Social and theological issues within scripture abound, and the injunctive voice tends only to underscore them.
I have seen some awful wrap-ups on Islam, am familiar with what the “islamophobes” access — e.g., Answering Muslims / Acts 17 Apologetics — and from the hardcore of the angered, have gotten the the ghosts left in direct memory from such far flung places as Congo, which has been riven with related religious warfare (x tribal competition for valuable mining resources).
While the news gathers, distributes, and promotes sensational events, the “Great Conversation”, echo of another age, that has ensued has to go somewhere, and unreasoning defense doesn’t do that — but chatter toward the moderate, peaceful, and reasoning trumps violence any day.
Where we have good relationships, decency, at least, in Christian-Jewish-Muslim discourse, I don’t believe it’s because of scripture or related spiritual guidance: it’s because of us, the speaking, and time. Our medieval world, the same that Putin, Assad, Khamenei, and Baghdadi have struggled to sustain, needs to be “back there” somewhere in the cabinet of things we used to do or recall in history as having gone through.
This is history in the making.
IF the Islamists are heretics, shouldn’t they be treated as such? If they are those who have exceeded limits (not much question about that) or who could not restrain themselves, should they not be addressed that way?
My “sword blade” on all of this has been a very light political psychology taking note of the nature of dictatorship and related malignant narcissism. The outlook doesn’t tie to any one political or religious body or system of thought but rather wants a look at certain leaders, their systems, and their followers.
*** (From another part of the same conversation) —
The Muslim Brotherhood, the modern intellectual mothership, believes the activities of any number of related organizations grounded in Islamic theology. However, the same may not see itself as irretrievably chained to medievalism in its realpolitik, i.e., it really wants to rule and believes it should (as in Egypt, so briefly). The Islamic flavor, at least, if not character, of Islam’s troubled JiSadists can neither be blinked nor masked away, but it may be approached with a wider lens on the scope of its own history (and favored legends, like the Banu Qurayza, like Saffiya).
Some leaders would rather be feared than liked.
Most people would rather be liked than feared.
đ
Despite ourselves — and our various legacies in holy marching orders — we’re likely to tend (and “trend”) toward peace without mind-dulling, soul-numbing subjugation and subjection. Â Dictatorships are becoming just oh so yesterday.
However, as in chemistry, change needs heat — extra activity — and the Ummah is getting that with every acid drop of terror spilled into the global body politic in its name.
First: defensiveness and denial, behaviors in keeping with narcissistic maintenance (whatever it is, it’s never ourselves — while “ourselves” are always a part of our problems).
Second: as with New Age Islam, rejection of a too familiar path and engagement in introspection and long conversations, and probably the long walks too that help with new writing.
Third: a glimpse of the future, that end of the tunnel sunny day, or so it may look on the way to it, never mind that it might prove another wilderness: at least it will be a different one.
Fourth: change — when you have something to go to and it looks good — one goes.
BackChannels may turn out “ChriJewsLim”, which would be fine, for what goes on living and doing so well, poor or rich, wealthy in friends or in solitude, is fine.
For the first time, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has confirmed on the record that Israelâs prime minster offered him a map of the borders of a Palestinian state in 2008, and he turned it downâand Iâm still waiting for a word of this to appear on an international news agency or website.
Itâs the 2008 peace proposal that I discovered in March 2009, but my employers, The Associated Press, banned me from writing about it. A version of the map is here.
Israeli TVâs Channel 10 just wrapped up a three-part series about the peace talks in 2000 and 2008. In an on-camera interview, Abbas confirmed, in Arabic, that he was offered a map with borders of a Palestinian the equivalent to all of the West Bank (with some exchanges of territory), all of Gaza and a land link between the two. He refused to initial it, he said, becauseâŚ
Putin’s Feudal Revanche, the One Big Step Backward, involves many moving parts and relationships (e.g., Putin-Assad-Khamenei, Putin-Khamenei, Putin-Orban; Syrian Tragedy, partially enabled by Moscow on behalf of Damascus; a war on the lawful, NATO, and the west masked behind fighting “the terrorists”, which in Syria appear to have been incubated by Assad — and now Russia — preferencing moderate rebel targets over opportunities to slam the al-Qaeda Typicals), but it appears to have as its end the installation of 19th Century Feudalism (“New Nobility” and all) in our 21st Century. Â Required: renewed “blood and soil nationalism” — and nationalist fervor — everywhere.
Much to the chagrin of Syrians I know — not those concert goers in Damascus, God bless them for maintaining the more delightful aspects of western civilization, but the refugees of indiscriminate barrel bombs and chemical attacks — Putin may get away with the promotion of his version of KGB Theater, “Assad vs The Terrorists (AKA “Assad OR The Terrorists”) and the related appeal to fascist nationalist urges worldwide, for that is what a body part does when injured: it swells around its wound.
Proud flesh.
Putin, having given the Russian Orthodox Church a front row seat to his State of the Federation address, has gone back to the 19th Century drawing board. Â The Soviet is 24 years long gone and the Church is back in business, not such a bad thing with perhaps post-Holocaust updates producing an ambiguous (actual best possibility: Jew-friendly) Cossack community.
Vlad, so one might say, you can’t go home again: even if you drive a whole nation back there, what was there isn’t there anymore except for its ghosts.
Back to the latest in real bloody politik: one may expect Catholic France to rise to this occasion with some increase in anti-Muslim sentiment; however, this time, the French and everyone else have got a new word to place in place of “Muslim”: “Islamist” — and it’s going to be okay getting about the business of detecting and removing “Islamists” from French society.
The “crusader west” might not appear, at least not as expected.
âIt is a lie to say that the Right Sector is anti-Semitic. The anti-Semites are the Russians, who try to recruit Ukrainians to hurt Jews so that they could later on say that the âUkrainian fascistsâ did some horrible things.â
In later writings about the KGB, one former senior agent in the 1990s wrote about the simmering discontent within the agency during Putinâs time there, and the increasingly prevalent disconnect between the intelligence officers, who saw themselves as servants of the âeternalâ Russian nation rather than of the Communist Party.
âHeâs learned the lessons of the past,â said Gaddy, âand from the failure of the Communist Party to tap the deep support that certain national and nationalist institutions have.â
Mentioning what he describes as âleft-wing studies about the future of the EU and a possible European superstateâ, Mr Orban subscribes to the view that the nation-state as a concept is being eroded and says the European Left and âradical American Democratsâ have come up with a theory for this Ënew worldË idea. He has no doubt that this is connected to the issue of migration.
NATO has been saddled with two weak partners, one of them friendly to Moscow, and, of course, as suggested by quoted piffle, that one happily deflects blame to the west while embracing and producing a nationalist autocracy himself.
âWe are confronted with a collective effort that has been engaged in terrorism,â ErdoÄan said as he listed the attacks committed by ISIL in different parts of the world, namely in Suruç, DiyarbakÄąr, Ankara and most recently in Paris. âThis act of terror is not only against the people of France but against all peoples of the world,â he added.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s politics as regards Daesh needs its own expanded analysis. Â However he may represent “conservative” Islamic political forces in Turkey, and whatever has transpired to this point by way of the passage of Jihadis through Turkey to Daesh — also the transport of black market oil; the election to bomb Kurdish outposts instead of Daesh when first given the opportunity — the NATO bond leans on his own military, the Shiite-backed interests of Syria are not his, and playing ever in the background may be (should be) the Shiite vs Sunni rivalry. Â Erdogan, like Orban, may have shoehorned himself into some pretty sweet digs (the “White Palace” thing), but he really cannot bond with the Putin that has aligned as “Putin-Assad-Khamenei”. Â Instead, Obama gets Erdogan’s business.
Those gunmen, I am almost certain, were sent from the so-called Islamic State (which we refer to as Daesh because it is neither Islamic nor a state). I am a media and civil society activist from Kafranbel, Syria, a village that has gained global attention for its witty and sarcastic protest banners. We have fought the regime, we have fought extremism and we have maintained our focus on bringing a civil democracy to Syria. The Assad regime has bombed us nonstop since August 2012, killing more than 500 civilians. The Islamic State also used to attack here, raiding our offices and assaulting our activists, but its attempt to kill me was its last gasp in Kafranbel. The people of Kafranbel rose up and kicked the group out. The Islamic State has no presence here today.
But the pleasantries were not to be and the communication was cryptic. Could I come to the family home âright now?â It was an emergency. The eldest son had been arrested for taking a hoax bomb to school the previous day. NBC News had just left. The Dallas Morning News was present. How long would it take me to arrive?
Tammy Swofford, the author of the piece, has been chatting with BackChannels’ editor for years. Â The surreal Ahmed Mohamed clock-in-a-box story that broke in Irving, Texas landed not so much in her lap but much on her virtual table on which she had mixed curiosity about Islam and politics, friendship with the family, and file-it-away-for-later journalism. Â Throughout the drama, she removed herself to the sidelines while watching in horror as the incident sped into international consciousness with President Obama’s tweet “Cool clock, Ahmed.”
If true, I don’t think it’s nonsense. The Kingdom has to assert itself against the revised Moscow-Damascus-Tehran alignment. Everyone knows that the PLO was a KGB project from the git-go and that similar politics (as with a Moscow meeting with the PFLP at this time last year) have been sustained by Putin. The Kingdom — and Kingdom Holdings — Prince al-Waleed Bin Talal have become stakeholders in the west.
The Soviet dissolved in session almost 24 years ago.
For people who think with calendars, this next year could be a doozy.
Cute, But Slow Down That Trolley!
What was reading before reading that headline:
Saudi multibillionaire Al-Waleed bin Talal has said that he would stand with Israel against the Palestinians if a new uprising was ignited, Kuwaiti media reported on Tuesday.
According to the AWD news website, bin Talal told the Kuwaiti newspaper Al-Qabas: âI will side with the Jewish nation and its democratic aspirations in case of outbreak of a Palestinian Intifada.â
An article from an obscure website falsely claiming that Saudi Arabian Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal had said that he would side with the Israelis against the Palestinians, went viral on social media before the prince released a statement on Thursday roundly denying the story.
Uh oh.
And Now the Rest of the Message from “Behind the News” (Israel)
The Saudi Arabian Football Federation has announced its refusal to play a World Cup preliminary match against the Palestinian national soccer team in a stadium near Ramallah, Samaria.
In its official announcement Tuesday to FIFA, Saudi Arabia expressed concern for the safety of its players in the sensitive area of Judea-Samaria, but reports say the real reason behind the refusal is fear that playing in the area would be a recognition of the âIsraeli occupation.â
Of course, BackChannels prefers the allegation of Prince al-Waleed Bin Talal’s gentle swing west to the strident reportage and commentary produced by east and west partisan press.
To test public attitude and sentiment on any given but not yet presented policy, one may “float a trial balloon” — put it Out There: “swings west” vs “refuses play on Israeli occupied territory!” — and ascertain the public response to each possibility.
Happens every day.
What is the distance between the private convictions of the powerful and the public perception of the same?
The Prince Online
One of the largest shareholders in Citigroup, the second-largest voting shareholder in News Corporation after the Murdoch family, and with major stakes in dozens of other Western companies, he travels the globe often wearing bespoke suits instead of the traditional Saudi thawb. Based in a country where women canât drive or vote, he champions womenâs rights and discourages his female employees, who make up 65 percent of his workforce, from wearing the veil in his offices.
Saudi Arabian billionaire Prince Alwaleed Bin Talalâs Kingdom Holding Co. agreed to sell its almost 30 percent stake in Saudi Research and Marketing Group at nearly double the market value.
âNot in London, not in New York, not in Dubai, right here in Saudi Arabia,â he said eagerly. âKingdom Hotels, that will go public in Dubai and London. But Kingdom Holdings, that must go public here, thatâs for sure. Because half of my investments are in Saudi Arabia.âÂ
Farther down the column of the same piece:
Many of Prince Alwaleedâs most visible investments have been in the West, especially in hotel propertiesâmost recently Fairmont Hotels & Resorts , which he purchased with Colony Capital for some $3.5 billion. Kingdom Hotel Investments, which Deutsche Bank and Morgan Stanley will take public, raising at least $300 million, holds stakes in 26 hotels including such landmarks as Londonâs Savoy, the George V in Paris and a number of Four Seasons properties.
The world online, probably much like the one represented virtually, appears to have arrived freighted with classes and masses. Â The wealthy, the few breathtakingly so, appear to battle for share of control of the world’s productive businesses and resources, and two of the qualities of high honor, dignity and integrity, attend their achievements. Â The much, much, and far less wealthy may both bask in that glory as well as swim in its patronage and its “sweet words”, at times, perhaps, pandering.
Where is the Prince going?
The reader’s guess may be as good as BackChannels’ — although a writer blessed with look-up time and cursed with imagination may have a small edge in the collection of tea leaves for floating above the dark waters of an abyss of possibilities.
Back rooms and boardrooms, closed curtains and curtains lifted on theaters, few in the world, much less meandering around the web, may ever ascertain a true state of affairs in the region of the practical interests and strategies of the world’s chief controlling agents of privately-held capital or privately-controlled state capital.  Whether watching Kingdom or Kremlin — how different those two! — the (public access) watching needs must take place from somewhere far on the sidelines — down the columns and between the lines of common publications — and however magnificent the parade, one may see only one’s own small and shades-of-gray portion of the passing show.
“He was brainwashed and manipulated to the point where he spared no one. Â He didn’t spare the wife, he didn’t spare the child, he didn’t spare the rabbi. Â He killed the husband, attacked the wife, the child, and the rabbi until the police came and shot him dead.”
Related Online
During the past week terrorist attacks, which had been concentrated in greater Jerusalem, spread to other locations in Israel, including Kiryat Gat in the south, Tel Aviv, Afula in the north, and Gan Shmuel (near Hadera) and Raanana (in the center of the country). The attacks have been carried out by young lone terrorists, most of them from east Jerusalem, and some from Judea and Samaria. There were also two Israeli Arabs (from Nazareth and Um el-Fahm), Palestinians staying in Israel illegally, two women and two children. They were motivated for the most part by the lie spread by the Palestinian media that Israel allegedly threatened Al-Aqsa mosque, as well as by the frustration, desperation and anger of the younger generation. Generally speaking, the terrorists have not been operatives of any established terrorist organization, and the current wave of terrorism has not been directed by any organization, but rather is directly inspired by the intensive incitement accompanying it.
“The aggressive and growing Israeli attack against our people, land and holy places undermine peace and stability,” Abbas said in a televised speech, according to the official WAFA news agency. “This attack threatens to ignite the fuse of a religious war, which will burn everything — not only in the region (but) perhaps in the entire world.”
Political blackmail — intimidation, threat — may be expected from a leader who no longer has anything, not even peace, to offer the people he purports to represent, much less his counterparts in the west.
The centrist leader Yair Lapid, otherwise stridently secular, has found inspiration in Talmudic precepts: âThe rabbis teach that if someone comes up against you to kill you, you should kill him first,â he said. âThat should be our working model.â He added, âDonât hesitate. Even at the start of an attack, shooting to kill is correct. If someone is brandishing a knife, shoot him. Itâs part of Israelâs deterrence.â
About a month ago, Russian President Putinâs âSpecial Representative for the Middle East and Deputy Foreign Ministerâ Mikhail Bogdanov met with representatives of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and discussed, among other things, the stalled delivery of Russian S-300 missiles to Syria in 2012. Two days ago, the issue resurfaced in the news with the message that the delivery would go through.
Ahmed Meligy, speaking from the Egyptian historic and national experience, appears to understand the power words may have to sway large swaths of population,  never mind that such words may be untrue.  The medieval world may have found itself unburdened by the spreading of viciously absurd blood libels; this one between appears to deal instead in the more subtle aspects of disingenuous speech: sins of omission (as in the reporting of Israeli arrests but not the conspiracies or crimes that provoked them); emphasis on the death and injury of Palestinian miscreants and de-emphasis on the assaults that drew both an appropriate and narrowed response.
You can see what the New York Times is attempting from the headline.
âThe Dueling Narratives of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflictâ is an attempt to provide journalistic âbalanceâ on a story where none exists.
We could say a lot about the article, with its lopsided reliance on Palestinian sources and reference to Hanan Ashrawiâs charge that police had planted knives to frame innocent Palestinians (a charge she even admitted she had âno evidenceâ to back up.)
The PLO, Fatah and the Palestinian Authority have for decades used children as fodder to throw rocks, fireworks and explosives at soldiers, as bombers, as lookouts and couriers. Hamas has been even more brazen, publicizing its recruitment of an army of child soldiers. In the current wave of terrorism in Israel and Palestine, we have seen attackers as young as 13 years old.
In one of the most shocking examples, the mother of a Palestinian terrorist who was killed during an attack on a Jerusalem bus earlier this month pulled out a knife during a television interview and threatened to follow her son’s example.
“I am concealing this weapon for Israel. Watch out, Israel! Watch out!” exclaimed Umm Muhammad Shamasne while making stabbing gestures in an Oct. 22 interview on the Lebanese Al-Quds TV station.
The Institute for Palestine Studies published a detailed report on Gazaâs Tunnel Phenomenon in the summer of 2012. It reported that tunnel construction in Gaza has resulted in a large number of child deaths.
âAt least 160 children have been killed in the tunnels, according to Hamas officialsâ
The author, Nicolas Pelham, explains that Hamas uses child laborers to build their terror tunnels because, âmuch as in Victorian coal mines, they are prized for their nimble bodiesâ.
During the first three weeks of October 2015, ten Israelis were killed and 112 wounded â eleven of them seriously â in 40 stabbing attacks, four shootings, and five vehicular attacks that took place throughout the country.
On October 23, however, BBC News told its audiences that Israelis are suffering from either a collective psychosis âcharacterised by delusions of persecutionâ or âunjustified suspicion and mistrust of other peopleâ â depending on which definition of the word âparanoiaâ BBC editors intended with their headline that read: âParanoia deepens wedge between Israelis and Palestinians.â
On Phillip Weiss’s contribution to anti-Semitic / anti-Zionist propaganda.
Iâve made an occasional reference to Weiss or the blog he founded, Mondoweiss, since then. Mondweiss is basically one-stop shopping for anti-Israel news. Anything bad that goes on in Israel will be publicized and exaggerated at Mondoweiss. If you want to know the far-left anti-Israel party line on any recent event, Mondoweiss is the place to go.
It’s more than possible these days to trace in the English language the intellectual seams of the New Old Now Old Far Out and Lost Left, the Left that died a little when the Soviet dissolved and is dying a lot as a feudal revanch as Putin’s buddy Assad drops barrel bombs on all non-combatant Syrians he thinks might oppose his dictatorship.
Kirkpatrick invariably seeks out the same poisonous wells. In the case of this article, these are: Human Rights Watch, a non-governmental organization in search of funds. Through attempting to interpret the facts about the New Egypt to fit its own theoretical notions of what constitutes the upholding of human rights. It is a private corporation in search of aggression through intervening in internal affairs via the human rights pearly gate. Ignoring that in countries in transition, like Egypt, the collective rights of the populace trump the rights of the individual.
BackChannels appreciates Dr. El-Ayouti’s piece as not being about Israel but about post-Islamist Egypt under al-Sisi and reporting favoring the Muslim Brotherhood and biased against the modernizing efforts of the central power of the state.
1. Anti-Semitism serves feudal power. It is a tool for the manipulation and direction of mobs. Note: Ismail Haniyeh and Khaled Mashaal are billionaires today, which begs the question: who has really occupied what? The PLO and PFLP have been Moscow projects from the beginning and the encouragement of an anti-Semitic middle east a major part of the Soviet program, which medieval / oligarchal phantoms we are fighting today.
2. Nationalism tends toward fascism (ask any of the more western-oriented opposition in Hungary about that). In Israel, the Hebrews, +5,000 years together, are back in the Land of the Hebrews, and they have been taught a long lesson by way of the leaders and fans of the “International Solidarity” and “Palestinian Solidarity” garbage (that’s the word for them): the complaint about Israel has never been about Israel — it has been always about Jewish existence itself, not only in Israel but anywhere on the planet.
3. Go back to Moses the Lawgiver and go forward to Hillel the Elder who to accommodate the restive of a decaying Rome made Judaism more about principle than ritual and more accessible to converts. Then: Jesus, Paul, Constantine; then: Muhammad. Those who really hate the Jews hate the law and humanity. The may hate themselves. Boco Haram, ISIS, Hamas, Hezbollah: call them the “God Mob” because intimidation, theft, and murder on one side and pandering and patronage on the other appears to be what each has best demonstrated in organizational lives short and long.
As much verbiage as BackChannels spools onto the threads of The Awesome Conversation, the social network chatyping fest, it wonders who compressed it may make a packet of thought.
Anti-Semitism : Feudal Mentality
Perhaps that should be enough.
It has been deeply disappointing watching some Syrians (for the most part, not friends, but others the “friends of friends”) refuse to struggle with the anti-Semitic expression that not only accompanies their suffering but plays directly into hands of the medieval troika, Putin – Assad – Khamenei, each of whom have pegged their survival on irrational mob behavior and, indeed, feudal wars that for being so intellectually bereft that they cannot resolve through violence.
Some prefer the engines of war to the machinery of peace.
A moderate Syrian opposition site had played a cartoon showing Putin, Khamenei, and Netanyahu in bed together while Assad lay on the floor. Â Never mind the nonsense in which the leader of an open democracy shares the same mattress as the two despots, the intent to harm Israel absent of reason stands signal of the too familiar sickness and the fascism to which it connects.
Anti-Semitic hate contributes directly to the medieval worldview promoted by Putin, Assad, and Khamenei. Israel’s arrangements with Russia over Syria have been defensive and perfunctory. Before the Soviet Union dissolved (December 1991), this is how it manipulated latent Jew Hate in the middle east into the Baathist dictatorships — from one of which Assad has descended. In fact, Assad is counting on Syrian anti-Semitism to contribute to his stay in power. https://conflict-backchannels.com/…/ftac-tip-to-the…/
BackChannels 