In Gaza, Syria, and northern Iraq, the moderate have been disempowered. The dictator has an army; the religious fascists have arms and sufficient martial narcissism to bully their domains, but none act in the interest of the main body of their constituencies. The more “open societies” surrounding — or surrounded by — these conflict have the challenge of moving from complaint toward useful political action and evolution toward the recognition of a common humanity and its interests, and then within the turmoil, the resident such as “Sarah” may need to realize that her interests count, that she is the change, but perhaps not empowered or organized to see her will and her interests evident in the local politics.
At one point, it is the end of an era; at the same time, it’s the formation of a challenge ushering to it the vanguard of a new era, and such as Baghdaddi are not of it.
Over July 24-6, 2014, a chapter of religious pluralism ended in the city of Mosul, Iraq and its sister city across the Tigris, the ancient city of Ninveh. The Islamic militants of ISIS forced out all of the Christians, and blew up the Tombs of Seth (son of Adam and Eve) and of the Prophet Jonah.
Jonah
Jonah was the last prophet considered holy to each of the monotheistic religions. His story was unusual in several respects which enabled him to capture the imagination and dreams of Christians, Muslims and Jews.
Thousands of years ago, Judaism was the only monotheistic religion. The people in the Middle East practiced a variety of religions and worshiped many gods. The non-Jews were not particularly interested in the Hebrew Bible, and the Bible – seemingly – did not address them. The prophets in the Old Testament almost universally addressed the Jews: the children of…
The title’s a bit heady and long for a brief compendium and observation on a blog . . . but on with it —
Old folk wisdom: “He who points the finger at others out to point it back at himself first.”
Mea culpa: the Israelis are not perfect, but in the site of God — or perhaps just one another, open courts, and an open democracy — they keep working on becoming better children of the universe and students of the universal in humanity.
Hamas, its associates, and its fans would seem to represent a different sort of unconscionable consciousness, one always accusing, deflecting, denying, and lying, for here is a short list of egregious accidental (on purpose?) and deliberately evil behaviors that have led to the injuring and killing of hundreds of residents of Gaza.
Shifa Hospital – Hamas Headquarters
On July 15, for example, William Booth of the Washington Post wrote that the hospital “has become a de facto headquarters for Hamas leaders, who can be seen in the hallways and offices.” Back in 2006, PBS even aired a documentary showing how gunmen roam the halls of the hospital, intimidate the staff, and deny them access to protected locations within the building—where the camera crew was obviously prohibited from filming.
The station said that a “Hamas Fajr-5 rocket aimed at central Israel, which was fired from a playground outside the Shifa hospital and exploded on the site causing casualties, had at least a 100 kg (220 lbs) warhead,” according to The Times of Israel.
Reporter Nir Devori of Channel 2 and analyst Ehud Yaari confirmed the carnage was most likely the result of a failed Fajr rocket launch — aimed at central Israel.
What kind of a monster would deliberately “shield” a war room, a control room, a bunker, with a hospital of ill and injured patients above it?
Among this blog’s key terms, “Facsimile Bipolar Political Sociopathy” takes a good run at the anomic aspect of Hamas, which appears not to care about the humanity of its constituents. From that alone, whether it cares much about God either: it shouts a lot, collects and keeps hundreds of millions of dollars in the pockets of its own, and it gets other people to die for its own grandiose delusions.
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Hamas said the explosions were a “direct” strike by Israeli drones, while Israel said they were caused by failed militant rockets. “A short while ago Al-Shifa hospital was struck by a failed rocket attack launched by Gaza terror organizations,” the IDF said in a statement, adding that “there was no Israeli military activity in the area surrounding the hospital whatsoever. “
UNRWA has admitted that a Hamas misfired rocket hit a U.N.-run school in Beit Hanoun in northern Gaza, according to Channel 2′s Ehud Ya’ari, but an errant IDF artillery shell also may have hit the facility, where Gaza sources claim an estimated 17 children and United Nations personnel were killed and 200 others were wounded Thursday afternoon.
I like my month/day/year style more than Israel’s day/year/month, but beyond that, these two items tells that the Big Media Story was suspect from near start.
The results of the IDF forensic investigation naturally follows, and while its conclusions may be displeasing to some and suspect by anti-Semites (because they are what they are), the data will be around for independent examination when the fighting concludes.
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The preliminary report indicates that militants fired anti-tank missiles at IDF soldiers, who then responded by firing several mortars in their direction.
The preliminary inquiry and footage indicate that a single errant mortar landed in the courtyard of the UNRWA school, when it was completely empty.
The Institute for Palestine Studies published a detailed report on Gaza’s Tunnel Phenomenon in the summer of 2012. It reported that tunnel construction in Gaza has resulted in a large number of child deaths.
“At least 160 children have been killed in the tunnels, according to Hamas officials”
The author, Nicolas Pelham, explains that Hamas uses child laborers to build their terror tunnels because, “much as in Victorian coal mines, they are prized for their nimble bodies”.
But there is no Iron Dome for tunnels. The tunnels give me real pause. It’s hard enough to imagine a situation in which your neighbours are quite intentionally trying to blow up your house and kill your children with rockets. But Hamas’s well-developed kidnapping strategy represents a whole other category of depravity. The handcuffs and tranquilizers are mere baroque, Pulp Fictionish details. The core depravity of Hamas is its longstanding policy of treating every Jew as a target for elimination.
Multiple media outlets report that Hamas’s offensive tunnel network – now known to have been composed of over forty attack tunnels dug underneath Israel’s border with the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip – was set to be activated during the Jewish High Holidays (September 24th) as a mass terror attack.
The attack was meant to generate as many as ten thousand casualties, men, women and particularly children and hundreds of captives. Explosives were particularly placed underneath kindergartens to make certain that these “institutions” would be the first struck, even before any thing else.
The tunnel-building program involved 800 million tons of concrete, according to reports on the web, the deaths of 160 Palestinian children (that would seem the minimum number known), about $1 million per project, so now we’re about looking at $40 million or more dollars worth of wreckage — completely wasted Gazan money, except for those who got paid working underground — and that’s probably another dismal story about exploitation (I wonder how much line-level workers made).
Involving Hamas Earlier in Time
I would like to have seen more snap in this calmly narrated video, but the point of it is clear: a violent incident of some kind within Gaza and independent of the IDF took place, killing and wounding a “cast” reassembled on a beach and filmed for anti-Israel propaganda.
Again: where the data persists and the investigative method is empirical, the dead may well tell a different story than the malignant narcissist would have you believe.
The mentality: aggrandizing, bloodsucking greedy, unrestrained sociopaths.
The world has seen this pattern repeated around the world, and while it would seem to be waking up to it, it may not be doing so with the strongest hand, the ambitions of the venal outstripping efforts to get at them before they do real damage as has been deeply experienced in places as different as Pakistan, Somalia, and Iraq.
After the evacuation, Israel opened up border crossings to facilitate commerce. The Palestinians were also given 3,000 greenhouses which had already been producing fruit and flowers for export for many years.
But Hamas chose not to invest in schools, trade, or infrastructure. Instead, it built an extensive network of tunnels to house thousands upon thousands of rockets and weapons, including newer, sophisticated ones from Iran and Syria. All the greenhouses were destroyed.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ali-a-rizvi/post_8056_b_5602701.html – 7/28/2014. I don’t agree with the nastiness covered by political politeness in the first point (or similar ploys): “Yes, there’s an unfair and illegal occupation there, and yes, it’s a human rights disaster” — for, no, there has been no Israeli occupation of Gaza since surrendering it to the refugees in 2005: there has been only a military cordon to keep out arms (which cordon appears to have failed despite its naval blockade and inspections of overland shipping. And the same cordon has not been illegal by any internationally agreed upon basis in law. That the Arab states arrange gang-ups in the UN and such anti-Semitic spectacles as the Durban conferences is just a fact of life, but that it happens doesn’t make it right.
The translation of Péter Szentmihályi Szabó’s article on the “agents of Satan” three days ago on Hungarian Spectrum has reawakened international scrutiny into the real nature of Viktor Orbán’s regime. Immediately after the document’s publication letters started pouring into the Italian Foreign Ministry and the Italian embassy in Hungary asking the Italians not to accept Szentmihályi Szabó as Hungary’s envoy.
Eva Balogh described Szentmihályi Szabó as a “raging” and “inveterate” anti-Semite. She quoted an article written by him in 2000 in the far-right Magyar Forum, called “The Agents of Satan,” which, though it doesn’t specifically use the term “Jew,” clearly describes Jews in classic anti-Semitic terms similar to those used in Nazi propaganda.
The Hungarian Jewish leadership did not immediately respond to the nomination. But a source close to the leadership of the main Jewish umbrella group Mazsihisz told JTA that the nomination…
Late Sunday night the media learned that Péter Szentmihályi Szabó, a mediocre poet and political commentator of the far right, will be Hungary’s next ambassador to Rome. Two opposition parties, Democratic Coalition and Együtt-PM, immediately protested against the appointment, pointing out that over the last two decades the nominee has been publishing in such far-right papers as István Csurka’s Magyar Fórum, Kárpátia, and Nemzetőr. Currently, he has a regular column in the far-right Magyar Hírlap and is also a regular on Echo TV, another far-right organ.
Tibor Navracsics and Péter Szentmihályi Szabó The foreign minister is delighted
There were commentators whose “breath was taken away” when they heard the news of Szentmihályi Szabó’s imminent ambassadorial appointment. A blogger expressed himself more strongly: “Viktor Orbán happened to appoint a rat to be ambassador to Rome.” One thing is sure: Szentmihályi Szabó is an inveterate anti-Semite. Pure and simple. So, it is a…
Mudar Zahran: I think Egypt must take responsibility for Gaza. Egypt must take responsibility for Gaza the same way Jordan must recognize its responsibilities towards the Palestinians. And I do see Egypt intervening to booth protect and save Gazans as well as provide to them.
BackChannels: To protect them from Hamas or from Israel? Our small world should not want to continue the Hamas-style Islamist enterprise and the anti-Semitic cant that forms a part of its character. That way of speaking — to demonize and slander the Jews (above all) — is in part everyone’s enemy.
From correspondence with Mudar Zahran, Jordanian Palestinian and peace activist, July 27, 2014
The HamaNazi part of the Islamic Botherhood goes.
Gazans — refugees proven unwanted by and not actively integrated into the rest of the Arab world — decidedly stay.
A new culture is born.
Occupation: yes — a real one, not a phony baloney political slogan.
Occupiers: Egyptian and Israeli military.
Transition: from God Mob mafia state to responsible and responsive local governance with foreign policy overseen by an Egyptian-Israeli-Gaza partnership.
Guaranteed: Gazan freedom and self-determination; real respect in the world.
On the basis of our ethics and practice, we are denouncing what we witness in the aggression of Gaza by Israel.
We ask our colleagues, old and young professionals, to denounce this Israeli aggression. We challenge the perversity of a propaganda that justifies the creation of an emergency to masquerade a massacre, a so-called “defensive aggression”. In reality it is a ruthless assault of unlimited duration, extent, and intensity. We wish to report the facts as we see them and their implications on the lives of the people.
We are appalled by the military onslaught on civilians in Gaza under the guise of punishing terrorists.
Rightfully, the esteemed publication caught heat:
The Lancet, a top tier scientific journal by all accounts, did a great disservice to the medical community. The publication of an extremely biased one-sided analysis of such a complex situation is outrageous and full of lies.
And setting to rights, it brought also a long riposte by nearly a dozen esteemed medical professionals at the end of last week (8/15/2014). Excerpted:
For The Lancet and its editors to avoid any further embarrassment in associating this prestigious journal with such a vituperative betrayal of its scientific mission, we recommend The Lancet retract the authors’ letter on the basis of favouritism for anti-Israeli political positions, the victimisation of Israeli academia, and the competing interests of a lead author known to be a political activist with anti-Israeli stances . . . .
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We find abhorrent that academic authors would, without evidence or data, accuse an entire academic community of crimes against humanity by association of national identity or professional affiliation, an accusation that is not only a rank dehumanisation of an entire state, but explicitly seditious in propagating virulent anti-semitic sentiments to the detriment of whole academies. Although our feelings will undoubtedly recover, the authors, through their reckless words, have inflicted a deep wound to the body and soul of global scientific and medical academia at the very moment opportunities for apolitical engagement, collaboration, and bridge-building are most needed.
BackChannels 