Heartbreaking Photos of Syrian Refugees and Their Newborns
27 Thursday Aug 2015
Link – With Iran, Greed is Good!
26 Wednesday Aug 2015
Posted in Links
While conceding there were still some ‘fundamental differences of view’ on ‘major issues’, Hammond hailed the ‘power of diplomacy’. This doesn’t include the power to stop Iran from executing dissidents and others at the fastest rate in many years, or the power to get Iran to halt its support to the Syrian regime’s murder machine.
What the diplomacy with Iran does have the ability to do, Hammond explained, is slake the ‘huge appetite’ of UK businesses and banks to begin commerce with Iran. Indeed, impediments to doing business could be eliminated by the spring. In this cold-blooded calculation the British government is hardly alone.
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Link – Iran – Afghanistan – Al Qaeda (All Together Now)
26 Wednesday Aug 2015
Tags
The 2005–06 documents reveal that Iran offered bounties for the murder of NATO soldiers and members of the elected Afghan government. Later reports indicated that this policy continued into 2009, when Iran was working in tandem with al-Qaeda to spread the Taliban’s reach in southern Afghanistan. This should hardly come as a surprise: The 9/11 Commission reported that Iran began training al-Qaeda jihadists through Hezbollah in 1992 and collaborated with al-Qaeda on the Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia in 1996. To this day Iran maintains an al-Qaeda network on its territory, which supplies weapons, money, and fighters to Jabhat an-Nusra in Syria.
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FTAC – After the Obama Years
26 Wednesday Aug 2015
Posted in FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation
I don’t feel divided or conquered; nor do I wish to demonize Obama EVEN IF he has promoted a “Peace in our times” treaty, i.e., a worthless piece of expletive deleted: I believe he has changed the structure in and around Iran in which warfare may be waged against the west. Point by point:
We have seen serious reductions in oil revenues funding the governments and national lifestyle of Russian and Iran: both have had to respond to that loss of income and the centralized power of distribution of the same (state capitalism: state patronage).
Despite the apparent failure of the “Arab Spring” (or “Persian Bloom”?), Iran’s colleges today are populated about 60 percent female! Women are going to be the educated person in the Next Iran. I’ll be surprised if those demographics don’t have an effect on the state within the next presidential term.
Speaking of which, Obama, as we say in the American colloquial mode, is “outta here” in about a year. Done. Finished. No more Barrack. He’s going to pick up his “chips” in favors owed (he could even turn out the world’s first trillionaire), but he’s going to be finished with the business of managing America’s governance, and the backlash to come is right here on Facebook in its conservative circles.
We’re going to have our guns.
Our vote is going to matter.
We’re going to get over, if we have to, “retribalization” and race, color, creed, and religion — as we have had idealized at the beginning, and that we have realized through civil war and civil rights movement and law suits and disputes across centuries.
Americans — doesn’t matter what race, color, creed, or religion, or gender preference, for that matter — are going to emerge from the Obama Years more egalitarian, ethical, just, and strong.
It could be the wine talking (with cold pizza), but at least I hope so.
The prompt had to do with the American Jewish community’s reaction to the “Nuclear Deal” with Iran.
I think “the deal” entirely bogus based on the character of the Iranian tyranny.
Period.
It’s dishonest with itself (you should visit the revision made to Wikipedia’s Iran’s Wealthiest page — something like that — and the listing of Ali and his brother commanding as much as $57 billion in personal portfolio); it’s sadistic with its critics and rivals; its “human rights” record makes sharks look like warm and fluffy pets. On this blog, do the search for “Iran, hangings” (oh, heck, I can give you the URL). This blog has always suggested to readers what these people — and people like them — are.
Filter that message politically (dictators), theologically (devils), or psychologically (sociopaths) and then tell me how you see them as “fathers” or “liberators” in any dimension but Hell.
Of course, I had to write on.
Some people shouldn’t “drink and drive” — I probably should not imbibe and write . . . but it made a nice BackChannels piece.
I really do believe, D., that with everything we discuss today, we have to take a broader and longer-range view of political and social realities.
I don’t believe “detente” will hold with Iran — it’s doing evil to its own people while conducting “war by proxy” against Israel, against the Syrian people (true), and against Yemen, right now, and isolating its governing powers every inch of the way.
I believe also, while I’m chatyping with wine, that Israel’s peace with Egypt will hold fast and strong, and that Muslims like N. and Jews like me need to pioneer a greater future together rather than apart. I may not be a “Jew’s Jew” by orthodox standards, or any standards at all. I am an American humanist, Diest, in alliance with nature, Emersonian and Shakespearian. My river is the Potomac, not the Jordan, but I hope my ethics and morality are, by and large, with Moses and, in this day and age, with Jewish kindness and love, just the same as gave voice to Hillel the Elder (35 BCE to 10 CE) and Christ and a fair part of Muhammad as well (“One scholar is more powerful against the devil than one thousand worshippers”). If we have immense problems with scripture and human organizations, well, that’s our immense capacity for language married to imagination and our deficits having to do with compassion and empathy.
Enough said (and I am positive about that).
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Syria – Assad – “We trust the Russians . . . .”
26 Wednesday Aug 2015
Tags
21st Century Neo-Feudalism, dehumanization, feudalism, foreign affairs, political psychology, politics, Syria, Syrian Civil War, Syrian Tragedy, tyranny
Injured girl, field hospital, Douma, Syria. The downloaded image itself contained no EXIF or IPTC data.
Related: http://www.citizenside.com/en/photos/politics/2015-07-27/118223/syria-field-hospital-in-douma.html#f=0/1299528 – 7/27/2015.
“. . . we trust the Russians. They proved throughout the crisis, the last four years, they proved they are honest, transparent, and have principles . . . .”
Without Putin, Bashar al-Assad as a dynastic leader would have been finished in 2011. However, instead of appropriately responding to Syrian complaints at the time and the yearning for a voice in their own governance, Assad chose to arrest and torture children. All that has changed in the past four years has been the scope in breadth and cruelty of the punishment meted to noncombatant Syrians.
At the outset, President Vladimir Putin’s post-Soviet neo-feudal Russia presented a block to the start of the erosion of the Assad family’s absolute ruling power; next: Assad cultivated ISIS by selectively not bombing the al-Qaeda Typicals in their infancy, which then dealt to himself a glorious piece — in his warped eyes — of political theater, “Assad vs The Terrorist”. Putin, Assad, and Khamenei each knew “The Terrorists”, which have largely turned out to be ISIS, although many other and similar organizations exist in the field, would present an even more difficult challenge to the west.
For Khamenei, nothing could sustain an Islamic theocratic tyranny in Iran quite like the prospect and reality of a continuous Great Shiite vs Sunni Battle, for which ISIS would conveniently serve as foil to the further expression and regional projection of Iranian Shiite power.
For the west, perhaps, there is less of “reset” in what has taken place in Syria and more of pressing the collapse of Soviet-style “state capitalism” in the form of an oligarchy — a “new nobility” — brought into existence and managed by Putin. From that perspective, Russia has stalled in Syria and Crimea — and given the price of oil at the well these days — or the evident callousness of the Russian leadership — it may not want the burden of settling either conflict or reconstructing that which it has helped destroy, both “hot spots” being more effective at bleeding the west of financial resources and focus. With U.S. President Obama shrugging away much of that form of challenge — or seeming to do that — that tack may not be going so well.
Similar observations may be made in regard to Iran’s position.
Even though it will see immense cash flow for the “nuclear deal”, the regime will have to deal with greater greed around itself as well as its unpopular extension through wars by proxy in the region.
Who knows but that Hezbollah will tire of its men dying for the ambitions of the Ayatollah.
Still, nothing will change all that fast.
While Putin, Assad, and Khamenei together defend “absolute power”, the suffering accompanying that psychology — and what ISIS means to bring to Syrians, i.e., greater tyranny in the name of God, will be even worse — will grow worse: the “Eye Doctor” has lost himself in his own inverted fantasia, a world in which Putin’s Russia has proven “honest, transparent, and principled” (tell that to Ukrainians) and Syrians suffer primarily at the hands of “The Terrorists” and not beneath the barrel bombs dropped on the most helpless of them by Assad’s own air force.
The “additional reference” section may be at this point outmoded by a very good and quick Google search engine. We can find what we may want to read in flash; whether we can find the conversation we need to have as quickly remains to be seen.
Search string: “Syria, barrel bombs” / news:
http://www.npr.org/2015/08/22/433735915/activists-un-denounce-deadly-syrian-barrell-bombs – 8/22/2015
https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/news/middle-east/20570-barrel-bombs-fall-on-syrias-douma-killing-50-source – 8/23/2015
http://www.ibtimes.com/syrian-regimes-barrel-bombs-kill-more-civilians-isis-al-qaeda-combined-2057392 – 8/18/2015
http://www.dailysabah.com/nation/2015/08/25/assads-barrel-bombs-cost-syrian-boy-his-family-and-hearing – 8/24/2015
Search string: “Syria, water, war” / news
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/26/world/middleeast/water-is-called-casualty-of-syrian-war.html – 8/25/2015 Related: http://www.unicef.org/media/media_82980.html
Search string: “Syria, moderate forces” / news
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/aug/19/us-trained-syrian-rebels-we-need-training-be-faste/ – 8/19/2015
Search string: “Syria, New Syria Force”
http://www.cnn.com/2015/08/18/middleeast/new-syria-force-fighter-abu-iskander/ – 8/18/2015
Misc.
http://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/ps/2015/08/246155.htm – 8/17/2015.
https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/articles/africa/20625-are-we-human-beings – 8/24/2015
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FTAC – On the The Repudiation of Feudal Barbarism
19 Wednesday Aug 2015
Part of the difficult in addressing ISIS and others becoming defined as “Islamists” by the worlds to which they have brought harm involves accessing the greater body of literature stemming from the Qur’an and the legends and speech of Muhammad plus a body of commentary plus a developed and divided legal history. The miscreant groups, and clearly Qanta Ahmed repudiates them in her article, draw on verbal lore, however selected, however selfishly believed, to validate their barbarism.
My acquaintance who have delved into, let’s call it “dangerous text”, have done so with some blanketing “Islamophobic” intent, in essence justifying ISIS behavior on the basis that ISIS claims, and with which Dr. Ahmed claims to be unfamiliar.
Scholarship developed in isolation or within a circumscribed intellectual and geopolitical space may be given to corruption by the scholar’s own self-interest. In any religion, a cleric or priest or other “holy man” may be expected to install in others what benefits his own position. Today, asking a modern person — again: any religion — to delve into the arcane bodies of work promulgated by the experts, i.e., asking me to read the Talmud, for example, or Dr. Ahmed to plow through volumes (and ages) of related intellectual history to support further argument, merely leads the mind back into the closed universe of the feudal world. What ISIS has put on display by displaying itself needs no extraordinary scholarly knowledge for universal condemnation, including condemnation by the greater Islamic Ummah.
Those whose obsessions lead them back into lost worlds may also drown themselves in the same. For some, myself, at least, time is the only ocean, and one wants to navigate the crossing of it into the future, not into the past.
The prompt: the posting of Dr. Qanta Ahmed’s condemnation of ISIS (CNN, August 18, 2015) on a forum page and, in the background, a conversation with a friend who has collected and come to know a fair portion of the material on which the Daesh project permits itself its excesses.
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FTAC – Iran’s Political Evolution – Wider Angle, Please
18 Tuesday Aug 2015
Tags
I relay some conservative thought, as in the above video, with hesitation as it doesn’t represent my thoughts, but my thoughts . . . egads! smile emoticon
I think issues associated with any aspect of the “Islamic Small Wars” (my term) are by nature intergenerational and likely to be longer-lived than any single American presidential term. Therefore, the prism through which these events and processes are viewed must be wider than the instance in which they occur.
While it’s true that the Obama Administration appears to have done as much as possible to accommodate a tyrannical regime that has refused all compromise on its barbaric, lethal, and piratical agendas — outside Iran and within — it’s also true that there will be another American Administration in about a year, that other and alternative games (political and military), ideas, and plans developed and out of sight are going to be “forwarded” into that administration. While the future has yet to be written, Iran will have a new generation of professional, about 50 percent or more of it female, graduating from its colleges in the same period; it will have within whatever influence has been brought to its elites and “masses” (I hate the term, but it suits) by Internet, relationships, and by new trade; if the regime gets its money back (from sanctions), it may have issues with avarice and greed at the highest levels.
I believe Time is with the west, not the medievalists, but it takes some tolerance of threat and related patience to get through time, and, granted, the Obama Administration has embarked on a long-term but still perilous course.
The question for the medievalists — Putin, Assad, Khamenei: how well have you done, really? Extended in Yemen, stalled in Ukraine, one-third of Syria beyond state control — and each situation appears stalemated at best?
This is a long video, but it may help some readers align with the observations and thoughts of more specialized intelligentsia.
Posted to YouTube 11/26/2013.
Related: Abbas Milani.
Near horizon: uncomfortable.
The Iranian regime is known for its aggressiveness, anti-Semitism, duplicity, egoism, and piratical character.
It is also known to be ageing.
Persians know too their greater history — and none among the educated have forgotten Cyrus.
A little offstage: the effects of the history of state police forces, from the czars to the Soviet and KGB to today’s FSB in Russia and VEVAK in Iran. At about 25:15 in the above video, Professor Milani invokes the modern update term on feudalism: “state capitalism”. Oligarchy. (The URL trope to insert here: Reuters “Assets of the Ayatollah” — and so done).
Whatever one might wish to call such dictatorships operated by state mafia or theocracy, I believe the form still feudal and formed around the concentration of political power and access to wealth in one human demagogue.
In any case, the demagogue in Tehran has at hand a latent nuclear weapons making capability, in state or beyond (who knows?), and the worth of any agreement with the same has no basis in experience or earlier history (save that scandal with the illicit arms trade and even perhaps rougher politics).
Still, time is time, and the more time floats around and past the dictator, the more cultural evolution may temper the excesses of the malignant personality. Where The Great Leader will not, or cannot, change, the Greater Society may.
Related Reference
Alliance of Iranian Women: Until Victory
“In September 2012, women made up more than 60 percent of all universities’ student body in Iran.”
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Three Links – Two Thoughts by “The Last English Prince” +
18 Tuesday Aug 2015
Posted in Islamic Small Wars, Religion
Tags
I have discussed this issue with two Islamic lawyers. One man is part of an Islamic Tribunal. The second, received his law degree from Damascus. These rulings are applicable in a modern age. There was no backing down, when I pressed hard for a logical explanation. The age of nine years was also given as a legal age for men to have intercourse with little girls.
Two schools of thought exist regarding apostasy. One school of thought is that an apostate Muslim must be killed immediately with the sword. The second school of thought allows the apostate to be secured alone for three days and given a chance to repent. If unrepentant, the individual can be clubbed to death. This clubbing, just might make the person repent before being beaten to a pulp. This ruling comes from a companion of one of the four great Islamic jurists, ash-Shafi’i.
Swofford, Tammy. “Islam: Death for Apostasy.” The Last English Prince, August 17, 2015
That the religion of Islam lends itself TODAY to such criticism bodes ill yet for Muslims and others. As loud as outrage has become toward Daesh, which purports to represent the Islam presented by Muhammad, not one Muslim army has risen to crush it and crush away its barbarism (this despite some Big Talk from Jordan). Instead, the Kurdish community, which has to defend its own ethnolinguistic culture against Islamic aggressors (Turkey is the other), has proven the most effective army in the field; granted, Iraq’s Shiite militia infused with Iranian Revolutionary Guard have also gone up against their old familiar but transformed Baathist foes (become Daesh generals for the money dispersed by Baghdadi), but that is to sustain Shiite vs Sunni animus to the benefit of the career and legitimacy of Ayatollah Khamenei.
Contemporary Islamic humanists, reformers, rethinkers, revisionists, secularists have certainly emerged on the world’s sociopolitical radar (M. Zuhdi Jasser, Qanta Ahmed, Irshad Manji, Tarek Fatah, Sultan Shahin [New Age Islam]), but their names are yet young in history, and they too are in a kind of intellectual cradle within a universe of exegetical counterpoint to the al-Qaeda Typicals and the Hezbollah Viruses.
Abstract or dimensional variables associated with argument around “Islamism” or “Political Islam” may include conservatism, fascism, inflexibility, liberalism, narcissism, and religiosity, each term begging its own build-out in meaning. High intensity emotion, narcissism, obsessive focus, and rigidity — in one word: “intolerance” — begs disaster every time out as nature appear to prefer across flora, fauna, and human culture and thought abundance, adjustment, and variety.
(CNN)I am an observant Muslim. And because I am a Muslim, I believe in pluralism. I believe in tolerance. These are the beliefs that Islamist totalitarians are determined to extinguish in the world as they oppress and brutalize those they deem to be “the other.”
Guided by a false, supposedly Islamic doctrine, ISIS has enslaved and systematically raped Yazidi women and young girls. These crimes, described last week by The New York Times, are the latest example of how Islamism defiles Islam. This travesty crosses new thresholds of human depravity: holding pens for humans, busy slave markets, the bureaucratic herding, bidding and buying of Yazidi women and girls. ISIS demands that we confront these new horrors.
Ahmed, Qanta. “When bigots use ISIS atrocities to smear all Muslims.” CNN, August 18, 2015.
Related Reference – Pew Forum and Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_the_United_States
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christianity_in_the_United_States
http://www.pewforum.org/2013/10/01/jewish-american-beliefs-attitudes-culture-survey/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reform_Judaism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_schools_and_branches
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_Muslim_movements
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madhhab
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Reconstruction_of_Religious_Thought_in_Islam
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