11 Tuesday Nov 2014

Posted by in FTAC, Islamic Small Wars

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Switch axis: “The Israeli citizen, identified by the station only as 31 years old and a resident of Tel Aviv, said she had contacted Kurdish fighters over the Internet before travelling through Iraq to train at one of their camps on the Syrian border.

“They are our brothers,” she told the radio station. “They are good people. They love life, a lot like us, really.”

http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/fighting-isis-canadian-israeli-woman-joins-kurds-in-syria-1.2830122

There have been a lot of volunteer irregulars involved in the Islamic Small Wars, and most reports cover the rush to join al Qaeda and its affiliates. However the “choose sides” has this side too – lovin’ life and updating and upgrading whole societies.

The Kurds have been reported to have turned their backs on the Yezidis — and certainly left a few on a mountain surrounded by ISIS militants — but perhaps with a good influence, they too will become a little more universal.

Johnny and “Johnette” go off to war either to fight with barbarians or against them (and, sigh, some have been a little confused about which is the barbarian).

While it may be refreshing to read a story in which the cultural existence and self-determination of another people has attracted support, as it should, the “Islamic Small Wars” may widen by the measure of who is participating in open combat field operations.

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10 Monday Nov 2014

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

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“Eleven-year old girls are raped, and the males are massacred,” Hoenlein said with obvious pain in his voice, “yet you don’t hear the outcry… it is so horrific, yet the indifference of the world continues, and no steps are being taken; very few countries are interceding with aid and the like… I cannot understand: Where are the demonstrations? Where is the UN Security Council? It just reminds you [of what happened during the Holocaust]…”

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/187235#.VGFVzzTF98E – 11/9/2014.

The UK Daily Mail published a price list for the going rate of slaves in the IS market. The prices range according to age, with 40 to 50-year-olds going for only 50,000 dinars (about $43 US), while children under nine fetch 200,000 dinars (about $175).

http://www.breakingisraelnews.com/24058/isis-sex-slave-market-shows-plight-yazidi-girls/#pjZFXjEFT7l1wZVp.99 – 11/10/2014.

This unusual article — FSA cooks infiltrate and poison ISIS fighters — piggybacked the slave market video on the end of the story:

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/dozen-isis-fighters-killed-after-4590573 11/8/2014.

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10 Monday Nov 2014

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

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The complaint against Mashaal was not directed at Hamas rocket attacks on Israel, but at alleged war crimes Hamas perpetrated against the Gazan population.

The complaint alleged that on August 22, 2014, Hamas “executed 18 so-called collaborators who had been convicted of no crime,” including “publicly execut[ing] seven of these ‘collaborators.’” Moreover, the complaint said that on July 28, 2014, Hamas summarily executed 20 Gazan civilians for engaging in anti-war protests against its rule in the Strip.

http://www.jpost.com/Arab-Israeli-Conflict/Shurat-Hadin-files-war-crimes-complaint-against-Abbas-with-ICC-381312 – 11/10/2014

FTAC – On False Cause

10 Monday Nov 2014

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Philosophy, Politics

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The “Palestinian Cause” has left refugee residents stranded in Gaza and around Ramallah while failing to produce anything — anything — beyond “martyrs”, not that billionaires Mashaal and Haniyeh would wish to join them.

The failure over the summer of “Gaza Fortress” — credit Robert Satloff at TWI for that term — appears to have pushed Hamas to push itself where it has outside of (Judenrein) Gaza. Still, no matter what Hamas does, the cause is done, the encampments — as inholdings in Israel, as ghettos like Yarmouk in Syria — are maintained entirely not by disaffected Arab hands but by Arab kleptocrats hiding what they really do (how else become a billionaire on the backs of the impoverished?) behind cloaks, screens, and walls of disingenuous words.

Suzerainty might serve for Israel’s area of control to recognized international borders. The camps elsewhere want for a sea change in Arab heart and outlook. The twined ropes of national socialism and a strident Islamism have repeatedly served to aggrandize autocrats while failing, and in fact killing, their constituents.

It was never a real estate problem.

It isn’t one today.

It’s a problem about enmity founded in avarice and religious successionary ambition, old ropes tangled together by perhaps the Soviet encouragement of a thieving while patronizing “pan Arab nationalism” — of the sort pursued by Saddam Hussein (count the palaces built at the expense of the hunger of his constituents) — and a klepto-theocratic Islamism, the kind that sacrifices children to tunnel building and tells the mothers to regard their own innocent young as “martyrs”.

It should be over.

Someone needs to call it “over”.

No interest vested in sustaining the middle east conflict.

None, perhaps, hooked on one- and two-state real estate arguments care much for a responsible and, actually, liberating suzerainty with public courts and a press in which the tolerant among the curious are well defended and the reportage — clear, accurate, and complete — routinely notes not only the arrest but the cause of it as well.

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FTAC – Good Influence

10 Monday Nov 2014

Posted by in FTAC, Politics

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I’ve had mixed feelings about Tom Trento — I follow him on Facebook but have not friended him — ever since he drove up to Arab festival in Dearborn as an observer-provocateur. In response, I made friends with Dearborn mover and shaker Ron Amen; however, sigh, these far left and right alignments do not work well for me. If through “ethos, logos, and pathos” defeating one’s most strident (but reasoning) critic makes for progress, Trento is a strong critic of Islam where criticism is needed and, perhaps, reform or strong directional emphasis involving literature extant may respond to it.

“If I am not for myself, who will be for me?”

We cheerlead our own. We enjoy our fans. It’s good to have a good cultural and ethnic program and to feel good about it.

“If I am not for others, what am I?”

Helping others — other cultures and ethnic enclaves — grow into their own good program may come with the territory.

In the west, “Judeo-Christian” (+ “Greco-Roman”) alignment may be where history has delivered us.

What about everyone else?

Hillel’s Question No. 2 applies.

In the first stages of Facebook uptake — desktop computing meets broadband meets the “social network” — Qanta Ahmed asked, more or less, “What now? What do we do with this?” My response: “Good influence.”

As Jews, perhaps we talk about ourselves too much; however, we don’t conquer or proselytize but through thought. Good influence.

I’m going to add here a friend from Papua New Guinea, a nation that when the Christian ethnologists and linguists arrived supported more than 850 separate language cultures, some living within miles of one another and unaware of the existence of the neighbor.

I am personally going to turn into a “people who garden” if I can ever get into a house . . . . 🙂

I am for, at least in principle, the Baloch, the Kurds, Shiite Islam, Sufi Islam, truth-telling people wherever they are, however governed and organized, and I hope we will together say goodbye to a few more political criminals and organizations (like al-Qaeda and ISIS, like Setad in Iran, like “MoscVegas” in Russia) in my lifetime.

“With every generation, a little more freedom is won.”

I hope here that’s what we’re working on.