The issue: the symmetrical treatment of history such that Israelis and Palestinians should teach both “The Holocaust” and “The Nakba”.
Rubbish.
Israelis and Palestinians would do well to research and teach history in the direction of nonpartisan and well substantiated truth.
The idea that “history is written by the victors” should be today an artifact of the medieval world, i.e., the world of “absolute power” and thuggish personalities.
In the modern world — and should it wish to be a good one — scholarly integrity should matter most of all (and Muhammad himself is reputed to have said, “One scholar is worth more against the devil than one thousands worshippers”).
The barbarism known to history — medieval rape and rapine, ethnic cleansing, genocide — need not be known to the future, but as much becomes the province of those alive today. If Muslim Fulani gangs and war parties wish to continue their program of razing Christian farming villages — and kidnapping, raping, and slaughtering the residents — that is really up to them, there being no sufficient power (yet) to stop them where they roam, plan, and execute foul deeds.
Integrity, rightness, and righteousness should have qualities that transcend small interests. As often as we may find that not true, we may hope that one day as much will be true.
The article features a Gombe State case study that romanticizes the Fulani at peace within their own ethnic and religious community. My question for you: why not take Taraba, Benue, or even Plateau State in the north central region of Nigeria or the more than 16 states that have experienced horrific violence and see the story through the eyes of the bereaved and dispossessed?
Screen capture of the outline of Gombe State, Nigeria, October 1, 2018.
BackChannels’ editor has been responding to a contact in Nigeria with interest in what this blog has referred to as the “Fulani Land Pirates” — and this has been the year for watching “activity” (brigandage or warfare or both) that has amounted to the ethnic cleansing of Christian villages from the land with either apparent or somewhat implied complicity on the government’s part.
Last month, The New York Times (TYNT) published an overview of the Fulani drifting — in part a response to desertification — and the related conflict, but the journalist chose to paint a romantic view of the Fulani who have indeed lived with the bravado, color, and community known to nomadic herdsmen. On behalf of Nigeria’s isolated or remote Christian community, the contact took exception to that depiction.
The edited letter was submitted to TNYT last week (October 24), but having not appeared, BackChannels offered to publish it.
I don’t believe there has been a deliberate attempt to mislead the general public and do injustice to the thousands of people that have been raped, hacked or killed by assaults associated with herdsman, but the numbers in the article have merely hinted at the scale of the violence. Many attacks have involved marauding “troops” with numbers above one-hundred, and as a consequence today there are thousands of people living in camps for internally displaced persons (IDPs) in states like Benue, Taraba and Plateau.
Herder umbrella groups like Miyetti Allah that have issued threat of violence and followed through with hundreds of people killed were not mentioned in the article.
Moreover, the failure of security under the present government to arrest these killers was also not mentioned.
Portraying the southern part of Nigeria as a Christian majority viewing herders as beheaders, rapists, or Boko Haram may suggest bias in support of the herders. The truth is the southern portion of Nigeria has accommodated all despite differences in culture and religion.
In fact, most herders have lived peacefully with their hosts until turning without warning to run the same off the land.
In the past few years, the continuous influx of herders into Nigeria coupled with ethnic and religious issues and a complete absence of the rule of law have set loose countless raiders against Christian farmers.
Southern Nigeria has been organized into three large geopolitical zones comprised of 17 states, most of which have suffered murders, kidnappings, destroyed property, and the loss of farmland. At times, related arson has been dramatically political. The burning of a farm owned by Chief Olu Falaye on 21 January 2018 and the burning of former naval chief Afolayan’s 90 hectares of productive land – oranges, cassava, and palm – deliberately beg the public’s conscience and patience in relation to the desire for earnest state defense.
I also disagree with the article’s position that the President has not done much for Fulani herdsmen.
President Buhari has represented Fulni interests more than those of any other group. In October 13, 2010 he led a protest to the Oyo state government complaining about the treatment of Fulani herders despite that he was acting on a wrong heading. He also has tried to grab land to give to the Fulani herders but has been impeded only by constitutional arrangements in which lands are not vested with the Federal government but with state governments.
The article features a Gombe state case study that romanticizes the Fulani at peace within its own ethnic and religious community. My question for you: why not take Taraba, Benue or even Plateau State in the north central region of Nigeria or the more than 16 states that have experienced horrific violence and see the story through the eyes of the bereaved and dispossessed?
Why whitewash this conflict that at the hands of Kalashnikov-armed Fulani herdsman has seen numerous Christian villages burned and ethnically cleansed in the manner of medieval rape and rapine?
One may concede that cattle rustling is a major problem that affects herders, and that rustlers – as bandits often do – cut across ethnic boundaries (as widely reported in Zamfara State where the majority are Hausa-Fulani Muslims), and the police should up their game on bringing to justice those criminals.
For peace for the near future of Nigeria, ranching would be the best solution to pursue through legal political processes. The frontier for nomadic herding without boundaries may need to be closed.
Screen capture, Plateau State, Nigeria, October 1, 2018.
Mahmoud Abbas has aged. Approaching 83 come this November 15, he has stood before the United Nations General Assembly repeating himself and inventing anti-Semitic / anti-Zionist invective in the old Orwellian Soviet way.
In Abbas’s surreal world, Israel must return to “four June 1967” borders, Israeli settlers and IDF “blaspheme against the holy sites” of Islam, and the latest “Nation State Law of the Jewish People” is racist. In the President’s masked away thinking, no blood shed in defensive war bought the expansion; the “Western Wall” must not belong to the Jews who built it; and a mild declaration more than in keeping with the tenets of a dozen European monarchies must be racist yet.
All that: inside of 2.5 minutes.
The familiar canard follow in language’s best known “dark mirror”. “The Palestinians” — the Arabs of Jordan and Egypt and the laborers who came into the region as Jewish land purchases produced a new agricultural economy — have the history of what today is Israel, not the Hebrews, not the Jews. The designated and too well known Palestinian Liberation Organization terrorists become the picture of innocents against the tyrannous Israel and United States.
“The Congress comes out of the blue to say the PLO is a terrorist organization. How come?”
While Abbas claims Palestinians have been denied the right to self-determination, it would be difficult to overlook the existence of the PLO/PA government and Hamas as the governing power in Gaza. Which of either government has not been self-determining?
“We reject the idea of militias . . . .”
?
“We are not redundant . . . .”
After 70 years of Arab abuse and apartheid in camps and through political treatment, BackChannels believes the “Palestinian People” a body isolated and unique in experience and therefore a “people” but one being born a little upside-down.
Israel most often views the main base of Palestinians as more human than the corrupt “leadership” organizations that plainly exploit them.
Ford claimed that, thirty-six years ago, Kavanaugh held her down on a bed against her will, groped her, and covered her mouth when she tried to scream. Ford made the allegation anonymously in a letter to her congresswoman, Anna Eshoo, and Senator Dianne Feinstein, who originally declined to share the letter and later referred the matter to the F.B.I. for investigation. Ford has since come forward publicly; her lawyer has stated that she and her family have received threats since her name became public. Kavanaugh has responded with a categorical denial, saying in a statement, “I have never done anything like what the accuser describes—to her or to anyone. . . . I had no idea who was making this accusation until she identified herself.”
Loyalty to President Trump and possible-to-probable interference in judicial processes have been thematic from the start of President Trump’s Administration.
While charges remain “alleged”, BackChannels believes Brett Kavanaugh’s accuser Christine Blasey Ford utterly authentic.
IF public and Senate opinion comes to the same conclusion, then what will matter most will not be whether as a 17-year-old boy Kavanaugh had assaulted Ford but how he handled the accusation. He has by his blanket denial effective removed claim to the defense of juvenile behavior and will have been caught lying — and in a breathtaking abuse of power libeling his accuser — as a fully fledged adult.
What malign narcissism brought these politics to the once ever believing, confident, and idealistic United States of America?
Screen capture from hearing, September 27, 2018.
While Kavanaugh brags about his carefully kept calendars / calendar-journals, his voice breaks. Of course, had he committed an assault with great ambitions in mind, the calendar or the journal would have been the place to write the incident out of the record by not including it.
In one passage, beginning on Page 92, Judge describes his time working at a grocery store in the context of his drinking problem. Emphasis added.
It was the summer before senior year, and by now, even though I wasn’t drinking every day, I was completely hooked. Going a week without getting drunk was unthinkable. I was spending between four and seven nights with the gang, either at a party or at O’Rourke’s.
Elsewhere in the book, Judge describes one of his acquaintances at the time, someone named “Bart O’Kavanaugh,” who vomited in a car after a party.
“Truth does not become more true if the whole world were to accept it; nor does it become less true if the whole world were to reject it.”
“The risk of a wrong decision is preferable to the terror of indecision.”
September 28, 2018 (and live at posting here).
“The basic principles that underscore the Senate’s constitutional duty of advice and consent on federal judicial nominees require nothing less than a careful examination of the accusations and facts by the FBI,” said Robert Carlson, president of the organization, in a Thursday night letter addressed to Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley and ranking Democrat Dianne Feinstein.
“Each appointment to our nation’s Highest Court (as with all others) is simply too important to rush to a vote,” Carlson wrote. “Deciding to proceed without conducting additional investigation would not only have a lasting impact on the Senate’s reputation, but it will also negatively affect the great trust necessary for the American people to have in the Supreme Court.”
I got the polygraph test Dr. Ford took showing truthfulness about her account in the record. To quote a judge: “law enforcement agencies use polygraphs to test the credibility of witnesses” & the tests “serve law enforcement purposes.” That judge was Brett Kavanaugh in 2016 case.
.@SenateGOP: Enough righteous indignation over "the process." If you really want a proper process aimed at learning the truth, support an FBI investigation.#Kavanaugh#DelayTheVote
“The Supreme Court,” he said, “must never be viewed as a partisan institution.”
His performance on Thursday, responding to accusations of sexual misconduct at a hearing of the same Senate committee, sent a different message. Judge Kavanaugh was angry and emotional, embracing the language of slashing partisanship. His demeanor raised questions about his neutrality and temperament and whether the already fragile reputation of the Supreme Court as an institution devoted to law rather than politics would be threatened if he is confirmed.
Political independence may be America’s greatest prize for free thinkers. BackChannels’ editor left the Democratic Party about nine years ago and has not registered with the Republican Party since then.
Regarding Shamus Khan’s piece, one may suggest the following, which has been copied from the editor’s portion of The Awesome Conversation online:
What would be tyrannous would be to allow the privileged to mask away crime and impose their will on others without criticism or notice and with impunity. The combination of humanism (all the way back to Cyrus and his cylinder), British empiricism, and American ideals beg for and rely on the thorough examination of criminal acts and, at times, libelous claims.
The FBI has now an additional week to explore the validity of both Kavanaugh’s and Blase Ford’s testimony, and we will see — or hear — how evidence acquired adds up.
It’s not enough to be angry or partisan in such a matter: it’s important to reject assumptions and beliefs in favor of examination taken with the highest integrity.
This morning saw a follow-up:
The survival of a democratic state depends on the confidence of its constituents. Toward that end, the Senate delayed its vote in favor of a one week extension for supplemental FBI investigation.
Finger pointing serves no democratic ends.
Most tyrannies know well “reflection in the mirror”, i.e., accusing targets of harboring the aggressive plans that are the speaker’s own.
Considering the term Supreme Court justices enjoy . . . what’s another week?
I think it’s good to see “checks and balances” in action.
Google is in a business similar to China’s: social observation. One compiles and exploits user data to facilitate the commerce that builds its own advertising and research revenues; the other may use the same data to identify and channel Internet end users in service to the regime’s planning, revenue development, and security.
In the Soviet Era, the KGB groomed Arafat and installed the PLO as a block and goad holding the then communist and Russian line against the expansion of western liberalism. Mahmoud Abbas has also his KGB record, and he too has sustained the Palestinian “People’s Liberation” mythology in service to an Orwellian model of political power, and combination of feudal power as guided by “secret” police (to get back to the promotion of Russian anti-Semitic political mechanics, go back to the Okhrana at the end of the Russian Imperial period).
Abbas essentially serves Moscow while trying to sustain a patronage system funded by obligations diplomatic and practice met by the west. Neither Abbas nor the Soviet / post-Soviet political “vision” he represents have any place to go. He’s an old man; the old Soviet bloc has been largely ruined in the middle east. However, Putin has chosen to support the older politics and related alignment to either the point of war, which I feel is near, or some bitter end afterward. I suspect Israel, the United States, and NATO and others would have preferred a diplomatic transition to archaic medieval destruction (as witnessed in Syria), but here we are with another Soviet-type dinosaur in power in the opposition and we’re dealing with primitive but effective fire-bearing kites and balloons from Gaza, which seems a sight both ridiculous and surreal.
We had been talking about South America, the promotion by the Left of anti-western and frequently anti-Semitic ideas.
The only defense against indoctrination: critical independent reasoning and research.
The Left leverages the sense of hardship and resentment known to “the masses” — or just plain too many people. To undermine that leverage, the responsible wealthy have indeed to program some to produce a less discomfited but more positively motivated general population.
QUALITIES OF LIVING
Physical Comfort and Security
–basic reliable clothing, food, housing
Psychological Comfort and Security
–basic responsible autonomous personal decision making: aesthetics; ethical, moral, social: dignity and freedom.
Political and Social Comfort and Security
–basic human rights and defense / freedom from criminal enterprise and intent
For the most part, those who are affluent or reliably employed enjoy the positive attributes of the above dimensions, and so much so that we don’t even think about them. We have our “basics” covered and our public security institutions and systems, so we believe, “have our backs”: we are free to be ourselves, to work as we may or must, and in a manner of our choosing.
Where the above are lacking is where the Left / Far Left finds leverage: injustice, insecurity, insolvency (III).
The three “I’s” involve always degraded personal security and the extension of that out to related family and community.
Well recognized universally: many forms of crime committed against persons may be also crimes committed against the state. In the case of murder, for example, whether or not anyone else cares about the deceased, the good state cares.
Where the state cannot defend the natural and right interests of The People — the dignity and freedom of the lawful — the Left / Far Left finds purchase in the interests of the same.
Conservatives, of course, may know abuses too but when empowered without restraint are the more likely to abuse their dependents and labor because . . . they can — too much money, narcissism, and will may produce a ferocious power giving way to the worst expression. Then “absolute power” becomes the power to visit suffering on others with impunity. In that regard, Far Left and Far Right authoritarianism bleeding into fascism may produce similar conditions, and those who would be free and possessed of dignity would from the moderate ranks rise and separate themselves from either extreme to battle back excessive political and social control and exploitation.
It’s a bit preachy keen, but someone “Liked” it, and so I’ve elected to share it.
In the faith communities referencing Moses, competition for power and wealth through subscription and the many demonstrations of devotion and loyalty have produced some bloody “competitions” across time and space. The pious have long fought among themselves — schisms will do that — as well as taken aim at external enemies.
Has as much not been the way of the world?
This day is a little different: we may see one another through what we have to say, and hearing and seeing more, we may think a little more as well.
Moses challenged politically absolute power and with the guidance and power of God removed from it the Jews and the “mixed multitude” that would join them. Not much has changed. No one likes to be tyrannized.
The Jewish liberation story and much else about Judaism proved potently attractive enough to inspire uptake — give Hillel the Elder some credit — by the “restive of Rome”, i.e., those tiring of the brutality and excesses of the powerful. Even with eased conversions, the tribal ethnolinguistic culture (perhaps) could not begin to absorb the numbers, and the Romans looking for a new answer may have had other cultural needs better addressed by Jesus / Paul.
With Christianity in place, General Constantine finds his mission, and about 300 years later, General Muhammad develops his.
The Jews: they appear to worry much less about subscription, power, and wealth, and it’s pretty clear where and how the Hebrews have settled.
Aside: in 12th Century Hungary, laws designed by a Christian government to discriminate against Jews were upon activation applied equally to Muslims (ref. Raphael Patai’s _The Jews of Hungary).
This may be the best time to get off the medieval merry-go-round by looking forward while leaving some attitudes and beliefs plus archaic doctrines and methods far in the past where they belong.
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