By labeling the acts of radical Islamists as mere “terrorism” we imply that there is an Achilles heel to expose — a political demand or a territorial gain with which they might barter, with which we might naively appease.
The reality is completely different. Their goals are nihilistic and non-negotiable: they want the total elimination of all who are not with them. Nairobi was possibly the most explicit demonstration of such.
Someone raised expectations, perhaps; someone provided explicit instruction; someone’s words were received amplified, heightened, deified, perhaps; and someone challenged The Wisdom, saying in effect, “Prove it – it is either of the stars or not.”
Along the line of the Christian anti-Jihad, there is no way away from elements of scripture delivered in practical and literal terms. Their experience of what on this blog I call “shimmer” starts with their examination of the Quran plus impression from history plus, finally, an acquaintance with Hadith. None of that ends well, and less for Christian pride than its basis in Jewish thought after Hillel.
For the Jews, the noise starts somewhere beyond the arguments and themes inspired by — but seldom stated explicitly in — the Torah. Even with something as simple as “The Binding of Isaac”, the reader is never told whether the test is of Abraham’s obedience, which is the common interpretation, or one given to children by their parents, or of conscience, which is a little bit more incisive and likely to arrive as epiphany with sufficient fascination and reflection.
The Jews long ago formed a culture apart and have learned a great deal about themselves and others. Credit the Torah for that. Or credit the necessity of separation given the humanity that must have gathered in the ancient desert appalled with the world, and, later, with Pharaoh. Muslims, by comparison, have formed of the seduced or the conquered of the world, and whatever spirit predated Muhammad would seem to persist in expression now conflated with Islam.
Whether what is in Qanta Ahmed to grasp as a modern Muslim woman a progressive and humanist Islam is actually in Islam, I don’t know, for there are many forces in the Ummah — the “Islamists” but a facet, the “sword verses” another, the conflations with child marriages and honor killings producing yet additional self-slander and fuel for critics, and the history of conquest (start with the wholesale slaughter of the men and rape of daughters and wives of the Banu Qurayza) — that would belie the assertion.
For the Kurds fighting Al Qaeda today in northern Syria, nothing has changed: they know their old enemy.
Additional Reference
Concerns with terrorist atrocities in Christian or western states may overlook the inkblot spread of Al Qaeda-defined conflict in ungoverned or autonomously governed spaces. That context tells of a format in warfare as familiar to the 7th Century as it is to the morning news sifted by foreign affairs wonks.
The Kurdish community in northern Syria hasn’t to care about the modern humanist assertion, reformation, or survival of Islam: a Muslim army, self-appointed, self-defined, has arrived on their doorstep to convert or annihilate them, and they know it and have taken up defensive positions and initiated diplomatic efforts congruent with that.
Abdul Hakim Quick – a preacher from the Islamic Education and Research Academy, who has called upon God to “clean and purify Al-Aqsa from the filth of the Yahood [Jews]” and to “clean all of the lands from the filth of the Kafirun [non-believers].” He has also stated: “They said ‘what is the Islamic position [on homosexuality]?’ And I told them. Put my name in the paper. The punishment is death. And I’m not going to change this religion.”
Baghdad, 1 October 2013 – According to casualty figures released today by UNAMI, a total of 979 Iraqis were killed and another 2,133 were wounded in acts of terrorism and violence in September.
But a little over a year after it was suspended, the death penalty was reinstated by the new Shiite-led central government. A year later, in 2005, the executions, usually by hanging, resumed.
Since then, around 500 people have been executed, according to records kept by human rights observers including Amnesty International. During the first four months of this year alone at least 50 people were hanged.
Iraq is one of the world’s most prolific executioners, as the government continues to battle against a high level of violence by armed groups. Hundreds of prisoners are currently held on death row. In 2012 a sharp rise in executions was recorded in Iraq making it the country with the third highest number of executions in the world, after China and Iran. At least 129 people were executed in 2012, almost twice the known total of 201 since the beginning of 2013 at least 83 people, including two women, have been executed.
The civil war in neighboring Syria — itself a volatile, sectarian conflict — has spilled across the border, and Sunni jihadi factions are operating in both countries. Now, four months before the next parliamentary elections, Iraq increasingly appears to be spiraling toward a civil war.
The Iraqi government plans to form a division comprised of Iraqi Shi’a militia members. This planned division will be deployed in Baghdad. This development is recognition by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki that current security measures are ineffective. While the formation of this division may appeal to the Iraqi Shi’a, it may lead to further discontent by the Iraqi Sunnis. Al-Qaeda in Iraq will capitalize on the formation of this division and seek new opportunities to escalate sectarian violence in Iraq. The formation of the division will damage Maliki’s credentials and likely lead to further instability.
For those who may take a special interest in Iraq. Stephen Wicken‘s blog on which the above quoted piece by Ahmed Ali appears, updates weekly.
______
“Two mad wasps in a bell jar” — my analogy for Shia vs Sunni fighting in Syria would seem to hold up as well for Iraq, which looks to me to be dissolving into a purely retributive bloodbath of a civil war.
The UN’s count approaching 1,000 dead in Iraq in September appears in brief overview a reliable monthly rate with sources reporting 5,000 dead by way of political violence in the land since April of this year.
Saturday 5 October: 100 killed
Baghdad: 55 in bomb attacks.
Mosul: 5 by gunfire.
Balad: 15 by car bomb.
Baquba: 11 in separate bombings.
Yusufiya: 3 Sahwa members by IED.
Hawija: 3 Sahwa members by gunfire.
Muqdadiya: 1 by IED.
Tikrit: 3 (women and child) killed during clashes.
Falluja: 4 by gunfire, IED.
Presuming that those remote to the fighting are nonetheless getting an accurate impression of Iraq’s fully functioning if entirely off-kilter slaughterhouse, one begs to ask about motivation on the part of killers, and never mind their affiliation.
“At the root of these attacks – said Msgr. Sako – is a strong tension between the Shiite majority and the Sunni faction and this violence is clearly sectarian and confessional in nature.” In Kirkuk alone, the archbishop continued, there were four targeted killings of innocent people. “The aim – says the prelate – is to destabilize the country” because “the central government lacks unity and political force even within the same Shiite majority. There is great tension, there is no dialogue between groups and greater barriers are emerging “.
It appears in Iraq that even such things as wanton destruction and murder may become habits, first of mind in excessively perceived oppressive, anxiety-ridden, paranoid, and infernal atmospheres, i.e., the bizarre, surreal, and untrustworthy atmosphere of a war zone, and then habits in activity and action: some population has long been accustomed to the presence of firearms, ammo, explosives and, this perhaps spelling the difference between a predominantly peaceful “gun ownership” and a restless one prone to violence, a mise en scene of explosions and shootings overlaying thousands of smaller but vicious acts of intimidation and suggestion.
There’s the madness of the wasps in the bell jar in that.
The state’s monopoly on violence, as in Hussain’s day, may suppress and reduce violence in the streets, but imposed along sectarian lines, or perceived as such, it will fail.
The battle that looks like Shiite vs Sunni may turn out an unformed middle — about to be called into being out necessity — against an habituated cast of aimless, mindless, morally bankrupt and vengeful war zombies today reduced to blowing themselves up among pilgrims and school children.
No one who has retained either an ounce of their own courage or humanity can fail to see the inchoate and lost qualities in these deluded monsters who walk around with death their only real meaning.
While Robert Spencer noted recently, “. . . the idea that the Sunni-Shi’ite divide, which is 1,400 years old and goes all the way back to the murky origins of Islam, is something that can without undue difficulty be “overcome” is a sterling manifestation of the general superficiality of Washington’s analysis of the Middle East, during both the Bush and the Obama Administrations,” I would ask who is not fighting that fight today for the good reason they had on one day or another in this lifetime found the world changed when they opened their eyes.
Their numbers needs must dwarf these others.
Where are they?
Do they not understand what is killing them?
Habits of mind are like any other: one foregoes the behavior for a while, whether some form of gluttony or excessive passivity, and then, so one may hope, moves on to better thoughts and brighter days.
When a militant core develops somewhere down deep in the middle of Pakistan’s middle or middle-elite and modernizing middle classes — business, landowners, and military — there may come a more vigorous battle against the miscreant forces throwing bombs at them.
* * *
AP reports two bombings today in Baluchistan — two soldiers killed in one attack; six people in the other (plus 11 wounded).
Having scratched through the surface of the Baloch Conflict — start looking up nouns if you’re enthused about solving this one of the world’s problems — I could not find the noble figure of a people’s leader who was not himself above it all in the now familiar narcissistic pattern, self-aggrandizing, self-enriching, not quite so truly egalitarian and magnanimous.
That fighting is going to go on until someone runs short of either ammo or manpower.
___
Also, in the same piece, AP tells of other recent deadly violence related to the ferrying relief to the victims of a recent earthquake in the region. Rather than tally the count, which is one way of removing and sanitizing what is happening — by turning humans into numbers — I’d rather readers used their imaginations for two minutes.
A terrible earthquake has taken place somewhere. Homes have been destroyed; roads have been damaged, perhaps; communities and families have found themselves cut off from others, the economic ecology of their lives — getting food, having a place to sleep — has been suddenly altered and they’re exposed to both malevolent human and natural forces. Military troops — good young men, every one of them — have been summoned to get in aid and for that expression of compassion and good deed doing have been attacked and killed with bombs or gunfire.
Of and for the dead we ask whether their murderers were Baloch separatists or Islamic militants when, in fact, the answer is irrelevant to the ethics and humanity of the situation.
Whoever the killers are, it seems they could not discern the difference between a combat mission and a humanitarian one, much less between a soldier and a civilian — and if the history of this fighting affords any clues, they never could.
_____
Start with the end of the story: “At least 20 people were killed and nearly 40 were injured when another bus carrying government workers was bombed in the same area in June 2012.”
Same time, next year?
Add a couple of months: 17 dead is the count from the bus bombing that took place a week ago in Peshawar.
______
“Police and hospital officials say most of the dead and injured were women and children. The diocese of Peshawar says several were Sunday school students and choir members.” — from the video heading Suicide bombers kill 81 at church in Peshawar, Pakistan – CNN.com – 9/23/2013.
Imran Khan who has promised to talk with the Taliban (I cannot but imagine that a “see here, old chum, this is just not acceptable . . . .” is not going to get very far) and Nawaz Sharif may be figuring out that not only is talk cheap in the face of such an onslaught of mayhem and murder, it may also no longer suffice for calming crowds and placating the bereaved.
______
Shafqat Malik, the head of the local bomb squad, said the bomb was planted in a car parked in front of a small hotel in the Qissa Khawani bazaar, the city’s oldest and one of its biggest. The device used about 440 pounds of explosives and was detonated by remote control, he added, leaving a crater 5 feet deep.
Toll: 43 dead, 100 wounded, “in a crowded market about 350 yards from where a memorial service was being held for the victims of last week’s church bombing.”
Zulfiqar Ali and Mark Magnier’s piece in the Los Angeles Times makes mention of the recent series of attacks as possibly intended by Taliban to discredit peace talks with the government.
Mudar Zahran promoted the above via social networks about 50 minutes ago: whom he addressed, where, and when was not provided.
Addendum: Mudar Zahran speaking at the Menachem Begin Heritage Center, “Two States for Two Peoples on Two Banks of the Jordan River,” Dr. Arieh Eldad, Chair, Jerusalem, August 25, 2013.
In reference, I’ve provided links to Zahrans writings and related material as well as items focusing on Jordanian stability.
In addition, Zahran has noted the landing of a shell in Ramtha, Jordan within the past three hours. Such mortar shell “spillover” (who knows with what intent it traveled?) has been a regular occurrence in Ramtha this past year.
The king was flying himself to Karak, which is one of the poorer cities in a distressingly poor country, to have lunch with the leaders of Jordan’s largest tribes, which form the spine of Jordan’s military and political elite. More than half of all Jordanians are of Palestinian origin, with roots on the West Bank of the Jordan River, but the tribal leaders are from the East Bank, and the Hashemite kings have depended on East Bankers to defend the throne since the Hashemites first came to what was then called Transjordan from Mecca almost 100 years ago.
Jordan shares the region’s troubles: a faltering economy; rampant unemployment, especially among the young; and a popular demand for a say in how the country is governed.
“Jordan is stable, but you feel what is so unstable,” says Labib Kamhawi, describing the contradictions. He is the head of the National Front for Reform, a coalition of political groups and civil society organizations. “The decision-making process is without any input from the people.”
Almost 2 million people have fled Syria since the civil war began in early 2011, according to U.N. numbers. By some estimates 800,000 of these poured into neighboring Jordan, a traditional safe haven for refugees from previously war-stricken regions such as Iraq and Palestine. This influx is taking a heavy toll on the Arab nation which by the end of the year may host as many as a million refugees.
Hassan Abu Hanieh, political analyst and expert on Islamic groups, said earlier this week that Jordanians are considered among the most prominent foreign nationalities fighting alongside Islamist forces in the anti-Assad rebellion, as hundreds have allegedly joined the radical and ultraconservative Salafist jihadist groups of Jabhat Al Nusra and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, both Al Qaeda-affiliated, he said.
Islamic terrorists dressed in Nigerian military uniforms assaulted a college inside the country Sunday, gunning down dozens of students as they slept in their dorms and shot others trying to flee, witnesses say.
A costume du jour provides the Trojan horse and malevolent uncloaking suffices to murder with least risk dangerous merchants and sleeping students. One may start to wonder at this point whether the civilian targets of Boko Haram ambush should themselves be trained and armed.
They’re certainly not being defended by their government even as the same may pursue them.
One report noted a government shutdown of communications intended to impede Boko Haram’s coordination, but the same, so one might reason, would seem to prevent a common SOS getting through to Nigeria’s military.
Communication blackout
“A friend who came from Mubi at the weekend told me that there is no fighting in Mubi, but the curfew imposed on the state is affecting business and free movement,” Sani said. “You cannot communicate because phones have been cut. Farmers cannot farm because of fear, and food prices have gone up.”
Nigeria has experienced a recent spate of terrorist activities and protracted security challenges. In addition to the attacks in May, a suicide booming in March claimed the lives of 41 people, and in April, fighting between the army and Boko Haram claimed the lives of 187 people.
When the Nigerian military announces its victories against Boko Haram, it usually includes a list of the weapons that soldiers have recovered. It used to be mostly AK-47s, ammunition and bombs. More recently the list has included machine guns mounted on trucks, anti-aircraft and anti-tank guns.
As Nigerians were on the street protesting over fuel subsidy removal, a British based man was being arraigned in UK over the shipping of 80,000 rifles and pistols and 32 million rounds of ammunition to Nigeria. The shipment included 40,000 AK47 assault rifles, 30,000 rifles and 10,000 9mm pistols.
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.
*
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.
______
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.
BackChannels 