The wealth tied into the feudalism that drives the middle east dispute may be difficult to imagine for most. On the Shiite side, Ali Khamenei and his brother control in private portfolio about $57 billion. Reuter’s “Assets of the Ayatollah” (easy lookup) tells how that came about. At least two of the Hamas leaders, Ismail Haniyeh and Khaled Mashaal, have developed reputations as billionaires also. Basically, “the terrorists” (the leaders) are not being spoiled: they are living the lifestyles to which they have become accustomed.
Israel’s medical ethic, which stems from the Hippocratic Oath, has been always to leave the politics at the door and attend to the needs of the injured and sick. I think that ability to separate issues and focus on challenges in separate dimensions may be expressive of the modern mind as the medieval appears less able to set abstract and just boundaries.
The feudal mode in thought and governance may also dominate Sunni politics, which is complex. Erdogan, the Turkish leader, has moved into his immense “White Palace” and proven reluctant to destroy ISIS at this time. He appears to prefer beating back Kurdish hopes for independence to stalling the ISIS project. He would (I believe) align with “Putin-Assad-Khamenei” if not for his Sunni identification. Still, overarching Putin, Assad, Khamenei, Erdogan, and some others is the devotion to “political absolutism” or the concentration of “absolute power” in a single leader. As much works against the democratic and humanist distribution of power throughout populations.
Stimulus: Israeli doctors have been treating an Hamas terrorist recently, and the poster had asked whether the modern workspace was luxurious enough to spoil him.
The Machiavellian “behind the curtains” has been supplanted by “in the shadows” and into the shadows may be where mainstream media fears to tread.
Both the Bond movies and Le Carre novels, and I’ve enjoyed both in series, have reflected in fiction the issues (as well as atmosphere) of their day, each work of art in essence packaging up the look and spirit of a part of a decade using the secret world as its window. For the writers, intuitive exploration may turn out more secure than looking into essentially powerful secret societies. In fact, the possession of private power and wealth may be inseparable today from the control of political influence and movement in the mirrors of criminal and lawful worlds and the feudal and democratic ones in which the bad guys work in secrecy and the good guys do as well but, perhaps, differently.
In real life, someone leads an organization that kidnaps an Israeli Olympic team at the event — and someone else leads another organization that quietly hunts down the miscreants.
Must the journalists know all? And when? As history? As now?
Many stories emerge over time.
I haven’t yet watched _Kill the Messenger_ but from description it appears that it will fit with a stack of nonfiction histories about the security services of states. Whatever happened may be done, but the processes may not be done, and that’s where the public becomes curious in its own interest. However, journalism has also a politics of discretion belied by the terms of art “on the record” and “off the record” and the public may never know what has been imparted “off the record”, much less what has been sealed in the minds of agents and the vaults of the KGB/FSB and others.
I’m more inclined to trust The Washington Post than, say, Alex Jones 🙂 , but one may suspect that the Post must also keeps secrets.
With conventional warfare somewhat nulled by the immense firepower developed by would-be adversaries, the twists that are “low-intensity conflict”, “hybrid warfare”, “war by proxy” and so on depend on mafia-type arrangements and relationships to produce activity (or perhaps as much has been always the way of the street in which conflicts are conceived and worked into reality).
Posted to YouTube 12/1/2014.
In books available through Amazon and in videos on YouTube, there’s a surfeit of material covering the history of spying, from The Bible, no less, and forward. One has only to look. Of historic interest and, perhaps, contemporary curiosity, may be the depth of control and integration a state has with its people along this axis. From the 20th Century experience, the mere mention of “Gestapo”, “STASI”, and “KGB” summon the vision of totalitarian police states operated by political elites with security forces sufficiently populated to reach down through their societies to the extent that even children are made into informants.
When Mr. Putin and company set out to preserve the privileges of the Soviet without the Soviet (reference: Karen Dawisha’s book, Putin’s Kleptocracy), the drive appears to have been developed precisely for interest already established within the KGB and Party to preserve power and wealth and the ability to distribute the same to similar favored elites. As a king to knights and lords, so has Putin been to his “new nobility” (another title in the Russian Section of this blog’s library).
Do the services of western powers mirror the security systems that maintain Russia’s neo-feudal governance (yes/no?) and, if so, democracy by democracy, how? What’s similar? What’s different?
I’d rather imagine the answers and work in fiction — and may, for this lonesome blogger is not The Washington Post or The New York Times, and even the “best and brightest” in those companies may choose — or have long chosen — to exercise discretion.
Ismail Haniyeh: Billionaire Khaled Mashaal: Billionaire Ali Khamenei and his brother: between the two of them, $57 billion in private portfolio.
The only “powers” occupying the Arab communities of Greater Israel or potential Palestinian suzerainty remain the PLO, Hamas, and powerful Palestinian families expert at getting others to die or suffer for their greed.
The official needs of the Arabs abandoned in now multiple wars and made to serve as goads to Israel and the west are as bottomless as the souls of their leaders have proven empty. Their claims to nobility — as suggested by the full pockets known to Arafat, Haniyeh, and Mashaal — have turned out over generations the proven claims of thieves and murderers. Hamas + human rights; Hamas + human shields; Hamas + millionaires: after a while, such searches tell a whole political story. Fatah has done less well in some regards. Black September is history. What Fatah and Hamas appear to have to offer their own, much less Israel or anyone else, appears to be their tired old jaws and their continuing violence or threat of it against their own constituents as well as Israel.
Related Reference
Bar-Zohar, Michael and Eitan Haber. The Quest for the Red Prince. New York: William Morrow & Company, Inc., 1983.
Update From the Awesome Conversation – June 29, 2015
Obama’s bought time to let education and this web-thingy update a generation of Persian professionals away from the medieval regime; he’s also demonstrated some U.S. – Saudi ability to degrade oil revenues, control the offsets in new revenue, and insult the regime (also Putin’s regime) using U.S. controls. Will the lesson take or has it worked? I guess we’re staying tuned and will find out.
I put up an Allen West post on Back-Channels — https://conflict-backchannels.com/…/the-united-states…/ — there’s the chance that the staunch conservative voice may overplay its hand, which relies here heavily on fear of the first delivery of a nuclear attack (could be dirty bombs delivered by rockets fired by Gaza; could be a one-off delivered by Hezbollah, which has got the full store of rockets already).
Money is funny for Khamenei’s regime. He and his brother are reputed to control a conservatively estimated $57 billion in personal assets. Basically, “state sponsorship” – personal, criminal, or actually from state coffers — of terrorism is not a financial problem — and its comes cheap in any case: what happens if others become more enriched, more dependent on the possession of their assets, more greedy for new business themselves?
So the nuclear deal seems a bad deal on old terms, but Obama’s ship of state and all attached to it left that harbor a while ago, and we’re sailing with these new variables in play. Ultimately, America is indigestible to the forces perceived by conservatives as enemy: we’re not going to be conquered, as much as we obsess about that, but the kind of evil posed, proposed, and sustained by Putin-Khamenei needs to be met by altering their native political demographics to come to more accommodating, more productive global standards. The two mentioned are playing or pushing for a more deeply medieval world steeped in greater chaos and conflict: we’re building a more modern world interlaced and held together by open communications, democratized business and personal relationships, and the embrace of anti-piratical and perhaps humanist overarching shared values.
The “nuclear deal” might be a bad deal — but it also might be a good move.
A rabbi said to me one day with regard to the Islamic Small Wars, “Everyone’s in too much of a hurry to get to the end of the story.”
Well then, as regards global conflict and threat: let’s hasten slowly and be not so much in a hurry to see how it all ends.
Time may work in the favor of our humanity against the ravages brought to it by those “malignant narcissists” we call “presidents for life” and “supreme leaders”, the human containers and projectors of absolute personal (also often infantile and sadistic) power.
“Organizations like Rabbis for Human Rights who get money from the European Union, get money from the New Israel Fund, they’re using that money to smear Israel’s name around the world by using the example of Susiya, which is a one-hundred percent illegal village, and using that as an example of the bad Israeli occupier not allowing the poor Palestinians to live here, and that’s a scene they want to create, but hopefully with this video, you have seen a different view of that, and the truth has to come out.”
Real ethnic cleansing proceeds with a concept from the dark mirror in language — https://conflict-backchannels.com/coins-and-other-terms/anthropolitical-psychology/paranoid-delusional-narcissistic-reflection-of-motivation/ — i.e., the ability to deliberately invert a situation (so the Jews are attacking Hitler and Germany) and present the inversion as the truth. Anti-Semitic ideation — and much bigotry toward others as well, Rwandan Tutsi, Hungarian Roma, for examples– appears to rely on such knee-jerk nationalist or racist cant and its Orwellian head-nodding acceptance — or embrace by those most benefitting from this form of lawless territorial aggression, and doubtless not the souls camped out but their wealthy handlers.
Addendum – Forwarded by Regavim: Background on Sussiya
Susiya- the Facts, and only the Facts
A historical village? Not really! The claim that this is an Arab village which existed hundreds of years, or even decades, is completely false. According to travelers in the 19th century, and from surveys of villages and population conducted by the British mandatory powers in 1945, which mention all of the villages in the area and even some of the inhabitants, there is no hint of the existence of a village named Susiya, except as an ancient archeological site. This rocky land on which this illegal encampment is situated served the purpose of grazing land. In those days, only during the grazing months, the caves in the area provided temporary protection for the shepherds from the village of Yatta from robbers, wild animals, and inclement weather. Aerial photographs testify that in this place, there never was any settlement before the year 2000, except for 4 or 5r structures which were built illegally during the late 1990’s.
Jewish history. In the archaeological excavations on the ancient site, there was found an ancient Jewish settlement which dated from the 4th to the 9th centuries of the Common Era. According to the scholars, this was a thriving Jewish community, which existed hundreds of years after the destruction of the Second Temple, and achieved the height of its development at the end of the Byzantine period, and at the beginning of the old Arab period. On the site, they discovered a large synagogue, ritual baths, homes, community buildings, and other structures. Further, in 1986, 277 dunam in the area were allocated to establish an archaeological site, and from then on, it was forbidden for the shepherds to use the old caves. At first, during the grazing seasons, the shepherds came and put up tents and —- for the period of the grazing, but in the last decade, the Nawaja family has tried to take permanent control over the area.
Not an expulsion—an eviction of squatters. Research in the population registries of the Civil Administration indicates that the majority of the families found in the illegal encampment owned homes in the village of Yatta. The Najawa family, who lives in Yatta, seized control of lands which do not at all belong to them. Thus, we are not speaking of driving people off of their lands, but of evicted illegal squatters who have put up tens of structures in violation of the law.
Illegal building – At present, there are about 64 structures in the encampment, all of which were built illegally and without building permits from the authorities of the Civil Administration. 85% of these structures were put up between 2011 and 2013, by systematically ignoring the administrative orders of the supervising authorities(?) which forbid continuation of the building, and even contrary to the specific orders of the High Court of the State of Israel, which has been involved in this case since the year 2001. The Court has ruled that the claims of the squatters to ownership of the land are invalid, and there is no basis to approve building on that area.
Contempt of Court – In 2013, the High Court issued an interim order against the illegal building, which explicitly found that the is forbidden to carry out more illegal building in the encampment in addition to that which already existed. Yet, after the issuance of that order, more than 33 illegal structures were put up, which amount to more than half of the total number of structures in the encampment. To anyone who respects the law, it is clear that this is a scandal and in contempt of the rule of law.
The Jews could not have done very well against the Romans!
🙂
Revisit Titus and the horrific burning of Jerusalem.
Revisit Masada, for that matter.
The distillation and order I suggest for the uptake of a Judaic monotheism, which we all share (whether we like it or not) starts with the jurist Hillel the Elder (35-BCE to 10-CE), who produced decisions and an outlook that made Judaism less ethnic, more evolving around principle, and more accessible to conversions (uh oh). smile emoticon So: Hillel the Elder –> Jesus and Paul –> General Constantine –> General Muhammad.
We may agree on the unity (and sanctity) of life and of a natural life well lived, but our disagreements on scripture, the composition of extended works and exegesis, devolve to our ethnolinguistic cultures once more separated by geospatial relationships and by time. In retrospect, here at the advent of a new world interlaced with Internet-based communicating, our enmities seem cultivated in fear and dreadfully superficial and malignant narcissism.
At this point, no one need have the last word — not Moses, not Jesus, not Muhammad, nor our overlooked link in the end-of-the-Roman Era family guy Hillel the Elder. What we may need are new words resonant with the more noble aspects of our common humanity.
Artists and assorted creative types needs must submerge themselves with object-projects: book, essay, play, poem, screenplay. That’s what it takes to pioneer thought and fashion ideas and insights into transmissible forms, and that auto-constructed isolation may go hard on the soul — it certainly has on mine, and the desktop has added its own layer of interference with the experience of what is proximate in the way of events and people. Nonetheless, “chatyping” in response to what others spell out online proves always stimulating while the cyber-environment — global, politically across cultures, across political boundaries, across languages and religions — provides a glimpse at what today is possible and perhaps needs to become a new reality in conversation.
The Awesome Conversation itself has been nothing less than miraculous.
What comes next?
This blog has stated its six most irreducible virtues at the top of the sidebar to the left.
Those ennobling characteristics, however, may be brought to bear against a world rife with cruel and despotic leaders and their deeply manipulated and misguided (start with “state-controlled press” and end with “absolute political suppression”) followers and the messes made by related widespread conflict, diminishment, ignorance, and impoverishment.
Rome was neither built nor taken apart in a day, and while Latin has become a “dead language” — useful to the Catholic Church and to science for its stability, Hebrew has been returned to life and with it, so one may hope, interest in the preservation, survival, and evolution of some approximately 7,000 still living languages and the cultures and subcultures each represents in the global tapestry.
Note: BackChannels believes “Putin-Assad-Khamenei” have created Daesh to bleed the west, produce the political theater that is “Assad vs The Terrorists”, and then serve Khamenei’s Shiite regime as a foil and as part of a program to keep preserved the Sunni vs Shiite animosity that in turn underwrites theocratic political power in various of the Islamic-majority states, Iran foremost among those with interest exploiting the division for piratical long-term gain.
BackChannels 