When did a Jewish man become just another white man?
by Matthew Johnson
409 words
Apparently race and ethnicity have been reduced to a person’s outward physical appearance according to some on the left—especially those who so brazenly and unfairly dismiss Bernie Sanders as just another straight, white, cisgender male attempting to usurp power from the underprivileged masses.
Never mind that he’s Jewish. Never mind that being Jewish in the United States historically has not been a bed of roses. Ask Leo Frank. Never mind that there was a racist massacre at a synagogue in Pittsburgh just last year committed by a white man who clearly did not see Jews as his brothers and sisters. As a straight, white (gentile), cisgender male whose group has never been the target of such a (hate) crime, I call bullshit on this bizarre attempt to undermine Sanders by stripping him of his oppressed-group identity.
It’s a sign of how sectarian the left has become that somehow Jews lose their minority status if they present as white men. This could be good news for Sanders if racist voters agreed—but even the blindest white supremacists always seem to know when a person is a member of minority group no matter how WASPY said person appears to be. Some of my friends on the left have somehow become even blinder. They don’t seem to understand that the concept of race (and the privilege it bestows) is primarily political and has never been confined to physical appearance. Ask Irish Americans, who were not always considered white.
It’s particularly sad that Sanders’s status as a Jew does not even guarantee support from Israel, whose extremist government and jingoistic defenders are at least capable of seeing past not only his physical appearance but also his heritage—and closely examining his policies. His foes are strangely divergent: In the left corner is a raging bull that can’t stand the color white, and in the right corner is a cynic so committed that he would rather support a president who courts anti-Semitesthan a wayward member of his own tribe. What unites the two is that they are both prisoners to identity politics.
All of this conspires to undermine an incredible candidate who, despite enormous challenges, has moved the once-rigid Democratic party to the left and shaken both sides of the political establishment. If identity politics are used as a weapon to defeat what could (and should) be the first Jewish president of the United States, it would be a bitter, shameful irony.
–end–
Matt Johnson, syndicated by PeaceVoice, is co-author of Trumpism.
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For Immediate Release: 7/27/19
(Logan, UT) – Genital mutilation victims are storming the Rockies with a visually-arresting message concerning human rights: No one should alter the body of an unconsenting person without acute medical need. Bloodstained Men and Their Friends are sharing this message in 18 cities on an ambitious 20-day protest tour through Utah, Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho. The Bloodstained Men will be in Logan on Monday, July 29th, in Ogden on Tuesday, and the 20-day tour concludes in Salt Lake City on Wednesday, July 31st. Please see the full protest schedule below.
The 14th Amendment of the US Constitution guarantees equal protection of the law to all citizens of this country. Despite this, under the false rubric of preventative medicine, 3,000 baby boys lose their basic human right to an intact body every day in America, while baby girls are federally-protected from all genital cutting, including a ritual religious pinprick that removes no tissue and severs no nerves.
The general public will be peacefully confronted by activists including victims of genital cutting. Passersby will be reminded that babies whose genitals are mutilated as infants grow up to be men who are speaking out about what was done to their penis before they could defend themselves. Parents will be faced with the basic, undeniable human rights argument against the routine genital cutting of children: the foreskin is a healthy, valuable body part that belongs to the child. It is unnecessary, cruel, damaging, and morally wrong to remove it from a healthy person who is incapable of consent.
American circumcision policy is shaped by the AAP's expired Circumcision Policy Statement – a contradictory, convoluted, cleverly disguised cultural justification for an unnecessary, permanent, painful, and nonconsensual cosmetic procedure. The United States is a holdout in eradicating this Victorian-era practice which the rest of the developed world understands as a destructive human rights violation. Profit and lack of understanding keep routine circumcision alive here. The Bloodstained Men's mission is to educate all Americans about the risks and harms of genital cutting. “Most parents have no idea what they put their babies through,” says Brother K, Co-Director of Bloodstained Men & Their Friends.
The international conversation about the many risks and harms of the forced genital cutting of children has gone viral with game-changing articles and progressive litigation. Germany, Iceland, Denmark, and several other European countries are poised to prohibit the cultural, nontherapeutic genital cutting of minors regardless of parents' religious beliefs. AMERICAN CIRCUMCISION, a groundbreaking full-length documentary feature film that received several film festival awards including Best Documentary film of 2017 at the Lone Star Film Festival and the Silver Jury Prize at the 2017 Social Justice Film Festival, was released and has been watched voraciously on Netflix. Conscientious Americans are fed up with the unnecessary, painful genital mutilation of our children, and are FIGHTING BACK with protests, social media groups, local educating, nonprofit organization work, and more.
Bloodstained Men & Their Friends is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization dedicated to giving victims of genital cutting a voice and to educating Americans about the harms of infant circumcision and the importance of the foreskin. Our bloodstained suit serves as an arresting visual reminder that circumcision affects its victims for life. When a baby boy is circumcised, so is the man he will become. Please visit:
https://www.facebook.com/BloodstainedMenTheirFriends and http://www.bloodstainedmen.org
All are welcome at our peaceful protests. The full protest tour schedule can be found below and on our website. We encourage attendees to wear the Bloodstained Suit. For more information or to arrange an interview, please attend a protest or contact press secretary Erika Talvitie at etalvitie@bloodstainedmen.com or call/text (716)884-3710.
Rocky Mountain Circumcision Crisis Protest Tour Schedule:
Friday, July 12, 2019
West Jordan, UT
10am to 3pm
Saturday, July 13, 2019
Orem, UT
10am to 3pm
Sunday, July 14, 2019
Grand Junction, CO
11am to 4pm
Monday, July 15, 2019
Denver, CO
10am to 3pm
Tuesday, July 16, 2019
Denver, CO
10am to 3pm
Wednesday, July 17, 2019
Colorado Springs, CO
10am to 3pm
Thursday, July 18, 2019
Pueblo, CO
10am to 3pm
Friday, July 19, 2019
Denver, CO
10am to 3pm
Saturday, July 20, 2019
Fort Collins, CO
10am to 3pm
Sunday, July 21, 2019
Cheyenne, WY
11am to 4pm
Monday, July 22, 2019
Casper, WY
10am to 3pm
Tuesday, July 23, 2019
Gillette, WY
10am to 3pm
Wednesday, July 24, 2019
Billings, MT
10am to 3pm
Thursday, July 25, 2019
Great Falls, MT
10am to 3pm
Friday, July 26, 2019
Helena, MT
10am to 3pm
Saturday, July 27, 2019
Idaho Falls, ID
10am to 3pm
Sunday, July 28, 2019
Pocatello, ID
11am to 4pm
Monday, July 29, 2019
Logan, UT
10am to 3pm
Tuesday, July 30, 2019
Ogden, UT
10am to 3pm
Wednesday, July 31, 2019
Salt Lake City, UT
10am to 3pm
With the Every Student Succeeds Act continuing to shape state curriculums and students getting closer to the end of their summer breaks, the personal-finance website WalletHub today released its report on 2019's States with the Best & Worst School Systems as well as accompanying videos.
In order to determine the best school systems in America, WalletHub compared the 50 states and the District of Columbia across 29 key measures of quality and safety. The data set ranges from pupil-teacher ratio to dropout rate to median standardized-test scores.
States with the Best School Systems
States with the Worst School Systems
1
Massachusetts
42
Alaska
2
New Jersey
43
Nevada
3
Connecticut
44
Oregon
4
Virginia
45
District of Columbia
5
Vermont
46
Alabama
6
Minnesota
47
West Virginia
7
New Hampshire
48
Mississippi
8
Nebraska
49
Arizona
9
North Dakota
50
Louisiana
10
Wyoming
51
New Mexico
Best vs. Worst
To view the full report and your state or the District’s rank, please visit:
https://wallethub.com/edu/states-with-the-best-schools/5335/
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Dear moderators of the presidential debates: How about raising the issue of how to avert nuclear war?
by Lawrence Wittner
925 words
You mass media folks lead busy lives, I’m sure. But you must have heard something about nuclear weapons—those supremely destructive devices that, along with climate change, threaten the continued existence of the human race.
Yes, thanks to popular protest and carefully-crafted arms control and disarmament agreements, there has been some progress in limiting the number of these weapons and averting a nuclear holocaust. Even so, that progress has been rapidly unraveling in recent months, leading to a new nuclear arms race and revived talk of nuclear war.
Do I exaggerate? Consider the following.
In May 2018, the Trump administration unilaterally withdrew from the laboriously-constructed Iran nuclear agreementthat had closed off the possibility of that nation developing nuclear weapons. This U.S. treaty pullout was followed by the imposition of heavy U.S. economic sanctions on Iran, as well as by thinly-veiled threats by Trump to use nuclear weapons to destroy that country. Irate at these moves, the Iranian government recently retaliated by exceeding the limits set by the shattered agreement on its uranium stockpile and uranium enrichment.
At the beginning of February 2019, the Trump administration announced that, in August, the U.S. government will withdraw from the Reagan era Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty—the historic agreement that had banned U.S. and Russian ground-launched cruise missiles—and would proceed to develop such weapons. On the following day, Russian President Vladimir Putin declared that, in response, his government was suspending its observance of the treaty and would build the kinds of nuclear missiles that the INF treaty had outlawed.
The next nuclear disarmament agreement on the chopping block appears to be the 2010 New START Treaty, which reduces U.S. and Russian deployed strategic nuclear warheads to 1,550 each, limits U.S. and Russian nuclear delivery vehicles, and provides for extensive inspection. According to John Bolton, Trump’s national security advisor, this fundamentally flawed treaty, scheduled to expire in February 2021, is “unlikely” to be extended. To preserve such an agreement, he argued, would amount to “malpractice.” If the treaty is allowed to expire, it would be the first time since 1972 that there would be no nuclear arms control agreement between Russia and the United States.
One other key international agreement, which President Clinton signed—but, thanks to Republican opposition, the U.S. Senate has never ratified—is the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). Adopted with great fanfare in 1996 and backed by nearly all the world’s nations, the CTBT bans nuclear weapons testing, a practice which has long served as a prerequisite for developing or upgrading nuclear arsenals. Today, Bolton is reportedly pressing for the treaty to be removed from Senate consideration and “unsigned,” as a possible prelude to U.S. resumption of nuclear testing.
Nor, dear moderators, does it seem likely that any new agreements will replace the old ones. The U.S. State Department’s Office of Strategic Stability and Deterrence Affairs, which handles U.S. arms control ventures, has been whittled downduring the Trump years from 14 staff members to four. As a result, a former staffer reported, the State Department is no longer “equipped” to pursue arms control negotiations. Coincidentally, the U.S. and Russian governments, which possess approximately 93 percent of the world’s nearly 14,000 nuclear warheads, have abandoned negotiations over controlling or eliminating them for the first time since the 1950s.
Instead of honoring the commitment, under Article VI of the 1968 nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, to pursue negotiations for “cessation of the nuclear arms race” and for “nuclear disarmament,” all nine nuclear powers are today modernizing their nuclear weapons production facilities and adding new, improved types of nuclear weapons to their arsenals. Over the next 30 years, this nuclear buildup will cost the United States alone an estimated $1,700,000,000,000—at least if it is not obliterated first in a nuclear holocaust.
Will the United States and other nations survive these escalating preparations for nuclear war? That question might seem overwrought, dear moderators, but, in fact, the U.S. government and others are increasing the role that nuclear weapons play in their “national security” policies. Trump’s glib threats of nuclear war against North Korea and Iran are paralleled by new administration plans to develop a low-yield ballistic missile, which arms control advocates fear will lower the threshold for nuclear war.
Confirming the new interest in nuclear warfare, the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, in June 2019, posted a planning document on the Pentagon’s website with a more upbeat appraisal of nuclear war-fighting than seen for many years. Declaring that “using nuclear weapons could create conditions for decisive results and the restoration of strategic stability,” the document approvingly quoted Herman Kahn, the Cold War nuclear theorist who had argued for “winnable” nuclear wars and had provided an inspiration for Stanley Kubrick’s satirical film, Dr. Strangelove.
Of course, most Americans are not pining for this kind of approach to nuclear weapons. Indeed, a May 2019 opinion pollb y the Center for International and Security Studies at the University of Maryland found that two-thirds of U.S. respondents favored remaining within the INF Treaty, 80 percent wanted to extend the New START Treaty, about 60 percent supported “phasing out” U.S. intercontinental ballistic missiles, and 75 percent backed legislation requiring congressional approval before the president could order a nuclear attack.
Therefore, when it comes to presidential debates, dear moderators, don’t you—as stand-ins for the American people—think it might be worthwhile to ask the candidates some questions about U.S. preparations for nuclear war and how best to avert a global catastrophe of unprecedented magnitude?
I think these issues are important. Don’t you?
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Dr. Lawrence Wittner, syndicated by PeaceVoice, is Professor of History emeritus at SUNY/Albany. He is the author of Confronting the Bomb(Stanford University Press).
