Weekly News Roundup
Friends! It's been quite a week at BPF and Turning Wheel! Our call for submissions on the Dharma of Food Justice dropped, and we're already confirming contributions from authors, poets, and activists that I'm super excited about. (I'm talking people whose work I've been following for years! Yes!) And last Sunday here in Oakland we held our first installment of "What's Up With Engaged Buddhism" (video and photos coming soon!). Now I'm catching my breath and getting up to speed with some recent news. Here are a few highlights."You cannot liberate women through occupation, through war, through violence…"
As protests popped off in Chicago at this week's NATO Summit, US Army veterans teamed up with Afghans For Peace (helmed by women) to lead anti-war marches. When Amy Goodman asked Afghans For Peace activist Suraia Sahar about propaganda congratulating NATO for supporting Afghan women (around minute 34:00 of the video), Sahar dropped some wisdom:
No, I think that's an absolute ridiculous joke. They are not liberating Afghanistan's women. You cannot liberate women through occupation, through war, through violence, through bombs, through tanks, through weapons. That's not how you do it. And it's quite offensive to me as an Afghan woman standing here before you. … [Afghan women] need to be empowered. We need to refocus our priorities on their basic human needs. Education. Health care … Education and health care would be the top two, and also we need to focus on reconciliation efforts, and on reparations.
All of NY now forced to share fingerprints with Department of Homeland SecurityRemember when "Secure Communities" (a.k.a. S-Comm), a horrible US immigration program that ramps up deportations by automatically sharing local law enforcement's fingerprint checks with DHS, was billed as optional? As in, each county could decide whether or not to adopt it? Yeah, not so much. In New York, Mayor Bloomberg has adopted the program on behalf of the entire state.Rumors of German police joining anti-capitalist protesters proved false
A photo on Occupy Canada's Facebook page, shared 23,425 times as of this writing, depicts helmet-less riot cops in Frankfurt walking in front of the "Blockupy" protest (estimated 20,000 people), with a caption saying that the police took off their helmets and badges and joined the march. What's most interesting to me about this apparently false rumor is how many activist and engaged Buddhist friends of mine on Facebook seemed excited to believe it. Makes me curious to study more examples of when police and military (often very different from each other) actually do defect and join mass movements.Women in Bhutan talk gender discrimination in religious institutions
Much love to The Buddhist Channel for its wonderful offerings of worldwide news on dharma. A new article on the site this week reports on a public lecture by women authors and spiritual leaders, given in Bhutan, in which the speakers emphasized that despite discriminatory institutional practices, women do have spiritual capacities equal to men.*
When a male from among the audience asked how men are responding to empowerment of women efforts, Swati Chopra said, “They dig in their heels, and use tradition as a reason, but women also don’t support women, as a result of internalising tradition; but right now there is nothing to worry about, the wave is still being built.”
*To avoid reducing gender to a binary, I'd add that people of all genders have equal spiritual capacities. :)What else?What news on social transformation has been on your mind this week? Feel free to share!