FTAC – Regarding Candidate Trump and Islamic Extremism

01 Monday Aug 2016

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Islamic Small Wars, Political Psychology, Politics, Religion, Syndicate Red Brown Green

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I am certain that Donald J. Trump doesn’t know the region between Islamism and Islamic Reform as he should, but he knows how to be thorough in assessing and working through a challenge, and he’ll come up to speed on an issue that is essentially about extremism and incitement PLUS the amplification of similar qualities in others, i.e., with every “Allahu Akbar” attack, a portion of the recipients elevate their response — and Putin, who has set out to destabilize the west, loves it!

You know what . . . let’s keep in mind that the greater framework for Islamic extremism and terrorism is in fact the Cold War and its shadows — the Phantom of the Soviet, state sponsor of terrorism and proxy wars, lives on in structure in a revanchist neo-imperial Russia. The sooner everyone sees that, the sooner we’ll get through this together and come out with still modern, secular, pluralist, humanist, and amazingly free democracies that work.

Related Reference

BackChannels.  https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/07/31/also-in-media-retrospective-look-at-american-policy-and-language-associated-with-islamic-extremism/ – 7/31/2016.

Ahmed-Ullah, Noreen S., Sam Roe and Laurie Cohen.  “A rare look at secretive Brotherhood in America.”  Chicago Tribune, September 19, 2004.

Continuation

I think the demonizing slung from both sides in this ugly election season skews our perception, but of the two, I prefer his straight talk, and I think he knows he’s a tenderfoot among politicians and needs to come up to speed, fast!

Also, again, the framework for the “islamic Small Wars” — we’ve all seen a lot of change — Arab Springs to the failed coup in Turkey — in the past decade, but it takes reading and research to see the same wrapped in the themes of the Cold War.

We’re going to be voting character plus the character of the party associated with the election’s winner.

This bothers me:

http://www.blackforpalestine.com/

it doesn’t bother because there are black people struggling to make lives for themselves and there are refugees whose families were caught and abandoned between armies in 1948. It bothers me because it links back to the Soviet Era and the mentality of Russia’s Communist Party and hypocrisy in promising paradise and brutalizing millions for the privileges of party apparatchik.

Here’s the reminder of the relationship between Moscow and the formation of the Palestinian Liberation Organization. https://conflict-backchannels.com/…/quote-manipulation…/

Tell me, after 68 years, how much the leaders of the PLO / PA and Hamas shown compassion or empathy with regard to the lives of the refugees of 1948?

Clinton / Trump – Washington Insider / Washington Outsider — it’s not going to make any difference if WE don’t find our way back to the center of the aisle — “Moderate Conservatives / Moderate Liberals”.

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The Arab world has an empathy problem

31 Sunday Jul 2016

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology

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Forest Rain's avatarInspiration from Zion: This is a Love Story

Yes. I said it.

Don’t jump on me, hear me out. This is not about being derogatory to an entire culture, this is about a little discussed but very dangerous trend that is effecting the entire world.

Yes. This is a generalization. Again – this is NOT about individuals, it’s about a culture.

To clarify (because many people find this confusing):
Not all Arabs are Muslim, there are Arab Christians too. In addition, not all Muslims are Arabs; for example the Muslims in Iran, Indonesia and Africa (who are converts to Islam). Arab culture stems from Islamic domination but is not consigned only to people of Muslim faith. There is an empathy problem in the Arab world. People of Arab descent raised in Western cultures will have more difficulty identifying with what I am writing. Looking to the Middle East (and ideology exported from the Middle East) things become more clear.

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Also in Media -Retrospective (2014)Look at American Policy and Language Associated with (Islamic) Extremism

31 Sunday Jul 2016

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Islamic Small Wars, Syndicate Red Brown Green

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In October 2014, Katharine Gorka of the Council on Global Security published a white paper on how language was developed and finessed by the American government to cultivate the moderate and discourage extremists.  While noting “The conscious effort not to insult “peaceful” Muslims and at the same time not confer legitimacy on violent Muslims,” she settles on a critique of “Social Movement Theory and Counter-Terrorism Policy,” which turns out also a criticism of the Obama Administration’s approach to “Allahu Akbar” terrorist attacks up to the approximate date of publication.

Here is an excerpt from the thesis of the work:

What are the implications of the Social Movement paradigm for U.S. counter-terrorism policy? First and foremost, it dismisses the ideas and beliefs that inspire
terrorists to act. It reduces their actions from religiously or ideologically inspired acts of will to merely reflexive reaction, little more than an involuntary response to abject circumstances. In this way it also serves to legitimize the actions of extremists, deeming them not as the unjust and horrific acts that they are but as the rational and justified response to negative circumstances, whether they be imperialism, colonialism, tyranny, or poverty.

To be clear, social movement theory can provide valuable and instructive insights into how groups form and behave, but as a unitary and all-encompassing lens through which to view Islamic terrorism and extremism, it dooms the United
States to strategic failure.

Not surprisingly, this single issue is at the heart of the current debate. Today, in the United States, the most important point of contention over U.S. counter-terrorism policy is its deliberate rejection of the ideological component, of the way in which Islam itself drives or inspires extremism or terrorism.

A large number of authors and analysts, as well as lawmakers, have criticized the systemic failure of the U.S. government to address the ideological component of Islamist terrorism.

This paper argues that the roots of that failure lie here, in the application of social movement theory to Islamic activism. If one looks closely at the policy documents that emerged from Obama’s National Security Staff around this time, one can see the influence of social movement theory as well as the criticisms these documents elicited.

 

Gorka, Katharine C.  “The Flawed Science Behind America’s Counter-Terrorism Strategy.” (PDF) White paper, p. 11.  The Council on Global Security, October 2014.

 

As a history, Gorka’s paper covers the many strategies that have been applied to detected and quelling Islamist violence — or should that be “Islamist”?

BackChannels has dropped the quotation marks for at least that much.

While dismissing the “social movement paradigm” as a foundation for counterterrorism strategy, Gorka may have overlooked other contributing variables, much including messianic-narcissistic drives in Islamist leaders and the ranks that support them, and behind that — basically taking place earlier in the formation of personality — the “narcissistic mortification” that drive compulsive wishes and actions beyond normal boundaries in belligerence and the importance of the centrality of control to proponents.

While making the “call the spade a spade argument” — ” . . . language must be used that accurately identifies and distinguishes the enemy, for example, the Global Jihadist Movement” — Gorka may have missed the extremism developing in the Red “comrade networks” of the anti-Semitic International Solidarity / Palestinian Solidarity movements and in such “Brown” and “New Nationalist” spheres as the right-wing Jobbik in Hungary and now so many name-your-nation “defense leagues” springing up in response to the goad of Islamist terrorist events.

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Six of Six – To Russia, Ever So Politely, U.S. Embassy Syria Tweets Advice

29 Friday Jul 2016

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Islamic Small Wars, Syndicate Red Brown Green

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USEmb6-6Tweets

BackChannels best guess for “CoH” — “Cessation of Hostilities”.

That “weakness invites aggression” or “peace through strength” should be concepts well known, but even so, the circumstances in total want for someone’s “good gamble”.

Are we there yet?

For NATO, the headlines from countercoup Turkey are not looking so good: NYT: “With Army in Disarray, a Pillar of Modern Turkey Lies Broken”; Reuters: “Turkish military a fractured force after attempted coup”; Fox: “Turkish military faces overhaul after failed coup”.

It was good to have won the war and the peace in 1945, but that was 66 years ago, and most of that Great Generation that fought are today permanently at rest, and what the present generation — raised on football and Kardashians — has on its plate in Moscow, Damascus, Tehran, Pyongyang, Beijing, and a few elsewheres are the kind of “Great Leaders” capable of producing what has been witnessed in Syrian and what has been recorded in the histories of their own states in their rise to power.

Posted to YouTube 7/24/2016.

Addendum – August 1, 2016

Gutman, Roy.  “As Obama Dithers, Syrian Rebels in Aleppo Brace for Putin’s Onslaught.”  The Daily Beast, August 2, 2016:

In several days of phone conversations with Moscow, Kerry was unable to obtain clarifications of how the new decision was compatible with the talks he’s been holding with his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov.

European diplomats said Kerry’s current initiative, which involved a highly controversial concession to share intelligence with Russia and to conduct joint and coordinated attacks on Jabhat al-Nusra, could collapse in short order.

According to Assad’s political opponents, that is not the worst of it.

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FTAC – Absolute Power – Positioning for Greater Conflict

29 Friday Jul 2016

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, China, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Eurasia, Europe, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Great Britain and United Kingdom, North Korea, Politics, Russia, Syndicate Red Brown Green, Ukraine

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September and October — flak jackets on and hunker down: We’ll have the election in November; Putin will have more assembled in Syria and Crimea and, in general, who knows what on behalf of the world’s other dictators; Erdogan will have sorted out Turkey HIS way with NATO at this moment deeply compromised by dissolving or near dissolving of the Turkish military (accompanied by the rise of a Turkish police state). As weakness invites war, expect “fireworks” this fall.

I don’t want to shout “the sky is falling too often”, but just this once, take a look at the total state of foreign affairs. American appears to be between presidents and the politics are hardly bringing us together.

These “rigs” in relationships have survived the Obama Administration: Putin-Assad-Khamenei; Putin-Orban; Putin-Erdogan.

The Russian Army claiming retreat in Syria has instead ramped up its basing and technology there; in Crimea, it still has Ukrainians fighting one another while Russian Orthodox Christians in the state march on Kiev. In the west, its “investment” in ISIS has paid off handsomely as goading populations toward or into defensive nationalist postures themselves. “BREXIT” was not a win for the UK or Europe: it was helpful to Russia in its efforts to destabilize the region, i.e., weaken its enemies. Or, taken this other way, because it thinks so much of itself — superior Russian soul and culture and all that — the manipulation proves to itself its own mastery over the world.

Russia’s message has changed with revolution and dissolution, but perhaps its medieval essentials have not: secret police, an all powerful head of state, a patronized aristocracy: they are all there on this day. And those who might take advantage of heightened east-west, medieval-modern, despotic-democratic tensions breaking out into conflict, they’re getting into position.

Even sitting at a desktop with few distractions (from political chatter, at last), once cannot “cover it all” — not China in the South China Sea, not North Korea, which has effectively updated its war footing with Washington, not Syria, not Crimea.  Overviewed, however, an image seems to emerge.  For BackChannels, it has been that of accentuation or amplification along Red, Brown, and Green — Old Communists, New Nationalists, and Islamists — lines sufficient to weaken the west and make way for the greater establishment of authoritarian / despotic governance and all that may be implied by that.

Related Reference

Kureev, Artem.  “The Invisible Russian military presence in Syria.”  Russia Direct, July 19, 2016.

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The Jewish Syrian who dreams of rebuilding his country – The Local Voices

29 Friday Jul 2016

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology

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Under Assad, Jews were officially banned from politics and government employment. “If you talk to my grandparents, they would tell you that there was no hatred among Syrians toward Jews or anyone else. Jews used to have jobs and trade, and that was very popular in Syria before the Assad regime came to power in the seventies, after which most Jews were forced to flee.”

Source: The Jewish Syrian who dreams of rebuilding his country – The Local Voices – 7/25/2016

FTAC – Post-Soviet Medievalism – Amplification of Narcissistic Political Passion

29 Friday Jul 2016

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, American Domestic Affairs, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Islamic Small Wars, Politics, Syndicate Red Brown Green

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Remember the order of events:

Erdogan refuses apology to Putin over the downing of a Russian jet (November 2015)

Erdogan apologizes to Putin over the same (June 27, 2016)

Turkish coup-countercoup (July 15, 2016)

Revival of Turkish Stream gas project with Russia (July 27, 2016)

Erdogan’s reinstallation of compete autocratic control (now)

July 28, 2016 — http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/29/world/europe/turkey-military-coup.html

Go back in time a little bit: http://www.newsweek.com/us-accuses-assad-aiding-islamic-state-through-airstrikes-338582 The article gets at Assad’s method of incubating ISIS (let it grow!).

Keep in mind the appearance of strident “Red Brown Green” — old comrade networks, new nationalists, Islamists — politics in the open democracies of the west.

In Hungary, Orban developed and promoted law favoring his own authoritarian rule; in Turkey, a similar thing but along Islamist lines.

Putin knows that the Christian-majority states of Europe, once goaded by terrorism, would have a chance of reverting to nationalism (and its fevers) to fight it. Possibly, for that reason, western leaders have chosen to absorb the spill-off from terrorism rather than relent with regard to the political theater produced by Russia and Russo-Iranian cooperation.

What that world looks like may be on display in Syria.

Do you want to live in a medieval world with modern weapons?

Islam has to emphasize pluralism, update, and reform — but not everyone wants it to do that, including some of its familiar enemies.

Also keep in mind that Moscow refuses to designate either Hezbollah or Hamas as terrorist organizations.

The questions are much easier to ask than to answer.

How did the Democratic Party become so infected with an (anti-Semitic) “Red-Green” contingent?

How did the American campus and other intellectual assets become so infiltrated by ideologues professing the same thoughts to young students with their minds wide open?

How did that Turkish autocrat, the president of a once stable NATO state reverse course and revert so abruptly backward to theological proto-fascism, destroying an army, building a police element devoted to his social ordering, and moving the mob to destroy at least one bookstore (one may expect more to come from those forces as they lose their containment and inhibition)?

Is there a “Silent Majority” today that hates to see the nation so divided along lines laid in during the 1960s and 1970s?

Where is that majority today?

American will learn part of the answer to that in November.

Given the “social contract” involved in the creating and sustaining of the world’s democracies, how powerful is money in the hands of the world’s business and political elites?

As “ships of state”, the democratic open societies of the west have sailed along in comparative peace and prosperity for many years, inspiring the want of democracy — fair and free elections, meaningful laws, justice systems infused with integrity — and now each faces the decision of being dragged back into the political snakepit of the medieval world.

How do Russians feel about the transformation of the post-Soviet environment into the “vertical of power” state?

How do Americans feel today about their education in American civics, geography, and history?  How are they feeling now about developing for themselves — in each household — a substantial grasp involving foreign affairs, international relations, and world history?

So many questions!

Regarding Putin’s imperial and medieval revanche, there should be no question that it has assaulted NATO not with tanks but with sufficient disinformation, agitation, and propaganda to encourage “fascism on the left” in the Democratic Party and resurgent nationalism (of an unknown character) in the Republican Party.

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FTAC – “Peace Prevails When . . . .” – On the Middle East Conflict

28 Thursday Jul 2016

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Anti-Semitism, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Gaza Suzerain, Islamic Small Wars, Israel, Middle East, Palestinia, Politics

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Peace prevails when some lies are acknowledged and brought to a standstill. Without apprehension of the Soviet Era, historic Russian anti-Semitism (which the Soviet would go on to heavily promote in the middle east), and the KGB invention of Arafat followed by the spinning up of so many “alternative narratives”, indeed that poison will not subside for a while — but the Soviet has been gone 25 years, Moscow-Tehran aren’t looking very good in Syria, and Hamas and Hezbollah, both endorsed by the same “couple”, may be reaching the end of their argument with only corruption, kleptocracy, and death to show for it. They’re going to be “found out” by those they boasted of protecting, and that will the end of the middle east conflict.

What is yesterday still doing here?

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