19 Sunday Apr 2015
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Nous, a canadiens pour la coexistence, souhaitons vous inviter à nous rejoindre à cette célébration interreligieuse réunissant des personnes de tous les huit grandes religions du monde. RSVP jusqu’à mardi, le 21 avril, 2015.
We, at Canadians for Coexistence wish to invite you to join us in this Interfaith Celebration uniting people of eight major world religions. RSVP by Tuesday, April 21, 2015
http://www.interfaithcelebration.ca/#sthash.T2CW6ROQ.dpuf
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13 Monday Apr 2015
Reuters – April 13, 2015.
Iran’s war-by-proxy sneaked under cover of negotiations over its nuclear program has tragically turned Aden, Yemen into another battered middle east war zone in the fashion known to “Putin-Khamenei-Assad” — merciless, mindless, piratical, and ruthless.
The troika have been waging the medieval against the modern — the destructive and thieving potential of absolute power against the productive democratic distribution of power — for years, and visible so since the onset of Syria’s civil war. With the distribution of military personnel into Crimea and Yemen, the dynamic Putin-Khamenei duo have brought payback in flooded oil markets and online opprobrium, although I don’t think either Putin or Khamenei bothered by criticism, at least not on the surface and outside of their bailiwicks.
Three sources in the southern port city’s anti-Houthi militias said the Iranians, identified as a colonel and a captain, were seized in two separate districts that have been rocked by heavy gun battles.
“The initial investigation revealed that they are from the Quds Force and are working as advisors to the Houthi militia,” one of the sources told Reuters.
“How can Iran call for us to stop the fighting in Yemen?” asked the the top Saudi diplomat at a news conference alongside French counterpart Laurent Fabius. “We came to Yemen to help the legitimate authority, and Iran is not in charge of Yemen.”
Tharoor, Ishaan. “Saudi and Iranian leaders wage war of words as Yemen burns.” The Washington Post, April 13, 2015.
VICE – September 10, 2014.
Lonely bloggers cannot compete with funded international media in reporting the news, unless we have unusual friends on the ground.
However, as audience to mainstream media — and conflict adventure media — we may wrap events differently online, read about what we are seeing when we’re offline, and perhaps approach conflict and political analysis with something combining humanism, journalism, and scholarship.
As regards the above clip, this blogger may reflect on what a single lie can do in the way of evil.
At 2:31 in the video immediately above, Iman Dr. Taha says to his gathering, “I told him, “What are you doing? Your country is getting destroyed. This is all part of an action by American intelligence. And today, a new order was given telling the world that 70% of foreigners are terrorists who want to rip our country apart. They want to kill our people and our nation and destroy our unity. The faith is Yemeni and the wisdom is Yemeni. God is great. Death to America.”
That audience: handled, misguided, maneuvered, used.
It appears they haven’t the means or temerity to question what they’re told (and independently discover for themselves who has been lying to them all along — and why).
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13 Monday Apr 2015
This is a 4-minute message of peace from Ahmed Meligy, an Egyptian and me, an Israeli. I was frightened to travel to Egypt, a Muslim country, because I am scarred from a Muslim machete. Yet I trusted Ahmed, who is also scarred from his time in an Egyptian prison. We are two different people from two different cultures, guilty of a mutual crime; our unequivocal insistence that Israel has the right to exist, survive and thrive.
Peace is not a bogus deal signed between the leader of the free world and a rogue state bent on destroying the State of Israel.
Peace is impossible with any leadership that justifies incitement that leads to terrorism; the maiming and murder of innocent civilians for political gain. However, true peace is possible and it happens when people of different cultures and faiths are willing to see beyond the dissimilarities and embrace one another as equal human beings.
Rabbi Nachman said, ‘the whole world is a bridge and the main thing is that we should not be afraid.’
Ahmed, as we walk this bridge together, we will hold each other’s hand. I hope that many will follow. May G-d keep you brave and safe my friend. I love you.
סירטון קצר שבו אני, ישראלית וחבר מוסלמי מצרי יקר מדברים על שלום. שלום לא של הסכמים שמסכנים את מדינת ישראל ולא שלום עם אנשים שרוצים לרצוח יהודים – אלא שלום אמיתי שנולד מרצון להכיר זה את זה ולכבד זה את זה. כל העולם כולו גשר צר מאוד והעיקר הוא לא לפחד כלל. אחמד, אחי היקר, אני אוהבת אותך ומעריצה אותך, שאלוהים ישמור עליך וביחד כולנו, צעד צעד, נעבור את הגשר
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13 Monday Apr 2015
“In a process of profound importance, five Arab states in the Middle East have effectively ceased to exist over the last decade. The five states in question are Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen and Libya. It is possible that more will follow.
The causes of their disappearance are not all the same. In two cases (Iraq, Libya) it was Western military intervention which began the process of collapse. In another case (Lebanon) it is intervention from a Middle Eastern state (Iran) which is at the root of the definitive hollowing out of the state.”
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10 Friday Apr 2015
The Palestinians in Yarmouk are unlucky, mainly because they are being attacked and killed by Muslims, and not by Israel. An Israeli attack on the camp would have drawn worldwide condemnation and protests, with Palestinian and Arab leaders rushing to seek the intervention of the UN Security Council and the international community.
The Palestinians in Yarmouk are unlucky because their leaders in the Palestinian Authority and Hamas are still busy fighting each other over power and money. This is a power struggle that has been going on since Hamas drove the PA out of the Gaza Strip in the summer of 2007.
Toameh, Khaled Abu. “Why Palestinians in Yarmouk Are Unlucky.” Gatestone Institute, April 10, 2015.
Setting aside the fine points of Islamist rivalry that may exist between Daesh and Hamas, the absurdity and obscenity of the destruction of the Palestinian Yarmouk Camp may serve to highlight the sociopathic character of the despots who brought it about: Putin, Assad, Khamenei.
Aboud Dandachi’s observations regarding the perverting of Syria’s Arab Spring into an extremist’s civil war are borne out by the advance of the al-Qaeda spin-off that is Daesh and the more than equal measure of punishment meted to Yarmouk by the Assad (“Or Burn It”) regime. All of the Arab accusation and handwringing on behalf of the (descendants of) refugees of 1948 have been betrayed as convenient loud mouthiness. In the pinch, not one militant or military Arab hand stood to defend — to hold dear and keep safe — the larger population of Yarmouk.
If the reader should happen to be thinking like a healthy human being, this might be a good time to put on the mantle of any of a number of malign narcissistic sociopaths and start to think like a ringleader, a showman, a producer of conflict to be delivered, described, and framed in the cause of one’s own self-aggrandizing political theater.
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said the mayhem has turned Yarmouk into “the deepest circle of hell.”
“A refugee camp is beginning to resemble a death camp,” Ban told reporters at the U.N., adding that the residents, including 3,500 children, are being used as human shields by armed elements inside Yarmouk and government forces outside it.
You cannot understand the Islamic State’s assault on the camp or what it means unless you also consider how Bashar al-Assad, as a gift to the Palestinian people, turned a thriving neighborhood of hundreds of thousands of people into a desperate population of 18,000 waiting to die. We cannot stop what happened in Yarmouk from repeating itself elsewhere unless we save the 600,000 besieged civilians whom Assad is starving to death.
At the time, the full scale of the group’s collusion with the Assad regime was not yet well known, and it was perceived as an independent Al-Qaeda group with dreams of a 21st century caliphate, which they started to impose on Raqqa.
In mid-2012, Hezbollah entered Syria, ostensibly to safeguard a regime that was vital in supporting its operations in the region. Once thought of as the ‘axis of resistance’ against Israel, their intervention, coupled with their ally’s brutal siege on Yarmouk, has damaged the movement’s popularity among Palestinians from Syria.
Published about a year ago, this piece seems practically quaint by the standards of horror being visited today by Daesh on the beleaguered Palestinians.
Reports also say that several Palestinians including an imam have been beheaded by Isis. Grisly pictures posted on social media shows severed heads hung on spikes inside the refugee camps.
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06 Monday Apr 2015
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He’s done more than screw up the region — or address larger political tectonics like the post-Soviet collapse of Soviet arrangements and behaviors. Boasting transparency, he has removed from popular observation the underlying policies of his Administration, transforming America’s democracy into its own neo-feudal world, a mirror perhaps of the feudal world he has engaged.
I remain both ambivalent and clinical cold in my “reading” of Obama’s domestic and foreign political policy involving his avoidance of confrontation and a kind of almost (!) but not quite complete rollover to the infiltration and possible perversion of intellectual assets (from advisors to campuses to think tanks). The U.S., perhaps others as well, has absorbed the agents of malicious movements, but it has also weakened the legs of the post-KGB Putin-Khamenei programs. The end of the Cold War and suspension of the Soviet failed to permanently transform Russia into a rule-of-law state. Colonel President Emperor Putin has extended the old program under cover of a neo-feudal nationalism and Obama has been either stuck with its disassembly or made part of its longevity.
Credit Obama with destabilizing the Soviet holdovers in international business and criminal relationships. The “Putin-Assad-Khamenei” arrangement has been looking a bit rough lately (I understand the preferred enemy — as opposed to a moderate popular revolutionary one — the “Islamist Front” — because it makes a better self-glorifying story for our malignant narcissists — has drawn close to the gates defending whatever remains of Assad’s governing power [he has really destroyed his own crib]).
Also looking unmasked and pale: Venezuela’s Maduro may handily deal with the direct opposition using the tools familiar to dictators, but with the economic woes derived from his own disastrous national policies, he appears bound to deal with enemies within his own circles as well.
Leopoldo López has been imprisoned in a military prison for one year and a month. Leopoldo is innocent, he shouldn’t remain as a prisoner for another day. He is imprisoned because of his words, because of what he thinks, for daring to say what the majority of Venezuelans wanted to hear.
He denounced Maduro’s regime as undemocratic, corrupt, inefficient, and repressive. Those words are now more alive than ever.
Marty, Belen. “Lilian Tintori: “Leopoldo Surrendered to Unmask Maduro.” Pan Am Post, March 31, 2015.
It was a sign of how bad things are in the Americas. Authoritarian governments now rule in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Venezuela, Ecuador, Argentina and Bolivia. All employ, to varying degrees, at least some elements of the Cuban model in which the executive consolidates power, civil society is suppressed, and due process is passe.
Elections are rigged. Rulers expropriate at will. Media outlets that dare to differ from the party line face legal burdens that can wipe them out.
Hiding dictatorship — how it works its ugliness, what it really looks like — from the young appears increasingly difficult given American Presidential attention. While American conservatives frame Obama’s about-to-happen meet-and-greet with Raoul Castro as a gross compromise of the American democratic spirit, as much also highlights how really awful — “state capitalist” (actually), criminal, manipulative, and repressive Cuba’s governing elite have been all along:
But a second activist, from Argentina, reported on social media suffering similar treatment.
Micaela Hierro Dori said “the same happened to me”, and that she was threatened with being deported to Argentina.
“They are looking to silence the young,” she said.
Perhaps the young will wish not to be silenced this year.
Be that as it may, Obama’s friendly reach-out-and-touch-someone-awful tour appears to have a way of uncloaking or uncovering ageing despots: it appears some are getting the attention — the global spotlight — they themselves have long craved.
More From the Awesome Conversation:
Old southern joke about an drunk accused of arson: “Your honor,” he says, “the bed was already on fire when I got into it!”
For Obama, the middle east, so delicately balanced in power, was well screwed up when he got into office, and given both the clout and ruthlessness of the enemies of democracy and modernity, the direct “Arab Spring” may have been due to fail if too much associated with Washington. Instead, the demonic — those “malignant narcissists” — have been given their wish: highest visibility and plenty of room for showing the world how they do business and what the world — and its latest generations — really thinks of them.
We often let attitude and predisposition establish our beliefs when what is wanted may be a lot of observation and a little bit of “wait just a minute”.
While fretting over Khamenei getting The Bomb, have we given much thought to the impact on Iranians of various revelations about the Khamenei brothers wealth? What is that information doing to both colleagues and constituents within each despotic state?
Out of necessity, American presidents find themselves hitched to the momentum of American programs. They might fiddle with some things — get in some licks on behalf of their own inclinations and sentiments — but the machinery is larger than they are and, so far, it has survived every one of them.
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29 Sunday Mar 2015
Montaghi told an Iranian opposition channel broadcasting from London that he did not see any sense in his profession as a journalist since he could only write what he was told to write.
According to the British Telegraph newspaper, Motaghi also harshly criticized the American role in the talks, saying the White House was attempting to persuade the other members of the P5+1 group of nations (US, England, France, Russia, China and Germany) to accept Iran’s point of view.
“The US negotiating team is mainly there to speak on Iran’s behalf with other members of the 5+1 countries and convince them of a deal,” Montaghi said.
“Iranian journalist covering nuke talks defects to West”
http://www.timesofisrael.com/iranian-journalist-covering-nuke-talks-defects-to-west/ – 3/29/2015.
Primary:
27 Friday Mar 2015
We start by lightening the load on our children’s minds, allowing them objectivity rather than indoctrination, and hopefully guiding them to think and plan for a future instead of programming them to perpetually whine over a past long gone.
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Much ado about a little something again, as the Egyptian education authorities pokes a hornet nest.
Buzzzzzzzzzzz!
It goes with the usual hysteria! But is it merited? Well, if “the preservation of history” is the only focus and every other detail is blocked out, then yes, there is potentially room for a debate. Otherwise, this is possibly the best news I have heard all week in a sea of bad news, each piece of news a wave sweeping over the last so fast, I barely had time to pop my head up for air.
The latest news?
Restricting the tide of “hero worship” in the language curriculum in Egyptian schools.
The assortment of headlines may have included more sentational wording but that really is the total sum of it! It is not an attempt to obliterate the memory of Salah El Din or Uqba Ibn Nafi. Just restrict their stories to where they belong, in the history class with lessons to learn from their errors as well as triumphs, not the Arabic language/Religious education one usually delivered by the same teacher.
“Bravo!” is what many of us think and I will tell you why.
I personally love languages, all of them, especially my native one Arabic!
Nothing touches my very soul like Arabic.
As a young student, my Arabic teacher, who I am not going to name as I do not wish to be associated with his name now or ever was also my religious education teacher. When the teacher began to adopt very fundamental views on religion, none of us in that class questioned them. Cut a long story short, eventually I announced to my horrified parents that I would be wearing a Burka from then on!
Shorter story still, my father said NO, absolutely NOT.
That really was the total sum of my teenage rebellion quashed by my tyrant father- or so I thought at the time. Oh, I protested and complained for weeks, but that was that, as I never dreamt of disobeying my father at 14/15 I just settled for resenting him for a very long time. It is ok — I’ve grown up since realizing over time how we get so excited at times over our freedom of this, that, or the other, and we should, sometimes! But at times, depending on what is at stake, we should pause and look further, wider, and deeper into what we are about to launch into wars, be it an actual war or just one of words.
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I very much doubt an introduction to Salah El Din is necessary for anyone reading this. Every one knows who he was. And this is too short an article to discuss a man who is possibly the most revered after religious figures. I ll let you do that research into the volumes and volumes of studies at your own leisure. What is relevant to this very short piece is what I believe is the impact of the myth on the whole region, especially during the past 100 years or so. Allow me to quote a few lines from Switching Souls – a book online- that sum this impact: “….. the father of every Arab nation, fancied himself the reincarnation of Salah El Din, the great Muslim warrior who unified the Islamic nation against the undeniable danger of the Crusades. Imperialism became the bastard offspring of the Crusades and Zionism was cast as the devil child of both: who could can resist that?”
I can just picture the shock and horror generated by an Arab, which i proudly am, disputing the greatness of this incomparable Warrior.
Relax I am not disputing anything!
Salah El Din was great and inspirational in every way.
Salah El Din is also dead now and the circumstances that dictated any or all of his actions were never identical to the circumstances throughout the past 100 years, and that is the point: the only common denomination in this operation is in fact Jerusalem. If we are brutally honest, had Jerusalem not been the focal point, he might have remained where he belonged, in the history books relating to the Crusades. By linking the crusades to Western imperialism, religion was dragged into a dispute that had nothing to do with religion to start with.
Yes, I know anti-semitism started that whole chain reaction with the persecution of the Jews, an ethnic group recognised for their religion most of the time, I know!
Still, leaping from that to making the Jewish/Arab conflict a religious one and asserting that the fight for Jerusalem was a religious holy war was, is, and will be the doom of the whole region.
The formula is all wrong and too deadly, and it works only with the mythical figure of the warrior at its centre. So it makes a certain kind of sense to lay that to rest, especially in language classes that by habit often spill into religious education.
It is a tall order compressing all this in a few lines, but I sincerely believe that if we are serious about finding peace for us all in the region, not to mention pulling the plug and the black magic rug from under the feet of every abomination that has sprung from it as a result, then we have absolutely no choice but to start the divorce procedures now: divorce from myths, from forced similarities, from delusions of recapturing a glorious past by dressing up in the heroes costumes. Instead, today, we start by concentrating on freeing young and impressionable minds from the cobwebs left hanging within them, and by founding a stronger basis to their identities than “I used to be great, so great my great, great, grand father used to whoop your great, great grandfather’s butt, you non-Arab, non-Muslim thing ya!”.
We start by lightening the load on our children’s minds, allowing them objectivity rather than indoctrination, and hopefully guiding them to think and plan for a future instead of programming them to perpetually whine over a past long gone.
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