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~ Conflict, Culture, Language, Psychology

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Category Archives: Political Psychology

Deja Vu Jabbari

02 Thursday Oct 2014

Posted by commart in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Political Psychology

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Tags

ayatollah khamenei, criminality, despotism, Hassan Rouhani, injustice, Iran, murder, state murder, tyranny


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delara_Darabi

Delara Darabi was put to death by hanging on May 1, 2009.

______

Crocodiles smile too.

What can be said about such pleasant looking men whose mirrors wall them off from the blood and horror suffered directly at their own criminal will?

One may only imagine how modern Iranians feel knowing that the murder that will take place about 6 days from this one is not an aberration in the politics attending their lives but perfectly normal now, an atmosphere of fear maintained for Persians in a manner no different than that which would be meted to them by any other conquering agent in history.  In fact, Ayatollah Khamenei and President Rouhani, Iran’s two leading political sadists and sociopaths, have obtained from Iranians in general what conquest obtains: compliance, passivity, plunder, silence, and subjugation.

What follows has been only loosely put together, but as so much of blogging may be, it’s a snapshot of the Jabbari case as emblematic of the regime’s despotic, misogynist, piratical, and sadistic mentality and the machinations and politics attending it.

______

President Hassan Rouhani’s public criticism of Mr Cameron came as Amnesty International warned of the imminent execution in Tehran’s Evin Prison of a 26-year-old woman found guilty of murder.

If Reyhaneh Jabbari is hanged, she would be the 600th person to suffer the death penalty since Mr Rouhani took office in August last year – giving Iran the highest number of executions anywhere in the world, apart from China.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/iran/11131075/Irans-president-attacks-Camerons-unacceptable-remarks-as-woman-faces-execution.html – 9/30/2014.


Therefore, Jabbari was sentenced to death for her action under the Islamic judiciary system of Iran. Why would a young professional woman be executed for defending herself against unwelcome actions from her superior, a sexual abuser?

The profound irony, and the peak of the Islamic Republic’s hypocrisy, became clear this week in a speech marking Women’s Day, when Iranian president Hassan Rouhani made international headlines by condemning any form of sexual discrimination and advocating for equal opportunities and rights for women.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/majid-rafizadeh/iran-executing-a-victim-of-attempted-rape/ – 4/24/2014.


Nazanin (Mahabad) Fatehi (Persian: نازنین فاتحی‎, born 1987) is an Iranian woman who was sentenced to death for stabbing a man who allegedly tried to rape her and her 15 year old niece, events occurring when she herself was a 17 year old. After more than 2 years in jail, Fatehi was cleared of intentional murder, ordered her to pay diyeh (blood money for the death), and released on bail (January 2007). As of 2012, Fatehi’s whereabouts were reported to be unknown to concerned supporters outside of Iran.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazanin_Fatehi


She was arrested after being raped by a 51 year old man. But according to Islamic Sharia Law, she was convicted for ‘crimes against chastity’, based on her admission, obtained through torture, that she repeatedly had sex with a 51-year-old ex-revolutionary guard turned taxi-driver Ali Darabi, a married man with children.[1] She was raped and tortured for 3 years,[2] a secret from both her family and the authorities. However, while in prison, she finally told her grandmother, saying that afterwards she could only walk on all fours because of the pain.[3] In the court the judge was Haji Rezai. As Atefah realised she was losing her case, she removed her hijab, an act seen as a severe contempt of the court, and argued that Ali Darabi should be punished, not she. She even removed her shoes and hit the judge with them.[4] The judge later sentenced her to death.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atefah_Sahaaleh

Related:

On August 15th, 2004 a 16-year-old girl was hanged in a public square in Neka, Iran. Her death sentence was for “acts incompatible with chastity”. Her name was Atefah Rafavi Sahaaleh. The only evidence against Atefah was her own forced confession.

Atefah Rafavi Sahaaleh, 16, executed in Iran for “acts incompatible with chastity” – Vimeo video


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Covenant_on_Civil_and_Political_Rights


Rouhani’s justice minister, Mustafa pour-Mohammadi, has been accused of executing thousands of Iranian political prisoners in 1988. [7] As a matter of formality, both US and EU officials have publicly criticized Iran’s human-rights records under Rouhani, but at the same time they have restarted trade in exchange for Iran dismantling its nuclear program.

Rouhani has filled his cabinet with wealthy ministers. According to Elias Naderan, a member of Iran’s parliament, several ministers in Rouhani’s cabinet have wealth of around 800 to 1000 billion tomans (US$265 to $330 million) – the toman is a superunit of the rial. [8] While most Iranians are suffering from poverty, Rouhani’s wife gave a lavish party on April 19 in the previous Shah’s Sadabad Palace, which raised strong criticism in the Iranian media. [9]

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/MID-01-090514.html – 5/9/2014.


Setad has become one of the most powerful organizations in Iran, though many Iranians, and the wider world, know very little about it. In the past six years, it has morphed into a business juggernaut that now holds stakes in nearly every sector of Iranian industry, including finance, oil, telecommunications, the production of birth-control pills and even ostrich farming.

The organization’s total worth is difficult to pinpoint because of the secrecy of its accounts. But Setad’s holdings of real estate, corporate stakes and other assets total about $95 billion, Reuters has calculated.

http://www.reuters.com/investigates/iran/#article/part1 – 11/11/2013.


# # #

Abbas – Gaslighting Gaza and the World at Large

28 Sunday Sep 2014

Posted by commart in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Gaza, Islamic Small Wars, Israel, Middle East, Political Psychology, Regions

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Tags

gaslighting, malignant narcissism, middle east conflict, political psychology

What I have been calling “The Islamic Small Wars” — the internecine competitions and interfaces within Muslim-majority political space running from Afghanistan to Yemen — have been wars about integrity — basic truth telling — requiring armies of poets and detectives for fighting and resolving.

______

Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen,

In this year, proclaimed by the United Nations General Assembly as the International Year of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, Israel has chosen to make it a year of a new war of genocide perpetrated against the Palestinian people.

http://www.timesofisrael.com/full-text-of-abbas-speech-to-un/ – 9/26/2014

A bold gambit but it may be filtered by BackChannels’ own concept in political psychology: “Paranoid Delusional Narcissistic Reflection of Motivation”.

Abbas’s words are just not true.

Moreover, they may be proven untrue, the Jews being the absolute worst genocidiers on the planet: before they kill you, they afford you basic services, emergency and sophisticated specialized health services (in which all patients are treated absent of politics), Internet access, freedom of speech sufficient to sustain adverse public relations and research organizations (like B’Tsalem).

What may be true is the greater the hate encountered in anti-Semitic / anti-Zionist cant (there is no difference between those two), the greater the opportunities for Israel’s expansion.

The Abbas speech may be investigated and laid out purple phrase by phrase (“Amidst a torrent of massacres and storms of massive destruction” — not one mention of the more than 10,000 rockets launched from Gaza since 2005 and every two to few years to launched at a tempo sufficient to call the same an assault against Israel’s children).

Sins of omission are not the only sins evident in Abbas’s speech before the UN.

Note the demonizing of Israel, the “reflections in a mirror” — a very dark and most primitive mirror in language — in such well-known canards as “However, and as usual, the Israeli government did not miss the opportunity to undermine the chance for peace” — never mind those tunnels illegally and surreptitiously built (with child labor, 160 accidentally killed or deliberately murdered in the process) to assault Israeli communities.

Add to that demonizing simple Arab refusal of just responsibility for the Arab refugees of 1948:

Israel refuses to end its occupation of the State of Palestine since 1967, but rather seeks its continuation and entrenchment, and rejects the Palestinian state and refuses to find a just solution to the plight of the Palestine refugees.

Neither the Jewish community (worldwide) nor Israel created or sustained the refugee camps now well established as cantonments denied basic rights (in varying degree) in Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, and Egypt (and note well the Arab tenderness displayed recently toward the refugees of the Yarmouk Camp in Syria).

BackChannels no longer casually employs the term “Palestinian”.

As neither Egypt nor Jordan will absorb nor take responsibility for the constituents of (Judenfrei since 2005) Gaza, I refer to the same as “Gazans”).

Given the lying going on around Gazans — allegedly on their behalf but never beyond sacrificing them (individuals, family, finances, and property) as the pawns of Hamas’s supersessionary war against Judaism, one might expect them to become independent in their own right and to insist on the development for themselves of an independent, modern, responsible, responsive, and transparent democratic government.

Judea may be more complicated with its historic flow-down from the Soviet’s brand of poison (not only the Palestinian Liberation Organization, in spirit, remains present but a simple right-click of the mouse is all one needs to reach the airliner-hijacking Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the effects of the anti-Semitic New Old Now Old Far Out and Lost Left lingering long on the landscape, still leveraging the language of the refugees, which comes in the Abbas speech as, ” . . . against Israel’s policies of occupation, apartheid and colonial settlement . . . .’

The lie that is self-aggrandizing speech is there in that portion: one wonders just how large the combined International and Palestinian Solidarity Movements really are.

Investigating consultant and journalist Lee Kaplan has told me about the seeding of these groups on America’s college campuses and their access to student activity funds, which is fair under the precepts of freedom of speech in a truly open democracy, but we didn’t get to how really small these movements may be despite their broad distribution and the money pumped into them for priming.


The phrase comes from the 1940’s film Gaslight, in which an abusive husband deliberately dims the gaslights in the house, but when his wife comments on it he tells her she’s imagining it, that the lights never dimmed at all.

Gaslighting is one of the most insiduous, viscious, nasty and effective forms of emotional and psychological abuse.

http://www.daughtersofnarcissisticmothers.com/gaslighting.html


Transporting psychology — the study of individual mind and mentality — into politics may have inherent issues in both psychology and politics: for example, are we now going to filter or judge politicians in relation to our concept of “malignant narcissism”, which in turn would seem to inform the psychology of dictatorship?  At the same time, what choice has the world suffering war between brutal and sometimes immense despotic personalities?

(Of Bashar al-Assad and opponent (in general terms) al-Nusra, I have often remarked: “Different talk — same walk”.

The two together, Assad and al-Nusra — and the advent of BadDaddy and the Islamic Hate represent where the path of the malignantly narcissistic winds up — have burned out and left scorched the middle humanity of the historic Syrian state — factually speaking, about 9 million Syrians have been displaced in the fighting between the tyrant and the zealots [about 200,000 souls have been separated from life altogether]).


What I have been calling “The Islamic Small Wars” — the internecine competitions and interfaces within Muslim-majority political space running from Afghanistan to Yemen — have been wars about integrity — basic truth telling — requiring armies of poets and detectives for fighting and resolving.

Some people lie.

That’s a sad fact of life, and criminals and politicians both often draw the pointing fingers on the basis of their affiliations, ambitions, and reputations.  Less acknowledged and less stated: observations about culture-wide denial, dissimulation, false assertion, and hapless vulnerability to the beguiling and patronizing sweetness of an evil tongue.

Often, in many quarters of the world, if not most, a loyal lie may be preferred to an uncomfortable truth, for shows of loyalty may draw immediate rewards, from praise to patronage, while relaying a critical or damaging truth may be met with punishment, including that of a swift death.

Additional Reference

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-09-27/us-slams-as-offensive-abbas-speech-on-israel/5773628 – 9/27/2014

Recommended Reading

Anderston, Hans Christian.  “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” (1837).  Jean Hersholt, Translator.

Chayes, Sarah.  The Punishment of Virtue: Inside Afghanistan After the Taliban.  Penguin Press HC, 2006.

Karsh, Efraim.  Palestine Betrayed.  New Haven, Yale University Press, 2010.

Morris, Benny.  1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War.  New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008.

Phillips, Melanie.  The World Turned Upside Down: The Global Battle over God, Truth, and Power.  Encounter, Books, 2010.

Recommended Web Searches

Arafat’s invention, “Palestinian”

Gaza, rocket fire

Hamas abuses human rights
Hamas arrests protesters
Hamas, human shields
Hamas, Haniyeh, wealth
Hamas, Iran
Hamas, Mashaal, wealth
Hamas, political oppression
Hamas, Qatar

Hamas, tunnels, children
Hamas, wealth

israeli hospital services haniyeh granddaughter

Jewish Exodus from Arab Lands

Mahmoud Abbas, anti-Semitism

Psychology, gaslighting
Psychology, magical thinking
Psychology, malignant narcissism
Psychology, narcissistic mortification
Psychology, narcissistic personality disorder

Reuters, Khamenei, wealth

Syrian Civil War, Yarmouk Camp


# # #

 

Link

27 Saturday Sep 2014

Posted by commart in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Islamic Small Wars, Political Psychology, Politics

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Tags

Prison Islam

“Muslims have a role, too, by collaborating with authorities, by reassuring their neighbors, by being good community citizens, so that there is confidence restored that the vast majority of Muslims reject this totally and will participate in safeguarding our whole community,” Ahmed concluded.

http://foxnewsinsider.com/2014/09/27/radical-impact-what-causing-westerners-turn-radical-islam – 9/27/2014.

From Correspondence – Note – Killa Saifullah District, Pakistan

26 Friday Sep 2014

Posted by commart in Afghanistan, Asia, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Facsimile Bipolar Political Sociopathy, Islamic Small Wars, Pakistan, Political Psychology

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Tags

Balochistan, conflict, Taliban, terrorism

taliban with weapons roam there freely…….it seems that they are making another sawat or waziristan……no one can ask them about their activities even the tribal chief nawab is silent…..and just 100 away from killa saif ullah there comes loralai city ,a city of 5 lac population most people educated, the in loralai a young man was beheaded by taliban his video of slaughtering also came on scene…there was a letter with his body in which they had warned the people that whoever speaks against taliban would see the same fate

Posted verbatim as received 9/26/2014.

After more than a decade of effort, Taliban continue to promote and produce mayhem and murder in many districts of as yet unsecured frontiers in Afghanistan and Pakistan.  The miscreants remain “hard to see” until they show up, and Out There they continue to show up in force and continue demonstrating ability to choreograph their assaults.

Pakistani Dawn reported a decapitation in Loralai back in June of this year, and I cannot tell whether the correspondent had that to rely or something new.

Related Reference

Taliban have beheaded 12 civilians and torched some 60 homes in an assault on security forces in the eastern Ghazni province, an Afghan official said.

The province’s deputy police chief Asadullah Ensafi said the Taliban have attacked several villages over the past week in the Arjistan district.

http://www.pakistantoday.com.pk/2014/09/26/foreign/taliban-behead-12-civilians-in-ghazni/ – 9/27/2014.


http://www.dawn.com/news/1112630 – ” Decapitated Body Found in Laralei” – 6/14/2014.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killa_Saifullah_District

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loralai

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loralai_District

http://www.satp.org/satporgtp/countries/pakistan/Balochistan/index.html – “Balochistan Assessment – 2014”.

# # #

 

 

Aside

24 Wednesday Sep 2014

Posted by commart in FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Islamic Small Wars, Political Psychology

≈ Leave a comment

FTAC

Political Islam evidently encourages the narcissistic want of power over others — supremacy — and children may obtain that social grammar early, and there is a difference between “you’re as good as anyone else” and “you’re better than everyone else”. The course of a malignant narcissism ends always in sadistic control by way of the diminishment and infantilization — induced dependence — of constituents by a despot and related demonizing, murder, and plunder of others. That’s the program. If you don’t like it, stand up together now.


The prompt:

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/girl-8-calls-on-islamic-youth-to-back-jihad/story-e6frg6nf-1226475239074 – 9/17/2014.

# # #

FTAC – On the Ideas of Genocide and War

14 Sunday Sep 2014

Posted by commart in Anti-Semitism, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Political Psychology, Politics

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Tags

anti-Semitism, genocide, language, political psychology

“X” appears here careful to avoid the misappropriation of the term “genocide”, which really refers to a categorical cultural-racial basis for the elimination of an entire people. In such a frame, the Tutsi of Rwanda were the target of genocidal Hutu mania. Similarly, the white Arab onslaughts brought against the black animists of Darfur similarly constitutes “genocide” —

http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0714/p09s02-coop.html.

The perception of “war crime” cannot hinge on carnage alone, nor some whacked out ideas about fairness in the parity of death counts. The war against war entails the destruction of one party’s will to war, or, if failing that, ability to make war. If one were to suggest that WWII was excessive in every aspect by every party in every respect, one would have difficulty arguing against that and the necessity of having in place, at least, a United Nations and an International Criminal Court. Of course, neither have proven of much use in Syria or against ISIS in Iraq, but at least we have them, and in time, we may have each other in such a way as to forestall the empowerment of personalities who lead themselves, their nations, and all surrounding into immense destruction.

Notably, the forces massed against Berlin (at the end of WWII) — and with an immense Russian force doing the honors — may suggest what it has taken in the past to eliminate the grandiose messianic will driving such war. That will, fear, drive, motivation, etc. exceeds limits, does not reason, would seem to fight to and perhaps even beyond death — and then it may work against an energy equal to its challenge and, eventually, greater than itself.


If hate were shit, and it is, a lot of people would seem to be walking around with a load in their pants.

A part of the psychology addressed in the generation of bigoted rhetoric lays out within the “paranoid delusional narcissistic reflection of motivation“.  How that becomes pattern in behavior and indicative of habits of mind, I wouldn’t hazard to guess but would suggest the language process associated with the same resides in childhood and a natural cowardice and imagination inclined to package fear borne by objects in such a way to push them away from the personal atmosphere.

I barely understand adults.

🙂

I don’t understand children.

However, to understand adults — to “get” an anti-Semite or other form of vociferous bigot — it might help to delve into the formation of language-sustained beliefs and attitudes adopted in childhood, and the coming into existence of some socially grammatical, rule-deriving, and later rule-based response to natural fears and emotional needs.

# # #

FTAC – Note – Media Audience and Moral Entrepreneurship

11 Thursday Sep 2014

Posted by commart in Anti-Semitism, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Islamic Small Wars, Philology, Philosophy, Political Psychology, Politics

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Tags

casual audience, engaged audience, media, perception, philology, politics, reading

One may differentiate between casual audience comfortable with the world it knows and humanist-intellectual audience with amateur or professional background and buy-in with regard to shaping the next world.

If you are here, you are either between those broad classes or in the latter, and if there’s even just a tiny bit of appropriate education or training back there, then you may be trusted to read critically, to both demand and sift data, to argue about dimensions and variables with a subject of interest, to engage in introspection and reflection as well as judgment, and to think broadly about what would be helpful — anthropologically, ethnographically, evolutionary — in the creation of a greater, more peaceful, more progressive global commune.


The prompt was a piece in Honest Reporting about pandering.

Pandering is a form in lying predicated on the enforcement of loyalty by the panderer.  The seminal fairy tale that is “The Emperor’s New Clothes” applies; it really is not a favor to be told how brave, glorious, and self-sacrificing one is by a personality inclined to sacrifice you in the interest of their own aggrandizement and unbridled glorification.

With the review of media coverage of the latest war in Gaza, the political skewing of the news devolves both to overt Hamas intimidation of the press and the reluctance of the same to either give up a story or taint the same with an acknowledgment of the compromise of their integrity.

Compromised journalism comprises its casual audience.

As suggested at the top of this post, not all audience is casual.  In fact, while a vast global intelligentsia has come into being with the development of the World Wide Web — the numbers may be low but the distribution must certainly be global — a large analytical class has also been present in the world either with partisan loyalties or greater humanist and spiritual motives.  From the “desk analysts” of national security bureaus to the latest in NGO do-gooders, there are plenty of readers who read for data and the arguably most accurate picture they may obtain from the same.  While some things lend themselves to a technocratic objectivity, from conventional defense arrangements to road building coupled with economic development, other themes require a broadened vision of humanity — that “anthropolitical psychology” I’ve mentioned on this blog — and also a world of poetry and consideration for the remaining 7,000 or so living languages in the contemporary human inventory and the cultures and individuals suspended in them in time.

# # #

Addressing the Rise of Global Anti-Semitism – Brigitte Gabriel, UN

10 Wednesday Sep 2014

Posted by commart in Anti-Semitism, Political Psychology, Politics

≈ Leave a comment

“As you notice, I am wearing a Star of David.  This necklace was given to me by a man during a book signing in Dallas, Texas.  This necklace belonged to his wife who died in a tragic accident.  He said to me crying, this necklace was his wife’s favorite.  She died wearing it.  ‘She considered your her hero for your work with the Jewish people.  I want you to have it.  Promise me you’ll wear it.  I couldn’t find a more befitting time to honor her and her memory than now wearing this Star of David as a Lebanese giving a keynote speech at the United Nations in defense of the Jewish People.”

# # #

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Epigram

Hillel the Elder

"That which is distasteful to thee do not do to another. That is the whole of Torah. The rest is commentary. Now go and study."

"If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am not for others, what am I? If not now, when?"

"Whosoever destroys a soul, it is considered as if he destroyed an entire world. And whosoever that saves a life, it is considered as if he saved an entire world."

Oriana Fallaci
"Whether it comes from a despotic sovereign or an elected president, from a murderous general or a beloved leader, I see power as an inhuman and hateful phenomenon...I have always looked on disobedience toward the oppressive as the only way to use the miracle of having been born."

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

Abraham Isaac Kook

"The purely righteous do not complain about evil, rather they add justice.They do not complain about heresy, rather they add faith.They do not complain about ignorance, rather they add wisdom." From the pages of Arpilei Tohar.

Heinrich Heine
"Where books are burned, in the end people will be burned." -- From Almansor: A Tragedy (1823).

Simon Wiesenthal
Remark Made in the Ballroom of the Imperial Hotel, Vienna, Austria on the occasion of His 90th Birthday: "The Nazis are no more, but we are still here, singing and dancing."

Maimonides
"Truth does not become more true if the whole world were to accept it; nor does it become less true if the whole world were to reject it."

"The risk of a wrong decision is preferable to the terror of indecision."

Douglas Adams
"Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?" Epigram appearing in the dedication of Richard Dawkins' The GOD Delusion.

Thucydides
"The Nation that makes a great distinction between its scholars and its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools."

Milan Kundera
"The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting."

Malala Yousafzai
“The terrorists thought that they would change our aims and stop our ambitions but nothing changed in my life except this: weakness, fear and hopelessness died. Strength, power and courage was born.”

Tanit Nima Tinat
"Who could die of love?"

What I Have Said About the Jews

My people, not that I speak for them, I nonetheless describe as a "global ethnic commune with its heart in Jerusalem and soul in the Land of Israel."

We have never given up on God, nor have we ever given up on one another.

Many things we have given up, but no one misses, say, animal sacrifice, and as many things we have kept, so we have still to welcome our Sabbath on Friday at sunset and to rest all of Saturday until three stars appear in the sky.

Most of all, through 5,773 years, wherever life has taken us, through the greatest triumphs and the most awful tragedies, we have preserved our tribal identity and soul, and so shall we continue eternally.

Anti-Semitism / Anti-Zionism = Signal of Fascism

I may suggest that anti-Zionism / anti-Semitism are signal (a little bit) of fascist urges, and the Left -- I'm an old liberal: I know my heart -- has been vulnerable to manipulation by what appears to me as a "Red Brown Green Alliance" driven by a handful of powerful autocrats intent on sustaining a medieval worldview in service to their own glorification. (And there I will stop).
One hopes for knowledge to allay fear; one hopes for love to overmatch hate.

Too often, the security found in the parroting of a loyal lie outweighs the integrity to be earned in confronting and voicing an uncomfortable truth.

Those who make their followers believe absurdities may also make them commit atrocities.

Positively Orwellian: Comment Responding to Claim that the Arab Assault on Israel in 1948 Had Not Intended Annihilation

“Revisionism” is the most contemptible path that power takes to abet theft and hide shame by attempting to alter public perception of past events.

On Press Freedom, Commentary, and Journalism

In the free world, talent -- editors, graphic artists, researchers, writers -- gravitate toward the organizations that suit their interests and values. The result: high integrity and highly reliable reportage and both responsible and thoughtful reasoning.

This is not to suggest that partisan presses don't exist or that propaganda doesn't exist in the west, but any reader possessed of critical thinking ability and genuine independence -- not bought, not programmed -- is certainly free to evaluate the works of earnest reporters and scholars.

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