Category Archives: Islamic Small Wars

Also in Media: From Chechnya to Myanmar — Military Brutality and Political Control: The Creation of War

16 Saturday Sep 2017

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Also in Media, Asia, Burma, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Islamic Small Wars, Political Psychology, Politics, Religion

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , ,

False-Flag Fire Starter:

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/439060/vladimir-putin-1999-russian-apartment-house-bombings-was-putin-responsible

Brutalizing of Chechnyan noncombatant villagers:

http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/S/bo3617244.html

Backgrounder, published yesterday, on the persecution of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar:

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/09/what-the-hell-is-happening-in-myanmar.html :

The monks, too?

There’s one famous Buddhist monk who was on the cover of Time magazine a couple of years ago, and he’s described as a “Buddhist Bin Laden.” His name is Ashin Wirathu. He’s a very strange character because he wears the Buddhist garb, which is worn to demonstrate your withdrawal from the world. At the same time, he has diamond-studded watches; he flies on a private jet. It’s completely contradictory. He’s one of the main instigators of the violence. Buddhists believe in reincarnation, and Wirathu and followers of his Buddhist nationalist 969 movement believe that the Rohingya minority have all reincarnated from snakes and insects. So when you actually kill them, you’re not actually killing people, you’re actually just killing snakes and insects. That laid the foundation for the current situation that we’re in.

Who would know the beauty of a malignantly narcissistic kleptocracy better than Moscow?

And I will add, though it may be irrelevant, what hypocritical kleptocratic and medieval entity would know how to infiltrate and support terrorists worldwide better than Tehran?

Give the transitive formula a moment to sink in:

Chechnya : Myanmar

Ingush : Rohingya

The world has been once again drawn into global warfare, Moscow’s way.

By way of wholesale abuse and slaughter, the innocent of war have been pushed in both regions into flight and defensive conflict while being branded as “The Terrorists” — perhaps not unrelated to the process that has burned through Syria but the very facsimile of it.

Given how Moscow / Moscow-Tehran work, the world gets “The Terrorists” — and, oh, they’re real in an of themselves, they’re channeled with their ranks filled out by the efforts of manipulating “leaders” greater than themselves.

Related in the News

There is an urgent need for de-escalation in levels of violence in Rakhine State as there is a strong possibility of other displaced Rohingyas being radicalised by Sunni fundamentalist groups including the Bangladesh chapter of the Islamic State to take to arms. The Rohingya displacement is a matter of serious concern but the root cause of increased animosity among the Burmans and other ethnic groups against the minority community should also not be glossed over. The international community has questioned Myanmar for the crisis but has forgotten the bloody contribution of Pakistan-based jihadist groups to this catastrophe.

http://www.hindustantimes.com/analysis/pakistan-is-fuelling-unrest-in-myanmar-s-backyard/story-LXHqEMzdW5mE4Ut1EwtefO.html – 9/15/2017.

–33–

FTAC: 9/11 – Sixteen Years of Accelerating, Expanding Conflict Between Archaic Worlds and the Modern One

11 Monday Sep 2017

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

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , ,

The medieval worldview and its marriage to financial and political power may be archaic in the modern world.  Faith in God and religion may be good things, but as demonstrated by the Islamists, by the Saudi Royals and their spreading of Wahhabi madrasas, and by related clerical wealth dependent on subscription plus political repression, too much of that kind of “religion” suffocates creativity, freedom, and economic exchange.

I believe the modern world wishes not to be dragged back into the “medieval mode” — or your nation should have a new King with his legitimacy validated by Bishops and the Pope.

Yours has also a different kind of contest going with archaic systems: the tribal systems (with chiefs) are absolute and often worlds unto themselves, and they may well be discomfited by seeing their children yanked into mines and (perhaps) abused.

The Third World War seems to me quite healthy and under way as regards barbarism and the most cynical and evil worship of money by those encouraging horrific acts worldwide.  

Thank Putin who has been most visible in relation to the barbaric horrors of Syria, the creeping warfare ongoing in Ukraine, numerous “frozen conflicts”, which become transfer points for smuggling, potentially on a nearly unimaginable scale, and today the support of al-Qaeda-like Taliban in Afghanistan.

When, and since we woke up sixteen years ago this day, has the modern world — the civilization of open democracies — not been at war with barbarism?

My South American correspondent counseled the various forms of “sword” against the evils wrought by bankers who sought deregulation that invited the 2007/8 financial meltdown, by the godless forces of still nominal and virulent communist and socialist politics, and by indigenous either living in older worlds or lost in this one.

Since 9/11, a curtain in time has come up on the world that surrounds all of us as we have come to casually and commonly access cultural activities and political news around the world via Internet.  Perhaps the community of foreign affairs and international relations enthusiasts as well as professionals has been grown as a consequence of access to . . . the online universe of media, political institutions, and, of course, fellow travelers — and, perhaps, we have become or started on the path toward greater cognizance and sophistication about the world’s myriad conflicts and their true underlying drivers.

For brevity, BackChannels will leave this post “airy” — short on specifics — but note that we — “the west”, “EU / NATO”, “the open democracies of the world” — may be more at war today with feudal despots and medieval illusion and “The Terrorists” — the global network of clerical power bound to media production and incitement and transnational crime (arms, diamonds, drugs, for a start) and related and active cells than was the case before this day sixteen years ago.

–33–

FTAC: Arafat and Potential for Revolutionary Palestinian Leadership in the Coming New Middle East – A Note

03 Sunday Sep 2017

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Anti-Semitism, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Gaza Suzerain, Islamic Small Wars, Israel, Middle East, Palestinia, Political Psychology

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , ,

Excellent statement — let’s keep it grounded in the both the realpolitik of its day and what we know of leadership psychology today:

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/10/03/palestinian-kgb/

Russia has had a long history of virulent and institutionalized anti-Semitism. Before Arafat’s arrival, it used anti-Semitic sentiment to court its targets in the Arab world. https://conflict-backchannels.com/2015/10/12/ftac-tip-to-the-kgbs-amplification-of-middle-eastern-anti-semitism/ In addition to spreading the forgery and libel that was the _Protocols of the Elders of Zion_, it produce a propaganda campaign accompanied by sending trained agents and workers into the middle east to facilitate its own ends.

In states burdened today by the legacy of “medieval political absolutism”, the narcissistic egomaniac only appears to represent the cultural spirituality of the state, but the same presumptuously does as much at any and every cost to The People — and that may include what has happened to the Palestinian People.

https://conflict-backchannels.com/coins-and-other-terms/anthropolitical-psychology/malignant-narcissism/

The malign qualities in leadership may stem from damage done to the self-concept of the leader in childhood or youth as humiliation or similar injury finds an antidote in that person’s reinvention of personality and its appearance. In the context of militarized societies or others obsessed with honor, the observation that the people ultimately create the Great Leader — and the Great Leader becomes also their own Great Burden — would seem to have become in this era entirely predictable. 

The prompt: a discussion about why Arafat failed to set up conditions for a Palestinian democratic society.

The most basic and honest answer to that is this: Arafat’s handlers in Moscow forbid him any development of liberalism or democracy in territories to which he was assigned.  Instead, Moscow asserted its will to impose itself on the Palestinian People and produce a sustained conflict beneath which many would profit from long decades engaged in corruption, crime, and related patronage.  The would be no justice within the Palestinian community for the leadership and its cronies.

More recently, as noted in the BackChannels piece, “Palestinian KGB” (cited above), it has been revealed that Mahmoud Abbas has himself had KGB status — a fact of life that never goes away — and appears today to be as hamstrung in his political stance as his predecessor and probably for the same reason.  He may be representing modern Palestinian interests far less than the archaic medieval interests of Moscow in sustaining dictatorships and the related looting-by-leadership known to too many Soviet-style intimidated and subjugated populations worldwide.

For the greater base of the Palestinian people, the Middle East Conflict has been a good business for the Palestinian privileged by way of the favor of politically criminal Palestinian leaders.

Closely Related on BackChannels

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/09/23/ftac-these-too-are-palestinians/

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2017/07/29/ftac-antidote-to-what-poisoned-the-palestinians/

–33–

FTAC: A Note on War, Cultural Preservation and Transformation

28 Monday Aug 2017

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

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , ,

Some filling in on the intellectual history of Nazism and the spread of anti-Semitic myth seems in order:

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/12/27/excerpt-1920s-the-spread-of-hate-russia-germany-laqueur/

Plainly, the defeat of “Nazi Germany” neither displaced the German language nor the German People (in their majority) but it did transform Germany into a modern and multicultural state haunted by and reacting to the crimes of the mid-20th Century.

The brutal, cowardly, and underhanded methods developed by the Nazis in their achievement and expression of martial and political power may remain — and I hope they remain – unparalleled in intensity and scope in history. Lesser cabal, like ISIL, and some states, as with Russia’s behavior in Syria, may prove equally sadistic but lesser in reach, not that we don’t pay attention.

Regarding Islam and “how many Islamists” — Daniel Pipes has been publishing on that question since 2005 — there are some approaches to coming up with percentages, but the bottom line is that Muslims would seem first in the way of jihadi violence, and so much so that their own security interests focus on keeping the Muslim Brotherhood and their relations neutralized and largely out of power.

The Moscow-Tehran relationship with Hamas and Hezbollah and others and the histories both centers of power have had with terrorism might encourage a good look those two and their historic promotions of anti-Semitism plus participation (state sponsorship for) associated with terrorism.

The prompt: an Islamophobic tirade blanketing all absent of resolving observation and reflection.

–33–

 

FTAC: Islam, God, Nature, the Universe, and 7,000 Languages: A Note and Declaration

11 Friday Aug 2017

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

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , ,

” . . . remember that I have bestowed favours upon you . . .”

Is that God?

Is that God and the Prophet?

” . . . remember that WE have bestowed favours upon you . . . .”

Mohammed will proclaim that the Jews perverted the Torah, but the Jews — and let’s acknowledge that the Torah has been “set” in history (okay, it was a committee) and then transcribed by hand on parchment in Hebrew for every living Torah letter by letter by scribes devoted to that extraordinary and regimented art — may claim that not one letter of the Torah has been altered through the ages . . . through the ocean of time between finality and what is read today.

What is “supersession” but a political attempt to “one-up” the Torah and claim final authority in the interest of personal aggrandizement and enrichment?

No Moses?

No Muhammad.

No Constantine?

No Church of Rome.

Frankly, I blame Hillel the Elder for striving to make Judaism accessible to the “restive of Rome”.

He succeeded.

But the Romans, whatever they were, were not necessarily Jewish in soul. They could and did abandon the Pantheon of the Gods (good thing), but they needed the symbols of the divine as Divine.

And oh ye Muslims . . .ye cannot brag the slaughter of the Banu Qurayza on one hand and convincingly tell of “no compulsion” on the other.

It doesn’t wash.

I’m an American of Jewish descent — an American Secular Humanist.

I appreciate the full range of thought about God, nature, and the universe, and much the appreciate today the fewer than 7,000 living languages into which our thoughts have been packed, each language representing an isolated People’s way of inventing responses to their own environmental and social challenges.

If I were drawing salary as an academic or writer, I would embark on a lengthy period of research and discussion about “modernity”, humanism, comparative religion, and multiculturalism.  However, unpaid, occasionally validated, I may leave the above to stand as it stands.

Here is the renowned but under-publicized Daniel Everett on his experience with Christianity, primitives, language, and faith:

Everett’s terrific, a capable scholar of unquestionable integrity.

–33–

FTAC: Antidote to What Poisoned the Palestinians

29 Saturday Jul 2017

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Epistemology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Gaza Suzerain, Islamic Small Wars, Philology, Political Psychology, Politics

≈ 20 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , ,

. . . the Palestinian street doesn’t learn because they’re disinformed and misdirected by leaders who have been “handled” by Moscow / and, since the Islamic Revolution in Iran, by Moscow-Tehran in their bid to sustain our world in their politically feudal mode.

Do those in the “middle east peace industry” really want to sustain the conflict by limiting the scope of observation to the Palestinian masses?

For the _earlier_ Arab world, post-WWII, latched previously to Hitler, and afterward courted by the Soviets who used anti-Semitism as a lever with which to seduce a few powerful leaders and their followers, the refugees as refugees conventionally managed would have been a lasting reminder of a lost war — a shame, in other words. The creation of a People’s Liberation Movement with a history to match handily solved that issue and “weaponized” the minds of the dislocated population.

Instead of continuing to reinforce negative Palestinian self-concept through condemnation, which is what write-offs do, perhaps moving better information into the main base of the community would undermine the sources of the kind of energy it puts on display when it “chest bumps” Israel on flimsy pretexts and outright lies.

We should be dismantling the political culture informed by the Nazis and later the Soviets. It’s the phantoms of those vicious political movements — plus the fascist or supremacist element in Islam — that may be keeping the Palestinians locked into too small a worldview and boiling with anger.

Almost an aside: a lot of these movements associated with dictators or dictatorship won’t concede their absurd positions until force or freedom alters their political perception.

I would prefer that it was freedom that reached the Palestinians.

–33–

FTAC – Middle East Conflict (MEC) – The Big Wrap

24 Monday Jul 2017

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

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , ,

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/12/27/excerpt-1920s-the-spread-of-hate-russia-germany-laqueur/

In the bridge between the medieval and modern eras, Germany’s Luther had at least opened the coffin’s lid:

“Luther’s influence was not decisive, and certainly not neutral, but ambivalent. So, for example, his writings communicated a generalized distrust, describing Jews as thieves in his preface to the 1528 edition of the influential 15th-century handbook for policing vagrants, the Liber vagatorum. This “evolved into a powerful and all-embracing stereotype—‘that of the Jews as a people of thieves and robbers extraordinaire,’” except that Luther by no means propagated this message alone.”

http://religion.oxfordre.com/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780199340378.001.0001/acrefore-9780199340378-e-312

We shouldn’t be writing with crayons, but on the web where ideas move quickly in these small tiles, broad statements and telegraphing are what we do.

The intellectual history of modern “Jew hate” appears to move from Russia (with the “Protocols”) via White Russian emigre fleeing the Bolshevik Revolution; at the end of WWII, the Soviet Union was in position to amplify and leverage anti-Semitic sentiment in the middle east into political influence and power.

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2015/10/12/ftac-tip-to-the-kgbs-amplification-of-middle-eastern-anti-semitism/

The Arab World could not have hated the Jews quite so much prior to WWII and Nazi and later Soviet influence for it’s states sustained a population of (that well-known figure) 800,000 Jews and their businesses and synagogues. There’s certainly a minority experience contained in the memory of that population, but that it was there and working tells us that the politics of the World War and its immediate aftermath set the stage both for the birth of Israel and the Arab expulsion of the Jews.

IF the Kingdom represents today’s Arab world, it is heavily invested in western success through Kingdom Holdings. It has taken small steps toward updating its culture (I have yet another blog piece standing signal to that), and it has taken interest in developing technology requiring the western interface. Nonetheless, the narcissistic medieval worldview needs must prevail for the time being, and cultural inertia continues to leverage anti-Semitism. (just a little more).

Rival Iran — Moscow / Moscow-Tehran — challenges the liberalism of the west with “absolute power” — the rule of the emperor or king for his own desired ends and with sufficient contempt and cruelty to enforce a malign will. One may consider the destruction of Syria by a tyrannical Assad as flanked by Putin and Khamenei merely a demonstration of the “principle” of absolute ownership of an entire people.

In 2011, Barack Obama offered President Putin a gambit: lean west — and Putin rejected the role of tempering Assad and instead embraced the KGB past — that which groomed Arafat and approved Abbas — and here we are. By focusing on ISIS and some on Tehran while “working with Russia”, we avoid a fast disaster.

For the Palestinians, all of the above involving Russia’s historic influence, has been a disaster, and this view — I don’t think I’m the only one propagating it — may be reaching the Arab World on the “Anglo and western axis”. The other channels and manipulates and incites along medieval lines that it means to sustain, and it wants the wars of all against all that lend it glory.

An earlier post noted social media’s unsuitability for “long copy”.

In “Life Online”, readers much prefer epigrammatic statements and slogans to digested narratives or overviews — we want to get the message quickly and then get back to the next social moment or breaking news.

I’ve tried with BackChannels to find a place between the scholarly tract and the lay observation with hope that other journalists — more powerful — and some in the generally interested public would pick up on the blog’s themes.

Of course, I place some faith and hope in each post at the moment it’s published, and often that is all a writer may do.

–33–

Also in Media: “Can Ayaan Hirsi Ali Liberate Islam from Islamism?” | by Andrew Harrod | Religious Freedom Coalition | July 20, 2017

21 Friday Jul 2017

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Also in Media, American Domestic Affairs, Islamic Small Wars, Political Psychology, Religion

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , ,

“Dawa is to the Islamists of today what the ‘long march through the institutions’ was to twentieth-century Marxists,” writes Ayaan Hirsi Ali in her latest monograph, The Challenge of Dawa:  Political Islam as Ideology and Movement and How to Counter It.  In it the Somali-born political activist accurately analyzes the threat of, and necessary response to, Islam’s faith-based political ideology, yet the feasibility of her desire to reform this “Islamism” out of Islam is questionable.

Analyzing dawa’s call to Islam, Ali calls for a “paradigm shift that recognizes how violent jihad is intertwined with the ideological infrastructure of dawa,” the “subversive, indoctrinating precursor to jihad.”  Reflecting a commonplace myopic focus on jihadists, President George W. Bush “often referred to a ‘war on terror,’ but terror is a tactic that can be used for a variety of ideological objectives.”  Accordingly, “nonviolent and violent Islamists differ only on tactics; they share the same goal, which is to establish an unfree society ruled by strict sharia law.”

Source: Can Ayaan Hirsi Ali Liberate Islam from Islamism?

–33–