Condemning the move, a Save the Children official told Reuters that the Pakistan government had been stopping aid shipments entering the country, “blocking aid to millions of children and their families”. It comes after the Pakistani government announced it was tightening the rules for NGOs, revoking several of their licences. An interior ministry official said on Friday it had cancelled agreements with at least 15 foreign charities, including the Norwegian Refugee Council, on the advice of intelligence agencies that said the organisations had been “collecting sensitive data” from Pakistan’s tribal areas bordering Afghanistan.
Foreign charities have complained that they have been treated with increasing hostility and suspicion in Pakistan, with obstacles to their work becoming ever more difficult especially in the last 6 months.
Others who are like you will have to fight back with you.
Gather around: the outlook is not a perspective: it is a religion, a religious obligation; and constitutionally supported.
The truth is as it is made out — The polio vaccine was fake. ” . . . Interior Minister Chaudhary Nisar Ali Khan, said the organisations in question “are operating with support from the United States, Israel and India” (from Wilson Chowdhry’s piece).
That Christian missions and press spoil against their Islamic counterparts holds no surprise, but what presumably educated adults in Pakistan are willing to do to children, their own or others, beneath the cover of paranoid conspiracy theories and socially lauded hate, surpasses cruelty.
The greater story — what may be found as one rises above an animosity that is as medieval as it may be parochial — is that other Pakistanis, including other elements in governance, are again struggling to save children from Poliomyelitis.
A large number of the citizens of Turkey, a NATO member, see Israel and the United States as enemies.
A survey conducted recently in Turkey found that nearly half the country’s citizens (42.6%) see Israel as the biggest security threat, followed by the United States (35.5%), and only then Syria (22.1%).
How do they visualize Israel, a country with which they have made several military and trade agreements, as being a security threat? Do they think Israel would ever invade Turkey? Bomb Turkey? Nuke Turkey? This view seems to be based on either religion-induced paranoia caused by Islamic anti-Semitism, or else their understanding of reality has been distorted Nazi-style by Turkish leaders and the media.
Turkey was the first – and for decades the only – Islamic country to recognize the Jewish state, opening diplomatic relations in 1949. While Turkey became a member of NATO in 1952, and Israel served during the Cold War as a Western ally to counter Soviet alliances in the Arab world, relations between the two states were low-key through the decades of wars fought between Israel and the Arabs. Yet Turkey never severed the relationship despite Arab pressure to do so. With the end of the Cold War, Israel and Turkey emerged as the most democratic and economically dynamic states in the region. Their foreign pro-Western orientation and their self-perception as bastions of democratic and free market values in an unruly neighbourhood placed them, as was the case during the Cold War years, in the same strategic boat.
Given the neo-feudal and fascist will of Syndicate Red Brown Green, the resilience of Israeli-Turkish relations has not looked good for some years.
What may be looking forward, however, is how well humanity-adverse and anti-Semitic drives and manipulations may be overviewed on the World Wide Web. Not only may pro-democracy true progressives in the west do the homework on the Putin-Erdogan relationship, brave and independent souls in Turkey (and elsewhere worldwide) may search up “Putin, Erdogan, Democracy”.
Other cool related searches: “Putin, palaces”; “Erdogan, white palace”.
After a while, in the same fashion as the Reuter’s piece on Khamenei, these reports that develop online — and they do add up thematically — create a certain impression and, perhaps, also leave a lasting impression.
I fear to see the term “anthropolitical” take off, but it could happen: in a New Age Strange Way, we’re all going to be part of distinct and meaningful legacy (and ethnolinguistic) cultures, but any will have the option at all times to overview the same rapidly — to see their world mirrored in real time — and inquire into its intellectual arrangements. From that may come greater discrimination in preferences in values plus an active delineation of “desirable universals” and “critical positive” cultural and intellectual assets.
The English x persons x language shall not rule the world: the worlds of the world must rule themselves differentially even if and while wrapped in a unifying global communications environment.
Addendum – June 15, 2015
Efraim Inbar, a professor of political studies at Israel’s Bar-Ilan University and director of the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies (BESA), is not optimistic about AKP’s imminent political downfall and does not expect a change in Turkey’s attitude toward Western nations and Israel.
“The struggle over the soul and identity of Turkey continues,” Inbar told JNS.org, explaining that while “the election is definitely a blow to the AKP, [the party] still remains the major political force in Turkey.”
The psychology, which may be shared in the many subcultures residing beneath the umbrellas of major religions, involves “locus of control”, or in more familiar terms, who or what is the central power and who and what are peripheral to it.
God always wins this one.
🙂
A portion of unfortunate and perhaps misdirected mankind chooses to argue through a figure of human agency.
Judaism — at least contemporary Judaism — most strictly separates its prophets, all of whom are depicted as imperfect and riven with faults from their earliest introduction, from its God.
Critics of Islam, I believe, point to conflation that perhaps inappropriately elevates the human to be as like a god even if not God.
What headaches we have given ourselves with this combination of metaphysical (therefore unprovable by empirical standards) conjectures and their installation into culture. Before drawing rebuke, I may remind that in 12th Century Hungary, laws designed to discriminate against Jews were upon implementation applied equally to Muslims, which is my way of suggesting that whether Christian, Jewish, or Muslim (alphabetical ordering guides that method of listing, nothing else), we need together to step down from the bloody merry-go-round and pause to reflect and wonder at legacy with both compassion — I favor ethnolinguistic coevolution in my outlook — and the determination to look forward rather than backward, to become free of the past and more able to embrace a new dawn.
Before Jesus, Paul, and Constantine and not much later Muhammad, the Jewish teacher Hillel the Elder had spent his career shifting Judaic arguments from the defense of rote and ritual to the promotion of derived principle and in doing so had produced a more accessible religion, it’s uptake in a restive Rome being perhaps no accident. However, the politics of power intrude, competition develops, and we are left “full of it”. Becoming or being aware of that as well as more sophisticated about how we’re really put together psychologically and spiritually should help mitigate the adverse effects of the endowments of each.
The atheist’s argument may be specious in that anyone interested in leveraging license to lord over another may claim victimization and the imperatives of defense. As much becomes a transparent ploy — and one that cynical dictators apply by producing “false flag” attacks . . . or more recently, drawing retributive fire and treating the same as unprovoked. As much also becomes a juvenile and dirty way of working. As the same becomes more apparent, it becomes also more shameful.
What magic Mumbo Jumbo calls an end to conflict seated primarily in the mind?
I wish I knew.
By way of the example of Putin and Khamenei and their common interest in feudal absolute power, we may know more about political criminality than in centuries past. One may review from “The Russian Section” exactly how a vicious authoritarian system may be made to work to privilege a class of overlords or piratical wealthy. Of course, the same develop the “realpolitik” in politically repressive power to keep themselves in business (Mugabe’s proof as far as I’m concerned).
Along with locus of control (mentioned above), the taking of license — the power to make others suffer with impunity — should also be viewed as politically and socially problematic. Dictatorships concentrate power in one entity (person, cabal, junta, party), and that power becomes the power to capriciously visit suffering on others with impunity; authentic democracies distribute power and constrain the powerful in such a way to leave God and the law more powerful than any soul that may chance to be born human and pass beneath both.
Our cultural and language differences have a breadth to them defined by the wild nature of nature. From my intuitive perspective, our cultural programming begins when the ears are turned on, if not before, and that’s in the womb. We hear — and we start “taking statistics” on sound. Correlation — with our own chemistry and mood; with the timbre and meaning of noise, so that we may discern what is important in listening and set aside similar data to focus on it — would seem a part of that process. By the time we get around to speaking ourselves or, later, reading, we have learned — or come to believe — an awful lot about cultural and physical aspects of our environment. Most fascinating, albeit again intuited: without language, we cannot suspend our cultures in time by transmitting the same through the tongue.
What’s up there is not such a bold new thought. Linguists have been long submerged beneath the surface of it and “taking statistics” themselves from observations of behavior in relation to language uptake in infancy.
What may be new given our access here to the Awesome Worldwide Conversation may be our adult ability to become both introspective and observing across language cultures faced with or hosting significant conflict-related violence and querying the sources of development of related psychological contributors. “Cognitive style”; “listening style”; “manners in speech”; “attitude-behavior correspondence” and its ancillaries in the individual’s interior development of beliefs and their emotional and logical primacy and weight.
Across cultures, do we hear and listen, read, and speak as if the same — or are we differentially programmed?
Down to households and up to high office, cultures support and perpetuate intellectual ecologies familiar to their residents but perhaps alien beyond themselves. That’s something to think about when launching an app, choosing movie or television program to watch in the “home theater”, or when opening a book or game with which one covertly, privately, interacts, mind-to-mind or mind-to-minds.
Mommy sends – baby receives: what do mothers send? What do babies get? Examine x dyad x household x community x region x state? Are things we may suppose universal actually so?
In the middle east conflict, there seem always to be things “everybody knows” that turn out not in the least true.
Better ask the flat earth believers: what are the effects of social conformance, fear, or anti-authority protest on what may be observed, argued, and measured (and re-observed, measured, and tested) as true?
Is there a difference between “political cant, propaganda, and rhetoric” and plain honest, valid, reliable, and responsible speech?
Addendum – FTAC – June 4, 2015
What’s relevant could be described as global ethnolinguistic survival and self-determination. Baloch, Kurds, Hebrews, Pashtun, and others (the earth’s inventory of living languages stands at around 7,000 speech communities, albeit with far fewer major language groups) share this interest in common. If you’re going to go after the Hebrew soul — as long as we’re confessing: I don’t speak Hebrew: I am solely an English-speaking American, and I am still Jewish — whose soul in being is to be dispensed with next? Arab heritage? Persian?
For various reasons, beginning with the discussion-inducing qualities of the Torah — whatever its injunctions, it sets out the broadest range of ethical and moral dilemmas and puzzles (what if Eve hadn’t eaten the “fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil?) — and moving on to figures like Maimonides and Hillel the Elder, the latter deliberately setting out to make Judaism more accessible to converts, what “Jewish” is remains ever arguable (except with simpletons like Hitler who thought it had to do with blood and measured that for murder — and theft — by distance from the legacy of Jewish family). Moreover, the same allows Jewish culture and life to grow and adapt to times over time without losing its essence, despite the occasional complaint from the presumptuously and magically more “authentic, pure, or real” Jew. In place of “Jew” place “Christian” for “Muslim” or “Buddhist” or “Hindu” and the same effects may apply: identity becomes more important than character; ritual supplants principle.
Language cultures may be a little different on the global landscape. Each is a part of our human library and inventory in manners, speech, and thought corresponding to the experience of life in some unique cultural space. While “updating” to access a modern (vs feudal / medieval) worldview and enjoy the benefits of that, we may also appreciate one another’s very different cultural adventure and experience to date — and be careful not to lose any.
Shall the earth’s dominant politics pit all against all?
Or shall we instead drift toward “harmonious relations” and see what might be achieved with “all for all” ascending and predominating?
The remark was prompted by listening to a colloquy on the heritage acquired by (imparted to; experienced by) the Jewish People as a people — but with reference to, I suppose, one might say, less authentic Jews.
Out of our abundant human adaptive and intellectual abilities, metaphysical thought puts up an astounding construction, if you will, in language: beliefs, miracles, legends, myths, fables, homilies, epigram, witticisms . . . all of those words — words, words! — shaping our outlook on existence itself.
Of late, I’ve been asking myself what it means to be an American these days, that as opposed to a hyphenated-American, an American modified by race, color, creed, religion, income, fitness level (“healthy American”), gender, sexual habits and preferences, preferences in housing style (are there “Cape Cod Americans”, “Rancher Americans”?), or location-based Americans (“urban Americans” vs “rural Americans”), not to mention Americans modified by political identity — “Red State Americans” vs “Blue State Americans”.
American.
That’s it.
But put the ring on her finger and make the baby, and no matter what, and one is smothered back in the folds of priestly robes: baptism? Or bris? What church? Which synagogue?
The West insists on maintaining the illusion that the government in Baghdad is something other than a Shia sectarian-dominated entity in the process of entering a de facto military alliance with the Iranians. This stubbornness is producing the current absurd situation in which Western air power is being used in support of Shia Islamism.
It is important to understand that this is not taking place because there is no other option for stopping the advance of the Islamic State. There is another, more effective option: direct aid to the Kurds, and to the Sunni tribes further south.
In the medieval mode, sectarian religious teleology — who wins the favor of God? How soon do we get to find out? — reaches the boundary of the ineffable: may God decide on the field of battle, and the sooner the better!
In the modern mode, the same narrative may be left to God to decide gently across millennia — or not at all: who needs must get to the end of the story in their lifetime or even want the same to arrive in their great grandchildren’s day?
BackChannels has been surprised by the tenacious hold given, so the blog shall refer to it, the “Great Sunni vs Shiite War” in Shiite circles and doubtless, whatever the proportions, in Sunni ones as well.
How is it for the west that so alien, primitive, and singular an unanswerable dispute may by ripples and waves spread to engulf the modern of two to several middle east states?
Ayatollah Khamenei’s expansion of influence, and this despite the regime’s infamous behavior in its own space, appears to proceed apace through the combined artifice of political theater — how conveniently the ISIS story links to the narrative “Assad vs The Terrorists” — and, in Yemen, just watch those Houthis go — war by proxy.
As a soldier, I felt like a real master. I drove tanks in the desert and I carried a big assault rifle when in the city. One day, as I walked the streets of Jerusalem, believing myself to be the biblical King David, my eyes met those of a young Arab lady in a long white dress standing on the rooftop of her house. There she stood, erect and proud. She stared at me, and then sang lovely Arabic tunes that captured my mind and heart. I stared back at her, a gorgeous beauty with the voice of an angel, and fell in love on the spot. Her song, I promptly concluded, was far more piercing than any of my bullets.
At this point Captain Swan stunned his men with his own innovative plan. He argued that their voyaging along the Mexican coast had brought nothing but disappointment and it was pointless continuing. Instead, they would cross the Pacific and “go into the East-Indies.” He conjured the glory days of Drake and Cavendish, who successfully passed that way, but even so he had a struggle. Two-thirds of his men did not believe it possible. “Such was their ignorance,” wrote Dampier, that they were convinced “he would carry them out of the world.”
Preston, Diana and Michael. A Pirate of Exquisite Mind: Explorer, Naturalist, and Buccaneer: The Life of William Dampier. New York: Walker & Company, 2004.
These two wildly different accounts of voyages through time have between them one theme in common: the temporary ascent of assumptions and guesses over real knowledge.
William Dampier, who set out in life a sailor, precedes James Cook, Charles Darwin, and others in his gourmandizing, navigating, observing, suffering, swashbuckling, writing triple circumnavigation of the earth under 17th Century sail.
In the life movie, as it were, Tuvia Tenenbom appears to have embarked upon his life’s journey as one who might have believed a superstitious misstep would have carried him out of the world:
But then, on one wintry cold day, I got my hands on all kinds of books and pictures and found out that I’ve been lied to. Our “Jewish” black clothes made me look frighteningly similar to the non-Jewish Polish nobles and Austrian bourgeois of a century or two ago; our community’s glorification of virgins was more in line with the thinking in Islamic societies; and the way my rabbis prevented me from engaging with sexuality in any capacity — “Thou shalt never look at females,” they always reminded me — seemed more rooted in Catholicism than in Judaism.
True to my nature as a representative of God, I consulted with heaven and left the ultra-Orthodox fold.
By the time Tenenbom publishes in today’s Forward, he has become a much more cognizant and sophisticated navigator, rather like Dampier in his day, but in this age, he has stumbled across a similar ignorance and misguidance. However, where Dampier’s men could be called “out of the loop” and innocent of emerging knowledge about the world and the mapping of continents, islands, currents, and winds, Tenenbom’s anti-Semitic and Israel-hating acquaintance appear to have been corralled, lied to, programmed, and seduced: they have lost their clues to what is real and what is not and would appear today to be made to live in Orwell’s worst nightmare: intellectually poisoned and too easily maneuvered, they have been “carried out of the world” — the world that includes worlds with authentic histories, including their own ethnolinguistic legacies — as cognizant and knowledgeable free agents in their own right.
As jihadi recruitment has grown even more severe, I believe it is because we have failed to factor in early childhood development. This is where the prologue to violence begins including radicalization and recruitment later on . . . .
While a lot of money is being thrown at “de-radicalization,” reminiscent of the War on Poverty (and just think of where that has gotten us), we owe it to the public and to ourselves not to be terrified to address childrearing practices in these homes. They are different than in the West. Nevertheless, the Western converts who radicalized share a similar background of shame and troubled early childhoods.
The Banality of Suicide Terrorism: The Naked Truth About the Psychology of Islamic Suicide Bombing
Penetrating the Terrorist Psyche
Readers may finding themselves swimming in Kobrin’s sprawling style but with brights applied to sifting thematically while doing so will also develop insight into the building blocks of the “exploding iceberg”, i.e., enraged terrorist cool in personality.
Only once, I believe, has BackChannels addressed the formation of a psychologically teleological path from out of a simple childhood experience (with language): Guilt and Jealousy in Two Lines (September 26, 2013).
Generally speaking, children don’t — because they cannot frame their own case — write dissertations, and adults addressing adult displays of violence approach the same with the combines of hardware and legal tools known to military and paramilitary missions.
Message: quell it first; unravel the motivation afterward.
Posted to YouTube 2/7/2007 (views: about two million).
The mother has tremendous impact on a baby. These are women often isolated from the larger society. I always asked the prisoners about their mothers. Often their eyes would well up because they knew that I knew that they were Mama’s Boys, bullies. Yet these mothers should not be blamed because in a shame honor culture the female is at the eye of the storm. She is THE shock absorber of chronic emasculated male rage. If we do not deal with early childhood development, we will lose this war on radicalization.
Raising a child happens behind closed doors. Neighbors always say about the jihadi that he was such a nice boy without knowing what really went on. To air one’s dirty laundry in public is shaming for a clan culture. Nonetheless childhood development must be factored into a cohesive plan for “de-radicalization” if we want to foil the numerous ticking human bombs.
While cultural and ethnolinguistic self-invention and experience correspond to the exigencies of living in some place with some people — really: about 7,000 living languages wrap the earth in its humanly conscious expression and reflection — the strength of combined analytical, creative, empathic, and scientific effort in the conflict and crime arenas resides in the promise of the universal applicability of hard won insight, for we are natural observers of ourselves, individually and communally, and, in some part, healers as well.
The crime that is theft — including the theft of life itself — needs no introduction anywhere on earth, but that which programs the criminal and scripts the crime — what gets into a really nasty “piece of work” — begs a good looking over life’s earliest formative experiences, and it needs that examination in a way that produced universally accessible and understood insight. Kobrin, who in her works shares her own recollections of torment in this regard, lays out what might be called — so I may call it — “the terrorist’s tableaux”: despite the scatter in the writing, one finds in her explications about “exploding icebergs” and “maternal cameos” coherent narratives about the formation of criminal bullying and terrorizing behavior.
The oldest brother of the Toulouse scooter killer, Mohamed Merah, denounces the role of his own father, mother, sister and brother in spawning a “monster” in his new book.
Abdelghani Merah, 36, says the youngest of his four siblings was raised in an “atmosphere of racism and hatred” but also of violence and neglect. He has written the book – “Mon Frère, ce terroriste” (My brother the terrorist) – to try to counter the hero-worship of Mohamed, 23, among some young French Muslims. “I am the killer’s brother but I am on the side of his victims,” he says.
Tsarni told reporters assembled on his leafy street that day he had not seen his brother’s brood for years. “I wanted my family away from his family,” he said. It’s not hard to understand why he would distance himself from the two young men accused of engineering that murderous blast, but he insists the whole family is trouble—from welfare scams to bomb threats to jihad—and it all stems from their mother, who fled the United States and now lives in Dagestan.
Back on the phone, still thinking about his brother’s family, he apologizes for his outburst of profanity, and then launches into yet another condemnation of his sister-in-law. “That woman—she created evil spawn. Evil spawn from an evil woman.”
Appearing on the cover in which the above piece lives in the magnetosphere: “Twisted Sisters: As Dzhokhar Tsarnaev awaits trial for his alleged role in the Boston Marathon Bombing, many of the women in his life are still proclaiming his innocence . . . and pushing for jihad.”
Terrorism centers on the inability to mourn loss. It becomes obsessive about the inability to process the concept of death and dying— the persistent denial of death. Terrorists deny death and even claim to love it. In reality they are terrified and taunt death like bungee jumpers who taunt heights because they cannot accept their terror, their vulnerability, and their own mortality. The suicide bomber is the terrorists’ death-anxiety emollient. It is a bizarre kind of counterphobic activity. Terrorism becomes the celebration of death. Terrorists communicate their obsession with death to their children through peculiar rituals. Think of Hamas and Hizbollah and their death parades, dressing children in suicide bomber uniforms. Or selling little doll suicide bombers as toys, making the bizarre practice of killing off one’s own acceptable. Or consider the thousands of plastic keys that the Ayatollah Khomeini ordered from Taiwan to be placed around the necks of Iranian children who went to their death as human mine sweepers during the Iran– Iraq War. The “nice” Ayatollah slaughtered these innocents while telling them and their impotent, terrorized parents that this plastic key guaranteed their entry into paradise. The terrors of the terrorist’s “inner child” are literally and concretely projected into their own children. Terrorists feel dead and want others to feel what they feel. But they cannot put their feelings into words. In the world of terrorism everything is the opposite of what it should be.
Kobrin, Nancy Hartevelt (2013-11-12). Penetrating The Terrorist Psyche (Kindle Locations 482-493). Multieducator Inc. Kindle Edition.
Modern law enforcement may address terrorism as a physical process (e.g., sometimes involving “bombs on two legs”) and try to get in the way of it or forestall an act close to or at its commission.
The detachment, as it were, of contemporary psychoanalytic forces may delve back much, much farther into the beliefs and habits of cultures and families, what may be imparted through the infant’s period of language uptake, how children respond to abuse by way of the formation of “grammatical” or rule-based behaviors , and the ready political systems for culture-wide programming, intake, and operations that one finds with such as Hamas and Hezbollah. In those forces, which I presume always around (or we wouldn’t have “Officer Krupke” and its inverted psychobabble for entertainment) and always new, Nancy Hartevelt Kobrin has produced the voice of the damaged and injured by terrorism in the family — the exercise of sadistic will in the realm of the intimate — and welled that out into the portion of the human experience now embroiled in related conflicts and the singular and senseless tragedies that come of political terrorism and its inversions.
The incident began with the Iranians ordering the ship into Iranian waters. When the ships master refused, the Iranians began to fire in a way to try to disable the ship, not just as warning shots, the U.S. official said.
Several shots hit the cargo ship, but did not disable it. The ship went into UAE waters and the Iranians followed it into those territorial waters, continuing to fire, before breaking off.
A senior Iranian military official warned that any effort to board a Yemen-bound ship – supposedly filled with aid supplies – would “spark a fire,” amid speculation that Tehran is using the shipment to try to provoke an incident.
One U.S. official told Fox News the Iranian ship has media aboard.
“Iran is begging for us to board the ship. This is all for show,” he said.
From the same piece: “”I bluntly declare that the self-restraint of Islamic Republic of Iran is not limitless,” Gen. Masoud Jazayeri, the deputy chief of staff, told Iran’s Arabic-language Al-Alam state TV late Tuesday.”
There should be no question about the defects in personality involved in Iranian belligerence and its version of military and political reality testing in service to extraordinary kleptocracy and political manipulation in turn associated with an equally ambitious and piratical expansionism.
Connect the dots:
a little elbowing at sea;
some war by proxy in Yemen to rub away the buffer and mess around with the margin of Saudi power;
add the demonstration of callousness and ruthlessness associated with the Syrian tragedy (shaped by Putin-Assad-Khamenei to produce a polarized “Assad vs The Terrorists” image diverting the initial and popular 2011 push for the reform of the Assad regime).
The Ayatollah appears incapable of restraint except when confronted with the prospect of main force — and the smaller parts of “main force” — “diplomacy”, sanctions, excoriations — appear of little concern given the regime’s comfortability with its criminality, limitless ambitions, and largely unimpeded operating style.
BackChannels 