Category Archives: Conflict – Culture – Language – Psychology

Bozosphere Journalism – Just a Note

11 Thursday Sep 2014

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To make a longer story very short by summing it as if for a cable (or txt mssg) — Idlib, Syria – destroyed by blast: Ahrar-al-Sham – “The Free Men of Syria” — described by Breitbart as “main rival to ISIS.”

http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-London/2014/09/11/ISIS-Opposition-Killed-Bomb – 9/11/2014

Nearly fifty senior commanders of a major coalition of Islamic ‘moderates’ opposed to ISIS in Syria have been killed by an explosion at their secret command bunker as they met to discuss strategy against the the Islamic State.

http://astuteblogger.blogspot.com/2014/09/mega-uh-oh-entire-isis-opposition-wiped.html – 9/11/2014.

Main rival to ISIS or main moderate opposition to ISIS?

The leader of one of the biggest Islamist rebel groups in Syria has been killed by an explosion in the north-western province of Idlib.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-29135922 – 9/10/2014.

Note the date of the BBC report.

Another wrinkle: “The doctor saw bodies with frothing at the mouth and fluid coming from the eyes and noses, Abu Baraa said, adding: ‘This was a highly sophisticated attack in a location that was very secure.'”

Big concussive blast with fire or some other kind of explosion with a chemical payload?

Oh, who cares how they died, eh?

An activist collective called the Edlib News Network, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights and Syrian state media also reported Aboud’s death. The activist reports said the men died in a suicide bombing.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/09/09/ahrar-al-sham-leader-killed_n_5792942.html – 9/9/2014.

I kid about the not caring — caring is what matters and how whatever has happened has happened matters in numerous ways.  But to push on: with the count coming down to “over 40” (cited in the HuffPost piece) from 50, somehow 10 (or less) people (somewhere) have gotten to live.  Credit the AP writers with noting how the numbers are reported (in tens) and uncertain in the wake of an event.

A statement posted on Ahrar al-Sham’s official Twitter feed said the blast had hit a meeting in Idlib province in north-west Syria and confirmed Hassan Aboud, the group’s leader, among at least 12 dead.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/sep/09/explosion-syria-islamist-insurgent-islamic-state – 9/9/2014.

The Guardian makes mention of 28 dead (citing another source, probably the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights) before dropping the count to 12.

What we know: the story broke at least two days ago; about 50 leaders of Ahrar al-Sham, an ISIS rival, had assembled in a basement to discuss the war; and there was an explosion (of some kind) leaving between 12 and 50 dead.

What we also know: the event was not a 9/11 event.

Why post it as one?

It may be making the rounds as “news” cogent to the anti-Jihad when it was news two days ago and not particularly about “moderate” forces opposed to Assad’s absolute rule.

Moreover, with Ahrar al-Sham aligned with al-Qaeda, why characterize it as part of the bands of the “Free Syrian Army” even if in the field cooperation develops and dissolves according to conditions and who else is in the field?

Ahrar al-Sham cooperates with the Free Syrian Army and other secular rebel groups, however, it does not maintain ties with the Syrian National Council.[27] Although they coordinate with other groups, they maintain their own strict and secretive leadership, receiving the majority of their funding and support from donors in Kuwait.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahrar_ash-Sham – as viewed 9/11/2014/2125-ET

Way down on the irreducible floor of the Islamic Small Wars, there is in addition to an underlying argument about integrity (with all men, not only Muslims) a similar one about mankind: does nature dictate “all against all”, which appears the zeitgeist most in play across Syria and Iraq, or is a democratic, egalitarian, systematic, and reasoning “all for all” a real possibility for most of the world?

Stay tuned, but adventure out where ye may and live beyond war: it looks like answering the simple binary posed today in Syria and Iraq will take a lot more time, possibly generations.

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11 Thursday Sep 2014

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The courtship between Eastern European far-right parties and Russia has been going on for years, of course. In 2008, Eastern Europe’s far right supported the Russian war against Georgia. In May 2013, leaders of Jobbik, the Hungarian far-right party with dubious fascist origins, met with Russian Duma leaders and academics at Moscow State University. The neo-Nazi Bulgarian Ataka party has vocally supported Putin and Russian foreign policy. In 2012, Ataka’s leader, Volen Siderov, traveled to Moscow, reportedly at his own expense, to celebrate Putin’s sixtieth birthday and express admiration for the Russian president’s strong leadership. After Russia’s annexation of Crimea, Siderov threatened to withdraw his party’s support from the coalition government if it supported further sanctions against Russia.

http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/article/strange-bedfellows-putin-and-europe%E2%80%99s-far-right – September/October 2014.

FTAC – Note – Media Audience and Moral Entrepreneurship

11 Thursday Sep 2014

Posted by in Anti-Semitism, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Islamic Small Wars, Philology, Philosophy, Political Psychology, Politics

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One may differentiate between casual audience comfortable with the world it knows and humanist-intellectual audience with amateur or professional background and buy-in with regard to shaping the next world.

If you are here, you are either between those broad classes or in the latter, and if there’s even just a tiny bit of appropriate education or training back there, then you may be trusted to read critically, to both demand and sift data, to argue about dimensions and variables with a subject of interest, to engage in introspection and reflection as well as judgment, and to think broadly about what would be helpful — anthropologically, ethnographically, evolutionary — in the creation of a greater, more peaceful, more progressive global commune.

The prompt was a piece in Honest Reporting about pandering.

Pandering is a form in lying predicated on the enforcement of loyalty by the panderer.  The seminal fairy tale that is “The Emperor’s New Clothes” applies; it really is not a favor to be told how brave, glorious, and self-sacrificing one is by a personality inclined to sacrifice you in the interest of their own aggrandizement and unbridled glorification.

With the review of media coverage of the latest war in Gaza, the political skewing of the news devolves both to overt Hamas intimidation of the press and the reluctance of the same to either give up a story or taint the same with an acknowledgment of the compromise of their integrity.

Compromised journalism comprises its casual audience.

As suggested at the top of this post, not all audience is casual.  In fact, while a vast global intelligentsia has come into being with the development of the World Wide Web — the numbers may be low but the distribution must certainly be global — a large analytical class has also been present in the world either with partisan loyalties or greater humanist and spiritual motives.  From the “desk analysts” of national security bureaus to the latest in NGO do-gooders, there are plenty of readers who read for data and the arguably most accurate picture they may obtain from the same.  While some things lend themselves to a technocratic objectivity, from conventional defense arrangements to road building coupled with economic development, other themes require a broadened vision of humanity — that “anthropolitical psychology” I’ve mentioned on this blog — and also a world of poetry and consideration for the remaining 7,000 or so living languages in the contemporary human inventory and the cultures and individuals suspended in them in time.

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NATO – ISIS – Turkey’s Weakened Stance

10 Wednesday Sep 2014

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

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Under perhaps the pretext of defending Turkey from ISIS, Turkish Prime Minister, now President Recept Tayyip Erdogan appears to have methodically trounced basic western values in the maintenance of open responsible and responsive governance.

When this past June ISIS took control of Turkey’s embassy in Mosul, Iraq, which site it today uses for its headquarters, and kept hostages, then Prime Minister Erdogan ordered coverage of the matter kept out of the state’s news: whatever was to happen, Turks would not be able to follow it in a free press.

When ISIS then “offered” (or ordered, for this matter also appears dark) ISIS oil in exchange for Turkish cash, it appears then Prime Minister Erdogan accepted the offer (which perhaps he could not refuse, either for defensive purposes or patently offensive ones — i.e., perhaps nothing beats hiding a venal intent behind one’s own hostages).

In the matter of NATO radar defense arrangements in Turkey, then Prime Minister Erdogan whined across months that the same not be used to protect Israel (“the only democracy in the”  yada-yada and once robust trading and defense partner with Turkey).

Finally, and with unmistakable reference to anti-Semitism, now President Erdogan has refused Israel an oil pipeline westward.

Back in May: “At least 10 firms bid for Israel-Turkey gas pipeline: Report.”

Yesterday: “Turkey nixes energy partnerships with Israel.”

While Turkey may wish to look strong as a Muslim-majority state and reliable as a NATO partner, anti-Semitism itself has a reputation as a great deflector of attention away from mediocrity and weakness.

Additional Reference

Turkey’s discomfort with NATO and its pro-Semitic western stance comes through its lax border control, which it is now being asked to address, its battering relationship with the Jewish State, and its perhaps compliant position with the Islamic State — and saying it ain’t so won’t prove it ain’t so as now President Erdogan perhaps walks down both a familiar and increasingly lonely road.  He may feel enlarged, as autocrats do, by the “narcissistic supply” arranged through deflection and cultivated with pandering,  but as that story grows large too in the chaos and disruption it engenders, it never ends well for the host.

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When ISIS took Turkish photojournalist Bunyamin Aygun hostage in 2013, he said the militants repeatedly told him “Turkey is next.” After the first few weeks of his detainment, he was transferred to an ISIS brigade made up of mostly Turks. “They rained curses on Erdogan, and Davutoglu, saying they were ‘infidels,’” Aygun told al-Monitor. “They claimed that if Turkey sealed the border gates that were under IS control they would hit one Turkish village after the other and trigger a civil war inside Turkey.”

http://www.ibtimes.com/nato-coalition-against-isis-turkey-role-mostly-symbolic-1680708 – 9/7/2014.

Since Turkey’s 49 consulate staff and their family members were taken hostage in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul on June 11, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government has taken all measures to keep the public in the dark on the issue.

http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2014/06/daloglu-mosul-hostage-crisis-erdogan-isis-iraq-turkey.html#ixzz3Cv1ThPsZ – 6/25/2014.

Mahmut Tanal, a lawmaker from the opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), told The Daily Beast he was trying to get an official government comment on reports saying that ISIS was exporting up to 4,000 tons of fuel to Turkey every day and earning $15 million every month from the trade. “I am expecting some answers here,” he said.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/09/08/is-nato-ally-turkey-tacitly-fueling-the-isis-war-machine.html – 9/8/2014.

“For energy projects to proceed, the human tragedy in Gaza will have to be stopped and Israel will have to instate a permanent peace there with all elements,” Yildiz told reporters in Ankara, referring to the recent counter-terror Operation Protective Edge.

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/184930#.VBBOQcJdV8E -“Turkey Refuses to Transfer ‘Inhumane’ Israeli Gas to Europe” – 9/9/2014.

http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2014/07/zaman-isis-turkeys-mosul-consulate-headquarter-iraq.html – 7/17/2014

http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2014/03/turkey-tomb-suleiman-shah-syrian-territory-pretext-incursion.html# – 3/27/2014.

http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2014/04/turkey-syria-borders-smuggling-guns-conflict-kurds-pkk-isis.html##ixzz3Cv7wzwGu – 4/30/2014.

An 18-vehicle convoy was dispatched to the Tomb of Suleiman Shah to rotate the troops and resupply. The convoy entered Syria from the YPG-controlled Kobani and returned via ISIS-controlled Jarablus. A Syrian Kurdish source told Al-Monitor that, as per the accord reached with the officials of the “Kobani canton” who recently visited Turkey, the YPG provided security to the Turkish army convoy while passing through Kurdish-controlled area. According to this source, the convoy was stopped by ISIS in Cadde village, three kilometers [two miles] from the tomb, after it left the Kurdish area. Since official sources kept mum on what transpired at Cadde and along the way, speculation grew.

http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2014/09/turkey-usa-syria-iraq-isis-coalition.html##ixzz3CvAeBuNa – 9/8/2014.

Needless to say, if Obama would find an enthusiastic NATO ally in his quest to construct a coalition to deal with IS, his attitude toward his Turkish counterpart might be different. Yet, Turkey’s reluctance in taking part in the efforts led by the United States against IS is also confirmed by Turkey’s media outlets following the Erdogan-Obama meeting.

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http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/01/15/us-nato-turkey-israel-idUSBREA0E0NZ20140115 – 1/15/2014.

(Reuters) – Turkey has accepted assurances a planned NATO missile defense system in which it is playing a part is not designed to protect Israel as well, the alliance’s deputy secretary-general said on Wednesday.

Alexander Vershbow said objections by Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan’s government had resulted in part from confusion about a Turkish-hosted NATO radar. Ankara had been further assuaged by alliance Patriot anti-missile batteries assigned to protect its territory from Syria.

Related:

http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/turkey-based-nato-radars-israel-protection-in-question.aspx?pageID=238&nID=69424&NewsCatID=483 – 7/22/2014.

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http://www.worldtribune.com/2014/08/04/nato-commander-u-s-radar-turkey-wont-used-help-israel/ – 8/4/2014.

Turkey has opposed Israel’s participation in NATO exercises. Officials said Ankara was abandoning plans to improve relations with Israel.
“Normalization with Israel is a fantasy,” Turkish Deputy Prime Minister Bulent Arinc said.

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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/umut-ozkirimli/stoking-the-fire-antisemi_b_5779302.html – 9/8/2014.

Yet something was different this time around.   Something to do with the intensity and audacity of displays of anti-semitism, and the not so covert official backing they received, which was one of the talking points of the recent meeting between U.S. President Obama and Turkish President Erdoğan who discussed, according to the statement by the NSC Spokesperson Caitlin Hayden “the importance of … combating the scourge of anti-Semitism,” among other things.

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http://online.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748703279704575335043894776482 – 6/29/2010.

Brothers in Arms

Some major Israeli arms contracts with Turkey

1997: $632 million order for Israel to outfit Turkish F4E Phantom aircraft with advanced avionics.

1998: $90 million order for Israel to provide AGM-1 and Popeye-1 missiles for the upgraded Phantoms.

2002: $687.5 million deal to upgrade Turkey’s M60-A1 tanks to Israeli Sabra-3 version, the last of which was delivered in April.

2005: $183 million deal to provide 10 Heron drones.

Note: All contracts completed except drones, which are being delivered. Source: Serdar Erdurmaz, Turkish Center for International Relations and Strategic Studies

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http://www.dailysabah.com/mideast/2014/09/10/over-40-states-combine-forces-against-isis – 9/10/2014.

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05 Friday Sep 2014

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And yet, freelance reporters like Sotloff and Foley are at the core of every foreign story. From 2003 to 2012, newspapers axed 16,200 full-time newsroom jobs and magazines cut 38,000 jobs. A survey conducted by the American Journalism Review of 10 major newspapers and one chain found that between 2003 and 2011 the number of foreign correspondents dropped from 307 to 234. But in 2011 that number would have been much lower had AJR not also included contract reporters, who often perform the same duties as staffers but without the same benefits or pay. Freelancers working on a story-to-story basis are left to fill the void left by laid off staffers.

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/119313/steven-sotloff-james-foley-beheadings-expose-failed-freelancer-model – 9/4/2014.

Ach! About “Mariupol Under Fire”

04 Thursday Sep 2014

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Earlier today, I slugged a post — the “link” that follows this — “Mariupol Under Fire”, which related articles I went a seeking.  I wasn’t too far off the mark:

http://www.france24.com/en/20140904-russia-ukraine-donetsk-mariupol-ceasefire/ – 9/04/2014.

However, what I ended up doing was scraping and posting news clips, and “Mariupol” was forgotten, except in the slugged title and on Twitter.  My apologies then to those who today had been seeking similar data on the appearance of Russian military assets in the Ukrainian battle space.

Now, the slug that Twitter treated as a header as turned true!

Or more true than was suggested earlier.  The following is about an hour old from the Los Angeles Times:

“It is a totally new game,” said Oleg Odnorozhenko, deputy commander of the volunteer Azov Battalion, adding that the city’s fighters are now certain they are being attacked by regular Russian army troops, not just mercenaries and homegrown separatists.

http://www.latimes.com/world/europe/la-fg-ukraine-russia-mariupol-20140904-story.html – “Russian troops attacking Mariupol, Ukrainian militia leader says.’  – 9/4/2014.

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04 Thursday Sep 2014

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(9/4/2016)

To be sure, this has been Mr. Putin’s war from the beginning. After Victor Yanukovych fled Kyiv in late February and the parliament appointed an acting government in his place, it was Mr. Putin’s order that sent “little green men”—professional soldiers in Russian-style combat fatigues but without identifying insignia—to seize the Crimean peninsula, the most blatant land grab in Europe since World War II.

http://nationalinterest.org/feature/mr-putin%E2%80%99s-war%E2%80%94-why-he-continues-deny-it-11205 – 9/5/2014.

The ragtag battalion was hurriedly put together from a group of civilians including a piano teacher, bulldozer operator, steel worker and bodybuilding instructor as pro-Russian rebels advanced on Mariupol over the past week.

Renewed shelling of the city on Thursday, despite hopes that a ceasefire might be agreed on Friday, meant Ukrainian troops continued to organise defences in case of an all-out assault by pro-Russian separatists Kiev says are backed by Moscow.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/09/04/ukraine-crisis-mariupol-idUSL5N0R52BV20140904 – 9/4/2014.

A day before a planned ceasefire in east Ukraine, Russia-backed rebels edged closer to Mariupol, threatening a final push against the strategic port city, which the Ukrainians have promised to defend at all costs.

It was unclear whether the rebel advance was merely a show of force, or the prelude to a proper attack on the city, but as night fell, shelling was audible from the city centre.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/sep/04/russia-rebels-ceasefire-approaches-ukraine – 9/4/2014.

“Ukraine exists,” was the understated but undeniable election slogan of the (failed) 2010 Yushchenko presidential campaign. Crimea, Ukraine’s most restive and most beautiful area, was finally settling in for the long haul—better to be a strange, anomalous, mostly Russian-speaking Ukrainian appendage than to be inside a paranoid, authoritarian Russia. That the revolution against Yanukovych, a triumph of human fortitude, should result in the loss of territorial integrity is sad but comprehensible. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction, and here is this one.

https://nplusonemag.com/issue-19/the-intellectual-situation/ukraine-putin-and-the-west/ – Spring 2014.

http://en.inforesist.org/russian-soldier-published-a-photo-made-near-illovaisk-in-ukraine/ – 9/4/2014.

Gazprom’s natural gas production fell 19.6 percent last month compared with the same period last year, as the state-owned behemoth struggles in the face of increasing competition at home and declining exports that are due in part to a breakdown in the political relationship between Moscow and Kiev.

http://www.themoscowtimes.com/business/article/gazprom-sees-production-tumble-as-ukraine-crisis-bites/506410.html – 9/3/2014.

http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/ukraine-crisis/fighting-shows-no-sign-ebbing-eastern-ukraine-n195636 – 9/14/2014.

“The open aggression from the Russian side against sovereign countries means the there is an attack not only against Ukraine, it is an attack against the peace in Europe,” Grybauskaitė said in Tallinn on Wednesday.

http://en.delfi.lt/central-eastern-europe/grybauskaite-ukraine-fights-for-us-all-we-should-help-in-any-way-possible.d?id=65739552#ixzz3CNIYlrG3

Weekly update from the OSCE Observer Mission at the Russian Checkpoints Gukovo and Donetsk, 28 August until 08:00, 3 September 2014:

http://www.osce.org/om/123151 – 9/3/2014.

 

 

FTAC – Adjusted Western Engagement In the Islamic Small Wars

04 Thursday Sep 2014

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My friends in Islam are wrestling with what to do with ISIS, and the talk is not about joining.

Some are trying to find their way between persecution as Shiites and cooperation with Sunni Kurdish Peshmerga, for example. We don’t appreciate the crevasses in multiple self-concepts (x religion x sect x nation x locality x external relationships) involved in making what are both political and personal military decisions.

By way of mistaken aggregation, simple prejudice may misguide our perception of true states of affairs.

On the Sunni side in the middle east, every stable regime plus every peaceful human subscribed by legacy now finds status divided according to the word of Baghdadi: either accept his authority as caliph to rule over all Islam or prepare for battle with his forces. The irony of that possession has a cosmic ghastliness to it: who among theocratic or clerically authorized autocrats would not claim the same favor and infallibility?

The President’s lank position, so far, is to leave the matter of becoming resolved up to Muslims involved de facto in these wars, albeit with the exception of either protecting patently American assets, as in Iraq, or encouraging the moderate among the revolutionary forces assailing Assad in Syria. If boundaries are broached, as has happened some in Israel’s Golan, then additional measures have to be taken to maintain the geographical parameter of the heavy fighting (associated terrorism in foreign lands then becomes the province of established government agencies developed to address domestic threats).

I think Obama’s play between personal engagement and insouciant disengagement is a part of his stage management: why shouldn’t the rest of the world, and as it yearns to be free, police and defend itself?

People make up their minds about the world and themselves as they go along.  Culture, experience, and information both lead and push all of us down or chosen or programmed paths, but left alone in mind, the mind has its own life and, predominantly, survival mission: it faces quandaries posed by the malignant, and often it fails and becomes the patsy or tool of the vicious; sometimes too, it rises to the occasion and takes a giant step forward from where it has been pinned by history, circumstance, and time.

Related Reference

http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2014/09/02/dont-expect-peshmerga-fighters-to-beat-the-islamic-state – 9/4/2014.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/09/04/us-mideast-israel-syria-idUSKBN0GZ1CG20140904 – 9/4/2014.

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