Category Archives: Gaza

FTAC: Middle East Conflict: The Absurd Preoccupation

27 Wednesday Dec 2017

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Anti-Semitism, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Epistemology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Gaza, Iran, Islamic Small Wars, Israel, Middle East, Palestinia, Political Psychology, Political Spychology, Politics, Russia

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While the Laws of War may apply to contested space and recognize the division between the “occupier” and the “occupied” — and the “stronger” and the “weaker” for that matter — there’s something now absurd about the preoccupation with an occupation that treats the “occupied” better than their own leaders.

The law and the thinking behind it have become absurd as the conflict becomes redefined. I think I’ve done my part to harp on the Soviet / post-Soviet engineering of the conflict and get in the way of the memorization of political cant and disinformation that keeps the darned thing — and the Arab apartheid of the Palestinians and related exploitation of the main base by the leadership elite — cycling.

Maybe the cadre who most genuinely care about the Palestinian main base are figuring out the true history of the conflict — that would be a better preoccupation than the one to which too many have been and are still indoctrinated.

Related on BackChannels for Palestinian Cadre – A Module

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/10/03/palestinian-kgb/

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/09/23/ftac-these-too-are-palestinians/

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/03/08/bds-cult-modules/

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2015/10/12/ftac-tip-to-the-kgbs-amplification-of-middle-eastern-anti-semitism/

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/12/27/excerpt-1920s-the-spread-of-hate-russia-germany-laqueur/

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2017/12/16/excerpt-first-political-terrorist-organization-in-history/

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2017/07/29/ftac-antidote-to-what-poisoned-the-palestinians/

https://conflict-backchannels.com/category/anti-semitism/
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FTAC: Palestinian Captivity: Thank Moscow for the PLO

19 Tuesday Dec 2017

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Anti-Semitism, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Gaza, Islamic Small Wars, Israel, Middle East, Palestinia, Philology

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It’s Russia that has used its power to keep the Palestinian leaders in loot and the Palestinian main base bereft. If the phrase “free will and determination” of Palestinians is to have any meaning at all, then the same must displace the kind of power (and repressive political methods) represented by both the PLO and Hamas. Otherwise, the population hasn’t any free will — only camps and containers to keep them suspended and held powerless by their own interlocutors.

BackChannels has practically produced a constructive module on this topic:

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/10/03/palestinian-kgb/
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https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/09/23/ftac-these-too-are-palestinians/
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https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/03/08/bds-cult-modules/
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https://conflict-backchannels.com/2015/10/12/ftac-tip-to-the-kgbs-amplification-of-middle-eastern-anti-semitism/
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https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/12/27/excerpt-1920s-the-spread-of-hate-russia-germany-laqueur/
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https://conflict-backchannels.com/2017/07/29/ftac-antidote-to-what-poisoned-the-palestinians/
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https://conflict-backchannels.com/category/anti-semitism/

 

It wold take multiple acts of willful ignorance to deny what the Soviet Union did in its day to contribute to the political abuse, channeling, and repression of what have become today’s Palestinians locked into camps, patronized (if part of what the Soviet picked up in relationships after the Nazis were defeated) or preserved to act as “human shields” in wars provoked by leaders who happily steal funds intended for their development and welfare.

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On President Trump’s ‘Jerusalem Declaration’

12 Tuesday Dec 2017

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, American Domestic Affairs, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Eurasia, Europe, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Gaza, Islamic Small Wars, Israel, Middle East, North America, Palestinia, Politics, Regions, Russia, Ukraine, United States of America

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The prompt: opprobrium for much of President Trump’s other actions and utterances with glowing exception for announcing the moving of the American Embassy to Jerusalem.

Trump has to respond to internal personal as well as external political pressures. He has to make decisions with those two universes somewhat in balance.

The “Jerusalem Declaration” sense a message to (you know what I’m going to say 　 — fill it in), and the timing is right as Israel is somewhat surrounded by PLO, Hamas, Hezbollah, Syria, and Russia (which has military stationed about eight miles from the Golan).

The West has symbolically re-planted its flag at the Israeli bridgehead with what used to be more predictable despotic “eastern” dictatorships or “politically absolute” governments (some of them, of course, plainly hideous).

Russo-Iranian imperial aggression in the middle east has pushed the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia westward, and the same has focused the remaining liberal states of EU / NATO (so perhaps not Turkey or Hungary or Poland) on resistance to extremist and tyrannous politics). The President’s move in Jerusalem nudges the other side to back off or up its game. We hope that Moscow axis will “hold” where it is and reconsider its ambitions and the means now applied — including election meddling and real fake news — toward achieving them.

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Political Spychology DeLITEful: Pavel Stroilov’s 2011 Pastiche

08 Friday Dec 2017

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Gaza, Islamic Small Wars, Israel, Middle East, Palestinia, Political Spychology

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In the same conversation, Arafat confided:

There are 250,000 Palestinians living in the US. 8,000 of them are university lecturers. Palestinians are highly educated people. Our level of education is higher than the Israelis’.22

May I be so bold as to suggest: the high proportion of American university lecturers among the long-suffering Palestinian people is a factor which needs much more attention from analysts of the Middle East. It may explain a lot.

Under the Soviet and Arab pressure, the PLO was internationally recognized as the “sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people” (imagine al-Qaeda being recognized today as the sole legitimate representative of the world’s Muslims).

Stroilov, Pavel. Behind the Desert Storm: A Secret Archive Stolen From the Kremlin that Sheds New Light on the Arab Revolutions in the Middle East (p. 45). Price World Publishing. Kindle Edition, 2011,

If a secret gets out but no one hears it or reads about it, does it count?

🙂

The key is in the “if no one”.

In fact, the professional politico in or around Russian studies knows of, say, the Mitrokhin Archive, Ion Mihai Pacepa, the volumes listed in the “Russian Section” of this blog, and doubtless Russian as well plus an enormous “much else”.

The public at large?

Perhaps not so much.

For that, Pavel Stroilov proves easily read, delightfully illuminating, and reliably provocative.

Here’s where he begins:

 This book, I am proud to say, proceeds from a grand theft aggravated by high treason.

To be more precise, it concludes a whole series of crimes—and puts a stop to it.

I have stolen these secrets from Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet dictator, a Nobel Peace Prize winner. I covertly copied thousands of secret Politburo documents from the Gorbachev Foundation Archive, and then smuggled them out of Russia.

Who among the enthused for liberal democracy would not be charmed?

And here within the virtual pages of the Kindle edition, the past catches up with the present:

Chapter 3:
Comrades and Ayatollahs

…The movement continues in the right direction: the resistance to imperialist forces. Very important roles belong to Syria and even to Iran. In this sense, Iran is our ally, even though we are very different.

Mikhail Gorbachev to Hafez Assad, 28 April 1990

BackChannels joyously recommends reading “Pavel” to Cold War beginners, and, as may be glimpsed from more critical reviews cited, as a way on to the bridge between Cold War history and today Middle East conflicts.

Additional Reference

BackChannels

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/11/23/moscows-rules-a-module/

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/11/28/a-short-page-referencing-works-by-or-associated-with-ion-mihai-pacepa/

General Reading Online

Berlinski, Claire.  “The Cold War’s Arab Spring: How the Soviets Created Today’s Middle East.”  Tablet, June 20, 2012.

Kalinovsky, Artemy.  “On the (supposedly) sensational documents from the Gorbachev Foundation Archives.”  Critical review.  LSE Ideas, May 17, 2010.

National Security Archive, George Washington University (portal).

Radchenko, Sergey.  “Behind the Desert Storm: A Secret Archive Stolen from the Kremlin That Sheds New Light on the Arab Revolutions in the Middle East by Pavel Stroilov (review).  Journal of Cold War Studies, pp. 266-268, 14:4, Fall 2012:

Devoid of any scholarly analysis, the book is full of nonsense, some of it derived from far-fetched interpretations of Stroilov’s source material and some borrowed from popular conspiracy theories. Fortunately, Stroilov is relatively brief with his own comments. Most of the book is made up of verbatim transcripts of documents, including memoranda of Gorbachev’s conversations with foreign leaders, Politburo transcripts, and various enlightening notes penned by Gorbachev’s chief foreign policy aide, Anatolii Chernyaev, and by other officials. Although excerpted and often cited out of context, these documents offer an interesting glimpse into the dynamic of Gorbachev’s policymaking and disclose hitherto unknown aspects of Soviet diplomacy during the first Gulf War.

Wilson Center.  Cold War International History Project (portal).

Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_measures

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuri_Andropov

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Peace_Council

Stroilov-bio

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FTAC: Middle East Conflict: Bring “Moscow” to Account for Palestinian Suffering

31 Tuesday Oct 2017

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Gaza, Islamic Small Wars, Israel, Palestinia, Politics, Russia

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The prompt: “The Palestinians went to Poland . . . the Israelis went to refugee camps . . . .”

A Palestinian professor had taken a group of students to Auschwitz, and on the other side, Israelis have toured Palestinian camps — so both statements are true but leave out the third and fourth parties (Soviet Era Moscow and the the post-WWII and 1948 Arab leaderships) responsible for the Arab Apartheid and political conditioning that have produced generations (70 years worth) of confined, politically programmed, and emotionally “weaponized” Palestinians — also unemployed and trapped.

It would be better if Palestinian and Israelis would travel to Moscow and ask Mr. Putin directly why the Soviet Union chose to block democracy and liberalism by transforming a post-war refugee situation into a People Resistance movement that would go on to cover another system for making money and distributing the same through systems of patronage.

Now that Palestinians have had a glimpse of the Jewish history of persecution in Europe (and in Russia) and Israelis have seen how Hamas and the PLO actually regard their people, it would be helpful as well to revisit both Arab and Soviet history at the end of WWII — and then work to get that history more securely into the past, fixed there, remember there, and, ultimately, dismissed in the interest of regional peace and cooperation.

Related on BackChannels

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/10/03/palestinian-kgb/

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2017/07/29/ftac-antidote-to-what-poisoned-the-palestinians/

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/12/27/excerpt-1920s-the-spread-of-hate-russia-germany-laqueur/

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/03/08/bds-cult-modules/

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/09/23/ftac-these-too-are-palestinians/

End “The Occupation”?

End the preoccupation with the Jews — and End the Hate (once engineered by Moscow).

One may also consider the business of producing and sustaining conflicts for politically criminal profiteering by way of corruption, skimming, and smuggling.

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FTAC: Responding to an Attempt to Conflate the Kurdish Struggle with the Palestinian Effort

03 Tuesday Oct 2017

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Gaza, Islamic Small Wars, Israel, Kurdistan, Middle East, Palestinia

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Prompt: “Kurdish statehood aspiration is mirror image of Palestinian statehood aspiration. Both will bring regional security and stability.” (Mohammed Dajani Daoudi, leader of the Islamic moderate Wasatia Movement).

Riding somebody’s coattails?

The Kurdish community of about 35 million souls possessed of a unique language and culture has been fighting for decades their division across five states that have been able to militarily dominate them and forestall their developing a seaport (that’s a long way off).

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2014/08/10/impromptu-kurdistan-israel-usa/

Back in the 1970s, the Kurdish liberation story appeared posed similarly by the same Moscow masters in the form of a PKK, which became also a terrorist organization that remains so to this day.  However, Kurdish leadership has been both able to distance itself from the PKK identity (even though it’s still there) by moving its behavior and politics strongly westward in geopolitical courtship while diminishing Moscow’s old role in the formulation of its own independent political culture and its values (reference the Rojava Revolution that it appears to have in it something of communal and liberal value for everyone).

Now, if the Palestinians should wish to dance with the Israelis and the west . . . well that would seem a revolution indeed!

For background:

  • 9/6/2017

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/markaz/2017/09/19/the-kurdish-referendum-wont-deliver-independence-heres-why-it-matters-anyway/ – 9/19/2017

http://henryjacksonsociety.org/2017/09/27/iraqi-kurdistans-independence-referendum-and-the-wests-middle-east-strategy/ – 9/27/2017

The feel of the Kurdish struggle: not-ready-for-prime-time democratic coherence — but here they are whether the surrounding powers like it or not.

That’s a good stance for independence but one of questionable character: authoritarian?  Soviet / post-Soviet?  Kleptocracy?  Rojava Revolution Utopia?

Many things have been and remain possible.

However, there comes a place where dreaming must stop and the functional administration of a state of some form must ensue.

Among things certain, however, one should not miss the murderous persecution of the Kurdish People by Turkish forces, nominally bound to NATO but in the realpolitik much influenced by President Putin’s autocratic effects on President Erdogan — and for grease: Turkish Stream.

Addendum

Since composing the response at the top of this post, the Kurdish People have expressed in referendum their desire for a state apart from their generally demeaning hosts who with force keep them from freedom.  One state, however, has supported the Kurdish Liberation struggle:

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu released a statement ahead of the referendum saying Israel “supports the legitimate efforts of the Kurdish people to attain a state of its own.”

At a conference on counter-terrorism last month, Israeli Minister of Justice Ayelet Shaked added her support, saying, “A free Kurdistan should be established, at least in Iraq. It is in the United States’ and Israel’s interest for this to happen. It is time for the US to support the process.”

http://www.cnn.com/2017/10/02/middleeast/iraqi-kurdistan-israel-support/index.html – 10/2/2017

Related: http://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/Politics-And-Diplomacy/Netanyahu-scoffs-at-Erdogans-claim-that-mossad-behind-Kurdish-referendum-506396 – 10/1/2017

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FTAC: Middle East Conflict (MEC): On the Facing of Uncomfortable Truths . . . Together

18 Monday Sep 2017

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Gaza, Israel, Middle East, Palestinia, Political Psychology

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Affect –> Negative or Positive Emotion x Intensity

Attitude = Belief x Affect

Is a thing true or false, and if true, is it a good thing or a bad thing?

So

Belief +/- contributes to Attitude.

Beliefs have also two properties: early or late establishment (primacy) and importance – degree of relevance (to survival).

The really evil thing about a misguided belief (via disinformation or the manipulation of perception) is that if set in early (e.g., childhood indoctrination), all that follows may be made to set atop what have become basic principles.

George Orwell’s _Animal Farm_ uses “Two legs good, four legs bad” to make about the same point.

In social psychology, the term for look-up would be “Attitude-Behavior Correspondence”.

It has been a rich field for the narrowed.

Atheist Christopher Hitchens has in his decease on offer a marvelous volume about adherence to basic principles and related observation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_Orwell_Matters

Kind words — actually: civil conversation — makes possible reconciliation by allowing discomfiting discoveries to be shared with one’s adversary, and later, former adversary, without fear of disaster or punishment. While its true that in much of the world, the “loyal lie” may account for one’s lifestyle and very life itself, the principle of facing an uncomfortable truth proves stronger than lies over time.

On many of these posts, the conversational partner has been Mohammed Dajani Daoudi who has been exploring a middle way in Islam beneath the banner of his Wasatia Movement.

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FTAC: Middle East Conflict – Moscow’s Project – Abbas’s End

24 Thursday Aug 2017

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Gaza, Israel, Middle East, Palestinia

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Abba — Arafat’s known and others may be suspect — bend to Moscow (the KGB record never goes away), and as Moscow has nowhere to go that wouldn’t be trapped in a century-and-one-half old imperial time bubble, neither has Abbas, who has not been able to do more for the Palestinians than enrich his own network through corruption.

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/10/03/palestinian-kgb/

Imho (who else’s?), the Middle East Conflict was Moscow’s post-WWII Cold War Era project, and here perhaps comes the beginning of the end with Abbas bottled up and — for having no place to go — floating backward into history.

It should be all over but the fighting, and on that surreal “Animal Farm” political habitat referred to as Moscow has lost for itself through its displays of barbarism in Syria and Ukraine all moral and noble authority.  Neither the “Mafia State” nor Mahmoud Abbas’s need much effort for tarring as regards their corrupted systems.

The prompt for these remarks: http://www.jpost.com/Arab-Israeli-Conflict/Palestinian-leadership-considers-dissolving-PA-says-Abbas-insider-503268 (8/23/2017).

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