Category Archives: Middle East

FTAC: Essential Truth and the Palestinians

12 Monday Mar 2018

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, A Little Wisdom, Anti-Semitism, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Epistemology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Gaza, Israel, Middle East, Palestinia, Philology, Philosophy, Political Psychology

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Prompt: the host had assigned a loose title about “ethnic cleansing” to historian Benny Morris.  “Thought leaders” on the web will either traffic in earnest speech (when earnest) or make themselves worthless with disingenuous and false claims.

Cultures engage in “magical thinking” in their fairy tales, legends, and myths. They are part of the spirit of the place. Engaging in the same in the context of study produces only “revisionism” favorable either to the narcissist in the mirror or the one in power. Differentiation between what is true — and what a joy it would be for Palestinians to know what is true! — and what seems (!) flattering and patronizing plays a major part in the installation and maintenance of the world’s dictatorships. Among the _malign_, the narcissist can never be wrong.

From other and prior portions of the same conversation:

_The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine_ was authored by Ilan Pappe — this represents his reputation today:

https://newrepublic.com/article/85344/ilan-pappe-sloppy-dishonest-historian

***

Benny Morris, by comparison, has been a tough “New Historian”. This is his page on Amazon (USA): https://www.amazon.com/Benny-Morris/e/B001IQX8V8/

I have been through _1948_, not the others, but even so it mentions the Jewish neighbors who begged Arabs to stay home while Arab forces encouraged flight before their own onslaught.

Efraim Karsh — _Palestine Betrayed_ — may be worth a mention as well.

Again, the Russo-Arabian “framing” of the conflict would seem after 70 years of insistent repetition on the way to being . . . found out.

Related on BackChannels: https://conflict-backchannels.com/2018/02/06/set-palestinian-kgb-and-other-backchannels-observations-related-to-the-middle-east-conflict/

In the same ballpark

” . . . to hate and resist occupation and occupiers . . .” would be to hate and resist Fatah and Hamas who insist on their own power while depriving Palestinians of their vote, their right to assemble in opposition to either, and of their right to speak freely, openly, without fear.

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War | East-West | Abomination | Syria | Bombing Hospitals

24 Saturday Feb 2018

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Iran, Politics, Russia, Syria, United States of America

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2/21/2018

At first, it looked like an ordinary dictator’s response to a little criticism and a comparatively polite people’s request for a little consideration and power, but in 2011, what looked like a civil war masked the deeper, more prolonged, and vicious desire to sustain medieval absolute power — the power of the tyrant — against the entire Christian, humanist, and liberal experience and political philosophy of the western world.

2013-fetusWBullet-432x.jpg

Are there to be no differences between property and persons?

Are such malign narcissistic personalities, uniquely limited in conscience and that mysterious thing we call heart, to be given free reign to assert themselves as powerful primarily with false flag theater (e.g, “Moscow Apartment Bombings“, “Assad v The Terrorists”) followed by an expressed cruelty and sadism in power that encounters neither boundaries nor limits?

Know thy tyrants.

Putin-Assad-Khamenei-524x.jpg

This east-west conflict between thieving barbarians and the just nobility of western civilization has been brewing in the post-WWII region in time, and the world that won’t massacre refugees is being drawn into the vortex.

This morning, Americans were vilifying a policeman who stood outside a school in Florida while a mass killing was taking place within.

Should he not have acted?

Perhaps we should now ask about the nations watching from similar sidelines the horror on continuous display in Syria: where has been their courage, humanity, and resolve as Russian and Syrian air power directly bombed nearly two dozen hospitals and other medical facilities in the vicinity of East Ghouta, Syria?

Reference

Alsaafin, Linah and Zouhir Al Shimale.  “‘Survive or die together’: More than 400 killed in Eastern Ghouta.” Al Jazeera, February 7, 2018.

Chulov, Martin.  “Medical crisis in east Ghouta as hospitals ‘systematically targeted'”.  The Guardian, February 23, 2018.

Khadder, Kareem.  “Ghouta residents now face being burned out of their destroyed homes.”  CNN, February 23, 2018.

Williams, Sara Elizabeth.  “UN poised to vote on ceasefire to end deadly bombing in Syria’s Ghouta.”  The Telegraph, February 24, 2018.

Addendum to Reference From March 15, 2024.

Triebert, Christiaan, Evan Hill, Malachy Browne, Whitney Hurst, Dmitriy Khavin, Masha Froliak.  “How Times Reporters Proved Russia Bombed Syrian Hospitals.”  The New York Times, October 13, 2019, updated April 7, 2020.

Addendum to Reference – Update June 15, 2024

Hill, Evan, Christian Triebert, Malachy Browne, Dmitry Khavin, Drew Jordan, Whitney Hurst.  “Russia Bombed Four Syrian Hospitals.  We Have Proof.”  The New York Times, September 15, 2020.

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Syria: The Horror: Around 2012

24 Saturday Feb 2018

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Politics, Syria

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Putin-Assad-Khamenei

Bashar al-Assad By Kremlin.ru, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=44378508 | Vladimir Putiin By Kremlin.ru, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=60759727 | Ali Khameini By Tasnim News Agency, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=57953266

Houla, 2012

Posted to YouTube June 27, 2012.

Related:

Ryskulova, Nargiza and agencies.  “Syria: war crimes committed by regime in Houla, UN finds.”  The Telegraph, August 15, 2012.

“The commission found reasonable grounds to believe that government forces and the Shabbiha had committed the crimes against humanity of murder and of torture, war crimes and gross violations of international human rights law and international humanitarian law, including unlawful killing, torture, arbitrary arrest and detention, sexual violence, indiscriminate attack, pillaging and destruction of property,” said the 102-page report by the independent investigators led by Paulo Pinheiro.

Torture

Human Rights Watch.  “Torture Archipelago”.  July 3, 2012.

Since the beginning of anti-government protests in March 2011, Syrian authorities have subjected tens of thousands of people to arbitrary arrests, unlawful detentions, enforced disappearances, ill-treatment, and torture using an extensive network of detention facilities, an archipelago of torture centers, scattered throughout Syria.

Hell of a title —

Bond, Anthony.  “We took their fingernails out with pliers and we made them eat them. We made them suck their own blood off the floor’: Grisly accounts from inside Syria’s ’27 torture centres'”.  Daily Mail, July 3, 2012.

Related:

Posted to YouTube May 16, 2013.

18+ torture video — “Syrian Police Torture Protester” — posted to YouTube September 1, 2011

BackChannels experience suggests that if it’s called what it is — “war p___n” — it will attract a lot of viewers, such are the low desires of the world when it comes to deliberately seeking artless depictions of sex and violence.  the above URL links to a video of a young man who wears a tire around his chest while receiving a beating.

Related

Black, Ian.  “Bashar al-Assad implicated in Syria war crimes, says UN.”  The Guardian, December 2, 2013.

A UN inquiry has found “massive evidence” that the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, is implicated in war crimes as the latest reported death toll in the country’s civil war reached 126,000.

Navi Pillay, the UN’s human rights chief, said a commission of inquiry into human rights violations in Syria “has produced massive evidence … [of] very serious crimes, war crimes, crimes against humanity” and that “the evidence indicates responsibility at the highest level of government, including the head of state.”

Posted to YouTube Dec. 2, 2013.

Cumming-Bruce, Nick and Rick Gladstone.  “U.N. Says Execution Video from Syria Shows Apparent War Crime.”  The New York Times, November 2, 2012.

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FTAC: Putin, Terrorism, Autocracy, and the New Nationalism

14 Wednesday Feb 2018

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, American Domestic Affairs, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Europe, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Hungary, Middle East, Political Psychology, Political Spychology, Politics, Russia, Turkey, United States of America

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When Russian jets first overflew Turkish airspace in 2015, Erdogan stood fast in his refusal of apology.

https://www.cnn.com/2015/11/26/middleeast/syria-turkey-russia-warplane-shot-down/index.html

Six months later, he did what Netanyahu had done in relation to the Mavi Marmara: he apologized.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jun/27/kremlin-says-erdogan-apologises-russian-jet-turkish

Setting aside the Israeli story a moment, points of leverage may have involved the “Turkish Stream” energy project, a piece of “realpolitik”, and an appeal to the narcissistic concept of cultural leadership and state in which the “Great Leader” is the embodiment of the living state concept _and entitled_ to aggrandizement and glory without limit (or, clinically, “unlimited narcissistic supply). Putin’s vision appears to me to be that of the medieval world sustained with raw power put in place of democracy.

The look of the mode — big palaces, nepotism on a royal scale, confusion in relation to the boundaries of person and state (and the state’s treasury) — marks the medieval mind and related revanche.

Men like Putin, Assad, Khamenei, Erdogan, Orban may consider true popular democratic government as impeding their own authority, sovereignty, and will. While the term “autocrat” sounds quite bureaucratic, similar concepts — caliph, emperor, king, sultan — fit these guys.

Because we know of the “Moscow Apartment Bombings” and that Russia has been arming the Taliban in Afghanistan — and there’s more back there with Zawahiri and others — it may not be too far fetched to suggest that Moscow has manipulated terrorism to induce in struck targets a predictable patriotic new nationalism and that “the terrorists” — ISIS or PKK — now provide a platform for conflict, all against all, and without end. Where Putin has held sway, he has turned back history’s clock.

Our President Trump has had no issues bearing and wearing the mantle of authority, but it would be facile to say he hasn’t had some issues with the “Estates” of a matured democracy.  In that regard, he may fit the world to which Putin has wished to return the world.

Inspiration for the above note:

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Set: “Palestinian KGB” and Other BackChannel’s Observations Related to the Middle East Conflict

06 Tuesday Feb 2018

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Anti-Semitism, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Gaza, Israel, Middle East, Palestinia, Political Psychology, Politics

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As BackChannels interests developed, it became possible to plug-and-play appropriate material into Facebook and Twitter feeds with the hope that the same would pass through the western choirs, as they may be, and into the Palestinian’s own debilitating, degrading, faked-up “orientalist” gang counseling resistance with one hand and thieving (via corruption and other methods) from the same with the other.

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/2017/12/29/ftac-middle-east-conflict-back-to-max-erwin-von-scheubner-richter-and-forward-to-the-plundering-of-palestinian-misery-by-palestinian-leadership-elites/

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

–https://conflict-backchannels.com/2019/02/24/shuafat-on-the-edge-between-good-and-evil/

Those genuinely interested in peace but making their careers, for now, on the spine of the conflict may today ask themselves how much they need to sustain the conflict as a conveniently evil institution.

As a dictatorship or sham democracy, one may expect today’s Moscow and company in similarly absolute power to want to keep another generation of refugees or Gaza and West Bank residents trapped in time and kept exactly as they are.  The business that made Arafat and Abbas multimillionaires and Haniyeh and Mashaal billionaires has been pretty good for cash and the related power that comes with dispensing the same as patronage.  Why stop now?  Or ten years from now?  Or twenty . . . or seventy-plus?

BackChannels would ask a different question: what do the open democracies wish to do with political systems redolent of medieval and totalitarian epochs and post-modern and politically criminal worlds?

Should Palestinians not “enjoy” another 70+ years as the political captives of their interlocutors?

Related on the Web

Bergman, Judith. “The Soviet-Palestinian Lie.” Gatestone Institute, October 16, 2016.

Bergman, Ronen. “The KGB’s Middle East Files: Palestinians in the Service of Mother Russia.” YNet News, April 16, 2011 & YNet News. “The KGB’s Middle East Files”.  October 28, 2016 to December 1, 2016.

Fish, Christopher.  “The Deception of Palestinian Nationalism.”  The Stanford Review, February 27, 2008.

Lundberg, Kirsten O. “Arafat says Soviets support PLO ties with Jordan.” UPI, January 13, 1983.

There’s no end to bibliography and producing it becomes after a while mindless.  With strong word processing software, it may be possible for the URLs to become a long list at the back of a book, so BackChannels will again freeze this “set” about here (August 12, 2018).  If there is a place to go with the contemporary history of the middle east conflict, it would be into Yuri Andropov’s relationship with terror worldwide and then, to get to “now”, the KGB/FSB’s relationship with al-Qaeda, the Taliban, ISIS, and others that so bedevil the west and that appear in Vladimir Putin’s  “RealPolitikal Theater” to support feudal-medieval political absolutism.

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Also in Media: FPA Blog: “How Can America Bring Iran Back to the West?” | January 11, 2018.

28 Sunday Jan 2018

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Also in Media, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Iran, Politics

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The recent Russian rejection of an American initiative at the UN Security Council for the world community to express solidarity with the Iranian protesters in the face of the Islamist regime’s brutalities did not come as a surprise. In fact, given the history of Russia’s imperialistic behavior towards Iran, the rejection came as a natural move on the part of Putin. In this article I am going to make a survey of Russian imperialism in Iran and indicate what America can do to neutralize that threat and consequently bring Iran back to the West.

https://foreignpolicyblogs.com/2018/01/11/can-america-bring-iran-back-west/

One more excerpt as a teaser to this reading highly recommended:

The Tudeh’s professed goal, according to Abrahamian (Iran Between Two Revolutions, 1982), was to “adapt Marxism to the local environment” so that in the end a Soviet-style Communist revolution can be brought about in Iran. In other words, as Iran was mostly a Shiite Muslim community, the Tudeh would use Shiite religious jargon and lore in order to attract the attention of the masses. This ploy would later play into the hands of the revolutionary Islamists who took over in 1979.

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FTAC: +70 Years of Palestinian and Israeli Coexistence: A Comment

25 Thursday Jan 2018

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

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It has happened: the refugees of 1948; the KGB-designed Arafat and PLO and associated Abbas; and Hamas, held to account for rocket fire from Gaza: all — whatever has been the mix — have coexisted with Israel for 70 years.

If not happily, there’s a story there that goes back to the WWII and the character of the Soviet Union then and comes forward to that of the Russian Federation today. Absolute power, corruption on the part of the powerful, the deceptive and disingenuous use of language — such have been the variables that have sustained Palestinian hardship and an angry coexistence with the Jewish neighbor from near the ruins of Ottoman power and Nazi adventure in the middle east. When the phantoms of the Soviet wake up and then decide to go back to sleep forever, then the coexistence will become peaceful, pleasant, productive, rewarding.

I don’t know if there’s a fairy tail ending with “peace and prosperity” for all, but I feel the burden and weight of the “Nakba” should be rightly assigned to the post-WWII role taken up by an historically autocratic, authoritarian, elitist Russia having difficulty shaking off its attachments to “political absolutism” and related egotism, narcissism, and hypersensitivity to civilizational self-concept and image.

Of course Moscow means to look noble and powerful before the world.

Well, here it has its chance to stop covering its yesterdays, which may include immediately two major revolutions and the weathering of three governments within the past 100 years, and shrug away the chaos and dishonesty that have brought a mess to Syria, hardship to Ukraine, and continuous meaningless and needless suffering to the Palestinian main base.  BackChannels may well see in its crystal ball — why else publish such a blog?  🙂 — the difficulty of transitioning patronage and power away from corrupt elites in the effort to better and honestly serve the interests of an abused and disenfranchised once refugee population, but where else to go?  Let the political criminals and gamblers settle up, reinvest, and move on to the challenges posed by genuinely noble causes and enterprises.

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Iran Protests 2018: Killed or Detained: Faces

23 Tuesday Jan 2018

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Iran, Politics

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WhoIsNextSepidehIran-Protester-pr-blockFacesdetainees

Detainees disappeared
Families of a number of detained protesters have not been able to obtain any information about their loved ones. Among them are Ashkan Absavaran, a 20-year-old male detainee, and Sepideh Farhan (Farahabadi), a young female. Ashkan Absavaran informed his family of his detention in a telephone call on 4 January. Officials of Evin prison told his family later that he had disappeared.

The IRGC and its affiliated paramilitary force, the Basij, have been mainly responsible for the heavy crackdown on the protesters. Having initially denied direct involvement in repressing the protesters, the IRGC commander declared on 3 January that they had taken action in three provinces. Furthermore, the IRGC has been responsible for torturing the detainees in order to make false confessions in Wards 2A and 240 of Evin prison.

FIDH: Worldwide Movement for Human Rights.  “31 protesters died in streets & detention centres; more than 3,700 detained.”  January 10, 2018.

BackChannels has been here before.

Embedded on the post, “On Human Rights Day, Iran is Again Covered in Blood” — Maryam Rajavi, BackChannels readers will find added from 2009 “Iran -References to the Serial Murders and Related — From April 22, 2009” and a listing of the dead titled “Iran — The Mute”.

For how long will Iran’s payoffs for murder continue to be accepted by the patronized of the state?

Noted on the Human Rights Day post:

In one of the above clips, Maryam Rajavi put the number of regime executed political martyrs at above 120,000, with 30,000 killed shortly after the taking of power in 1988.

Related Online

Stecklow, Steve, Babak Dehghanpisheh and Yeganeh Torbati.  “Khamenei controls massive financial empire built on property seizures.”  Reuters, November 11, 2013.

The Iran Observer.  “Iran Lawyer Raises Concern Over Missing Hijab Protester.”  January 2018.

Posted to YouTube on January 20, 2018.

Children of Iran’s captive south run through the streets chanting “Death to Rouhani” – video date reported from source as January 22, 2018.

Updates from the News Online

Rannard, Georgina.  “Iran hijab protester: Where is she?”  BBC News, January 23, 2018.

 

 

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