In the south, the Israelis measure the distance from Gaza in time, not meters. It is the time you need to find a shelter when the siren sounds. Overlooking Gaza is the town of Sderot, which in the minds of the Israelis is synonymous with poverty and danger. Sderot has, in fact, the highest number per capita in the world of shelters: 200. On this small city, the Muslims from Gaza fired 8,600 rockets. So far the Israeli government has invested $ 120 million in Sderot to provide the shelters.
A button on the homepage of the JMI website links to a related website where the work-product of JMI’s own cadre of young journalists is published. Naturally, it’s in Arabic only; these contents are not meant for the Western sponsors and international partners. But intentionally or not, it is these pages – along with the invaluable help of Google Translate’s Arabic-to-English service – that shine a revealing light for non-Arabic speakers like us on what all that NGO money and European inspiration is enabling for this “unparalleled centre of excellence in the Middle East”.
If you visit it today, as we did, you will notice that on every page of the site, under the headline “Success Models”, a journalist called Tamimi is profiled. She is the murderer of my daughter Malki.
Duplicitous talk has been always thematic in the middle east where “sweet words” often mask evil intentions (or the Jews most certainly would not have left Gaza in 2005).
While past need not be prelude, and one hopes that one day it will not be so in the middle east, a bad rap sheet — as bad as it gets — does not pretty up without proof of sea change conversion, reformation, transformation. Writers know the bad girl isn’t always bad and the good one not always good, but for purposes of the plot, the evil bitch is going to play out her script — the one programmed most deeply in her head — more likely than not.
Still, and beyond track records, there remains the matter of what is opined and reported today.
The accolade given a convicted terrorist, a mass murdering personality incapable of discerning innocents or noncombatants from military, may indicate detente, inclusion, or solidarity with a large force within Jordanian society. The insight provided by Arnold Roth, the writer of the quotation presented at the top of this post, indeed may indicate how far Arab attitudes and beliefs about others and general contempt may be from global standards.
A few major difficult languages — Arabic, Chinese, Russian — have by being so defended their ethnolinguistic communities with a strength greater than mountains: democratic high-integrity ideas and news cannot obtain mass access without state-based approval, and despotic nefarious designs may be protected by the restriction of access to them by multilingual communities, often with vested interests either in business or defense.
That may change as the expansion of social relationships online necessarily add to machine translation human bilingual pairs and multilingual virtual communities.
Wildcard: within the context of a progressing open society, one that encourages freedom of expression, civic and civil responsibility, and an open discourse free of intimidation and one prizing “ethos, logos, and pathos” together in adversarial exchange, a community or state may start hearing what it does not wish to hear and either tolerate it and struggle with challenges presented, or, as has been true of Iran and Russia, it may revert to state-controlled media and the throttling of democracy.
The term “illiberal democracy” — there is no such thing — belies fascism beneath the banners of autocratic moral entrepreneurs, starting with the Muslim Brotherhood (who in Egypt made plain their agenda in that state and thereby inspired an extraordinary, deeply populated, and widespread revolt). Wherever that kind of “putsch” takes place, reassertion of the military state may be welcomed, but over time, by and large, a good people, one inclined to promote the “humanity of humanity” and include themselves within rather than above it, may congregate and argue around central and familiar near universal ideals and values.
Doha-Washington may be competing with Tehran-Moscow (with Damascus between them), and the point of both would seem to be to have a scourge, accidentally or deliberately, worth elimination and the claim of rescue.
Assad managed to turn an “Arab Spring” revolution toward democracy and modernity into a deeply medieval and polarized civil war pitting his “secular” regime against Islamic extremists. It didn’t start out that way — and missing from the fields of battle: about nine million displaced Syrians.
On the Sunni side of this geopolitical knot (a knot because the Soviet Union was not finished off but merely transferred to the KGB, which has pursued a deeply feudal and equally thieving — internally and externally — course) stands an apparently duplicitous alliance that started out intending to knock Iran out of Syria (taking care of Hezbollah on the way) and produce an updated Islamic.
Things are just not working out the way they seem to have been planned — and much of that planning may have been to promote one appearance or another of a version of political reality. Again: there’s too much of theater in the combat.
The tail isn’t wagging the dog.
The whole dog is wagging the dog, from the tip o’ the nose to the end o’ the tail, U.S.-NATO and perhaps a Sunni-aligned alliance on one side while on the other: Neo-Feudal Russia, today a KGB/FSB Dictatorship, and its familiar “Axis of Evil” partners, Khamenei-Setad, Bashar the Butcher, and assorted anti-American and national socialist whatnot worldwide.
And hanging over every inch of the latest lightning in this storm: the immense and darker cloud of a nuclear umbrella.
In Tehran, the deputy chief of staff of Iran’s armed forces, Brigadier-General Massoud Jazayeri also denied any collaboration. Iran considered the US responsible for Iraq’s “unrest and problems”, he said, adding that the US would “definitely not have a place in the future of that country”.
The Palestinians know very well that if and when they have a state of their own, they will never be able to rely on their Arab brethren.
The Arab countries have a long record of turning their backs on the Palestinians, not only with regard to financial aid promises, but even when it comes to basic needs such as medical treatment.
But what will happen after the creation of a Palestinian state? Palestinians say they do not have high expectations that the Arab countries will help them build their state.
These days in our country, news is not good: to be a communist, to be a Christian (especially a Moslem converted to Christianity), to be a Zoroastrian or a Jew, to be a liberal or a secular … they are all castaway.
Even Moslems don’t have much security. The only accepted Moslems are those who are not reformist, not followers of Interuniversalism, not a Gonabadi Sufi, not an independent journalist, not a Moslem wanting separation of religion and politics, not an independent lawyer, and not anyone critical of state policies…
Indeed, with these designations, is there any Iranian who is safe from being detained for sure?
Quite possibly, the rejection of the bannered anti-Semitism of the piratical bastards who have infantilized, intellectually poisoned, suffocated and subjugated millions of their own constituents by lying — by way of deception and pandering — and by applying mafia methods in service to their own breathtaking criminal aggrandizement.
The world’s unrelenting focus on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is an injustice to tens of millions of victims of tyranny and terrorism in the Middle East. As we speak, Yazidis, Bahai, Kurds, Christians and Muslims are being executed and expelled by radical extremists at a rate of 1,000 people per month.
How many resolutions did you pass last week to address this crisis?
I telegraph online impression via schematics like “mouth –> ear –> mind –> heart system” to get a much larger constellation in thought down to something almost memorable.
🙂
Nonetheless, reduction goes only so far: “overviewing” picks up some of the slack, which is often what happens here, and then, well, one must turn off the computer in favor of lengthier reading, which lately for me has been Pacepa & Rychlak’s Disinformation, an account of KGB’s accomplishments in the black arts accompanying libel, misdirection, misguidance, slander, and — I say this with “malignant narcissism” in mind — theatrical production.
Writing for The Guardian, Simon Tisdale recently commented on Putin and “The New Cold War” (11/19/2014) — “Last weekend’s G20 summit in Brisbane, Australia, showed just how raw nerves have become – over Ukraine and, more broadly, over what the west has come to see as a pattern of expansionist, confrontational and often illegal behaviour by the Putin regime . . . ” — but perhaps not (yet) as aggression on two fronts.
In fact, my sources suggest that PFLP representatives met with Mikhail Bogdanov, the Russian President’s Special Representative for the Middle East and Deputy Foreign Minister, earlier in November (possibly Sunday, November 2, 2014) and discussed, among other things, S300 missile shipments placed on hold in 2013.
“I suggested to Foreign Minister Lavrov that we intensify intelligence cooperation with respect to ISIL and other counter-terrorism challenges of the region and we agreed to do so,” Kerry said just after the meeting, using an alternative name for IS jihadists.
As Sarajevo would ultimately like to join NATO and the European Union, they understand that every few years the Americans and the EU will put pressure on them to reduce their ties to Iran, particularly to its intelligence services. A sort of Balkan kabuki theater inevitably follows, with promises by the SDA to crack down hard, this time. A few Iranian “diplomats” are discreetly asked to leave the country, some of the more overt Iranian intelligence fronts in Bosnia shut their doors, usually only temporarily, and the Americans and Europeans are bought off for a couple years. And the Iranians remain.
It is believed that MOIS cooperates with other intelligence agencies. One of these agencies is the Russian SVR, the KGB’s replacement. Despite the two agencies’ dissimilar doctrines and the complicated relationship between Iran and Russia in the past, they managed to cooperate in the 1990s, based not only on their intention of limiting U.S. political clout in Central Asia but also on their mutual efforts to stifle prospective ethnic turbulence. The SVR trained not only hundreds of Iranian agents but also numerous Russian agents inside Iran to equip Iranian intelligence with signals equipment in their headquarters compound. It is unclear whether this relationship is ongoing and whether the two intelligence agencies continue to cooperate.
From page 41 of the above cited piece: “Bin Laden’s phone records, obtained by U.S. investigators working on the U.S. embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, show that 10 percent of phone calls made by Bin Laden and his lieutenants were to Iran.”
Khamenei, South America
The Mexican law student was surprised by how easy it was to get into Iran two years ago. By merely asking questions about Islam at a party, he managed to pique the interest of Iran’s top diplomat in Mexico. Months later, he had a plane ticket and a scholarship to a mysterious school in Iran as a guest of the Islamic Republic.
Next came the start of classes and a second surprise: There were dozens of others just like him.
While Iranian South American “feed and seed” programs may be continuing, the gist of a 2014 Congressional Research Service summary (by Mark P. Sullivan and June S. Beittel) suggests Khamenei’s regime may not be making as much progress as it would like. Rather than excerpt, I’ll leave it to the reader to look-see on this document: Latin America: Terrorism Issues. August 2014.
Dawisha, Karen. Putin’s Kleptocracy: Who Owns Russia? New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014.
Pacepa, Ion Mihai and Rychlak, Ronald J. Disinformation. Washington, D.C.: WND Books, 2013.
Soldatov, Andrei and Irena Borogan. The New Nobility: The Restoration of Russia’s Security State and the Enduring Legacy of the KGB. New York: Public Affairs, 2010.
The delegation stressed that Syria has been exposed to a U.S.-western-Zionist conspiracy, which is backed by some regimes in the region with the aim of liquidating the Palestinian issue since Syria is the main supporter of the cause.
Prime Minister Viktor Orbán openly admires the ‘illiberal’ models of Russia and China. Critics say his Fidesz party is using Putin-like tactics to cut the funding of newspapers and NGOs that conflict with the Orbán government.
Putin is clearly the dominant force in the relationship. Orban may be currently the master of all he surveys within his own borders but externally, he looks increasing like the leader of a client state that is gently but perceptively gravitating towards Moscow’s sphere of influence. Which in itself is a remarkable state of affairs considering the residual concerns over the 1956 invasion by the Soviet Union.
The radicals, of course, are most vocal. Nigel Farage, leader of UKIP, the U.K.’s anti-immigrant, anti-EU party, has expressed his admiration for Putin “as an operator, not a human being.” Farage has demanded that the West stop opposing Russian actions in Ukraine and ally itself with Putin in the fight against Islamic extremism. Marine Le Pen, leader of France’s ultranationalist Front National, is another Putin admirer. And Heinz-Christian Strache, the leader of Austria’s far-right Freedom Party, has praised the Russian leader as a “pure democrat.”
I want to confess that I did something foolish once when I was young. Back in 1993, I abandoned my university studies in California and returned to Moscow. European nations had signed the Maastricht Treaty and I dreamed that Russia would join the European Union.
While the U.S. and Russia have pledged to share intelligence on the group, Russia—one of the main international backers of Bashar al-Assad’s Syrian government—is not a member of the U.S.-led “broad coalition” against ISIS announced last month. As one Russian foreign ministry official recently put it, “We do not expect any invitations and we are not going to buy entry tickets.”
Like others of his generation, he is part of a cadre of men who came of age in a massive, multinational, nuclear-armed superstate in the early 1970s. The faceless cogs who made this system work were unremarkable people like Putin, trained in ideology and imbued with the false faith that the USSR’s greatest days were yet to come.
In their later years, these men have experienced the normal anxieties and embarrassments of middle age. (In Putin’s case, she’s a gymnast young enough to be his daughter.) But middle age for the sovoks also brought many to realize they spent their lives serving a state based on lies and held together almost entirely by force.
So spend a moment imagining the better time for which these men yearn.
As long as Israel acknowledges that the Palestinian Arabs’ national claims to statehood in Judea-Samaria are authentic and legitimate, Israel can never be secure externally, or internally.
For complying with those claims will make the country indefensible over time against threats that emanate beyond the Green Line, and ensure that the embers of incipient domestic revolt within it will continue to glow menacingly, capable of bursting into flames at any moment in response to legitimate actions taken to deal with those threats.
On Monday, we awoke to news that four worshipping Jews, one of them a British national, were murdered by Palestinian terrorists as they prayed in their Jerusalem synagogue. Hamas praised this atrocity, as it praises every terror attack in which the victim is an Israeli Jew. There should be absolutely no doubt: Hamas’s recent statements celebrating terror attacks are entirely consistent with its charter, which calls for the murder of Jews.
Khaled Mashaal has accrued wealth estimated above $2.5 billion in this business.
Ismail Haniyeh similarly now enjoys a reputation as a billionaire.
Gaza’s residents and those settled around Ramallah should understand this criminality pursued in their name diminishes their name.
Given political intimidation under the rules promoted by political mafia, have any choice?
Perhaps “any” have choice every morning, every minute, every day, and every day becomes more clear, more informed, more truthful.
Do books get in to the Arab enclaves within Israel?
Conversation?
Blog posts?
I don’t know.
However, unless our communicating systems are closed or deeply filtered, they are open and free – and free of manipulation. Curiosity may face a wilderness in information, but all the parts and particles of authentic stories — not the manipulations calculated with libels, obfuscations, omissions associated with lies that either pander or threaten — about themselves are there for looking. Fear should not direct the eyes or conscience.
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