Category Archives: Middle East

Pat Condel – “Boo Hoo Palestine”

21 Tuesday Oct 2014

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Gaza, Gaza Suzerain, Islamic Small Wars, Israel

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Posted to YouTube October 20, 2014.

Reminders

http://tabletmag.com/scroll/180400/hamas-killed-160-palestinian-children-to-build-terror-tunnels – 7/25/2014.

http://www.algemeiner.com/2014/07/28/gazas-millionaires-and-billionaires-how-hamass-leaders-got-rich-quick/ – 7/28/2014.

Protectorates and Suzerain

Semi-Autonomous Gaza

Semi-Autonomous Ramallah

The camps of Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, and Egypt: national protectorates until integrated out of Arab apartheid.

Some dreams never come true and shouldn’t.

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FTAC – On “The dictator Khamenei-Putin-Assad . . . .”

17 Friday Oct 2014

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Iran, Islamic Small Wars, Middle East, Political Spychology, Politics

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I’ve joked about the dictator “Putin-Assad-Khamenei — together they are defending political absolutism”, but recently I’ve become curious about the roles played by Putin’s FSB and Khamenei’s VEVAK in the middle east and in relation to drawing down U.S.-NATO resources and resolve.

Khamenei coming out and pointing the finger the CIA for ISIS, a huge absurdity, makes me want to point the finger back at VEVAK by way of blackmailed private money in KSA and Qatar. I know I know I know and promise not to indulge further in conspiracy-think but given the consolidation of wealth in Iran’s Setad operation, the dictator “Khamenei-Putin-Assad” might make some sense.

The public — any public — knows one thing about secrets-keeping in times of war: if the authorities aren’t talking candidly, conditions might be larger and worse than imagined.

Two items inspired the note in the Awesome Conversation: one was the initiation of Russo-Iranian military exercises in the Caspian Sea (Times of Israel, October 17, 2014); the other was Khamenei’s off-the-wall accusation through his Minister of Intelligence Heydar Moslehi of combined Mossad, MI6, and CIA involvement in launching, so I call it, “BadDaddy’s Islamic Hate” AKA “ISIS”.

Should that finger pointing not be pointing back at the Islamic Devilution in Iran?

Too much politics “behind the curtains” destroys democracies and perhaps only temporarily strengthens despots.  What is certain today would seem Putin’s deeply callous (for Sochi: $51 billion; for Syrian relief: $0) relationship with a Syrian regime that set off on political suppression by jailing and torturing children caught up in protest, appears to have moved to spare ISIS and related positions while bombing the hell out of noncombatant targets, and appears now to be sucking NATO toward collision on both Iraqi and Israeli flanks.

That Iran would undertake to create an enemy designed to distract Washington and that it might clean up should it make major gains makes more sense than Washington creating the monster against which it has been actively flying missions and seeking a strategy to undermine ISIS in every way possible.

So if ISIS has not been a Washington project, whose baby might it turn out to have been after all?

Who invested some seed money in it?

Given the criminal abuse of its own subjugated people – by theft or by hanging — and its long demonstrated indulgence in deception, deflection, and dishonesty with others, might it be . . . ?

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Link – Gaza – Four Boys, A Beach – Staged Murder

15 Wednesday Oct 2014

Posted by in Gaza, Israel, Journalism, Political Psychology, Politics

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Do you ever see little boys out jogging? Of course not. They’re following directions. Someone is trying to figure out the best way to exploit them. A Swedish site says that this image was taken the previous day. I don’t believe it. I’m sorry, Palestinians: I no longer believe a single word you say. They’re gamboling unnaturally, they just happen to be the three who were killed, and they’re in the same clothes that they wore when they died.

By the way, the children had to have been unaware of the real plan. They were mercilessly used by murderers.

http://www.thomaswictor.com/was-the-gaza-beach-incident-a-setup/ – 10/1/2014 with updates.

Wictor appears to report his observations and reasoning as he experiences them and as he has enough to package into a post.  In the above, I’ve taken an excerpt from what at the moment is the second piece in a series.  In order, and as an update (October 16, 2014), here is what is online now:

http://www.thomaswictor.com/four-boys-on-the-gaza-beach/ – 9/29/2014.

http://www.thomaswictor.com/was-the-gaza-beach-incident-a-setup/ – 10/1/2014 with updates.

http://www.thomaswictor.com/wall-street-journal-confirms-hamas-beach-operation/ – 10/15/2014.

Propagandists count on three elements for the effectiveness of their work: the show-and-tell of a simple picture and an immediately sensible explanation for it; the impossibility of honest investigation; defeat, fear, intimidation, or laziness within their target audiences.  Against that framework, Thomas Wictor has been quietly analyzing the feed from “Pallywood” — more or less the Hamas Production Company — and how its claims and products have been actually put together.

Central throughout the Islamic Islamic Small Wars: who do you believe?

And why believe whom you might believe?

Fear, intimidation, loyalty, and patronage may be in that decision.

The love of God, of humanity, integrity, and principle may be in it too.

Wictor’s an honest man (we’ve corresponded briefly, and with that and what he does, that’s how I feel).

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Gaza Script Rewrite

13 Monday Oct 2014

Posted by in Gaza, Israel, Middle East

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For some 20 years now Israeli governments, left and right, operated within the paradigm of the two-states solution, “land for peace” formula and the belief that only the establishment of a Palestinian country in the very heart of our own will solve all our problems. This, however, was tried and failed numerously. If there’s indeed any science in “political science”, then these “experiments” and “observations” must be taken into the most serious of consideration.

http://levzhivaev.blogspot.co.il/2014/10/yom-kippur-and-false-conceptions.html – 10/9/2014.

I should publish the  above excerpt as a link and leave it be.

Instead, and this a true “back channel” in “People’s Diplomacy” (online), I will suggest only that poetry needs once again to be taken seriously.

🙂

The kind of Gazan leadership that uses children — 160 of them now dead — to build assault tunnels has a problem in the head sustained by language internalized and maintained (or else!) in the head.

That language can be changed.

Gazans may be quiet, considering the kind of ears the walls may have, but they need no longer be kept blind and deaf as well.

Where Hamas has exploited children, Gazans may know it.

Where Hamas has forced, manipulated, or positioned noncombatants and their immediate surrounds as human shields, Gazans well know it.

Where Khaled Mashaal appears to have gone missing through the action while producing a reputation as a now powerful and wealthy man worth more than $2.5 billion, Gazans may know it.

Where Israelis mean well and Arab Israelis, Christian or Muslim, do good by themselves and others, Gazans now know it.

Those are nice homilies for reading by the side of the road, but let’s really get on the on ramp: the language traps formed by Islamist and Soviet post-Soviet anti-Semitic cant and rant and the congruent manipulations in language to produce anti-Semitic / anti-Zionist passion are the kind of traps that hold the mind in tangled webs.  They’re woven of evil pairings — simple metonymy — into dismal and self-defeating worldviews.  Taken up and strewn around campuses and streets by the “solidarity movements”, they sustain the plundering of Gazans by powerful, deeply exploiting, and sociopathic personalities.

The Revolution on the Inside will not be televised.

Related Reference

http://levzhivaev.blogspot.co.il/2014/07/israeli-military-operations-in-gaza.html – 7/17/2014.

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Christy Anastas — From the Middle East Conflict — “Stories Not Told to the World” — A Christian Voice

10 Friday Oct 2014

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Islamic Small Wars, Israel, Middle East, Palestinia, Politics, Regions

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The content dates from Spring 2014, and some of it has been well reviewed, but I feel it still worth a listen and a look.

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A video was uploaded onto YouTube which featured a young Palestinian Christian woman describing what it was like to live under Israel military occupation. If that was all the video was about, it would have simply been added to the thousands of other YouTube videos which describe the same thing. What made Christy Anastas’ video unique was that she bravely revealed how Palestinian Christians have and are being treated by Palestinian Muslims and nationalists.

http://thefederalist.com/2014/05/01/what-happens-when-a-palestinian-doesnt-hate-israel-enough/ – 5/1/2014.

Christy Anastas: “I believe in people, not concrete.”

Posted to YouTube – 4/25/2014.

On the whereabouts of Christy Anastas —

Christy Anastas, the 24-year-old woman who has fled the West Bank (where a journalist was recently sentenced to a year in prison for mocking Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas on Facebook), will present herself for inspection at a police station in England on the morning of April 29, 2014.

Why?

Because a self-styled “peace and justice” activist has called the police in England, informing the authorities that she may be a “missing person.” Consequently, Christy will present herself at a police station somewhere in England this morning to assure them that she is not being held against her will.

http://blog.camera.org/archives/2014/04/christy_anastas_on_the_stone_p.html – 4/28/2014.

On PLO negotiator Saeb Erekat —

So, given that even Hamas never claimed that 96 percent of those killed were civilians, where did Erekat get this number? Again, we must admit that he simply made it up.

This is not exactly the first time: Erekat was one of the inventors of the “Jenin Massacre” in 2002. In fighting in the West Bank city, 52 Palestinians were killed, as were 23 Israeli soldiers. Yasser Arafat claimed at the time that the “Jenin Massacre” could only be compared to the siege of Stalingrad in World War II. Erekat himself said “the numbers of killed could reach 500 since the Israeli offensive began. Thousands of wounded. The Jenin refugee camp is no longer in existence, and now we’ve heard of executions there.”

There was considerable destruction in parts of the camp, but at no time did it cease to be in existence. He made that up. Does any of this matter? It does.

http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=10183 – 10/8/2014.

Today:

http://www.emmaus-group.org/

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Khamenei, in the Name of God – A Comment on the Rayhaneh Jabbari Story

10 Friday Oct 2014

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Iran, Islamic Small Wars, Middle East, Political Psychology, Politics, Psychology, Regions

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. . . Shole Pakravan, said Wednesday morning that her daughter has heard nothing about the execution and is being pressured to sign a document that denies there was any attempt at rape and that there was no third party present at the time of the alleged murder.

http://www.bayoubuzz.com/us-news/item/759116-life-or-death-family-of-capitve-iranian-woman-left-in-the-dark – 10/9/2014; primary: http://www.lisadaftari.com/family-rayhaneh-jabbari-iranian-woman-death-row-dark-despite-report-spared/

As if more proof were needed of Ayatollah Khamenei’s ______ (you fill it it in — the writer’s tired), the entire world has now the spectacle of this smiley old white haired fella torturing a young woman not only by denying her an inherent right to an authoritative, honest, fair, just, and open — and openly audited — trial before the Iranian public but by degrading and humiliating her all the way to the gallows — or freedom, God willing.

Reyhaneh Jabbari’s first lawyer, Mohammad Mostafaei, had apparently made it clear that Jabbari’s death sentence was signed by the courts even after the evidence had been destroyed or went “missing.” Possibly those who signed her death sentence in the Islamic Republic of Iran are not even sure of Jabbari’s guilt themselves, or could be just trying to blame her for the murder, regardless.

 http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4283/iran-rayhaneh-jabbari-stay-of-execution – 4/23/2014.

The government announced that the execution will be postponed but did not give any indication the sentence had been overturned. It also did not disclose if any future execution date had been set.

Jabbari, who has already served seven years in prison, claims Sarbandi drugged her and attempted to have physical contact with her.

http://www.foxnews.com/world/2014/04/15/tehran-government-postpones-execution-woman-charged-with-killing-her-accused/ – 4/15/2014.

Modafe website 31 Aug 2010 News Report- (Human right Lawyer Mr Mostafaei’s Official site)

Reyhaneh Jabbari is a girl from Iran. She is now 22 years old and has been in Tehran’s Evin prison where the last Wednesday of every month a number of prisoners are hanging. She has spent the best years of her life in the prison and she will. Maybe some other days of her life have left.

http://www.gopetition.com/petitions/save-reyhaneh-jabbari.html – 8/31/2010.

Here is an interesting trio based on the web search “Iran, executions, last Wednesdays”:

http://edition.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/meast/08/07/iran.executions/index.html – “Human rights group notes ‘alarming spike’ in Iran executions” – 8/7/2009.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/02/02/us-iran-executions-idUSTRE71161O20110202 – “Iran executions three times last year’s rate: U.N.”- 2/2/2011.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/04/04/us-iran-idUSBREA330VH20140404 “Spike in Iran executions seen politically motivated” – 4/4/2014.

Proposed film title: “Iranimania II: Death Cult Hanging Orgy!”

Each of the above reports, published in  2009, 2011, and 2014, comments on the acceleration of the rate of hangings by the Iranian regime: more arrests, more “trials”, more hangings, never fewer, often if not predominantly similarly unjust — and when a hanging is “unjust” it is only a common act of murder.

Into this atmosphere of the Islamic Devilution in Iran comes Rayhaneh Jabbari who presents as a young miss who handily fended off a known regime _______ (again, you fill it in) “—a former intelligence officer and, at the time, a high-ranking member of Iran’s government—,” says an April 2014 Vice article of the deceased Morteza Abdolali Sarbandi, who had attempted to sexually assault her.

Earlier this month, Human Rights Watch declared in a most polite header with subheading, “Iran: Stop Woman’s Execution: Legal Process Plagued With Irregularities” (October 1, 2014).  The tone was matched by an equally circumspect recounting of the horror.

”The grotesque spectacle of bound, blindfold figures being hauled into the air by cranes in public hangings is a common sight in Rouhani’s Iran.”

Many of these executions were carried out after trials lasting “only minutes,” added Mr Hogarth.

“Iran is a serial human rights offender and Britain needs to confront this fact in any dealings with the country,” he said.

Since Hassan Rouhani has become president over 1000 prisoners have been executed including women and juvenile offenders.

http://www.ncr-iran.org/en/news/human-rights/17329-iran-a-prisoner-hanged-in-zahedan-prison3 – 10/8/2014.

Update – October 26, 2014

http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/breaking-iran-executes-reyhaneh-jabbari-26-year-old-woman-who-killed-her-rapist-1471698 – 10/25/2014

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/25/iran-woman-hanged-for-killing-rapist_n_6046350.html – 10/25/2014.

http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2014/10/amnesty-iran-set-hang-woman-at-dawn-2014102422855125759.html – 10/26/2014.

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Rayhaneh Jabbari – Uncertainty and State Sadism

07 Tuesday Oct 2014

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Iran, Middle East

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Ayatollah Khamenei’s regime had granted Reyhaneh Jabbari a stay on execution to October 8, 2014.

As I type, it is about 9 p.m. in Tehran.

The known facts of her case are clear and simple: a male boss plied her with a date rape drug, took her to a deserted space, and attempted to rape her.  Rayhaneh Jabbari fought back.  Whether she only injured him (with a small knife) or killed him has not been discerned: given the ethical and procedural issues attending the case, the pack of human rights groups who tally the most egregious miscarriages of justice have been following the Jabbari’s story for years.

Facebook pages, petitions, blog posts (like this one), attention across the global press have been to little avail other than to have delayed Jabbari’s execution to about this hour.

With more than 700 executions during his tenure, Rouhani has even surpassed Ahmadinejad’s statistics, and has virtually doubled the rate of executions. Dozens of public executions, mass hangings in prison courtyards, and clandestine and undocumented murders of prisoners are what define Rouhani’s notion of human rights improvement.

http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-London/2014/06/19/Over-700-Executions-in-Rouhani-s-First-Year-As-Human-Rights-in-Decline-in-Iran – 6/19/2014.

The combined Khamenei-Rouhani “charm offensive” should by now have now transformed into an “offensive charm”, i.e., a charm offending a greater world, including a greater Persian world within the state, a world still in possession of conscience and heart and still sensitive to and outraged by theft.

Fox News journalist Lisa Daftari has maintained a page on Rayhaneh Jabbari.

Reuters has had online great coverage of the (often stolen) “Assets of the Ayatollah”.

After a while, one must ask: where does this ayatollah-thing live where it cannot see its own true image?

From the “Chain Murders of Iran” to the horrors of Evin Prison, the regime would appear to sweat evil:

“To many Iranians, the concept of Evin prison is synonymous with political repression and torture,”Gissou Nia, executive director of the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center, told FoxNews.com. “Today, anyone who is perceived to be a threat to the Iranian regime, including human rights defenders … is kept within the confines of Evin and other notorious prisons in Iran.”

http://www.foxnews.com/world/2013/01/28/inside-evin-look-at-world-most-notorious-political-prison/ – 1/23/2013.

From a recent Daftari interview with Rayhaneh’s mother:

“The countdown has begun. It’s hell. It’s the worst feeling. I can’t be awake facing this reality and I can’t go to sleep,” she said. “When people see that someone (is) drowning, some rush to rescue and some who are indifferent stay away and say that ‘let’s not get involved because if we do we will get our pants or feet soaked in water.’ I can shout and shout that my daughter is in danger, but everybody knows what the right thing is to do for my daughter in this situation.”

http://www.foxnews.com/world/2014/10/02/execution-iranian-woman-accused-killing-attacker-back-on-says-mom/ – 10/2/1013.

A note of hope has appeared today in the L.A. Times:

Authorities were seeking consent from the family of the victim to vacate the capital judgment against Reyhaneh Jabbari, according to an Iranian judiciary spokesman, Gholamhossein Mohseni-Ejei, who made the comments at his weekly news conference.

Meanwhile, the semiofficial Iranian Students News Agency quoted Justice Minister Mostafa Pourmohammadi as saying that the hanging of Jabbari would be put off for at least a month.

http://www.latimes.com/world/middleeast/la-fg-iranian-woman-death-penalty-20141006-story.html – 10/7/2014.

Is there really hope in that story?

Why were things discussed today not undertaken months or years ago?

To hold over someone’s head the power of life and death — to hold over the world’s head the power of life and death — one might wonder how that feels?

For an answer, ask the sociopath and sadist — the one or the two — best positioned to know the answer to that question but don’t hope for a conversation: next to killing innocents, lying, smiling, and thieving (from those who trust them most) would seem their next best and most proven talents.

Update: Wednesday, October 8, 2014

In order to save her daughter’s life, Pakravan published the contents of this call on social media and asked the public for help. In fact, the execution was postponed, in Pakravan’s opinion, because of the public pressure, she told DW.
Now only one thing can save her daughter: if the slain man’s family pardons Jabbari. But Sarbandi’s family of refuses to do this on the grounds that Jabbari dragged his good name through the mud with allegations of rape.

http://www.dw.de/the-last-word-in-iranian-justice-revenge/a-17982603 – 8/3/2014.

IF Sarbandi is but an alleged rapist, how can Rayaneh Jabbari be other than an alleged murderess?

There is no justice Ayatollah Khamenei’s Iran, only darkness and capricious and sadistic raw power.

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“Come Hang ‘Em High” Khamenei – Another Alert

01 Wednesday Oct 2014

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Iran, Middle East, Politics, Regions

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” . . . agents of Iranian security guard have transferred Mr. Kazemeini Boroujerdi to an unknown place in order to execute him soon.”

http://www.bamazadi.org/2014/10/mrboroujerdi-was-transferred-to-unknown.html#more – 10/1/2014

He reportedly first expressed his opposition to the theocratic nature of the Islamic government of Iran under which Islamic jurists rule or provide “guardianship” in 1994. He has been quoted as saying Iranians “are loyal to the fundamentals of the true religion and the Prophet’s mission”, but are “tired of the religion of politics and political slogans.”[1]

Boroujerdi and many of his followers were arrested in Tehran on October 8, 2006, following a clash between police and hundreds of his followers. Iranian officials charged him with having claimed to be a representative of Muhammad al-Mahdi, a venerated figure in Shi’i Islam, a charge he denies.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hossein_Kazemeyni_Boroujerdi – as viewed 10/1/2014.

I have been told there are others today in similar danger to Boroujerdi and Jabbari.

One may recall here that the (malignant) narcissist is never wrong — or so sensitive to criticism as to suppress as much of that as possible.  In the medieval mode in which Ayatollah Khamenei exists, this sort of thing, a combination of rivalry accompanied by excoriating observations, may have been what compelled the Grand Ayatollah to push another ayatollah off stage:

Of course, you were correct when you said that international sanctions could not accomplish a damn thing! Not only because you and your cronies and support system in general, suffered no setback; your provinces of Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and Bahrain also weren’t bothered, because they blatantly looted and pillaged the God given wealth and natural resources of our defenseless nation and laughed their way to the bank, while stripping them of their economic independence and their will to think freely.

You have filled these thirty five years of contemporary history with your disgrace and deceit; and the names and memories of the sons of Iran have been written in blood which is the legacy of an antiquated dictatorship that operates in the dark ages.

http://www.bamazadi.org/2014/05/kazemeini-boroujerdi-to-khamenei-it-is.html – 5/19/2014.

Words are eternal in several ways.

Installed in books, they have shelf lives.

Installed in minds, they have a life in memory.

Uttered in politics, even if not remembered, they may develop influence, which may prove more powerful than mere encrustation in ink as thoughts take on lives of their own, passing from mouth to ear to mind to heart, one from the other, again and again, across the world and possibly out into the universe to God’s own ears.

That’s influence.

Related Reference

http://www.reuters.com/investigates/iran/#article/part1 – 11/11/2013

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