The war I see is “red brown green” vs “blue” / the despotic vs the democratic / the permitted deceitful vs the honest to a fault. There isn’t anything else to this 20th Century extension of Hitler’s Germany and the Soviet Era. In Moscow, first thing last November, Mikhail Bogdanov met with representatives of the PFLP (this was before the synagogue attack): how is that still taking place today? How is that Hamas (with its leader-billionaires) and the PLO (or has “Abu Mazen” transformed somehow) remain in business when they actually bring so little and do so little for their people (apart from keeping them bent, corralled, and controlled)? The MEC has been about the power of a very few, not about real estate — for the regard given the refugees by warring Arab would-be protectors, visit the Yarmouk Camp story in Syria — and until that’s address — until those who manipulate this inhuman show business are address — it just goes on.

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One’s themes may continue until they are written out and one has returned to them day after day.

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I think there is one state, the Land of the Hebrews — an ethnolinguistic concept — with two inholdings, Gaza and Ramallah. Those represent two distinct outposts in what is or has become essentially a fascist challenge to the “Greco-Roman Judeo-Christian west”: one draws its impulsion from the Soviet Union and it’s KGB’s program to promote anti-Semitism in the middle east to leverage power for Moscow (this is not so old history even though it is history); the other in Gaza signals colonization along an Islamist front, and for the many sources of support, the essential tandem appears to me to be Moscow-Tehran, i.e., Putin-Khamenei (The People — any! — count much, much less in the politics than the psychology of the leadership).

In the earliest days of November, Moscow (Mikhail Bogdanov) met with representatives of the PFLP (this took place before the synagogue attack, and, perhaps weirdly, they talked about S-20 missiles, a pretty good indicators of many things: the Soviet dissolved in the early 1990s — KGB did not; the PLO and PFLP and others simply did not lose their purchase with Moscow; Putin-Assad-Khamenei (those missiles had to do with Syria) are part of the same engine driving today a “Red Brown Green Alliance”. The Jews, having long ago developed (received) and argued into life an ethical-humanist code (the first attributes the Torah ascribes to humanity — darn that apple and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil — are human consciousness, self-consciousness and conscience (everything needed to deal with the world — and with Pharaoh — are right there at the beginning) keep standing in the way of a kind of person, a tyrant, a “malignant narcissist”.

Religions are universes in themselves, but some personalities always and across the new space that is the plane of time — time as a surface on which things enter into and out of existence (that thought takes a little time for entertaining) — both create or leverage belief for power and wealth: apostasy, heresy, and hypocrisy becomes charges useful for prying away position, property, and life, and as much seems so with the “isms” familiar to fascist eruptions. Not German enough, not communist enough, not genuinely Catholic (Inquisition), not Muslim enough: what a useful rhetorical tool that has been, but for the worst of the worst of mankind. Before the business, political, and religious mafia that avail themselves of such tools, stand the Jews — who get an update from Hillel — and Christians and Muslims who better note their cousinhood. (Back in Exodus, not only Moses and the Jews escape Pharaoh, but a “mixed multitude” — these details are argued to death, but room is there to believe the Jews not exclusive but instead inclusive, and then, indeed, it’s the dictators, the tyrants, who believe themselves exclusive and go on to intellectually poison their populations to the extent that they can do it.

That’s been “my middle east conflict” for a while now, and it took some time, news watching and other reading, to shift the focus from wars between political interests and states to wars that are more about the character and psychology of leadership and the nature of fascism.

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More From the Awesome Conversation:

From Stalin-Hitler –> PLO-Hamas, roughly, should by now be clear but perhaps not clear in the information-controlled cultures or regions of interest. Those same, however, have large diaspora, and if the diaspora comprehends what powerful political agents have done to them — and can summon the courage to own up to having been made the targets of that manipulation — then Gaza City and Ramallah will “get it” too. I continue to recommend Pacepa and Rychlak’s book _Disinformation_ for a good look at how the KGB worked.

The true conflict — cleared of legal and rhetorical clutter — has come to seem to me to be about democracy and classical liberalism vs feudal despotism. It’s not the land that’s being contested: but two principles in the social organization of humans.

2/12/2015

Stimulus for the response:

http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/we-palestinians-hold-the-key-to-a-better-future/ by Bassem Eid – 12/12/2015.

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2/13/2014:

It appears (to me) the launch of both Christianity and Islam involved “borrowing” from the Jewish story and mythos while also distancing from it as an update (Christianity) or reversion (Islam). However, the historical politics writ large appear (to me) to have been both obvious in large frame but obscured to the populations involved, and perhaps not without understandable causes:

1. The Hebrews must have comprised then a more confined ethnolinguistic cohort, one in fact decimated by the Roman Army (Titus burned Jerusalem in 70 AD, killing, it has been estimated, between 250,000 and 400,000 Jews and enslaving untold numbers, many to be managed in Egypt). The Roman culture that produced that unfortunately not singular act of horror were destined to become Jews themselves and Christians in their overwhelming majority. At the base and in the period around the birth of Christ, Hillel the Elder (35-BC to 10-CE) may have been a crossover figure, much overlooked outside of Jewish circles but credited with making the study of Judaism more accessible to the “gentile” and therefore less insular. (You know the quotation spoken to a hesitant convert while Hillel stood on one leg): “That which is distasteful to thee do not do to another. That is the whole of Torah. All of the rest is commentary. Now go and study”). Roman-Christian distancing from the Jews while embracing as basic to Catholicism the “First Testament” would develop the feudal animosity and levers — demonizations, blood libels, accusations of apostasy and heresy — that would form the fascist successionary anti-Semitism of the Church or, perhaps more accurately, those it empowered for centuries to come. The Catholic Church – Rome – backed off on its charge of “Deicide” only in 1964; the Lutheran Synod in the United States waited until, I believe, the 1980s to make a similar course correction.

As Hillel the Elder had stated, whosoever destroys a soul, it is considered as if he destroyed an entire world. And whosoever that saves a life, it is considered as if he saved an entire world.”[6] — copied from Wikipedia. Again, Hillel’s estimated period of presence in history: 35-BC to 10-CE. Muhammad’s echo follows hundreds of years later. The Legend of the Banu Qurayza (which legend Tarek Fatah dismisses out of hand although it appears prevalent in the literature) couches a military surrender to power and subsequent slaughter (mass beheading, 800 males down to the boy with but one pubic hair . . . .) in self-righteous terms, a political process much witnessed today in the rhetoric and acts of “the Islamists”.

Oh good grief.

The Jews again proved resistant to acknowledging the presence of a prophet, all of the Jewish ones — from Moses himself and forward — proving inescapably human and flawed in the very first of their descriptions. Moses, for example, may give the human signal for advancing into the Red Sea, but God drives the winds (and the pillar of cloud) that parts the waters. It could be early science fiction, I would grant, but there’s more of humanity going on in every “bible story”, starting with Moses leaving Egypt with not only the Jews but a “mixed multitude”, and while some scholars may have used the “mixed multitude” as a mistake that would destroy “the pure” (how that echoes around the world!), I don’t see that interpretation embedded in the English translations: what I read is the inclusion of others wishing to flee a tyrant.

Now our armies — despotic (Putin!) — or democratic (Obama!) are nuclear tipped machines capable of producing massive death and destruction, and we’re carting around this intellectual load in language that needs a holy edit or unholy but wise observation (yay) that leaves the Hebrews alone and brings everyone else (who wants to come along) onto the same plain — there’s that river running through time, and we are still on its near side.

I appear to be making this post a running commentary From the Awesome Conversion (FTAC) on conflict and religion and where I / we are as a divided (despotic vs democratic) and triangulated (Jewish, Christian, Muslim) global enterprise.

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