A word of solace to those panicking at the prospect of a Drumpf presidency: he is not going to march into the White House & start building a wall on the southern border. US agribusiness is absolutely dependent on the labor of undocumented immigrants–as are construction, meat packing, & several other industries. His braggadocio is not going to preempt the imperative needs of several multi-billion dollar industries.
He is not going to lay down a ban on Muslims entering the US. The US Immigration Service carefully monitors who does & does not enter this country. Modifications are & can be made in their practices without a single word from Drumpf. More importantly, the presidency is not yet a dictatorship & will not become one unless oligarchic rule is challenged & sees no other way to defend its system. There is a history & a method to fascism that is not going to be altered by his bombast.
As for those wars he promises? Clinton has promised even more. But neither of them will go to war against any country unless the generals in the Pentagon, the CIA, all those government think tanks & high-level consultants, & the oligarchy agree to it.
If we do our political work & build the social movements for change & justice, we have less to fear & more cause for hope.
The postmortems on the Sanders revolution are as tiresome as they are exhaustive when the death of an illusion is something to be lauded, not grieved.
The parsing of differences between Clinton & Drumpf have just begun & promise to make the next five months a hell on earth. It’s the price the rest of us pay for lesser evil politics.
Palestinian solidarity activists are called upon to tell the truth, the whole truth, about their struggle against Israeli colonialism. We are not authorized to accept discounts on their behalf on their right to self-determination.
It is not sectarian idealism to stand by principles & reject the compromises, betrayals, & political idiocies of a bantustate solution or to criticize liberal Zionists (like Rabbi Michael Lerner) who try to make that a realistic possibility for Palestinians.
Call me a nitpicker, but that speech by Rabbi Michael Lerner at Mohammad Ali’s memorial service got a whole lot less impressive when he called for a Palestinian bantustate rather than a democratic secular state for Palestinians & Jews.
The good rabbi is my political generation & well-versed in the gestalt of 1960s & 1970s activism: antiwar, pro-civil rights, women’s rights, LGBT rights. He may be progressive on many questions but he remains–despite the violence of Israeli colonialism, apartheid, & ethnic cleansing–a liberal Zionist supporter of Israel. Like Chomsky & Finkelstein, he opposes the violent character of Israel but refuses to acknowledge the inextricable relationship of apartheid to the ideology of Zionism & Jewish supremacism. He supports Israeli colonialism.
Also like Chomsky & Finkelstein, he is an opponent of BDS. He often tries to appear impartial, equivocal even, but he opposes it. You can’t play both sides of the street in politics & the good rabbi is long enough in politics to know that. He’s written a book titled “The Socialism of Fools: Anti-Semitism on the Left” where he attributes criticism of Israel to “internalized anti-Semitism” & tries to distinguish “legitimate criticism of Israel from Israel-bashing.” So he sure as hell doesn’t support BDS which he considers a threat to a Jewish-only state.
Lerner has the politics of J Street, the liberal alternative to AIPAC & the organizational attempt to give a more humane face to Israeli apartheid & ethnic cleansing.
Swell that he talks tough to power but not if its to be in a better position to shill for Israeli colonialism & stick Palestinian justice in a bantustate.
Labor and international news