Egypt’s “Muslim Brotherhood is done,” stated the native Egyptian Copt and Hudson Institute Islamism expert Samuel Tadros on November 2 at McLean, Virginia’s Westminster Institute. Yet his presentation “The Future of Islamism in Egypt” before an audience of about 30 ominously examined how the dangerous ideology of Islamism would continue to outlive repeated failures by the Muslim Brotherhood and other organizations.
Tadros noted that the failure of the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamists to hold power in various Arab nations following the misnamed 2011 “Arab Spring” popular overthrow of Arab dictators. Accordingly, “people were happy to talk about the end of Islamism,” a “phenomenon that the Arabic-speaking world had suffered from for generations.” Particularly in Egypt, following the July 3, 2013 military overthrow of the Muslim Brotherhood government, state repression facing the Muslim Brotherhood “today is much larger than anything they have faced in the past,” with thousands of Muslim Brotherhood members either jailed or exiled.
The last children’s hospital in besieged Aleppo has suspended operations after a brutal “double-tap” bombing.
A wave of airstrikes targeted medics in the rebel-held eastern district as they treated dozens of children who had been hit with chemical attacks.
Doctors and patients fled to the basement as more than 20 barrel bombs pounded the centre on Wednesday morning.
But less than 48 hours later two missiles tore through the unit as staff carried-out a clean-up operation.
Video footage shows the terrifying moment nurses pulled new-born babies from their incubators and fought their way through the dust and debris in search of safety.
The Independent Doctors Association, a medical group, said barrel bomb attacks had damaged two facilities it supports in eastern Aleppo — the children’s hospital and the only bloodbank in the area.
Medical facilities have regularly been hit, and sometimes completely destroyed, in the government’s fight against rebels, though Damascus and Moscow deny they target hospitals.
Doctors Without Borders said the children’s hospital and a specialized surgical hospital were hit by Wednesday’s strikes.
“Hospital staff managed to move children – including prematurely born babies – from cots and incubators to the basement of the building in order to shelter them from the bombing,” said the aid group, which sponsors both hospitals.
“You cannot imagine what we see every day: children who are coming to us as body parts. We collect the body parts and wrap them in shrouds and bury them,” said Bara’a, a nurse at one of the affected hospitals, who was present during the bombings.
“Tell the world to wake up, to wake their consciences. Where are you? When Palestine was being destroyed everyone got involved. Why are Syria’s children being forgotten? Nobody is doing anything to reduce this suffering.”
Monday saw yet another targeted strike in Syria. Not against Isis or against anyone threatening. No, the latest attack was another deplorable airstrike on a Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) hospital that was providing vital medical care to the region surrounding Maarat al-Numan.
According to a monitoring group in the area, the attack resulted in more than nine people’s deaths – including one child’s – and was carried out by Russian forces. Only two days earlier they had agreed to limit hostilities in Syria.
This was no accident. Four rockets hit the hospital: it was a targeted attack, and a cold-blooded one too.
Of the 470,000 Syrians who have been killed in this terrible war, the overwhelming majority have been killed by Assad and his allies, and that’s even truer of the civilian casualties. The United Nations in February concluded that the Assad regime had violated the laws of war in six distinct ways and committed systematized atrocities — crimes against humanity — in seven separate categories, including rape and extermination. There is no cruelty IS has committed, from sexual violence to immolation, that the regime has not at least matched and usually exceeded.
In relation to “Medieval Political Absolutism” and “Malignant Narcissism“, consider calling what Moscow-Damascus-Tehran have going in Syria the worst case of “Political Gaslighting” in history.
Readers who have made it this far with BackChannels KNOW that Assad incubated ISIL — to blackmail the west; to goad the west with refugees and a related terrorist threat; and to serve as a foil for demonstrating the latest and greatest out of Moscow’s updated military boom-boom: with Moscow central to the project, Syria has been made a win-win-win for each dictator’s ambitions and image.
BackChannels asks (along with Ukrainians) whether greater American cooperation (appeasement) with “Moscow-Tehran” will not herald the end of meaningful democracy and freedom worldwide.
Occasional Updates
3 killed & many injured after Russia bombed the hospital in Deir Sharqi, southern Idlib 4 times this morning. Hospital no longer operational pic.twitter.com/bIU4Su4UD4
Assad incubated the al-Qaeda types all the way to ISIL!
And he did exactly by preferring other strategies and targets — noncombatants, including the sniping of pregnant women, and, of course western-leaning Free Syrian Army (FSA) and others in the field. Providing leeway provided room for ISIL to develop and play the convenient foil in “Assad vs The Terrorists”.
Please don’t believe me, but rather check out the significance of “Russia is hitting the groups that we are backing” by using and questioning the same references and checking them as well.
I would beg conservatives not to ennoble Russian (Putin-Assad-Khamenei) barbarism in Syria.
Have conservatives been duped (along with everyone else) by Putin’s changing postures over time?
It’s a question worth asking this day.
Posted by Gladbecker, November 12, 2016.
Above — and within the “awesome conversation” — the inspiration for this post.
Beneath — what Assad, as flanked by Putin and Khamenei, have done to Syria in the “cause” of medieval political absolutism.
Posted by Muhammed Al Mousa, September 4, 2016.
BackChannels believes American and Israeli and other conservatives have been duped by Putin and the arc of a narrative that began 25 years ago with the dissolving of the Soviet Union and the initial touting of capitalism and democracy that produced confidence in Putin as a leader who would bring order and stability to Russia while producing a civil and free society.
In essence, Putin represents the rule of the strong as more powerful than the rule of law, and, ironically, the conservative “new nationalists” of the open democracies — those who should be fully supporting the rule-of-law and other classically liberal and western values — appear to be helping him do it.
But if the grass ever did look greener, which political party do you think you’d be more comfortable with? Well, if I ever ran for office, I’d do better as a Democrat than as a Republican–and that’s not because I’d be more liberal, because I’m conservative. But the working guy would elect me. He likes me. When I walk down the street, those cabbies start yelling out their windows.
It was too good a quotation not to share on this blog.
There are others nuggets as regards the Trump show, the promotion of extraordinary egotism (on this blog, the same may be interpreted and developed as a malign or reparative narcissism), admiration for the Chinese government’s show of strength at Tienanmen Square, and obsession with nuclear war:
I’ve always thought about the issue of nuclear war; it’s a very important element in my thought process. It’s the ultimate, the ultimate catastrophe, the biggest problem this world has, and nobody’s focusing on the nuts and bolts of it. It’s a little like sickness. People don’t believe they’re going to get sick until they do. Nobody wants to talk about it. I believe the greatest of all stupidities is people’s believing it will never happen, because everybody knows how destructive it will be, so nobody uses weapons. What bullshit.
The business newspaper Vedomosti analyzed the reasons why the case of a largely unknown opposition activist received so much attention, including that of the Kremlin. Even the presidential spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, who usually avoids commenting on such topics, called the situation unacceptable. This, on the one hand, might mean that the state propaganda machine seeks to use its full capacity to cover this issue. On the other hand, there might be a darker motive: Dadin’s case could be used as a reminder for the population of what discontent and opposition activity might lead to.
The online publication Gazeta.ru believes that it might take a while before the situation with Dadin is resolved. There are different assessments of the developments, with some arguing that Dadin might have deliberately exaggerated the situation, lying about the torture and humiliations. The situation gets even more complex, since doctors have avoided giving their accounts on Dadin’s health examination.
This isn’t a correctional institution, it’s a concentration camp. People aren’t held here to be to be reformed but to be humiliated. Please send a statement in my name to the Investigations Committee in connection with the fact that a whole array of torture is being used on the prisoners in IK-7. The beatings and torture aren’t stopping even now, after the intervention by [human rights ombudsman] Tatyana Moskalkova and the arrival of members of the HRC [president’s Human Rights Council] Pavel Chikov and Igor Kalyapin.
I hear people being beaten, I hear them shouting. I know the torture with hunger and cold is continuing, and I can’t write a complaint about that myself. I’m prepared to give specific dates, but personally in a conversation with human rights defenders, because I’m afraid the guard will find out and also delete those video recordings (Pavel Chikov said that the recording of Dadin’s beating may have been deleted, as the data from the video cameras is stored for 30 days, and the incident happened in September – Meduza). I know that recently they deleted video recordings from the hard disk and I want to request all the video recordings from all the cells that should exist – while at least some are still saved. It will be easy to confirm my words because the beatings take place here virtually every day.
Russia’s jailing of a peaceful opposition activist for violating the country’s new law on public assemblies is a shocking and cynical attack on freedom of expression, Amnesty International said today.
Ildar Dadin was sentenced to three years in jail by a Moscow court for repeated anti-government street protests. He is the first person to be jailed using the law, which was introduced in 2014 and punishes repeated breaches of public assembly rules.
The SBU Security Service of Ukraine has reported an unexploded piece of ordnance of the Russian-made Smerch heavy multiple rocket launcher (MRL) was found in the Anti-Terrorist Operation zone in eastern Ukraine.The rocket landed in the yard of a local resident in the village of Berezove in Maryinsky district, Donetsk region, the SBU`s press center said.Military experts concluded that the marking of the rocket reveals that Russia`s hybrid military forces in Donbas use 300mm (12 in) rocket projectiles fitted with fragmentation submunitions scattering cluster warheads.
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