2008 December 02 « Rev. Danny Fisher

Religion Dispatches: Nick Street on the "Guilty" AIDS Sufferers

On the occasion of World AIDS Day 2008, Sōtō Zen priest and journalist Nick Street has a remarkable new piece at Religion Dispatches on AIDS, innocence, and compassion. This is required reading.

I wrote a big post about an article Street wrote for the Los Angeles Times last year.

Shambhala Sun: Celebrating 30 Great Years of Buddhism in America

Shambhala Sun has kindly made available online the full text of an article in their newest issue: senior editor Barry Boyce’s “Celebrating Buddhism in America: 30 Great Years”. It’s a wonderful piece–give it a read.

December 2, 2008

The Price of Silence

Visit http://www.amnesty.org.

December 2, 2008

Burma News (12.2.08)

Here are some new news items on Burma:

Today’s Boston Globe features a powerful op-ed piece by Chris Beyrer, director of the Center for Public Health and Rights at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and Frank Donaghue, CEO for Physicians for Human Rights. Their subject is the “unnatural disaster” in Burma: a “profoundly inhumane” system for disaster relief in Burma in which “good Samaritans [are] punished for their compassion.” This is a must-read.

Variety reports that Burma VJ–Reporting from a Closed Country, a new documentary “which describes the work of a group of citizen reporters who secretly filmed the uprising against the military dictatorship in Burma in September 2007,” won the top prize at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam, “the world’s top event for documentary features.”

In a new piece as part of her ongoing series for the Democratic Voice of Burma, author Gemma Dursley considers alternatives to nonviolent resistance and concludes (as I and others have):

…It is crucial to understand that any attempt at violent resistance would run into the same obstacles that impede nonviolent action, while possessing none of the advantages of the latter. Instead of allowing themselves to be led by the military into a futile armed confrontation, activists should concentrate on circumventing the obstacles to collective action imposed by the junta, presenting a coherent and united movement for change, and maintaining a commitment to nonviolent methods.

December 2, 2008

Tibet News (12.2.08)

Here are some of today’s headlines about the situation in Tibet:

At his blog Pomfret’s China, author John Pomfret writes about China’s refusal to talk “as Rome burns.”

In the letters to the editor in yesterday’s New York Times, the British Foreign Office’s Minister of State responds to Columbia University Tibetologist Robbie Barnett’s recent op-ed “Did Britain Just Sell Tibet?”

The Agence France-Presse reports that while in Prague His Holiness the Dalai Lama said:

I’m always telling my friends that a good, a close relationship with a huge country like China is very essential, and not only for the economy. But in the meantime, there are principles, like freedom of expression, human rights, democracy… for which you have to stand firm. Genuine friendship leaves a space to be firm, and at the end the other does appreciate (that)… That is genuine friendship, but sometimes for totalitarian people it is difficult to understand those things.

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