Are the Pashtun, who are Pashtun while referring to themselves as “B’ni Israel” both a little bit Jewish and Muslim?
There are ethnic elements in the invention, uptake, and adaptation of Islam that may not be separated from “Muslim” — not “Islamic” — self-concept and volunteered description. When for tribal business, independence, security, or survival one civilization accepts the overlay of another, it becomes difficult in time to pry apart that melding. At the same time, an ethos that drives against the grain of humanity, i.e., as that possessed by the “Islamists”, needs must be ejected at least in part.
There is an argument to be had about the character of Muhammad and that of Islam with some who would put all Muslims in the al-Qaeda (or similar) box even though Muslims appears the first victims (and warriors against) that efflorescent fascism that has no place among good people.
We are born with our identities: culture and its customs and laws, our parents, and our families, our names. God (Nature and the Universe) provide us with no choice in those earliest matters. However, as we are not fixed as characters in books and much less in place and time, we as adults may confirm our cultural self-concept or change it. Over time, change is what we do because “back there” in time includes ideas and practices that become for each “new world” — a generational concept — maladapted.
While most of the western public has been focused heavily on violence associated with Islamic extremists and the sense of related threat coming off the brutal depopulating of Syria (in no small part, that’s what the stupid piece of bloody theater has been about), it may have overlooked its own predictable reaction. Where we have been stung by an attack, we naturally respond with cultural pride and state patriotism leaning into nationalism. The result of the dictatorships of the world (different talks — same walk) is the modern renewal of feudalism and related conflict.
The manipulation has been paying off for the world’s political criminals.
In the post-Cold War framework, the “West” has been duped and played into perhaps assisting the enterprises of former and current communist elites in sustaining the feudal worldview needed to maintain for themselves medieval political absolute power.
Now everyone has a problem, not least the state of ______: do the leaders of the world — and the worlds of business, finance, and politics — want the present to recycle into the future using totalitarian techniques — or does it want authentic progress on behalf of our species and the planet that hosts all of us?
I have come to know — no longer just think — the Moscow believes that political issues and perceptions can be invented and controlled from ‘behind the curtains”. Knowing the little I know of wildness in nature and evolutionary unpredictability, I would counsel against that Orwellian ambition.
Place the blame for 9/11 on “east-west competition” for political and resource (“Grand Game”-related) control; post-Cold War realignment, perhaps — the idea that western security services would cooperate with Moscow’s on crime, for example, or on “fighting the terrorists” (after Moscow has positioned them) where it belongs and in proportion to the contribution to design. Of the two, “Moscow” and “Washington”, the data I have dredged from the web points to Moscow’s so-far persistent totalitarian ambition.
There’s much to hash in the above message, but all will distill into the two familiar and very different worldviews so often referenced by BackChannels as “Medieval Political Absolutism v Modern Democratic and Liberal Distribution of Power”.
In which world would you rather live?
Point by point —
First, official Saudi Arabia revoked Osama Bin Laden’s citizenship over the crime visited on the United States of America on September 11, 2001. That leaves unofficial KSA and other actors as possible donors to the Wahhabi al-Qaeda enterprise, but as the sovereign state has maintained its innocence, the potential rogues within have made themselves only potential persons of interest for internal policing. At this time, about 17 years later, a KSA-USA alliance has been established and is being promoted as reliable online.
Regarding reliability, we shall see, as it seems in the nature of history and politics to be full of surprises.
Second and in regard to the news articles cited, BackChannels has noticed from the Cold War Era a kind of symmetrical diplomacy attending “east-west relations”. When, for example, the Soviet Union reclaimed its nuclear missiles from Cuba, the United States moved back its forward-based Jupiter missiles from presence near the Soviet Union’s fringe. Whatever the two states may have been saying to one another, they were saying it at the same time. In popular history, the more dramatic and visible recovery of “nukes” from Cuba was more quietly matched by similar behavior in Europe. It would not be much of a stretch, if any, to suggest that as the Soviet Army retreated from Afghanistan, the American CIA similarly pulled back from its involvement with the Mujaheddin even though that would leave the proxy available to the next Russian state, which was to announce its presence, however pale, with the appearance of the Russian Tricolor raised above the Kremlin on the morning of December 26, 1991.
Finally, BackChannels may wish not to know what took place in 1992 between business interests and multiple state security services with the Cold War presumed over, Communism defeated in Russia, and some new western-leaning and capitalist state about to be born. It would rather — and so will — fast forward to today’s “Phantom of the Soviet” and the destruction brought to Syria and Ukraine (Crimea), the revival of feudal ambitions spurred in EU/NATO targets by the reflexive response to Islamic terror attacks, and in both Turkey and nascent Kurdistan the leverage applied to ego by Putin’s “energy politics” and appeals to narcissistic aggrandizement in leadership in both geopolitical spaces.
Today’s Hamas-produced political theater on Gaza’s border with Israel smacks of Soviet Era spectacle. While nothing would appear to have changed from earlier days, much has changed as regards “state-sponsored terrorism”. The Soviet Union passed into history more than 25 years ago, and the phantoms of it in search of the source of their dark souls must find it absent. In its place now stands the autocratic “Mafia State” fully willing to destroy innocents in its chosen combat arenas, induce greater chaos in the world (seldom more so than in Syria and in Ukraine’s Crimea), bomb hospitals with impunity, and revive the Soviet’s most criminal and pernicious practices and programs.
If Gazans, who in the main have gotten very little out of decades of so-called — and violent — “resistance” only knew for what and for whom they were protesting . . . .
Hmm.
The Internet is fully up: now the Palestinians may know (and know well who has lied to them and how) and — if and when determined to extricate themselves from the powers that have profited off their sustained suffering — make themselves truly free within their own community and more genuinely nascent Palestinian state.
“On the streets of Gaza people have a sense of security – except when Israel attacks” — In defensive modes, preventive, responsive, retributive.
The Palestinians have long surrendered their dreams to propaganda, the PLO/PA, and Hamas as well as the corruption attending such governments that hold themselves beyond criticism.
From what sense of ethics, integrity, or justice were the greenhouses and synagogues of Gaza destroyed after departure in 2005?
Such rage would seem to have been set loose by officially and socially approved, promoted, and popular anti-Semitic incitement, the same that had Hamas in 2006 proclaiming to Palestinians that Hitler admired them as ideal revolutionaries (PMW: “Hamas: Hitler praised the Palestinians as models”).
Perhaps Israel should treat as poison the disinformation fed to the Palestinians and see the same receive an antidote in an honest telling, for Hamas fairy tales have only enslaved the Palestinians and gotten them to get themselves killed for show.
Posted to YouTube March 30, 2018. Ten more Palestinians were to draw fire and die, and the cause should be clear through what the cameras recorded in the way of “peaceful” demonstration.
One may marvel at the power of bad ideas and failed dreams to continue placing the innocent in harm’s way — and for the global press, the more souls corralled and misled into martyrdom, the better for sympathy and “understanding”, never mind the squandering of billions of dollars intended for Palestinian practical betterment going into the pockets of corrupt and venal leaders and their systems of patronage.
The Soviet Union dissolved in bankruptcy about 26 years, and yet the scenes remain much as Yuri Andropov must have seen them when promoting dictatorship beneath the cover of Popular Liberation Movements.
The peace camps of the west may have to soon decide whether they wish to remain in business by doing their part to sustain the middle east conflict on bogus claims; and Mr. Putin may soon have to decide whether he will take KGB and more general historic Russian barbarism forward with the cynical manipulation and destruction of every space in which Moscow has chosen to play.
Of the 110 schoolgirls kidnapped in Dapchi in February, 104 were released by the Boko Haram, five died during the kidnap while one remains with the terrorists for allegedly refusing to put on a hijab and renounce her Christian faith.
Her killers wear masks and appear to have no names.
From The Awesome Conversation —
The Ummah of Islam has bloody edges, and the Christian community of Nigeria appears to be an edge. The “Fulani Land Pirates” — that’s what I’m calling them — are nibbling away Nigerian Christian territory with rape and rapine, and the Christian community disarmed by the state is become “internally displaced”, currently by about 200,000 souls in relation to the Land Pirates, about 2 million in relation to Boko Haram, who have got a kind of game going: abduct, convert or kill, and return the sworn converts to their parents.
There are multiple levels in these conflicts — locally, Boko Haram is a scourge; however, the arms are Kalashnikov, generally speaking; we know today that Moscow arms and backs the Taliban in Afghanistan; we know that the same defends politically absolute systems, AKA “dictatorships”, and we know that the sponsors in the surrounds of these fighting elements, emir, general this or that, fit that description.
My call: it’s not overpopulation or too much imagination that drive the Islamic Small Wars, although that would be true for producing recruits for war parties: Nigeria provides dual images — the assaults of the Fulani Land Pirates in one part, the barbarism practiced by Boko Haram in the other — of the Islamist program of conquest “by the sword” in action.
Whatever reassurances and sweet words may come from the “leadership” may appear more and more as cover.
The marauders keep getting away — and refreshed with arms and funding keep returning too.
Posted to YouTube on February 26, 2018 — before the return of most of the schoolgirls: ” . . . and just asking how could our daughters be left unprotected to be taken again . . .?
Speaking in tears, the middle-aged resident of Jumbam, a village 2km away from Dapchi, said rather than the Nigerian soldiers combating the insurgents after they came back to drop the girls, the soldiers simply “watched with folded arms while the insurgents left triumphantly.”
The resident spoken was the father of Aisha Adamu, Adamu Jumbam.
The report involved 3,455 household surveys and 46 focus group discussions across 12 local government areas in Borno State. Most of the IDPs surveyed expressed fears about security as their main reasons for not wanting to return home.
Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari has claimed on several occasions that Boko Haram—which has fractured into at least two major factions—was no longer a fighting force in Nigeria. But the militants have continued to launch attacks and have been solely responsible for some 700 deaths so far in 2017, according to the Council on Foreign Relations.
IDMC estimates that there are almost 2,152,000 internally displaced people (IDPs) in Nigeria as of 31 December 2015 . . . .
Of the total figure of IDPs, the assessment indicates that 12.6 per cent were displaced due to communal clashes, 2.4 per cent by natural disasters and 85 per cent as a result of insurgency attacks by Islamists. The decrease in the percentage of IDPs who were displaced by insurgency from 95.3 per cent in August to 85 per cent in December 2015 and the increase in the numbers of those displaced by communal clashes from 4.6 per cent to 10.1 per cent in October were due to the inclusion of five additional States witnessing communal violence more than insurgency by Islamist groups.
But a source who also participated in the negotiations with Boko Haram that led to release of over 80 Chibok girls in 2017 told SaharaReporters that the federal government not only made the ransom payment of five million euros to the insurgents, it also exchanged some Boko Haram prisoners in return for the Dapchi girls.
However, the lie that no ransom was paid to secure the return of the Dapchi girls followed a consistent pattern of such under the table millions of dollars payments by the Nigerian government to Boko Haram to secure freedom of abductees, especially since the advent of the Buhari administration.
Addendum – More From the Awesome Conversation
Moscow’s hidden hand may be behind both conflicts — Boko Haram and the Fulani Land Pirates — for the still medieval Russian state appears to promote “political absolutism” — the power of the tyrant to destroy both property and persons with impunity — worldwide. In such systems, the state exists to serve the Great Leader who may hold his position beneath a banner and program essentially swallowed by the public. As regards dictatorships, one may say: “Different Talks — Same Walk!” Always.
BackChannels source this morning relayed the following from Lagos, Nigeria in relation to raids by apparent herdsman against largely disarmed villages.
Since the first of the years, source claims, more than 500 Nigerians have been slaughtered in raids and no arrests have been made;
The number of Internally Displaced Persons associated with the conflict exceeds 200,000;
The Nigerian government has been repossessing simple weapons from villagers while attackers typically carrying AK-47s surround their targets and destroy buildings and stores with burning petrol;
The complement attending raids may average about 100 or more fighters;
Source of arms: Libya, other Arab nations, and Turkey.
In 2013, news reports mentioned a Hezbollah cell and weapons cache in Nigeria; the latest weapons seizure of similar scale in 2017 appears to have originated through Turkish channels.
Although Fulani herdsman have been blamed en masse for the aggression noted, BackChannels has heard suggestion that the weaponizing may devolve to the same forces backing extremist organizations elsewhere. The 2013 Hezbollah connection and the more recent 2017 interdiction involving Turkey would appear to support that thesis.
Recruitment into raiding units would also appear to correspond to conditions channeling fighters into rogue organizations elsewhere.
Dr. Omolade Adunbi, Assistant Professor, Political Anthropology, University of Michigan noted the following earlier this year in the publication Africa is a Country: “The question then becomes, how are these insurgents with no clarity of purpose able to recruit members into their dysfunctional group? The answer to this question is not far-fetched. First, the effect of climate change on the rise of social inequality in many parts of the country has meant the increased susceptibility of socially vulnerable groups to recruitment.”
Related on YouTube
Posted to YouTube 3/28/2014
Posted to YouTube 1/11/2018
Posted to YouTube 8/2/2016
BackChannels can never “vet” these videos, but most recognize this conflict in Nigeria as involving cattlemen, basically, and farmers. Less played may be the role played by religion in the conflict, which here has been made apparent:
Posted to YouTube 1/16/2018
Considering the 2013 Hezbollah weapons cache story, the latest interdiction of arms involving Turkish (criminal, of course) channeling, the claim of arms coming from Libya and more recent participation associated with Turkey and the activities of Moscow and Tehran in manipulating conflicts and extremism into existence (listen to the BBC interview of a once Soviet admiral on the Ogaden War), the drivers of this latest tragedy in Nigeria may start to surface.
The Turkish Ambassador to Nigeria, Mr. Hakan Cakil, in a meeting with the Comptroller-General of the Nigeria Customs Service, Col. Hameed Ali (rtd), over importation of four containers of pump-action rifles into Nigeria in last eight months vowed to help Nigeria fish out criminals behind the illegal arms shipment to Nigeria.
The question then becomes, how are these insurgents with no clarity of purpose able to recruit members into their dysfunctional group? The answer to this question is not far-fetched. First, the effect of climate change on the rise of social inequality in many parts of the country has meant the increased susceptibility of socially vulnerable groups to recruitment . . . .
On 4 December 2017, Nigeria’s air force sent fighter jets to fire rockets at villages as a “warning” to deter spiralling communal violence, as hundreds of herdsmen attacked at least five villages in Adamawa state to avenge the massacre of up to 51 members of their community, mostly children, the previous month in Kikan.
An Amnesty International team visited the villages in the aftermath of the air raids and gathered witness testimony from residents who described being attacked by a fighter jet and a military helicopter as they attempted to flee.
(Reuters) – Nigeria’s secret service say they have arrested a “terrorist cell” trained in Iran who planned to attack U.S. and Israeli targets in Africa’s most populous nation.
The State Security Service (SSS) said they arrested Abdullahi Mustapha Berende and two other Nigerians in December after Berende made several suspicious trips to Iran where he interacted with Iranians in a “high profile terrorist network”.
The National Chairman of Fulbe (Fulani) Development Association of Nigeria (FULDAN), Malam Ahmad Usman Bello, has declared that they cannot be defeated by any ethnic group in the country.
Bello made the remarks while speaking with Saturday Tribune in Kano, amid the widespread outcry against the murderous activities of Fulani herdsmen in Benue, Plateau and Taraba states and many other parts of the country.
The federal government is set to meet Turkish diplomats today over the spate of illegal importation of rifles from Turkey to Nigeria.
Nigeria Customs Service (NCS) Comptroller-General (CG) Col. Hameed Ali (retd) said this when he briefed reporters over the seizure of another 470 rifles at Tin-Can Island port in Lagos.
The body also said communal clashes have claimed over 700 lives since last year. AI made its position known in a statement issued on Monday. It stated that clashes between herdsmen and farmers in Adamawa, Benue, Taraba, Ondo and Kaduna states have resulted in 168 deaths in January alone.
President Buhari has urged patience on the part of the Nigerian public:
Once again I sympathize with the people of Benue State, and the families of all those who‘ve lost their lives in these attacks. The security agencies will continue to work to protect all Nigerians. And we will not allow anyone who takes the life of a Nigerian to evade justice. pic.twitter.com/eqKp3YSJoa
Nigeria’s issues with the nomadic Fulani, pressured by drought and motivated some by Islamic supremacist egotism, has been a developing conflict issue in Nigeria for some time. Herewith a smattering of related reports and news news reports and fair use excerpts from them.
Fast Reference
All excerpts are partial (there’s more to be read at the source) and dated either in the address line or short after the URL.
Fulani herdsmen and farmers conflict in Nigeria is a land resource based conflict in north-eastern Nigeria. According to a Human Rights Watch report of December 2013 violence between Fulani herdsmen, farmers and local communities had killed 3,000 people since 2010.
On herdsmen, Adebanjo said he had no trust on the ability of the police to quell the activities of the group as the police hierarchy had already described the killings as communal clashes.
He further lambasted President Buhari over his handling of the killings, stressing that “even when someone in the caliber of Falae was kidnapped, he didn’t utter a word. He has also refused to identify Fulani herdsmen as terrorists.
President Muhammadu Buhari had barely left Plateau State when the attacks were launched on Ganda village of Daffo District in Bokkos Local Government Area and Miango village in Bassa Local Government Area. The communities were attacked few hours after the inauguration of Plateau State Peace Building Agency by the President, who was in Jos, the state capital, on a working visit.
He said: “Twenty-five people lost their lives in a fresh attack on Dundu village of Kwall District of Bassa Local Government Area. The incident occurred just as the Irigwe community had planned a mass burial for four of the five earlier killed in a similar attack on Nzhauvo village.
“When we reacted to a claim by the Miyetti Allah group in January of missing cattle, we told you it was a ploy to justify another round of killings. True to this, the Fulani militia, which the Federal Government has refused to brand a terrorist organisation to the dismay of Nigerians, have continued to visit our villages with orchestrated and unwarranted carnage.
Daily Sun gathered that the attack, which occurred at about 7pm, left several houses burnt and scores injured.
It was learnt that the attackers took the villagers unawares when they were preparing to take their dinner and the entire village was enveloped by gunfire from the attackers, leaving children, women and the aged scampering for safety.
A youth leader, Lawrence Timothy, said 25 corpses have been found, while more were still being recovered from the bush
Attributed to Lawrence Zongo, spokesman, Miango Youth Development Association:
“Others, including two women are now receiving treatment in a nearby hospital in the community. One girl later died in the hospital, making it 26 victims. This is too bad as we are planning for a mass burial of the last attack. So far, we have more than 500 in Internally Displaced Persons camp. The international organisations should please come to our aid.”
Information about perpetrator groups was reported for 77% of terrorist attacks in Nigeria in 2016. Due to a 63% decrease in the number of attacks carried out by Boko Haram and a 62% increase in the number of attacks carried out by Fulani militants, Fulani militants were responsible for the most terrorist attacks in Nigeria in 2016.
In recent weeks, Nigerian security forces have claimed that some groups of semi-nomadic Fulani herdsmen engaged in bitter and bloody conflicts with farmers in several Nigerian states are actually composed of members of Boko Haram. A statement from Nigerian Director of Defense Information Major General Chris Olukolade claimed the potentially dangerous identification came during the interrogation of Fulani herdsmen arrested after a series of killings and arson attacks in Taraba State (Vanguard [Lagos], April 23; Leadership [Abuja], April 24; Nigerian Tribune, April 24). Reports of Boko Haram members (who are mostly members of the Kanuri ethno-cultural group) disguising themselves as Fulani herdsmen while carrying out attacks in rural Nigeria are common. Though many of these reports may be attempts to deflect responsibility from Fulani herders for attacks on sedentary farming communities throughout north and central Nigeria, even the perception that the Fulani herdsmen have joined forces with Boko Haram could propel Nigeria into a new and devastating civil war.
Note: because Russia has been cited as arming the Taliban in Afghanistan in its war against liberal and democratic modernity in that state, BackChannels may suggest searching for similar connection in the “handling” of both Boko Haram and the portion of Fulani Herdsmen engaged in creating chaos, dispossession, and ruin in Nigeria.
It should be evident worldwide that Soviet / post-Soviet Moscow works to weaken states: Syria has been half destroyed in association with Moscow, Crimea invaded and today badgered daily by related military and terrorist-type elements, and so one may ask — or must ask — where else? And for whose benefit?
For more immediate Nigerian and practical realpolitik, the response to Fulani “softening” for incursion may turn out the state’s army and armed local militia.
Kobrin’s a little challenging for reading, but the manner of taking others into one’s own suicide in suicide terrorism has been well documented and explored.
Everyone has complaints: perhaps the pilot in the above video should have asked himself for greater insight into his own behavioral repertoire, so as not to have alienated so many others — and then blamed them for his continuing his own unhappiness.
Of course some parts of the world grind against us, but our souls battle back with constructive ends and ideals.
While the pilot had found fault with everyone on that plane, the same passengers may have missed the pilot who could just as well have gone on to tweak his “ugly duckling” music into a beautiful swan — then too, with the money he must have been making as a pilot, imagine if he had used his new wealth to attend to more children like himself, how amazing the things they may have gone on to do.
Instead, he took himself out of the picture and drew the hate and want of revenge from all of the families and friends associated with all of the passengers on board his flight.
“Brotality” promotes itself on facebook as an entertainment organization.
BackChannels readers are welcome to look them up and drawn their own conclusions.
The Urban Dictionary offers two or three definitions today of the term “brotality“, among them this gem — “When a real hard ass bro kills someone, mortal kombat style. ‘Bro’ being the prefix and ‘tality’ being the suffix.”
There’s much to hash in the above message, but all will distill into the two familiar and very different worldviews so often referenced by BackChannels as “Medieval Political Absolutism v Modern Democratic and Liberal Distribution of Power”.
