Tags
Erdogan, Hamas, Islamism, medieval v modern, Militant Islam, NATO, Turkey
“Hey, Martha!” — BackChannels Reading Page on Facebook
16 Wednesday May 2018
Category Archives: BCND – BackChannels News Day
Dr. Kogan / Dr. Spectre Appears Before Parliament
24 Tuesday Apr 2018
Tags
Aleksandr Kogan, Aleksandr Spectre, Cambridge Analytica, hearing, multisource, new media, perceptual control, private industrial spying
Aleksandr Kogan / Aleksandr Spectre has a chat with the British government.
Related Online
Complicated world and this is a small proof-of-principle involving an ABC News feed to Facebook (public) with an address that has evidently come through on this WordPress blog.
The Cambridge Analytica scandal involves Facebook Civilization’s (54 billion souls?) handover, somewhat unwitting, private information useful for those who make money manipulating public perception.
Also cogent to awareness of the the just-make-it-up news:
AN INTERVIEW WITH an 11-year-old Syrian boy broadcast last week on Russia’s main state-owned news channel, Russia-24, appears to have been filmed not in the boy’s hometown, where a suspected chemical attack took place, but at a Syrian army facility where Russian military advisers were present.
The report, claiming to prove that video of the attack’s aftermath was fake, is considered so important by Russian officials that Vassily Nebenzia, Russia’s ambassador to the United Nations, plans to screen it for the Security Council.
So Moscow wags the dog.
War may be a business — there’s a theme for BackChannels — but ask any victim of war if war is show business.
This may be a temporary post. I didn’t say much. Still . . . multiple sources, one live, one reportage, one an old film. Cool.
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FTAC – The Decentralizing of ISIS
03 Monday Apr 2017
Something to know about ISIL: https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/12/09/syria-assad-isil-background/
ISIL — the “Islamists” — have been long “played” by Moscow and Tehran as a goad to the west and a useful foil in their feudal struggle to sustain the medieval political absolutism that in turn supports their respective dictatorships.
President Trump’s bearing down on ISIS threatens to remove that plaything from the Moscow-Tehran (old “Red-Green Alliance”) toy box. Under pressure, and as much may have taken place in St. Petersburg earlier today, ISIS has now to displace and redistribute its criminal program.
The kind of manipulation involved between Moscow and an assortment of terrorist organizations may often be indirect. As the editor of Back-Channels, I believe that the al-Qaeda presence in Syria was “incubated” of de-emphasized in Syria’s combat planning, so as to shape and “frame” the look of the developing civil war. That’s what the piece is about, and there’s more online to support it.
Regarding the St. Petersburg train bombing — today’s event — there are some tweets now crediting ISIS with the attack.
The prompt: the suggestion that ISIS was finished in Iraq.
Jared Kushner’s visiting Iraq may be overshadowing the battlefield story.
There may be more signs likes this one, however — http://www.iraqinews.com/iraq-war/islamic-state-kills-imam-mosque-western-mosul/ — that ISIS, ever murderous and disinterested in the fates of the living, has grown desperate in Iraq and gone in for “motivating” resistance by summarily killing those unwilling to cooperate in their own suicides.
Reliant on the open source, BackChannels has been finding it difficult to obtain data regarding the ISIS presence in Mosul and elsewhere in the combined Syrian-Iraq Theater of War. This may be the closest one may get with today’s field reporting:
Some posters on Isis forums linked the explosions to Russia’s backing of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, who is fighting Isis as well as other groups in the Syrian civil war.
The group hasn’t yet claimed responsibility for the attack, but often takes as long as a day to do so. If it does claim responsibility for the incident – which it has done with attacks that officials have later said it had no role in – it would be far from the first time it has done so, after it said it had inspired attempted attacks in Chechnya and Russia earlier this year.
“Syria conflict: Raqqa’s civilians foresee last days of Isis: City residents describe a kind of anarchy as jihadis prepare for final battle”: https://www.ft.com/content/db290a58-1847-11e7-a53d-df09f373be87
Note: Undated URL’s were published on the same day as the BackChannels post.
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St. Petersburg Metro Blast – Ten Dead, Thirty Injured – Whodunit?
03 Monday Apr 2017
BackChannels doesn’t know which way to go with the latest reports of the bombing of a subway car in St. Petersburg — cynical or sincere?
False flag (remember the “Moscow Apartment Bombings“) or authentic independent action by an enemy of the state?
Islamic terrorists or domestic dissenters?
For catching up:
http://www.cnn.com/2017/04/03/europe/st-petersburg-russia-explosion/index.html
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/04/03/saintpetersburg-bombing-casualties-explosion-metro-train/
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/04/03/everything-know-explosion-st-petersburg/
BackChannels may experiment here with watch-write updating on this post.
This is a complicated attack made more so by the foreknowledge that the Russian State, if true to form, will frame it for the public and neither the public nor the sincere among police may have access or authority in the investigation launched.
In the west, the public would trust involved security services to get to the truth and to tell the truth. In Russia, one may expect absolute authority to say what it may and for the public to nod agreeably or mumble away in political impotence.
(more to come)
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All Russia Protests Against Corruption – Rolling Tweets
26 Sunday Mar 2017
Tags
All Russia Protests, anti-corruption, dictatorship, kleptocracy, March 26, rallies, Russia, tweets
Order: reverse chronological or most recently encountered material toward the top, a flexible guide.
The Guardian’s latest:
Hundreds of protesters have been detained by riot police in cities across Russia, as some of the largest anti-government protests in years swept the country.
The call to protest came from the opposition politician and anti-corruption campaigner Alexei Navalny, who was himself detained at the Moscow demonstration. A monitoring group said at least 700 people were detained in Moscow alone, while the news agency Tass gave a figure of 500.
The post may exist only to get the Sunday reader started on the “All Russia Protests Against Corruption” (the title is BackChannel’s interpretation of the Russian billing for the event).
Note: many of today’s gatherings across Russia in protest of the Putin regime’s feudal indulgence in theft and corruption (reference: Gary Kasparov’s Winter is Coming and Karen Dawisha’s Putin’s Kleptocracy) have not been permitted by state officials, so all who have responded to the call for protest risk arrest and other methods of political repression known to those who have challenged similar regimes in the past.
Recommended: https://twitter.com/navalny; https://twitter.com/Kasparov63;
Add the supporters of opposition leader Alexei Navalny now organize such actions in dozens of Russian cities. In many places, authorities have not agreed on the meetings under various pretexts, and some are already there have been reports of detentions.
Screen Capture:
Time on the recording: 20:50 Location: Field of Mars, St. Petersburg, Russia
– https://www.periscope.tv/teamnavalny_spb/1nAKEVzDzLXGL?
“I have a couple of times at the meetings asked what my personal motive and whether he is. There is a personal motive, yes. The answer is:”
“Tomsk is now”
Note: “now” was 4:14 p.m. in Tomsk, Siberia.
“Ufa. Again, no one came.”
“The leading news agencies of the country (TASS, RIA, Intefaks) about the actions taking place in different regions, not a word report.”
“Before our eyes is now crumbling propaganda myth of the ‘marginal minority’ do not enjoy the support of the people.”
@ naganoff_ru
Urban District Deputy # Khimki # Moscow// # Dubna # Dmitrov # Taldom // info@naganov.ru
Joined February 2011
Born in 1984
Who, what, where, when: above.
Why: below.
“The Italian Minister of the residence and you pay for it” (machine translated); posted to YouTube March 16, 2017. English subtitles available using the “cc” (caption) control.
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BackChannels News Day, March 4, 2017
04 Saturday Mar 2017
Today’s compilation may be light – what am I even doing here at the computer, and so early? Still, my eyes see a lot of political coverage from around the world having to do with the support of democracy and its liberal humanist values.
This kind of post has had its own category on BackChannels for years, but has not been a staple for the blog. The writing by others and the reading is so good an spot-on it would be a shame not to share on one sheet.
The links may be dated variously but close to the day encountered (or not — I’ll have to make up my mind about that).
http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/blog/melik-kaylan/mysterious-circumstances-surrounding-russian-murders-deaths – 3/17/2017.
Georgetown Prof: “Is Islam an Enemy of the West? It Does Seem Like Such a Ridiculous Question, Doesn’t It?”
“Is Islam an enemy of the West? It does seem like such a ridiculous question, doesn’t it?” asked Georgetown University professor Tamara Sonn on February 22 at its Saudi-funded Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding (ACMCU). What seemed manifestly obvious to this Qatar-funded Hamad Bin Khalifa Al-Thani Professor in the History of Islam at the ACMCU presentation of her new, eponymously-titled book, is not clear at all to skeptical observers. Thus, her work resembles that of many of her Middle East studies colleagues, who long ago replaced rigorous scholarship of Islam with a fawning approach that blames the West for the region’s systemic problems.
Sonn presented her “little, airport-size book” to an ACMCU conference room filled with about fifty listeners, included like-minded Georgetown colleagues Jonathan Brown, Jordan Denari Duffner, and Father Drew Christianson.
For the whole story:
Earlier, on Friday, February 24, Head of the National Agency for Prevention of Corruption (NAPC) Natalia Korchak says her agency has received a request from Ukrainian Finance Minister Oleksandr Danyliuk to probe into the finances of Ukrainian State Fiscal Service chief Roman Nasirov`s trip to attend the inauguration of U.S. President Donald Trump.
Ukrainian state agencies sought to detain the head of the tax and customs service on Friday over the alleged embezzlement of around $75 million – a potentially landmark case after patchy anti-graft efforts from the Western-backed authorities.
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-ukraine-crisis-corruption-idUSKBN16A0NW
https://www.wsj.com/articles/western-feminists-snub-an-iranian-heroine-1488413022 – 3/1/2017
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FNS – From Phyllis Chesler, Another Note on the Education of Palestinian Adolescents
07 Thursday Nov 2013
For the first time ever, the New York Times had a front page story about how Hamas is brainwashing its high school students into hating Israel by having them read textbooks with false, defamatory, and one-sided narratives.
According to Fares Akram and Jodi Rudoren, “The books used by 55,000 (Palestinian) children in eighth to tenth grade do not recognize modern Israel or mention the Oslo Peace Accords.”
NYT Article Referenced: To Shape Young Palestinians, Hamas Creates Its Own Textbooks – NYTimes.com – 11/3/2013:
Asked the lesson of the uprising, one of the 40 boys in class promptly answered, “Al Buraq Wall is an Islamic property,” using the Muslim name for the site, one of the holiest in Judaism. Pleased, the teacher then inquired whether the students would boycott Israeli products, as Arabs had boycotted Jewish businesses in 1929. A resounding chorus of “Yes!” came back from the class.
I am telling you the truth: unless they are my targets, those I quote here as authorities tell the truth.
As regards the Palestinian students involved, if they’re in high school, they’re not children: they’re tall and strong enough to kill and dumb enough to swallow the bait fed them by their elders.
Of all the crimes possible against humanity, the misdirecting of the young — let me be clear: the theft of a real education from the very young — would rank highest among them.
# # #
FNS – Egypt — Watching It With You
29 Saturday Jun 2013
Tags
Most newspaper editors refrained from mockery of Morsi’s predecessor, Hosni Mubarak, during his thirty-year reign, but in the new Egypt, things are different. A law against “insulting” the President remains in the penal code, but illustrators unabashedly lampoon Morsi on a daily basis.
Guyer, Jonathan. “A Year of Drawing Morsi.” The New Yorker, June 29, 2013.
I’ll be asking what I’m doing “watching it with you”, but, for a while, I’ll be watching for videos and tweets on what would seem to be shaping up as a bloody day in Egypt.
As the world turns, Cairo’s about six hours ahead of New York City, so no “all nighter” seems necessary here, and, part of answering my own question, I’m not scoopin’ nobody!
If I’ve two cents to add, it’s going to have to do with analysis and reflection.
Themes
Petition to remove President Morsi from office: “Egypt group: 22 million signatures against Morsi”
General violence: “American Killed in Egypt Taught English to Children.”
A friend called a couple of hours ago to commiserate over reports of another gang-type rape of a journalist in association with Egypt’s violence, but one would expect that to play at the top of reports, and an attempt to access a referenced video link sent by the same party seemed only to block my web connection in general.
Reduced street-to-world time in reporting: “Egypt protests set for showdown, violence feared.” The URL is about two hours old — I think CNN and Reuters are going to “own my eyeballs” as other outfits start begging subscriptions when they really haven’t any monopoly on a large story nor, if narrow casting, all that unique a perspective (but that brings up my motivation too, and it nags me that I might fare better working on much narrowed research by contract).
Lessons yet to be learned:
At 0:32, Hamada Moharram says, “He can’t even rule a village. This isn’t fair. The Muslim Brotherhood as a whole is an organization full of corruption.”
Somehow, I just don’t want to play The Who’s “Won’t Fooled Again” again in this spot.
It gets old.
Kind of like the web.
Be that as it may, good luck today, Egypt.
The whole world will be watching.
Try not to horrify it too much.
