06 Wednesday May 2015
Posted to YouTube 5/5/2015.
Featured: Arab-Israeli diplomat George Deek.
Event: First Annual Reception
Link: http://www.standwithus.com/news/article.asp?id=3930
Reference: Doherty, Rosa. “Israel’s Arab diplomat tells StandWithUs guests why he backs the Jewish state.” The Jewish Chronicle Online, May 1, 2015.
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27 Monday Apr 2015
Posted to YouTube 4/24/2015.
I spoke last Wednesday night at Brooklyn College, if you can still call it that. Every seat was filled – 80 percent by Muslim students. If this is the future, it is murder. The sneers, the jeers, the laughter – my discussion of the most savage jihad acts was met with huge peals of laughter. It wasn’t a talk; it was a vicious circus: lawless and shameful.
From the moment I began to speak, the Muslim students were cackling and catcalling with Jew-hating remarks and jeers.
http://pamelageller.com/2015/04/pamela-geller-wnd-isis-at-brooklyn-college.html/#sthash.clTfmR90.dpuf – The event took place April 22, 2015.
Last fall, The New York Times referred to ISIS as a “cult of sadism” (October 2, 2014), noting of the center of ISIS power in Iraq and Syria, “In this confused and complex landscape, the Islamic State seems a model of remorseless clarity. We have not seen the last of its horrors.”
Recommended for insightful reading in the psychology involved: any of the works of Nancy Hartevelt Kobrin.
Related on BackChannels: “JiSadists — An Update on Westgate Mall Barbarity.” October 1, 2013.
BackChannels got its start elsewhere with comments on the 2006-7 assault by al-Shabaab on Somali, and its author then noted its caprice in dealing death to Muslims. The al-Qaeda-type group appeared then to have the conscience of an earthquake or typhoon, both mindless forces of nature, which is to say it appeared to have no conscience at all. After seven years, the only change marked by Daesh appears to be the amplified scale of the firepower, the general warfare, and the vacuous horror visited on those whose bodies, minds, and souls it destroys.
While al-Qaeda was once the most barbaric terror group in the world, that dubious label now goes to ISIS.
http://abc30.com/news/filmmaker-interviews-isis-fighters-for-documentary/680517/ – 4/24/2015.
I know this piece is all over the map . . . but what fresh observation from media is wanted?
From the documentary filmmaker mentioned in the above article, Itai Anghel:
Posted to YouTube 1/18/2015.
From the Awesome Conversation, one friend asked in reference to this piece, “Where are America’s most prominent feminists? The Naomi Wolf, Rachel Maddow, Amy Goodman? sadly many are Jewish.”
BackChannels would suggest that some mouths have been trained in a certain political aesthetics: what is “cool”. Some people will stick with “what was cool” even while time wraps layers of change around them, and they become like amber, old, shiny, and fixed.
The developed empathy that drove a humanist liberalism would do well to confront new challenges. The Jewish community, conservative and liberal, will always address abuse, disconcern, neglect in the promotion of human dignity and human rights, but it may need to update now and then its assessments of the ambitions of its fellow travelers.
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23 Thursday Apr 2015
Tags
VICTORY!Judge rules for us in AFDI vs MTA:”The [MTA’s} theory is thoroughly unpersuasive” #WIN http://t.co/7nkCXIrTd7 pic.twitter.com/EtdlRs2kZL
— Pamela Geller (@PamelaGeller) April 21, 2015
If the screenshot banner copy is unclear or too small to read, it says, “‘Killing Jews is Worship that draws us close to Allah’ — Hamas MTV. That’s His Jihad, What’s yours?”
The Geller and Spencer and other anti-Jihad shows ask of Islam sufficient introspection and courage emphasize virtue, reform if necessary, and put both the 20th Century inspiration for the “Muslim Botherhood” and related poison-in-the-head out of business so that more of the world can get to work on other things.
However, the conflict and violence that assaults us daily by way of global media — and investment in this region of discussion — hasn’t only to do with Islam: it has to do with the interpretation of power — absolute and feudal or distributed and democratic. “Putin-Assad-Khamenei” are of a type, and Islam, especially in the middle east, has been “played” (ref.: Pacepa and Rychlak) and plays to their deeply medieval world vision and the image they have of themselves in it.
The Jews continuously, famously, remove themselves from cults of godlike personality and continue eternally in search of the Promised Land. Instead of imposing, the commune invites, and perhaps after Hillel, some ideas about a common humanity become borrowable but also political and little bit crooked (in Judaism, for example, all of the prophets are drawn as faulted humans, deeply so, and kept separate from God). For our grandiose delusional dictators fascists malignant narcissists, the limitation perhaps seems a deep affront and “control”, sadistic and total, becomes their thing. Must we have them? “Syndicate Red Brown Green” and NATO, more or less, are wrestling over it. Hamas is way down on the food chain (thank Khamenei, among others, for keeping it in business) but it’s leveraging some Islamic zeitgeist to produce chaos, fear, and sorrow around itself serves the larger press of the feudal mode.
Not only “the awesome conversation” elicits the above but also simply visiting these themes — conflict, culture, language, psychology — day after week after month after years: things come to the surface. Some become so familiar as to become blog-based tropes:
No Moses — no Muhammad
Hillel the Elder –> Jesus, Paul, Constantine –> Muhammad
The Torah begins with God
The Torah, closely read, compels progressive ethical and moral argument
Syndicate Red Brown Green (post-Soviet neo-feudal Russia; new national socialists; Islamists)
Expect some items to show up on the “Alpha – Zulu” page of this blog. Others may be simply plugged into meditative political writing as fit.
The tests of will in conflict that BackChannels has come to perceive has been very much within the medieval vs modern template, which would be fine if the medieval proved good. The matter, however, has been complicated by a dark portion in psychology, i.e., the compulsive, endless, and helpless fascism and sadism of the malignant narcissist. Too often, capricious power — power considering itself above all natural laws and inclined to create and make the same to suit itself without limits — comes to impose suffering on others with impunity. It (!) appears to prize the annihilation of others and the erasing of time out of the urge to exist in a timeless world entirely of its own fashioning — and doing so it dooms itself to annihilation.
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22 Wednesday Apr 2015
Thanks to retreats like this one, it is Khamenei’s red lines, not Obama’s, that have determined the shape of the emerging deal—a fact that prompts the president’s critics to accuse him of fecklessness and/or naïveté. But these descriptions miss the mark. The president is not wedded to any set of specific demands. For him, the specific terms of the nuclear agreement are far less important than its mere existence. One of Obama’s greatest diplomatic successes is to have persuaded much of the world, including many of his critics, that the primary goal of his Iran diplomacy is to negotiate a nuclear arms-control agreement. In fact, the primary goal is détente with Iran.
BackChannels comment: It makes complete sense, and I hope it’s completely wrong — but it’s a complete and lucid analysis of a foreign policy that has been wrested from the awareness and perception of most Americans and fellow travelers.
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21 Tuesday Apr 2015
Alongside the honor brigade’s official channel, a community of self-styled blasphemy police — from anonymous blogs such as LoonWatch.com and Ikhras.com to a large and disparate cast of social-media activists — arose and began trying to control the debate on Islam. This wider corps throws the label of “Islamophobe” on pundits, journalists and others who dare to talk about extremist ideology in the religion. Their targets are as large as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and as small as me.
The above article was mentioned by Ayaan Hirsi Ali in a video featured on another BackChannels post.
The more action taken against the classically liberal world, the more the medieval machinations grinding away at it and Islam’s future become clear. Lightly linked here “malignant narcissism” within the realm of political psychology, the roots of intellectual stuckness, the propensity for deeply authoritarian and sadistic leadership, become increasingly clear.
As noted on that other post, the discussion of reformation in Islam has been taken up in an earnest fashion by New Age Islam and, of course, there is now no end to criticism from every direction, including from deep within Islam, of an Ummah beset with bloody conflicts and terrorist incidents from Afghanistan to Yemen.
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15 Wednesday Apr 2015
It’s not just the vice-chancellor of Jamia Azhar but others too that are now calling for reformation in Islam, something that was being done so far in a consistent and methodical manner only on Islamic website New Age Islam. Indeed, New Age Islam remains banned for the last two years in Pakistan for countering the Jihadist theology of violence being propagated on over 150 Jihadi publications in that country.
Thus it is gratifying that several other Muslims from different parts of the world are now coming out to demand introspection and change. Four well-known Muslim intellectuals, for instance, have appealed to all Muslim political and religious leaders to stand up and support what they term “democratic Islam.” They have called for a conference in France early next year that would “define the contours of a progressive interpretation of Islam firmly grounded in the 21st century.”
In Judaism, God’s three gifts to His first two children are human consciousness, self-consciousness, and conscience.
The ethnic development of the technology may in some ways undermine the implicit and appealing universalism in the message, but in schema, this amounts only to urging the separation of the authors of ideas inherently dignifying and liberating from contemplation of those ideas as they stand on their own.
One or two cousinly additional thoughts for the reform minded: all figures depicted by the Torah and referred to as “prophets” by Islam have in the Torah been drawn as faulted people and distanced from God — in essence, disconflated, Moses included (God parts the waters, not him); the Torah also compels ethical and legal argument without end, for when God “proves Abraham” — tests him — the test is not defined, and whether of obedience or conscience (perhaps Abraham had been expected to speak his mind about the sacrifice of Isaac, i.e., to have been conscionable, not blindly obedient) is left to the listeners and readers to argue.
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13 Monday Apr 2015
Reuters – April 13, 2015.
Iran’s war-by-proxy sneaked under cover of negotiations over its nuclear program has tragically turned Aden, Yemen into another battered middle east war zone in the fashion known to “Putin-Khamenei-Assad” — merciless, mindless, piratical, and ruthless.
The troika have been waging the medieval against the modern — the destructive and thieving potential of absolute power against the productive democratic distribution of power — for years, and visible so since the onset of Syria’s civil war. With the distribution of military personnel into Crimea and Yemen, the dynamic Putin-Khamenei duo have brought payback in flooded oil markets and online opprobrium, although I don’t think either Putin or Khamenei bothered by criticism, at least not on the surface and outside of their bailiwicks.
Three sources in the southern port city’s anti-Houthi militias said the Iranians, identified as a colonel and a captain, were seized in two separate districts that have been rocked by heavy gun battles.
“The initial investigation revealed that they are from the Quds Force and are working as advisors to the Houthi militia,” one of the sources told Reuters.
“How can Iran call for us to stop the fighting in Yemen?” asked the the top Saudi diplomat at a news conference alongside French counterpart Laurent Fabius. “We came to Yemen to help the legitimate authority, and Iran is not in charge of Yemen.”
Tharoor, Ishaan. “Saudi and Iranian leaders wage war of words as Yemen burns.” The Washington Post, April 13, 2015.
VICE – September 10, 2014.
Lonely bloggers cannot compete with funded international media in reporting the news, unless we have unusual friends on the ground.
However, as audience to mainstream media — and conflict adventure media — we may wrap events differently online, read about what we are seeing when we’re offline, and perhaps approach conflict and political analysis with something combining humanism, journalism, and scholarship.
As regards the above clip, this blogger may reflect on what a single lie can do in the way of evil.
At 2:31 in the video immediately above, Iman Dr. Taha says to his gathering, “I told him, “What are you doing? Your country is getting destroyed. This is all part of an action by American intelligence. And today, a new order was given telling the world that 70% of foreigners are terrorists who want to rip our country apart. They want to kill our people and our nation and destroy our unity. The faith is Yemeni and the wisdom is Yemeni. God is great. Death to America.”
That audience: handled, misguided, maneuvered, used.
It appears they haven’t the means or temerity to question what they’re told (and independently discover for themselves who has been lying to them all along — and why).
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10 Friday Apr 2015
The Palestinians in Yarmouk are unlucky, mainly because they are being attacked and killed by Muslims, and not by Israel. An Israeli attack on the camp would have drawn worldwide condemnation and protests, with Palestinian and Arab leaders rushing to seek the intervention of the UN Security Council and the international community.
The Palestinians in Yarmouk are unlucky because their leaders in the Palestinian Authority and Hamas are still busy fighting each other over power and money. This is a power struggle that has been going on since Hamas drove the PA out of the Gaza Strip in the summer of 2007.
Toameh, Khaled Abu. “Why Palestinians in Yarmouk Are Unlucky.” Gatestone Institute, April 10, 2015.
Setting aside the fine points of Islamist rivalry that may exist between Daesh and Hamas, the absurdity and obscenity of the destruction of the Palestinian Yarmouk Camp may serve to highlight the sociopathic character of the despots who brought it about: Putin, Assad, Khamenei.
Aboud Dandachi’s observations regarding the perverting of Syria’s Arab Spring into an extremist’s civil war are borne out by the advance of the al-Qaeda spin-off that is Daesh and the more than equal measure of punishment meted to Yarmouk by the Assad (“Or Burn It”) regime. All of the Arab accusation and handwringing on behalf of the (descendants of) refugees of 1948 have been betrayed as convenient loud mouthiness. In the pinch, not one militant or military Arab hand stood to defend — to hold dear and keep safe — the larger population of Yarmouk.
If the reader should happen to be thinking like a healthy human being, this might be a good time to put on the mantle of any of a number of malign narcissistic sociopaths and start to think like a ringleader, a showman, a producer of conflict to be delivered, described, and framed in the cause of one’s own self-aggrandizing political theater.
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said the mayhem has turned Yarmouk into “the deepest circle of hell.”
“A refugee camp is beginning to resemble a death camp,” Ban told reporters at the U.N., adding that the residents, including 3,500 children, are being used as human shields by armed elements inside Yarmouk and government forces outside it.
You cannot understand the Islamic State’s assault on the camp or what it means unless you also consider how Bashar al-Assad, as a gift to the Palestinian people, turned a thriving neighborhood of hundreds of thousands of people into a desperate population of 18,000 waiting to die. We cannot stop what happened in Yarmouk from repeating itself elsewhere unless we save the 600,000 besieged civilians whom Assad is starving to death.
At the time, the full scale of the group’s collusion with the Assad regime was not yet well known, and it was perceived as an independent Al-Qaeda group with dreams of a 21st century caliphate, which they started to impose on Raqqa.
In mid-2012, Hezbollah entered Syria, ostensibly to safeguard a regime that was vital in supporting its operations in the region. Once thought of as the ‘axis of resistance’ against Israel, their intervention, coupled with their ally’s brutal siege on Yarmouk, has damaged the movement’s popularity among Palestinians from Syria.
Published about a year ago, this piece seems practically quaint by the standards of horror being visited today by Daesh on the beleaguered Palestinians.
Reports also say that several Palestinians including an imam have been beheaded by Isis. Grisly pictures posted on social media shows severed heads hung on spikes inside the refugee camps.
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