Now, as an American citizen living in San Francisco, I can write about my experiences and perspectives in ways that many in Gaza cannot, fearing only that my parents, siblings and other family members who remain there are not held responsible for my opinions. My folks are sometimes jealous of my ability to speak my mind and remind me frequently to consider the implications for them of what I say.
While Israel continues to play a significant role in Gaza’s affairs, the grim anniversary of the Hamas takeover warrants focusing less on Israel than the role that Palestinian political organizations have played in worsening the misery for Gaza’s more than 2 million residents. And that has led me to conclude that the United Nations, for all its problems and the hate it incurs by Israelis, is perhaps Gazans’ best hope for progress.
I am suggesting that if rational peace were possible today — and you are rational in your thinking — it would have been achieved with the Oslo Accords or, later, when the Jews accepted their own ejection from Gaza.
Conveniently dropped from the “rational” discourse, which isn’t so rational if it avoids, covers, or masks the historic alliances, the more brutal forces of order, and the intellectual poisoning (disinformation fed to the Palestinians for incitement), in the region are elements difficult to deny. For simpletons and “useful idiots” — Stalin’s term for those he could control and use with his mouth — the narrative will start with colonizing and theft of the land by European Jews (even though land was purchased and Jewish agricultural development grew the population in paid Arab and Jewish labor; even though the Jewish presence / residence in the land spans thousands of years — 3,500 years in Gaza; even though Hebrew could have been borne and spoken nowhere else; even though 800,000 Jews ejected from Arab states — what happened to their property? — contributed to the formation of modern Israel — and the Hebrews are justifiably back in the Land of the Hebrews).
All of that in parenthesis seems tucked away in the arguments of the anti-Semitic.
Add: the “work” of the BDS movement, the Electronic Intifada, the nominal “peace movements” and leaders that sustain the middle east conflict — and most at cost to Palestinians more than anyone else! — by promoting the same vacuous words over and over and over again in true _Animal Farm_ fashion: “The Occupation” (“the brutal occupation . . . .”) when in fact Moscow literally produced Arafat to produce in turn a pretty good conflict business that has liberated no one but the corrupt and the criminal.
Husseini-Hitler?
Shrugged away.
Hamas anti-Semitism?
Masked away with apologies and professions of good intentions made by third parties.
Arab apartheid — evidenced in the camps and much confirmed by the brutality meted to Yarmouk in the course of the Syrian Tragedy?
Not a mention of responsibility for the diminishing of the rights and status of refugees — and note: all others spilling out of other wars are at worst most reluctantly maintained in camps as they meet other migration and resettlement challenges. Only the Palestinians have been singled out by the Arab world — or the former edition of it — for use as a weapon against the Jewish (Hebrew) State. For almost seventy years, the fate of the same have been suborned to the ambitions of royals leveraging fear and hatred of the Jews and interest in religious supersession to do it.
Both Ismail Haniyeh and Khaled Mashaal have developed reputations as billionaires while the Palestinian main base is held captive — politically intimidated, ruthlessly exploited, frequently punished — in the interest of many money-making methods.
In many ways, the middle east conflict has been institutionalized and for the once KGB developed leaderships turned into a pretty good family business.
Among the more interesting aspects of the conflict may be the language programming developed to keep the machinery working for the criminally wealthy: “The Occupation” (I call it “The Preoccupation with the Jews!”); “Resistance” (to meaningful education, health care, economic development, etc.). In all aspects, the rhetoric fed to the Palestinians is medieval and designed to serve the equivalent of feudal lords and connected families (a patronage system).
Notably, Hamas associates and backers, starting with Moscow / Moscow-Tehran, share investments in similarly feudal systems and absolute power.
Prompt: mention of “Israel apartheid” (a standard trope in the anti-Semitic wings of the New Old Now Old Far Out and Lost Left) and “letting the refugees return”.
How about ending Arab apartheid and absorbing the Arab refugee generations whose first were abandoned between armies in 1948?
Oh, and how about giving the Palestinians their money back, considering the manners in which Arafat and Abbas became multi-millionaires and Haniyeh and Mashaal billionaires.
Sustaining the MEC supports feudalism, makes crooks wealthy, and extends for Palestinians The Preoccupation with the Jews.
Prompt: Israel is the sole cause of the refugee issue.
Arab absence of empathy and favoring of an anti-Semitic posture and related supremacist assumptions at the end of WWII led to the refusal of terms and the subsequent genocidal (river to the sea) gang-up on the new Jewish State. The “Palestinians” — Egyptian and Jordanian Arabs, migrants also to the fields of the new agricultural economy of the day — had been encouraged out of the way of battle with hopes the Jews would be gone when it was over.
It didn’t work out that way.
It takes a mighty and malign narcissism to refuse culpability for a disaster like the one dealt to the Arab refugees of 1948 (never mind the 800,000 Jewish refugees from Arab lands that would follow in the wake of the war) and then to turn the same bereft population into a political “poker chip” for the enrichment of a criminal few unconscionable enough to spend decades manipulating hate in the cause of their own aggrandizement.
It appears that given a choice between encouraging conflict and undertaking development, the Jew-hating and once Soviet-loving portion of the Arab bloc invariably persists in poisoning the Palestinian mind, keeping the conflict alive, and handily siphoning off the world’s charity to line its own pockets in related systems of patronage, not that any should want “powerful families” to find themselves bereft of their portion of the take.
Later and latest: “Moscow” — today, a political police state, still fundamentally feudal.
Moscow-Tehran : Red-Green ; Brown-Green: all about force in power.
Mudar Zahran – Mahmoud Abbas has the KGB record, a record that represents a relationship that never disappears. It’s the KGB that set up Arafat and the PLO — and it has been the Palestinian main ranks that have been made to suffer on behalf of those who have mightily enriched themselves.
Nadiya Al-Noor – is there a “modern world” capable of opposing the persistence of the medieval mode in the lives of states?
I think the general conversation on the middle east conflict across the forums has grown way beyond the Che image and poetry of the “freedom fighter”.
We’re all freedom fighters these days.
We should take a good look around at “what was” and needs be no more.
The Soviet Union dissolved in bankruptcy officially on December 25, 1991, i.e., more than 25 years ago, and its offspring Putin strives mightily to sustain feudalism and associated motivations for conflict because his kind of narcissism loves appearing heroic amid the chaos and destruction he himself has created. He’s representative of the worlds so opposed to classical liberalism, justice, and life itself, and perhaps we may now dismiss the phantoms of earlier days.
Are we becoming public figures — are we public figures — enough for leaving the names in?
On this post, I think so.
There’s a lot alluded to in the excerpt, and I incline to leave it be but with the echo of its question:
Is there a modern world capable of opposing the persistence of the medieval mode in the lives of states?
AMUDA, Syria — At long last, those of us struggling to maintain a fledgling democracy in Northern Syria have been buoyed by the announcement from the Trump administration that the American military will begin to directly arm the Kurdish men and women who make up the backbone of the Syrian Democratic Forces. Those forces have been America’s most valued and effective allies in the war against the Islamic State.
This is something we’ve asked for repeatedly during the nearly three years our militias have been fighting the Islamic State and winning, victories achieved despite tough odds and a lack of heavy weapons. We’ve steadily driven the jihadists back hundreds of miles to the brink of defeat at Raqqa. The Islamic State won’t give up its self-styled capital easily. This military aid will be crucial in finishing the job.
But as President Trump prepares to meet next week with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey — no friend to the Kurds in Syria or in his own country — we ask the American president and people to be mindful of the enormous sacrifice the Kurdish people have made in this fight, and the importance of the unique democratic system we have worked hard to build in the area of Northern Syria known as Rojava.
BackChannels has repeated made the case and point that ISIL had been incubated — protected early on from annihilation — by Assad’s preferring to fight the west (and democratic liberalism in the distribution of power) first at the outset of the Syrian Tragedy, and that decision had been flanked by Moscow and Tehran.
By electing to make the primary enemy “The West” and only halting the advance of al-Nusra and other al-Qaeda-type organizations at critical points, Bashar al-Assad created conditions in which the true terrorist opposition could gather and grow. While Syrian forces were creating the horrific conditions that would spur the influx of jihadists into Syria while also inducing mass displacement and migration, it turns out that Saddam Hussein’s old Baathist officer corps had in mind some similar ideas regarding their own lives as puppeteers.
Haji Bakr was sent by the group into Syria in late 2012, as a part of a tiny advance cluster, with the mission to help plot out the steps for the emergent “Islamic State,” to capture as much territory as possible in Syria, and from there to launch an invasion back into Iraq. Haji Bakr settled obscurely in the small Syrian town of Tal Rifaat, north of Aleppo, where he put his immense knowledge of Saddam’s intelligence and totalitarian practices to work, charting out the invasion of Syria and emergence of the “Islamic State”—plans that were later meticulously carried out by ISIS.[17]
Haji Bakr was killed by a Syrian rebel group in 2014,[18] but not before he had transmitted his knowledge and intelligence plans learned inside Saddam Hussein’s former totalitarian regime to the nascent “Islamic State.” The documents he produced, discovered after his death, consist of 31 pages of handwritten organizational charts, lists, and schedules, all of which describe how to step-by-step subjugate a nation.
It is into this greater intersection between “east and west” — actually: feudal dictatorship and western democracy — that the pro-democratic talking Kurdish presence and armed Peshmerga have emerged as forces for modernity.
Given, perhaps, that few in the general public get this far into the machinery of war, it’s possible that “Moscow-Tehran” and “baby Damascus” (between them) may now engage ISIS . . . more sincerely, with Moscow recovering some face and flexibility for doing so. As much may account for the Peshmerga’s wishing to work with Moscow against ISIS, but as ISIS has made for Moscow, Damascus, and Tehran the most useful enemy, there may be a little bit of funny business in attempting that.
Duplicity would seem much less known where American forces and political resolve have been involved although Turkey’s preference for suppressing the Kurds (while developing its own dictatorship) has complicated the Yankee do-good in the Syrian-Iraq theaters.
BackChannels feels that Washington and others may try to match Moscow in the realm of corrupt “realpolitik” but may suggest that working modern ideals against bad deals may better suit everyone’s future. Moscow may make a show of shutting down ISIS, but its clinging to dictatorship and totalitarian show business bodes ill for genuinely western and western-leaning cooperation.
“Right now, Sunnis, Shias, and Kurds can’t live together under a single administration.”
While the Hebrews are back in the Land of the Hebrews and mighty independent about being so, Baloch, Kurdish, and Pashtun communities, among others, continue to struggle against the dominance of hitherto more powerful states.
BackChannels would promote ethnolinguistic cultural community and political autonomy — i.e., what is really meant by the term “cultural self-determination of a People” — with central and margin-bearing features. To get there, however, requires great strength in independent cultural identity plus the cooperation of tribal leaders in producing a coherent unified proto-national politics.
Is the once communist Kurdish PKK the same as it was back in the 1970s, and may that account for some turn toward Moscow today?
BackChannels hasn’t that answer today. The last time this editor looked into that question was 2007 (as a rank political science beginner on an entirely different blog: http://commart.typepad.com/oppenheim_arts_letters/2007/10/turkeys-pkk-hot.html — Turkey looked every inch a democracy back then; and the PKK looked like old bandits holed up in caves and just about finished as a political force.
Oh my how things have changed!
At this time, it appears that fighting ISIS in Iraq and Syria has brought the multiply suzerain Kurdish community together as never before. Now it needs to sustain its cohesion and strength against the pressuring of the errant Arab and Persian worlds once swayed by the Soviet Union and still hungover from the increasingly anachronist experience.
A little BackChannels rah-rah for the home team:
What has given the American model its power has been first and foremost the immense adventurousness and imperialism of the British Empire AND it’s intellectual experience and loading with equal measures Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian cultural experiences. Had the ideals of the Cyrus Cylinder held sway in the middle east, the conversation would be quite different, but its Magna Carta that has worked its will through the western experience and now returns to intercede on behalf of cultures overrun by gross and malign power.
From the Kurdish general:
“Iraq needs to be divided into three neighboring countries, and each country to govern themselves according to the reality of the region. Sunni and Shia Arabs have different approaches in making relations with others. The Kurdish approach is different than both of them. These things have to be considered, so then each one will be responsible for their people, place and country. And these three groups are better as neighbors. Our message for the world is that Iraq is no longer the same, only its shell remains.”
At the moment, Turkey is not what it was either!
BackChannels suggests the United States would do well to deepen the bond with the pro-democracy forces of the Kurdish political community.
Islam orders the Muslim to be honest to himself and others. This order repeatedly comes in the Noble Qur’an and the sayings of Prophet Muhammad (SAWS). Islam orders the Muslim to tell the truth even if it is against the teller’s interest. Orders him not to cheat or deceive other people. A Muslim is ordered by Allah to be honest in his words and deeds, privately and publicly alike.
Portions of The Other Side have been considered as Holocaust denial by some critics,[8] especially the parts disputing the accepted number of deaths in the Holocaust as well as the accusations that Zionist agitation was the cause of the Holocaust,[9] a charge that Abbas denies.[10]
When Abbas was appointed the Palestinian prime minister in 2003, he wrote that the “Holocaust was a terrible, unforgivable crime against the Jewish nation, a crime against humanity that cannot be accepted by humankind” and that he does not deny it,[11] and said that “When I wrote The Other Side … we were at war with Israel. Today I would not have made such remarks”.[12] More recently, in 2013 he reasserted that part of his thesis that “the Zionist movement had ties with the Nazis”.[13][14] In 2014, he stated the Holocaust was the “most heinous crime in the modern era”.[15]
Apparently, Mr. Abbas spreads lies when at war with Israel but shrugs through the truth when its suits him.
Or perhaps when it suits his family’s wallet.
These documents, reports from senior Fatah officials and Palestinian social media reveal extensive corruption at the highest levels — the Abbas family and a Palestinian elite manipulating the political and financial systems to benefit themselves at the expense of the people.
The architect of the Holocaust, Nazi mastermind Adolf Eichmann, was one of the first to deny its existence. While escaping the Nuremberg trials and evading international law, Eichmann befriended Nazi supporters in Argentina who published an anti-Semitic magazine titled “Der Weg,” or “The Way.” The magazine aimed to disprove what they called “the falsehood of the 6 million.” The magazine claimed the Holocaust was nothing but a libel, that there were never any gas chambers in Hitler’s Europe and that the Jews collaborated with the Third Reich in order to have another country for themselves after thousands of years in exile. According to Eichmann and the magazine’s publishers, the Jews were willing to sacrifice themselves to gain a national homeland.
Many Arabs were enthralled by this theory, and a young doctoral student by the name of Mahmoud Abbas, now the president of the Palestinian Authority, even wrote a dissertation on the subject titled, “The Other Side: The Secret Relationship between Nazism and Zionism,” which opened the door for several different conspiracies on the subject of the Holocaust to develop.
The Arabs were among the first Holocaust deniers to adopt Eichmann’s theory.
In the proverbial east, so it would appear, what may not be accomplished honestly may be accomplished through guile — and if not guile, plain lying and force.
One social trope BackChannels has heard regarding lying: “Any who lie to you don’t respect you.”
Fair enough.
BackChannels wonders to what extent those who lie to others, especially Palestinians who lie to Palestinians, respect even themselves.
Posted to YouTube by Human Rights Watch, August 29, 2016.
Expect updates to this post as more material comes together on Abbas representative of the end of a long cycle of totalitarian dictatorship — perhaps more gently, “authoritarian governance” — comes into view on the world stage. Today’s political crooks get covered in global media and come to look exactly as they have painted themselves throughout the course of their careers. Mahmoud Abbas? KGB — he has the record of it, and once marked is marked forever with that organization — so whose interests, apart from his own, is he really representing?
Abbas has also made for himself a record as a Holocaust denier although he has backed away from that lunacy — still, one may wonder how many unwarranted words — assertion of fact that just aren’t true — he has still to recover.
BackChannels 