The West insists on maintaining the illusion that the government in Baghdad is something other than a Shia sectarian-dominated entity in the process of entering a de facto military alliance with the Iranians. This stubbornness is producing the current absurd situation in which Western air power is being used in support of Shia Islamism.
It is important to understand that this is not taking place because there is no other option for stopping the advance of the Islamic State. There is another, more effective option: direct aid to the Kurds, and to the Sunni tribes further south.
In the medieval mode, sectarian religious teleology — who wins the favor of God? How soon do we get to find out? — reaches the boundary of the ineffable: may God decide on the field of battle, and the sooner the better!
In the modern mode, the same narrative may be left to God to decide gently across millennia — or not at all: who needs must get to the end of the story in their lifetime or even want the same to arrive in their great grandchildren’s day?
BackChannels has been surprised by the tenacious hold given, so the blog shall refer to it, the “Great Sunni vs Shiite War” in Shiite circles and doubtless, whatever the proportions, in Sunni ones as well.
How is it for the west that so alien, primitive, and singular an unanswerable dispute may by ripples and waves spread to engulf the modern of two to several middle east states?
Ayatollah Khamenei’s expansion of influence, and this despite the regime’s infamous behavior in its own space, appears to proceed apace through the combined artifice of political theater — how conveniently the ISIS story links to the narrative “Assad vs The Terrorists” — and, in Yemen, just watch those Houthis go — war by proxy.
By contrast, Cockburn takes a generous view of the regime’s belated and brief confrontation with ISIS. He has pronounced Assad’s army its “main military opponent,” deserving of Western support. But facts tell a different story. According to a Carter Center study, the regime has spared ISIS in 90 percent of its attacks; and an IHS Jane’s Terrorism and Insurgency Center (JTIC) study finds that in 2014, the regime targeted ISIS in only 6 percent of its attacks. (ISIS in turn directed its fire on the regime in only 13 percent its operations.)
Since Aboud Dandachi laid out the shaping of the battle by Assad forces in his refreshingly honest and entertaining history and polemic, The Doctor, The Eye Doctor and Me: Analogies and Parallels Between the World of Doctor Who and the Syrian Conflict (2014), the feudal perversion of a modest pro-democracy protest in 2011 into a brutal epic one might title “Assad vs The Terrorists” has been apparent but the statistics on how it was done never so well relayed.
BackChannels (oh the bias!) commonly invokes the term “Putin-Assad-Khamenei” in place of Bashar al-Assad alone to play up the axis, its Russo-Iranian core, and define the conflict in Syria as other and greater than “civil war”, a mere internal dispute, the greater dispute being that between medieval absolute power and modern democratic distributed or popular power.
From recent correspondence — so recent, it hasn’t even been sent!
You may wish to wonder at the goodness of your country in its domestic ideals. China and Russia work differently, and what they do has probably long “leaked” into our own analyses and options.
With Iran, “War by Proxy” is obvious everywhere the regime sows chaos, death, and sorrow. This week: Yemen.
With Russia, those criminals make war and lie about it. As much has been the story of the invasion of Crimea from the start.
Who OWNS that monster Out There in Syria-Iraq (“Syriaque”?*).
That it has served Putin-Assad-Khamenei, that person that has managed to pervert a a popular people’s protest into an ineffable tragedy one might title, “Assad vs The Terrorists” (mission accomplished), points to the forbearing of barrel bombing old terrorists positions when the districts of Homs proved so much more convenient and harmless and helpless for doing so.
This month (merry one of May) has brought an example of active observation but passive response to a challenge that has morphed from a negligible horror into a military and political scourge calling to mind the possibly more gentle manners of Attila the Hun.
The story released by Fox has been picked up on the Blogosphere, and the report itself may be located and downloaded as a PDF.
While on the subject of the dismantling of Syria-Iraq boundary points, BackChannels has taken note of the strength of “nominal affiliation” and “sectarian teleology” in producing and sustaining brutal conflict in the region. The gamble on the favor of God and related glory appears to overmatch the promise of social cooperation and cohesion across sectarian lines that would produce a more sound freedom, peace, and prosperity while intellectual and social habits related to the experiences of fear and security prevail: Our People vs Those People, Sunni vs Shiite, appears to remain primary across population to some extent.
I was smiling as they gave us instructions worthy of a spy movie: “Come to the bus stop… There’ll be a man in a grey suit with a rolled-up paper in his hand… Don’t approach, keep walking. He’ll catch up with you… Jump into the green taxi – it’s our driver… Delete the numbers from your mobile…”
They were careful, but exceptionally brave, and full of hope. They genuinely believed then that, in a matter of months, the ruthless, authoritarian government that had ruled Syria for decades would fall, just like Egypt’s and Tunisia’s did. They had high hopes of building a new country, a new society, governed by democratic values and the rule of law.
Damascus, SANA – President Bashar al-Assad on Monday received Foreign Affairs Minister of Belarus Vladimir Makei and the accompanying delegation.
Makei delivered to President al-Assad a letter from President of Belarus Alexander Lukashenko in which he expressed his country’s support for Syria in the face of the terrorist attack targeting it, with Lukashenko expressing confidence in the Syrian people’s ability to achieve victory and overcome the crisis and asserting that Belarus is committed to developing relations with Syria in all fields.
“It is quite understandable that the Syrian army withdraws to protect large cities where much of the population is located,” said Waddah Abded Rabbo, director of Syria’s Al-Watan newspaper, which is close to the regime.
“The world must think about whether the establishment of two terrorist states is in its interests or not,” he said, in reference to IS’s self-proclaimed “caliphate” in Syria and Iraq, and Al-Qaeda affiliate Al-Nusra Front’s plans for its own “emirate” in northern Syria.
“Syndicate Red Brown Green” has been made a term of art on BackChannels for just this reason: it’s not looking good for the Assad regime’s recovery of Syria, but with a painful retrenching in the offing, it has its friends: Putin’s Russia; Khamenei’s Iran — and Putin’s Russia has a relationship with a dictatorship amenable to hosting some family with few places to go.
That day has not come yet, but while perverting a gentle 2011 challenge to its authority — this tragedy began with nonviolent protests met with the arresting and torturing of children — into a ferocious heroic narrative, “Assad vs The Terrorists”, a frame requiring the indiscriminate bombing of the innocent and allowance for the real terrorists to get their acts together in order to play their roles. The Terrorists have made it just about to the gates of state power.
Gov. Talal Barazi of the central province of Homs, which includes Palmyra, told The Associated Press Sunday that IS members have “committed mass massacres in the city of Palmyra” since they captured it on Wednesday. He said IS fighters took many civilians, including women, to unknown destinations.
Activists in the town have said that IS fighters have hunted down President Bashar Assad’s loyalist since taking the town, killing some 280 people.
As a reflection of the news with a little widening into overlooked space, i.e., Belarus, this post has turned out a bit of a patchwork: a little bit about the Syrian Civil War; a little about dictatorship and the “Putin-Assad-Khamenei” axis. So be it. There is nothing neat in the way these small wars work or in the ways powerful elites work either.
Lumping together 1.6 billion Muslims into one reviled abstraction is a disservice not only to Israel but also to Israel’s values of democracy, diversity, tolerance, and human rights. Muslims are not an abstraction. Among Muslims, you will find neighbors, friends, relatives, business partners, co-workers, and fellow citizens. Among Muslims you will also find some of the fiercest opponents of Islamist extremism. Reality is complex and often overwhelming, but it cannot be explained away by the wholesale demonization of a quarter of the world’s population.
In the political psychology, we are perhaps all a little bit full of ourselves as “locus of control” play right along with “the real Jews”, “the true church”, “final word from God” and all of that. Nonetheless, bearing legacy within ourselves from near birth (or language uptake), we each have many ways of appreciating and enjoying our ethnic and spiritual endowments without feeling compelled to conquer the rest of the world with the same.
Agha ma wati jinday wastha naya Goda degay khe b mani wastha.
Agha ma degrani wastha naya goda ma cheyan?
Agha ani na, goda kadi?
In the first century BCE, Babylonian born Hillel (later known as Hillel the Elder) migrated to the Land of Israel to study and worked as a woodcutter, eventually becoming the most influential force in Jewish life. Hillel is said to have lived in such great poverty that he was sometimes unable to pay the admission fee to study Torah, and because of him that fee was abolished. He was known for his kindness, gentleness, concern for humanity. One of his most famous sayings, recorded in Pirkei Avot (Ethics of the Fathers, a tractate of the Mishnah), is “If I am not for myself, then who will be for me? And if I am only for myself, then what am I? And if not now, when?” The Hillel organization, a network of Jewish college student organizations, is named for him. Hillel and his descendants established academies of learning and were the leaders of the Jewish community in the Land of Israel for several centuries. The Hillel dynasty ended with the death of Hillel II in 365 CE.
Without prompting, a Facebook friend, a teacher, translated Hillel into Baloch.
At the end of a note to the same, I’ve stated a perhaps uniquely modern stance:
Our world offers an abundance of timeless knowledge and wisdom from myriad sources, a vast reach across cultures through the great libraries and their scholars, and one may be gifted with opportunity and time to do some soul searching about the meaning of life and living in the place that one inhabits. Toward that end, while I do my part 🙂 , I generally promote ethnolinguistic cultural survival and self-determination, not only for the Hebrews but for Baloch, Kurds, Pashtun, and every other unique living language community on the planet.
In fewer words, plainly promoted: geospatial coexistence with ethnic centers, margins, and mixers; global cultural co-evolution with updating toward what is authentic in belief, kind in social manner, and respectful in its humanity; and continuously improving “qualities in living” with economic, psychological, physical, and spiritual dimensions.
As a soldier, I felt like a real master. I drove tanks in the desert and I carried a big assault rifle when in the city. One day, as I walked the streets of Jerusalem, believing myself to be the biblical King David, my eyes met those of a young Arab lady in a long white dress standing on the rooftop of her house. There she stood, erect and proud. She stared at me, and then sang lovely Arabic tunes that captured my mind and heart. I stared back at her, a gorgeous beauty with the voice of an angel, and fell in love on the spot. Her song, I promptly concluded, was far more piercing than any of my bullets.
At this point Captain Swan stunned his men with his own innovative plan. He argued that their voyaging along the Mexican coast had brought nothing but disappointment and it was pointless continuing. Instead, they would cross the Pacific and “go into the East-Indies.” He conjured the glory days of Drake and Cavendish, who successfully passed that way, but even so he had a struggle. Two-thirds of his men did not believe it possible. “Such was their ignorance,” wrote Dampier, that they were convinced “he would carry them out of the world.”
Preston, Diana and Michael. A Pirate of Exquisite Mind: Explorer, Naturalist, and Buccaneer: The Life of William Dampier. New York: Walker & Company, 2004.
These two wildly different accounts of voyages through time have between them one theme in common: the temporary ascent of assumptions and guesses over real knowledge.
William Dampier, who set out in life a sailor, precedes James Cook, Charles Darwin, and others in his gourmandizing, navigating, observing, suffering, swashbuckling, writing triple circumnavigation of the earth under 17th Century sail.
In the life movie, as it were, Tuvia Tenenbom appears to have embarked upon his life’s journey as one who might have believed a superstitious misstep would have carried him out of the world:
But then, on one wintry cold day, I got my hands on all kinds of books and pictures and found out that I’ve been lied to. Our “Jewish” black clothes made me look frighteningly similar to the non-Jewish Polish nobles and Austrian bourgeois of a century or two ago; our community’s glorification of virgins was more in line with the thinking in Islamic societies; and the way my rabbis prevented me from engaging with sexuality in any capacity — “Thou shalt never look at females,” they always reminded me — seemed more rooted in Catholicism than in Judaism.
True to my nature as a representative of God, I consulted with heaven and left the ultra-Orthodox fold.
By the time Tenenbom publishes in today’s Forward, he has become a much more cognizant and sophisticated navigator, rather like Dampier in his day, but in this age, he has stumbled across a similar ignorance and misguidance. However, where Dampier’s men could be called “out of the loop” and innocent of emerging knowledge about the world and the mapping of continents, islands, currents, and winds, Tenenbom’s anti-Semitic and Israel-hating acquaintance appear to have been corralled, lied to, programmed, and seduced: they have lost their clues to what is real and what is not and would appear today to be made to live in Orwell’s worst nightmare: intellectually poisoned and too easily maneuvered, they have been “carried out of the world” — the world that includes worlds with authentic histories, including their own ethnolinguistic legacies — as cognizant and knowledgeable free agents in their own right.
The Islamic State’s recent conquest of Yarmouk—a once thriving Palestinian suburb with the formal status of a refugee camp that lies on the outskirts of Damascus—provides far more than just insight into which aspects of the Palestinian plight get editorial privilege and which do not. Since the strangulation of Yarmouk began in 2012, the fate of its people has offered a bald reminder that within the Arab world, Palestinians still encounter an ambivalence that can spill into open contempt. Just as instructive, and certainly more novel, is the realization that the global Palestinian solidarity movement, by not holding mass demonstrations highlighting the slaughter and starvation in Yarmouk, has become complicit with the dictator Bashar al-Assad and the beheaders of IS.
I am an Arab Canadian, an organizer of small 2006 Gaza/Lebanon protests, and I am concerned on the rise of antisemitism.
The massive Gaza protests this year, organized by the Workers World Party, were about promoting antisemitism rather than concern for Palestinians. These protests excluded Arab voices so they could be free to demonize Israel. Worldwide, almost each time Syrian Palestinians brought a Free Syrian flag to protests, they were met with harassment, and, in some cases, violence. As one Palestinian woman from the Yarmouk Ghetto of Syria said, “We have been used.”
The truth, however, is Israelis have been quietly giving food to Jordan-based Syrian refugees while Jordan continues to strand them in the desert. While Hezbollah has been beating and even lynching Syrian Palestinians, the Lebanese army bombed refugee tents. Yet, Israel has, in the meantime, been medically treating and saving the lives of Syrians in Israeli hospitals assembled at the Syrian border. The Holocaust Museum hosted the photos of Cesar on the Syrian concentration camps. When the whole world abandoned Syrian Palestinians, Israel was there for them and Turkey took in millions of refugees. Even the Canadian opposition leader, Thomas Mulcair, referred to Assad as a genocidal maniac, but “Save Gaza” activists were silent.
BackChannels 