Modern standards may link to a better informed perception of demarcations between childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. It hasn’t anything to do with affluence: we just know better. Cultures that maintain an earliest onset standard (or worse) may well be regarded as backwards and, frankly, stupid (uninformed) or stubborn or both. As with “honor killing”, we may recognize the anthropological and cultural evolution of the social behavior (we’re a wild species, after all, and we invent ourselves and pass on our invention through generations), but we don’t have to validate it or otherwise fit it into modern terms.
The topic was childhood marriages and related abuses, and the above paragraph was my thread-killer response.
While worldviews needs must shift with boundary changes and knowledge in the world, evolving cultural self-concept may involve selective discarding of no longer useful assumptions or habits of mind. Why hold on to what is not true? Or to what failed to work? Or what is not working? Or what is needlessly, uselessly dangerous or painful to another?
None sail without casting off lines and leaving old ports of call.
From another thread in response to not being dictated to by the U.S.:
Independence in curiosity and thought may not be dictated. Those attributes would seem within the province of the adventurous and bright across cultures and across time. However, exploration, illumination, insight, surprise, and vision may may be bound together in the complete intellectual tour.
Empirical method vs magical thinking is part of contemporary conflict as are secret societies vs open ones (but none are completely open) and loyalty to power vs integrity and loyalty only to what is ideal, what is God, and what are nature and the universe. Which of the worlds should one wish to inhabit: the world of everything imaginable is possible? The world of knowing, not guessing, with high probability of accurate perception?
On the web, I’ve been swimming of late through the worlds of “preppers” and “truthers”, one community preparing three-day “bug out bags” for the short-term surviving of a disaster, which admittedly, is nowhere impossible, and the latter continuing to blame all large-force variables on the usual pack of suspects: the Jews, the United States, the CIA, Mossad, et al. If it’s hidden in their soul and projected into reality, the same in targets suits the ascription of responsibility: the hidden hands of hidden will have arranged their worlds, and they are hell bent on figuring things out by guessing wildly, seeing selectively, and proving their perceptions objective, however disingenuous or tortured their arguments may be.
Given the shakiness of such realities, I’m inclined myself to turn some attention to writing fictions.
Kassig was abducted in October 2013 while traveling to a town in eastern Syria for SERA. For the intervening year, the Kassig family kept silent about his abduction “at the wish of those who have held their son,” the representative said.
U.S. officials confirmed to the Associated Press that Kassig was being held by the Islamic State.
A representative of the Kassig family who shared details about Peter Kassig reported he has converted to Islam while in captivity and now goes by the name Abdul-Rahman.
At least Wednesday appears to have passed without the predicted beheading.
Update, November 16, 2014
The authenticity of the footage has not been verified. National Security Council spokesperson Bernadette Meehan said in a statement that intelligence officials were “working as quickly as possible to determine its authenticity.
“Shimmer” continues to apply, as may “The Long War” (which suits perfectly the journal that follows it), and the themes built up around authenticity vs invention, medieval vs modern, Islamic Supremacist vs Islamic Democratic Compatibility.
Despite Shadi Hamid’s arguments for a democratic but illiberal Islamicism, that project would seem to have failed in the Muslim-majority states in which autocratic leadership prevails either as expressive of Islamic idealization, as in Saudi Arabia, or as the secular response to the same, as in Egypt and Syria where Islamism has been rejected without successfully attenuating the political absolutism that binds both.
Championing the middle and moderate ranks, which may need a Harris organization to map out the intellectual terrain in its totality, Qanta Ahmed, whom I follow via Facebook, consistently stands up for Islam as essentially graced in the west by liberal multiculturalism and secular tolerance. Indeed, in the western ethos, one’s deepest beliefs about God, nature, and the universe (and one’s self) are owned and sustained persons — free agents in their own lives — not their religious organizations (who may serve only at the pleasure of their subscribers), and not states.
In essence, I would cite Qanta Ahmed as the one (modern) “scholar more powerful against the devil than one thousand worshipers”.
The problem is that not only to “BadDaddy and His Islamic Hate” but to others less obviously stuffed full of themselves and evil, Qanta Ahmed may draw also the moderate to plain nasty “takfiri”, those who accuse others of heresy or treason in relation to their idea of themselves within Islam.
Even in America, leading Muslim organizations and clerics bully with threats of ostracism those Muslims who dare to dissent. Old-guard ideologues, too, used to monopoly control, make it crystal clear to their Muslim critics: Take us on and we will make an example of you as a traitor to the Muslim community (the ummah).
Little more than a month ago, Arizona physician M. Zuhdi Jasser, who years ago embarked on a mission to keep separate “mosque and state”, found himself the target of a fellow of his own mosque, a chiding resembling, in my opinion, the hand-pat-to-cheek known to mafia worldwide.
A little leaning, I call that, a bit of “straighten up, boychick, and get with our program (or else)”.
Whatever it may be called, the incident was aggressive, uncalled for, and, for Dr. Jasser, discomfiting, and, indeed, he placed the best chosen plain word “bullying” in the title of his article.
Is there or is there not “no compulsion in religion”.
A grammatic switch in Islamic culture pits loyalty against integrity, validates lying for gain or power (look through this lens when you visit or revisit the screeds associated with the middle east conflict), and the good who by definition possess integrity find themselves on the outs in their own community of legacy.
We’ll get around to differentiating between the pleasing — and pandering — notes of a language and bedrock human universal wisdom, but for now, while “BadDaddy and the Islamic Hate” burn, rape, murder, and plunder their way around the Iraq-Syria back of beyond, it may bear suggesting that one was the real Islam, emulated in anachronist attitude, dress, language, and ritual, and the other a nascent up-to-speed, modern and progressive Islamic Humanism.
It’s not that one shouldn’t have to choose between Ahmed’s way and Baghdaddi’s blood and horror-filled statement, but that the choice, much less the encouragement to retrogress, should not be available at all.
However, today, that choice is available and “Syriamania” and “Prison Islam” and “Islamic Jihad”, which is just not about good medicine or much good anything else but the jihadist’s immense and unbridled ego and penchant for sadism — see this blog’s pages on “malignant narcissism” and “Facsimile Bipolar Political Sociopathy” — are all real and but a handful of leaders have risen to turn the dismal tide.
Jamaleddin Khanjani (جمالدین خانجانی), aged 81, is one of seven Bahai ‘Yaran’ (national facilitators for the Bahais in Iran) who were sentenced to 20 years in prison after their May 2008 arrest. He is imprisoned in block 12, the wing of Raja’i Shahr prison that holds prisoners of conscience, and suffers from diverse ailments connected to his age. On September 27, in accordance with the instructions of the prison doctor, he was sent to a medical centre outside the prison, but unidentified officials opposed his treatment and he was returned to the prison. Another prisoner of conscience from the same section of Raja’i Shahr prison, Ali Salanpour (علی سلانپور), was taken to hospital and returned in the same way, also on September 27. He is suffering intense pain because of a problem with a vertebra in his neck. In his case he was asked, while…
Today we are seeing the identical mass psychopathology — just using different flags, slogans, hats and uniforms. The psychology of mass murder cults remains the same. That is why we see ISIS versions of KKK-types today, recruiting young, depressed, alienated teenagers from many nations by using snuff videos on social media. For those eager recruits, murderous barbarism for some cult delusion is a magnetic attraction. They need a faith, any faith, and if they feel desperate enough, ISIS will do. These were the same kinds of kids who wanted to join the Hitlerjuegend and a hundred other totalitarian youth cults in the last century.
Delara Darabi was put to death by hanging on May 1, 2009.
______
Crocodiles smile too.
What can be said about such pleasant looking men whose mirrors wall them off from the blood and horror suffered directly at their own criminal will?
One may only imagine how modern Iranians feel knowing that the murder that will take place about 6 days from this one is not an aberration in the politics attending their lives but perfectly normal now, an atmosphere of fear maintained for Persians in a manner no different than that which would be meted to them by any other conquering agent in history. In fact, Ayatollah Khamenei and President Rouhani, Iran’s two leading political sadists and sociopaths, have obtained from Iranians in general what conquest obtains: compliance, passivity, plunder, silence, and subjugation.
What follows has been only loosely put together, but as so much of blogging may be, it’s a snapshot of the Jabbari case as emblematic of the regime’s despotic, misogynist, piratical, and sadistic mentality and the machinations and politics attending it.
______
President Hassan Rouhani’s public criticism of Mr Cameron came as Amnesty International warned of the imminent execution in Tehran’s Evin Prison of a 26-year-old woman found guilty of murder.
If Reyhaneh Jabbari is hanged, she would be the 600th person to suffer the death penalty since Mr Rouhani took office in August last year – giving Iran the highest number of executions anywhere in the world, apart from China.
Therefore, Jabbari was sentenced to death for her action under the Islamic judiciary system of Iran. Why would a young professional woman be executed for defending herself against unwelcome actions from her superior, a sexual abuser?
The profound irony, and the peak of the Islamic Republic’s hypocrisy, became clear this week in a speech marking Women’s Day, when Iranian president Hassan Rouhani made international headlines by condemning any form of sexual discrimination and advocating for equal opportunities and rights for women.
Nazanin (Mahabad) Fatehi (Persian: نازنین فاتحی, born 1987) is an Iranian woman who was sentenced to death for stabbing a man who allegedly tried to rape her and her 15 year old niece, events occurring when she herself was a 17 year old. After more than 2 years in jail, Fatehi was cleared of intentional murder, ordered her to pay diyeh (blood money for the death), and released on bail (January 2007). As of 2012, Fatehi’s whereabouts were reported to be unknown to concerned supporters outside of Iran.
She was arrested after being raped by a 51 year old man. But according to Islamic Sharia Law, she was convicted for ‘crimes against chastity’, based on her admission, obtained through torture, that she repeatedly had sex with a 51-year-old ex-revolutionary guard turned taxi-driver Ali Darabi, a married man with children.[1] She was raped and tortured for 3 years,[2] a secret from both her family and the authorities. However, while in prison, she finally told her grandmother, saying that afterwards she could only walk on all fours because of the pain.[3] In the court the judge was Haji Rezai. As Atefah realised she was losing her case, she removed her hijab, an act seen as a severe contempt of the court, and argued that Ali Darabi should be punished, not she. She even removed her shoes and hit the judge with them.[4] The judge later sentenced her to death.
On August 15th, 2004 a 16-year-old girl was hanged in a public square in Neka, Iran. Her death sentence was for “acts incompatible with chastity”. Her name was Atefah Rafavi Sahaaleh. The only evidence against Atefah was her own forced confession.
Rouhani’s justice minister, Mustafa pour-Mohammadi, has been accused of executing thousands of Iranian political prisoners in 1988. [7] As a matter of formality, both US and EU officials have publicly criticized Iran’s human-rights records under Rouhani, but at the same time they have restarted trade in exchange for Iran dismantling its nuclear program.
Rouhani has filled his cabinet with wealthy ministers. According to Elias Naderan, a member of Iran’s parliament, several ministers in Rouhani’s cabinet have wealth of around 800 to 1000 billion tomans (US$265 to $330 million) – the toman is a superunit of the rial. [8] While most Iranians are suffering from poverty, Rouhani’s wife gave a lavish party on April 19 in the previous Shah’s Sadabad Palace, which raised strong criticism in the Iranian media. [9]
Setad has become one of the most powerful organizations in Iran, though many Iranians, and the wider world, know very little about it. In the past six years, it has morphed into a business juggernaut that now holds stakes in nearly every sector of Iranian industry, including finance, oil, telecommunications, the production of birth-control pills and even ostrich farming.
The organization’s total worth is difficult to pinpoint because of the secrecy of its accounts. But Setad’s holdings of real estate, corporate stakes and other assets total about $95 billion, Reuters has calculated.
He reportedly first expressed his opposition to the theocratic nature of the Islamic government of Iran under which Islamic jurists rule or provide “guardianship” in 1994. He has been quoted as saying Iranians “are loyal to the fundamentals of the true religion and the Prophet’s mission”, but are “tired of the religion of politics and political slogans.”[1]
Boroujerdi and many of his followers were arrested in Tehran on October 8, 2006, following a clash between police and hundreds of his followers. Iranian officials charged him with having claimed to be a representative of Muhammad al-Mahdi, a venerated figure in Shi’i Islam, a charge he denies.
I have been told there are others today in similar danger to Boroujerdi and Jabbari.
One may recall here that the (malignant) narcissist is never wrong — or so sensitive to criticism as to suppress as much of that as possible. In the medieval mode in which Ayatollah Khamenei exists, this sort of thing, a combination of rivalry accompanied by excoriating observations, may have been what compelled the Grand Ayatollah to push another ayatollah off stage:
Of course, you were correct when you said that international sanctions could not accomplish a damn thing! Not only because you and your cronies and support system in general, suffered no setback; your provinces of Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and Bahrain also weren’t bothered, because they blatantly looted and pillaged the God given wealth and natural resources of our defenseless nation and laughed their way to the bank, while stripping them of their economic independence and their will to think freely.
You have filled these thirty five years of contemporary history with your disgrace and deceit; and the names and memories of the sons of Iran have been written in blood which is the legacy of an antiquated dictatorship that operates in the dark ages.
Uttered in politics, even if not remembered, they may develop influence, which may prove more powerful than mere encrustation in ink as thoughts take on lives of their own, passing from mouth to ear to mind to heart, one from the other, again and again, across the world and possibly out into the universe to God’s own ears.
BackChannels 