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Tag Archives: civil war

“Happy Yemens” – South-Central Yemenis Shout Out!

05 Monday Oct 2015

Posted by commart in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Islamic Small Wars, Journalism, Links, Middle East, Politics, Regions, Yemen

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civil war, foreign affairs, foreign policy, international news, journalism, media coverage, south-central Yemen, Yemen, Yemeni

What’s Happy Yemens? Happy Yemen, Arabia Felix was the name Romans gave to Yemen. The organization is called Happy Yemens, promoting the interests of South and Central Yemen, two distinct parts of Yemen fighting with the Northern North for the past 800 years that the international community has been trying to silence. The international community is trying to hide our existence, and paint it as a Saudi-Houthi war. They only use voices from Sanaa & the Northern North who have never been to South & Central Yemen, nor do robbers and occupiers understand the reality of whom they have robbed and occupied. Most journalism is “Sanaa journalism” interviewing our occupiers about us. We aim for South and Central Yemenis to speak for themselves rather than our occupiers speak for us.

We are a media collective of South and Central Yemenis around the world. We feel that South ande Central Yemenis are persecuted by the Goebbels style defamation of the “Death to Jews” shouting Houthis who have adopted a neo Nazi ideology and many of its tactics. We want to give South and Central Yemen its own voice

http://happyyemens.org/about/


Bolding and italics added by BackChannels.

# # #

PSA – Syria – U.S. Holocaust Museum

31 Friday Oct 2014

Posted by commart in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Syria

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atrocity, civil war, Syria

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.

http://www.sacouncil.com/united-states-holocaust-museum-opens-exhibit-on-regime-war-crimes-in-syria-based-on-caesar-photographs/ – 10/20/2014.

Related:

http://www.ushmm.org/search/results/?q=Syria

http://www.ushmm.org/syria.

http://www.ushmm.org/confront-genocide/cases/syria/syria-photo-galleries/evidence


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.

http://en.etilaf.org/all-news/news/syrian-coalition-everyone-s-participation-in-political-decision-making-is-the-safest-way-to-build-a-state-of-law.html – 10/31/2014.

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Link

One Day, it Will be an Alawite Who Finally Kills Assad

25 Friday Apr 2014

Posted by commart in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology

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Assad, civil war, conflict, political analysis, politics, Syria

One Day, it Will be an Alawite Who Finally Kills Assad

By failing to defeat an opposition he has consistently painted as posing an existential threat to his own Alawite constituency, a narrative that has also made impossible even minor confidence building measures such as permitting aid to the besieged rebel areas, and the release of high profile prisoners such as Dr Khan, measures which could have been built on to eventually ensure a political arrangement to end the conflict, Assad has trapped himself in a course of action that can only end in one way; his death at the hands of his fellow Alawites.

From Syria – _The Doctor, the Eye Doctor, and Me_ – A Damning Statement

28 Friday Feb 2014

Posted by commart in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Islamic Small Wars, Middle East, Political Psychology, Politics, Regions, Syria

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

book review, civil war, literature, political, political science, politics, Syria

In the months that followed, it became very clear that the Eye Doctor was counting on attitudes like mine. His airforce bombed every part of the country, except those towns occupied by ISIS. His army fought every opposition brigade, but made sure to leave ISIS units well alone. ISIS in turn abducted even more opposition activists, murdered the commanders of other brigades, and generally left the regime’s forces to do as they liked.

The Eye Doctor and ISIS feed off one another; the existence of one legitimized the continued existence of the other.

Amazon.com: The Doctor,The Eye Doctor and Me: Analogies and Parallels Between The World of Doctor Who and the Syrian Conflict.  eBook: Aboud Dandachi: Kindle Store – Kindle Edition, 94-101, 2/17/2014.

Also: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/409862 (free).

______

This wry and lived history must surely become one of the classics of political science.

“The Doctor” is “Doctor Who” of perpetuated BBC legend, a doctor who in earthly television series years also happens to be 50 years old.

“The Eye Doctor” is, of course, ophthalmologist and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Dandachi, trapped in a hotel room in Tartus, Syria for 18 months becomes a Netizen hooked on the BBC program and able to apply his mad software skilz to watching it and helplessly drawing parallels between The Doctor’s and The Eye Doctor’s differing ways.

Should you be cursed with an ounce of sentiment for either al-Assad or the Islamist “armies” hanging off the stinging Medusa jellyfish that is al-Nusra and companions, Aboud Dandachi’s book will cure you of that.

Note: the author of this blog is an independent writer beholden to none, but I have had contact with Aboud Dandachi and learned about his book through him.  I risked my own $0.99 on obtaining it.

Dandachi sells his work quite well too:

Now, a word on politics. There will be political opinions expressed in this book . And they will be expressed strongly. They will be anti-Assad, and very much for the idea of his removal and that of his regime.

And if any reader should find that objectionable, then I’m sorry.

Actually, I’m not. Because nothing can come close to matching the offensiveness of hearing a murderous dictator who made refugees out of millions of Syrians, be described and pitied as a “victim of Zionist/ Wahabi/ CIA Imperialist Empire Building Neo-Con conspiracies. Now let’s go Occupy Wallstreet or something”.

This book is not meant to be an exhaustive review of either Doctor Who or the Syrian revolution-turned -conflict.

So, inadvertently, the reader will have in Kindle hand a thorough, if perhaps not exhaustive, overview of how things got to be so thoroughly stupid in Syria.

______

If the pro-regime areas in Homs felt under threat and under siege, fearful of retaliations for crimes committed by the regime they had become associated with, then with any luck, they would instinctively look to the regime for protection.

Dandachi, Aboud (2014-02-17). The Doctor,The Eye Doctor and Me: Analogies and Parallels Between The World of Doctor Who and the Syrian Conflict (Kindle Locations 1198-1199). Aboud Dandachi. Kindle Edition.

Assad’s “overreaction” to schoolkid heckling?

Knee jerk, possibly (my call after reading), for as Dandachi makes clear and with forceful argument, the proven more than ruthless dictator deliberately turned up the barbarism dial at the outset to inspire the armed insurrection for which his army had been built!

No wonder so many military officers and state officials have jumped ship across the years.

With no greater force majeure to intervene and all facets seemingly anti-western (not to mention deeply anti-Semitic, at least at face value), what has become an Assad vs Islamist war continues to burn through the productive center of Syrian society.

______

. . . what was needed was for a way for the very people the regime depended on to suppress the demonstrations, to feel that they weren’t so much defending the regime, as defending their very lives, the lives of their communities and families. The men who made up the armed forces and security agencies had to be made to believe that the revolution posed an existential threat to them and all they held dear.

Going on and on about “foreign conspiracies” involving everyone from Zionist-Salafis to the NATO-Wicked Witch of the West could only be effective for a limited amount of time . . . .

Dandachi, Aboud (2014-02-17). The Doctor,The Eye Doctor and Me: Analogies and Parallels Between The World of Doctor Who and the Syrian Conflict (Kindle Locations 1145-1149). Aboud Dandachi. Kindle Edition.

Every sentence, paragraph bloc, page, and chapter read as well, much fulfilling Aristotle’s dictum “to educate, entertain, and delight.”

The Doctor (sort of) – Vid’ and URL to the Doctor Who Share List (YouTube)

Sonic Screwdriver (Trock Parody of Telephone by Lady Gaga) – YouTube

The Eye Doctor

Bashar al-Assad Interview with Fox News Part 4Syria: Syrian President Bashar al Assad Charlie Rose – YouTube – 2/26/2014:

“It doesn’t matter what they say, whether he is a dictator or a reformer.  Today you have propaganda.  Do they say the same word about their allies in the Gulf states?  Do they talk about dictatorship in the Gulf states? — We’re talking about Syria now — I know, but I have the right to answer about the other regimes, er, states, that they are much far from democracy than the Syrian state.”

Dandachi talks about the private money funding al-Nusra and ISIS and here in the above clip, Assad himself draws the convenient and logical comparison between his absolute rule and the same astonishingly narcissistic construct working through the wallets and minds of the forces arrayed against him.

Why should the President of Syria rollover to democracy when the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and Qatar and others retain equal interest in the similarly despotic accretion and expression of wealth?

No wonder there has been no intervening force of magnificent Doctor Who-like scale in Syria.

# # #

Syria – Still No Army for the People

27 Thursday Feb 2014

Posted by commart in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Fast News Share

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Tags

civil war, political, politics, Syria

A jihadist group in Syria has demanded that Christians in the northern city of Raqqa pay a levy in gold and accept curbs on their faith, or face death.

BBC News – Syria crisis: ISIS imposes rules on Christians in Raqqa

* * *

BEIRUT (AP) — The main Western-backed Syrian opposition group demanded an investigation Thursday into an ambush by government forces that state media said killed 175 rebels near Damascus a day earlier.

The Syrian National Coalition disputed the government report, saying the people killed were civilians trying to escape the siege imposed by President Bashar Assad’s forces on suburbs of the Syrian capital.

Syrian group demands investigation into killings – Yahoo News

______

How long may this go on?

I would guess until one army or another runs out of human targets or human shields.

There’s nothing stopping either from destroying the entire economic, physical, and social infrastructure and population of the nation, and they already hold captive and subjugated the same, and for the spirit, that may be as good as dead.

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FTAC – Syrian Arrangements and Related Induction

16 Thursday Jan 2014

Posted by commart in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Islamic Small Wars, Politics

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Tags

civil war, conflict, Damian Clairmont, induction, Jihad, strategy, Syria

Putin and Assad’s strategy means to play the Syrian regime against a growing Sunni AQ-type threat overshadowing its own anti-western characteristics and the Shiite Hezbollah presence.

Naive Obama may have misgauged the true effects of the Soviet demise, which appears to have removed the ideology of the former state but not the program mechanics by which it operated.

Reference

Schism in EU? Intelligence co-operate with Syria amid political freeze — RT News – 1/15/2014.

Damian Clairmont killed fighting with al-Qaeda-linked rebels in Syria – Canada – CBC News – 1/16/2014.  Watch both videos.  I found the second frightening:Interviewee Muhammad Robert Heft states, “It’s just the extreme of what happens.  You’re going to save the world.  I call it the khalifa complex.  They suddenly think that picking up an AK-47 and shooting a few people that we’re going to live happily ever after.  It’s so wrong.  It’s taken us fourteen-hundred years as Muslims to become dysfunctional, and we want it back in twenty-four hours.  It’s just not going to happen that way.”

How is it going to happen?

Additional Commentary

Political calculus suggesting that Syria has become a battleground between two of the same personality — different talk, same walk — continues to hold in my thinking, but Bashar al-Assad may have the edge with the gift provided by the Al Qaeda affiliates: if not him, them.

The west has gotten the message and, as ever, seems not to have a good return for it other than to perhaps redouble its efforts with General Idris and what remains of a more moderate FSA, which seems hardly in the news these days (except when it gives up a major weapons depot to hardened Islamists).

The draw of vulnerable “Clairmonts” to serious battle reenactment in foreign space is not the least new in the west, but my impression is the numbers have gone up.  These are not a handful of Somali youth from the American midwest lighting out for Mogadishu and a lesson in al-Shabaab realpolitik.

There is an open and extensive conflict under way in the middle east, and these wish for their glorious role in it.

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FTAC – On Syria — Mirrored Sides

09 Thursday Jan 2014

Posted by commart in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Islamic Small Wars, Middle East, Politics, Psychology, Syria

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civil war, malignant narcissism, personality, political psychology, Syria

It’s not sinking in but I keep asserting this: the same personalities — different talk; same walk — occupy both sides of the combat. There is no winning, and they are proving that by mutually losing, not only treasure but also respect and self-respect. I noted earlier this morning that more than 11,000 children have died in the Syrian Civil War, most beneath the bombing on the state’s side and some at the hands of snipers aligned with the state. That doesn’t shift the black/white, good guy/bad guy thinking at all considering what the global jihad does to children. That both sides do similarly unrestrained things — they exceed limits — tells about the “malignant narcissism” of the characters driving the war. Neither care about people. The care about control, power, subjugation, and self-aggrandizement and they use fear and force to get their share of “narcissistic supply”. There’s nothing actually in the predominant warring parties — not God; not humanity — over which to bargain and make peace. In the end, they will be seen as killers and nothing else.

The key: “different talk — same walk.”

The dictator and the revolutionary have the same self-aggrandizing drive, and God above and humanity at their feet are of no real account: they have already bent words to clothe themselves and provide to themselves the exclusive privilege of determining the fates of others.

God works through both — the blood bespattered dictator and opposed zealot alike — does He not?

So they themselves might say.

The humanity of humanity may beg to differ.

Sideways Related Reference

OCHA | Coordination Saves Lives – Second International Humanitarian Pledging Conference for Syria | OCHA

As UN prepares for mammoth Syria aid conference, Assad regime keeps relief from the suffering | Fox News – 1/7/2014.

Snowmen and suffering: A bleak winter for young Syrian refugees – CNN.com – 12/21/2013.

Aid sought for Syrian refugees facing harsh winter | GulfNews.com – 1/8/2014.

Sharjah’s Sheikha Jawaher’s plea to UAE residents help Syrians as winter conditions turn ‘catastrophic’ | The National – 1/8/2014.

Champion the #childrenofsyria

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Iraq – Animus, Instability, Repression – Challenging the State Concept

31 Tuesday Dec 2013

Posted by commart in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Iraq, Islamic Small Wars

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Tags

analysis, civil war, factional, Iraq, political psychology, politics, warfare

Across the Islamic Small Wars, one may wonder about the validity of the state concept in “states” barely holding it together across inchoate and uncooperative political campuses.

In some places, the answer to “Why can’t y’all just get along?” is “We all just don’t want to get along.”

That’s Iraq.

Let’s take this imagined internal dialogue two steps further:

“We believe that something has been taken away from us, and we can steal it back with vengeance.”

*

“We believe we can achieve something greater and can force it into existence.”

* * *

Part of what binds the contemporary functioning democracies of “the west” may be the experience of the corruption and tyranny of the feudal systems that preceded them.  The collective memory contains the inspired eruption of deeply repressed contempt and hatred for “ruling classes” and with it the smell and taste of blood spilled  in ways and in volumes that would today cast al-Nusra in Syria as the pale ghost of a minor devil.

In essence, all those pretty open democracies so peacefully gathered around the Mediterranean have been no strangers to sectarian warfare, mass beheading, industrialized death by every nefarious means available, and settlement, at times, through only the complete destruction of an armed foe.

Those Europeans “all get along” amid battle scarred landscapes and in the presence of cemeteries ranked with men too young for death because well they know how sickening nasty the war business can get, and they no longer want any part of it — and if they must be part of it, it’s going to be as short and violent and decisive an engagement as it may be made.

______

We may be entering an area, or may be already within one, in which great private interests, no less than in feudal days albeit with greater subtlety, arrange their political environments out of sight of constituted and official governments.

Mafia defined by greed becomes the true underlying or hidden governing model, and the units of analysis: families and clans of note with business interests attending.

The politicians have handlers, payoff masters, as it were.

Perhaps.

In the letting of contracts and jobs, it may appear that nepotism trumps merit, and it may be so.

How to tell?

Who are the auditors and where are they?

Where are the journalists who report with integrity?

What is to temper power?

Where is the state leader brave and canny enough to promote an open conversation while carefully reigning in the only the elements intending to destroy core democratic political process?

______

The New York Times reports that the United States is quietly rushing dozens of Hellfire missiles and low-tech surveillance drones to Iraq “to help government forces combat an explosion of violence by a Qaeda-backed insurgency that is gaining territory in both western Iraq and neighboring Syria.”

This happens in the context of the deaths of more than 8,000 Iraqis in 2013, the highest level of violence since 2008.

The President Who Lost Iraq « Commentary Magazine – 12/26/2013.

* * *

Deputy Prime Minister Saleh al-Mutlaq told CNN that he was “shocked” to hear U.S. President Barack Obama greet al-Maliki at the White House on Monday as “the elected leader of a sovereign, self-reliant and democratic Iraq.”

Iraq’s leader becoming a new ‘dictator,’ deputy warns – CNN.com – 12/13/2013.

* * *

While Iraq’s Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has been catching flak as another Washington-sponsored dictator in the making, one cannot assign to him the year-long uptick in sectarian tit-for-tat violence and terror even if assertions launched against him should prove true.  Example: 

Leaders of the popular uprisings in 6 Sunni provinces told me that the wave of terror which has claimed the lives of 7,000 people so far this year in Iraq is his responsibility, because he controls the military, the police, the intelligence services and all aspects of security in the country. Iraq is rapidly spiralling down towards a renewed insurgency and Maliki’s only response is to marginalise the Kurds, label the Sunnis as terrorists and turn a blind-eye to the systematic discrimination and violence against other ethnic minority groups.

European MEP in Erbil says “Maliki’s authoritarian policies are tearing the country apart” – CNN iReport – 11/27/2013.

Is the hearsay true?

Prove it — or call it slander.

What would the most balanced leader do if (setting out with a fair neutral force at his disposal) he were confronted with crimes against his constituents — all of them in representation — accompanied by accusation of sectarian preference in the operations of his government promoting attacks that in turn promote revenge?

Would he investigate the crimes as crimes only wrapped in political or religious cover and go on with the business of producing an institutionally open, responsive, and responsible government?

Or would he revert to the loyalty of his own and reconstruct a government built on deep wells of suspicion expressed in the application of tyrannical force against all suspected challengers not of his own affiliation?

* * *

“Regretfully, the Arab revolutions were able to shake the dictatorships but were not able to fill the void in the right way,” Mr. Maliki said. “So a vacuum was created, and al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations were able to exploit it and to gain ground.”

Iraq’s Maliki Blames Rising Extremist Violence on Syria – Washington Wire – WSJ – 10/31/2013.

In the Arab world, deflections of responsibility inevitably produce harm.  They are part of lying (by omission: regulars here know the refrain: “to hide something; to get something”) as well as avoiding engagement with the values that in fact weaken the state in such a way as to make it a prize for factional contests through the usual means — intimidation, murder, terror — rather than a central forum for factional arguments in accord with Roberts Rules.

* * *

And the violence shows no sign of letting up. Suspected Sunni Islamist militants on Christmas day set off three bombs in the heavily Christian Dora district of the capital, killing at least 38, including 24 who died at the conclusion of a church service. Western regions of the country were on edge on Sunday after the Shia-dominated government’s security forces arrested a popular Sunni lawmaker and killed his brother and five guards in a raid.

International companies aim to set up shop in Iraq despite violence – FT.com – 12/29/2013.

The bungling, if it was that, doesn’t help in Iraq’s difficult environment — and is it possible to balance that “Shia-dominated . . . security force” with greater Sunni and Christian complements?

Beyond that, so one might urge: get over the sickness in the head that divides others in the world into those worthy of one’s respect and those deserving of contempt, and that to the extent that they may be slaughtered at will: God did not authorize the humans judging to make such judgments.

______

(Reuters) – Fighting erupted when Iraqi police broke up a Sunni Muslim protest camp in the western Anbar province on Monday, leaving at least 13 people dead, police and medical sources said.

The camp has been an irritant to Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki’s Shi’ite Muslim-led government since Sunni protesters set it up a year ago to demonstrate against what they see as marginalization of their sect.

Fighting erupts as Iraq police break up Sunni protest camp | Reuters – 12/30/2013.

* * *

Iraq’s security forces have almost entirely abandoned the successful formula of population-focused counter-insurgency developed by the US-led coalition, instead falling back on counter-productive traditional tactics such as mass arrests and collective punishment.

BBC News – Analysis: Iraq’s never-ending security crisis – 10/3/2013.

* * *

The Iraqi government is now making many of the same mistakes the United States made back then: It is alienating the Sunnis and occupying their communities with a heavy-handed, military-led approach that doesn’t differentiate between diehard militants and the mass of peaceable civilians.

Yes, Iraq Is Unraveling – Foreign Policy – Michael Knights – 5/15/2013.

______

The phrase “weak government” may itself be weak.

If the potential strength of a coalition of the moderate (well representative of population overall and intent on peace) does not display in firm martial ability, it invites fracturing along the more parochial lines associated with private financial, psychological, and religious agenda.

In essence, the state as a political whole may prove too weak to restrain the restive energies inhabiting its body — it literally cannot contain itself — and it then fails as a reliable political element.

Autocratic attempts to contain latent fracturing through repression may work as presently suggested by the Egyptian narrative that has developed between the army and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt’s still nascent, still potential democracy.

However, the same in Iraq, as the screws tighten, may isolate state authority and invite a civil contest so incoherent  with mixed factional motivations that the fighting cannot be resolved through compromise and accommodation — nor may it be won as the point of it becomes a continuous and ill-defined struggle beneath the delusion that there is something greater yet to be won when plainly there is not.

Peace is to be won first and foremost.

Without it, nothing else can be done.

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Epigram

Hillel the Elder

"That which is distasteful to thee do not do to another. That is the whole of Torah. The rest is commentary. Now go and study."

"If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am not for others, what am I? If not now, when?"

"Whosoever destroys a soul, it is considered as if he destroyed an entire world. And whosoever that saves a life, it is considered as if he saved an entire world."

Oriana Fallaci
"Whether it comes from a despotic sovereign or an elected president, from a murderous general or a beloved leader, I see power as an inhuman and hateful phenomenon...I have always looked on disobedience toward the oppressive as the only way to use the miracle of having been born."

Talmud 7:16 as Quoted by Rishon Rishon in 2004
Qohelet Raba, 7:16

אכזרי סוף שנעשה אכזרי במקום רחמן

Kol mi shena`asa rahaman bimqom akhzari Sof shena`asa akhzari bimqom rahaman

All who are made to be compassionate in the place of the cruel In the end are made to be cruel in the place of the compassionate.

More colloquially translated: "Those who are kind to the cruel, in the end will be cruel to the kind."

Online Source: http://www.rishon-rishon.com/archives/044412.php

Abraham Isaac Kook

"The purely righteous do not complain about evil, rather they add justice.They do not complain about heresy, rather they add faith.They do not complain about ignorance, rather they add wisdom." From the pages of Arpilei Tohar.

Heinrich Heine
"Where books are burned, in the end people will be burned." -- From Almansor: A Tragedy (1823).

Simon Wiesenthal
Remark Made in the Ballroom of the Imperial Hotel, Vienna, Austria on the occasion of His 90th Birthday: "The Nazis are no more, but we are still here, singing and dancing."

Maimonides
"Truth does not become more true if the whole world were to accept it; nor does it become less true if the whole world were to reject it."

"The risk of a wrong decision is preferable to the terror of indecision."

Douglas Adams
"Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?" Epigram appearing in the dedication of Richard Dawkins' The GOD Delusion.

Thucydides
"The Nation that makes a great distinction between its scholars and its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools."

Milan Kundera
"The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting."

Malala Yousafzai
“The terrorists thought that they would change our aims and stop our ambitions but nothing changed in my life except this: weakness, fear and hopelessness died. Strength, power and courage was born.”

Tanit Nima Tinat
"Who could die of love?"

What I Have Said About the Jews

My people, not that I speak for them, I nonetheless describe as a "global ethnic commune with its heart in Jerusalem and soul in the Land of Israel."

We have never given up on God, nor have we ever given up on one another.

Many things we have given up, but no one misses, say, animal sacrifice, and as many things we have kept, so we have still to welcome our Sabbath on Friday at sunset and to rest all of Saturday until three stars appear in the sky.

Most of all, through 5,773 years, wherever life has taken us, through the greatest triumphs and the most awful tragedies, we have preserved our tribal identity and soul, and so shall we continue eternally.

Anti-Semitism / Anti-Zionism = Signal of Fascism

I may suggest that anti-Zionism / anti-Semitism are signal (a little bit) of fascist urges, and the Left -- I'm an old liberal: I know my heart -- has been vulnerable to manipulation by what appears to me as a "Red Brown Green Alliance" driven by a handful of powerful autocrats intent on sustaining a medieval worldview in service to their own glorification. (And there I will stop).
One hopes for knowledge to allay fear; one hopes for love to overmatch hate.

Too often, the security found in the parroting of a loyal lie outweighs the integrity to be earned in confronting and voicing an uncomfortable truth.

Those who make their followers believe absurdities may also make them commit atrocities.

Positively Orwellian: Comment Responding to Claim that the Arab Assault on Israel in 1948 Had Not Intended Annihilation

“Revisionism” is the most contemptible path that power takes to abet theft and hide shame by attempting to alter public perception of past events.

On Press Freedom, Commentary, and Journalism

In the free world, talent -- editors, graphic artists, researchers, writers -- gravitate toward the organizations that suit their interests and values. The result: high integrity and highly reliable reportage and both responsible and thoughtful reasoning.

This is not to suggest that partisan presses don't exist or that propaganda doesn't exist in the west, but any reader possessed of critical thinking ability and genuine independence -- not bought, not programmed -- is certainly free to evaluate the works of earnest reporters and scholars.

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