Our YouTube feeds respond to our Internet habits — all that Google Chrome or other mammoth machinery may capture (about us), crunch with algorithms, and throw back to us with the logic that if we clicked on it, we must have been interested in it — but let me not get distracted with computer-human interactions, social engineering, and programmers.
Regarding the above clips: Farrokh Sekaleshfar had his name made the moment Omar Mateen operationalized at least an opinion similar to his own; Nouman Ali Khan, whose online presence I found connected with the Islamic Center of Irving (Texas) appears a countervailing speaker to Sekaleshfar; and then, in the way of YouTube’s relational “other video” options, comes a voice of reason about madness — Omar Mateen’s ex-wife.
What do they look like together, these three videos?
GREAT DAYS OF SERVICE IN IRVING, TEXAS, IS AN INTERFAITH ASSOCIATION OF FAITH COMMUNITIES AND COMMUNITY PARTNERS UNITED IN SERVING GOD AND COMMUNITY THROUGH RENEWING NEIGHBORHOODS AND AIDING HOMEOWNERS IN THE RESTORATION OF THEIR PROPERTIES.
Great Days of Service is a non-profit association of diverse Irving faith communities, businesses, and civic groups who are united in serving God and community by renewing neighborhoods and aiding homeowners in the restoration of their properties.
The GDS website supports pages displaying Church Partners (there are many — 14 churches listed and one mosque – the Islamic Center of Irving) and Community Partners, a melange of relevant government and the kinds of good-hearted private businesses that anchor the tapestry of small town America.
BackChannels has heard that in the past year– and for the next — one or two churches have dropped out of the ranks of the multi-faith “Great Days of Service” in the wake of a “dust up” with the mosque.
Those who keep tabs on voter rolls say the number of Muslim voters has jumped from about 150 two years ago to over 800 in the May 7 election. Of the city’s 92,000 registered voters, about 3,800 — slightly more than 4 percent — identify as Muslims.
But they made up nearly 18 percent of the ballots cast in an election where the turnout was low.
Possibly, this given the direction of those not-so-sacred numbers (indicating growth), it may not hurt the representatives of Irving’s Muslim community to share back into the Christian community the making and posting of participation-and-accomplishment videos having to do with those “Great Days of Service” –(added per the addendum at the top) nor would it hurt the churches to produce and post their own videos on the matter . . . or have a hand in the interfaith making of the next video.
Sigh.
In the medieval mode, religious succession — initially, the ascent or uptake of Christianity displacing (for most) Judaism (source of history and inspiration) and much else — accounts for bloodshed through many ages, but cue the angels (“Aaaaaaah”) and The Enlightenment arrives, the church divides and divides again — and fends off Islam’s incursions in what has become Europe– until within its many domains Northern Ireland quiets down and that seems the end of that part of the bloody story.
But wait: about here enters those “Red Brown Green” malignant narcissists — “Comrades, Nationalist, Islamists” but Kleptocrats (and subscription builders) most of all — and we’re once again on this potentially bloody — and still medieval — merry-go-round.
In the way of the web and YouTube, this video automatically followed the two cited and displayed above:
Apparently, the fishers of souls continue to count their success in subscriptions and may adjust their talk to compete.
Addendum and Mild Retraction – July 10, 2016
There have been other “Great Days of Service — Irving” videos recent within the past two years. However, the top search results appearing on YouTube come up absent of productions posted by the Christian churches.
What is the difference between “moderate” and “extreme” politics?
And how “packed” should a blog post be?
Closing in on “Syndicate Red Brown Green” works a little at a time, at least for those who care to overview the results from a search like “Ferguson and Gaza”.
Ferguson is not Gaza — and Gaza would not be Gaza without Hamas, and Hamas is just another Muslim Brotherhood / Muslim Botherhood organization like . . . ISIL, the gang of the day.
In some ways, suffering — hunger, indignity, inequality, injustice — is the same everywhere, but we all don’t point the fingers the same way.
“White police shot a black man!”
Uh huh.
Except it was a Latino policemen, neither “white cracker” or Yalie WASP.
Should we even notice the “white guy” was Latino?
Not really.
We only do it because we’ve been made to notice that the deceased was black.
Before this is over, more fingers will point to force personnel evaluation or training, one or the other, not the whiteness of the force or the blackness of the community.
Probably, Philando Castile was an American Everyman who could have been any man.
This is what courts are for: examination, second looks, reevaluations.
Those old Lefties (and, believe me, this is being written by an old liberal) — now the New Old Now Old Far Out and Lost Left?: to hell with the courts!
It was murder — and don’t forget to show whitey what’s what downtown.
So here comes that long hot summer involving some kind of 1960s and 1970s American Revanche — Glory Days!
There’s a whole new generation ready to pick up the cudgels.
Parts of the Revolution will be televised.
Anything not televised will show up on the World Wide Web.
A simple caption might do: Diamond Reynolds meets the press on the police-involved killing of her boyfriend Philando Castile in the Falcon Heights community outside of Minneapolis, Minnesota.
As Reynolds breaks into tears and is comforted by a pastor, another man comes forward wearing a “Day of Dignity” t-shirt that has come from an event sponsored by Islamic Relief USA (there are many Day of Dignity events annually).
BackChannels to this point has been “crayony” and superficial about “Moscow-Tehran” and “Syndicate Red Brown Green”, which one may infer from pictures at the intersection between the black nationalist movements and Palestinian Solidarity — raised fists and green flags — and it’s there in the latest attractive trope, “Ferguson-Gaza” — by way of examples online:
“Ferguson-Gaza” — look it up 🙂 — loads up on the anti-Semitic New Old Now Old Far Out and Lost Left, of course, and the same is met (same search) by Jewish and other commentary questioning the comparison. Be that as it may, take this post as being about the motivation for hitching emotions to the readymade and head-nodding programs of the Far Left and potential Islamist Front, not that there’s anything in the least controversial about missionary sympathy from any religious quarter toward those to whom injustice has either been done or who perceive the same as being so.
Again, this post is about the motivation: the policeman looked white; the angel looked black.
That’s the way it looks and will probably be remembered as the way it looked.
On the basis of surface events and visceral perception, those in politics and ambitious about picking up their legions know exactly how to exploit such misery to pick up their own numbers.
“Black Lives Matter Chicago, the Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression and Trinity United Church of Christ calls upon all the various strands of the peoples movement to come out and join us in protest of the cold blooded, brutal murders of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile. We will rally Monday, July 11, 2016 in Federal Plaza (Dearborn and Adams) at 4:30pm and march in the streets.”
In relation to Dallas, never mind the political incitement present, so might be inferred, in the head of sniper Micah Johnson. How did such an idea as shooting police from a parking garage in Dallas get in there in the first place?
Regarding “Syndicate Red Brown Green”, a term of art on this blog, this piece may be essential for understanding how Far Left movements do, in fact, collide:
The point should be clear and for now remain: the proper framework for Far Left politics in the United States (and perhaps elsewhere) remains the Soviet, the Cold War, and the aftermath — the political phantoms — that have flowed down with both over time. If one wants to drive back even further in cultural-political history, one may through the lens of greater Asian and Russian history and the barbarism and feudal conquests associated with both. What for interest appeals to BackChannels is the extreme narcissism in play in history and in present politics where powerful personalities have placed themselves beyond criticism and law and immune to the suffering of others, especially when they themselves capriciously impose that suffering on others with impunity.
National Review writer David French has also weighed in on Black Lives Matter. Here are two pieces, one dating back to December 2015 and another posted yesterday.
BackChannels places conflicts involving Iraq in the post-Cold War framework and suggests that military engagements were part of “containment” and the “building down” of Soviet alliances that remained in character authoritarian and openly supportive of terrorism.
Basically, Russia then and Russia today criminally manipulates foreign political constituencies to suit its own kleptocratic appetites. Hussein (and Gaddafi) were part of that enterprise, and perhaps as God willed it, both are gone (and thank God).
Yesterday’s BBC report on the Chilcot report keeps itself narrowed on the image of Iraq as an oasis of stability, however miserable, under the rule of a strongman, and the report itself reasserts at face value the idea that “regime change” in Iraq linked to direct threats posed by WMDs, which imbroglio BackChannels would shove into a bin labeled “Potential Convenient Pretexts” (sorry the same don’t really work out) and the more general “Global War on Terror,” which period of observation appears to start on September 11, 2001:
10. After the attacks on the US on 11 September 2001 and the fall of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan in November, the US Administration urned its attention to regime change in Iraq as part of the second phase of what it called the Global War on Terror.
It is unfortunate that governments most devoted to “classical liberalism” and democracy should feel the need to resort to manipulating their “masses” (instead of free constituencies) because they have failed to publically educate the same in the longer-lived themes of geopolitics and history — or worse, lost that battle to the New Old Now Old Far Out and Lost Left that relies on short memories to promote their own ultimately authoritarian, fascist, and totalitarian outlooks.
I don’t know what BackChannels is going to do when the 25th Year Anniversary of the Dissolving of The Soviet passes on December 26, 2016, but as that day is still coming up, it’s going to harp on it with the hope that other “English” and Europeans and others less free or more so catch a glimpse of Putin’s Excellent World (PEW), the world from which it has emerged, and the malignantly narcissistic worldview it continues to promote or install wherever it may.
The “PLO” became the “PA” — but I’m going to call it the “PSO” — “Palestinian Slavery Organization” from here on out. The Fatah Party, a secular-nationalist political machine, continues to dominate the PLO / PA. The chain of association between it, the old Soviet, the Baath Parties, and pan-Arab nationalism should be clear.
I don’t know the early history of Hamas, but two characteristics certainly stand out today: we know (we know, I know you know, and everyone knows) it”s a Muslim Brotherhood organization. However, it is also an organization approved and manipulated by Moscow and Tehran, neither of whom — from Tehran, we would expect this but not from Putin’s Moscow — will join the west in designating the same as a terrorist organization. In fact, and despite Putin’s “anti- anti-Semitism” stance, Moscow hasn’t altered its relationship much since Soviet days, and the neo-feudal / neo-imperial revanche has sought to sustain old “friendships”.
Although Hussein and Gaddafi have been shoved off the world’s stage, Putin appears to regard the Russian client Syria as essential to his state’s ambitions and defense — and mafia ways of doing business. It appears to me that Washington and NATO have chosen to contain the Russo-Syrian-Iranian arrangement rather than challenge it while at the same time seeking to accept the fallout in jihadism (ISIS was incubated by Assad’s counterrevolutionary strategy, and I have plenty of evidence for that) and refugees, leaving the blame for Syria on Moscow’s doorstep.
Back to the “Palestinians” — the refugees: they remain representative of Cold War / Soviet politics. As Putin plays extremes against the middle, i.e., supporting Far Right and Far Left organizations and personalities worldwide, the PA and Hamas suit his ends, which includes promoting and sustaining absolute and frequently criminal political power at state level in his world and in others.
Into this comes Mohammed S. Dajani Daoudi who for his good nature slipped through the fence, figuratively in his reading, literally with the visit to Auschwitz with his students, and now I think the has a larger problem: what does one say to a whole population that has been duped by political machinations they could not see? How does one approach decades of disinformation, miseducation, and deep political manipulation?
As suggested in the excerpt From the Awesome Conversation, the Obama Administration and NATO have adjusted to perhaps containing the apparent (!) energies of a revanchist Russia while choosing to let that most dispassionate of political scripting that has been “Assad vs The Terrorists” play itself out into the horror that it has become.
From Cold War to Cold Struggle and from the installation of the Middle East Conflict to this day seems not that long a span by the measurements of history — 68 years of statehood for Israel and the same period for the Arab world’s separation of the Refugees of 1948 from the mainstream of Arab history; 71 years since the collapse of Nazi Germany and the near concurrent initiation of competition and hostility (and fear) between Moscow and Washington — and 24 years and six months since the dissolving of the Soviet (December 26, 1991).
Where are we now?
I doubt the 25th anniversary of the dissolving of the Soviet will go unremarked in major media, and perhaps it is about now, this summer, and not to mention this American Independence Day, that analysis, lowly bloggers, and major media pundits will be asking the same question: as regards Moscow and Moscow-Tehran and the many “worlds” spun up around central absolute or authoritarian power, indeed, where are we now?
Putin’s clawing into NATO, and he’s going to use Erdogan, a natural authoritarian (with his own White Palace) to further establish “absolutism” around a feudal Russian core.
In the today’s news:
The Kremlin accepted a letter from Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan as an apology this week.
Mr Putin spoke to Mr Erdogan by phone on Wednesday, telling him he planned to lift the travel sanctions.
The lifting of non-travel trade sanctions will depend on the outcome of the trade talks, the Russian leader said in his decree.
In news analysis appearing in The Atlantic about three years ago:
The Turks suffer from a deep-rooted, historic reluctance to confront the Russians. The humming Turkish economy is woefully dependent on Russian energy exports: More than half of Turkey’s natural gas consumption comes from Russia. Consequently, Turkey is unlikely to confront Moscow even when Russia undermines Turkey’s interests, such as in Syria where Russia is supporting the Assad regime, even as Ankara tries to depose it.
Historically, the Turks have always feared the Russians . . . .
Moscow has so far been able to separate itself from such wondrous moves as the incubation of ISIS (through “deselection” for bombing and combat early in the Syrian Tragedy) and the related development of Syrian mass migration, and with Turkey and the latest airport bombing — and where the terrorists come from but Russia, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan — the same channeling applies and to similar effect: Russia has been channeling its extremists to ISIS, and when they do what they do in the NATO community, it may lay claim to being tough on the same.
If terrorists should wreak havoc on a renewed Russian flight to Turkey, well then: Moscow and Washington may then mutually share sorrows and perhaps move toward rapprochement (on counterterrorism cooperation, say) while Assad the Tyrant and the familiar Soviet / post-Soviet (now neo-feudal) arrangements remain in place.
There’s a greater problem with such a rosey “what-if” or outcome, and that is the modern world’s ceding itself to the sustained “feudal absolute power” that today, as in medieval days, lends itself to despotism, kleptocracy, and the war of all against all without end. Unfortunately, “Red Brown Green” applies: to have within NATO nationalist or Islamist authoritarians (Hungary’s Orban, Turkey’s Erdogan, for starters) lends itself to Russia’s feudal revanch and its imperial ends.
The “single state” solution fails not for enmity but for comprehension of what is represented by the Hebrews living in the land of the Hebrews.
Language as a cultural technology evolves within a people in somewhat isolated social space sufficient to invent their way of getting along among themselves and with the surrounding earth. For each ethnolinguistic cultural cohort on the planet, there is a land, a someplace, from whence it came.
So the Hebrews are back in the Land of the Hebrews: Israel. There are also Baloch, Pashtun (“B’ni Israel”, self-defined), and Kurds who have a relationship with the land that made them, and they too have some political issues involving their autonomy and survival as a people.
The Jordanian Arabs and the migrant workers caught between armies in 1948 have been deeply manipulated by powerful forces within and outside of Arab culture. The Russian KGB’s invention of Arafat, an Egyptian, and the PLO either is or should be history well known to scholars who have devoted themselves to studying and solving the “middle east conflict” (never the others ongoing — and “hot” — at the moment). The contemporary and feudal Russian story, that which has had Mikhail Bogdanov entertaining PFLP in Moscow (Nov. 2014) while the state refuses to acknowledge either Hamas or Hezbollah as terrorist organizations, should be taken into account.
It’s not the Israelis or Palestinian People (again: somewhat isolated in time and space — long enough to create new language 🙂 ) who sustain the middle east conflict: all along, it has been those who misinform, mis-educate, and maliciously “program” socially captive innocents in service to their own feudal-medieval aggrandizement (and financial enrichment).
This blog now has plenty of data for backing up its opinion about what has created and what sustains the “Middle East Conflict (MEC)”. From the vicious narcissism that would hold refugees in camps (Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, Egypt) and separated from general state populations (a genuinely apartheid policy) to the Soviet distribution of anti-Semitic propaganda and, yes, the invention of Arafat, the MEC has come to represent medievalism at its greed-laden best.
Look into UNRWA spending and tunnel smuggling, and then take another look at who got the loot.
BackChannels 