After so many years of conflict watching where the behavior on exhibit in the field seems only to become more depraved and the surrounding politics more duplicitous, sadistic, and twisted, it may help to remind that the greater world, perhaps with the help of a greater God, goes around so many disasters of human and natural origin to deliver critical aid and services to those in need.
“Peace and development” means many things, takes many forms, and in the life of our own wild species has limitless potential in design.
I’m not going to pull down the volumes by Lester Brown, George McRobie, and E.F. Shumacher and others that grace my library shelves, at least not right now, but it’s good to check every now and then this other side of conflict.
” . . . the Safavid dynasty was not Iranian, it was a Turkish tribe from Lebanon who conquered Iran in 1499. Until then, Iran had no national religion dating back to the human rights proclamation of the Cyrus the Great and freedom of the Jews from Babylonian slavery, in 539 BCE. The Safavids were Shia, and upon their occupation they imported a group of Shia clerics, olima, from Lebanon — hence the connection of Iranian Shia establishment with the Hizb’allah — including the infamous Mohammad Baghir Madjlesi, the author of the rule of Jurisprudents, meaning the god-given rule of clerics, that Khomeini adopted 300 years later and implemented in Iran again in 1979.
The imported Shiite establishment overrode the Iranian culture and civilization of human rights, equal rights of women, freedom of worship and respect for all, dismissing it as pagan and enforcing a new culture of Islamic Sharia laws written by Madjlesi.”
Should I have resisted juxtaposing these two images, the Janus coin that is one side modern (and good) and the other deeply medieval (and heartbreakingly evil)?
“Shimmer” — a term of art on this blog — has not changed, but one hopes the numbers of those arrested in yesterday have diminished while those who come forward, who have stepped forward into their own next world, have grown.
Where are the political and social scientists on change?
I don’t know where they or their numbers — observable, measurable cultural and political topology — are today.
Of course, you may have been under the impression – perhaps from reading our quaint Constitution from those dark pre-Fundamental Transformation days – that We the People are sovereign, that our government must take its marching orders from us. To the contrary, President Obama is claiming in his Iran deal that he – unilaterally and without congressional advice, consent, or legislation – may huddle with Russian strongman Vladimir Putin, the Chinese Communist government, some European leaders, and our Iranian enemies to devise enforceable law. We and our elected representatives are expected meekly to submit.
With increasing annoyance, I exclaimed “Who would want their celestial virgins cleaning their clothes and doing their laundry? Is it their mothers they want in heaven, or vixens?” Clearly these women were not painted on these walls to lure the young men to the gates of paradise. Other paintings suggested a more plausible explanation: this partially bombed out building had probably been a guesthouse.
In the above cited article, far more provocative paragraphs await!
The French government will continue to fund a militantly anti-Israel NGO, despite its involvement in last month’s flotilla to break the Israeli army’s blockade on Hamas-controlled Gaza, France’s Embassy in Israel as well as the French Foreign Ministry told Arutz Sheva.
As revealed by an Arutz Sheva investigation in June, one of the leading sponsors of the Freedom Flotilla III – the Platform of French NGOs for Palestine (Plateforme des ONG françaises pour la Palestine) – has received more than half a million euros in grants from the French government since 2010.
Ukraine says it is not as reliant on Russian gas as it once was. Its representatives at the Vienna talks said it has imported no more than one-third of its gas from Gazprom so far this year because it has found less expensive gas from other countries in Europe.
That gas, in fact, was originally supplied to these nations by Russia, and the customers were reselling it to Ukraine. Moscow, however, says it is illegal for its customers to sell these “reverse supplies,” as they are called.
There is this idea that the Greeks got themselves into this current mess because they paid themselves too much for doing too little. Well, maybe. But it’s not the complete picture. For the Greeks also got themselves into debt for the oldest reason in the book – one might even argue, for the very reason that public debt itself was first invented – to raise and support an army.
Suicide terrorism has become so commonplace that it is easy to overlook how relatively new and suddenly popular the phenomenon is. Between the end of World War II and the Iranian revolution, there were no suicide attacks in the world. Yet only months after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini solidified power and formed the Pasdaran and Basij, suicide attacks began to appear in conflicts involving Shiites (Lebanon, the Iran-Iraq war) and then took root among Palestinian Sunni groups.[3] It eventually became the preferred tactic of Islamist terror organizations.
Khomeini selected specific passages from the Qur’an and hadith (canonical collections of Muhammad’s alleged sayings and actions) to craft his suicidal version of radical Islam. His two-part rhetorical plan necessitated convincing Muslims that suicide is not suicide and that death is not death.
Eight hundred years ago next month, on a reedy stretch of riverbank in southern England, the most important bargain in the history of the human race was struck. I realize that’s a big claim, but in this case, only superlatives will do. As Lord Denning, the most celebrated modern British jurist put it, Magna Carta was “the greatest constitutional document of all time, the foundation of the freedom of the individual against the arbitrary authority of the despot.”
‘No free man shall be arrested, imprisoned, dispossessed, outlawed, exiled or in any way victimised, or attacked except by the lawful judgement of his peers or by the law of the land’
This right is most famously contained in the American Bill of Rights embodied in the constitution of the United States of America.
War robs you of everything including your humanity. After the war, things are never like they used to be – it takes several generations to eradicate or simply to forget its tragic consequences.
However, all the valuable things, including peace, have their price. Most Europeans naively believe that it’s been paid by their grandparents and great-grandparents during WWI and WWII, but the truth is that this valuable thing is extremely fragile and requires continuous work to keep it alive.
