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Two Videos Juxtaposed – Son of Hamas on Islam; Jacob Olidort on Variance in Salafism
26 Thursday May 2016
Category Archives: Political Psychology
FTAC – A Comment on Obama, The Islamic Small Wars, and the Syrian Tragedy
25 Wednesday May 2016
Tags
foreign affairs, Iraq, ISIS, Islamic Small Wars, Russia, Russian political and military strategy, Syria, Syrian Tragedy
Let’s try this model . . . .
We, including Muslims, have before us the archaic manifestation of a legacy in religion owned by about 1.6 billion souls. Some, and for reasons ranging from how they were raised to the possession of the adolescent messianic narcissism known to dictators, would place themselves somewhere beneath the Muslim Botherhood (intentional) umbrella.
Wouldn’t the moderate and peaceful, truly peaceful, want the hotheads and the improvident to get up and go where they might be seen and subjected to the horrors of their own dreams?
As I have argued elsewhere (any may feel welcome to ask), the incubating of the al-Qaeda types, including ISIS, in Syria appears to have been designed as political theater — a theater of the very real — to both blackmail and goad the west into concessions before the Assad regime. It was a good KGB-style plan, and, please note, Russia got to channel the worst of its own Chechnya rebels to the fighting (and it slipped in a few spies as well); however, update: NATO may sting post-Soviet neo-feudal Russia and its alignments (Damascus, Tehran) with its own wasps.
While ISIS has been growing or distilling out of other populations those most prone to join the fight as 7th Century barbarians in Syria, the greater world has been witness to the we’re-not-those-Muslims Muslim repudiation of the al-Qaeda types, the common use of the terms “Islamist” and “jihadist” and such to separate the same from the greater Ummah going forward, and, of late, the appearance reform-minded discussions (e.g., New Age Islam) and organizations (e.g., Muslim Reform Movement). Expect traction to take some time.
There are other facets . . . like that of getting the Iraqi military to hold itself together against not only ISIS, from whom it has been wresting territory this past month, but also from Khamenei’s aggression through Iraq’s more “fiery” Shiite militia, long infested with Revolutionary Guard officers.
Archaic | Feudal-Toward-Modern Main Body | Cultural Avant Garde –>
Quite possibly for the public accustomed to ironic simplifications, what Moscow, Damascus, and Tehran have developed in Syria looks a little like the mirror image of CIA’s support for the Taliban in association with Zia Haq’s own conservative Islamism pitched against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. In today’s Syrian Tragedy, it’s Moscow, essentially, that appears to manipulate the Sunni-aligned jihadists munching away on the landscape (and enriching itself with oil sales by way of whoever hands over the cash for it).
Be that as it may, it’s looking like the west has been neither blackmailed nor goaded by “Assad vs The Terrorists” has instead absorbed the fallout in finger-wagging (for not intervening) and refugee migration, and may well stick Moscow (Damascus and Tehran) with “The Terrorists”. It may be toward that purpose that the Russian military has strengthened it presence in Syria.
The inspiration for the response: claim that ISIS had been strengthened under the Obama Administration in relation to the Administration weak response to terrorism.
BackChannels counterpoint: the strategy to move the medieval world (and the representatives of political absolute power) toward the modern one (and distributed, checked, and representative power) has a slow track, and in relation to the Islamic Small Wars involves making the feudal world sufficiently visible for fighting. IF that idea works, THEN the post-Soviet axis (Moscow-Damascus-Tehran) has done a right thing for the wrong reasons: intending to get at the west, it has helped produce an enemy in space that can be addressed with conventional forces from every side opposed to it.
Reference
BackChannels. “Syria — ‘Assad vs The Terrorists’ — How ISIS Defends Assad.” October 2, 2015.
BCC. “Syria conflict: IS ‘destroyed helicopters’ at Russian base.” May 24, 2016 — (breaking story today, May 25, and still frequently updated).
Fox News. “ISIS claims female Russian spy infiltrated terror network.” May 9, 2016.
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FTAC – MEC – Thin Wall
18 Wednesday May 2016
One has not to choose sides at all: one may choose integrity.
This is about where the modern Palestinian alternative narrative began: https://conflict-backchannels.com/…/quote-manipulation…/
The world’s community of “Kremlin watchers” well know the history of domestic political policing and the manipulation and stage managing of foreign conflicts, and that not much more different than what we’re witnessing today in Syria.
While Putin has been charming in Israel and inclined to accuse Ukrainians of anti-Semitic drift, one of the ploys involved in “information warfare” in the Crimean Stall, Russia has unfortunately had a long history with that brand of hate, and it surfaced in the Soviet’s approach to middle east politics.
https://conflict-backchannels.com/…/ftac-tip-to-the…/
International and Palestinian Solidarity continue to preach and promote “Sovietese” — the tired language of the Far Left and what I’ve called the “New Old Now Old Far Out and Lost Left” — and that’s coming from a modern liberal’s voice.
This a listing of the Board of Directors of a wealthy real estate development corporation anchored in Gaza:
http://www.padico.com/Public/English.aspx?Page_ID=631…
They are each real persons, profit minded, some educated in the United States. The public generally doesn’t hear much about the extent and nearness of private wealth in Gaza. There are embarrassing financial reasons for that — there are no ethical or moral arguments for not increasing investment levels throughout Gaza in the cause of peaceful trade.
Final note regarding the true economics of the privileged in socialism: both Ismail Haniyeh and Khaled Mashaal have developed reputations as billionaires. “Arafat’s millions” remains a popular look-up on the web, and “Abu Mazen” may be following in similar steps.
What would be wrong with having “Two Narratives for Two People”?
🙂
One of them would remain forever hateful and wrong — and manipulated by the most heartless bastards on the planet, the kind that produce child soldiers, that force noncombatants into harm’s way, that skim up their wealth from legitimate businesses, that run smuggling operations not in their people’s interests, and that create and spread lies guaranteed to keep their people muzzled and truly occupied (by themselves) and preoccupied (with “the Jews”).
In the title of this piece, “thin wall” refers to a boundary in information warfare. It is the boundary between the creation, promulgation, reach and protection of Soviet-style propaganda under the cover of socialism and human rights and the potential intrusions of political observation and analysis naturally generated by the democratic and open societies.
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FTAC -Longitude – The Hebrews, Judaism, and Law
16 Monday May 2016
Tags
despotism, ethics, foreign affairs, freedom, idolatry, Islam, malignant narcissism, mutuality, political philosophy, political psychology, politics, reform, The Jews, totalitarianism, tyranny
While Judaism, Jewishness, and Zionism combine in the interest of Hebrew ethnolinguistic cultural and spiritual survival, the religion probably should not be confused with the practical motivation for related ethnic survival. For anti-Semites only, it’s all the same — Jews, Jewish faith, Israel, Zionism — but attacking Zionism in the age of tolerance becomes the more sustainable ploy.
In contemporary animus and conflicts targeting Jewish life, there are four themes:
1. Absolute Power — political power consolidated in one ruler;
2. Capricious Law — because the ruler is the law;
3. Idolatry – the ruler lays claim to divine right or historic inevitability for his legitimacy in power, and progressively conflates his image with God or the State, and expects followers to respond appropriately — or else!
4. Sadism — with confusion as to what is God and what is human, the permit to exercise a singular will to make others suffer with impunity comes into play.
However any may care to think about any number of political and religious figures in history, I feel the above describe the character of tyrants, small or large, or men or women on the way to becoming tyrants.
The Jewish program embedded in Christianity and Islam — attractive in Rome and useful in consolidating the Arab world — unfailingly promotes (from the git-go in Genesis) human consciousness, self-consciousness or self-awareness, and, most important of all, the possession of a human conscience. Moses later becomes the lawgiver who would oppose Pharaoh in the exercise of his contention that he himself was as if a god.
Game over.
The defense and transfer of concept over thousands of years has been apparently painful. The Jews, we Jews, are a mixed lot, including the atheist portion, but common to all has been mutual good regard, from Adam to Netanyahu, and the development of a conversation through time about divinity, ethics, and morality. We know discipline and order too, but Torah-derived or induced argument (regarding Isaac, should Abraham have talked back to God?) has led to a compendium of law sufficient for living, working, and trading in peace worldwide.
As an ethnolinguistic cohort, the Hebrews could grow only so much in numbers as Hebrews, but the uptake in Christianity and Islam fills in the story.
The “Abrahamic Faiths” should get off the bloody medieval and tribal merry-go-rounds and revisit their “operating instructions” line by line and in the context set by time — BCE, CE, feudal, medieval, mercantile, possibly “post-modern” — and eject the absurdity of global competition based on being born with a few labels in place.
As time is spacious and timeless, what other work than that of fostering ethnolinguistic cultural survival and co-evolution by producing a global political atmosphere in which mutual good regard matters.
Reference Off to the Side
Oppenheim, Lassa. “International Law: A Treatise.” London, New York: Longmans, Green, and Co, 1905.
While “The West” draws its shape also from Greek and Roman civilizations, the “Judeo-Christian” contributions in thought and in woefully bloody history serve to have produced so far deeply desired and survivable codes of conduct and of law. Whether we’ll be able to enlarge the familiar term to “Judeo-Christian-Muslim” contributions remains to be seen, for as implied by way of the awesome conversation, what Baghdadi has put on demonstration smacks of absolute power, capricious law, idolatry, and sadism, all of which greater portions of Islam seem to be rejecting as I type.
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FNS* – Russia steps up terror offensive with armed raid on mosque in Occupied Crimea :: khpg.org
08 Sunday May 2016
Tags
21st Century Neo-Feudalism, Crimea, Crimean Tatars, Hizb ut-Tahrir, Russia, Russian foreign political manipulation, Russian history
Crimean Tatars had just ended their Friday prayers and were rounded up en masse. With no suggestion that anybody was suspected of an offence, the raid, by men with machine guns, can only be called an overt attempt to terrorize Crimean Muslims. This is not the first such act of primitive intimidation, with at least one of the previous occasions making it quite clear that the Russian occupation regime is targeting Crimean Tatars in general.
Source: Russia steps up terror offensive with armed raid on mosque in Occupied Crimea :: khpg.org – Reported May 7, 2016.
Commentary
The above cited article will go on to note the following: “Attacks on people who have just left Friday prayers is both intimidation and part of the mounting campaign by Russia as occupying force to treat Crimean Tatars as ‘extremists’. / 10 Crimean Muslims are currently in detention facing ‘terrorism’ charges for alleged involvement in an organization – Hizb ut-Tahrir – which only Russia and Uzbekistan have banned.”
“Hizb ut-Tahrir”?
From the top, Wikipedia’s description: “Hizb ut-Tahrir (Arabic: حزب التحرير Ḥizb at-Taḥrīr; Party of Liberation) is a radical,[1] international, pan-Islamic political organisation, which describes its “ideology as Islam”, and its aim as the re-establishment of “the Islamic Khilafah (Caliphate)” or Islamic state. The new caliphate would unify the Muslim community (Ummah)[2] in a unitary (not federal)[3] “superstate” of unified Muslim-majority countries[4] spanning from Morocco in West Africa to the southern Philippines in East Asia.
From the military perspective promulgated by Global Security: “The group claims to be a political party that proceeds with nonviolent means and whose ideology is Islam. Its objectives are strictly political, and its main goal is to topple an existing regime to resurrect the caliphate with structures and conditions similar to the ones of early 7th century Islam. The proposed Islamic state will be responsible for transforming society in a united Ummah, and for spreading the word of Islam throughout the world. Hizb ut-Tahrir rejects modern, secular state structures and democracy as things that are ‘man-made, humanly derived, and un-Islamic,’ and, therefore, it does not participate in any secular electoral processes. However, Hizb ut- Tahrir does not reject modern technology and its advantages.”
Russia and Crimean Tatars share a brutal history, much of it condensed in an article by Eric Lohr in the Religion and Politics blog (May 28, 2014):
If Russia and the Tatars are to get along, they will have to overcome not only the bitter legacy of the 1944 deportations, but also centuries of conflict. Russian Tsar Catherine the Great’s conquest of the Crimean Khanate in 1774 led to a mass emigration of Tatars to the Ottoman Empire that was encouraged by the new Russian authorities. Catherine then proceeded to distribute vast lands that had been used by Tatars for grazing to Russian, Ukrainian, German, and foreign nobles and farming communities. The Crimean war of 1853-56 spurred another mass emigration of Crimean Tatars. Memories of historical injustices run the other way too. During the three centuries when the Crimean Tatar Khanate was part of the Ottoman Empire (1478-1774), one of its primary activities was seizing captives from Russia, Ukraine, and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and selling them as slaves in the Ottoman Empire and Middle East.
In the present, Putin’s Era, labeling Russia’s overt investigation of the Crimean Tatar community and the brushing away of the Islamist taint linked to Hizb ut-Tahrir perhaps signals that disingenuous writing that would promote chaos, at least, if not evil outright under the guise of concern with liberation and human rights.
Suspicion of within-mosque association with Hizb ut-Tahrir might rightly call any number of authorities, Ukrainian no less than Russian, to alert and to action. The same may not condone The Bear’s hamfisted and often suspect methods, but it may excuse them in the interest of further explicating political drifts and their strength within so many conflicted and conflict-creating communities within Russia and within the Russian “sphere of challenge” — defined by annexations, frozen conflicts, infiltrations, information warfare, etc. — redeveloped KGB-style by Vladimir Putin.
As regards the Russia-in-Crimea act of fascist assertion and intimidation in surrounding with police a presumably peaceful mosque (“Shimmer” always applies): where is and where was the crime?
Ukrainians (a lot more than Russians) will need to know who is modern, i.e., who has become accustomed to and positively willing to embrace a world adjusted beneath the umbrella of compassionate, practical, and tolerant secular law?
Ukrainians also may wish to know who is not modern, i.e., who would embrace and reconstruct the medieval world and worldview, the same that has been on bloody display in Syria since 2011?
Midway down the left sidebar of this blog comes a bit of Jewish advice to those who would for kindness or naivete abet the designs of those inclined toward intolerance, sadism, and willfulness:
Talmud 7:16 as Quoted by Rishon Rishon in 2004
Qohelet Raba, 7:16
אכזרי סוף שנעשה אכזרי במקום רחמן
Kol mi shena`asa rahaman bimqom akhzari Sof shena`asa akhzari bimqom rahaman
All who are made to be compassionate in the place of the cruel In the end are made to be cruel in the place of the compassionate.
More colloquially translated: “Those who are kind to the cruel, in the end will be cruel to the kind.”
Online Source: http://www.rishon-rishon.com/archives/044412.php
As Halya Coynash’s writing makes the rounds, the example of that with which this post was started and titled, one may wish to keep in mind post-Soviet Russia’s deeply feudal revanch under Putin’s guidance. The “mafia state” — the same that supported the rightly deposed thug Yanukovych — has also a nationalist drive and a revived Russian Orthodox Church attached: for the want of its own greater aggrandizement and not a little criminality, Russia appears to believe it has cause to induce extremism — or more extreme response — in the path of its own habitual imperialism.
As with the delinquent fireman who sets the fire that he can put out, Russia’s state game appears to involve creating the problem (as with the incubating of ISIS in Syria) that its own “heroic” self might solve — an evil design, for sure, but if it has worked so far, and for Russia, so well, lol, in Syria, may God let it not take off in Crimea.
The method worked at least once (upon a time) in Somalia.
Additional Reference
If the symbolic attributes of Mejlis are banned, uncertainty will prevail concerning the use of the flag of Crimean Tatars. The latter is not a symbol of Mejlis, but of all Crimean Tatars. It is used by Mejlis to represent the community’s identity.
“The decision to ban Mejlis for alleged “extremist activities” may open the way to a massive wave of prosecution of Crimean Tatars for whom Mejlis is a symbol of struggle against century long repressions,” – said Karim Lahidji, FIDH President.
*FNS: “Fast News Share” — BackChannels may be using the WordPress application “Press This” to swiftly share items of interest to its readers.
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Russia’s Disinformation History – Elements
01 Sunday May 2016
Tags
Of BackChannels’ several inventions in political psychology, the “Paranoid Delusional Narcissistic Reflection of Motivation” might apply best to President Putin’s way of looking at western liberalism, developing cause to consider it threatening, and then, at last, accusing the west of possessing his own true motives as regards political control through disinformation, force, and manipulation.
For history, start with Czar Nicholas III’s “Okhrana“, the political secret police tasked with influencing and shaping the Czar’s own opposition — Ayatollah or Emperor, why not play both sides of the chessboard? The political theater is either yours or it’s not — prove it’s yours: put on a play; give the opposition its head; slip it a script; settle back and enjoy the show.
Dang if it hasn’t worked!
Of course, there’s more to the story of Russia’s romance with autocracy, state-controlled information and the perversions that are disinformation and propaganda, and secret political police. What follows on this post is an afternoon’s brief compilation of articles pertinent to the challenge posed today by Putin’s approach to throwing the wool over so many eyes, including, possibly, his own.
In general, the Russian media portrays anything going on from the point of view of Vladimir Putin. He has unlimited access to the media and they explain everything that’s going on according to his official statement. It doesn’t really matter if it’s a war in Syria or any other topic.
Russia today is the first intelligence dictatorship in history. It is a brand new form of totalitarianism, which we are not yet familiar with. Now the KGB, rechristened FSB, is openly running Russia.
Ion Pacepa in an interview with Blaze Books as reported by Benjamin Weingarten in The Blaze, February 10, 2014, citation included in reference.
BackChannels also possesses in its library a small “Russian Section” that boasts many volumes on the Russian experience in the 20th Century, on the Soviet, and on the transition from the Soviet to “Putin’s Kleptocracy”.
When the Soviet Union collapsed, its people had a unique opportunity to also cast off the country’s political police, that peculiarly Russian instrument of power created by the 16th century’s Ivan the Terrible, which had changed its name many times, from Okhrana to Cheka, to GPU, to OGPU, to NKVD, to NKGB, to MGB, to MVD, to KGB. Unfortunately, the Russian people were not yet ready — or able — to seize that opportunity.
Pacepa, Ion Mihai. “Brand-New Russia, Same Old Disinformation.” National Review, November 8, 2014.
The international community faces serious challenges arising from a new mode of information warfare, which Russia has deployed during the Russian-Ukrainian conflict in 2014-2015. This ongoing “propaganda war” is the most recent and frightening example of information warfare. It reflects the wide array of non-military tools used to exert pressure and influence the behaviour of countries. When skilfully combined, disinformation, malicious attacks on large-scale information and communication systems, psychological pressure, can be even more dangerous than traditional weapon systems, since they are extremely difficult to discover and combat.
The Kremlin’s disinformation campaign goes far beyond controlling its own media. It is aimed at nothing less than presenting a parallel version of reality and disseminating it as if it were news. The Kremlin’s goal is to make people question the value of media at all; to reject the idea of an absolute truth; and to persuade the public that “reality” is relative.
Emerson, John B. “Exposing Russian Disinformation.” Atlantic Council, June 29, 2015.
If someone—some lost, ersatz-port-begotten ghost—materializing before me at that moment, had told me that, thirty years later, I would be writing about Andropov’s death in English, in America, on the week when post-Soviet Russia’s ruling class—made up, to a considerable extent, of the old K.G.B. cadre—would be celebrating the hundredth anniversary of his birth with a large exhibit dedicated to his life, at whose opening a glowing telegram from his spiritual successor, President Vladimir Putin, would be read—well, I would have known for certain that I had finally and irrevocably, once and for all, lost my mind.
Iossel, Mikhail. “The Night Andropov Died.” The New Yorker, June 17, 2014.
As a former KGB officer and head of the KGB’s successor agency, the FSB, Putin knows the value of information. His concept of the media, however, is a far cry from the First Amendment. For him, it’s a simple transactional equation: Whoever owns the media controls what it says.
“There should be patriotically minded people at the head of state information resources,” Putin told reporters at his 2013 annual news conference, “people who uphold the interests of the Russian Federation. These are state resources. That is the way it is going to be.”
Additional and Cited Reference
Bershidsky, Leonid. “Primakov Would Have Run Russia as Putin Has.” Bloomberg View, June 26, 2015.
Deutsche Welle. “German media worries about Russian-led disinformation campaign.” February 19, 2016.
Goble, Paul. “15 Characteristics of Russian Propaganda.” Stop Fake, April 18, 2016.
Disinformation is always a conscious policy and part of a larger policy agenda. It is not simply dishonesty of this or that official in response to a particular event. It is implemented with a clear understanding that a combination of truth and falsehood is useful and effective. And it is pursued as long as it is effective, being sacrificed only when there are reasons to believe that either it is no longer necessary or it is no longer being accepted. All of those things have characterized Putin’s approach to information about Ukraine, a pattern that makes what Moscow is doing all the more disturbing.
Iossel, Mikhail. “The Night Andropov Died.” The New Yorker, June 17, 2014.
Johnson, Alan. “The Rehabilitation of Felix Dzerzhinsky.” World Affairs, October 14, 2014.
Kofman, Michael. “Russian Hybrid Warfare and Other Dark Arts.” War on the Rocks, March 11, 2016.
Pacepa, Ion Mihai. “Brand-New Russia, Same Old Disinformation.” National Review, November 8, 2014.
Stop Fake. “Russian Propaganda”. Compilation of articles.
Wikipedia. “Okhrana”. The following comes from the “Pre-1905” section of the Wikipedia entry:
While P.I. Rachkovsky, as head of the Okhrana’s Foreign Agency, had long ordered Okhrana agents to infiltrate and influence revolutionary movements abroad, Zubatov brought these tactics to a new level by creating Okhrana-controlled trade unions, the foundation of police socialism.
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Posted to YouTube March 5, 2014.
Addendum – July 11, 2016 and Forward
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On Naz Shah’s 180-Degree Apology
29 Friday Apr 2016
I am sorry.
For someone who knows the scourge of oppression and racism all too well, it is important that I make an unequivocal apology for statements and ideas that I have foolishly endorsed in the past.
The manner and tone of what I wrote in haste is not excusable. With the understanding of the issues I have now I would never have posted them. I have to own up to the fact that ignorance is not a defence.
http://www.jewishnews.co.uk/jewish-news-exclusive-naz-shah-my-apology-to-the-jewish-community/
From the Awesome Conversation —
FB friend: Just a political move of a Jew hater!
Editor: I’m not so certain. People dead-end on bad habits, including bad habits of mind. In the past month, she has been the guest at a private seder without issues; she has made a public apology that reads as authentic statement . . . I think the world surrounding her has changed, and Naz Shah MP has set off in a new direction.
FB Friend: yes, the beauty is in the eyes of the beholder! It’s good to be optimistic! i am skeptical though!
Editor: I’ve just been to her page, and you can read the anti-Semitic spew that comes out in her crowd. Naz Shah with her apology and her soul has betrayed that mob, so she’s going to have to gather herself and face it. Good news if she has courage, she’ll have decent company and plenty of it.
Not only Naz Shah has been plunged into soul searching, the entire Labour Party has been lit up like summer noon by no less liberal a spotlight than The Guardian:
Lady Neuberger claimed the issue in Labour was “attached to Jeremy Corbyn becoming leader”, and “an issue within the hard left”.
John Woodcock, MP and former chair of the Labour Friends of Israel, said: “The handling of this has been a mess. But the most important thing is that the Labour leadership properly acknowledges now the scale of the antisemitism problem that is growing in the party.
Ben Judah, author of Fragile Empire: How Russia Fell In and Out of Love with Vladimir Putin (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2013) has weighed in on George Galloway’s Hitlerian method — leveraging “Jew hate” (start with the stew — anger, fear, jealousy, ignorance, impoverishment, suspicion, shame — and stir it up) into political power and comfortable digs — and legacy in Bradford:
Perhaps that cycling-up of the anti-Semitic phantasmagoria that has duped and shortchanged Bradford will stop now with Naz Shah’s turnaround and the Labour Party’s (perhaps garment-rending) introspection as regards its tolerance for bigotry (anti-Semitic cant generally signals greater antipathy and contempt for additional others matched to the speaker’s own avarice and penchant for social control and related plunder).
Underestimated: the length of the shadows cast across the Left / Far Left (on this blog, the New Old Now Old Far Out and Lost Left and Syndicate Red Brown Green) by Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia and their deliberate, intense, and medieval defamation of Jewry in service to whipping their mobs and using that energy to build the aristocracies that would then ride them into the ground.
Cited and Related Reference
Addendum – April 29, 2016, 8:17 a.m., EST
The conversation rolls on:
Facebook Friend: It is claimed that Shah’s apology was much more contrite before Seamas Milne took his blue pencil to it, speaking specifically about antisemetism.
BackChannels: Then she’s now wrestling with conscience and her political position. Gosh, I would like to speak to her for a few minutes! 🙂 When we “talk politics” we seldom talk “political psychology”, but behind all of this — behind Galloway, behind the disinforming and misshaping of Bradford’s political perception — there has been at work the malignant narcissism that manipulates mobs, that reaches for their sorrows and then gives the same a plate of readymade answers to what bothers them. Counter to that: the reparative vision — and once gotten, it’s impossible to give it back or give it up.
The latest on Seumas:
Posted to YouTube April 29, 2016
Related: http://order-order.com/2016/04/29/seumas-milne-praises-hamas/
Related (Posted Both At and After Publication and Addendum Dates):
Malik, Kenan. “The British Left’s ‘Jewish Problem'”. The New York Times, May 3, 2016.
Mosbacher, Michael. “The Stalinist Past of Corbyn’s Strategist.” Standpoint, December 2015.
Omer-Jackaman. “The Left, Anti-Zionism & Anti-Semitism.” London Progressive Journal, March 28, 2015.
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Turkish Autocrat Erdogan – On Track
19 Tuesday Apr 2016
Posted to YouTube April 14, 2016.
Posted to YouTube March 31, 2016.
From the early sacking of the generals accustomed to the state that Kemal Ataturk bequeathed to the Turks to the latest and disingenuous assaults on the Kurdish People under the cover of fighting terrorism accompanied by something like the resurrection of the Kurdish PKK, a Marxist-infused movement dating back to the 1970s and long stalled in its ideological tracks but naturally mixed back into Kurdish politics, Turkish President Tayyip Recep Erdogan has pursued a course in action, behavior, and language more familiar to Moscow than to Washington.
Add in that grandiose residence, the “White Palace”, a mixed development Versailles, but with its private residential part supporting some 250 rooms set on a landscape dotted with at least a few $10,000 trees imported from Italy.
On this post, the related and additional reference sections and fair-use excerpts should provide plenty for reflection on Turkey as a NATO state that while fulfilling its military contract has drifted as a democracy far into authoritarianism. Although the Moscow-Tehran axis blocks any chance of an Erdogan-Putin political “bromance” like that between Putin and Hungary’s Orban, who despite his state’s NATO membership has displayed the same drift toward authoritarian rule, Erdogan’s path remains the one that leads to dictatorship.
Related Reference — Freedom of the Press
https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-press/2015/turkey – “Turkey: 5-Year Decline in Press Freedom”: “Conditions for media freedom in Turkey continued to deteriorate in 2014 after several years of decline. The government enacted new laws that expanded both the state’s power to block websites and the surveillance capability of the National Intelligence Organization (MİT). Journalists faced unprecedented legal obstacles as the courts restricted reporting on corruption and national security issues. The authorities also continued to aggressively use the penal code, criminal defamation laws, and the antiterrorism law to crack down on journalists and media outlets.”
http://www.dw.com/en/security-for-turkeys-erdogan-scuffles-with-journalists-in-washington/a-19157072 – “Security for Turkey’s Erdogan scuffles with journalists in Washington”: “The president’s security detail removed one opposition Turkish reporter from the speech room, kicked another and threw a third to the ground outside the Brookings Institution, in a melee that provided Washington’s foreign policy elite a firsthand glimpse at the state of the press in Turkey.” Note: In the United States, Secret Service details protect foreign heads of state. However, it appears that Brookings, Erdogan’s own security detail may have made moves against would-be Erdogan critics.
Related Reference — Human Rights
https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2015/country-chapters/turkey – “World Report 2015: Turkey – Events of 2014”
https://www.amnesty.org/en/countries/europe-and-central-asia/turkey/report-turkey/ — “Turkey 2015/2016”
Additional Reference
Ben-Meir, Alon. “Turkey’s Path to Dictatorship.” Consortium News, March 10, 2016:
. . . Erdogan has used his strong Islamic credentials to project himself as a pious leader, when in fact he consistently engaged in favoritism, granting huge government contracts to those who supported him and to his family members, irrespective of conflicts of interest and the corruption that ensued as a result.
Filkins, Dexter. “Erdogan’s March to Dictatorship in Turkey.” The New Yorker, March 31, 2016.
Google Search. “Erdogan, dictatorship” (last seen on date of this post’s publication).
Gursil, Kadri. “Why Erdogan can’t end PKK war.” Al-Monitor, April 5, 2016.
Human Rights Watch. “UN Committee against Torture: Review of Turkey
57th Session of the Committee against Torture.” April 22, 2016:
The breakdown in 2015 of the government-initiated peace process with Abdullah Öcalan, the imprisoned leader of the armed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), has been accompanied by an increase in violent attacks, armed clashes, and serious human rights violations since summer 2015. The latter includes violations of the right to life and mass displacement of residents in eight southeastern towns where the security forces and PKK-affiliated youth groups have engaged in armed clashes, as well as denial of access to basic services including healthcare, food and education for residents placed under blanket curfew conditions for extended periods and in some cases months at a time. The past eight months have seen hundreds of security personnel, Kurdish armed fighters and civilians killed, with almost no government acknowledgement of the civilian death toll estimated at between 200 and 300 in this period. The renewed violence has provided the context too for numerous arrests of political activists and alleged armed youth on terrorism charges and ill-treatment of detainees.
See Richard Spencer’s piece, listed below, for an estimation of a changed PKK politics within the Kurdish effort to eject ISIS, where the Kurds of produced the most effective ground fighting force since the Syrian Tragedy took hold in 2011, and otherwise establish and sustain their autonomy despite their historic four-state division and subsequent treatment as an ethnic suzerainty.
“The PKK has become part of the people. You can’t separate them anymore,” said Zubeyde Zumrut (in Diyarbakir), co-chair of BDP, which won control of one hundred municipalities in the southeast of Turkey in the 2009 local elections and thirty-six parliamentary seats in the June 2011 national elections. “Which means if you want to solve this problem, you need to take the PKK into account.”
President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s recent attack against academics – who signed a petition condemning military operations in Kurdish cities and calling for peace and negotiations – is yet another banal expression of the authoritarian politics that have long prevailed in Turkey under Justice and Development Party (AKP) rule. All authoritarian regimes are anti-intellectual and this tendency intensifies when they are in trouble. So it is not surprising that Turkey’s president and his party look for scapegoats to blame for their domestic and foreign policy failures. Indeed, authoritarianism is rarely a reflection of political power; rather, in most cases it is a result of weakness.
We joined the agency in January, hired to edit English-language news, but quickly found ourselves becoming English-language spin-doctors. The agency’s editorial line on its domestic politics – and Syria, in particular – was so intently pro-government that we might as well have been writing press releases. Two months into the job, we listened to Deputy Prime Minister Bülent Arınç talking bollocks about press freedom from an event at London’s Chatham House, downplaying the number of imprisoned journalists in Turkey.
SPIEGEL: The government says it is exclusively pursuing terrorists.
Demirtas: The war is primarily focused on civilians that Erdogan suspects of supporting the PKK. Almost 400,000 people have had to leave their homes. The southeast of Turkey resembles Syria.
Serinci, Deniz. “The PKK’s Evolution, 30 Years On.” Rudaw, August 15, 2014.
What has happened is that Turkey has decided to allow Iraqi Kurdistan’s army, the Peshmerga, to join the YPG, the PKK’s Syrian affiliate, in defending Kobane.
The Kurds of south-east Turkey cheering the Peshmerga convoy as it passes are of course hoping they will save their fellow Kurds in Kobane. But they are also cheering the new-found unity of the Kurdish cause. For once, the faction-fighting of their leaders has been set aside in a common purpose, and the Kurd in the street feels anything is now possible.
The Turkish PM is on a roll: About 10% of the country’s top brass are in jail, awaiting trial for allegedly plotting against him. Voters have given him a mandate to rewrite the country’s constitution, produced under the shadow of a 1980 military coup and that allowed the military to interfere in the process of governance.
But there are suspicions the evidence against the officers was fabricated and the moves are intended to silence the opposition. Numerous journalists and academics are being held on similar charges.
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