“One Earth, Many Worlds” – From Anti-BDS to Arab Shift, A Note on Intercultural Adjustment

03 Sunday May 2015

Posted by in A Little Wisdom, Anti-Semitism, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Philology

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The resolution, which is expected to be signed next week by Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam, declares that the BDS movement is “one of the main vehicles for spreading anti-Semitism and advocating the elimination of the Jewish state,” adding that BDS activities in Tennessee “undermine the Jewish people’s right to self-determination, which they are fulfilling in the State of Israel.”

Furthermore, the resolution states that the BDS movement and its agenda are “inherently antithetical and deeply damaging to the causes of peace, justice, equality, democracy and human rights for all the peoples in the Middle East.”

Algemeiner.  “Tennessee General Assembly Becomes First State Legislature to Condemn BDS.”  April 22, 2015.

The story appeared on the Facebook page of Proclaiming Justice to the Nations. Congruent with the above, which was published two weeks ago, comes this from last week:

It all began as a personal project by a young Israeli Arab who lives in northern Israel. He wanted to use social networking to convince other Israeli Arabs that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) are not some “army of evil” and that its soldiers are not as bloodthirsty as they tend to be portrayed in Arab propaganda films. He soon learned, however, that in the digital age, there is no end to surprises. Instead of messages and responses from the Israeli Arab audience he was targeting, he began receiving messages of peace and love from young Arab men and women from across the Arab world.

PJTN.  “Arab youth use social media to send message of support for Israel.”  April 30, 2015.

In a world where every day is somewhere a first day, the mind of the world goes through its day magnificently housed in about 7,000 living languages.  As it seems to BackChannels easier to lose a language than to invent one, the idea of preserving the library — what constitutes an “us” if not a language? — might come first.

While that sounds delightful — for what dual-language reader would care to be confined to the lingua franca that has been English? — our languages and the spirits represented in them come freighted with some heady components and related cultural ambitions and habits, and not all awake feeling harmonious.

Those that do, however, have some work ahead of them.

One Earth, Many Worlds

The new global intelligentsia — have we not all just shaken virtual hands over the past seven common broadband and about 20 popularly connected years or so? — has now to revisit its multicultural, multilinguistic packages, the beliefs, histories, myths, morals, and values contained within each separable ethnolinguistic enclave, and fundamentally adjust to a true changed revolutionary circumstance.

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Link — Politically Correct Misrepresentation — Mainstream Media and Zaytuna College

29 Wednesday Apr 2015

Posted by in Links, Religion, United States of America

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A Religion News Service article reprinted in the Washington Post and elsewhere, including the Christian Century, described Zaytuna as “A college that requires the study of both Wordsworth and the Quran for graduation… now the first fully accredited Islamic university in America.”

Yet WASC approved only one program: a B.A. in Islamic law and theology.

Schwartz, Stephen.  “Don’t Believe the Hype about Zaytuna College.”  Campus Watch from American Thinker, April 29, 2015.

Soviet Anti-Semitism, An Example from Andrew and Mitrokhin’s _The Sword and The Shield_.

29 Wednesday Apr 2015

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Anti-Semitism, Books, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Russia, Syndicate Red Brown Green

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In January 1953 the MGB was officially accused of “lack of vigilance” in hunting down the conspirators.  The Soviet news agency Tass made the sensational announcement that for the past few years world Zionism and Western intelligence agencies had been conspiring with “a terrorist group” of Jewish doctors “to wipe out the leadership of the Soviet Union.”  During the final two months of Stalin’s rule, the MGB struggled to demonstrate its heightened vigilance by pursuing the perpetrators of this non-existent plot.  Its anti-Zionist campaign was, in reality, little more than a thinly disguised anti-Semitic pogrom.  Shortly before Stalin’s sudden death in March 1953 Mitrokhin was ordered to investigate the alleged Zionist connections of the Pravda correspondent in Paris, Yuri Zhukov, who had come under suspicion because of his wife’s Jewish origins.  Mitrokhin had the impression that Stalin’s brutal security supremo, Lavrenti Pavlovich Beria, was planning to implicate Zhukov in the supposed Jewish doctor’s plot.  A few weeks after Stalin’s funeral, however, Beria suddenly announced that the plot had never existed, and exonerated the alleged conspirators.

Andrew, Christopher and Vasili Mitrokhin.  The Sword and The Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB.  Page 2.  New York: Basic Books, 1999.

In the “Russian Section” (of the in-house library), the above title is appended “UR” for unread.  BackChannels hopes to update that status soon.  Even so, with the theme of anti-Semitism emerging on the second page of a mighty classic, so it appears, among the scholars, the same may inform the character of today’s “Solidarity” organizations and their updates on Soviet disinformation and propaganda programs that produced the privileged and the privileges of the Party.

These historic incidents and the portent of books like The Sword and The Shield may be easily accessed by the lay public as well as scholars, but time having become the new space, information has become the vegetation on the landscape, and large packages so easily spied on Amazon may not be so easily opened.  With each passing year — the volume was published in 1999 — fewer and fewer readers, lay or scholar, are likely to have the experience of seminal works.  For the most part, the public won’t know, won’t have personal or transmitted historic memory, giving cognizant autocrats freedom to deliver the past to their constituents.

Related on BackChannels: “Rhetorical Objects — Anti- Anti-Semitism & Anti-Semitism” (April 20, 2014).

Addendum

This crossed my desktop late this afternoon:

The ultimate goal of state censorship is self-censorship among the citizenry. If you can get the people to police themselves, and each other, it takes part of the burden off the state and also makes people complicit in their own oppression. And so it’s disturbing to see things take this turn in Putin’s Russia. As the New York Times reports, Moscow bookstores removed from their shelves–voluntarily (sort of)–their copies of Maus, the pathbreaking graphic novel of Nazi crimes against the Jews. It’s the “voluntarily” part of this that stands out, and makes it clear that Putinism has not been, and will not be, good for the Jews of Russia.

Mandel, Seth.  “Dark Days Ahead for the Jews of Russia?”  Commentary, April 28, 2015.

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Baltimore – Recognizing “Shut it down!” And Shutting It Off

27 Monday Apr 2015

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Political Psychology, Politics, United States of America

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When the Ferguson riots broke August 9, 2014, the New Old Now Old Far Out and Lost Left got busy churning out “false flag” accusations involving New Establishment elements for incitement.  In related search, “DHS Is Employing Agent Provocateurs and are Behind the . . .”; “Ferguson Witness: Government is Planting Provocateurs in . . .”; “Busted! ‘Agent Provocateur’ Caught Red Handed in Ferguson!”  With such as those, BackChannels would happily invoke its mouthy “Paranoid Delusional Narcissistic Reflection of Motivation” and remind that the old KGB proved adept at “false flag” manipulation of the Russian constituency with, among other episodes, the “Moscow Apartment Bombings”, today relentlessly examined and rehashed by Miami University scholar Karen Dawisha in her book Putin’s Kleptocracy (listed in the “Russian Section”).

The injury and death of Freddie Gray will receive — is receiving — the scrutiny deserved regardless of the public press “for justice” (without injustice proven but certainly suspected) and the spillover into violence.

This is what promotes that violence:

Malik Shabazz, president of Black Lawyers for Justice, a Washington, D.C.-based group that called for the demonstration and advertised it on social media, told the crowd that he would release them in an hour, adding: “Shut it down if you want to! Shut it down!”

Stolberg, Sheryl Gay and Stephen Babcock.  “Scenes of Chaos in Baltimore as Thousands Protest Freddie Gray’s Death.”  International New York Times, April 25, 2015.

Shut what down?

Shut “it” down!

A city, a society, a long fought quest for equality and justice frequently achieved.

Yesterday in WND, conservative journalist Aaron Klein noted of Shabazz, “Not a single news media outlet quoted above informed its readers of that which a simple Google search of “Malik Shabazz” reveals. As highlighted on his Wikipedia page, until October 2013, Shabazz notoriously served as the national chairman of the New Black Panther Party.”

Klein goes on to note in relation to Shabazz episodes involving voter intimidation (“using such phrases as ‘white devil’ and ‘You’re about to be ruled by the black man, cracker'”), anti-Semitic invective, and incitement.

Earlier today, The Baltimore Sun noted the notables in attendance at Freddie Gray’s funeral, and BackChannels would suggest all of a different mein — and with Dick Gregory present, some of a different era — than Shabazz.

Shut “It” down?

Violence and looting overtook much of West Baltimore on Monday, seriously injuring several police officers and leaving a store and several vehicles in flames.

Dance, Scott.  “Riots erupt across West Baltimore, downtown.”  The Baltimore Sun, April 27, 2015.

Shutting Not Much Down, But Some appears to be continuing into the evening.

With generations of of the Left to Far Left in town, one’s ears may tune to the rhetoric to come: will it be accusing, ad hominem, venomous?  Will it be responsible, encouraging inquiry, open observation, and discussion?  In what part either?

Shut it down?

That kind of talk, yes.

Cited and Other Reference

Dance, Scott.  “Riots erupt across West Baltimore, downtown.”  The Baltimore Sun, April 27, 2015.

Klein, Aaron.  “Media Fail to Identity Leader of Baltimore Riots: Ex-New Black Panther chairman a notorious racist.”  WND, April 26, 2015.

Marbella, Jean and Jonathan Pitts.  “Friends, family bid farewell to Freddie Gray.” Baltimore Sun, April 27, 2015.

Schwartzman, Paul and Dana Hedgpeth.  “‘Another life gone’: Hundreds gather for Freddie Gray funeral in Baltimore.”  The Washington Post, April 27, 2015.

Stolberg, Sheryl Gay and Stephen Babcock.  “Scenes of Chaos in Baltimore as Thousands Protest Freddie Gray’s Death.”  International New York Times, April 25, 2015.

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“Unspeakable Stories. Unspeakable.”

27 Monday Apr 2015

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Islamic Small Wars

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Posted to YouTube 4/24/2015.

Source: Pesta, Abigail.  “Iraqi woman most wanted by ISIS gives tearful account of extremist group’s atrocities.”  Women in the World in Association with The New York Times, April 23, 2015.

I spoke last Wednesday night at Brooklyn College, if you can still call it that. Every seat was filled – 80 percent by Muslim students. If this is the future, it is murder. The sneers, the jeers, the laughter – my discussion of the most savage jihad acts was met with huge peals of laughter. It wasn’t a talk; it was a vicious circus: lawless and shameful.

From the moment I began to speak, the Muslim students were cackling and catcalling with Jew-hating remarks and jeers.

http://pamelageller.com/2015/04/pamela-geller-wnd-isis-at-brooklyn-college.html/#sthash.clTfmR90.dpuf – The event took place April 22, 2015.

Last fall, The New York Times referred to ISIS as a “cult of sadism” (October 2, 2014), noting of the center of ISIS power in Iraq and Syria, “In this confused and complex landscape, the Islamic State seems a model of remorseless clarity.  We have not seen the last of its horrors.”

Recommended for insightful reading in the psychology involved: any of the works of Nancy Hartevelt Kobrin.

Related on BackChannels: “JiSadists — An Update on Westgate Mall Barbarity.”  October 1, 2013.

BackChannels got its start elsewhere with comments on the 2006-7 assault by al-Shabaab on Somali, and its author then noted its caprice in dealing death to Muslims.  The al-Qaeda-type group appeared then to have the conscience of an earthquake or typhoon, both mindless forces of nature, which is to say it appeared to have no conscience at all.  After seven years, the only change marked by Daesh appears to be the amplified scale of the firepower, the general warfare, and the vacuous horror visited on those whose bodies, minds, and souls it destroys.

While al-Qaeda was once the most barbaric terror group in the world, that dubious label now goes to ISIS.

http://abc30.com/news/filmmaker-interviews-isis-fighters-for-documentary/680517/ – 4/24/2015.

I know this piece is all over the map . . . but what fresh observation from media is wanted?

From the documentary filmmaker mentioned in the above article, Itai Anghel:

Posted to YouTube 1/18/2015.

Addendum

From the Awesome Conversation, one friend asked in reference to this piece, “Where are America’s most prominent feminists? The Naomi Wolf, Rachel Maddow, Amy Goodman? sadly many are Jewish.”

BackChannels would suggest that some mouths have been trained in a certain political aesthetics: what is “cool”.  Some people will stick with “what was cool” even while time wraps layers of change around them, and they become like amber, old, shiny, and fixed.

The developed empathy that drove a humanist liberalism would do well to confront new challenges.  The Jewish community, conservative and liberal, will always address abuse, disconcern, neglect in the promotion of human dignity and human rights, but it may need to update now and then its assessments of the ambitions of its fellow travelers.

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FTAC – Advertising by the Different Jihad’s Anti-Jihad

23 Thursday Apr 2015

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

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If the screenshot banner copy is unclear or too small to read, it says, “‘Killing Jews is Worship that draws us close to Allah’ — Hamas MTV.  That’s His Jihad, What’s yours?”

 Comment From The Awesome Conversation

The Geller and Spencer and other anti-Jihad shows ask of Islam sufficient introspection and courage emphasize virtue, reform if necessary, and put both the 20th Century inspiration for the “Muslim Botherhood” and related poison-in-the-head out of business so that more of the world can get to work on other things.

However, the conflict and violence that assaults us daily by way of global media — and investment in this region of discussion — hasn’t only to do with Islam: it has to do with the interpretation of power — absolute and feudal or distributed and democratic. “Putin-Assad-Khamenei” are of a type, and Islam, especially in the middle east, has been “played” (ref.: Pacepa and Rychlak) and plays to their deeply medieval world vision and the image they have of themselves in it.

The Jews continuously, famously, remove themselves from cults of godlike personality and continue eternally in search of the Promised Land. Instead of imposing, the commune invites, and perhaps after Hillel, some ideas about a common humanity become borrowable but also political and little bit crooked (in Judaism, for example, all of the prophets are drawn as faulted humans, deeply so, and kept separate from God). For our grandiose delusional dictators fascists malignant narcissists, the limitation perhaps seems a deep affront and “control”, sadistic and total, becomes their thing. Must we have them? “Syndicate Red Brown Green” and NATO, more or less, are wrestling over it. Hamas is way down on the food chain (thank Khamenei, among others, for keeping it in business) but it’s leveraging some Islamic zeitgeist to produce chaos, fear, and sorrow around itself serves the larger press of the feudal mode.

Not only “the awesome conversation” elicits the above but also simply visiting these themes — conflict, culture, language, psychology — day after week after month after years: things come to the surface.  Some become so familiar as to become blog-based tropes:

No Moses — no Muhammad

Hillel the Elder –> Jesus, Paul, Constantine –> Muhammad

The Torah begins with God

The Torah, closely read, compels progressive ethical and moral argument

Syndicate Red Brown Green (post-Soviet neo-feudal Russia; new national socialists; Islamists)

Expect some items to show up on the “Alpha – Zulu” page of this blog.  Others may be simply plugged into meditative political writing as fit.

The tests of will in conflict that BackChannels has come to perceive has been very much within the medieval vs modern template, which would be fine if the medieval proved good.  The matter, however, has been complicated by a dark portion in psychology, i.e., the compulsive, endless, and helpless fascism and sadism of the malignant narcissist.  Too often, capricious power — power considering itself above all natural laws and inclined to create and make the same to suit itself without limits — comes to impose suffering on others with impunity.  It (!) appears to prize the annihilation of others and the erasing of time out of the urge to exist in a timeless world entirely of its own fashioning — and doing so it dooms itself to annihilation.

Additional Reference

Miller, Michael E.  “Killing Jews is worship posters will soon appear on NYC subways and buses.”  The Washington Post, April 22, 2014.

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Link – Obama and Detente with Iran

22 Wednesday Apr 2015

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Iran, Islamic Small Wars, Middle East

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Thanks to retreats like this one, it is Khamenei’s red lines, not Obama’s, that have determined the shape of the emerging deal—a fact that prompts the president’s critics to accuse him of fecklessness and/or naïveté. But these descriptions miss the mark. The president is not wedded to any set of specific demands. For him, the specific terms of the nuclear agreement are far less important than its mere existence. One of Obama’s greatest diplomatic successes is to have persuaded much of the world, including many of his critics, that the primary goal of his Iran diplomacy is to negotiate a nuclear arms-control agreement. In fact, the primary goal is détente with Iran.

Doran, Michael.  “The Tectonic Shift in Obama’s Iran Policy: A nuclear deal is only the beginning. The president’s goal, at the expense of America’s allies, is full-fledged détente with Iran.”  Mosaic, April 22, 2015.

BackChannels comment: It makes complete sense, and I hope it’s completely wrong — but it’s a complete and lucid analysis of a foreign policy that has been wrested from the awareness and perception of most Americans and fellow travelers.

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