Imagine such a thing as a “Medieval Time Bubble” — a place where heads of state hold “absolute power” over their plundered and subject people. It’s in that bubble, today post-Soviet and neo-feudal, that Putin, Assad, Khamenei, AND Baghdaddi need one another for keeping on display “Assad vs The Terrorists” and sustaining eadh their own portion of the medieval worldview.
I believe Daesh autonomous in its operations and spirit but manipulated to serve the ruling feudals as a foil for their militaries or their politics, to serve as leverage (“Assad OR The Terrorists” is the name of that play), and to serve as a goad to the west and related western defense spending.
The response to Daesh AND other medieval enterprises may have to come from the world that most immediately surrounds them.
Trolls online — paid? not paid? who knows — regularly credit the United States with having developed ISIS / ISIL / Daesh. For cause based in news, BackChannels has taken the opposite stance, and Daesh, although autonomous in its own mind and in its own workings, serves the medieval designs of Moscow, Damascus, and Tehran for the furtherance of despotism, fascism, and militarism — and endless war — far into the 21st Century.
In essence, the dissolving of the Soviet, almost 24 years ago, led not to democracy but to a feudal revanche benefiting primarily the ultra-privileged of Russia.
Today’s axis Moscow-Tehran may boast not only autocratic governance but with the help of Daesh’s presence in Iraq and Syria, a pretty good engine for the promotion of “New Nationalist” urges elsewhere and amplified and broadened divisions between people based on legacy in nationality, race, and religion, an anti-NATO strategy that appears to be working as post-KGB / KGB-Style Theater (“Assad vs The Terrorists”) proves that perception at a glance may create a useful target’s impression of reality.
Assad’s central strategy, this with the probable collusion of its partners, has been to produce an interesting piece of post-KGB-style political theater: “Assad vs The Terrorists”, which becomes also “Assad OR The Terrorists.” First, however, he needed “The Terrorists”, and he needed bad enough terrorists to confuse the moderate opposition with them. He had a few ways of accomplishing this effect. He could spill Islamists out of his jails (I’ll refer to a piece on that bit of data in a moment) and he could focus his air and ground forces against FSA (the initial revolutionary force while giving the al-Qaeda Typicals (like al-Nusra and ISIS) time to incubate.
Mission accomplished.
With “The Terrorists” fully present, Assad could then make the demand, “help me, or help them.”
The same system makes way also for the Assad-side slogan, “Assad, Or We Burn the Country.”
The western position: help neither, but try to help other forces strong enough in their own moral and fighting fiber to fight both — and the same have been fighting on their two fronts — against Assad’s forces and against Daesh.
Max Fisher’s piece attends to the complicated political nuts and bolts where I have emphasized a larger struggle between the medieval world of political absolutism, of which Putin, Assad, Khamenei, and Baghdaddi form a whole: the first three have in the fourth the enemy they need to write the future of the world their way. None appear possessed of any compassion sufficient to forestall their own inability in restraining themselves.
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What has come from this has been a steady stream of “war porn” — indescribable images of death, dismemberment, maiming, and mutilation having for their subject tens of thousands of Syrian noncombatants. All who have watched the “Syrian Tragedy” — that’s my term for it — online have seen this horrific feed.
While we have also seen — and in some ways been made to see — Daesh atrocities conveyed in pictures and text, what we have seen also without end have been the targets and effects of Assad’s barrel bombing of whole areas. A portion of Homs today looks like Nagasaki after the ashes have cooled. Famously, the Palestinian Yarmouk Camp has been devastated between Assad’s forces and those of the Islamic State — http://www.longwarjournal.org/…/islamic-state-releases…
Fundamentally, the struggle between the post-Soviet feudalists (“absolute powers” each of them) and the Islamic feudalists is medieval in a particularly barbaric way: both are using modern weapons absent of any apparent compassion or conscience.
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The medieval screed wants the division of all against all — and those who benefit from it have to promote that division as part of their own archaic, faulted, or otherwise misguided ambition — and for shame or honor, none dare admit fault.
Worse, the medieval of mind align differentially — according to national, religious, or sectarian nominal affiliation. Because you were born . . . Shia . . . because you were born . . . Sunni . . . because you were born Russian Orthodox . . . because you were born Arab . . . . because you were born Turkish . . . . these obligations (to bully, demean, and diminish others, to pick fights with others, the more helpless, the better, etc.) are incumbent upon thee.
The medieval world had been constrained by slow transportation, primitive methods of distant communication (runners with notes or messages) and personal weaponry. These medieval elements in the modern world are not so constrained and are both borrowing and leaking themselves into the platforms, as it were, of the progressive manufacturing of devastating weapons as well as other sectors generating the modern experience of community and technology.
Start with Assad’s planes.
The barrel bombs might be basic in various ways, but the flying machines are not.
Now: Russian cruise missiles launched from air and sea; on the ground, anything that can be gotten and carried.
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Part of the online crowd supports the Russian position coupled with affinity for the Christian Church (which church matters less at the moment: whatever the true political topology may be, Assad’s opposition — “The Terrorists” — are all Islamists in the Baghdaddi tradition. Often reached for in objection to that position are the many images of dead, injured, maimed, and mangled children or their parents. In Assad’s war, the same have not been “collateral” or “in the way” of “The Terrorists”: by all appearances and by way of general barrel bombing most of all, they have been the certain targets of Assad’s so-called “defense”.
This video post on YouTube on May 3, 2011 appears among the earliest statements of the Assad concern for any opposed to its absolute authority in Syria:
Related from 2013:
“It’s more horrific than any other war zone I’ve worked in. Most civilians are caught in crossfire, they are never really caught in direct fire. It is direct fire this time” he told BBC News.
Such state-generated terrorism encourages sympathy for the Syrian opposition, including in the confusion “The Terrorists” that the Assad regime allowed to incubate.
There are many other and similar observations and arguments having to do with “Assad and The Terrorists” and the medieval barbarism put on display before the world. The escalation attending Russia’s entry into the combat area, the side-by-side mix of Russo-NATO (U.S.) cooperation and “proxy war” have no effect on the kind of inhuman consciousness involved in sustaining the conflict.
It has been and remains BackChannel’s thesis that Putin, Assad, Khamenei, and Baghdaddi and what they represent — on this blog, 21st Century Feudalism — require one another for survival.
Related on BackChannels: https://conflict-backchannels.com/2015/10/02/syria-assad-vs-the-terrorists-how-isis-defends-assad/ – 10/2/2015.
Zubatov had long harboured plans for the restructuring and expansion of the political police, envisioning an elite and quasi-independent political police, acting under the direct order of its own Special Section and only indirectly under the orders of Fontanka; a truly secret police expanding and operating at the behest of the MVD‘s edicts, circulars, and regulations and not through the statutes of the Svod Zakonov (Digest of Laws).
Plehve dismissed Lopukhin’s plan and gave Zubatov’s proposals his full support. Zubatov’s ideas on police reform fitted comfortably within Plehve’s view of traditional tsarist bureaucratic behavior, satisfying both his belief in Imperial power politics and his secretive nature. He conceived of political police reform in the only way his experience allowed him to: not through decentralization of authority as Lopukhin believed, but through its deconcentration — the expansion of central authority in the provinces. Indeed, this strategy would permit Plehve to swell the size of the political police to ministerial proportions. As a result Plehve would in fact hold two very powerful ministerial portfolios: minister of internal affairs and the unofficial post of minister of internal security, enhancing his power and prestige within both ministerial circles and the court, making him the most powerful man in Russia next to the tsar.
Zuckerman, Fredric S. The Tsarist Secret Police in Russian Society, 1880-1917. Pp. 92-93. Washington Square, New York: New York University Press, 1996.
“Fontanka” refers to “Fontanka 16 Quai” (St. Petersburg), the central location, evidently of minimized importance at the above passage, for Tsar Alexander II’s secret police.
According to Wikipedia, “Many authors maintain that it was Rachkovsky’s agent in Paris, Matvei Golovinski, who in the early 1900s authored the first edition.[3] The text presented the impending Russian Revolution of 1905 as a part of a powerful global Jewish conspiracy and fomented anti-Semitism to deflect public attention from Russia’s growing social problems. Another Rachkovsky agent, Yuliana Glinka, is often cited as the person who brought the forgery from France to Russia.”
A rabbi said to me one afternoon in relation to religious zealots, “end times”, and terrorism: “Everyone’s in too much of a hurry to get to the end of the story.”
We were then looking forward.
At the moment, BackChannels has been looking backward and would say to the rabbi, “To the contrary, everyone wants to go back to the drawing board!”
For the Islamists, the “drawing board” appears to be 7th Century Medieval Barbarism.
For the Russian President, perhaps, it may be the political police serving Tsar Nicholas II.
Erdogan’s deposing of the Kamalist generals as he took power may have been offset recently by NATO’s relationship with his current generals, NATO has yet sway on that military. Also: Putin’s alignment with Assad in Syria and with the Shiite Assahola bars Erdogan from moving toward Moscow in all but vanity: the Turkish leader has now got his grandiose dream house, the White Palace. While Jihadists have walked from Istanbul’s airport to BadDaddyLand on his watch, and black market oil has reached buyers in Turkey, he’s a bit stuck as regards U.S.-NATO-Kurdish alignment against Daesh.
Putin may be credited with transiting the “Party Privileged” of the Soviet into a “New Nobility” in his 19th Century neo-feudal revanche.
At the moment, that enterprise has not been serving the general Russian population very well, but as he controls Russian media (and only 7 percent of the Federation reads or speaks in English), he may leverage the coming unhappiness against the west and in the cause of Great Russia. In the past year, the Russian economy has contracted by four percent and its best and brightest in entrepreneurs and professionals have fled — are fleeing — for economies in which they may sell their wares. The oil revenues on which the state has been largely dependent have been slashed deeply, so with all of that, my prediction is he will turn to the oligarchs for military funding in the name of Russian patriotism.
The question was, “Why would they attack ISIS? ISIS are now a very convenient foreign policy tool to advance geopolitical agendas in the Middle East for many Muslim countries in the region, mainly Iran, Syria, Russia (non Muslim), Qatar, Turkey and the dreaded fanatics in the glass palaces of Riyadh.”
The medieval world has medieval headaches that it tries to share with the modern and democratic still open societies.
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.
🙂
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. 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.
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. 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. 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.
“It 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 ‘Ukrainian fascists’ did some horrible things.”
In later writings about the KGB, one former senior agent in the 1990s wrote about the simmering discontent within the agency during Putin’s time there, and the increasingly prevalent disconnect between the intelligence officers, who saw themselves as servants of the “eternal” Russian nation rather than of the Communist Party.
“He’s learned the lessons of the past,” said Gaddy, “and from the failure of the Communist Party to tap the deep support that certain national and nationalist institutions have.”
Mentioning what he describes as “left-wing studies about the future of the EU and a possible European superstate”, Mr Orban subscribes to the view that the nation-state as a concept is being eroded and says the European Left and “radical American Democrats” have come up with a theory for this ˝new world˝ 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.
“We are confronted with a collective effort that has been engaged in terrorism,” Erdoğan said as he listed the attacks committed by ISIL in different parts of the world, namely in Suruç, Diyarbakır, Ankara and most recently in Paris. “This act of terror is not only against the people of France but against all peoples of the world,” he added.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s politics as regards Daesh needs its own expanded analysis. 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. 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”. Instead, Obama gets Erdogan’s business.
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: “I will side with the Jewish nation and its democratic aspirations in case of outbreak of a Palestinian Intifada.”
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 “Israeli occupation.”
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 can’t drive or vote, he champions women’s 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 Talal’s Kingdom Holding Co. agreed to sell its almost 30 percent stake in Saudi Research and Marketing Group at nearly double the market value.
“Not in London, not in New York, not in Dubai, right here in Saudi Arabia,” he said eagerly. “Kingdom Hotels, that will go public in Dubai and London. But Kingdom Holdings, that must go public here, that’s for sure. Because half of my investments are in Saudi Arabia.”
Farther down the column of the same piece:
Many of Prince Alwaleed’s most visible investments have been in the West, especially in hotel properties–most 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 London’s 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. 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. 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. He didn’t spare the wife, he didn’t spare the child, he didn’t spare the rabbi. 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: “The rabbis teach that if someone comes up against you to kill you, you should kill him first,” he said. “That should be our working model.” He added, “Don’t hesitate. Even at the start of an attack, shooting to kill is correct. If someone is brandishing a knife, shoot him. It’s part of Israel’s deterrence.”
About a month ago, Russian President Putin’s “Special Representative for the Middle East and Deputy Foreign Minister” 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.
“The Dueling Narratives of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict” is an attempt to provide journalistic “balance” 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 Ashrawi’s charge that police had planted knives to frame innocent Palestinians (a charge she even admitted she had “no evidence” 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 Gaza’s Tunnel Phenomenon in the summer of 2012. It reported that tunnel construction in Gaza has resulted in a large number of child deaths.
“At least 160 children have been killed in the tunnels, according to Hamas officials”
The author, Nicolas Pelham, explains that Hamas uses child laborers to build their terror tunnels because, “much as in Victorian coal mines, they are prized for their nimble bodies”.
During the first three weeks of October 2015, ten Israelis were killed and 112 wounded — eleven of them seriously — 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 “characterised by delusions of persecution” or “unjustified suspicion and mistrust of other people” — depending on which definition of the word “paranoia” BBC editors intended with their headline that read: “Paranoia deepens wedge between Israelis and Palestinians.”
On Phillip Weiss’s contribution to anti-Semitic / anti-Zionist propaganda.
I’ve 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.
BackChannels 