Said rolled American racism and European colonialism into one mélange of white oppression of darker-skinned peoples. He was not the only thinker to have forged this amalgam, but his unique further contribution was to represent “Orientals” as the epitome of the dark-skinned; Muslims as the modal Orientals; Arabs as the essential Muslims; and, finally, Palestinians as the ultimate Arabs. Abracadabra—Israel was transformed from a redemptive refuge from two thousand years of persecution to the very embodiment of white supremacy.
I correspond off of Facebook as well (where do I find the time? It’s easy — I have no life), and this is what one from the anti-Jihad had to say about Islam in relation to the progress of the “Islamic State” (AKA “ISIS”, “ISIL”, “ISIS/L”) in Iraq and Syria:
I saw cars lined up. They were part of the death squads for Mosul. (Whilst perusing the jihad portal.) Now that we have rampant crucifixions and beheadings I await the public stoning of women. It is coming. M. allowed it. If it is good enough for him, it is good enough for them. I am determined to no longer reference these acts as “radical Islam”. They are the real Islam. This is real Islam, just as practised in the time of M. Radical Islam, would be an Islam that is moderate, philanthropic and kind. That is radical for Islam. What we are seeing, is the real Islam, based on texts, eyewitness accounts, primary source options from the era of the final Prophet.
With certainty, the entire Muslim Brotherhood and al-Qaeda-type affiliates believe deeply that they are Muslims, never mind with what anomic and casual bents they kill others who believe they are Muslim too. Of course, what my correspondent suggests with perhaps Christian insight is that those among the middle, mild, and moderate of Islam who stand up to terrorism and argue for a progressive modern society be considered the true radicals.
Why not?
What is it tumbling around in the Islamic Small Wars with a 1400 year old “road map” that tolerates no other instruction or thought but its own?
ISIS would call what it believes and pursues the true Islam, the only Islam, and bar the “radicals” from it.
So one may nod to the most radical of Muslims, “moderate, philanthropic, and kind”.
These have no idea what it is that’s coming for them:
The newly elected parliament convened with 255 out of 328 elected officials attending, which was enough for a legal quorum, the speaker said. But when many failed to return after the break, there were not enough members to continue.
He talks at length about all of the Western-made equipment ISIS has captured during its various routs of the Iraqi army. “Look how much money America spends on fighting Islam, and it ends up going to us,” he crows. “Message to the people of the West: just keep giving and we will keep taking.”
Vox. ISIS mocks Obama in Michael Bay-style propaganda video – 7/1/2014. Vox has imported the video to its page, so, to my friends around the world, if you want to see an ISIS representative in a ball cap and speaking American English, click through to it.
As ISIS has picked up “assets” in American machinery and weaponry, also Iraqi military uniforms, I was curious about the suggestion that the same were on the road to Damascus.
Is there an ISIS armored column gunning for Bashar al-Assad and his government?
Will U.S. arms shipments to “moderate” Syrian forces arrive in time to kill or capture that column and retake ownership of The Revolution?
About a week ago, Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi noted, “The upcoming battles will reveal the extent of ISIS’ maturity. Most probably, it will stop at the maximum extent in the south like it now with the North’s Kurds and it will rest a little benefiting from international incompetence” (Al-Aribya, June 24, 2014).
How else could resistance to the developing and expanding conflict be characterized?
The Iraqi Parliament, so it appears, can’t keep itself seated for even one day.
The call-up of tens of thousands of young men from Iraq’s south, Shiites, for the most part, appear to be getting a pep talk, a helmet, a firearm, and a ride toward wherever the action is, pretty much just enough to get themselves killed.
I would like to be more optimistic, of course, but the good spirit of going off to war, the preparations with uniforms, steel, and gun oil, play to vanity more than the necessities of what has to be just the ugliest and most heartbreaking business on earth. For certain, I would not want to be an American military adviser handed recruits with two weeks (or much less) of “boot camp” behind them for a day’s work in an active field populated by so deeply a delusional and treacherous enemy, but perhaps that kind of challenge is what combat pay is all about.
From Sunday’s Guardian, this quote tells of a theme I’ve encountered elsewhere:
“We have Da’ash on one side,” said Abu Mustafa, a Baquba resident, using the colloquial word for Isis. “And we have Asa’ib ahl al-Haq on the other. I don’t know who to be more scared of.”
Even if held together for a time by Saddam Hussein’s power to manipulate his constituence and keep it roiled in fear, Iraq has been long divided by the Sunni-Shiite schism, and on that matter, never mind American secular ideals and military intervention, it has been laid open to Iranian and Saudi influence and related jockeying and meddling. Into that rift has roared ISIS with inhuman and frankly incontinent bloodletting and cruelty, and the state is on the edge — beyond it, possibly — of reverting to the language and terms of the war with which it’s familiar, a reenactment in reality of the obsessive bidding for succession that attended the death of Muhammad, who having left advice about how to do everything else appears to have left out the matter of continuing his enterprise beyond his final breath.
In Wikipedese:
The historic background of the Sunni–Shia split lies in the schism that occurred when the Islamic prophet Muhammad died in the year 632, leading to a dispute over succession to Muhammad as a caliph of the Islamic community spread across various parts of the world, which led to the Battle of Siffin. The dispute intensified greatly after the Battle of Karbala, in which Hussein ibn Ali and his household were killed by the ruling Umayyad Caliph Yazid I, and the outcry for his revenge divided the early Islamic community.
Although the headline sensationalizes the potential for an all-out Sunni-Shiite showdown, even in the field and among fellow Islamists, opinion of ISIS may run low. From the same article:
“The gangs of al-Baghdadi are living in a fantasy world. They’re delusional. They want to establish a state but they don’t have the elements for it,” said Abdel-Rahman al-Shami, a spokesman for the Army of Islam, an Islamist rebel group. “You cannot establish a state through looting, sabotage and bombing.”
A confection celebrates the kidnapping of two Israeli and one Israeli-American teenagers. The photo had been posted by the IDF prior to today’s discovery of the bodies.
As I type, there are ugly murder stories all over the web, from ISIS in Iraq to children raped and swung from tree limbs with their own scarves (India). Some not Jewish, not Israeli, not American must wonder why these get so much attention (three dead Jews — who cares?). The answer is these would have cared about others far from themselves and would have been part, one way or another, of inspiring good and justice and then been a part of drawing down all that other injustice, mayhem, and murder in the world.
That’s a lot to suggest . . . perhaps a lot to promise . . .but I think it comes with the territory, from Pharaoh to now.
I don’t like everything I read about the Jews and Israel. As a matter of fact, I was earlier this afternoon reading about Sabra and Shatila and the IDF both controlling access to those camps and standing aside as Christian Phalangist militia slaughtered in that Palestinian refugee camp old men, women, and children. That event was not among the Jewish State’s finer moments (September 1982), but here’s the thing: perhaps we learn even from — or starting with — our own failings and missteps and trespasses. I would not expect as much from ISIS today as it has indulged itself in the most wanton orgies of killing; Hamas seems equally unable to repair or restrain itself or related loose energy running around the Gaza Strip (which over the weekend launched multiple rockets against Israel). Name them all, they seem to raise their children with a murderous hate for others, Jews first (thank you very much), and when their children do as they have been trained . . . .
I am wondering: are we — is the whole world — going to see celebration photos this time?
At this point, it is quite possible to believe Meshaal when he says that he knew nothing about the kidnapping and that he has no idea what happened to the teens. But Meshaal and the leaders of Hamas have a problem. As long as they don’t denounce the Qawasmeh family, and as long as they let the family take them down a dead end time after time, the leaders of the movement will be forced to pay the price.
Related on anti-Semitism from earlier this month (same subject): http://firstonethrough.wordpress.com/2014/06/23/eyal-gilad-naftali-klinghoffer-the-new-blood-libel/ – 6/23/2014.
If we’re not looking at ISIS or related al-Qaeda-type company, what are we seeing?
And if we are seeing a fighter following the script to replace all else with Islam, what then?
The west may not begrudge an Islamic motive for regime changing Bashar al-Assad, but it’s not about to swap out the Queen of England for anything remotely resembling a caliph.
Perhaps the youth are too youthful in their investment in faith in the inevitability of their own glorious future, which may be interpreted as a facet of Mobarak Haider’s term for the Taliban’s problem: “civilizational narcissism”.
Even confined x choice x fate to the “second row seat to history”, I’m not particularly thrilled with recycling Facebook and Twitter posts, i.e., other people’s news, and it’s with some apology to VICE that I note that.
However — wow! — what a decent piece of reporting and much needed in the Syrian theater that has been played by Putin-Assad-Khamenei to pit the malignantly narcissistic Great Leader against, albeit in some part, an equally malignant rebel force marching beneath the banner of Islam.
Perhaps what is needed is an overview of the “moderate” revolutionary forces today laying claim to cohesion in the field and legitimacy as the basis for the governance of a New Syria.
(8:21): “Terrorists and ISIS want to make this place just like all the others by killing and committing crimes here.”
VICE interviewer Danny Gold tweets as @DGisSERIOUS.
The web would seem to be coming along for near real time experience of the world’s war zones. This environment from field signal to page makeup to Twitter publicity to blog to reader is not another generation’s evening network news: I’m not holding my breath but am waiting for the waves of live remote feeds to come marching over the virtual berms at any time.
Par for the middle east course and evident in the above clip: deeply shared Kurdish and Arab tribal animus, and that with each attempting to align the other with ISIS (of the two, I would suggest the Kurds have the more coherent view of the fighting and how it will play both to their autonomy, defense, and expansion).
The “love of the land” also plays in the Kurdish script as regards how things should be and, therefore, how events should unfold for the Kurds as a people free — self-determining — in their own lands.
We shall see how that motivation plays in the coming days.
ISIS appears to be its own wild and piratical machine.
In fact, ISIS reminds me of the al-Shabaab saga in Somalia in which Islamic anarchists, essentially, have long terrorized the state, at times controlling the bulk of it, at others finding their footprint reduced to their southern reaches. To this day, they’re still part of the Somali landscape and proven capable of instigating or conducting attacks on targets in their vicinity. One expects that even a smashed ISIS will continue spinning around Iraq’s landscape as a human version of the chemist’s “free radical”.
While ISIS makes progress in Iraq it has also gotten itself surrounded by either natural enemies or enemies it has been making on its beyond-all-limits killing spree in Iraq. It’s presence has urged a nation to its feet, but the same today has many different kinds of feet, and they seem not to want to advance in the same direction.
Externals: the dictator Putin-Assad-Khamenei becomes now the dictator Khamenei-Assad-Putin driving a Russia-aligned Shiite bloc against the Saudi sphere’s NATO-aligned Sunni bloc, the same that was to have produced a modern people’s revolution in Syria. Probably, that alignment has run its course, worn itself out, and pushed the White House into deep reconsideration of how to sort out the middle east for its own sake, for oil, and for NATO’s existence and the values it promotes.
Aside: America’s chief oil suppliers have been Canada and Mexico, and as American energy policy produces greater flexibility in access to crude, one may expect related politics to follow.
Back to Iraq: It turns out deposing Saddam the Tyrannical was the easy part. Then too, perhaps the way in always is, for everything else having to do with the middle east has been twisted up, torn apart, patched back together, and totally fucked up beyond all repair (FUBAR).
As a culture may be its language and the possession of its history in language, the argument over succession is unresolvable from the outset, but that the perception of the prize inspires so much animosity, contempt, and jealousy spells a dismal future for either hewing to such a legacy or, as discomforting but less absurd, retreating from the same.
While Hillel goes unremarked (“This which is distasteful to thee, do not do to another”), the greater world goes on around this schism that mires its humanity in its own sealed environment, which is more essentially an environment sustained in the poetry known to its own mind.
A book is a world, a movie a mirror of our own character in community.
The work of creative writers partially involves showing us to ourselves. Some criticize their societies. Some patronize them. Of the two, I would prefer honest critics.
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