Overcoming racism in the Westchester Reform Temple

March 24

GUESTS: Jessi Sander, a Jewish American school teacher, and her lawyer Robert Herbst talk about why she was fired from her job by the Westchester Reform Temple for a recreational blog post criticizing the most recent attack on Gaza by the State of Israel.

A Jewish Teacher Criticized Israel; She Was Fired

Jessi Sander was fired for her beliefs. Not for beliefs she had expressed in the school that had hired her as a teacher. Sander was fired for some blog posts she had written years before. 

The official position of the Westchester Reform Temple is that teachers' opinions fall under the protection of free speech. Not only that, the Rabbi who hired Sander had talked about the importance to the Jewish faith of expressing and discussing ideas. 

PEP has long been a problem for the nation's liberals. "Progressive except for Palestine" holds that human rights values and racial justice should apply to all. Well, not to all. Palestinians don't get human rights because they keep reminding the world that Israel has stolen their homes, slaughtered their youth and pushed millions off their lands. Instead of upholding "Jewish" traditions, PEP zealots allow no debate on Israel's right to commit these war crimes. Like all colonial philosophy, those being occupied and oppressed are less than real people. 

I am sorry that Jessi Sanders is paying the price for this hypocrisy. And like many Jewish people of her age, she is fighting back against Israel's apartheid. As Joel Kovel, author of Overcoming Zionism, said several years ago, "It's a fight between Jewish values and Jewish tribalism." Joel paid a price himself for writing the book. He was pushed out of his teaching position at Bard College, that supposed bastion of liberal thought in Upstate New York. Liberal of course, except for Palestine. 

Joel died several years ago, and Jessi Sanders will someday overcome the racism she has found in the Westchester Reform Temple. But will the six million Palestinians in the diaspora ever regain their homeland? Will the five million Palestinians living under a brutal occupation ever get their lives and their dignity back? 

We as Americans hold the key to ending the occupation. Our Congress members must stop getting payments from the Israel Lobby. Maybe then our elected representatives will stop giving Israel 3.8 billion a year for weapons to kill Palestinians. The shameful courting of our police departments by Israeli money and training might come to an end as well. And the billions that Israeli megadonors put into racist campaigns against Muslims will be exposed and terminated.

There is a lot of work to do, and genuinely progressive Jews will be standing there with us as we shine a light on Israel's crimes. Not in our name!

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Holding Our Ground: Resisting Colonialism

March 17

GUEST: Sleydo’ (Molly Wickham), spokesperson for the Gidimt’en check-point on Wet’suwet’en lands and resident of the Cas Yikh (grizzly house), an Indigenous reoccupation site in British Columbia since 2014, talks about her people's resistance to the Coastal Gasoline pipeline.

Gidimt’en Access Point vows to continue resistance

We were fortunate to get Sleydo' as a guest on Activist Radio. She and her family are under assault by the Canadian Mounties and other agents of the Coastal Gasoline pipeline. The video of these officials taking a chainsaw to her house is as disturbing as any footage of Palestinians losing their homes. The forces of Big Oil will allow no resistance, as we have seen in our own country at Standing Rock. 

The tie that binds together the Wet’suwet’en and the Palestinians people, however, is not Big Oil. It is the invader mentality that condones slowly pushing native peoples off their lands. It is a special form of racism practiced by those with too much power, and no sense of human rights. It is the ugly side of US and Western imperialism, that doesn't hesitate starving millions in Afghanistan, Palestine, Yemen, and Western Sahara for political and economic gain. 

A number of local human rights groups in the Hudson Valley invite you to discuss these issues further in a Zoom event. I hope you can join us.

Holding Our Ground: Resisting Colonialism
and Environmental Destruction

Sunday, April 3 at 12 noon ET 

Colonization exists to exploit land and natural resources for the profit of the colonizers. The history, culture and needs of the indigenous people are not relevant considerations to the colonizers. Palestinians and indigenous American people have both faced determined campaigns to separate them from their lands and despoil their resources. This Zoom panel will explore the ways these two colonized peoples have fought back to preserve their natural resources from invading settlers, soldiers, pipelines, and corporations. 

Panelists:
-Mazin Qumsiyeh, Director of the Palestine Institute of Biodiversity and Sustainability, professor at Bethlehem and Birzeit Universities, and author of several books including "Popular Resistance in Palestine: A History of Hope and Empowerment.”
-Sleydo’ (Molly Wickham), spokesperson for the Gidimt’en checkpoint on Wet’suwet’en lands and resident of the Cas Yikh (grizzly house), an Indigenous reoccupation site in British Columbia since 2014.

To register for this Zoom panel go to

Sponsored by Jewish Voice For Peace - Hudson Valley, Middle East Crisis Response, NYC Veterans For Peace, US Boats to Gaza, and Women in Black - New Paltz. Contact: mecr@mideastcrisis.org or 845 876-7906

Thanks,

Fred Nagel
Rhinebeck, NY
 
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Desperate quest for a better life

March 10

GUEST: Mariel Fiori, a professional journalist from Argentina and co-founder and managing editor of La Voz, a Spanish magazine distributed in the Hudson Valley, talks about the needs and rights of the Latinx community in an age of heightened racism against immigrants.

We are still here

The many wars the US has instigated in Central America have pushed tens of thousands towards our boarders. So to has the climate crisis, perpetuated by the US and their giant oil companies. Latin America has been colonized by the US for centuries, of course. But more recently the bloodbaths are more ubiquitous and the warming climate has made crops impossible. Thanks to colonization, a million people will be headed for our boarders.

Instead of trying to end these wars of exploitation and dominance, the US has increased spending on military arms and training. In Central America, countries are either with the bully of the north or against it. Nicaragua insists on electing a socialist as president. Honduras has just freed itself from a US imposed dictator. Will the US ever keep its bloody hand off other people's land? 

The right wing now uses immigration to fan the flames of discontent in the US. What our military and our corporations have done to Central America now plays a part in moving our country to the right. That is the hidden story of what the empire has done in this hemisphere. It is not such a difficult history to understand. But our media works overtime to obscure these realities from the people. 

One way to push back is to welcome immigrants and to support their desperate quest to have a better life. In so doing, we will expose the evils of colonizing and exploiting our neighbors to the south. 

 

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That is where we could really make a difference

March 3

GUEST: Yousef Aljamal: translator, blogger, and co-host of the podcast, "The World From Palestine," talks about his first hand experience exposing and resisting the narratives of settler colonialists.

Yousef Aljamal brings his Palestinian witness to U.S. Congress

Yousef weaves his pwersonal history with the story of Palestine. Growing up in Gaza, he has seen it all. One can only imagine living in a barbed wire prison for two million people, without electricity or food at times, and subject to periodic bombardments. That was his childhood.

We see the US and most Western European countries as they express horror for slaughter in Ukraine. How can Russia be so barbaric, committing war crimes on an innocent population? One might almost believe that the US puts human rights ahead of other considerations in directing its foreign policy. 

That is until one thinks about Gaza. The US makes all the bombs, the planes, and the drones that are used in Israel's periodic genocide of these captive people. We send Israel more bombs when they run out. We give billions in military aid, while defending Israel's barbarism at the UN. This long term genocide belongs to the American people as much as to the Israeli people. History books, if we have such things after the war in Ukraine, will call apartheid Israel the client state of US aggression in the Middle East. 

Worried about civilians in Ukraine? Why don't we try doing something about our blood drenched policy in Palestine. That is where we could really make a difference. 

 

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Spiritually crippled society that MLK foresaw

February 24

GUEST: Adaner Usmani, assistant professor of sociology at Harvard University, and editorial board member of the Catalyst Journal of Theory and Strategy, talks about mass incarceration and the false narrative of its creation.

Did Liberals Give Us Mass Incarceration?

Why would anyone feel the need to create a false narrative about the creation of mass incarceration? Or to put it another way, wouldn't everyone in power over the last four decades want a little wiggle room? White America has extended and increased the suffering and gross injustices of Jim Crow for decades after the 1960s, the last time that our country tried to come to terms with its Black underclass. 

So what is not really being said about how our "land of the free" filled its jails with people of color? Adaner Usmani suggests that it has more to do with class theory than out and out racism. And he also finds more people to blame. The reality of our caste system was explored very thoroughly in the Kerner Report, a study initiated by President Johnson as part of his "Great Society." But the results of the report were staggering. To bring a large underclass out of poverty meant that things like wars had to be put aside. The United States could not fight wars abroad and remedy its poverty problems at the same time. Our country had to choose.

Martin Luther King had said the same thing, especially in the year before his assassination. And his warnings were as stark as his words. 

A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual doom.

Our country did continue its war in Vietnam. After all, President Johnson was always known as "Brown & Root's man in Congress." And Brown & Root was making tens of millions on supplying the war effort. The Military, Industrial Complex had already decided that the US would choose militarism over eliminating poverty. 

All of us have gone along with that decision every since. We have cheered our military adventures and turned a blind eye on our racially biased caste system. It is no wonder false narratives need to be created. We live in the spiritually crippled society that MLK foresaw so many decades ago. 

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Welcome to the country with the most dead from COVID

February 17

GUEST: Joshua Frank, author of Big Heat: Earth on the Brink, and managing editor of CounterPunch, discusses how anti-vaxxers and Big Pharma are partners in crime.

Vaccines, RFK Jr. and The Science of Misinformation

How reason is often overcome! One would think that there was a segment of the scientific community that opposed vaccines. But there really isn't. Sure, there are a few podiatrist who make YouTube videos, morons in white coats. How could a large segment of the people believe such crap?

They are happy to buy hundreds of dollars in fake pills from these vaccine doubters as well. Where is their common sense?

Big Pharma is different. These companies rake in billions by making false promises and charging too much. We are the only developed country in the world that allows its pharmaceutical companies to advertise. So the public is sold millions of pills that they don't need, for diseases they don't have. It's a scam, of course, and another inditement of unfettered capitalism. 

So is Big Pharma pushing vaccines in the same way? Not really. These companies face the full scrutiny of our scientific and medical community when they offer these vaccines. It is not that these large companies are honest; they are just adequately regulated so that they can't lie about something this important. This is the subtile difference that anti-vaxxers don't get. There is a large scientific and medical establishment in this country that is mostly focused on improving patient outcomes and preserving people's lives. 

To be an anti-vaxxer then requires a leap of faith. And we have always had people willing to make that jump (see the cartoon from the 1800s). Smallpox was eventually eradicated by tracking down cases and by inoculating the public. It has worked that way in the past, but anit-vaxxers are even less interested in medical history. The believe because their friends believe. And it must be somewhat satisfying to be "in the know" when the rest of the world is supposedly being fooled. Ignorance compliments the psychological need to be important. Welcome to the country with the most dead from COVID in the world.

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Crazy demagogue waiting in the wings

What happens when both the liberals and conservatives give up on our current form of government? There are all sorts of reasons why this may happen. The corrupt two party system is so riddled with corporate bribery that dealing with the most important issues of our day seems impossible.

Take global warming. The Republicans are marinated in crude oil cash. But Biden and the Democrats are addicted to the similar pay to play philosophy. The same is true for America's endless conflicts abroad. Biden and Blinken have moved Nato troops right to the very edge of Russia, while feigning an interest in negotiating peace. Two nuclear powers with troops facing each other is what our two corrupt parties have led us to. The future of our species is not as important as the mountains of cash our politicians get from the all important weapons industry.

And it is only going to get worse. The billionaires have expanded their wealth beyond anyone's comprehension, while an ever growing underclass has little or nothing. The anger at this fraudulent system is easily diverted to the hatred, of immigrants, Blacks, gays, and women.

We have seen it all before in the 1930s. When governments become paralyzed by the very rich and their huge corporations, there is always some crazy demagogue waiting in the wings. Then societies reap what they have sown, with book burnings, racial attacks, and armed uprisings. Maybe the evils of unfettered capitalism always lead countries to fascism, where every day is January 6.

Fred Nagel
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