[P2P-F] Fwd: An exchange of letters about Occupy Oakland and violence

Michel Bauwens michel at p2pfoundation.net
Mon Nov 14 06:01:19 CET 2011


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Rabbi Michael Lerner, Network of Spiritual Progressives <
rabbilerner at tikkun.org>
Date: Mon, Nov 14, 2011 at 10:11 AM
Subject: An exchange of letters about Occupy Oakland
To: Michelsub2004 at gmail.com


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*I think you might find this exchange between a student and me about Occupy
Oakland and the Oakland community of some interest. There is a rumor that
there may be a new violent confrontation hours from now as the occupiers
refuse to leave (the mayor had previously offered for us to be able to stay
24/7 but without tents--in other words, just as people coming to present
our ideas, but not as occupiers. Let me hasten to add that I believe that
the police riot 12 days ago was totally unjustified, and believe that the
police who were involved should be sent to prison like others who violate
the law. The violence of Oakland police is a daily reality for people of
color in Oakland and many other American cities, and always a shock to
everyone else because it is only when it happens to white people that the
media stays on the story for more than a day or two!*

*    So here is the letter I received on email this morning: *



JORDAN ASHE <isitjusticeorlaw at gmail.****com <isitjusticeorlaw at gmail.com>
> wrote:



Dear Rabbi Lerner:



My name is Jordan Ashe and I am a student member of your Tikkun community.
 I attended the Oakland camp yesterday.  I washed dishes, observed, and
engaged in conversation.  My children left sidewalk chalk drawings as gifts
to the occupiers.  It felt good to be part of the 99%.  It felt good to
give of myself to others and to see my legacy-my family-do the same.



To my horror, however, I observed and heard things that left me in a state
of great concern.  The 99% need healing, they need repair, they need
transformation.  The camp was ripe with hostility towards police.  My
conversations with the occupiers revealed little or any willingness to
forgive and seek atonement from the police.  Even more horribly, the
occupiers seemed content to forget or even ignore the basic lessons our
great non-violent leaders left for us.  Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said the
most dangerous thing about violence is its futility.    This great leader
recognized that fighting violence with violent resistance leads to a
continuing cycle of inter-generational trauma and hatred.



Yet many of the occupiers seemed ready for a violent fight-some welcomed
it- and many more were unready to forgive.  I fear this movement is in need
of spiritual guidance less it lead to the same horrible cycles history has
witnessed many times over.  This guidance was sorely lacking at the
occupation and even as I journeyed throughout the camp, I was unable to
find a spiritual center.  It is the lack of spiritual consensus and
guidance that, I believe, is responsible for what I observed next.



The highlight of the day was a speech and a reading from the Egyptian
movement that was followed by a "Solidarity March."  The reading was
disturbing to hear because its focus was on the justification for *violent
resistance*.  Although the need for violent aggression may be debatable in
Egypt, it is not here in America.  The activists of our past changed this
county by being willing to die, not by being willing to kill.  What shocked
me more was that no one (including myself) booed or hissed.  We sat there
and many applauded.  Worse followed.



A leader of a Palestinian youth group read his own speech.  "Down with
Israel," he said near the end of a speech that focused on past wrongs.
 There was resounding applause.  Then one of the leader's crew standing
next to me said "fucking Jews," and in the face of this I could stand it no
longer.  I told him that I believed it was racist to say that and that
forgiveness and atonement is the only hope for peace in the middle east.  I
told him that I forgave him and he should be careful with his thoughts and
words.  I told him that my best friend is Palestinian and I am close to
many Jews and I wished sincerely to see the differences reconciled for the
sake of the *innocent generations of the future.*  Then I had to leave
because I was overcome with tears and wanted to scream out to the crowd (I
wish I had).  The Solidarity March went out shortly thereafter but some
people stayed out of the march for the same reasons I did.  After all, it
makes no sense to march in a "Solidarity March," when the speeches before
the march openly contradict the concept of solidarity.



 I wish our American youth and people around the world would use the tools
passed down by the legacy before them.  Organized Non-Violent
Non-Cooperation is a gift of strategy from our greatest activists.  MLK,
Gandhi, Cesar Chavez-these are men who changed the world by doing but not
by killing and we squander their memory and their message when we ignore
their teachings.  How quickly the world forgets.  To the religious and
faithful and spiritual around the world (those like myself), I would ask:
Does God want us to kill in God's name?  Or, Does God want us to be willing
to die in God's name?  Shall we sacrifice the lives of others before we
sacrifice of ourselves?  Shall we win the battle against our external
enemies yet loose the battle against our inner self?  In the struggle
against oppression, against fear, against the machine of death and war,
perhaps our greatest weapons will be forgiveness, atonement, selflessness,
and love.  I hope people arm themselves with these weapons and I hope they
fight back with all their might.  I would give my life to that kind of
fight.



I am not sure why I wrote to you.  But I am sure that writing to you helped
me put the sadness of this event behind me.  Thanks for reading and for
being there.



-Jordan Ashe

Law Student, Father, Husband, 99%er



Dear Jordan,

     Thanks so much for this letter. I share your sadness at the
distortions within Occupy Oakland.

 I have been participating both in Occupy Oakland and Occupy San Francisco,
and I feel that the Occupy movement nationally has made a tremendous
contribution to our society. By formulating things in terms of “the 99%” it
finally did what many other progressives have failed to do—namely, identify
us as having a common interest in protecting ourselves from the class war
that has been waged against us, all of us, for the past 30 years by the 1%
and their representatives in the government, media, academia and military.
So I remain a passionate supporter of this movement.

Yet some of the strengths that exist elsewhere are notably lacking in the
core group that led people into the struggle in Oakland. Let me be clear,
however:  I know that at least 90% of the people who marched on Nov. 2nd
during the General Strike and marched to the Port of Oakland are people who
agree with you. But there is a determined group of violent self-described
"anarchists" who ideologically believe in violence and seek it out. They
correctly note that destruction of property is not the same as destruction
of human beings, and they correctly note that the amount of violence
against human beings built into our global economic and political systems
makes any violence that they do pale in comparison. Moreover, the violence
of the Oakland police has been a central reality in the lives of people of
color in Oakland, and only stays in the attention of the media for more
than a day or two when the victims are white (or in this case, a former US
soldier back from Iraq and Afghanistan). So there is a built in hypocrisy
when the media makes the story "the violence of the demonstrators."

  But those arguments are, in my view, not good reasons to allow violence
or provoke violence or property destruction by demonstrators,  for two
reasons: 1. We should be non-violent because it is the right way to treat
other human beings created in the image of God, and should not seek to
create circumstances in which police violence is inevitably triggered
unless we do so by ourselves being totally nonviolent in action and words.
 I'm in favor of non-violent disruptions of oppressive institutions (e.g. a
sit-in in the Bank of America or in a Wall Street firm or in a corporation
involved in illegitimate foreclosures or in producing military equipment or
at the State Dept or the various offices of the Immigration and
Naturalization Services given their vicious processes) as long as we keep a
100% non-violent stance. I do not think people need to sit down and get
arrested--though that works in many cases; it is also legitimate to do
nonviolent disruptions using mobile tactics in which demonstrators disrupt
and then withdraw to disrupt somewhere else--as long as the demonstrators
avoid destruction of property or creating a situation in which violence is
inevitable. Non-violence does not mean passivity, but it must mean a
fundamental respect for human life and for the dignity of human beings,
including those with whom we strongly disagree. Our actions must reflect
that sense of respect for the humanity of the Other--because that is
precisely what is absent from the policies and practices of the 1% and
those who do their bidding.    2. Though breaking windows or destroying
property is not the same as breaking bones, it is perceived by much of the
American public as a wrongful act, and a movement that engages in that
activity quickly loses public support and isolates itself no matter how
much the American public agrees with its goals. That is why the FBI and
other elements of the "security apparatus" of the US government have
consistently planted their youngest employees inside social movements with
the goal of trying to encourage acts of violence so as to provide an excuse
to repress those movements with public approval.

     But non-violence has not been the stance of the inner core at Occupy
Oakland. I was deeply disturbed, and have withdrawn from active involvement
with, a group of clergy who were meeting to discuss how they could assist
in Occupy Oakland. At the third meeting I attended I proposed that we urge
Occupy Oakland to officially endorse non-violence, train monitors to
non-violently restrain violence-oriented demonstrators, and appeal to the
majority of demonstrators to support these monitors to restrain the
violence-oriented ones. To my shock, the clergy voted that down. They were
only willing to endorse a resolution saying that they themselves supported
non-violence, but they objected to the notion that they should call upon OO
to share this same orientation.

       Not surprisingly, then, a few days later when one of the
participants at OO suggested a resolution for non-violence, without the
active support of this clergy group the people who agreed with him felt
silenced after some part of the crowd actively booed when he mentioned
Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi's commitments and teachings for
non-violence.

        The dominant reason given by the clergy for their cowardice was
that "we have no right to impose our view on those who are taking the risks
of sleeping outside at Occupy Oakland; we should respect their process."
But advocating is not imposing, and a movement that claims to speak for 99%
of the population ought to have some mechanism to pay attention to the
sensibilities of the people whom they claim to be speaking for! If those of
us who have been in the movement, marched with the movement, and publicly
advocated for the movement, do no have a legitimate voice in that movement,
it seems transparent that such a movement cannot claim to be fighting for
democracy. It thus undermines itself.

          I watched this same thing happen in the 1960s and early 1970s
when a small group of violence-oriented Weathermen, and the FBI agents who
infiltrated the anti-war movement and a few of their more suggestible
followers, managed to play an important role in undermining support for the
entire movement by demeaning people who weren't ready to "prove their
commitment" by violent or property-destroying acts. Not only did the
violence provide public justification for an increase in repression of the
anti-war movement, it also soured the millions of people who were attracted
to the possibility of building a different kind of world based on love,
kindness, generosity and caring for others. The mass of participants in our
movement abandoned it once the violence-prone got the attention of the
corporate media, and I fear that the same thing is happening now.

         There's yet another twist in our current situation. The Occupy
movement is meant to challenge the class war  being waged against the 99%
by the 1%. Sitting in front of a particular building to make that point was
a useful tactic. But the people who are there have turned the tactic into a
fetishization of the encampments, as though the movement was really about
their right to set up tents and stay their all night, rather than about
challenging the materialism and selfishness of the global marketplace and
the lack of democracy in a society that allows the wealthy and the
corporations to give endless monies to elect people (in both major parties)
who in turn support the corporate agenda and the tax benefits for the rich.
I personally believe that the city governments should actively help the
demonstrators find a place to demonstrate in an area adjacent to the forces
they are demonstrating against. But if they don't, we should not make that
the center of the struggle, because there are a myriad of other tactics to
keep the issue on the front burner.

              I share with you a deep distress at the hatred toward Israel
and/or toward Jews you encountered. I've seen little of that in the days
that I've been down there, but I'm not surprised that a handful of people
retain those feelings. Again, I feel it is the obligation of the clergy and
the adults to stand up to this publicly, raise the issue and challenge
those who misuse legitimate outrage at the current policies of the current
government of the State of Israel as their excuse for delegitimating the
State of Israel itself or for expressing anti-Semitism. While I fully
reject the attempt to label all criticism of Israel as anti-Semitic, and
have myself been subject to attacks and death threats from right-wing
Zionists who have labeled me a "self-hating Jew," I do think that we should
insist that our friends in the Occupy movement or any other activist
movement of progressive bent challenge anti-Semitism or the double standard
applied to Israel by a handful of people who thereby sully our movements
and give ammunition to those who seek to discredit us entirely!

             Warm regards,

             Rabbi Michael Lerner,

             Editor, Tikkun &  Chair,The Network of Spiritual Progressives
  RabbiLerner at Tikkun.org
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