A Gaza salafist group which has sworn its loyalty to the terrorist Islamic State organization has posted a video showing the bombing of the coastal enclave’s French cultural center late last week, NRG News reported Thursday.
The Guardian understands the text to be a compromise between Jordanian and French resolutions.
Israel’s prime minister said the moves in Europe were an example of “staggering hypocrisy”. Speaking before a meeting with the US senator, Joni Ernst, Binyamin Netanyahu invoked the Holocaust: “In Geneva they call for the investigation of Israel for war crimes, while in Luxembourg the EU court removed Hamas from the terror list … It seems that too many in Europe, on whose soil 6 million Jews were slaughtered, have learned nothing.”
Nonetheless, the essentials: ISIS appears to have appeared on the Gaza Strip; the “French Cultural Center”, which provides some diplomatic services, appears to have been bombed; and the European Parliament, “in principle”, supported this week the concept of Palestinian statehood, which is fine, but would be even better if any of the talk and underlying anti-Semitic raving actually served to liberate the residents of Gaza rather than continue and actually reinforce their enslavement by Hamas and others.
The Islamic State of Iraq and Sham (ISIS) split off from Al Nusra in 2013 as the Syrian Civil War progressed. Geopoli.info has extensively documented its origins, where its fighters come from, parties that benefit from its action, unholy alliances and Russian-speaking commanders. In June 2014, as ISIS was making gains in Iraq, getting widespread publicity we came across a video from Eastern Ukraine – introducing “Islamic state of Donbass and Lugant” (“Lugant” is made up of words “Lugansk” and “Levant”) in Eastern Ukraine.
This perpetual festering wound, nurtured by the UN through the actions of UNRWA gives the anti-Semites in our world a legitimacy that has been missing since the end of WWII. Seventy years after the Christian world, not just the Nazis, colluded in the murder of 6 million Jews and the disbursement of millions of others, the “down-trodden Palestinians” are the justification for the contempt of the United Church of Canada, the Presbyterian Church in the USA, the European leaders toward Israel and their desire to agree to the demands of people who want the death of Israel.
As leaders (with immense egos, in lay parlance) “malignant narcissists” — autocrats, dictators, tyrants — do about the same things with the same ends beneath their various banners. In a certain basic way, “Putin-Assad-Khamenei” understand one another better than we, perhaps, understand them. While we’re arguing about ideological or religious doctrine, texts, and themes, they’re manipulating the world around themselves every which way! Part of that manipulation reaches susceptible marks, essentially, who cathect (now I’m getting technical) to a program on offer that speaks to their brand of grandiose narcissistic delusion: in jail, on campus, before a computer reading al-Qaeda’s Inspire online magazine, they have found their mission.
Ditto: XYZ nationalist movements.
General litmus, imho: anti-Semitic expression!
Jews listen for the Jew-hate, of course, but another possibility in observation might attend to what else is spoken around that signal.
The talk was about the attack on the Lindt cafe in Sydney and about the criminals — persons known to the courts, person sending up all kinds of yellow flags — that connect with ideological and religious doctrines that provide to them a sense of mission compatible with “grandiose messianic delusion”, a part of the terms of art associated with bipolar and narcissistic personality disorders.
What is funny to us is the way in which the North Korean government works to create a mythology about itself and to protect itself from people finding out what’s really going on in there and the distortions that they propagate. All these things you hear about their leaders being born under a double rainbow or about them not defecating or urinating—these things are pretty obvious targets for comedy, to us anyway. We watched a lot of documentaries of journalists trying to get in there and see what’s really going on and it’s always the same damn thing: They are shown all of these fake shopping malls and fake cities with fake people walking around pretending that they live there and everything is fine when you can see, just out of frame, that everything is basically weird and haunting and crumbling.
Millions of dollars stashed in shoe boxes, bribes delivered to their recipients in chocolate packages, a gigantic gold smuggling scheme conducted through an Iranian “businessman,” the arrest of ministers’ sons, the resignation and dismissal of ministers and shameful corruption conversations wiretapped legally and illegally are some of the episodes of the probes now engraved in public memory.
Take note of the other headlines on the Al Monitor page: “Erdogan Defense Brotherhood’s Qaradawi After Arrest Warrant”; “Energy Deals May Make Turkey Irreversibly Reliant on Moscow”; “Shadow Government Set up in Erdogan’s White Palace”.
Don’t say BackChannels didn’t warn you about this politically malignant backbone: Putin-Assad-Khamenei / Putin-(Yanukovych) / Putin-Orban / Putin-Erdogan.
Bent on glory, the Club of Bad Little Boys appears to have formed a confederacy of different interests bonded in state-based kleptomania.
The Pyramid Conundrum
Considering what had to have taken place to build the Great Pyramids of Egypt, plus what we my know and what they Jews have to say about it, the public may scratch its collective international head today over the building of the Great Palaces of the Politically Criminal, which I hope have been built already well enough for move-in, for I would not want to see the compounds or palatial estates of these wealthy left unfinished for the public to absorb when they’re gone.
Leaving completed works — that’s just being polite, as such “gentlemen” should be, well affording the same on the apparent misappropriation of national wealth.
Nonetheless, local, state, and global intelligentsia and empowered or struggling policy makers may indeed weigh the benefits of despotic rogue self-aggrandizement in creating magnificence from gain miserably obtained against the implied costs in freedom, human rights, and general rule of law.
“The Pyramid Conundrum”?
The pyramid does not get built without Pharaoh’s absolute power and related sociopathy.
A government may build some sturdy buildings — or a national Interstate highway system, which in the United States may be considered another wonder of the world — but they’re generally not monstrous residences.
Or mausoleums.
Related Reference
Pacepa, Ion Mihai and Rychlak, Ronald J. Disinformation. Washington, D.C.: WND Books, 2013.
Not to be too hypocritical and uppity here, a reminder of how it was in the west (with family and friends of a highly privileged sort) may be found here: http://www.anglotopia.net/anglophilia/top-11-stately-homes-in-england-best-english-manor-houses/ (11/9/2010).
Global communications and sub-state mafia and media;
Corruption and political criminality at state level and downward;
Within-state cultural and social fractiousness, incoherence and insecurity.
Whether Goodluck Jonathan’s Nigeria where Boko Haram runs riot or clannish Somalia where warlords reign and al-Shabaab roams wild, the above-stated conditions apply: the God mob and its criminal associates communicate and recruit at will while the reliability of official power seems questionable and other social variables attenuate the response to the presence of the problem.
General Population Divides
Criminal vs Just
Despotic vs Democratic
Loyalty to Local Power vs Integrity Before God
Medieval vs Modern
Shiite vs Sunni
Sub-National Culture vs National Identity
Choosing up sides is no game in war zones.
For many, the telling of a loyal lie would appear to feel both more comfortable and survivable than telling the truth (if this were not so, anti-Semitic libel would not exist); for as many more, political discomfort or greed — one, the other, or both — serve to influence immediate alliance: In fact, criminal actors all along the cutting edges of these conflicts leverage choice their way through direct confrontation, false praise, intimidation, and patronage, speaking of which . . . .
Methods
Assassination and Theft
Leverage and Intimidation
Manipulation and Patronage
Mafia is the way of both the “God Mob” and the “Anti-God Mob” — i.e., the communist drive to obtain control over the productive assets and capacities of others.
Tools
Banners, Scripts, and Programs
Committees, Gangs, Organizations, Patrols
Hardware and Software
Banners, scripts, and programs serve manipulation by piratical personalities.
Whether or not the same buy their own ranting, all despots amass immense power over others — and wealth thereby — on the basis of whom may be intimidated and who seduced to their designs. The banner is their cover; the script is that which plays in their heads on the stage of which each is the star of their own show; and the program is what is to be sold to or imposed on others for control by themselves.
The rest is about social violence, much produced by way of the mouth, and in the theaters of war, much more effect produced by violence.
Call it “big picture” or merely “bloviating prose”, the world would seem to wade in blood beneath the elements noted.
To form up societies capable of expelling the criminal would seem to require first and foremost idealism and integrity — behavior and performance bound to the more magnanimous of time-honored principles — in whatever area-wide or regional security system exists, and then that element has to prove effective in securing a whole constituency to the effect that any may offer up intelligence or call in a crime with confidence in the institutional forces serving their own defense.
From my node on the World Wide Web’s “Second Row Seat to History”, I cannot connect the dots from a Taliban assault on an army school in Peshawar to any of the myriad halls of power owned by dictatorships that In the Name of People engage in breathtaking exploitation of the property and productive capacities of the same. Confusion and corruption rule those worlds. Try to trade it on the ground — good luck with living to report the story; try to get at it from a computer terminal, the data is not extant and remoted relationships may want for a much improved security framework too.
One such remote Pakistani contact writes now and then of the visible presence of known Taliban operators on the streets where he lives. He says there seem to be “good Taliban and bad Taliban” and when asked to tell the difference says the good Taliban operate in Afghanistan and the bad ones in Pakistan.
The concept that is “frontier” is no longer a place — there’s no “over those mountains” or “beyond that river”: frontiers are instead spaces containing some mix of geopolitical content, and the worst contain the worst in some “observable-measurable” way but not conveniently visible way.
This piece got confused along the above lines — indirect connection, virtual space disconnectedness — but I’m going to publish it anyway just to have it off my plate.
As a first answer, revenge may serve a small and now embattled circle of Islamic militants certain to have drawn another broad intelligence and military response to their communities and operational redoubts.
That’s one story — the local-to-regional Taliban story — that should corroborate easily now and in the days ahead.
Beyond that story, one may wonder about the Taliban’s “handlers” — those who are not Taliban but help sustain their machinery, motivation, and organization: who are they?
Did what happened at the Army Public School in Peshawar today distract from events elsewhere in some meaningful way?
Target center for western interests has been Iran’s theokleptocracy and its efforts to wrap its mitts around a nuclear war making capability that it might use to leverage concessions (first) and theft (later). The Iranian regime as a focal point also has arranged around itself the Syrian-to-Russian axis and through Putin’s post-Soviet and now neo-feudal channel another line of political influence and power through Crimea and Hungary’s general drifting around fascist urges signalled both, albeit separably, by Jobbik and by Viktor Orban’s administration.
Call it the International Club of Bad Little Boys, the New Assembly of Global Autocrats — Assad, Erdogan, Khamenei, Orban, Putin Yanukovych (although he seems way off stage today): how far off as approvers, backers, enablers, instigators where they from what happened in Peshawar?
They don’t have to conduct the loud — most apparent — sections of their orchestras — direct control has limits, and I don’t go in for grand conspiracy theorizing — but they may countenance and encourage the chaos and suffering that distracts attention from their own quarters and their state-based thieving. As much aligns with their shared pathology as malignantly narcissistic leaders, each atop his own dizzying pyramid.
(posted to YouTube 11/10/2014)
He has increased the number of substantial directorates of the presidency from four to 13. New units include internal security, foreign relations, economy, defense, energy and investment monitoring. Previously there were only the directorates of administrative and financial affairs, institutional communications, information technology and human resources. The president, whose main function was to approve draft bills, used to sit around the table with his advisers and ask for their opinions.
According to the authors, Putin has overseen a phenomenal expansion in the awarding of presidential perks. At his disposal are 20 palaces and villas, a fleet of 58 aircraft, a flotilla of yachts worth some 3bn roubles (£59.2m), a watch collection worth 22m roubles and several top class Mercedes.
“We did not publish data on the cost of the clothes and things that Putin regularly uses: the suits, shoes and ties worth tens of thousands of dollars – mere trifles when compared to the villas, aeroplanes watches and cars,” they wrote.
Add “Setad”, the Iranian Entity with an estimated worth of $95 billion, privately held, and certainly not subject to public oversight: “It is not overseen by the Iranian Parliament, as that body voted in 2008 to “prohibit itself from monitoring organizations that the supreme leader controls, except with his permission”. It is, however, an important factor in Khameni’s power, giving him financial independence from parliament and the national budget, and thus “insulating him from Iran’s messy factional infighting” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Setad).
One might continue with this kind of thematic gathering — as regards dictators in general: man, how those cats do live! — because living high (on the backs of the low), from the junta in Burma to Paul Biya in Cameroon to Mugabe in Zimbabwe and back to Khamenei-Putin-Assad, living off the land (and all who toil upon it) is what they believe themselves designed to do “in name of the people”.
We know who financed the Afghan guerrillas 25 years ago. But who foots the bill for the Taliban now remains unclear. In the third part of his series about the lessons that can be learnt from the Soviet experience in Afghanistan, Vladimir Snegiryov poses question about the Taliban’s mysterious financial side.
Vladimir Snegiryov posed the question from the Russian perspective, and here more than five years later, I pose the same from the American stance: if it ain’t the devil (and well it could be the Devil, but if it’s not, lol), who is keeping the Taliban schedule loaded with assault plans?
Here is the latest: http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/12/16/us-afghanistan-kunar-idUSKBN0JU1QB20141216 – 12/16/2014 – “Taliban fighters mount offensive near Afghan border with Pakistan”.
From November: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-29871077 – “Pakistan bombing: Wagah suicide attack near Indian border.”
*Between publishing this post and today, January 19, 2015, the Wikipedia page has been altered. This table appears to have appeared on the page up to December 23, 2014 (and this blog post was first published on December 16, 2015).
As regards the general impression of the Khamenei regime (and the wealthy of Iran), there’s plenty online (that appears to be staying online) for maintaining the various impressions that predominate in the west.
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