Showing solidarity with the enemy

"Peace" demonstrations will be held worldwide tomorrow.

Damascus, Jan.17(SANA)-[official Syrian news agency]

A huge popular march will be organized tomorrow, Saturday in Damascus to protest the American aggression on Iraq and to express support to the Palestinian heroic Intifada.

All sectors of the people are scheduled to take part in the march which will set off from downtown head to the peoples’Assembly where the march will turn into a mass rally.

Speeches which are scheduled to be delivered will stress Syria’s principled stances that support the Intifada and the struggle of the Palestinian and Iraqi people against the Zionist and imperialist aggression.

The comes in response to a call by non-governmental organizations in 76 states where similar demonstrations will be held simultaneously for this purpose.

And joining them, in Washington D.C. and San Francisco, will be a large group of Jewish sympathizers, organized by those losers at Tikkun.

New York Tikkun members together with guests coming from Tikkun New England are organizing a "Teach In" bus trip to Washington DC for the national anti-war rally scheduled on January 18. The bus will be reserved for Tikkun members, and those interested in Tikkun, throughout the Northeast region. During the bus ride from New York to Washington Tikkun members can discuss the Tikkun position on the Middle East, and practice articulating this position for lobbying efforts, media outreach activity, speaking presentations, and educational forums. The bus will leave from NYC on Saturday morning, January 18.

It does seem that Tikkun has few a little "ethical" problems with this particular demonstration, though. Not that that's going to stop them from participating, but in an email to their supporters, they apparently felt compelled to mention a few things, just to assuage their "conscience," I guess, and offer some lame excuses.

Though many members of the Tikkun Community are participating in the demonstrations against Bush's war in Iraq, for reasons articulated in the editorials and articles in Tikkun opposing the war, many are doing so with some degree of concern. The group that sponsored this event, A.N.S.W.E.R., has been hostile to Israel and used these demonstrations to mis-educate about the complexities of the Israeli/Palestinian struggle.

Although we at Tikkun are critical of Israeli policy, we are also critical of acts of violence by some Palestinians, and believe that these acts of violence are an important part of the reason why Ariel Sharon has grown in popularity and why many Israelis despair of peace.

We do not accept a one-sided account of the Israeli/Palestinian struggle.

I'm impressed. How about you? Wait, there's more.

As Rabbi Michael Lerner demonstrates in his new book [plug deleted] both sides have co-created this mess and any discourse which tries to make one side the bad guys and the other the innocent victims is deeply distorted. Yet that is exactly the rhetoric that we have heard from A.N.S.W.E.R. in the past.

Moreover, there is a kind of unsophisticated anti-Americanism that gets articulated in this context which ignores the reality that Saddam Hussein is in fact a very evil person whose role has in fact been very destructive and genocidal. It is true that the war in an attempt to extend American power, that it will provide American domination over oil fields and deepen America's reliace on fossil fuels (with their attendant destructiveness to the ozone and the atomosphere), and that it is likely to encourage yet more wars in the future. These are good reasons to oppose the war. Still it feels that we are being manipulated when we are subjected to a group of mindless speeches and slogans whose knee-jerk anti-imperialism rarely articulates the deep and compelling reasons why we should oppose the globalization of capital.

We approached the A.N.S.W.E.R. coalition and asked to be given enough time (minimum 15 minutes) to put forward our more complicated analysis, but were turned down.

Many people have wondered how the A.N.S.W.E.R.
coalition got into the position to run this demonstration. The answer is that they are heavily infused with a Marxist sect group, the Revolutionary Communist Party, and they were smart enough to get the permits and begin to advertise for this event and the march last Fall. But there are other peace coalitions being formed, and in the future we will work with them. In the meantime, this is what is happening now, so many local Tikkun Communities are participating because their upset agaisnt the war is stronger than their upset about who and how these demonstrations are being run and who gets to speak at them.

The sheer hypocrisy of this statement is overwhelming. Tikkun never seems to find its depth. It just keeps sinking lower. And finally, there's this.

There is another complaint we have about this event: that it is held on Shabbat. While most Jews do not observe Shabbat and so that won't be a factor in their non-participation, some of us do, and this makes it extremely difficult to participate. Yet, as we've insisted in the past, The Tikkun Community is not just for Jews, and so it is not surprising that many local Tikkun communities will be out in force in Washington or San Francisco on Saturday.

Tomorrow also just happens to be Tu B'Shvat, one of the more delightful celebrations on the Jewish calendar, and it's very much connected with the Land of Israel. More on this later.