Washington, DC – The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) has continued its recognition of the suffering of the Syrian people by opening an exhibit focused on the regime war crimes documented by Caesar. Earlier this year, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum hosted defected regime photographer ‘Caesar,’ for a small meeting with USHMM executive staff and journalists. Caesar’s photos of systematic torture and killing in the Assad regime’s prisons will be featured in a special exhibit within the USHMM, which is the United States’ official Holocaust memorial. Since its opening in 1993, USHMM has received nearly forty million visitors, including over 3,500 foreign dignitaries from over 130 countries. Additionally in 2013, the museum’s website, which also now features a Syria section on its main page, received over 16.5 million visits. Visit http://www.ushmm.org/ to learn more about their online exhibit.
Mohammad Khair al-Wazir, director of the organizing committee of the “Inside Syria Forum”, which concluded today, said that this conference, aimed at greater coordination between activists and politicians, is not the first and will not be the last in a series of activities supervised by the Syrian Coalition and leaders in the of civil movement in Syria.
However, as has always been the case even in the darkest chapters of human history, there have been the noble few to whom “never again” was a promise to be kept regardless of the cost, and who have risen above the prevalent apathy and helped those in most need. Despite having their resources and capabilities stretched to the breaking point, for three years neither Jordan nor Lebanon ever closed their borders to the multitude of Syrian refugees. Refugees who managed to reach Turkey found a country and people whose hospitality and generosity knew no limits.
And despite having every reason to hunker down behind a big fence or wall, Israel did no such thing when it came to helping Syrians in need, and thousands of Syrian lives were saved by Israeli medical assistance on the Golan.
My two cents on global sluggishness and resistance to settling the Syrian Civil War with an influx of weapons and manpower sufficient to defeat both Bashar al-Assad and the Al-Qaeda affiliates now operating throughout the battlespace.
Endemic Syrian anti-westernism bolstered by a present if not embraced expanding “Islamism” (Islamic Jihad) may dampen enthusiasm for long-term adversary that needs immediate assistance.
Arab and Arab-Syrian anti-Semitism, of which this blog has taken note, would seem to prove that the revolution would rather fail and die then alter its alignment against the “criminal genocidal imperial colonialist Zionazi entity”.
The Great Dictator Putin-Assad-Khamenei lies, misleads, steals (from its own people) and a third of it is a known nuclear power.
My advice to the “moderate” Syrian revolutionary leadership: lose the anti-Semitic, anti-Western contempt and hate, so that I may remove the quotation marks around “moderate” and others may reevaluate how to meet Russian President Putin’s gambit in Syria and the Middle East for re-founding and sustaining a Greater Russian Empire.
Note 5/8/2014: after so many months with this post live, I’ve elected to remove the image of two children hanging from rafters allegedly victims of the persecution of of the Muslim Rohingya in Burma. As agitprop or testament, the picture had a visceral impact in real time and space — i.e., it was not bounded in the long ago of historical artifact — and in part because they are someone’s children, nephew and niece, cousins, playmates, and so on, I thought it time to leave the picture at its central vector.
There are some other pictures published on BackChannels that I would regard as “war porn” — the artifacts of conflict-linked violence, from bombing to stoning to firing squad to beheading: how much do you need to see? How much do I need to inadvertently promote in relation to commentary?
For visual impact, there’s plenty for finding online, but here I hope to generate insight beside observation in politics and political psychology.
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I fear to tread.
As noted (ftac) to the Pakistani friend who shared the image in a forum:
I’ll share this image. Although it seems natural for Muslims to view what is happening in Burma as a Buddhist-on-Muslim genocide, the state itself remains a military junta (with cosmetic reforms, if that much) hostile to Buddhist political power — its suppression of its own “Orange Revolution” was brutal — and otherwise cultivating through neglect the fears and resentments attending primitive tribalism. The Burmese leadership is holed up in its own paradise, basically, and the country as a country and culture have been left to go to hell, which is where they are today.
Parlayed in the way of other special interest religious press that plead their own victimization in the world, the above obscenity has at least as much to do with the global reserve of primitivism and tribalism as it does with Buddhist aggression, not that Buddhists and much of the rest of the world have not been pissed off by the destruction of the Bamyan Buddhas (and only Buddhists would have the discipline to take that kind of aggression in stride). However, this is not to suggest that whatever is working within some portion of the Burmese Rakhine People does not conflate with their religious identity.
Dark Space
The photograph as downloaded from Live Leak seems to have no EXIF or IPTC data. Somebody made the recording somewhere, and it can neither be authenticated nor denied as recent or valid.
Dark space — censorious, cordoned, private — abets autocrats, dictators, malignant narcissists. Whether geographically convenient — distant from airports, communication centers, and roads — or enforced in back rooms in the mafia way, informationally “dark space” hides evil.
President Obama may come away from Burma with the pasted on rictus telling nothing about what he’s thinking, apart from choosing his battles carefully and disengaging from most, but, lately, it seems that was has been happening in Burma isn’t staying in Burma.
Local people and senior police officers, speaking off the record, told us the southern section of this beautiful island is gangster territory – the hood of human traffickers, who run a number of secret prisons from the jungle floor.
However, one may call the true region Thailand’s dark space and, perhaps, corrupt edges.
It’s hard to tell.
While “The Majors” in the news business dip their toes in the bloody waters, for the most part, there seems to be some up-to-the-minute coverage in the blogosphere (I’ve been working with this post for a couple of hours and am surprised that it took the search string “Burmese military Royhinga genocide” to find it: Rohingya Blogger
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Since the second Rohingya massacre in October, the Burmese people have watched the world ignore or misrepresent what many experts are calling a genocide. President Thien Sein has been on a world tour, where he has been met with open arms, receiving a 21-gun salute in Australia and getting $5.9 billion of international debt canceled. Canada has opened its first-ever Burmese embassy, and multinational resource corporations are queuing for contracts. No one is in the mood to bring up genocide, even when a third massacre was openly planned for this month.
The initial enthusiasm surrounding recent political reform in Burma has recently given way to reminders of the dark legacy of the nation’s past. Among the most notable of these expositions was a July 2013 cover story published by Time Magazine in which journalist Hannah Beech showed that the specter of past crimes against humanity, including genocide, have resurfaced in Burma and that extremist forces in the country have focused their attention upon the Muslim minority within the Buddhist-majority state.
Today happens to be the Jewish Holocaust Remembrance Day, which I have been following via Facebook, but while it’s rightly a day for the Jews, my people, to honor the memory of the dead, to reflect on unimaginable suffering, to rejoice in life and statehood in the possession of the Land of Israel, it is also perhaps not the day to leave the next day to rest on the laurels of the last one.
This day, while reflecting on the murder of six million Jews and the miraculous survival and recovery of Jewry worldwide and the jewels that are Israel and Jerusalem that have stood symbolically and in real space and time against despotism for thousands of years,perhaps we should look again and with dogged persistence into the inhumanity displayed in the despicable photo that tops this post and the mentality in Burma, its government, and then in southeast Asia that has so brutalized and demeaned the Rohingya.
It is estimated that there are currently 800,000 to 1 million Rohingya living in Burma. Since the 1970’s the regime in Burma has been trying to drive out or restrict the Rohingya.[5] This sentiment was put into law in 1982 when it created a Citizenship Law, which mandates that a person must prove their Burmese ancestry dating back to 1823 in order to have freedom of movement and access to other basic rights such as education in the country.[6] (Recall: Armenian Genocide and Nazi Germany). This law is one of the prime reasons why the Rohingya have become “stateless.”
Islamic terrorists dressed in Nigerian military uniforms assaulted a college inside the country Sunday, gunning down dozens of students as they slept in their dorms and shot others trying to flee, witnesses say.
A costume du jour provides the Trojan horse and malevolent uncloaking suffices to murder with least risk dangerous merchants and sleeping students. One may start to wonder at this point whether the civilian targets of Boko Haram ambush should themselves be trained and armed.
They’re certainly not being defended by their government even as the same may pursue them.
One report noted a government shutdown of communications intended to impede Boko Haram’s coordination, but the same, so one might reason, would seem to prevent a common SOS getting through to Nigeria’s military.
Communication blackout
“A friend who came from Mubi at the weekend told me that there is no fighting in Mubi, but the curfew imposed on the state is affecting business and free movement,” Sani said. “You cannot communicate because phones have been cut. Farmers cannot farm because of fear, and food prices have gone up.”
Nigeria has experienced a recent spate of terrorist activities and protracted security challenges. In addition to the attacks in May, a suicide booming in March claimed the lives of 41 people, and in April, fighting between the army and Boko Haram claimed the lives of 187 people.
When the Nigerian military announces its victories against Boko Haram, it usually includes a list of the weapons that soldiers have recovered. It used to be mostly AK-47s, ammunition and bombs. More recently the list has included machine guns mounted on trucks, anti-aircraft and anti-tank guns.
As Nigerians were on the street protesting over fuel subsidy removal, a British based man was being arraigned in UK over the shipping of 80,000 rifles and pistols and 32 million rounds of ammunition to Nigeria. The shipment included 40,000 AK47 assault rifles, 30,000 rifles and 10,000 9mm pistols.
Eyes gouged out, bodies hanging from hooks, and fingers removed with pliers’: Horrific claims of torture emerge as soldiers reveal gory Kenyan mall massacre details
In Western news-making and opinion-forming circles, there’s a palpable reluctance to talk about the most noteworthy thing about modern Islamist violence: its barbarism, its graphic lack of moral restraint.
Many years ago and with reference to Al Shabaab, I have mentioned the unbridled aspect of a force of nature that may cloak itself in some kind of program but that in reality has no program apart from its own hypnotic inclination to indulge itself in mayhem, murder, and sadism beyond all limits.
Has Islam helped them along?
Probably — certainly no other major religion today supports the breadth, frequency, intensity, and undeniable and inexhaustible sadism associated with atrocious acts of violence committed most often against unprepared innocents with the war cry, “Allahu Akbar!”
With twisted political force, double-binds, intimidation and darkly teased loyalty one may warp the child whose greatest possession would seem to become his hate and his liability, equally consuming, his inability to contain it.
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Hitler exhibited many psychiatric symptoms, including extreme paranoia and defenses that ”could fill a psychiatry textbook,” he most likely was not truly mentally ill. Hitler’s paranoid delusions, Dr. Redlich writes, ”could be viewed as a symptom of mental disorder, but most of the personality functioned more than adequately.” Hitler, he added, ”knew what he was doing and he chose to do it with pride and enthusiasm.”
Readers of this blog know that I’ve an expanding toolkit built around “Facsimile Bipolar Political Sociopathy“, and it seems to be working just fine with such as Adolph Hitler, Al Shabaab, and Charles Manson.
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With every “Islamist” attack, Islam draws greater scrutiny, and even though as a class Muslims may not identify with terrorism or terrorists, especially with themselves comprising the vast majority of victims of this brand of criminal behavior, the same may taint them. This, of course, is part of “shimmer“. The more murder that takes place beneath the banner of Islam, the more conflict generated in its name, the more breathtaking — or numbing — the violence indulged, the more difficult it becomes to claim cultures associated with it equal, noble, or virtuous, their children and their doings becoming the most important gauge of their acumen and success.
Manson relocated the Family to a ranch near the Simi Valley owned by a friend of one his followers. Life there was dominated by rules meant to render Family members — particularly the women — enslaved and dependent. Suddenly, no female was to ever carry money. At the two daily meals, men were served first and “the women got what was left.”
Has the treatment of women in, say, Saudi Arabia, been so much different?
Notably for Americans, Manson occupies his one legendary true-crime space.
The assorted criminals and nut sacks associated with similarly outrageous crimes have no central connection to him apart from their recognition as comparatively isolated psychopaths.
What Al Shabaab does — and Al Qaeda and Taliban and . . . . well, you get the point: it’s a little different, more tied together across time and space and shared gruesome fantasia.
The reason one may note how Charlie Manson treated women and ask whether similar arrangements have not been as true of Saudi Arabia is that with the unnatural horror unleashed in Al Shabaab’s mindless zombie attack in Nairobi, the Manson and the Tate-LaBianca murder comes naturally to mind. It’s not only a convenient analog — again, one an isolated American lunatic crime (knives more than guns, if any, in that one too): the other as lunatic but predictable given the many nations hosting each a part of the Islamic Small Wars and how often similar mayhem occurs — but a key also to what the two entities may have had in common in part: a narcissism similar in its contemptuous and malignant aspects.
and why is that?
To shake the head and not understand seems only that much more dumb given what happened in Kenya at whose hands and with the authority, at least in their own heads, of what book beneath what banner associated with whom and what.
Whatever it is, it is not primarily “the west’s” fight.
The missiles, American officials warned, could one day be used by terrorist groups, some of them affiliated with Al Qaeda, to shoot down civilian aircraft.
But one country ignored this admonition: Qatar, the tiny, oil- and gas-rich emirate that has made itself the indispensable nation to rebel forces battling calcified Arab governments and that has been shipping arms to the Syrian rebels fighting the government of President Bashar al-Assad since 2011.
It’s mighty social of President Obama to allow others to strut their hour upon the global stage, which it appears Qatar may be doing as promotes a Sunni front in Syria by proxy.
As modern and shiny as Qatari money has made Qatar, onlookers may not be so certain about its mercenaries and their ability to restrain themselves. The alleged murder of Roula Adnan last week adds its bit of opprobrious behavior to the eating-the-heart video that went viral earlier in the month. I’ve hedged with “alleged” as the news reached me by way of Pakistan and involved as source a Syrian nationalist outlet given to headers like, “US Citizens Kill Deputy Head of Ministry of Education in Aleppo.”
We’re not going to have two essential empirical truths in a world integrating within the communal mind of the World Wide Web: whatever Qatar has enabled, even if spun over-the-top with canards out of the political playbooks of bomb throwers of the 1970s, what happened to Roula Adnan (and her neighbors) will come out.
And just before coming after Roula, the same “rebels”, the ones that the MSM is romanticizing broke into another home. They carried a man from Khalil family to the street and shot his hands and feet. Then they beaten up his wife and daughter, right in front of the neighbors. The terrorists wanted Syrians to witness the crime; they wanna scare us into submission.
As it does always, the fog of war will lift — but these days, it’s likely the curtains masking behind-the-scenes deals, wherever they have taken place, will be drawn back too.
“A famous Eye-Specialist Dr. Ali Haider, and his 11 year-old son Murtaza Ali Haider, was martyred Saudi-funded terrorists of Sipah-e-Sahaba and Punjab Government-backed Taliban opened fire on their car in Lahore’s Kinal Road.”
My return:
Bookmarked: Islam, Sectarian Conflict. 😦 Without a broad and common law enforcement (paramilitary) umbrella, this atrocious criminality would seem without end.
The special interest press reports these items also as a badge of honor and claim of grievous injustice — both fair enough — but the effect may be to encourage and sustain more of the same in cycle. Some groups — “Pallywood”, for sure, the remote Catholic press, maybe, sometimes — make stuff up: pure propaganda; but this is not.
It may be one reason Obama’s Administration has approached violence associated with Islamic Jihad or a Muslim defensive posture (e.g., Fort Hood Massacre) as clinically criminal — these events add up to “murder in the first degree” and nothing else — rather than legitimize them as culturally, politically, or socially expressive.
I mentioned posting the exchange to this blog.
So done.
As I had mentioned Fort Hood in the exchange, I may mention here that on Facebook, the Coalition of Fort Hood Heroes: More Than Remembrance wants the same sense of the crime — that is, a Muslim American military officer upset with the American military mission in Afghanistan opened fire on his (unarmed) brothers and sisters in uniform while shouting “Allahu Akbar” all the way through.
Just another “gun nut”?
Same category as any other mass shooting (i.e., the “mass shooting”, “massacre”, or “rampage” category — plain force of nature)?
Where nationality, race, or religion — a simple generalized “discriminator” — provides excuse for aggression and murder, no one wins. In fact, such violence would seem to backfire and set off an “antibody” type reaction in the populations surrounding events. Every assassination, every ambush of the innocent and of the unarmed, becomes — or should become — cause for a different kind of courage.
Whether such crimes should be stripped of the rhetorical filigree that would make them more grounded (in something, even poison) if no less hateful, I don’t know.
In the west, this ploy goes both ways: legislators and states on the modern track have a still new classification in “hate crimes” and may add to recognized felonies additional penalties for a crime having been anti-gay, anti-Jewish, anti-Muslim, and so on.
At the same time and as demonstrated by the Obama Administration in its handling of the context or framing of the Fort Hood Massacre, taking the chief contributor to cause — ideological conviction and identification within the Islamic frame (or a version of it) — and officially minimizing its role in the crime has become a part of the Administration’s display of appeasement, courtship, and denial in the American (Christian-majority nation) relationship with Islam or Muslim-majority states and the internal wiring that keeps many of the same (from Afghanistan to Yemen) slipping in pools of their own blood.
