Tag Archives: conflict

FTAC – Good, Evil, Language Metonymy and Social Grammar

04 Friday Oct 2013

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Philology, Politics

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , ,

The science experiment preceding the comment involved measurements of attitude affected by first introducing participants to short collections of words that might have an impact on subsequent perception of other subjects.

I thought the science silly, actually, but it lent itself to the kernel, which at this point for me seems iterative.

The “priming” referred to in the article attaches to two fundamental concepts in the cultural perception of good and evil: language metonymy and social grammar. To delve into one may involve dipping into linguistics and poetry and the other wants for focus on the processing of cultural and social signals in infancy’s language acquisition period.

In essence, science still gives us a glimpse of what may be known empirically and religion becomes the mirror of cultural expression, imagination, and invention. “Good”, from such a clinical perspective, becomes what culture and language have become together across time for the set of constituent speakers.

Two enjoyable reference in this area: Daniel Everett’s Don’t Sleep, There are Snakes and Language: The Cultural Tool.

I cannot emphasize the idea too much that a romantic combat signals the poetic arrangement of symbols suspended in language and woven around the fighter’s own self-concept and image.

When one has cause to denote the pen mightier than the sword, doing so recognizes that good and evil, beauty and sophistry, guidance and misguidance involve the speech of either healthy or poisonous tongues and then an accurate or inaccurate assessment of states of affairs.

*

We humans don’t live through our organics: rather, we live with them and at times, this with age especially so, barely tolerate them; where we actually live is within the mouth-ear-mind-heart system that we use to tell ourselves about ourselves and others and the world.

If we’re to find greatness and heroism within ourselves and our ranks, it’s in that vessel woven out of strings of words fashioned like steel; if we’re to be disheartened or humbled, it may be through the deformation or shattering of those same strings, and then perhaps for their being either too rigid to withstand a little pressure or too gimp with receiving a load of confusion to keep their own best form.

# # #

“Another Kind of Islam . . . .”

27 Friday Sep 2013

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Islamic Small Wars, Philology, Philosophy, Politics, Psychology, Religion

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , ,

Ahmed is convinced that only the Muslims themselves could be the answer to the “Islamists” and that the moderate Muslims must find the resources to counter what she called the “multi-head Medusa.”

“Only if we tell ourselves the truth, that the Islamists are a threat within us, can we confront them. The chasm between Muslims and Islamists is a deep one,” she said.

Israel Hayom | Muslim scholar: ‘I refuse to let Islam fall captive to the Islamists’ – by Reuven Berko, 9/27/2013

Between Islamic Jihad and Western Anti-Jihad, or perhaps better phrased, between the Islamist’s Believers and the More Strident of the Crusader West — that’s got the Kavkaz Center obsession working in it — reside the lives of approximately 1.2 billion persons.

Where the true religion mixes time in a forever present, leaving the virulent segment of believers forever fighting the Battle of the Trench, “another kind of Islam” would seem to want to join with the nations in progress across the many qualities of living.  As sensible as that may seem, as easy as it may be to do — just switch off the “contempt” and “hate” buttons — language-based perception — start with the child’s command of a globally antagonistic and misfitted social grammar; move on to the compression of time integrated with a powerfully romantic and barbaric scripture (for example, reference At-Tawba 29 — the binary or split Jihad/anti-Jihad views of the literature are abundant on the web); and wrap-up with alignment of ahadith, essential hearsay, to suit political interest, and don’t forget to add the black-and-white thinking (acceptable / not acceptable) accompanying it — precludes so convenient an answer.

______

Narrators who took the side of Abu Bakr and Umar rather than Ali, in the disputes over leadership that followed the death of Muhammad, are seen as unreliable by the Shia; narrations sourced to Ali and the family of Muhammad, and to their supporters, are preferred. Sunni scholars put trust in narrators, such as Aisha, whom Shia reject. Differences in hadith collections have contributed to differences in worship practices and shari’a law and have hardened the dividing line between the two traditions.

Hadith – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia – as viewed 9/27/2013.

With Muhammad’s death, apparently, the Religion of Peace seems to have become the Religion of Eternal Conflict, starting with the conflict between the Shiite and Sunni camps in their exercise of a) tribal choice in the b) absence of more clear successionary  instructions.  In the medieval fields of battle in an age much less comprehending of empiricism, enlightened reason (Shakespeare’s contribution to a pagan humanism that he would weave within and around the separate character of the Church — or ever mindful of it — more than 700 years later), it would be said that “God decides” even though what “decided” then (as now) would have been diplomacy, energy (brought to bear in battle), strategy, and steel.

The Jews have had issues with language too, but where the Torah teases minds into arguments — what is the meaning of an action, a passage, a moment? — injunctions to act as programmed in the adoption of attitudes and beliefs about others and with reference primarily to one’s own grandiose image as licensed to subjugate whole populations, a thing well demonstrated by either the invention or favored adoption of the Banu Quarayza legend, that behavior as primarily language behavior has and indeed has had other effects.

* * *

For Muslim readers, perhaps the toughest chapters deal with Muhammad’s slaughter of the Banu Qurayza. Fatah denounces the story as invented by influential scholar Ibn Ishaq nearly 100 years after the Prophet’s death. No archeological evidence supports it. No Jewish text corroborates it. Yet the story forms part of Islam’s Hadith literature and the Sira, the biography of the Prophet, and has come to be regarded as divine truth, Fatah says.

The problem, the author says, is that Islam lacks a tradition of questioning religious texts. So far, no Toronto imam has joined him to reject the Banu Qurayza story. So far, no mosque has invited him to speak.

The Jew Is Not My Enemy: Tarek Fatah | Toronto Star – by John Goddard, 11/19/2010

More than merely modernity or opportunity, the “humanity of humanity” — there will be a page on that here — has long tempered Islam in its treatment of Jews, albeit capriciously, much in line with the fate of the Jews left exposed to the will of more powerful others whenever and wherever Jews have been in the minority position, and that from Roman times to this day.

As with the quintessential Jewish desire to band in the desert — in human evolutionary reality, who were those people who first gathered together and determined a good way, their way, and way of life that would leave dictators to their fates — or, as with Haman, defeat them? — Islamic humanism and humanists seem to me a more natural course for Muslims than that conceived, promoted, and disciplined by the God Mob even though their stripe seems to have been there at the beginning.

There may be in the above thought a patently Jewish perspective, but a glance at Islam’s more beneficent and merciful humans, certainly more so than the miscreants often mentioned on this blog, tells of something deeply universal operating across cultures and languages as one slips into the modernity of any epoch:  Eman Fahad Al Nafjan, Irshad Manji, M. Zuhdi Jasser, Pervez Hoodbhoy, Mudar Zahran, Qanta Ahmed, Tarek Fatah have each taken firm stances against “Islamist” drift while deeply acknowledging or affirming their relationship with Islam.  With such good people and scholars, every one of them, one wants to know whether theirs collectively will become the voice of a powerful Muslim “silent majority” — I don’t think they are that today in the world’s Muslim-majority states — rather than the expression of a highly educated, intellectual, western-oriented elite, which (look ’em up on YouTube) is how some may be played by the more Brotherhoodly among zealous coreligionists.

______

It’s hard to look into the heart except through the mouth using for an instrument one’s ears.

Those I’ve named speak bravely, consistently, reliably and seem ever good voices and great souls.

They are influential in our global online village, and they’re not in the least alone — the fan base is pretty good, but perhaps its development may be likened to depositing vaporized precious metal on a suitable substrate — it takes a little bit of time and repetition to get from that process something solid and strong.

For the time being, I suspect the English speaking and Express Tribune reading Muslim complement to a still emerging global intelligentsia — we have each shared with the other a hearty “welcome aboard!” although aboard what may remain in contention — indeed comprises but a thin layer and kind in the amalgam of the earth-wide communicating whole.

Will Islamic humanism and humanists contain what needs to be contained?

Tune in (after the Sabbath).

Additional Reference

VCU Menorah Review, “An Open Letter to Tarek Fatah” by Richard Sherwin, Winter/Spring 2012.

The Jew is Not My Enemy: Unveiling the Myths that Fuel Muslim Anti-Semitism: Tarek Fatah: 9780771047848: Amazon.com: Books (2011)

Maimonides – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia – as viewed 9/27/2013:

During the reign of the Almoravids, the position of the Jews was free of significant abuses,[14] but after another Berber dynasty, the Almohads, conquered Córdoba in 1148, they abolished the dhimma status (i.e. state protection of life and wealth) in some of their territories. The loss of this protected status threatened the Jewish and Christian communities with conversion to Islam, death, or exile.[13]

Maimonides fled to Egypt and became the personal physician to the Kurdish general and sultan Saladin and his family.

Golden age of Jewish culture in Spain – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia – as viewed 9/27/2013:

The coexistence of Muslims, Jews, and Christians during this time is revered by many writers. Al-Andalus was a key center of Jewish life during the early Middle Ages, producing important scholars and one of the most stable and wealthy Jewish communities and a relatively educated society for the Muslim occupiers and their Jewish collaborators, as well as some Christians who openly collaborated with the Muslims and Jews. María Rosa Menocal, a specialist in Iberian literature at Yale University claims that “Tolerance was an inherent aspect of Andalusian society”.[1]

Islamic Humanism – Lenn E. Goodman – Oxford University Press

Islam And Terrorism: A Humanist View, by David Schafer, May/June 2002

# # #

Syria – States of Siege

18 Wednesday Sep 2013

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

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , ,

Hindsight may not turn out 20/20 when it comes to Syria, as the true extent of the damage may not become apparent for years given the dimensions involved, from the destruction of cities to the less evident effects of the traumatizing of children and young adults — or their indoctrination or orientation to combat and the black hurricanes of war.

For this post: the briefest survey of how dismal and evil Syria’s civil war has been.

Today, there are Syrian children certain to grow up as the immigrants and refugees of war.

For tens upon tens of thousands of Syrians, were peace to arrive tomorrow (let’s not even go there today), there would be not only no homes to return to but no businesses or communities either.  War has erased their past lives and the artifacts and furnishings attending them.

For Syria or portions of it, I think we’re short today on the environmental and natural history stories, but perhaps it’s not for the conservationists, as a rule, to throw themselves into still burning conflicts to sample air and water quality and note the health of overlooked habitats.

______

AleppoVacations

Aleppo Tourism and Vacations: 18 Things to Do in Aleppo, Syria | TripAdvisor as viewed 9/18/2013.

While the search engine listed the page date of the above as 2007, the “Travel Alert: Security Concerns” notice proved right up to date.  One could walk at leisure around ancient ruins in Aleppo just six years ago; some day, one hopes soon, one may do the same around the latest in modern ones.

______

Combat

A senior U.N. diplomat in New York says details on scale of the attack, the rockets used and trajectory data cited in the report make it “abundantly clear” that the Syrian regime was behind the attack. The diplomat said: “There isn’t a shred of evidence in the other direction.”

AP top news headlines | Tampa Bay Times “UN report suggests regime behind sarin attack,” 9/18/2013

The UN Chemical Weapons Report: One Third of the Story that Needs to Be Told | Center for Strategic and International Studies 9/17/2013

Perhaps the most besieged parties in Syria will turn out the forces that launched sarin-loaded warheads from sites on Mount Qasioun.

On the war crimes front, both UN reports and “western” diplomacy seems to be closing in on Damascus today and its specific higher elevation defenses.

The New York Times’ C.J. Chivers and Human Rights Watch’s Josh Lyons, a satellite imagery specialist, examined details buried in the U.N. report released Tuesday that concluded definitively chemical weapons were used in Syria without implicating either side. Both came to the same conclusion through separate, independent investigations: the rockets carrying sarin gas were fired from Syria’s Mount Qasioun . . . .

The U.N.’s Case Against Syria Is Hidden in the Details – Connor Simpson – The Atlantic Wire 9/18/2013

Rocket trajectory links Syrian military to attack 9/18/2013 AP

* * *

BEIRUT — The prisoners are crammed together in small, dark rooms with no water or electricity and barely enough food to survive. Diseases such as scabies and tuberculosis are rampant among them. Every so often, the crash of artillery shells rocks their sprawling prison complex, a stark reminder of the civil war raging outside.

In Syria’s Aleppo prison, thousands of inmates caught in war’s deadly stalemate – The Washington Post 9/18/2013

In the conventional war fighting realm, Syria’s prisoners have been made prisoners of the war as much as of the state.  Theirs is truly a state of siege with state forces defending the prison and keeping them and rebel forces attacking the prison and claiming intentions to free them.  While fate, God, nature, machinery, and politics squat like The Thinker on their stony lives, the war gets to them anyway, and according to the AP story, by way of shelling, lack of medicine, and possibly execution by guards (“opposition groups say”).

Also: Syria: Aleppo prisoners caught in deadly stalemate – Washington Times 9/18/2013

Pentagon proposes plan to equip and train ‘moderate’ Syrian rebels — RT USA 9/19/2013 (only on the web may I relay tomorrow’s early news).  🙂

Pentagon proposes training moderate Syrian rebels – CNN.com 9/19/2013

Related background: The Non-State Militant Landscape in Syria | Combating Terrorism Center at West Point 8/27/2013

Economics

The closure of factories, disrupted communications, rising unemployment, a growing shadow economy, prices increases, and a serious shortage of many vital goods and services have accompanied the upheaval in Syria. Since government resources are being depleted, the economic implications of the Syrian crisis work against Assad’s regime in the long run.

Asia Times Online :: Syria’s looming economic disaster 9/16/2013

Related: Insight: Syria’s economy goes underground as black market thrives | Reuters 9/5/2013

What we think of as “civilization” may not be all that fragile, as most places most of the time tolerate some low-level incidence of violence in crime, of urban decay, social pathology, the burdens of natural health-related issues across their populations, and outbreaks of flu and such, but political violence develops its own and often amplifying energies.  While the military technician’s “low-intensity conflict” may be also continuous and survivable — as much seems to be true in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, and other hosts within the Islamic Small Wars as well as distinctly different conflict-laden cultures, e.g.,Mexico with the cartels, Colombia with the FARC — the same smoldering heat with its incidental fires may break out into more virulent and much amplified form.

The Assad regime did itself, much less its subject people, no favors when it launched jets against suspect redoubts where a more temperate leadership may have dispatched detectives and spies.  In essence, it put itself on the path to burning down its own house.

______

Environment

This drought — combined with the mismanagement of natural resources by [Syrian President Bashar] Assad, who subsidized water-intensive crops like wheat and cotton farming and promoted bad irrigation techniques — led to significant devastation. According to updated numbers, the drought displaced 1.5 million people within Syria.

Drought helped cause Syria’s war. Will climate change bring more like it? 9/10/2013

Pictures: Syrian Cultural Sites Damaged by Conflict 8/2012

List of heritage sites damaged during Syrian civil war – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Aleppo: Scenes from a City of Ruins | TIME.com 4/26/2013

One should not overlook the pervasive influence that environment and landscape exerts on human mentality (see, for example, Vine Deloria Jr.’s God is Red), and while in our modern age we really should tackle this earth-human “earth process” challenge (visit, for example, Thomas Berry’s legacy foundation page), we may wonder at the fragility of our works in the path of war.

No less than with the culture, infrastructure, and habitations of the American south of 1860 by the end of 1865, the Syria of 2007 would seem about as “gone with the wind”.

The sovereignty of the regime has disappeared from the Kurdish quarter of the state; the state’s ability to monopolize violence and secure the lives of its citizens seems contested everywhere outside of Damascus; with the chemical weapons imbroglio, it’s ability to operate with near impunity within its own boundaries has been deeply compromised as it has dragged both Putin and Obama more deeply into its political workings.

One may leave the sovereign to be a sovereign even while asking “sovereign of what?”

With Syria at the moment, the answer to that may be “whatever’s left”.

______

Health

Syria’s once sophisticated health system is “at breaking point” and parts of the country are completely cut off from any kind of medical service because of “deliberate and systematic attacks” on medical facilities and staff, senior doctors said on Monday.

Health care in Syria is ‘hell on earth,’ doctors say | Fox News 9/17/2013

Related: Open letter: let us treat patients in Syria : The Lancet 9/16/2013

Fox seems to have put up a conservative lead.  That article goes on to note, among other similarly depressing factoids, that, “Of the 5,000 physicians in the city of Aleppo before the conflict started, only 36 remain . . . .”

______

Refugees

More than 2 million Syrians are hosted in the region, placing unprecedented strain on communities, infrastructure and services in host countries.

There has been a massive escalation of arrivals in 2013. Over one million Syrian refugees have registered as refugees since the beginning of 2013.

Women and children make up three-quarters of the refugee population.

The vast majority of refugees are dependent on aid, arriving with little more than the clothes on their backs.

Stories from Syrian Refugees, UNHCR, as viewed 9/18/2013.

Related: UNHCR – Syria Regional Response Plan (January – December 2013)

The combined burdens plus energies attending Syria’s displaced and refugee populations will change the world.

Or not.

Either way, the most vulnerable, hapless, youngest, peaceful, and innocent of humans involved in the war present the greater humanity, all of it, with the challenge of their survival, including their integration with what I’ll call the common humanity.

To date, with Somalia’s 1.7 million refugees, the trumped Palestinian numbers — in camps or somewhere between, all of those have been settled for years even if most unsatisfactorily across four states and two nominal territories — and yet some messes in Iraq and Pakistan, the greater humanity seems to have gotten used to keeping uprooted humans in circumscribed camps.  However, the numbers involved in Syria’s political meltdown defy so pat, simple, or foreseen an approach to management and order.

With Syria’s refugees, not exactly friends of the Jews, Israel, “the west” — in part, it’s their own familiar claptrap that has both enabled and sustained the Assad dictatorship and invited to the archaic and decadent system the whirlwind now consuming it and themselves — the world will either harden its heart or open its doors (credit Sweden recently with responding to its part of the challenge with humanity).

______

Related Reference

Russia blasts U.N. report on Syria chemical weapons attack as “politicized, preconceived and one-sided” – CBS News 9/18/2013

WFP aims get better food to Syrian refugees and more cash into host nations’ economies with voucher program – CBS News 9/18/2013

Detecting Looming Border Conflicts Using Satellites | United States Institute of Peace 9/10/2013

# # #

Syria – Fast

10 Tuesday Sep 2013

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

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, ,

Update 130910-1630

Assad Bombs Damascus While Agreeing to Give Up Chemical Weapons | World Affairs Journal 9/10/2013 The Daily Star, Lebanon

Destroying Syria’s chemical weapons is harder than it sounds – The Week 9/10/2013

 

Update 130910-1540ET

Syria Will Sign Chemical Weapons Convention, Declare Arsenal, Foreign Ministery Says 9/10/2013 Huffington Post / AP

UN Council Syria meeting postponed: envoys – Yahoo! News 9/13/2013

______

Battle For Ancient Historic Christian Village Of Maaloula In Syria

What is all that about?

I wish I knew — or I’m glad I don’t know.

As suggested by the PressTV inclusion in the above footage, we appear to have a secular dictatorship backed by a Shiite theocracy opposed to a Sunni Islamist force derided by other Sunni Arab influences (in achieved cooperation with London and Washington) in the theater but, nonetheless, the Al Qaeda affiliated are in the field, and it neither looks nor sounds like they’re running short on ammunition or manpower.

Upside-down?

Make that upside-down and all mixed up.

Russia now champions secular rule (yes, as they did back in that other Afghanistan) while the United States would seem to be championing God knows what if it were not for the more granular analyses leading back to the actual make-up of the forces of Syria’s revolution, but it seems only the wonks (and Christopher Dickey) want to get into that.

Fast Reference

Obama’s Syria speech is now a dual challenge – The Washington Post 9/10/2013

Pro-Democracy Forces Still Among Rebels Fighting Assad, Study Finds – The Daily Beast 9/9/2013

Syria: al Qaeda linked fighters take strategic town of Maaloula | euronews, world news 9/9/2013

Syrian Christians Pack Passports Fearing Islamist Onslaught – Bloomberg 9/10/2013:

If Islamist rebels exploit a U.S. attack to advance into their neighborhood, Nakazy will grab the bag and join the 1.2 million Syrians who have fled to Lebanon. At least 450,000 of Syria’s 2 million Christians have been displaced, Gregorios III, Patriarch of the Church of Antioch, said last week.

“We’re worried that the fighters would take advantage of any confusion,” Nakazy, 56, said by phone from Jaramana.

Syria Islamist rebels take control of Christian town of Maaloula – CNN.com 9/8/2013

# # #

Syria’s Chemical Weapons Problem and the Call to Conscience

09 Monday Sep 2013

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

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , ,

With Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) in play, no one really cares about the details: with Syria, the threshold ventured in March would seem to have been crossed in August, scaling up a dollop of death in one context to a brazen full-scale assault — 1,400 dead, 400 of them children, according to the Obama Administration — on innocents.

Must something be done?

______

MOSCOW — Syria on Monday quickly welcomed a call from Russia, its close ally, to place Syrian chemical arsenals under international control, then destroy them to avert a U.S. strike, but did not offer a time frame or any other specifics.

Russia To Push Syria To Put Chemical Weapons Under International Control Huffington Post 9/9/2013

Whether a disingenuous gesture to buy time or a sincere one to wage its war with the will of men and conventional machinery and materiel rather than with invisible, odorless clouds of poison, the gesture would seem to acknowledge culpability and guilt, and that with Russian encouragement to assemble, surrender (to international control), and destroy chemical weapons stores while also joining the signatories to the Chemical Weapons Convention.

It appears that a kind of monster born in German laboratories, manufactured in U.S. subsidiaries, and shipped out to several middle east states under cover of the “dual use” use label — all along the conception, development, and delivery line knew it would come to this, even though Syria worked out the details itself — must now be contained and destroyed in an active, “existential”, zero-sum kind of battleground.

Rick Ungar writing for Forbes today notes well the motivation: “Putin understands very well that he stands to gain far more by being the man responsible for taking Assad’s chemical stockpile out of the game than he stood to gain by being responsible for any future use of the same.”

It’s hard remaining evil when one wants most to look good and to be perceived as just and heroic.

Still, one recognizes that one recognizes a correct and right course and side, and that is the consequence of the presence of conscience.

And if Putin has a conscience . . .

😉

It’s not all public relations.

The world will not care whether Obama or Putin or other forces remove from battlefields — and if for all time, then good — the chemical weapons option.  It is the other side of the equation — the one that would forestall the wanting to use such weapons — that would seem troublesome, i.e., the cultivation of conscience sufficient to turn a destructive capacity and drive, also the license afforded grandiose ambitions and delusions, toward courses more empathetic, kind, liberating, noble, and productive.

______

Aside: a world that wants for basic resources, starting with energy and possibly ending with oxygen, must tame war itself, even if starting with the most barbaric of its rough edges, for the contemporary mix of exceedingly dangerous nuclear technologies and equally fragile alternative wonders (like solar-electric farms) demands that the exceptionally egotistical and reckless among leaders — those who too readily sacrifice others, including their own constituents and their children — be no more.

Such have become everyone’s monsters.  

Fast Reference

By dragging Truthout URLs to this section, I have not joined the left, but I have as broad a spectrum of civil and gracious friends as I believe it possible to have in the online social networks, and so, as may we all, I get a good walk around the dimension of subjects of interest.

Chemical Weapons Convention (Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons)

Obama’s Case for Syria Didn’t Reflect Intel Consensus Truthout 9/9/2013

Putin Offers Surprise Plan For International Control Of Syrian Chemical Weapons-Moves To Steal Obama’s Thunder? – Forbes 9/9/2013

Syria – Ambassador Rice’s Comments | BackChannels 9/9/2013

Syria: Six Alternatives to Military Strikes Truthout 9/6/2013

The Jewish Press » » Meet the Monster Behind Syria’s Chemical Weapons 8/29/2013

# # #

Syria – Ain’t No Iraq

09 Monday Sep 2013

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Islamic Small Wars, Middle East, Politics, Psychology, Syria, United States of America

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , ,

Kerry also said he had no doubt that Assad was responsible for the chemical weapons attack in east Damascus on 21 August, saying that only three people are responsible for the chemical weapons inside Syria – Assad, one of his brothers and a senior general. He said the entire US intelligence community was united in believing Assad was responsible.

John Kerry gives Syria week to hand over chemical weapons or face attack | World news | theguardian.com 9/9/2013

John Kerry calls Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad “a man without credibility”

______

Syria: Syrian President Bashar al Assad Charlie Rose Interview September 9, 2013

______

In state-level affairs, the sovereign or government-in-power may be held accountable for what takes place within its purview.  So right off the bat this week, the nit of The Guardian headline, “Assad did not order Syria chemical weapons attack, says German press” has a disingenuous cant to it.

If not Bashar, what about Maher?

If not Maher, what about an officer in charge under his command?

Note Simon Tisdall and Josie Le Blond in Berlin in writing for The Guardian:

The German intelligence findings concerning Assad’s personal role may complicate US-led efforts to persuade the international community that punitive military action is justified. They could also strengthen suspicions that Assad no longer fully controls the country’s security apparatus.

______

I’m not making the call, but the single case for pointing to a rebel false flags seems to stand on an accident involving the mishandling of chemical weapons stocks.

Or a recording — edited, underscored, produced, disseminated — showing a successful launch of a “blue bonnet” style rocket (using what looks like a launch vehicle matched to the purpose).

One case: two stories . . . .

That leaves the public with a spy story in a world waiting for the journalists to get into what I’m going to call “Political Spychology” — the massive, multinational industry devoted to capturing, listening, sniffing, stealing, interpreting signal for military as well as industrial purposes.

By vicinity x chatter x who x impact:

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/28/israeli-intelligence-intercepted-syria-chemical-talk

______

I am of the mind that the Syrian Civil War has degraded the central power of the Assad regime but neither installed nor shifted the same toward any coherent and responsible party: instead, it has drawn the state toward gross political anarchy and with a look in many places not dissimilar to Mogadishu’s: hard destruction around and through which shifting tides of suffering humanity amid armed gangs, loosely aligned at best, state or rebel, make their way.

Their situation will worsen as the lack of honesty and integrity across the field and the presence of grandiose ambitions in some ensures greater anarchy, brutality, and political dissolution.

To get the chemical weapons off the field is not to solve the war: it’s to make it a little more discerning (at least between combatant and noncombatant targets), humane, and secure because while other weapons projectiles explode or hit something with finite effect, poisonous gasses drift and are indiscriminate even on the gentlest of their lethal breezes.

To solve the war is to address the poetry of the mind of the warrior romantics involved in imagining themselves “God’s darlings” — Haider Mobarak’s phrase related to the narcissism involved — and striving to prove as much so through the intimidation, murder, and subjugation of all presumably less admirable and beloved-by-God others.

Fast Reference

Assad did not order Syria chemical weapons attack, says German press | World news | The Guardian 9/9/2013

Obama, his team sharpen Syria pitch as Congress prepares to vote | Fox News 9/9/2013

Obama’s Syrian chemical attack “proof” relies solely on Israeli intelligence | Intrepid Report.com 9/3/2013

Syria chemical attack analysis — CNN 9/7/2013

Syria | The White House (viewed: 9/9/2013)

Live today at 12:30 PM ET, White House National Security Adviser Susan E. Rice. Ambassador Rice will discuss the Assad regime’s use of chemical weapons against Syrian civilians, the longstanding international norm against the use of chemical weapons, and the need for action to deter the Assad regime from future use of chemical weapons.

Time isn’t on the White House’s side on Syria resolution 9/9/2013

What if Syria’s Assad didn’t personally order the chemical weapons attack? – The Week 9/9/2013

White House Intensifies Efforts to Make the Case for Syria Military Strikes – ABC News 9/8/2013

# # #

Syria – Maaloula! “Syria’s Oldest Christian Community” — Overrun – Plus Brutality in Uniform

08 Sunday Sep 2013

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

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , ,

Russia? We are living in an alternative universe. This is what America should be doing. Instead, our President is going to Congress to intervene militarily on behalf of the jihadists attacking the Christians. Shameful.

Russia Calls for Protection of Christian Holy Places in Maaloula, Syria – Atlas Shrugs 9/8/2013.

Perhaps in “enemy of my enemy” fashion, American anti-Jihad conservatives may seem to be aligning with anti-Jihad Assads.

The Janus-faced brutality would more seem everyone’s enemy.

With Syria, the only good side is either outside of it or, perhaps, hunkered down quietly within the storm and praying to God for it to end with neither a dictator nor a Jihadi left standing.

______

The Other Side, Possibly, of Anti-Obama, Pro-Assad Endorsement

Who would be wearing the boots and uniforms, holding helmets and assault weapons?

The YouTube counter says “7 views” as I watch it.

Published today by “Ryan Hughes” there are questions about it I can’t answer: who is being beaten?  Where?  On what day?  Why?

Still, it looks authentic.

I bet it is.

Fast Reference

Activists: Syrian Rebels Take Christian Village | TIME.com

Al Qaeda-linked rebels gain control of Christian village, Syrian activists say | Fox 9/8/2013.

Al-Qaeda Vows to Slaughter Christians After U.S. ‘Liberates’ Syria | FrontPage Magazine 9/5/2013:

Thus al-Qaeda terrorists eagerly await U.S. assistance against the Syrian government, so they can subjugate if not slaughter Syria’s Christians, secularists, and non-Muslims — even as the Obama administration tries to justify war on Syria by absurdly evoking the “human rights” of Syrians on the one hand, and lying about al-Qaeda’s presence in Syria on the other.

Maaloula, Christian Village Outside Damascus, Captured By Syrian Rebels, Activists Say

NewsSyria Islamist rebels take control of Christian town of Maaloula – CNN.com 9/8/2013.

# # #

Syria – Opinions on Intervention – Moral and Strategic Obligation

08 Sunday Sep 2013

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Fast News Share, Islamic Small Wars, Middle East, Politics, Regions, Syria

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

, , , , ,

To this day, many Jews continue to decry an evident lack of interest in saving Jewish lives either at the start of Hitler’s genocidal campaign or toward the end when rail lines may have been bombed to slow the feed to the ovens.

Well, here we are again, but it’s not the Jews who are suffering.

In fact, many in the path of Assad’s brutality would seem to hate America and Jews and “the west” at the very least out of language habit, although with the large and loose assembly of Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda-type forces displaying their own brutality in the field, more than and other than talk must be shaping defense and political policy between the White House and the Pentagon.

This business of discerning who to save continues to have a “no good dog in the fight” feel to it, this despite assurances from Qatar and the rallying presence of General Salim Idris, who may be the commander in the western suit but not the supreme disciplining force across his own battle space.

* * *

Syria may also remind how for all the philosophical and political talk, the business of war remains intensely geographical (spatial) and physical in nature.

For one thing, Syria has become the most isolated and transparent hot conflict and political laboratory on the planet.  Not only do the primary antagonists rate among the least sympathetic of human figures — again: the forces of a brutal dictatorship would seem to share the field, in part, with those of the most absurd religious extremism — but they’re doing “their thang” across a landscape broad and remote enough (and, damaged and emptying enough) to afford, from the talk to the walk, their own display.

Approach it with a toolkit — a few ships, say — or roll it into the operatory known as the UN, but give it a good look because, at the moment, the Syrian Civil War is its own machine with the broken and working parts fairly well lit up for viewing.

* * *

No one really wants to bring peace to that sandbox of a nation, no more than the local constabulary wants to knock on the door behind which a vicious domestic has broken out with flying furnishings, which one hears through the walls, and perhaps broken bottles, knives, and guns, which, alas, one must open the door to see.

At least on a “domestic” the scale is small and the police a force larger than it.

A civil war across a landscape awash in criminal and gambler’s money, arms, blood, death, and suffering and steeped in obsessive cruel and vengeful thinking — that’s a whole other threshold for crossing, one for which the confirmed use of chemical weapons takes the absurdity and inhumanity of it beyond the capacity of conscience for either bearing or controlling.

* * *

In another way, more abstract, one now has a kind of “rogues on display” in Syria with Putin’s implicit cooperation with the Assad regime even though perhaps he has done some things to adjust the flames in the oven (e.g., Russia Delays Arms Supplies to Syria over Money – Paper | World | RIA Novosti 8/30/2013) and the rate at which it burns.  Add on the other side the appearance and influx of Islamists in the battle space (e.g., and three hours old at the moment, Syria Islamist rebels take control of Christian town of Maaloula – CNN.com).

Truly, a whole world is watching Syria, and I should think that it must be thinking about what it is actually seeing and doing so in ways apart from immediate self-interest, for in the theater we may now call “Syria On Display” what would seem to be on display would seem to comprise also the worst of the worst behavior in humanity.

* * *

Just a moment for fiction here:

“I kill you and cut out your heart and eat it!”

______

“I make you and your people — infants, children, mothers, old men — die in agony without warning.  And I do it with impunity!”

* * *

Which world do you want to live in: the one that intervenes — or the one that let’s it go on?

Syria has serious problems, but it appears no one has yet figured out to whom those problems belong.

Then too while the world believes it watches such a spectacle from the outside, that would seem true only until it discovers itself inside of it after all.

Indeed, in the First Age of the Internet (or is it “Internet 2.0” or “3.0”) and an era filled with agressive Islamism and related violence, we all may have to ask whether state boundaries serve to isolate cultural and political systems in necessary ways while also guiding and defining a practical global politics in ways that may have been more helpful as little as 15 years ago.

Fast Reference

Moran: America Has Moral Obligation in Syria | ARLnow.com 9/4/2013:

The congressman, who opposed the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the military surge in Afghanistan, strongly supports a “surgical strike” against Syria’s chemical weapons capabilities.

On Syria, Words Have Consequences | TIME.com 9/4/2013:

From the start of the Syrian ­conflict, President Obama has wanted to take two very different approaches to it. On the one hand, he has been disciplined about the definition of American interests and the use of force. On the other hand, he has sought a way to respond to Bashar Assad’s ­human-­rights atrocities.

Should the US involve itself in the Syrian conflict? | Daily Trojan 9/5/2013:

The United States must intervene in Syria for humanitarian reasons.In 1994, the world watched as Hutu soldiers, armed with machetes, hacked apart the Rwandan countryside. Despite clear evidence of genocide from the United Nations observers and human rights watch groups, the U.S. decided it had no permanent interests in the region and sending a small deployment of soldiers would have been too risky. By the time the civil war ended three months later, 900,000 Rwandans had been slaughtered.

U.S. military planners don’t support war with Syria – The Washington Post 9/5/2013:

They are embarrassed to be associated with the amateurism of the Obama administration’s attempts to craft a plan that makes strategic sense. None of the White House staff has any experience in war or understands it. So far, at least, this path to war violates every principle of war, including the element of surprise, achieving mass and having a clearly defined and obtainable objective.

# # #