Category Archives: FTAC – From The Awesome Conversation

If — in my own head — I hit a universal note just about right in Facebook or other conversation, I may simply wrench it from context and publish it here in this category as a mix of observation and, I hope, a writer’s wisdom.

FTAC: Palestinian Integrity: Palestinian Liberation

18 Saturday May 2019

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Anti-Semitism, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Gaza, Gaza Suzerain, Israel, Palestinia, Political Psychology

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State of Affairs: Palestinian leaders needs must treat the Palestinian main base as captives to be kept from free and open discourse and research in relation to their own history.

For BackChannels, “The Palestinians” exist, but the idea of the “The People” differently than presumed by the dictatorships and kleptocrats that have chosen to exploit as weapons “the refugees of 1948”, i.e., the many Christians and Muslims abandoned between armies as Arab forces abandoned their mission to annihilate the Jews of Israel.

Genuine peace may have something to do with shared integrity, not my-side-your-side and the wheedled detente that is ever a ceasefire, never a peace.

My argument for the Palestinian People: after 70+ years of comparative isolation associated with Arab Apartheid, the cohort defined by the Arab refugees of 1948 have indeed become a People, but they have been also deeply intellectually poisoned. The big lie as a thought left unaddressed to fester . . . to whip resentment into boiling anger: “The Jews stole your land and God wants to you to seize it back (and annihilate the Jews)”. Never mind the Turkish land registries, the land purchases that began long before WWII, the agricultural industry that drew Arab labor into its economy, or the continuous presence of Jews in Roman-named “Palestine” across millennia.

The myth: Israel was an invasion.

The truth: Israel has been an investment legitimately obtained.

The cruelties to which the Palestinians, in some radicalized part, remain subject: Hitler’s license for the harboring of genocidal ambitions now supported by Hamas, at least; Uncle Joe’s and Father (I guess) Andropov’s reliance on “Information Warfare” and political repression in the ordering of their own delusional worlds.

Today we know what happens to Palestinian dissidents.

https://www.hrw.org/news/2018/10/23/palestine-authorities-crush-dissent

And “collaborators”.

Haven’t The Palestinians an inherent right to question their leadership — it has been a long time since the last casting of ballots for them — or to read and discuss, I don’t know, say, Benny Morris, Efraim Karsh, or to engage with Israels as each may see fit without fear?

https://www.timesofisrael.com/quietly-israeli-high-tech-companies-contract-gaza-engineers/

An authentic Palestinian Liberation Movement would be helpful.

BackChannels has addressed this “Medieval v Modern” topic quite a few times over the years. Among the editor’s favorite echoes: https://conflict-backchannels.com/2018/10/20/ftac-mec-palestinians-a-people-waiting-to-be-born-again-honestly/

The Soviet / post-Soviet seduced Left / Far Left — the Corbynites, the Cult BDS Waters of the world — are not for the Palestinians but for those who have enriched themselves championing their misery in service to the corruption of those who most purport to represent them.

Soviet cartoons distributed in the Middle East to leverage “the masses” into the Soviet camp.

Might Russia’s animus with the Jews go all the way back to the Viking encounter with the Khazar Kingdom that received tribute from east-west trade?

That’s possible. The Khazar, representing a Turkic Khaganate, had converted en masse to a Karaite form of Judaism and would have been regarded as Jews by those whose eastern trade they had taxed. The ever expanding-contracting-expanding range of Nordic / Russian power overtook the Kingdom has it would Kiev as well as half of Britain: the Vikings were to hold sway in what is today thought of as “The West”, or one might say the European tribes north of the Roman Empire.

Has anti-Semitic hate traveled forward from that far in the past?

That too is possible, the calendar of the Hebrews dating back 5,779 years this year.

How primary in the life of polities are fundamental beliefs and accompanying attitudes?

Would Great Britain be “British” without the anti-Semitic depictions of Shakespeare’s Shylock and Dickens’ Fagin, both far predating the encouragement of Russia’s Okhrana and later Bolshevik KGB?

Add the thought to conjecture.

Whatever history may tell the scholars, today’s hatred of the Jews, i.e., contemporary anti-Semitic ideation and obsession, seems a part of the medieval world and its views, not the modern one of integrity, reason, and study.

For The Palestinians, living as subject to the capricious and unquestionable power of Fatah (via the PLO / PA) and Hamas (thanks to its financial supporters), their dignity, freedom, and human rights will remain in the hands of their true captors, and that is the present Palestinian “leaders” who have led them into the most absurd and dark of dead ends.

The cry for freedom is the same the world over. Vocalist Jamala, 2016 Eurovision Song Context, posted to YouTube February 22, 2016. For the story behind the song: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/tv/2016/05/11/jamalas-ukraine-eurovision-song-stirs-up-russia/

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FTAC: On the Tetanus Vaccine Mass Sterilization Rumor and Potential Interaction with East-West Conflict

09 Thursday May 2019

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Africa, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, International Development, Kenya, Philology, Political Psychology, Politics

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Inspiration for anger: http://healthimpactnews.com/2014/mass-sterilization-kenyan-doctors-find-anti-fertility-agent-in-un-tetanus-vaccine/ (banner: “Health Impact News: News that Impacts Your Health that Other Media Sources May Censor!”).

One might wish that others posting in the world’s open and socially networked web environment would be responsible about it and take the additional 30-seconds it may take using Google search (or Bing, whatever) to check out claims. This particularly vicious sterilization-by-vaccine rumor has been in circulation for decades.

BC’s immediate response to the post follows.

Disinformation.

The story may be a good example of Soviet Era “Active Measures” carried forward into the post-Cold War period. It appears this claim has been in circulation for decades, and not only in Kenya but several other developing nations.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/tetanus-vaccine-sterilization/ | https://africacheck.org/2016/05/25/analysis-why-does-an-old-false-claim-about-tetanus-vaccine-safety-refuse-to-die/ | https://www.vaccineconfidence.org/old-rumours-resurface-the-tetanus-vaccine-story/ | https://www.unicef.org/kenya/media_15665.html

Take note of the nations involved — Mexico, Nicaragua, Tanzania, Philippines, Argentina, Bolivia — and their interaction with east-west (Moscow v Washington) conflict.

https://www.workers.org/2009/world/julius_nyerere_1105/

I cannot prove my thesis, such has been the nature of manipulation from “behind the curtains” down through the ages, but often enough, it would seem those who most claim to be interested in Justice turn out also to be the most obsessed with acquiring Absolute Power — and that “by any means necessary”.

In 2014, The Washington Post got involved in this surreal silliness, noting that, “The issue is far from settled: The government says it tested the same vaccine for the presence of the hormone and found none. The government and the Catholic leadership group even used one of the same labs to test the samples, apparently receiving different results” (Abby Ohlheiser, “The tense standoff between Catholic bishops and the Kenyan government over tetanus vaccines”, November 14, 2014).

The possibility of chicanery should not be overlooked in relation to deeply partisan interests.

While the history of the Catholic Church and Communist Movements has been complex, both systems counsel power as absolute, whether the Power of Almighty God or the Power of Communal Man. At least one source-at-a-glance notes the blending of the two in the 1960s through infiltration.

Whatever the fine points of history may be — and the devils are always in the details — “framing” a medical miracle, whether vaccination for polio or vaccination for tetanus as an evil thing, would seem itself a deed most evil and intended to sow discord and fear. Why? Those who promote malicious perception may then portray themselves as the bearers of hope and order.

Related online and associated with similar partisan religious motivations:

Shalzad, Asif and Jibran Ahmad. “Monstrous rumors stoke hostility to Pakistan’s anti-polio drive.” Reuters, May 2, 2019.

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FTAC: The Big Lie About Israel and the Whipping of the Mob – Palestinian Subjugation by Hamas

04 Saturday May 2019

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Gaza, Islamic Small Wars, Israel, Middle East

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From the Awesome Conversation:

A narrative through which the Palestinians have been lied too for more than 70 years is not something either Israelis or Palestinians need to or should respect. The soul of the conflict sustained by PLO / PA has to do with (genocidal) Palestinian intentions for Israel far more than the history of the place, but the accompanying demonizations of Jews and of Israel is not something that Israel, the west, or modern Palestinians need to accept or tolerate. Those old lies, that propaganda from another age, needs to drift into the past and, at some point, be sealed in it.

Screen capture, May 4, 2019 at 5:50 p.m. EST. Message: “Al Quds will extend the range of rockets. Dimona. Ashdod Port. Ben-Gurion airport and Haifa refinery will be on fire.”

What was the lie?

It has gone something like this: “The Jews stole your land and God wants you to seize it back!”

As lies may, sounds true to the disinformed, ill-educated, impressionable, and simple minded, but it is not a true statement — and for that not the kind of thought intended to improve the lives of Palestinians in any meaningful dimension, financial, physical, psychological, or spiritual.

What that lie has done is simply deflect attention from marauding, mediocre, and murderous “leaders” and their sponsors who have used the same to promote worldviews — there have been two or more broad inventions (Pan-Arab Nationalism; Islamic Extremism) — certain to serve their own egos, social standing (in politically disciplined circles), and wallets.

Russia has made an art of amplifying the resentments of their marks — those who will serve them — and enraging them.

Soviet cartoons distributed in the Middle East to leverage “the masses” into the Soviet camp.

The Palestinians have been corralled into apartheid Arab camps like Yarmouk (neither love nor mercy were shown them in the course of the Syrian Civil War), politically repressed in Gaza and the West Bank, and treated as human shields fit for martyrdom with a little push — or abandonment — by their governments.

For the Palestinian main base there has been no end to subjugation by the PLO/PA and Hamas and related abuse, corruption, and neglect. For Palestinians in the Diaspora — and for the hipsters on the Far Left that endorse counterproductive and misery-sustaining efforts like the “Boycott Divestiture and Sanctions (BDS) Movement” — there hasn’t been a better time to have an independent look into any of the following:

Hamas Human Rights Abuses and Political Repression

Israeli Expansion Via Defensive Arab Wars of Annihilation

Ottoman Administration of the Land Registry of the Region

Palestinian Economic Development and Marketing and Shipping To and Through Israel

Palestinian-Serving Qualified Enterprise Zone Programs

Zionist Land Purchasing Programs

The Palestinian relationship with the Soviet KGB and the phantoms of it have not been fruitful for most Palestinians – but how would Palestinians subjugated by Fatah and Hamas know that? How would those driven mad with resentment and bad information undo their training?

Global News, Canada, May 4, 2019. Related:
Akram, Fares. “3 dead after Israeli airstrikes target Gaza in response to 200 rockets fired by militants.” Global News, May 4, 2019.
Sky News, August 6, 2018. Backgrounder.

Related on BackChannels: “Hamas Urges Palestinians Toward Injury and Death.” May 14, 2018.

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FTAC: Regarding Palestinian Dissent

25 Thursday Apr 2019

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Gaza, Gaza Suzerain, Islamic Small Wars, Israel, Middle East, Palestinia

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Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Historical_boundaries_of_Palestine_(plain).svg (Creative Commons) | Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestine_(region)

https://www.hrw.org/news/2018/10/23/palestine-authorities-crush-dissent

This is the report: https://www.hrw.org/report/2018/10/23/two-authorities-one-way-zero-dissent/arbitrary-arrest-and-torture-under

Regarding Palestinian Land Ownership: http://www.badil.org/en/publication/periodicals/al-majdal/item/1055-land-ownership-in-palestine/israel-1920-2000.html

“Palestine”, so declared in the course of Roman conquest, has never been a sovereign power but a suzerainty through all of its existence.

“The Palestinians” have never before been a People, but given 70+ years of the Arab Apartheid that stranded the refugees of 1948, one may grant that the Palestinians are a unique People desperate for autonomous, responsible, and responsive modern governance.

We know the Palestinians are not getting that governance.

This is the kind of “governance” meted to Palestinians by Hamas:

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14057/hamas-gaza-protests-torture

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FTAC: Brief Note Re. Poland and the Holocaust

21 Sunday Apr 2019

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Anti-Semitism, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Europe, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Poland, Russia

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The topic is perennial: “The Poles did nothing to stop Hitler”; “The Poles murdered the Jews”; “The Poles were the worst of anti-Semites”; etc. So here is one fast response to all of that.

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shtetl/ –> Marian Marzynski’s documentary on PBS “Frontline”.

The Holocaust may be unique in this overlooked way: it was an event so damning of the character of our species that it has been and may remain visited universally over time. The experience of it has given over to the memory of it. Each soul that visits The Holocaust, and there are many ways now, will experience and respond to it differently.

Compiled by the Polish American Librarians Association, a new list of recommended reading emphasizes books that effectively examine inflammatory questions that may never be fully answered or understood but continue to be asked: Did Poles collaborate with the Germans? Why did Poland have the largest Jewish population of any country in Europe? Why did the West disbelieve information about the death camps that was gathered by the Resistance? Why didn’t more Jews resist? Why was Poland the only country in which the death penalty was imposed for Christians harboring Jews? Why was the response of the Catholic Church so meek? Why, by far, are there more Polish names on the roll at Yad Vashem of Righteous Gentiles who saved Jews than any other nationality?

http://palalib.org/collection/poland/ (current)

Three million Poles were also taken by the Holocaust.

And there’s no denying the theft and inhabiting of Jewish property by the Poles.

Nonetheless, lose the black-and-white thinking.

For the energetic, two lesser known proper nouns might be worth a look-up in relation to The Holocaust: “Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter”; “Michael Kellogg” (The Russian Roots of Nazism).

Kellogg’s book: https://academic.oup.com/ahr/article-abstract/111/5/1618/14004

I had left the nouns — Kellogg and Scheubner-Richter — without URLs to encourage readers of the thread to make a little bit of effort to know the true kernel of The Holocaust.

Additional basic reference online: http://www.holocaustchronicle.org/ | https://www.yadvashem.org/ | https://www.ushmm.org/

Recommended for viewing: “Image Before My Eyes: A History of Jewish Life in Poland before the Holocaust”.

https://www.amazon.com/Image-Before-My-Eyes-Holocaust/dp/B000CRR3J2

Addendum in Response to Comment

The Polish experience of the Holocaust had been mixed and not in any small or trivial way. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_crimes_against_the_Polish_nation tells a part of the story of horror for those in whom the Nazis found no value.

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For a Moment, All Were Jewish

19 Friday Apr 2019

Posted by in FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Philology, Philosophy, Political Psychology, Religion

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Source: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4b/%C3%9Altima_Cena_-_Da_Vinci_5.jpg

From the (Still) Awesome Conversation:

I may note that the Jewish Liberation Story — the Exodus from Egypt — has stood signal as God’s affront to human power for almost 6,000 years. In that narrative, God commands Moses while having at the same time control of Pharaoh. While Jews treat Moses with reverence, none ever conflate or confuse Moses with God (he was lucky to have been rescued from among the reeds; spoke with a stutter or lisp (I think — he was most imperfect); and seemed to need a sidekick for courage. Moses was . . . merely human. He didn’t part the waters: God did.

Jesus, rabbi; the first Christians; was it really a Seder?

https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/people-cultures-in-the-bible/jesus-historical-jesus/was-jesus-last-supper-a-seder/

BackChannels will leave the gathering and weighing of history’s slim evidence to the curious, but as depicted by da Vinci, inspired by The Bible, and inscribed now in the intellectual awareness and evolution of mankind, The Last Supper changed the character of the world.

Here’s “the rest of the story” — at least about the painting.

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FTAC: “The Media Went Easy on Obama”

01 Monday Apr 2019

Posted by in Epistemology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Journalism

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Inspiration: the idea that “the media” has a coordinated conscience.

The title of this post has been drawn from the familiar accusation that the media — the “Mainstream Media”, “MSM”, “Lamestream Media” — has been giving President Trump a bum rap.

From the Awesome Conversation

After so many years following other politics, I might be a little less surprised [by anything coming up in the daily news feed]. However, one may pull (and check) factual data from articles extant.

BC sees two worlds in the Open Source: the public’s window and perception and the journalist’s or researcher’s image of the world.

Generally speaking, the public obtains a narrowed, parochial, and under-informed worldview bounded by the constraints of interest, prior education, and time plus, and if engaged as a voter, near-term focus on candidates and issues. Journalists and researchers by profession dig into the history — events, personalities, organizations — contributing to their subject areas and related states of affairs.

When BackChannels reads — that’s what this “reading page” has been about — it accesses current and prior research effort repeatedly in a not too wide band of interests: conflict, foreign affairs, now some U.S. domestic politics.

For the record, BC believes that “the media” — mainstream and popular journals — e.g., Politico, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, The Diplomat, McClatchy, The Daily Caller, The Daily Beast, The Nation, The American Interest, etc. — don’t “go easy” on any politician of interest.

https://www.mcclatchydc.com/

The publishing industry engaged in U.S. domestic and international politics represents a competitive rather than consciously coordinated field, while the journalists also represent a similarly competitive and polyglot crowd but one generally possessed of integrity. It’s up to the reader, one at a time x millions, to evaluate the intents and veracity of articles, their authors, and their publications, as he reads through what is the mediated experience of the world.

The media could not have “gone easy on Obama”: it observed, reported, and opined with customary vigor in the familiar fashion. Obama’s parade through two terms simply gave up less daily fodder for humor and outrage than today’s incumbent.

Related on BackChannels

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2017/10/23/fake-news-genuine-fake-news-the-real-fake-news-get-your-fake-news-here/

Related Online

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ann_Dunham

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/03/richard-north-patterson-i-quit-novels-cover-trump/585901/ | Richard North Patterson. “I Used to Write Novels. Then Trump Rendered Fiction Redundant: The president is a fiction writer run amok, the hero of his own impermeable drama.” Mar 31, 2019.

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FTAC: Briefest Comment: Corbyn, Anti-Semitism, and the Soviet Era

31 Sunday Mar 2019

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Anti-Semitism, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Political Psychology, Politics

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Inspiration: Corbyn’s intellectual connection with the Soviet Era as mentioned by Ben Cohen in a notice and review (The Tower, October 2016) of David Rich’s The Left’s Jewish Problem. My conversational partner had asked about the origins of British anti-Semitism, and while I had a sense of where the answer might be, I hadn’t much validation for it. Now that little patch of curiosity and intuition may be on the cusp of becoming known.

From the Awesome Conversation on Facebook

Of course. I’ve been right about the “Phantoms of the Soviet”. I just purchased the earlier Kindle edition of David Rich’s The Left’s Jewish Problem and hope that will fill in some gaps.

The west has made broad strides in mopping up after the Cold War; however it has succumbed to the new “syndicate”, a melange of authoritarian governments bent on the renewal of feudalism above a darker background of global crime and corruption driven by trade in narcotics and abetted by money laundering.

For Russian power, today’s “anti- anti-Semitism” and anti-Semitism are just political tools for the defense of the terminal or singular representation of the power of the state in one person. What it long ago promoted beyond its borders has been pure intellectual poison.

Updated edition published September 18, 2018.

Related Online

Bloodworth, James. “Labour’s New Anti-Semitism Has Disturbingly Old Roots.” Foreign Policy, August 21, 2018.

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