Tarek Fatah, a founder of the Canadian Muslim Congress, thought the Banu Qurayza legend so egregious ethically and juvenile politically that he sought to dismiss its validity and credit jealousy — “We put one over on the Jews for once” — for the popularity of its defense otherwise but perhaps in relation to the Asian quarter that he has spent his life studying.
This comes from a critique site:
______ Muhammad and his band of immigrants arrived in Medina in 622 completely dependent on the hospitality of the three Jewish tribes that lived there alongside the Arabs. In less than two years, two of the tribes that had welcomed him, the Banu Qaynuqa and the Banu Nadir would be evicted, losing their land and their wealth to the Muslims as soon as their guests gained the power to conquer and confiscate. Muhammad accomplished this by deftly exploiting his opponents divisions.
The prophet of Islam chose the order of the doomed tribes carefully. He knew that the other two tribes would not come to the assistance of the first, for example, since they had been aligned against one another in a recent war. He also knew that the third would not assist the second – due to a dispute over “blood money.”
The last tribe to remain was the Banu Qurayza. ______
However, on the web there are many pages devoted to the Banu Qurayza story.
In my linguistic morphology, what is of interest is the virulence of “Islamist” and ambition and violence associated with it. For such as Pamela Geller (no introduction needed), it’s pervasive, an integrated part of the religion, and the religion would not be itself without it. For Qanta Ahmed — most here I believe would know her or know of her — the state of affairs is opposite: BadDaddy and his Islamic Hate are an anomaly — along with the entire Muslim Brotherhood — destroying her beautiful Islam.
With regard to what I’ve called “Shimmer” (it’s huge! It’s small. It’s gone. It’s back), we’re starting to see some geopolitical polling indicative of the shift from feudal to modern across the Ummah.
Down in our own engine rooms, we are still wired together by language and its epistemologic influence plus, here, the programming that is “social grammar”. One cannot solve much in a Facebook post, but one may lay out a lot for consideration.
There’s a lot in a comparatively small package.
How do we wind up killing one another?
Somebody tells a lie and some dumb soul either believes it or goes along with it.
Hypothesis: The violence may be an offshoot of license, pandering, and provocation produced within circles of the society of the religion. Denials of culpability; preference for a loyal lie — telling or receiving — over an uncomfortable truth; and promotion of exclusivity and supremacist thought obviously reach a certain crowd and a certain kind of person within it who will then act on so many evil and false premises.
While sensitivity to anti-Semitic acts works some like litmus — if the Jews are being attacked, who is next? — the chief victims in the path of this behavior are Muslims. From Gaza to Quetta, if you look, you will see the same violence scaled up to frequent acts of intimidation, murder, and mass murder.
The content dates from Spring 2014, and some of it has been well reviewed, but I feel it still worth a listen and a look.
______
A video was uploaded onto YouTube which featured a young Palestinian Christian woman describing what it was like to live under Israel military occupation. If that was all the video was about, it would have simply been added to the thousands of other YouTube videos which describe the same thing. What made Christy Anastas’ video unique was that she bravely revealed how Palestinian Christians have and are being treated by Palestinian Muslims and nationalists.
Christy Anastas: “I believe in people, not concrete.”
Posted to YouTube – 4/25/2014.
On the whereabouts of Christy Anastas —
Christy Anastas, the 24-year-old woman who has fled the West Bank (where a journalist was recently sentenced to a year in prison for mocking Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas on Facebook), will present herself for inspection at a police station in England on the morning of April 29, 2014.
Why?
Because a self-styled “peace and justice” activist has called the police in England, informing the authorities that she may be a “missing person.” Consequently, Christy will present herself at a police station somewhere in England this morning to assure them that she is not being held against her will.
So, given that even Hamas never claimed that 96 percent of those killed were civilians, where did Erekat get this number? Again, we must admit that he simply made it up.
This is not exactly the first time: Erekat was one of the inventors of the “Jenin Massacre” in 2002. In fighting in the West Bank city, 52 Palestinians were killed, as were 23 Israeli soldiers. Yasser Arafat claimed at the time that the “Jenin Massacre” could only be compared to the siege of Stalingrad in World War II. Erekat himself said “the numbers of killed could reach 500 since the Israeli offensive began. Thousands of wounded. The Jenin refugee camp is no longer in existence, and now we’ve heard of executions there.”
There was considerable destruction in parts of the camp, but at no time did it cease to be in existence. He made that up. Does any of this matter? It does.
. . . Shole Pakravan, said Wednesday morning that her daughter has heard nothing about the execution and is being pressured to sign a document that denies there was any attempt at rape and that there was no third party present at the time of the alleged murder.
As if more proof were needed of Ayatollah Khamenei’s ______ (you fill it it in — the writer’s tired), the entire world has now the spectacle of this smiley old white haired fella torturing a young woman not only by denying her an inherent right to an authoritative, honest, fair, just, and open — and openly audited — trial before the Iranian public but by degrading and humiliating her all the way to the gallows — or freedom, God willing.
Reyhaneh Jabbari’s first lawyer, Mohammad Mostafaei, had apparently made it clear that Jabbari’s death sentence was signed by the courts even after the evidence had been destroyed or went “missing.” Possibly those who signed her death sentence in the Islamic Republic of Iran are not even sure of Jabbari’s guilt themselves, or could be just trying to blame her for the murder, regardless.
The government announced that the execution will be postponed but did not give any indication the sentence had been overturned. It also did not disclose if any future execution date had been set.
Jabbari, who has already served seven years in prison, claims Sarbandi drugged her and attempted to have physical contact with her.
Modafe website 31 Aug 2010 News Report- (Human right Lawyer Mr Mostafaei’s Official site)
Reyhaneh Jabbari is a girl from Iran. She is now 22 years old and has been in Tehran’s Evin prison where the last Wednesday of every month a number of prisoners are hanging. She has spent the best years of her life in the prison and she will. Maybe some other days of her life have left.
Proposed film title: “Iranimania II: Death Cult Hanging Orgy!”
Each of the above reports, published in 2009, 2011, and 2014, comments on the acceleration of the rate of hangings by the Iranian regime: more arrests, more “trials”, more hangings, never fewer, often if not predominantly similarly unjust — and when a hanging is “unjust” it is only a common act of murder.
Kassig was abducted in October 2013 while traveling to a town in eastern Syria for SERA. For the intervening year, the Kassig family kept silent about his abduction “at the wish of those who have held their son,” the representative said.
U.S. officials confirmed to the Associated Press that Kassig was being held by the Islamic State.
A representative of the Kassig family who shared details about Peter Kassig reported he has converted to Islam while in captivity and now goes by the name Abdul-Rahman.
At least Wednesday appears to have passed without the predicted beheading.
Update, November 16, 2014
The authenticity of the footage has not been verified. National Security Council spokesperson Bernadette Meehan said in a statement that intelligence officials were “working as quickly as possible to determine its authenticity.
“Shimmer” continues to apply, as may “The Long War” (which suits perfectly the journal that follows it), and the themes built up around authenticity vs invention, medieval vs modern, Islamic Supremacist vs Islamic Democratic Compatibility.
Despite Shadi Hamid’s arguments for a democratic but illiberal Islamicism, that project would seem to have failed in the Muslim-majority states in which autocratic leadership prevails either as expressive of Islamic idealization, as in Saudi Arabia, or as the secular response to the same, as in Egypt and Syria where Islamism has been rejected without successfully attenuating the political absolutism that binds both.
Championing the middle and moderate ranks, which may need a Harris organization to map out the intellectual terrain in its totality, Qanta Ahmed, whom I follow via Facebook, consistently stands up for Islam as essentially graced in the west by liberal multiculturalism and secular tolerance. Indeed, in the western ethos, one’s deepest beliefs about God, nature, and the universe (and one’s self) are owned and sustained persons — free agents in their own lives — not their religious organizations (who may serve only at the pleasure of their subscribers), and not states.
In essence, I would cite Qanta Ahmed as the one (modern) “scholar more powerful against the devil than one thousand worshipers”.
The problem is that not only to “BadDaddy and His Islamic Hate” but to others less obviously stuffed full of themselves and evil, Qanta Ahmed may draw also the moderate to plain nasty “takfiri”, those who accuse others of heresy or treason in relation to their idea of themselves within Islam.
Even in America, leading Muslim organizations and clerics bully with threats of ostracism those Muslims who dare to dissent. Old-guard ideologues, too, used to monopoly control, make it crystal clear to their Muslim critics: Take us on and we will make an example of you as a traitor to the Muslim community (the ummah).
Little more than a month ago, Arizona physician M. Zuhdi Jasser, who years ago embarked on a mission to keep separate “mosque and state”, found himself the target of a fellow of his own mosque, a chiding resembling, in my opinion, the hand-pat-to-cheek known to mafia worldwide.
A little leaning, I call that, a bit of “straighten up, boychick, and get with our program (or else)”.
Whatever it may be called, the incident was aggressive, uncalled for, and, for Dr. Jasser, discomfiting, and, indeed, he placed the best chosen plain word “bullying” in the title of his article.
Is there or is there not “no compulsion in religion”.
A grammatic switch in Islamic culture pits loyalty against integrity, validates lying for gain or power (look through this lens when you visit or revisit the screeds associated with the middle east conflict), and the good who by definition possess integrity find themselves on the outs in their own community of legacy.
We’ll get around to differentiating between the pleasing — and pandering — notes of a language and bedrock human universal wisdom, but for now, while “BadDaddy and the Islamic Hate” burn, rape, murder, and plunder their way around the Iraq-Syria back of beyond, it may bear suggesting that one was the real Islam, emulated in anachronist attitude, dress, language, and ritual, and the other a nascent up-to-speed, modern and progressive Islamic Humanism.
It’s not that one shouldn’t have to choose between Ahmed’s way and Baghdaddi’s blood and horror-filled statement, but that the choice, much less the encouragement to retrogress, should not be available at all.
However, today, that choice is available and “Syriamania” and “Prison Islam” and “Islamic Jihad”, which is just not about good medicine or much good anything else but the jihadist’s immense and unbridled ego and penchant for sadism — see this blog’s pages on “malignant narcissism” and “Facsimile Bipolar Political Sociopathy” — are all real and but a handful of leaders have risen to turn the dismal tide.
Integrity counts and truth matters and the two integrate with honest scholarship. “Simply put, the Jews fleeing Europe and the atrocities of Nazism, found a home in the mid-1940s in the newly-created State of Israel, while the Palestinians lost theirs.” It’s not true. It’s stated as true because it’s believed, easily comprehended, and perhaps troublesome to actually independently research. Even intending to “get into the books” may be complicated by questions like “how far back does one go?” Or “what should be taken into account and what dismissed?”
Zionism responds to centuries of European persecution, and in fact discrimination that targeted Muslims along with Jews. The leveraging of religious passion and supersessionary argument account for that (the Church has had its institutional subscription building and subscription-taxing interests too) as does ethnic minority status outside of one’s homeland.
Modern Zionism is also a 19th Century pursuit and the subsequent Jewish immigration and agricultural capitalization of what is today Israel far precedes the rise Nazi Germany.
The best scholars serve God because the attachment of mind to cultural and personal loyalties produces ephemeral research and dishonest and disingenuous findings. We should not see what we want to see but see what is to be seen, and doing that with clarity, we may then repair some things.
Source of the little bit of grit in this clam’s shell:
Proposed new approach: adopt empirical methods; adhere to good principles in ethics, morality, and scholarship; and let’s move on to get people settled without rancor in their various spaces and otherwise integrated, independent, and living as the free agents of their own destinies, not as the subjugated pawns of the destinies of piratical dictators or their mafias.
What I have been calling “The Islamic Small Wars” — the internecine competitions and interfaces within Muslim-majority political space running from Afghanistan to Yemen — have been wars about integrity — basic truth telling — requiring armies of poets and detectives for fighting and resolving.
______
Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen,
In this year, proclaimed by the United Nations General Assembly as the International Year of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, Israel has chosen to make it a year of a new war of genocide perpetrated against the Palestinian people.
Moreover, they may be proven untrue, the Jews being the absolute worst genocidiers on the planet: before they kill you, they afford you basic services, emergency and sophisticated specialized health services (in which all patients are treated absent of politics), Internet access, freedom of speech sufficient to sustain adverse public relations and research organizations (like B’Tsalem).
What may be true is the greater the hate encountered in anti-Semitic / anti-Zionist cant (there is no difference between those two), the greater the opportunities for Israel’s expansion.
The Abbas speech may be investigated and laid out purple phrase by phrase (“Amidst a torrent of massacres and storms of massive destruction” — not one mention of the more than 10,000 rockets launched from Gaza since 2005 and every two to few years to launched at a tempo sufficient to call the same an assault against Israel’s children).
Sins of omission are not the only sins evident in Abbas’s speech before the UN.
Note the demonizing of Israel, the “reflections in a mirror” — a very dark and most primitive mirror in language — in such well-known canards as “However, and as usual, the Israeli government did not miss the opportunity to undermine the chance for peace” — never mind those tunnels illegally and surreptitiously built (with child labor, 160 accidentally killed or deliberately murdered in the process) to assault Israeli communities.
Add to that demonizing simple Arab refusal of just responsibility for the Arab refugees of 1948:
Israel refuses to end its occupation of the State of Palestine since 1967, but rather seeks its continuation and entrenchment, and rejects the Palestinian state and refuses to find a just solution to the plight of the Palestine refugees.
BackChannels no longer casually employs the term “Palestinian”.
As neither Egypt nor Jordan will absorb nor take responsibility for the constituents of (Judenfrei since 2005) Gaza, I refer to the same as “Gazans”).
Given the lying going on around Gazans — allegedly on their behalf but never beyond sacrificing them (individuals, family, finances, and property) as the pawns of Hamas’s supersessionary war against Judaism, one might expect them to become independent in their own right and to insist on the development for themselves of an independent, modern, responsible, responsive, and transparent democratic government.
Judea may be more complicated with its historic flow-down from the Soviet’s brand of poison (not only the Palestinian Liberation Organization, in spirit, remains present but a simple right-click of the mouse is all one needs to reach the airliner-hijacking Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the effects of the anti-Semitic New Old Now Old Far Out and Lost Left lingering long on the landscape, still leveraging the language of the refugees, which comes in the Abbas speech as, ” . . . against Israel’s policies of occupation, apartheid and colonial settlement . . . .’
The lie that is self-aggrandizing speech is there in that portion: one wonders just how large the combined International and Palestinian Solidarity Movements really are.
Investigating consultant and journalist Lee Kaplan has told me about the seeding of these groups on America’s college campuses and their access to student activity funds, which is fair under the precepts of freedom of speech in a truly open democracy, but we didn’t get to how really small these movements may be despite their broad distribution and the money pumped into them for priming.
The phrase comes from the 1940’s film Gaslight, in which an abusive husband deliberately dims the gaslights in the house, but when his wife comments on it he tells her she’s imagining it, that the lights never dimmed at all.
Gaslighting is one of the most insiduous, viscious, nasty and effective forms of emotional and psychological abuse.
Transporting psychology — the study of individual mind and mentality — into politics may have inherent issues in both psychology and politics: for example, are we now going to filter or judge politicians in relation to our concept of “malignant narcissism”, which in turn would seem to inform the psychology of dictatorship? At the same time, what choice has the world suffering war between brutal and sometimes immense despotic personalities?
(Of Bashar al-Assad and opponent (in general terms) al-Nusra, I have often remarked: “Different talk — same walk”.
The two together, Assad and al-Nusra — and the advent of BadDaddy and the Islamic Hate represent where the path of the malignantly narcissistic winds up — have burned out and left scorched the middle humanity of the historic Syrian state — factually speaking, about 9 million Syrians have been displaced in the fighting between the tyrant and the zealots [about 200,000 souls have been separated from life altogether]).
What I have been calling “The Islamic Small Wars” — the internecine competitions and interfaces within Muslim-majority political space running from Afghanistan to Yemen — have been wars about integrity — basic truth telling — requiring armies of poets and detectives for fighting and resolving.
Some people lie.
That’s a sad fact of life, and criminals and politicians both often draw the pointing fingers on the basis of their affiliations, ambitions, and reputations. Less acknowledged and less stated: observations about culture-wide denial, dissimulation, false assertion, and hapless vulnerability to the beguiling and patronizing sweetness of an evil tongue.
Often, in many quarters of the world, if not most, a loyal lie may be preferred to an uncomfortable truth, for shows of loyalty may draw immediate rewards, from praise to patronage, while relaying a critical or damaging truth may be met with punishment, including that of a swift death.
BackChannels 