Tag Archives: anti-Semitism

Book Excerpt: Shekhovtsov: KGB Seeds Anti-Semitic Violence: Period 1959–1960.

16 Monday Oct 2017

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Anti-Semitism, Books, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Philology, Political Psychology, Politics

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The KGB and its counterparts in the countries of the Warsaw Pact kept on infiltrating neo-Nazi organisations in West Germany and some other Western countries, but then with a different aim, namely to goad them into extremist activities, only to accuse Western countries of the alleged resurgence of Nazism afterwards. One example of such initiatives was the ‘swastika graffiti operation’ devised by Soviet KGB General Ivan Agayants, who at that time headed the KGB Department D (disinformation), and carried out in 1959– 1960 in West Germany. 79 In that period, KGB agents painted swastikas and anti-Semitic slogans on synagogues, tombstones and Jewish-owned shops. Jewish families received anonymous hate mail and threatening phone calls. The initial KGB operation would stir up residual anti-Semitic sentiments in the West German society and, consequently, produce a snowball effect where troublemakers would carry out anti-Semitic activities on their own.

Shekhovtsov, Anton (2017-09-08). Russia and the Western Far Right: Tango Noir (Routledge Studies in Fascism and the Far Right) (Kindle Locations 1272-1279). Taylor and Francis. Kindle Edition.  (Publishers URL).

Amazon U.S.: https://www.amazon.com/Russia-Western-Far-Right-Routledge/dp/1138658642.

Related Reference

Michel, Casey.  “Inside Russia’s alliance with white nationalists across the globe.” Interview with Anton Shekhovtsov.  Think Progress, October 15, 2017.

Note: the above relayed passage was highlighted while reading and before encountering Michel Casey’s interview with the author, in which it is described as “One of the most widely cited moments in reviews on your book . . . .”

🙂

It has been BackChannels hope that readers less specialized in political history and dimensions within it will nonetheless appreciate some bridging between the world of the ambitious academic and the information bombarded generalist who may most of all appreciate a point made fast and indelibly.

As its editor and, I’m sure, it’s readers have figured out, more material of interest often winds up in reference than in the main body of the post.  At near publication on this post, a quick look-up was given the terms, “Putin, political technologist” — here’s the image of first page results (Oct. 16, 2017):

L-U-Putin-PoliticalTechnologist

Also related on BackChannels as regards the “KGB Playbook”, two posts, one related to the incubating of ISIS by Bashar al-Assad and the other the “application” of Islamic Terrorism to the development of what this blog refers to as the “Newest Nationalism”:

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/12/09/syria-assad-isil-background/

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2017/03/11/reflexive-control-process-allahu-akbar-terrorism-new-nationalism-neo-feudalism/

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FTAC: On Arrogance, Religion, and Related Political Rhetoric

04 Monday Sep 2017

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Anti-Semitism, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Epistemology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Philology, Political Psychology, Politics, Psychology, Religion

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The prompt came also from the Qur’an (“5:82-83”) as presented this way: “You will surely find those closest in friendship to the believers to be those who say, “We are Christians.”  That is because among them are priests and monks who are not arrogant.”

Response —

“O you who have believed, do not take the Jews and the Christians as allies. They are [in fact] allies of one another. And whoever is an ally to them among you – then indeed, he is [one] of them. Indeed, Allah guides not the wrongdoing people”. – https://quran.com/5/51-61

Apparently, if one is not close to a monk or priest (or perhaps a recluse with a library), one may be in danger of trusting an untrustworthy friend.

Note: one might ask whether caliphs, kings, and emperors are not inherently arrogant in their assumptions of power over all others, and therefore particularly sensitive to arrogance in those whom they would subjugate.

Compact between shaman and chief and cleric and king spans the ages but may not be a permanent feature in humanity’s intellectual and political evolution. That may be something to think about in the experience of language, both in political rhetoric and in scripture (no matter to whom the words belong), and that of power as dominion over others.

The region of the Qur’an cited, 5:82 and 5:83 presents in English through several well-remarked translations — and of a standard four — Asad, Malik, Pickthall, and Yusuf Ali — the conveyances of none would seem as sweet as the statement quoted as the prompt.

Here is the presentation of the verse as translated by Yusuf Ali:

“Strongest among men in enmity to the believers wilt thou find the Jews and Pagans; and nearest among them in love to the believers wilt thou find those who say: “We are Christians:” because amongst these are men devoted to learning and men who have renounced the world and they are not arrogant.”

Source: http://www.alim.org/library/quran/ayah/compare/5/82/disbelievers-among-the-children-of-israel-were-cursed-by-the-tongues-of-david-and-jesus-and-christians-are-closer-to-muslims-than-the-jews-and-pagans

One thought attending the description of “men devoted to learning” and “who have renounced the world and are not arrogant” is that such men would seem less than challenging to martial or political power and therefore dismissible by any speaker intent on monopolizing and wielding such power.

Qur’an 5:83 although cited in the prompt appears not present in the statement at the top of this post.  Here is that verse in the Yusuf Ali translation from the Alim library URL noted:

“And when they listen to the revelation received by the Apostle thou wilt see their eyes overflowing with tears for they recognize the truth: they pray: “Our Lord! we believe; write us down among the witnesses.”

If thou woulds’t be apostle, caliph, king, or emperor would though not note the sweetness of the complete and grateful surrender of thine greatest potential resistance?

Given that question and thought, one might appreciate attempts at transitional revisionism.

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FTAC – Middle East Conflict (MEC) – The Big Wrap

24 Monday Jul 2017

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Anti-Semitism, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Islamic Small Wars, Philology, Political Psychology

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https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/12/27/excerpt-1920s-the-spread-of-hate-russia-germany-laqueur/

In the bridge between the medieval and modern eras, Germany’s Luther had at least opened the coffin’s lid:

“Luther’s influence was not decisive, and certainly not neutral, but ambivalent. So, for example, his writings communicated a generalized distrust, describing Jews as thieves in his preface to the 1528 edition of the influential 15th-century handbook for policing vagrants, the Liber vagatorum. This “evolved into a powerful and all-embracing stereotype—‘that of the Jews as a people of thieves and robbers extraordinaire,’” except that Luther by no means propagated this message alone.”

http://religion.oxfordre.com/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780199340378.001.0001/acrefore-9780199340378-e-312

We shouldn’t be writing with crayons, but on the web where ideas move quickly in these small tiles, broad statements and telegraphing are what we do.

The intellectual history of modern “Jew hate” appears to move from Russia (with the “Protocols”) via White Russian emigre fleeing the Bolshevik Revolution; at the end of WWII, the Soviet Union was in position to amplify and leverage anti-Semitic sentiment in the middle east into political influence and power.

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2015/10/12/ftac-tip-to-the-kgbs-amplification-of-middle-eastern-anti-semitism/

The Arab World could not have hated the Jews quite so much prior to WWII and Nazi and later Soviet influence for it’s states sustained a population of (that well-known figure) 800,000 Jews and their businesses and synagogues. There’s certainly a minority experience contained in the memory of that population, but that it was there and working tells us that the politics of the World War and its immediate aftermath set the stage both for the birth of Israel and the Arab expulsion of the Jews.

IF the Kingdom represents today’s Arab world, it is heavily invested in western success through Kingdom Holdings. It has taken small steps toward updating its culture (I have yet another blog piece standing signal to that), and it has taken interest in developing technology requiring the western interface. Nonetheless, the narcissistic medieval worldview needs must prevail for the time being, and cultural inertia continues to leverage anti-Semitism. (just a little more).

Rival Iran — Moscow / Moscow-Tehran — challenges the liberalism of the west with “absolute power” — the rule of the emperor or king for his own desired ends and with sufficient contempt and cruelty to enforce a malign will. One may consider the destruction of Syria by a tyrannical Assad as flanked by Putin and Khamenei merely a demonstration of the “principle” of absolute ownership of an entire people.

In 2011, Barack Obama offered President Putin a gambit: lean west — and Putin rejected the role of tempering Assad and instead embraced the KGB past — that which groomed Arafat and approved Abbas — and here we are. By focusing on ISIS and some on Tehran while “working with Russia”, we avoid a fast disaster.

For the Palestinians, all of the above involving Russia’s historic influence, has been a disaster, and this view — I don’t think I’m the only one propagating it — may be reaching the Arab World on the “Anglo and western axis”. The other channels and manipulates and incites along medieval lines that it means to sustain, and it wants the wars of all against all that lend it glory.

An earlier post noted social media’s unsuitability for “long copy”.

In “Life Online”, readers much prefer epigrammatic statements and slogans to digested narratives or overviews — we want to get the message quickly and then get back to the next social moment or breaking news.

I’ve tried with BackChannels to find a place between the scholarly tract and the lay observation with hope that other journalists — more powerful — and some in the generally interested public would pick up on the blog’s themes.

Of course, I place some faith and hope in each post at the moment it’s published, and often that is all a writer may do.

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FTAC: Anti-Semitism: On the Left Sidebar’s Earliest Statement

16 Sunday Jul 2017

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Anti-Semitism, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Political Psychology, Politics

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“Caution: The possession of anti-Semitic / anti-Zionist thought may be the measure of the owner’s own enslavement to criminal and medieval absolute power.”

The statement appears with many others down the left sidebar:

https://conflict-backchannels.com

The greater contest associated with anti-Semitism may be that between feudal power supported by the medieval worldview — power descends directly from God to some benighted human — and the modern image of our glorious and variegated humanity. Those that recognize that God, nature, and the universe have produced and sustained for us at this time about 7,000 living language cultures, each of them addressing their environmental and social challenges differently, should not be able to remain with or return to an inflexible absolutism. 

The supremacist values — out of any people anywhere at any time — defy nature and human nature, and where they’re forced to work — because it takes force to get them to work — people suffer . . . and it could be said that everyone suffers.

Indulgence in anti-Semitic cant may be a good signal of having chosen to march one’s people backward in time.

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Ukraine – A Litmus on the Further Ejection of Medieval Practices

17 Wednesday May 2017

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Also in Media, Anti-Semitism, Ukraine

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Wiesenthal Center Urges Ukrainian Authorities to Take Action Against General Who Threatened to Murder Jews

May 17, 2017

Jerusalem-The Simon Wiesenthal Center has called upon the Ukrainian government to take legal action against retired Security Service General Vasily Vovk in the wake of a recent Facebook post of his in which he wrote that he intends to murder Jews, among them Jewish MP Vadim Rabinovych. In a letter sent to Ukrainian ambassador to Israel Hennadii Nadolenko by its Director of Eastern European Affairs, Dr. Efraim Zuroff, the Center emphasized the severity of the general’s comments and lack hitherto of an appropriate response by the Ukrainian authorities.

According to Zuroff’s letter:

“I am aware of the fact that the embassy here in Israel responded to express your regret about the ‘highly provocative post of [an] anti-Semitic character,’ but there is no indication that any legal action of any sort has or will be taken against General Vovk. So although the embassy ‘condemns all kinds of manifestations of anti-Semitism, xenophobia, and other forms of intolerance,’ the bottom line as far as the Ukrainian authorities are concerned, is absolute impunity for vicious anti-Semites.

“We urge you to convey our concerns to the authorities in Kiev with a demand that appropriate and resolute action be taken against General Vovk, to send a clear message that in democratic Ukraine there will be no tolerance whatsoever for anti-Semites and bigots of any type.”

BackChannels snipped the contact data and boilerplate from the press release.  The original may be found here: http://www.wiesenthal.com/site/apps/nlnet/content.aspx?c=lsKWLbPJLnF&b=8776547&ct=14995945&notoc=1

On the same topic, there’s an ages old Russian story:

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/12/27/excerpt-1920s-the-spread-of-hate-russia-germany-laqueur/

Scaptegoating and targeting Jews, among others, seems ever more a part of feudal control and not the modern world.

To his credit, Putin maintains a stance best described as anti- anti-Semitism.  However, the same would seem belied by Moscow’s continuing relationships with Tehran, Hamas, Hezbollah, and PFLP.

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FTACT: Anti-Semitism and the Displacement of the Medieval Mode by a Developing Modern World

09 Tuesday May 2017

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Anti-Semitism, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Political Psychology

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Anti-Semitic talk and thought have been the most medieval tools for controlling, deflecting, and moving mobs and, at times, producing a little extra money for the feudal nobility by way of plunder accompanied by theft and murder.

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/12/27/excerpt-1920s-the-spread-of-hate-russia-germany-laqueur/

I have on deck a similar excerpt from Michael Kellogg’s book, _The Russian Roots of Nazism: White Émigrés and the Making of National Socialism, 1917–1945_ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005; online 2009). but I think what you may read by Walter Laqueur will give you something to think about.

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2015/10/12/ftac-tip-to-the-kgbs-amplification-of-middle-eastern-anti-semitism/

The Soviet Union picked up a share of the pieces — relationships — after the Nazi defeat in WWII, and it exploited anti-Semitic sentiment to build a base for itself.

The medieval history of religion gets a little complicated. Ruling Christians in Hungary in the 12th Century formed laws to discriminate against Jews and Jewish potential and accomplishment, and then upon activation applied the same laws to Muslims.

I’ve taken the stance with anti-Semitism x feudalism and tribalism that associated conflict and cruelty are really about replacing the medieval mode and worldview with what has become politically and spiritually modern — democratically checked and distributed political power; multicultural inclusion; a great measure of compassion and secular humanism in the functional aspects of law, and where beneath such law, all are treated as equal.

The thought may at first seem spotty as President Putin handily sustains possibly the most pro-Semitic Russia in Russian history, but as one visits Moscow’s relationships with Assand and Khamenei, Hezbollah and Hamas (and PFLP) plus autocrats like Erdogan and Orban (add in Le Pen but perhaps not the now well-briefed Trump), Moscow’s medieval facets would seem unmistakable.  Add to that the cruelties so well demonstrated in Syria and the cloaked “hybrid warfare” in Ukraine that would seem to amount to not much more than recognizable old infiltration accompanied by massive disinformation (for the misguiding of the masses, and much more of Russians — the 93 percent of Russians who may read and speak only in Russian — than of anyone else) and the onset of conventional war.

The inspiration for the post came by way of a Muslim convert to Christianity who had expressed enthusiasm for modern Israel, calling it a “Hebrew state” and an inspiration for the world.

Addendum

Not shortly after publishing this piece, I found a well-known figure boasting of a recently attended Christian, Jewish, and Muslim colloquy and querying the presence of a “clash of civilizations”.  My response:

There is a “clash of civilizations” — but it’s not the one we have been led to believe exists, i.e., some thing between the Muslim and Christian worlds. That “clash” doesn’t exist in any meaningful reality: what does exist is the struggle of the modern world to displace several worlds — Christian, Jewish, and Muslim — remaining mired in medieval outlooks, politics, and practices.

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FTAC – A Note on Culture-Wide Anti-Semitism, Orientalism, and the Perpetuation of the Feudal/Medieval Mode

26 Sunday Mar 2017

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Anti-Semitism, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology

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BackChannels may have hit this general topic area — i.e., the relationship between the promotion of anti-Semitism and the experience of fascistic and feudal political cultures.  Nonetheless, if one may get a complex of thoughts into a very small box, well all the better in our harried Internet Age.

Discrimination has been part of Islam — and in some ways defines Islam — since Muhammad chose to divide the world in the black-and-white differentiation between believers and unbelievers with Christians and Jews made to occupy a lesser but middle space, just one up from infidels (I’m really an amateur at this, so please forgive any over-simplifications nonetheless suited for discussion. That ability to smear competition has long been part of the medieval mentality and may well define it considering the “enthusiasm” for religious warfare not so long ago.

It may interest Muslims reading this thread to know that in Christian states, well, at least Hungary, 12th Century, laws designed to discriminate against Jews were upon activation applied equally to Muslims.

—

I think Edward Said published _Orientalism_ in 1972, and the same has become a staple in higher education representing politics on the Left / Far Left / Far Out Left.

I have it “on deck” today in my own library, so I’ll reserve comment on it but to convey two related URLs:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orientalism_(book)

http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/article/enough-said-false-scholarship-edward-said

The Russian Soviet Era effort to “pick up” difficult undeveloped states and exploit them by way of a “liberation theology” — as with the Palestinians — that produced sweet promises — as with the contemplated destruction of Israel, or the elimination of whites from states like Zimbabwe (now Zuma in South Africa is using the same ploy) — that would in fact install dictatorship (absolute power) and exploit The People has been accompanied in “Active Measures” fashion by way of inserting the poison into the intellectual assets of foreign states.

I write long enough as is, but any reading may pick up on the questions that develop from my assertions.

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Islam’s Double Vision: American Islamic Forum for Democracy & “Islam on the March!”

24 Friday Mar 2017

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Also in Media, American Domestic Affairs, Anti-Semitism, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Extreme Brown vs Red-Green, Islamic Small Wars, Philosophy, Politics, Religion

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AIFD-Banner-BePartOfTheChangex600

The American Islamic Forum for Democracy’s (AIFD) mission is to advocate for the preservation of the founding principles of the United States Constitution, liberty and freedom, through the separation of mosque and state.

AIFD is the most prominent American Muslim organization directly confronting the ideology of political Islam and openly countering the common belief that the Muslim faith is inextricably rooted to the concept of the Islamic State (Islamism). We stand firmly for universal human rights – including gender equality, freedom of conscience, and freedom of speech and expression. Founded by Dr. M. Zuhdi Jasser, AIFD envisions a future wherein Muslims never feel a conflict between their personal faith and their commitment to individual liberty and freedom. Rather, we work to empower Muslims to be primary advocates for liberty and freedom.

American Islamic Forum for Democracy.  “About AIFD”.  As encountered March 24, 2016. 

We are being called to tolerate, accommodate, and include people who believe it is compassionate to murder gay people; from Imams trained in moderate Saudi Arabia to moderate Iran. We see gays from these countries murdered before our eyes: gays hanging from cranes in the city squares or thrown off tall buildings. Think about that. Close your eyes and picture someone blindfolded, hands tied behind their back and flung over a building. Imagine the horror of that death. Yet we say nothing and invite Islam into our western countries-to preach and proselytize in the name of freedom of religion and freedom of speech-yet without question against our laws.

We tend to forget that Islam is far more than a religion. It, like democracy, is an ideology, but at odds with democracy.

Islam is inherently, innately, systemically, and endemically homophobic, misogynistic, xenophobic and virulently anti-Jewish. Islam opposes the ethic that the Jewish people brought into the world 3500 years ago and brought to these shores by Christians. We know this because we hear their calls “Death to America,” “Death to Israel,” “Death to the Jews.”

Bederman, Diane.  “Islam on the March Part 2”.  Diane Bederman.com: Your Passionate Voice of Reason, March 23, 2017.

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