Category Archives: Religion

Genocide – Chaldean Christians – Iraq

07 Thursday Aug 2014

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Iraq, Islamic Small Wars, Middle East, Political Psychology, Regions, Religion

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“Tal Kayf is now in the hands of the Islamic State. They faced no resistance and rolled in just after midnight,” said Boutros Sargon, a resident who fled the town and was reached by phone in Arbil.

“I heard some gunshots last night and when I looked outside, I saw a military convoy from the Islamic State. They were shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’ [God is greatest],” he said.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/aug/07/isis-offensive-iraq-christian-exodus – 8/7/2014.

BackChannels Comment

Unfortunately, when it comes to political absolutism (why I call them the dictator “Putin-Assad-Khamenei”), despotism, and fascism (Hungary’s Jobbik now relates to Iranian heritage), there seems no end to variants.

ISIS has been proving vulnerable to the Kurdish Peshmerga, who know what will happen to them if they lose, and some ad hoc assembly of very small ambush parties that are targeting its leaders. Nonetheless, they’re using Erdogan’s embassy in Mosul as a headquarters (and they have gotten Erdogan to purchase $800 million in oil from them — and Erdogan has blacked out mention of the story in Turkey . . . all of which is bad news for NATO and the Turkish people).

The story with dictators who “take off” always ends in surreal depravity and sadism, and that much BadDaddy Baghdaddi’s lunatics have clearly accomplished.

More From the News

Jihadists who took over large areas of northern Iraq today have forced 100,000 Christians to flee as they occupied churches, removing crosses and destroying manuscripts.

They have fled with nothing but their clothes, some on foot, to reach the Kurdistan region, according to Louis Sako, the leader of Iraqโ€™s largest Christian denomination.

http://www.9news.com.au/world/2014/08/07/21/51/thousands-of-christians-flee-jihadists-in-iraq#5PB1tIbs4sBUCXi0.99 – 8/7/2014.

CNN interview with Mark Arabo, Los Angeles –

http://edition.cnn.com/video/data/2.0/video/world/2014/08/06/idesk-iraq-christians-persecuted-mark-arabo-intv.cnn.html

Related:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/08/07/the-islamic-states-bloody-campaign-to-exterminate-minorities-even-genghis-khan-didnt-do-this/ – 8/7/2014.

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FTAC – MEC – “Don’t Say You Didn’t Ask” – Distillation

24 Thursday Jul 2014

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Islamic Small Wars, Philology, Politics, Religion

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I haven’t been funded for focus, and that has led to a broad reading experience in this area but not mastery of any part. What I have been able to do is distill some themes and and reintroduce some basics and that has led to some terse formulations that others may use to springboard into new journeys and (a phrase I’ve been using lately) _come forward_ of familiar but perhaps stuck historical positions.

An example: Hillel the Elder (35BCE-10CE) | Jesus-Paul-Constantine | Muhammad.

It’s a poem.

Putin-Assad-Khamenei | Putin-Yanukovych | Russia-China

The world knows how they do business. ๐Ÿ™‚

On the Middle East Conflict —

Soviet Era – Pan-Arab Nationalism | Malignant Narcissist Manipulation – Autocratic Totalitarian Culture

Arab vs Persian Islamism | Fascist Theocratic Kleptocracy

Now you can take a puzzle piece like Bashar al-Assad and see how and where it fits, and the same may be done with Hamas. The language-conveyed expectations and myths expressed by either either may also be codified, bounded, known, and dismissed, evolved, or otherwise put into perspective.

The “Middle East Conflict” has nothing to do with human rights or real estate. It has to do with civilizational self-concept, human behavior, the embrace of ethics and ideals, and allowance or permit or what Assad represents — or Hamas or the iIDF — and then simply choices about a bored child’s question: “What do you want to do now? How do you want to live now”?

I would like to see a global evolving peaceful cultural polyphony smooth along a little bit with planning and tuned toward greater human potential and its realization.

That is a form of believer’s humanism.

Don’t say you didn’t ask.

๐Ÿ˜€

Someone asked for my opinion on a thread.

Another drop of e-paragraph elixir.

Hamas made a lot of promises on its way into power — everything was going to be okay by their claim — but they are malignantly narcissistic, a familiar profile for dictators, and while glorifying themselves, they have also cheated, intimidated, manipulated, and plundered much of Gaza (and the world, considering the plethora of funding streams involved) and now demand that Israel cease to exist (truly, that was Mashaal’s within the last day or so) to fulfill their own grandiose delusions about themselves. Like a bad daddy (trust me), it’s hard seeing them accurately when they’re close and a little unbelievable seeing them from a distance either in space or time.

. . . how do you feel about the information imparted by Electronicintifada, the International Solidarity Movement, the Palestinian Solidarity Movement, Code Pink ๐Ÿ™‚ , Ma’an News Agency (I actually kind of like them as they seem to report about as much as they can without drawing party thugs into their offices, i.e., they leave information out of their stories, e.g., they’ll report arrests but not causes for the same)?

http://www.meforum.org/522/the-smoking-gun-arab-immigration-into-palestine There are a lot of partisan “hate-peace peace groups” for the middle east conflict on Facebook. Some are barbaric. Some are collegial. A few are open. The true divide if interpreted through the filter of political psychology:

Adhesion to Loyalty vs Promotion of Integrity.

I don’t lie to you or anyone (or deceive people who are somehow different from myself) or spin this material, and if at times I’m . . . then I’m wrong. I apologize about it, make amends or corrections, and move on.

In a mafia state — doesn’t have to be religious — a loyal lie may better than survival than the telling of an uncomfortable truth. It just takes more courage to tell the truth, and it helps to tell the truth in an atmosphere more encouraging of it. Where partisan intimidation is present — and lies are invented, told, and sustained to either pander to listeners or to develop power over the same — things don’t work so well, partially because everything becomes based on lies.

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FTAC – A Different Kind of Synopsis for a Different Kind of War

23 Wednesday Jul 2014

Posted by in Anti-Semitism, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Islamic Small Wars, Philology, Political Psychology, Religion

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There’s a Syrian section in this piece — https://conflict-backchannels.com/2014/03/19/its-hard-helping-you-when-you-are-anti-semitic-among-other-things/ — that tells when I followed leads (online) toward the Facebook presence of the Syrian revolution, it didn’t take long to find what could be interpreted here as Sunni-based anti-Semitic cant about a step removed from the common browsing public, but I’m not sure I’m that common.

๐Ÿ™‚

Sometimes I keep “clicking” around a problem.

The Syrian state view and opposition world view that have as a habit of mind ready and vicious (and vacuous) anti-Semitic / anti-Zionist rant haven’t a palatable program for the secular or humanist and post-Enlightenment drivers of the western mind.

The absence of a sympathetic modern human program for the state (Assad’s baggage) and the axis of power that represents political absolutism opposite NATO has tragically kept NATO in position to avoid nuclear Russia while alsoย assigning permit for the disaster to Russia (which pledged $10 million for Syrian relief while spending $51 billion on Sochi).

At the end of each day, whatever our civilizational and religious affiliations may be and their related “self-concepts”, what the Jewish contingent and “Greco-Roman Judeo-Christian” civilization represents is the amassed historical weight of hard won western principles and values.

It’s not that a Jew is worth more than a Muslim, or vice versa, or that the Northern Hemisphere has ruthlessly enslaved the Southern Hemisphere or other such manipulative tripe. It — agape, love, the foundation of a good ethics and experience of a good life — is about dwelling on such an observation as, say, “whosoever destroys a soul, it is considered as if he destroyed an entire world. And whosoever that saves a life, it is considered as if he saved an entire world” (Hillel repeated by Muhammad) and dwelling on the meaning of that long enough to get it and develop some empathy and regard for other souls.

That empathy is not a given in nature: it’s cultivated.

These that get far astray do some damage — and then they do what they do under many ideological banners.

I’ll see how I feel about that on in the morning.

Maybe I’ll like it.

Maybe I won’t.

I don’t like the overuse of “dwelling” but will leave it as authentic verbal jazz.

A little more and I will drop the conversation.

Some social scientists believe that any attitude devolves to some set of beliefs having valence (good thing / bad thing) and intensity (not too bad . . . extremely bad) and primacy. Our legacies in culture and religion, in name and early acquired messages about ourselves (as early as “language uptake”) seem to me primary because we forget having learned such things and then we go an build on them throughout our lives. Our survival includes the perpetuation of these signifying elements of our existence. I think they’re important and believe in evolutionary cultural polyphony but a few have problems with that. Add greed, hormonal motivation, psychological problems, and so fascist dictators and followers are born, and when they grow up and become like BadDaddy with his Islamic Hate terrifying the neighborhood, they are hard to switch off.

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From Gaza to Mosul With Some Dwelling on Ankara in Relation to the Enabling of Islamic Jihad

23 Wednesday Jul 2014

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Islamic Small Wars, Politics, Religion

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The groups that comprise “Islamic Jihad” do worse than push innocents out in front of their violence: they hide in plain sight, infiltrate target communities, and creep forward with programs of intimidation, theft, and murder until they have a developed opportunity to surface in an attack. From Boco Haram to the “islamic State” north of Baghdad, that’s how they work. Moreover, noting Turkey’s apparent cooperation with the Islamic State (underscored by its failure to call the NATO card in on the takeover of its embassy in Mosul), containing this force calls for active blocking and dismantling wherever it is found.

The agony experienced in Gaza may be only prolonged by indecision as regards the “islamist” enterprise and the full spread of its overt objectives, including the genocide of the Jews, and its underlying motivations related to malignant and unbridled narcissism and the criminality it generates.

The note responds to the suggestion that civilians in Gaza be allowed into Egypt to flee the fighting on the strip. ย However, as all know, and not least the Egyptian military, “the terrorists” look like anybody when it suits them, and Egyptย has appropriately restricted traffic through the Rafah Crossing.

The allusion to Turkish cooperation with the “Islamic Stat” stems from a WordPress article, possibly reposted here, asserting that “ISIS gets men and $800 million from Turkey” (Money Jihad, July 8, 2014). ย The body of that piece appears to have been based on a piece in The Algemeiner (June 22) that no longer appears online.

๐Ÿ˜ฆ

Was the Algemeiner report real?

Has the report allegedly appearing there been suppressed?

Welcome to journalism from the web’s second row seat to history (and see the addendum to this piece).

Be that as it may, I’ve compiled a short list of articles having to do with the character of the Turkish-ISIS relationship. ย The salient points that might be best defended via online information sourcing:

  • Whatever the process involved or the stat’s position on it, Turkey has long served as a transfer point for fighters transiting through to Islamic Jihad groups in Syria. ย The effect of that lax security makes it as if the state abetted terrorists on their way to battle.
  • The attack by ISIS on Turkey’s embassy in Mosul has been accepted to the extent that the “Islamic State” has been using the facility as its headquarters and without interruption. ย The story, which may be slugged “Mosul hostage crisis” has been suppressed within Turkey, and I / we may not know what talk-talk-and-more-talk has been taking place between Prime Minister Erdogan’s government and BadDaddy Baghdaddi’s murderous machinery. In its attempt to manage its blackened eye — the Turks have lost evident sovereignty over both their embassy in Mosul and its personnel — the Turkish state machinery has moved the hostages off the front page and hidden its negotiations and attendant politics from the Turkish constituency at large.
  • Turkey’s issues with the Kurdish community play through in the politics attending its stance toward al-Qaeda / Brotherhood-type organizations on top of its own AKP-driven government. ย The longer the secular constituency remains secondary in the power structure of the state, the worse fascist tendencies may be expected to become, and that may include the passive-aggressive response of enabling rogue Islamic Jihad by simply going soft with it.

For about a month now, Erdogan’s government has muzzled the press and the opposition with regard to the Mosul hostage crisis:

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoganโ€™s government has taken all measures to keep the public in the dark on the issue. The prime minister first warned the media on June 15 not to write or talk about the developments in Mosul. A Turkish court followed up on the warning the next day by imposing a gag order to all print, visual and Internet media. The government is now applying a similar gag order to opposition party members in parliament, denying their requests to be informed about the issue.

http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2014/06/daloglu-mosul-hostage-crisis-erdogan-isis-iraq-turkey.html#ixzz38IWGWWg5 – 6/25/2014.

The situation is so absurd that on look-up, this header appeared just last week: “Iraqi Kurds Offer Turkey Intel on Mosul Hostages” (Hurriyet Daily News, July 16, 2014).

Reference Arranged by Ascending Date of Publication

http://www.todayszaman.com/diplomacy_isil-seizes-turkish-consulate-in-mosul-takes-diplomats-captive_350080.html – 6/11/2014.

http://www.todayszaman.com/diplomacy_isil-seizes-turkish-consulate-in-mosul-takes-diplomats-captive_350080.html – 6/12/2014.

http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2014/06/daloglu-nato-turkey-syria-isis–al-qaeda-mosul-iraq.html – 6/11/2014. “Turkey not asking NATO for help with ISIS.”

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/06/14/america-s-allies-are-funding-isis.html – 6/14/2014.

http://english.cntv.cn/2014/06/16/ARTI1402877168646586.shtml – 6/16/2014. ย “NATO chief to visit Turkey amid worsening situation in Iraq.”

http://www.danielpipes.org/14486/turkey-isis – 6/18/2014 – “Turkish Support of ISIS.”

http://www.longwarjournal.org/archives/2014/06/turkeys_new_neighbor.php – 6/21/2014.

http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2014/06/zaman-salih-muslim-turkey-blind-eye-isis-mosul-syria-iraq.html – 6/23/2014 – “Syrian Kurdish leader: Turkey turns blind eye to ISIS.”

http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2014/07/zaman-isis-turkeys-mosul-consulate-headquarter-iraq.html – 7/17/2014.

http://www.todayszaman.com/national_hostages-relatives-davutoglu-has-been-testing-our-patience_353461.html – 7/20/2014.

http://www.dailystar.com.lb/Opinion/Commentary/2014/Jul-22/264649-turkeys-benign-neglect-helped-spur-the-islamic-states-rise.ashx#axzz38IL0BDe2 – 7/22/2014.

http://blogs.reuters.com/faithworld/2014/07/23/turkeys-top-cleric-calls-new-islamic-states-caliphate-illegitimate/ – 7/23/2014.

Addendum

One Turkish opposition politician estimates that Turkey has paid $800 million to ISIS for oil shipments. Another politician released information about active duty Turkish soldiers training ISIS members. Critics note that Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip ErdoฤŸan, has met three times with someone, Yasin al-Qadi, who has close ties to ISIS and has funded it.

Apparently, as comment reflects, The Algemeiner article was that by Daniel Pipes from which the above excerpt was taken.

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FTAC – A Comment on Vacuous Literalism in Islamist Reading

15 Tuesday Jul 2014

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That fanaticism may be rooted in a decontextualized and literal reading of the Qur’an, the will to express power by definitively superseding other religions while obtaining absolute control over the lives of others and their assets and otherwise productive energies. ย 

That the Islamic enterprise either contains or has enabled this political program should go without saying; the extent to which the main body either abets, enables, or impedes the progress of “Islamist” elements is arguable. ย Egypt, for example, reversed the course of the Brotherhood (in Egypt), which handily proved itself anti-democratic and unconcerned with practical and progressive governance; the appearance of the “Islamic State” in Iraq appears to have met either widespread Sunni cooperation or plainly insufficient resistance north of Baghdad despite the development of a military vastly outnumbering the fighters within the incursion.

The comment responded to Adnan Oktar’s latest deploring Islamist aggression in the middle east and Muslim failure to protect Christians and Christian assets in the region:ย http://www.weeklyblitz.net/2014/07/christian-church-middle-east/ – 7/15/2014.

In relation to my assertion about a “decontextualized and literal reading of the Qur’an”, fate would have me post the following prior to the above:

How ISIS thinks: “โ€œWe havenโ€™t given orders to kill the Israelis and the Jews. The war against the nearer enemy, those who rebel against the faith, is more important. Allah commands us in the Koran to fight the hypocrites, because they are much more dangerous than those who are fundamentally heretics.โ€ http://www.haaretz.com/news/world/.premium-1.605097 – 7/15/2014.

Is the Islamic State’s reading of the Qur’an valid or invalid?

If the interpretation is invalid, what are the proofs supporting that position?

While the world may be uncomfortable with the projection of the Islamic superhero who defends all that is “truth, justice, and the Islamic way”, to parody another well known trope, it may prefer a little bit of that to the mindless cruelty of the cookbook Islam whipped up by the host of Muslim Brotherhood affiliates that have expressed their presence in the world through blooms of blood and horror.

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Aside

13 Sunday Jul 2014

Posted by in FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Philology, Political Psychology, Religion

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Response to lauding correspondence from Pakistan:

Perhaps we got better at laying in nuts-and-bolts development infrastructure than feudal-to-modern transitioning intellectual infrastructure. Much of the world needs a new poetics — new heroes, new legends — that connects deeply with the heart and sets them bravely against both the tyrant and the miscreant.

While it’s good seeing Pakistan’s Defense Force finally sanding away the Taliban, one wishes for far, far less disruptive methods (you have a lot of refugees moving about, many with freshly shaven faces) and intellectually more certain ones — in cultural development as well as intelligence – as well. It really is a kind of person that embraces or promotes violence and terrorism to achieve ends in which they themselves must be perpetually the star of the show

The “win” is toward the middle of humanity, not toward those who go against the grain of nature in human aspiration and adjustment.

However, forming the martial power of the moderate in their majority has proven most difficult. ย For the sticks that are fear and punishment and the carrots that are bribery and patronage, “loyalty” (to the ruthless with guns) trumps integrity throughout the fronts of the Islamic Small Wars: it seems one either flees the “God Mob”, dies fighting it, or succumbs to its ultimately self-serving political program.

Among my favorite bulwarks for making this point:ย http://www.reuters.com/investigates/iran/#article/part1 – 11/11/2013.

My correspondent asked, “So very true, but where do find them?”

Well, whether legends or writers, my response —

We settle down to creative writing on behalf of the more innately fair, forgiving, and just of humanity. With that kind of writing, God helps, and I do not believe the contributors need to be raving bipolar narcissistic megalomaniacs themselves — just good people with great empathy and strength and some connection — the spooky part — with life, the universe, and a little bit the miracle that is God.

You’re among the writers or among the facilitators of such writers.

Our now familiar “malignant narcissists” count on “information control” — censorship, ignorance, repression — to get away with doing what they do. ย The way to fight back: open the mouth: speak!

And those possessed of abundant empathy and integrity among the articulate and forceful: do your thing.

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FTAC – A Note on Friendship Across Boundaries

11 Friday Jul 2014

Posted by in Anti-Semitism, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Islamic Small Wars, Political Psychology, Politics, Religion

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Friendship is long work.

Between communities, it involves, in part, choices in the tension that may exist between principled integrity. to which all nod with affirmation at first, and loyalty, which the powerful may abuse or abuse on the way to becoming powerful (as with mafia) and to which the less powerful but prudent, either as regards ambition or survival, pay heed.

When “Caliph Ibrahim” demands acknowledgment and fealty, he is doing what criminal “godfathers” have done long, long before him and what other dictators do beside him: he emasculates and subjugates any potential rivalry (and his self-aggrandizement has but one goal: continuous narcissistic supply, but that’s another topic). The main this is his WILL rather live with a loyal lie than venture with an uncomfortable truth.

Iran has remained deeply involved in arming Hezbollah, maintaining Bashar al-Assad, which has twisty politics but all would at this point acknowledged that he’s a proven a monstrous dictator as ever existed, and smuggling to Hamas (http://freebeacon.com/national-security/israeli-ambassador-hamas-using-iranian-rockets-to-attack-israel/). The ideals of Shiite Islam may differ but the realpolitik obsessed with the development and maintenance of absolute power and control would seem to make a lie of a friendly face, loyalty being ultimately the enforced principal of this kind of power.

Time buys all of us time to visit faith and reason together — because we are in it together — and through argument and conversation approach a stance through which we may diminish or even head off what looks like a coming train wreck. While we get to work on that, some things just get worse, and there’s little we can do to influence malevolent processes running beside our own reparative ones.

I have yet to retire from this mode, but know I need to do so.

In the meantime, I may stand by my observations, starting with the notion that languages are invented or incubated and sustained in some kind of bounded space. Some may remain near pure or aged in isolation; others become complex amalgams from many streams in speech, but they’re more than merely functional and far more than the same in all but sound. ย Along the way, perhaps, an unhampered “cultural technology” may be its own exclusive and heady world.

With English a somewhat globalized but far from universal medium for intellectual exchange, cultural differences in belief, cognition, and social behavior may become dramatically apparent but not easily accelerated toward compatibility or resolution, and we’re in that muddy region. ย Part of that involves the conceptual space between feudal comprehension and the related appreciation of power and associated criminality, such absolute power being likened to mafia rule, and modern reliance — perhaps too much so — on social idealism and principle. ย Nonetheless, for great cause, I’d much rather live in the modern world than crawl along in the feudal one or even have at command its levers that obligate pandering and patronage on one hand while encouraging immense brutality, ruthlessness, and sadism on the other.

To cross this bridge that crosses time demands a completely new and democratized bonding that itself becomes reflected in the next politics shaping the overall experience of the human journey.

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Aside

10 Thursday Jul 2014

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Islamic Small Wars, Israel, Middle East, Philosophy, Political Psychology, Regions, Religion

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FTAC:

You know what, J. — I should not type with a glass or Rose next to me — I’ve become or am becoming more aware of the followers in these disasters than the leaders.

We know what Hamas is about.

The constituency of Gaza, whether endorsing or not, knows what Hamas is about.

But Hamas — not as an organization but as an event in the life of community — takes place anyway!

This is near to an historic day because out of the many hate-peace peace groups blathering all around the middle east conflict, we are all just one mouse-click away from chatyping with (what we may perceive as) enemy.

And I thought photography was an adventure . . . . ๐Ÿ˜€

And throw the calculus out the window because we know (from Vietnam we must know) that the numbers don’t mean nachas! What has meaning are basic principles and values _in the mutual defense of our own_).

What if “The Terrorists” had captured and murder three young men from Alexandria. Virginia. What if?

That’s the only question on the table.

Hamas has a big problem with Arabic. Hanniyah, in video, gets his pecker up exclaiming how “We believe in death as they believe in life!”

Well, bullshit.

http://www.jpost.com/Middle-East/Israeli-hospital-treats-Hamas-PM-Haniyehs-granddaughter-332193

Hamas believes in life!

Too.

Dictators, like the dictator “Putin-Assad-Khamenei” defend political absolutism in their own right (AKA “unlimited narcissistic supply”) — http://www.reuters.com/investigates/iran/#article/part1 (such a gentle looking soul . . .but don’t overlook Evin Prison or its population).

That’s where we are.

Wherever.

Now we can talk.

Who else is going to talk?

Talk with me.

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