My plea to the people of Israel: Liberate yourselves by liberating Palestine

Excerpt reprinted from Haaretz


Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu, in an exclusive article for Haaretz, calls for a global boycott of Israel and urges Israelis and Palestinians to look beyond their leaders for a sustainable solution to the crisis in the Holy Land.



By Desmond Tutu    | Aug. 14, 2014 | 9:56 PM

A child next to a picture of Nelson Mandela at a pro-Palestinian rally in Cape Town. August 9, 2014 Photo by AP  

The past weeks have witnessed unprecedented action by members of civil society across the world against the injustice of Israel’s disproportionately brutal response to the firing of missiles from Palestine.

If you add together all the people who gathered over the past weekend to demand justice in Israel and Palestine – in Cape Town, Washington, D.C., New York, New Delhi, London, Dublin and Sydney, and all the other cities – this was arguably the largest active outcry by citizens around a single cause ever in the history of the world.

A quarter of a century ago, I participated in some well-attended demonstrations against apartheid. I never imagined we’d see demonstrations of that size again, but last Saturday’s turnout in Cape Town was as big if not bigger. Participants included young and old, Muslims, Christians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, agnostics, atheists, blacks, whites, reds and greens ... as one would expect from a vibrant, tolerant, multicultural nation.

I asked the crowd to chant with me: “We are opposed to the injustice of the illegal occupation of Palestine. We are opposed to the indiscriminate killing in Gaza. We are opposed to the indignity meted out to Palestinians at checkpoints and roadblocks. We are opposed to violence perpetrated by all parties. But we are not opposed to Jews.”

Earlier in the week, I called for the suspension of Israel from the International Union of Architects, which was meeting in South Africa.

I appealed to Israeli sisters and brothers present at the conference to actively disassociate themselves and their profession from the design and construction of infrastructure related to perpetuating injustice, including the separation barrier, the security terminals and checkpoints, and the settlements built on occupied Palestinian land.

“I implore you to take this message home: Please turn the tide against violence and hatred by joining the nonviolent movement for justice for all people of the region,” I said.

Over the past few weeks, more than 1.6 million people across the world have signed onto this movement by joining an Avaaz campaign calling on corporations profiting from the Israeli occupation and/or implicated in the abuse and repression of Palestinians to pull out. The campaign specifically targets Dutch pension fund ABP; Barclays Bank; security systems supplier G4S; French transport company Veolia; computer company Hewlett-Packard; and bulldozer supplier Caterpillar.

Last month, 17 EU governments urged their citizens to avoid doing business in or investing in illegal Israeli settlements.

We have also recently witnessed the withdrawal by Dutch pension fund PGGM of tens of millions of euros from Israeli banks; the divestment from G4S by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation; and the U.S. Presbyterian Church divested an estimated $21 million from HP, Motorola Solutions and Caterpillar.

It is a movement that is gathering pace.

Violence begets violence and hatred, that only begets more violence and hatred.

Continue reading here.  

Will You Vote?

Dear Folks, 

No big message here. I simply want to strengthen what Debbie W. Schultz says below as head of the Democratic National Committee. This November election will be a very crucial, literally vital to our country. If we don’t vote by the millions for our Democratic candidate, there is a danger we may even lose the Senate. We need also to reconquer the House. Is this impossible? Not if we vote, and encourage all we know to vote. Obama’s work would be finished and a next Demo President would also be seriously blocked from meeting basic needs, from jobs, to immigrants and the environment. 

Love, John G

Debbie Wasserman Schultz wrote:

A Matter of Character

Dear Folks, 

We are wise enough as Democrats to know our party and its reps are not perfect. We are getting a taste of this now in the latest Veterans Department scandal in which some of its places have falsified the number of Vets cared for. Because of our two latest wars and Vets returning we know Vet hospitals and clinics have been overwhelmed. We also know –and have for years—that Vet Care as such has been famous even among Europeans for the level of help, when a Vet is actually there.

However, as a party we have been pure compared to the Republicans. We have not only been more effective. We also have demonstrated more sheer character. There, I have said it: we have more character, because our major concern—not perfect but major—has been for the people and not the wealthy and powerful. Consider what has happened since Obama came to office. Rep Jay Rockefellow said this in Congress yesterday: “Our president is mostly opposed because of “his wrong color.” We simply look at the facts. This present Congress ---with the House under Republican control for the last two years and the two years preceding, when the Senate Republicans filibustered into the hundreds—has been the most ineffective in terms of bills passed in its entire history. Except for Obama Care and fiscal controls under Barney/Frank - and both seriously hampered because of Republican resistance - Obama and his team have been crushed in such vital issues as jobs and infrastructure, unemployment compensation, immigration, minimum wages, and food stamp - all programs which would feed our economy from the ground up: a trickle up, not a failed trickle down from the wealthy, who are the richest people in human history.

To a Scientist

Andrea Tsurumi

Dear Folks,

For years I have been writing a book to be called (almost finished) "The Patriarchal Nightmare: The Maternal Principle in Nature, Culture and Persons." There was an article by this scientist Saturday in The New York Times. Here is my answer now added to my book.  - John G

A Sour Note from One Scientist.

The following article appeared in The New York Times by Alan Lightman, a physicist who teaches humanities at M.I.T. (Lightman, 2014k, p. 17). The article is entitled “Our Lonely Home in Nature.”

Like so many of his cohorts, he does not believe that “Nature is purposeful. Nature simply is…..There is no reciprocity. There is no mind on the other side of the wall.”

He writes this because he considers mother nature’s many calamities, such as earthquakes and hurricanes, “happen without the slightest consideration for human inhabitants.”

A Letter to a Republican Woman

Below a letter I sent to Kathleen Parker, a Republican journalist.

APRIL 3, 2014

Dear Kathleen,  How can you a woman live with your present party? Once in the past, it was a solid party.  But now? A party that voted 47 times to cancel Obamacare!!! One of the most important laws passed in the last 60 years. Think of this. Millions of people, especially children with preconditions now covered. Think of the number of children who will suffer because of 9 billion cut from food stamps, let alone poor adults. Have you ever been poor?

I remember when my Mom wept because she had only ten cents in her purse. Think of the children when so many families lost unemployment compensation. Are you married? Do you have children? Can you imagine them suffering for lack of food and medical care. Let me be blunt. Your party leaders lack empathy, the capacity to see suffering of others. In the Senate, Caterpiller Co was challenged because they ship in effect two and a half billion  dollars in taxes we need here to Switzerland. How many other companies do this, in the billions? The democrat leading the committee pointed out that such monies would enormously help strengthen our education and also infrastructure, all people needs. Senator McCann instead responded: these companies are already paying top taxes. Your guy responds with number. Our guy with concern for human needs. How can you a woman stand being in such a party? 

Sincerely, John Giannini

April Fools

Dear Folks,

This is April Fools day. So my subject is: who is fooling who and who is telling the truth?

My answer is going to be seen by some as “political” as if the term means something nasty. We do the same with “religion.”  Both politics and religion are at rooted sacred, with one dealing with governance and the other dealing with divinity. Politics sacred?!!  Have you seen the actual copy of the Declaration of Independence?  In my view, that document is biblical in the deepest sense, because it teaches the same virtues, concern for and care for every citizen, because each of us is endowed by God with “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

Given the above, I am going to some readers appear to be prejudiced. Prejudice, however, is an irrational view of  persons or even events and ignores fact. Prejudice fools people. You be the judge as to whether I am logical and factual. Here it is: we are being fooled by many unscrupulous political leaders in both parties. That is a fact. However, there is another fact: there is an enormous difference in the policies of the two parties as well as in the overall behaviors of the two parties. As to policies, which party is serving the people and which party the rich one percent? Obamacare has been in the news, at first declared a failure. Now over l0 million are signed up including those added to Medicaid.

The Notorious Banksters

Dear Folks,

See below.  The information below is enormously important. The power of corporations and their Wall St cohorts has increased exponentially as it is now concentrated in a one percent group (roughly 400 families and individuals) who have great power in politics. We are, as Chris Hedges writes, the colonized and they are the colonizers.

However, we still have free speech on so many levels that they do not yet control: emails, youtube, facebook, twitter, etc.  Most of all our geeks are mobilizing over l000 volunteers nationally under the Democratic National Committee to get out the vote on a level that has never occurred in a mid-term election. They will not be going house-to-house but rather email to email, twitter to twitter, etc. As in the 2012 election, they will seek people's deepest interests and needs and show them the democratic party meets those needs and interests. This is how we will counter the millions and millions going into Republican advertizing by the Koch Brothers and other billionaires.

Urgent

Dear Folks,

Any one of  us attending to the news have heard the Fox folk inventing one invective after the other about Obama. A few months ago they characterized him as a “dictator” and “tyrant” when he began to make presidential decisions, especially removing the filibuster in the Senate that blocked needed leaders of his administration. Now, with the Putin initiatives, Republicans of every stripe, from the old-timers such as McCain to Rand Paul, attached him for being weak and ineffective. The fact is that this president is one of the smartest and indeed geek--like in our history and draws brilliant people into his orbit. As evidence of this, his Chicago election campaign was able to identify young people needs to democratic party values so effectively that over 30 million additionally voted for him. Geeks, using the sophisticated statistical methods popularized by Ned Silver led in this achievement.

Some of these and others also recently led the way in healing the tech problems of Obama Care in six weeks. Their story is in a banner article, entitled “Code Red” in the March l0 issue of Time. An amazing group. I want name as many as I can with their backgrounds for a very good reason in which I enlist your help. They are Ryan Panchadsaram, engineer and Presidential Innovation Fellows, Todd Park, chief tech officer of the US, Obama aid Jeffrey Zients who was one key leader, Jini Kim, former google product manager, Paul Smith, former Democratic party tech officer, Gabriel Burt, rocket scientist and chief technological officer at Chicago’s Civis Analytics (Civis is now the commercial home of Obama’s campaign whiz kids), Mikey Dickerson, Google site reliability engineer who took a leave to be on Obamas’s election team and with Zients, led the team. Also added were  Mike Abbott, who had corrected Twitter’s technology and Marty Abbott, C TO of EBay.

Folks, we need this team back in Washington or Chicago to take back the House in November and keep the Senate democratic. The person for each of us to contact is Denis McDonough, the White House Chief of Staff who was deeply involved in the selection of the above team. His address is the White House’s: l600 Pennsylvania Ave, NW, Washington, DC, 20500. I do not have his e-mail. We can also connect more directly via www.whitehouse.gov

JOHN G

Concerns

Dear Folks,

I have two big concerns.  

(1) Citizens United that declared corps are persons is one of the most outrageous and destructive decisions ever conceived of by our Supreme Court in history. This raises a crucial issue: If our government has three branches that are meant to be equal and so subject to some controls, how is it that the Congress nor the President seem not to have the power to deny a Supreme Court decision when it is jn itself clearly unconstitutional. Go to both the First and the Fourteenth Amendment. They deal respectively with the right of free speech and the rights of persons. A corp is not a person; it is a legal entity that obtains its right to exist from the government. It  is neither born physically nor dies physically nor does it as entity think or decide.

SO THE ONLY RECOURSE IS AN AMENDMENT TO THE CONSTITUTION WHICH ONLY WE AS CITIZENS CAN MAKE POSSIBLE—SINCE CONGRESS IS SEEMINGLY HELPLESS. GO TO MOVETOAMEND.ORG and sign up.

If 20 percent of citizens so sign, it must go to the congress to so accept or reject.  Can you imagine with 20 percent signing that any congress would reject the voice of the people.  Maybe this congress which is now the weakest in history.

(2) Citizen United has practically speaking almost rendered democracy dead in our country. Only our votes ---as also in the case of our signing an amendment—can make a difference. Even the 400 million spent by the Koch Brothers could not overcome re-electing Obama  However, in many places, from state govs to townships the power of money is winning out. We are in effect colonials and the corps the colonizers, writes Chris Hedges. There are also examples of enormous differences between  l percenters and us as 99ers. (l) Last year 40 Wall St hedge fund people earned l4 billion, the amount earned by 300,000 teachers (2) The 5 or 6 owners of Walmart are as wealthy as the first forty million people.  (3) 94 of the richest people in the world equal the wealth of a half of the worlds population, that is, 300 billion.  

Citizens of the world, unite; we can change this madness and outrage!!!!  John G

Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence, By Rev. Martin Luther King

4 April 1967

Speech delivered by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., on April 4, 1967, at a meeting of Clergy and Laity Concerned at Riverside Church in New York City

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article2564.htm

---

I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight because my conscience leaves me no other choice. I join with you in this meeting because I am in deepest agreement with the aims and work of the organization which has brought us together: Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam. The recent statement of your executive committee are the sentiments of my own heart and I found myself in full accord when I read its opening lines: "A time comes when silence is betrayal." That time has come for us in relation to Vietnam.

The truth of these words is beyond doubt but the mission to which they call us is a most difficult one. Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government's policy, especially in time of war. Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought within one's own bosom and in the surrounding world. Moreover when the issues at hand seem as perplexed as they often do in the case of this dreadful conflict we are always on the verge of being mesmerized by uncertainty; but we must move on.

Some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak. And we must rejoice as well, for surely this is the first time in our nation's history that a significant number of its religious leaders have chosen to move beyond the prophesying of smooth patriotism to the high grounds of a firm dissent based upon the mandates of conscience and the reading of history. Perhaps a new spirit is rising among us. If it is, let us trace its movement well and pray that our own inner being may be sensitive to its guidance, for we are deeply in need of a new way beyond the darkness that seems so close around us.

Over the past two years, as I have moved to break the betrayal of my own silences and to speak from the burnings of my own heart, as I have called for radical departures from the destruction of Vietnam, many persons have questioned me about the wisdom of my path. At the heart of their concerns this query has often loomed large and loud: Why are you speaking about war, Dr. King? Why are you joining the voices of dissent? Peace and civil rights don't mix, they say. Aren't you hurting the cause of your people, they ask? And when I hear them, though I often understand the source of their concern, I am nevertheless greatly saddened, for such questions mean that the inquirers have not really known me, my commitment or my calling. Indeed, their questions suggest that they do not know the world in which they live.

In the light of such tragic misunderstandings, I deem it of signal importance to try to state clearly, and I trust concisely, why I believe that the path from Dexter Avenue Baptist Church -- the church in Montgomery, Alabama, where I began my pastorate -- leads clearly to this sanctuary tonight.
I come to this platform tonight to make a passionate plea to my beloved nation. This speech is not addressed to Hanoi or to the National Liberation Front. It is not addressed to China or to Russia.
Nor is it an attempt to overlook the ambiguity of the total situation and the need for a collective solution to the tragedy of Vietnam. Neither is it an attempt to make North Vietnam or the National Liberation Front paragons of virtue, nor to overlook the role they can play in a successful resolution of the problem. While they both may have justifiable reason to be suspicious of the good faith of the United States, life and history give eloquent testimony to the fact that conflicts are never resolved without trustful give and take on both sides.

Tonight, however, I wish not to speak with Hanoi and the NLF, but rather to my fellow Americans, who, with me, bear the greatest responsibility in ending a conflict that has exacted a heavy price on both continents.

PUT CITIZENS UNITED IN THE DUMPSTER OF BAD IDEAS

Hi Power Politics People,

Citizens United was a disaster. It opened the floodgates for corporations to write big checks to fund right-wing special interest attacks, helping them pour $719 million into the 2012 elections.

The question is, what are we going to do about it? How are we going to stuff this "corporations are people, elections are auctions, democracy is for sale" mess into the Dumpster of Bad Ideas?

Here's how: A constitutional amendment that puts power back in the hands of the people. The actual, human people.

Sign the petition to join me in calling for a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United.

- Al Franken


That's why I signed a petition to The United States House of Representatives, The United States Senate, and President Barack Obama.

Will you sign this petition? Click here:

http://pac.petitions.moveon.org/sign/put-citizens-united-in?source=s.em.cp&r_by=8043976