Inspiration for this little bit of wisdom: another set-to about the God of Judaism and the God of Islam — or depictions, expressions, instructions, etc. seemingly attached to the construction or perception (in mind, of course) of each.
Basically: “Your God is not my God — and my rightness must be therefore more right than your rightness.”
And God must have put us here to prove how right we are about God.
Something like all of that plus the bloody historical baggage that has been dragged through time with that kind of thinking.
Ethnolinguistic cultures on earth: about 7,000 (fewer, actually). There are many ways of looking up at the stars and experiencing or interpreting the divine.
In the Torah, God hears Ishmael’s cries too.
The more true challenge of the present lies in handling the habits attending medieval politics and worldviews that better account for turning something we cannot know — God, as we think of God, is greater than our observational capabilities — into something we think we know. Judaism represents the Tribal Way of the Hebrews, an old People with a calendar to prove it and a distinct trail through time planted on or in the earth in built space or artifacts. Rather than mosey on to other civilizational uptake, adaptation, and competition, it might prove healthier to visit the present, take a deep breath, and have both a broad and long view backward, the better perhaps for considering and taking the next step forward.
Having given up the burning of witches and largely ejected “contra-lateral amputation” as inhumane (although there are some barbaric, malignant, primitive, and sadistic holdouts), we might do better than eternally trying to erase one another.
Call it a plea for peacefulness momentarily enshrined in a blog post . . . also a plea to perhaps stand together for a broad and great gaze backward from this extraordinary plateau in human communicating and social interaction — and then: think fresh; think forward; think next.
Commence.
The “New Nationalists” — there’s a term that’s getting around — are old feudal reactionaries. Each — start with Erdogan in his White Palace — means to live as if in a castle socially surrounded by nobility and attended by peons and slaves.
BackChannels hopes they will one day find themselves left floating in their own blood-dimmed and greed-soaked clouds and the better world, broadly inclusive, culturally self-sustaining (we should be concerned with keeping and growing our 7,000 or so living language cultures), earth conscious, still in awe of the universe, and beautifully interwoven will look back on them with a shudder.
Asked of a child: “Who controls the camp?” — “Young militants control the camp, and when the Israeli army comes we throw stones at them. the army doesn’t come here a lot, and there is no authority here. We have nothing.” (05:38).
Oh, Palestinians — yon Jews never stole your land and ye shall know the 1948 and post-1948 truth about that war, about the Arab apartheid camps of your world, and about the “leaders” delivering the drugs, failing to sweep the streets, failing to guarantee the safety of basic housing and water and electrical supply.
Think about those words out of a child’s mouth: “There is no authority here.“
BackChannels has news for you: wherever the Soviet has meddled and Russia to this day maintains old criminal and feudal relationships, “there is no authority” but over and around the inner circles of absolute and capricious power.
For the feudal lords of the Gaza and the West Bank — and the handlers and greater powers of Moscow and Tehran — the Palestinian main base doesn’t really matter.
Money in their own pockets matters much more.
The streets of Shuafat have been left to become garbage strewn and rat infested while the minds of Palestinian children, generation upon generation, are made to entertain lies about their historic and political origins, about the Jews, the west, capitalism, democracy, humanism . . . everything.
“There is no authority here.”
In place of authority, what is there in Shuafat?
Vanity – a malign, merciless, and unyielding vanity on the part of those who would live well off the dispensing of misery to their communities.
What is good?
For the purposes of governance, perhaps start with authentic culture, education, opportunity, service.
The Palestinians have gotten the mind fuck of all times in the dishonest framing of their predicament — thank the KGB and some generations of middle east leaders and compliant local powers for that.
The Cold War, the Soviet Era, has been over for more than 27 years. In its place: a mash-up of Russian feudal and mafia-style power.
Perhaps in the Shuafat enclave in Jerusalem, some should demand of their “leadership”, UNRWA, of themselves — even so young as to be able to say, “There is no authority here” — and of Israel adequate basic services plus authentic education and information subject to each their own inquiry and independence of mind, i.e., the end of the political suppression of the lawful, moderate, and optimistic.
Contrary to the beliefs of nice people who believe The West, the United States, and Israel the chief repositories of evil in the world, dictatorship do not provide their people with stability: they provide themselves with the power to accumulate and indulge in excess and that especially of cruelty, power itself as the malignant embrace it becoming the power to visit suffering on others with impunity.
Note: the editor has added the URL to a BackChannels piece on ISIS as Assad’s preferred enemy or foil.
I used to say the same thing, especially in relation to the invasion of Iraq: ” . . . at least Saddam Hussein kept the lid on the pot.”
In retrospect, Hussein did not keep things under control. He leapt into a ruinous war with Iran when presented with weakness in the shadow of the Islamic Revolution, and produced infamous sport like this:
As regards Syria, I and my blog 🙂 have tried to float a too accurate message about barbarism, feudal and totalitarian politics, and their blending in KGB-style Political Theater. Assad had really to produce conditions favorable to the assembling of the “AQ-types”, the “jihadists”, and their sorting out into the most vicious of fighting elements, and then with ISIL / ISIS make certain that he would have the foil best suited to driving off (to Europe) his most troublesome noncombatant population.
Mission accomplished.
Where westerners believe themselves culpable for such a disaster — “if we hadn’t done this or done that” — the truth slips away without pursuit _except_ by a seemingly small cadre of academics and journalists (and retirees) who drill down beneath the convenient cant to drown themselves in the details of history.
Russian political culture has long displayed itself as medieval, ruthless, and ever paternally authoritarian.
In the near span of 100 years, 1917 to 2017, the experience of two upheavals by revolution and the appearance of three forms in government has not changed its historic character. Russians less connected to Moscow and St. Petersburg are missing out on all the fun with cash while the oligarchy could care less — and thus as it has ever been.
While Moscow often admires Europe and the west and adopts related aesthetic and cultural practices, it seems to resist deep political change, not to beg the point. The Obama Administration had indeed hoped to encourage a little bit of western liberal values in what remained of the Soviet axis of power in the middle east, and at that junction in 2011 defined by Bashar al-Assad’s response to a mild challenge to his absolute power, he would go on to say that Putin had reverted to “the KGB playbook” — and that’s the truth long forgotten at this point in the Syrian Tragedy, so I call it, and the more general and frightening “east-west rivalry”, so others call it.
BackChannels has adopted the term “paternally authoritarian” from the work of the recently late Richard Pipes. There are two volumes listed in “The Russian Section” of this blog’s library:
Blog editors may not have the collegial and financial defenses plus resources known to tenured scholars, so there may be other of Pipes’ works here, even bookmarked — there’s a box full of set-asides that has not been opened in ages — but the two mentioned by do for a start. Note also: flood by web-info, the editor has developed a short memory for which countermeasures are being installed, specifically, limited time on the web to much less “Facebooking” and blog posting in order to return to that world in which the companionship of a book — any long read — might be appreciated for a day or two without deflection or distraction.
When I started my journey around the world Online (In English), I had never even heard of “Partition”.
While I forget much or what I read, I’ve had the wisdom to keep my reading — my books — close by and may rapidly access what I’ve read.
I have 2,000+ close by reading options and could do my own in-house “Great Books” education, languages included, but I have to match age and mission sense with available resources. ??
As a species, our issues on Earth are profound, and that includes not only our search of political reconciliation and the diminishing of war, God willing, but the greater taking up of the stewardship of our planet, so that we may enjoy the image of our survival much farther into the future than the end of, say, Epoch of Oil.
We can and should open our eyes more widely than we do today:
Do you believe in the existence of conscience? Empathy?
God also may be described as an “inter-consciousness” between man and nature across the universe.
Thomas Berry has promoted “earth consciousness” with our species as stewards.
I’d go the extra light year and may — or not as Internet publishing appears to promoted promote abbreviation and compression of thought.
Many years ago, I played with Heinrich Böll’s “Murk’s Collected Silences“, a short story about revisionism involving a radio host and his indecision about the invocation of that singular and most Proper Noun, “God”. At the end of his career and interested in shaping the memory of himself, he decided to hedge, and instead of the recorded invocations of “God”, he had his technician cut out the world and replace it with “thou higher being whom we revere”. Murk, the technician, then cut even the resulting moments of silence for splicing together.
Here on BackChannels, this editor has been using as a trope, similarly hedging but advancing a concept at the same time, “God, Nature, and the Universe”.
It may be that we humans merely process chemicals faster than rocks, and that is all that differentiates our species and all else that lives from stardust.
Indeed, one may see pools of blood where spilled become flakes the color of rust (for the same reason) and drops of it diminish to powder dissolving in air.
Around the world, resurgent nationalism in defense of indigenous culture has refocused too many on the authenticity of their character: “The Real Americans”, “The Real Jews”, “The Real ____________”.
Whatever the McCoy sought, one might discover a few overlaps.
What answer may there be to so shallow a perception– more than that: a defense! — of legacy in identity?
I spent forty years in the American Wildness before venturing into the synagogue where I live and joining it.
I recall one afternoon lazing on the mall of the Maryland campus when a “Succoth Mobile” stopped not far from where I was enjoying my hour in the sun and a representative came up to me and asked, “Are you Jewish?”
“No.”
I wasn’t middle eastern.
My American eastern woodlands were nothing like, what, the hills of Judea?
Here for harvest, we celebrate Thanksgiving.
However, I also recall spending hours one afternoon in some lonely part of an upper floor of McKeldin Library (UMCP) looking over the photography of the Holocaust.
I don’t recall the motive, only the moment.
I took my Bar Mitzvah in 1968 reading off a plastic card. The morning may have been a ceremony for two, and, on my side, certainly for the adults. I really hadn’t much to do with it at all.
Forty years later, after walking out of that mill, I walked into a real synagogue where American children spoke Hebrew with fluency at their ceremonies. The “Conservative-to-Reform” Friday night greeting of the Sabbath took place in both English and Hebrew, and the building remains regal and old. There were other European and Hebrew and Israeli features as well as the unmistakable imprint of generations going back 125 years.
In hyperactive America, that’s an old synagogue.
So, one might say, I got to reconnect with family, my spiritual family (although I have spent time with the Unitarians and the Ethical Society as well over the years). I have been also ten years with my synagogue. I am one of those who, perhaps, visit for a time, but I am Jewish, and that knowledge is as fundamental to my sense of identity as my name, Schmuel. You may call me “an American of Jewish descent” but that in no way would make me less Jewish than thou.
“Indeed, it would appear Jamal Khashoggi’s disappearance, flight, or murder has become a matter most delicate, most intriguing, most opaque.”
Epistemological Khashoggi
Things we know.
Things we don’t know.
Things we don’t know we don’t know.
Things we don’t want to know.
Things we will never know.
Thing we know but don’t know that we know.
Things we don’t know but fervently believe.
Finally
Things we would like to find out.
One of the 15 suspects in the death of dissident Jamal Khashoggi dressed up in his clothes and was caught on surveillance cameras walking around Istanbul on the day Khashoggi went missing.
Footage being used as part of the Turkish government’s investigation into Khashoggi’s death was shared with CNN, and shows the man, identified as Mustafa al-Madani, leaving Saudi Arabia’s consulate through the back door wearing Khashoggi’s clothes, a fake beard, and glasses, a senior Turkish official told CNN.
Even so, what has happened to other potential evidence of murder?
Above all: where is the body?
A man in a foreign land leaves his fiancee (of another nationalist) parked by the curb, walks into his nation’s embassy to obtain a permit for marriage and fails to walk back out to drive off into the sunset with his presumed beloved.
Missing: the body.
Also missing: blood spatter; the odor of disinfectant; the appearance of discarded . . . anything: clothing; a table or parts of one involved in a murder; not even a shoelace, much less a pair of shoes, has been shown to the public.
Also for public notice: embassies are considered a part of the sovereign territory of the state represented: what have the Turks been doing (directly) in the Saudi’s building?
Everyone knows the answer to that question — one good reason for the invention of the “Secure Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF)” within buildings intent on defending the most private and sensitive of conversations.
Bold added:
Erdogan called on the perpetrators to be brought to justice in Istanbul and questioned whether the Vienna Conventions, which give immunity to diplomatic staff, applied in this case.
It was the first time that any official in Turkey has publicly outlined the Turkish contention that Khashoggi was killed by a hit squad sent from Saudi Arabia. But while Erdogan had promised the “naked truth,” he offered few details beyond those revealed by Turkish officials speaking privately.
But officials are skeptical of Saudi’s explanation for the Khashoggi’s death. Turkish officials have repeatedly touted claims that Khashoggi was brutally tortured and dismembered by what appeared to be a 15-person kill squad flown in from Saudi Arabia.
Where are the bones? The clothes? The “body bag”? Was there a sink? A plastic or porcelain tub? Where are the clothes of the killers? Where was the fire and smoke needed to burn things that burn? Where are his shoelaces and their plastic tips (if of common construction)? No nails? No hair follicles?
After his transforming Turkey into a family enterprise, what motive has anyone from the post-Enlightenment west for believing the presentations of President Erdogan?
In Sum
Where is the body?
Where, in fact, is the story?
BackChannels may suggest that the Saudi confession to murder should have been accompanied immediately by its evidence. Today, the lag in time between the confession and the turning up of evidence — so late as to make fabrication possible — may make the confession suspect.
The time may be running out for even the telling of an untimely untruth.
Indeed, it would appear Jamal Khashoggi’s disappearance, flight, or murder has become a matter most delicate, most intriguing, most opaque.
Multiple sources suggested Khashoggi had been cut up and his face “disfigured,” Sky News reported.
Sources in the Istanbul Prosecutor’s office denied that Khashoggi’s remains were found at the consul general’s home, adding that a picture on social media purportedly showing the corpse is fake.
BackChannels will try to stop at this point: where is the body? Is a body found really the body? If a man wished to leave his body, loosely speaking, would he also not leave behind his old clothes?
There is no way to address such questions from an armchair or by watching television.
That may not be the problem — so the man is dead or, perhaps, on his way to early skiing vacation in the Swiss Alps (never let it be said the editor of this blog has not been a foolish romantic); what is the problem is that “the public” — or respective national publics or statistical clumps of national or party identity — may lose its basis for believing anything from any source.
Gruesome, brazen and barbaric were some of the terms that were thrown around in response to learning his fingers were cut off first, then his head and finally his body was chopped into small pieces in order to “disappear” it from the crime scene.
Images of such a sadistic act were the linchpin in inciting the political debacle. Yet, since the remains of Khashoggi’s body had not been found yet, it also served to precipitate a war over who controlled the narrative. With this “memory” destroyed, who owned the truth?
