Author Archives: commart

Syria – Assad – Belarus – Red Brown Green

24 Sunday May 2015

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology

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Posted to YouTube 5/24/2011.

I was smiling as they gave us instructions worthy of a spy movie: “Come to the bus stop… There’ll be a man in a grey suit with a rolled-up paper in his hand… Don’t approach, keep walking. He’ll catch up with you… Jump into the green taxi – it’s our driver… Delete the numbers from your mobile…”

They were careful, but exceptionally brave, and full of hope. They genuinely believed then that, in a matter of months, the ruthless, authoritarian government that had ruled Syria for decades would fall, just like Egypt’s and Tunisia’s did. They had high hopes of building a new country, a new society, governed by democratic values and the rule of law.

Neistat, Anna.  “No excuse for failing Syria.”  Amnesty International, March 14, 2015.

Damascus, SANA – President Bashar al-Assad on Monday received Foreign Affairs Minister of Belarus Vladimir Makei and the accompanying delegation.

Makei delivered to President al-Assad a letter from President of Belarus Alexander Lukashenko in which he expressed his country’s support for Syria in the face of the terrorist attack targeting it, with Lukashenko expressing confidence in the Syrian people’s ability to achieve victory and overcome the crisis and asserting that Belarus is committed to developing relations with Syria in all fields.

Sana.  “President al-Assad receives letter from President of Belarus expressing support for Syria.”  February 9, 2015.

“It is quite understandable that the Syrian army withdraws to protect large cities where much of the population is located,” said Waddah Abded Rabbo, director of Syria’s Al-Watan newspaper, which is close to the regime.

“The world must think about whether the establishment of two terrorist states is in its interests or not,” he said, in reference to IS’s self-proclaimed “caliphate” in Syria and Iraq, and Al-Qaeda affiliate Al-Nusra Front’s plans for its own “emirate” in northern Syria.

Ketz, Sammy.  “Syria regime ‘to accept de facto partition’ of country.”  Yahoo News, May 24, 2015.

“Syndicate Red Brown Green” has been made a term of art on BackChannels for just this reason: it’s not looking good for the Assad regime’s recovery of Syria, but with a painful retrenching in the offing, it has its friends: Putin’s Russia; Khamenei’s Iran — and Putin’s Russia has a relationship with a dictatorship amenable to hosting some family with few places to go.

That day has not come yet, but while perverting a gentle 2011 challenge to its authority — this tragedy began with nonviolent protests met with the arresting and torturing of children — into a ferocious heroic narrative, “Assad vs The Terrorists”, a frame requiring the indiscriminate bombing of the innocent and allowance for the real terrorists to get their acts together in order to play their roles.  The Terrorists have made it just about to the gates of state power.

Perhaps Belarus awaits more and other than Assad cousin Hafez Makhlouf.

Gov. Talal Barazi of the central province of Homs, which includes Palmyra, told The Associated Press Sunday that IS members have “committed mass massacres in the city of Palmyra” since they captured it on Wednesday. He said IS fighters took many civilians, including women, to unknown destinations.

Activists in the town have said that IS fighters have hunted down President Bashar Assad’s loyalist since taking the town, killing some 280 people.

Aji, Albert and Bassem Mroue. AP.  “Official: Syrian army preparing for counterattack on IS.”  Yahoo! News, May 24, 2015.

As a reflection of the news with a little widening into overlooked space, i.e., Belarus, this post has turned out a bit of a patchwork: a little bit about the Syrian Civil War; a little about dictatorship and the “Putin-Assad-Khamenei” axis.  So be it.  There is nothing neat in the way these small wars work or in the ways powerful elites work either.

Reference

Bohdan, Siarhei.  “Belarus Turns to Pro-Western Nations in The Middle East.”  Belarus Digest, May 5, 2015.

Brown, Hayes.  “What Putin’s ‘Friends’ Think of His Ukraine Adventures.”  Think Progress, March 7, 2014.

Cadwalladr, Carole.  “Natalia Kaliada: ‘In Belarus it’s very simple — everything’s repressed.”  The Guardian, June 2, 2012.

Channel 4 News.  “Belarus: Undercover in Europe’s last dictatorship.”  Video (YouTube).  May 22, 2014.

Dreazen, Yochi J.  “Belarus May Be Providing Syria With Deadly Military Technology.”  The Atlantic, June 14, 2012.  Related by same author: “Is Belarus Assad’s Newest Ally?”  National Journal, June 13, 2012 — last sentence: “Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko, like Russian President Vladimir Putin, believes that foreign nations shouldn’t be allowed to intervene in the internal disputes of a sovereign nation.”

European Union.  “Restrictive measures (sanctions) in force.”  Belarus section included.  Listings updated March 19, 2015. (PDF)

Lester, Maya.  “EU Court Annuls Ternavsky’s 1st Belarus Sanctions Listing and Upholds 2nd.”

Neistat, Anna.  “No excuse for failing Syria.”  Amnesty International, March 14, 2015.

Nemtsova, Anna.  “Where Can Syria’s Asma Assad Go?”  The Daily Beast, July 22, 2012.

Rafiq, Jeffrey.  “President of Belarus Alexander Lukashenko talks about Syria & Assad.”  Video (YouTube), posted March 7, 2013.

Reuters.  “Syria death toll now exceeds 210,000.”  February 7, 2015.

Sana.  “President al-Assad receives letter from President of Belarus expressing support for Syria.”  February 9, 2015.

The Daily Star.  “Assad cousin relocates to Belorussia.”  September 29, 2014.

U.S. Department of the Treasury.  “Belarus Sanctions.”

World Vision.  “FAQs: Syria’s War, Children, and the Refugee Crisis.”  May 12, 2015.  Article reports 7.6 million internally displaced and 4 million made refugee.

“Natalia Kaliada – Theatre of Resistance.”  OsloFreedomForum, YouTube, June 10, 2013.

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Link – Muslims for Israel – A Note on Diversity In Islam

24 Sunday May 2015

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Islamic Small Wars, Links, Politics, Religion

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Lumping together 1.6 billion Muslims into one reviled abstraction is a disservice not only to Israel but also to Israel’s values of democracy, diversity, tolerance, and human rights. Muslims are not an abstraction. Among Muslims, you will find neighbors, friends, relatives, business partners, co-workers, and fellow citizens. Among Muslims you will also find some of the fiercest opponents of Islamist extremism. Reality is complex and often overwhelming, but it cannot be explained away by the wholesale demonization of a quarter of the world’s population.

Maroun, Fred.  “If you are anti-Islam then you are no friend of Israel.”  Blog: “An Arab Canadian’s Reflections on Israel”, The Jerusalem Post, May 24, 2015.

Fred Maroun names names — a growing list of them.

In the political psychology, we are perhaps all a little bit full of ourselves as “locus of control” play right along with “the real Jews”, “the true church”, “final word from God” and all of that.  Nonetheless, bearing legacy within ourselves from near birth (or language uptake), we each have many ways of appreciating and enjoying our ethnic and spiritual endowments without feeling compelled to conquer the rest of the world with the same.

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Hillel — in Balochi

24 Sunday May 2015

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

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Agha ma wati jinday wastha naya Goda degay khe b mani wastha.

Agha ma degrani wastha naya goda ma cheyan?

Agha ani na, goda kadi?

In the first century BCE, Babylonian born Hillel (later known as Hillel the Elder) migrated to the Land of Israel to study and worked as a woodcutter, eventually becoming the most influential force in Jewish life. Hillel is said to have lived in such great poverty that he was sometimes unable to pay the admission fee to study Torah, and because of him that fee was abolished. He was known for his kindness, gentleness, concern for humanity. One of his most famous sayings, recorded in Pirkei Avot (Ethics of the Fathers, a tractate of the Mishnah), is “If I am not for myself, then who will be for me? And if I am only for myself, then what am I? And if not now, when?” The Hillel organization, a network of Jewish college student organizations, is named for him. Hillel and his descendants established academies of learning and were the leaders of the Jewish community in the Land of Israel for several centuries. The Hillel dynasty ended with the death of Hillel II in 365 CE.

Web Page: “Rabbi Hillel”.  Bold added.

Without prompting, a Facebook friend, a teacher, translated Hillel into Baloch.

At the end of a note to the same, I’ve stated a perhaps uniquely modern stance:

Our world offers an abundance of timeless knowledge and wisdom from myriad sources, a vast reach across cultures through the great libraries and their scholars, and one may be gifted with opportunity and time to do some soul searching about the meaning of life and living in the place that one inhabits. Toward that end, while I do my part 🙂 , I generally promote ethnolinguistic cultural survival and self-determination, not only for the Hebrews but for Baloch, Kurds, Pashtun, and every other unique living language community on the planet.

In fewer words, plainly promoted: geospatial coexistence with ethnic centers, margins, and mixers; global cultural co-evolution with updating toward what is authentic in belief, kind in social manner, and respectful in its humanity; and continuously improving “qualities in living” with economic, psychological, physical, and spiritual dimensions.

Additional Reference

Wikipedia.  “Hillel the Elder”

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Excerpts – Two Journeys Across New Worlds

24 Sunday May 2015

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Anti-Semitism, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Epistemology, Islamic Small Wars, Political Psychology, Religion, Syndicate Red Brown Green

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As a soldier, I felt like a real master. I drove tanks in the desert and I carried a big assault rifle when in the city. One day, as I walked the streets of Jerusalem, believing myself to be the biblical King David, my eyes met those of a young Arab lady in a long white dress standing on the rooftop of her house. There she stood, erect and proud. She stared at me, and then sang lovely Arabic tunes that captured my mind and heart. I stared back at her, a gorgeous beauty with the voice of an angel, and fell in love on the spot. Her song, I promptly concluded, was far more piercing than any of my bullets.

Tenenbom, Tuvia.  “Why European NGO’s and the Red Cross Are Real Enemies in Israel.”  Forward, May 24, 2015.

At this point Captain Swan stunned his men with his own innovative plan.  He argued that their voyaging along the Mexican coast had brought nothing but disappointment and it was pointless continuing.  Instead, they would cross the Pacific and “go into the East-Indies.”  He conjured the glory days of Drake and Cavendish, who successfully passed that way, but even so he had a struggle.  Two-thirds of his men did not believe it possible.  “Such was their ignorance,” wrote Dampier, that they were convinced “he would carry them out of the world.”

Preston, Diana and Michael.  A Pirate of Exquisite Mind: Explorer, Naturalist, and Buccaneer: The Life of William Dampier.  New York: Walker & Company, 2004.

These two wildly different accounts of voyages through time have between them one theme in common: the temporary ascent of assumptions and guesses over real knowledge.

William Dampier, who set out in life a sailor, precedes James Cook, Charles Darwin, and others in his gourmandizing, navigating, observing, suffering, swashbuckling, writing triple circumnavigation of the earth under 17th Century sail.

In the life movie, as it were, Tuvia Tenenbom appears to have embarked upon his life’s journey as one who might have believed a superstitious misstep would have carried him out of the world:

But then, on one wintry cold day, I got my hands on all kinds of books and pictures and found out that I’ve been lied to. Our “Jewish” black clothes made me look frighteningly similar to the non-Jewish Polish nobles and Austrian bourgeois of a century or two ago; our community’s glorification of virgins was more in line with the thinking in Islamic societies; and the way my rabbis prevented me from engaging with sexuality in any capacity — “Thou shalt never look at females,” they always reminded me — seemed more rooted in Catholicism than in Judaism.

True to my nature as a representative of God, I consulted with heaven and left the ultra-Orthodox fold.

By the time Tenenbom publishes in today’s Forward, he has become a much more cognizant and sophisticated navigator, rather like Dampier in his day, but in this age, he has stumbled across a similar ignorance and misguidance.  However, where Dampier’s men could be called “out of the loop” and innocent of emerging knowledge about the world and the mapping of continents, islands, currents, and winds, Tenenbom’s anti-Semitic and Israel-hating acquaintance appear to have been corralled, lied to, programmed, and seduced: they have lost their clues to what is real and what is not and would appear today to be made to live in Orwell’s worst nightmare: intellectually poisoned and too easily maneuvered, they have been “carried out of the world” — the world that includes worlds with authentic histories, including their own ethnolinguistic legacies — as cognizant and knowledgeable free agents in their own right.

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Link – Yarmouk – Played

20 Wednesday May 2015

Posted by in Anti-Semitism, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Gaza, Islamic Small Wars, Israel, Middle East, Palestinia, Politics, Syria

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The Islamic State’s recent conquest of Yarmouk—a once thriving Palestinian suburb with the formal status of a refugee camp that lies on the outskirts of Damascus—provides far more than just insight into which aspects of the Palestinian plight get editorial privilege and which do not. Since the strangulation of Yarmouk began in 2012, the fate of its people has offered a bald reminder that within the Arab world, Palestinians still encounter an ambivalence that can spill into open contempt. Just as instructive, and certainly more novel, is the realization that the global Palestinian solidarity movement, by not holding mass demonstrations highlighting the slaughter and starvation in Yarmouk, has become complicit with the dictator Bashar al-Assad and the beheaders of IS.

Cohen, Ben.  “Yarmouk and the Failure of Palestine Solidarity.”  The Tower, Issue 26, May 2015.

Related on BackChannels:

I am an Arab Canadian, an organizer of small 2006 Gaza/Lebanon protests, and I am concerned on the rise of antisemitism.

The massive Gaza protests this year, organized by the Workers World Party, were about promoting antisemitism rather than concern for Palestinians. These protests excluded Arab voices so they could be free to demonize Israel. Worldwide, almost each time Syrian Palestinians brought a Free Syrian flag to protests, they were met with harassment, and, in some cases, violence. As one Palestinian woman from the Yarmouk Ghetto of Syria said, “We have been used.”

http://www.cija.ca/antisemitism/rising-antisemitism-1/ – by Maria Al-Masani – 10/21/2014.

The truth, however, is Israelis have been quietly giving food to Jordan-based Syrian refugees while Jordan continues to strand them in the desert. While Hezbollah has been beating and even lynching Syrian Palestinians, the Lebanese army bombed refugee tents. Yet, Israel has, in the meantime, been medically treating and saving the lives of Syrians in Israeli hospitals assembled at the Syrian border. The Holocaust Museum hosted the photos of Cesar on the Syrian concentration camps. When the whole world abandoned Syrian Palestinians, Israel was there for them and Turkey took in millions of refugees. Even the Canadian opposition leader, Thomas Mulcair, referred to Assad as a genocidal maniac, but “Save Gaza” activists were silent.

http://www.cija.ca/antisemitism/rising-antisemitism-2/ – by Maria Al-Masani – 10/22/2014.

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Link – Iraqi Theater – Iranian Disinformation

20 Wednesday May 2015

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Iran, Iraq, Islamic Small Wars, Middle East, Politics, Syndicate Red Brown Green, United States of America

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The idea that the United States is effectively arming the Islamic State is a popular rumor, particularly on Iranian State-run media, but the extent of individuals who believe that mistruth reaches to the highest echelons of Iranian society, according to Crytzer.

“The Iranian Quds Force commander absolutely believes we’re supplying Daesh,” Crytzer told Defense One. “He’s not trying to play on it. He actively believes it.”.

Tucker, Patrick.  “US Helicopter Shot at By Anti-ISIS Forces; Commander Blames Iran.”  Defense One, May 19, 2015.

Disinformation suits the feudal/medieval mode and its concentration of power and wealth in a very few “malignars” (malignant narcissists) devoted primarily to their own absolute power and breathtaking aggrandizement.

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Link – Ramadi – The Way It Looks

19 Tuesday May 2015

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Iran, Iraq, Islamic Small Wars, Middle East, Politics

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It’s obvious that the US did the bare minimum in the fight for Ramadi. The list of targets destroyed by American air strikes reads like satire or gallows humor.

“Near Ramadi, seven airstrikes struck one large and five small ISIL tactical units and an ISIL IED facility, destroying four ISIL resupply structures, three ISIL fighting positions, two ISIL buildings, two ISIL heavy machine guns, an ISIL VBIED and an ISIL motorcycle.”

No artillery positions were struck, even though they ringed the city. None of the ten trundling Islamic State armored bulldozers were struck. No waves of Islamic State assault infantry were struck. My guess is that President Obama wants to simply run out the clock and leave this mess to his successor. He’s pretending to help, but our contribution is often worthless.

Wictor, Thomas.  “Without Resolve, All is Lost”.  Thomas Wictor, May 18, 2015.

“Anybody who supported the government will probably be executed within the next 24 hours,” said Baer. “Their families will be driven out. It will be a bloodbath over the next couple of days. All the soldiers who were captured will be executed.”

A flood of residents has been pouring out of Ramadi toward safer parts of Anbar and Baghdad in recent days.

“We are witnessing a humanitarian crisis,” said Haimour, estimating that as many as 8,000 people had left the city Sunday.

Mullen, Jethro.  “ISIS seizes key Iraqi city of Ramadi: What happens next?”  CNN, May 18, 2015.

Related, same day: Hoft, Jim.  “ISIS Holds Massive Military Parade in West Anbar Celebrating Victory in Ramadi . . . (Where’s the Coalition?).  Gateway Pundit, May 18, 2015.

US Secretary of State John Kerry said on Monday he was “absolutely confident” that the situation could be reversed within days.

Merthi, Karim Abou.  “Iraq forces eye swift Ramadi fightback before IS digs in.”  Yahoo News, May 19, 2015.

The way it looks for Ramadi, Sunnis, and Shiites in Iraq is not good.

The additional forces summoned by Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi: Hashed al-Shaabi, Shiite “popular mobilization” units with a reputation for deeply seated Sunni-directed animus.  Merthi’s piece in Yahoo goes on to note, “Abadi and Washington had hoped to rely on regular forces and locally recruited Sunni tribal fighters newly incorporated into the Hashed al-Shaabi to fight IS in Anbar.”

In light of de facto black-and-white divisions in perception — for some (to many) in some spaces, one is either a this or a that, choose a label, and not to be noted for the better qualities of one’s more essential humanity — political habits may pit “all against all” (and some simply spoil for the Great Shiite vs Sunni War) when and where “all for all” is essential to forestall the march of the tyrannical.

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Link – Arab Anti-Semitism – Dismissing an Old Zeitgeist

18 Monday May 2015

Posted by in Anti-Semitism, Links

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Despite anything that is said to the contrary, there is no such thing as a pro-Palestinian movement, not at the United Nations, not on university campuses, not among “pro-Palestinian” demonstrators, not among world politicians, and not even in the highly “pro-Palestinian” Israeli extreme left. There is only an anti-Israel movement, born from antisemitism, and nurtured by idiocy and ignorance.

Maroun, Fred.  “the pro-Palestinian activists are not pro-Palestinian.”  Blog: An Arab Canadian’s Reflections on Israel, The Jerusalem Post, May 17, 2015.

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