It’s not about physical territory. It’s about spiritual territory. It’s not about nationalism. It’s about Islamism. It’s not about the “Occupation”. It’s about Islam.
“I raised my children on the knees of the (Islamic) religion, they are religious guys, honest and clean-handed, and their goal is to bring the victory of Islam,” the mother of one of the Hamas killers said. Not a Palestinian nation. Not a Two State Solution. Not forty percent of this and sixty percent of that. The victory of Islam.
And they will be told by a central power — ayatollah, caliph, king, or president-for-life — to shut up.
In many systems — not all! — unquestioning obedience to God (which is not sealed in the Jewish ethos) has been already conflated with obedience to a human claiming to represent the Almighty.
Get the habits going in behavior and language, keep the cruelty in punishment high for dissent, and it’s all over.
I have vacillated a long time about the nature of Islam, as have many within the Ummah and many would-be dhimmi and kaifir, but what we are seeing suggests that al-Qaeda to ISIS represents an “Old Islam” — a how to scrape up the criminal and dispossessed, bring in the powerful to become more powerful, and expand the enterprise while growing more powerful and wealthy on plunder. It’s been there in the Banu Qurayza legend, which some among the revolutionary — the real radicals are the moderates — try to dispossess, and it’s at play in Iraq with the internecine warfare culminating in the want of a unified system beneath a single authority.
Ambivalence within the communities mentioned may stem from consideration of the possibility that such as ISIS works (as a tip of the spear) and that as long as one is Sunni, one is safe, and, therefore, why be upset about the gung-ho armed with Qurans, Kalashnikovs, and great glorious dreams of empire?
On both the true radical and Shiite angles, I would welcome Abbas Zaidi’s or Dean Mousavi’s comments.
Obama seems to want to leave this kind of warfare alone — consign it to the Middle East and North Africa (and the more Goons of the Dictator and Fanatics of Islam killed in Syria, the better, but, gosh, too bad about the people) — but I think most of humanity, and on this we too should be +95 percent want to see this evil and the excuses for its license with everyone else quelled and in any which way that works. The suffering is too much — and in the end, in displaced persons, in crime, in political anarchy, in disruption, the whole world pays the price for this deeply barbaric and medieval nonsense.
And the beat goes on.
So it goes.
Any old cliche will do for these days and issues that go on and on and on without substantial address nor an inch of change.
Also from the same conversation, my part preceding the above passage: “The silent may believe they will benefit ultimately from the political program in a system of expansion that strikes me as deeply bigoted, coercive, deceptive, and egregious on general terms.”
http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/2014/07/its-not-occupation-its-islam.html – 7/2/2014: “I raised my children on the knees of the (Islamic) religion, they are religious guys, honest and clean-handed, and their goal is to bring the victory of Islam,” the mother of one of the Hamas killers said. Not a Palestinian nation. Not a Two State Solution. Not forty percent of this and sixty percent of that. The victory of Islam.”
I invest in the idea that contemporary Jewish ethics are reinforced by two fundamental statements by Hillel the Elder, the family man 🙂 who lived ten years into the Common Era: “That which is distasteful to thee, do not do to another” (“That is the whole of Torah. The rest is commentary. Now go and study”). and “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am not for others, WHAT am I?” If not now, when?” Whether or not any Jewish action, conversation, or thought traces back to those statements directly, both would seem part of the Jewish spirit, and both would seem evidenced in the long, long history of Jewish social activism.
We do not know what we are dealing with?
Yes we do.
We’ve had a lot of experience since Pharaoh.
We’re getting better at comprehending the psychology involved with “monsters” who are, all said and done with every dictator ever vanquished and the worst among the same living, merely human after all. We may not be able to see what has set a “malignant narcissist” on his course, but we can label the type and take a hard look at how they work with language and how we (humans) are culturally programmed in relation to language behavior and content.
With the Haggadah with which I grew up, we cried, symbolically, for the Egyptian lives lost in the exodus and would go on to note that “with every generation, a little more freedom is won.” Lo these many years and laden with inexpressible costs and sorrows, we find those words still true.
From the sidebar of my blog:
Simon Wiesenthal
Remark Made in the Ballroom of the Imperial Hotel, Vienna, Austria on the occasion of His 90th Birthday: “The Nazis are no more, but we are still here, singing and dancing.”
Indees, we are still “singing and dancing” and we will go on singing and dancing, but we are mindful of our neighbor’s suffering too, and however we might feel about it for a moment — say from Afghanistan to Gaza to Iraq — we’ll help them to greater freedom and greater lives too.
“If I am not for others, what am I?”
That’s what we’re about.
We can travel into the uptake of Jewish thought after Hillel into Christian and Muslim communities and related paths taken by Constantine and Muhammad, but “the base” — the authentic — has been and will be eternally Jewish. Perhaps the same in human thought needs to be dis-embedded from ethnic rivalry.
And just a moment on the murder of an Arab teen in the vicinity of Jerusalem, an abhorrent act some — not only some Muslims, Jews as well — have skidded into calling an act of revenge far in advance of investigation. My response elsewhere to that:
Said rolled American racism and European colonialism into one mélange of white oppression of darker-skinned peoples. He was not the only thinker to have forged this amalgam, but his unique further contribution was to represent “Orientals” as the epitome of the dark-skinned; Muslims as the modal Orientals; Arabs as the essential Muslims; and, finally, Palestinians as the ultimate Arabs. Abracadabra—Israel was transformed from a redemptive refuge from two thousand years of persecution to the very embodiment of white supremacy.
I correspond off of Facebook as well (where do I find the time? It’s easy — I have no life), and this is what one from the anti-Jihad had to say about Islam in relation to the progress of the “Islamic State” (AKA “ISIS”, “ISIL”, “ISIS/L”) in Iraq and Syria:
I saw cars lined up. They were part of the death squads for Mosul. (Whilst perusing the jihad portal.) Now that we have rampant crucifixions and beheadings I await the public stoning of women. It is coming. M. allowed it. If it is good enough for him, it is good enough for them. I am determined to no longer reference these acts as “radical Islam”. They are the real Islam. This is real Islam, just as practised in the time of M. Radical Islam, would be an Islam that is moderate, philanthropic and kind. That is radical for Islam. What we are seeing, is the real Islam, based on texts, eyewitness accounts, primary source options from the era of the final Prophet.
With certainty, the entire Muslim Brotherhood and al-Qaeda-type affiliates believe deeply that they are Muslims, never mind with what anomic and casual bents they kill others who believe they are Muslim too. Of course, what my correspondent suggests with perhaps Christian insight is that those among the middle, mild, and moderate of Islam who stand up to terrorism and argue for a progressive modern society be considered the true radicals.
Why not?
What is it tumbling around in the Islamic Small Wars with a 1400 year old “road map” that tolerates no other instruction or thought but its own?
ISIS would call what it believes and pursues the true Islam, the only Islam, and bar the “radicals” from it.
So one may nod to the most radical of Muslims, “moderate, philanthropic, and kind”.
These have no idea what it is that’s coming for them:
The newly elected parliament convened with 255 out of 328 elected officials attending, which was enough for a legal quorum, the speaker said. But when many failed to return after the break, there were not enough members to continue.
He talks at length about all of the Western-made equipment ISIS has captured during its various routs of the Iraqi army. “Look how much money America spends on fighting Islam, and it ends up going to us,” he crows. “Message to the people of the West: just keep giving and we will keep taking.”
Vox. ISIS mocks Obama in Michael Bay-style propaganda video – 7/1/2014. Vox has imported the video to its page, so, to my friends around the world, if you want to see an ISIS representative in a ball cap and speaking American English, click through to it.
As ISIS has picked up “assets” in American machinery and weaponry, also Iraqi military uniforms, I was curious about the suggestion that the same were on the road to Damascus.
Is there an ISIS armored column gunning for Bashar al-Assad and his government?
Will U.S. arms shipments to “moderate” Syrian forces arrive in time to kill or capture that column and retake ownership of The Revolution?
About a week ago, Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi noted, “The upcoming battles will reveal the extent of ISIS’ maturity. Most probably, it will stop at the maximum extent in the south like it now with the North’s Kurds and it will rest a little benefiting from international incompetence” (Al-Aribya, June 24, 2014).
How else could resistance to the developing and expanding conflict be characterized?
The Iraqi Parliament, so it appears, can’t keep itself seated for even one day.
The call-up of tens of thousands of young men from Iraq’s south, Shiites, for the most part, appear to be getting a pep talk, a helmet, a firearm, and a ride toward wherever the action is, pretty much just enough to get themselves killed.
I would like to be more optimistic, of course, but the good spirit of going off to war, the preparations with uniforms, steel, and gun oil, play to vanity more than the necessities of what has to be just the ugliest and most heartbreaking business on earth. For certain, I would not want to be an American military adviser handed recruits with two weeks (or much less) of “boot camp” behind them for a day’s work in an active field populated by so deeply a delusional and treacherous enemy, but perhaps that kind of challenge is what combat pay is all about.
From Sunday’s Guardian, this quote tells of a theme I’ve encountered elsewhere:
“We have Da’ash on one side,” said Abu Mustafa, a Baquba resident, using the colloquial word for Isis. “And we have Asa’ib ahl al-Haq on the other. I don’t know who to be more scared of.”
Even if held together for a time by Saddam Hussein’s power to manipulate his constituence and keep it roiled in fear, Iraq has been long divided by the Sunni-Shiite schism, and on that matter, never mind American secular ideals and military intervention, it has been laid open to Iranian and Saudi influence and related jockeying and meddling. Into that rift has roared ISIS with inhuman and frankly incontinent bloodletting and cruelty, and the state is on the edge — beyond it, possibly — of reverting to the language and terms of the war with which it’s familiar, a reenactment in reality of the obsessive bidding for succession that attended the death of Muhammad, who having left advice about how to do everything else appears to have left out the matter of continuing his enterprise beyond his final breath.
In Wikipedese:
The historic background of the Sunni–Shia split lies in the schism that occurred when the Islamic prophet Muhammad died in the year 632, leading to a dispute over succession to Muhammad as a caliph of the Islamic community spread across various parts of the world, which led to the Battle of Siffin. The dispute intensified greatly after the Battle of Karbala, in which Hussein ibn Ali and his household were killed by the ruling Umayyad Caliph Yazid I, and the outcry for his revenge divided the early Islamic community.
Although the headline sensationalizes the potential for an all-out Sunni-Shiite showdown, even in the field and among fellow Islamists, opinion of ISIS may run low. From the same article:
“The gangs of al-Baghdadi are living in a fantasy world. They’re delusional. They want to establish a state but they don’t have the elements for it,” said Abdel-Rahman al-Shami, a spokesman for the Army of Islam, an Islamist rebel group. “You cannot establish a state through looting, sabotage and bombing.”
A confection celebrates the kidnapping of two Israeli and one Israeli-American teenagers. The photo had been posted by the IDF prior to today’s discovery of the bodies.
As I type, there are ugly murder stories all over the web, from ISIS in Iraq to children raped and swung from tree limbs with their own scarves (India). Some not Jewish, not Israeli, not American must wonder why these get so much attention (three dead Jews — who cares?). The answer is these would have cared about others far from themselves and would have been part, one way or another, of inspiring good and justice and then been a part of drawing down all that other injustice, mayhem, and murder in the world.
That’s a lot to suggest . . . perhaps a lot to promise . . .but I think it comes with the territory, from Pharaoh to now.
I don’t like everything I read about the Jews and Israel. As a matter of fact, I was earlier this afternoon reading about Sabra and Shatila and the IDF both controlling access to those camps and standing aside as Christian Phalangist militia slaughtered in that Palestinian refugee camp old men, women, and children. That event was not among the Jewish State’s finer moments (September 1982), but here’s the thing: perhaps we learn even from — or starting with — our own failings and missteps and trespasses. I would not expect as much from ISIS today as it has indulged itself in the most wanton orgies of killing; Hamas seems equally unable to repair or restrain itself or related loose energy running around the Gaza Strip (which over the weekend launched multiple rockets against Israel). Name them all, they seem to raise their children with a murderous hate for others, Jews first (thank you very much), and when their children do as they have been trained . . . .
I am wondering: are we — is the whole world — going to see celebration photos this time?
At this point, it is quite possible to believe Meshaal when he says that he knew nothing about the kidnapping and that he has no idea what happened to the teens. But Meshaal and the leaders of Hamas have a problem. As long as they don’t denounce the Qawasmeh family, and as long as they let the family take them down a dead end time after time, the leaders of the movement will be forced to pay the price.
Related on anti-Semitism from earlier this month (same subject): http://firstonethrough.wordpress.com/2014/06/23/eyal-gilad-naftali-klinghoffer-the-new-blood-libel/ – 6/23/2014.
BackChannels 