30 Tuesday Sep 2014
The sister of a leading Iranian nuclear physicist widely believed to have been assassinated by Israel as part of an effort to derail the Islamic Republic’s drive to create nuclear weapons says her brother was murdered by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard (IRI) because he wouldn’t cooperate with the effort to divert nuclear activities from peaceful purposes.
http://www.themedialine.org/news/news_detail.asp?NewsID=40909 – 9/29/2014.
29 Monday Sep 2014
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“Stand Up – Step Forward” might be my personal, intercultural, and political slogan this Autumn.
So what if the numbers are small?
So what if the cries fall on deaf ears?
Keep shouting.
Keep pinging on the radars of the piratical.
Annoy them.
Pester them.
Remind them that while they have lost theirs, others more human retain the gift of good conscience.
Let that sweet looking old white haired fella look in the mirror and feel the blood of innocents welling up around his ankles.
Inspiration:
http://www.lisadaftari.com/iran-set-execute-rayhaneh-jabbari-woman-charged-killing-attempted-rapist/ – 9/29/2014.
Does talk make a difference?
I’m a Jew.
I believe in the pebble in a pond.
I believe in the goodness and the rightness of Rayhaneh Jabbari and the result of her self defense.
“An Iranian woman due to be put to death for killing a man she said was trying to sexually abuse her is reported to have had her execution postponed.
Officials said on Monday that Reyhaneh Jabbari, 26, had been transferred to a prison west of Tehran to be hanged.
But activists claimed on Tuesday that an online campaign had persuaded the state to give her a 10-day reprieve.”
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-29429942
The only thing I want … from God, from people around the world … in any way, in any form, is I just want to bring Rayhaneh back home,” Pakravan said in Farsi, which was translated by FoxNews.com. “I wish they would come tie a rope around my neck and kill me instead, but to allow Rayhaneh to come back home.”
http://www.lisadaftari.com/mother-rayhaneh-jabbari-iranian-woman-sentenced-death-makes-plea-daughters-life/ – 10/1/2014.
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29 Monday Sep 2014
The former imam of the Oklahoma City mosque attended by beheading suspect Alton Nolen apologized this week to ISIS for previously criticizing the group.
Suhaib Webb is currently the imam of the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center, which is part of the same entity under the same ownership as the Islamic Society of Boston, where Boston Marathon bombers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev worshipped.
Related:
http://blogs.reuters.com/faithworld/2014/09/29/james-foley-photo-removed-from-anti-islamic-bus-ads-in-new-york/ – 9/29/2014.
Americans are finding nothing clears the head quite like a beheading. This weekend as we learn more about the perpetrator, the nation is reaching a new clarity regarding the threat of jihadist ideology following the shocking beheading of a woman in Oklahoma.
My first invitation to a beheading came in Riyadh.
http://dailycaller.com/2014/09/29/the-oklahoma-beheading-a-call-to-sever-islamism-from-islam/ – 9/29/2014.
29 Monday Sep 2014
Americans are finding nothing clears the head quite like a beheading. This weekend as we learn more about the perpetrator, the nation is reaching a new clarity regarding the threat of jihadist ideology following the shocking beheading of a woman in Oklahoma.
http://dailycaller.com/2014/09/29/the-oklahoma-beheading-a-call-to-sever-islamism-from-islam/ – 9/29/2014.
29 Monday Sep 2014
No Arab state should accept the Turkish leader’s attempts to embarrass and undermine the progress of the most populated Arab country we Arabs call “Umm al-Donya” (Mother of the World), that represents one of the oldest and richest cultures on the planet. Erdogan’s toxic speech and petty behaviours in New York are an affront to all Arabs everywhere and let’s not forget that Sisi was representing the Arab League at the U.N. on this occasion. We stood silent as the Turkish President (then Prime Minister) hosted Muslim Brotherhood conferences and flashed its ugly hand signs. But this time he’s overstepped the mark. As far as I’m concerned, insults hurled at one of our leaders is akin to slandering all of them. He pretends that his stance is moral. In that case, why didn’t he rail against the governments of Thailand and Ukraine, which were brought to power on the back of a coup?
http://english.alarabiya.net/en/views/news/middle-east/2014/09/29/Erdogan-s-behaviour-must-not-be-tolerated.html – 9/29/2014.
28 Sunday Sep 2014
What I have been calling “The Islamic Small Wars” — the internecine competitions and interfaces within Muslim-majority political space running from Afghanistan to Yemen — have been wars about integrity — basic truth telling — requiring armies of poets and detectives for fighting and resolving.
______
Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen,
In this year, proclaimed by the United Nations General Assembly as the International Year of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, Israel has chosen to make it a year of a new war of genocide perpetrated against the Palestinian people.
http://www.timesofisrael.com/full-text-of-abbas-speech-to-un/ – 9/26/2014
A bold gambit but it may be filtered by BackChannels’ own concept in political psychology: “Paranoid Delusional Narcissistic Reflection of Motivation”.
Abbas’s words are just not true.
Moreover, they may be proven untrue, the Jews being the absolute worst genocidiers on the planet: before they kill you, they afford you basic services, emergency and sophisticated specialized health services (in which all patients are treated absent of politics), Internet access, freedom of speech sufficient to sustain adverse public relations and research organizations (like B’Tsalem).
What may be true is the greater the hate encountered in anti-Semitic / anti-Zionist cant (there is no difference between those two), the greater the opportunities for Israel’s expansion.
The Abbas speech may be investigated and laid out purple phrase by phrase (“Amidst a torrent of massacres and storms of massive destruction” — not one mention of the more than 10,000 rockets launched from Gaza since 2005 and every two to few years to launched at a tempo sufficient to call the same an assault against Israel’s children).
Sins of omission are not the only sins evident in Abbas’s speech before the UN.
Note the demonizing of Israel, the “reflections in a mirror” — a very dark and most primitive mirror in language — in such well-known canards as “However, and as usual, the Israeli government did not miss the opportunity to undermine the chance for peace” — never mind those tunnels illegally and surreptitiously built (with child labor, 160 accidentally killed or deliberately murdered in the process) to assault Israeli communities.
Add to that demonizing simple Arab refusal of just responsibility for the Arab refugees of 1948:
Israel refuses to end its occupation of the State of Palestine since 1967, but rather seeks its continuation and entrenchment, and rejects the Palestinian state and refuses to find a just solution to the plight of the Palestine refugees.
Neither the Jewish community (worldwide) nor Israel created or sustained the refugee camps now well established as cantonments denied basic rights (in varying degree) in Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, and Egypt (and note well the Arab tenderness displayed recently toward the refugees of the Yarmouk Camp in Syria).
BackChannels no longer casually employs the term “Palestinian”.
As neither Egypt nor Jordan will absorb nor take responsibility for the constituents of (Judenfrei since 2005) Gaza, I refer to the same as “Gazans”).
Given the lying going on around Gazans — allegedly on their behalf but never beyond sacrificing them (individuals, family, finances, and property) as the pawns of Hamas’s supersessionary war against Judaism, one might expect them to become independent in their own right and to insist on the development for themselves of an independent, modern, responsible, responsive, and transparent democratic government.
Judea may be more complicated with its historic flow-down from the Soviet’s brand of poison (not only the Palestinian Liberation Organization, in spirit, remains present but a simple right-click of the mouse is all one needs to reach the airliner-hijacking Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the effects of the anti-Semitic New Old Now Old Far Out and Lost Left lingering long on the landscape, still leveraging the language of the refugees, which comes in the Abbas speech as, ” . . . against Israel’s policies of occupation, apartheid and colonial settlement . . . .’
The lie that is self-aggrandizing speech is there in that portion: one wonders just how large the combined International and Palestinian Solidarity Movements really are.
Investigating consultant and journalist Lee Kaplan has told me about the seeding of these groups on America’s college campuses and their access to student activity funds, which is fair under the precepts of freedom of speech in a truly open democracy, but we didn’t get to how really small these movements may be despite their broad distribution and the money pumped into them for priming.
The phrase comes from the 1940’s film Gaslight, in which an abusive husband deliberately dims the gaslights in the house, but when his wife comments on it he tells her she’s imagining it, that the lights never dimmed at all.
Gaslighting is one of the most insiduous, viscious, nasty and effective forms of emotional and psychological abuse.
http://www.daughtersofnarcissisticmothers.com/gaslighting.html
Transporting psychology — the study of individual mind and mentality — into politics may have inherent issues in both psychology and politics: for example, are we now going to filter or judge politicians in relation to our concept of “malignant narcissism”, which in turn would seem to inform the psychology of dictatorship? At the same time, what choice has the world suffering war between brutal and sometimes immense despotic personalities?
(Of Bashar al-Assad and opponent (in general terms) al-Nusra, I have often remarked: “Different talk — same walk”.
The two together, Assad and al-Nusra — and the advent of BadDaddy and the Islamic Hate represent where the path of the malignantly narcissistic winds up — have burned out and left scorched the middle humanity of the historic Syrian state — factually speaking, about 9 million Syrians have been displaced in the fighting between the tyrant and the zealots [about 200,000 souls have been separated from life altogether]).
What I have been calling “The Islamic Small Wars” — the internecine competitions and interfaces within Muslim-majority political space running from Afghanistan to Yemen — have been wars about integrity — basic truth telling — requiring armies of poets and detectives for fighting and resolving.
Some people lie.
That’s a sad fact of life, and criminals and politicians both often draw the pointing fingers on the basis of their affiliations, ambitions, and reputations. Less acknowledged and less stated: observations about culture-wide denial, dissimulation, false assertion, and hapless vulnerability to the beguiling and patronizing sweetness of an evil tongue.
Often, in many quarters of the world, if not most, a loyal lie may be preferred to an uncomfortable truth, for shows of loyalty may draw immediate rewards, from praise to patronage, while relaying a critical or damaging truth may be met with punishment, including that of a swift death.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-09-27/us-slams-as-offensive-abbas-speech-on-israel/5773628 – 9/27/2014
Anderston, Hans Christian. “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” (1837). Jean Hersholt, Translator.
Karsh, Efraim. Palestine Betrayed. New Haven, Yale University Press, 2010.
Morris, Benny. 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008.
Arafat’s invention, “Palestinian”
Gaza, rocket fire
Hamas abuses human rights
Hamas arrests protesters
Hamas, human shields
Hamas, Haniyeh, wealth
Hamas, Iran
Hamas, Mashaal, wealth
Hamas, political oppression
Hamas, Qatar
Hamas, tunnels, children
Hamas, wealth
israeli hospital services haniyeh granddaughter
Jewish Exodus from Arab Lands
Mahmoud Abbas, anti-Semitism
Psychology, gaslighting
Psychology, magical thinking
Psychology, malignant narcissism
Psychology, narcissistic mortification
Psychology, narcissistic personality disorder
Reuters, Khamenei, wealth
Syrian Civil War, Yarmouk Camp
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27 Saturday Sep 2014
The foreign assault on western intellectual assets and channels hardly looks an assault: it arrives with money, lots of it, and funds primary academic and media jobs that in turn boost portions of the economies of the open democracies. Although in the United States that spending may look like Washington-business-as-usual, the yellow flags are going up. Mainstream journalists and conservative intellectuals have found cause to revisit foreign state interests and related facilities and research grant funding only superficially intended to foster greater depth with integrity in the key policy analyses by the hires that benefit from those paychecks.
Related excerpts follow with the post capped by a 25-minute talk by Mitchel Bard on his findings related to influence from the middle east.
More than a dozen prominent Washington research groups have received tens of millions of dollars from foreign governments in recent years while pushing United States government officials to adopt policies that often reflect the donors’ priorities, an investigation by The New York Times has found.
The money is increasingly transforming the once-staid think-tank world into a muscular arm of foreign governments’ lobbying in Washington. And it has set off troubling questions about intellectual freedom: Some scholars say they have been pressured to reach conclusions friendly to the government financing the research.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/07/us/politics/foreign-powers-buy-influence-at-think-tanks.html – 9/6/2014.
Let Brookings take Qatar’s money—or Russia’s, or China’s, or Burma’s, or Saudi Arabia’s—if it wants. But make them own it. Make them disclose it.
http://freebeacon.com/columns/this-is-not-what-democracy-looks-like/ – 9/19/2014
The Times article exposed — astonishingly — the corruption of liberal establishments such as the Brookings Institution, the Center for American Progress, and the National Democratic Institute. How honest, honorable, and unexpected from a newspaper that has become the nation’s billboard for unthinking liberal bromides. Conversely, the exposé found not a penny going to conservative institutions such as the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and the Hudson Institute.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/387939/think-tanks-sale-or-rent-daniel-pipes – 9/15/2014.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Agents_Registration_Act
Bard, Mitchel. The Arab Lobby. Broadside Books, 2011.
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27 Saturday Sep 2014
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“Muslims have a role, too, by collaborating with authorities, by reassuring their neighbors, by being good community citizens, so that there is confidence restored that the vast majority of Muslims reject this totally and will participate in safeguarding our whole community,” Ahmed concluded.
http://foxnewsinsider.com/2014/09/27/radical-impact-what-causing-westerners-turn-radical-islam – 9/27/2014.
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