BackChannels places conflicts involving Iraq in the post-Cold War framework and suggests that military engagements were part of “containment” and the “building down” of Soviet alliances that remained in character authoritarian and openly supportive of terrorism.
Basically, Russia then and Russia today criminally manipulates foreign political constituencies to suit its own kleptocratic appetites. Hussein (and Gaddafi) were part of that enterprise, and perhaps as God willed it, both are gone (and thank God).
Yesterday’s BBC report on the Chilcot report keeps itself narrowed on the image of Iraq as an oasis of stability, however miserable, under the rule of a strongman, and the report itself reasserts at face value the idea that “regime change” in Iraq linked to direct threats posed by WMDs, which imbroglio BackChannels would shove into a bin labeled “Potential Convenient Pretexts” (sorry the same don’t really work out) and the more general “Global War on Terror,” which period of observation appears to start on September 11, 2001:
10. After the attacks on the US on 11 September 2001 and the fall of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan in November, the US Administration urned its attention to regime change in Iraq as part of the second phase of what it called the Global War on Terror.
It is unfortunate that governments most devoted to “classical liberalism” and democracy should feel the need to resort to manipulating their “masses” (instead of free constituencies) because they have failed to publically educate the same in the longer-lived themes of geopolitics and history — or worse, lost that battle to the New Old Now Old Far Out and Lost Left that relies on short memories to promote their own ultimately authoritarian, fascist, and totalitarian outlooks.
I don’t know what BackChannels is going to do when the 25th Year Anniversary of the Dissolving of The Soviet passes on December 26, 2016, but as that day is still coming up, it’s going to harp on it with the hope that other “English” and Europeans and others less free or more so catch a glimpse of Putin’s Excellent World (PEW), the world from which it has emerged, and the malignantly narcissistic worldview it continues to promote or install wherever it may.
Masked off by our own reading and research habits as well as general busyness with information is the history of Russian and Soviet anti-Semitism and its influence throughout the political campus of the Left and Far Left to this day.
There are many portals today through which to pick up on the history of Soviet anti-Semitism, Soviet-supported terrorism, and the relationship of the Soviet to the International and Palestinian Solidarity organizations and their radical movements. I usually — and here may — blog such links as the following:
Where the focus is narrowed to influence of the Soviet on Middle Eastern politics and on Islam, one will find reported by Pacepa the Soviet’s massive promotion of anti-Semitism in the Arab sphere.
The former lawyer has vowed to be “the British Muslim who takes the fight to extremists.” Yet the Labour Party under leader Jeremy Corbyn has veered sharply to the left on these matters, and Mr. Khan has been an enabler of that transformation.
Abdel-Al—who lives in occupied East Jerusalem—is visiting Chicago this week at the invitation of the United Electrical Workers (UE), the U.S. Palestinian Community Network, and Jewish Voice for Peace to enlist the support of the U.S. labor movement in the Palestinian liberation struggle. He addressed standing-room-only audiences of rank-and-file unionists at last weekend’s Labor Notes conference and again on Tuesday night at the local UE Hall.
The campaign for ‘Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions’ (BDS) against the Israeli government gains ground every day while defenders of the Palestinian Occupation seem to be able to do no more that trot out the same tired charges of anti-Semitism against its proponents!
As George Bisharat points out in the article below, the charge of anti-Semitism is completely without substance. Indeed there has been a tragic history of persecution of Jewish people for which all of us Europeans rightly feel a sense of shame. Even so, for Zionist politicians to manipulate this shame to justify the persecution of Palestinian people is reprehensible, and it’s a tactic that is becoming increasingly transparent to the Western public.
Perhaps the most significant thing about Bisharat’s article is that it appeared in the Chicago Tribune. Indeed the BDS is going mainstream!
The above paragraph had been posted as prelude to “Applause for the academic boycott of Israel” by George Bisharat (the two are on the same page, i.e., same link).
Those who read across publications may find similar claims, tropes, and strategies in play. The picture is generally stark with the charge of brutality always leveled on the Jews:
U.S. enabling of Israel, particularly in its colonial expansion into the West Bank, has voided the two-state option and fostered a single functioning state there in which only Jews enjoy relative security, prosperity, and full political rights, while Palestinians suffer gradations of oppression.
Never mind the Soviet KGB-invented Arafat and the Palestinian Liberation Organization, today’s Palestinian Authority; and never mind the genocidal — and Palestinian plundering — Hamas. The presence of the two disappears when Israelis / Zionists / Jews seem much preferred in the target sites.
Corey Gil-Shuster has been video interviewing Israelis and Palestinians — and anyone else within range — for years on the widest variety of questions having to do with the middle east conflict and justice in Israel. Here’s a short example from 2012:
Posted to YouTube May 9, 2012.
Finally about the promotion of impoverished Palestinians beneath the “brutal occupation” — there’s a lot more to that story that includes Hamas billionaires, but this may suffice for a glimpse into the reality of luxury development in Gaza: PRICO Real Estate Development Company.
For someone who knows the scourge of oppression and racism all too well, it is important that I make an unequivocal apology for statements and ideas that I have foolishly endorsed in the past.
The manner and tone of what I wrote in haste is not excusable. With the understanding of the issues I have now I would never have posted them. I have to own up to the fact that ignorance is not a defence.
Editor: I’m not so certain. People dead-end on bad habits, including bad habits of mind. In the past month, she has been the guest at a private seder without issues; she has made a public apology that reads as authentic statement . . . I think the world surrounding her has changed, and Naz Shah MP has set off in a new direction.
FB Friend: yes, the beauty is in the eyes of the beholder! It’s good to be optimistic! i am skeptical though!
Editor: I’ve just been to her page, and you can read the anti-Semitic spew that comes out in her crowd. Naz Shah with her apology and her soul has betrayed that mob, so she’s going to have to gather herself and face it. Good news if she has courage, she’ll have decent company and plenty of it.
Lady Neuberger claimed the issue in Labour was “attached to Jeremy Corbyn becoming leader”, and “an issue within the hard left”.
John Woodcock, MP and former chair of the Labour Friends of Israel, said: “The handling of this has been a mess. But the most important thing is that the Labour leadership properly acknowledges now the scale of the antisemitism problem that is growing in the party.
Ben Judah, author of Fragile Empire: How Russia Fell In and Out of Love with Vladimir Putin (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2013) has weighed in on George Galloway’s Hitlerian method — leveraging “Jew hate” (start with the stew — anger, fear, jealousy, ignorance, impoverishment, suspicion, shame — and stir it up) into political power and comfortable digs — and legacy in Bradford:
Perhaps that cycling-up of the anti-Semitic phantasmagoria that has duped and shortchanged Bradford will stop now with Naz Shah’s turnaround and the Labour Party’s (perhaps garment-rending) introspection as regards its tolerance for bigotry (anti-Semitic cant generally signals greater antipathy and contempt for additional others matched to the speaker’s own avarice and penchant for social control and related plunder).
Underestimated: the length of the shadows cast across the Left / Far Left (on this blog, the New Old Now Old Far Out and Lost Left and Syndicate Red Brown Green) by Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia and their deliberate, intense, and medieval defamation of Jewry in service to whipping their mobs and using that energy to build the aristocracies that would then ride them into the ground.
Facebook Friend: It is claimed that Shah’s apology was much more contrite before Seamas Milne took his blue pencil to it, speaking specifically about antisemetism.
BackChannels: Then she’s now wrestling with conscience and her political position. Gosh, I would like to speak to her for a few minutes! 🙂 When we “talk politics” we seldom talk “political psychology”, but behind all of this — behind Galloway, behind the disinforming and misshaping of Bradford’s political perception — there has been at work the malignant narcissism that manipulates mobs, that reaches for their sorrows and then gives the same a plate of readymade answers to what bothers them. Counter to that: the reparative vision — and once gotten, it’s impossible to give it back or give it up.
Freedom of speech is nowhere completely free. The law excludes conspiracy and incitement to commit crimes, or, as with shouting “Fire!” in a crowded theater, to produce mayhem. In wartime, and a part of Islam seems committed to warring continuously with the west, democratic and open societies may also choose to outlaw seditious speech while tightening up on that traitorous speech related to spying.
As Choudary believes himself Muslim, as do the host of Brotherhood and Hezbollah elements, he speaks as if Muslim while embracing a regressive and retrograde agenda for all others. I doubt his case will produce much sympathy, if any, outside of Islamic circles.
While one may swear to defend to the death disagreeable political speech, the threat of imminent death associated with the speaker’s rant may draw the limit on that that principle and sentiment.
All the men were held on suspicion of being a member of, or backing a banned terrorist group and supporting terrorism. The alleged offences, which come under two counter- terrorism acts, carry a maximum penalty of seven years’ imprisonment.
Choudary was arrested at an unknown location after fleeing his home two weeks ago in the middle of the night in the wake of threats from far-Right groups.
Just hours before he was held, he posted a burst of nine inflammatory messages on Twitter, branding the US bombing raids as a ‘rallying call for Muslims’ and labelling the actions of Western governments in Muslim countries as ‘terrorism’.
Not to make light of court decisions made between fair modern British law and a feudal demagogue and rabble-rouser, perhaps the Crown has done right by treating Choudary no differently than anyone else.
Now I’m curious about the merely less dishonest newspapers!
🙂
However the scribblers spill ink or etch their brilliance into long-term optical-magnetic storage, the British jotters appear to be picking up on the latest in the conflict between the truth and political correctness.
Hardline Muslim governors led an ‘organised campaign’ to change the character of ordinary state schools, the Education Secretary Michael Gove told MPs in a fiery Commons statement this afternoon.
Her Majesty’s Inspectors carried out inspections of 21 schools in Birmingham between 5 March 2014 and 1 May 2014. All of the schools that were inspected are publicly funded and none is a faith school.
The inspectors found evidence that governors of some schools had exerted ‘inappropriate influence’ on the day to day running of schools — including narrowing of the curriculum, manipulating staff appointments and misuse of school funds. The makeup of some governing bodies has changed ‘markedly’ over recently years, leaving the schools vulnerable to ‘influence by unsuitable governors’.
In particular, some of the academies were judged by Ofsted to be breach of their funding agreements — including not having ‘broad and balanced’ curriculums, a ‘balance in religious education’ or fulfilling a ‘general requirement to promote community cohesion’.
That last excerpt includes a four-minute-and-forty-second address by Sir Michael Wilshaw, the Ofsted organization’s chief inspector. Less than two minutes along, he says, ” . . . there has been a sudden and distinct decline in these schools . . . .’
A Muslim school found to have books suggesting stoning and lashing as appropriate punishments says it is the victim of “hostility”.
According to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, the waters around Gibraltar are indisputably British territorial waters.
But Spain disputes UK sovereignty over Gibraltar, a limestone outcrop known as the Rock near the southern tip of the Iberian peninsula, which has been ruled by Britain since 1713.
In my best British vexed: how can the west expect Islam to get a grip on its small wars, whether spun into reality by criminal egotism and greed or rightful fear of dissolution associated with access to and control of money, natural resources, and trade, when it entangles itself in a spat over a long-held British property?
The causes are small but significant: cigarette smuggling; alleged environmental impact of a small artificial reef — intended to promote biodiversity and littoral marine health — on a Spanish fishery.
Stop the tobacco smugglers on the British side (equalize the pricing, perhaps; govern the volume of shipping received, perhaps; if criminally received, put the behavior in the international crime — and narcotics — category, or treat as if it was).
Compensate the fisherman, if necessary, or produce a positive economic adjustment program.
Whatever the casuistry, stop it, put the guns down and get the disputes settled by attending to the issues together.
To teach well or learn, one asks not for flattery but rather to hear the worst from one’s critics.
I’ve quoted myself recasting an ancient commonplace, but not that I’m stuck on myself: there’s plenty to be quoted from others in relation to the above trope.
With friends like Melanie Phillips, who needs enemies? Articulate and useless.
Melanie Phillips writes in her latest column, entitled The British government’s jihad against free thought, “I do not support the approach taken by either Geller or Spencer to the problem of Islamic extremism. Both have endorsed groups such as the EDL and others which at best do not deal with the thuggish elements in their ranks and at worst are truly racist or xenophobic.”
PVV: England once again pleases Islam by silencing its critics
The British government shows itself once again to be made up of Islamophiles by objecting to speech by critics of Islam. It shows the weak knees it showed in 2009 when turning down Geert Wilders for entry into England; this time, the U.S. critics of Islam Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer are banned.
Indeed, the British nanny state seems quite unconcerned with stepping in to “protect” its children’s ears and minds from comprehending a broad and complete argument.
One understands this process.
Maybe.
In deference to my Muslim friends on Facebook, I have judiciously (but not consistently with others) restrained myself from sending a friend request to Tom Trento, thereby forestalling my endorsement of his Christian agenda. Nonetheless, he’s a well studied critic of Islam armed with points difficult to dislodge and impervious to ad hominem attack.
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So let’s recap: Geller and Spencer banned for blogging critically about Islam. Al-Suleiman and Al-Arifi given free passage despite actively fomenting sectarian divisions and endorsing terrorism.
Considering the conclusion drawn by “Media Hawk”, one might find the backstabbing dismissals preceding it both absurd and compromising, as from the top, Hawk states, “Let me clarify something from the outset of this blog, so you are not confused by what I am about to say. I am no fan of Pamela Geller (Sorry Pam).”
Indeed, Melanie Phillips does the same thing when she too rises above it all with, as quoted above by Geller, “Both have endorsed groups such as the EDL and others which at best do not deal with the thuggish elements in their ranks and at worst are truly racist or xenophobic” (Phillips, Melanie, “The British government’s jihad against free thought,” blog, June 27, 2013).
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For the record, I endorse both Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer for their possession of a great ethical and moral center and vision in relation to their critiques of Islam. Where I differ involves the political topology involved, and the significance of the presence of my Muslim friends who repudiate Osama Bin Laden and the Taliban and all similar others, as they often do and with passion.
When the same promote out of their own soulful existence a contemporary Islamic humanism, I believe them.
The want to trim away “extremist elements” all around, whether those bloodying the Ummah with anti-western swagger and sectarian violence, or those espousing an absolute stance in the west (by typing a few hours about Islamic extremism and, perhaps, going out for lunch afterward) runs headlong into the absurdity just implied (in the preceding parenthesis) on three counts: 1) the “extremist” critics have something of merit to discuss, 2) do not incite or promote violence — neither Geller nor Spencer should be backward-linked to yobs who brings themselves to political movements of every kind — and 3) they might be right.
Fear of the argument — fear of criticism — produces the muzzling that has today degraded British expectations about what may be said and discussed in public.
BackChannels 