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.
“Caution: The possession of anti-Semitic / anti-Zionist thought may be the measure of the owner’s own enslavement to criminal and medieval absolute power.”
The statement appears with many others down the left sidebar:
The greater contest associated with anti-Semitism may be that between feudal power supported by the medieval worldview — power descends directly from God to some benighted human — and the modern image of our glorious and variegated humanity. Those that recognize that God, nature, and the universe have produced and sustained for us at this time about 7,000 living language cultures, each of them addressing their environmental and social challenges differently, should not be able to remain with or return to an inflexible absolutism.
The supremacist values — out of any people anywhere at any time — defy nature and human nature, and where they’re forced to work — because it takes force to get them to work — people suffer . . . and it could be said that everyone suffers.
Indulgence in anti-Semitic cant may be a good signal of having chosen to march one’s people backward in time.
I’ve harped on this answer around Facebook, and may have gotten a bad rep for it, but I stand behind what I have found in relation to the middle east conflict and the political history of the 20th Century:
The west and the Palestinians (together) have been duped by Moscow!
I know that Arafat and Abbas are deeply admired figures in the Palestinian territories, but I / we also know that the Palestinians have been deeply controlled by the powerful management of their information space accompanied by political repression.
None may have peace without integrity and none may have integrity without full acknowledgement and comprehension of how Russia’s history and political culture contributed to Nazism and to the later formulation of Palestinian “liberation” rhetoric — and then the raiding of the proceeds of the business.
Regarding the path of the forged “Protocols” and their transfer into Germany in the 1920s:
The Palestinians may not know it, but they’re in good position, professor Dajani especially, to become the world’s leaders in bona fide intellectual history IF they can get The Bear off their backs.
That’s something to think about.
In the interest of peace, one may also lend consideration to whether evolving and modifying the systems of infantilizing disinformation (for “the masses” who would fare better being treated like human beings) and related loyalty and patronage should be changed quickly or slowly — but they have to be changed IF the Palestinians and their advocates (or interlocutors) genuinely wish for better lives — real dignity, real freedom, honorable prosperity — all the way around.
Repressive, selfish, and totalitarian regimes hide what they do by shielding their followers from cogent and legitimate information. They basically keep their own in order — loyalty to powerful narcissists — by keeping them deprived of knowledge.
The officials who continue to harp on Mein Kampf, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and countless rumors that serve as “blood libels” should be of another day a long time ago.
Those who sustain such practices with their mouths should be regarded as phantoms by Israelis and Palestinians equally.
The prompt for the rant had been reference to a Palestinian Authority “leader” talking up the forgery that was The Protocols of the Elders of Zionand the question raised was what to do today about that kind of baldfaced lying.
BackChannels shorter answer: drag it out into the sun where all may see it.
I am suggesting that if rational peace were possible today — and you are rational in your thinking — it would have been achieved with the Oslo Accords or, later, when the Jews accepted their own ejection from Gaza.
Conveniently dropped from the “rational” discourse, which isn’t so rational if it avoids, covers, or masks the historic alliances, the more brutal forces of order, and the intellectual poisoning (disinformation fed to the Palestinians for incitement), in the region are elements difficult to deny. For simpletons and “useful idiots” — Stalin’s term for those he could control and use with his mouth — the narrative will start with colonizing and theft of the land by European Jews (even though land was purchased and Jewish agricultural development grew the population in paid Arab and Jewish labor; even though the Jewish presence / residence in the land spans thousands of years — 3,500 years in Gaza; even though Hebrew could have been borne and spoken nowhere else; even though 800,000 Jews ejected from Arab states — what happened to their property? — contributed to the formation of modern Israel — and the Hebrews are justifiably back in the Land of the Hebrews).
All of that in parenthesis seems tucked away in the arguments of the anti-Semitic.
Add: the “work” of the BDS movement, the Electronic Intifada, the nominal “peace movements” and leaders that sustain the middle east conflict — and most at cost to Palestinians more than anyone else! — by promoting the same vacuous words over and over and over again in true _Animal Farm_ fashion: “The Occupation” (“the brutal occupation . . . .”) when in fact Moscow literally produced Arafat to produce in turn a pretty good conflict business that has liberated no one but the corrupt and the criminal.
Husseini-Hitler?
Shrugged away.
Hamas anti-Semitism?
Masked away with apologies and professions of good intentions made by third parties.
Arab apartheid — evidenced in the camps and much confirmed by the brutality meted to Yarmouk in the course of the Syrian Tragedy?
Not a mention of responsibility for the diminishing of the rights and status of refugees — and note: all others spilling out of other wars are at worst most reluctantly maintained in camps as they meet other migration and resettlement challenges. Only the Palestinians have been singled out by the Arab world — or the former edition of it — for use as a weapon against the Jewish (Hebrew) State. For almost seventy years, the fate of the same have been suborned to the ambitions of royals leveraging fear and hatred of the Jews and interest in religious supersession to do it.
Both Ismail Haniyeh and Khaled Mashaal have developed reputations as billionaires while the Palestinian main base is held captive — politically intimidated, ruthlessly exploited, frequently punished — in the interest of many money-making methods.
In many ways, the middle east conflict has been institutionalized and for the once KGB developed leaderships turned into a pretty good family business.
Among the more interesting aspects of the conflict may be the language programming developed to keep the machinery working for the criminally wealthy: “The Occupation” (I call it “The Preoccupation with the Jews!”); “Resistance” (to meaningful education, health care, economic development, etc.). In all aspects, the rhetoric fed to the Palestinians is medieval and designed to serve the equivalent of feudal lords and connected families (a patronage system).
Notably, Hamas associates and backers, starting with Moscow / Moscow-Tehran, share investments in similarly feudal systems and absolute power.
Inspiration: another baseless Trumpeted attack on CNN.
Posted elsewhere earlier today:
If there’s “Fake News” among the majors of “Big Media”, there must be fake journalists and institutions passing along their fakery to young journalists.
I’ve been arch in the opener (of course): The organizations noted have each devoted themselves and inspired young journalists toward excellence.
The weakness in democracy resides in the absence of meaningful political education in the constituents or deliberate disinformation, generally by way of the “agent provocateurs” of foreign sponsors. Basically, if the voters fail their history tests 🙂 and sustain their disinterest in most domestic and foreign affairs, then they leave the character of the government up to government elites and potentially elite influences. If that’s where we’re going, government may as well become a private business benefiting private interests and exploiting as much of the public as possible.
In some ways, such a process may be inevitable, as we rely on others to keep other machinery humming while each of us does our thing even if as free as we may be to independently read and pursue research curiosity. We’re plainly limited x time / day x energy and cannot “ride herd” on the reporting on critical issues.
Still, I would question the leader who attempts to dissolve the credibility of the professional journalism community while engaged in turning a state into something of a private fief.
Fault for American ignorance in relation to the “Fourth Estate”, not to mention the foundations of American political culture and America’s leadership (or perhaps now former leadership) in the greater world may be assigned to generations of business and technical interests on our public education systems. The failure to transmit cultural basics and values down to the floor of the economy is signal of cultural failure.
Prompt: the image of the Scales of Justice and the remark that the mission of the just is to “keep the balance or to seek balance when there is an imbalance”.
. . . . the scales of justice do not represent the equalization of everything or refer to “cultural relativism”: they represent blind-equal-objective weighing of evidence in matters pertaining to justice.
Justice does not seek to make the wealthy poor or the poor wealthy but rather to maintain the same ethical, legal, and moral principles as societies choose desirable and good for both classes. Rich or poor, black or white, Israeli or Palestinian Arab, all should be equal under the law.
In that the the Arab hangover from the 20th Century, the PLO, and Hamas apply different standards for the managing of Palestinian Arabs in their greater population than they do for themselves, it would seem an injustice on the part of such leaders to treat the Palestinians as less than themselves.
For Israel, military oversight is only a practical matter of defense. For the wealthy Abbas, Haniyeh, and Mashaal, the enclosure, separation, and language-borne “weaponizing” of their subject populations must be something else, i.e., the idolization of power over justice.
By way of Moscow’s practically patented habits in barbarism, including the manipulation of “the masses” through disinformation and reprehensible cultural education, the Palestinians have come to represent to the world a much confined and ill-used population anchoring for their leaders a most lucrative conflict business.
That’s just how it has been for the past 70 years: the feudal leadership directs popular anger toward Israel but keeps itself flush with serious cash.
Related on the Web:
If it had been invested shrewdly and well Gaza today could be a mini-Monaco. It could have a deepwater freight port, a flourishing fishing port and a leisure harbour crammed with the yachts of wealthy visitors. It could have resort hotels on the sea and farms, ranches and orchards in the hinterland producing nutritious food.
It has nothing of these. It is a failed state of poverty, misery and violence. So what happened to all that money? Well, a lot went on guns, explosives for bombs and material to build rockets to launch at Israel. But the bulk has certainly suffered the fate of most wealth in that neck of the woods. It has simply been embezzled, not by Israelis but by Palestinians and above all by their leadership cadres.
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas is currently building a $13mn presidential palace in the West Bank, just outside Ramallah.
Reportedly scheduled to take two years to finish, the palace’s construction, including two helipads, guest quarters and administrative offices over more than six acres of land, comes just months after the PA was forced to pass an emergency budget when billions in pledged international aid failed to come through.
Given Tehran / Moscow-Tehran’s duplicity where their ambitions have been concerned, State would have known the Iranian treaty worthless before it was signed and consequently used weakness (remember Kerry’s pink tie?) to purchase time for other measures.
In that Moscow-Tehran tie together in analysis, the same policy in diplomacy has helped Moscow-Damascus destroy Syria while running down Moscow’s ready cash base. Possibly: we weren’t going to be blackmailed by the incubating of ISIS or the threat of mass migration; instead, in time-honored fashion, we have been watching the enemies of the west destroy themselves.
The Saudi deal — billions in arms — seems more complex but pursues similar ends in relation to the continued diminishment of the once Soviet Era axis that Moscow has been trying to sustain and Washington has been trying to neutralize and transform. In that the Saudis have had a long history with The English and today are today heavily invested in western success (look over Kingdom Holdings) and taking some steps to alter the deeply medieval character of the state — https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/11/02/sixteen-women-the-kingdoms-most-powerful/ — the relationship may be more valuable than the arc of time involved in getting a medieval state that has contained itself from violently aggressing against the west — into position for updating.
That these “moves” work too slowly and across Administrations dissatisfies us, but some — well, maybe just me — who take the long view of Russian, Islamic, and post-revolution Iranian politics, the popular demand for direct-fast change promises primarily to deliver the chaos and violence of revolution and war (which may have to be met in any case given Moscow-Tehran’s commitment to feudalism, feudal political methods, and the sustaining for their populations a medieval worldview). It would seem better to maneuver both into being less ready for war on a large scale — one by allowing the leadership to run the state short on ready operating cash (Russia) and the other (Iran) by way of the modern wants of its constituents, who will find they cannot get what they want if their regime cannot contain itself.
Prompt: mention of “Israel apartheid” (a standard trope in the anti-Semitic wings of the New Old Now Old Far Out and Lost Left) and “letting the refugees return”.
How about ending Arab apartheid and absorbing the Arab refugee generations whose first were abandoned between armies in 1948?
Oh, and how about giving the Palestinians their money back, considering the manners in which Arafat and Abbas became multi-millionaires and Haniyeh and Mashaal billionaires.
Sustaining the MEC supports feudalism, makes crooks wealthy, and extends for Palestinians The Preoccupation with the Jews.
Prompt: Israel is the sole cause of the refugee issue.
Arab absence of empathy and favoring of an anti-Semitic posture and related supremacist assumptions at the end of WWII led to the refusal of terms and the subsequent genocidal (river to the sea) gang-up on the new Jewish State. The “Palestinians” — Egyptian and Jordanian Arabs, migrants also to the fields of the new agricultural economy of the day — had been encouraged out of the way of battle with hopes the Jews would be gone when it was over.
It didn’t work out that way.
It takes a mighty and malign narcissism to refuse culpability for a disaster like the one dealt to the Arab refugees of 1948 (never mind the 800,000 Jewish refugees from Arab lands that would follow in the wake of the war) and then to turn the same bereft population into a political “poker chip” for the enrichment of a criminal few unconscionable enough to spend decades manipulating hate in the cause of their own aggrandizement.
It appears that given a choice between encouraging conflict and undertaking development, the Jew-hating and once Soviet-loving portion of the Arab bloc invariably persists in poisoning the Palestinian mind, keeping the conflict alive, and handily siphoning off the world’s charity to line its own pockets in related systems of patronage, not that any should want “powerful families” to find themselves bereft of their portion of the take.
Prompt: the image of the Scales of Justice and the remark that the mission of the just is to “keep the balance or to seek balance when there is an imbalance”.
BackChannels 