Some items on the web are ever-new or evergreen, and many of them play at this time of the year; however, “West Bank Story” may be one that plays beside the regret that things could be and could have been different eight years ago and should be and by now should have been different today.
The film’s official web site provides back-story; that I found the link earlier this day on Facebook tells how our communications environment has changed since 2005: the clip was new at first encounter, a little disappointing for having been posted in November of 2012, and now illuminating to find it traces back to 2005.
The world that does not know what to do with its hate — or understand why it has that wired into its social grammar in selective parts — may find “West Bank Story” again relevant at this time next year. Everyone else, however, may wish it God’s speed into irrelevance and transformation into a charming artifact left to grace the lid of the dust bin of history to which the middle east conflict and much else may one day be consigned.
The two videos are not in perfect chronological order or spatial relationship, but the approximation nonetheless makes its point.
The preying on the believing by attaching monotheist faith to messianic and grandiose delusion, a part of the signal of “civilizational narcissism”, “malignant narcissism”, narcissistic political sociopathy (reference “Facsimile Bipolar Political Sociopathy”) leads to darkness.
The Jewish attitude toward others is very different, conservative and scaled down when hateful — so the Jewish people set themselves apart from what they believe isn’t so good, unless directly threatened, a defensive rather than crusading posture (reference: The Peace and Violence of Judaism: From the Bible to Modern Zionism: Robert Eisen: 9780199751471: Amazon.com: Books), and if wanting to elicit some change in others, Rabbi Kook’s advice might prevails:
“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.”
One may respect the “chosen” qualities of others.
One may also bring light to darkness.
The Al Qaeda affiliates in Syria, believing themselves possessed of all the answers, swiftly inhibit the freedom of thought among the ranks of children.
Perhaps as a rule, autocrats and autocratic societies drain and suffocate their subjugated constituencies, which afford “narcissistic supply” to those who then enrich and aggrandize themselves without limits.
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Syria may have General Idris as one side, but the other two are on the same side even though opposed in battle.
The Assad Regime and the Al Qaeda affiliates are of the same mind — repeat: different content and rant but same psychopathology. This abstract observation may be hard to see at first but over time and with the death and displacement of millions of souls who don’t share their outlooks, the source of the conflict in the mind becomes apparent.
What to do about it?
Well, the world is failing Syria, imho, but the development and sustaining of the Syrian Civil War represents chiefly the failures of different but psychologically similar external governments, Russia and Saudi Arabia and their related political complexes, who will now be seen as backing competing autocratic-totalitarians in the Syrian theater.
Israel has confined itself to responding to some urgent humanitarian needs; the United States has fumbled on the issues — somebody in State should be tracking this blog — and has been trying to back away from the association of the anti-Assad revolution with the developing presence and power of the al Qaeda affiliates.
Those hunting for war porn may find it on Live Leak.
The variety of insults to humanity evident in the Syrian theater have horrified and numbed this observer, albeit not in the action immediately — although throwing civilians into baking ovens would seem as bad as it gets: from there, the numbers subject to similarly depraved behavior may climb, God rest their souls, but the character of the crime could not be worse, well, perhaps with the exception of being boiled in exploding nuclear plasma — but in the consideration that this dive down into the criminal depths has been going on, and one may say this today with a straight face, for years.
While Putin and Obama may try to keep at their own arms length the depravity exhibited by the Assad regime (from the outset) and the Al Qaeda affiliates that have carried into the fray their own intellectual poisons as well as a demonstrated lack of self-restraint, the two remain visible at the outer boundary of the melee, would that either could untie themselves from what keeps them in an opposition fast losing its equilibrium.
The Syrian Civil War as a furnace, in the larger sense, continues drawing fuel from Islamist ranks worldwide. In fact, as we head into the New Year, Syria would seem the go-to place for fighting to establish the global caliphate, to chat freely about offing the Jews, once and for all, and for throwing innocents into baking ovens.
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Syria today is a country of blurred facts and wild rumors, but the abduction and in some cases murder of Christian clerics is real enough.
It is believed that more than 30 journalists are currently being detained in Syria.
Many kidnappings have been downplayed in the hope of aiding negotiations.
On Tuesday the Spanish newspaper El Mundo decided to publicise the abduction of two journalists in Syria in September after indirect communications with their captors led to “no result”.
That contemptuous phrase “the whims of man” applies well to autocratic societies in which, indeed, the whims of one man control a great swath of humanity, but with those, one knows the methods: to those who humiliate themselves before their regimes: bribery, nepotism, and patronage: i.e., those get fed like dogs; to those who threaten such regimes: blackmail, intimidation, murder.
In contemporary realpolitik, the path ends with the suffocation of the constituent humanity or the overthrow of the regime.
Syria’s a good case in point today: I cannot figure out on whose side God has appeared. From the survey of that unfolding tragedy, He would seem altogether absent.
One more thing: the struggle for truly just systems of law beneficial, invested in, and trusted by all has not come about through whim.
The struggle for decency in human relationships by way of ethical and moral argument that finds expression through the law has a millennial existence, one that would seem to have its roots in the depths of tragedies, small and large, attending the human experience across oceanic time.
The “fog of war” descended on Syria a long time ago.
That process began with a despotic and reactionary state eschewing talk with its challengers and leaping to air power to bomb the daylights out of its own constituents — city blocks, suburbs, towns, villages, schools — free of discrimination regarding noncombatants.
The same seems to have picked up with the fractured assembly of the Free Syrian Army and to have accelerated with the incursion of the Al Qaeda affiliates and their ability to steal The Revolution, redefine The Cause, and confuse the comparative loyalties and purposes of the patchwork of anti-Assad forces.
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The fighting in Maaloula is part of a wider struggle between Al-Qaeda linked fighters of the Nusra Front and the Syrian army for control of the strategic Damascus-Homs highway, which passes close by the town.
Maaloula was the scene of heavy fighting in September. It is considered to be one of the birthplaces of Christianity and is home to a number of shrines and monasteries, which are listed as UNESCO world heritage sites.
Activists and residents say Syrian rebels have again taken control of parts of Maaloula, an ancient Christian town near Damascus.
A spokesman for the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights and a local resident said on Monday that rebels were steadily seizing swathes of the town which they have occupied on previous occasions as fighting has ebbed and flowed in the rugged Qalamoun region near Damascus.
In a statement relayed by the Lebanese National News Agency, Qabbani said that “kidnapping and physical abuse go contrary to the teachings of Islam, and are offensive to the essential teachings of tolerance especially at a time of conflict and war.”
It was not immediately clear whether the nuns had been kidnapped or merely evacuated for their own safety.
Oh, please, oh sponsored press: the Islamist front has retaken a critical position in the Syrian theater, picked up in the weird way of the religious world a dozen useful assets that it may use to forestall the next Assad airstrike, or, if the jets fly anyway, use as anti-regime PR (by way of their obliteration by the air force of the despot) even while a few of their own are dispatched to Paradise.
The Syrian terrorists abducted 12 nuns from Mar Takla monastery, which lies in the historic town of Maaloula in Damascus, and movedNuns them form to the nearby town of Yabroud.
While America’s lopsided right-side conservatives excoriate President Obama for this mess, it may dawn on some to take a second look at the weight and singularity of the emerging rebel arsenal. Neither the weapons launched in the above attack or very good zoom video used to record the attack arrived out of thin air. As with all film and television productions, especially today the real ones, there would seem to be a lot of treasure involved.
Whose?
When?
Through what channels?
I don’t think I’m going to find the answers to those questions on the World Wide Web.
In sum, Syria embodies multi-layered “spider web-like “ networks of Sunni and Shia militias and paramilitary forces, and this can only continue to plunge Syria into violence and chaos not unlike the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990), although Syria’s war is at least 100 times worse and intense and potentially will last a lot longer.
The supporters of these proxy rebel groups, like Saudi Arabia, the UAE , and other GCC states on the Sunni jihadists’ side, and Iran on the Shia side, have no regard for the innocent civilians suffering horrifically in Syria and also as refugees in neighboring countries. These proxy supporters are as guilty of atrocities as Bashar al-Assad. All sides are guilty of war crimes
In the order encountered in the above article: The Islamic State of Iraq and Sham (ISIS); Free Syrian Army; Ahrar al-Sham; Jaysh al-Islam; Suqour al-Sham; Liwa al-Tawhid; Liwa al-Haqq; Ansar al-Sham; Kurdish Islamic Front; Hezbollah; Revolutionary Guard Corps.
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“I want to say to the clerics to fear Allah. They have destroyed people. They have destroyed families. They have destroyed all people. They have destroyed young people. They lie to them and lure them. For what? For Jihad for the sake of Allah. All this is nothing but slander and brainwashing.”
We can thus say with high confidence that at least 1,200 European Muslims have gone to Syria since the start of the war. This is a remarkable figure; we are talking about the largest European Muslim foreign fighter contingent to any conflict in modern history.
Hey, guys, let’s put on a war and see who shows up!
The Mohammad Must Off Ya Club, partially invited by the Old Soviet Boys Network and the Shiite Propeller Beanies — everyone’s making money but the fighters, and some of those are making money too — have found their calling in Syria:
Explosive weapons, including bombs, killed seven in 10 of the more than 11,000 Syrian children under the age of 17 who have died in Syria’s brutal civil war, according to a report released on Sunday . . . Most often, they were killed by explosives, but also from executions and torture. Since March 2011, 113,735 civilians and combatants have been killed in the Syrian conflict.
Exercise your imagination with this factoid from the above cited Al Jazeera piece:
Small arms fire from guns and rifles accounted for 2,806, or 26.5 percent, of the children killed, with 764 children who were executed and 398 killed by fire from a sniper. And among those children who were executed, 112 were tortured, including some infants.
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Upon arrival in Syria, the mercenaries were told that their employers were private individuals, not the Syrian government, and the weapons they were told they’d be given, including T-72 tanks, were replaced by antiquated tanks that didn’t run, and by makeshift armored vehicles with machine guns. Also, they soon learned that instead of guarding oil fields, they were supposed to be recapturing them from jihadists.
Oh what a tangled web we weave when what we do best is set out to murder and deceive.
For money.
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St Petersburg newspaper Fontanka interviewed some mercenaries who said that they were lured by a promise to get $4,000 per month and a solemn oath that the first salary would be transferred within days.
They were taken on a flight to Beirut, Lebanon and from there they were transferred by cars to Damascus. When they reached the Syrian border they traveled with a convoy of local guardsmen. In Damascus they were taken to a local hotel. The following day they were transferred by a plane to Latakia, and from there to a Syrian military base.
The Islamic Small Wars are no longer about infidels, Islam, or states: they’are about kinds of persons, sometimes the absolute autocrats one feels comfortable referring to as “malignant narcissists”; sometimes common bandits, murderers, psychos, and thieves taking the opportunity to cloak themselves in patriotism or religion; sometimes nothing more than young men in the hormonal sway of grandiose messianic delusions.
Perhaps it will turn out a good thing to have had them gathered so in one bloody place.
They’re all easier to see that way — and what a spectacle they make of themselves.
While the malignancies do the chop-chop and Kalashnikov war dances, Oxfam on Syria notes the following:
The UN estimates that almost 7 million Syrians inside of Syria are in need of assistance, including 4.25 million internally displaced.
Thousands continue to flee Syria daily.
The total number of refugees in neighboring countries is now more than 2.2 million.
It is estimated that the population of Lebanon has increased by more than 25% and the population of Jordan by 6%. This is putting extreme pressure on local infrastructure.
“One 24-year-old man, suspected of organising journeys to Syria, was in touch with several “fixers” who facilitated travel between Turkey and Syria, while another previously fought with an Islamist group in Syria, the sources said.”
In casual and often jocular language typical of messages on social media, the authors paint a rosy picture of life on the front, stressing the pious atmosphere and the sense of brotherhood-in-arms shared by the fighters. They note that recruits may come with their wives and children, and stress the practical advantages of joining the jihad community in Syria, such as the prospect of finding a bride and the low cost of living.
Within and around Iran, conflict seems a state of affairs, but the form conflicts take today — sub-state, transnational, highly technological — is very different from anything experienced ever. No one has to assault or bomb anything IF it can shut down computing operations, electrical feeds, satellite signals, etc., or otherwise interfere with arming or delivery paths.
We may be entering an energy age involving both fragile and extremely dangerous technologies — solar farms (easy to bomb or disconnect) and nuclear power stations (real ones involving fires we don’t know how to put out when their cooling systems fail) — and IF we wish one another to live well and prosper (so the Jews meet Star Trek), our ability to dispel, manage, or quell political and social chaos and violence comes to the fore. Basically: we can’t produce a higher global standard in quality of living if we cannot curtail the behavior persistent at the other end of the lifestyle and governance spectrum.
The problems have to dispense with arms.
We’re going to have a lot of arguments.
We do not want to have a lot of accidents.
I’ve counseled for a universal basis in values “compassion, humility, inclusion (very important), and integrity. The world’s at a crossroads and will go forward, but whether it strives to do so today and gets a grip on itself or painfully scrapes through 400 more years to get to about the same place, I don’t know.
I do feel certain that to that to produce a sufficient global distribution in end-user resources to forestall or ameliorate conflict, disease, economic suffering — real suffering — and starvation wants for greater global cooperation and a steep reduction in the kind of human wildcards that spoil everything for everyone.
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