The university campus is becoming increasingly hostile to both Jews and Israel. From what I have witnessed and experienced, it is no side effect, but rather part of a deliberate and well-planned strategy. We are witnessing an entry operation.
Arab-American college radicals such as Jess Ghannam (a professor of psychiatry today at UC San Francisco), Zahi Damuni ( a biochemist, formerly of St. James University in Canada), and Mazen Qumsiyeh (a geneticist from Yale, fired for anti-Semitic emails), some of whom were born in the West Bank, went on to graduate university and with their professional incomes started the group Al Awda (Arabic for “the Return”), an organization set up to promote PLO and later Hamas goals against Israel’s existence.
During this time, Al Qaeda was also founded by a Palestinian named Abdullah Azzam, the mentor for Osama Bin Laden. This was the Muslim jihadist link behind the BDS Movement to this day.
Today, the leadership of Al Awda helps promote BDS along with myriad other groups and clubs that have sprung up to promote starving out the Jews in the Middle East and, by extension, linking to the worldwide jihad. Al Awda is still very active in the USA and in promoting BDS.
BDS was launched in Israel in 2005 by Palestinian Jamal Juma and later Omar Barghouti, an Arab student from Kuwait attending Tel Aviv University helped to specifically launch the academic boycott in Israel and worldwide with the help of Jess Ghannam, Manzar Foroohar (an Iranian Muslim) and some other Arab professors in the USA in 2007 that comprised a steering committee.
Lee Kaplan, who has made a career of investigating the International Solidarity Movement (in BackChannels’ opinion, too many themes lead back to Moscow, Soviet Era and Feudal Revanch), has produced a sprawling tour de force in investigative journalism, videos included, as regards connections between Islamist movements and the BDS Movement. It’s difficult reading for the wall of verbage presented to the eyes online, but, for the patient, it’s rich with BDS Movement links back to the history of Palestinian terrorism, and it affords insight into the greater politics leading into the progressive circles that unwittingly — or, if otherwise, less innocently — sustain suffering throughout the middle east.
When comparing quality of life conditions between advanced Western nations and individual states within the U.S., a growing amount of data available shows that those which are the most conservative and religious are the most violent and plagued with far greater social problems in more than a dozen categories like overall crime, economic mobility, infant mortality, environmental abuse, teen pregnancy, incarceration, life expectancy, poor educational systems, murder, healthcare efficiency, average worker to CEO pay ratio, paid maternity leave, obesity, income inequality and minimal worker’s benefits.
The claim expressed in the title generally applies as much to individual states in America as it does to the nations of the world. Contrary to the repeated slogans of asserted “self-evident truths” within my very conservative upbringing, I’ve discovered that the economic, historical and sociological data shows that the best answer is a moderate combination of conservatism, liberalism and libertarianism. See in the statistics below sizable evidence…
Much of the information below comes from Steven Pinker’s book, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. This remarkable text evaluates and combines the work of dozens of historians to show that, contrary to popular opinion on the left and right, the planet has become far more peaceful than in any other time in history. Terrible things like the following are in radical decline (or in some cases have been eliminated): warfare, rape, murder, judicial torture, child abuse, legal and illegal slavery, use of the death penalty, robbery, infanticide, bullying, lynchings, corporal punishment, misogyny, theft, domestic abuse, racism, blood sports, religious persecution, burglary, debtors’ prisons, sexism, abortion, dueling, property crime, witchhunts and animal abuse. This process started when societies began to organize away from hunter-gatherer communities between 7,000-10,000 years ago into structured civilizations, but shifted to an accelerated level of reform during the 18th century’s Age of Enlightenment and…
From the early sacking of the generals accustomed to the state that Kemal Ataturk bequeathed to the Turks to the latest and disingenuous assaults on the Kurdish People under the cover of fighting terrorism accompanied by something like the resurrection of the Kurdish PKK, a Marxist-infused movement dating back to the 1970s and long stalled in its ideological tracks but naturally mixed back into Kurdish politics, Turkish President Tayyip Recep Erdogan has pursued a course in action, behavior, and language more familiar to Moscow than to Washington.
Add in that grandiose residence, the “White Palace”, a mixed development Versailles, but with its private residential part supporting some 250 rooms set on a landscape dotted with at least a few $10,000 trees imported from Italy.
On this post, the related and additional reference sections and fair-use excerpts should provide plenty for reflection on Turkey as a NATO state that while fulfilling its military contract has drifted as a democracy far into authoritarianism. Although the Moscow-Tehran axis blocks any chance of an Erdogan-Putin political “bromance” like that between Putin and Hungary’s Orban, who despite his state’s NATO membership has displayed the same drift toward authoritarian rule, Erdogan’s path remains the one that leads to dictatorship.
Related Reference — Freedom of the Press
https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-press/2015/turkey – “Turkey: 5-Year Decline in Press Freedom”: “Conditions for media freedom in Turkey continued to deteriorate in 2014 after several years of decline. The government enacted new laws that expanded both the state’s power to block websites and the surveillance capability of the National Intelligence Organization (MİT). Journalists faced unprecedented legal obstacles as the courts restricted reporting on corruption and national security issues. The authorities also continued to aggressively use the penal code, criminal defamation laws, and the antiterrorism law to crack down on journalists and media outlets.”
http://www.dw.com/en/security-for-turkeys-erdogan-scuffles-with-journalists-in-washington/a-19157072 – “Security for Turkey’s Erdogan scuffles with journalists in Washington”: “The president’s security detail removed one opposition Turkish reporter from the speech room, kicked another and threw a third to the ground outside the Brookings Institution, in a melee that provided Washington’s foreign policy elite a firsthand glimpse at the state of the press in Turkey.” Note: In the United States, Secret Service details protect foreign heads of state. However, it appears that Brookings, Erdogan’s own security detail may have made moves against would-be Erdogan critics.
. . . Erdogan has used his strong Islamic credentials to project himself as a pious leader, when in fact he consistently engaged in favoritism, granting huge government contracts to those who supported him and to his family members, irrespective of conflicts of interest and the corruption that ensued as a result.
The breakdown in 2015 of the government-initiated peace process with Abdullah Öcalan, the imprisoned leader of the armed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), has been accompanied by an increase in violent attacks, armed clashes, and serious human rights violations since summer 2015. The latter includes violations of the right to life and mass displacement of residents in eight southeastern towns where the security forces and PKK-affiliated youth groups have engaged in armed clashes, as well as denial of access to basic services including healthcare, food and education for residents placed under blanket curfew conditions for extended periods and in some cases months at a time. The past eight months have seen hundreds of security personnel, Kurdish armed fighters and civilians killed, with almost no government acknowledgement of the civilian death toll estimated at between 200 and 300 in this period. The renewed violence has provided the context too for numerous arrests of political activists and alleged armed youth on terrorism charges and ill-treatment of detainees.
See Richard Spencer’s piece, listed below, for an estimation of a changed PKK politics within the Kurdish effort to eject ISIS, where the Kurds of produced the most effective ground fighting force since the Syrian Tragedy took hold in 2011, and otherwise establish and sustain their autonomy despite their historic four-state division and subsequent treatment as an ethnic suzerainty.
“The PKK has become part of the people. You can’t separate them anymore,” said Zubeyde Zumrut (in Diyarbakir), co-chair of BDP, which won control of one hundred municipalities in the southeast of Turkey in the 2009 local elections and thirty-six parliamentary seats in the June 2011 national elections. “Which means if you want to solve this problem, you need to take the PKK into account.”
President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s recent attack against academics – who signed a petition condemning military operations in Kurdish cities and calling for peace and negotiations – is yet another banal expression of the authoritarian politics that have long prevailed in Turkey under Justice and Development Party (AKP) rule. All authoritarian regimes are anti-intellectual and this tendency intensifies when they are in trouble. So it is not surprising that Turkey’s president and his party look for scapegoats to blame for their domestic and foreign policy failures. Indeed, authoritarianism is rarely a reflection of political power; rather, in most cases it is a result of weakness.
We joined the agency in January, hired to edit English-language news, but quickly found ourselves becoming English-language spin-doctors. The agency’s editorial line on its domestic politics – and Syria, in particular – was so intently pro-government that we might as well have been writing press releases. Two months into the job, we listened to Deputy Prime Minister Bülent Arınç talking bollocks about press freedom from an event at London’s Chatham House, downplaying the number of imprisoned journalists in Turkey.
SPIEGEL: The government says it is exclusively pursuing terrorists.
Demirtas: The war is primarily focused on civilians that Erdogan suspects of supporting the PKK. Almost 400,000 people have had to leave their homes. The southeast of Turkey resembles Syria.
What has happened is that Turkey has decided to allow Iraqi Kurdistan’s army, the Peshmerga, to join the YPG, the PKK’s Syrian affiliate, in defending Kobane.
The Kurds of south-east Turkey cheering the Peshmerga convoy as it passes are of course hoping they will save their fellow Kurds in Kobane. But they are also cheering the new-found unity of the Kurdish cause. For once, the faction-fighting of their leaders has been set aside in a common purpose, and the Kurd in the street feels anything is now possible.
The Turkish PM is on a roll: About 10% of the country’s top brass are in jail, awaiting trial for allegedly plotting against him. Voters have given him a mandate to rewrite the country’s constitution, produced under the shadow of a 1980 military coup and that allowed the military to interfere in the process of governance.
But there are suspicions the evidence against the officers was fabricated and the moves are intended to silence the opposition. Numerous journalists and academics are being held on similar charges.
There are differences in how different scriptures work and (!) how they may be leveraged into religious or secular autocratic power.
I’m the editor of the blog cited, and for the idea that more human misery has to do with the character of leaders and their followers than with related artifacts — books, legends, poems, songs, etc. — I’ve used for dictators the phrase, “Different talks — same walk.”
In general, most people don’t like the “walk” — or strut — laid down by a strongman, but for the medieval of mind, the crowds or “masses” matter much less than relationships with similar powerful persons, their own inner circles in business, military, and paramilitary communities, and then the constituencies that have bought in with them. Out of that complex political community come the “evildoers” and those leveraged to cooperate with them.
“Different talks — same walk.”
The latest in polling has given us the “94 percent” figure: what is different then about the six percent who would endorse the violence against innocents that may be delivered with the cry “Allahu akbar”?
I think the true immediate axis in global conflict is that between medieval and modern conceptions of man and related concentrations or distributions of power in those who govern. How absolutely powerful a tyrant is compared to the leader constrained by institutional powers greater than himself.
Chatyping in social media dredges up a host of ideas familiar to BackChannels readers, not least among them the idea that a kind of personality produces for itself a political environment suited to its need for control of the surrounding world — and that to the point where it may mete out suffering to others with impunity. Such power proves always deeply destructive and sadistic.
It’s best to catch it at the gates — in the truly functioning democracies, at the polls — but even then the popular will may invest in an egregious choice.
Addendum – April 16, 2016
Regarding narcissism, which may be malignant or reparative in its balance, one possible trigger for the malignant — those who seek absolute power over others and in the process lose their brakes (or “exceed limits”), an instance or pattern of “narcissistic mortification” may set off attempts at covering (hiding) and repair that lead to the barking, as it were, and the rejection of criticism.
The reinvention of the self that follows may include a verbal part that then serves to aggrandize, elevate, empower the narcissist, and when it gets going as a kind of cycle and dare, then develops the business that is a cult at the lowest level and a dictatorship at the highest.
______
One may infer such a development between Jim Jones, the mass murder by Kool-Aid guy, and Bashar al-Assad, the mass murderer by way of whatever means have happened to be at hand, but not find the incident or period of mortification as that resides in the narcissist’s memory.
Writing about Russia can be like that: Focus on a crime, follow it into more general corruption, arrive at the “mafia state”; overview energy and economics, move on to “hybrid warfare” and other aggressive military and paramilitary activities, and it dawns that there is an imperial state at work; have a glance at history, then get the nose out of the books and have a look around at present Putin & Co. relationships, disinformation, domestic information control, and global propaganda.
What may be most dangerous about Russia today is the slowly developing surround in alliance and axis accompanied by the seduction of the popular mind (in Soviet-speak, “the masses”) by way of the promotion of confusion.
For its part, this blog has pressed the idea that defending Putinism, much less spreading it, devolves to sustaining a deeply feudal-medieval worldview that in turn undergirds the power of state elites: the “New Nobility” that is the FSB; the “Vertical of Power” that is this most singular Russian President around whom other elements revolve; the Oligarchs that produce and enjoy the state’s wealth, albeit with a nod to the permit provided by their political mastermind.
With numerous stolons — plant-generated surface and underground runners that propagate some of the species that use them — the Moscow hub appears to support an immense array of illicit and licit relationships.
Here’s a nugget pulled from the illicit bin, which, of course, is the one that most bothers the west:
The leaked files suggest that Roldugin is not keeping this wealth for himself, but is funneling the money to Putin’s inner circle, the reports say. Although Putin is not mentioned in the documents, he appears to be at the center of a web of Russia’s most influential and powerful men who owe their posts and fortunes to nothing but their friendship and association with him.
“It’s possible Roldugin, who has publicly claimed not to be a businessman, is not the true beneficiary of these riches,” the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists wrote. “Instead, the evidence in the files suggests Roldugin is acting as a front man for a network of Putin loyalists — and perhaps for Putin himself” (Mirovalev, LAT, April 4, 2016).
How deep go these relationships?
How many are there?
Can you see the tree? The trees? The forest?
The blight?
The Syrian Tragedy, as BackChannels refers to that horrific process in which it appears Damascus with tacit approval from Moscow and Tehran pursued a course certain to produce “The Terrorists” by preferentially bombing more moderate Free Syrian Army forces and refraining from curbing the early development of al-Nusra and ISIL, needs no introduction: the human spillover is either encamped or migrating all over the Middle East and Europe.
Posted to YouTube April 14, 2016.
Moscow, however, has been also busy from the Baltic Sea (as depicted in the above naval incident) to the Black Sea. Crimea and Ukraine, Lithuania, and Moldova, among others moan with the impositions or threats posed by the phantom of the Soviet alive within the Russian Federation.
Given Moldova’s limited economic potential, the country struggles to maintain its defense capabilities. It only allocates 0.3% of its GDP for military purposes, which amounts to about 25 million dollars per year. Furthermore, Moldova presents limited interest to the West. Its strategic and economic importance is negligible. To make things worse, Moldova is highly dependent on Russian energy supplies, export and labor markets. Russian media control a significant share of Moldova’s informational space. Finally, Kremlin has been instrumental in using Russian speaking minorities in Moldova to advocate interest that often go against the will of the majority of the local population.
Whatever the Soviet was thinking — arms sales? Expansion of forced influence? — it sure wasn’t thinking about the lives and needs of either either Ethiopians or Somalis. In effect, in the promotion of the Ogaden War, The Bear wrapped an arm around the Somali leadership and offered to help the same acquire a fair patch of earth as redress for earlier grievance — and then with that accomplished, it did the same on the other side.
What works, unfortunately, works.
If you now see the Ogaden in history — you have seen one tree.
Nothing has changed: now as then, one may wonder at the character and mentality of the post-Soviet neo-imperial Russian leadership, the same that has treated Russia as it has other states: create chaos and danger, drown the masses in propaganda (ah, those good old Party days are here again!), and for power — and the protection of so many money making enterprises, licit and illicit — promise the super nationalist’s version of greatness, security, and stability.
Note: Putin-Erdogan — politically opposed (there’s that Shiite vs Sunni thing + NATO) but psychologically aligned (and Erdogan has the White Palace to prove it).
This blog’s editor got off on a little bit of a roll this morning, but will ease off on pontification. 🙂
The challenge is setting off and managing a transition from the medieval mode in governance toward modern features.
Europe itself continues to support at least a dozen monarchies, and they would be no different as centers of power and sources of patronage than the Saudi Kingdom or the Islamic Republic of Iran were it not for the leveraging of power out of exclusive hands.
Much of the world contesting the authority of the west (basically: Russia vs NATO) has either to press forward with “political absolutism” or turn toward “classical liberalism”. In Moscow, Putin has chosen a feudal, neo-imperial course. In Riyadh, such a luminary as Prince Al-Waleed has found ways to blend — at least for himself and those to whom he extends patronage — the best of both worlds.
What Moscow, again using that proper noun to represent Putin, the “New Nobility” (FSB), and the Oligarchs, appears to want is greater chaos in the world to which it then may respond as a provider of greater stability!
Moscow plays a deeply manipulating script over and over and over.
Let’s try this Matryoshka doll method of nesting from the larger to the smaller:
Moscow vs NATO
Tehran vs Riyadh (Shiite vs Sunni Islam)
Damascus vs Split Proto-Democratic | Proto-islamist Forces
Hamas | Hezbollah vs Tel Aviv
From the big conflict-containing political doll down to the smallest:
Medieval Autocratic Power vs Modern Distributed Power
From my desktop experience and perspective, the principle as regards the architecture of the most notable “conflict set” — we should stop calling it “East vs West” at this point — doesn’t change.
Moscow appears to want a world of vast feudal estates managed by “strongmen”.
Washington may appreciate and produce wealth fit for kings, but its system prefers the presence of a meaningful electorate, then politicians, then the Chief Administrator we call a President, lesser administrators, and then appointed judges, all of its political machinery governed by a stable Constitution and a host of legal codes upheld from township to Federal region.
That’s the “different kind of war” seen from the BackChannels’ desktop. It has great stability — “Medieval Autocratic Power vs Modern Distributed Power” — but also some variance within (and the Rolling Stones have conquered only popular Cuba).
In that parenthesis is another conflict that involves the discrepancy between the rule of the strong (anywhere) and the popular will (anywhere). Although both Moscow and Washington — and all the others — support vast internal security campuses, the differences may be at least superficially marked (e.g., KGB/FSB vs FBI / CIA / U.S. Homeland Security) but with depth immediately beyond this blog’s interest, reach, and scope.
As regards the binary “Medieval vs Modern”, change on the side of the good — universally compassionate and reparative — involves myriad elements in transition. Perhaps when President Obama has counseled patience or refused to demonize Islam in its totality — a common complaint from the extreme wings of western nationalists — it has been to both compel but manage a global and gradual political greening. Whether the Administration has done far too little at a mosey may be subject for another post.
In our common malignancy, perhaps, our narcissism lends repair to psychological damage to self concept. Life’s rough and in part insults us, less or more, but, again perhaps, the greater the insult to esteem — the heavier the hand — the more passionate the want of self-aggrandizement, security, and wealth.
In the healthy, it’s good having basic and somewhat above good circumstance in freedom, money, and general security. In the malignant, the same wants get Up There and Out There. On Back-Channels, I’ve likened such qualities to the recognized psychological pathologies that are bipolar disorder and narcissistic personality disorder. In our general political psychology and related sociology, we aspire and trade up in comfort and prestige, and we do that through laws an practices that accommodate a healthy general development with concern spanning the distance from penthouse to street.
The malignant do things quite differently.
Muammar Qaddafi’s Mullah Shweyga story (easily looked up) tells the difference. Such leaders take full advantage of the possession of the power to visit suffering on others with impunity. All of the crimes that may be visited on one may as well be extended to others: capricious “justice” or detainments, imprisonments, hangings, tortures. Each dictator asks: “who is going to stop me?” And off each goes into the high life on the backs of the hungry, the powerless, and vulnerable.
I’m always happy to share the Reuters piece on Khamenei (“Assets of the Ayatollah”), but I think it better that others embark on similar journeys as regards the entire host of figures whose power has proven malignant and resides in the brutalities and related fears and levers (e.g., bribery and patronage; intimidation and murder) known more to the medieval mind than the modern one.
Yes, this may be the only blog on earth suggesting the reader continue doing the research.
🙂
Here’s a related comment on Moscow’s role in managing conflicts in a manner fit to destroy those it manages to manipulate and prize from the same conflict-related income and, at least in its own hive-mind, power and prestige.
Moscow, representing Putin’s political police, himself, and the oligarchs, may be a greater power than Tehran. It may barely be keeping its political image clean — remember: officially, Moscow is helping Damascus fight “The Terrorists” — but it may have the habit of manipulating political situations to its advantage.
From Somali General Galal, who is still alive, here’s a densely compacted recap of the Somali vs Ethiopian war over the Ogaden: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03pk9c1
In the PROCESS of that war, Moscow apparently manipulated Somali leaders into laying claim or reclaiming the Ogaden, pitting first guerrilla then regular forces against Ethiopian control of the space. As advances pushed Ethiopia out of the contested space, Soviet Russia stepped in to arm Ethiopian forces, who then pushed back the Somalis. The Ogaden continues to host some related “low-intensity conflict”.
Who won?
Getting away from one’s own interests, in this instance Syria, and venturing to overview Moscow’s involvements in conflicts worldwide across time may help us more brightly resolve (accurately perceive) states of affairs in Syria and the Middle East Conflict.
Much of the information below comes from Steven Pinker’s book, 
BackChannels 