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13 Thursday Nov 2014

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Once again Ukraine finds itself in a state of revolution and war, and the outcome may affect all Europe and the United States. As accomplished author and Ukraine scholar Wendy Lower notes, the conflict over who controls Ukraine’s future is also a conflict over the interpretation of its history. With the intent of informing, and perhaps narrowing the gap between historical facts and inflammatory rhetoric, the editors of Holocaust and Genocide Studies have issued this special edition on the Holocaust in Ukraine, featuring selected articles from the past ten years. Read as a whole, these essays begin to fill in the bigger picture of the history of Holocaust in Ukraine and the Nazi occupation.

Read the issue online for a limited time.

http://www.oxfordjournals.org/our_journals/holgen/ukraine.html

FTAC – There Are Handlers . . . .

13 Thursday Nov 2014

Posted by in A Little Wisdom, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC, Political Psychology, Politics

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There are . . . “handlers”. The adversely aligned organizations are their tools. The power and wealth involved are immense — look up “Setad”; enjoy Karen Dawisha’s still new book — and the traceback from street violence to a number of palaces should start to become clear. Perhaps: confront not the UN but 21st Century Neo-Feudalism.

“Adversely aligned” to Israel, the west, rule of law, human rights, dignity, autonomy, freedom : aligned to barbarism, criminality, mafia, rule of might, and malignantly and viciously narcissistic aggrandizement.

I think N’s on the right track as regards the relationship between corruption at the top and the driving of ideological, nationalist, or religious violence in the field or on the street except where the violence is counter to political mafia and manipulation.

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FTAC – MEC – Final Chapters

11 Tuesday Nov 2014

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Israel’s defense doctrine has the People going their own way until forced to responds. Biblically: the Jews leave Egypt; they don’t conquer it. 🙂 As an ethnolinguistic cohort — that is in large part what a “people” is — the Jews have had a homeland — the “Land of the Hebrews” — and they have it again. The adversarial Arab spin has been to invert and mirror the legitimate in an astonishing attempted theft using very people left scattered on the field as their armies retreated, and the same, armies and states, have treated the refugees as aliens ripe for exploitation, manipulation, segregation, and, most evil, weaponization.

When an AQ-type group infiltrated Nahr al-Bared (2007) to defend all of Lebanon from “Israeli aggression” — a good example of the “paranoid delusional reflection of motivation” — Lebanese Defense Forces had the camp filtered and bussed while it attacked and razed the same right down to its underground where the last holdouts were finally pinned.

More recently, neither Arab Nationalist al-Assad nor Arab Islamist al-Nusra appeared much interested in the wellbeing of the Palestinian residents of Yarmouk, which were cordoned, starved, used as human shields. http://www.unrwa.org/crisis-in-yarmouk Arafat managed to leave this world with millions of dollars for his widow; Mashaal remains in it with an estimated fortune above $2.5 billion.

Tyrants are not leaders.

Tyrants are takers.

Call them “kleptocratic”:, “piratical”, “autocratic”, “authoritarian”, their profession of being about “their people” (who confirms them?) effectively screens the deepest exploitation of the same. For deflection, anti-Semitism works, for if the tyrant can get his people to blame the Jews, for a while or a long time — especially if the press is controlled and critics are eliminated — the people won’t turn around to dwell on the evil of those who led them astray.

In peace, inhabitations, Jewish, Christian, Muslim, or other become normal commercial and tax generating centers _for those lucky enough to live in peace with their near neighbors_. That’s where the true end of the Gaza City and Ramallah stories reside. The surrounding Arab world has an even larger and more difficult story to outgrow, and it’s suffering between the ghosts of national socialism and a darkly romantic yearning for a long ago yesterday.

The presence of Israel is not on “Arab lands”, much less Persian ones.

The hatred of the Jews is not what drives the “middle east conflict”.

Sorry.

It only looked that way for a long time.

“Assad or Burn It” — Bashar al-Assad’s message to his subjugated people is what one sees across the collection of Arab interlocutors for the refugees of 1948: excessive cruelty and heartless, call it “sociopathic”, greed and venality on the part of leaders who make a lot of money — Arafat’s millions, Haniyeh and Mashaal’s billions, Khamenei’s Setad (estimated value: +$90 billion) — manipulating the emotions of vulnerable, infantilized, ultimately enslaved constituents.

Take the few leaders who most sustain the middle east conflict, and survey their behavior and their state governments for corruption, cruelty, injustice, inhumanity, piracy and tyranny.

As much appears to be on the web to be seen by way of news every day, numbers reported by the watching organizations, the blogs of some daring Arab souls.

In addition to http://www.unrwa.org/crisis-in-yarmouk, which is up to date (as of the posting of this piece):

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/arafats-billions/ – 11/7/2003

http://www.reuters.com/investigates/iran/#article/part1 – 11/11/2013 (this story broke one year ago today)

http://www.algemeiner.com/2014/07/28/gazas-millionaires-and-billionaires-how-hamass-leaders-got-rich-quick/ – 7/28/2014.

http://www.tabletmag.com/scroll/180400/hamas-killed-160-palestinian-children-to-build-terror-tunnels#undefined – 7/25/2014.

I am an authentic pro-Palestinian Arab reaching out to Israelis. I do not white-wash Israeli settlements or say that Islamophobic bigotry doesn’t exist among some members of the Jewish community. But I also acknowledge that Israel helped Syrians when the world abandoned them and that much of the hate toward Israel comes from Russia, Assad, and Iran’s attempts to rally support for their empire. I acknowledge CIJA for being extremely helpful when I reached out. I learned that many of my non-Arab allies weren’t friends at all. They hate Israel more than they loved Arabs; they are simply antisemites riding on the coattails of our tears.

By Maria al-Masani:

http://www.cija.ca/antisemitism/rising-antisemitism-1/ – 10/21/2014.
http://www.cija.ca/antisemitism/rising-antisemitism-2/ – 10/22/2014.

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Music tribute to the Sacrifice of US Servicemen (Dire Straits)

11 Tuesday Nov 2014

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology

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First.One.Through's avatarFirst One Through

The “War on Terror” has thus far claimed 4,423 US lives in Iraq; 2,320 lives In Afghanistan and another 66 lives around the Arabian Sea.

In addition, there have been over 50,000 injured, over 34,000 Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Diagnoses and over 4,000 servicemen killed since returning from battle from suicide and car accidents.

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Please, Do Not Choke On Your Coffee

11 Tuesday Nov 2014

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology

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Algiers — Amid reports that the Islamic State (ISIS) intends to rewrite and edit the Holy Qur’an, academics, scholars and religious leaders are voicing the need to confront the group on its ideological home turf.

According to Iraqi channel Afek, “The Islamic State organisation decided to rewrite the Qur’an, and delete some verses.”

Turkish daily Aydinlik also reported that ISIS had announced its intention to rearrange verses of the Qur’an.

The extremist group claims that the verses they want to delete were put in by “forgers”.

http://allafrica.com/stories/201411110361.html – 11/10/2014.

Amid calls for Islamic Reform, one would not have expected the same to have been proposed so swiftly by BadDaddy’s Islamic Hate.

The fate of the “B” guy himself is a mystery this week following reports of injury beneath aerial raids.  Posted about 20 hours ago:

(CNN) — He’s enemy No. 1 in the fight against ISIS. But after waves of airstrikes by both Iraq and U.S.-led coalition forces, questions abound over whether the terror group’s leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, was hit.

Iraq’s minister of defense, Khaled al-Obeidi, said on Facebook that al-Baghdadi was wounded in airstrikes in Mosul on Friday night and that his deputy, Musallam al-Turkmani, was killed.

But Iraq’s Interior Ministry said the Iraqi air force wounded al-Baghdadi in an airstrike Saturday not in Mosul, but in the Iraqi town of al-Qaim — about 400 kilometers (250 miles) away.

http://edition.cnn.com/2014/11/10/world/meast/isis-threat/index.html — 11/10/2014.

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FTAC – Observation on the Banu Qurayza Legend

11 Tuesday Nov 2014

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

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http://www.pbs.org/muhammad/ma_jews.shtml

For many, the bottom line on the Banu Qurayza legend — Tarek Fatah denies its authenticity, others embrace it and like it — involves the unconditional surrender of the Jewish tribe followed by the mass slaughter of all of the males (down to the youngest with but a single pubic hair). It stands as the echo in history of what ISIS is doing today and right to the letter of the script as read by Baghdaddi (who may be dead by now . . . we are uncertain of that state of affairs today).

The above noted PBS piece starts this way:

“Judaism was already well established in Medina two centuries before Muhammad’s birth. Although influential, the Jews did not rule the oasis. Rather, they were clients of two large Arab tribes there, the Khazraj and the Aws Allah, who protected them in return for feudal loyalty. Medina’s Jews were expert jewelers, and weapons and armor makers. There were many Jewish clans-some records indicate more than twenty, of which three were prominent-the Banu Nadir, the Banu Qaynuqa, and the Banu Qurayza.

“Various traditions uphold different views, and it is unclear whether Medina’s Jewish clans were Arabized Jews or Arabs who practiced Jewish monotheism. Certainly they were Arabic speakers with Arab names. They followed the fundamental precepts of the Torah, though scholars question their familiarity with the Talmud and Jewish scholarship, and there is a suggestion in the Qur’an that they may have embraced unorthodox beliefs, such as considering the Prophet Ezra the son of God.”

There are now many contradictory renditions of the Banu Qurayza legend and analysis on the web, but that may serve to underscore my argument that part of the world is fighting over survival through corrupted allegiance — the telling of loyal lies — and the risks of promoting an integrity that has God and the ideal — the true — as its standard. We hope for the latter because it serves all universally. It’s better to have honest reporting, honest scholarship, research with integrity, and, perhaps with the Banu Qurayza, the wisdom to say one doesn’t know how the Qurayza lives.

Historically, the Jews as merchants developing wealth have done so because of a circumspect trustworthiness — i.e., people with whom one can do earnest business. The medieval persecutions inevitably apply leverage based in religion — the Spanish Inquisition and the Spanish Expulsion serve as example — to shun, murder, and plunder the Jews for the wealth they have developed. That’s how it works, has always worked, and probably how it worked in the 7th Century: simple theft and murder cloaked in religion.

The Awesome Conversation may become a clear conversation about power, loyalty, idealism, and God.

Within the context of the Islamic Small Wars, there’s political litmus in how one relates to certain symbols, and the Banu Qurayza Legend is one of them.  Some embrace the story — a great victory (met with unconditional surrender followed by mass slaughter) — and some, like Tarek Fatah, find it so inexecrable that it needs to be downplayed and written out of the lore being dragged into the future.

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