The number of political groups that are inclined to support Russia’s president Vladimir Putin is growing, both in the ruling parties of the European countries and in the opposition; from Hungary’s Victor Orban and his ruling Fidesz party to the far-right opposition parties that are performing spectacularly well in national elections, such as Marie Le Pen and her Front National of France. Sympathy and support also comes from Hungary’s Jobbik radical nationalists, the Flemish nationalist Vlaams Belang in Belgium, Greece’s far-right Golden Dawn, Austria’s Freedom Party, and Italy’s Lega Nord, just to name a few.
I would expect Russo-Iranian methods in the development of power and wealth to expand until stopped cold. The interior mythology in both units, to be clinical about it, have zero incentive to stall or stop aggression on the basis of the political accommodations and levers owned by others. That implacable will may be buttressed by an equally sociopathic view of humanity. For evidence of that in addition to Ukraine (and how Yanukovych milked it): Bashar al-Assad’s behavior in Syria.
— Israel is a real (Jewish-majority) society and one gathered back from all over the world. It has issues within itself, but the focus on racism in Israel may belie something in the accuser.
I’m not going to respond to X unless he starts calling and verbally elbowing others here.
What he is doing is singling out The Jew.
I’m not playing that game — and none of you should either. He’s not presenting “a different point of view”: he’s promoting old fashioned anti-Semitic agitation and propaganda.
You should know that the International Solidarity Movement complains of FBI infiltration — a good thing if true, for the FBI indeed watches extremist groups carefully. Also, the ISM has supported Hamas and Fatah operations — and in the U.S., Hamas is designated a terrorist organization just as the Taliban may be in Pakistan.
The Ugly
Regarding the sterilization story, it is unfortunately true, acknowledged by the government — I’ll share a Salon piece with you in a moment. It was wrong. However, in a democratic open society, scandals break, the ugly truth comes out, and if the system works, justice is sought and in some part obtained.
Again, it was wrong, but it also comes to light, and I hope grievance has been openly redressed (I haven’t looked at this story in a long time).
The Bad (Gets Better)
It’s hard being an immigrant anywhere, new on the block, not yet part of the landscape, and that’s true for Jewish immigrants to Jewish Israel —
— but again, Jews listen, and white Jews who have problems with black ones get some comeuppance, some criticism in public, some change in public policy if necessary, and the society moves forward.
On the claim involving FBI infiltration of the ISM, web search “FBI, International Solidarity Movement” should yield listings of socialist publications dealing with arrests and infiltration.
What follows here for neophyte political readers are western-side introductions to the ISM.
In Ethiopia, where I stayed for two days, almost everyone I met seemed to think that Israeli war crimes deserved international sanction and that Jews should be made to pay reparations for the destruction of Gaza hospitals and educational facilities.
Iran Human Rights, October 24, 2014: “They called from the prison office now. Told me to go to an address they gave me for the last visit. She (Reyhaneh) will be transferred tonight. Tomorrow is set for her execution”. Shole Pakravan, Reyhaneh Jabbari’s mother, wrote these phrases on her Facebook page at about 4 pm Tehran time.
“It is upon all Muslims to exhort love, respect for others and human dignity,” Rouhani reportedly said Wednesday, a comment that was widely perceived as being in support of the protesters.
Although Rouhani did not mention the protests or the acid attacks, the statement was remarkable, and it could be the latest public acknowledgement of an internal fight between Rouhani’s government and other, more conservative Iranian institutions. Rouhani has repeatedly clashed with religious hardliners in recent months, and he called them out again on Wednesday. “The sacred call to virtue is not the right of a select group of people, a handful taking the moral high ground and acting as guardians,” he said.
The “different kind of war”, the “war for detectives and poets”, the “Islamic Small Wars” — singular or plural — have not been impeded at their low-intensity simmer.
The impetus for this post came with a phone call, a heads-up on the Ottawa incident —
The violence is not confined to Parliament. Police say that there could be multiple shooters and that there are three shooting incidents in the capital.
Ottawa police, whose buildings were also locked down, provided details on Twitter about multiple shootings: “Incidents occurred at National War Memorial, near the Rideau Centre and Parliament Hill.”
The shooting at the government complex came after witnesses said they saw two men jump out of a Toyota Corolla and run toward the memorial, where one opened fire on the soldier, who later died at Civic Hospital. Officials did not identify the guard pending notification of his family, but The Ottawa Sun said he was a member of Hamilton’s Argylls of Canada – 91st Canadian Highlanders who were on tour guarding the memorial.
OTTAWA—Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s office says two scheduled events today in Toronto with Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai have been cancelled. The last-minute announcement comes amid an ongoing emergency in Ottawa, where several shootings have occurred on or near Parliament Hill.
The latest follows an apparently attempted murder by car in Quebec:
(Reuters) – A Canadian man who was killed by police on Monday after trying to run over two soldiers in Quebec “had become radicalized,” the government said after the first such incident in Canada since the country joined the fight against Islamic State militants.
A baby girl was killed and eight people were injured Wednesday, after a terrorist hit them with his car outside the Givat Hatachmoshet (Ammunition Hill) Light Rail stop.
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.
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 . . . ?
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.
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:
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).
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.
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.
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