Resistance Strategies

But the ECI is no friend to Israel.

Ours is primarily a linear society which rewards building, doing, improving, and growing. It’s no surprise, then, that countercultural movements have tended to emphasize circles: consensus rather than hierarchy, egalitarianism, nuanced notions of ‘progress.’ Does this sound familiar? It should—it’s behind a lot of what observers have noticed about the Occupy movement: that there are no clear goals, no policy prescriptions, no realistic (i.e., incremental) demands.

Saturday’s surge of Occupy Wall Street-themed actions could be a turning point. There’s obviously more to be felt and said about this than any journalistic treatment could hope to engage; nonetheless, four RD contributors, moderated by Senior Editor Sarah Posner, shared their own thoughts about a movement that remains fluid and thrilling and quite literally indescribable.

The organizer behind the Kol Nidre service at Occupy Wall Street says the Jewish establishment has asked Jews to “check our social justice values” at the door.

Now that the curtain’s been pulled back on the false wizardry of a deregulated financial system, and Americans have been left holding a bag full of bank bailouts, home foreclosures, historic levels of unemployment and poverty, and wage stagnation for those with jobs, “loser” is a label most of us can, in one way or another, wear easily in the current economy. So goes the American Dream these days.

Eric Cantor says he’s “concerned.”

Under normal circumstances, we would view the words of atonement in the Kol Nidre service as speaking about our own spiritual commitments—but these are not normal circumstances.

He wrote to his mother, saying, more or less, Jesus was only a man and a man is on his own. It’s clear that there was a lot of anguish in that decision. If anything, untethering his conscience from religion put more pressure on him to prove himself and his sincerity. When Evan was manacled to the bars of his cell in Fort Leavenworth because of his absolute refusal to serve the army, his friend (and President Wilson’s son-in-law’s brother) John Nevin Sayre went to Wilson on his behalf and repeatedly described Evan to Wilson as Christ-like. Evan would have hated that description, but clearly part of him wanted that and needed that kind of commitment.

While many books will no doubt be written about the momentous events that are unfolding in the Middle East, many of them will doubtless leave out the prehistory. By exploring the rich tradition of nonviolent resistance in the Muslim world—from Palestine and Pakistan, to Kosovo and the Maldives—Amitabh Pal dispels the oft-repeated misconception that what we are witnessing in the Arab Spring is without precedent.

By repeatedly asking what was in his heart, the FBI seems to have, not only sought to establish intent, but assumed that Muslim militancy is directly related to religion. Moreover, its operative assumption about religion was an implicitly Protestant one which conceived religion as an inward experience (faith) rather than the more Islamic conception of religion as the moral standard by which people ought to be judged. While the FBI was trying to ascertain the intent of Mohamud’s heart, Mohamud himself, by FBI’s own account of events, appears to have been preoccupied with creating sensational headlines.