The protesters reportedly claimed the series defames the large and powerful Bakhtiari tribe. A Bakhtiari family in the series is depicted as corrupt, nouveau riche and monarchist.
I see no reportage of the video up top on either site, not that I’m looking too hard for that or expect that from a system invested in controlling constituent access to global information.
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If the world’s on fire, we can see it today, but no one can see it all at once. I’ve missed protests in Venezuela, a now ongoing story in major media, and am not inclined to keep up daily with the tragedy dogging the Burmese Rohingya (Malaysia, which accepts members of the Muslim tribe, would do well to attend their defense and retrieval) or the Central African Republic (CAR), where Christian militia have been persecuting Muslims, although that conflict I might well bring on to these virtual pages.
This episode well portrays the different workings of “western” and “eastern” minds. The western mind wants the protests to be about “freedom of speech”; the eastern one, apparently, wants it to be about freedom from insult.
The protesters reportedly claimed the series defames the large and powerful Bakhtiari tribe. A Bakhtiari family in the series is depicted as corrupt, nouveau riche and monarchist.
The Syrian People haven’t control of any army representing their needs, which today are immense with suffering.
The three amigos of dictatorship — Putin-Assad-Khamenei — have positioned and milked Syria’s productive capacities and strategic location for some time. One may have hoped for Russia in the post-Soviet, post-KGB era to have taken the lead in producing a post-Soviet buffer and client in Syria, which by legacy may be conceded to Russia’s zone of control and influence (if we’re going to have that kind of world with superpowers locked into strategic checkmate for everyone’s security).
No dice.
Post-Soviet has transformed into a 19th Century style oligarchy suspended firmly in favor and patronage around the “vertical of power”. So far. Putin knows what’s needed and is capable of change. Nonetheless, the horror he has back in Syria cannot or will not differentiate between combatants and noncombatant constituents, and state media RT and others have spun barrel-bombing Bashar al-Assad into the hero of Syrian secularism.
While there’s some truth to that, the damage in death and injury, dispersion and lost cities tell that the want of a healthy secularism pales before the ambition to again deeply subjugate the Syrian People to the Assad will.
A Look At the Other Side
Al-Nusra and ISIL and a large assortment of fighters, from upside-down European teenagers to old village militia, has looked to the Qur’an for guidance toward the development of Syrian theocracy or caliphate, either way another autocratic system bent on the glorification — today: self-aggrandizement — of leaders and the subjugation of all others. They have discovered instead, so far, the endless divisions and egotism inherent in narcissistic “mobocracy” and “thugocracy”.
Instead of launching war of principle to unseat a brutal dictatorship, the Islamists find themselves fighting over personalities, which, if any may step back from it, they might find a war over the character of leadership personality itself.
The “west” and most of the world able to make itself helpful has now a proven capability for moving humanitarian aid to regions troubled by natural disaster and war, and a part of that involves the volunteering of military assets; however, the world hasn’t got the principle of deploying a military coalition as an invading force in a civil war. NATO “Coalitions of the Willing” have involved at least the chimera of direct threat (Iraq) underscored, again, by the workings — including state support for terrorism — of an obscene dictatorship, or actual attack from foreign lands (Afghanistan).
Those volunteers most passionate about fighting in Syria have repeatedly proven themselves confused about God, humanity, and themselves — or none would have had the chance, much less the motivation, for throwing bakers into their own ovens. Now they and we are in a terrible position: pushing out against Assad-Khamenei (with Putin in a supporting role), there is no expanding middle force. The kernel for that should have been General Idris, but good, much less, civil, even nice, doesn’t seem to work in the Syrian theater.
Between dictatorship-for-money and tyranny attached to an egotistical presumption about one’s self and God, the French, among others, have signaled refusal to support either fascist track.
Israelis have been providing emergency medical care, including longer-term care, to Syrians injured or in need of medical attention (Syrian mothers have borne children in Israel). They have also pitched in with humanitarian relief even with the erasure of Hebrew or origin labels attached to care shipments.
It’s not like it hasn’t been thought about, but even the band-aid of an “humanitarian corridor”, a DMZ, a safe zone on Syrian soil adjacent to affected boundaries, requires defense.
Experience with the camps developed for the refugees of 1948 suggests too that such become permanent habitations and develop their own political character, a character sustained and damned by charity across generations and ensured by Arab prejudice and will, the refugees remaining disenfranchised and, so well demonstrated by what has happened to the Yarmouk Camp in Syria, treated as military assets held for war rather than like human beings.
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It may be taken with a weary nod that Muslim teens and converts outside of Syria have been drawn to the fighting, for such fighting presents to them as noble and packaged with many other directions and emotions about things in the world, while the adults in charge (for the time being) seem not very far from the illusions and passions of youth themselves. They are up there on the ramparts, “loaded for bear” (as hunters say), and full of themselves but now, the evil on the other side exceeding what they have made of themselves, they have to stay, and what the world would fight for, if it could get it together, is what they themselves may have to fight for, and that starts with change within.
So one would wish not to see one tyrant replaced by another, but in Syria’s brutal and frequently absurd medieval fighting, the tyrannical within the opposition needs must recognize itself and bend toward the grain of humanity.
Carter taught Christian students in Plains Georgia that Judaism teaches Jews to feel superior to non-Jews, that Jewish religious practices are tricks to enhance wealth, and that current Israeli policy toward Palestinians is based on these “Jewish” values and practices.
The history of Palestinians was something I was familiar with as well, only because in high school, my friend’s parents were Moroccan Jews with staunch right-wing Zionist views. They’d go on about how Palestinians were worth shit and how they were sucking off the land they stole, and how they were not from Palestine, but Jordan. Truth be told, my friend’s parents’ passion about their ‘homeland’ made me sick. As a black person living in the United States, I could not relate to their love for their proclaimed homeland because I never had one. My ancestors were captured from various regions of Africa and forced onto ships bound for the Americas. Therefore, when questioned about the geographic origins of my ancestors, my answers were as vague as Africa is big.
It appears the young celebrity creating his celebrity flew to Israel on The Carter Center’s dime (“In the weeks preceding my departure from Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport to Tel Aviv, I received travel warnings from The Carter Center, the organization responsible for sponsoring my trip”) with a reactive and retributive attitude forged in self-righteous alienation, never mind that, for example, about 1.7 million Israelis live in the same funky poverty for which he would claim to stand in the interest of social justice.
Our worlds are as small or as large as the information we acquire about them, and they are also as false or honest as the methods we use to comprehend whole issues and the integrity and curiosity with which we pursue them.
I get a little “Jewed out” myself, sometimes, and somewhere between the ever present clouds of the Holocaust and constant distributed cheerleading (deserved) and defense (also deserved) of Israel. Nonetheless, riding beside my own brand of international humanism (thanks, Felix Adler and Abraham Maslow — two more Jews), Judaism itself and its call to conscience (yo, Jimmuh: Jesus was Jewish!) remains for me an integral part of seeking social justice and what is good in living individually and communally.
* * *
Despite months of lobbying by anti-Israel activists and a desperate last minute petition drive, the 141st APHA annual meeting and exposition held in Boston. defeated an anti-Israel resolution by 74 to 36 votes. The resolution was discussed by the association’s Joint Policy Committee. The anti-Israel campaign was led by activists of BDS, the global movement for a campaign of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against Israel, which was initiated by Palestinians in 2005 and is coordinated by the Palestinian BDS National Committee established two years later.
The forces of Jew Hate, a term earthier and less sanitized than “anti-Semitism”, have created on-campus and political bubble environments sufficient to enclose the “open-minded”, who may not be as much so as presumed, nor more cagey than vulnerable.
* * *
As I stood in line at JFK waiting to be interrogated by security agents prior to boarding a flight to Tel Aviv last January, I thought of all the reasons why I didn’t belong there. I’m only half Jewish, for starters – and it’s the wrong half. I only know a couple of Hebrew words. I have a lot of what an Un-Jewish Activities Committee might call “Palestinian sympathies.”
Jewish ethnicity and the embrace and expression of faith may vary quite within the Jewish community, but it may not be possible these days to escape the influence of the wisdom of Hillel the Elder, himself quite possibly the elder contemporary of Jesus, from any contemporary stance. One might also go back a little farther in time to “The Akedah” and the undefined test given Abraham, a test either of obedience, which children believe without question, or of conscience, which adults may perceive with penetration – and perceive as Abraham failing (God never speaks to him again; an emissary in the form of an angel has to intercede in the murder; a substitute ram is made to appear for the knife Abraham would have too willingly used on Isaac: had he only spoken up, or, in the modern vernacular, spoken truth to power on behalf of Isaac and Sarah).
Israel provides a broad suite of basic services, including the training of Abbas’s police force, to the generations of refugees who remained on the land after the Arab war of annihilation in 1948. When the hate recedes, when the threat of violence against Jews fades on to the pages of history, the Jews and other Israelis — Christians, Muslims, and others — will prove as helpful as can be, but those days seem always set farther away by smears.
Mr. Carter’s underdog obsession is what motivated him to legitimize Fidel Castro and take his side in a bio-weapons dispute with the United States and to praise North Korean dictator Kim Il Sung with the words: “I find him to be vigorous, intelligent,…and in charge of the decisions about this country.” This is the Korean dictator who, together with the tyrannical son who succeeded him, starved to death about 3 million of their own people. Carter added absurdly, “I don’t see that they [the North Koreans] are an outlaw nation.” He also hailed Marshal Joseph Tito as “a man who believes in human rights,” and said of murderous Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu, “Our goals are the same: to have a just system of economics and politics . . . We believe in enhancing human rights.” Carter told Haitian dictator Raul Cédras that he was “ashamed of what my country has done to your country,” which made most Americans ashamed of Jimmy Carter.
In some parts of the world, it rises for the first time.
With time, and with the efforts of a courageous independent few, the hateful games played by spoilers against the Jewish people become more clear as to their true intents, and not only as regards Jews but as regards all others in their path.
Around 11:15:
This is all anti-Semitism 2.0 . . . the problem for me as a leader of my people is we’re going to suffer because of this . . . as long as they push us into fighting against Israel and make the point that Israel is demonized and bad while we get killed and kill Israelis in the process . . . . this is awful, and this is exactly what Mr. Kerry’s peace plan, actually King Abdullah’s peace plan, this is exactly what it’s going to bring . . . .
“I’ve had a few instances even in Halifax when Muslims will say, look I may not agree with everything but its given me things to think about. That’s the start you know; its’ creating cracks in the lies they may have accepted as truth. So that’s one of the best feelings, when I do have Muslims and it’s made them think, challenged what they believe and their ready to take it further.”
President Janos Ader and Prime Minister Viktor Orban in separate messages felicitated the anniversary of victory of the Islamic Revolution to President Hassan Rouhani and First Vice-President Eshaq Jahangiri.
In his message, President Ader underlined the efforts of both countries in expansion of bilateral cooperation in all fields, which secure interests of the two countries.
There have been additional references to Hungary in relation to other subjects, e.g., European reparations to the Jewish community, but it’s the drift into nationalism that catches play here and with it movement within the European aligned NATO state to cement relationships with the Islamic Revolution in Iran.
As as happened over the course of Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan’s tenure, drift toward fascism may draw a strong liberal response from the middle and thereby stall a conservative state movement.
Similar dynamics have also surfaced in Kiev — Ukraine protests take center-stage at EU foreign ministers meeting in Brussels | News | DW.DE | 10.02.2014 – which population has found itself in The Bear Trap, i.e., aesthetically, politically, and spiritually aligned with European modernity and its social values but beholden to a state in which the “vertical of power” — the Autocrat — determines the character, position, and values of the state and states it makes its buffer.
Hungarians may express themselves, take to the streets, and throw fits, but Papa Putin with the checkbook and gas tap has sufficient clout for leaving the Ukrainian government to shrug off its liberal critics.
That particular Bear has also aligned itself with Iranian interests — the better to drum up defense and nuclear sales business — and to the extent that it also holds Hungarians in its paws by way of energy supply and sales, it may stalls Hungary’s westward inclinations and, possibly, encourage those who feel comfortable with thuggish mafia-style Putinesque Russian politics.
The effects of the axis — Putin-Assad-Khamenei — made visible by the collapse of Syria, a lingering post-Soviet artifact may be just emergent in the discussion eastern European politics.
If I had budget plus swift graphic arts I would do this with clusters, but a linear verbal illustration might suffice:
Where tanks may once have been dispatched, cash and energy may suffice — and money gets around without conscience.
Additional Reference
Hungary
Viktor Orbán in Moscow: “Putin’s new little kitten”? | Hungarian Spectrum – 2/1/2014: “Moreover, one must keep in mind that for Hungary Russia is a much more important partner than vice versa. In trade relations the Hungarian share of Russian imports is only 2%. On the other hand, Hungary because of its dependence on natural gas and oil is heavily dependent on Russian goodwill.”
Putin $14 Billion Nuclear Deal Wins Orban Alliance – Bloomberg – 1/15/2014: “The deal shows Putin’s ability to use Russia’s control over energy resources to extend his sway beyond the former Soviet Union. Last month, he pledged a $15 billion bailout and a cut in the price of natural gas to Ukraine and promised to lend as much as $2 billion to Belarus.”
From the above cited BBC news link: “Washington’s European envoy Victoria Nuland was heard using an expletive to disparage the EU’s handling of the crisis and revealing Washington’s determination to influence the outcome of the Ukrainian struggle.”
Obama cancels meeting with Putin amid Russia tensions – NBC News.com: “Given our lack of progress on issues such as missile defense and arms control, trade and commercial relations, global security issues, and human rights and civil society in the last twelve months, we have informed the Russian Government that we believe it would be more constructive to postpone the summit until we have more results from our shared agenda,” the White House said.
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The collapse of the Soviet Union left Soviet business and political relationships as well as Soviet style in place: at least as much would seem embodied in the post-KGB, now FSB person of Russian President Putin who has accepted the defeat of Russian communism — or the armored covering of it — but not of Russian empire and the idea of a Russian way of doing things, even if regress to a 19th Century stance with class empowerment through patronage and equal footing with despots similarly endowed becomes the price paid by Russia’s constituency for the privilege of being different, quintessentially Russian, and now as in the Romanov-then, also cut out of the money but restored in pride.
SOCHI, Russia — A Russia in search of global vindication kicked off the Sochi Olympics looking more like a Russia that likes to party, with a pulse-raising opening ceremony about fun and sports instead of terrorism, gay rights and coddling despots.
And that’s just the way Russian President Vladimir Putin wants these Winter Games to be.
Militants accidentally set off their own car bomb Monday at a training camp in the countryside north of Baghdad, leaving 21 dead and resulting in two dozen arrests, Iraqi officials said.
To even comment on the Islamic Small Wars anywhere would seem to require great aptitude for quadratic equations: extremists x moderates / Sunni vs Shiite / KSA vs Iran / USA vs (for now) Russia.
Make it stop!
No wonder Buddha laughs.
The headline snapshot tells the story: “ISIL” and others are doing their now familiar thing while their opposition struggles to contain their energies and deconstruct their motivations.
Not that the headlines say that.
🙂
However, one sees the meting of death associated with ISIL aggression and terrorism and the response in a) boosted contractor presence and deliveries of war fighting machinery and materiel all around, and b) appeals for chit-chat and threats against clerics that incite anti-government violence. That “b” part may prove the more powerful route in that the fighting and its apparent penalties simply fail to quell surface religious and underlying psychological (narcissistic) motivations for violence as a means of assertion and channel to power over others.
The “God Mob” is never about God: it’s about itself and its own capture by a seemingly inescapable script — and one guaranteed to destroy its cast of players by hoisting them high on their own hubris.
I wonder if that might not turn out like Eve’s death, where God had promised her she would die if she ate of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, while the snake, contradicting God but animated by God as well, assures her she will not die. Indeed, with the bite of the apple, our blithe and oblivious Eve disappear, as good as dead, but then becomes the woman human we know as aware, self-aware, possessed of conscience, and seductive, God bless her, which well He has.
To ask a man to disbelieve, modify, or reconsider tenets of faith that a) either excuse evil that for various reasons he may naturally wish to do, or b) actually motivate that evil, is like asking the sleeper to wake from his nightmare, or, here reverting to the account of the emerging consciousness of humanity, to wake up from oblivion, come down from his dream, and experience with great empathy a more common — yet also more noble — human condition.
There have been unverified reports published about horrifying massacres taking place that targeted entire Alawite families, based purely on sectarian affiliation.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group said the Islamists killed 25 people in the village of Maan, mainly from a pro-Assad National Defence Force militia.
But the government said the dead were mainly women and children and accused the fighters of committing a massacre on the eve of the resumption of peace talks in Geneva.
BEIRUT (Reuters) – A Syrian government delegation in Geneva urged mediator Lakhdar Brahimi on Monday to condemn the violence in the mainly Alawite town of Maan in central Syria in which at least 41 people were killed on Sunday.
Extremist Islamic rebels overran a village in central Syria populated by Assad’s Alawite minority, killing at least 40 people Sunday, activists said. Half of the victims in the attack in Maan were civilians and the rest were village fighters defending their homes, said the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
There’s something cosmetic about peace talks and related optimistic political prognoses: Bashar al-Assad’s Syria is done; the Syria to come is not even envisioned with coherence or cohesion; the theater has long been a playground for Islamic Jihad and anarchic violence set loose across the land, the appointment of General Salim Idris as titular leader of a well-intended revolution notwithstanding.
While Russian President Putin enjoys the winter games at Sochi and American President Obama attends to domestic issues, it is doubtful either will countenance the development of an Islamist Syrian Republic in place of the merely Arab one recognized. However, it seems both will let the spontaneous internal demolition continue until the curtain closes on the bloody first act, which ends with fevered diplomacy amid scattered fighting and political anarchy.
Syrians displaced and refugee, Syrians suffering with dread and loss, need an army of their own — not the dictator’s army, which serves the dictator, not the armies of God that serve primarily themselves even while cloaked in religion. However, the Syrian army wanted would seem today the one routed from the field or diminished in its capacities.
About a month has passed since the running of the above-cited headline, “Salim Idris has failed as leader of Syrian rebels, coalition says.’ Doubtless, however, diplomatic and war planning activity continues around Salim Idris and the necessity of sooner or later confronting, containing, (and dismantling) the al-Qaeda-oriented fronts that seem to spread with deadly — and soul-deadening — exuberance.
As a dictator develops, he may pass certain milestones in the way that any other criminal might. What starts with techniques for stealing elections, for example, gets on to a depth in corruption hard to reverse (once everyone’s on the take) — and then, later, more substantial crimes. Vladimir Putin may have launched and pursued his career along two tracks: one as the ultimate Bond villain, the Soviet, post-Soviet KGB thug — and he’s already got the nukes — and the other is his own figure in Russian history: how will he be remembered?
The farther down into the depths Syria goes, the more difficult Putin will find it to control his own reputation even as he rebuilds aspects of the Russian security state. He could intervene to temper the Assad regime with some kind of Russian ideological humanism lifted out of 19th Century aristocracy and agitation, but the Assad regime seems to have gone beyond rescue, imho, as has the ISIS part of the revolution, and such Russian medicine as may be applied may not be strong enough to reverse the damage done the state.
Incidentally, Putin evacuated Russian civilians from Syria, at least to the extent that they cared to leave (by air); he also pulled the naval presence from Tartus. That’s been part of the hands-off approach to Syria that has also made the battle space a political theater in which the worst of the worst really have shown their colors, somewhat diminished their own energies as well as assets in play, and brought inherent fault lines in the Arab world and in Islam into focus for the world to see.
A Putinesque intervention during Sochi would be glorious! 🙂 However, what does he have to work with, and what can he do with it? Syrians have needed what Egyptians have enjoyed: a protective and tractable army, not the one dropping barrel bombs on their heads. Take it further: they needed a mentality that would have gathered behind General Idris a malleable revolutionary army: instead, that bright idea has been flanked by the al-Qaeda affiliates and their remote sponsors.
If and as Russian web-based information culture expands, Putin’s reliance on image he can control will become more deeply challenged, but the so-called “fragile empire” has great backbone in the stolen billions of the energy business and use of the same to stoke corruption and patronage. Putin’s enjoying the winter games. He knows his kind of power, and, for now, he knows he’s got it and with it a fine image of himself along with the roaring adulation of his nationalist fans.
Inspiration: promotion of an article (which I’m not finding online) by Adnan Oktar encouraging Russian intervention in Syria.
Call it the “System of the Mahdi” or a thousand other things: essential humanism is the issue in Syria, and as noted here recently and implied in the top section, which was composed for a thread but is only posted here, Syrians have never known the possession of an army that stood for their interests.
What they have known and for three years experienced with increasing misery is a dictator’s army, Which has been the mighty instrument of their own subjugation.
With the revolutionary army partially, heavily, hijacked by the al-Qaeda affiliates, even if disaffiliated by al-Qaeda central, they’re trapped, and the reward for being defenseless is global hand wringing, UN humanitarian assistance, and neighborly emergency medical care in small portions — the injured or ill have to get to a border and across it — plus other assistance from (gasp!) Israel.
Syria is gone with several of its key cities destroyed and one-third to one-half of its population dispersed internally and externally.
Assad will not get it back, much less put it back the way it was.
Syrians, however, are not gone.
They will need to go home to their land and live different lives. God give them the army to do it, somehow, and give that army the prescience and wisdom to know and to separate true threats to Syrian freedom, when it comes, from the fabrications of fascist dictators.
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