The question was, more or less, do you let the haters participate?
Ah. The Jewish Question. 🙂
This is why I have a difficult time being away from Facebook for even a day.
Anti-Semitism is the gateway drug of bigots and criminals, and addressing it firmly, openly, squarely is a part of the Jewish “healing the world” (Tikkun Olem), a part of contemporary and decent governance, and a part of real political revolution and human progress and is itself anti-devolutionary.
In U.S. realspace and realpolitik, we protect our bigots. 🙂 They’re free to march, run web sites, and talk trash. They are also treated as marginal people and socially marginalized because the vast majority of the nation is intellectually, politically, and socially wired otherwise. Although pressures spinning off the Brotherhood and Hezbollah movements, the Wahhabi influence, and the Islamic Small Wars in general have a re-tribalizing (“circle-the-ethnic-wagons” effect for everyone), we’re still Americans who work with one another by custom and law without regard for “race, creed, color, or religion”.
Modern Pakistani drive and medieval Pakistani reality are contextually different, but if the want is the want of a modern state: stand up now. Three points:
1. Refuse to tolerate the intolerant. 2. Channel the retrogressive away and elsewhere. 3. IF you want to read Tarek Fatah’s _The Jew is Not My Enemy_ 🙂 and to go on to have an extended talk about anti-Semitism, let’s create a forum space specifically for that.
As mentioned, the black flags will get into [closed forum] and attempt to do their thing: do not let them get away with their criminality.
Integrity counts and truth matters and the two integrate with honest scholarship. “Simply put, the Jews fleeing Europe and the atrocities of Nazism, found a home in the mid-1940s in the newly-created State of Israel, while the Palestinians lost theirs.” It’s not true. It’s stated as true because it’s believed, easily comprehended, and perhaps troublesome to actually independently research. Even intending to “get into the books” may be complicated by questions like “how far back does one go?” Or “what should be taken into account and what dismissed?”
Zionism responds to centuries of European persecution, and in fact discrimination that targeted Muslims along with Jews. The leveraging of religious passion and supersessionary argument account for that (the Church has had its institutional subscription building and subscription-taxing interests too) as does ethnic minority status outside of one’s homeland.
Modern Zionism is also a 19th Century pursuit and the subsequent Jewish immigration and agricultural capitalization of what is today Israel far precedes the rise Nazi Germany.
The best scholars serve God because the attachment of mind to cultural and personal loyalties produces ephemeral research and dishonest and disingenuous findings. We should not see what we want to see but see what is to be seen, and doing that with clarity, we may then repair some things.
Source of the little bit of grit in this clam’s shell:
Proposed new approach: adopt empirical methods; adhere to good principles in ethics, morality, and scholarship; and let’s move on to get people settled without rancor in their various spaces and otherwise integrated, independent, and living as the free agents of their own destinies, not as the subjugated pawns of the destinies of piratical dictators or their mafias.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
BackChannels 