Should there be peace between Israel and the Palestinians it would not end the warfare in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). How would peace between Israel and the Palestinians stop the massacre of the Yazidis and the Christians? Tribal warfare amongst the Muslims would continue. The Alawites and the Sufis, the Salafists, the Shiites and the Sunnis, the Hashemites. ISIS and al Qaeda, al Nusra, Boko Haram, Hezbollah and Hamas. Wahhabis and the Taliban. Even with a programme I can’t follow the tribes-who hates whom; who’s with whom.
Conflict in the Lands of Isms — communisms, Islamism, feudalisms, tribalisms, fascisms — would seem to beg a look into “small group social psychology”, i.e., how we humans, such a gregarious species in general, organize ourselves to have always enmity between us. There are academics with journal publications (e.g. Small Group Research) in this area; whether there is a lay channel between the researcher’s view and popular perception, I don’t know, but in Diane Weber Bederman’s piece there is the matter of too many parochial interests rubbing against one another in all the dismally wrong ways.
The extremists can always point directly to the texts and reiterate that they are the infallible, revealed word of God. Furthermore, the texts indicate that the entire world is ultimately destined to become a Caliphate under Islamic law and the actions of terrorists, while abhorrent to us, will inspire a portion of the world’s Muslims — who would otherwise have not been tempted — to become extremists.
Would this description resemble any leader you might happen to be thinking about?
Has a grandiose sense of self-importance (e.g., exaggerates achievements and talents, expects to be recognized as superior without commensurate achievements)
Is preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love
Believes that he or she is “special” and unique and can only be understood by, or should associate with, other special or high-status people (or institutions)
Requires excessive admiration
Has a very strong sense of entitlement, e.g., unreasonable expectations of especially favorable treatment or automatic compliance with his or her expectations
Is exploitative of others, e.g., takes advantage of others to achieve his or her own ends
Lacks empathy, e.g., is unwilling to recognize or identify with the feelings and needs of others
Is often envious of others or believes that others are envious of him or her
Regularly shows arrogant, haughty behaviors or attitudes
THE mosque in Pakistan is now no longer just a religious institution. Instead it has morphed into a deeply political one that seeks to radically transform culture and society. Actively assisted by the state in this mission in earlier decades, the mosque is a powerful actor over which the state now exercises little authority. Some have been captured by those who fight the government and military. An eviscerated, embattled state finds it easier to drop bombs on the TTP in tribal Waziristan than to rein in its urban supporters, or to dismiss from state payroll those mosque leaders belonging to militant groups.
Yet these underlying differences have rarely turned into public disputes. As a report by the Moscow Carnegie Center put it, Russia and Turkey “have largely managed to compartmentalize their relations.” That’s down to pragmatism and realpolitik. But the similarities between the two countries’ leaders are hard to miss. Here are some reasons why Putin and Erdogan could look to each other, and find a kindred spirit.
Affinity between dictators constitutes a revanch feudalist theme in contemporary foreign affairs. Central to each: the rejection of classical liberal values and the embrace of unsavory methods in their political life plus the pursuit of grandiose ambitions perhaps associated with a giantism suited to immortality.
Russia, Syria, Iran, Hungary, and Turkey may not be doing gangbusters as states — from from it — but as gangsters set up in palaces or commanding immense portfolios on top of much unsung suffering, they’re at the top of their game.
The playing in Syria of a bloody chess match — or poker with three jokers wild — has produced a humanitarian catastrophe now coldly reflected in big numbers: more than 200,000 dead; more than 9 million internally displaced and refugee.
As a stalemate from the git-go — post-Soviet Russia vs NATO, the feudal world vs the modern — and held there by nuclear danger, Putin-Assad-Khamenei’s hands have transformed an authentic people’s revolution — call it a democratic socialist revolution, an anti-totalitarian revolution for classical liberalism — into an immensely tragic put-on featuring on the state’s side a tyrant and in much of the opposition the tyrants of the al-Qaeda-type organizations.
(On this blog, ISIS is a Khamenei proxy by way of direct bribes or subterfuge, and, one way or the other, its presence may be maintained as long as it serves Iranian diplomacy, war strategy, and the business that has been made of the want of infinite “narcissistic supply” — i.e., contemplated later glory).
Perhaps this way an endgame comes:
US-NATO has cut the revenues of oil-dependent states and their proxies;
US-NATO appears to have gotten Hezbollah consumed with striking Israel, which perverse shift in focus may signal gathering weakness in Assad’s military outlook (perhaps if he’s going down, he wants to see Israel hurt while he’s falling);
US-NATO has laid some groundwork for rebuilding a moderate army for Syria, one capable of destroying both the fattened red-brown capitalists and the jumpy green meanies of jealousy’s jihad that have made Syria the world’s capital of limitless suffering.
By when?
Not so fast.
It takes time to assemble parts, build machinery, and move the machinery around — and not only for the “small war” — always: if it’s in your own neighborhood, it is all the war in the world! — but for greater and more dismal possibilities as well.
Excerpts and Reference
The consequences of missing oil revenue for IS are severe. IS is unlikely to decrease funding for its military operations so it will have to find ways to simultaneously cut costs elsewhere and raise new revenue — and both methods are likely to jeopardize popular support for the group.
But the good times may now be over for Hezbollah and its supporters. Iranian oil profits, which have lubricated the proxy group with hundreds of millions of dollars a year, appear to be drying up. Western sanctions, imposed on Tehran due to its nuclear program, coupled with falling oil prices, have emptied the coffers of the Islamic Republic.
Hezbollah’s fear is that all that weaponry will be lost if Assad falls. One wonders, lost to whom? The Muslim Brotherhood? Al-Qaeda operatives in Syria? Since both the Muslim Brotherhood and Al-Qaeda are reported moving quickly into the mayhem and becoming part of the opposition mix, this strategic weaponry, including stockpiles of chemical weapons and long-range missiles, could fall into the hands of any of these terrorist groups, as the Syrian regime disintegrates.
With no American combat boots on the ground and limited intelligence, the U.S. is struggling to have an impact there against Islamic State militants or the Assad regime.
One of the biggest hurdles for the U.S. training program for Syrian rebels is identifying and vetting individuals to train. Defense officials said earlier this month that the U.S. is working closely with other U.S. government agencies as well as partner nations to find rebel fighters who would be candidates for the program.
Jihad Mughniyeh, son of former Hezbollah chief Imad Mugniyeh, as well as 11 others were killed in the airborne attack, including six Iranians, one of them a general. Iranian state sources confirmed the identity of the senior Revolutionary Guard officer, naming him as General Mohamed Allahdadi. Another key figure killed in the attack was identified as Mohammed Issa, the head of Hezbollah’s operation in war-torn Syria and Iraq.
Assad’s war against his people, attacks of terrorist groups, and the trauma of ordinary Syrians have gone unnoticed while the global leaders quickly gathered in Paris to condemn the killing of 12 journalists, which is of course an atrocious and condemnable act, but the same world is turning a blind eye and is not reacting to the daily killings by poisonous gases, explosions and missiles.
The inability of the international community to act has turned the Syrian issue into a huge humanitarian crisis.
Some combat takes place on the battlefields of Iraq and Syria. Other battles are on the streets of Ottawa, Paris, Boston and Montreal. Some involves the execution of soldiers; some, of shoppers. The aggressor in this war wants to browbeat his opponents into acquiescence; this doesn’t always entail killing. Sometimes the threat of violence is enough to cancel a lecture, silence a critic. The police are among the first to advise compliance in order to avoid trouble. They certainly don’t want to appear Islamophobic.
Cops are good for dealing with criminals. They are not equipped for war. Our legal system is not equipped for this different war. And so, we are losing.
UN Special Envoy for Syria Staffan de Mistura said on Jan. 15 that the continued violence in Syria is a “disgrace” and that the Syria conflict is “the largest humanitarian crisis since the Second World War.” Syrians have replaced Afghans as the world’s largest refugee population, with 7.6 million displaced and 3.3 million refugees, in addition to a death toll estimated at 200,000, and the return of typhoid, measles and polio to the country.
On Jan. 14, de Mistura got a boost from US Secretary of State John Kerry, who praised UN and Russian efforts to broker a settlement in Syria.
This blog has supported the notion that yesterday’s communist elite are today’s state capitalists backed and defended by security fascists motivated by money and a new fascist nationalism. That’s a complicated way of suggesting that “Old Red has met New Brown” — and the old Soviets are today’s New Nationalists.
Along that line, and while scanning, collecting, posting, and commenting on news from journalism’s “second row seat to history”, one cannot help but note that certain relationships seem defined by common interest in “political absolutism”: Putin – Assad – Khamenei | Putin – Orban – Erdogan – (Khamenei). The dry outer skin of the onion wants another story: secular vs religious power; Sunni vs Shiite teleology; Iran vs Iraq. However, lo and behold, as the Internet helps political wonks tear back the layers of the onion, Iran is in Iraq in a large evident way (and given the malignant psychology involved in men who would be as if gods — or just one — themselves, the Russo-Syrian-Iranian alliance may be what was in back of Daesh, for if one is to be as God, one would naturally manage the entire battle, not just one side of it.
As Putin was in the business of spending about $51 billion on the winter olympics in Sochi (the figure is disputed but still well into the tens of billions), he appears to have been thoroughly out of the business of tempering Assad’s response to a moderate, modern, and democratically updating revolutionary “Arab Spring” challenge or, Mr. Nice Guy, offering Russian aid to ameliorate the damage, displacement, and injury brought to millions of innocents. After all, it really wasn’t his concern, was it, whatever happened to Syrians.
The suggestion that Assad chose to bomb the daylights out of noncombatant zones while holding off on the al-Qaeda-types who came into theater of war may be borne out in the casualty, IDP, and refugee figures created in the monstrosity that is today the deeply polarized and globally signal “Syrian Civil War”, for while NATO and the western world press for classical liberal values in governance, it appears Putin, Assad, and Khamenei together press for immense systems of abuse, coercion, enslavement, and exploitation on the mighty piers of fear and patronage.
Call Syria an “axle of power” 🙂 — if the three dictators get away with driving over the state’s constituents to an inherently fascist conclusion, they might well drive the same anywhere else — and the end of that kind of power: the power to make others suffer capriciously, with impunity, without heart, without justice, without limits.
Still, Secretary of State John Kerry declared on Wednesday that the United States welcomed both initiatives. He made no call for Mr. Assad’s resignation, a notable omission from Mr. Kerry, who has typically insisted on it in public remarks. Instead, he spoke of Mr. Assad as a leader who needed to change his policies.
“It is time for President Assad, the Assad regime, to put their people first and to think about the consequences of their actions, which are attracting more and more terrorists to Syria, basically because of their efforts to remove Assad,” Mr. Kerry said.
Name the tyrants — communist, nationalist, Islamist (red-brown-green) — who have with grace backed away from or stepped down from power.
The Kremlin may be the main winner in the Lebanon war. Israel has been attacked with Soviet Kalashnikovs and Katyushas, Russian Fajr-1 and Fajr-3 rockets, Russian AT-5 Spandrel antitank missiles and Kornet antitank rockets. Russia’s outmoded weapons are now all the rage with terrorists everywhere in the world, and the bad guys know exactly where to get them. The weapons cases abandoned by Hezbollah were marked: “Customer: Ministry of Defense of Syria. Supplier: KBP, Tula, Russia.”
The four-and-a-half-year-long process of relocating members of the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI or MEK) to countries of safety was successfully completed on September 9, 2016 when the last 280 Camp Liberty residents left Iraq for Albania.
Displacement is not a “win”, but give the “People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran” its due: it appears to BackChannels as one of very few organizations that have moved from U.S. status as a terrorist organization to de-listing on that score. In the years tracked here, it has consistently spoken a democratic-egalitarian and peace line, so here it may be considered good that the people involved have found a less contentious and more secure home.
Posted to YouTube December 16, 2014.
Khamenei, Ahmadinejad, and Rouhani do not represent our nation Iran. The Iranian regime holds the record in the number of executions. It holds and is a symbol of bankrupt terrorism. It must be overthrown. This the verdict of history. This is what 120,000 martyrs of freedom have called for. This is the message of our gathering today: religious fascism must be overthrown.
Posted to YouTube June 27, 2014
And even though I want to believe that no Judiciary seeks to execute innocent people, the Iranian system makes the likelihood of unfair trials and arbitrary killings unacceptably high. Iranians are routinely subject to arbitrary detentions, beating and interrogations without the presence of a lawyer, vaguely worded national security laws, and prejudiced institutions that fail to protect them.
HRANA News Agency – After seven months of Saeed Shirzad’s arrest, he is still kept as detainee and under uncertain condition. His attorneys are not permitted to review his case.
An informed source regarding Nahid Gorji’s condition, told HRANA’s reporter, “She used to have contact with her daughter every week, but since three weeks ago she has not been allowed to make a phone call and has had no visit with her family which has made her family and relatives worried.”
HRANA News Agency – Atena Dayemi, civil rights and children’s rights activist, is still being kept in solitary confinement after nearly three months.
According to Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA), Atena Dayemi who was arrested on October 21, 2014 in her house and transferred to ward 2-A in Evin Prison which is controlled by IRGC, is still being kept in solitary confinement although the interrogation process has been finished.
This abominable crime has a special character: the savage assassination of writers and journalists under the name of Islam. For this reason, on behalf of the Iranian people and Resistance, I condemned this crime in strongest possible terms and state as a Muslim woman that the religion of Islam and the conduct of its great Prophet reject such acts of barbarism.
Today, the people of France hold a great gathering of solidarity, which we also participated, and we express our solidarity with them.
Eric Shawn: You mentioned the nuclear issue and of course, July 20th is a deadline for the nuclear agreement. Do you think Tehran can be trusted?
Maryam Rajavi: Certainly not. The mu↑llahs are masters of deception, duplicity and charlatanism. For this reason they can in no way be trusted. You know full well that Rouhani, himself, acknowledged during the election campaign that he had deceived the West in order to continue the nuclear activities inside Iran while the West being misled that thee regime has engaged in negotiations in order to halt their nuclear program. Therefore, they cannot be trusted.
Or has it already passed, and I am watching the stragglers?
I don’t think I am watching the stragglers, but I have been watching this parade for a while.
Additional Reference
My ears have been seduced, for Rajavi speaks well. However, the MEK past and perhaps her own present online behavior or encouragement of behavior carries forward a whiff of “KGB-itis” in the malignantly narcissistic signal of faith and investment in control of constituent perception through unsavory manipulations in information space.
___
Of course, when on the internet, like-minded people, especially those who strongly support parties or causes, will naturally act in a like-minded way; changing their pictures to similar ones, using similar backgrounds and slogans, etc.
But these accounts are literally identical in almost every respect. Similar pictures, similar slogans, similar lack of any personal touch whatsoever, and all devoted to either retweeting or paraphrasing Mrs Rajavi’s every word.
Throughout the decade, the MEK orchestrated terrorist attacks against the state that killed several Americans working in Iran, including military officers and civilian contractors, according to the U.S. State Department. (By 1978, some 45,000 of the 60,000 foreigners working in Iran were Americans.) The MEK denies any involvement with these incidents, asserting that they were the work of a breakaway Marxist-Leninist faction, known as Peykar, which hijacked the movement after the arrest of Rajavi.
Some analysts support this. “Rajavi, upon release from prison during the revolution, had to rebuild the organization, which had been badly battered by the Peykar experience,” said Patrick Clawson, director of research at the Washington Institute, in a CFR interview.
Yesterday, I listed a few names, most from Morteza Abolalian’s list, and here, reporting and commenting in reverse, I’ve started to get to know them better–who they were, how they lived–if possible.
So far, I’ve found web material scant.
There’s something wrong, of course, when my page comes up top on a Google search for any of the persons murdered allegedly, an appropriate term one must use even if reluctantly, by the Iranian state.
Politically, each name affords a window into the history and machinery of the Islamic revolution in Iran, most past, some nearly present.
From an empathic standpoint, one would wish to know them better, and that whether they were bad in some way or remarkably good. Such work has been undertaken by Human Rights & Democracy for Iran (http://www.iranrights.org/english/) through its undertaking “Omid”, in translation from Persian, “Hope”:
“Omid’s citizens were of varying social origins, nationalities, and religions; they held diverse, and often opposing, opinions and ideologies. Despite the differences in their personality, spirit and moral fiber, they are all united in Omid by their natural rights and their humanity. What makes them fellow citizens is the fact that one day each of them was unfairly and arbitrarily deprived of his or her life. At that moment, while the world watched the unspeakable happen, an individual destiny was shattered, a family was destroyed, and an indescribable suffering was inflicted.”
Our World Wide Web becomes memory for all humanity.
A week or two back I added this from writer Milan Kundera to my blog (bottom of the column on the right):
“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”
I may perhaps owe my own some work, but I don’t wish to dwell too much on that.
At the level of mind, we are a rapidly evolving species, cross-communicating, sorting, crystallizing, and we know injustice in one place is felt and has meaning in other places.
I’ve started working down the list I’ve got, but I can see that in the way of the web or human-to-web-to-human interaction, I’ve obligated myself to spend some time at Omid and appreciate the stories there.
The common denominator for all listed in relation to state repression is all were cheated of their lives, their works, and their voices in their greater potential.
This morning started out as quest for references, but even on the web and reading swiftly, one may travel only so far in two or three hours.
“The book in essence is a memorial volume in honour of Professor Ahmad Tafazzoli (1937-1996), containing nineteen articles by prominent scholars in the fields of Iranology, Ancient Persian Studies and Onomastics, on topics of Zoroastrianism, Ancient Iranian Religions, History of Ancient Persia, Studies in Middle Persian, Pazand and Sogdian texts. Prof. Tafazzoli himself contributed scholarly works in Middle Persian and Classical Persian Studies. The book contains a frontispiece of Prof. Tafazzoli and a bibliography of his published works and it is indeed unfortunate that the editors have opted to omit his works in the Persian language from that bibliography.”
Rafizadeh, Shahram. “A Caricature of Justice: Contradictions and Inconsistences in the Cases of the Political Serial Murders.” Gozaar – A Forum on Human Rights and Democracy in Iran, November 20, 2007:http://www.gozaar.org/template1.php?id=866&language=english
There are more resources online today than when the above list, culled from online, was compiled.
There are also more victims for the regime. In one of the above clips, Maryam Rajavi put the number of regime executed political martyrs at above 120,000, with 30,000 killed shortly after the taking of power in 1988.
BackChannels 