Eleven militias have announced their formal split from the Syrian National Coalition and dismissed its aim for a democratic government in favour of strict Islamic law.
The disturbing development comes after a study revealed the alarming spread of the hard-line Al Qaeda jihadist terror network.
In Tweihineh, “the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant… has forbidden girls in primary education and above from attending school unless they wear fully Islamic clothing including an abaya (gown), gloves and a veil,” the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
“Isis fighters broke the cross of the Sayida al-Bshara Catholic church,” SOHR said. “They also burned the church’s contents (crosses, paintings and statues) and set up the Isis banner on top of the church.”
“Isis fighters also removed the cross from the al-Shuhada’ Armenian church near the al-Rashid garden,” the group added.
The pretense that the so-called Syrian opposition-in-exile speaks for those inside the country, never firm to begin with, was further exposed late on Tuesday, in a two-minute video statement called “Communiqué No. 1,” which was issued by eleven armed rebel groups that are influential in northern Syria.
“Communique No. 1” — as if a new regime has taken power (when it has not or may not hold it or no one has or will acknowledge it) — discredits the Syrian rebel cause.
In the next few days, those who watch will look for evidence of a resurgent moderate or Idris-type resurgent FSA. If it doesn’t show up — around here, that means showing up in online reportage — Syria will continue down a Somalia-like path characterized by increasing anarchy, barbarism and cruelty, and fighting without cause or end apart from having learned how to live smeared in blood.
“The statements has [STET] four points, some of them a little rambling:
– All military and civilian forces should unify their ranks in an “Islamic framework” which is based on “the rule of sharia and making it the sole source of legislation”.
– The undersigned feel that they can only be represented by those who lived and sacrificed for the revolution.
– Therefore, they say, they are not represented by the exile groups. They go on to specify that this applies to the National Coalition and the planned exile government of Ahmed Touma, stressing that these groups “do not represent them” and they “do not recognize them”.
– In closing, the undersigned call on everyone to unite and avoid conflict, and so on, and so on.
The following groups are listed as signatories to the statement.
Under Abbas, the PA has been waging a war of words against the Jewish state, engaging in anti-Semitic incitement of the vilest kind and using Holocaust denial, racial slurs, and Judeophobic epithets. It is a stream of hostility cultivated and implemented over the past decade under the Abbas leadership. A stream which is competing with “Der Ewige Jude”, the Eternal Jew, favored by Joseph Goebbels, in which Jews are compared to rats.
A comment in The New York Times on the funding and training of Palestinian Authority Security Forces:
Much of the training supported by the United States and the European Union was conducted in Jordan, away from traditional Palestinian bases, in hopes that months away from home would cement a new professional ethos. Yet old neighborhood and clan ties continued to be used in recruitment and some of the most powerful Palestinian security organizations remained outside the reform regimen.
We write today because we are deeply disturbed by recent reports of large-scale political arrests being carried out by the Palestinian Authority inside the occupied West Bank. These arrests have targeted critics of the Palestinian Authority, including youth activists, human rights defenders, prisoners’ rights organizers and scholars, and journalists, including former political prisoners held by Israel and released in the October 2011 prisoner exchange agreement and subsequently.
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This operation is currently under the command of Rear Admiral Paul Bushong.9 We are deeply disturbed by the security coordination regime and the role of the United States, highly committed to supporting the Israeli military diplomatically, economically and militarily, in maintaining this regime to the detriment of Palestinians’ freedom of association and expression.
The oddness of the fracturing of the flow down from duel authoritarian modes and the simplistic ways of understanding them seems to me ever striking. Plainly through its behavior and language over time, the Palestinian Authority remains bent on Israel’s destruction and the theft outright of the Jewish state, and in that it has no place to go, and yet it seems to cull or silence competitors either worse than itself or better.
**
Perhaps it would be well to mention here that the American freedom of speech concept was and remains intended to protect discomforting or unpopular speech — not conspiracy or incitement to commit crimes, but politically distasteful speech, and that on the basis that protecting legitimate criticism is a necessary facet of a living and progressing democracy.
As regards then the constituents governed by the Palestinian Authority, one might then take an interest in whose voices have been intimidated, restrained, or silenced by it.
It appears one state cannot bribe another — that is what western assistance seems made to look like — off its language-conveyed-and-sustained program, however destructive, evil, and deeply misguided and suffocating to its own people that program may be.
I had the opportunity to meet with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, who expressed grave concern both for Israel’s security as well as for the prospects for peace. “How,” he asked us, “could the Palestinian leadership be a serious partner for peace if it welcomed into its ranks vicious terrorists who continue to deny the very right of the state of Israel to exist?” His concern is more than justified.
Gross corruption charges have for a long time been directed at the PLO, which already by 1993 was the richest terrorist organization in the world, according to the British National Criminal Intelligence Service, having assets of ten billion dollars and an annual income of approximately two billion dollars. The Daily Telegraph reported in 1999 that the PLO had secretly invested over 50 billion dollars around the world. Still, Norway has continuously broken bread with these people.
Arguably, the use of propaganda by Palestinians to gain compassion and political support has been their one great success. The Palestinian narrative of victimhood, with its falsifications of history and politics, its portrayal of themselves as not only innocent but the most compelling victims in the world, its staging of events to blame Israel for atrocities they themselves have committed, its deliberate concentration on alleged injuries or deaths of children, and its achievement in persuading much of the media to accept and advance its manipulation of language and action, have all been part of its success in the propaganda war.
The loosely compiled list that follows may be offered more for impression than information.
As with the above material, it’s indicative of the official continuance of a surreal state of affairs, one in which Israel and the west put up effort in funding, labor, and services to bring the refugees of 1948 into a modern state and state of being while the graying post-Soviet remnant of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) continues to promote an anti-Semitic, genocidal, and totalitarian engine suited to its own combined tribal and mafioso needs.
The real story hasn’t to do with murder per se but with the complete and final enslavement and subjugation of the refugees generations by way of the control of what they may read and speak and think.
Since the establishment of limited Palestinian self-rule in the West Bank and Gaza Strip in the mid-1990s, the U.S. government has committed over $4 billion in bilateral assistance to the Palestinians, who are among the world’s largest per capita recipients of international foreign aid.
Successive Administrations have requested aid for the Palestinians to support at least three major U.S. policy priorities of interest to Congress:
• Preventing terrorism against Israel from Hamas and other militant organizations.
• Fostering stability, prosperity, and self-governance in the West Bank that inclines Palestinians toward peaceful coexistence with Israel and a “two-state solution”.
Those who follow the middle east conflict more closely know that beneath the sawing of vocal interlocutors in the Preoccupied Territories, legitimate economic development, and utility and trade throughput plus access to higher education and sophisticated medical services have formed arrangements that the well known vanguard of the vain may feel beneath their own considerations.
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First, as I just said, I profoundly believe that it is in the national security interest of the United States to help resolve the Israeli-Palestinian dispute.
Second, I am one of those who firmly believes in a two-state solution: a Palestinian state living in peace and security alongside the state of Israel is the only solution that will meet the long-term needs of Israel and the aspirations of the Palestinian people. This has long been the policy of our national leadership, and I share it.
Third, let me state very clearly my deep conviction—and I tell this to my Israeli friends all the time—that as President Obama said last year, the bond between the United States and Israel is unbreakable today, it is unbreakable tomorrow, and it is unbreakable forever. [Applause.]
Before I get into the details of the program, I would like to remind you that the Government of Israel has 100% ransparency into all aspects of US support to the PA Security Forces (PASF) and that the USSC will never advocate or sponsor activities that could threaten Israeli security.
Convincing Washington to support the security mission remains a tall order even today. Despite the undisputed progress the Palestinian security force has shown on the ground, Republican lawmakers in the House of Representatives have recently put yet another hold on funds for maintaining and developing the force, as a demonstration of their displeasure with policies adopted by the Palestinian Authority.
Saving the Bashar al-Assad regime by getting it to junk weapons of mass destruction it doesn’t need while vastly improving Russia’s international image is a good deal for them
(Reuters) – In the photograph the two robed men stand shoulder-to-shoulder, one tall and erect, the other more heavyset. Both smile for the camera. The picture from Tehran is a rare record of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei meeting Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, the head of Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shi’ite paramilitary group.
A family in Israel’s Arab minority is mourning the death of their son, killed fighting in the Syrian civil war.
Zaki Agbariah said he is proud of his 28-year-old son Mueid. The family told Channel 1 television Wednesday that Mueid didn’t tell anybody that he was going to Syria to fight.
Syria has deterrent weapons, more advanced than anything in its chemical arsenal, that could blindside Israel in mere moments, Syrian President Bashar Assad claimed Thursday.
“Originally, we produced chemical weapons in the 1980s as a deterrent to Israel’s nuclear capabilities,” Assad said in an interview with the Hezbollah-affiliated, Lebanon-based Al-Akhbar newspaper, adding that “today, we have weapons that are far more important and sophisticated and that can blindside Israel in the blink of an eye.”
Suddenly there is a volley of fire. “Get down guys,” the soldiers say. Some dive for cover in a concrete trench.
A sergeant explains that bombs and bullets from the Syrian war regularly land inside Israeli territory. The shooting may have been warning shots, or maybe just some stray bullets from a gunfight on the outskirts of Quneitra.
When it’s the people in the apartment next door, one monitors the loud voices, the character of the yelling, something breaking like a plate or glass. Then something big and heavy pounds against the wall.
Him? Her? The kid? Furniture?
Time to call the police.
Even that level of involvement may not be so easy.
If the domestic combatants figure out it was you called the cops, watch your back.
If there are children involved, you have not only called the police but social services and probably initiated a separations investigation, and some suffering mama or papa may not be too happy about that — and might figure you convenient for blaming first.
And all you was doin’ was watchin’ tv.
* * *
In the big bad ol’ world, states don’t intervene in wars so much as get sucked into them, rather like ships trying to sail on their way past the darkest of expanding vortex.
So the Jews, who were just watchin’ the tv too, stand beside the conflict in Syria not exactly unhappy to see Hezbollah invested in the battle while Russia and the United States stand outside the bloody sandbox trying to keep to keep the flying shit from spilling out farther into their own affairs.
That’s not really neighborly, but what’s a good and highly functioning state or two very powerful ones to do?
* * *
Israel has stepped up its sensitivity to potential activity on its borders; beyond that, and some sales of gas masks, it’s busy with being. With life. It has its security arrangements in place; it’s people — Jewish and other Israelis — have taken steps to be helpful to those in need of help — e.g.,
Delusional narcissistic reflection of motives — as with propaganda, the aggressor claims defense from what he himself has in mind for his target — would seem to have organized the Assad mentality to believe itself the target of Israeli aggression, a belief and posture abetting and motivating the state’s and state culture’s own aggression against Israel.
Give that a moment to settle.
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Within the framework of “civilizational narcissism”, Haider Mobarak’s term, this nifty nugget that you will find only here — “Delusional Narcissistic Reflection of Motives” — accounts much for the form of rhetoric embraced (language) and combat pursued (behavior) throughout the Islamic Small Wars.
The social grammar — the hidden rule learned early — is probably the message that if not defended, something will be taken from the child (e.g., “If you don’t eat your supper now, I shall give it to your brother” — a common enough phrase according to Raphael Patai).
What happens with the ancient and modern House of Israel with its civilizational psychology operating quite differently is that it’s outside of and unconcerned with this mess that is of intense interest to someone else enveloped in what might be called a narcissistic trap, that is the world spun around the narcissist’s delusions in such a way that it organizes the surrounding social architecture. In essence, the dictator at some point cannot escape his own dictatorship: he’s created too much myth, made too many corrupt deals, bargained himself right into a prison of the soul. The flow down is to fighters who cannot refuse the fight however absurd and surreal its imagined basis.
Who needs Pharaoh, that most magnificent construct of the malignant narcissist around whom the world revolves?
The Jews, and with a mixed multitude suffering the same insight, walked.
Who needs Assad?
The Jews, and the Israelis who are not only Jews, stand to the side eager only to help the bereaved, injured, and lost and otherwise maintain their defenses.
* * *
“Two mad wasps in a bell jar” — those who go into Syria to fight other than the one dictatorship go to combat over issues irrelevant to existence, the humanity of humanity, and probably to God as well, to whom, in the ancient manner, they may serve as illustration for the ages.
With revolution, something goes, it’s true, but that doesn’t mean something else takes its place, or much of it, all at once. With Pussy Riot getting more media play in these its quiet years than perhaps (darn!) it did in its earlier and exuberant phase, a part of the global conscience has been taking a second look at the state’s now anachronistic prison system plus its deeply antiquated view of its own purpose.
What brought this into focus was the notice that what has given way in Syria is of the same corroding poison: the Ghost of Soviets Past and perhaps (ach!) the Phantom of the Czars.
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is it about to lose its last ally in a newly democratised Arab world, of which Syria will remain a vital hub whatever happens? Russia inherited its Middle East presence from the Soviet Union, but it did not gain any new friends. With Gaddafi gone and Assad on his way out, Russia stands to lose more than physical assets.
Here we are coming up on two years later and Syria as a fine place to work (perhaps [grimace]) and play isn’t looking so good.
With the Kurdish Community enjoying autonomy and perhaps (egads!) enjoying fending off Al Qaeda a little less, with the faces of satellite-made maps rearranged significantly, with more than 110,000 souls absent forever and some millions struggling with new and insecure quarters, in the country and in other countries, and two superpowers arguing over the rules rather than the war, Syria has long passed the point of repair and territorial restoration.
And why?
In the post-Soviet internal grab fest, the Assad’s Syria just went on working as it had before the revolution.
Somebody forgot to invent and install Assad Regime in Syria 2.0
“The prison administration claimed that Nadezhda Tolokonnikova had been placed in isolation for her own protection, but we are concerned this could be yet another punishment for demanding that her own rights and the rights of other inmates are respected. What authorities should do is investigate the allegations she made,” said Sergei Nikitin, Director of Amnesty International’s office in Moscow.
If there is a dictator around and true to form, he will blame the adverse and scrutinizing media challenge on foreign agents and then do nothing or, at best, attend the cosmetics by summoning up the empire’s most renowned tailors of public relations to sew up a caring and concerned cloak to wrap around the matter.
That sort of thing suits emperors.
However, if the dictator is absent and another kind of administrator present, independent assessments and studies will be supported, an open conference or two may be arranged (and, perhaps [pfft] institutionalized), and Amnesty will be answered with a degree of candor possibly unknown to Russia’s best invested class.
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Also wheezing around like an old fart on matters post-Soviet: my own United States of America:
In 1974, Congress enacted the Jackson-Vanik amendment, which limits trade with “nonmarket” countries that restrict emigration. While it did not mention the Soviet Union, it was clearly aimed at pressuring Moscow to grant Jews the freedom to leave the country. Two decades after the fall of Communism, that is no longer a problem, but the law is still in place.
I don’t know if the matter has been addressed, and, right now, I don’t want to know. Celebrities in jail and civil wars grab everyone’s attention and inspire the nimble to undo the wrapping and have a look at who, what, where, how, and, perhaps especially (oh, groan), why!
Tariff law?
That’s kind of wonky, y’know?
“If Jackson-Vanik is not lifted, American exporters — including big players such as Caterpillar and Boeing — will be paying higher tariffs than European and Asian competitors” just doesn’t reach out and sing to me quite the way that Pussy Riot’s Prison Blues do.
Additional Reference
Prison people, New Times, n.d. (in Russian, machine translated)
1. To citizen and professional journalists and publishers: please dateline everything published. Otherwise, one may as well be reading short stories. Perhaps (I think that was one too many).
2. Khodorkovsky’s in a funny spiritual space. My impression from reading Fragile Empire is that he had leaped from the Communist Party into private ownership of whatever he could get his hands on during the transition, and though his heart may have been in the right place despite its oil-laden and much enriched blood, the wrangling over taxes would seem to reveal as greedy a Republican soul as any known to the royalty of black crude in Texas.
On the other hand, Putin’s Robin Hood may have played if the distribution architecture hadn’t so favored so many Merry Men of old and new acquaintance — no funny propaganda intended. Then too the revenue generating resource and the money have to move through their trade and economic channels and should a president not start with his own channels?
Perhaps (this one’s different) not.
Tempered modification may be the watchword for how states of affairs evolve in Russia.
While concentrations and movements in wealth and power hold interest, there’s an underlying dimensions analogous to operating a wood burning stove: whose job is it? How much fuel should it be given? How much oxygen, ventilation, and exhaust? Who is harvesting the wood? Who is holding it? Who is sitting next to the stove? Why? How? By what right? Etc.
With Putin, Russia has avoided anarchy.
It has not avoided oligarchy, so far, nor has it transformed itself in the direction of an integrated global political modernity. That’s a thing larger than “the west”: it includes India, for example.
The Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia has said it is “necessary to destroy all the churches of the region,” following Kuwait’s moves to ban their construction.
Hearing him talk after the Church attack, it is clear that Mr Khan is no ‘apologist’. An apologist makes excuses, often in an oblique manner for the acts of another, after the commission of the act. Mr Khan does no such thing. He is crystal clear in his absolute defense of the terrorists. And more importantly, he pre-approves of all future murderers.
Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta, whose nephew and his fiancé were among the victims, maintained a policy that Israel introduced to the world in the Entebbe raid and then abandoned in recent years – no negotiations with terrorists. “We will not negotiate with terrorists,” said Colonel Cyrus Oguna, a Kenyan military spokesman.
Such extreme violence against minorities tends to be perpetrated by the country’s many and various militant organisations. The group that claimed responsibility for this latest attack has links to the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan and said it was acting in retaliation for drone strikes. Yet the problem runs far deeper than a few rogue elements. Disturbingly, these extremist groups, which have been allowed to operate by successive governments, do have an impact on the national debate. This has contributed to increasing intolerance across society.
In south central Pennsylvania this afternoon, the news on the television mounted in a corner beneath the ceiling of the diner where I was enjoying a late lunch hung on the tragedy playing out in Nairobi’s Westgate Mall. This other story involving a death toll greater than Westgate — 85 as opposed to 68 — and targeting a Christian community and its sacred space may have had a different presence, less visceral, less important for having taken place in Muslim-majority Pakistan and having involved a less affluent and cosmopolitan community.
Perhaps.
Or perhaps we are more used to hearing of Islamist outrages in Pakistan — something in the realm of Islamic arm twisting and terror happens every day or every other day in Pakistan’s part of the Islamic Small Wars — and then, again, it’s a Muslim state and one with an outlook very different from Christian Kenya’s with its historic and decent relationship with Israel.
***
Their 52-year-old father had been looking forward to it, particularly the period after the service when the congregation spills out into the enclosed courtyard to chat.
“He was looking forward to seeing his friends,” said Joel.
It’s convenient, I suppose, for this old bleeding heart to bleed for everyone at the desktop: in my pseudo-solopsist online existence, all of the Islamic Small Wars (and a few others) occupy the same space, about 24-inches from eyes to screen. In real space, are they not on just one planet? Are they not coinciding, if not colliding, in time?
Is there anything that would make the murder of a 52-year-old father returning to church in Peshawar any less horrific and tragic than that of his doppelgänger gone shopping for a few hours in a mall in Nairobi?
Perhaps Pakistanis who now must admit the state’s declared religion has been hewed to, commandeered, perverted, or merely exploited (choose any option) by those “who would fly planes into office building” or blow up wedding processions, funerals, or parishioners gathering after services at church should lend attention to the more harmonious and tolerant values of the west and of the Christians. And of the Jews. And, perhaps, infidel others ever so much more at peace with the wide, wide world and themselves.
Israeli interests in Kenya run deep. According to the website of Israel’s embassy in Nairobi, Israel has provided technical assistance in areas such as agriculture and medicine for decades, in some cases going back to the days before Kenyan independence in 1963.
“They arrived in our town at dawn… and shouted ‘We are from the Al-Nusra Front and have come to make lives miserable for the Crusaders,” said one woman identified as Marie in Damascus, where many people from Maalula fled after rebels first attacked that town.
To control a situation, President Putin knows he must withhold his cards. Fear, worry, and tension are the wild horse’s bit and bridle, and Putin, perhaps more than Obama, knows how to ride a horse.
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