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~ Conflict, Culture, Language, Psychology

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Category Archives: Middle East

Also in Media: “How to save Gaza: Palestinian American says it’s time to stop blaming Israel” | by Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib | Jewish Journal | July 12, 2017

15 Saturday Jul 2017

Posted by commart in 21st Century Feudal, Also in Media, Gaza, Gaza Suzerain, Israel, Middle East, Palestinia

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Gaza, MEC, middle east conflict, Palestinian diaspora

Now, as an American citizen living in San Francisco, I can write about my experiences and perspectives in ways that many in Gaza cannot, fearing only that my parents, siblings and other family members who remain there are not held responsible for my opinions. My folks are sometimes jealous of my ability to speak my mind and remind me frequently to consider the implications for them of what I say.

While Israel continues to play a significant role in Gaza’s affairs, the grim anniversary of the Hamas takeover warrants focusing less on Israel than the role that Palestinian political organizations have played in worsening the misery for Gaza’s more than 2 million residents. And that has led me to conclude that the United Nations, for all its problems and the hate it incurs by Israelis, is perhaps Gazans’ best hope for progress.

Read the Whole Thing: How to save Gaza: Palestinian American says it’s time to stop blaming Israel – 7/12/2017.

Related on BackChannels

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

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

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

Related on the Web

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/9090/soviet-union-palestinians

http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/ru/contents/articles/originals/2017/05/palestinian-authority-stop-funding-electricity-israel-gaza.html

http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2017/06/palestine-hamas-lebanon-hezbollah-rapprochement.html

–33–

FTAC: MEC: Russia’s Earlier Influence of the Palestinians

13 Thursday Jul 2017

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

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authoritarianism, autocracy, dictatorship, intellectual history, middle east conflict, Orwellian rhetoric, Palestinian community, Palestinian honor, Palestinian integrity, Russian anti-Semitism

I’ve harped on this answer around Facebook, and may have gotten a bad rep for it, but I stand behind what I have found in relation to the middle east conflict and the political history of the 20th Century:

The west and the Palestinians (together) have been duped by Moscow!

Repeat it twelve times — because it’s true.

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

I know that Arafat and Abbas are deeply admired figures in the Palestinian territories, but I / we also know that the Palestinians have been deeply controlled by the powerful management of their information space accompanied by political repression.

None may have peace without integrity and none may have integrity without full acknowledgement and comprehension of how Russia’s history and political culture contributed to Nazism and to the later formulation of Palestinian “liberation” rhetoric — and then the raiding of the proceeds of the business.

Regarding the path of the forged “Protocols” and their transfer into Germany in the 1920s:

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

The Palestinians may not know it, but they’re in good position, professor Dajani especially, to become the world’s leaders in bona fide intellectual history IF they can get The Bear off their backs.

That’s something to think about.

In the interest of peace, one may also lend consideration to whether evolving and modifying the systems of infantilizing disinformation (for “the masses” who would fare better being treated like human beings) and related loyalty and patronage should be changed quickly or slowly — but they have to be changed IF the Palestinians and their advocates (or interlocutors) genuinely wish for better lives — real dignity, real freedom, honorable prosperity — all the way around.

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

Repressive, selfish, and totalitarian regimes hide what they do by shielding their followers from cogent and legitimate information. They basically keep their own in order — loyalty to powerful narcissists — by keeping them deprived of knowledge.

The officials who continue to harp on Mein Kampf, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and countless rumors that serve as “blood libels” should be of another day a long time ago.

Those who sustain such practices with their mouths should be regarded as phantoms by Israelis and Palestinians equally.


The prompt for the rant had been reference to a Palestinian Authority “leader” talking up the forgery that was The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the question raised was what to do today about that kind of baldfaced lying.

BackChannels shorter answer: drag it out into the sun where all may see it.

–33–

FTAC: Middle East Conflict – So Old It has Produced Its Own Useful Boilerplate

03 Monday Jul 2017

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

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Tags

21st Century Feudalism, Arab Anachronism, Exploiting Palestinians, middle east conflict, Moscow / Moscow-Tehran, Red-Green Criminality, The Occupation, The Preoccupation

Hamas is the occupying force in Gaza.

http://www.tabletmag.com/scroll/180400/hamas-killed-160-palestinian-children-to-build-terror-tunnels

Both Ismail Haniyeh and Khaled Mashaal have developed reputations as billionaires while the Palestinian main base is held captive — politically intimidated, ruthlessly exploited, frequently punished — in the interest of many money-making methods.

In many ways, the middle east conflict has been institutionalized and for the once KGB developed leaderships turned into a pretty good family business.

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

Among the more interesting aspects of the conflict may be the language programming developed to keep the machinery working for the criminally wealthy: “The Occupation” (I call it “The Preoccupation with the Jews!”); “Resistance” (to meaningful education, health care, economic development, etc.). In all aspects, the rhetoric fed to the Palestinians is medieval and designed to serve the equivalent of feudal lords and connected families (a patronage system).

Notably, Hamas associates and backers, starting with Moscow / Moscow-Tehran, share investments in similarly feudal systems and absolute power.


–33–

FTAC: Moscow-Tehran – Slow Diplomacy with the Untrustworthy

25 Sunday Jun 2017

Posted by commart in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Iran, Russia

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21st Century Feudalism, American diplomacy, bridged administration, Iran, Moscow, Russia, Tehran

Given Tehran / Moscow-Tehran’s duplicity where their ambitions have been concerned, State would have known the Iranian treaty worthless before it was signed and consequently used weakness (remember Kerry’s pink tie?) to purchase time for other measures.

In that Moscow-Tehran tie together in analysis, the same policy in diplomacy has helped Moscow-Damascus destroy Syria while running down Moscow’s ready cash base. Possibly: we weren’t going to be blackmailed by the incubating of ISIS or the threat of mass migration; instead, in time-honored fashion, we have been watching the enemies of the west destroy themselves.

The Saudi deal — billions in arms — seems more complex but pursues similar ends in relation to the continued diminishment of the once Soviet Era axis that Moscow has been trying to sustain and Washington has been trying to neutralize and transform. In that the Saudis have had a long history with The English and today are today heavily invested in western success (look over Kingdom Holdings) and taking some steps to alter the deeply medieval character of the state — https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/11/02/sixteen-women-the-kingdoms-most-powerful/ — the relationship may be more valuable than the arc of time involved in getting a medieval state that has contained itself from violently aggressing against the west — into position for updating.

That these “moves” work too slowly and across Administrations dissatisfies us, but some — well, maybe just me — who take the long view of Russian, Islamic, and post-revolution Iranian politics, the popular demand for direct-fast change promises primarily to deliver the chaos and violence of revolution and war (which may have to be met in any case given Moscow-Tehran’s commitment to feudalism, feudal political methods, and the sustaining for their populations a medieval worldview). It would seem better to maneuver both into being less ready for war on a large scale — one by allowing the leadership to run the state short on ready operating cash (Russia) and the other (Iran) by way of the modern wants of its constituents, who will find they cannot get what they want if their regime cannot contain itself.


–33–

FTAC: Observation: Arab Refusal of Culpability for the Middle East Conflict

21 Wednesday Jun 2017

Posted by commart in 21st Century Feudal, Anti-Semitism, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Egypt, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Gaza, Gaza Suzerain, Islamic Small Wars, Israel, Jordan, Palestinia, Political Psychology

≈ Leave a comment

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Arab and Russian anti-Semitism, Arab feudalism, malignant narcissism, MEC, medieval vs modern, middle east conflict, political psychology

Prompt: mention of “Israel apartheid” (a standard trope in the anti-Semitic wings of the New Old Now Old Far Out and Lost Left) and “letting the refugees return”.


How about ending Arab apartheid and absorbing the Arab refugee generations whose first were abandoned between armies in 1948?

http://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300172348/palestine-betrayed

http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/article/enough-said-false-scholarship-edward-said

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

Oh, and how about giving the Palestinians their money back, considering the manners in which Arafat and Abbas became multi-millionaires and Haniyeh and Mashaal billionaires.

Sustaining the MEC supports feudalism, makes crooks wealthy, and extends for Palestinians The Preoccupation with the Jews.


Prompt: Israel is the sole cause of the refugee issue.


Arab absence of empathy and favoring of an anti-Semitic posture and related supremacist assumptions at the end of WWII led to the refusal of terms and the subsequent genocidal (river to the sea) gang-up on the new Jewish State. The “Palestinians” — Egyptian and Jordanian Arabs, migrants also to the fields of the new agricultural economy of the day — had been encouraged out of the way of battle with hopes the Jews would be gone when it was over.

It didn’t work out that way.

It takes a mighty and malign narcissism to refuse culpability for a disaster like the one dealt to the Arab refugees of 1948 (never mind the 800,000 Jewish refugees from Arab lands that would follow in the wake of the war) and then to turn the same bereft population into a political “poker chip” for the enrichment of a criminal few unconscionable enough to spend decades manipulating hate in the cause of their own aggrandizement.

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

It appears that given a choice between encouraging conflict and undertaking development, the Jew-hating and once Soviet-loving portion of the Arab bloc invariably persists in poisoning the Palestinian mind, keeping the conflict alive, and handily siphoning off the world’s charity to line its own pockets in related systems of patronage, not that any should want “powerful families” to find themselves bereft of their portion of the take.


Related on BackChannels

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

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

–33–

FTAC: “Claims regarding Iran’s innocence . . . .”

14 Wednesday Jun 2017

Posted by commart in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Iran, Political Psychology, Russia

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

absolute power, feudalism, Iran, kleptocracy, medieval worldview, Russia

Claims regarding Iran’s innocence in relation to global terrorism are fallacious. The state supports Hezbollah and Hamas and is itself an immense kleptocracy — http://www.reuters.com/investigates/iran/#article/part1 .

As regards Sunni-based terrorism, a fair look-up of “Zawahiri, Russia” should straighten that out. In the wake of the Soviet defeat in the 1980s, the criminals appear to have picked up on the CIA/ISI method of producing a treasury-draining proxy (Charlie Wilson’s Taliban) and throwing it back at the west.

The Kingdom has invested heavily in western success (via Kingdom Holdings) and has embarked on cultural updating sufficient to produce an iconic set of accomplished women — https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/11/02/sixteen-women-the-kingdoms-most-powerful/ . However, sigh, in the medieval worldview, the legitimacy of kingdoms rest on the persuasive power of clerics.

My trope for all dictatorships: “Different Talks — Same Walk!”

They all produce leaders who look good on the outside — well, maybe Qadaffi’s a stretch on that — but turn out irredeemably ugly on the inside. I call them “MaligNarcs”, short for “Malignant Narcissists”.

The greater east-west framework: feudal methods, medieval worldview v modern democratic rule of law and the constraint of power by representative means. On that, the House of Saud has a long history with “the English” and may be expected to lean westward with time. The same may not be said today of Moscow / Moscow-Tehran and all the related phantoms of the Soviet Era.


–33–

FTAC: MEC – Passing Into History (One Hopes One Day Soon)

04 Sunday Jun 2017

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

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

21st Century Feudalism, 21st Century Neo-Feudalism, disinformation, kleptocracy, middle east conflict, New Nationalism, psychology, weaponizing humans

Q: “Is it our psychology or our nature that prevents us from being peace loving people?”

A: As regards the “middle east conflict”: _malign and manipulated_ psychology.

Post-WWII, post-Nazi Germany, Soviet Era agitation-propaganda leveraging anti-Semitic sentiment –> “Paranoid Delusional Narcissistic Reflection of Motivation“, i.e., the myth that the Jews were out to take over the middle east —

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

_Reflexive Control and the Encouragement of Absolute Nationalism_

Terrorism promotes intense concern with basic security wherever, however, and for whatever reason politically-focused violence takes place. In crayon fashion here (I’m pressed for time this morning), political violence associated with the Palestinian cause, from the air hijackings of the 1970s to the latest murder by car, essentially promotes Israeli nationalist fervor and the western program. The deeper problem: it never helped the Palestinians but rather the piratical leaderships drawing income from the sustaining of the conflict. Arafat passed away a multi-millionaire; Abbas has accumulated a similar share of wealth; Haniyeh and Mashaal have developed reputations as billionaires.

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

Israelis and Palestinians genuinely tired of near 70 years of artificially sustained conflict — and the “information / disinformation psychology” has been a part of keeping things just as they have been — may need to bring these questions up with “Moscow”.

Historically, Moscow has been intensely anti-Semitic — https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/12/27/excerpt-1920s-the-spread-of-hate-russia-germany-laqueur/ — but under Putin’s guidance, somewhat opposite today. Things have changed even though Putin continues to foster or control or appreciate (choose any option) kleptocratic absolute power. This seems to me something Palestinian intelligentsia need to consider and research independently.

I often note that “the Hebrews are back in the Land of the Hebrews”, a trope that lends emphasis to authentic ethnolinguistic cultural affiliation with land. At the moment, there are fewer than 7,000 living language cultures on the planet, and each developed their language somewhere at some time. Baloch, Kurds, Hebrews, Pashtun have land claims as do others. I may grant that after 70 years of isolation and wicked disinformation, the Palestinians need not be the leading edge of “Arab pan-nationalism” which should have passed away with the Soviet Union (at the end of 1991). One may urge reconsideration for having become unique but perhaps misguided by the politics of a much earlier era and, all may hope, one passing finally into history.


 

End the Preoccupation With the Jews!

Easier said than done?

The world’s political science scholars may be unraveling the relationship between Stalin’s Russia and Hitler’s Germany in the first half of the 20th Century,  and today there’s plenty for reading as regards Moscow’s efforts to sustain a piratical feudalism even as it runs short on ready cash and the rest, less ready, appears sunk in western assets and banking institutions.

Change, so BackChannels may observe, must come slowly where it involves BIG Family, Military, and Religious Institutions.  In the feudal mode, money moves along more by way of relationships than by way of merit or virtue.  That’s life.  Such themes will never be black and white but they may be better balanced for ethical and moral merit — greater rule of law; greater real justice — in the long run.

Whether the latest assault on innocents will be quelled by security organizations or grown into an absurd set of what should be archaic struggles based in race and religion and any number of assorted lesser discriminators — black/white; Asian/European; gay/straight; single/married; poor/rich; etc. — we together shall see.

–33–

FTAC: Dismissing the Mockery of the Mocking Bird

01 Thursday Jun 2017

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

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

21st Century Feudalism, 21st Century Neo-Feudalism, bigotry, false analogy, middle east conflict, Mockingbird, political criminality

The conversational partner wished to play Atticus on behalf of the Palestinians apparently beset by Israeli nationalist — “Zionazis” in the more fervent of anti-Semitic Lost Left circles.


The analogy fails, Mohammed, because the integrity in the American lawyer who would pursue justice — the truth — before an angered and bigoted mob would not find the interlocutors for the Palestinians, i.e., the clans, organizations, and leaders who have funneled so much money away from the Palestinians, particularly honest or sympathetic.

https://www.algemeiner.com/2017/05/29/norway-demands-palestinians-return-funding-for-youth-center-named-after-infamous-terrorist/

When the Soviet Union dissolved in bankruptcy, the nascent new Federation managed amid the ensuing non-state crime and chaos to sustain certain aspects of the old architecture and relationships, including those with extremists, but the SU really is gone, and practically every one of its former satellites prefers autonomy to renewed subjugation.

What choice — or choices — have the Palestinians today between Abbas and Haniyeh?

Everyone remembers the Palestinian children who died building tunnels into Israel to abet assault. http://www.tabletmag.com/scroll/180400/hamas-killed-160-palestinian-children-to-build-terror-tunnels No modern and sane adult should wish to re-read the story and call it “resistance”.

Why placate or pander to such a mob?


–33–

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Epigram

Hillel the Elder

"That which is distasteful to thee do not do to another. That is the whole of Torah. The rest is commentary. Now go and study."

"If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am not for others, what am I? If not now, when?"

"Whosoever destroys a soul, it is considered as if he destroyed an entire world. And whosoever that saves a life, it is considered as if he saved an entire world."

Oriana Fallaci
"Whether it comes from a despotic sovereign or an elected president, from a murderous general or a beloved leader, I see power as an inhuman and hateful phenomenon...I have always looked on disobedience toward the oppressive as the only way to use the miracle of having been born."

Talmud 7:16 as Quoted by Rishon Rishon in 2004
Qohelet Raba, 7:16

אכזרי סוף שנעשה אכזרי במקום רחמן

Kol mi shena`asa rahaman bimqom akhzari Sof shena`asa akhzari bimqom rahaman

All who are made to be compassionate in the place of the cruel In the end are made to be cruel in the place of the compassionate.

More colloquially translated: "Those who are kind to the cruel, in the end will be cruel to the kind."

Online Source: http://www.rishon-rishon.com/archives/044412.php

Abraham Isaac Kook

"The purely righteous do not complain about evil, rather they add justice.They do not complain about heresy, rather they add faith.They do not complain about ignorance, rather they add wisdom." From the pages of Arpilei Tohar.

Heinrich Heine
"Where books are burned, in the end people will be burned." -- From Almansor: A Tragedy (1823).

Simon Wiesenthal
Remark Made in the Ballroom of the Imperial Hotel, Vienna, Austria on the occasion of His 90th Birthday: "The Nazis are no more, but we are still here, singing and dancing."

Maimonides
"Truth does not become more true if the whole world were to accept it; nor does it become less true if the whole world were to reject it."

"The risk of a wrong decision is preferable to the terror of indecision."

Douglas Adams
"Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?" Epigram appearing in the dedication of Richard Dawkins' The GOD Delusion.

Thucydides
"The Nation that makes a great distinction between its scholars and its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools."

Milan Kundera
"The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting."

Malala Yousafzai
“The terrorists thought that they would change our aims and stop our ambitions but nothing changed in my life except this: weakness, fear and hopelessness died. Strength, power and courage was born.”

Tanit Nima Tinat
"Who could die of love?"

What I Have Said About the Jews

My people, not that I speak for them, I nonetheless describe as a "global ethnic commune with its heart in Jerusalem and soul in the Land of Israel."

We have never given up on God, nor have we ever given up on one another.

Many things we have given up, but no one misses, say, animal sacrifice, and as many things we have kept, so we have still to welcome our Sabbath on Friday at sunset and to rest all of Saturday until three stars appear in the sky.

Most of all, through 5,773 years, wherever life has taken us, through the greatest triumphs and the most awful tragedies, we have preserved our tribal identity and soul, and so shall we continue eternally.

Anti-Semitism / Anti-Zionism = Signal of Fascism

I may suggest that anti-Zionism / anti-Semitism are signal (a little bit) of fascist urges, and the Left -- I'm an old liberal: I know my heart -- has been vulnerable to manipulation by what appears to me as a "Red Brown Green Alliance" driven by a handful of powerful autocrats intent on sustaining a medieval worldview in service to their own glorification. (And there I will stop).
One hopes for knowledge to allay fear; one hopes for love to overmatch hate.

Too often, the security found in the parroting of a loyal lie outweighs the integrity to be earned in confronting and voicing an uncomfortable truth.

Those who make their followers believe absurdities may also make them commit atrocities.

Positively Orwellian: Comment Responding to Claim that the Arab Assault on Israel in 1948 Had Not Intended Annihilation

“Revisionism” is the most contemptible path that power takes to abet theft and hide shame by attempting to alter public perception of past events.

On Press Freedom, Commentary, and Journalism

In the free world, talent -- editors, graphic artists, researchers, writers -- gravitate toward the organizations that suit their interests and values. The result: high integrity and highly reliable reportage and both responsible and thoughtful reasoning.

This is not to suggest that partisan presses don't exist or that propaganda doesn't exist in the west, but any reader possessed of critical thinking ability and genuine independence -- not bought, not programmed -- is certainly free to evaluate the works of earnest reporters and scholars.

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