Introduction: “Tzachi Hanegbi, member of the Knesset, Likud, and former Israeli minister of intelligence, addresses The Washington Institute’s 2013 Soref Symposium. Thursday, May 9, 2013.”
The concept of “integrity” constitutes a global western theme in relation to the Islamic Small Wars.
In essence, the west anchors itself in empiricism, talks policy in the open, and the broader and more inclusive the conversation in participation, comprehension, and reach, the better for mankind.
The cited video, accessible worldwide with exception existing only in states too autocratic or too fragile and tender (or all three) provides a good example of the intellectual process. It has breadth and depth and may be viewed as easily in Riyadh or Islamabad as it is accessible in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.
In this video, the Jewish question, oh my, actually comes up in the final minutes.
I may remind readers, Chomsky’s disingenuous rhetoric notwithstanding, that all of the world’s states contain a something-majority, whether Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Muslim or something else: count on the world’s one Jewish-majority state surviving as such, and that specifically as the center of a global ethnic and religious commune with its heart ever in Jerusalem and its body in the spirit of the Land of Israel.
Let’s call what the politicians do the “Bloody Dog and Pony Show” because Iran’s attempts to shuttle weapons to Hezbollah and Syrian intentions to swipe at Israel have been a part of the country’s Arab Spring Screaming since the git-go.
Politically impotent potentates like Bashar al-Assad and Ayatollah Khamenei have with their self-indulging narcissistic zeal painted themselves into corners from which they cannot grow their state’s peaceful and productive capacities but rather, and primarily, wage war against all. Their kind devour themselves but not without first inviting the destruction of everything around them.
As noted here, Syria’s chief problem has to do with the complete absence of anything good “in play” in the battle space. Who today among the civilized, contained, and reasoning should care to support, essentially, Maher al-Assad’s established and continuing sadism?
Who of contemporary western bent should care to see the mixed bag of Islamist rebels, Al Qaeda among them, prevail?
Syria has become the dense sucking black star of the Islamic Small Wars.
None should be surprised about loose chemical warheads or rebels (allegedly) mixing up their own small batches of burning chlorine-based clouds.
Wikipedia’s report of deaths-to-date ascribed to the civil war: between 69,390 and 82,130. “On 13 February 2013, the United Nations put out an estimate of 70,000 that had died in the war.”
Whatever figure you choose, it’s pretty bad.
And there’s no need to tidy up the Syrian slaughterhouse and its deep well of death with a figure – 70,000 – as fat and round as it is unfathomable: “A boy of 12 sees his best friend shot through the heart. Another of 15 is held in a cell with 150 other people, and taken out every day to be put in a giant wheel and burnt with cigarettes” (Reuters, March 13, 2013).
Presuming that most are not reading this “in-country”, imagine having that obscenity taking place in your backyard.
Countermeasures?
Fill the moats, drop the portcullis, and set free those birds with the baked clay!
All of that the Jews have done and continue to do in the defense of the children of Israel.
And truth to tell when faced with so devouring a black and burning hole in the fabric of our humanity globally as Syria has become, it is to the defense of humanity — all God’s children — for which the “Zionist entity” strikes at the weapons centers and shipments that would bring to the whole world nothing less than the same insensate burning.
Hi, X — the “Sunni world” has deep investments in the west and in western trade and concomitant cooperation with the west, so on that broad basis, I believe, it proves itself the better partner in addressing Islamic expansion. The Ayatollah, Hamas, and Hezbollah — the active sworn enemies of Israel and the west — have cursed Shiite Islam in light of western interests as well as global interests in peace.
Iran’s shipments of rockets to Syria (for relay to and use by Hezbollah as well as Assad) signals a bump in Iran’s genocidal war on the “Zionist Entity”. In the experience of the Jews, this is the work of God pulling Israel into a defensive but active position: i.e., the people have once again been threatened with annihilation, the enemy is powerful, and it has shifted from stubborn Big Talk to “arming up” on Israel’s border — and Israel, which has every right to defend herself, will not only do so, but probably, as it has for thousands of years, change the course of history a little bit for the better.
I’ve mentioned many times, Usman, that there were no good guys within the Syrian “battle space” — and the “guys” outside of it, Putin and Obama, add non-Hezbollah Lebanese and then the Israelis, haven’t had a way toward dealing with any of the parties involved! In a very real sense, Syrians have been lost for a while and the effects of Saudi vs. Iran rivalry in the region have been making themselves felt.
If Syria’s rebel forces could both overrun the Assad regime _and reject the establishment of a hard Sunni line and its backers_ then Syrians might recover their state and stand for themselves instead of as proxies to NATO / Sunni / Saudi power as well as Russian / Iranian / Shiite power.
Sound impossible?
Ninety percent of the bloodshed has to do with the content of minds, and I believe minds can and will turn themselves in a good direction, but it might take some assistance to get them there.
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From the moment Maher al-Assad set loose an army absent of any apparent rules of engagement, Syria embarked on a war that could have no other end then to keep the state embroiled in conflict.
The civilian cry for justice and revenge alone would forestall peace with the state as constituted.
Of course, there’s more to the story than that posed by civil war against a despotic family.
Russia’s post-Soviet neglect of its client for all but business and defense concerns contributed to Syria’s “weak link” status in the middle east. The odd political bedfellow with an Iran beneath the Ayatollah’s black wing has only added to the Assad’s isolation. The family hasn’t really been in power in support of religious fanaticism, but that other fanatic passion for “Jew hate” has nonetheless sufficed to partially position the state as an Iranian proxy, and that in turn, plus population, has made the state a contemplated morsel for the House of Saud.
All around, Syria serves as the latest emblem of a weak state to be battered between superpowers and eaten alive by jackals.
For diplomats and professional war game enthusiasts, one might suppose that Iran’s smuggling rockets to Israel fits with some wise Pentagon planning, a conceit I would wish not the least bit true.
For the religious, this confluence of malignant forces — of grandiose messianic ambition in the person of Ayatollah Khamenei, of unsurpassed ambition and greed on the part of what my correspondent called “Sunni Islam” (which I read as Saudi Arabian ambition, expansion, and regional rivalry), of tangent involvement by Russia, the United States, and NATO — one may look to God perhaps arranging one more defensive war for the Jews and all of an Israel that with God will not tolerate in its enemy’s camps the presence of accurate and deadly rockets within range of her children.
The AlJazeera video only glances a reference, about four seconds, at the the shipping of arms between Iran and Syria. If it were an honest outfit, it would have reported on arms trafficking between Iran and Syria first, then the relationship that has made Syria partially dependent on Iranian financing and military support, and then, perhaps this is asking too much, the common bonding in Jew hate and the hatred of the “Zionist entity” that primarily serves to mask the essential impotence of the leadership of both states, an impotence etched into permanent consciousness by the blood and suffering of their own people at their own hands — a thing observable from Evin Prison to Maher al-Assad’s casual firing into passersby on an opposite street corner.
When I was a little iddle boy, debates like the one at the address above would have fallen into the category that is “thinking about the unthinkable”. These days, that unthinkable has to be thought about around the world, not only on the Korean peninsula or around Kashmir in the completely absurd India vs. Pakistan debacle or other now old nuclear armed regions but in the middle east as well, and there not only Israel (perhaps) vs. Whoever (this playing the anti-Semites line of rant) but Whoever vs. Whoever.
During the above debate, those who tune in will hear description of the thinking that would be at work in a “poly-nuclear”middle east.
Yesterday, Mohammed Salayma, 16 or 17 years old and in the vicinity of the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron, took the pistol pictured to the left and raised it to the face of an Israeli border guard. A fellow officer drew her service weapon and shot Salayma three times, killing him.
Salayma’s gun turned out a replica.
Out in the wild, the sale and manufacture of replica guns serve interests from children’s toys to theatrical productions. In the post-Stalinist, post-Soviet drama in which “actions” are planned for effect — or perhaps they just happen that way (sure they do) — perhaps someone had written the headline before arming or criminally failing to educate the victim. As much seems suggested by the above gun replica.
Do your own Googling if the subject interests you.
The Royal Canadian Mounted Police define a replica as “a device that is not a real firearm, but that was designed to look exactly or almost exactly like a real firearm.”
Look again at that photograph of the pistol that was raised to a guard’s face in the middle east conflict zone.
Suicide-by-cop or just plain awesome stupidity (or communal or lonesome but in any case vicious and unscrupulous political ambition), the story will come out as to what directly motivated Mohammed Salayma, an older teenager, to walk up to to a military guard, stick a fake gun in his face, and thereby draw fire.
Salayma’s death alone would be a tragedy, albeit not one unfamiliar to armed conflicts, but in the middle east conflict, riots and worse come from such sparks.
Ma’an News Agency, ever reluctant to put a whole truth (remember: clear, accurate, complete) up top in its articles (here’s the prosaic lead: “An Israeli border guard officer on Wednesday shot dead a Palestinian teenager in Hebron’s Old City in the southern West Bank”), nonetheless winds around to quoting Israel police: “Initial findings are that he had a fake pistol that he pointed at the officers at the time of the incident.” I’ll call that middle-of-the-clip effort a kind of balanced reporting. (Ma’an News Agency. “Israeli forces shoot, kill Hebron teenager”).
Leaving the conflict to fester requires defensive actions against terror, and by definition, all of such actions (activities, policies) are intended to get in the way of the next explosion. The only way this ends is with, unbelievably, a pro-Israeli revolution from within the Arab ranks and the Ummah, as hard a thing to imagine as ever can be imagined, but with autocrats from Assad to Erdogan (add Morsi, possibly) failing their own states and Hamas exacting its toll on every business it can reach (add in the Ayatollah and Nasrallah for the headaches they’re creating in their own neighborhoods), something like it can happen and perhaps must.
In the U.S. southern states of 1860, there wasn’t a landowner who could not imagine life without plantations and slaves; by 1865, that world was gone forever.
And good riddance.
The adaptation of liberal humanism around the world (credit ancient Greece with the spirit) involves the desire for credible explanations about things and, possibly too (it’s easy to forget those old playwrights) integrity. When the lies stop, everyone will be welcomed on the bus.
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The problem here is the criminal controls the behavior. In old revolutionary circles — probably in contemporary ones too — sitting around and thinking up ways to provoke authorities into initiating excessively brutal crackdowns was the way toward seducing “the masses”. What may be changing — I think it is — is the world surrounding the world of the would-be old school (atheist or religious) revolutionary, who may be boasting (inventing) their triumphs while losing their stride. For a while, true of both stars in the sky and in Hollywood, they’ll burn brighter before going out.
Scott Pelley, Anchor, CBS Evening News: “The Israelis say that civilians are being killed because Hamas militants are hiding among the civilians. What have you seen?”
Charlie D’Agata, CBS Journalists in Gaza City: “Hamas will tell you that that is absolutely not the case, but we know it is the case. The attack on the tv tower today, they were aiming at a person from the Islamic Jihad. People from that group had to admit that, yes indeed, that person was hiding among journalists.”
Should the figures be 100,000 rather than 300,000 Persian Jews prior to the establishment of the State of Israel?
I don’t know.
By any count, it seems fewer than 10,000 have chosen to remain in Iran.
Iran itself trots out the Neturei Karta — http://www.adl.org/extremism/karta/ — a cult, a fringe, at best, in the Jewish community both in Israel and the Diaspora.
[Responding to how I feel about five Israel deaths or 100 Palestinian deaths]:
“What bothers me most is not that Arabs kill our children, but that they force us to kill theirs.” Golda Meir, National Press Club, Washington, D.C., 1957.
The Jews I know have never felt differently.
Don’t you think it’s time to stop lobbing rockets at Israel? At the Jews?
Contemplating the destruction of the Jews?
Demonizing the Jews?
Hamas, heavily taxing its constituents, including “tunnel millionaires”, moving goods inbound and outbound with the cooperation of the IDF, purchasing electricity from Israel, ferrying its sick to Israeli hospitals when necessary, etc., nonetheless launched more than 1000 rockets, some supplied by Iran with a range of 45 miles, into Israel in 2012. Targets: any Israeli: Muslim, Christian, Jewish, adult or child, man or woman.
And then by design, Hamas has kept their own in harm’s way, launching within 1/2 block of residences, gasoline stations, schools, mosques, etc.
Hamas and Israel have entered a ceasefire at this time.
We’ll see how it holds up.
Trust the Jews, at least, for having the integrity to keep their side of the bargain (as they did ejecting their own from Gaza in 2005, a bid to “trade land for peace,” leaving Gaza Judenfrei).
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