Category Archives: Conflict – Culture – Language – Psychology

ISIS-Held Hostages Return to Turkey – Two Observations

20 Saturday Sep 2014

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Iraq, Islamic Small Wars, Middle East, Turkey

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Turkish broadcaster NTV said Turkey did not pay a ransom for the hostages who were held for three months by ISIS militants.

http://english.alarabiya.net/en/News/middle-east/2014/09/20/Turkish-hostages-seized-in-northern-Iraq-are-free.html – 9/20/2014.

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration is struggling to cut off the millions of dollars in oil revenue that has made the Islamic State one of the wealthiest terror groups in history but has been unable to persuade Turkey, the NATO ally where much of the oil is traded on the black market, to crack down on an extensive sales network.

http://www.bostonglobe.com/news/world/2014/09/13/seeks-turkey-help-starve-islamic-state-oil-revenue/IQIx3EPqamJ4iMfwEhQ7wI/story.html – 9/14/2014.

In relation to “hoping the crocodile eats you last”, the definite-maybe “crocodiles” of the Islamic Small Wars may be ambivalent about whether their role is to be crocodile or the prey of one.

We’ll have to imagine the degree of leverage or rollover, either, involved in securing the 49 hostages taken by ISIS in their sweep into Mosul, Iraq.

Davutoglu said their release was the result of the Turkish intelligence agency’s “own methods”, and not a “point operation” involving special forces. He gave no further details.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/sep/20/isis-releases-hostages-turkish-consulate-mosul – 9/20/2014..

Additional Reference

http://www.thetower.org/1057-sale-of-smuggled-oil-to-turkey-boosting-isis-coffers/ – 9/12/2014.

http://english.alarabiya.net/en/perspective/analysis/2014/08/28/Experts-ISIS-makes-up-to-3-million-daily-in-oil-sales.html – 8/28/2014.

http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/tr/business/2014/06/turkey-syria-isis-selling-smuggled-oil.html – 8/13/2014.

http://abcnews.go.com/International/isis-makes-million-day-selling-oil-analysts/story?id=24814359 – 8/2/2014.

Update

While the details of the hostage deal are still unclear, Ankara has had interlocutors with IS — from Arab tribes to former Iraqi Vice President Tariq al-Hashimi, who sought refuge in Turkey — who could have been instrumental in reaching it. Such a deal, however, may include a promise of continued non-involvement in the campaign against the jihadist group, with the soldiers stationed at Suleyman Shah serving as an insurance policy for the jihadists.

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2014/09/21/islamic_state_turkey_hostage – 9/21/2014.

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From Shiite Islam — Should Be Famous Last Words

18 Thursday Sep 2014

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Islamic Small Wars, Politics

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Fahs emphasized that he backed the so-called Arab Spring from the very beginning: “I am human, I am Muslim, I am Lebanese and Arab, and I want reformation because our call for reformation includes liberation from tyrants, our call includes a renaissance which is free and not extremist in accordance with the framework of Islam.”

http://www.dailysabah.com/mideast/2014/09/17/shiite-scholar-claims-iran-behind-syrian-conflict – 9/17/2014.

Related:

http://www.dailystar.com.lb/News/Lebanon-News/2014/Sep-18/271087-anti-hezbollah-shiite-scholar-hani-fahs-dies.ashx#axzz3DiWcTZ8y – 9/18/2014.

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Aside

From Correspondence – On Survival in Hostile Surrounds

17 Wednesday Sep 2014

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology

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In some ways, every country is as many countries as the people who live in it. If you can socially navigate away from bother or threat, that’s what you do. If not: keeping quiet may be what you have to do for a while.

The “politics of hate” are difficult everywhere because the communities that generate the same — not only in Islam: look at Russia — enable criminals to acquire power, and then they are interested in being powerful and holding on to power, not in the doing of good things. The wrong personalities get their hands on the wheels and levers of governance, and then they are hard to deal with.

It’s good to hear from you.

Some people “check in” — and they’re far more interesting than me, but it’s hard to see the same fully when they feel constrained or intimidated by their political atmosphere from sharing background, insight, or news at length.

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From Correspondence – A White House At Play With the Muslim Brotherhood?

15 Monday Sep 2014

Posted by in Anti-Semitism, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Islamic Small Wars, Politics, United States of America

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From correspondence:

Yours Truly: Obama has given MB plenty of room for operating and for being observed. As he is not a President for Life, the stronger elements that comprise our government will survive him and probably be able to use the knowledge gained during his tenure. I would fear as much a flip toward the extreme Right in America. We really need a central, progressive, and prudent politics, and the zealots in politics have really skewed the conversation away from the middle ranks. That needs fixing, so I am becoming a Passionate Moderate Liberal.

Correspondent: Unfortunately, your fears aren’t baseless. After the communist revolution in Russia in 1917 and many other countries 1919, 1920 where it failed, extreme right came to power, including Nazis in most devastated Germany. That’s why from the very beginning the idea of European Union was not to go separate ways, to keep together, thereby not allowing a fascist regime to surface in a singly taken country. Still, fascists raise their head in Hungary, Greece… I think drastic economic changes bring drastic political changes and false expectations… Only the ability to realistically analyze them, or rather inability, can bring extreme regimes into power. Once installed they cannot be peacefully removed, that has to be remembered. The main lesson of WWII perhaps should be that many countries that could do something to prevent the appetites of the Nazi Germany did simply nothing for wanting to be left in peace. Want to be left in peace, from many lazy western countries, isn’t that what helps bring all sort of criminals to power nowadays? If the progressive world media would together denounce Hamas and ISIS, what chance of survival would they have? Close to none, I think.

My correspondent had started here:

http://conservativetribune.com/hillary-obama-terrorists/ —

The Muslim Brotherhood, who took power in Egypt following the Arab Spring, were recently ousted by the Egyptian military and declared a terrorist organization.

Even still, they have been embraced by President Obama, invited into his administration, placed on a “hands off” list protecting them, and are even setting up their own official political party here in the United States.

I leave room for the Obama Administration to have been adventurous, curious, experimental, observing in attempting to integrate into the democratic process such as Mohamed Elibiary, who has been enjoying this week his share of “right-side” press for tweeting remarks about the inevitability of the global Islamic caliphate, for example:

Mohamed Elibiary was until last week a senior member of DHS’ Homeland Security Advisory Council (HSAC). After years of controversy about his status at DHS, Elibiary announced his final day with the department on Twitter earlier this month and said he would remain close to the agency.

Media outlets have raised questions about the circumstances surrounding his departure, speculating that his provocative comments about the “inevitable” return of the Muslim “caliphate” may have played a role.

http://freebeacon.com/issues/controversial-dhs-adviser-let-go-amid-allegations-of-cover-up/ – 9/15/2014.

Although organizing Arab support in the fight against ISIS in Iraq and Syria may amount to showbiz with an Administration and within an international political environment deeply invested in image — the wars for detectives and poets may turn out one day to have been wars for psychologists too, lol — the institutional memory Elibiary will leave behind will also inform this and successive governments in regard to the al-Qaeda-type assortment of Islamist challengers bent on acquiring power beneath the banners of Islam and with themselves conflated — by themselves — with God Almighty.

Related Reference

http://www.libertynewsonline.com/article_301_36189.php – “OBAMA’S RADICAL MUSLIM AND PRO-MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD HOMELAND SECURITY ADVISOR RESIGNS – 9/9/2014.

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FTAC – MEC in Five ‘Graphs

15 Monday Sep 2014

Posted by in Anti-Semitism, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Islamic Small Wars

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From recent correspondence, a brief explanation:

Pakistan is a Muslim-majority state that may need to protect its minority populations and accept the same — Christians and Jews (I know of one) — as citizens with equal rights, not dhimmi status.

Israel is a Jewish-majority state that has enfranchised its Arab Christian and Muslim citizens fully.

Surrounding Arab rejection of Israel / a Jewish-majority state / of Jews, in general, has kept trapped the remaining refugees of 1948. Egypt will not absorb Gaza. Refugees in now built camps in Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, and Jordan indeed remain barred from citizenship in those states.

In the stateless preoccupied territories intended in part for independent statehood, the two key power brokers, Fatah and Hamas, have not been able to negotiate peace between themselves. As their anti-Semitic beliefs and postures remain genocidal, Israel have had to work with both in a perfunctory manner as regards the delivery of basic services, including their security against crime (Washington writes the paychecks for Abbas’s security force, which is trained in Jordan by Israel instructors).

Here’s where I sympathize, however, in departure from more conservative elements: I think it’s time to get Fatah and Hamas thugs out of the way and enable the residents of Gaza and the West Bank to take control of their own lives. On that, however, the realpolitik continues to work opposite, and Hamas, which has made everyone in Gaza unhappy, has been gaining popularity in the West Bank, which is a headache for Abbas.

http://www.reuters.com/investigates/iran/#article/part1 – 11/11/2013.

http://www.algemeiner.com/2014/07/28/gazas-millionaires-and-billionaires-how-hamass-leaders-got-rich-quick/ – 7/28/2014.

http://english.al-akhbar.com/node/18454 – “Israeli minister: Abbas is world’s “most anti-Semitic leader” – 1/30/2014.

One now may easily and rapidly compile data on piratical leaders and their organizations, but the three pieces noted above might suffice to underscore what has happened to the hapless refugees of 1948 and their generations: Arabs have contained them in camps in Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, and Egypt; Israel, despite the claims of The Preoccupation (with the Jews), have provided and promoted a palette of basic services while leaving the Arab politics to the meddling “gentle character of Arab leaders and Arab-wannabee Muslim potentates with their own versions of brown shirts and jack boots on the ground.  In the way of Arab suffering at Arab hands, the results loom clear in Hamas, which has spirited now billions of dollars out of the Gaza trough (while sacrificing the lives of somebody’s children as tunnel diggers and sundry others — to about 2,000 recently — by pushing the same in harms’ way as human shields), and in Fatah, which hasn’t yet produced a convincing self-governance replete with human rights, freedom of speech, and general political freedom.

Anyone in for another sixty-six years of the same rigmarole?

One would hope the old Jew-hating and Jew-killing enthusiasm just a little bit aged, brittle, reduced by the criminality of those most responsible for those who have driven it a too long time.

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FTAC – On the Ideas of Genocide and War

14 Sunday Sep 2014

Posted by in Anti-Semitism, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Political Psychology, Politics

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“X” appears here careful to avoid the misappropriation of the term “genocide”, which really refers to a categorical cultural-racial basis for the elimination of an entire people. In such a frame, the Tutsi of Rwanda were the target of genocidal Hutu mania. Similarly, the white Arab onslaughts brought against the black animists of Darfur similarly constitutes “genocide” —

http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0714/p09s02-coop.html.

The perception of “war crime” cannot hinge on carnage alone, nor some whacked out ideas about fairness in the parity of death counts. The war against war entails the destruction of one party’s will to war, or, if failing that, ability to make war. If one were to suggest that WWII was excessive in every aspect by every party in every respect, one would have difficulty arguing against that and the necessity of having in place, at least, a United Nations and an International Criminal Court. Of course, neither have proven of much use in Syria or against ISIS in Iraq, but at least we have them, and in time, we may have each other in such a way as to forestall the empowerment of personalities who lead themselves, their nations, and all surrounding into immense destruction.

Notably, the forces massed against Berlin (at the end of WWII) — and with an immense Russian force doing the honors — may suggest what it has taken in the past to eliminate the grandiose messianic will driving such war. That will, fear, drive, motivation, etc. exceeds limits, does not reason, would seem to fight to and perhaps even beyond death — and then it may work against an energy equal to its challenge and, eventually, greater than itself.

If hate were shit, and it is, a lot of people would seem to be walking around with a load in their pants.

A part of the psychology addressed in the generation of bigoted rhetoric lays out within the “paranoid delusional narcissistic reflection of motivation“.  How that becomes pattern in behavior and indicative of habits of mind, I wouldn’t hazard to guess but would suggest the language process associated with the same resides in childhood and a natural cowardice and imagination inclined to package fear borne by objects in such a way to push them away from the personal atmosphere.

I barely understand adults.

🙂

I don’t understand children.

However, to understand adults — to “get” an anti-Semite or other form of vociferous bigot — it might help to delve into the formation of language-sustained beliefs and attitudes adopted in childhood, and the coming into existence of some socially grammatical, rule-deriving, and later rule-based response to natural fears and emotional needs.

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FTAC – Syria – A Note on Beyond the Burning

12 Friday Sep 2014

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Middle East, Syria

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The foundations of the invisible wall surrounding Assad start about here:

“In a gloomy interrogation room the children were beaten and bloodied, burned and had their fingernails pulled out by grown men working for a regime whose unchecked brutality appears increasingly to be sowing the seeds of its undoing.”

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/middle-east/110423/syria-assad-protests-daraa

And then it builds to about here:

“But there is something legitimately scary about the weapon’s do-it-yourself ethos and its new systematic deployment against the neighborhoods of Aleppo. It speaks to the regime’s single-minded focus on finding new ways to kill, its narrow and obsessive pursuit of mayhem and destruction as seemingly official strategy in the conflict that has run for nearly three years now.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/12/24/what-makes-syrias-barrel-bombs-so-scary/

Being a merely “bloody dictator” in a conflict cauldron that has in it argument over despotism, democracy, egotism, goodness, God, morality, and narcissism (finally) is not merely a bad position.

The condemnation backed by astounding imagery and numbers to match may not be overcome with exigent maneuvering.

I know: faced with Hitler, one might be eager to bargain with Stalin.

Call that yesterday.

This day with Assad having produced a war that has brought al-Qaeda affiliates and such to his doorstep and that has incubated and loosed ISIS on the world, may be different.

How happy should one be to be led by Assad today?

That’s not my question to answer.  It’s a question for Syrians to answer for themselves in whatever condition and place the war now finds them.

If “Assad or Burn It” was the slogan, it has been working a long time, and once burned — in whatever portion — what then?

What now?

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Orphaned Gaza

12 Friday Sep 2014

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Gaza, Islamic Small Wars, Middle East, Regions

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“In the end you are left with 1.7 million people in Gaza, and you don’t really want that.”

Responsibility.

Ehud Yaari‘s remark at The Washington Institute’s two-person panel “Sept. 11 – Gaza and Beyond: The Arab-Israeli Arena in the Wake of the Hamas War,” may tell how Israel’s latest response to Gaza rocket fire (and assault tunnel building) reached completion without changing much.

Indeed, Robert Satloff, the second speaker, would go on to characterize the incursion as “urgent, not very important.”

When asked in the Q&A that followed, “What does Israel want?”  Yaari suggested that what Israel wants is to “let Hamas rot in the Gaza Strip.”

Noting that Hamas had seen fail it’s “Gaza Fortress” approach to assaulting Israel, the journalist said the Hamas would “try to make a leap to the West Bank . . . a whole new opera” with the contemplation of its terrorism reaching everywhere in Israel.

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Not only Hamas may rot in Gaza, for no powerful or key element seems to want even to approach taking responsibility for 1.7 million Gazans.

Egypt, having with decision made the Muslim Brotherhood its problem, certainly does not want Gaza’s most egregious problem, except to keep the same exactly where it is.

Israel and Israelis: ditto, Egypt.

If there’s a transition plan for Gaza from Hamas sanctuary to, say, protectorate or suzerain in enthused and lasting peace (with the Jews and the Jewish State), I should like to hear of it.

The highly experienced and now octogenarian Mahmoud Abbas, who, anti-Semite that he may be, has been promoted as representing the Next Best Government, has looked over the nest and, so suggests Yaari, hasn’t the wish to run Gaza while Hamas, aspiring to ape Hezbollah, maintains its own army.  While Hamas planners in Turkey pass thoughts to the West Bank Committee in Gaza, with interest in unseating Abbas, Abbas would have to address the massive screening of old staff, the mustering of troops sufficient to overwhelm Hamas, and that’s not happening.

Gaza appears to be stuck with Hamas.

Even worse for Hamas, Hamas appears to be stuck with Gaza.

While Hamas stews over Gaza as well as in it, Israel and the Arab World, so suggests Satloff, may be experiencing some convergence of perception of regional states of affairs.

Perhaps such as ISIS helps with that.

While Hamas may be isolated in Gaza — imho, it sure looks that way — and both Egypt and Israel control the boundaries and crossings containing the same and the Global Jew-Hate Commune emphasizes hate over help (most often) and the UNRWA remains deeply compromised (as a Hamas helper), Gaza may have one partner for peace after all: Gazans.

It’s what we all have, isn’t it?

Ourselves when it’s us.

Themselves when it’s them.

Some friends convince me that Gazans love Hamas, vote for Hamas, die for Hamas.

Happily.

Proudly.

And some friends convince me otherwise.

Except through the Hamas filter — media controlling, politically intimidating, image obsessed — one cannot “see” Gazans (politically) otherwise, or, perhaps simply not yet.

Reference

http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/view/gaza-and-beyond-the-arab-israeli-arena-in-the-wake-of-the-hamas-war – 9/11/2014

Blogger’s Note

It’s true I may now scribble notes at a desktop two hours away from the event location — but can I read them afterward?  🙂  And did I get words down right in the first place?  And can I do a better job of differentiating between what someone else said and what I happen to think?  Of course.  With practice.

Every day online brings with it a slightly updated dawn that changes even the most remote soul’s intellectual ecology.

Yesterday’s live event, which I watched, is now a recorded event at the URL noted in reference.  I may give it another listen, and if I must update here, I will.  Internally, there’s an art in play — listen, notate, reflect, report, opine — and each step is its own dimension.

Update

http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/view/from-gaza-to-isis-a-trip-report-assessing-the-arab-israeli-arena — “From Gaza to ISIS: A Trip Report Assessing the Arab-Israeli Arena”, Robert Satloff, September 12, 2014

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