Mudar Zahran promoted the above via social networks about 50 minutes ago: whom he addressed, where, and when was not provided.
Addendum: Mudar Zahran speaking at the Menachem Begin Heritage Center, “Two States for Two Peoples on Two Banks of the Jordan River,” Dr. Arieh Eldad, Chair, Jerusalem, August 25, 2013.
In reference, I’ve provided links to Zahrans writings and related material as well as items focusing on Jordanian stability.
In addition, Zahran has noted the landing of a shell in Ramtha, Jordan within the past three hours. Such mortar shell “spillover” (who knows with what intent it traveled?) has been a regular occurrence in Ramtha this past year.
The king was flying himself to Karak, which is one of the poorer cities in a distressingly poor country, to have lunch with the leaders of Jordan’s largest tribes, which form the spine of Jordan’s military and political elite. More than half of all Jordanians are of Palestinian origin, with roots on the West Bank of the Jordan River, but the tribal leaders are from the East Bank, and the Hashemite kings have depended on East Bankers to defend the throne since the Hashemites first came to what was then called Transjordan from Mecca almost 100 years ago.
Jordan shares the region’s troubles: a faltering economy; rampant unemployment, especially among the young; and a popular demand for a say in how the country is governed.
“Jordan is stable, but you feel what is so unstable,” says Labib Kamhawi, describing the contradictions. He is the head of the National Front for Reform, a coalition of political groups and civil society organizations. “The decision-making process is without any input from the people.”
Almost 2 million people have fled Syria since the civil war began in early 2011, according to U.N. numbers. By some estimates 800,000 of these poured into neighboring Jordan, a traditional safe haven for refugees from previously war-stricken regions such as Iraq and Palestine. This influx is taking a heavy toll on the Arab nation which by the end of the year may host as many as a million refugees.
Hassan Abu Hanieh, political analyst and expert on Islamic groups, said earlier this week that Jordanians are considered among the most prominent foreign nationalities fighting alongside Islamist forces in the anti-Assad rebellion, as hundreds have allegedly joined the radical and ultraconservative Salafist jihadist groups of Jabhat Al Nusra and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, both Al Qaeda-affiliated, he said.
Under Abbas, the PA has been waging a war of words against the Jewish state, engaging in anti-Semitic incitement of the vilest kind and using Holocaust denial, racial slurs, and Judeophobic epithets. It is a stream of hostility cultivated and implemented over the past decade under the Abbas leadership. A stream which is competing with “Der Ewige Jude”, the Eternal Jew, favored by Joseph Goebbels, in which Jews are compared to rats.
A comment in The New York Times on the funding and training of Palestinian Authority Security Forces:
Much of the training supported by the United States and the European Union was conducted in Jordan, away from traditional Palestinian bases, in hopes that months away from home would cement a new professional ethos. Yet old neighborhood and clan ties continued to be used in recruitment and some of the most powerful Palestinian security organizations remained outside the reform regimen.
We write today because we are deeply disturbed by recent reports of large-scale political arrests being carried out by the Palestinian Authority inside the occupied West Bank. These arrests have targeted critics of the Palestinian Authority, including youth activists, human rights defenders, prisoners’ rights organizers and scholars, and journalists, including former political prisoners held by Israel and released in the October 2011 prisoner exchange agreement and subsequently.
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This operation is currently under the command of Rear Admiral Paul Bushong.9 We are deeply disturbed by the security coordination regime and the role of the United States, highly committed to supporting the Israeli military diplomatically, economically and militarily, in maintaining this regime to the detriment of Palestinians’ freedom of association and expression.
The oddness of the fracturing of the flow down from duel authoritarian modes and the simplistic ways of understanding them seems to me ever striking. Plainly through its behavior and language over time, the Palestinian Authority remains bent on Israel’s destruction and the theft outright of the Jewish state, and in that it has no place to go, and yet it seems to cull or silence competitors either worse than itself or better.
**
Perhaps it would be well to mention here that the American freedom of speech concept was and remains intended to protect discomforting or unpopular speech — not conspiracy or incitement to commit crimes, but politically distasteful speech, and that on the basis that protecting legitimate criticism is a necessary facet of a living and progressing democracy.
As regards then the constituents governed by the Palestinian Authority, one might then take an interest in whose voices have been intimidated, restrained, or silenced by it.
It appears one state cannot bribe another — that is what western assistance seems made to look like — off its language-conveyed-and-sustained program, however destructive, evil, and deeply misguided and suffocating to its own people that program may be.
I had the opportunity to meet with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, who expressed grave concern both for Israel’s security as well as for the prospects for peace. “How,” he asked us, “could the Palestinian leadership be a serious partner for peace if it welcomed into its ranks vicious terrorists who continue to deny the very right of the state of Israel to exist?” His concern is more than justified.
Gross corruption charges have for a long time been directed at the PLO, which already by 1993 was the richest terrorist organization in the world, according to the British National Criminal Intelligence Service, having assets of ten billion dollars and an annual income of approximately two billion dollars. The Daily Telegraph reported in 1999 that the PLO had secretly invested over 50 billion dollars around the world. Still, Norway has continuously broken bread with these people.
Arguably, the use of propaganda by Palestinians to gain compassion and political support has been their one great success. The Palestinian narrative of victimhood, with its falsifications of history and politics, its portrayal of themselves as not only innocent but the most compelling victims in the world, its staging of events to blame Israel for atrocities they themselves have committed, its deliberate concentration on alleged injuries or deaths of children, and its achievement in persuading much of the media to accept and advance its manipulation of language and action, have all been part of its success in the propaganda war.
The loosely compiled list that follows may be offered more for impression than information.
As with the above material, it’s indicative of the official continuance of a surreal state of affairs, one in which Israel and the west put up effort in funding, labor, and services to bring the refugees of 1948 into a modern state and state of being while the graying post-Soviet remnant of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) continues to promote an anti-Semitic, genocidal, and totalitarian engine suited to its own combined tribal and mafioso needs.
The real story hasn’t to do with murder per se but with the complete and final enslavement and subjugation of the refugees generations by way of the control of what they may read and speak and think.
Since the establishment of limited Palestinian self-rule in the West Bank and Gaza Strip in the mid-1990s, the U.S. government has committed over $4 billion in bilateral assistance to the Palestinians, who are among the world’s largest per capita recipients of international foreign aid.
Successive Administrations have requested aid for the Palestinians to support at least three major U.S. policy priorities of interest to Congress:
• Preventing terrorism against Israel from Hamas and other militant organizations.
• Fostering stability, prosperity, and self-governance in the West Bank that inclines Palestinians toward peaceful coexistence with Israel and a “two-state solution”.
Those who follow the middle east conflict more closely know that beneath the sawing of vocal interlocutors in the Preoccupied Territories, legitimate economic development, and utility and trade throughput plus access to higher education and sophisticated medical services have formed arrangements that the well known vanguard of the vain may feel beneath their own considerations.
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First, as I just said, I profoundly believe that it is in the national security interest of the United States to help resolve the Israeli-Palestinian dispute.
Second, I am one of those who firmly believes in a two-state solution: a Palestinian state living in peace and security alongside the state of Israel is the only solution that will meet the long-term needs of Israel and the aspirations of the Palestinian people. This has long been the policy of our national leadership, and I share it.
Third, let me state very clearly my deep conviction—and I tell this to my Israeli friends all the time—that as President Obama said last year, the bond between the United States and Israel is unbreakable today, it is unbreakable tomorrow, and it is unbreakable forever. [Applause.]
Before I get into the details of the program, I would like to remind you that the Government of Israel has 100% ransparency into all aspects of US support to the PA Security Forces (PASF) and that the USSC will never advocate or sponsor activities that could threaten Israeli security.
Convincing Washington to support the security mission remains a tall order even today. Despite the undisputed progress the Palestinian security force has shown on the ground, Republican lawmakers in the House of Representatives have recently put yet another hold on funds for maintaining and developing the force, as a demonstration of their displeasure with policies adopted by the Palestinian Authority.
Saving the Bashar al-Assad regime by getting it to junk weapons of mass destruction it doesn’t need while vastly improving Russia’s international image is a good deal for them
(Reuters) – In the photograph the two robed men stand shoulder-to-shoulder, one tall and erect, the other more heavyset. Both smile for the camera. The picture from Tehran is a rare record of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei meeting Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, the head of Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shi’ite paramilitary group.
A family in Israel’s Arab minority is mourning the death of their son, killed fighting in the Syrian civil war.
Zaki Agbariah said he is proud of his 28-year-old son Mueid. The family told Channel 1 television Wednesday that Mueid didn’t tell anybody that he was going to Syria to fight.
Syria has deterrent weapons, more advanced than anything in its chemical arsenal, that could blindside Israel in mere moments, Syrian President Bashar Assad claimed Thursday.
“Originally, we produced chemical weapons in the 1980s as a deterrent to Israel’s nuclear capabilities,” Assad said in an interview with the Hezbollah-affiliated, Lebanon-based Al-Akhbar newspaper, adding that “today, we have weapons that are far more important and sophisticated and that can blindside Israel in the blink of an eye.”
Suddenly there is a volley of fire. “Get down guys,” the soldiers say. Some dive for cover in a concrete trench.
A sergeant explains that bombs and bullets from the Syrian war regularly land inside Israeli territory. The shooting may have been warning shots, or maybe just some stray bullets from a gunfight on the outskirts of Quneitra.
When it’s the people in the apartment next door, one monitors the loud voices, the character of the yelling, something breaking like a plate or glass. Then something big and heavy pounds against the wall.
Him? Her? The kid? Furniture?
Time to call the police.
Even that level of involvement may not be so easy.
If the domestic combatants figure out it was you called the cops, watch your back.
If there are children involved, you have not only called the police but social services and probably initiated a separations investigation, and some suffering mama or papa may not be too happy about that — and might figure you convenient for blaming first.
And all you was doin’ was watchin’ tv.
* * *
In the big bad ol’ world, states don’t intervene in wars so much as get sucked into them, rather like ships trying to sail on their way past the darkest of expanding vortex.
So the Jews, who were just watchin’ the tv too, stand beside the conflict in Syria not exactly unhappy to see Hezbollah invested in the battle while Russia and the United States stand outside the bloody sandbox trying to keep to keep the flying shit from spilling out farther into their own affairs.
That’s not really neighborly, but what’s a good and highly functioning state or two very powerful ones to do?
* * *
Israel has stepped up its sensitivity to potential activity on its borders; beyond that, and some sales of gas masks, it’s busy with being. With life. It has its security arrangements in place; it’s people — Jewish and other Israelis — have taken steps to be helpful to those in need of help — e.g.,
Delusional narcissistic reflection of motives — as with propaganda, the aggressor claims defense from what he himself has in mind for his target — would seem to have organized the Assad mentality to believe itself the target of Israeli aggression, a belief and posture abetting and motivating the state’s and state culture’s own aggression against Israel.
Give that a moment to settle.
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Within the framework of “civilizational narcissism”, Haider Mobarak’s term, this nifty nugget that you will find only here — “Delusional Narcissistic Reflection of Motives” — accounts much for the form of rhetoric embraced (language) and combat pursued (behavior) throughout the Islamic Small Wars.
The social grammar — the hidden rule learned early — is probably the message that if not defended, something will be taken from the child (e.g., “If you don’t eat your supper now, I shall give it to your brother” — a common enough phrase according to Raphael Patai).
What happens with the ancient and modern House of Israel with its civilizational psychology operating quite differently is that it’s outside of and unconcerned with this mess that is of intense interest to someone else enveloped in what might be called a narcissistic trap, that is the world spun around the narcissist’s delusions in such a way that it organizes the surrounding social architecture. In essence, the dictator at some point cannot escape his own dictatorship: he’s created too much myth, made too many corrupt deals, bargained himself right into a prison of the soul. The flow down is to fighters who cannot refuse the fight however absurd and surreal its imagined basis.
Who needs Pharaoh, that most magnificent construct of the malignant narcissist around whom the world revolves?
The Jews, and with a mixed multitude suffering the same insight, walked.
Who needs Assad?
The Jews, and the Israelis who are not only Jews, stand to the side eager only to help the bereaved, injured, and lost and otherwise maintain their defenses.
* * *
“Two mad wasps in a bell jar” — those who go into Syria to fight other than the one dictatorship go to combat over issues irrelevant to existence, the humanity of humanity, and probably to God as well, to whom, in the ancient manner, they may serve as illustration for the ages.
Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta, whose nephew and his fiancé were among the victims, maintained a policy that Israel introduced to the world in the Entebbe raid and then abandoned in recent years – no negotiations with terrorists. “We will not negotiate with terrorists,” said Colonel Cyrus Oguna, a Kenyan military spokesman.
Such extreme violence against minorities tends to be perpetrated by the country’s many and various militant organisations. The group that claimed responsibility for this latest attack has links to the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan and said it was acting in retaliation for drone strikes. Yet the problem runs far deeper than a few rogue elements. Disturbingly, these extremist groups, which have been allowed to operate by successive governments, do have an impact on the national debate. This has contributed to increasing intolerance across society.
In south central Pennsylvania this afternoon, the news on the television mounted in a corner beneath the ceiling of the diner where I was enjoying a late lunch hung on the tragedy playing out in Nairobi’s Westgate Mall. This other story involving a death toll greater than Westgate — 85 as opposed to 68 — and targeting a Christian community and its sacred space may have had a different presence, less visceral, less important for having taken place in Muslim-majority Pakistan and having involved a less affluent and cosmopolitan community.
Perhaps.
Or perhaps we are more used to hearing of Islamist outrages in Pakistan — something in the realm of Islamic arm twisting and terror happens every day or every other day in Pakistan’s part of the Islamic Small Wars — and then, again, it’s a Muslim state and one with an outlook very different from Christian Kenya’s with its historic and decent relationship with Israel.
***
Their 52-year-old father had been looking forward to it, particularly the period after the service when the congregation spills out into the enclosed courtyard to chat.
“He was looking forward to seeing his friends,” said Joel.
It’s convenient, I suppose, for this old bleeding heart to bleed for everyone at the desktop: in my pseudo-solopsist online existence, all of the Islamic Small Wars (and a few others) occupy the same space, about 24-inches from eyes to screen. In real space, are they not on just one planet? Are they not coinciding, if not colliding, in time?
Is there anything that would make the murder of a 52-year-old father returning to church in Peshawar any less horrific and tragic than that of his doppelgänger gone shopping for a few hours in a mall in Nairobi?
Perhaps Pakistanis who now must admit the state’s declared religion has been hewed to, commandeered, perverted, or merely exploited (choose any option) by those “who would fly planes into office building” or blow up wedding processions, funerals, or parishioners gathering after services at church should lend attention to the more harmonious and tolerant values of the west and of the Christians. And of the Jews. And, perhaps, infidel others ever so much more at peace with the wide, wide world and themselves.
Israeli interests in Kenya run deep. According to the website of Israel’s embassy in Nairobi, Israel has provided technical assistance in areas such as agriculture and medicine for decades, in some cases going back to the days before Kenyan independence in 1963.
Speeches (“Becoming Men and Women of Integrity” 12/6/2011: “Tad R. Callister was a member of the Presidency of the Seventy of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints when this devotional address was given on 6 December 2011.”
The 8200 unit of the Israeli Defence Forces, which specialises in electronic surveillance, intercepted a conversation between Syrian officials regarding the use of chemical weapons, an unnamed former Mossad official told Focus. The content of the conversation was relayed to the US, the ex-official said.
The 8200 unit collects and analyses electronic data, including wiretapped telephone calls and emails. It is the largest unit in the IDF.
Funky timing: for four or five days, not one mention of specifically “who” in the where, what, how, and why of the chemical weapons attack in the Damascus suburbs — and today the answer seems to be unavoidable in online search and dated back to August 24 (see the Debka File citation in reference).
Nonetheless, if attributed to Maher al-Assad’s command, then the world has a figure already steeped in legendary criminal malice: there’s not much he can do to cast himself into even a darker light.
Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish prime minister, said in March 2011 that Maher’s actions during the uprising approached “savagery,” and urged Bashar to send him into exile.
If it only took 11 minutes for President Truman to recognize the State of Israel, why it requires not 11 years but decades to give Palestinians their independence and to bring back the borders before the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. Taking the unilateral role in this conflict U.S. should also be impartial.
In every pro-Palestinian effort, the right-of-return is always Number 1 on the agenda. You will never bear witness to a pro-Palestinian group that is divorced from this pipe-dream.
So virulent has been middle east peace talking that it seems only closed Facebook forums might qualify as “collegial and scholarly” in the area, an observation made when I started looking for a place to channel liberal Turkish interest in the conflict.
I didn’t want to hustle anyone into the rah-rah Zionist camp nor leave any to the wolves roaming the cyber corridors of any open proto-Nazi “hate-peace” peace groups.
As the group I found is a closed one, I won’t make mention of it here.
🙂
Still, it strikes me as remarkable how even persons of good intent may be misled into believing that Israel came into existence as compensation for the Holocaust, an event that in the twisted minds of some didn’t happen (oh yes it did) and in others for which there is no compensation although there has been that for a range of crimes — start with the theft of property — and it is good that apology, consideration, fairness, and forgiveness persist in this world and that some have yet the courage to prove it.
Of course, it may be less good that anti-Semitism provoked by ambitions related to religious succession and woven into the politics of the middle east also persist, and the poisoned politics coming of that have made the Arab refugees of 1948 first among its victims.
* * *
Yet despite the uproar, Fox is already a popular brand in the Palestinian territories. Store owners stock Fox products even in Hamas-controlled Gaza, where the government is far more hostile to Israel.
‘‘People in Gaza know that these items are made in Israel, but they buy them because they’re good quality,’’ said shopkeeper Raji Isaac, who has offered Fox products in his Gaza City store for the past four years. ‘‘Customers always look for good products and reasonable prices, and Fox is offering that.’’
As conflicts go, problems with the one known as the “middle east conflict” — today, probably the most peaceful conflict extant in the region — include the intransigent anti-Zionist / anti-Semitic ambitions of those in political power in the West Bank and in Gaza and the fact that The Preoccupation with Israel includes Israeli services in such municipal basics as electricity and water, significant contributions in the transport of goods, encouragement of trade and employment, and provisions for refugees in the areas of advanced education and health.
You would think that living and working in close proximity would encourage peace but never so much so if one party or the other believes itself mistreated or robbed, and that even if through nothing more than repeated libels.
Additional Reference
Karsh, Efraim. Palestine Betrayed. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010.
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