Monthly Archives: August 2012

Be Careful of the Truth – Crucifixion in Yemen Appears True

31 Friday Aug 2012

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Yemen

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On August 22, 2012, I picked up a story making the rounds on Facebook having to do with reporting the emergence of crucifixion in Egypt, and I looked into it (“Be Careful of the Truth — Crucified Christians in Egypt — Not Corroborated”).

A downloaded copy of the photograph accompanying the claim yielded no IPTC (International Press Telecommunications Council) data, and continued web searching led me to what I considered a reliable debunking.

However, with credit extended to the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), not only the picture but a video clip of the same appeared in relation to a spy caught having betrayed an Islamist group in Yemen.

I saw it first here on the Blazing Cat Fur blog, n.d.

And found a listing for something at least like it here:

#3552 – Man Crucified by Al-Qaeda in Yemen – Viewer Discretion Advised
The Internet – August 27, 2012 – 01:14

A subscription is required to view it — same or different, but same category — on the MEMRI site, and I’m looking into that.

The flip with dates (August 22, first round; August 27, posted by MEMRI; by August 30, well along in the anti-Jihad industry) I take as indicative of how information continues to crawl off the street and up to the web from the world’s most remote locales.

In the meantime, the Blogosphere seems to have picked it up and gotten its facts straight — “Sheik Yer Mami” (Winds of Jihad) notes a Jihad source on YouTube as a  primary location (see “Crucifixion in Yemen,” August 30, 2012 for the video plus that detail).

I suspect most believe the “War on Terror” involves neutralizing a number of violent moral entrepreneurs and their networks, but to my mind that’s a small part of a much, much larger story having to do with the development, installation, and continuing support of certain critical and laudable values and virtues worldwide, starting with the definition of “good conscience” (it’s not mapped the same for  everywhere, one reason I’ve launched this blog)) and then the possession by persons and groups of credibility and integrity within themselves and in relation to other persons across a world rapidly integrating its communicating and information resources and content.

War may be called deception; taqiyya may be advised: evil, however, begins with such easily digested lies and the lies to come from having swallowed both.

In war, deception may be a tactic, but wars are about other things — e.g., the possession of resources; the displacement, modification, or termination of cultures and their customs and languages — and “taqiyya”, ever loosely accessed (one well may lie to save life — for the western mind, there’s not much need to put a label on that), seems only to serve to make liars out of people who would otherwise be forthright.

When an overzealous, special interest press chooses to copy a photograph appearing in one context or application in an event alleged to have taken place elsewhere, it corrupts, dishonors, and sabotages itself.

Yesterday in Eritrea; yesterday in Somalia; yesterday in Waziristan; yesterday in Gaza: aggressive spoilers, parties to war, parties to cultural imperialism or annihilation (both) in the name of one cause or another, could, would, and did, with impunity, fabricate stories a very few or none could check.  Their common intention (never mind ends): power through the manipulation of perception in line with  mercenary agendas.

For the more remote regions of our planet, that thing called “yesterday” is closing, swept away by camera phones, tablets with recorders, and the World Wide Web.

It may go shaking its fists.

It may go slowly.

However difficult it may be to see it; however short our lives in comparison to such processes — and this across a frontier unique in recorded history, i.e., a frontier about mind globally — the past that has been past for some time will recede.

“I C U”.

Remember that?

Do.

An Opinion on Circumcision

26 Sunday Aug 2012

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Religion

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The religious and resulting ethnic basis: “10 This is My covenant, which ye shall keep, between Me and you and thy seed after thee: every male among you shall be circumcised. 11 And ye shall be circumcised in the flesh of your foreskin; and it shall be a token of a covenant betwixt Me and you. 12 And he that is eight days old shall be circumcised among you, every male throughout your generations, he that is born in the house, or bought with money of any foreigner, that is not of thy seed. 13 He that is born in thy house, and he that is bought with thy money, must needs be circumcised; and My covenant shall be in your flesh for an everlasting covenant. 14 And the uncircumcised male who is not circumcised in the flesh of his foreskin, that soul shall be cut off from his people; he hath broken My covenant.”[1]

I survived it.

Should I ever have a son, I’m sure he’ll survive it too.

The Chomskyesque internationalism that has set out to erase differences — ethnic, linguistic, religious — seems to want its dismal end in a colorless, faceless, godless, joyless, technocratic slum.

Perhaps older and wiser than intended, I still prefer to believe in magic, and that a signal of the presence of freedom and faith.

Reference

Rose, Joshua.  “The Intolerable Chutzpah of the Anti-Circumcision Movement.”  A Grain of Sand, June 5, 2011.

Sharon, Jeremy, Lahav Harkov, Benjamin Weinth.  “Yishai to Merkel: Stop criminalization of brit mila.”  The Jerusalem Post, August 23, 2012.

Wikipedia.  “Brit Milah”.

A Pearl Forms Around An Irritating Grain of Sand

24 Friday Aug 2012

Posted by in A Little Wisdom, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation

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The world has an irritant to which to respond, and the goodness of it is that it wakes up and starts moving around this adverse presence, but such a process may be very slow both in growing consciousness and in the development of many areas of response, some dismal and wearing the colors of many nations, some sublime and becoming the first poems of a new literature for a new world.

From the Awesome Conversation — “I Am Not An Atheist . . . .”

23 Thursday Aug 2012

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I guess I love to talk by “chatyping”.

Even back in my Booz (Allen and Hamilton) days, lunch and bbc-type intranet went together, not necessarily a good thing because in some corporate environments, people may track what others say with interest in evaluating or stinging the same down the road.

Then too, there are some “thought police” scattered around the world: the existence of state-controlled media tells as much, and the various wars on various nasty cabal and larger organizations involve every kind of intelligence “listening post” and cyber-scanning.

The machines want to know some things, one may suppose, and certainly all those offices also want to know the nature of the various species crawling across their once pristine and easily defined battlespace: forget about cartel kingpins and venal state lobbyists — what do with so many friendlies zipping and zapping everywhere in shark tank cyberspace?

God bless ’em.

And God bless us, one and all.

In any case, come forward about 17 years from the olden days and upwards of, I don’t know, maybe 30,000 or more messages typed online in various communities, and here am I (and you perhaps) with Facebook and both of us — all of us — somewhere in the middle of an awesome conversation, and it turns out I like what I type in short form.

Of course, I’ve had a lot of practice.

The subject was an aphorism that I “Liked” in the Facebook way: “Morality is doing the right thing regardless of what you were told; Religion is doing what you were told regardless of what is right.”

I laughed too.

And then I thought about it.

—–

Although I got a chuckle out of this, I feel I should mention that I am not an atheist, do not advocate “no religion”, and do believe that the cultivation of “good conscience” may be derived from and integrated with culture, cultural values, language in general, language metonymy more specifically, language behavior (sensibility and timbre in expression), and the vagaries of individual psychology and various social processes. If we follow the black-and-white inversion that may formulate as Too Much Religion –> No Religion, the barren quality in that may force even the most rigorous intellectuals to advocate as healthy the presence and persistence of magical, romantic, and universal thought.

The matter of resisting malicious ideas and impulses comprise a large part of moral and religious instruction, but a few can and do get their grip on the levers of institutions and in the pursuit of their own “dreams of glory” lose the better part of their humanity. They are those who exceed limits, cannot contain themselves, become the worst hypocrites, and, when so empowered, lead their people to ruin.

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Be Careful of the Truth — Crucified Christians in Egypt — Not Corroborated

22 Wednesday Aug 2012

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology

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I’ve pulled directly from my Facebook wall on this.  It’s too long a rant for my “A Little Wisdom” section, which may one day make a fine chapbook, but for any coming aboard the good blogship Backchannels, it’s a fair reflection of how I think:

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Be careful of the truth — whatever it may be — and be even more cautious with insinuation and rumor.http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2012/08/22/jonathan-kay-how-egypts-crucifixion-hoax-became-a-classic-internet-urban-legend/ Those who mislead to lead always lose their followers. It may take a while; the damage done by sewing animus and confusion may be immeasurable; but, God willing, and often proven so, those arrows called “libel” and “slander” have a way of turning around and returning direct to the hearts of their owners.

Within the complexity of what I call the ‘Islamic Small Wars” and in the interface with many traditions, there are two words that may determine how things go: they are “credibility” and “integrity” — and they are ideal. They refer not only to what people may tell others and what others may accept or choose to accept even well aware of their existence as lies, but they are all things said within hearing of God, or, if the reader should not believe, that good sense of better nature one might call “conscience”.

—–

My experience with the habits of the special interest press has not been reassuring.  Horrific political accommodations, limited press access to hot spots, remoteness itself seem to encourage lying, whatever the writer (and publication) can get away with until someone plods through the muck to check it out.

There may be one problem with our heads on this topic: can a way out story — a good conspiracy theory, say, or simply a tree that fell in the forest with one “listener” reporting — be definitively scotched?

Welcome to the land of things left unsaid (so many things, eh?) and things not shown (there were not many people around or no one had a cell phone or no one wanted to take the picture).

Uh huh.

Be wary of tarrying too long long in the Land of Unconfirmed — and impossible to disprove — Possibilities.

Edup12 Presents An Interview With Hitler’s Secretary Traudl Junge

21 Tuesday Aug 2012

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Europe

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Source: http://www.youtube.com/user/edup12

Posted here with thanks to my private correspondent in Lithuania and to YouTube’s “Edup12” for bringing this and more to light.

The study of “malignant narcissists” and how they do what they do has a complement in inquiry into the character of their enablers and their followers.  The above is longer than a “sound bite”, but hang with it: it has many things to say  about evil and its seductions.

The case for pathological narcissism and its characteristic defensiveness and obliviousness to others — and to reality, socially, sometimes physically — only becomes more clear as this filter borne of comparisons and observations becomes itself more resolving; then too, the charismatic effects of what may present as a happily grandiose mania may become more clear to those endangered as its targets or, far worse, enthralled by its recklessness and the first appearance of its excesses.

Traudl Junge was about 13 years old in 1933 and all of 25 when she found herself sharing the bunker in which Hitler committed suicide.

And here is a kicker — I didn’t like the cut of the film sent by way of Lithuania, and so went looking, briefly (in the way of the web), for another look at a part of André Heller’s Blind Spot documentary (source picked up from John Hooper’s reporting in The Guardian in 2002).

It’s different.

(Source: http://youtu.be/h5igDo-KJJo)

And yet much the same.

The second clip, early on, explains the voice-over appearing in the first (reaction shots Junge’s watching her own interview on a monitor).

And now — again, in the way of the World Wide Web –something really different:

And yet too much the same.

If we could not laugh, we would cry.

Other Reference

Hooper, John.  “Traudl Junge: She shared Hitler’s bunker, but claimed ignorance of the Holocaust.”  Obituary.  The Guardian, February 14, 2002.

Wikipedia.  “Traudl Junge”: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traudl_Junge

Docudrama available via YouTube (1:15:48) — Der Untergang Part 1 (Downfall)

“Freedom of Belief in the Islamic World” — A Video Featuring Moroccan Expatriate Deist Kacem El Ghazzali

20 Monday Aug 2012

Posted by in Religion

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As noted, I participate in the Rationalist Society of Pakistan’s forum hosted by Facebook, and the breadth of arguments and presentations of evidence should surprise those in the “anti-Jihad” who have taken the most pessimistic approach available toward all things Islam.  The above video comes by way of that forum and may be making the rounds today — I posted the same to my wall a few minutes ago — in that medium.

Kacem El Ghazzali, who blogs in English at Atheistica (now listed also to the left) strikes me as a young Moroccan version of the literary icon long familiar to English souls who have dipped into the whirlpools swirling around religion: Christopher Hitchens.

“Hitch” left us late last year, and, God willing, he will not have met his maker, nor heaven nor hell or any of that, but from my sentimental view may God bless him anyway, as he fought relentlessly for a better, more kind and thoughtful humanity.

Again, Hitch has left his mark and is gone, and as so much having to do with The English, the voices of others, even if in English in addition to some other more primary language for each,  have been surfacing on the radars of a rapidly developing international and typing-in-English (soon to become Skyping, I’m sure) intelligentsia.

Welcome then Kacem el Ghazzali, who is just starting his long journey across a short leg in the overall journey of Man.

If one takes “The Emperor’s New Clothes” as template, Ghazzali, who is by no means as innocent of power as the boy in the Hans Christian Anderson fairy tale, has in the boy’s place spoken to the powers that be (and those that merely roam about) — and he’s heard back in snarky comments and death threats.

“I have the fear,” Ghazzali says to Michael Coren, “but I can’t really submit, I can’t really stop what I’m doing because the cause I have is not only for me but for the thousands of young people who are living the Islamist’s war, and their conditions of life and conditions of security are much, much, much bad than what I have here.”

A mensch!

Coren goes on to bring up Hitchens, so here too is Hitchens, who has perhaps set a standard for toughened and unsentimental reasoning:

My own stance: Jewish.  I prefer to throw in with God, my people, and the ancient and customary one-sided Friday evening chit-chat with the Almighty, but I am ever mindful of nature too and within it our human potential in evolution that runs alongside the stupidity in some that finds necessity in fashioning by their own grandiose aspirations the suffering of others.