JERUSALEM, April 13 (Xinhua) — Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’ younger brother is hospitalized in critical condition in an Israeli hospital, a hospital official confirmed to Xinhua on Wednesday.
Israeli media reported that Abu Louai, 76, who lives in Qatar, arrived at Israel in secrecy.
Ramat Gan (TPS) – A Gazan child with severe burns is being treated in an Israeli hospital after a devastating house fire in Gaza took the lives of his three young siblings on Saturday. The tragedy has shaken the Gaza Strip and spurred angry finger pointing among the two dominant terrorist factions, Hamas and the Palestinian Authority’s Fatah.
Ahmed Al-Hendi, 7, was taken to Sheba Medical Center at Tel Hashomer Hospital in Ramat Gan on Sunday evening, a spokeswoman for the hospital confirmed to Tazpit Press Service (TPS), following the fire caused by candles used during a local power shortage.
The post may be spurious as “Palestinians treated by Israeli hospitals” turns out a perennial topic for news editors and hasbara crowd. Nonetheless, who shows up may surprise some readers, as may a glimpse into Israel’s medical ethic regarding access to services — basically, the medical system defends the patient, whatever the illness or injury and however obtained, and leaves the politics outside of the hospital.
A smattering of related article citations and partial quotations follow.
An unnamed Israeli doctor told Reuters that the request of a Palestinian physician was usually sufficient to guarantee the admission from Gaza of patients deemed urgent cases, suggesting the Hamas leader may not have been personally involved.
Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Hanieyeh’s brother-in-law was rushed to a hospital in Peta Tikvah, in Israel for urgent heart treatment four months ago, reported Ynet News website on Wednesday.
Suhila Abed el-Salam Ahmed Haniyeh’s husband suffered a serious cardiac episode, which could not be treated at any Gaza hospital. The couple had the option of going to a more advanced medical center in Egypt but chose to go to the Israeli hospital instead.
In nearly two and a half years, around 2,000 Syrians have been admitted to Israeli hospitals. While the vast majority are male — up to 90 percent at Ziv, the hospital closest to the border — there are women, too, and 17 percent of all patients are children.
There are the very old, and the very new: At least 10 Syrian babies have been born at Ziv alone since Syrians began arriving in February 2013.
Word has spread that Syrians can access medical help over the border from people they’ve long believed are the enemy.
The only rule that remains in place is the one that decrees that the wounded must be treated according to the severity of their condition and ability to survive, and no other criteria.
In the bloody theatrical production that has been “Assad OR The Terrorists” — and guess who’s responsible for casting “The Terrorists”? — Russia and Syria, who have ejected the terrorists from Palmyra, have turned to assert the values of their feudal aristocracies against the barbarism of their foes. http://www.nytimes.com/…/syria-russia-palmyra-isis…
While classical music may set the tone of a better deal, the larger picture sustains political absolute power over “the masses”, an affront and challenge to the democratic and deeply humanist character of those the Russian Federation has chosen to label as its enemies.
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Posted to YouTube May 5, 2016.
If the reader has no memory, then the reader may obtain one of two possible impressions: civilization, as represented by the symphony, is “winning” in Syria; civilization, as represented by the aftermath of an air strike against a refugee camp, is losing in Syria, and only barbarism is winning across that godforsaken land.
The truth has finer points.
In recent weeks, despite Russia’s promised pullback from Syria, Russia has instead strengthened its presence in the embattled state.
By strengthening Moscow’s hand in Syria, Putin may be firming up Assad’s perception of Syria as a Russian client state after all. As argued repeatedly on this blog, the true axis appears to be “Moscow-Tehran” and the purpose of it the sustaining of feudal absolute power enabling both imperial ambitions and further unrestrained kleptocracy.
Perhaps symphonies play louder than murder in so many state-controlled presses, but in the Open Source Environment, the same may be juxtaposed in a timely manner with the slaughter of noncombatants that would appear to secure their stay in service to the feudal aristocracies that appreciate them.
Also, the upgraded Russian military and political presence in Syria may leverage Washington into compromising with Moscow over Damascus in the control of situation. Given the horrors of the “Syrian Tragedy”, the ancillary humanitarian and political fallout that coalesces around refugee camps and mass migration, western resistance to the feudal program(s) on display may stand diminished and neither Moscow nor Tehran changed very much if at all.
The revelations come from new letters added to the 22,000 internal ISIS documents Sky News leaked in March. Before the Syrian troops regained control of the ancient city of Palmyra earlier this year, the Syrian government arranged a deal to allow ISIS to “withdraw all heavy artillery and anti-aircraft machine guns from in and around Palmyra to [the] Raqqa province.
On Corroborating Stories — Multiple Independent Sources
Tweet: “Putin, Assad, Khamenei — Together They Are Defending Absolute Power.”
Add Baghdadi.
BackChannels has been supporting the idea that malign and medieval leaders work together, whether directly or indirectly makes no difference, in supporting the feudal image and theater that in turn justifies they stay in political absolute power. As evidence mounts as regards the incubation of al-Qaeda-type forces and ISIS through the selective bombing of other targets, and as new reportage surfaces with news of collusion between Russian air power and ISIS ground forces, it starts to look like BackChannels got it right in the first place. From the above cited Daily Caller piece: “ISIS gets a detailed warning of when a strike is scheduled to take place, which allows it to withdraw to an agreed evacuation point.”
Anatoliy Golitsyn, a high-ranking KGB defector who served in the KGB’s ultra secretive long-range disinformation Department D, explained in his book New Lies For Old (1984) the then-Soviet Union’s reason for sponsoring terrorism:
The objective of violence is to create chaos and anarchy, to impose additional strains on ruling democratic parties, to eliminate their ablest leaders, to force them to resort to undemocratic measures, and to demonstrate to the public their inability to maintain law and order, leaving the field open to the legal communist party to present itself as the only effective alternative force.
“An extensive spy network has been set up inside Islamic State,” Kadyrov’s office quoted him on Monday as telling Russia’s state-controlled Russia 1 channel.
“Thanks to their work as agents the Russian air force is successfully destroying terrorist bases in Syria.”
Based on extensive fieldwork in one village in the North Caucasus, reporter Elena Milashina has concluded that the “Russian special services have controlled” the flow of jihadists into Syria, where they have lately joined up not only with ISIS but other radical Islamist factions.
While the Kremlin channels jihadis to ISIS, it may also embed spies, so it rids itself of at least a few potential terrorists — or thousands of them — in Russia and sets them up in easily targeted (because it may have also sent in spies) “kill zones” in Syria. Politically, it can promote, vicariously, say, the symphony while “barrel bombing” noncombatant Syrians while making its case for “Assad OR The Terrorists”, and through the Baathist generals who have become ISIS generals, it can display a convenient foil for Khamenei’s Revolutionary Guard, reported as embedded in the more “fiery” Shiite militia, for Tehran’s expansion of influence in Iraq. By doing all of the above, which I believe it has, the familiar post-Soviet axis has reproduced the image of the feudal world that each despotic leader needs to remain legitimate (in the eyes of their followers) in power.
Reports of ISIS beheading Russian spies surfaced in several news reports in December 2015, and similar reportage continued into April 2016.
Apparently, Russian spies inserted into ISIS may have both signaled ISIS positions to Russian air power as well as warned ISIS troops of impending strikes.
Oil has nothing to do with the Syrian Tragedy. The primary “driver” is the medieval political absolutism exploited and sustained by Putin, Assad, and Khamenei, each of whom relies on feudalism to keep themselves in business.
Note that Putin put $52 billion into the Winter Olympics at Sochi. What Putin has put into Syrian humanitarian aid: $0.00.
Obvious pacifism in the Obama Administration has been balanced some by weakening Putin’s own ability to prosecute his chosen enemies across time and in intensity. The in-and-out demonstration of power in Syria may reflect that reality, although the show worked well in Moscow. The stalling of the incursion into Ukraine through Crimea also attests to the Russian Federation’s underlying fragility. However, Russia remains a nuclear power, a newly militarized (revived in that aspect) and nationalist state, and a little unpredictable. It may be for that reason that “diplomacy” rather than “confrontation” has so far defined the western limits of engagement in Syria.
No one knows today how it will end, but I believe the west may look back on this period with immense shame for not having done more to block “Moscow, Damascus, Tehran” while pulling Syria — and Syrians — out of the medieval mode and into a modern politics. Results of related efforts on the battlefield appear to me to have been mixed, although one may credit Assad with the incubation of ISIS through the election to bomb other targets and leave Baghdadi’s enterprise to develop.
The themes are now tangled but still coalesce around “medieval vs modern”.
What is “medieval” now?
And what is modern?
Although BackChannels has frequently paired “medieval” with “absolute power” — and as much seems so — it may be more worthwhile at this point to travel into the 21st Century image of deeply medieval political worlds.
BackChannels readers will get to Riyadh, but let’s start with Moscow.
I have used the term in my own work, as well, and I define sistema as a style of exercising power that turns the country’s people into temporary operating resources, against their wills and in breach of their rights. Sistema is a deep-seated facet of Russian culture that goes beyond politics and ideology, and it will persist long after Putin’s rule has ended. Sistema combines the idea that the state should enjoy unlimited access to all national resources, public or private, with a kind of permanent state of emergency in which every level of society — businesses, social and ethnic groups, powerful clans, and even criminal gangs — is drafted into solving what the Kremlin labels “urgent state problems.” Under Putin, sistema has become a method for making deals among businesses, powerful players, and the people. Business has not taken over the state, nor vice versa; the two have merged in a union of total and seamless corruption.
Q: What are the roots of Putin’s ideological worldview?
A: By the beginning of the 1990s Putin had developed almost all the ideas he espouses today. He’d only just started working in St Petersburg, but if we look at documentary recordings of the time, we see that he already had a whole series of attitudes concerning, for example, the idea that Russia’s system of administration should be a unitarian, centralized state, and also his condoning the chinovniki [bureaucrats] taking bribes. That surprised many people, but it’s undeniable that he took a positive view of this. He even shared—and repeated—the scandalous thesis of the then mayor of Moscow, Gavril Popov, that bureaucrats had the right to a commission on contracts.
And here’s an image from the modern world according to Andy of Mayberry:
Posted to YouTube May 22, 2012.
The “Syrian Tragedy” — I don’t know what else to call it, for it represents in its various facets a bitter revolution, a (medieval) tyrant’s assertions about a family’s outright control and ownership of a state, a civil war but one complicated by multiple sides and the political “flavors” preferred — conveniently, earnestly, momentarily — by the roving bands of the hours — but it is most certainly the result of a consecrated villainy fit to the absence of conscience and the bloody caprice of the worst of kings and emperors of history.
Once tweeted: “Putin, Assad, Khamenei — together they are defending absolute power.”
Pavlosky, in the Foreign Affairs article cited, notes of Putin’s inner circle, “Transformed from a campaign committee into a presidential entourage, the team has changed only marginally in its composition. These are people who have never once told Putin, “You can’t do that” (p. 12).
In light of that observation, it might be worth taking another look at Andy and Opie and the difference between a quarter earned and three “just because”.
The big one which explaining to those many millions who still think changes are easy to bring — just raise our minimum wage and reduce the prices! It is not that simple and reeducating them will take time, reducing dependency on the state will take time, and getting them to stop throwing trash outside their homes will take time. But the religious preachers will have to come on board and help in the brain “write” to counter the past 50-80 years of brainwash. That is the tough one, but that is an internal matter that concerns Egyptians and no one else.
BackChannels:
What things (changes, conditions, policies, results) most produce hope in Egypt?
Naima Nas:
For as long as I can remember there have been (policies and changes and plans, etcetera ) but the one thing that has always been missing is autonomy en masse. The average citizen needs to be independent and resourceful, not just the hundred or so officials in office.
The good news is there are a lot of such citizens — possibly half the population.
There are the people who take advantage of reforms in any field and comply with laws that ensure improvements. If more schools are available and the law says everyone must stay in school till a certain age, they make sure their children go to school and do their homework and learn well, regardless of how difficult, and move up the ladder. I was born in a family like that . Policies or even magic potions have to be cooperated with not just set.
It may surprise you to learn that there have always been laws in Egypt addressing every area that needs addressing. The laws are all there, they just need to be applied to everyone without exception. That has always been the obstacle. That is the first thing that mesmerised me about Europe when I first stepped on the continent. It does not matter what or how trivial or grave the discrepancy, everyone answers to someone.
But to apply that to the chaos that is Egypt -pulled from pillar to post for years – is to start at the top and work down. Which is exactly what Sisi ‘s logic appears to be and the reason why I unreservedly support the man in his quest.
I’ll list one or two things as examples.
1. Understanding that it is impossible to have democracy or anything remotely resembling a fair government when the ruling elite are theocratic . So the “Islamic for Muslims only president” had to go, pronto! And no one cares how legitimate were the elections that put him there. He lost his legitimacy when the plan to throw Egypt under the Sinai terror bus became clear. And no one was waiting for paperwork!
2. Now we all — or almost all — agree on what we don’t want and what we really wish for, so let us make these laws visible! Starting with swift action against corruption. From the top down. That is the hardest thing to do. Because we all have a time when we wish we can speed up a process any which way .
3. Leading by example. So as he (el-Sisi) goes on records extending his hand in peace and sealing it with representatives on official level to boot. So can we — the average citizens . No one is too controversial by attending church or a synagogue and having Christian and Jewish best friends as many of us have done for years. Now it is definitely not a novelty to be tolerant and open minded because, look, the president has long been doing that.
Finally
4. The big one which explaining to those many millions who still think changes are easy to bring — just raise our minimum wage and reduce the prices! It is not that simple and reeducating them will take time, reducing dependency on the state will take time, and getting them to stop throwing trash outside their homes will take time. But the religious preachers will have to come on board and help in the brain “write” to counter the past 50-80 years of brainwash. That is the tough one, but that is an internal matter that concerns Egyptians and no one else.
The Obama Administration has played the weak hand in relation to overt confrontations while possibly working behind-the-scenes to kick the legs out from under the should-be-defunct Soviet arrangements. As I don’t live “behind the curtains” — or the doors of the CIA, Defense Department, and State and other national security and defense elements — I encounter the news with an analytical bent that really can’t confirm nor deny American weakness in the encounters with serious challenges. Neither, perhaps, can America’s enemies produce better estimates, so it would seem. In the end, the despots, the commanders, and their generals wage bets with every act of war. For these, if they don’t aggress in the face of weakness, they’re pussies (sorry); if they do and have their asses handed to them (eventually), they’re gone but with some grudging respect for following orders and going over the cliffs together. It’s a dubious honor, but so many belligerent “Armies of God” seem so completely invested in the medieval beliefs and visions that serve their handlers that they have no exit into the modern world. War, in essence, becomes for Hezbollah and others a loopy dead end.
The 21st Century’s investment in total in feudalism may be immense: it goes far beyond Hezbollah and into any number of “state capitalist” dictatorships (whatever the “ism” they preach) and criminal enterprises. Still, the medieval outlook and the barbarism associated with it, whether mafia, state mafia, or religious mafia, becomes less and less wanted given the modern tools enabling more fair distributions in power and greater security to the lawful through the earnest development and sustaining of “rule of law”.
Probably, the lands of the lawless have always to implode over internecine doubts, jealousies, suspicions, and rivalries. The depth of their tragedies, whether of Hitlerian or Stalinist proportions, may be measured in the suffering in extent and time of the constituencies made to ride along with maddened power inherently inherently malign and narcissistic.
The prompt was a comment suggesting Hezbollah’s possession of Syrian chemical weapons stocks, an issue that had been in the news in 2013 and appears more recently in The Wall Street Journal (July 23, 2015): http://www.wsj.com/articles/mission-to-purge-syria-of-chemical-weapons-comes-up-short-1437687744
Other of the Morning’s Remarks
Promotion of the Shiite vs Sunni feud promotes the medievalism endorsed by Putin, Assad, Khamenei, and Baghdadi whose own positions rest on sustaining political “absolute power” (dictatorship) for themselves!
From the modern and perhaps outside perspective, the medieval worldview brings its horrors to the surface in continuous and unresolvable conflicts. The medieval order has become today a ceaselessly demonstrated death machine.
With comparatively less headcount, a solid foundation in a single ethnolinguistic cohort, and thousands of years of varied history, the Jews have unhappily but successfully ejected much of what failed them over the years — animal sacrifice may serve as a convenient symbol of the abandonment of priestly magic. When the near 0-CE Hillel makes principle ascendent over ritual and works to improve convert access to Judaism, the religion “tails forward” (my opinion) to the Ethical Culture Movement associated with Felix Adler. It’s not the end of the story, God willing, nor a story about the abandonment of Judaism, but it is a story about staying the same and changing at the same time. Some beliefs, ideas, and rituals have well stood the tests of time, and time may disappear altogether between the lighting of the Sabbath candles between millennium.
The Qur’an’s promotion of the authoritative voice and injunction may make movement away from the medieval world more difficult. What I witness (by having been here day after day for years) are the channels, trials, and errors of a community that plainly will not travel further with the Muslim Brotherhood’s (et al.) guidance, but how people deal with Bad Baghdadi and similar others seems varied. Atheists, “apostates”, converts, modernists, reformists — everything but barbarians, and the barbarians (that go off to join ISIS or knock around in the killing fields — and the odd bombing — with Hezbollah) may be setting themselves up for slaughter. Many things will be tried as the future gets under everyone’s feet (as it apparently has in Egypt) and we hope a few things will work and peace will prevail between the “Abrahamic religions”.
Re. Obama: I don’t know that region that is “what’s really going on”, but it appears evident that Obama wants the world to police itself because he has most of American military policy focused on acute issues (like ISIS in Iraq) and covert and policing this-and-that in Somalia and other places where efforts only occasionally ping the headlines but have to have been continuous for those headlines to appear.
Re. Islam: it appears to have an issue with Baghdadi, Hezbollah, the Muslim Brotherhood Organizations, and with the medieval troika Putin-Assad-Khamenei — but ALL of that involves a potentially archaic feudal world from which modern souls should and do wish to depart. Getting more people across that bridge may be what the modern world needs to do to survive itself. However, that world appears flanked by two “superpowers” — Russia under Putin’s aegis and a China that straddles the medieval and modern worlds with the appropriation — via investment — of western assets and continuing “state capitalist” / political elite control of its nation, which might serve to keep away chaos from 800 million residents of the state.
Re. Trump: he’s a businessman, not a politician; he’s a pretend “tough guy”, a poker player, not a statesman; and I believe he’s ill-educated for leadership in the foreign policy of the United States. The world is not a China shop, but he’s a bull in it nonetheless and in need of a completely different education to come up to speed.
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Israel’s a strong state in command of its own defenses and related defense doctrine. However, as life need not be always a competition between similar entities, comparisons involving the cliches of Israeli prowess and Arab ineptness seem to me always questionable as well as certain to induce jealousies and resentments.
Immediate Arab states of affairs start with much greater populations and a more challenging melange of environmental and social themes. While the Hebrews have forged their lives apart, a kind of breakout or breakaway from despotism and disorder, Arab leaderships — and the latest suffered by the Persians — have wrestled long with systems of patronage and repression that have alternately kept the lid on darker forces or let them out, a bipolar political swinging fit to the medieval world that the modern might strive to attenuate but with a node for the scale and scope of the effort.
The BackChannels editor may cover a lot of topics in a day, but all talk and no reading (or play) makes for a dull pundit. More importantly, the greater the familiarity with political material, the stronger the need for more in-depth reading, other research, and talk, and that and other interest may slow the feed to this blog.
China’s martial ambitions have come up in social network chatter, of course, and that world too, this despite decades of development, investment, and trade, appears to remain committed to its possession of medieval absolute power and the related military force required to first defend it and then expand its influence and reach. The prompt for this note, which was made on the morning of January 8, 2016, was a January 7 article in the National Interest describing Chinese-Pakistani sea exercises involving submarines in anti-submarine warfare drills:
When you look at any state-of-the-art military machinery, you’re seeing the result of a long forward-looking process that started with talk, got the design bench, won funding, and produced a small industry in supplier contracts. In part, the incessant preparation for war _across the spectrum_ helps keep war in abeyance and the process of its part in aggression slow. Still, that process is there.
What I find frightening is after so many post-Nixon years of expanded investment and trade, the Chinese communist talk (despite all the mansions of Melbourne, AU sold to elites — plus ownership of the world’s largest bank) hasn’t changed a jot. Back-Channels observation of the defense of medieval political absolutism in relation to the Moscow-Damascus-Tehran axis of power may well apply to Moscow-Beijing. With Putin perhaps the Baghdadi of despotism, these old familiars may well be ganging up to force the United States and the world to accept what Assad plus the invasion of Crimea represent to Europe and the United States: i.e., the will of the despotic to impose themselves on the world at any cost to humanity.
If the United States had gambled on money as being the first principle of power, it appears to be losing its own shirt. Indeed, while the west has been kicking the legs out from under the old Soviet order (Moscow-Damascus-Tehran), a part of the arrangement may well be kicking back, and for the west, the distribution of money through constituent populations count for much more than it appears to in Moscow and Beijing (where Russian and Chinese development may be traded off for the ambitions of imposed military power and subsequent plunder, which may be the point of that power for those leaders).
The Russian power model sustained by Putin today may hearken directly back to Tsar Nicholas II’s “Okhrana” — Russia’s original “political police”. There are a few books out on the topic, but the idea of infiltrating and co-opting the opposition (to the absolute power represented by the tsar) starts early, the transformation of some police into political agents channeling, derailing, or subverting protest would seem to have become inseparable from the standard operating procedures of today’s political Russia.
This is “cutting edge” as distribution of the PDF precedes the publication of a related book:
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Many nationalities are represented among the foreign fighters. “I have seen people from the USA, the UK, Germany, France, Russia, Chechnya, China, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Algeria, Egypt, Palestine [limited numbers]), Lebanon, China, Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan,” Abu Jamal stated. He recalled that they were suspicious of the Russians. “We would consider them as agents because they were blonde, real Russian-blooded people and we would not trust them as they would mostly claim that they had been in the Russian Army and then converted to Islam and retired from their posts and came to fight for IS. They were also mostly military strategists and were making the plans for assaults and battles. They were effective on making strategic military decisions in IS.” Some of our informants wondered whether these Russians were plants (i.e. spies or agents), coordinating things with Assad’s forces.
ISIS defector remarks dovetail nicely with the participation of Baathist Generals working with ISIS to plan assaults. The Soviet may have officially dissolved itself on December 26, 1991 but perhaps its methods have been sustained.
Media moves fast these days, and the sharing of information through the conflict and psychology community probably competes with the latest sports scores for rapid distribution.
The cause for ISIS suspicions regarding Russian convert-recruits certainly fits with the greater than century-long history of Russia’s political police elements. How well present relationships may be traced is another matter, secrecy, of necessity, providing the foundations for every facet of conflict development and response (with perhaps the exception of making public the frank observations of terrorist defectors).
Oh what evil webs some may weave — one hedges where empiricism falters on ambiguous evidence or too little evidence: BackChannels would place Egyptian doubts regarding the Russian assertion of the plane’s having been sabotaged (by having a bomb put on board) before takeoff in Egypt within the following framework.
Post-Soviet, post-KGB neo-feudal now FSB Russia has developed its own “War On Terror” designed to destabilize and fracture NATO and allied or cooperative states.
Muslims may know the epigram, “All of the evil is in one room and lying is the key.”
Through the KGB, the Soviet established a reputation for deceitful and disingenuous action and speech, and in the post-Soviet environment, that nefarious spirit may be expressed, this with reference to the Moscow Apartment Bombings, through possible “false flag” operations designed to manipulate “the masses”. https://conflict-backchannels.com/library/russian-section/ Karen Dawisha’s book may be especially helpful in untangling some of the real life detective mysteries produced by the post-Soviet regime.
On rare occasion, but it happens, the fireman is the arsonist, the hero the creator the monster to be subdued. So it may go with Putin’s feudal revanche in which “Putin vs The Terrorists” — the political display of power proven effective in producing the nationalist fervor that wins elections — is an important fixture and image in Russian politics.
So the motive may be there.
Still, I and most modern observers (as opposed to medieval ones who feel their loyalties constantly tested) would rather have an empirical analysis of the crash than any useless collection of bold political assertions.
Given that all politics involves presentation, i.e., some show-and-tell business, one might ask whether any, most, or some political organizations possess more integrity than others.
The question’s fair today, for the theme most central to a spectacle in which the modern world — and the modern soul — struggles with the medieval involves the relative weight of a “loyal lie” to the possession of a possibly lonely integrity as regards an authentic and solid cognizance of the truth.
In the old biblical story in which “God proves” Abraham, the test is never defined but potentially involves either a test of absolute obedience to God or, much more interesting, a test of Abraham’s conscience and courage to speak back to God in defense of the life of the son he and Sarah had waited so long to have. God sees to it that Isaac lives (while a ram is made to die in his place) and never again speaks directly to Abraham.
BackChannels’ preferred argument: the test of conscience, courage, and, perhaps, Abrahams integrity as a father.
BackChannels 