In a recent Tweet, the high and not so mighty Dmitry Medvedev, chair of the Security Council of Russia, referred to Ukrainian President Zelensky as a “provincial clown”. After so many years of accumulating material about Russia, I had quite a bit to pack into one riposte–>
In the end, the darkness you believe surrounds you–that paranoia–is your own and fixed by a reliably delusional, grandiose, messianic, and malign narcissism that has no other purpose than the want of adoration (narcissistic supply).
The Israeli Defense Force (IDF) analysis has included review of Israeli military launch records; radar air activity tracking records; reverse-tracked rocket fire traced to the proximity of the hospital, i.e., rocket trajectory show the launch took place south of the hospital–and not far from it; and independent video of the actual failure of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad’s rocket.
In intercepted audio communications, launch controller-tracker officers note the location of launch as a cemetery behind the hospital . . . . So there’s the location south of the hospital–a cemetery!–and both cause and opportunity to lie about the attempt.
Regarding the matter of Hamas having lied to Palestinians to cover the shame attending a failed rocket launch (while blaming it on the other guy), the ways have always been several: cover, deflect, deny, erase, fabricate, frame, and omit.
No more clear an example of #MedievalVModern may appear than the war that has broken out between #Hamas and #Israel. For Hamas, only the weapons are modern. The motivations have been deeply medieval, well rooted in directed misperception, i.e., disinformation, fabrications, lies promoted and sustained by edict and enforced by unquestionable and vicious authority. In essence-this on the Gaza Strip-the #Palestinians have been perceptually controlled by their own “leaders”, and they are now bound to be driven to destruction by them too.
Sviatoslav finally succeeded in destroying Khazar imperial power in the 960s. The Khazar fortresses of Sarkel and Tamatarkha fell to the Rus in 965, with the capital city of Atil following circa 967 or 969. A visitor to Atil wrote soon after the sacking of the city: “The Rus attacked, and no grape or raisin remained, not a leaf on a branch.”
Today’s Khazarian and Rus descendants and others who have come to define Ukraine’s cultural, ethnic, and tribal endowments in total have become #ModernPeople, overwhelmingly lawful, fair and just, and peaceful in business and in general comportment while the most corrupt of persistent medieval thugs, Viktor Yanukovych, had been booted back to Moscow by general popular revolution, e.g., https://world.time.com/2014/02/22/ukraines-president-flees-protestors-capture-kiev/ and with the moral support of Ukraine’s army.
Hamas X Russian Political Absolutism, Barbarism, and Mafia
While Russia professes good will daily through its X-platformed embassy sites, its claims inevitably belie its own horrendous evil in the realms of chaos and mass destruction. The at-hand BackChannels references: https://conflict-backchannels.com/2023/06/28/a-dark-mirror-in-language/. For those most evil, language may be perverted to cover crime in the present and humiliation in the past as the rogue malign narcissistic psychology fashions strategies in language to match.
When it comes to bombing apartment buildings in the dead of night, none have done it better than #MadVlad who today threatens nuclear annihilation using the same methods in language inversion and psychological project to blackmail the west into the abandonment of Ukraine. And that’s “above the table”, i.e., in plain sight.
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The speech came after hardline political scientists and commentators in Russia said a return to nuclear testing could send a powerful message to Moscow’s enemies in the west. “I hear calls to start testing nuclear weapons, to return to testing,” Putin said.
Some in Russia have called for Putin to detonate a nuclear bomb to show the west that Moscow’s patience over its support for Ukraine and apparent unwillingness to negotiate is wearing thin.
Hamas has long found a sympathetic (or sympathetic-acting) presence in Mikhail Bogdanov, Moscow’s envoy to the Middle East. While it has been an independent actor, it appears to have also long-ingested the former communist state’s anti-Semitic rants and emphatic absolutism while holding itself n place with methods familiar to all dictatorships (for overview: https://freedomhouse.org/country/gaza-strip/freedom-world/2023).
Much has been written about the #RussianMafiaState. For quick reference->
Israel has been hampered in its assistance to Ukraine by a deconfliction arrangement with Russia over Syrian airspace (e.g., https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/russia-sees-military-coordination-with-israel-syria-continuing-2022-02-26/). Nonetheless, The Jewish State has arrived today with biblical, global, and modern histories. In Israel it has a homeland; around the world, it contains communities of all races and cultural strands bound together by Judaism, its Torah, and Jewish experience and lore across thousands of years; and it has so contributed to the ideas of the west that the entire political culture may refer to itself as “Judeo-Christian” as well as “Greco-Roman”. The barbarians from European North and Asian East have in Russia chosen to remain defined by whatever fear they may install in others and then tribute exact or steal in wealth. That’s what they did in the Byzantine and Medieval Eras, and that is what they are doing now.
In the Middle East, the Palestinians have served Russia as a block and goad to the west and the burgeoning and vibrant cultures associated with the democratic open societies of the world whose freedoms may be well symbolized by Israel’s vitality.
In Eastern Europe, Ukraine by revolution, election, and today war has in every possible way become part of the west, leaving Russia to attempt its capture and subjection or destruction even while “Muscovy” dies or destroys itself for its own archaic and deeply displaced, misguided, and perverse ambitions.
Under the guise of “liberation movements”, Russia’s “caretakers”, like Arafat and Abbas, plunder their own communities. The Palestinians remain both too vulnerable as weak parties before western power and its modern character and consequently too egotistical and proud themselves to believe it. In essence, they have imprisoned themselves in the dogma of “resistance”, and there they keep themselves ideologically, intellectually, financially, and, for the most part, physically trapped and suffocated.
“Bogdanov, Palestinians” serves as a useful starting search string on both the assertion, topic, and theme involving Russia’s power of persuasion in keeping the Palestinians hooked on a liberation theology that has no true foundation in anyone’s reality, not even that of the Palestinian leadership. All Russia has known through the 20th and 21st Centuries has been the horror that comes with the “leadership” of delusional thieves, Stalin to Putin with just a moment of post-Cold War sunlight between.
For seriously curious, independent, and industrious Palestinians, there’s a lot to unpack, a lot of Muscovian agitprop (intellectual infection) to address, and then only repairs to be done in relation to community-wide financial arrangements, security, and transparency.
For political philosophy in relation to the bullshit Moscow has been selling for decades to dictators, extremists, and useful idiots all along, I would suggest there is no justice but rather a better and happier side to history, and that it is more the true history of the assertion of human dignity, freedom, liberation, inclusion, and security. For Palestinians, it would be better to cross over to the happier side of history–and the future–than remain mired in the darkest and deepest pools of confusion, hate, and resentment.
I’ve had to revise this page (Dec. 19, 2023) in response to my own poor editing ages ago. My comment, here italicized, had appeared some time ago on Facebook, and I seem not in the mood to search for it.
* Why focus always returns to Israel or the Jews eludes me when, in fact, the primary conflict driver has been Arab and other (well, Russian) anti-Semitic habit welded to lies and willful political misguidance to keep democracy and humanism away from the dictatorships, including those systems headed by Palestinian “leaders”, disinterested in either.In fact, The Palestinians have been long weaponized – politically perverted in mind, heart, soul — by those who have most pretended to represent them (while in fact ensuring their continued plunder). *
In 2016, Ronen Bergman put together a piece of history involving Russia’s then secret political police, the KGB, and the Palestinians. It was the start of an era in which an alternative Palestinian liberation myth could be installed in the refugee population and used to goad the west (with terrorism) and block the expansion of western liberalism as represented by Israel. The rest would seem a history of capture and enslavement by anti-democratic and illiberal forces bent on plundering Palestinian support for their own pockets and lavish lifestyles.
I confess only to having made note of the KGB-Palestinian relationship a time or two and to asking the apparently novel question: why has the world not focused on the Palestinian’s feudal internal politics and the community’s historic emotional dependence on Moscow?
What earlier Arab intransigence, anti-Semitism, and KGB ends have done to the Arab refugees of 1948 (at that time, left stranded between armies) has perhaps today an unspeakable quality as vast sums intended for the community’s development have been diverted to war (“Resistance!” they call it) for more than 73 years — and the Palestinian main base has gotten nothing out of that deal but absolute rule (no elections!), corruption and exploitation, Gaza (for Hamas!), neglect, political repression, and, as a sop in the press, the globally distributed artificial image of an heroic narcissism for ultimately gazing upon themselves.
Related Online
The easiest of related web searches: “Fatah, corruption”; “Hamas, corruption”; “Palestinian child soldiers”; etc. Have curiosity, and you may travel online to your heart’s content. Nonetheless, I’ve listed a few ready references with which to click through to both greater knowledge and reflection.
Ali was incredulous. “You call them a government?” he asked. “I call them mafia.”
For the 22-year-old Palestinian resident of the southern occupied West Bank city of Hebron, the Palestinian Authority (PA), headed by President Mahmoud Abbas, is a corrupt institution that benefits only an elite few.
Rather like the good (!) arbitrator, doctor, judge, police, or social worker who steps in to resolve an issue once, I’d like not to again feel compelled to revisit this workout for the Middle East Conflict.
From the Awesome Conversation
Iran’s expansionist ambitions, religious and spatial, and its relations with the authoritarian hypocrisies of China and Russia doubtlessly drove the Arab world into Israeli alliance as made possible by western flexibility and Israeli supremacy in security technologies internal and external. Two games potentially in play: firm alliances for inevitable war (choose sides!); encourage the Cold War habituated PLO/PA and the post-Soviet Islamist Hamas to embark on their own transformation in light of their both lost and losing positions, for by the motion or progress known to history, both have stayed in the same ideological or political space for too long.
The Middle East Conflict has been always about Power — Medieval or Modern — Across Time and never truly about real estate, the latter a myth for mobs. The Fatah and Hamas sponsors have long endorsed criminal absolutism, would that some Palestinians would wake up and respond appropriately to their own duping exploitation.
Former President Trump himself knew all about mobs , which partially accounts for why he was as he was. His world was black and white, Hobbesian, zero sum and not a space for political clarity, honesty, or vision. Unfortunately, Biden, the much better man, appears to be looking backward himself and inclined to replay some aspects of the Obama Era experience (as with the renewal of the JCPOA) rather than move forward with the radical prospect of expecting from the Palestinians courage, independence, and integrity in their own right and from the best of themselves rather than the unscrupulous worst.
For deep conservatives in Israel and elsewhere, the presence of the Palestinians tends to fade away behind defensive considerations coupled with ambitions that make the Palestinian population . . . a bothersome “externality” to the revival of a romanticized ancient Jewish past. That’s not going to work either.
Staying locked in place in Orwellian fashion (in which case, someone like myself will be chatyping here in about the same way 75 years from now) may work (if any have the patience for it); war might work, but considering the “East v West” alliances involved, what would contain it? Best bet: encouraging an appropriate and honest sea change across the Palestinian campus, and while that may be difficult to approach — i.e., the idea that they really have been duped and exploited for more than 73 years by those most claiming to defend them — not by the Jews, Israelis, or the West, which is true — it’s the only practical and inherently achievable, good, and helpful adjustment in sight.
Shorthand for the above: the Palestinians were birthed on the wrong side of history and this is a good time, so motivated by pain and threat as facilitated by their own camps for the Palestinians to bravely call history — their own true history — back into open review against all post-WWII and Soviet / post-Soviet Era dogma and propaganda.
On the dishonest tack foisted upon the refugees of 1948 and subsequent wars by Arab and Communist — and now Islamist — interests, there never will be a state recognized by responsible Israelis, Europeans, North Americans, or others worldwide. Some idiots in official diplomatic circles and many on the know-nothing (Far Out) Left will encourage you to death, but history and the worldwide community of historians and political analysts possessed of integrity will never rewrite or revise their subjects to suit your egotism, emotions, or narcissism or, ultimately, Jew hate and want of absolute and capricious power.
The sooner Palestinians wake up to History Undeniable, the sooner Israelis and Palestinians may stop dying in the path of poisonous falsehoods.
Recommended related look-ups: KGB, PLO | Iranian proxy, Hamas
The Palestinians, now a community in situ, have let Moscow and others lie to them through their own leaders, and the price paid for that has been more than 73 years of sustained conflict, death, and dislocation.
BackChannels 