Now everything has changed. The glass is empty, the world sees that it is empty, but the Russian media proclaims: “The glass is completely full.” And no sooner does the glass become full again than we hear: “It is empty. There is nothing there.” I worked for Soviet newspapers during the terms of four Soviet leaders, from Leonid Brezhnev to Mikhail Gorbachev, and this is the first time the authorities have lied so brazenly and shamelessly. They have truly reached a new low.
Israel has confirmed that the funding for the June kidnapping and murder of Israeli teenagers Naftali Frankel, Gilad Shaer, and Eyal Yifrah—which set off a chain of events that led to the current war in Gaza—was provided by Hamas.
Our “malignant narcissists” — self-aggrandizing, grandiose, messianic personalities who prize for themselves the absolute control of others (like that dictator “Putin-Assad-Khamenei”) — work hard to script and limit the intellectual experience of their marks. They do that by producing with force (intimidation) and wealth a pervasive information environment around themselves and in foreign states an alternative press, which is really their press.
When next we see a “Gaza Flotilla” or an “Apartheid Week” demonstration, it’s worth giving some thought to the character in personality involved in the mounting of the same.
Over the past two weeks, I’ve seen coordination lists for the kind of “actions” that “make the news”. There’s nothing spontaneous about them or actually mysterious as regards the motivations for involvement. The argument is only about power, not actually doing anything for anyone, and just back of that argument are despots and fascists who through their rhetoric convey perhaps love and family (of a sort) to those who would and do follow them.
However, the history of the same follows a familiar program, and none should be surprised by either the accumulation of wealth or ruin brought to others attending the life of, say, a Mugabe, the junta in Burma, a Putin with a “mafia state”, a Khamenei, a Khaled Mashaal (worth billions of dollars today), and so on.
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.
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.
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)
Addendum
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.”
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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