Well, the Jews are not “fighting the Arab World” — there’s a kind of defamation in that statement.
Israelis are defending themselves from those who wish to annihilate them — and considering who has been friendly toward and paying for Hamas and Hezbollah, well, gosh, it’s just not the Arab world after all.
Moscow-Tehran as an axis appears to want to maintain a common interest in positively medieval political absolutism. Somebody has learned how to make a lot of money (for themselves, their cronies, their lackeys, and their tools) that way.
Of course the Arab and Muslim worlds have within them strong anti-Semitic currents, but let’s go back to the 1920s and endemic 19th Century Russian anti-Semitism and the echoes of other medieval anti-Semitism, the same that compelled Herschel and others to entertain the idea of establishing a Jewish homeland in Israel, and come forward to three distinct aspects in the character of the 1920s: Stalin’s installment in power in Russia as the dominant state in the Soviet Union; the development in the universities of an intellectual path leading to Nazism; and the founding of the Muslim Brotherhood (1928).
The mercurial, paranoid seventy-four-year-old tyrant was certainly capable of ordering the mass deportations. During the Second World War, he removed Kalmyks, Chechens, Ingush, Karachays, Balkars, ethnic Germans, and Crimean Tatars from their homelands—more than two million Soviet citizens in all. He was no novice, either, when it came to purges and show trials. In the Pravda report, most of the accused “murderers in white smocks” were identified as Jewish and agents of the U.S. and Israel. There were further arrests of Soviet Jews, exemplars of “national and racist chauvinism.” Jews were dismissed from their jobs. They were insulted on the streets, in shops, and on public transportation, according to Arno Lustiger, author of “Stalin and the Jews.”
The last children’s hospital in besieged Aleppo has suspended operations after a brutal “double-tap” bombing.
A wave of airstrikes targeted medics in the rebel-held eastern district as they treated dozens of children who had been hit with chemical attacks.
Doctors and patients fled to the basement as more than 20 barrel bombs pounded the centre on Wednesday morning.
But less than 48 hours later two missiles tore through the unit as staff carried-out a clean-up operation.
Video footage shows the terrifying moment nurses pulled new-born babies from their incubators and fought their way through the dust and debris in search of safety.
The Independent Doctors Association, a medical group, said barrel bomb attacks had damaged two facilities it supports in eastern Aleppo — the children’s hospital and the only bloodbank in the area.
Medical facilities have regularly been hit, and sometimes completely destroyed, in the government’s fight against rebels, though Damascus and Moscow deny they target hospitals.
Doctors Without Borders said the children’s hospital and a specialized surgical hospital were hit by Wednesday’s strikes.
“Hospital staff managed to move children – including prematurely born babies – from cots and incubators to the basement of the building in order to shelter them from the bombing,” said the aid group, which sponsors both hospitals.
“You cannot imagine what we see every day: children who are coming to us as body parts. We collect the body parts and wrap them in shrouds and bury them,” said Bara’a, a nurse at one of the affected hospitals, who was present during the bombings.
“Tell the world to wake up, to wake their consciences. Where are you? When Palestine was being destroyed everyone got involved. Why are Syria’s children being forgotten? Nobody is doing anything to reduce this suffering.”
Monday saw yet another targeted strike in Syria. Not against Isis or against anyone threatening. No, the latest attack was another deplorable airstrike on a Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) hospital that was providing vital medical care to the region surrounding Maarat al-Numan.
According to a monitoring group in the area, the attack resulted in more than nine people’s deaths – including one child’s – and was carried out by Russian forces. Only two days earlier they had agreed to limit hostilities in Syria.
This was no accident. Four rockets hit the hospital: it was a targeted attack, and a cold-blooded one too.
Of the 470,000 Syrians who have been killed in this terrible war, the overwhelming majority have been killed by Assad and his allies, and that’s even truer of the civilian casualties. The United Nations in February concluded that the Assad regime had violated the laws of war in six distinct ways and committed systematized atrocities — crimes against humanity — in seven separate categories, including rape and extermination. There is no cruelty IS has committed, from sexual violence to immolation, that the regime has not at least matched and usually exceeded.
In relation to “Medieval Political Absolutism” and “Malignant Narcissism“, consider calling what Moscow-Damascus-Tehran have going in Syria the worst case of “Political Gaslighting” in history.
Readers who have made it this far with BackChannels KNOW that Assad incubated ISIL — to blackmail the west; to goad the west with refugees and a related terrorist threat; and to serve as a foil for demonstrating the latest and greatest out of Moscow’s updated military boom-boom: with Moscow central to the project, Syria has been made a win-win-win for each dictator’s ambitions and image.
BackChannels asks (along with Ukrainians) whether greater American cooperation (appeasement) with “Moscow-Tehran” will not herald the end of meaningful democracy and freedom worldwide.
Occasional Updates
3 killed & many injured after Russia bombed the hospital in Deir Sharqi, southern Idlib 4 times this morning. Hospital no longer operational pic.twitter.com/bIU4Su4UD4
Assad incubated the al-Qaeda types all the way to ISIL!
And he did exactly by preferring other strategies and targets — noncombatants, including the sniping of pregnant women, and, of course western-leaning Free Syrian Army (FSA) and others in the field. Providing leeway provided room for ISIL to develop and play the convenient foil in “Assad vs The Terrorists”.
Please don’t believe me, but rather check out the significance of “Russia is hitting the groups that we are backing” by using and questioning the same references and checking them as well.
I would beg conservatives not to ennoble Russian (Putin-Assad-Khamenei) barbarism in Syria.
Have conservatives been duped (along with everyone else) by Putin’s changing postures over time?
It’s a question worth asking this day.
Posted by Gladbecker, November 12, 2016.
Above — and within the “awesome conversation” — the inspiration for this post.
Beneath — what Assad, as flanked by Putin and Khamenei, have done to Syria in the “cause” of medieval political absolutism.
Posted by Muhammed Al Mousa, September 4, 2016.
BackChannels believes American and Israeli and other conservatives have been duped by Putin and the arc of a narrative that began 25 years ago with the dissolving of the Soviet Union and the initial touting of capitalism and democracy that produced confidence in Putin as a leader who would bring order and stability to Russia while producing a civil and free society.
In essence, Putin represents the rule of the strong as more powerful than the rule of law, and, ironically, the conservative “new nationalists” of the open democracies — those who should be fully supporting the rule-of-law and other classically liberal and western values — appear to be helping him do it.
Of course, the citizens of every state needs must care about their own lives first — biological, familial and otherwise social, financial, emotional, spiritual. Security and stability in those aspects of life are generally part of everyone’s quality of living.
That Putin has been able to sustain and transform many aspects of the defunct Soviet Union tells a story about the kind of political power exercised in relation to malignant narcissism. In effect, he has got Russia revolving around himself, and for the discomforts he has caused, the Russians have channels today for faith and patriotism. The “Communists” are gone but the essence of the old nomenklatura has been transformed into an ultra-nationalist and neo-imperial enterprise.
The public that has wished to take an interest in foreign affairs has plenty of information — responsible, valid, and reliable — for working, but large constituencies may only attend to so much in aggregate. I would not think of such as “ignorant masses” but rather people with families and jobs and struggles and worries of their own. They may find what they need to know WHEN it matters to them, when the dots circle back to their own interests, and they perceive that.
The stimulus for the response made note of the people voting Putin into power.
Before Donald J. Trump does anything else, he’s going to have to articulate and navigate a position with Putin and a re-medievalized Russian security state.
One day, BackChannels will collect the books around the place and write a 3×5 card for each and by category — there are more volumes in “The Russian Section” than appear online. Nonetheless, and especially online for readers who arrive, much like the editor, with more curiosity than formal background in foreign affairs, international studies, and political science, there may be greater value in a short list — a short hallways with half a dozen doors — than in a comprehensive one.
In the online environment, such posts are stepping stones — no need to dwell: click on a selection and move on!
“As I have repeatedly said, it is not our fault that Russian – American relations are in that poor condition.”
If you’re a BackChannels regular or an enthusiast in political psychology, you know that the “malignant narcissist” — autocrat, bully, or dictator — is never wrong.
“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting”
Lest any forget, there’s plenty of reading at hand (these days: Amazon One-Click shopping may be the next best thing) for guarding against forgetting.
Posted by The Guardian, November 9, 2016.
BackChannels has framed contemporary conflict in terms of time, i.e., whether confronting Assad or, for a domestic example, the Ku Klux Klan, the modern person is actually rejecting the reappearance of the past in his own path.
For the most part, whether involving the aggressive Muslim Brotherhood aspect in contemporary Islam, the barbarism on display in Syria — and do “thank” Assad, Putin, and Khamenei for choosing that evil path — or the Russian invasion of Crimea, one is actually aiming the finger back at the world of Medieval Political Absolute Power, i.e., AKA the divine right of rule, rule by a presumptuously superior nature, rule by thuggery, and, most certainly, unquestionable authority, or authority beyond criticism and beyond law.
Putin : Medieval Political Absolutism
vs
Trump: Modern Democratic and Checked Distribution of Political Power
Choose.
Posted by VICE News, March 3, 2014.
While “western” political success and related productivity and affluence provide for western humanism and other aspects of idealism, “eastern” barbarism and suffering have left behind a world in which fear and insecurity appear to threaten those who should be in the most confident and secure of internal psychological states. Leadership in tribal cultures and states tend toward a winner-take-all — and loser-lose-all — position in their politics, and it may be that we mistake for a better politics and ennoble with the term “realpolitik”.
Our world pays a high price in general suffering — suffering associated horrors beyond imagining — for the emotional care and feeding of its “malignant narcissists” — its most damaged bad boys, the same that make themselves known as political and war criminals.
So:
Bashar al-Assad: war criminal?
Vladimir Putin: war criminal?
Ali Khamenei: political criminal?
As a class, dictators “exceed limits” — just as Muhammad warned 🙂 — and in doing so free themselves from other normative restraints while at the same time condemning themselves to remaining in political power at any cost (always to others).
In effect, the worlds of despots become worlds of political absolutes, and if for no other reason than the near impossibility of the retreat of their authors.
If over the past five years you had been a Syrian noncombatant, would you wish to see Bashar al-Assad a) remain in power, b) exiled, or c) hung in public?
If you had been swept off the streets of Tehran and dumped in Evin Prison (say for wearing that hijab a little to far to the back — or for being Baha’i or gay or western in outlook) , or if you had had family murdered by the Iranian regime, would you care to see Ali Khamenei’s term in power a) modified, b) truncated, c) “terminated with extreme prejudice”?
Has Putin a graceful retreat today — Syria was al-Assad’s war and armies, flyers especially, make mistakes; and Ukrainian autonomy was Khrushchev’s mistake, which was made with the confidence that Kiev would remain forever bent to Moscow?
Putin may have that.
And Trump may be wise to see that Putin, the Russian State, and the Russian People (of Russia proper) have that “out” — but to horse trade Ukraine, the European Union, the United Nations, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization?
“Nyet” to all that!
(Liberal politics have come to mire judgment, unfortunately. Biography.com maintains a page titled “Political Criminals” but begs credulity by placing side-by-side J. Edgar Hoover and Richard Nixon, both of whom may have exceeded some boundaries in power, with Adolph Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Benito Mussolini, Fidel Castro, and Idi Amin all of whom plainly represent the most reckless of minds and murderous of despots).
Historian John Bew suggests that much of what stands for modern realpolitik today deviates from the original meaning of the term. Realpolitik emerged in mid-19th century Europe from the collision of the enlightenment with state formation and power politics. The concept, Bew argues, was an early attempt at answering the conundrum of how to achieve liberal enlightened goals in a world that does not follow liberal enlightened rules.
If, as the poet says, America is not the world, then the world is surely owed an apology for the lack of attention paid to what ought to have been, and are, a series of alarming developments throughout Europe and the Middle East. Perhaps appropriately, all have involved or implicated a revanchist authoritarian power for which the incoming commander in chief has repeatedly professed his admiration and which, after having done all it could to facilitate an upset American electoral outcome—“maybe we helped a bit with WikiLeaks,” as pro-Kremlin political analyst Sergei Markov put it Wednesday morning—offers its hearty congratulations on his victory. Meanwhile, Russia’s alleged “wet work” and maneuvering outside the United States in the last two weeks has been even more impressive.
The Russian state’s history of political criminality — that which has driven the upending of its governments twice in the past 100 years — has sat at the base of the middle east conflict and helped kept it collecting money for those it blessed: Yasser Arafat, Mahmoud Abbas, Ismail Haniyeh, and Khaled Mashaal.
I don’t know if the state of affairs will straighten out with Donald J. Trump in office, but the more word gets around, the more likely it will.
Once you know — and perhaps once Moscow knows the popular west knows — and once the Palestinians know — this game with the refugees should be over.
Noting the KGB history may not change Arab culpability for sustaining the refugees as an apartheid population in relation to their own states, but two legs of the old table have been removed by time — Saddam Hussein and Muammar Qaddafi, both state sponsors of terrorism.
If the 1920s may be noted as the launch period for the Muslim Brotherhood, the umbrella organization beneath which al-Qaeda and others have developed, then this new way of looking at the old conflict also starts to put away an entire era of warfare that needs finally to be consigned more largely to the 20th Century.
Both the creation of the document, commentary on it, and the voting that ensued refused to acknowledge Moscow’s old hand in the creation of the Middle East Conflict.
BackChannels 