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Tag Archives: civilizational narcissism

On the Death of Soleimani and the Outlook for Iranian Power: Reading Recommended

07 Tuesday Jan 2020

Posted by commart in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Iran, Iraq

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civilizational narcissism, Iranian Power, Iranian Regime Legitimacy, malignant narcissism, medieval v modern, middle east

And therefore it was Suleimani and his proxies — his “kingmakers” in Lebanon, Syria and Iraq — who increasingly came to be seen, and hated, as imperial powers in the region, even more so than Trump’s America. This triggered popular, authentic, bottom-up democracy movements in Lebanon and Iraq that involved Sunnis and Shiites locking arms together to demand noncorrupt, nonsectarian democratic governance.

On Nov. 27, Iraqi Shiites — yes, Iraqi Shiites — burned down the Iranian consulate in Najaf, Iraq, removing the Iranian flag from the building and putting an Iraqi flag in its place. That was after Iraqi Shiites, in September 2018, set the Iranian consulate in Basra ablaze, shouting condemnations of Iran’s interference in Iraqi politics.

Friedman, Thomas L. “Trump Kills Iran’s Most Overrated Warrior”. The New York Times, January 3, 2010.

Ali Khamenei is a cagey leader who did not become one of the longest serving rulers in the Middle East by impetuously going to war with America. The clerical oligarchs respect American determination and understand the imbalance between a superpower and a struggling regional actor. They have never figured out Donald Trump, a U.S. president who offers unconditional talks while working to crater the Iranian economy. We should not expect Iran to take on a president who just ordered the killing of one of their famed commanders.

Takeyh, Ray. “Why the Death of an Iranian Commander Won’t Mean World War III.” Politico, January 3, 2020.

In Karbala – one of Shiism’s holiest cities, where a 7th-century battle resulted in Islam’s biggest schism between Sunnis and Shiites – the unthinkable has happened.

“The government doesn’t even rule any more. They’re Iran’s puppets. If Iran loosens its grip, then things can change,” explained a protester.

France 24. “In Shiite holy city of Karbala, Iraqis protest against Iranian ‘meddling'”. November 14, 2019.

Iran looks pale this morning.

The mullahs have within their body politic a severely contracting economy. Beyond it, they have inspired the limitless hate of Iraqi Shiite Muslims whom their ambitions have overrun and threaten to permanently subjugate in Iraq. Within their operations centers, they have greeted a dawn that has been deeply and strategically compromised by spies and with the extent of it unknown. Perhaps most lethal: their treatment of Earth herself: desertification, deforestation, severe pollution, etc.: corruption and mismanagement have helped produce not only a noxious politics, inside and out, but literally in some aspects a dying geophysical platform for the state’s existence.

As represented by Tehran, how long a lease has the feudal-medieval mode on earth?

God Almighty himself would not destroy his creation but in the greater natural processes to which Earth is heir — but for ambition, Iran’s Ayatollah would.

Also Related Online

McKay, Hollie. “Soleimani’s killing ignites Russia-vs.-Iran schism in Syria.” Fox News, January 6, 2020.

MEMRI. “New Qods Force Commander Esmail Ghaani: We will Remove American Presence from the Region and Bring About Global Rule of Hidden Imam.” January 6, 2020.

Orton, Kyle. “The Middle East After Qassem Sulaymani.” European Eye on Radicalization, January 6, 2020.

–33–

Read and Weep: Signal of the Return of Endemic Russian Anti-Semitism: Bausman: Russia Insider: January 15, 2018

17 Wednesday Jan 2018

Posted by commart in 21st Century Feudal, Also in Media, Anti-Semitism, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Extreme Brown vs Red-Green, Fast News Share, Political Psychology, Russia

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

anti-Semitism, civilizational narcissism, Defamation, dictatorship, Fake News, malignant narcissism, medieval v modern, political absolutism, Russian anti-Semitism, Russian history

RussInside-JewishHostility-180118

Bausman, Charles.  “It’s Time to Drop the Jew Taboo.”  Russia Insider, January 15, 2018.

Chosen link for a look-see: “Hostility to Putin’s Russia is largely a Jewish phenomenon”:

Russia Insider’s mission is to explain and describe Russia and her role in the world. As soon as you begin to drill into how other nations relate to Russia, and Russian history, it becomes obvious that the unreasonable hostility towards Putin’s Russia, particularly coming from the US and the UK, is very much a Jewish phenomenon, and has been for centuries.

And yes, ‘Jewish’ is the only term that accurately describes it, and not one of the many euphemisms we frequently see used.

The most vitriolic and obsessive Russia-bashing journalists in the media are mostly Jewish. The publications which push these writers most energetically are ALL Jewish-owned, and as a publisher, I know very well, that is where the buck stops.

BackChannels most respectfully suggests that Colonel President Emperor and Pharaoh Putler — if that is how he wishes to be known — may consider either disassociating his godliness from so cliche and puerile a revanche of the Imperial style in Jew Hate or now let the world know now he endorses it!  


Excerpt About the Forgery that Became Through the Agency of Russia’s 19th Century Okhrana — Tsar Nicholas II’s Secret Police — The Protocols of the Elders of Zion

A few months ago he bought a number of old books from a former officer of the “Okhrana” (Political Police) who had fled to Constantinople. Among these books was a small volume in French, lacking the title-page, with dimensions of 5½in. by 3¾in. It had been cheaply rebound. On the leather back is printed in Latin capitals the word Joli. The preface, entitled “Simple avertissement,” is dated Geneva, October 15, 1864. The book contains 324 pages, of which numbers 315-322 inclusive follow page 24 in the only copy known to Mr. X, perhaps owing to a mistake when the book was rebound. Both the paper and the type are characteristic of the “sixties and seventies” of the last century. These details are given in the hope that they may lead to the discovery of the title of the book [See Preface]. Mr. X. believes it must be rare, since, had it not been so, the “Protocols” would have speedily been recognized as a plagiarism by anyone who had read the original.

That the latter is a “fake” could not be maintained for an instant by anyone who had seen it. Its original possessor, the old Okhrana officer, did not remember where he obtained it, and attached no importance to it. Mr. X, glancing at it one day, was struck by a resemblance between a passage which had caught his eye and a phrase in the French edition of the “Protocols” (Edition de la Vieille France, 1920, 5, Rue du Préaux-Clercs, 5, Paris 7th Arrondissement). He followed up the clue, and soon realized that the “Protocols” were to a very large extent as much a paraphrase of the Geneva original as the published version of a War Office or Foreign Office telegram is a paraphrase of the ciphered original.

Before receiving the book from Mr. X, I was, as I have said, incredulous. I did not believe that Sergei Nilus’s “Protocols” were authentic; they explained too much by the theory of a vast Jewish conspiracy. Professor Nilus’s account of how they were obtained was too melodramatic to be credible, and it was hard to believe that real “Learned Elders of Sion” would not have produced a more intelligent political scheme than the crude and theatrical subtilties of the Protocols. But I could not have believed, had I not seen, that the writer who supplied Nilus with his originals was a careless and shameless plagiarist.

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_truth_about_The_Protocols

Related on BackChannels in No Particular Order

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/10/03/palestinian-kgb/

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/09/23/ftac-these-too-are-palestinians/

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/03/08/bds-cult-modules/

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

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

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2017/07/29/ftac-antidote-to-what-poisoned-the-palestinians/

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2017/12/29/ftac-middle-east-conflict-back-to-max-erwin-von-scheubner-richter-and-forward-to-the-plundering-of-palestinian-misery-by-palestinian-leadership-elites/

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2017/12/16/excerpt-first-political-terrorist-organization-in-history/

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/11/23/moscows-rules-a-module/

Related Reference

StopFake.  “Is Russia Insider sponsored by a Russian oligarch with the ties to the European far right?”  November 23, 2015.

Update: January 19, 2018: Lavrov Speaks Out Against Anti-Semitism

Source of First Encounter: Hanish, Seraphim.  “Russia’s top diplomat SLAMS anti-Semitism, calling it ‘the most horrible crime against humanity.”  The Duran, January 19, 2018.

Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov seems unable to separate the good intent shown in producing this overdue course correction from the seeking of advantage yet against Ukraine and the nationalist posture once taken against the Jews.  In fact, the Scheubner-Richter and Hitler relationship tells of a larger Russian history in the generation and dissemination of anti-Semitic libel and myth.  Nonetheless, Lavrov’s stern comments may pave the way for a long overdue pivot westward and away from the crimes against humanity of the Stalin years, the Soviet Era, and, most recently the same delivered with horrific brutality by Assad — as flanked by Putin and Khamenei –to noncombatant Syrians across the course of the civil war.

–33–

FTAC – Introducing, Recalling the Ouroboros

10 Thursday Oct 2013

Posted by commart in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Facsimile Bipolar Political Sociopathy, Islamic Small Wars, Philology, Philosophy, Politics, Psychology, Religion

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civilizational narcissism, malignant narcissism, narcissism, ouroboros, psychology, religion, systems analysis

One appreciates your resolve, would that the instructions, historically enforced, regarding dhimmi status for Jews and Christians were absent from the text. That one element alone lends dignity to the Muslim’s position at the expense of Christians and Jews, not to mention what’s in store for everyone else. It’s a flattering concept; it probably feels large (as in “living large”) but that seems to me a facet of an unbridled and untenable narcissism of a sort to which the world, Muslims first, must respond.

Islam shimmers with this aspect that may embrace and welcome in one part while also reserving to itself the mission to destroy others without restraint. That part today it wishes to cast off, which it must to save itself culturally and socially, but its head meets its tail in this again and again and again across time. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouroboros

Civilizational narcissism and the Ouroboros would seem thematic kin.

With either, we may drown in our own reflection or, same thing, devour ourselves, such is the nature of all closed ideological and tribal systems.

A good architect would not only design in some path of retreat out of his magnum opus but also a gateway to other gardens and a window to other worlds.

Additional and Cited Reference

Ouroboros – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Force of Reason: Oriana Fallaci: 9780847827534: Amazon.com: Books — This volume starts with an overview of Islamic aggression in Europe.

Running in circles – latimes.com – by Ed Park – 12/2/2007:

In “The Origins and History of Consciousness,” he writes, “It slays, weds, and impregnates itself. It is man and woman, begetting and conceiving, devouring and giving birth, active and passive, above and below, at once.”

# # #

Palestinian Authority – Incitements to Murder Jews in Service to the Subjugation and Enslavement of Its Own

29 Sunday Sep 2013

Posted by commart in Israel, Middle East, Politics

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

anti-Semitism, civilizational narcissism, Israel, middle east conflict, Preoccupied Territories, social grammar, social language programming

Under Abbas, the PA has been waging a war of words against the Jewish state, engaging in anti-Semitic incitement of the vilest kind and using Holocaust denial, racial slurs, and Judeophobic epithets. It is a stream of hostility cultivated and implemented over the past decade under the Abbas leadership. A stream which is competing with “Der Ewige Jude”, the Eternal Jew, favored by Joseph Goebbels, in which Jews are compared to rats.

Giulio Meotti – Abbas is a War Criminal: The Evidence – Op-Eds – Israel National News, 9/27/2013.

______

A comment in The New York Times on the funding and training of Palestinian Authority Security Forces:

Much of the training supported by the United States and the European Union was conducted in Jordan, away from traditional Palestinian bases, in hopes that months away from home would cement a new professional ethos. Yet old neighborhood and clan ties continued to be used in recruitment and some of the most powerful Palestinian security organizations remained outside the reform regimen.

Kimberly Marten – The Bane of Palestinian Infighting – NYTimes.com – 6/26/2013.

______

We write today because we are deeply disturbed by recent reports of large-scale political arrests being carried out by the Palestinian Authority inside the occupied West Bank. These arrests have targeted critics of the Palestinian Authority, including youth activists, human rights defenders, prisoners’ rights organizers and scholars, and journalists, including former political prisoners held by Israel and released in the October 2011 prisoner exchange agreement and subsequently.

*

This operation is currently under the command of Rear Admiral Paul Bushong.9 We are deeply disturbed by the security coordination regime and the role of the United States, highly committed to supporting the Israeli military diplomatically, economically and militarily, in maintaining this regime to the detriment of Palestinians’ freedom of association and expression.

National Lawyers Guild, Free Palestine Subcommittee.  Letter to Mr. Maen Areikat, Chief Representative of the Palestine Liberation Organization to the United States, Mr. Ali Muhanna, Minister of Justice, Palestinian National Authority, and Mr. Riyad al-Maliki, Minister of Foreign Affairs, Palestinian National Authority, October 8, 2012. PDF.

The oddness of the fracturing of the flow down from duel authoritarian modes and the simplistic ways of understanding them seems to me ever striking.  Plainly through its behavior and language over time, the Palestinian Authority remains bent on Israel’s destruction and the theft outright of the Jewish state, and in that it has no place to go, and yet it seems to cull or silence competitors either worse than itself or better.

**

Perhaps it would be well to mention here that the American freedom of speech concept was and remains intended to protect discomforting or unpopular speech — not conspiracy or incitement to commit crimes, but politically distasteful speech, and that on the basis that protecting legitimate criticism is a necessary facet of a living and progressing democracy.

As regards then the constituents governed by the Palestinian Authority, one might then take an interest in whose voices have been intimidated, restrained, or silenced by it.

______

▶ West Bank IDF soldier murder poses threat to peace talks: Israel soldier killed by sniper in Hebron – YouTube, 9/24/2013

______

It appears one state cannot bribe another — that is what western assistance seems made to look like — off its language-conveyed-and-sustained program, however destructive, evil, and deeply misguided and suffocating to its own people that program may be.

Children Taught to Hate on Palestinian Television: Where’s the Coverage? – YouTube, 7/14/2013.

▶ “Our enemy is Satan, Zion with a tail” – girl on PA TV – YouTube, 9/23/2013

______

I had the opportunity to meet with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, who expressed grave concern both for Israel’s security as well as for the prospects for peace. “How,” he asked us, “could the Palestinian leadership be a serious partner for peace if it welcomed into its ranks vicious terrorists who continue to deny the very right of the state of Israel to exist?” His concern is more than justified.

U. S. Congressman Steve Chabot speaking in the early minutes of a U.S. House of Representatives subcommittee-level hearing on the middle east conflict – PROMOTING PEACE? REEXAMINING U.S. AID TO THE PALESTINIAN AUTHORITY, July 12, 2011.

______

Gross corruption charges have for a long time been directed at the PLO, which already by 1993 was the richest terrorist organization in the world, according to the British National Criminal Intelligence Service, having assets of ten billion dollars and an annual income of approximately two billion dollars. The Daily Telegraph reported in 1999 that the PLO had secretly invested over 50 billion dollars around the world. Still, Norway has continuously broken bread with these people.

Gates of Vienna: Seduced by Palestinian Propaganda – 1/19/2013

Additional Reference

Arguably, the use of propaganda by Palestinians to gain compassion and political support has been their one great success. The Palestinian narrative of victimhood, with its falsifications of history and politics, its portrayal of themselves as not only innocent but the most compelling victims in the world, its staging of events to blame Israel for atrocities they themselves have committed, its deliberate concentration on alleged injuries or deaths of children, and its achievement in persuading much of the media to accept and advance its manipulation of language and action, have all been part of its success in the propaganda war.

Michael Curtis – American Thinker – Articles: The Palestinian Use of Propaganda – 9/29/2013

* * *

The loosely compiled list that follows may be offered more for impression than information.

As with the above material, it’s indicative of the official continuance of a surreal state of affairs, one in which Israel and the west put up effort in funding, labor, and services to bring the refugees of 1948 into a modern state and state of being while the graying post-Soviet remnant of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) continues to promote an anti-Semitic, genocidal, and totalitarian engine suited to its own combined tribal and mafioso needs.

The real story hasn’t to do with murder per se but with the complete and final enslavement and subjugation of the refugees generations by way of the control of what they may read and speak and think.

Deception: Betraying the Peace Process: Itamar Marcus and Nan Jacques Zilberdik: Amazon.com: Books (2012)  Even the unhappy review of the book lauded its scholarship and acknowledged the true state of affairs illustrated by it.

Palestinian Authority: Pursuing Peace, or Pushing Propaganda? – The Daily Beast – 12/11/2011

Palestinian Authority blocks critical websites – Committee to Protect Journalists – 4/24/2012

Palestinian Propaganda – Wild Olive web site page, n.d.

5 Signs of Sinking Palestinian Press Freedom | HonestReporting – 4/2/2013

West Bank and Gaza Strip * | Freedom House – 2012

After a while, and if one has lied in a large way, one sees it on the World Wide Web, the “mirror, mirror” not on the wall but on the desktop.

______

Ma’an News Agency.  “Fatah, Hamas officials trade accusations in heated debate.” February 23, 2013.

Oren, Amir.  “U.S. names top Navy officer security coordinator for Israel, Palestinian Authority.”  Haaretz, June 9, 2012.

Palestinian National Security Forces – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Sanders, Edmund.  “Israeli soldier lured to West Bank and killed, officials say.”  Los Angeles Times, September 21, 2013.

Sayigh, Yezid.  “Policing the People, Building the State: Authoritarian Transformation in the West Bank and Gaza.”  The Carnegie Papers, Carnegie Middle East Center, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, February 2011.

The Washington Institute.  “Peace through Security: America’s Role in the Development of the Palestinian Authority Security Services.” Conference Keynotes, 2009 Soref Symposium, featuring comment on and linking to an address by Lt. Gen. Keith Dayton (“Michael Stein Address on U.S. Middle East Policy”).

United States security assistance to the Palestinian National Authority – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

U.S. Dept. State, United States Security Coordinator for Israel and the Palestinian Authority (USSC)

U.S. Dept. State and Broadcasting Board of Governors, Office of Inspector General, Middle East Regional Office.  “Performance Evaluation of Palestinian Authority Security Forces Infrastructure Construction Projects in the West Bank.”  Report Number MERO-I-11-03, March 2011. PDF.

U.S. General Accounting Office – “Report to the Committee on Foreign Affairs and Its Subcommittee on the Middle East and South Asia, House of Representatives: Palestinian Authority: U.S. Assistance is Training and Equipping Security Forces, but the Program Needs to Measure Progress and Faces Logistical Constraints.  (2010).

Zanotti, Jim.  “U.S. Foreign Aid to the Palestinians.”  Congressional Research Service, January 18, 2013:

Since the establishment of limited Palestinian self-rule in the West Bank and Gaza Strip in the mid-1990s, the U.S. government has committed over $4 billion in bilateral assistance to the Palestinians, who are among the world’s largest per capita recipients of international foreign aid.

Successive Administrations have requested aid for the Palestinians to support at least three major U.S. policy priorities of interest to Congress:

• Preventing terrorism against Israel from Hamas and other militant organizations.

• Fostering stability, prosperity, and self-governance in the West Bank that inclines Palestinians toward peaceful coexistence with Israel and a “two-state solution”.

• Meeting humanitarian needs

Zanotti, Jim.  “U.S. Security Assistance to the Palestinian Authority.”  Congressional Research Service, January 8, 2010.

Etc. – Fragments and Outtakes

Those who follow the middle east conflict more closely know that beneath the sawing of vocal interlocutors in the Preoccupied Territories, legitimate economic development, and utility and trade throughput plus access to higher education and sophisticated medical services have formed arrangements that the well known vanguard of the vain may feel beneath their own considerations.

______

First, as I just said, I profoundly believe that it is in the national security interest of the United States to help resolve the Israeli-Palestinian dispute.

Second, I am one of those who firmly believes in a two-state solution: a Palestinian state living in peace and security alongside the state of Israel is the only solution that will meet the long-term needs of Israel and the aspirations of the Palestinian people. This has long been the policy of our national leadership, and I share it.

Third, let me state very clearly my deep conviction—and I tell this to my Israeli friends all the time—that as President Obama said last year, the bond between the United States and Israel is unbreakable today, it is unbreakable tomorrow, and it is unbreakable forever. [Applause.]

Lt. General Keith Dayton, U.S. Security Coordinator, Israel and the Palestinian Authority, Michael Stein Address on U.S. Middle East Policy, program of the Soref Symposium, The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, May 7, 2009.

______

Before I get into the details of the program, I would like to remind you that the Government of Israel has 100% ransparency into all aspects of US support to the PA Security Forces (PASF) and that the USSC will never advocate or sponsor activities that could threaten Israeli security.

Lt. General Moeller, United States Security Coordinator for Israel and the Palestinian Authority, Statement for House Committee on Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on the Middle East and South Asia, July 12, 2011.  PDF.

Convincing Washington to support the security mission remains a tall order even today. Despite the undisputed progress the Palestinian security force has shown on the ground, Republican lawmakers in the House of Representatives have recently put yet another hold on funds for maintaining and developing the force, as a demonstration of their displeasure with policies adopted by the Palestinian Authority.

 Nathan Guttman – Why No Love for Security Cooperation? – Forward.com – 6/19/2012.

# # #

Mobarak Haider’s Diagnosis — Taliban: The Tip of a Holy Iceberg

17 Friday Aug 2012

Posted by commart in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Library, Religion

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

book review, books, civilizational narcissism, history, Islam, Mobarak Haider, narcissism, political psychology, politics, religion, Taliban

Civilizational Narcissism

Everything you wanted to know about why what is wrong with Islam — that abysmal present soaked in blood, dependence, hate, ignorance, and failed or failing or drifted states from Asia to Africa to the Middle East — may be covered in Mobarak Haider’s 2008 (Urdu version; English version, 2010) Taliban: The Tip of a Holy Iceberg.

“Narcissism is a psychic state of extreme subjectivity.  The civilizational narcissists have mostly two alternating mental states: either they are perfectly unaware of the role of the world around them or if they are aware, they are sure that it admires or envies them.  This infatuation with their own charm renders them totally impervious to the beauty and merit of others.  Civilizational narcissism is therefore collective to the extent that all the admirers of their own civilization admire only abstract concepts; no living human or the existing pattern of civilization impresses them.”

With Pakistani street cred and cosmopolitan ivory tower brights and insight, Haider walks the reader through each dimension of cultural, geopolitical, linguistic, psychological, and social history and thought in laying out the case for an unbridled narcissism as the core component promoting the misery the Muslim Ummah continues to deal to itself and to others in the name of Allah.

In addition to the psychology, which I regard as rich and spot-on, Haider’s honesty and integrity in scholarship in and of itself stands signal to the kind of change the whole world wants as regards Islam’s ability to accept criticism, to develop by first developing itself (through other than alms and arms) and to enjoy — now these are my words — the world’s present and most assuredly future “cultural polyphony”.

I have found an implacability in conservative Muslim and American circles in which one party or the other is not only being victimized by the other, but reverting, or stuck, in the mechanics of the most woeful prejudice, which may be reduced to the statement, “they are all like that.” For some, every Muslim is a Jihadi-head (and it may be tragic for Muslims that whatever potential lay in the term “Jihad”, it really has become synonymous with “bombs on two legs” and the like); and for some opposite, every “right-winger” is Pamela Geller  or Robert Spencer (I like them both): my way out of that debacle has been through the window of a term I refer to as “shimmer” — i.e., for what’s coming over the berm, uncertainty as to who, in impassioned numbers, really wants what.

Not to be the “useful idiot” in this crowd, I have at this point engaged many Muslim friends (around the world too), most of whom I genuinely enjoy in an atmosphere as generous in mutual regard as I have ever experienced in conversation.

Nonetheless, in the hands of clerics, the Taliban, and the Arabs who profit mightily on religion — the Haj, the pilgrimage to Mecca, may be valued at $30 billion annually according to a Gulf News report — the culture produced within the vaunted “religion of peace” has serious social issues with the rest of the world.

And it can’t stand to hear about them.

After so much delving into contributing cultures and history, Haider makes this general observation, which I feel should be taken to heart:

“In all these forms of contact — individual, tribal, and civilizational — supremacy of one over the other, i.e., ascendancy of one sex over the other, of one tribe over the other, or of one civilization over the other, is a bad arrangement.  It is less productive and cannot hold forever.  It has been observed that if clash is less frequent than kindness, in these forms of relationships, the resulting posterity is healthier and happier.  The concept of dominance seems to be the less developed form of behavior in human history.  That is perhaps why all doctrines and philosophies of wisdom preached against it.” (p. 174).

I would suggest our species more gregarious than not and altogether more inclined toward real goodness and good relationships than not.

However, be that as it may, a little farther on in a chapter titled, “Hate the Jew: And Do Not Ask”, Haider notes, “The tragedy does not lie in the inability of Muslims to learn or think” — here I interrupt to note my friends do learn and do think, wonderfully, but they may be neither representative of all nor few, a subject to be taken up at another time . . . but back to Haider’s telling sentence — “it lies in the absolute dominance of Islamic dogma that has been carefully defended, so that no critical approach could ever raise a finger . . . .  In Saudi Arabia, even now geocentric astronomy is taught as syllabus; Abdul Rahman bin Baaz, the head of Medina University received award of merit for his thesis that the Earth is static while the Sun and the Moon move.”

I believe the veracity of Haider’s anecdotal evidence.

Those who believe Abdul Rahman bin Baaz’s theory would seem capable of believing anything, not that anyone dare tell them that.

Reference

American Psychiatric Association. Personality disorders. In: Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition, Text Revision. Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Publishing, Inc; 2000:717-731.

Ali, Jasim.  “Sweeping economic impact of the Haj.”  Gulf News, November 7, 2011.

Altaf, Waseem.  “We need multiple measures to start a return: Mobarak Haider.”  Viewpoint, n.d.

Ambardar, Sheenie and David Bienenfeld.   “Narcissistic Personality Disorder.”  Medscape Reference, updated May 24, 2011.  (References 2000 DSM-IV-TR).

Kreger, Randi.  “Don’t Diss the Narcissists!”  Psychology Today, May 24, 2010.

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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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