Today’s compilation may be light – what am I even doing here at the computer, and so early? Still, my eyes see a lot of political coverage from around the world having to do with the support of democracy and its liberal humanist values.
This kind of post has had its own category on BackChannels for years, but has not been a staple for the blog. The writing by others and the reading is so good an spot-on it would be a shame not to share on one sheet.
The links may be dated variously but close to the day encountered (or not — I’ll have to make up my mind about that).
“Is Islam an enemy of the West? It does seem like such a ridiculous question, doesn’t it?” asked Georgetown University professor Tamara Sonn on February 22 at its Saudi-funded Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding (ACMCU). What seemed manifestly obvious to this Qatar-funded Hamad Bin Khalifa Al-Thani Professor in the History of Islam at the ACMCU presentation of her new, eponymously-titled book, is not clear at all to skeptical observers. Thus, her work resembles that of many of her Middle East studies colleagues, who long ago replaced rigorous scholarship of Islam with a fawning approach that blames the West for the region’s systemic problems.
Sonn presented her “little, airport-size book” to an ACMCU conference room filled with about fifty listeners, included like-minded Georgetown colleagues Jonathan Brown, Jordan Denari Duffner, and Father Drew Christianson.
Earlier, on Friday, February 24, Head of the National Agency for Prevention of Corruption (NAPC) Natalia Korchak says her agency has received a request from Ukrainian Finance Minister Oleksandr Danyliuk to probe into the finances of Ukrainian State Fiscal Service chief Roman Nasirov`s trip to attend the inauguration of U.S. President Donald Trump.
Ukrainian state agencies sought to detain the head of the tax and customs service on Friday over the alleged embezzlement of around $75 million – a potentially landmark case after patchy anti-graft efforts from the Western-backed authorities.
Putin’s mission: sustain feudalism in service to political absolutism and reap the benefits of sustained conflicts and, eventually, subjugated and taxed populations.
KGB method: Reflexive Control via the indirect channeling of terrorism to promote the authoritarian nationalism certain to weaken EU / NATO cohesion and favor the development of political environments subject to the control by the wealthiest and most powerful of personalities.
Western Response Most Adverse to Democratic Modernity: in former Moscow-aligned organizations or personalities, adoption of “active measures” and forms of perceptual control, including the “false flag” painting of events, to channel popular perception in service to greater political power.
Western Response Most Favorable to Democratic Modernity: strongest possible emphasis on empiricism, integrity in investigation, and the promotion and retention of American and associated constitutional methods, principles, and values.
In the feudal mode, “the masses” — BackChannels finds the term itself degrading — may be controlled by disinformation, disingenuous information, framing, innuendo, rumor, and suspicion.
In the modern mode, the curious and the reasoning of the public may sift and evaluate for strong information — valid, reliable, significant, and straight.
North Americans and Europeans accustomed to political decency may wish to evaluate whether they really want to have the Feudal Mode installed in the future experience of their own presently democratic and modern rule-of-law states.
I would question the authenticity of each posture or pretense presented, and I should think a good detective would start with the accuser. Again, we have been made to enter an era marked by the potential for KGB-style “false flag” and other manipulation. Where some people dare the improbable — do the unthinkable — the numbers (what are the odds?) may not help them.
I find the Linda Sarsour side of the story deeply suspect given her relationship with Hamas.
What if Jews and Muslims accomplished the vandalism together, and then made a show of amity in the wake of tragedy?
In the feudal mode — where power is concentrated by a force in personality that generates immense wealth and patronage without regard for common law — and in the mind supporting the feudal worldview (blessed with imagination but cursed by limited access to applicable data, critical research and reasoning skill, and relevant knowledge), what, however improbable, is not possible?
In this imbroglio, to accuse either Jews or Muslims — or representatives of either — of engaging in a “false flag” operations draws immediate condemnation as either anti-Semitic or Islamophobic — and therein lies the beauty of medieval manipulation and political theater and the greater horror of it as well.
What happens when power play magus?
Syria — and the incubating of ISIL as useful tool for Moscow and the depopulating of the state to present the west with a major headache.
What will happen to the western public IF subjected to continued “reflexive control” and artifice in the presentation of political event?
Whatever the answer may be, it’s unknown to BackChannels.
However, BackChannels would attempt to armor the “American Mind” against so many feudal methods of perceptual control even though an obscure foreign policy / political science / political psychology blog cannot begin to do what perhaps the American Intelligence Community (IC) needs must do in defense of the Constitution and the related cohesion and integrity of the state itself: set the record straight.
How is it possible that an act of vandalism on the scale reported — in Philadelphia’s Mount Carmel Cemetery, some “75 to 100 headstones were topped” according to CNN — produced no claims (by person or organization), no witnesses — none that have been in any way publicized, at least — and to date no suspects.
What has been produced: innuendo, rumor, suspicion, each a part of the shifting — and at times easily manipulated — perceptions well known to feudal lords and their loyal subjects.
Context: the talk was of Meir Kahane and involved a friend who knew him.
One may respect your living it — and I would recommend Giulio Meotti’s (compassionate, complete, factual, pro-Israel) account of the Baruch Goldstein attack for how that really worked — but that the politicians chose to trim the tendency toward incitement may speak volumes about the image Kahane produced in his own day. Not only should Jews not explain away terrorism, the entire community should note Russia’s long relationship with political terror as an appropriate tool in its realpolitik for upwards of 100 years, and then denounce it and distance themselves from it.
I used this excerpt from Walter Laqueur’s scholarship with the hope that Jews of Russian descent and memory and others involved in the scholarship will deflect a little bit of attention from the Arab anti-Semitism and follow the modern narrative back to Imperial Russian anti-Semitism and its dissemination and amplification in other cultures, starting with the “informing” of the Nazi’s worldview and moving on to what the Soviet managed to do to the middle east — and what is sustained today in Moscow’s relationship with Tehran and Hamas, Hezbollah, and PFLP, if not others.
So how long do you want to keep around one of the world most deceitful and ugly of sustained conflicts?
Hamas and the PLO will continue exploiting and suppressing their subjugated populations — these guys are not Freedom Watch and Human Rights Watch winners by a long stretch — and Israelis and the west will continue building and buying upgraded defense systems to handle the next generations of terrorist drones, rockets, and tunnels.
I’ll apologize for the coming cynicism right here, but it sometimes seems everyone making money on the conflict goes home happy compared to those made to believe that the Jews or the Arabs must be the cause of all their woes, and they must continue suffering until Hamas obliterates the Jews or the IDF “takes down” Hamas.
Left alone, the Middle East Conflict may be a politician’s best and most reliable evil system, efficient for generating income in some parts, pretty good for speechifying and promising the world to one constituency or another.
Context: in light of dozens of bomb threats and two acts of vandalism against Jewish targets, the chatter turned to the JDL, which in the United States remains an FBI designated terrorist organization (the same has been left to operate in Canada and Great Britain). The matter of reevaluating the too obvious public appearance of anti-Semitic acts in America came up between Jews and here fits with the notion that a part of the nation seems now driven toward the revival of feudalism.
The commission of political violence before the Larger Force of the State renders the same very small and degrades and tarnishes the nobility of the actor. Now we reached a super-generational changing of the political guards. Angela Davis is 73 years old; Noam Chomsky is 88 years old. The Baby Boomers are counting on their retirement funding or the state to east them into death, and the New Guards of the Culture are climbing into their positions and making their marks.
In the framework of time, that is where these attacks on Jewish targets are taking place.
I have on Back-Channels noted an increasingly stark choice for modern bodies politic: do ye wish to remain “Modern” — cooperating, multicultural, mutually respectful beneath the benevolent and firm umbrella of secular-humanist / Greco-Roman / Judeo-Christian law developed atop much bloody argument about political power, or may ye wish to slide back into the feudal slime hoping to come out on top with the authoritarian who says he really likes you?
Conflict — equipment, manpower, research — is a money-maker for a lot of people employed and invested in related fields. Give it a thought: to really be kind to our neighbors, perhaps we should all just thin ourselves out. God only knows Americans have the firearms to do it to themselves.
Maybe Black Lives Matter would like to weigh in on this business about an America / EU / NATO that trends toward feudalism and the potential for the conflicts of all-against-all. The same would make the Arab, “I against my brother; my brother and I against my cousin . . . .” sound awfully quaint.
BackChannels reach on Facebook has been broad and not terribly shy; however, hateful events — bomb threats, the desecration of cemeteries — promote suspicions, and one may now wonder at the purposes of those who commit such acts, which appear to no longer involve one city or community center and at least one mysterious miscreant.
The bomb threats number in the dozens; the attacks on two Jewish cemeteries now involve two cities.
Has someone been going down a call list?
Has someone been driving from one place to the next?
Many who follow politics at many levels — diplomacy, foreign affairs, international relations, warfare and terrorism — have picked on some far ahead or far out concepts, e.g., that Obama made the United States “post-Constitutional” or that we are living in a modern “post-fact” world — or a world comfortably supporting “alt-facts”. How is one to reject the arrival of so ambiguous and ambivalent a political philosophy?
For the time being, the United States of America remains a “constitutional democracy”, and perhaps one with a security community that has its own backbone when it comes to the defense of the nation against “all enemies foreign and domestic”.
BackChannels suggestion to those vulnerable to being goaded into violence against pet targets on the basis of assumptions based on the constructs of swirling conspiracies or shadow and uncertain empirical evidence: cool it. Let’s not drag ourselves backward several hundred years in the way of the ill-educated, ill-informed, and paranoid.
Moscow and Company — the dictatorships of the world — require that their loyal patriotic subjects live in a feudal information bubble (that’s what state-controlled press is all about) and view themselves as defending their homeland and majority religion. The encouragement of nationalism and religiosity — and the suppression of political competition and criticism — sustains the despotic in power, and that whether nominally “Brown” or “Red-Green”.
To manipulate the western competition — EU/NATO — I believe Moscow has “played” terrorist organizations or media (like Kavkaz Center) to produce the “Allahu Akbar Terrorism” that induces or pushes democracies toward nationalism.
In military and political science circles — and KGB — a part of the the technique of getting an enemy to do what is wanted without firing a shot is called “Reflexive Control”:
If you are democratic, freedom loving, liberal, politically engaged and you have bought into extreme conservative or ultra-liberal politics in the past ten years, you may just have been — as I believe I have been while traveling in the conservative ranks — duped and possibly partly so by “Active Measures”, another lovely term of art for political agitation and propaganda.
Now look again at America’s Trump Administration and its “Russian Question”, the subject of ongoing FBI investigation.
Active Reflexive Control Hypothesis
Stimulation of “Allahu Akbar Terrorism” –> “Patriotic Nationalist Response” (“Brown”)
Complement: “Defensive Socialist Response” (“Red-Green”) to Threatened Reappearance of Fascism)
Moscow’s intention: concentrate power and wealth in the familiar oligarch manner “above politics” as supported by an immense KGB/FSB political control element while producing sufficient division and turmoil in the EU/NATO states to degrade cooperative democratic politics and return power to wealthy and ruthless feudal cabal.
“There Is Nothing to Fear in Islam,” Says DC Imam At Conference with Hamas-Linked CAIR OfficialFEBRUARY 25, 2017 11:34 AM BY ANDREW HARROD 23 COMMENTS“There is nothing to fear in Islam,” proclaimed Imam Talib M. Shareef during the February 9 “Tackling Islamophobia at Home” presentation at Washington, D.C.’s Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Library. Before over 300 largely sympathetic listeners in the library’s Great Hall entrance atrium, the panel presented an airbrushed understanding of an Islam perfectly at home within a “Red-Green” alliance.
Shareef, imam at a Washington, DC, area mosque, defined Islam as “surrendering to peace” and thus conjoined the disputed translations of this Arabic word as “peace” or, more accurately, “submission.” Among Shareef’s questionable Quranic interpretations, he indirectly referenced Quran 5:82 to suggest an Islamic scriptural basis for affinity between Christians and Muslims. Like many Islam apologists, he ignored how this very verse plays a central role among numerous Islamic canons supporting the antisemitism that is rampant among modern Muslims. Such inconvenient truths undercut his ludicrous contention that “there is nothing in the Quran that says anything against Christians and Jews.”
[Editor’s Update: Coincident with the publication of this post, The Forward published a detailed investigative report by Budapest-based Lili Bayer on Gorka’s ties to anti-Semitic groups in Hungary while he was politically active in that country from 2002 to 2007. It’s a very useful supplement to Prof. Balogh’s account of the history of Vitezi Rend and the Gorka’s family relationship to the group.]Sebastian Gorka, deputy assistant of President Donald Trump and member of a new White House team, the Strategic Initiatives Group, has been receiving an increasing amount of attention in the last few weeks. Julianne Smith, a former national security adviser to Vice President Joseph Biden, worries about both the existence of this new group and Sebastian Gorka’s presence in it. Counterterrorism experts are particularly concerned about Gorka’s ideas that Islam as a religion cannot be separated from the ideology of terror. Knowledgeable people in the field consider his ideas on Islam dangerous and a radical departure from U.S. policy over the last 17 years.
Even outlined, there’s a lot to know — but the Palestinians today should know it too: Moscow and its cronies have made good use of them, i.e., made a lot of money skimming off the money thrown into the middle east conflict.
If you get the chance to read about Moscow / Russia and anti-Semitism and the middle east, take the time. The conflict will look very different and the criminal motivations for it all the more clear.
For those benefiting financially and socially from programs associated with a sustained “middle east conflict”, the resolving of the same may spell “nakba” – a sudden loss in institutional and personal organization. Not only has the middle east conflict turned out its share of profiting millionaires and billionaires, it has provided Far Left (mostly) and some Far Right entities a good reason for getting up in the morning.
BackChannels wonders what readers think: should the Middle East Conflict be regarded as a necessary evil, a useful grinder between “eastern” and “western” — despotic and democratic — political interests?
Or should it be resolved before another generation of Palestinians — given 70 years of Arab-driven isolation and The Preoccupation With Israel, they may now be a People even though it remains unclear which jailer, Hamas or the PLO, may best exploit them — suffocates beneath the will of its Moscow trained or aided handlers?
Note that while Moscow turned briefly westward, President Putin has revived the state as an ultra-nationalist neo-imperial enterprise with its barbarism on display in both Syria and Ukraine. As such, it has sustained its relationships with other autocratic and kleptocratic entities, including at the highest level Bashar al-Assad’s tyranny and Ayatollah Khamenei’s brutal theocracy — and then at lower levels relationships with Hamas, Hezbollah, and PFLP, if not others.
Beyond talk, what have dictators ever done for their people?
Men of honor?
Well, they have made themselves powerful millionaires and billionaires, but they have taken from the mass of their own people their dignity and independence.
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