If the screenshot banner copy is unclear or too small to read, it says, “‘Killing Jews is Worship that draws us close to Allah’ — Hamas MTV. That’s His Jihad, What’s yours?”
Comment From The Awesome Conversation
The Geller and Spencer and other anti-Jihad shows ask of Islam sufficient introspection and courage emphasize virtue, reform if necessary, and put both the 20th Century inspiration for the “Muslim Botherhood” and related poison-in-the-head out of business so that more of the world can get to work on other things.
However, the conflict and violence that assaults us daily by way of global media — and investment in this region of discussion — hasn’t only to do with Islam: it has to do with the interpretation of power — absolute and feudal or distributed and democratic. “Putin-Assad-Khamenei” are of a type, and Islam, especially in the middle east, has been “played” (ref.: Pacepa and Rychlak) and plays to their deeply medieval world vision and the image they have of themselves in it.
The Jews continuously, famously, remove themselves from cults of godlike personality and continue eternally in search of the Promised Land. Instead of imposing, the commune invites, and perhaps after Hillel, some ideas about a common humanity become borrowable but also political and little bit crooked (in Judaism, for example, all of the prophets are drawn as faulted humans, deeply so, and kept separate from God). For our grandiose delusional dictators fascists malignant narcissists, the limitation perhaps seems a deep affront and “control”, sadistic and total, becomes their thing. Must we have them? “Syndicate Red Brown Green” and NATO, more or less, are wrestling over it. Hamas is way down on the food chain (thank Khamenei, among others, for keeping it in business) but it’s leveraging some Islamic zeitgeist to produce chaos, fear, and sorrow around itself serves the larger press of the feudal mode.
Not only “the awesome conversation” elicits the above but also simply visiting these themes — conflict, culture, language, psychology — day after week after month after years: things come to the surface. Some become so familiar as to become blog-based tropes:
No Moses — no Muhammad
Hillel the Elder –> Jesus, Paul, Constantine –> Muhammad
The Torah begins with God
The Torah, closely read, compels progressive ethical and moral argument
Syndicate Red Brown Green (post-Soviet neo-feudal Russia; new national socialists; Islamists)
Expect some items to show up on the “Alpha – Zulu” page of this blog. Others may be simply plugged into meditative political writing as fit.
The tests of will in conflict that BackChannels has come to perceive has been very much within the medieval vs modern template, which would be fine if the medieval proved good. The matter, however, has been complicated by a dark portion in psychology, i.e., the compulsive, endless, and helpless fascism and sadism of the malignant narcissist. Too often, capricious power — power considering itself above all natural laws and inclined to create and make the same to suit itself without limits — comes to impose suffering on others with impunity. It (!) appears to prize the annihilation of others and the erasing of time out of the urge to exist in a timeless world entirely of its own fashioning — and doing so it dooms itself to annihilation.
True, Muslims in Myanmar face genocidal persecution at the hands of state backed Buddhist extremists. To follow the thinking of the Pamela Gellers, Bill Mahers and Daniel Pipes of this world to its logical conclusion is to see Myanmar replicated in the West. It would require state sponsored genocide on several continents to even begin to put a dent in growth of the Islamic religion. Islamophobia can be very nasty, but even the most committed group of sit-in-a-think-tank-and-babble-on-about-taqiya Islamophobes cannot possibly pose an existential threat to the Islamic faith.
Unfortunately, the situation regarding Jewish communities around the world is much more precarious.
Associate the theme of this blog, “malignant narcissism”, with “bullying, deceiving, and sabotaging.”
Two videos plus one:
February 24, 2015.
Addendum
The missing Hirsi Ali video had recorded her observations in relation to watching the video that followed. BackChannels does not (yet) know what happened with regard to that video. By way of the spirit of this post and the blog that surrounds it, here is a more recent YouTube video featuring Ayaan Hirsi Ali and consistent with the role she has carved out as a public intellectual critical of Islam.
The MEC suffers beneath enormous evolutionary and global pressures, the transition from feudal absolute to modern democratic power foremost among them. At the same time, with each language culture its own library (humanity supports about 7,000 living languages today, and we are losing quite a few annually), It’s important that the Baloch, Hebrews, and Kurds and others hold their own even while “updating” away from the primitive to feudal aspects of governance. The Hebrews, of course, have turned out hypermodern and other issues external to them account for conflict. Islamic narcissism and locus of control factor heavily in “permitting” the Jews to exist, and that appears a position heavily promoted along the “Islamist” fronts and its frontmen.
Religious succession along the path sparked by Hillel (Hillel –> Jesus, :Paul, Constantine –> Muhammad) accounts similarly for attempts to neuter the Jewish community, null the religion as a corrupt precursor to the true and final words of God. In that the first gifts given to his children — or recognized by themselves and worthy of ancient mythification — are human consciousness, self-consciousness, and conscience, the Jews seem to prefer evolving themselves with God alone, a personal and ever progressing relationship.
Finally, the national socialists, the “red-brown” thugs, appear to tolerate religion while enthrall to themselves, and the Jewish ethos, starting with Moses as lawgiver, appear to get in the way of malign narcissistic emotional incontinence — and that suffices for anti-Semitic hate from not only that camp but the Islamist one as well. What I refer to as “Syndicate Red Brown Green” is always in solidarity with politically criminal mafia, the thirst for “absolute power” — the power to impose suffering on others with impunity — and limitless violence (so well displayed by Khamenei’s toy, ISIS, and others).
The Russian power elite approach to governance, from czar to Soviet to today’s neo-feudal arrangements have had a profoundly evil effect on the middle east (let’s not forget that Stalin-Hitler Pact either). https://conflict-backchannels.com/2014/12/02/quote-manipulation-about-the-plo-leader-pacepa-and-rychlak-2013/ The pincers from the Far Out Left and from the bloodiest and cruelest quarters of Islam, the PLO and Hamas, are the only real impediments to peace — but behind them are the manipulations of the aforementioned “estates”.
Between Egypt and Israel, both at peace today and possibly warming up after all these years, Gaza should be treated as a suzerainty, not a forward base for Iran’s feudal ambitions.
Ramallah may be Israel’s Quebec, an in-holding held dear.
And that is the end of the middle east conflict.
To old communists, new “state capitalist” fascists, and that part of Islam that has pursued a deeply feudal politics, apply the BackChannels concept that is the Paranoid Delusional Narcissistic Reflection of Motivation: what they would accuse the Jews and Israel of wishing turns out what they have in mind for others themselves.
The most troubling part of the heretical substitution of Gentile lineage into foundational roles within the Jewish root of Christianity is that the Christian Palestinian leaders bring this message to so many churches – without ever being confronted by the leaders of these congregations.
In the piece, Reverend Styrsky will go on to note the following:
Dr. Mitri Raheb: “Unfortunately, Palestine has been occupied for most of the time. Remember, the first people to occupy Palestine were the Assyrians -722, then we had the Babylonians – 587, then the Persian came, 538, all of this is BC – OK? Then the Greeks, then the Romans, then the Byzantines, then the Arabs, then the Crusaders, then a few others, then the Ottomans, then the British . . . and then Israel.”
TRUTH: This ridiculous historical summary reveals Raheb’s determination to use duplicity to obliterate the legitimate and historical Jewish bond to the land of Israel.
Bible believing Christians know that God first promised the land of Israel to Abraham around 2,000 – 1500-BC and history records his descendants have maintained ties to the Promised Land for more than 3,700 years.
The theme of cultural annihilation runs within and around Islamic Jihad and the Islamic Small Wars.
Annihilation, One Cultural Artifact, One Memory, At a Time
“Not all Arabs are Muslim; not all Muslims are Arab. In fact, only 23 percent of the Arab population living in the United States of America is Muslim; 77 percent are Christian.
“Islam being the fastest growing faith in this country, as it is in the world today, the number of Muslims in American has soared in the last decade 14 fold. Only half a million in the early 70’s, the estimated number of Muslims living in America today is between 6 to 7 mmillion. 75 percent of them are non-Arabs.
“Currently, there are 1.2 billion Muslims in the world: in other words, one out of every five persons living on the fact of the earth are Muslim, a ratio that is projected to be one our of four by 2020.
“In view of such a significant number and a vast variety of races, nationalities, and cultures, in what sense if any can one speak of the typical Muslim, man or woman? Such a person has never existed–just as an Islam unified in its practices, policies, and goals has never existed.”
With a recent note on the Taliban’s inhibition of the music trade in Mingora, Pakistan and its effects on the distribution, enjoyment, and preservation of indigenous Pashtun music, I thought I’d surf a few minutes for additional reference to the destruction of the cultural artifacts of others at the hands of militant Islam.
Such were not hard to find, starting, perhaps, with the Bamyan Buddhas destroyed by the Taliban in Afghanistan.
However, I was surprised to find out of the Islamic theocracy of Iran the destruction of an ancient bridge and threatened or now evolving degradation of other structural artifacts of global significance (see Amil Imani’s reference).
There seem too complaints of underhanded reconstruction underwritten by the Saudi state. To address the repair of Balkan Islamic monuments, Jolyon Naegele suggests the wholesale bulldozing of the same has been to replace that heritage with architecture more favoring the Saudi Wahhabi vision.
For Israel and the Jews, Mark Ami-El notes the erasure of evidence of Jewish habitation beneath the Temple Mount through the construction of an underground mosque:
“After September 2000, the Muslim Waqf closed off the Temple Mount entirely to any archeological oversight by the Israel Antiquities Authority. Then, in order to complete new underground mosques at the site, it removed to city garbage dumps some 13,000 tons of rubble from the Temple Mount that included archeological remnants from the First and Second Temple periods.
“The intention is to turn the entire 36-acre Temple Mount compound into an exclusively Muslim site by erasing every sign, remnant, and memory of its Jewish past, including the destruction of archeological findings that are proof of this past.”
On behalf of traditional Malaysian culture, Chris Prystay tells a tale of subtle erasure of ancient folk dance and theater at the hands of Islamic influence and party politics:
“A Mak Yon performance, which runs over two or three nights, tells one of a dozen stories of mythological royalty. They are typically morality tales about the perils of lust or pride. The story of Dewa Muda, who struggles with sadness because he can’t reach his princess, is the most popular.
“The performances are also therapeutic. Villagers seeking a cure for depression or other emotional ills don the same costume as the lead dancer and shadow her as she dances around the stage. By acting out Dewa Muda’s own struggle, they purge their own. At the end of the play, the shaman leads the villager into a trance dance, chanting verses to banish the illness.
“Rituals like this are now performed in secret by a handful of retirees . . . .”
Read ’em and weep.
For hope, watch the University of Virginia video featuring Farzaneh Milani and Abdulaziz Sachedina, the latter careful, I think, to compare facets of Islamic ethnic and religious identity with “Italian-ness, and Germaness” but not, no mention, of Jewishness.
Still, four hours down the pike and 3,000 miles across the continent and off to Hawaii or up to Alaska, Muslims, like everyone else, may do things a little differently in America. All welcome diverse and robust cultures, not one that would destroy all others.
It can be said, with considerable accuracy, that the unlikely and unseemly “androgynous hybrid” of the “Zionist Union” is – with the possible exception of the Arab-majority parties in the Knesset – the most anti-Zionist party to emerge on the Israeli political landscape in decades.
Peace in Islam means submission to Allah. The ultimate meaning of Islamic peace is all of us living in Dar-al-Islam—the house of submission. This is not a “radical” interpretation. Modern-day Islamic scholar, Ibrahim Sulaiman, says submission and peace can be very different concepts, even if a form of peace is often brought about through forcing others into submission. “Jihad is not inhumane, despite its necessary violence and bloodshed, its ultimate desire is peace which is protected and enhanced by the rule of law.” Armed responses are only permitted when all peaceful possibilities have failed. And once armed resistance begins it doesn’t stop “until the war lays down its burden” as Allah has mentioned in the Qur’an 47.
These ideas are foreign to us in the West. But that does not make them any less true or binding on those who believe. To shrug them off as radical is to disrespect Islam.
Subscriber loyalty x nominal affiliation creates enormous headaches.
Qanta Ahmed and numerous other vocal Muslims stand squared against “political Islam,” “Islamists”, “Islamofascism”, and so on even though the very same continue building their “Muslim Botherhood” enterprise worldwide and sending into the world a violence that compares well to lightning strikes and volcanos as a completely mindless, spiritless, vacuous force and accident of nature.
Evergreen on BackChannels in regard to this argument that is about Islam, the Qur’an, volumes of Hadith, and 1,400 years of associated literary output inseparable from the character of the enterprise has been “Shimmer“. While that post addressed the ambiguities that confront the conflict observer, it has become plain around the world, whether with Pakistan’s experience involving ISI and Taliban — who, so sources tell me, continue to roam freely in Quetta — and slow moving organizational politics, or, most recently, Turkish President Erdogan’s veiled or passive cooperation with ISIS (or he would have had his army participate in their slugging during the siege of Kobani and the fighting going on there now) that would seem linked both to his self-concept as a Sunni Muslim and his predilection for Putinesque autocracy and self-aggrandizement, White Palace and all.
Although I feel the central psychology in “malignant narcissism” well noted here, the basis for Islamist drive found in Islamic text cannot fail to address and question the attractions of the same: no one rewrote the Qur’an to disseminate “prison Islam” or seduce souls to “Islamic Jihad”.
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“Whosoever destroys a soul, it is considered as if he destroyed an entire world. And whosoever that saves a life, it is considered as if he saved an entire world.”
Ascribed to Hillel the Elder (circa 35-BCE to 10-CE) and Jerusalem Talmud Sanhedrin 4:1 (22a).
“On that account We ordained for the Children of Isra`il that if any one slew a person – unless it be for murder or for spreading mischief in the land – it would be as if he slew the whole humanity: and if any one saved a life, it would be as if he saved the whole humanity.”
In the concept that is “malignant narcissism”, the variable “locus of control” (although Rotter’s approach would seem to miss the dictators, the “verticals of power”) may number foremost among many features: who is being made central to the experience of the listener? Who is the controlling agent in “We decreed upon the Children of Israel . . . .”?
Humanist and modern Islam may look aghast at Boco Haram, ISIS, al-Qaeda, Taliban, Muslim Brotherhood, and so on but the same may have to approach either the deep misguidance and misreading of scripture or fly from both or go with the program as put on display by ISIS: the poetry would seem to leave little room for masking either its presumptions or its targets, dividing, conveniently, admirers from its intellectual competitors or, worse, its sources.
(On political locus of control, I suspect the more tender the deep or repressed personality — the narcissistically injured or mortified person — either the more manipulative and sadistic the personality encountered or, amazingly, reparative The dynamic psychology and social psychology at this nexus would be a good area for study — online, at least, the field, as of this afternoon’s quick look, looks wide open).
Paris police said the turnout was “without precedent” but too large to count. One organiser said he had indications it could be between 1.3 and 1.5 million people. Some commentators said the last street presence in the capital on this scale was at the Liberation of Paris from Nazi Germany in 1944.
Boko Haram is getting more extreme itself. This week, the group used a 10-year-old girl as a suicide bomber. “I doubt much if she actually knew what was strapped to her body,” one observer told AFP. The group has been using young women and children more and more.
Hundreds of bodies – too many to count – remain strewn in the bush in Nigeria from an Islamic extremist attack that Amnesty International described as the “deadliest massacre” in the history of Boko Haram.
Fighting continued on Friday around Baga, a town on the border with Chad where insurgents seized a key military base on 3 January and attacked again on Wednesday.
Local officials this week said the attack forced at least 20,000 people from Baga and other settlements in and around Lake Chad to flee, many of them across the border.
Nearly 600 others had been stranded on an island on the lake without food, water or shelter.
Addressing a large gathering outside the kosher supermarket that was targeted, Prime Minister Manuel Valls said: “Today, we are all Charlie, we are all police officers, we are all Jews of France.”
One may with immediate difficulty argue that the Islamist’s perception of Islam is aberrant and untenable given what at least seems like an increase in the tempo and virulence of Islamist attacks on soft targets and Islamist efforts to establish absolute rule by divine fiat in the form of caliphate or Islamic republic globally. Not only lone wolves have launched attacks on state, business, media (and specifically Jewish) targets, but terrorist teams and assembled militia have as well.
New York – Cataclysmic destruction of the Twin Towers Washington – Attempt to demolish the Pentagon London – Coordinated attack on the public transport system; the beheading of an off duty soldier in broad daylight in full public view Madrid – Bombing of crowded commuter trains at rush hour Nairobi – Seizure of Westgate shopping mall and murder of scores of innocents Burgas, Bulgaria – Bombing of a tourist bus Mumbai – Murderous attack on the Taj Mahal Hotel, Chabad House and other sites Boston – Bombing of the city’s annual marathon Bali – Bombing of crowded tourist locations Buenos Aires – Deadly attacks on Jewish institutions and the Israeli Embassy Ottawa – Assault on the Canadian Parliament Sydney – Recent seizure of a downtown café and murder of two customers In-Amenas, Algeria – Seizure of a gas facility and murder of dozens of civilians Chibock, Nigeria – Abduction of almost 300 schoolgirls, reportedly to serve as sex slaves This bloodcurdling list is in no way complete, and numerous other incidents could be added. It certainly does not include all the attempted attacks that were foiled by security services in various countries, preventing the commission of even more gruesome atrocities by adherents of Islam.
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The reality is that there is a problem with Islam. To say that is not to deny Islam’s immense diversity, impugn the millions of Muslims who abhor the horrors being wreaked in their name, or dispute the enduring value of religious faith in a secular age.
But it is undeniable that Islam’s distinctive features make it especially vulnerable to being used to incite religiously motivated violence.
Al-Baghdadi is emulating the Prophet Muhammad – the ultimate Islamic role model.[“Al-Baghdadi also claims to share the Prophet’s lineage when he calls himself Al-Qurayshi, a member of the Quraysh tribe, to which the Prophet belonged.”] The Prophet, while displaying cruelty in battle – cruelty mirrored by the IS – put off battles with his enemies and integrated compromises and tactical agreements in his policy, in order to gather strength prior to renewing action to obtain his ultimate goals.
BackChannels 