Rani Bibi (42) says, “I work as a hawker, vending utensils around villages, bartering them for raw material such as rubber and metallic goods. It is very rare when someone buys it for cash. I make One to Two Hundred Rupees a day and sometimes nothing after a whole day of vending under difficult conditions”.
According to UN-HABITAT Rani Bibi, is one of the 863 million people living in slums globally, making up 33% of the urban population in the developing world in 2012.
Taking into account various appraisals, it can be securely concluded that approximately 23 to 32 million people in Pakistan are slum dwellers. This constitutes a small but significant share of the one billion slum dweller across the globe. The influx of Afghans during the 1980s added to the number of katch abadi inhabitants.
Complete indoctrination and organization beneath the auspices of dictatorship. This is universal. Similar evil is just a fact of life worldwide but also arranged in discrete geopolitical space even though what I call the “Islamic Small Wars” doubtless produce the lion’s share of conflict misery globally. Other movements: drug cartels, which have a narcoterrorism edge to them; resource-based conflicts in Africa (where “warlords” may fight with elements of Islamic Jihad); and dictatorships like Robert Mugabe’s or Paul Biya’s where a “heavy hand” accompanies in-state plundering. All have their ugly moments.
When it hits close to home, it’s different, but no less horror has been visited on Muslims worldwide, the Christian community (visit Congo), Baha’i (iran), Yezidis (Iraq), and so on. It’s never only about the Jews; it is, however, always about a form of want for power and control of others.
The question before the answer ran along the lines, “How can anyone do that to someone?”
Well . . . .
It’s done worldwide, and (as you are reading BackChannels), not for cause but for expression of damaged personality, perhaps, and the want of limitless compensation, perhaps.
The term “malignant narcissism” belies a story taking place within the imagination and rationalizing reason of the autocrat or thug. That part, which lives in the privacy afforded individual mind, remains always hidden while the cultural and political effects become ever more obvious, disturbing, and horrific.
Things get bad.
All on the cyber war tour have been treated to a limitless pit of dismal still images and “rolling stock” (even though the “stock” today is digitally recorded — a child’s forearm and hand grasping a woman’s elbow, and that’s all that rests in the street, the bodies having been obliterated by the bomb that took them; children, truly, bloodied and hung by their necks from rafters in a Burmese shack, allegedly, a part of the tragedy of the Rohingya Muslims; executions by rifle of women kneeling in burqa before a stadium crowd; two young brothers, maybe twelve years old, set before a wall and being read a declaration by a so-called “adult” before being shot by firing squad; Pakistani Frontier Corps troops lined up on a hillside, shot by firing squad and finished by pistol, moaning, crying, and all . . . .
The peaceniks who want the brutality and carnage of conflict to stop tend to focus — or to be manipulated and focused — on facets of the political issues involved, but most may be most often deflected from attending to the character of the stagemaster driving — or attempting to drive — the entire theater.
Reading Recommended (for a Start)
Pacepa, Ion Mihai and Rychlak, Ronald J. Disinformation. Washington, D.C.: WND Books, 2013.
Post, Jerrold M. Leaders and their followers in a dangerous world: the psychology of political behavior. Forward by Alexander L. George. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2004.
U.A.E.’s list seems to be driven by something closer to home, however: The very first name included is the U.A.E. Muslim Brotherhood, and a significant number of the more surprising inclusions on the list appear to have ties to the transnational Sunni Islamist group: The Muslim American Society, for instance, was founded by Muslim Brotherhood members in the 1990s. Rumors about links to the Muslim Brotherhood have also dogged CAIR.
I generally exit out with “Shimmer” and plead also for pride in legacy if not the retention of aspects of legacy that have plainly outrun their permit: what “BadDaddy’s Islamic Hate” is doing in Iraq and Syria has no place on earth but that which it is temporarily occupying beneath its evil banner — it may be the “real deal”, the old, the authentic, how-it-was Islam, but whether or not so, it’s over: it only feels like it’s living Out There.
This with established organizations in the U.S. involves some complex thinking about advocacy organizations that play in the gray areas short of evident crimes: if it doesn’t commit crimes, why shut it down?
Take it further: what constitutes “incitement”? “Sedition”? “Conspiracy”?
The separation of talk from walk may keep some unsavory rhetoricians in business (until a crime traces directly back to them).
As much has been stated in this blog several times, and yet, the world from which Islam has come, and the Muslim leadership of it in various parts, understands how the program may be made to work — and work against themselves as much as anyone else. Quite rightly, the UAE’s criteria for threat appears to differ but focus on intellectual legacy, an aspect of “credentialism”, and in their opinion, and in their geopolitical space, the presence of CAIR and MAS must be barred.
What are the ghosts of skyjackers doing back on the front pages of the world’s news?
Along that axis I call “Putin-Assad-Khamenei” (or, possibly more accurately, Khamenei-Putin, given the way wise guys get power over one another), the post-Soviet still pan-Arab socialist whizbang PFLP believes it has a cause worth killing for, and while we can’t see the Big Money that helps move the mouths that incite the crime, one may suspect it’s there: plainly, “Jew hate” cloaks the piratical among leaders, Russia, for the time being excepted although Putin may be working an “anti- anti-Semitism” look-good cardas players around the “vertical of power” continue to accrue corrupt treasure for burial or cleaning safely in the rule-of-law west.
For the regime hated by Persians in Tehran, today’s murderous act fits with its promise of the destruction of the “Zionist Entity”, which has been the best cover (by deflection of attention) for thieving on behalf of Ayatollah Khamenei.
It may be broad connecting today’s attack (on the pious before God) with Moscow and Tehran and, by way of suggestion, perhaps others profiting from the promotion of chaos and conflict in the world, but nonetheless — and with mention of the PFLP — today’s act stinks of an old grave dug open and left to foul the air.
Yossi Dagan, the head of media relations for the Samaria Regional Council, filed a formal complaint Tuesday with the Government Press Office (GPO) against a CNN reporter for equating the terrorists involved in the Har Nof massacre with the victims.
According to Dagan, American CNN reporter Ben Wedeman was responsible for the headline describing the massacre under the headline, “Israeli police shot dead two Palestinian civilians” – when, in fact, the shooters were Palestinian terrorists who killed four Jews and wounded eight others as they prayed the morning service before being killed in a gun battle with police.
“We are proud of our sons who act fearlessly in the face of terrorist attacks,” Tarif said. “This is a black day for Israeli society and the State of Israel, when its citizens are murdered just for being Jewish.
“The Druze community condemns with revulsion the act of terrorism in which a Palestinian terrorist massacred and slaughtered innocent civilians. Such a situation, in which the country’s citizens are murdered on a daily basis, cannot continue,” Tarif said, and praised Israel’s security forces.
One of the most shocking aspects of the murderous attack on a Jerusalem synagogue this morning by men with guns and axes is not the attack itself—we’ve seen, from time to time, this sort of sectarian barbarism take place in places like Jerusalem, and Hebron. The most shocking aspect is the wholesale endorsement of this slaughter by Hamas, a group that, during this summer’s war in Gaza, half-succeeded in convincing the world that it wasn’t what it actually is: a group with actual genocidal intentions.
The first is that Jews can be forgiven for thinking that the world sees them as sacrificial pawns. Today’s victims are of course not the first deaths in the Palestinians’ latest not-quite-intifada. And they were not the first Americans killed either. And they were not the first victims of Abbas’s incitement or his directive to take action against Jews in Jerusalem. The sad fact is that the world regards a certain amount of Jewish blood as the cost of doing business–not worth getting all worked up about.
The word for that is “expendable.” And that’s what the families of victims and those who survived previous attacks understand all too well: their loved ones were expendable to the international community and, most painfully, to the government of the United States of America. A line has now been crossed, apparently, and the Jews under attack are no longer considered expendable. But it’s unfortunate that the line was there to begin with.
Neighbors make the neighborhood. When the neighbors have to count among themselves either secular or religious mafia — post-Soviet Putinism, retrograde Islamism — the good neighbors (e.g., “moderns” and “moderates”) disappear beneath the flashings of malignant egos who have as their chief concern themselves at the center of a universe they control and from which they derive adulation and love in abundance — that they have to rig everyone else’s reality is something easily overlooked — or hushed — by the same.
Gaza should be liberated from Hamas; Ramallah should be cleared of the hypocrites and liars of old PLO, PFLP, “solidarity” anti-Semites and lunatics and the basis in thought (the “information space”) for existing at all. We should know the names of families tied to terror by financing it; we should know how money moves into these streams that flow against humanity and see that law and military and paramilitary force cut them off and ruin them. Every facet sustained in sustaining the middle east conflict needs to be taken apart and taken down to its language — and then the language needs to be exploded never to be put back together again.
The neighbors make the neighborhood.
The problem with the middle east conflict resides with who has been running it, profiting from it, murdering for it (160 children in tunnels; the destruction and continuing suffering of Yarmouk in Syria [while Mashaal dances off to Tunisia with $2.5 billion in estimated wealth]) — it never was about the “poor Palestinians”, the Arab abandoned refugees of wars undertaken in the glorification of contempt for others, exclusiveness, and unbridled hate.
What is really challenged — all that is challenged — is the “malignant narcissism”, the domains of the “control freaks”, the feudal estates of the politically criminal.
Related
We feel that the Arabs and Jews are cousins in having suffered similar oppressions at the hands of powers stronger than themselves, and by a happy coincidence have been able to take the first step towards the attainment of their national ideals together.
The Arabs, especially the educated among us, look with the deepest sympathy on the Zionist movement. Our deputation here in Paris is fully acquainted with the proposals submitted yesterday by the Zionist Organisation to the Peace Conference, and we regard them as moderate and proper. We will do our best, in so far as we are concerned, to help them through: we will wish the Jews a most hearty welcome home.
According to Forbes, the Islamist terror group, also known by the acronyms ISIS or ISIL, has an annual income of $2 billion. Hamas comes in second, with a yearly revenue of $1 billion. Colombia’s FARC is ranked third with a $600 million annual turnover, while Hezbollah is fourth with $500 million. Fifth on the Forbes list is the Taliban with $400 million, followed by Al-Qaida and its affiliates with $150 million; Pakistani-based Lashkar e-Taiba with $100 million; Somalia’s Al-Shabaab with $100 million; Real IRA with $50 million; and, closing the top-ten list is Boko Haram, with a $25 million annual revenue.
The currency will free ISIS members from the “tyrannical monetary system that was imposed on the Muslims and was a reason for their enslavement and impoverishment, and the wasting the fortunes of the Ummah [the community of Muslims worldwide], making it easy prey in the hands of the Jews and Crusaders,” according to a translation via the Site Intelligence Group.
A new photographic exhibition in London follows the journey taken by England’s Prince of Wales (later King Edward VII) in 1862, as he undertook a four month tour around the Middle East.
And as usual, no sign of mosques or active Palestinian presence as the decades old argument from the Palestinian side to keep up the saga to fight and occupy, for the sake of jihad and foreign aid.
In the exhibition we find more photographs from Jerusalem in 1862, when the so called “palestinians” allegedly were already 1 million in population on land they profess to have “lost to Jewish occupation” a few decades later. The only problem with this argument is that, as with all photographs up to the second decade of 1900’s, there are rarely any Muslims or mosques to be found on any photographs. The only mosque – and a confiscated synagogue converted after Muslim invasion…
“The easiest day of the air campaign against ISIS was the first day,” said Christopher Harmer, an analyst with the Institute for the Study of War. U.S. pilots knew the locations of ISIS command and control facilities and storage depots, and to an extent the group was taken at least partially by surprise, since it didn’t know the precise time the strikes would begin. “Past that first day or two of easy targets, ISIS predictably dispersed into the civilian population. They quit using high-power radios, satellite and cellphones, starting moving to a dispersed command and control model,” Harmer said.
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