Posted to YouTube 12/4/2015.
Posted to YouTube 1/17/2012.
Posted to YouTube 12/4/2015.
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“There Is Not One Islam” — M. Zuhdi Jasser — From Islam’s American Reform Movement
05 Saturday Dec 2015
Category Archives: Islamic Small Wars
FTAC – The “Medieval Time Bubble” Mentioned
28 Saturday Nov 2015
Imagine such a thing as a “Medieval Time Bubble” — a place where heads of state hold “absolute power” over their plundered and subject people. It’s in that bubble, today post-Soviet and neo-feudal, that Putin, Assad, Khamenei, AND Baghdaddi need one another for keeping on display “Assad vs The Terrorists” and sustaining eadh their own portion of the medieval worldview.
I believe Daesh autonomous in its operations and spirit but manipulated to serve the ruling feudals as a foil for their militaries or their politics, to serve as leverage (“Assad OR The Terrorists” is the name of that play), and to serve as a goad to the west and related western defense spending.
The response to Daesh AND other medieval enterprises may have to come from the world that most immediately surrounds them.
Trolls online — paid? not paid? who knows — regularly credit the United States with having developed ISIS / ISIL / Daesh. For cause based in news, BackChannels has taken the opposite stance, and Daesh, although autonomous in its own mind and in its own workings, serves the medieval designs of Moscow, Damascus, and Tehran for the furtherance of despotism, fascism, and militarism — and endless war — far into the 21st Century.
In essence, the dissolving of the Soviet, almost 24 years ago, led not to democracy but to a feudal revanche benefiting primarily the ultra-privileged of Russia.
Today’s axis Moscow-Tehran may boast not only autocratic governance but with the help of Daesh’s presence in Iraq and Syria, a pretty good engine for the promotion of “New Nationalist” urges elsewhere and amplified and broadened divisions between people based on legacy in nationality, race, and religion, an anti-NATO strategy that appears to be working as post-KGB / KGB-Style Theater (“Assad vs The Terrorists”) proves that perception at a glance may create a useful target’s impression of reality.
Related on BackChannels
https://conflict-backchannels.com/syndicate-red-brown-green/
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FTAC – Syrian Tragedy and the Promotion of the Medieval Worldview
26 Thursday Nov 2015
Posted in 21st Century Feudal, Islamic Small Wars, Syria
Assad’s central strategy, this with the probable collusion of its partners, has been to produce an interesting piece of post-KGB-style political theater: “Assad vs The Terrorists”, which becomes also “Assad OR The Terrorists.” First, however, he needed “The Terrorists”, and he needed bad enough terrorists to confuse the moderate opposition with them. He had a few ways of accomplishing this effect. He could spill Islamists out of his jails (I’ll refer to a piece on that bit of data in a moment) and he could focus his air and ground forces against FSA (the initial revolutionary force while giving the al-Qaeda Typicals (like al-Nusra and ISIS) time to incubate.
Mission accomplished.
With “The Terrorists” fully present, Assad could then make the demand, “help me, or help them.”
The same system makes way also for the Assad-side slogan, “Assad, Or We Burn the Country.”
The western position: help neither, but try to help other forces strong enough in their own moral and fighting fiber to fight both — and the same have been fighting on their two fronts — against Assad’s forces and against Daesh.
http://www.vox.com/2015/11/23/9782082/isis-defeat-assad
Max Fisher’s piece attends to the complicated political nuts and bolts where I have emphasized a larger struggle between the medieval world of political absolutism, of which Putin, Assad, Khamenei, and Baghdaddi form a whole: the first three have in the fourth the enemy they need to write the future of the world their way. None appear possessed of any compassion sufficient to forestall their own inability in restraining themselves.
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What has come from this has been a steady stream of “war porn” — indescribable images of death, dismemberment, maiming, and mutilation having for their subject tens of thousands of Syrian noncombatants. All who have watched the “Syrian Tragedy” — that’s my term for it — online have seen this horrific feed.
While we have also seen — and in some ways been made to see — Daesh atrocities conveyed in pictures and text, what we have seen also without end have been the targets and effects of Assad’s barrel bombing of whole areas. A portion of Homs today looks like Nagasaki after the ashes have cooled. Famously, the Palestinian Yarmouk Camp has been devastated between Assad’s forces and those of the Islamic State — http://www.longwarjournal.org/…/islamic-state-releases…
Fundamentally, the struggle between the post-Soviet feudalists (“absolute powers” each of them) and the Islamic feudalists is medieval in a particularly barbaric way: both are using modern weapons absent of any apparent compassion or conscience.
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The medieval screed wants the division of all against all — and those who benefit from it have to promote that division as part of their own archaic, faulted, or otherwise misguided ambition — and for shame or honor, none dare admit fault.
Worse, the medieval of mind align differentially — according to national, religious, or sectarian nominal affiliation. Because you were born . . . Shia . . . because you were born . . . Sunni . . . because you were born Russian Orthodox . . . because you were born Arab . . . . because you were born Turkish . . . . these obligations (to bully, demean, and diminish others, to pick fights with others, the more helpless, the better, etc.) are incumbent upon thee.
The medieval world had been constrained by slow transportation, primitive methods of distant communication (runners with notes or messages) and personal weaponry. These medieval elements in the modern world are not so constrained and are both borrowing and leaking themselves into the platforms, as it were, of the progressive manufacturing of devastating weapons as well as other sectors generating the modern experience of community and technology.
Start with Assad’s planes.
The barrel bombs might be basic in various ways, but the flying machines are not.
Now: Russian cruise missiles launched from air and sea; on the ground, anything that can be gotten and carried.
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Part of the online crowd supports the Russian position coupled with affinity for the Christian Church (which church matters less at the moment: whatever the true political topology may be, Assad’s opposition — “The Terrorists” — are all Islamists in the Baghdaddi tradition. Often reached for in objection to that position are the many images of dead, injured, maimed, and mangled children or their parents. In Assad’s war, the same have not been “collateral” or “in the way” of “The Terrorists”: by all appearances and by way of general barrel bombing most of all, they have been the certain targets of Assad’s so-called “defense”.
This video post on YouTube on May 3, 2011 appears among the earliest statements of the Assad concern for any opposed to its absolute authority in Syria:
Related from 2013:
“It’s more horrific than any other war zone I’ve worked in. Most civilians are caught in crossfire, they are never really caught in direct fire. It is direct fire this time” he told BBC News.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-24593886 – 10/19/2013 – “Syria snipers ‘shoot at pregnant women,’ UK doctor claims.”
Such state-generated terrorism encourages sympathy for the Syrian opposition, including in the confusion “The Terrorists” that the Assad regime allowed to incubate.
There are many other and similar observations and arguments having to do with “Assad and The Terrorists” and the medieval barbarism put on display before the world. The escalation attending Russia’s entry into the combat area, the side-by-side mix of Russo-NATO (U.S.) cooperation and “proxy war” have no effect on the kind of inhuman consciousness involved in sustaining the conflict.
It has been and remains BackChannel’s thesis that Putin, Assad, Khamenei, and Baghdaddi and what they represent — on this blog, 21st Century Feudalism — require one another for survival.
Related on BackChannels: https://conflict-backchannels.com/2015/10/02/syria-assad-vs-the-terrorists-how-isis-defends-assad/ – 10/2/2015.
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FTAC – Ecumenical Islam – the Great Conversation
19 Thursday Nov 2015
Social and theological issues within scripture abound, and the injunctive voice tends only to underscore them.
I have seen some awful wrap-ups on Islam, am familiar with what the “islamophobes” access — e.g., Answering Muslims / Acts 17 Apologetics — and from the hardcore of the angered, have gotten the the ghosts left in direct memory from such far flung places as Congo, which has been riven with related religious warfare (x tribal competition for valuable mining resources).
https://conflict-backchannels.com/coins-and-other…/shimmer/
While the news gathers, distributes, and promotes sensational events, the “Great Conversation”, echo of another age, that has ensued has to go somewhere, and unreasoning defense doesn’t do that — but chatter toward the moderate, peaceful, and reasoning trumps violence any day.
Where we have good relationships, decency, at least, in Christian-Jewish-Muslim discourse, I don’t believe it’s because of scripture or related spiritual guidance: it’s because of us, the speaking, and time. Our medieval world, the same that Putin, Assad, Khamenei, and Baghdadi have struggled to sustain, needs to be “back there” somewhere in the cabinet of things we used to do or recall in history as having gone through.
This is history in the making.
IF the Islamists are heretics, shouldn’t they be treated as such? If they are those who have exceeded limits (not much question about that) or who could not restrain themselves, should they not be addressed that way?
My “sword blade” on all of this has been a very light political psychology taking note of the nature of dictatorship and related malignant narcissism. The outlook doesn’t tie to any one political or religious body or system of thought but rather wants a look at certain leaders, their systems, and their followers.
*** (From another part of the same conversation) —
The Muslim Brotherhood, the modern intellectual mothership, believes the activities of any number of related organizations grounded in Islamic theology. However, the same may not see itself as irretrievably chained to medievalism in its realpolitik, i.e., it really wants to rule and believes it should (as in Egypt, so briefly). The Islamic flavor, at least, if not character, of Islam’s troubled JiSadists can neither be blinked nor masked away, but it may be approached with a wider lens on the scope of its own history (and favored legends, like the Banu Qurayza, like Saffiya).
Some leaders would rather be feared than liked.
Most people would rather be liked than feared.
🙂
Despite ourselves — and our various legacies in holy marching orders — we’re likely to tend (and “trend”) toward peace without mind-dulling, soul-numbing subjugation and subjection. Dictatorships are becoming just oh so yesterday.
However, as in chemistry, change needs heat — extra activity — and the Ummah is getting that with every acid drop of terror spilled into the global body politic in its name.
First: defensiveness and denial, behaviors in keeping with narcissistic maintenance (whatever it is, it’s never ourselves — while “ourselves” are always a part of our problems).
Second: as with New Age Islam, rejection of a too familiar path and engagement in introspection and long conversations, and probably the long walks too that help with new writing.
Third: a glimpse of the future, that end of the tunnel sunny day, or so it may look on the way to it, never mind that it might prove another wilderness: at least it will be a different one.
Fourth: change — when you have something to go to and it looks good — one goes.
BackChannels may turn out “ChriJewsLim”, which would be fine, for what goes on living and doing so well, poor or rich, wealthy in friends or in solitude, is fine.
Wikipedia’s List of religions and spiritual traditions
Ethnologue’s map of the world’s living languages
Out of Many, One — and Earth, while it may contain many worlds, is most certainly singular.
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FTAC – Approaching Anti-Semitism and the Medieval Revanch
22 Thursday Oct 2015
1. Anti-Semitism serves feudal power. It is a tool for the manipulation and direction of mobs. Note: Ismail Haniyeh and Khaled Mashaal are billionaires today, which begs the question: who has really occupied what? The PLO and PFLP have been Moscow projects from the beginning and the encouragement of an anti-Semitic middle east a major part of the Soviet program, which medieval / oligarchal phantoms we are fighting today.
2. Nationalism tends toward fascism (ask any of the more western-oriented opposition in Hungary about that). In Israel, the Hebrews, +5,000 years together, are back in the Land of the Hebrews, and they have been taught a long lesson by way of the leaders and fans of the “International Solidarity” and “Palestinian Solidarity” garbage (that’s the word for them): the complaint about Israel has never been about Israel — it has been always about Jewish existence itself, not only in Israel but anywhere on the planet.
3. Go back to Moses the Lawgiver and go forward to Hillel the Elder who to accommodate the restive of a decaying Rome made Judaism more about principle than ritual and more accessible to converts. Then: Jesus, Paul, Constantine; then: Muhammad. Those who really hate the Jews hate the law and humanity. The may hate themselves. Boco Haram, ISIS, Hamas, Hezbollah: call them the “God Mob” because intimidation, theft, and murder on one side and pandering and patronage on the other appears to be what each has best demonstrated in organizational lives short and long.
As much verbiage as BackChannels spools onto the threads of The Awesome Conversation, the social network chatyping fest, it wonders who compressed it may make a packet of thought.
Anti-Semitism : Feudal Mentality
Perhaps that should be enough.
It has been deeply disappointing watching some Syrians (for the most part, not friends, but others the “friends of friends”) refuse to struggle with the anti-Semitic expression that not only accompanies their suffering but plays directly into hands of the medieval troika, Putin – Assad – Khamenei, each of whom have pegged their survival on irrational mob behavior and, indeed, feudal wars that for being so intellectually bereft that they cannot resolve through violence.
Some prefer the engines of war to the machinery of peace.
A moderate Syrian opposition site had played a cartoon showing Putin, Khamenei, and Netanyahu in bed together while Assad lay on the floor. Never mind the nonsense in which the leader of an open democracy shares the same mattress as the two despots, the intent to harm Israel absent of reason stands signal of the too familiar sickness and the fascism to which it connects.
Anti-Semitic hate contributes directly to the medieval worldview promoted by Putin, Assad, and Khamenei. Israel’s arrangements with Russia over Syria have been defensive and perfunctory. Before the Soviet Union dissolved (December 1991), this is how it manipulated latent Jew Hate in the middle east into the Baathist dictatorships — from one of which Assad has descended. In fact, Assad is counting on Syrian anti-Semitism to contribute to his stay in power. https://conflict-backchannels.com/…/ftac-tip-to-the…/
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FTAC – On Separating from the Medieval World
20 Tuesday Oct 2015
Those deep into the polarization(s) don’t understand that what Putin, Khamenei, and Assad are trying to cement for the future and for themselves is the medieval worldview. The tough decision shouldn’t be where to stand up, i.e., against feudalism and fascism, but rather how to lead or navigate the medieval world into a more productive — helpful, peaceful, prosperous — and modern global reality.
Conflicts consume attention and destroy time, so the drivers and engines leading to political polarization have to be impeded or slowed down as well.
Some BackChannels posts function as markers — brief remarks; “scraped” reference to other publications that become teasers (made you click!); commentary that turns old the moment read but remains as a snapshot of response to a part of the news of the day — and that above serves as a marker.
Via BackChannels — perhaps especially in the section “21st Century Feudal” — one catches a glimpse of 19th Century Russia revisited in Putin’s Moscow, the same as alluded to or referenced in the volumes of “The Russian Section”. The New Russian Security State is a medieval complex promoting spectacle (like the $51 billion Winter Olympics at Sochi) and political theater (like “Assad vs The Terrorists” AKA “Assad OR The Terrorists”) while failing to produce government responsive to Russians (some would add the term “outside of Moscow”) or responsible to humanity in general. It has taken BackChannels, which is not edited by an hoary Cold Warrior or newly sprung political science major, some time to see the Great Picture aligning a malignant narcissism with an epic that has laid waste to a nation before a horrified and benumbed global audience.
Projected against the backdrop of this bizarre stage: an image of a Russian bishop (unidentified) blessing rockets intended to kill moderate and modern Syrians, not “The Terrorists” incubated into today’s “Daesh”. The exact context of the image (in the linked Business Insider piece) has been contested but the message — there mere act of Christian religious authority blessing weapons intended for extremist Muslim targets — cannot but endorse the medieval script, would that history itself have kept its most bloody religious wars contained.
On stage, center and right: an endless, horrific, and obscene stream of the momento mori of war brought to the innocent, infant and adult: beheaded, burnt, crushed, mangled, poisoned, riddled, and sliced.
The post-Soviet, neo-feudal arc of power connecting Moscow, Damascus, and Tehran continues to blame the bloodletting on the west (even though last November — 2014 — it was Moscow entertaining the listed terrorist organization “PFLP”; even though it was then Assad’s, and today Russia’s, bombing priority to preference the mixed and moderate Free Syrian Army (FSA) as targets in bombing runs and spare Daesh as hornets to fill up Syria and lash against her neighbors should the Assad regime be plainly overrun).
Responsible oligarchy focused on internal development may survive Syria by way of the complexity of the numbers subject to authoritarian systems and the difficulty, for example, of offering the methods of democracy to such as the Muslim Brotherhood, an organization ever ready for elections followed by proving itself as demonic as advertised (in Egypt in 2013: so done), but the Moscow story now differs quite from that: Bloomberg Business has spotted the contraction of the Russian economy at 4.6 percent (8/10/2015).
Related and published about 30 minutes ago: Kolesnikov, Andrei. “Russia Chooses Bombers Over Pensioners.” The Moscow Times, October 20, 2015.
Related: Stadnik, Alexander. “Russia’s startup migration could help repair relationship with US.” Russia Direct, October 15, 2015; McKenzie, Malgorzata. “Why start-ups are Really leaving Russia.” Russia Direct, October 15, 2015; Murashova, Olesya and Elena Novoselova. “Employment: Recruitment Shortly Before 2016.” The Moscow Times, October 20, 2016; Whitman, Elizabeth. “Russia Unemployment Soars Under Putin Amid Sanctions, Falling Oil Prices: 4.1 Million Out of Work.” International Business Times, September 23, 2015.
However one may read or skim the above cited articles, business life (and employment) appears simply more tenable, perhaps even pleasant, in the west: more markets for high tech innovators, whether as labor or the heads of new businesses; the power to passively contribute to reduced global oil pricing — by way of North American Energy Independence for Canada and the United States — and, in relation to conflict, imposing sanctions that could only be imposed by the lawful (in banking, business, and trade) on the unlawful — and “unlawful” is what medieval “absolute power” — the rule of the despotic and piratical — has been always about.
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FTAC – Syrian Mass Migration – Tough Measures or Programmatic Ones?
18 Sunday Oct 2015
It’s too late for “tough” and as demonstrated by Hungary, the same plays to the fascist nationalism and medievalism promoted by Putin and Khamenei.
The way to handle waves of immigrants is simply to program ahead, determined to filter criminals and criminal jihadists from the ranks and produce a path for “acculturation, acclimatization, and assimilation.”
The other part is to go back to the “stink” that’s driving immigration and quell it. That too in Syria and Iraq needs must be done.
Will the west “hold off” on Syria? For how long? — And at what price?
Related from Pamela Geller: VIDEO: Doctor describes horrors in German hospital overrun by Muslim migrants, Doctors stabbed, no arrests, no media – See more at: http://pamelageller.com/2015/10/video-czech-doctor-describes-migrant-hospital-invasion.html/#sthash.XvkXDYAr.dpuf
Related on BackChannels: https://conflict-backchannels.com/2012/10/19/mobarak-haider-blasphemy-and-civilization-three-youtube-clips/
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FTAC – Russia in Syria – Afghanistan? Nope.
13 Tuesday Oct 2015
Syria seems a much more confused battlespace with a Soviet / Post-Soviet backbone supporting feudal absolute power. Russia has returned to support of a Christian church — so it can’t be about “godless communism” — but retains strong alignment with the regime in Iran and the ophthalmologist in the middle. It looks to me like the Sunni-side Arab Emirates post by Hasan Hasan favors Sunni expansion (duh smile emoticon ) with murderous ISIS as its edge, not an evil entity worthy of destruction by both Shiites and Sunnis.
Sigh.
From the western perspective, medievalism is on full display, and, post-Enlightenment, battle is not reason and winning or losing in the same says nothing about metaphysics. Modern Obama has invoked the term “dumb war” for staying out of the Islamic partisan wars of the middle east. Having been right to do so, he’s narrowed the American scope to fighting “The Real Terrorists” (as opposed to Assad’s version of “The Terrorists”) and has had U.S. military campaigning against “ISIL” assets and leadership.
The conversation starter — a question: “Afghanistan II?”
Nope — not Afghanistan Two or too.
The prompt for the conversation came from this report on Russian battlefield losses in the Syrian Theater:
Nearly two weeks after the Russian intervention began in Syria, one could say it has not got off to a good start. Last week, the Syrian regime launched its first ground offensive against the rebels under Russian air support.
The assault, in Hama’s northern countryside, failed spectacularly – rebels affiliated to the Free Syrian Army destroyed at least 18 tanks and held their ground.
Hassan Hassan. “How the Syrian crisis will change matters in Iraq”. The National, October 13, 2015.
Considering the source and the role played by partisan opinion and reporting around the Syrian Tragedy, the report of so many tanks destroyed may do with buttressing. Here it is:
The U.S.-made BGM-71 TOW missiles were delivered under a two-year-old covert program coordinated between the United States and its allies to help vetted Free Syrian Army groups in their fight against President Bashar al-Assad. Now that Russia has entered the war in support of Assad, they are taking on a greater significance than was originally intended.
“We get what we ask for in a very short time,” one commander, Ahmad al-Saud, said in an interview. He added that in just two days his group, Division 13, had destroyed seven armored vehicles and tanks with seven TOWs: “Seven out of seven.”
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