Threat does not look like what you think it looks like and can be very hard to detect . . . . Symbols and signals will fly. We may be able to catch them in the air with NSA tools, but catching is not identification, now is it? I can catch a pretty insect in my back yard. But if I am not able to identify it, [if] it is poisonous and it bites me, it does me no good. It is not enough to capture words. We must understand these words and what they mean.
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I’ve long characterized the Islamic Small Wars as wars for detectives and poets: detectives because so much that happens has been planned and put together in closely guarded private channels; poets because language and motivation seem inseparable, and language and objects made symbols may be used to facilitate operations.
I call that other force “the humanity of humanity” but while hoping the same aggregates toward the middle, mild, and moderate one also confronts immense cowardice and lethargy in the face of violent ambition. At one point, for example, an estimated 10,000 al-Shabaab fighters making a mess in Somalia had displaced, in effect, some 1.25 million Somalis to camps in Kenya and to make-do camps around Mogadishu. How is it the same were not organized — governed, self-governing — to stop “The Youth” in their tracks at first appearance? Of course, political anarchy and the individual interests of competing warlords and such then maintained conditions for an AQ-type landing or development.
Each of the societies hosting what I call the “Islamic Small Wars” exists with an incoherence sufficient to keep its destructive miscreants in business — and in business with money supply drawn from combinations of criminal activities (“narcoterrorism”) and rogue but princely largesse.
Ambivalent or difficult injunctive text may be neutral in the manner of a Rorschach — it maintains many things corresponding to the innate character of the reader, and it’s the reader that drives the character of the text into some kind of social reality.
I’m loath to reflect here on commands, demands, and judgments in scripture but may suggest for improved relations and peace that open and far ranging discussion — whatever it is, drag it out into the sun and let’s have a look at it together — may be the best aid in navigating OUR way toward something better.
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My old rabbi, a conservative with a lefty past, said he liked Reform Judaism because it “forces you to think”.
Perhaps some of us who read the Torah fresh find that it neither directs nor instructs but more often puzzles and thereby asks that we bring as much as we may to understanding something that we have just experienced through it. In effect, and running on very little familiarity with the five books, my close reading of the Adam and Eve story would suggest it is not about the “loss of innocence” and very far from “original sin”: instead, it’s about the gift and onset of human consciousness, self-consciousness, and conscience. God says to Eve that if she eats of the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, she will die, and the snake tells her she won’t die — and they have both told the truth!
What Eve does with that bite of the apple is transform.
Not to go on with that exegesis here, the point is the story refuses to dictate its message.
Moreover, if one chooses to do a close-reading crawl through the two well-known sections (Genesis 2 and 3), one may discover many puzzles in the way of comprehension: why, for example, does the snake mention just one tree to Eve when there are two — the other is the Tree of Life — planted in same place? The Church, for another example, may connect the fig leaves with shame, but why not mutual regard, for, when it comes to dressing for success, God sews for his two daring children — whom He is about to dispatch into human life — their first useful and protective clothing?
And so it goes.
The effect on the mind: deep aggravation and perturbation.
Should not God have told us about how we’re supposed to live?
Oh no — that would have been too easy and perhaps too cruel: we are forced instead to think through our way and the way ahead.
“It is ridiculous that Israel opens Jerusalem for foreign tourists, while millions of Palestinian Christians and Muslims are being banned from entering their occupied capital,” said Nabil Shaath, a confidant of the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas.” — We humans do ourselves in with our mouths, and our mouths do in others through their ears. When hate is the cause, the cause is poison, the body politic, should it care to care for itself, takes appropriate measures.
If there were a “true religion” God, perhaps, would have created fewer of them for waging wars that seem to pit all against all. However, despite mankind’s many religions and near 7,000 living languages, there may be a sufficient progressive tendency to bond toward the mild, moderate, and virtuous middle however we may conceive — of have conceived — of the meaning of our existence. Developing that bond, tending toward good, minimizing the power and impact of dogmatic absolutists may be our common struggle.
While mentioning the Soviet, now post-Soviet, vision accompanied by the familiar oligarchies of kleptocrats mad for power and wealth (and their display), one should not overlook elements of the Christian mythos in Hitlerism and its propagation in the Muslim world during and after World War II. This old fighting is not only or always about belief and religion: it is about the language-shaped character of humanity and the idea of human virtue and dimensions, ideals, and values associated with the same, e.g., “dignity, equality, fraternity”; human rights, equal justice; the balance between communitarianism and individualism; idealism itself.
As some doors may open on a new world, others may close, and we hope — I hope together we hope — that the door closes firmly over time on absolutism, dictatorship, terrorism, and totalitarianism.
Pretty words.
Across social divides, the human heart suffers from a sympathetic astigmatism: “the good” are in about the same place emotionally — please stop the fighting! — but also a different place for each language-informed and poetry-embracing mind and spirit. Nonetheless, the horror meted out in such as the Syrian Civil War, where the razory madness of a brutal dictatorship matched to an implacably evil fascist religious movement — just set all those millions in the middle aside for a moment — have been out on full display, tells that an end is wanted and the vision need not be Muslim, Jewish, Christian, or atheist or Arab or anything other than the largest possible human response to the twin obscenities of the unrestrained greed and sadism of the unconscionable and ruthless.
Now return to those millions traumatized at least, displaced most likely, maimed at worst — although the worst, the dead, number beneath the first million on the grim statistician’s abacus — and their inability to date to grapple with the twinned evils noted. They can do it, they can stand up on their own land, but only if — IF — they can arrange themselves with others, including those they may have believed competitors, enemies, rivals, and threats.
As with Syria, so the world: the want is for a bonded middle force that today does not exist.
In the wake of last week’s Eastern Ukrainian flyer imbroglio — briefly: a flyer bearing the “symbols of both Russia and the People’s Republic of Donetsk”and distributed outside a synagogue by men wearing balaclavas had asked the region’s Jews to register with the government and declare their property — I was tempted to compose a piece titled “Is Putin Playing for Jerusalem?”, as the Russian President may be accused of many things but never anti-Semitism.
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Above: posted to YouTube by JewishLife, June 26, 2012.
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“As you know, Judaism is one of the four traditional religions in our nation . . . .” (0:25).
So, hate the haters, political anti- anti-Semitism has become the symbol of virtue, and the other: that’s the tar with which to spatter one’s enemies.
However, in our convoluted topsy-turvy atmosphere complicated by facsimile bipolar political sociopathy and the license taken to exploit deceit in the cause of an immense but fragile “egotism”, it’s hard saying who, actually, is the anti-Semite and whom the anti- anti-Semite.
Or the call might be easy: neither – no one (normal) at heart.
The truth is as regards all but an emotionally arrested and purple political fringe — one that should stop holding its collective breath for validation of (choose any combination) white / black / Muslim / Aryan / Internationalist / (simpleton) / etc. supremacy — the Jews are off the examining table for any majority of concern and have been since Auschwitz reopened as a museum.
Nonetheless, the higher one climbs on the ladder of power, the more valuable the “anti- anti-Semite” and “anti-Semite” chips become.
The two political rhetorical objects — one claiming (“I am an anti- anti-Semite”), the other accusing (“You are an anti-Semite”) — may have nothing to do with modern Jewry, Judaism, Jewish culture and life, Jews, or Jewish anything else — but these two objects in social currency have power in service to the will to control others, and for a certain kind of political personality and temperament, that’s all that matters.
1. Donetsk could have published the flyer earnestly and backpedaled, possibly with a rebuke from Moscow. That would be the simplest explanation.
2. Ukrainian nationalists masquerading as Russians distributed the flyer to make break-away Russian nationalists look bad.
Now it gets interesting.
3. Putin may have suggested creating and distributing the flyer in Russian incognito to suggest just how low Ukrainian nationals would go in overturning the Moscow-aligned Yanukovych government.
Notably, and much to the credit of the Jewish community in Ukraine, Jews receiving the flyers asked the men distributing them to take off their face masks.
Guess who ran away?
The possession of integrity should not be so difficult.
However, comfort, defense, and refuge may be taken in lying given a certain kind of leader and leadership plus follower and following.
Update!
As JewishPress.com pointed out, it’s not going to stop at threatening letters. At 2 AM, Saturday morning, the Nikolayev synagogue in Ukraine was firebombed multiple times, as the anti-Semitism escalates.
Unfortunately, it appears the flyer and the emphasis on political rhetoric has not sufficed for either amusement or manipulation.
Posted to YouTube April 20, 2014.
However, I have a problem with the video: the weather in south Ukraine appears to have been above freezing last night: where has the snow come from? The looks of another synagogue firebombed in February look quite different from the building of interest, and the building of interest appears on the web elsewhere as a single story unit, not the two required for camera placement as the video would suggest.
Should anyone with a smart phone care to report in on the story, which has made the rounds on the Jewish press, please do.
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“It is part Soviet theme park, part wacky anti-western wonderland.”
“I’m asking those behind this not to make us tools in this game,” he said. Anti-Semitic incidents in the Russian-speaking east were “rare, unlike in Kiev and western Ukraine,” he said.
I used to call the “Islamic Small Wars” wars for detectives and poets — everything that happens has been planned in private and the motivation is all in the head suspended there by language. It’s disturbing seeing the same mode become ascendant in eastern Europe. Without claim for the crime, there’s no known criminal, and the finger-pointing goes in every direction.
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The traditional political cultivation of an anti-Jewish animus in services to institutional development and greed has been at least socially explicable. One understand the poison and its applications. The application of “anti- anti-Semitism” and “anti-Semitism” in Ukraine may signal a brand of cynicism and manipulation that has less to do with hating Jews than with tarring one’s political enemies.
However . . . Russian desk expert Luke Harding published this gem yesterday: http://www.theguardian.com/…/ukraine-donetsk-pro-russia… It could be the “kiddies” after all, and, God help them, if they’re demonstrably anti-Semitic, Putin will jettison them.
Attitude-belief systems have organic qualities. The Assad regime believes it owns Syria and Syrians on an absolute autocratic and kleptocratic basis; opposition leadership within the Syrian National Coalition, however, carries forward the intellectual poison that is anti-Semitism masked as anti-Zionism plus, reverse engineer it, an Islamic contempt for the world that isn’t itself, i.e., other than Muslim. To traverse the distance from the defensive position they’re in (as trapped between Putin-Assad-Khamenei and assorted bands with varying affiliation or affinity or practical alliance with Islamic Jihad, they have got to do some things within their own poetics or intellectual programming. While they discover, mull, or wait on that, they’re living through a hell that will not recede if either Assad or Islamic Jihad ascend to clear “victory” of any kind.
If attitudes (about others) are predicated on beliefs, which have affect (+/-) and structure in terms of primacy — some beliefs are more fundamental to self-concept than others — then revisiting the earliest linguistic “wiring” or programming demands effort on the part of the soul so slowly but with certainty poisoned.
With extremes provided by a tyrant on one hand and Islamic Jihad on the other, the state of affairs on the field seems impossibly inverted: one would think an inclusive, responsive, and responsible democratic way would have been embraced and pursued by most Syrian, but even if embraced, most Syrians caught unprepared for civil war have fled the fighting and those remaining “in-country” may not dare to speak so, again, captive between armies and uncertain as regards who might prevail.
In Syria, the center simply did not hold.
Of late, some online have conflated the inhumanity of the Assad regime with “genocide” even though the Assad cause is Assad and not particularly focused on any single ethnic, racial, or religious community. The bastards — the dictator “Putin-Assad-Khamenei” — stand together against the aspiring democratic forces (we could have a talk about that phrase as well) that would undo them and their type permanently.
While the revolution in the field bogs down with some escalation in firepower — Russian tanks vs American TOWs — the revolution in the heart seems barely to have gotten a start.
To my Syrian friends, whether established or latent, I would suggest this epigram (doctors write prescriptions –poets must make do with witty remarks): “The whole world may be against what you are against; however, the whole world may be also against what you are for.”
What does Syrian liberation mean . . . now?
What are “moderate” Syrian forces for?
It’s not ping-pong (although I do my sharing of “pinging”) going on in Syria or in Washington’s diplomatic circles. These matters in political psychology — about national and personal self-concept, about motivation, about attitude-belief systems and their suspension within language and its social grammar — may have an as yet unformed weight as powerful as barrel bombs and Russian tanks.
The Kremlin has returned to the criminal abuse of language in its effort to renew animus with the west and line its oligarch’s pockets with the proceeds attending conflict and contemplated conquest. Basically, the “Vertical of Power” has resuscitated Russian Imperialism.
Inspiration for the comment: an article on Chinese-Russian energy cooperation, which would seem out of left field given plenty of motivation by way of news out of Ukraine and Syria; however, in the back channel behind the back channel (are back channels recursive?), stands the unexplored thesis that the two great superpower dictatorships, Russia and China, understand one another better than they do their treacherous democratic open society partner on the Security Council.
Of course, the two mobsters are going to cut deals to cut out the nice guy.
This BackChannels blog signal travels to at least 112 nations, which provides me with a unique opportunity to pose a challenging question in development and with interest in improvement in the qualities of living across geopolitical space: choose, oh distant reader, how you wish to live: subjugated to economic and political elites whose judgment is capricious and powers strong enough to bend laws to suit their acquisitive, controlling, and unhealthily narcissistic wills? Or as constituent participants in governments possessed of greater integrity and capable of open public policy and law formulation subject to public or citizen’s audit?
With now state-controlled media and lots of propaganda money spread through the New Old Now Old and Far Out Left, Putin’s Russia will attempt to exploit language to produce renewed anti-American, anti-“western” (i.e., specifically pro-dictatorship) animus and xenophobia.
For the record here, the author of this blog enjoys zero (zilch, nada) political funding, and the only funding I may really want — not that I don’t need money — would be open online journalism or research grant money. In the universe of institutions, genuinely independent writers, research analysts, and scholars may be made to suffer — I know of no roof today beneath which to seek shelter — but the charm that comes with that fragility is intellectual freedom, a prize without price considering what media mercenaries have demonstrated do for the most tainted of paychecks.
I’ll go a little further to note than I am not the happiest of Americans in acknowledging the role Big Money plays in lobbying for laws and influencing Federal policy, but if, when, and where I may have specific complaint, I have confidence in my being able to research and write about the matter beholden to none and otherwise unfettered.
The teacher apologized forthrightly, promptly. Why persecute? How small should one wish to be? How limited a freedom (over arch and dark humor) in speech should we want? It would be hard criticizing Muslims, some of whom heralded the muzzling of Ayaan Hirsi Ali via a Brandeis executive decision last week, for touchiness if Jews (or some) were to be as miserably passive-aggressive and absent of the wherewithal to joust and riposte.
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