Category Archives: Islamic Small Wars

Link – Hirsi Ali on Islamic Reformation

22 Sunday Mar 2015

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The killers of Islamic State and Nigeria’s Boko Haram cite the same religious texts that every other Muslim in the world considers sacrosanct.

Instead of letting Islam off the hook with bland cliches about the religion of peace, we in the West need to challenge and debate the very substance of Islamic thought and practice.

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/opinion/why-islam-needs-a-reformation/story-e6frg6zo-1227272860152 – 3/21/2015.

Posted by The Australian from The Wall Street Journal, I have seen the piece met with derisive but now familiar ad hominem attacks on Ayaan Hirsi Ali that clearly evade issues in the language exploits and related behaviors noted.

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FTAC – Questions on the Portent of Conflict in the Middle East

06 Friday Mar 2015

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The scapegoating of the Jews : KSA vs Iran / Sunni vs Shiite : medieval conflict vs modern transition (with other cultural essentials intact) should probably be on the table for discussion all at once, for they seem to me inseparable issues.

Is security in the ME a “balance of power” issue? Are conflicts in the region about imposing one will or another on large populations? Or are they about “updating” — i.e., seeing things very differently?

Is ISIS a Sunni enterprise reinforcing Sunni vs Shiite animus — or is it an entity that needs to be fought by Sunni, Shiite, Christian, and other forces in concert?

In which world should a reader wish to live?

The one of deceit dividing others from self — or the one of integrity in which a virtue is a universal virtue?

A world modeled on “all against all” and certain to find cause for further division and means toward a nefarious discrimination and patronage — or the other that is “all for all” and against those who foment division and promote conflict between what they divide?

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No Filters – Netanyahu’s Speech to the United States Congress, March 3, 2015

03 Tuesday Mar 2015

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Iran, Islamic Small Wars, Israel, Middle East

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Posted to YouTube (by NYT) March 3, 2015

BackChannels may revisit this for comment.

Suffice the clip to post as a matter of record and on this site an emblem of the themes often brought up here: “Red Brown Green”; now “The Newest Nobility” (has Obama attached to “Red Brown Green”?  Do the world’s wealthiest live by different rules?  Are the piratical in business and politics free to act as 21st Century feudal lords?  Is the west and much of the aspiring world to be dragged backward into the medieval mode and therefore enslaved by the most “mafia”, the most ruthless and sadistic among autocrats?

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FTAC – Iraq – Obama – 21st Century Neo-Feudalism

03 Tuesday Mar 2015

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Iraq, Islamic Small Wars, Syndicate Red Brown Green

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The coalition may need “buy-in”.

Obama may be misguided or misled or in cahoots with what I guess I’ll call the “Newest Global Nobility” — very wealthy people who cooperate with one another in various ways while maintaining a popular screen of differences in their ideological or political rhetoric.

Khamenei — and his brother — appear themselves to be without boundaries, and perhaps unwittingly, the U.S. / NATO have opened the gates to Iranian power in Iraq — and, bear with the writer, Iran-manipulated ISIS (that’s the story I feel I’ve seen) provides both key and lever for that condition. Khamenei with ISIS has the leverage to convince Iraq’s Shiite community that it needs him in their defense, when, probably, he helped open the way for ISIS into Iraq and influenced the stall of the ISIS summer 2014 campaign north of Baghdad.

Complicated?

Putting on a show in “political theater” has been the Soviet way / post-Soviet neo-feudal KGB / FSB way, and Iran has been part of that all the way. The sanitizing and prettying up of the Camp Liberty crowd may signal Obama’s own complicity in this developing arrangement between emerging 21st Century neo-feudal politicians.

While “Red Brown Green” may be defined by the revanch skeleton of the Soviet Union in the form of a “Newest Nobility” — Putin-Khamenei as anchors, Assad, Orban, and Erdogan as lesser lords — the American and NATO roles in making adjustments on behalf of Really Big Money seems much less visible.

Is The Money Democratic or Republican?

Or is The Money just concerned with itself and include to manipulate whatever suits its accumulation best?

Are we watching the invention of a true-to-life (and politics) Global Monopoly Board?

BackChannels doesn’t know the answer to that question yet, but it’s coming to know how ruthless Soviet / post-Soviet and KGB-derived politics may be, and that to the extent that “false flag operations” and manipulated horrors like ISIL are possible in the cause of the acquisition of human but inhuman and psychologically disturbed (and disturbing) power.

Whether that “Moscow Apartment Bombing” kind of behavior (KGB false flag, according to Karen Dawisha) has found a place in the west remains to be verified (by some preponderance of evidence), but that Obama has been giving Khamenei a hand — Yemen ceded to the Houthis, apparently; the western coalition response to Daesh slowed before being made to response to atrocity (e.g., the enslavement and slaughter of the Yezidis; the intervention on behalf of the Kurdish community in Kobani) with some plans seemingly leaked — seems plain.  In Obama’s world, inaction appears to have become as good as action as regards enabling and encouraging the development of increasingly bad news.

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Pakistan – A Declaration of Character – Correspondence from Quetta

19 Thursday Feb 2015

Posted by in Asia, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Islamic Small Wars, Pakistan

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Verbatim as received:

YE JO DEHSHAT GARDI HAY YE JO TALIB GARDI HAY YE JO ISI GARDI HAY ….ES KAY PECHAY WARDI HAY(KHAKI WARDI/….THIS WAS THE SLOGAN OF PAKHTOON STUDENTS JOINED BY THE STUDENTS OF ALL OTHER COMMUNITIES AT QUAID E AZAM UNIVERSITY ISLAMABAD………THEY WERE PROTESTING AGAINST THE INDISCRIMINATE AIR STRIKE AND ARMED FORCES SHELLING OVER THE VILLAGES OF SOUTH-WAZIRISTAN,THAT TOOK
THE LIVES OF ALMOST 300 INNOCENT TRIBLES… I WISH THE AUTHORITIES COULD HEAR THEIR VICES…….BEFORE IT TURN INTO THE SLOGAN OF SEPERATION LIKE THAT OF BALOCHIS…………IT SEEMS TO ME LIKE THE HISTOTY OF 1971 IS BEING REPEATED….

Being an american studies student, i observed some similarities in US.PAK history n society, in the US Negroes suffered alot even they still live as C class citizens.Same is the case here in Paki society with Pakhtoons n balochs…..The Americans killed ruthlessly the natve Red Indians,same is being done in tribal areas of pakistan.Both enjoy Federal system of govt.the only difference is that in the US, the federating units joined the centre willingly, while Pakistan draged the units forcefully to join…..

war is a new pakistani movie ,released some months earlier. i just happened to watch it n found it absolutely biased n anti pakhtoon. it shows pakhtoons vs state.taliban are not only pakhtoons there is a huge group of punjabi taliban aswell.furthermore, taliban are only 1 percent of pakhtoon population, we also consider them a paid force of others n cancer for our society.out of those 50 thousand pakistanis who lost their lives in terrorist attacks, 40 thousand werw pakhtoon.we the pakhtoon are the main sufferors of terrorism.we lost our mosques,schools,colleges,homes n beauty of our cities……but still we the pakhtoon are shown as a terrorists……such a movies are spreading nothing but hatred………..to counter terrorism pakistani nation should be shown as a one nation…n pakhtoon,s sacrifices must be realised n acknowledged othrwise results may not favourable 4 our pakistan.

The distance between the writer of the above letter and personnel within Pakistan’s Frontier Corp, for a start, may be reduced to zero with a single URL copy, paste, and send.

As much has been bound to happen for some time — if you are reading this, you are probably also having an Awesome Conversation with the World and playing some part in the New Global Intelligentsia’s People’s Diplomacy.

God willing.

Officialdom may be too busy, too distracted, or too important to trifle with either corrections in impressions expressed by the writer or to engage where intellectual engagement may be due.

Get over it.

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” . . . taliban are only 1 percent of pakhtoon population, we also consider them a paid force of others n cancer for our society.”

American conservatives have long wanted Muslims caught in the path of Islamofascist ambitions to speak up.

So done.

In Pakistan and other states with boundaries defined by old “Great Game” politics, the yearning of a deeply rooted ethnolinguistic culture comes through clearly in what is a declaration about being Pakhtoon and not being Taliban nor part of the Pakistani national program that too handily sacrifices Pakhtoon interests and lives in various ways, including in the display of mobilized counterterrorism forces or operations for audio-visual ingestion in Washington, D.C.

“B’ni Israel”, the followers of the Pashtunwali, the “Yousafzai‘s” — “The Yusufzai tribe (literal translation The Sons of Joseph) of the Pashtuns of Afghanistan, who collectively refer to themselves as the “Bani Israel“, have a long tradition connecting them to the exiled Kingdom of Israel” — source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tribe_of_Joseph — are not my enemy and should not be made so.

With courage and tenacity, the truth that tyrants would rather suppress and dissolve emerges with the solidity of the authentic — a real history on the land replete with ancient artifacts and mentions matched to living culture and language.

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Link – The Atlantic – Graeme Wood on ISIS

17 Tuesday Feb 2015

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Many mainstream Muslim organizations have gone so far as to say the Islamic State is, in fact, un-Islamic. It is, of course, reassuring to know that the vast majority of Muslims have zero interest in replacing Hollywood movies with public executions as evening entertainment. But Muslims who call the Islamic State un-Islamic are typically, as the Princeton scholar Bernard Haykel, the leading expert on the group’s theology, told me, “embarrassed and politically correct, with a cotton-candy view of their own religion” that neglects “what their religion has historically and legally required.” Many denials of the Islamic State’s religious nature, he said, are rooted in an “interfaith-Christian-nonsense tradition.”

http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2015/02/what-isis-really-wants/384980/ – March 2015.

While writer Graeme Wood disproves his own intent as regards ISIS not being a psychotic phenomenon in the above thorough exploration of the cult and its deeply archaic reasoning about its own “methodology”, he also hits all of the keys as regards the broad front of a revanchist Islam.

Related:

http://www.defenseone.com/politics/2015/02/why-obama-wont-talk-about-islamic-terrorism/105390/ – 2/16/2015.

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Link – Having Integrity About Jesus, Jew, and the Origins of Christianity

10 Tuesday Feb 2015

Posted by in Anti-Semitism, Islamic Small Wars, Links, Political Psychology

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The most troubling part of the heretical substitution of Gentile lineage into foundational roles within the Jewish root of Christianity is that the Christian Palestinian leaders bring this message to so many churches – without ever being confronted by the leaders of these congregations.

http://juicyecumenism.com/2015/01/28/jesus-palestinian-false-narrative/ – 1/28/2015 – by Victor Styrsky

In the piece, Reverend Styrsky will go on to note the following:

Dr. Mitri Raheb: “Unfortunately, Palestine has been occupied for most of the time. Remember, the first people to occupy Palestine were the Assyrians -722, then we had the Babylonians – 587, then the Persian came, 538, all of this is BC – OK? Then the Greeks, then the Romans, then the Byzantines, then the Arabs, then the Crusaders, then a few others, then the Ottomans, then the British . . . and then Israel.”

TRUTH: This ridiculous historical summary reveals Raheb’s determination to use duplicity to obliterate the legitimate and historical Jewish bond to the land of Israel.

Bible believing Christians know that God first promised the land of Israel to Abraham around 2,000 – 1500-BC and history records his descendants have maintained ties to the Promised Land for more than 3,700 years.

The theme of cultural annihilation runs within and around Islamic Jihad and the Islamic Small Wars.

Reprinted from Oppenheim Arts & Letter (September 8, 2008):

Annihilation, One Cultural Artifact, One Memory, At a Time

“Not all Arabs are Muslim; not all Muslims are Arab. In fact, only 23 percent of the Arab population living in the United States of America is Muslim; 77 percent are Christian.

“Islam being the fastest growing faith in this country, as it is in the world today, the number of Muslims in American has soared in the last decade 14 fold. Only half a million in the early 70’s, the estimated number of Muslims living in America today is between 6 to 7 mmillion. 75 percent of them are non-Arabs.

“Currently, there are 1.2 billion Muslims in the world: in other words, one out of every five persons living on the fact of the earth are Muslim, a ratio that is projected to be one our of four by 2020.

“In view of such a significant number and a vast variety of races, nationalities, and cultures, in what sense if any can one speak of the typical Muslim, man or woman? Such a person has never existed–just as an Islam unified in its practices, policies, and goals has never existed.”

Source: Milani, Farzaneh and Abdulaziz Sachedina. “Imagining Unity: Muslim Cultural Diversity in North America”. Online video. UVA Newsmakers, 2003.

With a recent note on the Taliban’s inhibition of the music trade in Mingora, Pakistan and its effects on the distribution, enjoyment, and preservation of indigenous Pashtun music, I thought I’d surf a few minutes for additional reference to the destruction of the cultural artifacts of others at the hands of militant Islam.

Such were not hard to find, starting, perhaps, with the Bamyan Buddhas destroyed by the Taliban in Afghanistan.

However, I was surprised to find out of the Islamic theocracy of Iran the destruction of an ancient bridge and threatened or now evolving degradation of other structural artifacts of global significance (see Amil Imani’s reference).

There seem too complaints of underhanded reconstruction underwritten by the Saudi state.  To address the repair of Balkan Islamic monuments, Jolyon Naegele suggests the wholesale bulldozing of the same has been to replace that heritage with architecture more favoring the Saudi Wahhabi vision.

For Israel and the Jews, Mark Ami-El notes the erasure of evidence of Jewish habitation beneath the Temple Mount through the construction of an underground mosque:

“After September 2000, the Muslim Waqf closed off the Temple Mount entirely to any archeological oversight by the Israel Antiquities Authority. Then, in order to complete new underground mosques at the site, it removed to city garbage dumps some 13,000 tons of rubble from the Temple Mount that included archeological remnants from the First and Second Temple periods.

“The intention is to turn the entire 36-acre Temple Mount compound into an exclusively Muslim site by erasing every sign, remnant, and memory of its Jewish past, including the destruction of archeological findings that are proof of this past.”

On behalf of traditional Malaysian culture, Chris Prystay tells a tale of subtle erasure of ancient folk dance and theater at the hands of Islamic influence and party politics:

“A Mak Yon performance, which runs over two or three nights, tells one of a dozen stories of mythological royalty. They are typically morality tales about the perils of lust or pride. The story of Dewa Muda, who struggles with sadness because he can’t reach his princess, is the most popular.

“The performances are also therapeutic. Villagers seeking a cure for depression or other emotional ills don the same costume as the lead dancer and shadow her as she dances around the stage. By acting out Dewa Muda’s own struggle, they purge their own. At the end of the play, the shaman leads the villager into a trance dance, chanting verses to banish the illness.

“Rituals like this are now performed in secret by a handful of retirees . . . .”

Read ’em and weep.

For hope, watch the University of Virginia video featuring Farzaneh Milani and Abdulaziz Sachedina, the latter careful, I think, to compare facets of Islamic ethnic and religious identity with “Italian-ness, and Germaness” but not, no mention, of Jewishness.

Still, four hours down the pike and 3,000 miles across the continent and off to Hawaii or up to Alaska, Muslims, like everyone else, may do things a little differently in America.  All welcome diverse and robust cultures, not one that would destroy all others.

Reference

Ami-El, Mark. “The Destruction of the Temple Mount Antiquities.” Jerusalem Letter / Viewpoints, Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, August 1, 2002.

Anti-Wahhabi Blog (The). “Fanatics’ desparate effort to destroy pre-Islamic heritage.” Wednesday, September 12, 2007.

ArtsJournal.com. “Taliban Afghani Art Destruction.” Online Bibliography.

Circle of Ancient Iranian Studies (The), CAIS. “Islamic Regime have Finally Destroyed 2200-year-old Parthian Bridge of Khoda-Afarid (Negin).” December 8, 2007.

CULTURAL DIVERSITY OF ISLAM.

Imani, Amil. “Culturecide of the Islamic Republic of Iran.” American Thinker, June 28, 2008.

Milani, Farzaneh and Abdulaziz Sachedina. “Imagining Unity: Muslim Cultural Diversity in North America”. Online video. UVA Newsmakers, 2003

Prystay, Chris. “Bit of Malay Culture Is Now Vanishing Under Muslim Rules.” The Wall Street Journal, recast via YaleGlobal Online, April 21, 2006.

Sells, Michael A. “ERASING CULTURE: WAHHABISM, BUDDHISM, BALKAN MOSQUES; same location: Naegele, Jolyon. “Yugoslavia: Saudi Wahhabi Aid Workers Bulldoze Balkan Monuments”.

Wikipedia. “Buddhas of Bamyan.” Noted September 8, 2008.

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Link – Hanson on Obama, Narcissism, and Appeasement

05 Thursday Feb 2015

Posted by in FTAC, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Islamic Small Wars, Links, Political Psychology, Politics

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Members of the Obama administration have insisted that the Taliban are not terrorists. Those responsible for the recent Paris killings are not radical Islamists. The Muslim Brotherhood is largely secular. Jihad is a “legitimate tenet of Islam.” And “violent extremism,” “workplace violence,” or “man-caused disaster” better describe radical Islamic terrorism. Domestic terrorism is just as likely caused by returning U.S. combat veterans, according to one report by a federal agency.

What is the point of such linguistic appeasement?

http://victorhanson.com/wordpress/?p=8188 – 5/5/2015.

My response within The Awesome Conversation:

Not to nit, but the term “narcissist” belies a range of issues, some qutie normal and positive, or we should all be without Cadillacs, golf courses, and modern health care. “Malignant narcissism” may apply to the despotic, and in political psychology, that may have some basis in “Narcissistic Personality Disorder” (and a few other views of similar behavior) known to psychology proper. On the branch opposite that may be a “reparative narcissism”, the quality of a meaningful empathy returns.

While Obama’s de facto policy of “least war possible” may divert to other levers, e.g., energy independence, which card he’s playing now; continuing DoD-IDF cooperation and deliveries; and perhaps separation of the Muslim community from “the terrorists” to shear the moderate away from the lost (while a comparatively young fleet for leader emerges to “work the issues” with large religious cohort), the same brushes against old Jewish wisdom: He who is kind to the cruel will in the end become cruel to the kind.”

The Obama Administration’s foreign policy has been deeply opaque from the start but not necessarily in the manner proposed but certainly in a way that invites speculation. Less remarked in total has been the “Red Brown Green” cooperation defined by Putin-Assad-Khamenei, Putin-Orban, and Putin-Erdogan. It’s been much easier isolating conflicts, pointing at the President, and overlooking what amounts to a broad assault on North American power, NATO, and westward-looking alliances. Quiet incursions into government and intellectual assets have not been overlooked but have perhaps been less explored and the underplayed. That’s another subject, and I will stop here.

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