Tag Archives: barbarism

Taliban: The Whole World Is Watching

06 Monday Sep 2021

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, 21st Century Modern, Afghanistan, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Islamic Small Wars, Political Psychology

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And what is the world watching?

Potentially barbaric medieval ethical, moral, and spiritual decision-making in near real time for which the modern of this 21st Century need have no respect.

Here are two old examples of that kind of decision-making — According to the lore, Muhammad had had Safiyah’s husband killed for his treasure, and the murder was done in the most gruesome and torturing way: a fire was made on his belly to force his confession of knowledge of where the whole of that treasure had been buried. In proximate time, the prophet had taken Saifyah as war booty and later elevated her status to wife and free woman. How nice.

In near history, the rape of a 13-year-old Aisha Abrahim Duhulow by three men was followed up by stoning her to death for adultery. The private act of her tormentors has never been punished while her punishment unto death took place in a stadium before a thousand or so spectators.

How would such “justice” serve had what was meted to Safiyah or Aish involved your wife, daughter, or mother?

In such primitive manner, Muslims become the victims of more malign, narcissistic, and strident Muslims who have chosen to cover their own piratical behavior with familiar dogma.

Sweet words?

Foul deeds.

Two reports related in ethical, moral, and “spiritual” dimensions have surfaced recently in Afghanistan.

BBC. “Afghanistan: Taliban accused of killing pregnant police officer.” September 6, 2021. To be fair, the BBC has reported, “Details of the incident are still sketchy as many in Firozkoh fear retribution if they speak out. But three sources have told the BBC that the Taliban beat and shot Negar dead in front of her husband and children on Saturday.”

We shall have to wait and see whether the “New Improved Taliban” step up to the challenge of undertaking an empirical investigation using modern forensic methods amidst popular challenge. What integrity will they put on display; with what broad acceptance and trust may their findings be met? So we shall see.

Here’s another telltale with fear in the wind —

Looking pale and shattered having already suffered a beating at the hands of Taliban thugs, Gulafroz spoke in English, saying: ‘I was one of the very senior policewomen in Afghanistan.

‘I did everything to encourage women into the police, against the wishes of the Taliban. Now my life is in danger. Real danger.

‘Please help me and my family.’

Stewart, Will. “Top female Afghan cop beaten and hunted by the Taliban pleads for help from the West after eight-month-pregnant policewoman is executed by the terror group for removing a flag.”. Daily Mail, September 6, 2021.

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Nigeria: Raids: Fulani Land Pirates

01 Sunday Jul 2018

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Africa, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, International Development, Islamic Small Wars, Nigeria

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Posted to YouTube June 27, 2018.

The gun men came from the hills, armed with guns and machetes under the cover of an afternoon rain. They split into groups and selected remote areas within walking distances of between 40 and 50 minutes to unleash mayhem on innocent lives.

Before then, they had laid ambush on mourners returning from a funeral service in Kakuruk village and simultaneously raided nearby villages, shooting, stabbing and maiming anyone at sight. Even the youthful and agile were helpless as the scoundrels massacred and soiled the land with tears and blood. Witnesses said the carnage lasted for hours and travellers evacuated their vehicles and fled into the bush.

https://www.dailytrust.com.ng/inside-plateau-s-latest-killing-fields-258724.html – 6/30/2018

Last weekend 238 Christians were killed in a number of attacks by militia in Plateau State, a region in the heart of the country.

Campaigners are warning it is just the latest example of “pure genocide” in a country ravaged by religious division.

A joint statement issued by the Christian Association of Nigeria said more than 6,000 Christian worshippers – “mostly children, women and the aged” – had already been killed this year.

https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/981611/christian-persecution-christianity-nigeria – 6/30/2018.

Fulani brigades appear to arrive in numbers great enough to surround their targets and destroy them with automatic weapons and petrol.  For Christian defense: nothing — not weapons, which are confiscated by the government to discourage “vigilante actions”, not terrain, which is rugged but short on natural barriers to foot and vehicle assault, not military or police, who are either spread thin and easily confused or disinterested — and that last has become a point in political contention about the sincerity of Nigerian Muslim President Buhari in relation to his commitment to secure the Christian community in Nigeria.

Nigeria-PlateauState-180701

The blue frown refers to the 200 Nigerian recently killed by Fulani raiders in Plateau State.

United States Ambassador in Nigeria, Mr W. Stuart Symington has enjoined both the Nigerian leaders and citizens to make concerted efforts to stop the killings currently ravaging the country. The ambassador was speaking at ceremonies marking the 242 years of Independence for the United States of America.

Symington speaking on the situation in Nigeria said every day, people’s hopes are stopped by unnecessary deaths and by those whose acts reflect no good and served no cause.

http://www.tribuneonlineng.com/153039/ – 7/1/20128

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Ukraine – The American March, Washington, D.C., May 20, 2017

22 Monday May 2017

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, American Domestic Affairs, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Ukraine

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Saturday, May 20, 2017

Over there?

BackChannels readers have enjoyed a glimpse of the relationship between Moscow and terrorism.

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

The same have witnessed the destruction of Syria by Bashar al-Assad as flanked by Vladimir Putin and Ali Khamenei and how the casualty, IDP, and refugee figures have mounted on the chaos and mass destruction of warfare overseen by Damascus, Moscow, and Tehran.

The ambitious in research have figured out that the three dictatorships would rather fight the west than “The Terrorists” and then use the terrorists — al-Nusra, al-Qaeda, ISIS, and others — in their own interest in sustaining feudalism far into the 21st Century.  They should also know of the former Iraqi Baathist officers, those who once served Saddam Hussein, and their role in the creation and “handling” of ISIS.

If you think Russia’s invasion of Ukraine a separate issue . . . think again.

The organizer of the march for Ukraine in Washington, D.C., Ed Skibicki reports that the Ukrainian-language version of the march has pulled more than 120,000 views.

In BackChannels’ opinion, these videos and related material should be pulling hundreds of thousands of viewers worldwide as Ukraine serves — and as it has many times in history and too much in modern or “post-medieval” history — as a front line state standing against the barbarism, iron rule, greed, malign narcissism, and ruthlessness put on full display in Syria and Crimea by the once “Red-Green” phantoms of the Cold War.

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Barbaric Damascus – Mortality Report at End of 2016

28 Saturday Jan 2017

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Islamic Small Wars, Middle East, Syria

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During the period of October 1st, 2016 to December 14, 2016, the Damascus Center for Human Rights Studies (DCHRS) documented 1753 civilian victims, who were killed in Aleppo by Russian and Syrian regime forces. Among these civilians, there were 243 children and 120 women at a ratio of 14% and 9% respectively. As of December, extrajudicial killing began to take place and the number of victims that DCHRS was able to document is 82 victims.

Source: Damascus Center for Human Rights Studies.  “Statistical Analysis of Aleppo’s Victims During Oct 1, 2016 to Dec 14, 2016”.

Warning: while the page referenced features charts and graphs detailing casualties and the causes of mortality, it also provides earlier and horrific images of the victims of war, many of them children.

syria-war-dchrs-170128-0751-dim

The screen capture provides one example of charting available, which is larger on the page referenced.

Related

http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/foreign-policy/316485-trump-needs-a-new-approach-to-syria-bottom-up-defense – 1/27/2017.

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Also in Media – Syria – Reshet TV – Arab Israeli Muslim Excoriates UN on Syrian Inaction

16 Friday Dec 2016

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Also in Media, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Israel, Political Psychology, Politics, Syria

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Credit: Reshet TV – Lucy Aharish -Published December 15, 2016

For the malignant among leaders, the power aspired to becomes the power to visit suffering on others with impunity.

That power has been amply demonstrated in Syria with insufficient resistance.

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FTAC – Syrian Wrap

15 Monday Aug 2016

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Islamic Small Wars, Middle East, Philosophy, Political Psychology, Politics, Religion, Russia, Syria

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The “Syrian Knot” binds to itself two kinds of power in the world:

Political Absolutism (Moscow) v Democratic Distribution of Power (Washington)

Behind that contest:

–Syria’s drought and declining agriculture (leading to protests in 2011), which in a good world would be less important, but for a dictatorship, getting rid of people one doesn’t really care about or care for in the first place seems pretty convenient.

–Dissolving of the Soviet 25 years ago (December 26, 1991), for which the Soviet had prepared in the 1980s, and which Putin has effectively dropped the communist ideology but sustained the architecture of the earlier organization of the state, i.e., secret police (FSB), central leader (himself), and a privileged class (the “Oligarchs”). Possibly (probably), Russian barbarism predates the czars, and the combination of very dirty deeds (like bombing refugee camps) and high culture (like the concert in Palmyra) have centuries of historical precedent (that assertion is something I want to research and better anchor).

In 2011, and in a quick exchange about positions, Obama and Putin played what in chess would be an opening gambit. Obama had offered the potentially democratic Russian state a “reset” and Putin handily declined in favor of producing a neo-imperial update on the Soviet model. The KGB became the FSB. The invention of the PLO became the continuation of relationships with Hamas, Hezbollah, PFLP, and others.

***

The cultivating and promoting of anti-Semitism in the world is a feudal-medieval ruse to deflect fault on the part of leadership toward the Jews.

Why the Jews?

The Jews have been doing battle with “political absolutism” since the humbling of Pharaoh — thanks to God — and their turning their backs on the same with a “mixed multitude”, i.e., others who shared the Jewish abhorrence of the tyrant. What follows about 4,000 years later is “uptake” by others, i.e., the Romans who turn to Judaism and later differentiation and expansion of subscription (which brings wealth) as Christians. Several hundreds years after that, Muhammad borrows from the Jews, makes himself central in access to God or the Idea of God, and we arrive about here with a long sorry history of medieval warring over “political absolutism” and the basis for it (e.g., “divine right”; “dictatorship of the proletariat”; etc.)

With dictators, you know my rule: “Different Talks — Same Walk!”

Now the “digest” version of the Jews and Russia —

Once Rome had burned, raped, and sacked Jerusalem, the Jews became everybody’s “guests” . . . so come forward a thousand-plus years and find the Jews, a People laden with laws from the time of Moses, a “problem” (more of an opportunity) — an alien enterprise, strangers in a strange land — to Russian Christians who could and would leverage anti-Semitism into the customary theft and murder.

Look into the history of the Cossacks and the Pale of Settlement.

Then go forward again into the Soviet enterprise and its repression of religion (“the opiate of the people,” said Karl Marx). Russian Jews found themselves trapped for decades in Russia by the forces of Soviet exploitation and possession. When it became possible to leave that atmosphere en masse, they did.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Jews_in_Israel

Along comes Putin, and Putin makes it his mission to “defend” the speakers of Russian — “Russophones” — wherever they may be found. The ploy excuses aggression (as in Ukraine). With hundreds of thousands of the Jews of Russia repaired to Israel, he knows also to become modern in this fashion and stand against anti-Semitism!

Post-Holocaust, post-Hitler, what Russian leader would not do the same?

Let’s add back ISIS — Assad’s incubated horror — and “Islamic Terrorism” in general and its effects: when a mosquito pricks the skin, the skin swells. The body responds to in the insult. Of course, the hand slaps or slaps away the mosquito (or the bee or wasp), and it starts repairs against infection and against any poisons delivered.

So it is that each terrorist act encourages resurgent nationalism where it takes place.
Migration has similar effects: people want to close their doors seal their boundaries, and fend off those most in need.

It could be said that nature is cruel — or here with political nature that Putin, Assad, and Khamenei are cruel, but like the cowardly fireman who sets the fire and later offers to put it out (!), these have created a condition and perception in many of the west that they can handle ISIS — and they may, having incubated that enterprise to glorify themselves in battle against the same.

Oh brother oh sister — Israel is a precious jewel of a small state representing the character of a people who turned their backs on the idea that any man, including Moses, could represent God on earth. For the Jews, God is indeed greater, and while Moses gets recognition, prayer is always to God, not to Moses. That separation changes the politics, and when Titus of Rome destroys Jerusalem, the priests take the hit (because they failed!) and the scholars and teachers rise in the esteem of the community and the great conversation about ethics and morality comes to represent the Jews. Old Jewish wisdom . . . that’s just my opinion and not very good scholarship but something that might hold up to scrutiny.

Putin has melded many modern ideas into his own medieval atmosphere and the surface of related political theater — “Assad vs The Terrorists” — works for most who simply haven’t the time to examine (as I have) the complexity of the conflicts displayed or experienced.

Israelis don’t like being murdered by incited teenagers creeping into their children’s bedrooms — and there is Putin the Strong fending off Chechnya rebels and applying Russia’s most advanced weapons to the same once they have been channeled to ISIS in Syria.

The “west” has moved around Syria in its responding to post-Soviet neo-Imperial Russia in Syria and Crimea and elsewhere, but, give the devil his due, Putin has worked to weaken the European Union (the British vote on BREXIT seems to me an example of success with that) and NATO (Erdogan’s own embrace of despotism in Turkey accompanied by a go-ahead from Russia on the the “Turkish Stream” pipeline project seems also to affirm Putin’s influence and power) — and he has succeeded in partially renewing — or affirming — our world hosts immensely powerful financial and political elites — medievalism in the modern world.

Post-Soviet Russia saw two old clients — Saddam Hussein and Muammar Qaddafi — swept away into history, but with Assad in Syria and the way to Iran potentially laid bare, the dictators have taken their stands.

Would nature have forced mass (economic) migration from Syria?

Possibly.

But nature would not have incubated ISIS (by selecting other targets for bombing and combat earlier in the war) to later aggrandize and glorify the “abilities” of the “strong men”.

The conversation continued, always a few more words, a little more distillation of old observations and new ideas.

In the Garden of Eden story in the Torah, God introduces to Adam and Eve human awareness, self-awareness, and conscience.

It’s all right there at the beginning, i.e., a statement about our own nature — and it’s a good statement.

It’s not the Christian statement; it’s not Muhammad’s statement.

It’s a mysterious statement about the two that God will send off into human life and they will have to work to eat and wrestle with some thorny realities in the way of their own survival.

The dictators — caliphs, emperors, kings, sultans down through the ages — often bend the Divine to their own will, and then they use that power that comes from similar words and technologies in the worst imaginable ways.

The good seem either not powerful enough, proactive enough, or smart enough, frankly, to unmake the tyrant before he has got his hands on a serous treasury and a willing military.

Some could argue that the evil is as much our nature too.

I don’t know the answer to that.

I know that Syria represents perhaps the darkest tragedy of our time, as I believe it has been fashioned by Moscow, Damascus, and Tehran as a complete theater of politics and war.

______

BackChannels had a Muslim conversational partner for this post and one who advocated for Israel against anti-Semitic anti-Zionist smears launched in an advocacy site for the Syrian Revolution.  Questions were raised about Israel’s nationalist politics, links with Russia, and associated anti-Islamism.  Over the years, BackChannels has come to see Moscow promoting the amplification of political sentiment into internal conflicts beyond its borders.  Color codes “Red”, “Red-Green”, “Red-Black” apply to the reinvigorating of “old comrade networks” and the Islamic and Black Power politics that feed Black Lives Matter, Palestinian Solidarity, International Solidarity, Code Pink, and so many others nourished by the still moving inertia of old Soviet disinformation and related inspiration.

As Putin and Russo-Iranian politics have also promoted Far Right politics (Marie Le Pen in France, Jobbik in Hungary), the political color code “Brown” for nationalists and national socialists also applies.  It’s perfectly sensible that any space attacked by an alien force, conveniently “Islamist” these days, including “Islamist” against Muslims worldwide, will rally around its flag, and that whether it be in London or Islamabad.

A third force — i.e., a Moscow — helping to make that attack happen (by incubating ISIS; by using war to create conditions for mass migration irksome to one’s more true target regions and states) is something else: call it “diplomacy by other means” — and means generally beyond the public ken, for the public rarely has time and space for doing more than adjusting its perceptions according to major headlines.

Fast Link Reference

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/05/15/cold-war-cold-struggle/

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/02/09/ftac-on-why-the-jews/

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2015/10/02/syria-assad-vs-the-terrorists-how-isis-defends-assad/

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/05/06/ftac-russias-not-so-appealing-turn-in-syria/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Jewish_pogroms_in_the_Russian_Empire

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1990s_Post-Soviet_aliyah

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/war-in-syria-russia-s-rustbucket-military-delivers-a-hi-tech-shock-to-west-and-israel-a6842711.html – 1/29/2016

https://www.oilandgaseurasia.com/en/news/erdogan-turkey-russia-agree-jointly-implement-turkish-stream – 8/15/2016

http://vladimirets.org/pale_of_settlement.htm

http://www.newsweek.com/us-accuses-assad-aiding-islamic-state-through-airstrikes-338582

https://yannayspitzer.net/2012/07/22/a-new-map-of-jewish-communities-in-the-russian-empire/

 

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Also in Media – “Abandoning Iraq’s Religious Minorities to the Islamic State”

15 Monday Aug 2016

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Also in Media, Islamic Small Wars, Religion

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Left defenseless, Iraqi minorities often perceived their own Sunni Muslim neighbors in the area of ISIS’ advance as more of a threat than ISIS foreign fighters, Talabany stated.  As these minorities would recount, “our neighbors came to the Christian family and said, ‘you have lived next to us for 100 years and so for that reason I am going to give you and your family ten minutes to go and I won’t kill you.’”  She noted Yazidi ISIS sex slaves often knew their captors and dismissed trying to “re-integrate people with their torturers,” while segregation often helped pacify refugee camps.  Benoka asked of treacherous neighbors “how could we continue living in peace with them.”

Source: Abandoning Iraq’s Religious Minorities to the Islamic State – 8/10/2016

Bashar “Barrel Bomb” Assad . . . .

15 Tuesday Sep 2015

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Politics, Syria

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Syrian_Civil_War_barrel_bomb_attacks

BEIRUT, Lebanon — Syrian military helicopters dropped barrels packed with explosives in the government’s latest air raids on rebel-held areas of the northern Syrian city of Aleppo on Saturday, killing at least 23 people, including a family trapped in a burning car, activists said.

In neighboring Lebanon, a car bomb blew up near a gas station in a Shiite town, killing at least three people, in the latest attack linked to the war in Syria.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/02/world/middleeast/syrian-helicopters-drop-barrel-bombs-on-aleppo.html – 2/1/2014.

Ahmad al-Hamoud, Vice Commander of Ahfad Hamza Battalion for Special Missions, al-Sultan al-Fatih Brigade, told VDC that many kinds of the barrel bombs used by the regime forces had been recognizable. These included:

1- Regular Russian-made Barrels. These are believed to have been used by the Russian Army in the middle of the previous century. They were brought from Russia ‘ready to use’. The regime has owned them for decades. Their weight ranges between 300 to 500 kg and they’re filled with TNT and metallic scraps. There’re extremely destructive, yet their range is more limited than that of the other kinds.

2- Medium Destruction Barrels. These are believed to be made by the regime in ‘Defense Factories’ in al-Safira, in the Valley of al-Waha. Most of the helicopters taking off from this valley dropped these barrels on the districts of Aleppo. The weight of these barrels ranges from 400 to 500 kg.

3- Highly Destructive Barrels. These are the most dangerous and destructive of all. Weighing more than 600 kg, they take many shapes like containers, cisterns and, in some cases, green rubbish containers.

“A Special Report on the Recent Air Attacks on Aleppo: Potential Death Falling from the Sky…: Violation Documentation Center in Syria, March 2014.  Note: graphic forensic photographs included in the report.

Posted to YouTube 2/24/2015.

Source: https://www.hrw.org/news/2015/02/24/syria-new-spate-barrel-bomb-attacks – 2/24/2015.

Barrel bombs are improvised weapons: oil drums or similar canisters filled with explosives and metal fragments. They are dropped without guidance from helicopters hovering just above antiaircraft range, typically hitting the ground with huge explosions and the widespread diffusion of deadly shrapnel. They pulverize neighborhoods, destroy entire buildings and leave broad strips of death and destruction.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/06/opinion/barrel-bombs-not-isis-are-the-greatest-threat-to-syrians.html – 8/5/2015

http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2015/07/bombs-kill-dozens-syria-aleppo-150713131000494.html – 7/13/2015

http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/aljazeeraworld/2015/03/150325072934200.html – 3/25/2015 – “Death of Aleppo”.

Footage has emerged showing the Syrian regime using explosive “barrel bombs” on civilian neighbourhoods, killing hundreds, while its representatives attended peace talks at Geneva.

Filmed by activists in the southern Damascus suburb of Daraya, the ten minute video is a compilation of footage showing barrels, loaded with TNT, being dropped on the neighbourhood during the week the Geneva II conference was convened.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/syria/10618670/Syrian-military-drop-devastating-barrel-bombs-on-city.html – 2/5/2014.

Nongovernmental organizations researching and working in Syria, including Human Rights Watch and the Syrian Civil Defense, testified during the meeting. Staffan de Mistura, the United Nations special envoy on Syria, said in a video message that the Syrian government is responsible for the use of barrel bombs and that at the rate the weapons are being used, there won’t be any civilians left in Syria.

http://www.newsweek.com/united-nations-assads-barrel-bombs-continue-kill-syrian-civilians-347782 – 6/27/2015.

Government forces and pro-government militia continue to conduct widespread attacks on civilians, systematically committing murder, torture, rape and enforced disappearance as crimes against humanity. Government forces have committed gross violations of human rights and the war crimes of murder, hostage-taking, torture, rape and sexual violence, recruiting and using children in hostilities and targeting civilians in sniper attacks. Government forces disregarded the special protection accorded to hospitals, medical and humanitarian personnel and cultural property. Aleppo was subjected to a campaign of barrel bombing that targeted entire areas and spread terror among civilians. Government forces used incendiary weapons, causing superfluous injury and unnecessary suffering, in violation of international humanitarian law. Indiscriminate and disproportionate aerial bombardment and shelling caused large-scale arbitrary displacement. Government forces and pro-government militia perpetrated massacres.

Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights.  “Report of the independent international commission of inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic.”  Human Rights Council, 25th Session, Agenda Item 4, February 12, 2014.

http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2015/06/barrel-bomb-attacks-syria-aleppo-reported-150622175005995.html – 6/22/2015

While the Assad opposition masks off its own excesses, and, as always in the Islamic Small Wars, it’s hard “seeing” who is fighting exactly for what and how they’re doing it, warrior band by band, and sometimes person by person, there are no doubts as regards the smashing of large business, education, religious, and residential areas packed with noncombatant Syrians.

As Syrian Muslim and Jewish relationships develop — a perhaps “unheard of” now heard of — and Syrian anti-Semitism and anti-westernism comes more into focus as one impediment among several to western intercession, the scales may tip in the direction of the cosmopolitan and modern and therefore away from the medieval worldview that forms the basis for the despotism displayed by Putin, Assad, and Khamenei on the Shiite axis and al-Nusra and ISIS and others on the Sunni complement that serves the former as foils for the cooked up theatrical “Assad vs The Terrorists”.

In Syria, the center could not hold and the rough beast rose to savage the land.

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