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Category Archives: Politics

FTAC – Margins and Shadows

06 Thursday Aug 2015

Posted by commart in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Epistemology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Journalism, Political Spychology, Politics, Syndicate Red Brown Green

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Tags

neo-feudalism, security states

The Machiavellian “behind the curtains” has been supplanted by “in the shadows” and into the shadows may be where mainstream media fears to tread.



Both the Bond movies and Le Carre novels, and I’ve enjoyed both in series, have reflected in fiction the issues (as well as atmosphere) of their day, each work of art in essence packaging up the look and spirit of a part of a decade using the secret world as its window. For the writers, intuitive exploration may turn out more secure than looking into essentially powerful secret societies.  In fact, the possession of private power and wealth may be inseparable today from the control of political influence and movement in the mirrors of criminal and lawful worlds and the feudal and democratic ones in which the bad guys work in secrecy and the good guys do as well but, perhaps, differently.

http://www.madmagazine.com/blog/2013/04/23/mad-spy-vs-spy-prints-for-sale

In real life, someone leads an organization that kidnaps an Israeli Olympic team at the event — and someone else leads another organization that quietly hunts down the miscreants.

Must the journalists know all? And when?  As history?  As now?

Many stories emerge over time.

I haven’t yet watched _Kill the Messenger_ but from description it appears that it will fit with a stack of nonfiction histories about the security services of states. Whatever happened may be done, but the processes may not be done, and that’s where the public becomes curious in its own interest. However, journalism has also a politics of discretion belied by the terms of art “on the record” and “off the record” and the public may never know what has been imparted “off the record”, much less what has been sealed in the minds of agents and the vaults of the KGB/FSB and others.

I’m more inclined to trust The Washington Post than, say, Alex Jones 🙂 , but one may suspect that the Post must also keeps secrets.


With conventional warfare somewhat nulled by the immense firepower developed by would-be adversaries, the twists that are “low-intensity conflict”, “hybrid warfare”, “war by proxy” and so on depend on mafia-type arrangements and relationships to produce activity (or perhaps as much has been always the way of the street in which conflicts are conceived and worked into reality).

Posted to YouTube 12/1/2014.

In books available through Amazon and in videos on YouTube, there’s a surfeit of material covering the history of spying, from The Bible, no less, and forward.  One has only to look.  Of historic interest and, perhaps, contemporary curiosity, may be the depth of control and integration a state has with its people along this axis.  From the 20th Century experience, the mere mention of “Gestapo”, “STASI”, and “KGB” summon the vision of totalitarian police states operated by political elites with security forces sufficiently populated to reach down through their societies to the extent that even children are made into informants.

The prompt for this post was Diane Weber Bederman’s recent piece in the Canadian Press, “Media dereliction of duty to the citizenry” (August 6, 2015) about the film Kill The Messenger (which I have not yet seen, but I like IMDB’s quotation of the tag line: “Can you keep a national secret?”).

When Mr. Putin and company set out to preserve the privileges of the Soviet without the Soviet (reference: Karen Dawisha’s book, Putin’s Kleptocracy), the drive appears to have been developed precisely for interest already established within the KGB and Party to preserve power and wealth and the ability to distribute the same to similar favored elites.  As a king to knights and lords, so has Putin been to his “new nobility” (another title in the Russian Section of this blog’s library).

Do the services of western powers mirror the security systems that maintain Russia’s neo-feudal governance (yes/no?) and, if so, democracy by democracy, how?  What’s similar? What’s different?

I’d rather imagine the answers and work in fiction — and may, for this lonesome blogger is not The Washington Post or The New York Times, and even the “best and brightest” in those companies may choose — or have long chosen — to exercise discretion.

Who’s to know?

# # #

FTAC – MEC – The Preoccupied Communities . . . .

02 Sunday Aug 2015

Posted by commart in 21st Century Feudal, Anti-Semitism, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Gaza, Gaza Suzerain, Islamic Small Wars, Israel, Middle East, Palestinia, Politics, Syndicate Red Brown Green

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Tags

Israel, middle east conflict, politics

About the Preoccupied Arab Communities of Judea and Samaria — https://conflict-backchannels.com/…/quote-manipulation…/ —

Ismail Haniyeh: Billionaire
Khaled Mashaal: Billionaire
Ali Khamenei and his brother: between the two of them, $57 billion in private portfolio.

The only “powers” occupying the Arab communities of Greater Israel or potential Palestinian suzerainty remain the PLO, Hamas, and powerful Palestinian families expert at getting others to die or suffer for their greed.

https://conflict-backchannels.com/…/susiyas-illegal…/

The official needs of the Arabs abandoned in now multiple wars and made to serve as goads to Israel and the west are as bottomless as the souls of their leaders have proven empty. Their claims to nobility — as suggested by the full pockets known to Arafat, Haniyeh, and Mashaal — have turned out over generations the proven claims of thieves and murderers. Hamas + human rights; Hamas + human shields; Hamas + millionaires: after a while, such searches tell a whole political story. Fatah has done less well in some regards. Black September is history. What Fatah and Hamas appear to have to offer their own, much less Israel or anyone else, appears to be their tired old jaws and their continuing violence or threat of it against their own constituents as well as Israel.

Related Reference

Bar-Zohar, Michael and Eitan Haber.  The Quest for the Red Prince.  New York: William Morrow & Company, Inc., 1983.

# # #

“The United States of America Does Not Surrender to a Bunch of Black Robed Crazed Clerics Who Want to See Us Destroyed” — Allen West

29 Wednesday Jul 2015

Posted by commart in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Islamic Small Wars, Politics, Religion, Syndicate Red Brown Green

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Allen B. West, Allen West, conflict of interest, foreign affairs, Iran, Iran nuclear deal, Iran nuclear talks, political Islam, White House

Posted to YouTube July 22, 2015.

Related Reference

Bergman, Ronen.  “What Information Collected by Israeli Intelligence Reveals About the Iran Talks.”  Tablet Magazine, July 29, 2015.

Hickford, Michele.  “You will NOT BELIEVE who as best man at John Kerry’s daughter’s wedding.”  Allen B. West, July 28, 2015.

Update From the Awesome Conversation – June 29, 2015

Obama’s bought time to let education and this web-thingy update a generation of Persian professionals away from the medieval regime; he’s also demonstrated some U.S. – Saudi ability to degrade oil revenues, control the offsets in new revenue, and insult the regime (also Putin’s regime) using U.S. controls. Will the lesson take or has it worked? I guess we’re staying tuned and will find out.

I put up an Allen West post on Back-Channels — https://conflict-backchannels.com/…/the-united-states…/ — there’s the chance that the staunch conservative voice may overplay its hand, which relies here heavily on fear of the first delivery of a nuclear attack (could be dirty bombs delivered by rockets fired by Gaza; could be a one-off delivered by Hezbollah, which has got the full store of rockets already).

Money is funny for Khamenei’s regime. He and his brother are reputed to control a conservatively estimated $57 billion in personal assets. Basically, “state sponsorship” – personal, criminal, or actually from state coffers — of terrorism is not a financial problem — and its comes cheap in any case: what happens if others become more enriched, more dependent on the possession of their assets, more greedy for new business themselves?

So the nuclear deal seems a bad deal on old terms, but Obama’s ship of state and all attached to it left that harbor a while ago, and we’re sailing with these new variables in play. Ultimately, America is indigestible to the forces perceived by conservatives as enemy: we’re not going to be conquered, as much as we obsess about that, but the kind of evil posed, proposed, and sustained by Putin-Khamenei needs to be met by altering their native political demographics to come to more accommodating, more productive global standards. The two mentioned are playing or pushing for a more deeply medieval world steeped in greater chaos and conflict: we’re building a more modern world interlaced and held together by open communications, democratized business and personal relationships, and the embrace of anti-piratical and perhaps humanist overarching shared values.


The “nuclear deal” might be a bad deal — but it also might be a good move.

A rabbi said to me one day with regard to the Islamic Small Wars, “Everyone’s in too much of a hurry to get to the end of the story.”

Well then, as regards global conflict and threat: let’s hasten slowly and be not so much in a hurry to see how it all ends.

Time may work in the favor of our humanity against the ravages brought to it by those “malignant narcissists” we call “presidents for life” and “supreme leaders”, the human containers and projectors of absolute personal (also often infantile and sadistic) power.

# # #

Susiya’s Illegal Outposts

29 Wednesday Jul 2015

Posted by commart in 21st Century Feudal, Anti-Semitism, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Islamic Small Wars, Politics

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Arab colonization, Greater Israel, Israel, Palestinian, squatting, Susiya

“Organizations like Rabbis for Human Rights who get money from the European Union, get money from the New Israel Fund, they’re using that money to smear Israel’s name around the world by using the example of Susiya, which is a one-hundred percent illegal village, and using that as an example of the bad Israeli occupier not allowing the poor Palestinians to live here, and that’s a scene they want to create, but hopefully with this video, you have seen a different view of that, and the truth has to come out.”

Posted to YouTube June 28, 2012.


Aerial-Photo-Susiya-area-1999

Aerial-Photo-Susiya-Area-2013

The above photos were first viewed by BackChannels in Sar Shalom’s article at http://israel-thrives.blogspot.com/2015/07/the-truth-about-susiya.html (July 23, 2015).  Related links: http://regavim.org/susiya_facts/ and http://regavim.org/letter2ambassadorresusiya/

Real ethnic cleansing proceeds with a concept from the dark mirror in language — https://conflict-backchannels.com/coins-and-other-terms/anthropolitical-psychology/paranoid-delusional-narcissistic-reflection-of-motivation/ — i.e., the ability to deliberately invert a situation (so the Jews are attacking Hitler and Germany) and present the inversion as the truth.  Anti-Semitic ideation — and much bigotry toward others as well, Rwandan Tutsi, Hungarian Roma, for examples– appears to rely on such knee-jerk nationalist or racist cant and its Orwellian head-nodding acceptance — or embrace by those most benefitting from this form of lawless territorial aggression, and doubtless not the souls camped out but their wealthy handlers.

Additional Reference

Briggs, Ari.  “Illegal Arab building defies Supreme Court ruling.”  The Jerusalem Post, August 27, 2012.

Danan, Deborah.  “Gaza’s Millionaires and Billionaires — How Hamas’s Leaders Got Rich Quick.”  The Algemeiner, July 28, 2014.

Pérez, Perez.  “The 7 Richest Terrorist Groups in the World Today.”  The Richest, June 20, 2014.

Stecklow, Steve, Bobak Dehghanpisheh and Yeganeh Torbati.  “Assets of the Ayatollah: The economic empire behind Iran’s supreme leader.” Reuters, November 11, 2013.

Toameh, Khaled Abu.  “How Much is Mahmoud Abbas Worth?  Try $100 Million.”  Gatestone Institute, May 18, 2012.

Wikipedia.  “List of Arabs by Net Worth”.

Wikipedia.  “List of Iranian People by Net Worth”.  (Note: Ali and Mojtaba Khamenei top the list with about $57 billion between them).

Addendum – Forwarded by Regavim: Background on Sussiya

Susiya- the Facts, and only the Facts

A historical village? Not really! The claim that this is an Arab village which existed hundreds of years, or even decades, is completely false. According to travelers in the 19th century, and from surveys of villages and population conducted by the British mandatory powers in 1945, which mention all of the villages in the area and even some of the inhabitants, there is no hint of the existence of a village named Susiya, except as an ancient archeological site. This rocky land on which this illegal encampment is situated served the purpose of grazing land. In those days, only during the grazing months, the caves in the area provided temporary protection for the shepherds from the village of Yatta from robbers, wild animals, and inclement weather. Aerial photographs testify that in this place, there never was any settlement before the year 2000, except for 4 or 5r structures which were built illegally during the late 1990’s.

Jewish history. In the archaeological excavations on the ancient site, there was found an ancient Jewish settlement which dated from the 4th to the 9th centuries of the Common Era. According to the scholars, this was a thriving Jewish community, which existed hundreds of years after the destruction of the Second Temple, and achieved the height of its development at the end of the Byzantine period, and at the beginning of the old Arab period. On the site, they discovered a large synagogue, ritual baths, homes, community buildings, and other structures. Further, in 1986, 277 dunam in the area were allocated to establish an archaeological site, and from then on, it was forbidden for the shepherds to use the old caves. At first, during the grazing seasons, the shepherds came and put up tents and —- for the period of the grazing, but in the last decade, the Nawaja family has tried to take permanent control over the area.

Not an expulsion—an eviction of squatters. Research in the population registries of the Civil Administration indicates that the majority of the families found in the illegal encampment owned homes in the village of Yatta. The Najawa family, who lives in Yatta, seized control of lands which do not at all belong to them. Thus, we are not speaking of driving people off of their lands, but of evicted illegal squatters who have put up tens of structures in violation of the law.

Illegal building – At present, there are about 64 structures in the encampment, all of which were built illegally and without building permits from the authorities of the Civil Administration. 85% of these structures were put up between 2011 and 2013, by systematically ignoring the administrative orders of the supervising authorities(?) which forbid continuation of the building, and even contrary to the specific orders of the High Court of the State of Israel, which has been involved in this case since the year 2001. The Court has ruled that the claims of the squatters to ownership of the land are invalid, and there is no basis to approve building on that area.

Contempt of Court – In 2013, the High Court issued an interim order against the illegal building, which explicitly found that the is forbidden to carry out more illegal building in the encampment in addition to that which already existed. Yet, after the issuance of that order, more than 33 illegal structures were put up, which amount to more than half of the total number of structures in the encampment. To anyone who respects the law, it is clear that this is a scandal and in contempt of the rule of law.

# # #

Link – A Modern Intercultural Experience – Qanta Ahmed – Technion Chat With Peretz Lavie

28 Tuesday Jul 2015

Posted by commart in Islamic Small Wars, Links, Philosophy, Politics

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

cultural evolution, modern, modernity, Qanta Ahmed, Technion

Posted to YouTube July 26, 2015.


Above : Modern

Below : Feudal


Posted to YouTube July 27, 2015.


Should I have resisted juxtaposing these two images, the Janus coin that is one side modern (and good) and the other deeply medieval (and heartbreakingly evil)?

“Shimmer” — a term of art on this blog — has not changed, but one hopes the numbers of those arrested in yesterday have diminished while those who come forward, who have stepped forward into their own next world, have grown.

Where are the political and social scientists on change?

I don’t know where they or their numbers — observable, measurable cultural and political topology — are today.

# # #

FTAC – The Want of New (Meta) Language

28 Tuesday Jul 2015

Posted by commart in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC, Philosophy, Politics

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

humanism, metalinguistics

The Jews could not have done very well against the Romans!

🙂 

Revisit Titus and the horrific burning of Jerusalem.

Revisit Masada, for that matter.

The distillation and order I suggest for the uptake of a Judaic monotheism, which we all share (whether we like it or not) starts with the jurist Hillel the Elder (35-BCE to 10-CE), who produced decisions and an outlook that made Judaism less ethnic, more evolving around principle, and more accessible to conversions (uh oh). smile emoticon So: Hillel the Elder –> Jesus and Paul –> General Constantine –> General Muhammad.

We may agree on the unity (and sanctity) of life and of a natural life well lived, but our disagreements on scripture, the composition of extended works and exegesis, devolve to our ethnolinguistic cultures once more separated by geospatial relationships and by time. In retrospect, here at the advent of a new world interlaced with Internet-based communicating, our enmities seem cultivated in fear and dreadfully superficial and malignant narcissism.

At this point, no one need have the last word — not Moses, not Jesus, not Muhammad, nor our overlooked link in the end-of-the-Roman Era family guy Hillel the Elder. What we may need are new words resonant with the more noble aspects of our common humanity.


Artists and assorted creative types needs must submerge themselves with object-projects: book, essay, play, poem, screenplay.  That’s what it takes to pioneer thought and fashion ideas and insights into transmissible forms, and that auto-constructed isolation may go hard on the soul — it certainly has on mine, and the desktop has added its own layer of interference with the experience of what is proximate in the way of events and people.  Nonetheless, “chatyping” in response to what others spell out online proves always stimulating while the cyber-environment — global, politically across cultures, across political boundaries, across languages and religions — provides a glimpse at what today is possible and perhaps needs to become a new reality in conversation.

The Awesome Conversation itself has been nothing less than miraculous.

What comes next?

This blog has stated its six most irreducible virtues at the top of the sidebar to the left.

Those ennobling characteristics, however, may be brought to bear against a world rife with cruel and despotic leaders and their deeply manipulated and misguided (start with “state-controlled press” and end with “absolute political suppression”) followers and the messes made by related widespread conflict, diminishment, ignorance, and impoverishment.

Rome was neither built nor taken apart in a day, and while Latin has become a “dead language” — useful to the Catholic Church and to science for its stability, Hebrew has been returned to life and with it, so one may hope, interest in the preservation, survival, and evolution of some approximately 7,000 still living languages and the cultures and subcultures each represents in the global tapestry.


Posted to YouTube January 2, 2015.

# # #

Ted Cruz! Code Pink! Ayatollah Khamenei!

24 Friday Jul 2015

Posted by commart in 21st Century Feudal, Islamic Small Wars, Middle East, Politics, Syndicate Red Brown Green

≈ Leave a comment

Posted to YouTube July 23, 2015.

Note: the “CWA” logo prominent in the clip belongs to Concerned Women for America.


Posted to YouTube July 20. 2015.


Note: BackChannels believes “Putin-Assad-Khamenei” have created Daesh to bleed the west, produce the political theater that is “Assad vs The Terrorists”, and then serve Khamenei’s Shiite regime as a foil and as part of a program to keep preserved the Sunni vs Shiite animosity that in turn underwrites theocratic political power in various of the Islamic-majority states, Iran foremost among those with interest exploiting the division for piratical long-term gain.


Posted to YouTube July 21, 2015.

Related: Al-Aribya transcript of the above video.

# # #

Gaza – Four Little Boys on a Beach | Hamas – Family Business

24 Friday Jul 2015

Posted by commart in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Gaza, Gaza Suzerain, Islamic Small Wars, Middle East, Politics, Syndicate Red Brown Green

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Gaza, Hamas, neo-feudalism, philosophy of law, rule of law

Inside the pressure cooker, the battle between the clans and Hamas ebbed and flowed according to the fortunes and political needs of the Islamist group. One of the first clans targeted by Hamas was the al-Bakr family, which controls much of the strip’s fishing fleet. Known as Fatah loyalists, they came under attack during the clashes between Hamas and Fatah in June last year; after suffering heavy casualties, more than 200 al-Bakr gunmen surrendered to the Hamas fighters.

Buck, Tobias.  “The clans of Gaza take on the men of Hamas.”  FT Magazine, November 22, 2008.


From threaded chat correspondence with independent forensic media analyst Thomas Edward Wictor (July 21, 2015):

The problem is that reporters don’t bother to educate themselves, and words are losing their meaning. I have idiots arguing with me that shrapnel now means any fragment of a projectile. Fine, but the four victims had round holes in them, and not a single IDF munition uses round metals balls, whether you call them shrapnel or potato chips.

The IDF MAG Corps report says that the IDF fired two missiles. I can find physical evidence of only one missile being fired. The second missile left no trace evidence. No crater and no debris.

There’s video evidence of three separate explosions. One was the IED below the terrace of the Adam Hotel, one was the IDF missile hitting the shipping container, and one was the IED going off in the rubbish bin behind the Avenue Restaurant and Coffee Shop.

Those are the only explosions I know for sure took place.


If there’s a difference between the “Rule of Law” and the feudal alternative that is the “Rule of the Lawless”, it lies in final obedience to dispassionate courts working the representative will of a free people — free to speak; free to argue law in creation, theory, and fact; free to seek and hold office; free to submit themselves to their own best common and deeply argued and informed wisdom.

Wictor’s forensic investigations engage assertions and incidents that could do with such courts.

In relation to the murders of Mohammed Bakr, Ahed Bakr, Zakaria Bakr, and Ismail Bakr on July 16, 2014, Wictor has assembled raw video footage, media footage, research (as above) on Gaza’s true underlying political history and sociology, and both meticulously and repeatedly queried the same.

While Wictor may not represent a court of the lawful either — not more than anyone else — he represents a different kind of public defender and prosecutor: a global citizen fighting — in relation to this incident — the defamation of the Jewish People, which is equally a struggle for what is truthful and possessed of integrity regardless of the interests of men: good principal, good law, honest research — “clear, accurate, and complete” remains the journalist’s standard — and discerning, reasoned, and responsible judgment.

And if Wictor’s collection of conclusions remains doubtful?

Examination by a court of the lawful would begin with “discovery” in the presence of the prosecutor and the accused.

Here is a smattering of Wictor blogs on this piece.

“Timeline of the Hamas Gaza Beach Operation.” October 6, 2014.

“Hamas used three IEDs in the Gaza beach operation.”  October 16, 2014.

“Why did Hamas threaten journalists in Gaza?” October 18, 2014.

“Reader questions, Hamas beach operation.”  October 25, 2014.

“Gaza beach operation: the four decoys.”  December 27, 2014.

“Journalist confirms Gaza beach deception operation.” April 10, 2015.

“The IDF conclusion on the Bakr boys.”  June 11, 2015.

In the last article listed, Wictor says of himself, “What I’ve become—without either knowing it or planning for it—is an investigative reporter. I use what are known as open sources, meaning everything that I study is available on the Internet. This is something anyone can do. All it takes is patience.”

Do others see what Wictor sees?

The answer is unimportant, for it should be understood that the findings of one investigator remain subjective, however clinical and objective the undertaking: the presenter of so many reports — and ruminations — would appear to know that he is neither also judge nor jury nor even colleague or professional rival.  Still, there is only one true story about what happened on July 16, 2014, and Wictor has done more to look it over twice, three times, and more in the public venue that is his blog and the “Hamas Operation on Gaza Beach” portion of it.

Related Reference

Hamas, which promotes political Islam, has mounted occasional crackdowns on more radical groups that chafe at its engagement with Abbas and truces with Israel. Such groups support the broader struggle led by Islamic State and al Qaeda.

Al-Mughrabi, Nidal.  “Palestinian gov’t condemns Hamas for killing Islamic rival in Gaza.”  Reuters, June 2, 2015.


Jewish Virtual Library.  “Fact Sheets: The Hamas War on Palestinian Rivals.”  Updated May 2015.


Hamas has attempted to crack down, often through violent means, against opposition displays in Gaza. In May, the Palestinian entity demolished a mosque that was allegedly a recruiting ground for ISIS jihadis. At the time, a tweet from a Gazan ISIS-aligned group said, “Armed men from Hamas came to Deir Al-Balah and destroyed the mosque, acting in a way that even the Jewish occupiers and the Americans have not acted.” Also in May, a group that claimed to be affiliated with ISIS claimed responsibility for the bombing of Hamas headquarters.

Schachtel, Jordan.  “ISIS Threatens to Take Gaza From Rival Terror Group Hamas.” Breitbart, July 1, 2015.

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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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