Posted to YouTube by The New York Times, April 7, 2017.
Comment:
The public presentation of conflict may attempt to keep separate Syria, Ukraine, Russia, and Iran, but I don’t think the Kremlin (this is a good comment for Kremlin Watch) has an “Off” button in association with the defense of the autocratic feudal past that each dictatorship represents. Expect “mission creep”.
ISIL — the “Islamists” — have been long “played” by Moscow and Tehran as a goad to the west and a useful foil in their feudal struggle to sustain the medieval political absolutism that in turn supports their respective dictatorships.
President Trump’s bearing down on ISIS threatens to remove that plaything from the Moscow-Tehran (old “Red-Green Alliance”) toy box. Under pressure, and as much may have taken place in St. Petersburg earlier today, ISIS has now to displace and redistribute its criminal program.
The kind of manipulation involved between Moscow and an assortment of terrorist organizations may often be indirect. As the editor of Back-Channels, I believe that the al-Qaeda presence in Syria was “incubated” of de-emphasized in Syria’s combat planning, so as to shape and “frame” the look of the developing civil war. That’s what the piece is about, and there’s more online to support it.
Regarding the St. Petersburg train bombing — today’s event — there are some tweets now crediting ISIS with the attack.
The prompt: the suggestion that ISIS was finished in Iraq.
There may be more signs likes this one, however — http://www.iraqinews.com/iraq-war/islamic-state-kills-imam-mosque-western-mosul/ — that ISIS, ever murderous and disinterested in the fates of the living, has grown desperate in Iraq and gone in for “motivating” resistance by summarily killing those unwilling to cooperate in their own suicides.
Reliant on the open source, BackChannels has been finding it difficult to obtain data regarding the ISIS presence in Mosul and elsewhere in the combined Syrian-Iraq Theater of War. This may be the closest one may get with today’s field reporting:
Some posters on Isis forums linked the explosions to Russia’s backing of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, who is fighting Isis as well as other groups in the Syrian civil war.
The group hasn’t yet claimed responsibility for the attack, but often takes as long as a day to do so. If it does claim responsibility for the incident – which it has done with attacks that officials have later said it had no role in – it would be far from the first time it has done so, after it said it had inspired attempted attacks in Chechnya and Russia earlier this year.
Speaker of the House Paul Ryan
Senator Robert Menendez
Ambassador Nikki Hayley
Vice President Mike Pence
Tomorrow
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
Quote from Israeli Ambassador Ron Dermer: “We’re all on the same team, Americans and Israelis, Democrats and Republicans, Likud and other parties across the political spectrum . . . .”
Of course AIPAC has its own YouTube channel supporting the above suite of videos (BackChannels has no relationship with it), so the blog may stop here with at least today’s “pass along” of the recent footage.
How about the future political face of Palestine? In Gaza, Hamas just elected their replacement to Ismael Haniyeh. If you thought that the old face of Hamas was bad, the new face is even worse. Haniyeh was a disciple of the Muslim Brotherhood. His replacement, Yahya Sinwar, is an arch-terrorist linked to the extremist Islamic Salafist movement.
Sinwar was released from a twenty-year prison sentence on gross terrorism charges as part of a prisoner exchange for the release of Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier kidnapped from Israel and dragged into Gaza by a Hamas terror cell and kept in captivity for five years. Sinwar is not only responsible for the deaths of many Israelis. He is also reported to have murdered Palestinians with his own hands on alleged charges of “spying” or “collaboration” though it is more likely that they opposed his ruthless Hamas oppression.
Probably most stories about the Middle East Conflict are unconsciously about the oppression of Palestinians by tyrannical Palestinian governments. BackChannels may note as well that all have some relationships — from talk to arms — with Moscow as in the Soviet days. Today, of course, Moscow represents not Communism but plain despotism — “political absolutism” is the term for look-up — beneath the banner of resurgent nationalism that in fact sustains an enormously wealthy oligarchy while much of the rest of the state falls into financial collapse. That Hamas and the PLO exploit the Palestinians for similarly kleptocratic gain should surprise no one but the perpetually naive given to the programming of the leftover Far Left.
“This is actually the real map of the Middle East,” Kedar said, pointing to a slide showing a MENA geographic map without borders, a largely arid area in which vast deserts surround isolated water sources. “To live as a tribe is essential in this area. Otherwise you are weak; otherwise you cannot defend your source of water.” This means that families in the region banded together as clans millennia ago. Clan members could marry only fellow clan kin, lest familial connections create competing tribal claims for resources while the tribes developed codes of conduct (e.g. rules of retaliation) that predated and had more tribal loyalty than Islamic and state law.
Context: the talk was of Meir Kahane and involved a friend who knew him.
One may respect your living it — and I would recommend Giulio Meotti’s (compassionate, complete, factual, pro-Israel) account of the Baruch Goldstein attack for how that really worked — but that the politicians chose to trim the tendency toward incitement may speak volumes about the image Kahane produced in his own day. Not only should Jews not explain away terrorism, the entire community should note Russia’s long relationship with political terror as an appropriate tool in its realpolitik for upwards of 100 years, and then denounce it and distance themselves from it.
I used this excerpt from Walter Laqueur’s scholarship with the hope that Jews of Russian descent and memory and others involved in the scholarship will deflect a little bit of attention from the Arab anti-Semitism and follow the modern narrative back to Imperial Russian anti-Semitism and its dissemination and amplification in other cultures, starting with the “informing” of the Nazi’s worldview and moving on to what the Soviet managed to do to the middle east — and what is sustained today in Moscow’s relationship with Tehran and Hamas, Hezbollah, and PFLP, if not others.
So how long do you want to keep around one of the world most deceitful and ugly of sustained conflicts?
Hamas and the PLO will continue exploiting and suppressing their subjugated populations — these guys are not Freedom Watch and Human Rights Watch winners by a long stretch — and Israelis and the west will continue building and buying upgraded defense systems to handle the next generations of terrorist drones, rockets, and tunnels.
I’ll apologize for the coming cynicism right here, but it sometimes seems everyone making money on the conflict goes home happy compared to those made to believe that the Jews or the Arabs must be the cause of all their woes, and they must continue suffering until Hamas obliterates the Jews or the IDF “takes down” Hamas.
Left alone, the Middle East Conflict may be a politician’s best and most reliable evil system, efficient for generating income in some parts, pretty good for speechifying and promising the world to one constituency or another.
Even outlined, there’s a lot to know — but the Palestinians today should know it too: Moscow and its cronies have made good use of them, i.e., made a lot of money skimming off the money thrown into the middle east conflict.
If you get the chance to read about Moscow / Russia and anti-Semitism and the middle east, take the time. The conflict will look very different and the criminal motivations for it all the more clear.
For those benefiting financially and socially from programs associated with a sustained “middle east conflict”, the resolving of the same may spell “nakba” – a sudden loss in institutional and personal organization. Not only has the middle east conflict turned out its share of profiting millionaires and billionaires, it has provided Far Left (mostly) and some Far Right entities a good reason for getting up in the morning.
BackChannels wonders what readers think: should the Middle East Conflict be regarded as a necessary evil, a useful grinder between “eastern” and “western” — despotic and democratic — political interests?
Or should it be resolved before another generation of Palestinians — given 70 years of Arab-driven isolation and The Preoccupation With Israel, they may now be a People even though it remains unclear which jailer, Hamas or the PLO, may best exploit them — suffocates beneath the will of its Moscow trained or aided handlers?
Note that while Moscow turned briefly westward, President Putin has revived the state as an ultra-nationalist neo-imperial enterprise with its barbarism on display in both Syria and Ukraine. As such, it has sustained its relationships with other autocratic and kleptocratic entities, including at the highest level Bashar al-Assad’s tyranny and Ayatollah Khamenei’s brutal theocracy — and then at lower levels relationships with Hamas, Hezbollah, and PFLP, if not others.
Beyond talk, what have dictators ever done for their people?
Men of honor?
Well, they have made themselves powerful millionaires and billionaires, but they have taken from the mass of their own people their dignity and independence.
Palestine is many things. A Roman name and a Cold War lie. Mostly it’s a justification for killing Jews.
Palestine was an old Saudi-Soviet scam which invented a fake nationality for the Arab clans who had invaded and colonized Israel. This big lie transformed the leftist and Islamist terrorists run by them into the liberators of an imaginary nation. Suddenly the efforts of the Muslim bloc and the Soviet bloc to destroy the Jewish State became an undertaking of sympathetically murderous underdogs.
BackChannels 