“On the streets of Gaza people have a sense of security – except when Israel attacks” — In defensive modes, preventive, responsive, retributive.
The Palestinians have long surrendered their dreams to propaganda, the PLO/PA, and Hamas as well as the corruption attending such governments that hold themselves beyond criticism.
From what sense of ethics, integrity, or justice were the greenhouses and synagogues of Gaza destroyed after departure in 2005?
Such rage would seem to have been set loose by officially and socially approved, promoted, and popular anti-Semitic incitement, the same that had Hamas in 2006 proclaiming to Palestinians that Hitler admired them as ideal revolutionaries (PMW: “Hamas: Hitler praised the Palestinians as models”).
Perhaps Israel should treat as poison the disinformation fed to the Palestinians and see the same receive an antidote in an honest telling, for Hamas fairy tales have only enslaved the Palestinians and gotten them to get themselves killed for show.
Posted to YouTube March 30, 2018. Ten more Palestinians were to draw fire and die, and the cause should be clear through what the cameras recorded in the way of “peaceful” demonstration.
One may marvel at the power of bad ideas and failed dreams to continue placing the innocent in harm’s way — and for the global press, the more souls corralled and misled into martyrdom, the better for sympathy and “understanding”, never mind the squandering of billions of dollars intended for Palestinian practical betterment going into the pockets of corrupt and venal leaders and their systems of patronage.
The Soviet Union dissolved in bankruptcy about 26 years, and yet the scenes remain much as Yuri Andropov must have seen them when promoting dictatorship beneath the cover of Popular Liberation Movements.
The peace camps of the west may have to soon decide whether they wish to remain in business by doing their part to sustain the middle east conflict on bogus claims; and Mr. Putin may soon have to decide whether he will take KGB and more general historic Russian barbarism forward with the cynical manipulation and destruction of every space in which Moscow has chosen to play.
I don’t know how far back in modern history the penchant for exploiting or killing journalists go, but as much has been a part of the peril for the intrepid since I signed on here in 2006/7. The evildoers haven’t the innocence required to boast their programs with authentic faith; instead, they manipulate their programs — the Communism, the Islamism, possibly the Capitalism as well, and all other such — to assault their enemies while corralling their believers. Power has become a deeply cynical game beloved of dictators. They will say anything to direct, focus, and incite their mobs. It’s into that environment that it seems modern “war reporters” now walk. They are no longer “telling the other side of the story” — they’re either helping the other side produce their “optics” — or they’re getting whacked.
What the west may do in conflict is adhere convincingly through doctrine to their own arguably superior ethical and moral codes.
Would only that there were that “Hail Dorothy” moment when the Wicked Witch has melted and the army subjected to the poor bitch is found to have no complaints.
School of Media and Public Affairs (SMPA) George Washington Univeristy 805 21st Street NW Room 309 Washington, DC 20052 Phone: 202-994-6227 smpa@gwu.edu
Of the 110 schoolgirls kidnapped in Dapchi in February, 104 were released by the Boko Haram, five died during the kidnap while one remains with the terrorists for allegedly refusing to put on a hijab and renounce her Christian faith.
Her killers wear masks and appear to have no names.
From The Awesome Conversation —
The Ummah of Islam has bloody edges, and the Christian community of Nigeria appears to be an edge. The “Fulani Land Pirates” — that’s what I’m calling them — are nibbling away Nigerian Christian territory with rape and rapine, and the Christian community disarmed by the state is become “internally displaced”, currently by about 200,000 souls in relation to the Land Pirates, about 2 million in relation to Boko Haram, who have got a kind of game going: abduct, convert or kill, and return the sworn converts to their parents.
There are multiple levels in these conflicts — locally, Boko Haram is a scourge; however, the arms are Kalashnikov, generally speaking; we know today that Moscow arms and backs the Taliban in Afghanistan; we know that the same defends politically absolute systems, AKA “dictatorships”, and we know that the sponsors in the surrounds of these fighting elements, emir, general this or that, fit that description.
My call: it’s not overpopulation or too much imagination that drive the Islamic Small Wars, although that would be true for producing recruits for war parties: Nigeria provides dual images — the assaults of the Fulani Land Pirates in one part, the barbarism practiced by Boko Haram in the other — of the Islamist program of conquest “by the sword” in action.
Whatever reassurances and sweet words may come from the “leadership” may appear more and more as cover.
The marauders keep getting away — and refreshed with arms and funding keep returning too.
Posted to YouTube on February 26, 2018 — before the return of most of the schoolgirls: ” . . . and just asking how could our daughters be left unprotected to be taken again . . .?
Speaking in tears, the middle-aged resident of Jumbam, a village 2km away from Dapchi, said rather than the Nigerian soldiers combating the insurgents after they came back to drop the girls, the soldiers simply “watched with folded arms while the insurgents left triumphantly.”
The resident spoken was the father of Aisha Adamu, Adamu Jumbam.
The report involved 3,455 household surveys and 46 focus group discussions across 12 local government areas in Borno State. Most of the IDPs surveyed expressed fears about security as their main reasons for not wanting to return home.
Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari has claimed on several occasions that Boko Haram—which has fractured into at least two major factions—was no longer a fighting force in Nigeria. But the militants have continued to launch attacks and have been solely responsible for some 700 deaths so far in 2017, according to the Council on Foreign Relations.
IDMC estimates that there are almost 2,152,000 internally displaced people (IDPs) in Nigeria as of 31 December 2015 . . . .
Of the total figure of IDPs, the assessment indicates that 12.6 per cent were displaced due to communal clashes, 2.4 per cent by natural disasters and 85 per cent as a result of insurgency attacks by Islamists. The decrease in the percentage of IDPs who were displaced by insurgency from 95.3 per cent in August to 85 per cent in December 2015 and the increase in the numbers of those displaced by communal clashes from 4.6 per cent to 10.1 per cent in October were due to the inclusion of five additional States witnessing communal violence more than insurgency by Islamist groups.
But a source who also participated in the negotiations with Boko Haram that led to release of over 80 Chibok girls in 2017 told SaharaReporters that the federal government not only made the ransom payment of five million euros to the insurgents, it also exchanged some Boko Haram prisoners in return for the Dapchi girls.
However, the lie that no ransom was paid to secure the return of the Dapchi girls followed a consistent pattern of such under the table millions of dollars payments by the Nigerian government to Boko Haram to secure freedom of abductees, especially since the advent of the Buhari administration.
Addendum – More From the Awesome Conversation
Moscow’s hidden hand may be behind both conflicts — Boko Haram and the Fulani Land Pirates — for the still medieval Russian state appears to promote “political absolutism” — the power of the tyrant to destroy both property and persons with impunity — worldwide. In such systems, the state exists to serve the Great Leader who may hold his position beneath a banner and program essentially swallowed by the public. As regards dictatorships, one may say: “Different Talks — Same Walk!” Always.
BackChannels source this morning relayed the following from Lagos, Nigeria in relation to raids by apparent herdsman against largely disarmed villages.
Since the first of the years, source claims, more than 500 Nigerians have been slaughtered in raids and no arrests have been made;
The number of Internally Displaced Persons associated with the conflict exceeds 200,000;
The Nigerian government has been repossessing simple weapons from villagers while attackers typically carrying AK-47s surround their targets and destroy buildings and stores with burning petrol;
The complement attending raids may average about 100 or more fighters;
Source of arms: Libya, other Arab nations, and Turkey.
In 2013, news reports mentioned a Hezbollah cell and weapons cache in Nigeria; the latest weapons seizure of similar scale in 2017 appears to have originated through Turkish channels.
Although Fulani herdsman have been blamed en masse for the aggression noted, BackChannels has heard suggestion that the weaponizing may devolve to the same forces backing extremist organizations elsewhere. The 2013 Hezbollah connection and the more recent 2017 interdiction involving Turkey would appear to support that thesis.
Recruitment into raiding units would also appear to correspond to conditions channeling fighters into rogue organizations elsewhere.
Dr. Omolade Adunbi, Assistant Professor, Political Anthropology, University of Michigan noted the following earlier this year in the publication Africa is a Country: “The question then becomes, how are these insurgents with no clarity of purpose able to recruit members into their dysfunctional group? The answer to this question is not far-fetched. First, the effect of climate change on the rise of social inequality in many parts of the country has meant the increased susceptibility of socially vulnerable groups to recruitment.”
Related on YouTube
Posted to YouTube 3/28/2014
Posted to YouTube 1/11/2018
Posted to YouTube 8/2/2016
BackChannels can never “vet” these videos, but most recognize this conflict in Nigeria as involving cattlemen, basically, and farmers. Less played may be the role played by religion in the conflict, which here has been made apparent:
Posted to YouTube 1/16/2018
Considering the 2013 Hezbollah weapons cache story, the latest interdiction of arms involving Turkish (criminal, of course) channeling, the claim of arms coming from Libya and more recent participation associated with Turkey and the activities of Moscow and Tehran in manipulating conflicts and extremism into existence (listen to the BBC interview of a once Soviet admiral on the Ogaden War), the drivers of this latest tragedy in Nigeria may start to surface.
The Turkish Ambassador to Nigeria, Mr. Hakan Cakil, in a meeting with the Comptroller-General of the Nigeria Customs Service, Col. Hameed Ali (rtd), over importation of four containers of pump-action rifles into Nigeria in last eight months vowed to help Nigeria fish out criminals behind the illegal arms shipment to Nigeria.
The question then becomes, how are these insurgents with no clarity of purpose able to recruit members into their dysfunctional group? The answer to this question is not far-fetched. First, the effect of climate change on the rise of social inequality in many parts of the country has meant the increased susceptibility of socially vulnerable groups to recruitment . . . .
On 4 December 2017, Nigeria’s air force sent fighter jets to fire rockets at villages as a “warning” to deter spiralling communal violence, as hundreds of herdsmen attacked at least five villages in Adamawa state to avenge the massacre of up to 51 members of their community, mostly children, the previous month in Kikan.
An Amnesty International team visited the villages in the aftermath of the air raids and gathered witness testimony from residents who described being attacked by a fighter jet and a military helicopter as they attempted to flee.
(Reuters) – Nigeria’s secret service say they have arrested a “terrorist cell” trained in Iran who planned to attack U.S. and Israeli targets in Africa’s most populous nation.
The State Security Service (SSS) said they arrested Abdullahi Mustapha Berende and two other Nigerians in December after Berende made several suspicious trips to Iran where he interacted with Iranians in a “high profile terrorist network”.
The National Chairman of Fulbe (Fulani) Development Association of Nigeria (FULDAN), Malam Ahmad Usman Bello, has declared that they cannot be defeated by any ethnic group in the country.
Bello made the remarks while speaking with Saturday Tribune in Kano, amid the widespread outcry against the murderous activities of Fulani herdsmen in Benue, Plateau and Taraba states and many other parts of the country.
The federal government is set to meet Turkish diplomats today over the spate of illegal importation of rifles from Turkey to Nigeria.
Nigeria Customs Service (NCS) Comptroller-General (CG) Col. Hameed Ali (retd) said this when he briefed reporters over the seizure of another 470 rifles at Tin-Can Island port in Lagos.
The body also said communal clashes have claimed over 700 lives since last year. AI made its position known in a statement issued on Monday. It stated that clashes between herdsmen and farmers in Adamawa, Benue, Taraba, Ondo and Kaduna states have resulted in 168 deaths in January alone.
Prompt: ” . . . the Arabs . . . will become the majority in Israel, and things will . . . change.”
The apartheid — the separation of Palestinians in camps in Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, and Egyp — is Arab.
The exploiting of misery and leveraging of anti-Semitic perception is Russo-Arabian from the Soviet Era (and Russia’s 19th Century history as regards the libel of “The Protocols”).
Political suppression — suppression of criticism, of open speech, of election — may be credited to PLO/PA and Hamas.
Corruption and the skewing of financial distribution of UNRWA support has produced wealthy leaders — Arafat, Abbas, Haniyeh, Mashaal — and affluence among the patronized.
For those who feel diminished by not getting “one-up” on the Jews, the Jews in liberation theology got one-up on Pharaoh.
So many of the things you have heard have, perhaps, been intended to manipulate you, to make you angry, to exploit a bad situation.
Palestinian general good: never so loudly addressed.
The interest is there. The conscience, modernity, and will: absent.
Addendum – From the Same Day
The prompt had to do with Jews as outsiders, a trope coughed up frequently by the Palestinian holdovers from the era of Soviet cadre. (URL added, of course).
The Point of No Return blog will tell a substantial part of the story of the Jews and their return to capital and land of the Hebrews.
A fast look-up of “KGB, Arafat” and “KGB, Abbas” will tell you a little bit about the origin, design, and handling of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, PFLP, and others.
A revisiting of the Gaza’s historic Jewish community, its more recent (2005) displacement by force, and the destruction of its synagogues, which were to remain accessible, will tell you also about where Israel’s Jews have come from and what they valued where they were settled.
We do not reconcile good with evil: we grow the good — and “the good”, if it is good, has integrity.
And the incumbent President has not been so? Has the news really been fake? Had his vendors been paid completely and on time at completion of work? And then with hindsight, we could update this chart appearing in POLITICO last March:
Here’s the nut: “Did he or didn’t he?” doesn’t matter.
What matters is America’s coherence in its confidence in its presidency.
Where is that now?
The prompting statement to the effect that the “Clintons are pathological liars.”
Even if accepted in the nonpartisan spirit, where are Americans with their critical evaluation of the present leadership?
While drafting this temperature-checking note, I had asked “Where is the United States today as regards the Skripal poisoning in the United Kingdom?”, and I had expected to find not much given President’s Trump image as an autocrat in line with Putin’s encouragement of EU / NATO “New Nationalism”, an element part and parcel in the prying apart of the Alliance.
The two log lines — ” . . . with UK ‘all the way'” and ” . . . hesitant to blame Russia for the attack . . . .” address the ambivalence and suspicions that have dogged the Trump Presidency from before the elections (perhaps starting with the eyebrow-raising Trump campaign association with the now indicted Paul Manafort).
However Americans may feel about the American President at this moment, it’s the “Phantom of the Soviet” and the “phantoms of the Soviet” in issues that are being spotlighted in relation to KGB-style political assassinations that in turn have been evaluated by the intelligence services of the three NATO states now apparently in agreement on their origins.
BackChannels 