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 -Islam – A Comment on Sophisticated Interpretation / Reform

28 Tuesday Jun 2016

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Islamic Small Wars, Religion, Syndicate Red Brown Green

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I’ve never doubted Jasser’s sincerity but I have questioned the power of modern sensibility to “re-map” scripture. We’re beyond the age of miracles but not of religious sentiment, and to approach the updating of the legacy in scripture and related literature of Islam involves first overriding Muhammad’s warnings about tampering. On the part of modern and sophisticated people, I’ve seen two channels organizing effort to either interpret the Qur’an as a multilayered exercise in thought — and who is to say it’s not? — or, as Jasser and others have done, question the instructions and have the great conversation, and may both tracks lead away from the barbarism on display in Baghdadi’s emulation (so he believes) with ISIS in Syria-Iraq.

Related

ISIS – BackChannels supports the idea that ISIS was incubated by Damascus with the support of Moscow and Tehran, and that the method used we “de-selection” for combat and bombing early in the process that has become the “Syrian Tragedy”.

Chief in evidence: http://www.newsweek.com/us-accuses-assad-aiding-islamic-state-through-airstrikes-338582

More recent and related to the above as regards Moscow’s predictable style:  http://www.newsweek.com/russia-has-killed-more-syrian-civilians-assad-or-isis-last-month-report-426775

As interpreted by BackChannels: https://conflict-backchannels.com/2015/10/02/syria-assad-vs-the-terrorists-how-isis-defends-assad/

Islam

Mention is not endorsement, but as much may help move the conversation farther away from consideration of Baghdadi’s 7th Century display as immutable.

American Islamic Forum for Democracy

Center for Islamic Pluralism

Ex-Muslims of North America

LibForAll Foundation & International Institute of Qur’anic Studies

Muslim Reform Movement

New Age Islam & Rethinking Islam

Plain Islam & Islamic Society of Britain

Qanta Ahmed – National Review — BackChannels considers conservative American and Muslim physician and writer Qanta Ahmed a force of nature sufficient for mention as a figure representing a modern pluralist stance in Islam without reform and opposite the Muslim Brotherhood as regards leveraging concession from the rest of the world.

Wasatia

I have not subjected the list to scrutiny beyond the declared penchant of each for moderation and good.

Those who obsess on fundamental core tenets and advisements and hadith and sunnah may be expected to continue to condemn an unreformed Islam by way of its reflection from the past — the Religion of Peace web site conveys the tough critic’s perspective.  Whether the religion, which hundreds of millions of Muslims have assumed perfect from the start, has strength to weather genuine moderation and updating remains to be seen.

Political Psychology

“Cults of personality”, “dictatorship”, “fascism”, “feudal political absolutism”, “idolatry”, “malignant narcissism” — such terms revolve around the construction of feudal space and the will and rule of a single overwhelming and ruthless personality that through the carrot and stick of patronage and intimidation creates and manipulates a universe around itself.  On BackChannels, the great struggle with the past has been presented this way:

Feudal Absolute Power vs Modern Democratic Distribution

For Islam and for Muslims to integrate with the cultural complexities of modern, pluralist, and secular democracies, which may then develop stronger capitalist economies with social welfare attachments, may require some reconsideration of Muhammad’s conflation with God, whether generated originally or by clerics or others promoting their own power in supposed emulation.

Addendum

http://www.danielpipes.org/17792/why-islams-reformers-are-vitally-important – 7/18/2017.

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FTAC – Sideways on Brexit and Putin’s Medieval Theater

27 Monday Jun 2016

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Political Psychology, Russia

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🙂

A fair part of the world is now The World x multinational business x communication x shipping x transportation, and while sovereign states must control their borders, few are able to ignore their neighbors, their neighbors’ ambitions, or bad habits and bad sectors. Probably the way to think about criminality, as determined by familiar western and modern precepts is to attach it to “filtration” — catch the “bad apples” — and osmosis from ungoverned conditions and space to governed.

At the moment, there’s a feudal-criminal world (psst: Moscow and its assortment of Far Right and Far Left helpers) continuing to drive chaos into the more civil, more “rule-of-law” west. While the west should (must!) push back, it should do so with other than reversion to its own feudal tendencies.

What Moscow / Putin promotes has been on full display between Sochi and Syria — immense accumulations of wealth and power beside the most inhuman of practices and the most thoughtless and provocative real behavior in foreign policy. I know I can’t keep going over how Damascus incubated ISIS, or, in Russia, (or Iran), how criminality / kleptocracy leak down through the justice systems and corrode their entire societies, but all of that is what is actually represented by ISIS and so many Syrian refugees.

I know as an editor (of possibly the world’s most obscure political blog) that similar specialists or academics “get” the post-Cold War “big picture” but for most with more parochial interests, it’s “ISIS” and what Putin’s sayin’ sounds about right — lower the portcullis!

BackChannels has developed a whole image of the “Post-Cold War – Cold Struggle” environment anchored yet in Moscow and Washington.  In getting to this point, it has learned that “research analyst” (self-assigned, autodidact) knowledge and public impression and perception diverge often and quite, which fact of life may suit the treatment of the public as “the masses”, for as much fits with Moscow’s philosophy regarding information, “information space”, and political manipulation via, as with the handling of Syria, political theater writ large.

Related and Highly Recommended Summer Reading

Nothing is True and Everything is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia by Peter Pomerantsev, 2014.

Vovochka: The True Confessions of Vladimir Putin’s Best Friend and Confidant by Alexander J. Motyl, 2015.

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FTAC – A Reductionist Rationale for War

22 Wednesday Jun 2016

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Iran, Russia, Syria

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Suggested: “Interest” x “Values” x “Value” | Rationale.

From a humanist’s standpoint, the Syrian Tragedy hasn’t looked at all rational, but viewed through a lens that takes in “absolute power”, “feudalism”, “malignant narcissism”, and the wholesale producing of a theater of war as a demonstration of power, well then it makes perfect sense, horrific though that may be.

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FTAC – Putin’s Rosneft ‘Balloon’ and Syria

22 Wednesday Jun 2016

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Politics

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Yesterday, OilPro reported, “Putin Reportedly Considers Selling $11bn of Rosneft To China & India” (June 21, 2016), and I was asked for an opinion:

It could be a ruse or an easy play to encourage the feudalism he needs to keep his state where he has placed it as a new and kicking feudal homeland, but the ruling cultures — FSB and Big Oligarch Money — continue to confuse Russians and otherwise devour the state (that’s what kleptocracies do). I no longer know how true to form the “mafia state” and “Putin’s Kleptocracy” may be as Putin has for some years tried forcing the oligarchs to invest and spend within Russia. Now Russia has the “T-34 Tank Tomato” for export. What else is in the pipeline? And how “unreformed” may Russians and others, especially the open democracies, expect Russia to be, say, five years from now?

As regards Syria: it appears Putin, Assad, and Khamenei had expected to defend “feudal absolute power” with a great demonstration of barbarism plus the development of ISIS. The west’s refusal to intervene, which matter might and will be argued for a while, I’m sure, has left the problems created in the hands of those who fashioned them. Call it divine justice — or not — the three dictators have now to seriously diminish ISIS and reclaim Syrian space for the privileged of the state whose interests Assad represents. They were so smart in 2011 that here in 2016 they are draining their own pockets.

Related on BackChannels: “Syria — ‘Assad vs The Terrorists’ — How ISIS Defends Assad”, October 2, 2015.

The Obama Administration’s apparent policy of “least (visible) war possible” has forestalled interventions certainly noted as possibilities deep down in the government’s soul while it forged ahead with strategic maneuvers ranging from the achievement of energy independence to the buttressing of NATO elements where needed to stave off Russia’s renewed but “neo-imperial” ambitions.  Perhaps the point has been to strengthen the “western” (oh, come on: let’s call it the “human”) hand (naturally politically coherent, democratic, integrating, self-actualizing, self-organizing across broad polities) while receiving the survivor-refugees coming off the “Syrian Tragedy”, BackChannel’s term for what has been observed since 2011 in the Syrian theater of war.

Additional and Cited Reference

BackChannels.  “Cold War? –> Cold Struggle.”  May 15, 2016.

BackChannels: “Syria — ‘Assad vs The Terrorists’ — How ISIS Defends Assad”, October 2, 2015.

Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, Harvard Kennedy School and the U.S. Army Peacekeeping and Stability Operations Institute.  “MARO: Mass Atrocity Response Operations: A Military Planning Handbook.”  PDF.  Published by The President and Fellows of Harvard College, 2010.

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FTAC – Language, Islam, and ‘Cultural Metonymic Stability’

21 Tuesday Jun 2016

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

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Re. Language — https://www.amazon.com/Language-Cultural-Daniel-L-Everett/dp/0307473805 The author, Daniel Everett, challenges a substantial basis or claim in Chomsky’s theorizing about language.

My kernel for how languages work would be metonymy with paired, primary, and secondary sound/other signal associations. N. may want to catch this because it’s one of the elements involved in conflict within Islam that make winnowing the issue down to the “God Mob” (such may not be restricted to Islam but may be archaic elsewhere) so difficult. If one asks, for example, what the term “homosexual” means in terms of its resonance — what else does it call to mind? — we have several approaches to analyzing that. The science community might want to know and then refer to the incidence in behavior in nature x species and fit that data and theorizing about it with similar data compiled for Homo Sapiens sapiens.

The bohemian-creative communities, long on hedonism, unconsciously selfish or deep down exploitive and willful, give it a glance, give it a go, paint, write, dance, sing (“Take a Walk on the Wild Side”) about it, include it, dismiss it as trivial, so many other things considered, and move right on to their next scene. Dig? 🙂

And the religious refer to holy scripture and the logic of edict that must follow, which mentality went hard on the witches of Salem, not too many hundreds of years ago, and has visited similar villainy to . . . gays in an Orlando nightclub.

Bored, confused, dead-ended, invisible, still energetic and searching for answers — and then comes imam or speaker Farrokh Sekaleshfar who explains that the Muslim response to homosexuality is death, and it would be merciful to get it over with.

Now we have an issue: how stable is that message in Islamic jurisprudence and scholarship?

That’s really asking a question about metonymy within Arabic and within Islamic thought.

Then: how authoritative and how deep goes the distribution of that thought through the Ummah?

The Dhimmi and infidel on the defensive before such a cultural and political program may approach the same thought with external ideas, and chief among alternatives authoritative secular governance founded on reason undergirded by science and research and wedded to compassion, humility, inclusion, and tolerance.

Counterterrorism is a complex field, but in the language part, many recognize aspects of the talk (e.g., invoking the term “crusader west”) that key into signature by way of talk x behavioral change x foreign travel / association with Muslim Brotherhood figures x media obsessions x planning x arming.

In the west, wild poets alter the meaning of elements in language on an experimental basis, at least, and the public picks up and sustains what it finds “cool” — and, for the most part, the culture, the whole shebang, recapitulates itself into the modern English world.

In the Ummah, one still meets Farrokh Sekaleshfar sincerely plying old and frankly monstrous thought with authority. He’s got his hands full today (as a person of interest to western authorities), but what he’s drawn from in language has “cultural metonymic stability” — i.e., he’s not the only one talking that talk and pushing it into everyone’s future.

Related on BackChannels

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/06/12/omar-mir-seddique-mateen-known-to-the-fbi/ – 6/12/2016.

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FTAC – Moscow-Tehran – Far Left Connection – Distilled

15 Wednesday Jun 2016

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Anti-Semitism, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Islamic Small Wars, Political Psychology, Politics, Syndicate Red Brown Green

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One might agree with the sentiment in “BDS is mainly the invention of self-hating Israelis and Jews” but the truth is it’s mainly the invention of historic Russian anti-Semitism ported through the Soviet Union to the “comrade networks” that today have morphed into the New Old Now Old Far Out and Lost Left.

Here’s one of their portals, and I think a glance at the names still on the marquis, as it were, tells of the “longer game” being played on the world stage.

http://www.blackforpalestine.com/

In the wings, imho, but not without cause: the Russo-Syrian effort to sustain their systems of feudal absolute power far into the 21st Century. As KSA realigns westward, or follows its massive investments in the west, Moscow and Tehran may remain committed to installing in the west greater chaos, dissension, and threat.

It’s a big picture view, but the connections between so-called “liberation movements” (add the Far Right New Nationalists like Viktor Orban to the mix) seem to me unmistakable. Possibly, Obama and his subaltern Shapiro are giving signal, whether lip service or sincere, back to Moscow, as the Palestinians remain incapable of challenging the PLO / PA (set up by the KGB way back when) and Hamas (whom Moscow today refuses to designate a terrorist organization).

Does the suggested political architecture work?

Test it.

Directly related on BackChannels, which is now well woven: Syndicate Red Brown Green.

Addendum – 7/6/2016

Golding, Shenequa.  “Ray Lewis Blasts Black Lives Matter Over Silence On Black-On-Black Crime.”  Vibe, April 7, 2016.

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FTAC – Counterterrorism and Intercession

15 Wednesday Jun 2016

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Islamic Small Wars, Religion

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There would seem to me multiple components involved in intercession, starting with bag searches and metal detectors in proximity to potential targets. However, we have been asking law enforcement to produce a response to _anticipated_ crimes. To do that, we need to do some new things:

1. Acknowledge that a limited “opposition” — “Islamists”, not Islam — believes that it is at war with us, including most Muslims, and that it is — in this order — talking, walking, planning, operationalizing, and acting.

2. Broaden — by reducing strictures on — detention periods and surveillance of persons of interest, so that the talker and walker who pings the FBI radar, as has happened many times now, may enjoy some surreptitious follow-up as needed (say as when acquiring new weapons from the local gun shop).

3. In the region of freedom of speech, we need law recognizing “jihadi-talk” as involving conspiracy and incitement, and then we need permit to act against those who mix the poison that gets in through the ears and eyes and those who deliver that poison by publishing it. There have long been traditional limits to freedom of speech — conspiracy, incitement, libel, and slander. In the area of conspiracy and incitement, we have expected direct contact or cooperation between parties, but today we well know that mediated contact perhaps bolstered by related presentations in the mosque are sufficient to contribute to the motivation of an attack.

4. In the region of freedom of religion, we have to recognize that a religion that has in several aspects the motivation of subduing the world by force in fact represents an alien and invasive political program. As regards those aspects, challenge, confrontation, and reformation involve time, short or long, and the kind of time required is long as regards determining what options are forward and then very short, i.e., the time it takes a person to make a small decision in a good direction.

On those “options forward”, there are today many channels, some congruent with leaving scripture alone but interpreting it more deeply — or tortuously depending on one’s perspective; some unabashedly reformist and determined to eliminate “Political Islam” — and then rejection of the the faith through the abandonment of religion altogether, conversions to other faiths or traditions, and any number of adjustments as seem fit to those who flatly reject extremist programs.

FTAC – On Moscow and Tehran’s Interest in the Manipulation of Terrorist Organizations

13 Monday Jun 2016

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

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Moscow and Tehran have two interests served by facilitating and manipulating terrorists organizations: 1) sustaining the feudal worldview — including in the writing of political theater that is history itself — that in turn sustains each their own medieval leadership and systems of patronage; 2) weakening their enemies by infiltrating them with divisive political subcultures.

Notably, Moscow has refused to designate Hamas and Hezbollah and others as terrorist organizations. The probably reason for that is that the same are subject to “handling” in the interests of the now neo-feudal, neo-imperial Russian state.

Moscow has so far refused to designate Hamas and Hezbollah as terrorist organizations.

Tehran, of course, has a complicated but nonetheless a sponsoring relationship with Hamas and Hezbollah (the URL links to a 2014 U.S. State Department report: BackChannels believes the underlying politics have not changed radically in the two years that have passed).

BackChannels persists in believing that the Moscow-Damascus-Tehran axis of power deliberately incubated ISIS by preferentially bombing less eventually useful targets.

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