While feudal “Syndicate Red Brown Green”* — now a term of art on BackChannels — does its business “behind the curtains” and lies about everything it does with great creativity, it would appear the Obama Administration might not be playing ball with the Putin-Khamenei axis after all. However, if the above indictment involving the alleged illegal shipping of sensitive technology to the regime in Iran has surfaced, one might be curious as to how many other similar investigations are in the pipeline — and what other violations may be taking place “off the radar”.
As the public becomes aware of the “Red Brown Green” infiltration of American intellectual assets (for a lead, one might check out who has been promoting anti-Semitic cant and associated schemes — like “BDS” — from America’s academic, journalism, and research communities), curiosity as regards the political reliability of the nation’s business community should grow as well.
Brown = New Nationalist Movements — an allusion to the drifts of Orban’s Hungary and a part of the mix involved in Erdogan’s Turkey.
Green = Islamofascism generally with Ayatollah Khamenei possibly the most central element in driving the form worldwide, fromDaesh in Iraq toHezbollah in Argentina.
True, Muslims in Myanmar face genocidal persecution at the hands of state backed Buddhist extremists. To follow the thinking of the Pamela Gellers, Bill Mahers and Daniel Pipes of this world to its logical conclusion is to see Myanmar replicated in the West. It would require state sponsored genocide on several continents to even begin to put a dent in growth of the Islamic religion. Islamophobia can be very nasty, but even the most committed group of sit-in-a-think-tank-and-babble-on-about-taqiya Islamophobes cannot possibly pose an existential threat to the Islamic faith.
Unfortunately, the situation regarding Jewish communities around the world is much more precarious.
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.
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