President Obama gave a speech on Monday about the progress of the United States-led military campaign against the Islamic State (ISIS) in which he said that America would “do more to train and equip the moderate opposition in Syria.” This is a promise that has been made repeatedly made and repeatedly broken. The President’s strategy of détente with Clerical Iran has given Syria to Tehran as a sphere of influence—which precludes the U.S. building up a viable alternative to both ISIS and the murderous Assad regime, which has been effectively under Iran’s control since late 2012.
According to the Qur’an, Allah is the “best of deceivers” (3:54; 8:30). The phrase is often translated into English as “best of planners,” “best of schemers,” or “best of plotters,” but the root word (makr) means “deception.” Hence, the following Qur’an verses should be rendered as follows:
Qur’an 3:54—And they (the unbelievers) planned to deceive, and Allah planned to deceive (the unbelievers), and Allah is the best of deceivers.
Qur’an 7:99—Are they then safe from Allah’s deception? No one feels safe from Allah’s deception except those that shall perish.
Qur’an 8:30—And (remember) when the unbelievers plotted deception against you (O Muhammad), to imprison you, or kill you, or expel you. They plotted deception, but Allah also plotted deception; and Allah is the best of deceivers.
The historical background for the verse is that the Jews ‘planned’ evil in order to get Jesus arrested and crucified. And Allah in the verse says as they planned evil, so too Allah planned to thwart their wicked plan. Christian missionaries have an issue with the words used for both the Jews and Allah. They prefer to translate this way:
“and [they] deceived and Allah deceived and Allah is the best of deceivers”
The above translation does not exist. It is only made up by crazy deluded missionaries in order to lead people astray. Arabic word(s) makr, Makara can be used negatively and for good. So when the Jews planned to get Jesus arrested and crucified, that was evil, whereas when Allah thwarted their evil plan by saving Jesus, this was good.
True, the Jewish authorities and those who followed their lead pressed for the death of Christ;(13) still, what happened in His passion cannot be charged against all the Jews, without distinction, then alive, nor against the Jews of today. Although the Church is the new people of God, the Jews should not be presented as rejected or accursed by God, as if this followed from the Holy Scriptures. All should see to it, then, that in catechetical work or in the preaching of the word of God they do not teach anything that does not conform to the truth of the Gospel and the spirit of Christ.
Verily methinks the woman was deceived, the Jews were libled — the whole lot, and the post-Holocaust Vatican compelled to clarify the truth of its position in relation to the Jewish People.
Ironically related reference on the Soviet framing of WWII’s Pope Pius XII as “Hitler’s Pope”: Pacepa, Ion Mihai and Rychlak, Ronald J. Disinformation. Washington, D.C.: WND Books, 2013. (BackChannels readers will find more of similar in “The Russian Section” of the resident library).
Further related and more conveniently accessed: Akin, Jimmy. “How Pius XII Protected Jews.” Catholic Answers, n.d.: “Hochhuth’s fictional image of a silent (though active) pope has been transformed by the anti-Catholic rumor mill into the image of a silent and inactive pope—and by some even into an actively pro-Nazi monster. If there were any truth to the charge that Pius XII was silent, the silence would not have been out of moral cowardice in the face of the Nazis, but because the Pope was waging a subversive, clandestine war against them in an attempt to save Jews.”
As people lie — engage in deception — either to hide something or to get something, we know, this according to Ms. Lessing, what the ignoble imam was after; and according to Jimmy Akin as well as the breathtaking revelations of Pacepa and Rychlak (2013), we know what the noble Pope Pius XII was hiding for good cause.
The Discover the Truth blog goes on to note the moral ambiguity involved in the term “makr” this way: “The word, makr in Arabic denotes a subtle and secret move or plan. If this is for a good purpose, it is good; and if this is for a bad purpose, it is bad.”
The argument places the determination of good deed or evil beyond the declaration of Surat 3:54: “And (the unbelievers) plotted and planned, and Allah too planned, and the best of planners is Allah” (Yusuf Ali’s translation).
Again: “The word, makr in Arabic denotes a subtle and secret move or plan. If this is for a good purpose, it is good; and if this is for a bad purpose, it is bad.”
It would appear that “being the best of planners” — being the most proficient among the makers of subtle and secret moves or plans — would be a thing separate from being either good or evil, i.e., the statement is about facility in the making of “subtle and secret moves” and neutral about ethical and moral virtue, plain dealing, and straight talk as behaviors civil, desirable, good, and lawful in and of themselves.
Given so much encouragement and license for the making of “subtle and secret moves”, who then — or what — determines the qualities of good cause?
I’ll leave that question rhetorical.
One might suppose that had Lessing’s imam been honest with her, Lessing may yet be wearing her hijab with pride.
And let’s got on to the bad guys’ black hats (who could be the same guys or white-hat guys who have had their ideas / methods / products / processes stolen) —
According to the documents, 400GB of which have been published, Hacking Team has also been working with numerous repressive governments – something it has previously explicitly denied doing. It has not been possible to independently verify the veracity of the documents.
As with other tools, like axes and guns, software has itself has neither consciousness nor conscience. It doesn’t know who’s using it or how or for what noble or ignoble purpose, and the sawing will go this way: “Software doesn’t destroy, shield, or steal digital assets: programmers and end-users do.”
And now return to the good guys — so I freely presume the avatars of the lawful to be themselves lawful — and another electronic-communicating aspect of their problem with the bad guys of the certifiable kind:
The director of the FBI has warned that criminals and terrorists will be able to talk ‘with impunity’ if encryption goes too far.
James Comey said that anti-surveillance measures being deployed by the likes of Apple and Google will ‘inexorably affect my ability to do that job’ if they continue to expand.
What would be exploited by whom were it not kept safe?
Where is the war?
One of my distant correspondents noted of a small community project beneath his wing that he dared not display too much of physical improvements online for there were those in his village that might want a cut just because.
On May 1, 2014, a grand jury in the Western District of Pennsylvania indicted five members of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) for 31 criminal counts, including: conspiring to commit computer fraud; accessing a computer without authorization for the purpose of commercial advantage and private financial gain; damaging computers through the transmission of code and commands; aggravated identity theft; economic espionage; and theft of trade secrets.
It appears that not so many decades ago, technologists went to work on eliminating space as an impediment to forming basic social relationships while migrating the digitally empowered away from paper-based banking, gasoline-enabled shopping, and family-room television: mission accomplished.
In the process of eliminating so much work while producing incalculable savings, the same have done away with troves of evidence of physical bother: who needs cash, or even a courier, when numbers shuttled between computers move wealth?
Who needs a theater and ticket counter when the talented — whatever the talent — may put on a show, flash mob or flash bang, with the distribution of a signal from a cell phone?
What army is needed where one gunman — recruited online, minimally “handled” — can walk a weapon into some space and inside of a few minutes commit mass murder, damage a state’s tourist industry, or destroy a community’s sense of security in relation to racial or religious harmony?
For the west and geopolitical space integrating with the western mind (of the lawful), all of the traffic, however massive, ultimately educates, informs, or entertains while facilitating either comparatively healthy private and social behavior or behavior not yet codified.
A few of quite another mind — feudal, malignantly narcissistic, plainly malign by normative standards — diverge to disagree in expression and action.
Given free expression (short of direct conspiracy or incitement to crime), conflict between the lawful and the lawless has now long been moved to an electronic boundary between publically empowered and trusted investigators and privately enfranchised criminals, and along that boundary on both sides, software — code is king wherever it “wins” and for as long as it works — has become shield and sword.
Those of us who spend a fair part of our day online reading, writing, shopping, and watching YouTube videos, are going to be witness to and monitors of this challenge to the lawful control of information for some time to come.
The United States and Iran are seemingly days from signing an agreement on Iran’s nuclear program that has been brought about by a series of American concessions. If the deal is signed on the present terms it will effectively dismantle the sanctions against Iran and the international legal regime that recognizes the Iranian regime as an outlaw, will leave Iran on the threshold of nuclear weapons, and will provide legitimacy for, and billions of dollars toward, Iranian hegemony in the Middle East.
Following, for a while. As with so many others incapable of rejecting a sect (in its entirety) within a religion of which one is not a part and over a conflict that is distant and — and I will assign blame to Khamenei and others of feudal mind and ambition — archaic, I don’t want to weigh on the scales. I’ve found the same divide in Shiite and other circles where claim is made about being “the Jews of islam” (and persecuted by Sunni Muslims). Nonetheless, one understands: where this kind of conflict is hot — the bullets are flying and the bombs are going off and lives are being ended, shattered, or threatened in the most direct ways — polarization is as unavoidable as it is destructive and seemingly impossible to repair.
The place where the bullets are flying: Yemen.
The drift of sympathy: against the Houthis as representative of Ayatollah Khamenei’s War by Proxy that in turn defends feudal absolutism and seeks to expand the regime’s power against Sunni interests.
In another and now increasingly distant age — even 25 or 50 years ago may now seem like centuries — the Yemeni part of the Islamic Small Wars would been played as a clipping in the back of the “A” section of the newspapers, a remote tribal war to be overlooked by western indifference.
Those days are gone.
Our Facebook friends are either there or have family and friends who are close to live fire — not only in Yemen but everywhere being razed and ruined by these forces — and we’re watching without recourse to choosing a good and bad side except against the “al-Qaeda Typicals” and the “Hezbollah Virus”, i.e., operations with military wings so awful that the good of the planet would seek to shut down regardless of other disagreements stemming from nominal affiliations and associated cultural, political, and religious self-concept.
Instead, some of us seem to be standing by friends on both sides and hoping the theme of “The Medieval vs The Modern” will catch on before the medieval world, which some are working hard to sustain, swallows the modern. That outcome may not be possible across continents, but it seems to be proving possible in both the Middle East and Eastern Europe (with Putin-Khamenei as the hub from which so much chaos, destruction, and political confusion emanate).
Referencing the Back-Channels zeitgeist — on the greater web: https://conflict-backchannels.com/ — and this has been as much a journey in cultural and political navigation as it has been for others sailing together through time — both Putin and Khamenei have emphasized their devotion to feudalism and absolute power (for them, that’s the good side) and (the bad side) the validation of mafia-style governance and outright internal piracy.
Periodically, Iranian naval forces have tweaked the British Navy by capturing a patrol boat and forcing Great Britain into a predictable round of negotiations ending with, so one might say, faces saved.
Putin’s neo-feudal rig in Russia extends the privileges of the police state known in the Soviet Era (reference: Karen Dawisha’s work) and certainly harks back to the 19th Century’s Age of Empire (so I might wag “colonel, President, EMPEROR Putin” at times). With the invasion of Crimea most in evidence (western governments are the only entities acquiescing, albeit perhaps superficially, in various levels of denial), Putin similarly takes swipes at western resolve,
Much amounts to political theater (like the $52 billion Sochi Olympics show covering the butchery and degradation taking place in Syria with Putin’s military deliveries), but these feints may at any point become more pressed, more earnest, more deadly.
That Putin would call Obama to exchange Independence Day sentiment while this was taking place of course tells of the kind of mentality represented by the Russian President and how that differs from the still dominant American manner on the topside of international politics.
The thread starter: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2015/07/06/officials-us-jets-scramble-to-intercept-russian-bombers-off-california-alaska/ (July 6, 2015).
The Big Boys with The Big Toys play around the world this way —
. . . the Kremlin opted for a third strategy, identified with Putin’s diabolic aide Vladislav Surkov: a limited but bloody war in the eastern and southern part of only two of Ukraine’s 25 regions, Luhansk and Donetsk, known as the Donbas.
The destruction has been horrendous. The territory now occupied by Russian troops or their subordinates once harbored 3.3 million people, but most have since fled—1.3 million to other parts of Ukraine, 500,000 to Russia, and 100,000 to other countries, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Only pensioners, the destitute and criminals remain.
While one may wish not to endorse a racist national socialism – one that seeks the destruction or subjugation of all others everywhere – I’ve always stood behind the prerogatives of ethnolinguistic cultural survival and self-determination. The possession of culture (with beliefs, calendar, customs, institutions, and rituals) suspended in and transmitted through language is a precious gift, and one that man cannot create except in the natural course of living together in some human space and in limited numbers, i.e., a social subset of the species in its totality.
American multiculturalism works partly because of the English-borne classical liberalism passed down through its constitution through time and a combination of privacy, resources, and space such that every cooperating culture may and has found some place to plant itself and struggle along or thrive on the American quilt. Most other states, if not all, including those of the British Commonwealth, have a legitimate part of old feudal interest in the survival of, indeed, both a national way of life (x beliefs, calendar, customs, institutions, and rituals) and the adjusted survival of indigenous contributing cultures within.
The correspondent had shared the video with BackChannels. Plainly, the complaint devolves to geospatial cultural realities — Let Sweden be Swedish! — and how those interests may be handled today.
Among other observations, Talar notes on his Angry Foreigner page, “I don’t hate blacks, arabs and jews. No idea why some of the comments are like that. I am not against immigration as a phenomenon. Of course Im not saying that every country should close it’s borders. Im just asking that other countries take more responsibility with asylum seekers so that we in Sweden don’t have to take as much. It’s fucking killing us. Our politicians are too scared to integrate immigrants properly and it’s causing problems for both the ethnic population and us who have come here over the past years.”
Pat Condell, “Sweden – Ship of fools” (posted to YouTube October 13, 2014):
On the other side of asylum and immigration issues of serious scale are conditions in other lands. Mexico’s ever lumbering economy and narcoterrorism literally drives its population to border-running desperation. The same may be noted where mass lowest-level employment draws labor into foreign enslavement. In other quarters — but I have Syria and Iraq immediately in mind (however, watch out for an increase in Ukraine’s newly dispossessed) — open conflict (poorly addressed) has produced “internally displaced” and “refugee” (homeless, either way) numbers ranging far into the million (by way of Syria alone, above nine million).
Swedish good nature and goodness may account for folly in acts of grace that would take in the immigrant (tired, poor, wretched, and culturally militant), but the challenge to the world (perhaps: get the coming numbers down; get resources up; and move internal economies and trade into strong development) dwarfs even its best potential gestures.
The Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) has prepared a dossier laying out evidence for what it calls “Russian aggression against Ukraine.”
The report alleges there are some 9,000 Russian troops deployed in Ukraine, forming 15 battalion tactical groups. The force includes about 200 tanks, more than 500 armored fighting vehicles, and some 150 artillery systems, according to the dossier.
In today’s Washington Post, Jackson Diehl notes Russia’s suspension of gas deliveries to Ukraine and the west’s distractions with Greece and Iran, asking at the end of his piece “Will this be remembered as the summer when the West let Ukraine die?”
I won’t give away his answer.
My hope: I hope not.
Remember Yanukovych Leaks and the state-borne internal piracy that drove Ukrainians to give Putin’s stooge the boot.
Remember Putin’s $52 billion Sochi Winter Olympics, which obscene spending ignored and masked off the hundreds of thousands dead in Syria and the nearly 10 million displace while Putin-Assad-Khamenei fairly cultivated “The Terrorists” for Assad’s Big Political Theater and Khamenei’s teleological commitment to bringing forth the Great Shiite vs Sunni Battle.
“I want you to know why thousands of people all over my country are on the streets,” she said to the global audience, her voice full of feeling. “There is only one reason: They want to be free from a dictatorship. … We are civilized people but our government are barbarians. This is not a Soviet Union.” The video has since been seen by more than 8.3 million people.
Remember Milan Kundera’s famous statement about remembering: “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”
The main purpose of keeping the Donbas conflict in a smoldering state is to let Putin remain in power. The Donbas war will distract the Russians and help Putin stay in power, the ex-FSB officer said.
The BackChannel’s term for what Putin (and Putin and Khamenei together) represent in contemporary political possibility: “21st Century Neo-Feudalism”.
Dzerzhinsky may be a Communist saint, but the symbolism of the prince’s statue is inescapable. It will celebrate the new Vladimir, not just the old one. This may be obvious, but the subject is avoided in polite conversation.
There are other topics — rising prices, the fighting in Ukraine, the shape of things to come — that people don’t like to think about, even though these subjects are at times unavoidable. The economy is entering “a full-fledged crisis,” former Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin told Parliament recently. He warned that Russia’s gross domestic product is forecast to be 4 percent lower this year than it was in 2014. Meanwhile, food prices are rising. Official figures indicate a 23 percent jump for the year ending in March, but an informal survey of grocers in my neighborhood suggests a 30 percent jump is more realistic.
But Vyrypaev’s wider summing-up was admirably succinct: “This means that [the state] has the right to intervene, to control, direct, grow, regulate, monitor, and finally to develop the cultural process. It means that the state assumes the role of a kind of spiritual and educational shepherd for the people.”
While Obama has for the public paired Putin with Soviet revanche, it’s not the Soviet that Putin (and the KGB cum FSB organization) have brought to Russia: “feudalism”, “state capitalism”, “neo-feudalism” better describe what Putin has done — is doing — to the Russians.
Avedissian, Karena. “The power of Electric Yerevan.” Open Democracy, July 6, 2015: “The corruption and mismanagement of ENA reflect wider problems of governance and the political environment in Russia. When Russian state-owned companies (in which theft is not the exception but the norm) take over infrastructure in neighbouring countries, this is, in effect, ‘exporting corruption’.”
Popova, Polina. “Freedom of speech under fire in Ukraine.” The Hill, June 16, 2015. (The story becomes convoluted as official Ukraine responds to the assault of Russian propaganda: writes Popova, “Some journalists fear that the ministry was actually created to muffle internal opposition, rather than tackling Russian propaganda. It’s not surprising that it has earned the Orwellian nickname “the Ministry of Truth”).
Not a few Russian intellectuals, depressed by the Orwellian state of Russian public discourse, have come to see Ukrainian cities as the hope for the future of Russian culture. In this light, the Russian invasion of Ukraine to protect freedom of speech in the Russian language is perhaps better compared to America invading Canada to save the welfare state or North Korea invading South Korea to protect capitalism.
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