An Interview with Brant Rosen

by Eli Ungar-Sargon, JewSchool

If you've heard of Rabbi Brant Rosen, chances are that you know about his vocal and principled stance on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Rosen has been on a personal journey ever since Israel's 2008-2009 Operation Cast Lead, the brutality of which compelled him to question his beliefs about the State of Israel and Zionism. Much of this journey unfolded in public as Rosen courageously wrote about his evolving views on Israel/Palestine in his well-read blog, Shalom Rav. These blog posts and some of the responses to them formed the basis for his 2012 book Wrestling in the Daylight: A Rabbi's Path To Palestinian Solidarity. Rosen is the founder of the Jewish Voice For Peace Rabbinical Council and for 17 years he was the Rabbi of the Jewish Reconstructionist Congregation in Evanston. He stepped down from this pulpit in September and took a position as the Midwest Regional Director of the American Friends Service Committee. On July 5, he announced the founding of a new community called Tzedek Chicago. I contacted Rabbi Rosen earlier this week to learn more about his politics, identity, and new community.

by Joe Dyke and Almigdad Mojalli, IRIN

BEIRUT/SANAA — As ceasefires go, the latest one in Yemen might go down as one of the most irrelevant ever. It was supposed to be in place for 10 days but, depending on who you ask, it lasted for somewhere between 30 seconds and two hours.

Its dismal failure, analysts said, leaves the United Nations weak and immediate hopes for a peace deal dashed. But it also further illustrates how Yemen's civil war—which began when Houthi rebels seized the capital Sana'a last September, and eventually forced President Abd Rabbu Mansour Hadi into exile—is fracturing rapidly out of control.

A Saudi Arabian-led coalition has been bombing the Houthis to try to return Hadi to power, but new groups have risen to prominence on both sides with only loose loyalties and distinct local agendas. Convincing them to agree to any peace deal will only get harder with time.

by Florian Neuhof and Louise Redvers, IRIN

ERBIL/DUBAI — A month after fleeing his home in Qaraqosh, the largest Christian town in northern Iraq's Nineveh province, to escape the advance of militants from the so-called Islamic State (IS), Basim Mansour Yohanna received a telephone call. It was a former colleague, a Sunni Arab, who told the Assyrian Christian he was standing inside his family's apartment, preparing to ransack it.

"I won't go back with Sunnis there," the 55-year-old said angrily. "When I see them, it's like they are stabbing me in the stomach. They all betrayed us, we cannot trust any of them."

Huda Salih Marky, a member of the Yazidi religious community from Kocha, also in Nineveh, told IRIN how she was captured by IS and forced to work as a domestic servant in Mosul for a militant for several months, before being sold for ransom. "Yazidis will not be safe here in future, they can't stay in Iraq, the best thing is to emigrate to a country where there are no Muslims," she said.

These views may be extreme, but they are not uncommon.

by Ruben Andersson, IRIN

The warning was restrained, as was to be expected from a European border police chief, yet it was a warning nonetheless. Amid European leaders' scramble to launch a military operation targeting migrant smugglers' boats in the Mediterranean, the director of EU border agency, Frontex, voiced some caution: "If there is a military operation in the vicinity of Libya," he said in early June, "this may change the migration routes and make them move to the eastern route." One route closes; another opens up. Simple, really—yet rarely are any migration control lessons drawn from this elemental fact.

In the "war on drugs," it is often called the "balloon effect": squeeze the balloon in one place, and it expands somewhere else. Something similar is happening with efforts to crack down on irregular migration, with an important difference: when the balloon consists of people, they get more desperate the harder you squeeze. So too do border officials and politicians, as demonstrated by Italy's growing frustration with other EU leaders reluctant to help the country deal with the influx at its southern shores.

by Nava Thakuria, World War 4 Report

Amid the heat of protests over the killing of three secular bloggers this year, the government of Bangladesh has banned an Islamist militant group named Ansarullah Bangla Team (Volunteers of Allah Bangla team). The government of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina issued a notification May 25 declaring the group outlawed under the Anti-Terrorist Act of 2013. The most recent victim, hacked to death May 12 in a street attack in the northeast city of Sylhet, was Ananta Bijoy Das, 33. At least four assailants chased Das as he was headed for his office in the morning hours, killing him in full public view. Das was hurried to a local hospital, but the attending doctors declared him dead.

Das was the former editor of a Bengali-language periodical entitled Jukti (meaning Logic), and also wrote for Mukto-Mona, a website developed and moderated by atheist blogger Dr. Avijit Roy—who faced a similar end three months earlier in Dhaka, the country's capital. Das, who also campaigned for banning Islamist parties, had faced threats for his activities. Dr. Roy, 43, was slain on February 26, and his wife Rafida Ahmed Bonya was seriously injured in the attack. Another Bangladeshi activist-writer, Washiqur Rahman Babu, 27, was slain under similar circumstances in Dhaka on March 30. The only visible reason for their brutal murders was that they were free-thinkers who spokes out against the fundamentalists of all religions, including the Islam.

by Philippa Garson, IRIN

The United States may be the global leader in refugee resettlement, but so far it has opened its doors to a mere 1,000 Syrians looking for a safe haven from their war-torn country. Human rights groups, members of Congress and city planners are among those trying to persuade President Barack Obama to allow more Syrians to settle here. However, security concerns, anti-immigration sentiment and bureaucratic hurdles all stand in the way.

It has taken the world a long time to acknowledge that most of the 12 million Syrians displaced—inside and outside their country—by the five-year civil war will not be going home anytime soon. Neighbors Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey have absorbed nearly four million Syrians between them. Other countries have been slower to step up to the plate, particularly in terms of pledging to take some of the 88,000 Syrian refugees allocated for resettlement by the UN's refugee agency, UNHCR. Twenty-eight countries have so far agreed to take in 62,000 of them—with Germany taking nearly half.

Resistance to Dispossession

by Tania Paz, AIDA

"How do I explain do my son that to be a landowner will soon mean to be an employee?" asked a woman who may soon lose her land because of the proposed Nicaraguan Interoceanic Grand Canal. Her question resounds in my head each time I hear news of the canal's construction.

There is nothing more valuable than a piece of land to cultivate, land you’ve dreamed of your whole life, land that your children will some day inherit, land that makes the early mornings and long days working under the hot sun worth it.

People throughout Nicaragua have said "no" to the proposed canal. They have decided to fight because they're not willing to lose their dreams for nothing more than the promise of a job.

The Fight Against ISIS is My Fight

by Bill Weinberg, The Villager

Most "anti-war" folks in the US (like nearly everyone else) are in the dangerous habit of referring to the government with the pronoun "we." This rhetorical convention fosters the illusion that "we" commoners have any voice in Washington's foreign policy (beyond assenting with our silence or, optimistically, restraining somewhat through protest). It betrays more naiveté than cynicism about the nature of power in this country. There is no area where the US behaves more like an empire and less like a democracy than in waging war. Even Congress is rarely consulted—much less its lowly constituents.

This pronoun also burdens the question of US military involvements with a personal sense of (for the anti-war crowd) guilt or (for their jingo opposites) pride, barring a more distanced and objective view. For both the peaceniks and the jingos, use of "we" constitutes an imperial narcissism—an identification with the empire that makes the question about "us."

So when Ted Rall in The Villager last month asked, "Why are we at war with ISIS?"—my reply is, "Who is asking, and what is your stake in the question?"