The Wild Reed: April 2025

Sunday, April 06, 2025

Silence on Gaza Genocide Is “More Than a Mere Moral Abdication; It Is Lethal”

Muhammad Idrees Ahmad is Associate Editor at New Lines magazine and a Senior Lecturer and Director of Journalism at the University of Essex in the U.K.

As a progressive, I share Ahmad’s critique of the “moral cowardice and political myopia” of many American liberals when it comes to the Israeli government’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. He voiced this critque in the following piece posted yesterday on social media.

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Have you noticed how many American liberals see Gaza as a distraction from the “real” issues? Beyond a handful, no one talks about it. For 17 months their country has provided moral and material support to fascists perpetrating a genocide. Over $20 billion in arms, including 2000 lbs bombs, and more vetoes since 1982 than those cast by all other members of the security council combined. And yet there is no sense of responsibility, and expressions of sympathy and regret are rare.

This is a combination of both moral cowardice and political myopia. Since Gazan lives matter little to most Americans, let’s take stock of the ways this is impacting the things Americans do care about.

1. Freedom of expression in the US is at serious risk because of an organised effort to suppress speech critical of Israel. It started with hysteria about campus protests, attempts by a billionaires’ cartel led by Bill Ackman to threaten universities, pressure on institutions to use police to suppress campus protests, to arresting students based on tip-offs from the extremist Betar. As long as this was about Gaza, most people didn’t care. But with the change of government, and with a new position on Ukraine, we have already seen Columbia advising students not to speak up on Ukraine, and at least one pro-Ukraine, anti-Putin Russian academic has been arrested by ICE and faces deportation.

2. In the last election, U.S. democracy was at stake. The Democratic Party needed every vote. It’s base, especially the younger demographic, overwhelmingly opposes Israel’s actions in Gaza. They are also firmly opposed to supplying more arms for genocide. In at least one battleground state, Gaza was the leading issue. Yet, the Democratic Party leadership went out of its way to alienate its own base. Among traditional Democratic voters who sat out this election, Gaza was the leading concern. And yet, Democrats seem to have learned nothing from the experience. Chuck Schumer gave a statement supporting Trump’s actions to deport residents who “broke the law” (he was speaking in reference to Mahmoud Khalil, a green card holder who hadn’t broken any laws). Cory Booker meanwhile defied international law to host the wanted war criminal Yoav Gallant. Booker was hailed for a long filibuster during which he did not mention Gaza once.

3. Rule of law is being undermined both nationally and internationally on one hand to punish critics of Israel at home and on the other to protect Israeli war criminals abroad. But what started with Israel’s critics has already been expanded to people who might have any kind of criticism of the current regime. And the U.S. has lost all standing internationally on question of democracy, human rights, free expression, arbitrary detention.

4. Across the Middle East and even countries like India, the U.S. has never been more unpopular. Last year I took a group of Indian students for coffee at our campus cafe, and most of them refused to drink because the cafe is now a Starbucks franchise. They said it was an act of solidarity with Gaza. Even among Syrians, who were unusual in having a mostly positive view of the U.S., there is now deep revulsion. All illusions about the U.S. in particular and the west in general have evaporated. And to the extent there is still some positive feeling left, it is because of the very people American media has demonised: the students, the few dissident artists and writers, and rare politicians like Bernie Sanders.

5. Every 2000 lbs bomb dropped in a place with civilians is a massacre, let alone a place as densely populated as Gaza. The U.S. taxpayer has been supplying them for 17 months, with one or more major massacres EACH DAY. Israel dropped 600 of them within the first 40 days of its assault in Gaza alone. Your silence is more than a mere moral abdication; it is lethal.

– Muhammad Idrees Ahmad
via social media
April 5, 2025

– Source

Saturday, April 05, 2025

A Perpetual Fire Within

The Wild Reed’s 2025 Lenten series continues with a fifth excerpt from The Awakening of the Human Spirit by Inayat Khan. (For the first installment of this series and an explanation for why I chose this book, click here.)

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God is love. If God is love, love is most sacred, and to utter this word without meaning is a vain repetition. The lips of a person to whom it means something are closed; they can say little. For love is a revelation in itself: no study is necessary, no meditation is needed, no piety is required. If love is pure, if the spark of love has begun to glow, then spirituality is within. One must keep blowing the spark until it turns into a perpetual fire.

Where is that perpetual fire to be found? In one’s own heart. The spark that one finds glowing for a moment and that then becomes dim does not belong to heaven, for in heaven all things are lasting; it must belong to some other place.

Love has become a word from the dictionary, a word that is used a thousand times in the day, which means nothing. To the one who knows what it means, love means patience, love means endurance, love means tolerance, love means sacrifice, love means service. All things such as gentleness, humility, modesty, graciousness, kindness; all are the different manifestations of love. It is the same to say, “God is all and all is God,” as to say, “Love is all and all is love.” And it is to find it, to feel it, to experience its warmth, to see in the world the light of love, to keep its glow, and to hold love’s flame high as a sacred torch to guide one in one’s life’s journey to fulfill the purpose of life [which is our spiritual awakening].

– Inayat Khan
Excerpted from The Awakening of the Human Spirit
Omega Press, 1982
p. 80

NEXT:
One Wisdom

NOTE: Each post in this series is accompanied by Sufi music. Today it is an instrumental piece called “Sufi Spirit ✧ Duduk Meditation Music” from the YouTube channel Blueberry Meditation’s “Sufi Winds” series. I find this music perfect for times of meditation and prayer. Perhaps you will too.

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:

LOVE
• Douglas Richer: “God is Love and There Is That of God Within Everyone”
• Opening to Love
• With Love Inside
• Love’s the Only Dance
• Trusting the Flow
• Love Is My Guide
• Keeping the Spark Alive
• In the Garden of Spirituality – James B. Nelson
• Our Lives as LGBTQI People: “Garments Grown in Love”
• The Many Manifestations of God’s Loving Embrace
• Jesus: Our Guide to Mystical Love in Action – Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3
• The Mystic Jesus: “A Name for the Unalterable Love That All of Us Share”

AWAKENING
• Sufism: A Call to Awaken
• Don’t Go Back to Sleep
• In the Garden of Spirituality – Peng Roden Her
• Awakening
• An Extraordinary, Precious Opportunity
• The Task at Hand
• The Beauty and Challenge of Being Present in the Moment
• Shining On . . . Into the New Year

THE SUFI PATH
• Sufism: Way of Love, Tradition of Enlightenment, and Antidote to Fanaticism
• The Sufi Way
• Doris Lessing on the Sufi Way
• Sufism: A Living Twenty-First Century Tradition
• “Joined at the Heart”: Robert Thompson on Christianity and Sufism
• Clarity, Hope, and Courage
• In the Garden of Spirituality – Doris Lessing
• In the Garden of Spirituality – Kabir Helminski
• Bismillah
• As the Last Walls Dissolve . . . Everything Is Possible

INAYAT KHAN
• In the Garden of Spirituality – Inayat Khan
• Inayat Khan and the Heart of Sufism
• Inayat Khan: “There Must Be Balance”
• Inayat Khan on the Art of Selflessness

THE DIVINE PRESENCE
• “Everything Is Saturated With the Sacred”
• The Most Sacred and Simple Mystery of All
• The Source Is Within You
• Michael Morwood on the Divine Presence
• Prayer and the Experience of God in an Ever-Unfolding Universe
• Prayer of the Week – October 28, 2013
• Neil Douglas-Klotz: Quote of the Day – December 29, 2011
• Cultivating Stillness
• Thoughts on Transformation | II | III

THE LENTEN JOURNEY
• Blessing the Dust
• “This Beloved Quickened Dust”
• Ash Wednesday Reflections
• The Ashes of Our Martyrs
• Lent: A Season Set Apart
• A Lenten Resolution
• Lent: A Time to Fast and Feast
• “Here I Am!” – The Lenten Response
• Let Today Be the Day
• Pope Francis on Lenten Fasting
• “The Turn”: A Lenten Meditation by Lionel Basney
• Lent: A Summons to Live Anew
• Now Is the Acceptable Time
• Lent With Henri
• Waking Dagobert
• “Radical Returnings” – Mayday 2016 (Part 1)
• “Radical Returnings” – Mayday 2016 (Part 2)
• Move Us, Loving God

Recommended Off-site Link:
Inayat Khan and Universal Sufism – Filip Holm (Let’s Talk Religion, December 8, 2024).

Image: Alison Goss.

Friday, April 04, 2025

Sacred Convergence

Unfortunately, I won’t be back in the U.S. from Australia in time for tomorrow’s big “Hands Off!” National Day of Action. In fact, I don’t arrive back until Tuesday.

I’m sending good energy, however, to my many friends who I know will be participating. Some of these friends are seasoned activists, while others, like thousands of people across the country, will be taking their first steps into a protest setting. My hope and prayer is that tomorrow’s nationwide event will be a “sacred convergence,” one that facilitates a positive transformation both within all who gather and within the political life of the United States and beyond; a transformation that is deep and lasting.

Last night I drew the Sacred Convergence card when prayerfully centering with Alana Fairchild’s beautiful Rumi Oracle: An Invitation into the Heart of the Divine.

Following is an excerpt from the guidebook message for this card.

Sacred convergence indicates a coming together of souls in alignment with a greater cause. . . . This oracle has come to you because you are part of a great sacred convergence happening now. . . . Turn towards those connections that feel nourishing to your soul, and learn to share yourself without fear. Just be. You do not have to force the planets to spin, nor the great cycles of the soul to happen. All that is required is that you show up for what is offered to you now. Do your part. Take your steps. Dance. . . . [A]llow the gifts of sacred connection to change your world [and thus the world].

Related Off-site Links:
“There’s a Movement Bubbling Up”: Anti-Trump Protests Planned Nationwide Saturday – Sarah D. Wire (USA Today, April 4, 2025).
What to Know About Saturday’s Nationwide “Hands Off!” Anti-Trump Protests – April Rubin (Axios, April 3, 2025).
Before You Protest: A Nationwide Guide to Staying Safe, Smart, and Unshakable on April 5 – Closer to the Edge (April 3, 2025).
Resistance Rises – Dan Rather (Steady, March 31, 2025).

UPDATES: Millions March Against Trump-Musk in Nationwide “Hands Off” Protests – Common Dreams (April 5, 2025).
Huge Crowds Gather in “Hands Off” Rallies Nationwide in Protest of Trump Administration – Ivan Pereira, Christiane Cordero and Noah Minnie (ABC News, April 5, 2025).
“Hands Off!” Rally Draws Thousands to Minnesota Capitol to Protest Trump – Nicole Neri (Minnesota Reformer, April 5, 2025).
Don't Believe Fake Trump Post About George Soros Paying Protesters – Joey Esposito (Snopes, April 7, 2025).
Democracy Is Dying in Broad Daylight: How Trump Is Leading a Totalitarian Coup – Marianne Williamson (Rising, April 8, 2025).

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• Trusting the Flow
• Surrendering in Sacred Trust
• The Guidance of Higher Forces
• Trust and Surrender
• Our Dance
• Love’s the Only Dance
• Move Us, Loving God
• In Istanbul, Protests of Both Stillness and Motion
• Sufism: A Call to Awaken
• Don’t Go Back to Sleep
• Called to the Field of Compassion to Be Both Prophet and Mystic
• Mysticism and Revolution
• Protesting Trump’s “Dystopian” Immigration Policies
• Timothy Snyder on Resisting the Oligarchs’ “Logic of Destruction”
• “This Is Essentially Viktor Orbán’s Playbook”
• “An Extremely Clever Ruse”
• “To Be a Rib in This Body of Our Country”
• “This Isn’t Politics Anymore. This Is Treason”
• Robert Reich’s Ten Reasons for “Modest Optimism” During the Trump-Vance-Musk Regime
• Today’s Economic Blackout
• Building Solidarity on the Left
• “The Moment Is Ripe”: Butch Ware on Building a “True Oppositional Alternative” to the Duopoly
• Ralph Nader: “We’re Heading Into the Most Serious Crisis in American History. There’s No Comparison”
• Progressive Perspectives on Bernie Sanders’ “Fighting Oligarchy” Tour

Image: Card #11 (“Sacred Convergence”) in Rumi Oracle: An Invitation into the Heart of the Divine by Alana Fairchild. (Llewellyn Publications, 2016). Artwork by Rassouli.

Thursday, April 03, 2025

Progressive Perspectives on Cory Booker’s Marathon Speech

UPDATED 4/6/25

In a time marked by unspeakable horrors in Gaza, the Democratic Party faithful still found time to laud Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) for his 25-hour Senate speech. His spectacle, hailed as a triumph of Democratic grit, reveals a deep rot in a party so enamored with its own theatrics that it turns a blind eye to the carnage it funded and supported under the Biden administration.

To cheer Booker while Palestinians in Gaza are being slaughtered by Israel is not just tone-deaf. It is a damning indictment of a party as morally bankrupt as the Republicans led by President Trump.

The numbers alone should stop us cold. Since October 2023, Israel’s offensive has led to the deaths of more than 59,000 Palestinians in Gaza (one-third of them children), injured more than 116,000, buried countless others under Gaza’s rubble, and made millions homeless. In addition, Israel has deliberately cut off food, water and electricity – a war crime that the U.S. has done nothing to stop – that is pushing Gaza to the edge of famine.

Last week, reports emerged of Israeli soldiers executing 15 paramedics. In addition, since the beginning of 2024 the UN has reported discovery of mass graves around a number of hospitals containing the bodies of executed Palestinians.

Yet amid this ongoing carnage, Democrats chose to fawn over Booker’s speech which, for all its stamina, did nothing to fix America’s broken moral compass. This is not the mark of a party that values humanity. It is the behavior of a political cult, obsessed with symbolic gestures while failing to address real problems affecting people’s lives.

Booker himself is also guilty. He has pocketed hundreds of thousands of dollars over the years from pro-Israel groups. Far from being a champion of justice, Booker (like other Democrats) is a cog in the machine that Democrats have oiled and maintained that has led to the Gaza carnage.

The accolades for Booker aren’t just misplaced – they are symptoms of a pestilence within the Democratic establishment. Democrats condemn Trumpism as a fascist specter, yet the party’s unwavering support for Israel, its coziness with corporate interests and its refusal to confront its own complicity have erased any claim to moral superiority.

– Fareed Khan
Excerpted from “Praise for Booker Amid
Gaza Carnage Is a Sign of Democrats’ Moral Bankruptcy”
The Hill
April 6, 2025

In 25 hours of performance nonsense, lobby-paid shill of the Israeli regime Senator Cory Booker did not have a single word to say about the genocide in Palestine, one funded and defended by the very body he was addressing.

Outside the chamber, the slaughter continued throughout his speech.

Booker is not a voice of reason or decency. He is a supporter of genocide and a symbol of the corruption, deception, and decadence of the Congress – on both sides of the aisle.

– Craig Mokhiber
via social media
April 2, 2025

Folks, I know we are desperate for heroes, fot people who recognize the urgency of the moment, and are willing to take even a symbolic stand. We need to work with just about anyone in order to stop Trump. At the same time, I have a hard time getting excited about Sen. Cory Booker, given his support for the likes of Yoav Gallant, indicted by the International Criminal Court for “the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare; and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts.”

– Stephen Zunes
via social media
April 2, 2025

How do you speak for 25 hours straight without mentioning the genocide we are funding? Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have been killed with our bombs and our tax dollars.

How can you claim to defend democracy here while supporting fascism elsewhere? Genocide is always the red line.

– Crystal Reina
via social media
April 1, 2025

And finally, I appreciate the following by Kevin LaFleur, shared elsewhere online about the above Code Pink video . . .

Thank you! I’m so glad people are pushing back against this cheerleading of Cory Booker’s latest performative b.s. Empty performative words unless he points to specifics. Aren’t we all aware that an apology is meaningless without showing you actually learned something about something specific? Like he could address the Democrats’ prioritizing genocide over winning an easy and crucial election, or in sending the police after our own students and faculty who peacefully protested the same, or he could admit the party drags its feet on women's issues that it campaigns on so that they can campaign on it again next time and sollicite donations from you all. He apologized for NONE of that. He takes responsibility for none of it, just this vague and vacuous “I’m not perfect,” diatribe. No one’s looking for perfect; we’re looking for basic adult responsibility, accountability, leadership, and representation. I can’t believe Dems are still eating this garbage up as if this dude has done anything to take a real stand.

– Kevin LaFleur
via social media
April 1, 2025

Wednesday, April 02, 2025

A Living Light

The Wild Reed’s 2025 Lenten series continues with a fourth excerpt from The Awakening of the Human Spirit by Inayat Khan. (For the first installment of this series and an explanation for why I chose this book, click here.)

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It is very difficult to judge an awakened soul, as they say in the East, for there is nothing outwardly to prove its condition. The best way of seeing an awakened soul is to wake up oneself, but no one in the world can pretend to be awake when they are still asleep. . . . All other pretences one can make, but not the one of being an awakened soul, for it is a living light. Truth is born in the awakening of the soul, and truth is not taught, truth is discovered. The knowledge of truth cannot be compared with the knowledge of forms or ideas; truth is beyond forms and ideas. What is it? It is itself and it is our Self.

Very often people make an effort, though in vain, to awaken a friend or a near relation whom they love. But in the first place, we do not know if that person is more awakened than we ourselves; we may be trying for nothing. And the other point is that it is possible that a person who is asleep needs that sleep. Waking them in that case would be a sin instead of a virtue. We are only allowed to give our hand to the one who is turning over in their sleep, who desires to wake up; only then a hand is given. It is in this giving of the hand that is called initiation. No doubt a teacher who is acquainted with this path may give a hand outwardly to the one who wishes to journey, but inwardly there is the Teacher who has always given and always gives a hand to awakening souls, the same hand that has received the sages and masters of all time in a higher initiation. Verily, the seeker will find sooner or later, if only they keep steadily on the path until they arrive at their destination.

– Inayat Khan
Excerpted from The Awakening of the Human Spirit
Omega Press, 1982
pp. 122-123

NEXT:
A Perpetual Fire Within

NOTE: Each post in this series is accompanied by Sufi music. Today it is an instrumental piece called “As You Start to Walk on the Way, the Way Appears” from the YouTube channel Buddha’s Lounge’s RUMI Spiritual Music Live Stream. I find this music perfect for times of meditation and prayer. Perhaps you will too.

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:

AWAKENING
• Sufism: A Call to Awaken
• Don’t Go Back to Sleep
• In the Garden of Spirituality – Peng Roden Her
• Awakening
• An Extraordinary, Precious Opportunity
• The Task at Hand
• The Beauty and Challenge of Being Present in the Moment
• Shining On . . . Into the New Year

THE SUFI PATH
• Sufism: Way of Love, Tradition of Enlightenment, and Antidote to Fanaticism
• The Sufi Way
• Doris Lessing on the Sufi Way
• Sufism: A Living Twenty-First Century Tradition
• “Joined at the Heart”: Robert Thompson on Christianity and Sufism
• Clarity, Hope, and Courage
• In the Garden of Spirituality – Doris Lessing
• In the Garden of Spirituality – Kabir Helminski
• Bismillah
• As the Last Walls Dissolve . . . Everything Is Possible

INAYAT KHAN
• In the Garden of Spirituality – Inayat Khan
• Inayat Khan and the Heart of Sufism
• Inayat Khan: “There Must Be Balance”
• Inayat Khan on the Art of Selflessness

THE DIVINE PRESENCE
• Aligning With the Living Light
• “Everything Is Saturated With the Sacred”
• The Most Sacred and Simple Mystery of All
• The Source Is Within You
• Michael Morwood on the Divine Presence
• Prayer and the Experience of God in an Ever-Unfolding Universe
• Prayer of the Week – October 28, 2013
• Neil Douglas-Klotz: Quote of the Day – December 29, 2011
• Cultivating Stillness
• Thoughts on Transformation | II | III

THE LENTEN JOURNEY
• Blessing the Dust
• “This Beloved Quickened Dust”
• Ash Wednesday Reflections
• The Ashes of Our Martyrs
• Lent: A Season Set Apart
• A Lenten Resolution
• Lent: A Time to Fast and Feast
• “Here I Am!” – The Lenten Response
• Let Today Be the Day
• Pope Francis on Lenten Fasting
• “The Turn”: A Lenten Meditation by Lionel Basney
• Lent: A Summons to Live Anew
• Now Is the Acceptable Time
• Lent With Henri
• Waking Dagobert
• “Radical Returnings” – Mayday 2016 (Part 1)
• “Radical Returnings” – Mayday 2016 (Part 2)
• Move Us, Loving God

Recommended Off-site Link:
Inayat Khan and Universal Sufism – Filip Holm (Let’s Talk Religion, December 8, 2024).

Iimage: Artist unknown.

Tuesday, April 01, 2025

The Only Difference

In writing about the Trump State Department’s response to the murder by Israeli forces of 15 medical workers from the Red Cross, Civil Defense, and the U.N., Caitlin Johnstone highlights the “only difference” between Democrats and Republicans in relation to Israel’s ongoing genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. Following is an excerpt.

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It’s plain as day that there’s absolutely no crime Israel could possibly commit that Trump’s State Department wouldn’t defend. Netanyahu could live stream himself kicking a baby Palestinian off a cliff and telling the camera he did it because he wants to commit genocide, and the next day [State Department spokesperson] Tammy Bruce would respond to all questions about the incident by yelling the word “Hamas!” with her fingers in her ears.

Bruce has a much easier job than her predecessor Matthew Miller, who under Biden was obligated to facilitate the Democratic Party’s role as the nice guy face of the U.S. empire. When the press would ask Miller about Israeli atrocities, he’d have to put on a whole show about how the Biden administration is in conversation with Israel and waiting for more information about these very serious allegations, all while fighting to keep his notorious smirk off his face.

To be clear, these two positions are not meaningfully different from one another. Pretending to care about very serious atrocity allegations while continuing to sponsor those atrocities is exactly the same as not pretending to care about very serious atrocity allegations while continuing to sponsor those atrocities. One is a pile of dead children with a smiley face sticker on it, the other is a pile of dead children with a frowny face sticker on it. The children are just as dead either way.

And you really couldn’t ask for a better illustration of the difference between Democrats and Republicans than this. The Democrats are just the polite, photogenic face of the bloodthirsty U.S. empire, while the Republicans are the empire unmasked. The Democrats commit genocide and ethnic cleansing while denying they’re committing genocide and ethnic cleansing, while Republicans commit genocide and ethnic cleansing without bothering to disguise what they’re doing as something else. One’s prettier, one’s uglier. That’s the only difference.

– Caitlin Johnstone
Excerpted from “Trump’s State Department
Would Support Literally Any Israeli Atrocity”
Caitlin’s Newsletter
April 1, 2025