A simple caption might do: Diamond Reynolds meets the press on the police-involved killing of her boyfriend Philando Castile in the Falcon Heights community outside of Minneapolis, Minnesota.
As Reynolds breaks into tears and is comforted by a pastor, another man comes forward wearing a “Day of Dignity” t-shirt that has come from an event sponsored by Islamic Relief USA (there are many Day of Dignity events annually).
BackChannels to this point has been “crayony” and superficial about “Moscow-Tehran” and “Syndicate Red Brown Green”, which one may infer from pictures at the intersection between the black nationalist movements and Palestinian Solidarity — raised fists and green flags — and it’s there in the latest attractive trope, “Ferguson-Gaza” — by way of examples online:
“Ferguson-Gaza” — look it up 🙂 — loads up on the anti-Semitic New Old Now Old Far Out and Lost Left, of course, and the same is met (same search) by Jewish and other commentary questioning the comparison. Be that as it may, take this post as being about the motivation for hitching emotions to the readymade and head-nodding programs of the Far Left and potential Islamist Front, not that there’s anything in the least controversial about missionary sympathy from any religious quarter toward those to whom injustice has either been done or who perceive the same as being so.
Again, this post is about the motivation: the policeman looked white; the angel looked black.
That’s the way it looks and will probably be remembered as the way it looked.
On the basis of surface events and visceral perception, those in politics and ambitious about picking up their legions know exactly how to exploit such misery to pick up their own numbers.
“Black Lives Matter Chicago, the Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression and Trinity United Church of Christ calls upon all the various strands of the peoples movement to come out and join us in protest of the cold blooded, brutal murders of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile. We will rally Monday, July 11, 2016 in Federal Plaza (Dearborn and Adams) at 4:30pm and march in the streets.”
In relation to Dallas, never mind the political incitement present, so might be inferred, in the head of sniper Micah Johnson. How did such an idea as shooting police from a parking garage in Dallas get in there in the first place?
Regarding “Syndicate Red Brown Green”, a term of art on this blog, this piece may be essential for understanding how Far Left movements do, in fact, collide:
The point should be clear and for now remain: the proper framework for Far Left politics in the United States (and perhaps elsewhere) remains the Soviet, the Cold War, and the aftermath — the political phantoms — that have flowed down with both over time. If one wants to drive back even further in cultural-political history, one may through the lens of greater Asian and Russian history and the barbarism and feudal conquests associated with both. What for interest appeals to BackChannels is the extreme narcissism in play in history and in present politics where powerful personalities have placed themselves beyond criticism and law and immune to the suffering of others, especially when they themselves capriciously impose that suffering on others with impunity.
National Review writer David French has also weighed in on Black Lives Matter. Here are two pieces, one dating back to December 2015 and another posted yesterday.
BackChannels places conflicts involving Iraq in the post-Cold War framework and suggests that military engagements were part of “containment” and the “building down” of Soviet alliances that remained in character authoritarian and openly supportive of terrorism.
Basically, Russia then and Russia today criminally manipulates foreign political constituencies to suit its own kleptocratic appetites. Hussein (and Gaddafi) were part of that enterprise, and perhaps as God willed it, both are gone (and thank God).
Yesterday’s BBC report on the Chilcot report keeps itself narrowed on the image of Iraq as an oasis of stability, however miserable, under the rule of a strongman, and the report itself reasserts at face value the idea that “regime change” in Iraq linked to direct threats posed by WMDs, which imbroglio BackChannels would shove into a bin labeled “Potential Convenient Pretexts” (sorry the same don’t really work out) and the more general “Global War on Terror,” which period of observation appears to start on September 11, 2001:
10. After the attacks on the US on 11 September 2001 and the fall of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan in November, the US Administration urned its attention to regime change in Iraq as part of the second phase of what it called the Global War on Terror.
It is unfortunate that governments most devoted to “classical liberalism” and democracy should feel the need to resort to manipulating their “masses” (instead of free constituencies) because they have failed to publically educate the same in the longer-lived themes of geopolitics and history — or worse, lost that battle to the New Old Now Old Far Out and Lost Left that relies on short memories to promote their own ultimately authoritarian, fascist, and totalitarian outlooks.
I don’t know what BackChannels is going to do when the 25th Year Anniversary of the Dissolving of The Soviet passes on December 26, 2016, but as that day is still coming up, it’s going to harp on it with the hope that other “English” and Europeans and others less free or more so catch a glimpse of Putin’s Excellent World (PEW), the world from which it has emerged, and the malignantly narcissistic worldview it continues to promote or install wherever it may.
The “single state” solution fails not for enmity but for comprehension of what is represented by the Hebrews living in the land of the Hebrews.
Language as a cultural technology evolves within a people in somewhat isolated social space sufficient to invent their way of getting along among themselves and with the surrounding earth. For each ethnolinguistic cultural cohort on the planet, there is a land, a someplace, from whence it came.
So the Hebrews are back in the Land of the Hebrews: Israel. There are also Baloch, Pashtun (“B’ni Israel”, self-defined), and Kurds who have a relationship with the land that made them, and they too have some political issues involving their autonomy and survival as a people.
The Jordanian Arabs and the migrant workers caught between armies in 1948 have been deeply manipulated by powerful forces within and outside of Arab culture. The Russian KGB’s invention of Arafat, an Egyptian, and the PLO either is or should be history well known to scholars who have devoted themselves to studying and solving the “middle east conflict” (never the others ongoing — and “hot” — at the moment). The contemporary and feudal Russian story, that which has had Mikhail Bogdanov entertaining PFLP in Moscow (Nov. 2014) while the state refuses to acknowledge either Hamas or Hezbollah as terrorist organizations, should be taken into account.
It’s not the Israelis or Palestinian People (again: somewhat isolated in time and space — long enough to create new language 🙂 ) who sustain the middle east conflict: all along, it has been those who misinform, mis-educate, and maliciously “program” socially captive innocents in service to their own feudal-medieval aggrandizement (and financial enrichment).
This blog now has plenty of data for backing up its opinion about what has created and what sustains the “Middle East Conflict (MEC)”. From the vicious narcissism that would hold refugees in camps (Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, Egypt) and separated from general state populations (a genuinely apartheid policy) to the Soviet distribution of anti-Semitic propaganda and, yes, the invention of Arafat, the MEC has come to represent medievalism at its greed-laden best.
Look into UNRWA spending and tunnel smuggling, and then take another look at who got the loot.
I’ve never doubted Jasser’s sincerity but I have questioned the power of modern sensibility to “re-map” scripture. We’re beyond the age of miracles but not of religious sentiment, and to approach the updating of the legacy in scripture and related literature of Islam involves first overriding Muhammad’s warnings about tampering. On the part of modern and sophisticated people, I’ve seen two channels organizing effort to either interpret the Qur’an as a multilayered exercise in thought — and who is to say it’s not? — or, as Jasser and others have done, question the instructions and have the great conversation, and may both tracks lead away from the barbarism on display in Baghdadi’s emulation (so he believes) with ISIS in Syria-Iraq.
Related
ISIS – BackChannels supports the idea that ISIS was incubated by Damascus with the support of Moscow and Tehran, and that the method used we “de-selection” for combat and bombing early in the process that has become the “Syrian Tragedy”.
Qanta Ahmed – National Review — BackChannels considers conservative American and Muslim physician and writer Qanta Ahmed a force of nature sufficient for mention as a figure representing a modern pluralist stance in Islam without reform and opposite the Muslim Brotherhood as regards leveraging concession from the rest of the world.
I have not subjected the list to scrutiny beyond the declared penchant of each for moderation and good.
Those who obsess on fundamental core tenets and advisements and hadith and sunnah may be expected to continue to condemn an unreformed Islam by way of its reflection from the past — the Religion of Peace web site conveys the tough critic’s perspective. Whether the religion, which hundreds of millions of Muslims have assumed perfect from the start, has strength to weather genuine moderation and updating remains to be seen.
Political Psychology
“Cults of personality”, “dictatorship”, “fascism”, “feudal political absolutism”, “idolatry”, “malignant narcissism” — such terms revolve around the construction of feudal space and the will and rule of a single overwhelming and ruthless personality that through the carrot and stick of patronage and intimidation creates and manipulates a universe around itself. On BackChannels, the great struggle with the past has been presented this way:
Feudal Absolute Power vs Modern Democratic Distribution
For Islam and for Muslims to integrate with the cultural complexities of modern, pluralist, and secular democracies, which may then develop stronger capitalist economies with social welfare attachments, may require some reconsideration of Muhammad’s conflation with God, whether generated originally or by clerics or others promoting their own power in supposed emulation.
Dershowitz focused on largely unsuccessful efforts to promote Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel among American universities, campaigns that nonetheless helped “mis-educate a generation of future leaders.” BDS leaders admitted to wanting “to destroy Israel as the nation state of the Jewish people” contrary to rhetoric of pressuring Israel to conclude a peace settlement with Palestinians. Simultaneously the “very anti-peace” BDS movement “sends an erroneous message to the Palestinian street and the Palestinian leaders that says you don’t have to compromise…we will get you your state through extortion.”
One might agree with the sentiment in “BDS is mainly the invention of self-hating Israelis and Jews” but the truth is it’s mainly the invention of historic Russian anti-Semitism ported through the Soviet Union to the “comrade networks” that today have morphed into the New Old Now Old Far Out and Lost Left.
Here’s one of their portals, and I think a glance at the names still on the marquis, as it were, tells of the “longer game” being played on the world stage.
In the wings, imho, but not without cause: the Russo-Syrian effort to sustain their systems of feudal absolute power far into the 21st Century. As KSA realigns westward, or follows its massive investments in the west, Moscow and Tehran may remain committed to installing in the west greater chaos, dissension, and threat.
It’s a big picture view, but the connections between so-called “liberation movements” (add the Far Right New Nationalists like Viktor Orban to the mix) seem to me unmistakable. Possibly, Obama and his subaltern Shapiro are giving signal, whether lip service or sincere, back to Moscow, as the Palestinians remain incapable of challenging the PLO / PA (set up by the KGB way back when) and Hamas (whom Moscow today refuses to designate a terrorist organization).
When it comes to autocracy and insanity, more or less, think “Different Talks — Same Walk.”
The combines of bipolar and malignantly narcissistic psychology cross cultural, ideological, and religious divides to produce the kind of person that becomes a dictator or the kind of person that becomes a terrorist.
Scaled in terms familiar in social psychology, some percentage of population drifts toward and into the available extremes at the margins of their chosen channels.
While the “Kool-Aid” varies, there are a lot of language- and information-related processes ferrying the right kind of personality into their kind of combat or political action.
With Islam — as opposed to, say, post-Soviet neo-feudal Russian nationalism — I / we, perhaps, have been on a journey from knowing very little to knowing enough to at least get the big picture about right, and with that we’re getting to see how the “jihadists” differ from Muslims who really have no wish to force on others or otherwise vigorously purvey “Political Islam”.
Greater than Islam may be our general transition and transformation from the medieval worldviews represented by “Red Brown Green” to the modern one of greater cooperation, integration, integrity, and inclusion plus, not a small thing, the want of being helpful to others.
Although one cannot overlook the medieval character of medieval religions and related behaviors; however, one may choose to set aside aspects of the content of one screed or another to more closely focus on the political and social psychology at work — to be found on this blog: “social grammar”, “malignant narcissism”, “medieval vs modern”, etc.
This curriculum is informed and inspired by many sources, including the Unitarian Universalist Association’s Standing on the Side of Love campaigns, the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee, Churches for Middle East Peace, World Council of Churches, the American Friends Service Committee, the Israel-Palestine Mission Network of the Presbyterian Church (USA), Just Vision, Jewish Voice for Peace, Open Hillel, Nakba Education Project, Zochrot, many Palestinian organizations working for peace with justice, the UUJME Newsletter, Kairos Palestine, Steadfast Hope, Zionism Unsettled, Middle East Research and Information Project Primer, and Phyllis Bennis’s Understanding the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict: A Primer. Links to information about these and other resources are in the lessons and/or the Resource page at the end of the guide and the UUJME website. We are inspired also by those who choose to implement this part of the UUJME Reflection & Learning Project, and wish you the best in this endeavor to stand on the side of love with the people of Israel-Palestine.
However, and with all that love accepted, let’s have a look at some of the other contributors to the curriculum promoted by the Unitarian Universalists for Justice in the Middle East (UUJME).
To advance their “justice and peace” initiatives, they collude with Islamic and Palestinian friends in a covert scheme to sabotage Israel. Their web of anti-Zionism extends throughout Europe, the Americas and Africa. While this may seem a bold assertion, it is nonetheless worth examining some undeniable evidence.
WCC is among the many coalitions of Christians that embrace the extreme left and the jihad agenda as appeasers and collaborators.
In 2008, the AFSC, along with other similarly minded religious groups, hosted a gala dinner with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as the guest of honor, despite Ahmadinejad’s Holocaust denial, anti-Semitism, and genocidal threats against the Jewish state. Ahmadinejad, however, is only the most extreme example of the AFSC making dubious friends. The participants in its BDS summer camp were mostly Palestinians or Palestinian-Americans associated with the group Students for Justice in Palestine—an organization notorious not only for its vicious rhetoric against Israel, but for going so far as shouting down pro-Israel speakers on campus and harassing Jewish students.
Washington Presbyterians who engage in dialogue with Jewish groups are scrambling to undo what they say is the damage caused by a congregational study guide assailing Zionism distributed by a group affiliated with their denomination.
Related: NGO Monitor. “The Role of Antisemitism in the Presbyterian Church (USA)’s Decision to Support Divestment.” June 25, 2014, updated March 31, 2016; Anti-Defamation League (ADL) reporting on tension within the Presbyterian Church (USA) and the offshoot Israel-Palestine Mission Network of the Presbyterian Church: “Polling data consistently show that “mainline” Protestants overwhelmingly support a safe and secure Israel, even while also being concerned about the situation of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. The efforts at the PC(USA) and other churches to pass divestment resolutions reflect the views of a minority of activists within those churches who take advantage of the structures of those churches to press their agenda.”
JVP, like other prominent Jewish anti-Zionist individuals and groups, uses its Jewish identity to deflect allegations of anti-Semitism leveled against the anti-Israel movement in order to provide it with a greater degree of legitimacy and credibility. In this guise JVP views itself as the “Jewish wing of the Palestinian Solidarity Movement (PSM)” and is an integral part of this anti-Israel coalition, serving as its “Jewish shield”, espousing the belief that if there are Jews demonizing Israel, it can’t possibly be anti-Semitic.
Also like other aggressively anti-Israel organizations, JVP members regularly attempt to shut down dissent by disrupting pro-Israel events such as a 2010 talk by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the events at a 2011 Taglit Birthright reunion in New York and the 2012 AIPAC conference. Brandeis University Prof. Ilan Troen, who calls JVP “self-appointed saints with no mass following”, explains that “If you’ve ever dealt with the JVP, they themselves are a semi-terrorist group, promoting the disruption of free speech and the inability of others to conduct public discourse.”
The JVP advisory board includes leaders in anti-Semitic and anti-Israel hate, such as Judith Butler, Noam Chomsky, and Sarah Schulman. All three of these anti-Israel advocates deny the Jewish right to self determination, legitimize the internationally recognized terrorist group Hamas, and support the destruction of the world’s only Jewish state.
Related in the news: Shahmoon, Shani. “Jewish Woman Forced to Hide From Anti-Israel Activists at UC-Irvine.” Observer News & Politics, May 20, 2016: “Earlier this month, Jewish and pro-Israel students found themselves caught in what they describe as a “fire of hate” and feelings of mourning as they observed Holocaust Remembrance Day. The Muslim Student Union, Jewish Voice for Peace, Students for Justice in Palestine and the American Indian Student Association just happened to organize a week of anti-Israel activity marketed under the title, “Anti-Zionism: The Roots of Oppression,” during the same week.”
. . . while Open Hillel phrases their intentions in the context of a free and unfettered debate (hence “open”), their events, speakers and partners actually seem to be far more interested in institutionalizing a set of radical opinions—and browbeating the mainstream into accepting it: That far from being a lonely liberal democracy facing daunting challenges from without and within, Israel is actually an illegitimate, oppressive, colonial state that might be better off not existing; and that Jewish students cannot truly understand it without teaming up with extreme pro-Palestinian groups.
While “Nakba” points to disaster it also brings up the uncomfortable matter of whipping legions to genocidal war and losing the same. In the immediate aftermath of “1948”, the Arab world took revenge on the Jewish residents of Arab states, and that history may be read about on this blog: Point of No Return.
. . . the group’s founder has written the following about his vision of the future:
When the refugees return, Jews will become a minority in the country. Israel as a Jewish state will change radically, and it will no longer be defined as such. Jews will no longer be able to determine their future…by themselves…. There may be Jews, most of them of European origin, who won’t be able to adjust to a non-Zionist reality, and prefer to use their other passport to move elsewhere…”
What’s a nice Jewish girl like Phyllis Bennis doing at the head of the class of anti-Zionist, anti-Israel, (anti-Semitic) leaders, the kind who stand shoulder to shoulder with those inclined to label the Jewish-majority state “Israhell”?
Here’s a partial transcript leading to Bennis’s becoming swept up in the radical politics of the Vietnam Era — her further transformation into parroting the catechisms of the New Old Now Old Far Out and Lost Left comes in the back half of the video:
The short answer is the Vietnam War. I grew up right through highschool with this focus on Zionism. That was my social environment. Those were my friends. That’s who I hung out with. And then I went away to college. And I started college in 1968, the big year, if you will, and in that context, I spent my first year being very much a serious student . . . you do grow up as a Jewish kid with . . . it’s all about education, all about getting good grades . . . so here I am, a seventeen year old kid, showing off, linking up with a group of graduate students and taking their courses, their postdoctoral seminars, thinking of myself as quite the intellectual, but by the end of my freshman year I’m suddenly immersed in the student movement, anti-war stuff . . . the Black Student Union had taken over the computer center the year before in the struggle to get an ethnic studies department on campus — I’m at the University of California in Santa Barbara — and suddenly I’m joining SDS [Students for Democratic Society], I’m part of the new student government . . . we have an alliance with the Latino movement and the Black Student Union, and we take over student government, and suddenly I’m the chair of the lectures committee . . . you know what the hell is that? I didn’t really know, but I had a budget of ten thousand dollars, which at that time was really a lot of money, to bring people to campus. So I brought Angela Davis, I brought half the defendants of the Chicago Conspiracy Trial, and the lawyers from the trial, and suddenly I was involved with meeting all these people I had only heard about, and school suddenly was not really about going to classes . . . none of us went to class very much. We were publishing an underground newspaper, and we were doing radio — we took over the campus radio station . . . .
In the region of historic anti-Semitism associated with Christianity and Islam resides the concept of “religious succession”, i.e.,the idea that one true church — one true connection with God — will and must displace less authentic, less true competitors, and that includes the Judaism from which Jesus emerged.
BackChannels believes Constantine and Muhammad have made their points and that a medieval portion of their following in legacy continues to take unholy license in the doing of their bidding.
What is to give the new fascists (whether out of the Christian Far Right, the Islamist camps, or the Far Left) pause for reconsideration?
Look to 21st Century sophistication in ethnology, linguistics, and psychology to help us appreciate and comprehend how our species develops and sustains its cultures. That dawning self-awareness and knowledge may well improve general resistance to medieval manipulation and unintentional support of the ambitions, martial powers, and sadism of feudal tyrants — the most malign of narcissists — in their contemporary forms.
This post started with but a single paragraph from the introduction to a full multi-part curriculum developed to lead Unitarian Universalist congregants in the discussion of the middle east conflict, but a glance back at the contributors to that program may tell what its politics are really about. As had a large portion of the Presbyterian Church (USA) in 2014, those most responsible in the Universalist Unitarian Association may wish to investigate who — and what — may be served by the subgroup curriculum disseminated through their organization.
Waitstill Sharp was a minister in the Unitarian church in Wellesley, Massachusetts. His wife, Martha, was a noted social worker. During World War II, Martha and Waitstill Sharp helped hundreds of people escape from Nazi persecution.
Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority in Israel, honored the Sharps as Righteous Among the Nations in 2006.
BackChannels 