I would expect Americans to vote their judgment of character and their ideals, and neither candidate has appeal in character. That may be a function of this election’s relentless negative campaigning.
Think about it a moment.
The campaigners are the kind of people who would go microscopically digging in the past to scrape up a few moments of locker room braggadocio with which to scuttle a presidential contender’s campaign.
Vote Donald J. Trump!
But then . . . what does one do with Trump’s bankruptcies, “tax freedom” (one might call it), and the near routine stiffing of vendors who have delivered their work and then have had to sue to hold Trump’s side to its contract obligations?!
Vote Hillary Clinton!
Then li’l ol’ me goes dredging up — I’m a humble blogger, lowest of the low in journalism, a bum, so I’m allowed to go dredging (or is it “Drudging”?) — something out of Bill’s past, and there’s the Moscow connection.
Vote Donald J. Trump!
But Trump had the temerity or naivete to hire Paul Manafort, consultant to the world’s bloodiest dictators and political mafia, including Viktor Yanukovych whom Ukrainians ousted from power, so disgusted were they with the corruption associated with the regime. Yanukovych went crying to Moscow; Moscow sent in the “Little Green Men” and annexed Crimea against old agreements to leave Ukraine independent . . . .
Vote Hillary Clinton!
Feeling screwed either way?
Many of my fellow Americans may feel the same way.
On the 2016 American Elections, BackChannels has striven to either stay out of it or stay balanced, and it has possibly succeeded at both.
Come the day, many voters may feel they’re not voting for Clinton or Trump but rather voting against one or the other, i.e., blocking a perceived threat to America’s “domestic tranquility” — perhaps the entire election should be perceived as and rendered unconstitutional! — and its independent foreign affairs policies and practices.
While the surface may look calm — and in the above video positively modern and multicultural — here’s additional reference to what appears to lie beneath.
The president of Chechnya emerged from afternoon prayers at a mosque and with chilling composure explained why seven young women who had been shot in the head deserved to die.
Ramzan Kadyrov said the women, whose bodies were found dumped by the roadside, had “loose morals” and were rightfully shot by male relatives in honor killings.
Earlier this month, the leader of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, informed his more than one million followers on social networks that he had become “the happiest man in this land.” Something had come to pass that he never could have dreamed of, he said. He had had a transfusion, he said, from a descendant of the Prophet Mohammed, so now he has the Prophet’s blood flowing through his veins.
RAMZAN KADYROV has few inhibitions. Last week, just before the first anniversary of the murder of Boris Nemtsov, a liberal Russian opposition leader, by a member of Mr Kadyrov’s security services, the Chechen strongman posted a video on his Instagram page. It depicted Mikhail Kasyanov, a former prime minister, in the crosshairs of a sniper rifle. “Kasyanov is in Strasbourg to get money for the opposition,” Mr Kadyrov commented under the video, in a clear warning to opposition politicians. “Whoever still doesn’t get it, will.”
Vladimir Putin said when he first ran for president in 2000 that his “historic mission” was to resolve the situation in the North Caucasus. To do so, he oversaw a second war in Chechnya, already devastated by Russia’s failed attempt to subdue the republic in 1994-1996.
Instead of solving the North Caucasus issue, however, Putin created a monster. To end the fighting, he cut a deal with Chechnya’s rebel Kadyrov clan: In exchange for loyalty to the Kremlin, they received power and reconstruction aid.
This was a medieval deal that made Akhmad Kadyrov, a rebel commander and Sufi mufti, Putin’s feudal liege. The aim was to co-opt the more religiously moderate Sufis among Chechnya’s rebel fighters, marginalize the Salafist jihadists who appear to have fascinated the Boston bombers, and enable the Russian military to declare victory and draw down.
This subject is complicated by “Hizb ut-Tahrir”, a Tatar organization supportive of the Chechen rebels (presumably against affiliates of warlord Kadyrov) but not active itself with terrorism and, apparently, acting in the open.
The Pentagon has identified eight staging areas in Russia where large numbers of military forces appear to be preparing for incursions into Ukraine, according to U.S. defense officials.
As many as 40,000 Russian troops, including tanks, armored vehicles, and air force units, are now arrayed along Ukraine’s eastern border with Russia.
One could research and read through the many themes, but I like Ben Judah’s comment best regarding the compact between Putin and Kadyrov: “This was a medieval deal that made Akhmad Kadyrov, a rebel commander and Sufi mufti, Putin’s feudal liege. The aim was to co-opt the more religiously moderate Sufis among Chechnya’s rebel fighters, marginalize the Salafist jihadists who appear to have fascinated the Boston bombers, and enable the Russian military to declare victory and draw down.”
BackChannels has been singing medieval about “Putin, Assad, and Khamenei (and Baghdadi)” for ages, but the observation now begs another question: how modern is the west?
If we call what we have been witnessing in Syria a “New Medievalism”, we may well ask where is NATO on the timeline of political conventions?
BackChannels hopes there is such a thing as “Modern” in governance and that it is supported by the bravery in arms, integrity in character, and the honest research of the thoughtful.
This is the stuff of political thrillers in films and novels.
In general, both Hezbollah and Hamas may be interpreted as the advanced troops of Tehran as ultimately backed by Moscow. Again, the prize: political absolute power and destruction of democracies and the decimation of the concept — as demonstrated in Syria — of human rights.
The IRA was in contact with Red Army intelligence officers in London and New York, and it was in the former that the monthly stipend was handed over. The IRA’s senior officer in London passed along military intelligence, including specifications of British submarine detection sonar and aeroplane engines for bombers, military journals and manuals, and gas masks. In addition he arranged false passports for Soviet agents and even for a communist operative to travel to Romania in the guise of an Irish woollens salesman! It was in New York, however, that the Soviets got the most valuable information, from an IRA agent code-named ‘Mr Jones’. Jones’s sources likely included serving members of the US military, as he was able to provide reports of the army’s chemical weapons service, state-of-the-art gas masks, machine-gun and aeroplane engine specifications, and reports from the navy, air service and army. In Jones’s estimation, Soviet intelligence in the US would have been ‘helpless’ without the information he supplied.
The document, which the University of Cambridge’s Churchill Archives Centre confirmed was authentic, was smuggled in to the UK by a defector called Vasily Mitrokhin.
It is entitled “KGB developments – Year 1983” and Mr Abbas identifies him by the codename “Krotov” or “mole”.
“‘Krotov’ – Abbas, Mahmoud, born 1935, origin Palestine, member of the executive committee of Fatah, PLO, Damascus, agent of the KGB,” says the brief entry.
The KGB, when I was still connected with it, went to great lengths to transform an Egyptian born Marxist, Mohammed Yasser Abdel Rahman Abdel Raouf Arafat al-Qudwa al-Husseini, nom de guerre Abu Ammar, into a Palestinian-born Yasser Arafat. It took the KGB — and my DIE — many years to endow Arafat with a credible Palestinian birth certificate and other identity documents, to build him a new past, and to train him at the KGB Balashikha special-operations training school east of Moscow.
How much of the intellectual poison delivered by Soviet-borne misinformation persists today in the Middle East Conflict?
Considering the looks of Syria, the miserable psychology shared between the dictatorships — on this blog, have a glance at the “Paranoid Delusional Narcissistic Reflection of Motivation” — and the horrific results, a side by side glance at Hamas behavior in Gaza (x human rights) suggests the same malign narcissistic values continues to course through the governance in both locations.
Before I defected to America from Romania, leaving my post as chief of Romanian intelligence, I was responsible for giving Arafat about $200,000 in laundered cash every month throughout the 1970s. I also sent two cargo planes to Beirut a week, stuffed with uniforms and supplies. Other Soviet bloc states did much the same. Terrorism has been extremely profitable for Arafat. According to Forbes magazine, he is today the sixth wealthiest among the world’s “kings, queens & despots,” with more than $300 million stashed in Swiss bank accounts.
A little more than four months before the news this week that tests on Arafat’s body in a Swiss investigation showed “unexpected high activity” of polonium, a book co-authored by former Romanian spy chief Lt. Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa was published documenting Arafat’s training by the communist Soviet Union and pointing out that the only other known case of polonium-210 poisoning was the death of former KGB officer Alexander Litvinenko in 2006.
Yasir Arafat claims that he was born in Jerusalem, but he was actually born in Cairo. He claims to belong to the prominent Jerusalem family of Husseini, but he is at best only distantly related to it. He claims that he turned down a chance to go to the University of Texas, but according to one biographer, the Palestinian-born writer Saïd K. Aburish, it is highly unlikely that he was ever accepted. He claims to have disabled ten Israeli armored personnel carriers in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, but Israel didn’t even have ten APCs in the sector he was in. He claims to have made millions as a businessman in Kuwait, but this, too, is almost certainly untrue.
Obviously, Arafat is a congenital liar. But there’s more to it than that: his lies are all designed to create an aura of romance around himself and the Palestinian people.
The history of Palestine–Russia (and between 1917–1991, Palestine–Soviet Union) relations has been long and complex. For a number of historical and political reasons, it has been deeply interwoven with Russian (and between 1917–1991, Soviet) relations with the Zionist-Israeli enterprise, Palestinian nationalism, and Third World national liberation movements in general. However, at the same time, particularly between 1956 and 1990, Soviet-Palestinian relations were also part and parcel of the then ongoing Soviet-American confrontation, and even after the Cold War ended, the international and ideological role and importance of the Russian-Palestinian relationship always far exceeded its local and regional limitations. This relationship has continued even today. Russia remains an important player in the Middle East peace process and is a member of the Middle East Quartet.
The leader of the PLO, Yasser Arafat, established close collaboration with the Romanian Securitate service and the Soviet KGB in the beginning of the 1970s.[9] The secret training of PLO guerrillas was provided by the KGB.
According to Vasili Mitrokhin, a senior KGB archivist who defected to the UK in 1992, in early 1970 Haddad was recruited by the KGB as an agent, codenamed NATSIONALIST. Thereafter, in deep secrecy the Soviets helped to fund and arm the PFLP. The KGB had warning of its major operations and almost certainly sanctioned the most significant, such as the September 1970 hijackings. Haddad remained a highly valued agent till his death in 1978.
A letter by Yuri Andropov allegedly confirming Haddad’s role as an agent was independently discovered in Soviet archives by Vladimir Bukovsky and has since been published.
The Khaibar-1 (Arabic: خيبر-1) is a Syrian-made 302 mm [1] artillery rocket used by Hezbollah against targets in northern Israel. The name of the rocket was first revealed on July 28, 2006 by Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in a speech on Al-Manar television station.
In July, Russia’s Federal Security Service, successor agency to the KGB, released a list of 17 organizations the Russian Supreme Court had identified as “terrorist.” The FSB’s counterterrorism chief described all 17 groups as a threat to the Russian state and noted that almost all were linked in some way to the Muslim Brotherhood, one of the 17. Hamas, however, was not listed, though it openly describes itself as the Palestinian wing of the Muslim Brotherhood and frequently features deceased Brotherhood dignitaries like Hassan al-Banna and Abdullah Azzam alongside Hamas leaders on its posters and pamphlets. The reason for not listing Hamas, the counterterrorism chief explained, was that Hamas was not engaged in violent activity in Russia, nor was it linked to illegal armed groups operating in the North Caucasus. But Hamas supporters do maintain a presence in Russia, and the group does express solidarity with Chechen fighters, including suicide bombers.
The following was written to a law student approaching matriculation.
The Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan became the law of the land when it passed from the Majlis-e-Shoora to receive the signatory approval of the president on 19 April 2010. With this amendment Pakistan made massive movement toward being a progressive state with the welfare of the citizens a primary concern.
One of the greatest accomplishments, one whose benefit is as of yet not fully realized nor wielded as a legal tool for social justice is the following clause:
“Every citizen shall have the right to access to information in all matters of public importance subject to regulation and reasonable restrictions imposed by law.”
Let’s break this down into smaller parts to show both the beauty and strength of this carefully crafted sentence.
“Every citizen . . . ”
Yes! Every citizen must have equal status under the law. Minus equality there is injustice. So the baker seeking an explanation as to why the price of his wheat flour has risen to quadruple the price in six months is as worthy an explanation as the landowner who grows and sells the wheat for a reasonable profit margin. Between the farm and the bakery lie the roads in between. It is there, that the answer can be found. The answer to this question (extortion for right to passage) requires access to information through legal channels.
“Every citizen shall have the right….”
The rights of the one are the rights which belong to all. You are called to be a community – al-jama’ah. It is the duty of government to assure that all dealings and responses toward the community are uniform and binding.
Guardianship of the constitution is the beginning point for societal cohesion.
“Every citizen shall have the right to access to information…”
Modern governmental bodies are dependent on chain of command and chain of custody for information. While all citizens are not part of a formal chain of command they must be included in various chain of information regarding issues of state. It was one word – Recite – which opened up a chain of information which eventually brought about a nascent Islamic state in Madinah. Information is important because minus information we cannot make the important decisions.
“Every citizen shall have the right to access to information in all matters of public importance subject to regulation and reasonable restrictions imposed by law.”
Let’s explore the complete sentence a bit further by placing the burden for the adjudication of this clause of the Eighteenth Amendment firmly where it belongs.
This adjudication belongs within the hands of the holders of authority – ulu-‘l – amir. In the truest sense, those entrusted with authority are those which are known to be of noble character. Within the annals of Islamic history it can be seen that there are those who lay claim to noble lineage and others who lay claim to noble character. While not all can be categorized as the former, all, who are vested with the authority of the state must be of the latter category.
To be anything less is to be base, corrupt, and incompetent.
Perhaps this thought can be best expressed with the words of Muhammad ibn Yazdad, a minister of al-Ma’mun:
“Whoever is a guardian of this world, it is not fitting that he sleep while all the people are asleep; and how can there be rest for the eyes of the one who must address the difficulties of his affair; resolving and contracting (the affairs of others).
In the case of the Eighteenth Amendment and the issue of access to freedom of information for the public you are distinctly admonished to intervene in the affairs of others.
When a mighty upheaval brought about the birth of Pakistan, Muhammad Asad wrote an essay titled “Islamic Constitution-Making” and it was published in Urdu and English under the auspices of the Government of the Punjab in March of 1948. These early thoughts were later penned in his book, “The Principles of State and Government”. In Chapter I, he has this to say:
“In the life of every nation there comes, sooner or later, a moment when it seems to be given a free choice of its destiny; a moment when the decisions as to which way to go and what future to aim at, seem to be freed from the pressure of adverse circumstances, and when no power on earth is able to prevent the nation from choosing one way in preference to another. Such historic moments are extremely rare and fleeting, and it may well be that if a nation fails to avail itself of the opportunity thus offered, it will not be offered for centuries to come.”
On 19 April, 2010 the nation of Pakistan was gifted with a unique opportunity in the form of a wisely crafted Constitutional Amendment.
I continue to wish for you the best in your struggle to consider the merits of the law with regard to the health which it brings to your nation.
Corruption is never the “best kept” state secret nor is it meant to be so.
Clear lines of communication, fairness toward all, and public accommodation of requests for information strengthen the state and her standing with the citizens.
