It was under a tree, that the men aligned with Muhammad took a pledge to fight to the death for the rite of their religion. This pledge is known as Bayt-e-Ridwan. “Allah was well-pleased with the believers when they swore allegiance to you under the tree.” Al-Fatah 18 (translation by Malik) In light of a fast-developing and potentially bloody struggle a treaty was hammered out between the men of Qureysh and the followers of Muhammad. The recounting of the development of this document, whether Qur’an or Sunnah, provide a practical corpus juris for Islamic crafting of treaty which seeks entrance and egress, and possible concessions regarding land borders.
Now stupidity bores me. But intellectual dishonesty evokes quite a different response. In examining both context and the spirit of the law of just one aspect of this treaty it is glaringly apparent that Hamas has violated the principles set forth in seeking such a truce.
PA minister: PA agreements are modeled
after Muhammad’s Hudaybiyyah
Peace Treaty
Muhammad signed a 10-year truce
at Hudaybiyyah with the tribes of Mecca,
but two years later he attacked and conquered them
PA Minister of Religious Affairs Al-Habbash,
in the presence of Mahmoud Abbas,
compared PA agreements with Israel
to Muhammad’s pact that led not to peace
but to defeat of the peace partners:
“This is the example and this is the model”
I suspect failures of creativity in language and in living have the sorriest correlations with reversions to violence and barbarism.
Since Vladimir Putin returned to the presidency he never really left, Russia’s descent into neo-Soviet authoritarianism has become daily more brazen. Dissidents are once again being put on show trials that call up the ghosts of Joseph Brodsky, Andrei Sinyavsky, and Yuli Daniel. Laws are being jammed through the Duma with the express purpose of making Western-minded Russians fear that they will be arrested for spying for foreign powers.
The state media regulator Roskomnadzor filed a motion with the court in early October to have the agency’s license revoked, accusing the agency of publishing videos with foul language, according to reports in the local and international press.
While Putin’s machinery poses its challenges to foul language (and gay pride, judging by the latest), it would seem to welcome every opportunity to further abuse basic human rights and democratic values. By way of doing what it has been doing — and doing it better — it has inspired its opposition locally, online, and worldwide.
The MediEval Empire is back!
And it is fast returning Russians to the status of loyal — more and more frequently, barely tolerated — subjects.
Ah, the glory.
The funny thing is, predictably, with Al Qaeda operating in Syria, Putin remains an heroic standard bearer for decency and freedom despite what the Putin-armed Assad regime has done to Syrians (don’t look — at least put it off twenty more seconds) and what Putin’s editing of laws may be doing (are) to Russia’s vast and under-served constituency.
Still, the disappointment . . . .
Peering out from behind the bars of the closed and censored USSR, during the Perestroika period, we young journalists felt an incredible urge for freedom. While we were all ready to make sacrifices for that prize, none of us could not imagine in our worst nightmares that in a free Russia journalists could be killed for their work. Media professionals could be censored in USSR, fired, jailed or even exiled – but not killed. We also believed – and our Western counterparts with whom we were shared this belief – that the collapse of the Iron Curtain and the end of the Cold War would herald in a new era of free expression and independent talented journalism would inevitably flourish across Europe and Central Asia. East and West, we would create a bright liberated information space stretching undimmed from the Atlantic to the Pacific. We failed utterly to anticipate and foresee how corrupt authorities and criminal gangs would develop new forms of censorship and pressure to bring our dream so violently to heel.
The Russian advocacy group International Academy of Spiritual Unity and Cooperation of Peoples of the World nominated Mr. Putin, characterizing his forged agreement with Syrian President Bashar Assad — to turn over admitted chemical weapons cache to international authorities — a world-class and prize-worthy piece of diplomacy, United Press International reported.
On Nov. 10, Russian performance artist Pyotr Pavlensky undressed on Moscow’s Red Square, right in front of Lenin’s tomb, sat down and nailed his scrotum to the pavement.
Reactions to the radical act, which Pavlensky meant to be a “metaphor of the apathy, political indifference and fatalism of modern Russian society,” ranged from disbelief to mockery. A police source told state-owned news agency RIA Novosti that the action constituted normal behavior “for a mentally ill person.”
Make of that what you will — ouch! — and otherwise enjoy the references.
Netflix has it, so I’m off to watch the Khodorkovsky documentary.
Russia: TV Crew Reporting on Sochi Olympics Harassed | Human Rights Watch – 11/5/2013: “From October 31 to November 2, 2013, Russian traffic police stopped Øystein Bogen, a reporter for TV2, and cameraman Aage Aunes six times while the men were reporting on stories in the Republic of Adygea, which borders Sochi to the north along the Black Sea coast. Officials took the journalists into police custody three times. At every stop and in detention, officials questioned the journalists aggressively about their work plans in Sochi and other areas, their sources, and in some cases about their personal lives, educational backgrounds, and religious beliefs. In several instances they denied the journalists contact with the Norwegian Embassy in Moscow. One official threatened to jail Bogen.”
Jailed Anti-Kremlin Punk Rocker Launches New Appeal | Russia | RIA Novosti – 11/7/2013: “Tolokonnikova’s husband, Pyotr Verzilov, said he had been informed the Pussy Riot band member was being relocated to a prison colony in the territory of Krasnoyarsk, located 3400 kilometers (2100 miles) east of Moscow, but authorities have yet to confirm that information.”
Mihail Chemiakin – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: “With his colleagues from the museum he organized an exhibition in 1964, after which the director of the museum was fired and all the participants forced to resign. In 1967 he co-authored with philosopher Vladimir Ivanov a treatise called “Metaphysical Synthesism”, which laid out his artistic principles, and created the “St. Petersburg Group” of artists . In 1971 he was exiled from the Soviet Union for failing to conform to Socialist Realism norms.”
Mstislav Rostropovich – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: “Rostropovich fought for art without borders, freedom of speech, and democratic values, resulting in harassment from the Soviet regime. An early example was in 1948, when he was a student at the Moscow Conservatory. In response to the 10 February 1948 decree on so-called ‘formalist’ composers, his teacher Dmitri Shostakovich was dismissed from his professorships in Leningrad and Moscow; the then 21-year-old Rostropovich quit the conservatory, dropping out in protest.”
All of that above: barely a morning’s drag-and-drop with a hint or two of actual writing in it . . . . I like it although it could change that old book title and jazz and music line “That was then, this is now” to “That was then: THIS is still THEN.”
_____
Perhaps we could have both for a while — then, now, and then.
Almodallal, a 23-year-old who speaks fluent British-accented English, has assumed a post normally held by tough-talking men who voice Hamas’ bitter opposition to Israel. She will be responsible for the Gaza government’s communications with the international media.
It looks like the main base of Palestinian Tamarod just got off on a technicality.
I kid a little bit, discretion having been perhaps the better part of valor on this day’s promised demonstration by Fatahnikki in Gaza.
As with much else associated with the middle east conflict, today’s news, however clear and accurate, may not be complete, the government marching ever a few steps ahead of its subjugated and subdued constituents:
“The campaign started with summons that were sent to the majority of the arrested persons to refer to the ISS head office each in his area and/or arrest them from their houses. … [It] targeted a number of Fatah leaders, including current and former province secretaries, area secretaries and other members. The arrested persons were questioned about giving money to families of Fatah members who were wounded or killed during the events of June 2007,” the PCHR stated in a media release issued on Aug. 13.
Although Gaza’s Interior Ministry is trying to downplay the importance of this movement, the security authorities on the ground seem to have a different opinion. They summoned and detained a large number of journalists, activists and politicians to question them about Tamarod.
” . . . just as dead at 38 as you would be at 90 . . . you died when you refused to stand up for right, you died when you refused to stand up for truth, you died when you refused to stand up for justice . . . .”
If in Gaza, one says, “You first” or “Just as soon as they let me go,” the world may take note and God will just have to understand with a weary acknowledgment the soul deadening character of the Hamafia-created atmosphere and its gruesome legacy and portent.
Ours is a culture of guilty eschatology: hereafter is real, and here is fake, but we are more here-bound than hereafter-bound; we are not genuine Muslims because we are not Arab. We live in Pakistan, but we belong to the holy lands in the Middle East. Our political-economy is borrowed, stolen, and fake.
We gave those camels [a derogatory Afghan term for Arabs] free run of our country, and they brought us face to face with disaster. We knew the Americans would attack us in revenge.
Their base of operations logically became FATA, and they began to establish (or re-establish keeping in mind the 1980s) training camps in Pakistan. These camps included not only Afghans, but also constituted many new Pakistani recruits, and the Pakistani militant groups were actively involved, especially in South Waziristan. The organizing effort also brought an influx of money to the region, coming from various international sources hoping to help the resistance (Yousafzai & Moreau, 2009). Fighting against the foreign troops in Afghanistan and re-establishing Taliban rule served as the primary motivations, as well as profiting from control of drug routes out of Afghanistan (Acharya, 2009)
The reading, whether for background, retrospective analysis, or, frankly, pleasure proves illuminating.
If you are a BackChannels irregular, 20/20 hindsight rehashes of the Lal Masjid tragedy (2007) and more recent battles in the Afghanistan-Pakistan theaters may summon old memories, directly experienced or mediated.
Web searched first-page reference to data on the Taliban’s narcotics trafficking seems to trail off for 2013, but relayed at the bottom of this post, there’s combat footage from early 2013 posted just six days ago.
Afghanistan supplies 90% of the opium and heroin global markets.
The Afghan farmer who grows opium poppies could earn as much as $230 for a kilo to opium. Processing the opium into heroin turns it into one of the world’s most profitable commodities, fetching between $175,000 and $850,000 wholesale depending on the level of purity and availability.
Middle East Policy Council | Protecting Jihad: The Sharia Council of the Minbar al-Tawhid wa-l-Jihad – 2013. “This article analyses al-Maqdisi’s efforts to protect jihad by looking at his actual criticism of certain jihadi militants and, conversely, at his attempts to support and praise “good” jihadis in several countries. The article then focuses on the successful attempt by al-Maqdisi to set up a council of like-minded scholars in order to provide guidance and advice to youngsters dealing with religious questions about a host of issues, including jihad, and what advice this council has actually given. Using mostly Arabic primary sources taken from the internet,11 including the collections of fatwas published by the council, this article argues that these radical scholars may well have an important impact on the future of jihad and as such are worthy of both scholars’ and policy makers’ attention.”
Malhot, Aditi. “Understanding the Ghazi Force.” Center for Land Warfare Studies (CLAWS), November 15, 2012: “Pakistan’s once feared terrorist group, the Ghazi Force is back in the limelight. This time for the reported revival of their funding sources and its resurrection to inflict greater damage on the Pakistani state. a recent report from the Pakistani intelligence agency obtained by BBC urdu states that banned jihadi groups are reviving their local and international funding sources, after their affiliates started opening local and foreign currency accounts under pseudonyms.”
Related: ▶ Narcotics and Corruption in Afghanistan – YouTube – video (40:56), Posted by U.S. Army War College, posted 6/24/2012. Col. Lou Jordan asks, “What is the relationship between the poppy and the money?”
* * *
Cannabis was found to be the most commonly used drug in Pakistan, with by 3.6 per cent of the adult population, or four million people, listed as users. Opiates, namely opium and heroin, are used by almost one per cent of overall drugs users, and the highest levels of use are seen in the provinces which border principal poppy-cultivating areas in neighbouring Afghanistan.
His criticism of Luhansk and its corrupt, thuggish, and authoritarian Regionnaire authorities has remained unsparing. They’re easy to lambast and deserve every bit of his ire. Luhansk suffers from a rust-belt economy, collapsing social services, unhealthy living conditions, and a particularly sedentary Regionnaire elite.
Post-Soviet and Eastern European scholar and political science professor Alexander J. Motyl comments on Russia’s co-evolving dissenting political competition with his take on “Proctologist” blogger Stanislav Tsikalovsky, whom he predicts will climb the web vine up into a local political career between five and ten years from now.
I wouldn’t make such sunny predictions: in Putin’s Russia, a lot can happen in five hours — ask Khodorkovsky (Khodorkovsky’s main advocacy page)– much less five days, months, or years.
I’m less certain of what to make of the nom de blogging guerre “Proctologist” except to note the scatological relationship to “Pussy Riot” and the potential for Putin’s Russia to develop an entire generational legion of brothers and sisters in virtual arms and mutual contempt for what they will perceive as the ethical and moral failings of a regime to which they may relate as moral avatars and otherwise disenfranchised outsiders.
The worse it gets, the worse they’ll get would be my prediction. Even so, my impression is such a development may not have much room for maneuver as Putin’s post-KGB FSB organizes defensively in relation to them.
I will try to be more careful with exclamation marks! — now that I see so many of them in one place in relation to related subjects.
* * *
Perhaps not with “Blueberry Hill”, I wonder if Putin could not play Carnegie, setting in his autocratic wake a plethora of great homes and monuments that over time might integrate the greater Russian tapestry. In that the rich, however they may have gotten there, believe the world should serve them, they may realize they have the obligation to spend it some. Locally. Regionally. Nationally.
Or face taxes.
Or worse.
Eventually.
I jest today.
The emerging oligarchy is not Romanov, and its basis for being rather seems to twine with feudal national building: why not control the initial engines and outflows of the post-Soviet economy to one’s own temporal advantage but also to create an influential class — that “new nobility” — from varied quarters, including old school chums?
Metals and banking tycoons Vladimir Potanin and Mikhail Fridman, who made their fortunes in the 90s, are still high on the list of Russia’s richest men. But the past decade saw a rise of new billionaires who draw their wealth from state contracts and some of whom are known to be the presidents’ friends, like Gennady Timchenko.
It reads awfully unfair, but that’s today’s news, not next generation’s news.
For a few Russians, there is a “gilded age” — their own. What they amass, what they build, what they leave by way of constructive investments spells the fortunes of an era to come.
However he has done it, Putin has organized a state, and that being so, he has given his emerging political competitors a lot to work with.
* * *
Related on the vicissitudes attending wealth and noblesse oblige:
(CNN) — Gunmen burst into the home of a local leader Thursday in Iraq, killing him and five of his family members as they slept. The attackers then planted explosives and blew up the home, police said.
The attack took place in Tikrit.
The female MP recalled when Sheikh Ali was member of her political party, saying he used to live in a house owned by Iraq’s chief of staff and that he had 30 bodyguards who were all on the payroll of the government.
She further claimed that he used to praise and glorify the government day and night. But when it was no longer in his interest, he turned against the government and considered it his enemy.
And Sheik Ali Hatem al-Suleiman, a leader in the Sunni Awakening movement, storms out of the conference after the opening speeches and threatens to leave the conference altogether. “People want answers from us,” he says. “We’re not going to sit here only to listen to speeches.” The Awakening opposes the Sunni-led insurgency within Iraq. Shi’ite leader Sheik Muhammed Fahman al-Rikahis wonders how any reconciliation can take place if key groups are not invited or fail to take part in the dialog.
It’s not all the Sheik al-Suleiman’s fault, if it all.
The shadows creep across the landscape, sewing discord or renewing it, etching their program in blood to bear forth inconsolable sorrows to soak in endless cycles of revenge.
______
Six high ranked Democrats and Republican senators claimed sectarian violence was rife also because of Maliki’s failure to give Iraq’s Sunnis, Kurds and other minorities a greater role in the country’s administration.
“This failure of governance is driving many Sunni Iraqis into the arms of al-Qaida in Iraq and fuelling the rise of violence,” a letter signed by both high ranked Democrats and Republican senators read.
Perhaps Putin knows something about Al Qaeda – Wahhabi – Sunni Islam and the extremist fronts to which two, albeit from the darker shadows, contribute cash or favors for “field operations” to their perceived advanced guard.
______
Al Qaeda’s main branch in Syria, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), will be disbanded but the jihadist al-Nusra Front will continue to operate in the country under al Qaeda’s command, al Qaeda chief Ayman al-Zawahiri said in an audio message broadcast by Al Jazeera on Friday . . . Zawahiri said in the message that Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of al Qaeda operations in Iraq, had “made a mistake by establishing the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant without asking for our permission, or even informing us”. It was not clear when his statement was recorded.”
The legitimacy of a theocat’s power rests on several competitive dimensions — lineage, mentors, scholarship — approximated similarly among uncommon or exceptional personalities.
Of course, in lieu of other and more peaceful social methods and skills, they’re going to fight for position Alpha.
One may suggest that the invention of a religion synthesis the immediate concerns as well as habits of mind of the adapting and adopting culture, i.e., we invent our programs – sun worship or virgin sacrifice, holy emperor or more reasonably humble elected public servant — and then we live in them and call what we do “our culture” and our way and our calendar and our rites and our language.
Iraqis caught up in promoting and facilitating sectarian violence may be likened to dictators or mafia bosses: while we’re quick to notice the methods involved in making “offers that can’t be refused”, we’re slow to notice how dismally trapped — painted into their own corners, suffocated surrounded by their own mirrors — these personalities make themselves.
Having hitched their identity and honor to corruption, murder, and sadism, they’re “in it” but good with their associates behind them to keep them from backing up.
If that is the premise — and we could argue it some and it would probably hold up — what drives Iraq’s violence, what’s in the heart, i.e., combatant self-concept, has access to no program other than continued accelerated and escalated “gaming violence” and retribution.
Those who keep themselves out of it needs must passively, cautiously perhaps, weather it.
It’s a miserable condition in which to live with more moderate and productive passions and ends.
There are never enough dead for forestall the launch of one more attack.
Tamarod Gaza’s main demands, as presented in different declarations, including a letter to the secretary-general of the Arab League, include requiring Hamas to immediately allow the formation of an elections committee, “without any delay or obstacle,” to pursue speedy general elections under international Arab and Islamic supervision. The expiration of Tamarod’s ultimatum of sorts has been set at sundown of November 8.
Being “caught between a rock and a hard place” might start looking pretty good to anyone who has long been caught between a rock and a rock.
Since 1948, Arabs abandoned in the field by Arab armies have with their generations been sequestered, more or less, in the refugee camps of Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Egypt.
The same have been subject, differentially, to the diminishment of their human rights — notably, Mahmud Abbas received Jordanian citizenship around February 9, 2011, but even that story has been complicated by the middle east’s screwy loyalty x mafia flavored politics — from the preceding link: “The officials received citizenship at the same time they urged Jordan to stop giving Palestinian Jordanians citizenship, so they could consolidate their Palestinian identity, the Arab language newspaper said”; a little more than a year later, one reads (as if living in a very bad Orwell novel), “Jordan’s King Abdullah II is planning to revoke the Jordanian citizenship of Palestinian Authority (PA) and Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) officials, The Jerusalem Post reported Wednesday. It is unknown if PA President Mahmoud Abbas will also be stripped of his citizenship” — source: Jordan Continues to Strip Palestinians of Citizenship – Jewish Policy Center – 4/12/2012).
Others, who may have considered themselves lucky to have remained defiant of the State of Israel within its territories, admittedly contested, on the West Bank and Gaza (from which Jews were purged wholesale in 2005 in a faked out Arafat land-for-peace arrangement) have instead had to weather the abuses of Fatah-related cronyism and corruption and, in 2006, with soldiers of the same Fatah thrown from the rooftops of buildings in Gaza, the bizarre and deeply narcissistic Islamist control of Hamas.
To this day, the same have nurtured a surreal alternative narrative of the events of 1948, cultivated an absurd and ugly and wholly counterproductive anti-Semitic / anti-Zionist hate, treated childhood and adolescent educations as preparation for a war of conquest, and have complained incessantly and with great preoccupation of an “occupation” that has provided them with basic utilities, trade market exchange and throughput, educational services at the university level, and emergency medical services, trade partnerships, and jobs.
Around The Preoccupation has grown an immense online and print disinformation industry, including a “Pallywood” sector for the film propaganda buffs.
In association with the middle east conflict, who is really oppressing whom?
That question has been in the air a long time.
Lately, perhaps, with the Hamas’s six-year record of abuses in Gaza, it is finding some answers that may actually hold up to reason, not that it will hold up to Hamasfia’s intimidation backed by its history of paramilitary and military barbarism and brutality.
As events in Syria force the mini-Jihad and majestic cabal in the region to turn up their cards, i.e., make their true values, language habits, and behavior irrevocably visible, one may expect the roles of archaic pan-Arab nationalism and barbaric Sunni and Shiite extremism to show their bones beneath the pools of blood in which they have been bathing for decades.
As part of that process, the refugees of Israel’s 1948 successful struggle for survival may soon get an honest reappraisal of their legitimate identity and needs and that in terms accessible to the greater collection of humanity that inclines to regard itself as less special but altogether more dignified.
The 43-page report, “Abusive System: Criminal Justice in Gaza,” documents extensive violations by Hamas security services, including warrantless arrests, failure to inform families promptly of detainees’ whereabouts, and subjecting detainees to torture. It also documents violations of detainees’ rights by prosecutors and courts. Military courts frequently try civilians, in violation of international law. Prosecutors often deny detainees access to a lawyer, and courts have failed to uphold detainees’ due process rights in cases of warrantless arrest and abusive interrogations, Human Rights Watch found.
The UN, which has run the camps for all those years, is tired of the job. Balata’s alleys are caked in filth, a cash-for-work programme has all but collapsed, almost half the working-age adults have no jobs, and the UN’s once-prized classrooms are as overcrowded as the rooms where families live. Children sometimes leave school unable to write their names.
Even before this refugee crisis, Palestinians in Lebanon were not legally allowed to work in most professions. They continue to live in cramped spaces in 12 refugee camps or rented apartments. Half of the Palestinians from Syria are concentrated in two areas, Tyre and Saida, which includes the largest Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon, Ein el Hilweh, established in 1948. They’re living with 13 individuals per residence, on average.
. . . As an ex-Gaza refugee without a national ID number, Abu Sulayman has long lived without access to healthcare, full education, representation or any jobs aside from blue-collar labor. Now he also lives without teeth.
Abu Sulayman is one of 16 Gaza Camp refugees who were detained for two weeks in October following a weekend-long clash between the Palestinian camp, neighboring village al-Haddad and Jordan’s public security forces.
The PA was less than totally honest when it tried to justify the raid; it was, it claimed, to round-up corrupt individuals and outlaws. While some of the camp’s residents may well be so described, it is wrong to say that all of them are, and to treat them as if they are. The collective nature of the raid was actually intended to terrorise all of the residents. It is odd that such a show of force has never been attempt against the illegal Jewish settlers across the occupied West Bank.
“All of Palestine from the (Mediterranean) sea to the river (Jordan) belongs to us, to us Muslims,” it states, in accordance with the beliefs of the militant Islamic group, which refuses to recognize Israel.
For the first time ever, the New York Times had a front page story about how Hamas is brainwashing its high school students into hating Israel by having them read textbooks with false, defamatory, and one-sided narratives.
According to Fares Akram and Jodi Rudoren, “The books used by 55,000 (Palestinian) children in eighth to tenth grade do not recognize modern Israel or mention the Oslo Peace Accords.”
Asked the lesson of the uprising, one of the 40 boys in class promptly answered, “Al Buraq Wall is an Islamic property,” using the Muslim name for the site, one of the holiest in Judaism. Pleased, the teacher then inquired whether the students would boycott Israeli products, as Arabs had boycotted Jewish businesses in 1929. A resounding chorus of “Yes!” came back from the class.
I am telling you the truth: unless they are my targets, those I quote here as authorities tell the truth.
As regards the Palestinian students involved, if they’re in high school, they’re not children: they’re tall and strong enough to kill and dumb enough to swallow the bait fed them by their elders.
Of all the crimes possible against humanity, the misdirecting of the young — let me be clear: the theft of a real education from the very young — would rank highest among them.
