I read how at your hands the streets of Gaza are splattered with blood. Daily I am reminded of the ghetto at Warsaw and how I wept once reading an account of it. According to one report you forced a Palestinian family back into their home, bombed it repeatedly the next morning, and refused to allow ambulances to collect the dead bodies. How, then, does your state differ from all other states? Starvation and disease are rampant, one group is set upon another, mutilated bodies abound, corpses of babies lie strewn amid rubble, dissent is stifled, resources are pillaged, houses demolished, olive trees uprooted, waters defiled.

The eyes of all nations stand agape at your butchery. It reverberates everywhere. Your barbed wire, your check points, your unreason past and present, your Wall of discrimination, your silencing of discourse, your patent indifference to human suffering, your endless prisoners, your instruments of torture, your disproportionate bombings are laid bare for all to see. Are you not turning the planet into an inferno? Yet though your wars are unmasked, your collaborations known, your violence vanquished, it avails us nothing.

You speak with your enemy in secret rooms yet not openly under the sun’s rays. No principle justifies your massacring of children nor is one sought. By no principle do you massacre earth, air, water, and sky, nor are you held accountable. By no principle are your farm animals daily mutilated. Apparently innocence matters not to you. The lily, once your symbol, is now crushed under your boot. Does the vanishing ancient civilization of bees not testify to your ungodliness? Has nature itself not manifestly outgrown your garments of falsehood?

Power without legitimacy in the end wins no glory.

What have you to do with that noble, gifted, ethical people in whose name you claim to be warring, many of whom now turn their heads in shame from your unholy slaughter? Is such a people any more to you than a front for evils? Though your crimes are heartache for them, often they dare not speak. Why dare they not speak?

What have you to do with that light of religious freedom or that joyous emancipation from tyranny for which only the other day Hanukah was celebrated? What with the liberating of Hebrew slaves or divine miracles such as opened an ocean's doors? What with the commandments set down in stone at Sinai? What with the wisdom of King Solomon?

Dr. Martin Luther King used to say that violence can never drive out violence. In the long run it can only replace one tyranny with another. Is it your secret wish to enslave us all? Are you paving the way to another holocaust? Or do you think that by carnage you will improve the plight of your people? These are not questions I alone am asking. The blood of yesterday’s innocent still cries out from your hands.

The entire world is pleading with you to lay down your arms. Mine is one more pleading voice. I object to wars being fought in my name. I object to wars. Look at the piles of corpses all around you, a third of them children! Is warfare not like self-devouring Sin? Where now is your collective innocence? Look at the misshapen bodies, the sad eyes, of your weeping farm animals! What on this earth is still sacred to you? Is your manner of problem-solving not obsolete? Lay down your arms! What will violence avail you where a revolution of lambs is needed?

Sam Gold

The genocidal monsters of Israel are responsible for repairs and reparations to both Gaza and Lebanon.
America's elected officials must stand trial for aiding and abeting these crimes against humanity.