Author Archives: commart

FTAC – Summation – Syria and Red Brown Green

19 Friday Jun 2015

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Islamic Small Wars, Middle East, Political Psychology, Syria

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The schematics I feel I’ve observed over the years:

Post-Soviet –> neo-feudal Russia that has been quietly addressed (by sanctions; by a precipitous drop in oil prices and related revenues) as an extension of the former era.

“Putin-Assad-Khamenei” as an arc of power in the region and “Putin-Khamenei” as a hub for the greater development of political absolute power elsewhere.

“Syndicate Red Brown Green” — Putin’s Russia, KGB-to-FSB; new national socialist movements (Hungary); Islamists.

The cultivation of Daesh, self-generated but perhaps manipulated by Khamenei to serve as a Sunni foil for his regime’s Shiite expansion, serves narrative artifice that has been “Assad vs The Terrorists” — an horrific piece of political “theater of the real”.

All of that may be breaking up through the fragmenting of Syria, but nothing is near over, and, indeed, the anarchy and chaos developed in the space will have to be addressed on multiple levels, from combat and counterterrorism effort to some kind of refugee management and resettlement. Count out “Putin, Assad, Khamenei” as being of any help at all.

I had just seen a group of pictures featuring starved Syrian children, the latest in “war porn”, and it had featured an image of a starving adult man bearing a resemblance to President Obama.

Agitprop?

Not only agitprop, but propaganda from what appeared to me to be an anti-western, anti-Semitic, anti-Zionist “news agency” promoting victimization on one hand while isolating itself on the other.

BackChannels has been to this evil place before: “It’s Hard Helping You When You’re Anti-Semitic, Among Other Things” (March 19, 2014).

Written about the “Obamastarvingman” and the more evidently starved youngsters:

I don’t like the top figure’s resemblance to Obama — it smacks of propaganda, an attempt at not quite subliminal suggestion.

While “Syndicate Red Brown Green” put together the political theater that may be titled, “Assad vs The Terrorists”, the children shown, and of course noncombatant adults as well, were the kind of Syrians killed or punished by, in essence, their own feudal lords.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights may have additional information on the casualties of the breathtaking disaster that has taken place in Syria in the post-Soviet and now feudal context managed by Putin, Assad, and Khamenei. Obama watched; NATO watched; we watched. However: the continuing promotion of anti-Semitism, anti-westernism — basically hateful and undemocratic rhetoric (because it’s dishonest and disingenuous speech) — leaves the Syrian victims of Assad’s grandiose play (“Assad vs The Terrorists”) disenfranchised, helpless, and isolated.

No surprise: no one has yet “Liked” the comment.

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The Speicher Massacre and Its Legacy in Iraq

18 Thursday Jun 2015

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology

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1001iraqithoughts's avatar1001 Iraqi Thoughts

By Haidar Sumeri (@IraqiSecurity) & Hassan Hadad (@Abufellah)

1001-Cover

On June 10 2014, the terrorist organization formerly known as ISIS (or ISIL), now known as the “Islamic State” or Da’ish, captured the northern city of Mosul and began a rapid advance south towards Iraq’s capital, Baghdad. Within 48 hours, the central city of Tikrit had fallen to the militants. Along with Tikrit, Da’ish militants captured a massive contingent of army recruits and air cadets totaling three to four thousand, most of them in their twenties.

While earlier reports simply stated that the recruits “attempted to flee” the Da’ish onslaught and were subsequently caught, it soon became clear that the events leading up to the savage massacre were much more sinister. The details remain murky to this date but according to survivors’ tales, a desperate sense of panic washed over troops and recruits based at Tikrit Air Academy…

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Link – MEF – Summer – ” . . . that death is not death . . . .”

18 Thursday Jun 2015

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Epistemology, Iran, Islamic Small Wars, Links, Political Psychology, Psychology, Religion

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Suicide terrorism has become so commonplace that it is easy to overlook how relatively new and suddenly popular the phenomenon is. Between the end of World War II and the Iranian revolution, there were no suicide attacks in the world. Yet only months after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini solidified power and formed the Pasdaran and Basij, suicide attacks began to appear in conflicts involving Shiites (Lebanon, the Iran-Iraq war) and then took root among Palestinian Sunni groups.[3] It eventually became the preferred tactic of Islamist terror organizations.

Khomeini selected specific passages from the Qur’an and hadith (canonical collections of Muhammad’s alleged sayings and actions) to craft his suicidal version of radical Islam. His two-part rhetorical plan necessitated convincing Muslims that suicide is not suicide and that death is not death.

Caschetta, A. J.  “Does Islam Have a Role in Suicide Bombings?” Middle East Quarterly, Summer 2015.

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The Snowden Story Slowly Unravels

18 Thursday Jun 2015

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology

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20committee's avatarThe XX Committee

I am grateful to the German newspaper BILD for running this piece as “Wie Snowdens schöne Geschichte langsam zerfällt” For the benefit of readers who don’t know German, I’m providing the English version — enjoy!

Exactly two years after Edward Snowden went public with his exposure of Western intelligence secrets, causing a global sensation, the basic facts of his case are unraveling. Many who welcomed his exposure of National Security Agency domestic operations, for instance metadata collection, were nevertheless troubled by his move to Moscow.

Taking up residency under Putin’s roof, which Snowden shows no signs of leaving, was never a good fit with his status as a freedom-loving “whistleblower.” Russia, run by a former KGB man, spies on its citizens far more aggressively than any of the Western countries whose secrets have been exposed by Snowden – to say nothing of the mysterious deaths of politicians, journalists and others…

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FTAC – “Trusted Others” – Online

18 Thursday Jun 2015

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, A Little Wisdom, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Epistemology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Philology, Politics

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“Trusted others” has been an issue here, and I haven’t found a way to handle it except by being circumspect, diplomatic, and in line with the run of the western opposition. The beauty of “open source intelligence (OSI)”, a very fancy way of saying one reads the news and socializes online and draws on that for commentary (it’s a hobby), is that it is open: the world that can access the Internet in English is reading off the same pages. Those of us in the “social network” here and elsewhere are pioneering together in time.

The only thing available to adverse parties in these online news and social zones is their own reflection: they are left reading about their image from multiple perspectives and sources, not that they don’t try to inform that image creation themselves.  However, for political narrative, truth and its stability are easier to work with than the anarchy that comes of clumsy, doubtful, and self-serving fictions.

So pithy, I’ve assigned it to the “A Little Wisdom” section of this blog.

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Link – Pakistan – Xenophobic Actions

17 Wednesday Jun 2015

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Islamic Small Wars, Political Psychology, Politics, Religion

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Condemning the move, a Save the Children official told Reuters that the Pakistan government had been stopping aid shipments entering the country, “blocking aid to millions of children and their families”. It comes after the Pakistani government announced it was tightening the rules for NGOs, revoking several of their licences. An interior ministry official said on Friday it had cancelled agreements with at least 15 foreign charities, including the Norwegian Refugee Council, on the advice of intelligence agencies that said the organisations had been “collecting sensitive data” from Pakistan’s tribal areas bordering Afghanistan.

Foreign charities have complained that they have been treated with increasing hostility and suspicion in Pakistan, with obstacles to their work becoming ever more difficult especially in the last 6 months.

Chowdhry, Wilson.  “Save the Children charity ordered to leave Pakistan.”  Blog.  British Pakistani Christians, June 13, 2015.

Everyone’s against you.

No one likes you.

You have to fight back.

Others who are like you will have to fight back with you.

Gather around: the outlook is not a perspective: it is a religion, a religious obligation; and constitutionally supported.

The truth is as it is made out — The polio vaccine was fake.  ” . . . Interior Minister Chaudhary Nisar Ali Khan, said the organisations in question “are operating with support from the United States, Israel and India” (from Wilson Chowdhry’s piece).

Assorted Suggested Lookups: Civilizational Narcissism; Narcissistic Personality Disorder; Paranoid Personality Disorder; Facsimile Bipolar Political Sociopathy; etc.

That Christian missions and press spoil against their Islamic counterparts holds no surprise, but what presumably educated adults in Pakistan are willing to do to children, their own or others, beneath the cover of paranoid conspiracy theories and socially lauded hate, surpasses cruelty.

The greater story — what may be found as one rises above an animosity that is as medieval as it may be parochial — is that other Pakistanis, including other elements in governance, are again struggling to save children from Poliomyelitis.

Related Reference

Beaubien, Jason.  “Taliban in Pakistan Derail World Polio Eradication.”  NPR, July 28, 2014.

Bentz, Leslie.  “CIA policy: Won’t use vaccination programs as part of operations.” CNN, May 20, 2014.

End Polio Pakistan.

Saifi, Sophia and Greg Botelho.  “Over 500 Pakistani parents arrested for children’s failure to get polio vaccine.”  CNN, March 4, 2015.

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FTAC – Banu Qurayza – True or False? Congruent.

17 Wednesday Jun 2015

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Islamic Small Wars, Politics, Religion, Syndicate Red Brown Green

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The problem with the Banu Qurayza Legend is that it doesn’t need to be technically true: it has been promulgated by both the opponents and proponents of Islam and discussed into having a global life in the intellectual reality of those interested in this region of Jihad / anti-Jihad conflict.

The story of Safiyah garners similar attention.

The citing of the assassinations of competitor poets — another layer down in the layers of anti-Jihad / anti-Islam screed online — works the same way.

Intellectual integrity should not be pitted against political or social loyalty, but as much becomes a feature of feudal life in which the rule of the strong by coercion and main force trumps the rule of law.

Compound this by-the-sword image of Islam with Baghdaddi’s studied emulation of what he apparently believes to have been both the appearance in method of the spread of Islam at its inception.

What’s Out There — or around us when polls are taken — “shimmers” and whether the reality comes to something like 12 percent (or less) “Islamist” or 80 percent (or so) sympathetic or unyielding in the rejection of culpability for any wrong done in the name of Islam, the legends, true or not, fit with the portion of a violent reality on display across the al-Qaeda-type groups and Hezbollah operations (and Khamenei’s Shiite-associated wars-by-proxy).

Source of the bounce: Fatah, Tarek.  “Face reality: Many Muslims support ISIS.” Toronto Sun, June 16, 2015:

In the last week of May, the Qatar-based Arabic news network Al-Jazeera polled its Arabic-language audience on the question: “Do you support the victories of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in your region?”

The results were shocking. Of the 56,881 Arabic-speaking respondents, a whopping 81% voted yes.

On this blog, “Shimmer” has long addressed this issue involving the definition of the challenge in its open conflict aspect, and the piece has been updated from time to time.

Additional Reference

Arlandson, James M.  “Muhammad’s Dead Poets Society: The assassinations of satirical poets in early Islam.”  n.d. — An American Thinker article associated with the piece, so the piece claims, appears absent at its URL (“not found”) online; the piece has also been addressed by Bassam Zawadi on the “answering-christianity.com” blog.  (Perhaps the best way out of the Punch-and-Judy cycle is to give it a look, at best, and not get into it in the first place).

Ladadwi, Abdullah.  “The ‘Caliphate’ of al-Baghdadi – Announcement from Syrian Scholars.”  Islam21c.com, “09/07/2014”: “These events need to be leant the full consciousness of every individual, and bring forth new responsibilities on scholars and analysts wherever they may be. Remaining silent or looking for excuses is no longer an option, but rather it is now incumbent upon everyone to speak the truth like never before. / The invalidity of this ‘Caliphate’ can be seen from a number of angles . . . .”

Regarding the Syrian and Syrian-Iraq theaters, BackChannels’ view has been that the troika Putin-Assad-Khamenei, in the interest of sustaining feudal absolute power in their respective quarters (and promoting it in the greater world as well), perverted a mild “Arab Spring” people’s challenge to the Assad regime into a grand piece of political theater (theater of the real, for sure) that might be titled, “Assad vs The Terrorists”.  The method used was to bomb deeply noncombatant targets while not bombing the assembling of al-Qaeda-type groups developing in the countryside (reference on BackChannels “The Doctor, the Eye Doctor, and Me” (February 2014); on the web and in Newsweek, “U.S. Accuses Assad of Aiding ISIS Through Airstrikes” by Lucy Westcott, June 2, 2015).

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From Correspondence — Journalism Democritized

17 Wednesday Jun 2015

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Fast News Share, Free Speech, Journalism

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On the record?

Off the record?

Journalists exercise discretion as part of the business, but most put together stories for broadly distributed publication. The investigative types routinely pull together stories their subjects may not wish to see read anywhere.

That’s “Watergate”.

Ours is a different era.

We have the global “war on terror”; we have our wondrous Internet that wraps the world in new communications, intimate and public, trivial and history changing, friendly for the most part, on occasion discomforting; and we have information-oriented entrepreneurs of every imaginable type, all of whom self-assign and pursue eclectic projects, and they do what they would do if they were free because, in fact, and whatever the combination of funding, motivation, and time available — however they’re put together; however they put it together — they are free and can post thought in innumerable contexts.

In “information space”, you’re representative of both emerged and perhaps emerging types.

Many of my online friends routinely publish in “free press” publications and middle-media blogs sponsored by more established purveyors of news. Relatively few, if any, are picking up money on their virtual print output.

Alas, at similar levels, there are other fauna online: personalities with funny names and little background promoting through their chatyping a familiar and herding or “group-think” yackety-yack — they are the new nemeses, and they are placed everywhere. Be glad you are getting around in real space and spending time with real people . . . .

Doubtless some just “gather it all in” for hours a day.

How has New Media — it’s not so new anymore, actually — changed Everyman’s impression of the greater surrounding world?

In the inbox inside of the first 15 computer-on minutes of the day:

Local: http://www.heraldmailmedia.com/news/breaking/dozens-arrested-in-tri-state-area-in-connection-with-heroin/article_63db763e-143e-11e5-8517-27cfb4462c10.html

From Phyllis Chesler’s conservative feminist voice for liberation: “Op-Ed: The Truth-Teller’s Gulag: The price is high, but the cost of remaining silent far exceeds the left’s swift punishments for telling the truth.”  Arutz Sheva, June 16, 2015.

Without mentioning the Druze, IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Gadi Eizenkot said the authorities were preparing for a possible influx of Syrian refugees and would prevent a potential massacre at the border.

“The reality in the Golan Heights, where internal fighting is near the border with Israel, is of great concern to us, including the possibility we might have to deal with refugees from Syria arriving at the border,” Eizenkot told a parliamentary committee, his words conveyed by a spokesman.

Arutz Sheva Staff.  “IDF Chief Promises to Protect Syria’s Druze from ‘Massacre’.” Israel & Stuff, June 17, 2015.

All day, every day, the world turns up a sea of new information online.  Glance at it, parse it, sift it, comment on it, pass it along, recompile it, even act on it, it’s moving, living, morphing before our eyes.

That’s today’s news — a deeply democratized international gabfest, some very high percentage of which involves passing words along, or in the “listening posts” within the minds of citizen journalists chatting beneath the cover of writing– every man and woman a scribe that would wish to be — swallowed, digested, and saved away for a distant later that need never arrive.

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