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.
In reacting to Russia’s annexation of Crimea and support for pro-Russian separatists in Ukraine in early 2014, the US government did not call the Sixth Fleet into action; it did not ban all exports to Russia; it did not stop all cultural and educational exchanges. Rather, key elites close to “a senior Russian government official”—President Vladimir Putin—were targeted with asset seizures and visa bans.
Probably the most serious international crisis since the end of the Cold War, and the White House targets individuals? It seemed an odd response to some observers. But it made sense. At last, after 14 years of dealing with Putin as a legitimate head of state, the US government has finally acknowledged that he has built a system based on massive predation on a level not seen in Russia since the czars. Transparency International estimates the annual cost of bribery in Russia at $300 billion, roughly equal to the entire gross domestic product of Denmark, or many times higher than the Russian budgetary allocations for health and education. Capital flight totaled $335 billion from 2005 to 2013, or about 5 percent of GDP. But then in 2014, with the ruble and oil prices tumbling, it reached more than $150 billion—a figure that has swollen Western bank coffers but made Russia the most unequal of all economies, in which, according to Credit Suisse, 110 billionaires control 35 percent of the country’s wealth.
There’s now plenty of BackChannels opinion on “Syndicate Red Brown Green”, a clever collection of books (in the “The Russian Section” of the library), but no prescriptions and not much hope for those in the Russian oppositions being ground away or controlled for irrelevance by the “Vertical of Power”. The states of affairs may be ascertained swiftly with a glance at the web sites of well known critics.
Let BackChannels know when the outlook of each brightens.
The report, titled Putin. War, asserts that at least 150 Russian military personnel were killed during a Ukrainian offensive in August 2014. A further 70 — including 17 paratroopers from the city of Ivanovo — were reportedly killed during fighting near the bitterly contested town of Debaltseve in January and February.
Families of those killed in 2014 were given 2 million rubles ($39,000) by the government in exchange for signing a promise not to discuss the matter publicly, the report claims.
The great forces today are not in the “masses” or the “voting public” but in the construction and intentions of “adventurous governments” and otherwise integrated and stable ones. Among the “adventurous”: Putin, Assad, Khamenei, Orban, Erdogan, among others; “integrated and stable”: the classically liberal democracies of the world. The figure of “Everyman” shrugs before, sometimes beneath, these altogether large forces.
There are those who are able to think for themselves, who think outside the box and defy the hatred they were brought up on. Their minds and hearts opened up to learn about their so called “enemy” known as the Jews. Many of those who crave warm, peaceful, friendships with Jews and Israelis wouldn’t dare expressing their thoughts in public. However, there are a few courageous souls who decided to speak up loudly and clearly against anti-semitism (which I’d rather refer to as anti-Jewish sentiments), BDS and the anti-Israel propaganda not only in their own countries but also in the West.
Affection for Israel need have no discriminators, of course. This excerpt comes from Arab Canadian Fred Maroun:
Despite this, Israel still has a surprisingly diverse set of defendants, mostly among Jews, but also among non-Jews. These remarkable people have decided to stand for what’s right rather than for what’s hip. The non-Jewish pro-Israel activists come from all backgrounds: Arabs such as Palestinian Bassem Eid, Syrian Aboud Dandachi, Egyptian Hussein Aboubakr, Lebanese Jonathan El-Khoury, and Jordanian Mudar Zahran; non-Arab Muslims such as Kasim Hafeez; Christians such as Father Gabriel Naddaf; African-Americans such as Dumisani Washington; North American Natives such as Ryan Mervyn Bellerose; and many others.
“The runners at the Boston Marathon put my police officers, my citizens and others at risk. This program invited an incendiary reaction. Citizens picked my community, which does not support in any shape, passion or form, this ideology.”
Is the United States Constitution an incendiary device or is the resurgence of Islam as practiced in the seventh century an incendiary device?
The overall media consensus has been to blame the intended murder victims for recklessly provoking the terrorists. Such provocation, we are told, is unacceptable and irresponsible behavior given the risk of retaliation by offended radical Muslims.
By this bizarre logic, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Selma marchers should be condemned for instigating the melee on the Edmund Pettus bridge. Same for the three murdered civil-rights workers in Mississippi, the victims of Bull Connor’s police dogs, and anyone else who has taken a stand that might irritate violence-prone people.
The Kelly File. “Is freedom of speech under attack in America?” Fox News, May 6, 2015.
As “The price of liberty is eternal vigilance,” both direct attacks on the American Homeland and intellectual forays into weakening cultural adhesion to bedrock principles and values has served primarily to strengthen the arguments and ranks of America’s conservatives, who, in fact have become America’s most thoughtful liberals in line with the “classical liberalism” on which the nation was founded.
For all intents, Lincoln’s back in town.
Allen West included this observation in a post published last August:
First of all, let’s establish this point: modern conservatism is classical liberalism as developed by English political philosopher John Locke. His basic principles were the personal rights of life, liberty, and property. Clearly, today’s “post modern liberal” has nothing in common with John Locke. Today’s liberalism has more in common with Marxism/progressivism/socialism — but as with all things Leftist, the lexicon is changed in order to mask true identity and intentions.
Search string “Lincoln, classical liberalism” yields a few delightful URLs. Count “6 Quotes That Will Remind Republicans Lincoln Was a Liberal” (February 11, 2015) among them (it kicks off with, “Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal”).
• We will promote our belief that pluralism and moderation are fundamental principles of the Holy Qur’an.
• We recognize and honor the principles of individual liberty and freedom. We believe that the practice of religion and its laws are a matter of free choice within an individual’s beliefs and conscience only. Our governmental laws should be based upon our Constitution and Bill of Rights, and derived from reason.
• We believe that every Muslim is equally entitled to his/her opinion concerning the religion of Islam, in an environment free of ostracism, intimidation, and reprisal. While we recognize the value of scholarship and learned discourse in Islam, we believe that all Muslims should play an active role in the debate and ijtihad of our own faith.
• We will work to educate the public regarding the special historical relationship between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
• We will publicly affirm our belief that the primary threat to America is from both violent and non-violent Islamists who exploit the faith of Islam, and who use identity politics, victimology, tribalism, and intimidation to further their goal of Islamist hegemony.
What the arc of time may be for the intellectual transformation of the Ummah toward the above stated values (there are twelve such on the page referenced) seems to BackChannels unknown, but the blog has been around for enough years to observe that those who bid into a modern course have stood by their own programs and sought growth and greater distribution for core religious institutional concepts fit to the “classical liberalism” on which the United States has been developed.
The Garland, Texas “Draw Muhammad” event and the attack associated with it continue to play in the press. However it unfolded, whatever the play by play and the who, what, when, how, it was small and professionally foiled by police.
The shooters were known and had been tracked.
Headlines from the reading side of the BackChannels screen: “Gunman in Texas Shooting was FBI Suspect in Jihad Inquiry”; “Texas Attacker Left Trail of Extremist Ideas on Twitter”; “FBI alerted Garland Police about jihad attacker 3 hours . . . “; “ISIS Inspired, but Did Not Orchestrate, Garland Shooting at Muhammad Event”; “Texas attacker had private conversations with known terrorists”.
Block and search if you need to read the story behind a headline . . . the point is the First Amendment, the American gold standard of freedom of speech, won the day, the terrorists lost, and the arguing online about the right to speak freely — to challenge thought, to criticize ideas, to observe and report — and to argue about politeness, provocation, and, I suppose, cultural sensitivity, which all makes for lively debate, is as it should be and much, much preferred to silenced debate.
One more clip (and more to follow) from Pat Condell, posted on YouTube July 11, 2013 —
Addendum – May 10, 2015
How can any thinking and civilized person ever believe there is a wisp of truth to the proposition: “There are times when it is ‘understandable’ that people would slaughter others because of a cartoon”? Everyone who follows world events in the United States, regardless of their political leanings, has seen the unimaginably vile actions of ISIS against “unbelievers” and “those who defame the prophet.” How can anyone take their side? To do so even to the smallest extent renders the defender equally vile. And yet, of course, that is what we have come to in the cesspool that is the American left.
In 2009, Yale University removed several illustrations from a book I had written about the global controversy over the Danish cartoons. The redacted illustrations included the cartoons as also other pictures featuring Muhammad, including an Ottoman print of Muhammad going into battle with Ali at his side and an illustration of Dante’s Divine Comedy made by Gustave Doré. The publisher was Yale University Press. The university argued that the images could be considered offensive by Muslims and lead to violence, including attacks on Yale and other American institutions. In an Orwellian twist, Yale University cited my own book as evidence that reproduction of the cartoons was dangerous. The press defended its decision with reference to the advice of an expert panel (of which more later) ‘that there existed a substantial likelihood of violence that might take the lives of innocent victims.’
There is no legitimate controversy over why the Kouachi brothers targeted Charlie Hebdo. They murdered not to redress the social grievances or right the historical wrongs the PEN authors named. They explicitly told us why they murdered — for Islam, to avenge the Prophet Muhammad. Progressives who think otherwise need to face that reality. Put another way, the Kouachi brothers may have suffered racial discrimination and even “marginalization,” yet had they not been Muslims, they would not have attacked Charlie Hebdo. They would have had no motive.
And now we are bystanders in the destruction of our own remarkable history. We are allowing the barbarians to destroy memory while we watch. We were warned decades ago when Israel began fighting against the destruction of history by Muslims destroying artifacts under the Temple Mount in Jerusalem in their attempt to eradicate the Jewish past in order to promote a Muslim future.
In the 1980s the Waqf destroyed an ancient wall on the Temple Mount, probably from one of the courts of the Second Temple, (Herod’s Temple) during an unauthorized dig. “The wall was six feet thick, and more than 16 feet of it was exposed, but the entire wall was quickly removed and the area covered before Israeli archaeological authorities could study it.”
In September 2000, the Muslim Waqf closed off the Temple Mount entirely to any archeological oversight by the Israel Antiquities Authority and then removed 13,000 tons of rubble from the Temple Mount, including archeological remnants from the First and Second Temple periods. History was dropped into the dump.
The purpose of autocratic and capricious information control — to shut someone up; to censor or forestall expression — is personal or cultural erasure.
We express solidarity with the many American Muslims who feel wounded by this malicious disregard of their sacred heritage. Further, we are dismayed that a member of the American Jewish community led this incendiary effort. We can only imagine how upset we would be if a group set up a public display of cartoons mocking Jews, offering (as was the case here) a $10,000 prize for the “best” rendering.
Our long history as a persecuted and often taunted minority does not allow us to stand by in silence when such an act is perpetrated against another religious community in our society. Jewish history and teaching compel us to denounce such offensive and inflammatory behavior.
More than 25 rabbis signed the above letter, which hews to the social and transactional element in the Garland controversy: indeed, we should be careful of one another by being polite.
Then too we may be even more careful of one another by being plainly honest about present and past states of affairs. For that, many Jews would simply begin with the legend of the Banu Qurayza.
The Southern Poverty Law Center regards Pamela’s organization as a hate group . Since Morris Dees, the chief trial council of the center and most of the top officers in that organization are members of my own tribe, I wonder if he would still be so loudly condemning Pam Geller if Jihad attacked a synagogue and killed innocent Jews.
Since we are their favorite targets, this is a nightmare that is just waiting to happen. But, Dees and his left wing buddies would prefer to support condemning the one women with balls big enough to stand up to Jihad and tell them no , not today.
If there are any regular readers of BackChannels, it should go without saying that “Shimmer” always applies.
Beyond the Islamist’s “jihad” and everyone else’s struggle with living authentically good lives — not saintly lives, just good ones 🙂 — the basis in Torah that becomes the source material for the transformation of Rome and of the Arab Peninsula may call for revisiting in the cause of greater Christian-Jewish-Muslim accommodation or melding.
With regard to the American Freedom of Speech concept, this ascribed to Patrick Henry and slipped to young minds early in their American education (at least for my generation) tells of both attitude and behavior set before ALL Americans: ” “I may not like what a man says, but I shall defend to the death his right to say it!”
The current demonizing and framing of Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer and the democratic Left’s handling of the conservative voice reminds me of two Soviet Era fixtures: the KGB disinformation campaigns (reference Pacepa and Rychlak in the Russian Section of this blog’s library) and, as a philosophy, Hegelian dialectic, which, stating this offhand and without scholarship, would nonetheless seem to suggest that the branding takes place before a public possessed of its own independence and mind and inclined or stimulated to respond to the demonizing in a manner opposite the effort. Basically, Americans (who follow the news; who read independently; who argue around the dinner table or chat at the bar; and who have ready access to the Internet through computers, phones, and pads) are a deeply literate and informed people inclined toward freedom in the making up of their own minds.
Related
A mighty global community of humanist activists and public intellectuals has taken on the corrective updating of the medieval world. As much was probably not laid out in those terms, but whether out of outrage with “honor killing” or the horrors brought to the modern world by the al-Qaeda affiliates, they’re “in it” or engaged in producing greater coherence in global worldview.
“Locus of Control” may be thematic in the workout of motivation within the “Islamic Small Wars” and the resettling of attitudes and beliefs derived from cultural speech and texts, but there may be some way to go before understanding that variable. In the conservative ranks of the west, the reaction to Islamist ambition and Islamic teleology as presently set has been robust in a right-back-at-ya manner.
Some are saying I provoked this attack. But to kowtow to violent intimidation will only encourage more of it.
Sunday in Garland, Texas, a police officer was wounded in a battle that is part of a longstanding war: the war against the freedom of speech. Some people are blaming me for the Garland shooting — so I want to address that here.
United West — for those who might like to visit the art show with Tom Trento, this piece tops the United West web site: “MUHAMMAD ART EXHIBIT & CONTEST
Live Streaming now, Sunday May 3rd, 6pm-8pm Eastern,” and it features a three-hour YouTube video of the event.
I may copy the links to this blog’s “Alpha-Zulu” page — a catchall index of nouns relevant to BackChannels and linked to external sources — but suffice it to suggest that if one wanted to overview the intellectual drifts around a conflict area — and do it as a private citizen! — this online research capability plus social media provides for exactly that plus distillation.
Texted last night and this morning by one of BackChannel’s friends —
5/4/2015/0018
In the cab. Men actually left vehicle and were on foot. Swat told e . . . .
5/4/2015/0837
Not having fun. Police officer shot led times two. Bomb squad. We have been moved to a hardened position.
The event was sponsored by the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI) and attended by its president and co-founder, Pamela Geller — who is also president of Stop Islamization of America (SIOA). Both are listed as hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Since when has earnest and honest — not disingenuous, not libelous — speech been framed as “hate speech” — and with the speakers branded as a “hate group”?
Have you met the Stepford students? They’re everywhere. On campuses across the land. Sitting stony-eyed in lecture halls or surreptitiously policing beer-fuelled banter in the uni bar. They look like students, dress like students, smell like students. But their student brains have been replaced by brains bereft of critical faculties and programmed to conform. To the untrained eye, they seem like your average book-devouring, ideas-discussing, H&M-adorned youth, but anyone who’s spent more than five minutes in their company will know that these students are far more interested in shutting debate down than opening it up.
I had been writing a series of columns in the Village Voice about certain thought police at that very paper. I had found out that on Monday nights, when the paper went to bed, some editors and copy editors — without telling the writers — were cutting out certain words, sometimes sentences and paragraphs, that might offend the Voice’s constituencies.
Hentoff, Nat. “Free Speech for Me — But Not for Thee: How the American Left and Right Relentlessly Censor Each Other.” New York, HarperCollinsPublishers, 1992.
Where are we today?
How did this happen that comment and criticism of Islam — the same would seem much more safe and secure when the target of critical speech involves Christianity, Judaism, and every other religion expressed in the brave and free United States of America — has been framed as provocation for violence and seems to be being made to serve to excuse it?
Just so no English language speaker is caught short or left behind while trading the dozens, The Racial Slur Database lists some 2,649 of these pejoratives.
Contempt, which is what epithets express, contribute to our defensive arsenal in language: they are the weapons we reach for when we are done with words and reason and, overall, ready to rumble.
Pamela Geller, the organizer of the Texas “Draw Muhammad” event in Garland, Texas, that ended in a terror attack on a police officer, said on national television Monday she’d do it again – that free speech is way too important to cede to Shariah law extremists.
“Clearly what happened is indicative of how needed this conference was,” said Geller, on “Fox & Friends,” in reference to the violence that came on the tail end of the cartoon drawing contest, as WND previously reported.
Said Pamela Geller: “Inoffensive speech needs no protection; offensive speech needs protection.” (about 1:40 into the Fox video).
Ad hominem attacks and epithets may be offensive and also protected speech too, but add virtue to Geller’s so-called hate speech: considered and contemplated, well researched, respectful, clearly delineating “the terrorists”, albeit in absolute terms, while — for readers who actually care to look into this issue — recognizing Islamic humanists and reformists and other Muslims often in the path of jihadists themselves.
On the web, where most of my experience of the world arrives mediated, I have seen the development of a new global across-the-broadest-campus intelligentsia, and perhaps that soon should be the focus of a BackChannels post.
When contentious issues and conflict are worked by the public, is God like a cook watching over a simmering pot on the stove?
Too cool, and the food doesn’t transform — it needs some serious heat; too hot, and the pot boils over or boils out — those conditions need some serious cool.
Pamela Geller is a 56-year-old Jewish arch-conservative from New York, a vehement critic of radical Islam who organized a provocative $10,000 cartoon contest in this placid Dallas suburb designed to caricature the prophet Muhammad.
Elton Simpson was a 30-year-old aspiring Islamic militant from Phoenix who fantasized to an FBI informant about “doing the martyrdom operations” in Somalia and was convicted in 2010 of lying to the FBI about his plans to travel to the volatile eastern African nation.
The “Islamists” — which noun we use to set them apart from Muslims who are not “Islamists” and have been frequently the targets of the same — have a deep investment in force of will and intimidation. Control, locus of control, need for control, motivation for sadism, etc. are more topics worth concentrating on.
Americans know — and I believe I’m within reason saying this — that Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer exercise and represent free speech in action accommodated to American constitutional principles. Ascribed to Patrick Henry: ““I may not like what a man says, but I shall defend to the death his right to say it!” That’s it.
We don’t shout down opponents; we don’t deny anyone a soapbox. We may choose not to listen to their rants; we may choose to not invite our “verbal adversaries” to our house parties. But we don’t shut them up lest we ourselves suffering being shut up.
While Geller and Spencer have been “framed” — called, described as, denoted as, accused — as “Islamophobes”, the truth is that practice will simply elicit its opposite, sooner or later, in political reaction. I’ve shared the Back-Channels concept “Shimmer” with Geller — didn’t hear back — and out of no cause or motivation not my own but solely curiosity and enthusiasm for the broadband web, I’ve made acquaintance and friends across the Islamic world.
Religious teleology adjusts to many forces across time. The Catholic Church maintained the charge of Deicide against the Jews until into the early 1960s, and the Lutheran Synod in America tooks its time ejecting, at least officially, the same. In other aspects, the Jesuits continue writing letters to Jesus and God only knows — or only God knows! — the ways in which people profess faith and integrate themselves with a spiritual program or script . . . or come to the immense opportunity to adjust and update the same in fact or emphasis.
When the Ferguson riots broke August 9, 2014, the New Old Now Old Far Out and Lost Left got busy churning out “false flag” accusations involving New Establishment elements for incitement. In related search, “DHS Is Employing Agent Provocateurs and are Behind the . . .”; “Ferguson Witness: Government is Planting Provocateurs in . . .”; “Busted! ‘Agent Provocateur’ Caught Red Handed in Ferguson!” With such as those, BackChannels would happily invoke its mouthy “Paranoid Delusional Narcissistic Reflection of Motivation” and remind that the old KGB proved adept at “false flag” manipulation of the Russian constituency with, among other episodes, the “Moscow Apartment Bombings”, today relentlessly examined and rehashed by Miami University scholar Karen Dawisha in her book Putin’s Kleptocracy (listed in the “Russian Section”).
The injury and death of Freddie Gray will receive — is receiving — the scrutiny deserved regardless of the public press “for justice” (without injustice proven but certainly suspected) and the spillover into violence.
This is what promotes that violence:
Malik Shabazz, president of Black Lawyers for Justice, a Washington, D.C.-based group that called for the demonstration and advertised it on social media, told the crowd that he would release them in an hour, adding: “Shut it down if you want to! Shut it down!”
A city, a society, a long fought quest for equality and justice frequently achieved.
Yesterday in WND, conservative journalist Aaron Klein noted of Shabazz, “Not a single news media outlet quoted above informed its readers of that which a simple Google search of “Malik Shabazz” reveals. As highlighted on his Wikipedia page, until October 2013, Shabazz notoriously served as the national chairman of the New Black Panther Party.”
Klein goes on to note in relation to Shabazz episodes involving voter intimidation (“using such phrases as ‘white devil’ and ‘You’re about to be ruled by the black man, cracker'”), anti-Semitic invective, and incitement.
Violence and looting overtook much of West Baltimore on Monday, seriously injuring several police officers and leaving a store and several vehicles in flames.
Shutting Not Much Down, But Some appears to be continuing into the evening.
With generations of of the Left to Far Left in town, one’s ears may tune to the rhetoric to come: will it be accusing, ad hominem, venomous? Will it be responsible, encouraging inquiry, open observation, and discussion? In what part either?
BackChannels 