06 Wednesday Aug 2014
This time around, small, clandestine groups calling themselves “white shrouds” have adopted a low-profile tactic of assassinating ISIS militants and attacking their positions, in contrast to the earlier tactic of well-known Islamist and Free Syrian Army militias leading the fight.
# # #
06 Wednesday Aug 2014
A senior Cairo-based Hamas official said late on Wednesday there was no agreement between the Israelis and Palestinians over the extension of a 72-hour Gaza ceasefire that took effect on Tuesday.
“There is no agreement on the extension of the truce,” Moussa Abu Marzouk wrote on his Twitter feed.
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4555803,00.html – 8/6/2014.
What I have seen of “malignant narcissists”, secular as well as religious, engaged in conflict is that they are all-in with their chips (as long as other people are the chips they play — and their backers, bankers, and handlers are every bit as evil as themselves). In essence, they do not reason (why should they?), they have no off button (what would be the point if they had to modify their own aggrandizement?), and they draw destruction all around themselves (is that not glorious, grand, and romantic?).
In more constrained arenas, there’s only so much damage a nutcase of a narcissist can do — e.g., build and sink a business; make and break a Hollywood career — but in politics and in control of a fief or state, the breed is just cold bad news.
Cloaked in religion, seducing their marks with sweet words, pirating the wealth of a community, bathed in perfume and smiling kindly while blood wells up around their ankles, such seems to me the world of men who confuse themselves with God and get others to go along with them.
How bad does it get with one of these vampires and its minions inhabiting the body of your community?
(8/6/2014)
A senior Israeli official told the BBC Israel had expressed its readiness to extend the truce under its current terms beyond its expiry on Friday.
However, a member of the Palestinian delegation at the Cairo talks, Moussa Abu Marzouk, wrote on Twitter: “There is no agreement to extend the ceasefire.”
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-28683800 – 8/6/2014.
# # #
06 Wednesday Aug 2014
I now have confirmation that The Lancet resisted publishing rebuttal letters. Only after a tedious and protracted back-and-forth did they publish a letter online, written by two Americans, Jeremy M. Levin and Ron Cohen, which critiqued the pseudo-scientific piece which attacked Israel and amounted to a series of Blood Libels against the Jewish state.
# # #
06 Wednesday Aug 2014
Where are the human rights and “solidarity” crowds on this?
“Humanitarian agencies said Tuesday that between 10,000 and 40,000 civilians remain trapped on Mount Sinjar since being driven out of surrounding villages and the town of Sinjar two days earlier. But the mountain that had looked like a refuge is becoming a graveyard for their children.”
And what kind of leader lays this kind of siege to innocents?
# # #
06 Wednesday Aug 2014
To see death — to touch it with still-living flesh, to smell its saliva, to feel it in your hands, around you, on every corner of the street. To witness its brutality, its vulgarity, its mercilessness. To watch as bodies are scattered about in piles in front of you, like discarded exam papers at the end of a school term. One leg here, one arm there, an eye, a severed head, fingers, hair, intestines.
We are having lunch. We have barely started, when the sound of the tanks’ mortars thunders through the house.
FTAC Introduction
Contemporary war has a surface everyone can see — and “see” it we do from mass murder by the “Islamic State” in Iraq to conventional devastation in Gaza — but for all that, the “behind the curtains” processes, whether involving Baghdaddi or Hamas, remain opaque. We don’t know how they do what they do, these “Islamists”, but all know they bring war to everyone’s doorstep wherever they are and wherever they go.
# # #
06 Wednesday Aug 2014
Tags
Dear ______,
I’d rather we would not talk about Israel because we seem to totally disagree on this subject, and I don’t want it to have a bad impact on our long-time friendship. But I want to share my thoughts with you about you saying that in reality the Israelis are ashamed about the war in Gaza.
I am sure that the vast majority of my friends in Israel are certainly not ashamed of that war.
Many have children in the army in Gaza or in the West Bank. Many are worried, desperate, and certainly feel no less compassion for the Palestinian civilian victims than you. Most find war terribly and do not want that innocent people die.
But they also do not want thousands of Israelis to die or to continue to live under rocket-fire, under constant threat, with radical Islamists around them that make no secret of what they will do with Jews as soon as they will have the occasion.
Hamas never says “Israelis”. For them there is no difference.
But I can comment only for myself: I am against violence and war and just as horrified and shocked as you are about injured and killed children all over the world .
My compassion is not limited to Indian or South American children, nor is it limited to Palestinian kids either.
My sympathies are also go to Syrian Pakistani, Sudanese, Nigerian, Iraqi, Somali, Lybian children who are killed by hundreds of thousands by the same ideology, by radical Islam, which has cost the lives of more tha 11 000 000 Muslims since 1948 11 000 !!! [STET]
I have contacts with Palestinians, even with a filmmaker from Gaza, now … but .. I see the danger posed by radical Islamists such as Hamas, and that the blockade of Gaza came AFTER the rocket attacks, and is not it’s cause.
And I know that the wall that has been erected after horrible terror attacks brutally murdered more than thousand Israeli civilians in buses, schools and pubs have lost their lives, and that the settlements are NOT the main cause of failed peace talks, which is the general consensus and mantra of the “European Hasbara” of the Left, Greens, Islamists and neo-Nazis.
I am shocked by your lack of compassion for Israelis being bombarded for years, the many gruesome terrorist attacks, many of which I indirectly (and one even had directly experienced!) !!
And your one-sided criticism of Israel and your lack of understanding what is happening there. Your black and white view of Israel scares me.
I also have my criticism of many what happened in Israel, the swing to the right, but that is also happening in Europe.
My friends there, and I are almost all for a two-state solution.
But radical Islamism all around Israel makes this solution increasingly impossible and dangerous for Israel.
It is not only the settlement policy, which can be criticized of course.
But writing hateful and ironic, cynical comments, and sometimes even posting false photos or articles is certainly no way to peace either.
The only way to peace is the path of the heart, through encountering each other, and a mutual attempt to understand each other’s pain and fears.
I have a few such friends in Israel who are seeking this path. But it is not possible when organizations like Hamas have power because they are making any contact impossible.
And to liken Bibi and Bennet, no matter how much one may accuse them of racism or war-mongering, to the leaders of Hamas, who kill and torture their own people, is absurd.
I am often enough in Israel to capture the atmosphere there. Yes, there is a growing racism , and hatred, and religious fanaticism, like all over the world, and it has to be taken care of.
But the way you criticize Israel in your many posts, and never utter even a single word of criticism of Hamas or Fatah, you kindle only hatred of Israel.
I’m against war and violence, but I see a great danger in radical Islam, that is the new fascism, and history repeats itself again, unfortunately. And with radical Islamists, it is not possible to conclude peace negotiations.
Have you read the Hamas Constitution which openly calls for the murder of Jews?
Hamas wanted to start a mega terrorist attack and would kill every Israeli if they had the chance.
And now they can send rockets from Gaza to Haifa. What should Israel do according to you, to protect their civilians?
Was it wrong that the Allies bombed Dresden and Berlin?
It is not easy to answer this moral question…
The violence and the suffering of many innocents is of course shocking to any feeling being, and the pictures of dead or injured children are heart-breaking of course.
But the vast majority of people in Israel is also realizing the danger of not reacting to the constant shelling of rockets and the threat of the tunnels, and of Hamas acquiring more weapons.
Would you like to see such gruesome pictures also from Israel? Bombs on planes? Some rockets hit Ben Gurion airport a few days ago. How many deaths would there be now in Israel, after years of missiles fired into Israel by Hamas if there were no shelters and no iron dome?
Israel is between a rock and a hard place.
And what I do know, not from the media but from the children of my friends who are now soldiers in Gaza, is that they very often tell people exactly where they should stay to be safe if the houses are being blown up, but that Hamas prevents them to escape, and fires rockets near schools, hospitals and mosques.
This whole situation is terrible, and moves me very much.
However, I am sure that one-sided criticism of Israel, particularly in Europe where anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism are so closely intertwined, does not contribute to peace, and hurts not only Israel, but also the non-Islamist Palestinians.
I would appreciate if this issue would be settled between us, I respect your opinion, but do not agree with it.
For me this is not a reason not to be friends, or to judge you.
Everyone has their past, and experiences, and if I lived in Germany I would perhaps also share your opinion; if you were in Israel and your sons in the army now , you would probably think differently as you do now, I don’t want to condemn anyone.
I look forward but to talk to you about other issues.
Very best wishes, and also do not condemn you me and some of your friends in Israel on our opinion.
Our children have often wept over friends killed in attacks, and we sat there with our gas masks during the Gulf War, or in the shelter when missiles were falling.
There is a wise Indian saying “condemn no one unless you’ve been walking around a few days in his moccasins”.
See you soon, be well, and I hope that soon peace will come ………
Shalom,
# # #
05 Tuesday Aug 2014
Posted in Anti-Semitism, Philology
A discriminatory, over-and-above hatred, inexplicable in its hysteria and virulence whatever justification is adduced for it; an unreasoning, deranged and as far as I can see irreversible revulsion that is poisoning everything we are supposed to believe in here – the free exchange of opinions, the clear-headedness of thinkers and teachers, the fine tracery of social interdependence we call community relations, modernity of outlook, tolerance, truth. You can taste the toxins on your tongue.
Often in the rush that comes with appreciating a well known writer’s voice on a cogent topic, I’m wont to overlook the date or catch up with that detail after posting. Not this time. February 18, 2009 — the last war involving Hamas! Same evil — same useful idiots out on the street embarked on their very own experience of that syndrome well known to the Tutsi of Rwanda: Paranoid Delusional Narcissistic Reflection of Motivation AKA “Reflection” or “Reflection in a Mirror.”
Try a hall of mirrors, for this habitual mode known well to the rank and file of the New Old Now Old Far Out and Lost Left (start with the rabid anti-Semites of the International Solidarity Movements, please) would seem well related to both the grandiose messianic delusions of malignant narcissists and the methods launched against others to get whatever it is they want, never mind that whatever they get, it’s never enough, for the damage in their souls is located elsewhere: nonetheless — flattery and patronage on one hand; intimidation, theft, and murder on the other.
And in between, “Gaslighting” with that capital “G”, i.e., the effort to produce so closed and pervasive an information environment — add an equally perverse communal group-think environment (bounded by ostracism or violence) — that their marks actually swallow their garbage.
Would that the manipulation had to do with only garbage, but these that fabricate their own “hall of mirrors” without end, who aggrandize themselves on their martyrdom of children and whole families, have ways of “taking off” that bring ruin to their worlds.
The case I make with that date and the persistent relevance of Howard Jacobson’s fine observations: what Hamas does in setting itself up and what it does to others by way of exploiting their energies and ultimately ruining their lives has to do with “habits of mind”.
Break those habits in the head suspended in cliches and tropes, and the criminality and the warring will diminish; keep them going — another six months or another sixty-six years — and they will grind down the humanity that keeps those habits in its possession.
Related from Pat Condell and posted to YouTube today:
# # #
05 Tuesday Aug 2014
Tags
Children don’t choose to be part of a war any more than they choose their parents. Anyone who can view the suffering of Palestinians as they regard those who have been wounded and maimed and mourn their dead with indifference is wrong. Those who have lost the capacity to realize the common humanity even with an enemy have lost their moral compass.
# # #
BackChannels 