Life as a Jew in India was no different to the lives of people of other faiths. India is the only country in the world where anti-semitism never existed. Jews were full citizens with the same rights and duties as everybody else.
Jews from other parts of the world are usually surprised to discover the level of religious tolerance in a country they believed was ‘backward. It is difficult for them to believe that the Beni Israel have been in military service for generations. We did not live in ghettos. We could live and work wherever we wanted. We owned the land we worked on – something European nations forbade their Jews.
Thalas of sweets that arrived on Diwali and Christmas were never turned away. Mutton sent on Eid was welcomed. This was not ‘compromise’ but respect for other people’s feelings.
. . . Alexei Navalny was found guilty of what activists said were trumped-up charges and given a suspended sentence of 3½ years. His younger brother was sent to prison, a move that drew comparisons to the Stalin-era practice of punishing family members of enemies of the state.
For two or three reasons, I would not go so far as to permanently and seriously conflate Russia’s president with the little guy with the mustache in Germany.
For one thing, Russia’s own internal saboteur works from a very different space in political time, and he’s both engaged and surrounded by the world free of dictatorship, which at the moment is shunning his best buddies and diminishing revenues from his state’s easiest money.
Moreover, the colonel president emperor may be operating also with internal controls and desires quite different from Adolph’s, the piratical motive combined with domestic aggrandizement being already well established and far out ahead of the want of the headaches attending imperial designs.
He knows too that while the plundering of Russia by its “Vertical of Power” and the approximately 110 multi-billionaire “oligarchs” who control about 35 percent of the state’s productive capacity may be stalled by a flooded oil market responding to the misadventure in Ukraine, responsibility today for the the essential criminality of the state — in Luke Harding’s words, the “Mafia State” — reverse engineers to himself, the only man at the top, and he’s the only figure capable of reversing its course.
*
We need to learn to respect ourselves.
We need to look at this important notion such as reputation and that reputation of a specific hospital, school, institution, or social office is a building stone in the overall reputation of our country . . . .
“We all understand that the sources of assets are different, that they were earned or acquired in various ways. However, I am confident that we should finally close, turn the ‘offshore page’ in the history of our economy and our country. It is very important and necessary to do this.”
The sentiments expressed in the speech follow action taken earlier in the year:
On the 18th of March the Russian Ministry of Finance published a draft law on anti-offshore measures. Following wide public discussion, a revised draft was published on the 27th of May.
The draft introduces four key concepts, namely, controlled foreign companies (CFC) rules; Russian tax residence for foreign companies, based on tests of management and control; concepts of ‘factual right to income’ and ‘beneficial owner’ in the context of applying international tax treaties; and new rules on taxation of the indirect disposal of Russian real estate.
Apply: “For my friends, everything! For my enemies, the law!”
Putin may be making some new “frenemies” about now as he at one turn coaxes the return of capital to Moscow and determines, perhaps, to build from it a new modern domestic economy — and at the other, in days to come, woe to the holdouts who may be made to face the latest in law promulgated by the Ministry of Finance.
The haunt of old Joe may spook the careers of both Vladimir Putin and Alexei Navalny: he’s the ghost representing a past to which no one should wish to return. In fact, Kruschev trashed it; Gorbachov nearly buried it; but the KGB and associates have revived it just enough to suit themselves grandly.
The present neo-feudal Russian security dictatorship may have a problem in just not really wanting to be what it is, i.e., politically criminal, a Russian domestic disaster, a financial Chernobyl, a billboard for the expression of malignant, unbridled, and ruthless narcissism.
While Navalny appears to threaten the power that is, he may also stand as the one first most reliable channel marker out of the kind of hell that attends the psychology in personality of the same.
Perhaps for Russians as a whole the journey contained in the homily “you can’t go home again” has of necessity involved a deep revisitation through Putin with the near histories of feudalism and communism, a two steps back toward the revival of 19th Century aristocracy and 20th Century socialist fascism that has reliably, inevitably, recalled to mind the excesses and miseries attending both.
In that light, the regime may know that Navalny needs to be a part of the Russia to come, that he’s part of the self respect to come — a sentiment mouthed into necessity by the president — and that playing with him with the familiar tools of dictatorship might be just the simplest way of telling him to wait his turn: his better day will come.
Credit Suisse said that there were hopes with the demise of the Soviet Union that Russia would turn into a high skilled economy with fair wealth distribution but “this is almost a parody of what happened in practice.”
BEFORE we get to the heart of the matter, the meat, one must fully internalize the following: the fact that the latest cop killer, Ismaaiyl Brinsley, was also a typical thuggish hood, said vile characteristic in no way obviated the real impetus for his NYPD bloodletting. Bear this factoid uppermost in mind. It is critical and irrefutable.
IN a nutshell, the assassinations were the poisonous morphing of Islamic jihad + race-warfare; the explosive linkage between the red/green alliance. Yes, it was (still is) the combustible combination of a commie revolutionary’s “winks and nods” – geared towards forward march – in tandem with free reign given to Islamists, those who are protected under the umbrella of Barack HUSSEIN Obama. No doubt, the mutating of Bill de Blasio’s reign of anti-American fervor, coupled with…
I was perplexed by how the Russian people could possibly support and not be outraged by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But I live in Denver, and I read mostly U.S. and European newspapers. I wanted to see what was going on in Russia and Ukraine from the Russian perspective, so I went on a seven-day news diet: I watched only Russian TV – Channel One Russia, the state-owned broadcaster, which I hadn’t seen in more than 20 years – and read Pravda, the Russian newspaper whose name means “Truth.” Here is what I learned:
The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, has invited the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, to Moscow next year to mark the 70th anniversary of the Soviet defeat of Nazi Germany in the second world war, the Kremlin’s spokesman said on Friday.
It would be Kim’s first foreign visit since taking the helm of the reclusive east Asian state in 2011. His personal envoy travelled to Moscow last month as part of efforts by the two Cold War-era allies to improve relations.
Hollywood didn’t even dare to kill Hitler, the most evil of all dictators, during his lifetime. When Charlie Chaplin made The Great Dictator at the height of World War II, he lampooned the world’s most dangerous man without even considering the possibility of offing him.
The International Club of Bad Little Boys has been mightily insulted.
You don’t even have to show the movies even though the head-vaporizing clip has been making the rounds of the web for hours.
It may be enough for the malignantly narcissistic to know what they look like in America and, perhaps, how some of their people may be perceiving them via their own private adventures across the World Wide Web.
From The Awesome Conversation (FTAC) earlier today when asked where North Korea got its madly skilled IT hackers:
KGB–>VEVAK–>SSD Russian purpose or cover has been replaced by Putin’s neo-feudalism, but, possibly, probably, old relationships persist. China (–>MSS) is also not the west’s best buddy. As regards IT in general and possibly demonstrated by Assange and Snowden, the arc of despots seems quite capable of seducing western talent as well as producing prodigious security dictatorships sophisticated in every aspect of computer science concerned with the control of information.
Say it ain’t so, if you can.
It appears to me the United States — and, in general, the open democracies — is under attack in myriad ways daily, internally via foreign investment in influencing the nation’s intellectual assets, externally through means better known to James Bond movies — and now wild cinematic sendups, temporarily suppressed (one hopes) — than to foreign affairs readers.
I revise the axis “Putin-Assad-Khamenei” (“together they are defending political absolutism”) to Putin-Assad-Khamenei-Jong-Un.
He sent out plenty of “signal” by way of prior crude verbal behavior and visible crime, but the targets of his mentality and those who share it have been slow to promulgate or reinforce sedition and treason laws and to inaugurate detention / investigation without charge in some form. In legally egalitarian liberal democracy, what is done to one must be applicable to all of a class of offender (abortion clinic bombers, for example, are terrorists too), and that may be impeding reaction.
I suspect Muslim-majority states have a deeper quandary as regards identification with these aggressors on two grounds: one is fear of mafia politics in force by these gangs — the feudal seem accustomed to doing away with critics and rivals; and the other involves buy-in and getting something out of the program (and that, apparently, equals some 63,000 Facebook “Likes” for a garden variety narcissistic murderer).
Carlos Bledsoe, Little Rock
Nidal Malik Hasan, Fort Hood
Dzhokar Tsarnaev, Boston Marathon (he’s in Yahoo news today)
Michael Zihaff-Bibeau, Ottowa
At best: an incomplete list.
I hesitate to coin a term in what seems to me, online at least, an ambivalent and confused field: the study of narcissism. However, in relation to Bledsoe, Hasan, Tsarnaev, and Zihaff-Bibeau, on might suggest the existence of internalized narcissistic scripting. Each discovered laid out (just for them) a ready made mission in “political Islam” (Erdogan’s Islam, Baghdadi’s Islam, Qaradawi’s Islam, all Islam where either autocratic official or dependent fascist follower endorse civilizational Islamic supremacism). Once convinced by example and much reinforced by al-Qaeda or Brotherhood-type community-wide communications composed to encourage and incite bloody murder, these “lone wolves” (it has been claimed Monis had more than 60,000 “Facebook buddies”) are primed to deploy themselves and steal from the world the lives of innocents.
‘‘Like I said’’ there’s an all out war against Islam and Muslims in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Waziristan, Chechnya, Somalia, Palestine, Phillipines, Yemen etc. And Muslims have to fight back. Like I said before in a past interview we believe in an eye for eye not turn the other cheek. Now it’s a all out war on America and I’m on the other side. The side of the Muslims Yes! The side of Al-Qāeda Yes! Taliban Yes! Al-Shabaab Yes! We are all brothers under the same banner. Fighting for the same cause which is to rid the Islamic world of Infidel and Apostate Hypocritic regimes and Crusader Invaders and re-establish the Caliphate, the Islamic Empire and Islamic Law as was ended officially in 1924 by the fall of the Ottomans.”
Update – December 23, 2014
We allowed Iranian Man Haron Monis into our country on a business visa and then welcomed him as a political refugee. Charged with fraud at home, the Iranian government asked for him back. But we said no to the Iranians. When Monis wrote inexcusable letters to the families of soldiers who died in Afghanistan, describing them as pigs and Nazis, we excused that — delivering only a slap on the wrist of 300 hours of community service. Some called for his Australian citizenship to be revoked. We said no to that, too. We allowed Monis to remain an Australian citizen, a gift sought out by millions of refugees who are keen to embrace and respect Australia as an open, generous and free country.
To the left of this tile, the reader may find the more formally correct version of the epigram that goes, “Those who would be kind to the cruel are in the end made to be cruel to the kind.”
As noted, The so-called “lone wolves” among terrorists are not quite alone nor unknown to authorities.
The one thing they are not before committing murder: stopped.
A Gaza salafist group which has sworn its loyalty to the terrorist Islamic State organization has posted a video showing the bombing of the coastal enclave’s French cultural center late last week, NRG News reported Thursday.
The Guardian understands the text to be a compromise between Jordanian and French resolutions.
Israel’s prime minister said the moves in Europe were an example of “staggering hypocrisy”. Speaking before a meeting with the US senator, Joni Ernst, Binyamin Netanyahu invoked the Holocaust: “In Geneva they call for the investigation of Israel for war crimes, while in Luxembourg the EU court removed Hamas from the terror list … It seems that too many in Europe, on whose soil 6 million Jews were slaughtered, have learned nothing.”
Nonetheless, the essentials: ISIS appears to have appeared on the Gaza Strip; the “French Cultural Center”, which provides some diplomatic services, appears to have been bombed; and the European Parliament, “in principle”, supported this week the concept of Palestinian statehood, which is fine, but would be even better if any of the talk and underlying anti-Semitic raving actually served to liberate the residents of Gaza rather than continue and actually reinforce their enslavement by Hamas and others.
From my node on the World Wide Web’s “Second Row Seat to History”, I cannot connect the dots from a Taliban assault on an army school in Peshawar to any of the myriad halls of power owned by dictatorships that In the Name of People engage in breathtaking exploitation of the property and productive capacities of the same. Confusion and corruption rule those worlds. Try to trade it on the ground — good luck with living to report the story; try to get at it from a computer terminal, the data is not extant and remoted relationships may want for a much improved security framework too.
One such remote Pakistani contact writes now and then of the visible presence of known Taliban operators on the streets where he lives. He says there seem to be “good Taliban and bad Taliban” and when asked to tell the difference says the good Taliban operate in Afghanistan and the bad ones in Pakistan.
The concept that is “frontier” is no longer a place — there’s no “over those mountains” or “beyond that river”: frontiers are instead spaces containing some mix of geopolitical content, and the worst contain the worst in some “observable-measurable” way but not conveniently visible way.
This piece got confused along the above lines — indirect connection, virtual space disconnectedness — but I’m going to publish it anyway just to have it off my plate.
As a first answer, revenge may serve a small and now embattled circle of Islamic militants certain to have drawn another broad intelligence and military response to their communities and operational redoubts.
That’s one story — the local-to-regional Taliban story — that should corroborate easily now and in the days ahead.
Beyond that story, one may wonder about the Taliban’s “handlers” — those who are not Taliban but help sustain their machinery, motivation, and organization: who are they?
Did what happened at the Army Public School in Peshawar today distract from events elsewhere in some meaningful way?
Target center for western interests has been Iran’s theokleptocracy and its efforts to wrap its mitts around a nuclear war making capability that it might use to leverage concessions (first) and theft (later). The Iranian regime as a focal point also has arranged around itself the Syrian-to-Russian axis and through Putin’s post-Soviet and now neo-feudal channel another line of political influence and power through Crimea and Hungary’s general drifting around fascist urges signalled both, albeit separably, by Jobbik and by Viktor Orban’s administration.
Call it the International Club of Bad Little Boys, the New Assembly of Global Autocrats — Assad, Erdogan, Khamenei, Orban, Putin Yanukovych (although he seems way off stage today): how far off as approvers, backers, enablers, instigators where they from what happened in Peshawar?
They don’t have to conduct the loud — most apparent — sections of their orchestras — direct control has limits, and I don’t go in for grand conspiracy theorizing — but they may countenance and encourage the chaos and suffering that distracts attention from their own quarters and their state-based thieving. As much aligns with their shared pathology as malignantly narcissistic leaders, each atop his own dizzying pyramid.
(posted to YouTube 11/10/2014)
He has increased the number of substantial directorates of the presidency from four to 13. New units include internal security, foreign relations, economy, defense, energy and investment monitoring. Previously there were only the directorates of administrative and financial affairs, institutional communications, information technology and human resources. The president, whose main function was to approve draft bills, used to sit around the table with his advisers and ask for their opinions.
According to the authors, Putin has overseen a phenomenal expansion in the awarding of presidential perks. At his disposal are 20 palaces and villas, a fleet of 58 aircraft, a flotilla of yachts worth some 3bn roubles (£59.2m), a watch collection worth 22m roubles and several top class Mercedes.
“We did not publish data on the cost of the clothes and things that Putin regularly uses: the suits, shoes and ties worth tens of thousands of dollars – mere trifles when compared to the villas, aeroplanes watches and cars,” they wrote.
Add “Setad”, the Iranian Entity with an estimated worth of $95 billion, privately held, and certainly not subject to public oversight: “It is not overseen by the Iranian Parliament, as that body voted in 2008 to “prohibit itself from monitoring organizations that the supreme leader controls, except with his permission”. It is, however, an important factor in Khameni’s power, giving him financial independence from parliament and the national budget, and thus “insulating him from Iran’s messy factional infighting” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Setad).
One might continue with this kind of thematic gathering — as regards dictators in general: man, how those cats do live! — because living high (on the backs of the low), from the junta in Burma to Paul Biya in Cameroon to Mugabe in Zimbabwe and back to Khamenei-Putin-Assad, living off the land (and all who toil upon it) is what they believe themselves designed to do “in name of the people”.
We know who financed the Afghan guerrillas 25 years ago. But who foots the bill for the Taliban now remains unclear. In the third part of his series about the lessons that can be learnt from the Soviet experience in Afghanistan, Vladimir Snegiryov poses question about the Taliban’s mysterious financial side.
Vladimir Snegiryov posed the question from the Russian perspective, and here more than five years later, I pose the same from the American stance: if it ain’t the devil (and well it could be the Devil, but if it’s not, lol), who is keeping the Taliban schedule loaded with assault plans?
Here is the latest: http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/12/16/us-afghanistan-kunar-idUSKBN0JU1QB20141216 – 12/16/2014 – “Taliban fighters mount offensive near Afghan border with Pakistan”.
From November: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-29871077 – “Pakistan bombing: Wagah suicide attack near Indian border.”
*Between publishing this post and today, January 19, 2015, the Wikipedia page has been altered. This table appears to have appeared on the page up to December 23, 2014 (and this blog post was first published on December 16, 2015).
As regards the general impression of the Khamenei regime (and the wealthy of Iran), there’s plenty online (that appears to be staying online) for maintaining the various impressions that predominate in the west.
{Brooklyn cop killer’s FB page: 
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