“We don’t only want to be Muslim and eradicate anything before or after,” stated the University of Pennsylvania’s Lauder Arabic Language and Culture Program Director Amel Mili about the historical Muslim conquest of her native Tunisia. She and a fellow Tunisian offered a refreshing rebuttal of the hackneyed Islamic supremacist dogmas dominating Middle East studies at a conference in Washington, DC earlier this month.
Mili addressed a small breakout panel at the Policy Studies Organization’s Middle East Dialogue 2017. Her lecture examining a 1982 Tunisian court decision denying a woman her inheritance on the basis of sharia law shed light on the difficulty of reinterpreting Islamic scriptures for the modern world.
Premise: my conversational partner had shared with me a video: “2016 NPS Finals – San Diego – “Islamophobia” – and it was a perfect piece suited to interpretation as old Soviet “Active Measures”.
The argument in the above video is disingenuous in many regards.
For starters, Dylan Roof has been condemned as a white supremacist nutcake whose targets also believed in Jesus.
Next: in conflict and military terms, absolutely yes, the White Supremacist movements are absolutely a threat to America’s “domestic tranquility” and the same are tracked by the FBI and followed by a number of anti-hate organizations, from the ADL to the SPLC.
Adam Lanza (I don’t wish to look up the spelling) was an autistic rule-based child whose mother had told him something that he had misconstrued in line with his disability or alternative way of formulating his social reality. The poets have in fact used a mildly afflicted child as an emblem for their political cause.
You know my theory: Moscow promotes chaos for various reasons, including that of making itself look strong against . . . Islamic Jihad. It would work if western analysts and perhaps an increasing number of journalist were not so aware of “Active Measures“, false-flag operations (“Moscow Apartment Bombings“), “Reflexive Control“, and other concepts associated with KGB and Russian State behavior.
Do you see democracy, freedom, peace, and prosperity in the above video?
I don’t.
I see vultures who have figured out how to make a lot of money for themselves by creating and exploiting conflict.
The KKK has been asked to remove their robes, and they have been deeply marginalized in America’s political culture to about this day. This day seems to be a little different as the New Nationalism appears to appeal to the white supremacist community (by the way, the KKK was no friendlier toward Jews than it was African Americans).
The three poets are lying by way of the misrepresentation of political history — and you’re helping them.
Regarding Islam and Islam in America, it really doesn’t take much energy to locate anti-American / anti-State rhetoric in the mosque and the conflation of submission to God with obedience to the guidance of the imam.
“Stop letting the fear . . . .”?
Again: Moscow, Moscow-Tehran. They have got a good thing going with Hamas, Hezbollah, ISIL, and so many others.
Political Absolutism and Totalitarianism vs Open Democracy and Checked Power
The American Islamic Forum for Democracy’s (AIFD) mission is to advocate for the preservation of the founding principles of the United States Constitution, liberty and freedom, through the separation of mosque and state.
AIFD is the most prominent American Muslim organization directly confronting the ideology of political Islam and openly countering the common belief that the Muslim faith is inextricably rooted to the concept of the Islamic State (Islamism). We stand firmly for universal human rights – including gender equality, freedom of conscience, and freedom of speech and expression. Founded by Dr. M. Zuhdi Jasser, AIFD envisions a future wherein Muslims never feel a conflict between their personal faith and their commitment to individual liberty and freedom. Rather, we work to empower Muslims to be primary advocates for liberty and freedom.
We are being called to tolerate, accommodate, and include people who believe it is compassionate to murder gay people; from Imams trained in moderate Saudi Arabia to moderate Iran. We see gays from these countries murdered before our eyes: gays hanging from cranes in the city squares or thrown off tall buildings. Think about that. Close your eyes and picture someone blindfolded, hands tied behind their back and flung over a building. Imagine the horror of that death. Yet we say nothing and invite Islam into our western countries-to preach and proselytize in the name of freedom of religion and freedom of speech-yet without question against our laws.
We tend to forget that Islam is far more than a religion. It, like democracy, is an ideology, but at odds with democracy.
Islam is inherently, innately, systemically, and endemically homophobic, misogynistic, xenophobic and virulently anti-Jewish. Islam opposes the ethic that the Jewish people brought into the world 3500 years ago and brought to these shores by Christians. We know this because we hear their calls “Death to America,” “Death to Israel,” “Death to the Jews.”
We think of refugees and displaced people in a spatial context.
Somebody has lost their home, their security, their purchase on the control of their own life, and so they wander in-country or beyond, and depending on their personal characteristics – the movies always say “character”, but social reality is much different – they’ll grow again where they plant themselves or suffer the indignity of loss and rootlesness.
The segment you’re interested in is wandering through time with an unhelpful toolkit, and the obedient base can’t figure out why it’s not working. They’re mired in conflicts wrought by mutual greed and jealousy, and, perhaps like Imam ______, the more clever of tongue thrive on the turmoil by offering the unreachable untrue.
I recall a Star Trek episode in which a “holodeck” (synthetic surround theater) Dr. Moriarty achieved sufficient mastery of his own artifice and cyber environment to threaten the ship. Spoiler Alert! The solution at the end, which had to be negotiated because Moriarty really had interfaced with ship’s control, was to provide him and his woman (it’s complicated) with a cyber universe of their own. The world that would seem infinite to the evil couple was in the greater reality contained (and possibly ejected into space).
One might say of Catholic and otherwise conservative or orthodox observance in religion that all of it sustains something that took place a long time ago.
The figures have been frozen in time. The particular above have been especially well preserved by Keats’s poem.
Most of the religious in the modern world who attend a service also leave it with something taken away, and that adds its part to their lives and their search for a place for themselves. The monastery exists too. Add pope and papacy, the “Christ Process” – got that one from a Jesuit supplying blankets to the Four Corners region – and the existence of a timeless space maintained in the mind with the volition of the thinker.
Muhammad and his Islam may have had issues with boundaries – related on BackChannels: “Facsimile Bipolar Political Sociopathy” – just an opinion, of course, and that got into the patronizing and permits and orders produced within the Qur’an, not so complete for this world but ever so demanding in its build around injunction. The Muslims — the Islamists — that interest you may believe they are carrying out still relevant orders when they are raiding their targets – murder, theft, rape, and rapine – but in reality they are doing so much only for the aggrandizement of their chosen authority beneath the Eye of Heaven.
Ditto Putin.
What is the escape plan from the medieval worldview and its imposition – and impoliteness – today?
Universally, nature figures out how to destroy or mutate monocultures, whether in agriculture or in human existence. While we may be in a divine sense of “One cloud, one earth, one sky”, we are nonetheless highly differentiated humans x person x family x clan x tribe x nation.
For agriculture, the related science industry strives to maintain comprehensive seed banks as part of the arsenal at hand to address natural mutations adverse to production — of the simple enjoyment of something gardened — in the growing environment.
For the discussion of culture, BackChannels promotes the view that our planet’s cultural inventory” links to fewer than 7,000 living languages, each of which represents how a group of people in comparative isolation — population-in-place — used human sound and sign to aid in perceiving and addressing from their perspective their own particular environmental and social challenges and opportunities.
Often, instead of typing “The Jews (live in Israel)”, the note may be similarly but more tellingly expressed as “The Hebrews are back in the Land of the Hebrews”.
Arab, Baloch, Kurds, Pashtun — same treatment.
As “The English” — and English — have gone everywhere in some fashion, the language today provides a modern medium for communication without the demand for the erasure of other language cultures. And with the age of English colonial expansion now past, one may expect the resurgent greater being of other language cultures in their cores (x ethnolinguistic cultural density) and at their margins and finally in the mixing bowls of heterogeneous (multi-cultural) political spaces.
The American slogan, well linked to the European invasion of or presence in — interpretation is moot — North America, well reflected the necessity of tolerance and varying degrees of separation and mixing in the New World beneath the benevolent and idealist umbrella of a secular and humanist vision of governance. The delivery thereby of great personal freedom — to be Christian, Jewish, Muslim or of any other faith community — and to speak the new language, English, while retaining the power to speak also every other language on earth, to be multilingual by choice, has been also part of the bargain. Arabic, Hebrew, Latin, Pashto, Urdu, “Jamaican” — no problem, mon.
The American way has worked in America.
Other of the authentic open democracies of the world have found similar equilibrium and a key to prosperity and survival in related law and rule of law.
Other systems, much less liberal, some totalitarian, appear still invested in the feudal / medieval worldview and they “express” in nefarious methods (e.g., “Active Measures“, deception, disinformation, disingenuous speech, etc.) and vanguards their desire to impose their singular will — criminal, despotic, intolerant — far beyond their own context, and not only in space but in time as well.
For the most part for those preferring to live “back there” somewhere, the world goes on around them and evolves a both more inclusive but also widely varied cargo packed into the myriad cultures of humanity.
Putin’s mission: sustain feudalism in service to political absolutism and reap the benefits of sustained conflicts and, eventually, subjugated and taxed populations.
KGB method: Reflexive Control via the indirect channeling of terrorism to promote the authoritarian nationalism certain to weaken EU / NATO cohesion and favor the development of political environments subject to the control by the wealthiest and most powerful of personalities.
Western Response Most Adverse to Democratic Modernity: in former Moscow-aligned organizations or personalities, adoption of “active measures” and forms of perceptual control, including the “false flag” painting of events, to channel popular perception in service to greater political power.
Western Response Most Favorable to Democratic Modernity: strongest possible emphasis on empiricism, integrity in investigation, and the promotion and retention of American and associated constitutional methods, principles, and values.
In the feudal mode, “the masses” — BackChannels finds the term itself degrading — may be controlled by disinformation, disingenuous information, framing, innuendo, rumor, and suspicion.
In the modern mode, the curious and the reasoning of the public may sift and evaluate for strong information — valid, reliable, significant, and straight.
North Americans and Europeans accustomed to political decency may wish to evaluate whether they really want to have the Feudal Mode installed in the future experience of their own presently democratic and modern rule-of-law states.
I would question the authenticity of each posture or pretense presented, and I should think a good detective would start with the accuser. Again, we have been made to enter an era marked by the potential for KGB-style “false flag” and other manipulation. Where some people dare the improbable — do the unthinkable — the numbers (what are the odds?) may not help them.
I find the Linda Sarsour side of the story deeply suspect given her relationship with Hamas.
What if Jews and Muslims accomplished the vandalism together, and then made a show of amity in the wake of tragedy?
In the feudal mode — where power is concentrated by a force in personality that generates immense wealth and patronage without regard for common law — and in the mind supporting the feudal worldview (blessed with imagination but cursed by limited access to applicable data, critical research and reasoning skill, and relevant knowledge), what, however improbable, is not possible?
In this imbroglio, to accuse either Jews or Muslims — or representatives of either — of engaging in a “false flag” operations draws immediate condemnation as either anti-Semitic or Islamophobic — and therein lies the beauty of medieval manipulation and political theater and the greater horror of it as well.
What happens when power play magus?
Syria — and the incubating of ISIL as useful tool for Moscow and the depopulating of the state to present the west with a major headache.
What will happen to the western public IF subjected to continued “reflexive control” and artifice in the presentation of political event?
Whatever the answer may be, it’s unknown to BackChannels.
However, BackChannels would attempt to armor the “American Mind” against so many feudal methods of perceptual control even though an obscure foreign policy / political science / political psychology blog cannot begin to do what perhaps the American Intelligence Community (IC) needs must do in defense of the Constitution and the related cohesion and integrity of the state itself: set the record straight.
How is it possible that an act of vandalism on the scale reported — in Philadelphia’s Mount Carmel Cemetery, some “75 to 100 headstones were topped” according to CNN — produced no claims (by person or organization), no witnesses — none that have been in any way publicized, at least — and to date no suspects.
What has been produced: innuendo, rumor, suspicion, each a part of the shifting — and at times easily manipulated — perceptions well known to feudal lords and their loyal subjects.
“There Is Nothing to Fear in Islam,” Says DC Imam At Conference with Hamas-Linked CAIR OfficialFEBRUARY 25, 2017 11:34 AM BY ANDREW HARROD 23 COMMENTS“There is nothing to fear in Islam,” proclaimed Imam Talib M. Shareef during the February 9 “Tackling Islamophobia at Home” presentation at Washington, D.C.’s Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Library. Before over 300 largely sympathetic listeners in the library’s Great Hall entrance atrium, the panel presented an airbrushed understanding of an Islam perfectly at home within a “Red-Green” alliance.
Shareef, imam at a Washington, DC, area mosque, defined Islam as “surrendering to peace” and thus conjoined the disputed translations of this Arabic word as “peace” or, more accurately, “submission.” Among Shareef’s questionable Quranic interpretations, he indirectly referenced Quran 5:82 to suggest an Islamic scriptural basis for affinity between Christians and Muslims. Like many Islam apologists, he ignored how this very verse plays a central role among numerous Islamic canons supporting the antisemitism that is rampant among modern Muslims. Such inconvenient truths undercut his ludicrous contention that “there is nothing in the Quran that says anything against Christians and Jews.”
The purpose of this dictionary is to explain the confusing and terrifying behavior of the jihadis by bringing to light their unconscious motivation. What is missing in their mental development that makes an entire group enact such vicious crimes not only against humanity but even their own people? The reservoir of their rage arises from problems nested in early maternal attachment in shame–honor cultures ― the early mother/infant bonding attachment, the first relationship in life. This is the real driver of the terrorism. While there has been a voluminous amount of material written about terrorism, little hinges on how to decode the meaning of the terrorists’ aberrant behavior from the perspective of early childhood development and trauma.
One has to be cautious not to “diagnosis” an entire group of people, but given the amount of destruction, cruelty, sadism, and revenge leading to heinous crimes against humanity, in this case I make an exception. Daesh, The Islamic State, helped me uncover a borderline psychotic diagnosis for jihadis because their behavior is so out of bounds in terms of morality and ethics that it has revealed its own psychosis. Others in the Arab world are aware of this and realize that they have created a tiger whose tail they are now bound to ride. Hezbollah and Iranian extremism has also been blatant in its wanton destruction and, in fact, has been a major funder of Sunni violence even though they are Shia. Almost worse than the terrorist attacks themselves is the jihadis’ lack of empathy and concern for the pain they cause. Jihadis are incapable of walking in the shoes of others. They may appear to be empathic, but it is only what I refer to as pseudo-empathy.
Kobrin’s writing is as entertaining as its interpretations of language are educating and loaded with insight.
Here’s a portion from the first “A” — for “Acting Out”:
Acting out is a process frequently seen in play therapy, where children have the opportunity to play out their most violent behavior and repressed fantasies. Often these acts are attacks against the mother, who is seen as the source of painful dependency needs and nurturing. The breast that is needed is also the breast that needs to be destroyed — e.g., beheadings, rage against their mothers, the need to get rid of her, to violently separate from her. Jihadis manifest extreme attention-seeking behavior . . . . “watching somebody else doing an action is just like doing the action yourself.”
On a late page (271-272) — and all between appears just as well grounded and rich in perspective — comes this gem associated with “Neoteny”:
The Islamic suicide terrorists and all their accessories to the crime — the engineer bomb maker, the recruiter, the sender, the escort, the charismatic leader, their mothers and fathers, their uncles, the clan, the tribe, the umma — are terrified because they, too, have been “neotenized”. They are developmentally arrested and have never been allowed to separate, individuate, mature, or be free, independent, self-sufficient, confident, and competent human beings. They live their early lives in the throes of terrorizing and shaming child-rearing practices. If one never separates psychologically, they are left with group think, a kind of herd mentality. The family, the community, and the culture embody and accept bad behavior as normative . . . .
For all curious as how it is that Islam, the Religion of Peace seems to be somewhere always wading in blood and unimaginable cruelty, The Jihadi Dictionary delivers answers and explanations aplenty — and they would seem to work.
If the jihadist were not so predictable, the same would not be so useful to the politicians, like Assad, who have figured out how to get some use out of them.
Let’s talk about the ethic that Donald Trump,Barack Obama and John Adams extol. The Judeo/Christian ethic was in its time revolutionary and in the vast majority of countries today it remains that way. Freedom, democracy, is more than an election of a government. Think of the failure of the Arab Spring. This ethic, which comes from the Hebrew Bible, teaches us that all life is sacred; all people are born with equal intrinsic value; there is no countenance for the caste system or the idea of dhimmitude. It calls for the freedom and the obligation to make individual choices (free–will) rather than merely sit back and submit to whatever fate is handed us by our society or its gods.
BackChannels 