Islam – Two Recent Political Attitude Surveys

15 Wednesday Oct 2014

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

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Reference on this blog: “Shimmer”.

Update – October 9, 2014

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/10/06/ben-affleck-and-bill-maher-are-both-wrong-about-islamic-fundamentalism/ – 10/6/2014.  The global survey highlights tell at least a story suspected: attitudes are different in North America from those predominant in Asia and elsewhere.

As with other mirage, as one in fact draws closer to the object sought, the shimmering stops and more solid details maintain their appearance with solidity.

Update – October 15, 2014

The most striking as well as encouraging finding is that ISIS has almost no popular support in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, or Lebanon – even among Sunnis. Among Egyptians, a mere 3 percent express a favorable opinion of ISIS. In Saudi Arabia, the figure is slightly higher: 5 percent rate ISIS positively. In Lebanon, not a single Christian, Shiite, or Druze respondent viewed ISIS favorably; and even among Lebanon’s Sunnis, that figure is almost equally low at 1 percent.

http://fikraforum.org/?p=5608 – Distributed 10/14/2014 by The Washington Institute.  The web page summary has attached to it the full PDF report.

The BackChannel’s page “Shimmer” launched to suggest that factual data should exist somewhere between the apologist’s “ISIS does not represent Islam” and the strident anti-Jihadist’s “Islam is represented by ISIS”.

It should be noted that Islam-defending apologist and the strident Jihad watcher share the same abhorrence as regards what ISIS represents.  In contest, however, one argues that Muhammad the Messenger and the Qur’an are okey dokey and some Muslims are nutty (and need to be dealt with) and the other’s analysis suggests Muhammad’s battlefield history — with the Banu Qurayza signal to what was to come — plus the contradictions within the Qur’an plus patently vicious Hadith, including the counsel to deceive the infidel, are just plain ugly all the way through.

Now we’re starting to see numbers.

From a dimensional perspective, fog floats with them: the reduction “ISIS bad : Brotherhood good : Hamas very good” (suggested by facets of the Fikra Forum report) is a head scratcher: what central beliefs and tenets and related attitudes constitute irreducible surveyed objects of interest?

While the “Islamic Small Wars” burn everywhere beneath the surface or on it,  the want to address those “beliefs, tenets, and related attitudes” as candidly, completely and specifically as possible remains compelling.

Related and Recommended Reading

One woman gestured to her hijab, her face flushed, shouting: “Who are you to talk about these victims, when you aren’t even visibly Muslim?” For good measure, she added that I was personally responsible for the post 9/11 escalation in the harassment of veiled Muslim women.

I was stunned.

Ahmed, Qanta.  “In the Company of Prophets: One Muslim’s journey into Islamism, courtesy of Rutgers.”  National Review, October 15, 2014.

Update October 24, 2014

http://www.pewglobal.org/2013/09/10/muslim-publics-share-concerns-about-extremist-groups/ – 9/10/2013.  This poll predates the other two, but it belongs here as may Daniel Pipes’ classic “How Many Islamists?” from 2003.

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FTAC – ME – Comment – Political Absolutism

13 Monday Oct 2014

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Islamic Small Wars, Political Psychology, Politics

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The alternative axis of power — “Putin-Assad-Khamenei”, which may be more accurately expressed as “Khamenei-Putin-Assad” — is predicated entirely on the destruction of Jewish ethics, morality, and thought that has contributed mightily to the intellectual construction of the Judeo-Christian / Greco-Roman west. The west did not start out where it has arrived, but where it has arrived — equal rights, human rights, rule of law (rather than of men), democracy rather than despotism, etc. — stands as an affront to piratical dictatorships worldwide. Catch on and hang on or let go and get lost (so ISIS — bank robbers, plunderers extraordinaire — can pick you up) that sense of dignity in self and dignity in others might well be, ultimately, the “gift of the Jews”, from Moses to Muhammad in those parts speaking to the “better angels of our nature”. Putin, Assad, Khamenei are each believers in political absolutism. So is Baghdaddi. They may not know that they are really fighting together on the same side.

The tropes are going to take over, e.g., “Putin-Assad-Khamenei: together they are defending political absolutism.”

There’s some truth in them.

Perhaps they – so many repeated kernels, ideas, and puns – just need a page of their own.

Be that as it may, conflict involving “the west” may ultimately devolve to democracy vs despotism.

The details may be complicated, God knows, but the theme may be also just that simple.

Either have a voice in the governance of one’s geopolitical space — or not; either be free among those free to say yes and no to life’s challenges and opportunities — or be enslaved and have a host of decisions already made for you.  Such choosing between good and evil should be stark, but for some torn between a lonely idealism and the seductions set out by tyrants — or promoted by their agents, manipulations, and money — such choosing becomes deeply confused.

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FTAC – RANT – Pakistan – Bleating Hearts

13 Monday Oct 2014

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, foreign aid, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Pakistan, Political Psychology, United States of America

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Americans are not victims of America.

We own America.

We work for America as Americans and whether in private industry or government, we and every neighbor is in one or the other, Main Street to Wall Street, police station to military barracks in the far reaches of the world.

Hate America, undermine America, blame America — look in the mirror.

When aid to Pakistan, domestic and military, reaches Pakistan, it’s in Pakistani hands to spend. If much of that spending gets lost, goes without audit, does not make it to The People of Pakistan, does not improve security or domestic qualities in living, we didn’t spend it: we gave it.

Secrets-keeping governments naturally inspire conspiracy thinking and paranoia. Knowing this, in the U.S., we divulge our secrets, many, most, and all across time. Some decades may pass between act and acknowledgement but the truth (here) always surfaces. Our real armies don’t wear uniforms. Sometimes they don’t even get out of their jeans and sweatshirts, but they’re up to their elbows in historical research that may be and will be examined by peers and third parties and very possibly by God Almighty himself. That knowledge tends to make everyone responsible.

Such as ISIS love ambivalence, doubt, and weakness in targets, and the degree to which the same will sacrifice others not for God but for plunder and the merciless dominance of others is breathtaking.

If you think Iraq was a mistake, look over Saddam’s palaces built on the backs of his people. Ask the Marsh Arabs about the destruction of their timeless way of life. Ask the Kurdish people about what it’s like to be gassed en masse by an implacable tyrant. Speak to the Shiite about serving the Baathist “cause”.

Really hate the west: stop taking our money, time, resources, ingenuity, and available spending. The “west” for its part could and should do better to encourage better ecological and labor practices in its trading partners plus greater insistence on democracy and human rights. Beyond that, we give — Pakistan spends. If the state has problems with itself, swap out the politicians in the next round of elections.

Whether through the sewage pumped out by the solidarity movements are loose souls wandering in the shadows of one fascist past or another, there are global “Hate America First” crowds.

When cozy, they talk, inventing words that never existed, but it makes some feel good to have a central fixture for pelting with verbal stones.

Sound like something of which you may be aware?

Well, that’s language for you.  It has echoes, ghosts, mirage, murmurs, and reminders, and while it may be easy to go with so many programs that create ideas and relationships in our heads, we sometimes stop to think a moment about Iraqi poverty in the age in which Saddam Hussein maintained his palaces, and then we say “wait a minute — let’s have a closer look at how that works.”

That’s all it takes sometimes: a closer look at gross inequality, injustice, implacable will, and the numbing cruelty that accompanies them.

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Gaza Script Rewrite

13 Monday Oct 2014

Posted by in Gaza, Israel, Middle East

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For some 20 years now Israeli governments, left and right, operated within the paradigm of the two-states solution, “land for peace” formula and the belief that only the establishment of a Palestinian country in the very heart of our own will solve all our problems. This, however, was tried and failed numerously. If there’s indeed any science in “political science”, then these “experiments” and “observations” must be taken into the most serious of consideration.

http://levzhivaev.blogspot.co.il/2014/10/yom-kippur-and-false-conceptions.html – 10/9/2014.

I should publish the  above excerpt as a link and leave it be.

Instead, and this a true “back channel” in “People’s Diplomacy” (online), I will suggest only that poetry needs once again to be taken seriously.

🙂

The kind of Gazan leadership that uses children — 160 of them now dead — to build assault tunnels has a problem in the head sustained by language internalized and maintained (or else!) in the head.

That language can be changed.

Gazans may be quiet, considering the kind of ears the walls may have, but they need no longer be kept blind and deaf as well.

Where Hamas has exploited children, Gazans may know it.

Where Hamas has forced, manipulated, or positioned noncombatants and their immediate surrounds as human shields, Gazans well know it.

Where Khaled Mashaal appears to have gone missing through the action while producing a reputation as a now powerful and wealthy man worth more than $2.5 billion, Gazans may know it.

Where Israelis mean well and Arab Israelis, Christian or Muslim, do good by themselves and others, Gazans now know it.

Those are nice homilies for reading by the side of the road, but let’s really get on the on ramp: the language traps formed by Islamist and Soviet post-Soviet anti-Semitic cant and rant and the congruent manipulations in language to produce anti-Semitic / anti-Zionist passion are the kind of traps that hold the mind in tangled webs.  They’re woven of evil pairings — simple metonymy — into dismal and self-defeating worldviews.  Taken up and strewn around campuses and streets by the “solidarity movements”, they sustain the plundering of Gazans by powerful, deeply exploiting, and sociopathic personalities.

The Revolution on the Inside will not be televised.

Related Reference

http://levzhivaev.blogspot.co.il/2014/07/israeli-military-operations-in-gaza.html – 7/17/2014.

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FTAC – Droning Chat

13 Monday Oct 2014

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It’s a deeply cynical article in multiple. For one thing, Malala has a voice all her own, and she has made that voice make a difference in the world, and for that reason — for education, for equality, for freedom, for peace — she has gotten the ears of the truthfully free world.

Nabila Rehman is indeed a victim of the “war on terror” — which like the one on drugs is also a conflict involving people, many of whom either are or start out innocents. The level of effort, from Pakistani military runs with tanks (how come there seems to have been not much interest in the last sweep through the frontier?) to drone to shootouts to handcuffs and jails — responds to the character of challenge and resistance in the field: get the field down to where military or police may make arrests and more people live.

That civil or governed field isn’t there yet, and the drones correspond to keeping boots, not only American, off the ground, and the violence (compared to that which goes before a marching army) as low as that technology allows.

Now addressed: how did grandmother or family get on a target list in the first place?

It’s not easily done.

Somebody has to be noticed first.

As with Hamas in Gaza and elsewhere throughout the Islamic Small Wars, civilians get used badly, not only killed and maimed in the crossfire. Unlike computers and phones, minds may hold plans or signals that cannot be hacked (courier service). Homes and adjacent property may shelter tunnels, weapons depot, operations centers, etc. The God Mob may twist arms to get innocents in front of their evil doing, but that’s part of the hell that creates refugees — and damaged-for-life children.

I do commentary, not war planning or anything approaching “field operations” but as a writer, one wants to fill in the blanks: how did the target become a target? I would want to know that much before reviewing the dismal facts (“on the ground”) flowing down from that decision.

Inspiration:

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/11/malala-nabila-worlds-apart-201311193857549913.html – 11/1/2013.

The year-old Al Jazeera story was played against Malala’s recent Nobel Prize.

As there are people who believe that America (or the Jews, often enough) control and manipulate the world, there are writers who skinny on up that tree when the truth is there’s a lot of plain bad behavior, chaos, and danger out in the wild.  If the “Islamic Small Wars” (from Afghanistan to Yemen) could be solved with detectives, poets, and detachments of military and paramilitary polices, they would be handled just that way, and the drone bombings (which frequency has diminished) would diminish with reductions in terrorist attacks on persons and populations.

I have no apparent idea as to how a specific grandmother, family member, or home or home site gets on a target list, but it doesn’t happen with an “oops” by the hand of fate: somebody saw something, said something, investigated something — and the results are awful but much the same (but less) than market and mosque bombings and raids against military and police barracks.  Somehow, in the creation of anti-west opinion, a lot of information goes missing.

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Kobani, ISIS, Turkey, and the Political Smog of War

13 Monday Oct 2014

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The order is reverse-chronological

Turkey has not reached a new agreement to let the US use its Incirlik airbase in the fight against Islamic State (Isis) militants, and talks are continuing on the subject, the prime minister’s office has said, in comments that run contrary to a statement made by US national security adviser Susan Rice on Sunday.

The prime minister’s office said an agreement had been reached to train moderate Syrian rebels on Turkish soil, but that it was not yet clear “where [and] in what way” that would happen.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/oct/13/turkey-denies-agreement-open-air-bases-us-isis – 10/13/2014

Turkey has agreed to let US and coalition forces use its bases, including a key installation within 100 miles of the Syrian border, for operations against Islamic State (Isis) militants in Syria and Iraq, US defence officials have said.

But progress in negotiations with Turkey, including Ankara’s agreement to train several thousand Syrian moderate rebels, may not be enough to stop the massacre of civilians in Syria’s border town of Kobani, where intense fighting continues.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/oct/13/turkey-opens-bases-isis-syria-kobani-kurds-coalition – 10/13/2014.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights told the Associated Press the Islamic State militants, also known as ISIS or ISIL, have not been able to advance in Kobani since Friday but are sending in reinforcements. The Observatory’s chief, Rami Abdurrahman, said the group appears to have a shortage of fighters and has brought in members of its religious police known as the Hisbah to take part in the battles.

http://www.foxnews.com/world/2014/10/12/triple-suicide-bombing-in-iraq-kills-26-kurds/ – 10/12/2014

NATO should not expect any straight answers from the Administration of Turkey’s President Erdogan on anything having to do with Sunni Islamist Supremacist ambition.

Comments Not Posted – Posted

13 Monday Oct 2014

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

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For its quirky qualities, BackChannels draws a low but steady stream of viewers daily from around the world.  Apart from SEO spammers, few to none offer helpful comment, and when attempts are made, the qualities of the transmission may be sketchy.

Responding to an October 2013 story about imam Yusuf Kavakci, formerly of the Dallas Mosque Center and now living somewhere in Istanbul, this note arrived under pseudonym with an e-mail address traceable to a list of untraceable available e-mail addresses 🙂 —

Imam yusuf was not fit to be the imam,because he hide the true deen of Allah,without the sunnah of Prophet Mohammad mpbuh the deen is not complete. he was not following the sunnah in daily prayers and Janaza prayer. may Allah guide him,I am so glad he left the main mosque.

This spam-looking message responded to a piece critical of the Iranian regime’s little boy at the top and the flow down of that personality into the cruelty meted to Rayhaneh Jabbari:

***Please ACT & SHARE***
These petitions for #ReyhanehJabbari seem to have worsened the state of reconciliation for the two families. Please DO NOT sign or share such petitions, and also ask @Avaaz to remove this petition (there are also other sites such as the Amnesty international, Amnesty USA and…. please tell them, too):
https://secure.avaaz.org/en/petition/contact
and
https://secure.avaaz.org/act/?aSRcjhb
Choose campaign feedback in the section topic area and write sth like this:
Hello
Thanks for the petitions. You do a great job, but this petition on #ReyhanehJabbari’s case may worsen the state of the two families in reconciliation and saving Reyhaneh. I have heard that these petitions have increased the rage of the late Mr. Sarbandi’s family. So please remove this petition, it is so urgent. Reyhaneh may be hanged because of the impact of this petition. Thank you.

An Iranian engineer sent it.

Allegedly, Rayhaneh Jabbari fended off her would-be rapist, which is the only story that makes any sense of “Mr. Sarbandi’s” death, either at Jabbari’s hands or some other.

The truth may never be known, for to preserve the family honor of the deceased, Morteza Abdolali Sarbandi, with Ayatollah Khamenei’s complicity, the alleged primary crime, that of alleged attempted rape, must be erased, and to that end, evidence has been mangled and prosecution-side stories changed while Jabbari sits in jail under pressure to sign a “confession” to a murder without motive.

Someone living in fear of the despot, perhaps in his pay, or just plainly cognizant of how things work in the culture — a voice for the realpolitik that might spare a life — has sought fit to attempt to quiet the worldwide attention garnered by the Jabbari case.  The approach, however, would seem ventured far at the expense of justice and the kind of cold hard truthful examination that would lead to the same for Jabbari and all Iranians.

While BackChannels appreciates the attention, its comment and contact guidance has been updated.

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