Early Evening Pro-Israel Protest, Time-Warner Center, 59th Street and Columbus Circle, New York City, August 7, 2014. Used with permission of the photographer, (c) 2014 Daniel Sigmund Reichwald.
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If there is a crisis in journalism, the Arab-Israeli highlights the crisis as never before.
Former Israeli Ambassador to the US Michael Oren was interviewed on CNN after Ron Dermer, the current Israeli Ambassador to the US complained that CNN’s coverage was focused on pictures of Palestinian children, while not mentioning the UN school that housed rockets.
As the 2014 Operation Protective Edge (hopefully) draws to a close, one can expect the same histrionics that have become well-known and well-worn to emanate from the Arab world. The video below of Queen Rania of Jordan, is of her appeal to the United Nations five years ago, which can serve as the outline for the Arab textbook on UNRWA. In summation, we are pathetic and we want to ask the world for money again.
(As further background/amusement, Queen Rania of JORDAN was born in KUWAIT and considers herself Palestinian, when convenient).
“Life half-lived” – Palestinian Quality of Life. The Arabs will bemoan their treatment by Israel and ignore their treatment by their Arab brethren.
Palestinians in Lebanon and Syria are denied citizenship by their host countries. They are denied the ability to own property and obtain white color jobs. The Jordanians gave Palestinians citizenship in 1954, only to…
““We are being slaughtered!” she sobbed, her voice raw and worn out, as seen on this parliamentary video. “We are being exterminated! An entire religion is being exterminated from the face of the Earth. In the name of humanity, save us!””
“Brothers, away from all humanitarian disputes, we want humanitarian solidarity” (1:00)
Kurdish MP Vian Dakhil pleading for life before Parliament, August 5, 2014:
One Yazidis showed al-Jazeera a series of text messages received by Yazidis upon the arrival of ISIS, reading: “Where are you going to go? I swear [to] God I will cut you into pieces… We are coming for you, you pig, you enemy of God.”
The Yazidis took the threat seriously. The Washington Post reports that estimates vary from 10,000 to 40,000 Yazidis currently stranded on a mountain above Sinjar, knowing their immediate death awaits them at the foot of the mountain.
No IPTC data found. Source of download: Breitbart.
Thousands of Yazidis — a Kurdish ethno-religious community — have been trapped on Sinjar Mountain in northern Iraq as they attempt to escape the extremists’ grasp. The sole parliamentary representative of the Yazidis, Vian Dakhil, warned that her small community, which has roots in a 4,000 year-old faith, faces the threat of extermination.
Other religious and ethnic groups, including Christians, Shiite Turkmens and Shabaks, have also recently been displaced since the Islamic State began waging a violent campaign against minorities in the territory it controls.
Yazidis believe in one God and worship seven angels. Melek Taus, known as the Peacock Angel, plays the most important role. Worship of the Peacock Angel is where the label “devil worshipper” stems from. Christianity and Islam view the Peacock Angel as a fallen angel or devil for refusing to bow before Adam. Yazidis interpret this as a test of the Peacock Angel’s commitment to God and see the Peacock Angel as the chief of God’s angels.
David Rubin: Is that then part of it? This is so savage that partly . . . you know, everyone keeps saying the images out of Gaza are horrible, which they are, but there’s this definitive narrative There’s a bomb that drops on something . . .
Nikki DeLoach: It’s a war that we recognize. That’s how we’ve seen war. This is not that. This is savage. It’s like . . . medieval . . . something you would see on Game of Thrones.”
I doubt any will see the mass beheading of children (as has been reported in relation to the slaughter of Chaldean Christians in Iraq) on Game of Thrones.
(CNN) — If you’re following the news about ISIS, which now calls itself the Islamic State, you might think you’ve mistakenly clicked on a historical story about barbarians from millennia ago.
“The heinous crime of the Islamic State was carried out not just against Christians, but against humanity,” Sako told a special church service in east Baghdad where around 200 Muslims joined Christians in solidarity.
http://phylliscartersjournal.blogspot.ca/2014/08/the-abuse-of-god-death-and-destruction.html – 8/8/2014 (I continue updating a piece for a little while afterwards as new and telling verbiage appears. As ISIS is basically a raiding party, events move very quickly through its machinations. Where it hustles, Iraq and its allies plod, by comparison, toward getting their act together. At the moment, Aug. 8, 2014, and despite some U.S. activity, ISIS has battlefield resource superiority — arms and ammo, cash, armor and domestic vehicles, a modern enough headquarters, and some techniques in cover and cruelty that have made them especially hard to get at. In their world, the world is running away from them, which for plunder must suit them fine).
Even human rights group antagonistic to Israel acknowledge, according to a New York Times report, that Hamas probably counts among the “civilians killed by Israel” the following groups: Palestinians killed by Hamas as collaborators; Palestinians killed through domestic violence; Palestinians killed by errant Hamas rockets or mortars; and Palestinians who died naturally during the conflict. I wonder if Hamas also included the reported 162 children who died while performing child slave labor in building their terror tunnels. Hamas also defines combatants to include only armed fighters who were killed while fighting Israelis. They exclude Hamas supporters who build tunnels, who allow their homes to be used to store and fire rockets, Hamas policemen, members of the Hamas political wing and others who work hand in hand with the armed terrorists.
To suggest that the “field is confused” might understate the reality. However, distilled to structural themes, it might look a little bit like this:
1. Kingdom of God — >Sunni-Shiite rivalry : Saudi-Iranian rivalry 2. Contemporary Governance –> The Despotic vs The Democratic 3. Political and Social Psychology and Topology –> Extremists vs Moderates
Official Iranian hatred of the “Zionist entity” has has maintained a flow of war making machinery and materiel to Hamas from well before present hostilities. IDF interdicted at least one shipment and one may be sure analysts are reverse engineering back to sources the arming of Hamas.
How the above suggested themes are arranged in any given mind and heart seems to me as invisible a matter as it may be personal, and in the field as much account for mistrust and paranoia as related attitudes remain inaccessible to detection except out in battle space where the same becomes quite clear as to who has embraced what cause and with what attitude.
Addendum: As Regards Iran
As appears to happen with “Islamist-style” Islamic overlay, the society that existed prior to onset becomes suffocated and hidden (to greater or lesser extent). Despite the onslaughts of the Islamic Revolution in Iran, Iran, so _____ frequently points out, retains many facets of its pre-revolutionary modernity, and what the Ayatollahs Khomeini and Khamenei have done is dealt themselves their own kingdom (see “Reuters, Khamenei, wealth” on that) with themselves at the center of its universe.
As long as the dictator can keep the engines of wealth in his state operating and pursue his dream of himself unmindful of the suffering he causes, that’s all that matters. Iranians may have a problem with this — the modern are the competing interest — but not the Ayatollah, not any more than Baghdaddi or Putin or Assad. They’re very different in their ambitions, but they are of the same personality, and that may be what bonds them albeit along the Shiite axis, loosely speaking.
While oil plays a mighty role in these politics, it may be much less important than the protection of the immense (and fragile) ego of the despot.
The weight of American interest in Israel’s survival probably should not be credited too greatly to the evangelical Christian community: all of the open democracies feature a majority culture, but they are all democracies in function as well as spirit, and Israel stands with them.
Brotherhood-style “democracy” as exhibited in Egypt and perhaps illustrated by Erdogan’s work in Turkey, is inherently anti-democratic and despotic primarily because the intellectual, political, and social machinery exploited is itself kleptocratic or piratical.
Human language programming and scripting get into this right about here: how is one to navigate so confused a world? Adhering to instructions might seem a good idea, but when the same promote such as Baghdaddi the Butcher to star power, one might well question the validity of those charts as well as the functioning of that most perverted “moral compass”.
“Tal Kayf is now in the hands of the Islamic State. They faced no resistance and rolled in just after midnight,” said Boutros Sargon, a resident who fled the town and was reached by phone in Arbil.
“I heard some gunshots last night and when I looked outside, I saw a military convoy from the Islamic State. They were shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’ [God is greatest],” he said.
Unfortunately, when it comes to political absolutism (why I call them the dictator “Putin-Assad-Khamenei”), despotism, and fascism (Hungary’s Jobbik now relates to Iranian heritage), there seems no end to variants.
ISIS has been proving vulnerable to the Kurdish Peshmerga, who know what will happen to them if they lose, and some ad hoc assembly of very small ambush parties that are targeting its leaders. Nonetheless, they’re using Erdogan’s embassy in Mosul as a headquarters (and they have gotten Erdogan to purchase $800 million in oil from them — and Erdogan has blacked out mention of the story in Turkey . . . all of which is bad news for NATO and the Turkish people).
The story with dictators who “take off” always ends in surreal depravity and sadism, and that much BadDaddy Baghdaddi’s lunatics have clearly accomplished.
More From the News
Jihadists who took over large areas of northern Iraq today have forced 100,000 Christians to flee as they occupied churches, removing crosses and destroying manuscripts.
They have fled with nothing but their clothes, some on foot, to reach the Kurdistan region, according to Louis Sako, the leader of Iraq’s largest Christian denomination.
Now everything has changed. The glass is empty, the world sees that it is empty, but the Russian media proclaims: “The glass is completely full.” And no sooner does the glass become full again than we hear: “It is empty. There is nothing there.” I worked for Soviet newspapers during the terms of four Soviet leaders, from Leonid Brezhnev to Mikhail Gorbachev, and this is the first time the authorities have lied so brazenly and shamelessly. They have truly reached a new low.
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