Category Archives: Books

Rediscovery, Renewal of Devotion – Bederman’s _Back to the Ethic: Reclaiming Western Values_

11 Thursday Feb 2016

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Books, Philology, Philosophy, Political Psychology, Religion

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BTE_Front_Cover_BSP2_120915_jpg_not_reducedBederman, Diane Weber.  Back to the Ethic: Reclaiming Western Values.  Canada, Mantua Books, 2015.

The belief in an ethical God makes it possible over time, to move from a society of tribes to a society of many tribes, held together with commonly shared beliefs, stories, and traditions, because this God demands that we care for the other, the stranger, because we know how a stranger feels; we were once strangers in a strange land (see Exodus 23:9) (p. 60).

Canadian author Diane Weber Bederman, a friend of BackChannels’ editor, has put together a brief compelling volume about the origins of compassion, empathy — a pervasive thoughtfulness most of all — in contemporary western thought by way of Biblical language and lore and the interaction of the Judeo-Christian vision of God and man as woven through the western experience.

Although composed as defense and reminder of western values, it may turn out the right book at the right time as regards broadening the channels for the appreciation of a number of aspects of cultural and intercultural survival:

Ethical monotheism is not the enemy.

Belief in the ethical God of the Christians and Jews counterbalances egoism and the idolization of another human being.  I cannot place belief in any man perfecting himself.  The evidence is overwhelmingly to the contrary.  I wrote about that earlier, in my chapter “The Snake Tempted Me,” about the Enlightenment and the rise of secularism.  More people have died from wars that embraced secular fundamentalist propaganda than have been killed in wars based on religious differences.  Encyclopedia of Wars authors Charles Phillips and Alan Axelrod document the history of recorded warfare.  From their list of 1,763 wars, only 123 are classified as involving a religious cause; these wars account for less than 7 percent of all wars and less than 2 percent of all people killed in warfare.  It is estimated that more than 160 millions civilians were killed in genocides in the twentieth century alone, with nearly 100 million killed by the Communist states of USSR and China.  Think of Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, Kim Jong-il, and Adolph Hitler. 

Why do we allow ourselves to give up our free will and instead by swayed by others?  Why do we so easily forget God’s admonition, “Beware of letting your heart be seduced; if you go astray, serve other gods and bow down to them . . . you will quickly perish”? (Deuteronomy 11:16-17) . . . . (p. 101)

Bederman is right and rightly quotable, page after well researched and thoughtfully written page, for her book reminds of basic principles and tenets that form the bulwark of a healthy and productive western society.

The tour begins close to the thought, “Before ethical monotheism and the revelation at Mount Sinai, there was little concept of the intrinsic value of a human being.  There was little concept of the sacredness of human life” (p. 11).

Given the spectacle created by dictator and “eye doctor” Bashar al-Assad in Syria with the help of Putin, Khamenei, and Baghdadi, one cannot discount Bederman’s observation of history and its present corollaries, for conscience, empathy, kindness, human rights, freedom, and love itself may not be givens in human affairs but transmitted through the oral and written traditions in language of a civilization born of suffering beneath the words, whips, and yokes of tyrants.  For that, the Judeo-Christian experience has been (from Pharaoh to Hitler) immense.

Where Bederman quotes Thomas Paine — “Belief in a cruel God makes a cruel man” — she precedes the presentation of it with an observation drawn from commentary on the God of the Torah:

There is a commentary in one of the many books about the Bible that imagines God’s response to the happiness of the Israelites after the drowning of the Egyptians.  God hears the angels singing and celebrating His great victory.  But instead of rejoicing weeps and rebukes them.  “Why are you singing?”  He asks.  “Why are you rejoicing?  The Egyptians are My children, too, and they are dead, drowned in the sea.  There is no cause for you to sing.  Their deaths are not to be celebrated” (p. 38).

True, and to BackChannels’ mind memory of a passage in an old Haggadah serves up the same lesson.

We — of the Jews and the “mixed multitudes” that joined the flight from Pharaoh, of “the west”, of the world’s democratic open societies, of the realms of the considerate and lawful (as opposed to those more familiar with capricious justice) — don’t rejoice at death, not even the death of mortal enemies.

As a philosophy of ethics, Bederman takes on abortion, utilitarianism, geneticism, too accepting a multiculturalism, and, of course, moral relativism: “If ethics have no extrinsic or intrinsic substantive base, then ethical decisions will be made by those in power who can impose their beliefs on others” (p. 75).

Again, page after page, Back to the Ethic proves a rich and thoughtful reading, one also at times personal as when Bederman encounters her own passage through hell in the form of a costly medical misdiagnosis and the path she takes in response to it. However, the author does not dwell in the region of her own mortality but rather in the realm of the universal and its reflection in scripture and the defense through time of Judeo-Christian belief in the structuring of the western tradition and today’s compassionate, democratic, open, and most vibrant societies.

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Basijed! A Note on Saeid Golkar’s Comprehensive Overview of the Iranian Regime’s Scariest Cultural and Social Machine

23 Saturday Jan 2016

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Books, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Political Psychology, Religion

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Dystopian Imagination —

Three authors: William Golding,  Aldous Huxley, George Orwell.

Four books:  Animal Farm, Brave New World, Lord of the Flies, Nineteen Eighty-Four

In the American high school education of the 1960s, the above were part of the canon taught to all.  Any who missed mention of Golding, Huxley, and Orwell or failed to read Animal Farm (or the Cliff Notes) would have had to have missed school altogether.  Awareness and fear of absolute obedience before a tyrannical authority; of erasure beneath the wheels of an engineered, mechanical, repeating society; of cynical political manipulation and exploitation; and of savagery itself were built into the imaginations of the young.  As our own society could not be the dystopian nightmares observed in reading, we would have to wade back through history or wait for the Islamic Small Wars as they present online to let us know that somewhere our fictions were emblematic of somebody’s political and social reality in situ.

Dystopian Reality — 

Golkar, Saeid.  Captive Society: The Basij Militia and Social Control in Iran.  New York: Columbia University Press, 2015

Training a new generation of youth and inoculating them against the Western cultural invasion constitute another mission of the female Basiji, who should make their “children aware of the problems of threats through explaining outcomes and upshots of the soft war.”  To achieve this goal, the WSBA established the Babies’ Basij to indoctrinate children before they reach school age.  To establish the Babies’ Basij, the WSBO implemented the plan of Quranic kindergarten (mahdha-e mehrab).  Under this plan, a WSBO kindergarten was established at each mosque with a WSBO base.  Children between the ages of three to five years attend these kindergartens.  In addition, the organization designs a curriculum to be used in the home for instructing children who are younger than three years of age.  Female Basiji are encouraged to bring their children to Basij activities, in order to socialize with other children and train them for future posts in the Islamic regime (p. 117)

Columbia University Press provided BackChannels with a review copy a month or two ago, and while reading took place post-haste, reviewing has had to wait for the “what to say” about a book whose author, Saeid Golkar, has covered the subject thoroughly and done so in plain textbook prose that makes the telling of the tale — specifically, coverage of the layout and history of the most pervasive organizational element exploited by the Iranian regime to create, reinforce, and sustain a society obedient to its will  —  on each page all the more chilling.

Although Golkar balances his exploration of the Basij organizations (“Basij is a Persian word meaning “mobilization.”  The complete name of the group, Sazeman-e Basij-e Mostazafan, means “Organization for the Mobilization of the Oppressed”) with this-or-that modules (.e.g, “The Basij: Nongovernmental Organization, Administered Mass Organization, or Militia?”), there are portions focused on the regime’s impositions throughout the land, and as much comes out in subchapter titling: “Penetration in Society: The Organizational Structure of the Basij”; “Mass Membership and Recruitment Training”; “The Mass Indoctrination of Basij Members”; “The Basij and Propaganda”; “The Basij and Moral Control”; “The Basij and Surveillance”; “The Basij and Political Repression”; “The Basij and the Controlling of Families . . . Schools . . . Universities . . . the Economy.”  By the time one reaches “Islamic Warriors or Religious Thugs?” the drift in concern has been made abundantly clear.

Golkar, however, generously covers the contrary view: the Basij are part of the regime’s patronage system, and those who wish to earn some money and make way on their careers may join for the familiar and practical causes known well to western chambers of commerce and numberless academic and civic organizations.

Just don’t forget who’s boss!

Here’s the last paragraph before the appendix:

“With the expansion of the Basij’s involvement in Iran’s social, political, and economic life, the opportunity for the country’s peaceful transition to democracy will decrease dramatically.  Because many Basij commanders and members have been co-opted by the IRI, it is not implausible to think that they will resist any serious attempts at government reform that would jeopardize their positions” (p. 196).

Related Online

Parchizadeh, Reza.  “Iran Now Vets Academics for Ideological Commitment.”  The Algemeiner, November 9, 2016.

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Soviet Anti-Semitism, An Example from Andrew and Mitrokhin’s _The Sword and The Shield_.

29 Wednesday Apr 2015

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Anti-Semitism, Books, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Russia, Syndicate Red Brown Green

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In January 1953 the MGB was officially accused of “lack of vigilance” in hunting down the conspirators.  The Soviet news agency Tass made the sensational announcement that for the past few years world Zionism and Western intelligence agencies had been conspiring with “a terrorist group” of Jewish doctors “to wipe out the leadership of the Soviet Union.”  During the final two months of Stalin’s rule, the MGB struggled to demonstrate its heightened vigilance by pursuing the perpetrators of this non-existent plot.  Its anti-Zionist campaign was, in reality, little more than a thinly disguised anti-Semitic pogrom.  Shortly before Stalin’s sudden death in March 1953 Mitrokhin was ordered to investigate the alleged Zionist connections of the Pravda correspondent in Paris, Yuri Zhukov, who had come under suspicion because of his wife’s Jewish origins.  Mitrokhin had the impression that Stalin’s brutal security supremo, Lavrenti Pavlovich Beria, was planning to implicate Zhukov in the supposed Jewish doctor’s plot.  A few weeks after Stalin’s funeral, however, Beria suddenly announced that the plot had never existed, and exonerated the alleged conspirators.

Andrew, Christopher and Vasili Mitrokhin.  The Sword and The Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB.  Page 2.  New York: Basic Books, 1999.

In the “Russian Section” (of the in-house library), the above title is appended “UR” for unread.  BackChannels hopes to update that status soon.  Even so, with the theme of anti-Semitism emerging on the second page of a mighty classic, so it appears, among the scholars, the same may inform the character of today’s “Solidarity” organizations and their updates on Soviet disinformation and propaganda programs that produced the privileged and the privileges of the Party.

These historic incidents and the portent of books like The Sword and The Shield may be easily accessed by the lay public as well as scholars, but time having become the new space, information has become the vegetation on the landscape, and large packages so easily spied on Amazon may not be so easily opened.  With each passing year — the volume was published in 1999 — fewer and fewer readers, lay or scholar, are likely to have the experience of seminal works.  For the most part, the public won’t know, won’t have personal or transmitted historic memory, giving cognizant autocrats freedom to deliver the past to their constituents.

Related on BackChannels: “Rhetorical Objects — Anti- Anti-Semitism & Anti-Semitism” (April 20, 2014).

Addendum

This crossed my desktop late this afternoon:

The ultimate goal of state censorship is self-censorship among the citizenry. If you can get the people to police themselves, and each other, it takes part of the burden off the state and also makes people complicit in their own oppression. And so it’s disturbing to see things take this turn in Putin’s Russia. As the New York Times reports, Moscow bookstores removed from their shelves–voluntarily (sort of)–their copies of Maus, the pathbreaking graphic novel of Nazi crimes against the Jews. It’s the “voluntarily” part of this that stands out, and makes it clear that Putinism has not been, and will not be, good for the Jews of Russia.

Mandel, Seth.  “Dark Days Ahead for the Jews of Russia?”  Commentary, April 28, 2015.

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Dicks and Spooks – Books

01 Monday Dec 2014

Posted by in Books, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Political Spychology

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Quite slowly but with method, the library takes shape within the mansion within the cottage inside an apartment out in the countryside about one mountain beyond the Washington area.

Probably, the shelves should be alphabetized rather than categorized, but that would be a registry, not a library: a library has sections and themes, visual appeal and both mysterious and promising atmospheres — there are whole shelves here filled with Le Carre (all of his books) and Peter Mayle — but as regards this blog, certain aspects of the collection emerge in relation to “conflict, culture, language, and psychology”.

“Dicks and Spooks”?

Detectives and spies, intelligence organizations and operations, their marks: mafia and political criminals.

The section is small.  Even so, two of the list have not been read, one for boredom (“MI6” risks becoming a doorstop), the other — it’s not its time yet.

Titles as readable as they may be intriguing: The Good Spy, The Zhivago Affair, and Mafioso.

There’s relevant library on the Kindle as well — e.g., Tim Shorrock’s Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing — but I don’t even want to light up that screen or find out what Amazon has to say about me: The Book remains the Friend in the Library, spine out, ever present, ever ready to be read and to be read again on bed or sofa, or, God forbid it (which uttered objection is certain to bring about the same), at the table with coffee, note cards, and pens at the ready.

Inventory in “Dicks and Spooks” just noted:

Bird, Kai.  The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames.  New York: Crown Publishers, 2014.

Finn, Peter and Petra Couvee.  The Zhivago Affair: The Kremlin, the CIA, and the Battle Over a Forbidden Book.  New York: Pantheon Books, 2014.

Jeffery, Keith.  The Secret History of MI6.  New York: The Penguin Press, 2010.

Servadio, Gaia. Mafioso.  New York: Stein and Day, 1976.

Trento, Joseph J.  The Secret History of the CIA.  Roseville, California: Prima, 2001

All of the above solopsistic discussion for five books (of more than two thousand) . . . .  Still, one of five of two thousand just might appeal to the reader.

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Link to Recommended Review of Karen Dawisha’s _Putin’s Kleptocracy_

30 Sunday Nov 2014

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Dawisha takes Freeland’s realization one step further. She is arguing, in effect, that even before those nefarious rules were written, the system had already been rigged to favor particular people and interest groups. No “even playing field” was ever created in Russia, and the power of competitive markets was never unleashed. Nobody became rich by building a better mousetrap or by pulling himself up by his bootstraps. Instead, those who succeeded did so thanks to favors granted by—or stolen from—the state. And when the dust settled, Vladimir Putin emerged as king of the thieves.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/dec/18/how-he-and-his-cronies-stole-russia/ – 12/18/2014.

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A Universe of One’s Own: “The Russian Section”

11 Tuesday Nov 2014

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Dawisha, Karen. Putin’s Kleptocracy: Who Owns Russia? New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014.

Gessen, Masha. The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin. New York: Riverhead Books, 2012.

Harding, Luke. Expelled: A Journalist’s Descent Into the Russian Mafia State. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.

Judah, Ben. Fragile Empire: How Russia Fell In and Out of Love with Vladimir Putin. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2013.

Remnick, David. Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire. New York: Random House, 1993.

Smith, Hedrick. The Russians. New York: Times Books, 1983.

Soldatov, Andrei and Irena Borogan. The New Nobility: The Restoration of Russia’s Security State and the Enduring Legacy of the KGB. New York: Public Affairs, 2010.

https://conflict-backchannels.com/library/russian-section/

Our iddle biddle web has gurgled and Googled long enough for anyone to block text, right-click the mouse, and find on the web the alphanumeric string wanted and in the form desired.

The contemporary URL takes you to something the author specifically wants to show you.

As I would rather write blog posts, I suppose, than catalog the 2,000+ volumes that surround me, the library section of this blog remains sparse.  However, in the way of web-driven and curiosity-based fate, it appears I’ve got some linear shelf space supporting a “Russian Section” and that listed above this section is it.

Should one add to it web resources?

Miami University.  “Putin’s Russia”.  Havighurst Center, Russian and Post-Soviet Studies.

How about naming names (which from — I will call it “MoscVegas”– Karen Dawisha does in abundance)?

For this simple blog, a reduction to a few of the simple popular nouns of the opposition might suffice: Alexei Navalny, Boris Nemtsov, Gary Kasparov, Michael Khodorkovsky, Yevgeny Roizman, Pussy Riot, etc.  (the abbreviation of laziness, but on the web, nouns lead to nouns: one cannot compete with that comprehensive aspect of machine compilation given the labors of scads of academics and journalists contributing daily to wealth in knowledge).

A few moments ago, the search string (using the Google engine) “Putin, journalists” brought this gem to the top of the list:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_journalists_killed_in_Russia

Related:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Politkovskaya – “We are hurtling back into a Soviet abyss, into an information vacuum that spells death from our own ignorance. All we have left is the internet, where information is still freely available. For the rest, if you want to go on working as a journalist, it’s total servility to Putin. Otherwise, it can be death, the bullet, poison, or trial—whatever our special services, Putin’s guard dogs, see fit.[17]”

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Aside

An “Ordinary Day” Away from the EMadding Crowd . . . .

15 Sunday Jun 2014

Posted by in Books, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Iraq, Islamic Small Wars, Middle East, Politics, Regions

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“Almost unanimously Iraqis tell me that America will initially win the military war but will face a fierce resistance for establishing peace.  The exiled opposition, with its varying agenda, will pull Iraq further apart.”

Fassihi, Farnaz.  Waiting for an Ordinary Day.  New York: Public Affairs, 2008.

More than 99 notifications await me on Facebook.

I fear to download the weekend’s e-mail, this having signed on to enough lists to receive from the vending and politics communities about 5-MB of email per day.

That’s a lot of slush.

Then too, the world has a lot of absolutely senseless problems driven more by vainglorious egos — so I harp: malignant narcissism — and the mafia societies they create through, in, and around themselves, than any other cause for bellicose behavior.

Not particularly exceptional in this, even Hamas in Gaza lives in mansions.

Whatever they’re about (psst — murder and plunder), they’re not about justice, much less God.

Perhaps I should be receiving 10-MB of e-mail per day.

Or not.

Here one may make a case for a quiet space far from the emadding crowd, a fair cup of coffee, and a good book.

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FTAC – On Boko Haram and the Ghost Army

12 Monday May 2014

Posted by in Books, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Islamic Small Wars, Political Psychology

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The assembly of “Islamic Jihad” beneath or sharing the Muslim Brotherhood and Hezbollah banners effectively goad Islam to wake and stand from the center of its humanity and for the rest of the world with Islam to bond across the center.

It’s not going well in or around the hot conflict zones.

The center has not held.

The persistence, strength, and viability of dictatorship on general terms (e.g., “Putin-Assad-Khamenei”) has not waned; the want of Arab Muslim exclusivity in a war of all against all (possibly 90 percent of the schoolgirls kidnapped were Christian and “fight them . . . jizya . . . humbled” alone would have sufficed for license) has been powered up by energy earnings the west wants to recover in trade; and no bonded army of Christians, Jews, Muslims, and others has appeared in the field with the possible exceptions of U.S. / NATO intervention — post-Enlightenment secular states operating armies reflective of their national and international make-up — and an expansion of western buy-in creating or strengthening helpful alliance, e.g., Israel-India with moderation and modification in the Muslim-majority states, e.g., Pakistan and Turkey.

China’s not far outside of all of this either — it too has a vested interest in dictatorship while it’s issues with Islam on its flanks seems well managed enough for brushing aside. China’s role is “the money”, and it has been doing business with its eyes closed (e.g., as in Sudan) except where an absolute authoritarianism similar to its own has been challenged.

Perhaps as Uncle Sam has learned — and one way of the other, however’s he’s set up, whoever his handlers, if he has them, Obama knows — fighting Boko Haram isn’t about money alone: it’s about something in the concept of a “common humanity” that needs to surface, discover affinity and “common cause”, and then work to diminish the challenges and disruptions posed by so many “malignant narcissists” parading beneath so many banners — and with language fitted to the support of their too lofty contempt.

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I had really set out this morning to take a glance at political psychology, narcissism, and the role played by contempt in states of affairs (because to the criminally elevated, contempt both defends the damaged and feels good besides).  However, in the way of life online with Facebook, the deflections and distractions are the first things met.

On sorting the political psychology, I got as far as “discovering” Macalester Bell, who last year published the book title for the age: Hard Feelings: The Moral Psychology of Contempt (Oxford UP, 2013).  The Oxford price appears half that of the Amazon hardcover quote, so maybe, but not right now . . . what’s really needed here (in western Maryland) is a brick-and-mortar conflict and peace studies library with a wing devoted to political psychology (anyone want to talk?).

Be that as it may, other intelligent work showed up quick on the radar: from Canada, Nora Gold’s Fields of Exile, a novel developed around the experience of anti-Semitism on campus.

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Talmud teaches the need for many voices. The Gemara takes us on a journey of debates through the centuries, deconstructing the smallest detail-pilpul. In the Talmud we are given the majority as well as the minority view to examine. Some of the comments may cause discomfort-but so be it, as we are a people judged by our actions, not our feelings.

Bederman, Diane Weber.  “The Second Catastrophe”.  The Times of Israel, May 11, 2014.

“The Awesome Conversation”, which name I’ve given the Facebook chatyping but may well extend that idea to Google+ and every other platform for cultural and political salon, hosts all voices, some perhaps more predominantly loathed than others, but it’s important that they are heard as censorship knows only the ends, ultimately, of the censorious, whom, if self-appointed, may be themselves The Problem.

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The “Ghost Army” — that’s the Russian Army that should have intervened in Syria to modify the Assad regime and bring Syria toward democracy without wildly altering its demographics.

Instead: “Putin-Assad-Khamenei” have risen to the defense of absolutism, well demonstrating that the dictator had an army and a mixed host of moderate revolutionary and Islamic extremist revolutionaries could raise armies but not sort their differences toward a robust common sense of cause.  A fair portion of the millions of Syrians stranded between hotheads have been made the casualties and refugees of general warfare, and while they may enjoy an army of NGOs and experienced refugee camp administrators, the same would seem still incoherent as to ends (including the want of destroying Israel, which anti-Semitic raving no longer suffices for social bonding) and unable to wrest back their lands from either the heartless dictator or the vacuous Islamist.

The ghost army in Nigeria has form — at least there is an army to deploy against Boko Haram — but it may not have yet the virtue of a passion for addressing so evil a devotion to brigandage as that displayed by Boko Loco’s criminal mentality as abetted by Qur’anic injunction: “Fight those who do not believe in Allah or in the Last Day and who do not consider unlawful what Allah and His Messenger have made unlawful and who do not adopt the religion of truth from those who were given the Scripture – [fight] until they give the jizyah willingly while they are humbled” (Surat 9:29).

In Loco’s upside-down world, the Loco are the righteous.

Elsewhere, from Afghanistan to Brandeis (I’m thinking about the still recent Ayaan Hirsi Ali brouhaha and the possible effects of Prince al-Waleed’s wealth) to Crimea / Ukraine, The Money would seem the morality, and armies, ghost or not, and their generals (and presidents) must be paid — or paid off — and left in power to rule as they may see fit.  That is their most personal contest (so Hitler asked famously, “Who says I am not under the special protection of God?”).   From Karzai to Yanukovych, the leaders are not all alike although the degree of their corruption may be a common issue: in real time, in “realpolitik”, what forms up in arms beneath their sway spells the future for constituents (x area-squared) affected by their ambitions, behavior, outlooks, and proclivities.

One day, perhaps, the Ghost Army will appear across the span of the Islamic Small Wars but what divisions and patrols there may be today would seem to be faltering before evil.

Reference Off to the Side

Miller, John J.  “Clash of Cultures: How donors can increase understanding of the Middle East.”  Philanthropy Roundtable, cover story republished from the July / August 2007 issue of Philanthropy Magazine.

Fox News: “New video appears to show kidnapped Nigerian schoolgirls praying to Allah.”  May 12, 2014.

Spencer, Robert.  “90% of abducted Nigerian schoolgirls are Christians; jihadists released Muslim girls.”  Jihad Watch, May 11, 2014;

Fani-Kayode.  Vanguard. “Chibok Affairs: The Emerging and Uncomfortable Facts, By Fani-Kayode,” May 10, 2014:

The bitter truth is that regardless of wherever you come from, whatever your faith is and whichever side of the political divide you stand, we all have a duty to get to the bottom of this matter, join forces, close ranks, find out what is really going on and bring this nightmare to an end. We must join hands with all men and women of goodwill and, together, we must fight this insidious evil that seeks to envelop our land and overwhelm our people.

Toameh, Khaled Abu.  “Palestinian Authority: Combatants Against Peace.”  Gatestone Institute, May 12, 2014:

But the Palestinian Authority [PA] leadership and many Palestinians obviously don’t share this view. In fact, they see the participation of Palestinians in an event commemorating Israeli victims of violence as an act of treason.

The PA government in the West Bank — who do not miss any opportunity to tell Westerners that they remain committed to peace and coexistence with Israel — even went as far as disbanding the Palestinian branch of Combatants For Peace in June 2013.

Who has the real army?

National Post.  “‘They cut hands, cut heads, play with corpses’; Islamic extremists fighting brutal war against Kurds in Syria.”  May 11, 2013: “Residents of this new Islamist state are living in conditions of extraordinary brutality. Christians in Raqqa must pay a special tax — the jizya — in accordance with Shariah law. Anyone caught drinking alcohol is imprisoned and tortured.”

Halper, Daniel.  “#BringBackOurDignity.”  The Weekly Standard, May 12, 2014: “My editorial this week ended with a coda praising Ayaan Hirsi Ali and, in effect, daring Hillary Clinton to stand up for someone who, as the savagery of Boko Haram has reminded us, has been so right about Islamist terror.”

Hirsi Ali, Ayaan.  “Boko Haram and the Kidnapped Schoolgirls: the Nigerian terror groups reflects the general Islamist hatred of women’s rights.  When will the West wake up?”  The Wall Street Journal, May 8, 2014.

Johnson, Charles.  “Nigeria Accepts Israel’s Offer to Help Find Kidnapped Girls.”  Little Green Footballs, May 11, 2014.

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