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.
It’s not just the vice-chancellor of Jamia Azhar but others too that are now calling for reformation in Islam, something that was being done so far in a consistent and methodical manner only on Islamic website New Age Islam. Indeed, New Age Islam remains banned for the last two years in Pakistan for countering the Jihadist theology of violence being propagated on over 150 Jihadi publications in that country.
Thus it is gratifying that several other Muslims from different parts of the world are now coming out to demand introspection and change. Four well-known Muslim intellectuals, for instance, have appealed to all Muslim political and religious leaders to stand up and support what they term “democratic Islam.” They have called for a conference in France early next year that would “define the contours of a progressive interpretation of Islam firmly grounded in the 21st century.”
In Judaism, God’s three gifts to His first two children are human consciousness, self-consciousness, and conscience.
The ethnic development of the technology may in some ways undermine the implicit and appealing universalism in the message, but in schema, this amounts only to urging the separation of the authors of ideas inherently dignifying and liberating from contemplation of those ideas as they stand on their own.
One or two cousinly additional thoughts for the reform minded: all figures depicted by the Torah and referred to as “prophets” by Islam have in the Torah been drawn as faulted people and distanced from God — in essence, disconflated, Moses included (God parts the waters, not him); the Torah also compels ethical and legal argument without end, for when God “proves Abraham” — tests him — the test is not defined, and whether of obedience or conscience (perhaps Abraham had been expected to speak his mind about the sacrifice of Isaac, i.e., to have been conscionable, not blindly obedient) is left to the listeners and readers to argue.
“So, what do we do?” The answer: continuous jihad against despots.
Know them for “malignant narcissists”.
Know them for their autocratic criminality — for Iran, start with the “chain murders” and dwell a while on Evin and the dismal business of hanging even children on trumped or insufficiently investigated charges.
Know them for what they do for money — and how much (look up Reuters on Setad and Khamenei and have a look at what “Wiki” states about Ali and his brother [$60 billion in amassed wealth]).
Know them for their own feudalism and the company they keep: Putin-Assad-Khamenei + Orban + Erdogan.
And then keep them out of power.
Forever.
God, nature, and the universe are everywhere around and in us, and we humans tend to embrace a conscionable evolution and revolution across time.
May the monster that leads one day look back over his shoulder for followers and find himself surprised to find none.
Fine words, those, but we’ve come to an age in which for each Yanukovych (who got booted from power by way of popular revolt) there seem to be half a dozen copies of Mugabe, who has stayed in power long enough to become an old man and one most likely to die peacefully in his sleep, guilty of nothing in the protective bubble of his kind of consciousness and narcissism.
Iran’s war-by-proxy sneaked under cover of negotiations over its nuclear program has tragically turned Aden, Yemen into another battered middle east war zone in the fashion known to “Putin-Khamenei-Assad” — merciless, mindless, piratical, and ruthless.
The troika have been waging the medieval against the modern — the destructive and thieving potential of absolute power against the productive democratic distribution of power — for years, and visible so since the onset of Syria’s civil war. With the distribution of military personnel into Crimea and Yemen, the dynamic Putin-Khamenei duo have brought payback in flooded oil markets and online opprobrium, although I don’t think either Putin or Khamenei bothered by criticism, at least not on the surface and outside of their bailiwicks.
Three sources in the southern port city’s anti-Houthi militias said the Iranians, identified as a colonel and a captain, were seized in two separate districts that have been rocked by heavy gun battles.
“The initial investigation revealed that they are from the Quds Force and are working as advisors to the Houthi militia,” one of the sources told Reuters.
“How can Iran call for us to stop the fighting in Yemen?” asked the the top Saudi diplomat at a news conference alongside French counterpart Laurent Fabius. “We came to Yemen to help the legitimate authority, and Iran is not in charge of Yemen.”
Tharoor, Ishaan. “Saudi and Iranian leaders wage war of words as Yemen burns.” The Washington Post, April 13, 2015.
Lonely bloggers cannot compete with funded international media in reporting the news, unless we have unusual friends on the ground.
However, as audience to mainstream media — and conflict adventure media — we may wrap events differently online, read about what we are seeing when we’re offline, and perhaps approach conflict and political analysis with something combining humanism, journalism, and scholarship.
As regards the above clip, this blogger may reflect on what a single lie can do in the way of evil.
At 2:31 in the video immediately above, Iman Dr. Taha says to his gathering, “I told him, “What are you doing? Your country is getting destroyed. This is all part of an action by American intelligence. And today, a new order was given telling the world that 70% of foreigners are terrorists who want to rip our country apart. They want to kill our people and our nation and destroy our unity. The faith is Yemeni and the wisdom is Yemeni. God is great. Death to America.”
That audience: handled, misguided, maneuvered, used.
It appears they haven’t the means or temerity to question what they’re told (and independently discover for themselves who has been lying to them all along — and why).
No government can restrict itself to timing stoplights.
Each government — each unified state — promotes an ethics, spirit, and values embraced culture-wide — or it is not unified.
The west: Greco-Roman in spirit, Judeo-Christian in the derivations of common law.
With exception (like Leviticus), the Torah tells much less than it invites or induces in lively ethical and moral argument. Some results of the great conversation with the universe stand up to time — and some don’t.
Is Abraham to be emulated for his instant obedience to God, or should he be chastised for not having had the courage to speak his conscience before God when tested?
That’s a Jewish argument if ever laid out for generations.
The aesthetic and moral evolution of the Jews, as with all tribes, comprises an ethnic part, but the universalism exceeds the same and borrowed into Christianity and Islam (start with jurist Hillel the Elder, who dies around 10-CE after updating Judaism in its legal aspect and making it more accessible to converts) may after 2,000 years and much spilled blood brought us to something new: a fresh start for everyone from an old base.
Israel won’t go backward to rote obedience to anything: we are always leaving Pharaoh and crossing rivers and going to the Promised Land with a mixed multitude. The labels give us fits — and that is something to address — but the general and more kind contours of our humanity may be something to build and prize together.
With fewer than 7,000 living languages extant in the world — and many disappearing annually –the first sound basis for peace may be judicious ethnolinguistic separation and some recognition of related distribution cores and margins across space. To obtain that within a compressed socially integrating information system, one might want the guidance of a few helpful principles and virtues (perhaps like those listed in the upper left part of the sidebar of this blog).
“Secular” refers to many principles of fairness, but it does not mean merely “clinical” or “practical” or somehow “disembodied” and divorced from all that informs cultural self-concept.
The Jews caught a good break and bad one in their struggle with adverse and evil relationships and their striving for a different kind of culture, one diminishing the power of tyrants while being also kind and fair and just not only to its own throughout but to others as well.
Russia signed a contract worth about $800 million to deliver S-300s to Iran in 2007. But the U.S. and Israel pushed the Kremlin to drop the deal, expressing concern that Tehran could use the sophisticated air-defense system to protect its nuclear facilities from an attack.
BackChannels recalls that in Moscow last November, Mikhail Bogdanov and PFLP representatives discussed S-300 missiles (reference string: “Moscow, PFLP”). Could this breaking news refer back to that chat? By its $800 million figure, the contract bandied about seems the same, a perennial niggle for the diplomats involved.
Call the technique the “inspiration of inattention.”
Crimea’s adverse conditions aren’t simply limited to economics, however. The region’s inhabitants have faced systematic discrimination since becoming Russian citizens. In particular, Crimea’s Tatar Muslim minority is suffering levels of persecution not seen since the Soviet era. This pressure includes “disappearances, sadistic murders . . . attacks on media, and arrests on trumped-up charges,” according to one informed observer. So pervasive has this discrimination been that, back in February, the United Nations took the unprecedented step of publicly condemning Russia’s treatment of the Crimean Tatars.
What con does not expect to get his marks “looking the other way”?
(Reuters) – Iran on Monday urged the formation of a new Yemeni government and offered to assist in a political transition, comments likely to anger Saudi Arabia, which is backing Yemen’s president against a rebel force allied with Iran.
The Houthi advance towards the Yemeni city of Aden forced President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi to flee to Riyadh last month and triggered a Saudi-led campaign of air strikes to try to drive back the rebels, who share their Shi’ite faith with Iran.
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.
BackChannels 