Notice how Locke’s empiricism dovetails with the political principles of natural rights and basic equality: because all people have eyes and ears and minds, and because we must check and consult with each other to find truth, the many, not just the few, are entitled to assert their own beliefs and contest others. Epistemic rights, like political rights, belong to all of us; empiricism is the duty of all of us. No exceptions for priests, princes, or partisans.
With America’s former “Fake News!” Fake President dooming Congressional members of the Republican Party into becoming IrrElephants, now seems just the time for reconsidering the character, history, and nature of what informed and modern humanity has come to call “Truth”.
The matter shouldn’t be that complex, but considering the long history of narcissistic conceits (why of course the sun revolves around the earth!) and wars involving irreconcilliable beliefs, cocksure wrong conclusions, and innumerable faiths, it should seem no wonder that for the pleasure of obtaining where all may a deeply responsible peace we have arrived in a lively conversation about empiricism and epistemology.
I have only started reading Rauch’s book but feel both the quote and note here worthy of play.
For the Palestinians: more Medieval Political Absolutism (and related dogma and political theater) or Modern Open Democracy with its emphasis on practical, responsible, and responsive governance?
For the Israelis: is there a right mix between medieval habits and forces within and the modern and hyper-modern worlds that might become ultimately human-centered and less interested in cultural and religious revivals?
What is really at stake between Moscow x Tehran (as critically influential in the creation of Palestinian politics) and Washington x NATO (with modern Israel representative of the western civilizational project) is this argument about political power and purpose, medieval or modern.
Were it up to me, I’d see the medieval world largely packed away but for aesthetics, beliefs, comforts, rites, and rituals, i.e., communal, familial, and personal behaviors that we may engage in of our own free will, but not political and social behavior in which we needs must cooperate for both greater personal freedom and the many operations of complexly integrated and progressing societies.
I feel in my overviews of extremism over many years that the worst — of any camp! — devote themselves more to an imagined past and central narcissistic roles in power — or the vagaries of real ones that today would be anachronistic at best — than to the environmental and human challenges of the present and future.
Look ahead: medieval or modern?
With the above posted yesterday in a Facebook Israel-Palestine peace group, I arrived at the same this morning to find no response, or in old terms made new: the sound of silence.
Response –>
So if I read the silence correctly, Palestinians deserve medieval governance, corrupt with their money, dishonest to their face, with education bent and twisted, and with intimidation and violence politically repressive. No elections. Politics again at the end of the gun barrel. I don’t know if that’s what Palestinians deserve, but as much would seem to have been delivered to them through more than 73 years of hostilities sustained by their KGB-handled and Ayatollah-sponsored “leaders”.
With little ado and much copy-and-paste, I’ve again engaged the narrative — and truth — about the “Middle East Conflict” and the idea that the Palestinian leadership has over time served other than the Palestinians.
As mentioned in previous posts, any Palestinian today may look up “Palestinian, corruption” or “Palestinian, political repression” with a simple search request.
The argument for Palestinians is for the refuge of a Palestinian state.
Unfortunately, the Palestinian governments remain proxies to Moscow and Tehran and, through both, corrupt and suffocating in the cause of political absolutism. The Palestinians will not find their freedom through Israel but through loss of faith in the PLO/PA and Hamas as their representatives.
Palestinians will be free (“from the river to the sea”) when those who claim most to represent them — while effectively neglecting and plundering them by turns — are finished in the eyes of the Palestinians themselves.
The Palestinians are the victims of the same forces that sustain Putin, Assad, and Khamenei. While the deflections may be toward “The Jews” and western political will and technology, the simple fact is that the Syrians have only to look at the financially or morally failed states — dictatorships — associated with Soviet Era circles of control and regions of influence. Of the choices given by Yassin Swehat, I would choose for the PLO/PA and Hamas “ideological contortions” as they continue to serve the phantoms of the Soviet more than 30 years after the death of the same.
Regarding the west’s moral failures involving Moscow and the Syrian Tragedy: fear of direct nuclear exchange has probably been part of it; global warming and displacement without financial or political mechanisms in place beyond the shaping of migrant policies has certainly been part of it — as has the reflexively controlled turn toward proto-fascist New Nationalism in some democracy-degraded EU/NATO states (Hungary and Turkey, foremost; Poland and Italy mumbling along); finally, perhaps especially in the middle east, “disinformation” must be considered poison and lazily “missed information” something of its antidote. Arabs and Jews quick to come to their feet and raise their fists in anti-western solidarity often choose not to acknowledge authentically genocidal wars against the “Jewish State” nor look into the differing situations for enfranchised Israeli Arabs and those who would reject Israeli governance or influence at all costs nor, in the end, comb over the history of anti-Semitic / anti-Zionist incitements and the long history of horrific acts of terrorism associated with them.
Everyone, even Israel, may be with the Palestinians this time but not the once KGB-guided PLO/PA (still) and Iran’s proxy Hamas. The same forces in Moscow and Tehran that produced them have sustained Assad the Butcher and other miserable post-Soviet “leaders” (Venezuela’s worth a look) around the world.
I absolutely support democracy, freedom, and rule of law for the Palestinians, and no less for them than any living in the west.
How is it then that Palestinians should be subject to PLO/PA and Hamas corruption, lies, and repression without end?
And how much of the world’s information (in English) should be withheld from Palestinians by evidently more powerful Palestinians (for their own good)?
Why shouldn’t Palestinians enjoy the privileges attending “free and fair elections” with plenty of responsibly vetted, cogent, and reliable information (on par with the best investigative journalism published anywhere else in the free world) with which to make political policy and representation decisions in their own right?
Shouldn’t Palestinians be able to evaluate for themselves their near state relationships with Moscow and Tehran?
Is there any reason for Palestinians not enjoying the benefits of democratic, liberal, and modern responsible and responsive governance subject to impartial internal auditing?
Or do the same need to be subject somehow to other less modern, less “western”, less universal, and less savory principles?
(The statement responded to essentially declared freedom a universal right, irreducible and recognizable).
Not so strangely, I agree. However, not all who are powerful agree, and some in charge of substantial communities, from Beijing to Gaza City, seem to believe their people need more authoritarian control and guidance — backed by repressive measures and violence — than others elsewhere, especially in the open societies of the Wild West. What is it about Palestinian Freedom that Palestinian leaders fear?
Putin, Assad, and Khamenei — I have their pictures in one place: https://conflict-backchannels.com/…/syria-the-horror-2011/ — have cut adrift the conventions of medieval absolutism. Their worlds — and the worlds attached to them! — should be fading behind us, and “us” includes the Palestinians.
For Iran — https://www.reuters.com/investigates/iran/#article/part1 — the fig leaf’s slipping, and that will be a very good thing for the Palestinians who may be — or will be — free to question the dogma that has attended their existence — their very breathing in situ, in fact — for more than 73 years.
The medieval competition between monarchies would seem about finished by World War I and made additionally irrelevant by the rise of an angry and industrialized Nazi Germany and its ravages through World War II (most of Europe’s monarchies have become constitutional enterprises), and yet Stalinism, ordinary dictatorship, and brutal theocracy have persisted into first fifth of the 21st Century. Along the way, the Soviet Union courted and used Arab power plus the Palestinian Refugees of 1948 to goad and block the expansion of western liberalism, democracy, and rule of law. When presented the choice between supporting the “Arab Spring” in Syria in 2011 or backing a dictator, Putin chose the dictator — and for himself on the way into power, a most manipulative and feudal-medieval Russian revanche.
While Assad’s slaughter drove down Syria’s population by 5 million between 2011 and 2018, the Palestinians, who had been handled since 1948 by an array of “revolutionary” personalities and organizations, were pinned in place, and eventually kept so by Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria, each of which today maintains special-status Palestinian camps. While each “Arab war” against Israel has been lost, the Palestinians have not been treated as normal refugees, dispersed, resettled, or settled in place but rather meanly kept intellectually clouded with anger and incitements and weaponized for war against the “Zionist entity”. That strategy now regularly erupts in acts of terror or acts of war, drawing to Palestinians Israel’s defense operations that while securing Israel create the world’s most awful memories for Palestinians. The strategy works some on the post-Soviet Communist Far Out Left, but as western governments do their homework — and perhaps independent Palestinians will too — the “strategy” fails reliably.
The lies — the poison slipped into ears for decades — will eventually fail too.
As the “Greatest Generation” (WWII) has largely passed away in the United States and the liberal professoriate has grown lax with the acceptance of all stances and thought, however absurd, the Palestinians have found themselves in the pleasant but miserable condition of getting themselves killed by way of delusional encouragements and bitter incitements cooked up by their own medieval leaders.
I believe modern Palestinians wish to live modern lives but do not have modern leaders who would serve them first and with integrity before serving themselves and their relationships elsewhere.
For everyone feeling sorry for Palestinians and saying we're to blame, we can't stress this enough:
Hamas considers this a victory. Hamas thanks Iran for supplying their weapons like they're accepting an Oscar. Yes. This is a performance for YOU the gullible public. pic.twitter.com/vN9jMR6dsR
— The Mossad: Satirical, Yet Awesome (@TheMossadIL) May 23, 2021
Results of Operation Guardian of the Walls:
We are going to share a report based on an investigation into the 74 named Palestinians that were killed during the course of the operation. https://t.co/Lym6tcuDpn Source (@terrorisminfo) 🧵1/6
— The Mossad: Satirical, Yet Awesome (@TheMossadIL) May 23, 2021
The post-Soviet arc of power — define it for yourself and have a look any time — is riddled with cancerous, dying, or dead and failed states!
The world has plenty of other evil in it, but what “malignant narcissists” do to their own geopolitical spaces in the cause of their own aggrandizement (and centralization of power) always ends badly.
As far as I’m concerned, Americans are superior!
Lol.
We’re all on this one “Blue Marble” and many of our real issues — not issues rooted primarily in our own minds but a part of our shared global experience — are issues to be acknowledged and worked on together across our many cultural and political boundaries.
In any case, M, Big Pictures and more parochial ones — both at hand at the same time — Palestinian Liberation begins with you and your vision. You should defy Palestinian corruption and political repression at every chance, not overlook or shrug it away as both attach to your own character if accepted.
***
So End The Occupation – Hamas Out of Gaza!
Seriously, B., have you ever raised your voice against Palestinian corruption? PLO/PA and Hamas political repression?
The Palestinians — the Refugees of 1948 and other Arab wars undertaken to destroy Israel — ” . . . from the river to the sea . . . .” — have long been abused, lied to, and suffocated by their own corrupt and venal leaders who with disinformation, framing, and incitements deflect attention from themselves.
Have you ever taken an independent look at the larger historical picture having to do with power absolute and power democratic?
Probably, the world is with the Palestinians for being for the most part beneath the boot and beside the sticky fingers of “leaders” that keep most of the base ignorant, impoverished, silent, and robbed of the charity and support intended for their economic development. Those who really care . . . care to look. The same would seem to reliably find Palestinian-generated blood spatter, corruption, repression, and unwarranted egoism.
Today, no one — least of all Palestinians — need to tarry in the politics of the 1960s and 1970s. That was then; this is now: modern people needs must demand accountability and integrity in their own governance as well as an accurate and dispassionate telling of true political history along with best informed and comprehending modern analyses.
בדיון המיוחד שהתכנס היום בעצרת האו״ם, הטחתי בפני השגרירים את האמת לה הם מתכחשים. הזכרתי באמצעות אמנת החמאס, שמדובר בארגון טרור אנטישמי ושאנחנו לעולם לא נתנצל על ההגנה על אזרחינו, האחריות על הנפגעים בעזה היא רק של רוצחי החמאס. צפו בקטע מהנאום: pic.twitter.com/DqY36o0EZm
— Ambassador Gilad Erdan גלעד ארדן (@giladerdan1) May 21, 2021
Related
After the Palestinian Authority’s Foreign Minister Riyad al-Maliki accused Israel of committing war crimes and deliberately massacring children in their sleep, Israel’s ambassador to the UN Gilad Erdan walked out of the General Assembly meeting in protest of the minister’s charged statements, according to Israeli media reports.
Jerusalem Post Staff. “Israel’s ambassador to UN Erdan walks out of General Assembly meeting.” The Jerusalem Post, May 20, 2021.
Recommended Search Strings
Hamas, anti-Semitism Hamas, child soldiers Hamas, corruption Hamas, human shields Hamas, political repression
Few know how to exploit and harm the general Palestinian population quite like Iran’s shills for Islam.
***
Palestinian Authority, anti-Semitism Palestinian Authority, corruption Palestinian Authority, democracy Palestinian Authority, human rights Palestinian Authority, incitement Palestinian Authority, KGB Palestinian Authority, political repression
Again, more broadly, no one brings more harm to the Palestinian Refugees of 1948 and subsequent wars quite like those who insist on representing them while making great claims belied by abuse, intimidation, kleptocracy, medieval methods of political control, and their own general political failure.
Palestinians deserve better!
Anyone would who would wish to be a part of the modern secure, vibrant, and working world.
“Hamas can’t hide anymore. That’s a great achievement for Israel,” he said in a televised address. “We eliminated an important part of Hamas’s and Islamic Jihad’s command echelon. And whoever was not killed, knows today that our long arm can reach him anywhere, above ground or underground.”
In the medieval mode, power lies and makes it truth; in the modern world, power had better tell the truth given the world’s yet free legions of high-integrity academics, consultants, judges, lawyers, researchers, and scholars. Lie to us, and we will find you out and bring about your humiliation in the minds of future generations. So here we know the lie told to the Palestinian refugees of 1948: “The Jews stole your land, and God wants you to win it back” — and it seems an old portion of Arab power has given the Palestinians that lie as something against which to bang their heads for decades.
From the Awesome Conversation
***
What mobs hear, believe, and repeat is different from what lawyers, judges, and scholars examine and come to know with overwhelming validity.
The civilized way of attenuating findings certain to make one side or another unhappy is to cooperate in a relocation chosen by those moving out and as good or better than present circumstance and altogether agreed permanent according to the will of those so relocated. No death, outrage, vandalism, or violence — just a disruptive but civil adjustment undertaken in a mutually respectful even if reluctant atmosphere.
You would rather create a sore, salt it, and drive a mob against both historical and inherited realities and superior — proven, experienced — defense and security forces.
Given the bent, about all Palestinian “advocates” can guaranty is greater and more widespread Palestinian anger and related harm.
***
So the Power That Lies–what is it to tell its people when the game’s up?
The answer is Copernican: “We were wrong. We could not see nought but ourselves and God, the universe, and the world before us fully admiring, approving, validating no matter what we did to ourselves, those taught to trust us most, and those we regarded as our enemies.”
I would not regard my fellow Jews as occupying the Center of the Universe either, but one may respect or at least value the co-evolutionary presence of the world’s diminishing pool of ethnolinguistic cultures, and then perhaps respect Arabs and Israelis and others most of all for overcoming themselves and broadening the reach of those principles most peaceful, pleasant, responsible, and, ultimately, universal.
Inspiration: the conversational partner’s quoting of Thomas Jefferson and Nelson Mandela on Freedom on behalf of Palestinian aspirations related to the same.
***
Yes!
The authorities in the West Bank and Gaza repressed dissent by arbitrarily arresting tens of peaceful demonstrators, opponents, critics, journalists and human rights activists.1 In some cases, authorities used emergency COVID-19 regulations to stifle freedom of expression and assembly.
The Independent Commission for Human Rights (ICHR), the Palestinian national human rights institution, recorded 37 incidents of violations of freedom of expression, freedom of assembly, and freedom of the press: 21 in the West Bank and 16 in Gaza. The ICHR also recorded 158 cases in the West Bank and 118 in Gaza of the arbitrary arrests of opponents and critics. The Palestinian Centre for Development and Media Freedoms recorded 97 incidents of attacks against journalists, including arbitrary arrests, ill-treatment during interrogation, confiscation of equipment, physical assaults and bans on reporting: 36 in the West Bank and 61 in Gaza.
I don’t want to work up a timeline, but given the report cited, police action would appear perfectly reasonable, responsive, and responsible.
Other issues (excuses) have also their depth in legal detail and reasoning. On better than balance, Palestinian leadership incitements and Palestinians too dumb for tackling online independent research in their own interest will bear responsibility for this latest war.
The more fair and profound question worth asking is whether the greater powers wish themselves to sustain the “Middle East Conflict” as a necessary buffer between the regions of “political absolutism” and related fascist or totalitarian control and those whose political evolution has found greater freedom and latitude in personal behavior in the world’s democratic and open societies.
Inspiration: the assertion that Israel wanted Hamas to take over Gaza in 2005 (in the wake of the Jewish retreat from the region) in order to clean out its rivals (Fatah, PLO) –>
Against Wild Conspiracy-Think
Playing “The Jews did it!” with Hamas is surreal given the realities attending Israel’s ceding Gaza. You (as metonym for “The Palestinians”) were to have protected roadways and synagogues for access by members; you were to have produced peace regardless of the factional warring for control of Gaza; you were to have established peace and a peaceful relationship with Israel. You failed to achieve other than a genocidal war against Jewry as re-framed as a war with Israel.
There is has been no Jewish Power in Gaza since 2005, and yet Palestinians in Gaza remain subject to brute force and political repression.
How is that possible without the Palestinian failure to defend even themselves from internal forces claiming to represent their interests?
So far as I can tell, Israel’s defense and policing policies respond directly to states of affairs generated by Palestinian behavior.
The post-Soviet arc of power — define it for yourself and have a look any time — is riddled with cancerous, dying, or dead and failed states!
The world has plenty of other evil in it, but what “malignant narcissists” do to their own geopolitical spaces in the cause of their own aggrandizement (and centralization of power) always ends badly.
As far as I’m concerned, Americans are superior!
Lol.
We’re all on this one “Blue Marble” and many of our real issues — not issues rooted primarily in our own minds but a part of our shared global experience — are issues to be acknowledged and worked on together across our many cultural and political boundaries.
In any case, Big Pictures and more parochial ones — both at hand at the same time — Palestinian Liberation begins with you and your vision.
You should defy Palestinian corruption and political repression at every chance, not overlook or shrug it away as both attach to your own character if accepted.
***
Too often in modern conflict, “Accusation in a Mirror” applies to easily to the accuser. There’s older Chinese wisdom for that: “He points the finger has four more pointing back at himself.”
***
I believe Israel wants an authentic peace in a modern world characterized by democratic processes, rule of law, and wide latitude for individual choices in the election of personal beliefs and behaviors. The enemies of Israel, on the other hand, wish to live by way of the force of will and punitive power to control and channel their people as faceless and nameless masses. The same would be the enemies of evolution, humanity, modernity, and all of the open societies of the world.
The Soviet failed state cum Putin’s kleptocracy has found a role in its attachment to rogue political movements and states, thus, it might seem, it has been always. Here’s the latest on feudal and post-Soviet Era puffery with NATO’s Turkish wild child buddying up with Putin to shill for the Islamist angle —
Erdogan told Putin the international community needed to “teach a deterrent lesson” to Israel, adding that Ankara was working to mobilize this reaction, according to a statement from his office.
Erdogan also called for work to be done on sending international peacekeepers to the region to help safeguard Palestinians, a proposal Turkey has made since 2018.
Here’s Orwellian as spoken by Adnan Abu Amer, head of the Political Science Department, University of the Ummah, Gaza —
Russia is a major power with a permanent seat in the UN Security Council. It is also part of the Middle East Quartet working to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In addition, Russia maintains close relations with the three actors that matter most to Hamas – Israel, the PA and Egypt. Russia could, therefore, help Hamas to not only stand up to Trump and his “deal of the century” in the international arena, but also resolve its issues with the PA and Egypt.
The last Palestinian with whom I chatyped declared his people peaceful and religious. Which religion, I asked him: Christianity or Islam?
Well, he answered, we’re more Nationalist.
I didn’t follow up with what Hamas represents, but nonetheless thematic across the arc of intra-Palestinian relations has been the Fatah v Hamas rivalry.
The last time Hamas won power in that argument, this is how Palestinian Unity went down —
AP – Posted to YouTube July 13, 2015.
Fast forward to the near latest in Palestinian elections —
Polls will be scheduled within six months under a deal reached between Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas and Hamas political chief Ismail Haniyeh, officials from both sides told AFP.
“We have agreed to first hold legislative elections, then presidential elections of the Palestinian Authority, and finally the central council of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO),” said Jibril Rajub, a senior Fatah official, on Thursday.
RAMALLAH, West Bank – It was meant to be a historic and long-overdue vote aimed at ending 15 years of paralyzed and divided leadership. Instead, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas on Thursday called off next month’s parliamentary elections after challengers from his own party threatened to weaken his hold on power.
Abbas’ decision, which came just two days before campaigning was supposed to begin, indefinitely postponed the May 22 vote and apparently a July presidential election as well. The postponement angered Palestinians eager to replace a president who has not held a vote in a decade-and-a-half and failed to deliver on his main goal of achieving independence from Israel. Street protests broke out in several cities in the West Bank and Gaza.
Through it all — the terrorism, the street fighting, the demagoguery, and failed election promises, not to mention decade after decade of defeat in the Palestinian effort to eliminate the Zionist Entity — Russia has stood by Palestinian leaders in the cause of Palestinian Liberation (Enslavement), Dignity (Humiliation), Freedom (Political Repression), and Prosperity (Corruption and Kleptocracy), and Peace Most of All (Perpetual War).
With Moscow’s acceptance, blessing, and encouragement, Palestinian leaders defy democratic processes, hold on to power, pervert political language or rhetoric, and drive their constituents to exactly the kind of violence that Israel needs must respond to with order-restoring force.
Moscow, were it modern beneath Putin’s egotism rather than feudal-medieval, could encourage throughout the Palestinian community an appreciation for reliable contemporary and historical information, civil order, practical problem solving to address basic education, infrastructure, public services and other community-wide issues, and tried and true humanist reasoning — helpful and impartial in the improvement of Qualities of Living — but that might have Russia taking its place among the advanced and higher integrity open democratic societies of the west in improving the lot of the residents of the Palestinian Territories.
For Moscow, it’s plainly better that Gaza and West Bank Palestinians remain suspended in chaos, disillusion, disinformation, and political deadlock and impotence. That apparently, keeps Palestinian leaders coming to Moscow for guidance, and Moscow now plainly appreciates its own international importance and their ever faithful, ever hopeful esteem.
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