As long as Israel acknowledges that the Palestinian Arabs’ national claims to statehood in Judea-Samaria are authentic and legitimate, Israel can never be secure externally, or internally.
For complying with those claims will make the country indefensible over time against threats that emanate beyond the Green Line, and ensure that the embers of incipient domestic revolt within it will continue to glow menacingly, capable of bursting into flames at any moment in response to legitimate actions taken to deal with those threats.
On Monday, we awoke to news that four worshipping Jews, one of them a British national, were murdered by Palestinian terrorists as they prayed in their Jerusalem synagogue. Hamas praised this atrocity, as it praises every terror attack in which the victim is an Israeli Jew. There should be absolutely no doubt: Hamas’s recent statements celebrating terror attacks are entirely consistent with its charter, which calls for the murder of Jews.
Khaled Mashaal has accrued wealth estimated above $2.5 billion in this business.
Ismail Haniyeh similarly now enjoys a reputation as a billionaire.
Gaza’s residents and those settled around Ramallah should understand this criminality pursued in their name diminishes their name.
Given political intimidation under the rules promoted by political mafia, have any choice?
Perhaps “any” have choice every morning, every minute, every day, and every day becomes more clear, more informed, more truthful.
Do books get in to the Arab enclaves within Israel?
Conversation?
Blog posts?
I don’t know.
However, unless our communicating systems are closed or deeply filtered, they are open and free – and free of manipulation. Curiosity may face a wilderness in information, but all the parts and particles of authentic stories — not the manipulations calculated with libels, obfuscations, omissions associated with lies that either pander or threaten — about themselves are there for looking. Fear should not direct the eyes or conscience.
What are the ghosts of skyjackers doing back on the front pages of the world’s news?
Along that axis I call “Putin-Assad-Khamenei” (or, possibly more accurately, Khamenei-Putin, given the way wise guys get power over one another), the post-Soviet still pan-Arab socialist whizbang PFLP believes it has a cause worth killing for, and while we can’t see the Big Money that helps move the mouths that incite the crime, one may suspect it’s there: plainly, “Jew hate” cloaks the piratical among leaders, Russia, for the time being excepted although Putin may be working an “anti- anti-Semitism” look-good cardas players around the “vertical of power” continue to accrue corrupt treasure for burial or cleaning safely in the rule-of-law west.
For the regime hated by Persians in Tehran, today’s murderous act fits with its promise of the destruction of the “Zionist Entity”, which has been the best cover (by deflection of attention) for thieving on behalf of Ayatollah Khamenei.
It may be broad connecting today’s attack (on the pious before God) with Moscow and Tehran and, by way of suggestion, perhaps others profiting from the promotion of chaos and conflict in the world, but nonetheless — and with mention of the PFLP — today’s act stinks of an old grave dug open and left to foul the air.
Yossi Dagan, the head of media relations for the Samaria Regional Council, filed a formal complaint Tuesday with the Government Press Office (GPO) against a CNN reporter for equating the terrorists involved in the Har Nof massacre with the victims.
According to Dagan, American CNN reporter Ben Wedeman was responsible for the headline describing the massacre under the headline, “Israeli police shot dead two Palestinian civilians” – when, in fact, the shooters were Palestinian terrorists who killed four Jews and wounded eight others as they prayed the morning service before being killed in a gun battle with police.
“We are proud of our sons who act fearlessly in the face of terrorist attacks,” Tarif said. “This is a black day for Israeli society and the State of Israel, when its citizens are murdered just for being Jewish.
“The Druze community condemns with revulsion the act of terrorism in which a Palestinian terrorist massacred and slaughtered innocent civilians. Such a situation, in which the country’s citizens are murdered on a daily basis, cannot continue,” Tarif said, and praised Israel’s security forces.
One of the most shocking aspects of the murderous attack on a Jerusalem synagogue this morning by men with guns and axes is not the attack itself—we’ve seen, from time to time, this sort of sectarian barbarism take place in places like Jerusalem, and Hebron. The most shocking aspect is the wholesale endorsement of this slaughter by Hamas, a group that, during this summer’s war in Gaza, half-succeeded in convincing the world that it wasn’t what it actually is: a group with actual genocidal intentions.
The first is that Jews can be forgiven for thinking that the world sees them as sacrificial pawns. Today’s victims are of course not the first deaths in the Palestinians’ latest not-quite-intifada. And they were not the first Americans killed either. And they were not the first victims of Abbas’s incitement or his directive to take action against Jews in Jerusalem. The sad fact is that the world regards a certain amount of Jewish blood as the cost of doing business–not worth getting all worked up about.
The word for that is “expendable.” And that’s what the families of victims and those who survived previous attacks understand all too well: their loved ones were expendable to the international community and, most painfully, to the government of the United States of America. A line has now been crossed, apparently, and the Jews under attack are no longer considered expendable. But it’s unfortunate that the line was there to begin with.
Neighbors make the neighborhood. When the neighbors have to count among themselves either secular or religious mafia — post-Soviet Putinism, retrograde Islamism — the good neighbors (e.g., “moderns” and “moderates”) disappear beneath the flashings of malignant egos who have as their chief concern themselves at the center of a universe they control and from which they derive adulation and love in abundance — that they have to rig everyone else’s reality is something easily overlooked — or hushed — by the same.
Gaza should be liberated from Hamas; Ramallah should be cleared of the hypocrites and liars of old PLO, PFLP, “solidarity” anti-Semites and lunatics and the basis in thought (the “information space”) for existing at all. We should know the names of families tied to terror by financing it; we should know how money moves into these streams that flow against humanity and see that law and military and paramilitary force cut them off and ruin them. Every facet sustained in sustaining the middle east conflict needs to be taken apart and taken down to its language — and then the language needs to be exploded never to be put back together again.
The neighbors make the neighborhood.
The problem with the middle east conflict resides with who has been running it, profiting from it, murdering for it (160 children in tunnels; the destruction and continuing suffering of Yarmouk in Syria [while Mashaal dances off to Tunisia with $2.5 billion in estimated wealth]) — it never was about the “poor Palestinians”, the Arab abandoned refugees of wars undertaken in the glorification of contempt for others, exclusiveness, and unbridled hate.
What is really challenged — all that is challenged — is the “malignant narcissism”, the domains of the “control freaks”, the feudal estates of the politically criminal.
Related
We feel that the Arabs and Jews are cousins in having suffered similar oppressions at the hands of powers stronger than themselves, and by a happy coincidence have been able to take the first step towards the attainment of their national ideals together.
The Arabs, especially the educated among us, look with the deepest sympathy on the Zionist movement. Our deputation here in Paris is fully acquainted with the proposals submitted yesterday by the Zionist Organisation to the Peace Conference, and we regard them as moderate and proper. We will do our best, in so far as we are concerned, to help them through: we will wish the Jews a most hearty welcome home.
According to Forbes, the Islamist terror group, also known by the acronyms ISIS or ISIL, has an annual income of $2 billion. Hamas comes in second, with a yearly revenue of $1 billion. Colombia’s FARC is ranked third with a $600 million annual turnover, while Hezbollah is fourth with $500 million. Fifth on the Forbes list is the Taliban with $400 million, followed by Al-Qaida and its affiliates with $150 million; Pakistani-based Lashkar e-Taiba with $100 million; Somalia’s Al-Shabaab with $100 million; Real IRA with $50 million; and, closing the top-ten list is Boko Haram, with a $25 million annual revenue.
“In the issue of oil, the economy has not been the sole important factor,” Rouhani said. “International politics and plots” have also affected prices, he said, without elaborating.
NCRI – The Iranian regime is facing a deepening financial crisis as the price of crude oil plunges on international markets.
The regime’s budget deficit was reported by the state-run Ebtekar daily newspaper on November 8 issue as totalling 1.5 billion dollars. But economists believe the true figure is much higher.
Russia, whose economy is forecast by the central bank to run zero growth next year, is struggling under the weight of a plummeting ruble and sanctions imposed over the conflict in Ukraine. Brent crude, the grade that underpins prices for Urals, Russia’s main export blend, is set for a record losing streak amid speculation that OPEC will refrain from cutting production to ease concern of a supply glut.
A pressing question lies in determining what effects considerable cuts in the price of oil, the glut in oil supplies, and the remarkable growth of the U.S. oil industry, has and will have on international politics as well as on the global economy. Almost certainly, the United States and Western countries will benefit both politically and economically, while most of the members of OPEC, and countries including Russia, Iran, and the Islamic State of Iraq, and Syria, will be hurt. More broadly, there will be a global economic benefit as lower energy costs will help both producers and consumers.
Abductions, beheading, mass slaughter — headline grabbers!
Commodity pricing?
Squint.
While post-feudal North America has been working on greater achievement in energy independence, it appears some oil cash flow addicts have puffed and bluffed their way into an anticipated but unaddressed cash crunch with consequences looming on the near horizon, this perhaps despite deep pocket brags.
The US administration must candidly introspect whether it is the St John Philby type converts in its policymaking circles, sheer naiveté and skin-deep understanding of the regional dynamics or pure political expediency that the mother load of jihadists still survive and thrive in Pakistan. What the era after the US withdrawal from Afghanistan portends for that country and South Asia will depend a lot upon such soul searching.
Israel’s defense doctrine has the People going their own way until forced to responds. Biblically: the Jews leave Egypt; they don’t conquer it. 🙂 As an ethnolinguistic cohort — that is in large part what a “people” is — the Jews have had a homeland — the “Land of the Hebrews” — and they have it again. The adversarial Arab spin has been to invert and mirror the legitimate in an astonishing attempted theft using very people left scattered on the field as their armies retreated, and the same, armies and states, have treated the refugees as aliens ripe for exploitation, manipulation, segregation, and, most evil, weaponization.
When an AQ-type group infiltrated Nahr al-Bared (2007) to defend all of Lebanon from “Israeli aggression” — a good example of the “paranoid delusional reflection of motivation” — Lebanese Defense Forces had the camp filtered and bussed while it attacked and razed the same right down to its underground where the last holdouts were finally pinned.
More recently, neither Arab Nationalist al-Assad nor Arab Islamist al-Nusra appeared much interested in the wellbeing of the Palestinian residents of Yarmouk, which were cordoned, starved, used as human shields. http://www.unrwa.org/crisis-in-yarmouk Arafat managed to leave this world with millions of dollars for his widow; Mashaal remains in it with an estimated fortune above $2.5 billion.
Tyrants are not leaders.
Tyrants are takers.
Call them “kleptocratic”:, “piratical”, “autocratic”, “authoritarian”, their profession of being about “their people” (who confirms them?) effectively screens the deepest exploitation of the same. For deflection, anti-Semitism works, for if the tyrant can get his people to blame the Jews, for a while or a long time — especially if the press is controlled and critics are eliminated — the people won’t turn around to dwell on the evil of those who led them astray.
In peace, inhabitations, Jewish, Christian, Muslim, or other become normal commercial and tax generating centers _for those lucky enough to live in peace with their near neighbors_. That’s where the true end of the Gaza City and Ramallah stories reside. The surrounding Arab world has an even larger and more difficult story to outgrow, and it’s suffering between the ghosts of national socialism and a darkly romantic yearning for a long ago yesterday.
The presence of Israel is not on “Arab lands”, much less Persian ones.
The hatred of the Jews is not what drives the “middle east conflict”.
Sorry.
It only looked that way for a long time.
“Assad or Burn It” — Bashar al-Assad’s message to his subjugated people is what one sees across the collection of Arab interlocutors for the refugees of 1948: excessive cruelty and heartless, call it “sociopathic”, greed and venality on the part of leaders who make a lot of money — Arafat’s millions, Haniyeh and Mashaal’s billions, Khamenei’s Setad (estimated value: +$90 billion) — manipulating the emotions of vulnerable, infantilized, ultimately enslaved constituents.
Take the few leaders who most sustain the middle east conflict, and survey their behavior and their state governments for corruption, cruelty, injustice, inhumanity, piracy and tyranny.
As much appears to be on the web to be seen by way of news every day, numbers reported by the watching organizations, the blogs of some daring Arab souls.
In addition to http://www.unrwa.org/crisis-in-yarmouk, which is up to date (as of the posting of this piece):
I am an authentic pro-Palestinian Arab reaching out to Israelis. I do not white-wash Israeli settlements or say that Islamophobic bigotry doesn’t exist among some members of the Jewish community. But I also acknowledge that Israel helped Syrians when the world abandoned them and that much of the hate toward Israel comes from Russia, Assad, and Iran’s attempts to rally support for their empire. I acknowledge CIJA for being extremely helpful when I reached out. I learned that many of my non-Arab allies weren’t friends at all. They hate Israel more than they loved Arabs; they are simply antisemites riding on the coattails of our tears.
Dawisha, Karen. Putin’s Kleptocracy: Who Owns Russia? New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014.
Gessen, Masha. The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin. New York: Riverhead Books, 2012.
Harding, Luke. Expelled: A Journalist’s Descent Into the Russian Mafia State. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
Judah, Ben. Fragile Empire: How Russia Fell In and Out of Love with Vladimir Putin. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2013.
Remnick, David. Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire. New York: Random House, 1993.
Smith, Hedrick. The Russians. New York: Times Books, 1983.
Soldatov, Andrei and Irena Borogan. The New Nobility: The Restoration of Russia’s Security State and the Enduring Legacy of the KGB. New York: Public Affairs, 2010.
Our iddle biddle web has gurgled and Googled long enough for anyone to block text, right-click the mouse, and find on the web the alphanumeric string wanted and in the form desired.
The contemporary URL takes you to something the author specifically wants to show you.
As I would rather write blog posts, I suppose, than catalog the 2,000+ volumes that surround me, the library section of this blog remains sparse. However, in the way of web-driven and curiosity-based fate, it appears I’ve got some linear shelf space supporting a “Russian Section” and that listed above this section is it.
How about naming names (which from — I will call it “MoscVegas”– Karen Dawisha does in abundance)?
For this simple blog, a reduction to a few of the simple popular nouns of the opposition might suffice: Alexei Navalny, Boris Nemtsov, Gary Kasparov, Michael Khodorkovsky, Yevgeny Roizman, Pussy Riot, etc. (the abbreviation of laziness, but on the web, nouns lead to nouns: one cannot compete with that comprehensive aspect of machine compilation given the labors of scads of academics and journalists contributing daily to wealth in knowledge).
A few moments ago, the search string (using the Google engine) “Putin, journalists” brought this gem to the top of the list:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Politkovskaya – “We are hurtling back into a Soviet abyss, into an information vacuum that spells death from our own ignorance. All we have left is the internet, where information is still freely available. For the rest, if you want to go on working as a journalist, it’s total servility to Putin. Otherwise, it can be death, the bullet, poison, or trial—whatever our special services, Putin’s guard dogs, see fit.[17]”
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