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.
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.
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.
“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.
Freedom of speech is nowhere completely free. The law excludes conspiracy and incitement to commit crimes, or, as with shouting “Fire!” in a crowded theater, to produce mayhem. In wartime, and a part of Islam seems committed to warring continuously with the west, democratic and open societies may also choose to outlaw seditious speech while tightening up on that traitorous speech related to spying.
As Choudary believes himself Muslim, as do the host of Brotherhood and Hezbollah elements, he speaks as if Muslim while embracing a regressive and retrograde agenda for all others. I doubt his case will produce much sympathy, if any, outside of Islamic circles.
While one may swear to defend to the death disagreeable political speech, the threat of imminent death associated with the speaker’s rant may draw the limit on that that principle and sentiment.
All the men were held on suspicion of being a member of, or backing a banned terrorist group and supporting terrorism. The alleged offences, which come under two counter- terrorism acts, carry a maximum penalty of seven years’ imprisonment.
Choudary was arrested at an unknown location after fleeing his home two weeks ago in the middle of the night in the wake of threats from far-Right groups.
Just hours before he was held, he posted a burst of nine inflammatory messages on Twitter, branding the US bombing raids as a ‘rallying call for Muslims’ and labelling the actions of Western governments in Muslim countries as ‘terrorism’.
Not to make light of court decisions made between fair modern British law and a feudal demagogue and rabble-rouser, perhaps the Crown has done right by treating Choudary no differently than anyone else.
taliban with weapons roam there freely…….it seems that they are making another sawat or waziristan……no one can ask them about their activities even the tribal chief nawab is silent…..and just 100 away from killa saif ullah there comes loralai city ,a city of 5 lac population most people educated, the in loralai a young man was beheaded by taliban his video of slaughtering also came on scene…there was a letter with his body in which they had warned the people that whoever speaks against taliban would see the same fate
Posted verbatim as received 9/26/2014.
After more than a decade of effort, Taliban continue to promote and produce mayhem and murder in many districts of as yet unsecured frontiers in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The miscreants remain “hard to see” until they show up, and Out There they continue to show up in force and continue demonstrating ability to choreograph their assaults.
Pakistani Dawn reported a decapitation in Loralai back in June of this year, and I cannot tell whether the correspondent had that to rely or something new.
Related Reference
Taliban have beheaded 12 civilians and torched some 60 homes in an assault on security forces in the eastern Ghazni province, an Afghan official said.
The province’s deputy police chief Asadullah Ensafi said the Taliban have attacked several villages over the past week in the Arjistan district.
Iran’s Prosecutor of the Special Court, Mohamad Mohavadi, continued that the punishment for these crimes of “anti-government views” is execution, and stated that all those who had a hand in publishing [his] book will also be killed.
“The truth is that this started as a war against Israel, but it turned into a war between the Palestinians,” Gazans tell me. “And it’s not a war between Hamas and Fatah anymore, but rather between factions within Hamas, factions within Fatah, between individuals.”
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4573441,00.html – “In Gaza, hatred for Hamas and resentment of West Bankers: They may be too scared to speak publicly against Hamas, but the signs are there; and they have not forgotten that protests from their compatriots during the recent fighting were conspicuous in their absence.” by Francesca Borri – Published: 09.22.14, 00:04 / Israel News
It’s just not news when a blogger creates a new category.
However, I think the last Hamas war with Israel amply illustrates all of the issues with the Muslim Brotherhood, its behavior in language, and its soul-deadening program.
Billionaire Khaled Mashaal seems at the moment somewhere between stays in Qatar and Tunisia or Turkey.
“Gaza Fortress” lies in ruins.
And if Gazans have not figured out anything else, they’ve got to be figuring out this: they’re on their own.
I have made “Gaza Suzerain” a category here because . . . it’s a theme I believe the realpolitik within Gaza will make clear.
Let the residents of Gaza — Gazans — become their better selves with the human rights afforded others in the world, and let them do that for themselves with greater security provided by Egypt and Israel both.
Welcome to modernity.
Gazans may come up with something better than Israel: i.e., their own internally autonomous, democratic, and tolerant culture and state.
The concept of suzerainty (and protectorates) has a life longer in history than any given YNet News article, but checking back on this piece, I was surprised to find the referenced key link broken.
What sent me to look?
Last week’s Gaza “boat people” drowning, which is being spun as having been motivated by (that tired old canard) “the occupation”, which anti-Semitic truth I refer to as “The Preoccuation”. Francesca Bourri’s article focused the spotlight where it needed to be focused: Hamas’s dismal record in governance and in war and the quite probably truth about the despair Gazans deal in their isolation between large forces: Israel, Egypt, the Arab world, the modern world.
That deadlock is not eternal.
Gazans themselves need strengthening with reference to their unfortunate relationship with Hamas, which looks to me like showbiz — good script: it just hasn’t anything to do with humanity and its real aspirations, beliefs, needs, and wants — covering kleptocracy.
I’ve tweeted Borri and Ynet News. I want to hear how a story disappears from major Israeli media.
The talkbacks for the article still appear online:
BackChannels 