[P2P-F] Fwd: What to Do about ISIS

Tue Sep 2 04:37:04 CEST 2014

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Tikkun <magazine at tikkun.org>
Date: Mon, Sep 1, 2014 at 6:25 PM
Subject: What to Do about ISIS
To: Michelsub2004 at gmail.com

   Editor's Note: *Tikkun* seeks to present a range of views that you
wouldn't hear in the mainstream media, without necessarily endorsing those
perspectives. Please remember that *Tikkun*'s own position is articulated
only in our editorials.

In my view, the important article by David Swanson that I’m sharing below
may be underestimating the venality and murderous nature of the ISIS
coalition that he describes. Unlike Hamas and unlike the Muslim Brotherhood
in Egypt, ISIS appears to have genocidal intent toward Christians and Shia
Muslims (and possibly also toward Sunnis who don't share their perspective
and almost certainly toward Jews).

On the other hand, I know that I don't know who they really are or even
what they are really doing. I've read enough lies about previous run-up to
wars in the Western media to know not to believe anything I read, but only
to consider that the media's account is one possible way of viewing the
reality.

I also know that the gruesome accounts of murders committed by ISIS are
shocking to a U.S. audience in part because the far greater number of
people killed by the U.S. interventions in the Middle East, South East
Asia, Central and South America have never been presented in an honest way
to the American people. Most of us have not heard the gruesome details or
stories of the families that have lost loved ones as a result of U.S.
military and CIA actions.

Accounts of how ISIS members used waterboarding on their captives have been
told in a way that dramatizes the inhumanity of a tactic that was used on
many, many of those held by the United States in Guantanamo and in more
secret detention and torture facilities run by or contacted by the United
States around the world.

Yet U.S. feelings of rage about waterboarding were never directed at those
who perpetrated and those who approved that torture, so people like George
W. Bush and former vice president Cheney and the many under them in the
chain of command who carried out these outrageous acts have never been
brought to trial.

When it's ISIS that commits these abuses, we are encouraged to think of
their actions as reasons for war; when it's our U.S. leaders who commit the
same abuses, we don't even think it sufficient reason to put them in
prison!

*On the other hand*, my outrage at acts that we in the U.S. have committed
does not diminish my outrage at what ISIS is doing, if the media accounts
are even partially correct, and my desire to want to stop them before more
people are murdered. But how? Not in a way that will have even worse
consequences, in the way that the U.S. ouster of Saddam Hussein’s (who
should have spent the rest of his life in prison) led to the growth of
ISIS.

Our inclination always at *Tikkun* is to ask the following question of any
group espousing hateful ideas (including haters among Christian, Jewish,
Muslim, Hindu, and Buddhist fundamentalist movements; followers of secular
right-wing or fascist groups; and those who adhere to the
ultra-nationalistic, ultra-militaristic tendencies within American and
Israeli nationalism, as well as any other kind of nationalism): *What are
the underlying needs that these movements are speaking to that might be
legitimate needs of the people who respond to them? And how do we then
develop strategies to separate those legitimate needs from the fascistic,
racist, or irrational ways that people seek to meet those needs through
these hateful and sometimes violent movements?*

These are the questions that I've answered in some detail in my books *The
Politics of Meaning*,* Spirit Matters*, and *The Left Hand of God: Taking
Back our Country from the Religious Right*. The goal is not to excuse
outrageous and murderous acts, but to figure out how to disempower the
murderers, whether they be American, Iraqi, Chinese, Russian, Israeli, or
from Hamas. The goal is to ensure that their followers don't move on to
some other equally terrible movement or murderous sect or religion or
nationalism once these particular murderers are gone.

If you read those books you'll see why I’m inclined to think that Swanson
is moving in a good direction but lacks some of the psychological and
spiritual tools necessary to make his strategy successful. One of those
tools is a Global Marshall Plan (please download it at tikkun.org/GMP
<http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=5wxAwC4J5F3umCAEJL6jhFlYUFiz8M%2Bx>
and read the full 32-page brochure). The problem with mentioning the GMP is
that people immediately think it's primarily about giving money. But it's
not. It is predicated on a strategy of showing respect and genuine caring
for the well-being of all people on the planet. This caring would be
conveyed partly through money, but more importantly through a fundamental
transformation brought about by the Western world in adopting the New
Bottom Line laid out in detail at tikkun.org/covenant
<http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=sYYPojvg2x4yQDHCqYDQS4PdJffS3F18>
.

Without that approach, the United States will have no tools for dealing
with ISIS, and so inevitably the people of this country will fall back onto
violence and war making.

“Fine,” you may say, “but what are we supposed to do NOW? Don't you realize
that these people are a real menace?” That may be true, but the reason it’s
true is because people always go to that formulation—the one that led us
into a war to overthrow Saddam Hussein in the first place without having
any idea of what could replace him. Without that alternative, Swanson's
point is that we created the preconditions for the rise of ISIS.

So, truth is, I don’t know what we should do with ISIS in the short run,
except to follow some of the steps that Swanson proposes, other steps that
are defined in the Global Marshall Plan and in the Network of Spiritual
Progressives' Spiritual Covenant at spiritualprogressives.org
<http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=Nn5Keqe%2FMLCgttmEXbWsyVlYUFiz8M%2Bx>,
and yet others that I'll propose in a subsequent article within the next
few weeks.

While these steps may not be sufficient, I know for sure that taking any
other path that doesn't *also* include these steps is bound to simply
recreate the set of circumstances that have led us into the current mess.
The one thing I'm sure about: if some kind of intervention is justified,
and I think it may be, it should be genuinely led by the United Nations and
*not* by the United States. And it should not occur solely at the
initiative of the United States.

If the people of the world are ready to take some action, let us follow
their leadership rather than intervene alone—U.S. hands are, as they say in
law, “dirty hands” and hence not able to provide ethically credible
leadership. So please do read Swanson’s insightful article. And then please
also read David Sylvester’s post on Tikkun Daily
<http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=w9g3j9Ahy4au9Fg7aToJ0VlYUFiz8M%2Bx>
with its call for the Abrahamic religions to lead an international summit
of religious forces to develop a response to the increasingly murderous
realities we face.

*Meanwhile, have a joyous Labor Day 2014! Wouldn’t it be great if this year
working people used this day off to figure out how to take back control of
our country from the super-rich and powerful so that we too could
participate in the discussions that the elite have about which wars to drag
us into? Maybe next year?*

—Rabbi Michael Lerner
(RabbiLerner.tikkun at gmail.com)

------------------------------

*What to Do About ISIS*

*by David Swanson*

*Originally published on warisacrime.org
<http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=TmQfep66DHMWpy%2Fi5c2vr1lYUFiz8M%2Bx>*

 Start by recognizing where ISIS came from. The U.S. and its junior
partners destroyed Iraq, left a sectarian division, poverty, desperation,
and an illegitimate government in Baghdad that did not represent Sunnis or
other groups. Then the U.S. armed and trained ISIS and allied groups in
Syria, while continuing to prop up the Baghdad government, providing
Hellfire missiles with which to attack Iraqis in Fallujah and elsewhere.

ISIS has religious adherents but also opportunistic supporters who see it
as the force resisting an unwanted rule from Baghdad and who increasingly
see it as resisting the United States. It is in possession of U.S. weaponry
provided directly to it in Syria and seized from the Iraqi government. At
last count by the U.S. government, 79 percent of weapons transferred to
Middle Eastern governments come from the United States, not counting
transfers to groups like ISIS, and not counting weapons in the possession
of the United States.

So, the first thing to do differently going forward: stop bombing nations
into ruins, and stop shipping weapons into the area you've left in chaos.
Libya is of course another example of the disasters that U.S. wars leave
behind them—a war, by the way, with U.S. weapons used on both sides, and a
war launched on the pretext of a claim well documented to have been false
that Gaddafi was threatening to massacre civilians.

So, here's the next thing to do: be very skeptical of humanitarian claims.
The U.S. bombing around Erbil to protect Kurdish and U.S. oil interests was
initially justified as bombing to protect people on a mountain. But most of
those people on the mountain were in no need of rescue, and that
justification has now been set aside, just as Benghazi was. Recall also
that Obama was forced to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq when he couldn't
get the Iraqi government to give them immunity for crimes they commit. He
has now obtained that immunity and back in they go, the crimes preceding
them in the form of 500-pound bombs.

While trying to rescue hostages and discovering an empty house, and racing
to a mountain to save 30,000 people but finding 3,000 and most of those not
wanting to leave, the U.S. claims to know exactly whom the 500-pound bombs
are killing. But whomever they are killing, they are generating more
enemies, and they are building support for ISIS, not diminishing it. So,
now the U.S. finds itself on the opposite side of the war in Syria, so what
does it do? Flip sides! Now the great moral imperative is not to bomb Assad
but to bomb in defense of Assad, the only consistent point being that
"something must be done" and the only conceivable something is to pick some
party and bomb it.

But why is that the only conceivable thing to be done? I can think of some
others:

1. Apologize for brutalizing the leader of ISIS in Abu Ghraib and to every
other prisoner victimized under U.S. occupation.

2. Apologize for destroying the nation of Iraq and to every family there.

3. Begin making restitution by delivering aid (not "military aid" but
actual aid, food, medicine) to the entire nation of Iraq.

4. Apologize for role in war in Syria.

5. Begin making restitution by delivering actual aid to Syria.

6. Announce a commitment not to provide weapons to Iraq or Syria or Israel
or Jordan or Egypt or Bahrain or any other nation anywhere on earth and to
begin withdrawing U.S. troops from foreign territories and seas, including
Afghanistan. (The U.S. Coast Guard in the Persian Gulf has clearly
forgotten where the coast of the U.S. is!)

7. Announce a commitment to invest heavily in solar, wind, and other green
energy and to provide the same to democratic representative governments.

8. Begin providing Iran with free wind and solar technologies -- at much
lower cost of course than what it is costing the U.S. and Israel to
threaten Iran over a nonexistent nuclear weapons program.
9. End economic sanctions.

10. Send diplomats to Baghdad and Damascus to negotiate aid and to
encourage serious reforms.

11. Send journalists, aid workers, peace workers, human shields, and
negotiators into crisis zones, understanding that this means risking lives,
but fewer lives than further militarization risks.

12. Empower people with agricultural assistance, education, cameras, and
internet access.

13. Launch a communications campaign in the United States to replace
military recruitment campaigns, focused on building sympathy and desire to
serve as critical aid workers, persuading doctors and engineers to
volunteer their time to travel to and visit these areas of crisis.

14. Work through the United Nations on all of this.

15. Sign the United States on to the International Criminal Court and
voluntarily propose the prosecution of top U.S. officials of this and the
preceding regimes for their crimes.

<http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=6rn3w%2FLU7QEzzF5oOIoT2VlYUFiz8M%2Bx>

------------------------------

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