• Home
  • About
  • Concepts, Coins, and Terms
    • Anthropolitical Psychology
      • Civilizational Narcissism
      • Conflict – Language Uptake – Social Programming and Scripting – A Suggestion
        • Language Uptake – Programming – On Learning to Listen
        • Mouth –> Ear –> Mind –> Heart System
        • Social Grammar
      • Facsimile Bipolar Political Sociopathy
      • Malignant Narcissism
      • Narcissistic Scripting
      • Normative Remirroring
      • Paranoid Delusional Narcissistic Reflection of Motivation
    • FTAC – “From The Awesome Conversation”
    • God Mob
    • Intellectual Battlespace
    • Islamic Small Wars
    • New Old Now Old Far Out and Lost Left
    • Political Spychology
    • Shimmer
  • Library
    • About Language
    • Russian Section
  • Comments and Contact

BackChannels

~ Conflict, Culture, Language, Psychology

BackChannels

Category Archives: FTAC

FTAC – The Want of New (Meta) Language

28 Tuesday Jul 2015

Posted by commart in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC, Philosophy, Politics

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

humanism, metalinguistics

The Jews could not have done very well against the Romans!

🙂 

Revisit Titus and the horrific burning of Jerusalem.

Revisit Masada, for that matter.

The distillation and order I suggest for the uptake of a Judaic monotheism, which we all share (whether we like it or not) starts with the jurist Hillel the Elder (35-BCE to 10-CE), who produced decisions and an outlook that made Judaism less ethnic, more evolving around principle, and more accessible to conversions (uh oh). smile emoticon So: Hillel the Elder –> Jesus and Paul –> General Constantine –> General Muhammad.

We may agree on the unity (and sanctity) of life and of a natural life well lived, but our disagreements on scripture, the composition of extended works and exegesis, devolve to our ethnolinguistic cultures once more separated by geospatial relationships and by time. In retrospect, here at the advent of a new world interlaced with Internet-based communicating, our enmities seem cultivated in fear and dreadfully superficial and malignant narcissism.

At this point, no one need have the last word — not Moses, not Jesus, not Muhammad, nor our overlooked link in the end-of-the-Roman Era family guy Hillel the Elder. What we may need are new words resonant with the more noble aspects of our common humanity.


Artists and assorted creative types needs must submerge themselves with object-projects: book, essay, play, poem, screenplay.  That’s what it takes to pioneer thought and fashion ideas and insights into transmissible forms, and that auto-constructed isolation may go hard on the soul — it certainly has on mine, and the desktop has added its own layer of interference with the experience of what is proximate in the way of events and people.  Nonetheless, “chatyping” in response to what others spell out online proves always stimulating while the cyber-environment — global, politically across cultures, across political boundaries, across languages and religions — provides a glimpse at what today is possible and perhaps needs to become a new reality in conversation.

The Awesome Conversation itself has been nothing less than miraculous.

What comes next?

This blog has stated its six most irreducible virtues at the top of the sidebar to the left.

Those ennobling characteristics, however, may be brought to bear against a world rife with cruel and despotic leaders and their deeply manipulated and misguided (start with “state-controlled press” and end with “absolute political suppression”) followers and the messes made by related widespread conflict, diminishment, ignorance, and impoverishment.

Rome was neither built nor taken apart in a day, and while Latin has become a “dead language” — useful to the Catholic Church and to science for its stability, Hebrew has been returned to life and with it, so one may hope, interest in the preservation, survival, and evolution of some approximately 7,000 still living languages and the cultures and subcultures each represents in the global tapestry.


Posted to YouTube January 2, 2015.

# # #

Link – Hanson on Obama, Narcissism, and Appeasement

05 Thursday Feb 2015

Posted by commart in FTAC, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Islamic Small Wars, Links, Political Psychology, Politics

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

narcissism, Obama, political psychology

Members of the Obama administration have insisted that the Taliban are not terrorists. Those responsible for the recent Paris killings are not radical Islamists. The Muslim Brotherhood is largely secular. Jihad is a “legitimate tenet of Islam.” And “violent extremism,” “workplace violence,” or “man-caused disaster” better describe radical Islamic terrorism. Domestic terrorism is just as likely caused by returning U.S. combat veterans, according to one report by a federal agency.

What is the point of such linguistic appeasement?

http://victorhanson.com/wordpress/?p=8188 – 5/5/2015.


My response within The Awesome Conversation:

Not to nit, but the term “narcissist” belies a range of issues, some qutie normal and positive, or we should all be without Cadillacs, golf courses, and modern health care. “Malignant narcissism” may apply to the despotic, and in political psychology, that may have some basis in “Narcissistic Personality Disorder” (and a few other views of similar behavior) known to psychology proper. On the branch opposite that may be a “reparative narcissism”, the quality of a meaningful empathy returns.

While Obama’s de facto policy of “least war possible” may divert to other levers, e.g., energy independence, which card he’s playing now; continuing DoD-IDF cooperation and deliveries; and perhaps separation of the Muslim community from “the terrorists” to shear the moderate away from the lost (while a comparatively young fleet for leader emerges to “work the issues” with large religious cohort), the same brushes against old Jewish wisdom: He who is kind to the cruel will in the end become cruel to the kind.”

The Obama Administration’s foreign policy has been deeply opaque from the start but not necessarily in the manner proposed but certainly in a way that invites speculation. Less remarked in total has been the “Red Brown Green” cooperation defined by Putin-Assad-Khamenei, Putin-Orban, and Putin-Erdogan. It’s been much easier isolating conflicts, pointing at the President, and overlooking what amounts to a broad assault on North American power, NATO, and westward-looking alliances. Quiet incursions into government and intellectual assets have not been overlooked but have perhaps been less explored and the underplayed. That’s another subject, and I will stop here.

# # #

FTAC – MEC – When You See It, It’s Ugly

17 Monday Nov 2014

Posted by commart in FTAC, Gaza Suzerain, Israel

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

MEC, middle east conflict

Neighbors make the neighborhood. When the neighbors have to count among themselves either secular or religious mafia — post-Soviet Putinism, retrograde Islamism — the good neighbors (e.g., “moderns” and “moderates”) disappear beneath the flashings of malignant egos who have as their chief concern themselves at the center of a universe they control and from which they derive adulation and love in abundance — that they have to rig everyone else’s reality is something easily overlooked — or hushed — by the same.

Gaza should be liberated from Hamas; Ramallah should be cleared of the hypocrites and liars of old PLO, PFLP, “solidarity” anti-Semites and lunatics and the basis in thought (the “information space”) for existing at all. We should know the names of families tied to terror by financing it; we should know how money moves into these streams that flow against humanity and see that law and military and paramilitary force cut them off and ruin them. Every facet sustained in sustaining the middle east conflict needs to be taken apart and taken down to its language — and then the language needs to be exploded never to be put back together again.

The neighbors make the neighborhood.

The problem with the middle east conflict resides with who has been running it, profiting from it, murdering for it (160 children in tunnels; the destruction and continuing suffering of Yarmouk in Syria [while Mashaal dances off to Tunisia with $2.5 billion in estimated wealth]) — it never was about the “poor Palestinians”, the Arab abandoned refugees of wars undertaken in the glorification of contempt for others, exclusiveness, and unbridled hate.


What is really challenged — all that is challenged — is the “malignant narcissism”, the domains of the “control freaks”, the feudal estates of the politically criminal.

Related

We feel that the Arabs and Jews are cousins in having suffered similar oppressions at the hands of powers stronger than themselves, and by a happy coincidence have been able to take the first step towards the attainment of their national ideals together.

The Arabs, especially the educated among us, look with the deepest sympathy on the Zionist movement. Our deputation here in Paris is fully acquainted with the proposals submitted yesterday by the Zionist Organisation to the Peace Conference, and we regard them as moderate and proper. We will do our best, in so far as we are concerned, to help them through: we will wish the Jews a most hearty welcome home.

http://www.factualisrael.com/faisal-weizmann-agreement-arabs-invited-jews-return-israel/ – 3/3/1919 (9/25/2014).


According to Forbes, the Islamist terror group, also known by the acronyms ISIS or ISIL, has an annual income of $2 billion. Hamas comes in second, with a yearly revenue of $1 billion. Colombia’s FARC is ranked third with a $600 million annual turnover, while Hezbollah is fourth with $500 million. Fifth on the Forbes list is the Taliban with $400 million, followed by Al-Qaida and its affiliates with $150 million; Pakistani-based Lashkar e-Taiba with $100 million; Somalia’s Al-Shabaab with $100 million; Real IRA with $50 million; and, closing the top-ten list is Boko Haram, with a $25 million annual revenue.

http://www.ibtimes.co.in/forbes-israel-isis-worlds-richest-terrorist-organisation-history-613806 – 11/12/2014.

# # #

FTAC – There Are Handlers . . . .

13 Thursday Nov 2014

Posted by commart in A Little Wisdom, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC, Political Psychology, Politics

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

21st Century Neo-Feudalism, despotism, feudalism, foreign affairs, politics

There are . . . “handlers”. The adversely aligned organizations are their tools. The power and wealth involved are immense — look up “Setad”; enjoy Karen Dawisha’s still new book — and the traceback from street violence to a number of palaces should start to become clear. Perhaps: confront not the UN but 21st Century Neo-Feudalism.


“Adversely aligned” to Israel, the west, rule of law, human rights, dignity, autonomy, freedom : aligned to barbarism, criminality, mafia, rule of might, and malignantly and viciously narcissistic aggrandizement.


I think N’s on the right track as regards the relationship between corruption at the top and the driving of ideological, nationalist, or religious violence in the field or on the street except where the violence is counter to political mafia and manipulation.

# # #

FTAC – Observation on the Banu Qurayza Legend

11 Tuesday Nov 2014

Posted by commart in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC, Islamic Small Wars, Political Psychology, Religion

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Banu Qurayza, heresy and theft, medievalism, political power, religion

http://www.pbs.org/muhammad/ma_jews.shtml

For many, the bottom line on the Banu Qurayza legend — Tarek Fatah denies its authenticity, others embrace it and like it — involves the unconditional surrender of the Jewish tribe followed by the mass slaughter of all of the males (down to the youngest with but a single pubic hair). It stands as the echo in history of what ISIS is doing today and right to the letter of the script as read by Baghdaddi (who may be dead by now . . . we are uncertain of that state of affairs today).

The above noted PBS piece starts this way:

“Judaism was already well established in Medina two centuries before Muhammad’s birth. Although influential, the Jews did not rule the oasis. Rather, they were clients of two large Arab tribes there, the Khazraj and the Aws Allah, who protected them in return for feudal loyalty. Medina’s Jews were expert jewelers, and weapons and armor makers. There were many Jewish clans-some records indicate more than twenty, of which three were prominent-the Banu Nadir, the Banu Qaynuqa, and the Banu Qurayza.

“Various traditions uphold different views, and it is unclear whether Medina’s Jewish clans were Arabized Jews or Arabs who practiced Jewish monotheism. Certainly they were Arabic speakers with Arab names. They followed the fundamental precepts of the Torah, though scholars question their familiarity with the Talmud and Jewish scholarship, and there is a suggestion in the Qur’an that they may have embraced unorthodox beliefs, such as considering the Prophet Ezra the son of God.”

There are now many contradictory renditions of the Banu Qurayza legend and analysis on the web, but that may serve to underscore my argument that part of the world is fighting over survival through corrupted allegiance — the telling of loyal lies — and the risks of promoting an integrity that has God and the ideal — the true — as its standard. We hope for the latter because it serves all universally. It’s better to have honest reporting, honest scholarship, research with integrity, and, perhaps with the Banu Qurayza, the wisdom to say one doesn’t know how the Qurayza lives.

Historically, the Jews as merchants developing wealth have done so because of a circumspect trustworthiness — i.e., people with whom one can do earnest business. The medieval persecutions inevitably apply leverage based in religion — the Spanish Inquisition and the Spanish Expulsion serve as example — to shun, murder, and plunder the Jews for the wealth they have developed. That’s how it works, has always worked, and probably how it worked in the 7th Century: simple theft and murder cloaked in religion.


The Awesome Conversation may become a clear conversation about power, loyalty, idealism, and God.

Within the context of the Islamic Small Wars, there’s political litmus in how one relates to certain symbols, and the Banu Qurayza Legend is one of them.  Some embrace the story — a great victory (met with unconditional surrender followed by mass slaughter) — and some, like Tarek Fatah, find it so inexecrable that it needs to be downplayed and written out of the lore being dragged into the future.

# # #

11 Tuesday Nov 2014

Posted by commart in FTAC, Islamic Small Wars

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

cultural annihilation, cultural self-determination, cultural survival, Kurdish irregulars

Switch axis: “The Israeli citizen, identified by the station only as 31 years old and a resident of Tel Aviv, said she had contacted Kurdish fighters over the Internet before travelling through Iraq to train at one of their camps on the Syrian border.

“They are our brothers,” she told the radio station. “They are good people. They love life, a lot like us, really.”

http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/fighting-isis-canadian-israeli-woman-joins-kurds-in-syria-1.2830122

There have been a lot of volunteer irregulars involved in the Islamic Small Wars, and most reports cover the rush to join al Qaeda and its affiliates. However the “choose sides” has this side too – lovin’ life and updating and upgrading whole societies.

The Kurds have been reported to have turned their backs on the Yezidis — and certainly left a few on a mountain surrounded by ISIS militants — but perhaps with a good influence, they too will become a little more universal.


Johnny and “Johnette” go off to war either to fight with barbarians or against them (and, sigh, some have been a little confused about which is the barbarian).

While it may be refreshing to read a story in which the cultural existence and self-determination of another people has attracted support, as it should, the “Islamic Small Wars” may widen by the measure of who is participating in open combat field operations.

# # #

FTAC – Good Influence

10 Monday Nov 2014

Posted by commart in FTAC, Politics

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

politics

I’ve had mixed feelings about Tom Trento — I follow him on Facebook but have not friended him — ever since he drove up to Arab festival in Dearborn as an observer-provocateur. In response, I made friends with Dearborn mover and shaker Ron Amen; however, sigh, these far left and right alignments do not work well for me. If through “ethos, logos, and pathos” defeating one’s most strident (but reasoning) critic makes for progress, Trento is a strong critic of Islam where criticism is needed and, perhaps, reform or strong directional emphasis involving literature extant may respond to it.

“If I am not for myself, who will be for me?”

We cheerlead our own. We enjoy our fans. It’s good to have a good cultural and ethnic program and to feel good about it.

“If I am not for others, what am I?”

Helping others — other cultures and ethnic enclaves — grow into their own good program may come with the territory.

In the west, “Judeo-Christian” (+ “Greco-Roman”) alignment may be where history has delivered us.

What about everyone else?

Hillel’s Question No. 2 applies.

In the first stages of Facebook uptake — desktop computing meets broadband meets the “social network” — Qanta Ahmed asked, more or less, “What now? What do we do with this?” My response: “Good influence.”

As Jews, perhaps we talk about ourselves too much; however, we don’t conquer or proselytize but through thought. Good influence.

I’m going to add here a friend from Papua New Guinea, a nation that when the Christian ethnologists and linguists arrived supported more than 850 separate language cultures, some living within miles of one another and unaware of the existence of the neighbor.

I am personally going to turn into a “people who garden” if I can ever get into a house . . . . 🙂

I am for, at least in principle, the Baloch, the Kurds, Shiite Islam, Sufi Islam, truth-telling people wherever they are, however governed and organized, and I hope we will together say goodbye to a few more political criminals and organizations (like al-Qaeda and ISIS, like Setad in Iran, like “MoscVegas” in Russia) in my lifetime.

“With every generation, a little more freedom is won.”

I hope here that’s what we’re working on.


FTAC – Take Down that Wall – Comment on Intellectual Poisoning

27 Monday Oct 2014

Posted by commart in Anti-Semitism, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC, Philology, Political Psychology, Politics

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

cultural-political structure, ideology, kleptocracy, politics

Here’s a suggested schematic for the big story behind so much indoctrination. Billionaires –> nationalist / religious state dictators –> control, enforcement, and expansion organizations that include elements that attend to intellectual development and resources, internal and external.

Out of that model and through separable national socialist and Islamist pipelines come old Fatah and Hamas and emerging Jobbik (Hungary) and obvious ISIS. At the evident top: Putin-Khamenei. Behind the scenes: extraordinarily wealth personalities much enriched by criminality in state politics.

The commandeering of intellectual resources, whether targeting the kindergarten or college campus, is a part of sustaining criminal power. Where audience is captive or deeply susceptible, indoctrination and training go deep, so much so that the poison turns the world upside down. Where less area (geopolitical space) is captive, then intellectual skirmishing takes place with perhaps discouraging results.

I think a part of the answer to kind of bigotry and conflict addressed here may be to drive highest-integrity information — most open, tested, reviewed, criticized, most probable, etc. — into otherwise closed societies and the minds that have been kept closed by them. “B” may be living in a world of lies and mirrors that she cannot see for having been deeply manipulated within it. Those who wish for peace, who want an honest future (and it may be different than immediately contemplated) may have to disassemble that intellectual wall.


A racket’s a racket.

Ali Khamenei

Mojtaba Khamenei

Putin’s Kleptocracy


Gold-flecked ice cream wasn’t part of the picture that Shiite Muslim clerics painted during the Iranian Revolution, when they promised to lift the poor by distributing the country’s vast oil income equally across society.

But more than three decades later, record oil profits have brought in billions of dollars, and some people here are enjoying that decadent dessert. The trouble is, it’s just a small group of wealthy Iranians. Despite the promises of the revolution, many here say the gap between rich and poor has never seemed wider.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle-east/irans-rich-eat-ice-cream-covered-in-gold-as-poor-struggle-to-survive/2011/07/20/gIQAYKUmwI_story.html – 8/6/2011.


The economy bears more than a little resemblance to the crony capitalism that sprouted from the wreck of the Soviet Union. The 1979 revolution expropriated the assets of foreign investors and the nation’s wealthiest families; oil had long been nationalized, but the mullahs seized virtually everything else of value–banks, hotels, car and chemical companies, makers of drugs and consumer goods. What distinguishes Iran is that many of these assets were given to Islamic charitable foundations, controlled by the clerics. According to businessmen and former foundation executives, the charities now serve as slush funds for the mullahs and their supporters.

Iran has other lethal secrets besides its nuclear program, now the subject of prying international eyes. Dozens of interviews with businessmen, merchants, economists and former ministers and other top government officials reveal a picture of a dictatorship run by a shadow government that–the U.S. State Department suspects–finances terrorist groups abroad through a shadow foreign policy. Its economy is dominated by shadow business empires and its power is protected by a shadow army of enforcers.

http://www.forbes.com/global/2003/0721/024.html – 7/21/2003.


More than political criminality and cronyism are at play here.

The intellectual subjugation of entire constituencies is thematic throughout the range of the Islamic Small Wars and now in the development of a post-Hitlerian nationalism and national socialism in relation to the Russian nationalist stance on which Putin has relied for popular legitimacy.  Axes of power Khamenie-Putin and Putin-Orban (the same as would have been Putin-Yanukovych had there not been the revolution in Ukraine) and Putin-Assad represent the development and expansion of immense piratical wealth and power far at the expense of ordinary people.

So far, neither the European Union nor the United States nor anyone or anything else has gone so far as to explicate these drifts and relationships for popular overview although with Russia, the articles and books by academics and journalists have produced a handy few volumes for anyone’s home library (more on that later).

Related:

http://news.yahoo.com/bianna-golodryga-interviews-garry-kasparov-093317385.html – 9/30/2014.

# # #

← Older posts
  • Compassion
  • Empathy
  • Justice
  • Humility
  • Inclusion
  • Integrity
____________

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.
___________

Recent Posts

  • Nicolas Tenzer On A Russia That Must Be Condemned, Defeated, Taken Apart, and Taken Down
  • FTAC: Why Putin Won’t Stop Until Stopped
  • KGB FSB ROC M-O-N-E-Y
  • FNS: Morning Lies
  • FTAC–A Note: Iron River, Narcotics, and the Ecology of Latin American Mass Migration
  • Surrealpolitik: Orban & Putin & ‘Illiberal Democracy’

Categories

  • 21st Century Feudal
  • 21st Century Modern
  • A Little Wisdom
  • Also in Media
  • American Domestic Affairs
  • Anti-Semitism
  • Asides
  • BCND – BackChannels News Day
  • Books
  • Conflict – Culture – Language – Psychology
  • COVID-19
  • Epistemology
  • Events and Other PSA's
  • Extreme Brown vs Red-Green
  • Fast News Share
  • foreign aid
  • Free Speech
  • FTAC
  • FTAC – From The Awesome Conversation
  • International Development
  • Islamic Small Wars
    • Gaza Suzerain
  • Journal
    • Library
  • Journalism
  • Links
  • Notes On Reading BackChannels
  • Philology
  • Philosophy
  • Poetry
  • Political Psychology
  • Political Spychology
  • Politics
  • Psychology
    • Facsimile Bipolar Political Sociopathy
  • Qualities of Living (QOL)
  • Referral
  • Regions
    • Africa
      • Central African Republic
      • Guinea
      • Kenya
      • Libya
      • Mali
      • Morocco
      • Nigeria
      • South Africa
      • Sudan
      • Tunisia
      • Zimbabwe
    • Asia
      • Afghanistan
      • Burma
      • China
      • India
      • Myanmar
      • North Korea
      • Pakistan
      • Turkey
    • Caribbean Basin
      • Cuba
    • Central America
      • El Salvador
      • Guatemala
      • Honduras
      • Mexico
    • Eastern Europe
      • Serbia
    • Eurasia
      • Armenia
      • Azerbaijan
      • Russia
      • Ukrain
      • Ukraine
    • Europe
      • France
      • Germany
      • Hungary
      • Poland
    • Great Britain and United Kingdom
    • Iberian Peninsula
    • Middle East
      • Egypt
      • Gaza
      • Iran
      • Iraq
      • Israel
        • Palestinia
      • Jordan
      • Kurdistan
      • Lebanon
      • Palestinian Territories
      • Qatar
      • Saudi Arabia
      • Syria
      • United Arab Emirates
      • Yemen
    • North America
      • Canada
      • United States of America
    • Norther Europe
    • Northern Europe
      • Sweden
    • South America
      • Argentina
      • Brazil
      • Columbia
      • Ecuador
      • Venezuela
    • South Pacific
      • Australia
      • New Zealand
      • Papua New Guinea
      • West Papua
  • Religion
  • Spain
  • Syndicate Red Brown Green
  • transnational crime
  • Uncategorized
  • Visual Data

Europe

  • Defending History
  • Hungarian Spectrum
  • Yanukovych Leaks

Great Britain

  • Stand for Peace

Israeli and Jewish Affairs

  • Chloe Simone Valdary

Journals

  • Amil Imani
  • New Age Islam

Middle East

  • Human Rights & Democracy for Iran
  • Middle East Research and Information Project

Organizations

  • Anti-Slavery
  • Atlantic Council
  • Fight Hatred
  • Human Rights First Society
  • International Network Against Cyberhate
  • The Center for Victims of Torture

Meta

  • Register
  • Log in
  • Entries feed
  • Comments feed
  • WordPress.com

Epigram

Hillel the Elder

"That which is distasteful to thee do not do to another. That is the whole of Torah. The rest is commentary. Now go and study."

"If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am not for others, what am I? If not now, when?"

"Whosoever destroys a soul, it is considered as if he destroyed an entire world. And whosoever that saves a life, it is considered as if he saved an entire world."

Oriana Fallaci
"Whether it comes from a despotic sovereign or an elected president, from a murderous general or a beloved leader, I see power as an inhuman and hateful phenomenon...I have always looked on disobedience toward the oppressive as the only way to use the miracle of having been born."

Talmud 7:16 as Quoted by Rishon Rishon in 2004
Qohelet Raba, 7:16

אכזרי סוף שנעשה אכזרי במקום רחמן

Kol mi shena`asa rahaman bimqom akhzari Sof shena`asa akhzari bimqom rahaman

All who are made to be compassionate in the place of the cruel In the end are made to be cruel in the place of the compassionate.

More colloquially translated: "Those who are kind to the cruel, in the end will be cruel to the kind."

Online Source: http://www.rishon-rishon.com/archives/044412.php

Abraham Isaac Kook

"The purely righteous do not complain about evil, rather they add justice.They do not complain about heresy, rather they add faith.They do not complain about ignorance, rather they add wisdom." From the pages of Arpilei Tohar.

Heinrich Heine
"Where books are burned, in the end people will be burned." -- From Almansor: A Tragedy (1823).

Simon Wiesenthal
Remark Made in the Ballroom of the Imperial Hotel, Vienna, Austria on the occasion of His 90th Birthday: "The Nazis are no more, but we are still here, singing and dancing."

Maimonides
"Truth does not become more true if the whole world were to accept it; nor does it become less true if the whole world were to reject it."

"The risk of a wrong decision is preferable to the terror of indecision."

Douglas Adams
"Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?" Epigram appearing in the dedication of Richard Dawkins' The GOD Delusion.

Thucydides
"The Nation that makes a great distinction between its scholars and its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools."

Milan Kundera
"The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting."

Malala Yousafzai
“The terrorists thought that they would change our aims and stop our ambitions but nothing changed in my life except this: weakness, fear and hopelessness died. Strength, power and courage was born.”

Tanit Nima Tinat
"Who could die of love?"

What I Have Said About the Jews

My people, not that I speak for them, I nonetheless describe as a "global ethnic commune with its heart in Jerusalem and soul in the Land of Israel."

We have never given up on God, nor have we ever given up on one another.

Many things we have given up, but no one misses, say, animal sacrifice, and as many things we have kept, so we have still to welcome our Sabbath on Friday at sunset and to rest all of Saturday until three stars appear in the sky.

Most of all, through 5,773 years, wherever life has taken us, through the greatest triumphs and the most awful tragedies, we have preserved our tribal identity and soul, and so shall we continue eternally.

Anti-Semitism / Anti-Zionism = Signal of Fascism

I may suggest that anti-Zionism / anti-Semitism are signal (a little bit) of fascist urges, and the Left -- I'm an old liberal: I know my heart -- has been vulnerable to manipulation by what appears to me as a "Red Brown Green Alliance" driven by a handful of powerful autocrats intent on sustaining a medieval worldview in service to their own glorification. (And there I will stop).
One hopes for knowledge to allay fear; one hopes for love to overmatch hate.

Too often, the security found in the parroting of a loyal lie outweighs the integrity to be earned in confronting and voicing an uncomfortable truth.

Those who make their followers believe absurdities may also make them commit atrocities.

Positively Orwellian: Comment Responding to Claim that the Arab Assault on Israel in 1948 Had Not Intended Annihilation

“Revisionism” is the most contemptible path that power takes to abet theft and hide shame by attempting to alter public perception of past events.

On Press Freedom, Commentary, and Journalism

In the free world, talent -- editors, graphic artists, researchers, writers -- gravitate toward the organizations that suit their interests and values. The result: high integrity and highly reliable reportage and both responsible and thoughtful reasoning.

This is not to suggest that partisan presses don't exist or that propaganda doesn't exist in the west, but any reader possessed of critical thinking ability and genuine independence -- not bought, not programmed -- is certainly free to evaluate the works of earnest reporters and scholars.

Archives

Blog at WordPress.com.

  • Follow Following
    • BackChannels
    • Join 351 other followers
    • Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
    • BackChannels
    • Customize
    • Follow Following
    • Sign up
    • Log in
    • Report this content
    • View site in Reader
    • Manage subscriptions
    • Collapse this bar