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19 Thursday Jun 2014
Israel lends a hand. Will it be offered one as well?
19 Thursday Jun 2014
In May, Israel joined the US, Canada, France and England in providing support to Nigeria in its efforts to find the over 200 teenaged girls abducted by Boko Haram. “Israel expresses deep shock at the crime against the girls,” Netanyahu told the Nigerian president, “We are ready to help in finding the girls and fighting the cruel terrorism inflicted on you.”
Israel has a long history of providing aid to countries in trouble – even those where it does not have diplomatic relations, as seen in the video below.
It will be interesting to see if the world exerts pressure on, and withholds aid to the new Palestinian government, in light of the recent abduction of three Israeli teenagers. However, when one considers that only five of the 193 UN countries are helping Nigeria, one should temper expectations.
19 Thursday Jun 2014
Tags
Compiled Fast Reference: ISIS: 6/19/2014
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ISIS, wild and cruel, has proven through its criminality and inhumanity incapable of governance except through continued sadism. Call it deeply intoxicated by brute power, it is as it displays itself.
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Although the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) — a marauding army of Sunni Muslim jihadists — has turned south toward Baghdad, Kurds in the semi-autonomous oil-rich northeast expect that they may have to face their fellow Sunnis, who left a trail of death and destruction in overrunning the Iraqi army in taking the cities of Tikrit and Mosul.
The crisis caused by the sudden advance of the Isis insurgents has driven world crude prices past $114 a barrel in recent days and led to warnings of shortages from industry experts.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jun/18/dwindling-iraq-oil-reserves-cause-price-spike 6/18/2014.
. . . nearly 100 militants had been killed as his forces repelled wave after wave of attacks since Tuesday.
. . . a stark illustration of one of the most alarming aspects of ISIS’s rise: the group’s growing ability to fund its own operations through bank heists, extortion, kidnappings, and other tactics more commonly associated with the mob than with violent Islamist extremists.
ISIS appears to be as well-endowed economically as any such group can be endowed by conquest, by plunder and by voluntary contributions. How do they make their money?
http://wlrn.org/post/how-isis-endowed-conquest-stocks-its-war-chest 6/18/2014.
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Proposed: A Great Conversation About Power
18 Wednesday Jun 2014
Pharaoh to Hitler to Assad to ISIS: let’s have our talk about power, personality, and politics.
Now.
I don’t know what metaphor suits that concept that is time when it is time for one to seal off a section of history, to have arrived at the end of a chapter of one’s own story, and to have to look across a river (in time) or desert (in time — add the biblical term of forty years for wandering lost in the foyer to the future) — and to leave one bank (in time) to wade, swim, or bridge and walk to that other shoreline.
Is there parochial time?
Is there universal time that contains parochial time?
I feel that with the destruction of Syria, which carnage has exceeded that involved in the Destruction of Jerusalem by Titus (70 CE) and the challenge posed today by ISIS in Iraq, some Islamic introspection and review of Sunni-Shiite rivalry (throw in Arab anti-Semitism while at it) might be helpful.
Iraq is a test: will parochialism seek through blood letting a nation divided by sectarian identification that guarantees perpetual war — or will the middle, mild, and moderate of Sunni and Shiite humanity recognize ISIS as an alien force inimical to the survival of either and therefore band together to eject and destroy it?
What is the timeline for the development of either path?
The world would seem to have all of the time in the world for this conflict between (BackChannel’s trope coming right here) “two mad wasps in a bell jar”.
There’s a terrific political cartoon by artist Talal Nayer at this location: http://tnayer.blogspot.com/2014/01/sunni-vs-shiite.html.
Irshad Manji has featured the same on her Facebook fan page, and it has been shared about 500 times, a good indicator that others are seeing the same thing.
Power.
I think the Jews — because our stories compel us to argue about these things and one may have opinions — took the monotheist power represented by Pharaoh and threw it out into the universe — and beyond the universe — to an abstract conception of God (“King of the Universe”) — and that was that for the people who walked away from what Pharaoh represented as a power unto himself.
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Project Syria
18 Wednesday Jun 2014
What: Special Events
When: Wed 18 June 2014 –Sun 22 June 2014
Where: Victoria & Albert Museum, London. Tapestries, Room 94
INSTALLATION
Put on a headset to ‘walk’ the streets of Aleppo and enter a refugee camp full of children, as real events occur. The ongoing war in Syria has displaced nearly a third of the population; a terrible truth that can be hard to grasp at a distance and put you on scene as a witness to the unfolding events. Project Syria uses cutting-edge virtual reality technology to remove that distance.
V&A Director Dr Martin Roth has been instrumental in making sure Project Syria is hosted at the V&A during International Refugee Week 2014. Dr Roth clarifies that the V&A is a historic institution with a radical mission: to bring art and design to all. Prince Albert, its founder, was inspired by the work of Gottfried Semper…
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17 Tuesday Jun 2014
Posted in Anti-Semitism, Philology, Philosophy, Religion
Tags
anti-Semitism, great conversation, ideation, intellectual induction, Jewish community, Judaism, monotheism, monotheist rivalry, religion
We touched on this theme briefly at a synagogue planning meeting last night. In addition to reaching communities at the edges of our regional service area and bringing in also unaffiliated Jews, there was mention of the want of the passion to promote the distinctive wonderful qualities of the Jews as a community.
Not yet approached but on my mind very much as the very stamp of the “secularized” (in truth, I believe) American Jew: I want a Judaism and Jewish ethos more easily accessed and enjoyed on a more universalized basis. I’m not particularly Christian-friendly in this and also flatly reject Muhammad’s all-of-the-prophets-were-Muslim confusion, but as Judaism promotes a deep ethical and moral conversation between man and God and man and man, it may be a beacon beyond itself.
Generals Constantine and Muhammad built empires on the backbone of the Torah, but perhaps they did not build a better backbone in thought themselves.
With that said, “Jewish rejectionism” (of other faiths) also inspires anti-Semitic sentiment. A more welcoming religion might offset that.
A “beacon beyond itself’ — Judaism and the great conversation it invokes has been that, the basis for three great religions and inseparable from them.
No Moses?
No Muhammad.
It’s that simple.
Why not revisit the qualities of the base?
I’m a little more than half way through Fassihi’s book on Iraq — it seems I have mostly experienced the world through the technology of the the book, thousands of them — and when I’m done, I may well trim back to a second tour through the Torah.
In the process of this thinking out loud, I shared the draft with multifaith chaplain and writer Diane Weber Bederman, who then responded in this way:
I don’t see Judaism as rejectionist. I see it as a religion that says, believe in your God. The Noachide laws. It is a trusting religion that trusts in your beliefs. Unlike others who demean other religions we accept them That is the revolutionary change that Jews brought out of the desert. Caring for the other. Not by changing the other but by accepting the other. Which must not be confused with moral and cultural relativism
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Iraq Go No Go
17 Tuesday Jun 2014
It took Paul Bremer less than ten minutes to dissolve the Coalition Provisional Authority but it will take years, if not decades, for the Iraqi government to restore the messy legacy the Americans leave behind. The success of this new government hinges on its ability to convince skeptical Iraqis that they are nationalist caretakers of Iraq and not merely puppets controlled by Washington.
Fassihi, Farnaz. Waiting for an Ordinary Day. New York: Public Affairs, 2008.
Farnaz Fassihi’s book, which I am still reading, in part recounts the American abuse of Iraqi civilians in the wake of Operation Iraqi Freedom and well describes the consequences of that abuse.
While one may note also the ensuing chaos in the Iraqi-generated vendetta, sectarian assaults, and insurgent terror that provoked enormous IDP and refugee numbers while pumping casualty rates through the roof, the shadow looms large as regards American military incompetence related to “managing the peace” or the post-war transition overall.
When all goes well, people don’t give that normalcy a second thought.
Detain and torture the innocent (at any rate per capita): those stories mix with the war stories of a generation to become part of the national lore.
Having finally been extricated after nine years of trying to fix Iraq’s dysfunctional political culture, re-engaging in response to recent advances by Sunni extremists would be a mistake.
In a section titled, “We shouldn’t be taking sides in a religious war,” Loren Thompson notes, “The fundamental divide in Iraq that makes it ungovernable by anybody other than dictators is the split between the Sunnis and the Shiites, the two major sects within Islam.”
While I find much else in Loren’s article appeasing, disagreeable, and patronizing (on the political left), the hint that involvement in Iraq’s issues would engage in a deeply anachronistic and unreasoning cultural animosity tells a hard truth: The two deeply aggrieved camps have not been made to discover their common humanity.
The dreaded phantoms of the west, including Israel, made fearful by the propaganda of malignantly narcissistic leaders and spoilers all over the middle east cannot help them.
ISIS, as an infection pushing before it all potential victims of its ravenous appetites while subduing with fear all left to deal with it, may work that magic on the body politic, Sunni as well as Shiite.
We shall see.
And soon.
Related Reference
CBS News. “Will ISIS plan a 9/11-style terror plot against the U.S.” June 16, 2014.
After taking the weekend to ruminate on the suboptimal options available to him for dealing with the rapidly escalating crisis in Iraq and acting on none of them, the president awoke on Monday to his former acting CIA Director Mike Morell telling CBS’s This Morning hosts that the ISIS insurgency in Iraq poses an immediate threat to American national security.
This Day in History. “Mar 19, 2003: Bush announces the launch of Operation Iraqi Freedom.”
Addendum
FTAC – from correspondence immediately after posting this blog: “https://conflict-backchannels.com/2014/06/17/iraq-go-no-go/ Perhaps people have to sort themselves out, do they not? Resentment of the foreigner plus the foreigner’s inept qualities may have isolated Iraq. If anything like a national government wants its uniforms back, it’s going to have to get them itself.”
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FTAC – Iraq – Mad Wasps in a Bell Jar
16 Monday Jun 2014
As regards the above noted article, I am also reading http://www.amazon.com/Waiting-Ordinary-Day-Unraveling-Life/dp/B003D7JUF8 , which caught my eye at the used book store — $4. Apparently, American military forces and the mentality that accompanies them make a mess of relationships with even better-willed or moderate elements in the state’s culture and society, so it’s not so great sending in the Marines even though today’s Iraqi live in a world, a larger world, immensely different and unconcerned with the concerns of their own.
Elsewhere, I’ve characterized Sunni-Shiite rivalry (in neighboring Syria) as “two mad wasps in a bell jar” — they’re in this confined space, however large it may seem to those involved, bent on killing one another en masse in relation to aspects of religious history completely alien to most of the world — i.e., to Buddhists, Christians, Hindus, and others. That long embedded cultural content — the literature of the mind — holds sway against a clouded and uncertain political and spiritual future that wants for a sea change in the perception of humanity. If that change is happening, it’s happening around a storm front, the challenge posed last week by ISIS being exactly that. Before other thought may be entertained, the ISIS (radical Sunni) advance has to be stopped (by Shiite opposition within the framework adopted and endorsed over the course of centuries) and its power contained and reversed.
In neighboring Syria, it seems the one thing Obama and Putin may agree on has been containment rather than address of the issues in the space involved. Islam-by-the-sword, the legitimacy of political absolutism, the murderous Shiite-Sunni dispute have been essentially left alone in space to do as they wish, a de fact stance helpful primarily to war profiteers.
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The “above noted article” mentioned at the top of this relay was Matt Schiavenza’s “Why Ayatollah Al-Sistani’s Iraq Fatwa Is So Important” (International Business Times, June 13, 2014). Excerpt:
ISIS, meanwhile, announced that its capture of Mosul has triggered a recruitment surge, as radical Sunnis from around the region have traveled to Syria and Iraq to join the group. Residents in Mosul told the New York Times that ISIS has pacified the city, and that they prefer to be governed by a group al Qaeda deemed too radical than by the Shia-dominated government.
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