Chemical and biological weapons are absolutely prohibited under international humanitarian law. Debates and questions surrounding the alleged use of chemical weapons in Syria are not fading away. Robert Mardini, the ICRC’s head of operations for the Near and Middle East, explains the organization’s position.
Tell me about the world in which you would like to live.
Will it be a world that holds itself to time honored ethical and moral standards?
Will it be a world in which self-awareness and the awareness of others inspires an integrating compassion and consideration for the humanity shared?
Will it be a world in which the most notable and powerful of public speakers may be trusted to keep their own laws, to restrain themselves from excessive or unbridled appetites, and to tell the truth whether it becomes them or not?
If you should wish to live in some other world, don’t bother with this blog.
* * *
Unknown to Syrian officials, U.S. spy agencies recorded each step in the alleged chemical attack, from the extensive preparations to the launching of rockets to the after-action assessments by Syrian officials. Those records and intercepts would become the core of the Obama administration’s evidentiary case linking the Syrian government to what one official called an “indiscriminate, inconceivable horror” — the use of outlawed toxins to kill nearly 1,500 civilians, including at least 426 children.
Hours before his arrest, Abdelke had signed a petition that averred (here’s where Chrome’s translate option comes in handy) “support to the forces of the revolution who advocate the establishment of a pluralistic democracy” and “desire for a peaceful solution to stop the bloodshed and to preserve national unity and territorial integrity, which involves the departure of Bashar al-Assad and pillars of his regime.
Youssef Abdelke — never hard of him before two minutes ago — but as one who has learned the ways of the World Wide Web, the third minute opens on eternity.
(Reuters) – Syrian government forces have detained a dissident left-wing painter in a new wave of arrests of non-violent critics of President Bashar al-Assad, opposition groups said on Friday.
“A place to share art, uninhibited without a bunch of stupid ass rules. A place to help your fellow page owners grow and succeed. A group to have fun with no dictator shoving shit down your throat and bowing down. A group to be FREE to help as you see fit. A group to rock the fuck on!”
It’s a closed Facebook group, one to which I would apply if I were shooting the local downtrodden as opposed, say, to the leisured, business, and community development classes.
Nonetheless, “Art and FREEDOM”, my soul is with you and your author, Youssef Abdelke.
* * *
I really don’t know why Putin darkens his role in history by keeping in his hand with the Ayatollah’s Iran and the Assad’s Syria.
* * *
Novelist Daniel Silva has a great deal of fun with the “Russian President” — in fiction, merely a character, never named, nothing more than coincidental with anything or anyone in reality, in his latest best seller The English Girl.
As a fiction writer, Silva’s actually, probably, one of the very best political analysts on the international stage, and while playing that role through his characters and plots, the Russian President looms large and rightly so for the behind-the-curtain strategy pursued by the post-Soviet oligarchs of the Latest and Greatest in Russian States.
As we know about narcissists and narcissistic hunger and supply, they are ultimately about themselves, and whatever their charms, political and social, may be. Not that Bashir Assad has enjoyed abundance in dimension, but it’s the Russian President who has been most quiet on the obscenity of a state that deploys jets to suppress, at first, a small challenge to its authority.
While the Syria of 2010 has been destroyed, culturally, socially, structurally, one might note that Russia, in her defense, has ferried both the larger part of its civilian and military presence out of the country — not exactly a show of confidence, that, but not exactly either a show of humanist resolve.
The world wonders at the conundrum that has pit a brutal dictatorship against partially but deeply virulent Islamist forces. There is in that aspect of Syria’s agony the “no good dog in the fight” and the “black hole” of the Islamic Small Wars constructed of a contempt, hatred, and self-contempt in the inhumanity that draws in military energy and burns without end.
Nearly one hundred thousand dead and four million displaced in Syria’s furnace and neither of two of the most powerful statesmen of our era either cares to or knows how to shut it down.
Instead of the kumbaya “reset” between the states and the federation (how young is Obama?), Putin appears to be draining the former plus NATO by keeping the oven hot while avoiding, rightly, the imposition of another Chechnya in its sphere of influence. And yet . . . the Assad regime was the Soviet’s monster, and one would think that after 1991 the state would have been concerned with other than filling its pockets in collusion with it for another 22 years.
But that perhaps would have been too caring, too ethical.
Too English.
* * *
While the superpowers dick around with trivial issues like Snowden, Syria, in part, draws to it the “worst of the worst” — or just the most spirited — of fighters representing Shiite and Sunni Islam, those two angry wasps someone left in a bell jar separating their concerns from the much, much greater world surrounding.
On a portion of that, I would blame the west.
We’ve done business, haven’t we, for how many years?
And barely a word, most certainly few, if any, of outrage in regard to humanity and human rights in the contained but also dark medieval quarters of the globe.
So why not leave them — today in Syria, tomorrow perhaps in Egypt or somewhere else — in their own mess?
Whether the President of the Free World or that of the Russian Empire, is it incumbent on either to reorganize a middle east state as a pet humanitarian project?
There are, of course, other ambitions in the mix, much including Iran’s and Qatar’s, but one may one wonder between them whether either will wake up from their dream or with history pass away into it.
* * *
Prestige matters.
As a Jew, I may wonder how global memory will treat of today’s powerful in the days beyond their reclamation by the earth.
What they’re ignoring is that this is actually how democracy works. Even in a free society, the state has to have some secrets. The means and methods by which it tracks terrorists should, I’d suggest, be one of them. Should those means and methods be subject to scrutiny? Yes. Should that scrutiny come from our democratically elected representatives? Yes. Should the powers being scrutinised also be the subject of checks and balances from the courts? Yes. In other words, precisely what has been happening with Prism.
Jeffrey Toobin posting on The New Yorker’s web site: “Indeed, Snowden was so irresponsible in what he gave the Guardian and the Postthat even these institutions thought some of it should not be disseminated to the public. The Postdecided to publish only four of the forty-one slides that Snowden provided. Its exercise of judgment suggests the absence of Snowden’s.”
Toobin’s colleague John Cassidy provides counterpoint: “He is a hero. (My colleague Jeffrey Toobin disagrees.) In revealing the colossal scale of the U.S. government’s eavesdropping on Americans and other people around the world, he has performed a great public service that more than outweighs any breach of trust he may have committed.”
In Politico, Tal Kopan has worked up a scathing indictment of Snowden’s character founded on the slant of the details, from Snowden’s dropping out of high school, albeit completing his GED coursework in the community college system, to the stickers on his laptop: “4.His laptop stickers reveal his beliefs. Stickers on Snowden’s laptop express support for Internet freedom, The Guardian said. One reads, “I support Online Rights: Electronic Frontier Foundation,” and another is for the Tor Project, an online anonymity software.”
“The main stipulation for seeking asylum in Iceland would be that the person must be in Iceland to start the process,” said Johannes Tomasson, the chief spokesman for Iceland’s Ministry of Interior in Reykjavik. “That would be the ground rule No. 1.”
Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Facebook, Apple, AOL and Paltalk erected what the New York Timesdescribes as “locked mailboxes” in which to place data on suspicious persons requested by the government under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA. The Times’ description, published Saturday, used unnamed sources.
Basically, it looks like the post-911 Bush Administration launched a broad and comprehensive effort to detect terrorists and their operations (apparently, ignoring plain old gumshoe Russian intelligence sharing prior to the Boston Marathon bombing shouldn’t be mixed in with this NSA story), and, legally, Congress-approved, by law, Obama has sustained the Bush Administration plan.
This is for my paranoids — it’s at least four years old, has been viewed more than 57,000 times, and it will take you where you want to go.
God has not exempted geeks from having their own character and personality issues, so here I may lump Assange, the Wikileaks guy (click for the latest on that), and Snowden together — birds of similar feather, says I, and asylum, indeed, is what they have needed.
This morning on Facebook, I found that Marcia Kannry, founder of the Dialogue Project, a combined Israeli-Palestinian peace mission, had pasted beside one of Pamela Geller’s posters a note stating, “On Yom Kippur, I am fasting and reflecting. I am a Jewish Jihadi.
“Jihad is an Islamic process of reflection and struggle to bring thoughts, words, and actions in alignment with prayer and best ethical practices. So too as Jews we practice sleichot (asking for forgiveness from the humans whom we have offended).”
There’s a little more to the note, but that’s the gist, and in threaded discussion, a Facebooker noted that some would make peace and some, with hate, create divisiveness.
So I asked a question.
* * *
Is Geller’s poster hateful? Let’s get beyond the lockstep response “Everybody knows . . .” http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Terrorism/victims.html The recent behavior and speech of Presidents Ahmadinejad, Erdogan, and Morsi have played heavily against “The Zionist Entity” — the Jewish State of Israel. The greater world will always look over the evidence, from the IHH in the Gaza Flotilla’s Mavi Marmara fiasco to Morsi’s still recent libel that it is “Israel that has always broken its treaty with Egypt” — time code 1:23.
What is President Morsi when he says, ” . . . the peace treaty between us and Israel have always been violated by the Israelis.”
No sooner does an AQ-type raid on an Egyptian army controlled border take place, resulting in Egyptian casualties and Egyptian Army action to chase down other and similar miscreants in the Sinai, then the episode in a good chunk of “Arab street” becomes chalked off to Mossad.
What is that if not barbaraism?
Geller’s poster is a cry for peace. Real peace. Reliable peace. Friendship-based peace.
Is it too broad?
Perhaps.
I have met via Facebook a good share of Arabs and Muslims who support Israel or, otherwise, prove themselves caring, independent, and prudent thinkers and speakers: still, Geller has touched a nerve having to do with truth and with telling the truth and with the refraining of telling libelous gossip and lies.
* * *
By the way: where in the poster was religion criticized?
On that day, just like this one, “severe clear” as pilots say, I had been sitting in an office, “flex space” the real estate people call, working on a proposal and the owner of the company had the television on.
The only thing I had to say and said was, “They got through.”
I looked out the low second story window toward the north from Laurel, Maryland: not a plane in sight, unusual for the location close by Baltimore-Washington International Airport and Tipton Field, Fort Meade.
The Pin Del Motel where “the terrorists” stayed was over a bridge (from SR 197) and a jog right on U.S. Route 1.
The National Security Agency (NSA), whose mission it was to forestall such ugly business, was about two miles away on the Meade campus.
New York City: four hours north on I-95.
Should I have quit my contract, grabbed a camera, gone north?
Didn’t.
I picked up where I had left off on the proposal, the television footage playing, replaying, all day with more coming from a field in Pennsylvania and a face of the Pentagon.
Could I have then imagined having “Facebook buddies” from Islamabad to Riyadh?
No way.
The whole life has been a “long, strange trip”, let me tell you, but of the detours or channels, this engagement with The Islamic Small Wars, the collection of civil conflicts within Muslim-majority states and their interfaces with every other world on earth, has become the longest and strangest of them all.
BackChannels 