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.

Muslim Dread in Wake of Boston Bombing: “Please Do Not Let the Culprit Be Arab or Muslim”

16 Tuesday Apr 2013

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“I instantly thought of my friend who ran the Marathon upon learning of the explosions. However, concern for loved ones was superseded by a distinctly Arab and Muslim-American psychosis: “Please do not let the culprit be Arab or Muslim.”

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/04/201341681629153634.html

I picked up on this theme with Facebookers reporting similar statements on Twitter.

Take it is a great sign.

From The Awesome Conversation —

“Please don’t be a Muslim” is a good statement. It tells that the “heat” is on Islam, put there by news of the same stupid things — assassinations and bombings — daily across a host of Muslim-majority states, and this time some — the general targets of the anti-Jihad — are begging out. Want the next step, e.g., joining the ranks of helpful volunteers (that’s probably already happening, I’m not sure anyone’s looking), make them welcome in their repudiation of Islamic motivation as regards this sweeping class of related political crime.

America’s governments will try to slow the pace on the Boston Marathon Massacre, but they have been handed a big wrench for dividing Muslims who no longer wish to be “those Muslims” from Muslims who would — and do — plan and execute such crimes.

Sura 9:29 will go, sooner or later, and much too congruent with it, and this expression — “may it not be one associated with me” — seems a first step on the path to it.

We all know the culprits might be beer guzzling loons with a jones for the jogging set; angry taxpayers making a statement on the due date; black powder gun nuts getting a little attention.

Maybe.

But those have not been making the news daily, weekly, along the arcs of the Islamic Small Wars from Afghanistan to Somalia.

FTAC — “A True People’s War”

12 Tuesday Mar 2013

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” . . . the appalling silence of the good people . . . .”

Literature wrestling with the concept of the “malignant narcissist” goes back decades, but I’m uncertain as to what’s available (in political psychology) now on followers and witnesses.

Sigh.

This is where I most want the “in” to grant funding for independent scholarship. It seems to me to be somewhere between difficult and not possible to immerse in so tightly focused area for weeks or months without compensation / social inclusion or recognition / support.

In response congruent with my personal situation, I try to condense these issues involving refractive perception down to “content of mind” as suspended by language and related unique cultural metonymy.

I’ve wanted to suggest, perhaps poetically, that perhaps the war one sees outside of one’s window is actually a reflection of the war laid out in one’s own heart.

It’s the war one expects to see because, perhaps, it’s the war one has been trained to want.

If for Jews: “all Arabs”; if for Shiite, “all Sunni”; if or “X” owning the perception: all “Y” — as much may seem true for the Jews, Shiites, and Xs noted while the true political and social topology, if/when measured, simply doesn’t add back to the perception.

When a state produces a large rolling army or military force, it’s enemies rightly hold the state and all of its people responsible for that state’s martial and political behavior; be that as it may or may not be, not one “hot” (“blast and battle”) conflict on the planet conforms to that state-anchored conception today.

Instead, we’re treated to horror out of the “land o’ winks ‘n’ nods” — mafia-style deal making and positioning everywhere and the now too common, too familiar, eruptions and rants of a few sewing chaos with blood. Those are hard to see, but most who are most opposed to that behavior should not be so hard to see.

Where are they?

America’s conservative line asked of Muslims immediately after 9/11 about the same question, which in that context amounted to accusation, while taking the stance that Islam would repeatedly prove itself irredeemable. If Those: all Muslims. I’ve never found that right, nor have I accepted de facto the position of “apologist”, which is also a form of accusation. 🙂 Instead, I have found an army of Muslim humanists and rationalists, with the legacy providing that definition but themselves determining the meaning of their own lives. Out of that comes greater clarity about the nature of the humanity involved in its totality and the possibility of eluding the Big War whose primary seat is in the minds of those would pursue the creation of it as their reality.

I think the Common Humanity way behind as regards this view of attenuated civilizational clash based in forcing / producing a higher level of integrity in human affairs universally — not creating trust per se or just because, but by way of the inspiration of a genuine cross-cultural, cross-religion, cross-sect trustworthiness. That’s a hard battle for fighting — it’s a true “people’s war” — and one out far beyond the province of armies alone.

FTAC – Another Dollop of The Wisdom . . . .

04 Monday Mar 2013

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Responding to an assertion having to do with the civilizing effects of one of the monotheistic religions on a remote indigenous people:

They were always human and will be always regardless of what they believe.

Monotheism has helped a large portion of the world simplify the relationship between the existence of the ego and of the cosmic and has freed energy to attend to better and other than mere survival.

Like the search for gold.

And slaves.

Forgive me for having been arch.

The post-Soviet Left goes perhaps too far with ditching religious mysticism, which includes the concept of a God.

Or gods.

We should not mind the imagination so much but rather the want of the destruction of it in myriad others.

FTAC – A Note on Refusing to Legitimize Murder One

28 Thursday Feb 2013

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A correspondent in Pakistan brought this incident and publication to my attention:

Reference: http://pakshia.com/en/shia-killing-pakistan/lahore-sipah-e-sahaba-terrorists-open-fire-shiite-doctor-and-son-martyred/ –>

“A famous Eye-Specialist Dr. Ali Haider, and his 11 year-old son Murtaza Ali Haider, was martyred Saudi-funded terrorists of Sipah-e-Sahaba and Punjab Government-backed Taliban opened fire on their car in Lahore’s Kinal Road.”

My return:

Bookmarked: Islam, Sectarian Conflict. 😦 Without a broad and common law enforcement (paramilitary) umbrella, this atrocious criminality would seem without end.

The special interest press reports these items also as a badge of honor and claim of grievous injustice — both fair enough — but the effect may be to encourage and sustain more of the same in cycle. Some groups — “Pallywood”, for sure, the remote Catholic press, maybe, sometimes — make stuff up: pure propaganda; but this is not.

It may be one reason Obama’s Administration has approached violence associated with Islamic Jihad or a Muslim defensive posture (e.g., Fort Hood Massacre) as clinically criminal — these events add up to “murder in the first degree” and nothing else — rather than legitimize them as culturally, politically, or socially expressive.

I mentioned posting the exchange to this blog.

So done.

As I had mentioned Fort Hood in the exchange, I may mention here that on Facebook, the Coalition of Fort Hood Heroes: More Than Remembrance wants the same sense of the crime — that is, a Muslim American military officer upset with the American military mission in Afghanistan opened fire on his (unarmed) brothers and sisters in uniform while shouting “Allahu Akbar” all the way through.

Just another “gun nut”?

Same category as any other mass shooting (i.e., the “mass shooting”, “massacre”, or “rampage” category — plain force of nature)?

Aviva Shen’s “A Timeline of Mass Shootings in the U.S. Since Columbine” (ThinkProgress, December 14, 2012) provides an overview of the same kind of crime variously motivated.  Stateside racially-motivated killings may come closest to the sectarian experience (of similar crimes) within the Islamic Small Wars.

Where nationality, race, or religion — a simple generalized “discriminator” — provides excuse for aggression and murder, no one wins.  In fact, such violence would seem to backfire and set off an “antibody” type reaction in the populations surrounding events.  Every assassination, every ambush of the innocent and of the unarmed, becomes — or should become — cause for a different kind of courage.

Whether such crimes should be stripped of the rhetorical filigree that would make them more grounded (in something, even poison) if no less hateful, I don’t know.

In the west, this ploy goes both ways: legislators and states on the modern track have a still new classification in “hate crimes” and may add to recognized felonies additional penalties for a crime having been anti-gay, anti-Jewish, anti-Muslim, and so on.

At the same time and as demonstrated by the Obama Administration in its handling of the context or framing of the Fort Hood Massacre, taking the chief contributor to cause — ideological conviction and identification within the Islamic frame (or a version of it) — and officially minimizing its role in the crime has become a part of the Administration’s display of appeasement, courtship, and denial in the American (Christian-majority nation) relationship with Islam or Muslim-majority states and the internal wiring that keeps many of the same (from Afghanistan to Yemen) slipping in pools of their own blood.

FTAC – “I see no value in political correctness.”

25 Monday Feb 2013

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Anyone got the monopoly on truth?

Who decides (anything, everything)?

You do.

One listening or reading and reasoning soul at a time.

From The Awesome Conversation (on Facebook), and just ten minutes old, if that:

——————-

I see no value in political correctness. Period. I do see value in the global promotion of integrity, especially in the communicating and information sectors, and specifically educators, reporters, and researchers, and I might give some elevation to those toiling everywhere in the arts and humanities. These assume their roles with a debt already in place, whether they’re having a conversation with souls across time or writing a next series in pop songs.

This is the one way in which I’m glad Chomsky ascended to the barricades and become a Far Left (New Old Now Old and Lost Left) folk hero — he set the mark for Daniel Everett, a personality so much less of a Boston peacock, who has seen language a little differently and has an abundance of hard data and penetrating logic to support his views.

Let’s get to the shimmer, the “what’s coming over the berm” in the way of Islamofascism: is it “rising as one man” as my friend Tammy Swofford — it will take the curious two seconds to locate her conservative blog — has played with the title of a brief; is stumbling (and I think the stories in Somalia and Mali tell that story); are its adherents striving toward some kind of humanist reformation, and such seems to be appearing, if in small numbers, with Tarek Fatah, Qanta Ahmed, M Zuhdi Jasser, and many other co-aligning personalities across the Islamic Small Wars and their fronts.

Is there a line to be held?

I think so.

Is it only where Al Qaeda and its ilk have an active presence?

I don’t know.

I do know I have asked various others at time with regard to the Umman and their Kavkaz Center-like “Christian Crusader West” vs. the Aafia Siddiqui image of Islam whether any had a transition plan for about 1.2 billion souls nominally affiliated at minimum. None have yet to provide me — or anyone — with a politically correct or incorrect answer to that puzzle.

My tack: try not to get to the end of the story — the apocalypse, the messiah, Judgment Day, and such — too fast; and while slowing it down, let’s have a good look at culture, language, and psychology.

If a global intelligentsia, however cobbled together, has any value, it might have its own mission in evolution, one supplanting “all against all” with “all for all”.

This takes work, but between the possession of a somewhat common global English and some nifty computers, we get to invent our own extraordinarily democratized people’s diplomacy, and that alone may well subvert any state monopoly on information and image.

FTAC – Rational Divine

14 Thursday Feb 2013

Posted by in A Little Wisdom, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Philosophy, Psychology, Religion

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Rationality has its kernel in cogent observable and measurable correlation giving rise to hypotheses and theories that may be disproved.  The realm of things that may be disproved, like the idea that the earth is flat or that the sun and stars revolve around the earth, may be limited and dissatisfying, for most Homo sapiens sapiens prefer some share of the immeasurable by way of imagination invested in divinity and faith, and there may be in that, much observed, the freedom to soar.

At this point, I’m inclined to take my own narcissistic eloquence with a grain of salt, communion with God, nature, and the universe being probably as dangerous, intellectually and socially, as it may be romantic, enthralling, and wholesomely Jewish in its assertions.

From a more practical perspective, I’m a proponent of producing improvement in “Qualities of Living” universally and regardless of assigned legacy or appropriated religious or spiritual stance.  Faith in God is good, but food supply, health care and its distribution, and appropriate employment are good things too and more the sort of things on which we humans may work together.

Even so, poor or rich, animist or monotheist, let’s not be too quick to dismiss what is joyous and right in living.

Count ecstasy worthwhile.

FTAC – A Note On Democracies

12 Tuesday Feb 2013

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The audience for this sort of verbose Facebook posting has its concerns focused on Pakistan and its getting its act together.

I’m of the mind that there are no silver bullets in the architecture of governance as regards managing human energy, intelligence, and the myriad cultures and societies that come of both, but many things may work in a good direction, and democracy provides a great gauge of the character of the people (in place and time) and a responsiveness to that character that can be progressive in terms of “Qualities of Living” across a constituency.  Even so, with Germany’s stunningly regressive election of Hitler in mind and so many contemporary “President for Life” in offices worldwide, the People can turn themselves into Lemmings too and from there find themselves captives again to one sort of autocratic nut case or another.

Verbatim From The Awesome Conversation (FTAC):

Democracies only give voters a chance to change the personalities representing them (which leads to the arch saw: “In a democracy, people get the government they deserve”). The participatory format is not the quality of the government created, but it is progressive and responsive by way of the expressed character, needs, and wants of the culture represented.

Power and the powerful ferry a built-in issue with information that is exacerbated by conflict: how much can and should a government or leader share with “the little people”? Add beneath that the slush and sociology of everyday lobbying in other sectors. Constituents of the open societies get some fight-back from a slew of organizations and professionals who for many reasons investigate every inch of the political machinery in sight and then some.

While political candidates play up access and transparency in the process of selling themselves and their programs to voters, the truth is even the most open societies — perhaps the most open societies — are loaded with closed doors. The private side floats on a sea of proprietary information and relationships somewhat nailed down by confidentiality and nondisclosure agreements with associates and staff; the government at the higher levels may similarly share out information for the lay constituent but sewing up the more specialized details and issues in their own circles; and, of course, at the highest levels, a few words in a closed room, bureaucratic back-channels . . . there’s plenty for imagination.

In the U.S., we can vote presidents out of office after their first term, and the system retires them after two terms, but we cannot see but in small fragments the full weight of continuing relationships and prior agreements bearing down on those who assume office or rise to chair critical committees. In essence, for example, the public can “see Libya”, the end of the Qaddafi era, the advent of a proto-democratic society, but it cannot see the CIA, illicit arms deals, the complete social layout of revolutionary militia, etc. — all those items the province of established, specialized, institutionalized government.

In God we may trust, but for government we want as honest, unfettered, and skeptical and dogged a press and research community as can be funded out of private pockets in the general interest.

A dark space by cultural measures may be so either because of the boundaries, limitations, and qualities of the language attending the experience of living within the cultural mind or by way of the qualities of information available and accessible (!) to a culture.  Consciousness of states-of-affairs may involve not only having good data — cogent, valid, reliable — at hand but also having a honed abstract, imaginative, and value-oriented processing facility within the mind, and that too may have a cultural complement.

FTAC – Pakistan – Fast Note – Integrity in Information – Generalists and Governance

11 Monday Feb 2013

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Information possessing integrity may be Pakistan’s most critical missing piece between the feudal (and obscure) and modern (and open). Getting there, unfortunately, may involve the good — the most sound, the most righteous — fighting for every inch of carpet pulled back and curtain pulled aside. Some motivation may come from the polls, some from personalities already in place and fed up with some things they may have seen or that are bothering (leveraging) them personally, but however it happens, the bringing of more things to light, factually and in reportage, in information open to challenge and further investigation, may spell an end to many things.

As regards management, I’m inclined to agree with F. as regards the want of “bigger picture” generalists at the helm, but perhaps the “generalists” themselves need to be formed to fit the ends of the meshing of the various moving parts within their assignments. Getting improvements in Qualities of Living — physically / materially ; psychologically / spiritually — have a foundation in spatial relationships, and as much takes some brights to manage or produce or enable a whole and healthier human ecology.

While the flow and sensibility of my prose may be easily approached, such falls also too often into regions of the mind where it is much easier to imagine a better world, provide guidance to it, and avoid looking at those nasty gremlins crawling around the space and known as “facts on the ground”.

“We talked about ways to confront the dangerous conditions facing Pakistani journalists. It was a bad year: Seven journalists would be killed before 2011 concluded, making Pakistan the deadliest nation in the world for the press. The year before, eight had died.” [1]

Pulled from an interview with a Pakistani journalist, Ayesha Haroon, who was to be subdued by cancer, the statement only hints at how bad the record has been for journalists in Pakistan; in fact, according to the Center to Protect Journalists, some 51 journalists have been killed in relation to their work since 1992, and the coverage of politics, war, and crime account for about two-thirds of that grim news. [2]

The latest, Mirza Iqbal Hussain, caught the second bomb in the combined suicide and car bombing of a billiards hall in Quetta.  CPJ lists two other journalists killed in the same incident and one other journalist killed in another incident of similar “double-bombing” kind.

Fifth on CPJ’s list, Rehmatullah Abid seems to have been directly targeted — “Unidentified gunmen on a motorcycle killed Abid in a barber shop in Panjgur District, about 375 miles . . . from Quetta . . . .” — in relation to his reporting on the Balochistan Conflict.

In such ways, I suppose, “dark regions” remain dark.  (In fact, a “dark region” is an information concept: it could be a thug’s backroom in any city as well as a locale distant from consolidated military and police operations.  It could be a bureaucracy too — any place where the cards cannot be turned up by the public’s “trusted others” — journalists, in general; appointed official investigators who enjoy the imprimatur of a free and informed electorate).

Working down CPJ’s list, one finds possible dual or triple motives for the offing of Abdul Haq Baloch: one journalist submits that Baloch had been threatened by a state-sponsored militant army; another route: rebel armies upset about their exploits being ignored (!); and yet another path: a government cover-up involving missing (Baloch) persons.

From a related article:

“The latest victim of the violence against independent media in the area – Abdul Haq Bloch – was the Secretary General of the Khuzdar Press Club. He was a great source of inspiration for his colleagues and his violent murder has affected his community members quite deeply. The intensity of the panic amongst local journalists can be gauged from the fact that many of them decided to leave Khuzdar along with their families soon after the burial of their friend, Abdul Haq Baloch, in the evening of September 30th.” [3]

Intimidation works, unfortunately, and it takes a government — a very good one — to turn around to face criminal violence, investigate it thoroughly and to conclusion, and to mete out to murderers their name and their due.

(I’ve just sent a note to an associate asking about security in regard to covering government agencies and operations in Pakistan.  I’m looking forward to hearing back on that).

Now continuing to crawl down CPJ’s list, I find myself going back to January 2012, more than a year ago, to find a conventional, however, reprehensible listing of a murder.  Of Mukarram Khan Aatif, a Taliban spokesman said the journalist had been warned “a number of times to stop anti-Taliban reporting, but he didn’t do so. He finally met his fate.”

We in the west expect to read that kind of a statement.

It fits with what we know we know.

Two more stops down (the list is teaching me to set aside the Baloch theater as a separate variable associated with the killing of journalists), one finds a murder more associated with mainstream politics: “Shahid Qureshi, who also wrote for The London Postwebsite, told CPJ that he and his brother had received death threats from men who claimed they were from the Muttahida Qaumi Movement political party, or MQM.”  Faisal Qureshi had edited a a web site, The London Post, that was, according to CPJ, “widely recognized as anti-MQM.”

Also possibly more in context with Jihad vs. anti-Jihad thinking, and, finally, possibly involving the state, this lead packages the murder of Saleem Shahzad: “Shahzad, 40, vanished on May 29, after writing about alleged links between Al-Qaeda and Pakistan’s navy.”  Shahzad had also written a book with a dangerous title: Inside the Taliban and Al-Qaeda; and he had complained about receiving threats from intelligence officials.

Cited Reference

1. Dietz, Bob.  “Remembering Ayesha Haroon, editor who embraced facts.”  Committee to Protect Journalist, February 7, 2013.

2. Committee to Protect Journalists.  “51 Journalists Killed in Pakistan since 1992 / Motive Confirmed”.  Current to January 10, 2013 as I type.

3. Capital Talk.  “The tragedy of journalists in Balochistan.”  October 6, 2012.