Clashes in the mixed Muslim-Christian city, usually last for at least four hours every night and in recent days have pushed Palestinian Authority police to appear. When they do, however, they are able to do very little and stand armed but largely impotent against young men wielding rocks. This is in sharp contrast to the Israelis who have moved increasingly from utilising tear gas and rubber-coated-steel-bullets, to instead shooting off deadly live ammunition. In recent days, at least 20 protestors have been shot with live fire, mostly in the feet and legs.
Hamas has embraced a genocidal mission based in the theft of religious precepts and related successionary ambition. It’s very flattering to itself, and while it has gotten fat and built mansions on skimming funds and collecting tunnel tolls and various forms of taxation, it has demonstrated its love of people by making sure to put noncombatants between its operations and “blast and battle”.
The New Old Now Old Far Out and Lost Left (see “International Solidarity Movement” for example) has been getting money from somewhere and puffing itself up for just this kind of glorious man-the-barricades moment. It too doesn’t offer much beyond the grandstanding.
As I have read that Allah favors those who restrain themselves, I may do just that and refrain a while from posting my own opinion from elsewhere, which practice has just gotten weird.
I have a blog, for pete’s sake!
My prayers to Gaza noncombatants, non-Hamas residents who have asked for jobs, built businesses, taken care of their homes, and lived peacefully and would go on doing so were it not for the fire starters among them who literally bring war into their homes.
Recommended Search Strings
Gaza, Hamas, Governance
Gaza, Hamas, Human Rights
Gaza, Hamas, Human Shields
Gaza, Hamas, Mansions
Gaza, Hamas, Millionaires
Gaza, Hamas, Weapons
Assorted Previews
Warning tactics used by the Israel Defense Forces to apparently avoid civilian casualties in Gaza have been captured on camera. In a video published on LiveLeak, an IDF aircraft fires a loud, nonlethal bomb on a building to alert residents that they’re in the area of a target, allowing them to leave quickly.
. . . as Israel has stepped up its efforts to try and spare civilians even as it seeks to silence the terrorist fire, Hamas has also increased its efforts to ensure that as many inhabitants of Gaza as possible are hurt in the fighting.
Smuggled Syrian-made rockets based on a Chinese design have boosted Hamas’ 10,000-strong arsenal which is dominated by crude homemade devices, officials and experts say.
A surface-to-surface weapon that struck the coastal town Hadera – 30 miles north of Tel Aviv and 70 miles from the Gaza Strip – is an “M-302 type rocket” similar to a shipment of rockets Israel intercepted at sea in March, the Israeli Defense Forces said Wednesday.
Hamas faces an unprecedented economic and political crisis. The Egyptian government regards it as an enemy, has clamped down on smuggling activity, and kept the Rafah border crossing mostly closed. It has lost its Syrian base and Iranian support as a result of the Syrian civil war. Now its authority is weakening inside Gaza: it is on the point of bankruptcy and has been challenged by jihadist groups buoyed up by the success of Isis.
I don’t worry about God or godlessness but rather appreciate that most humans have some kind of sentiment as regards divinity and that atheism is more the exception than rule.
The other concern, would that I would settle down, has to do with the way we organize ourselves in language and within language cultures. As boundaries shift or become transparent, differences become apparent temporally as well as spatially: we are simply not going to accept or tolerate anywhere a deeply feudal future, moats, and closed portcullis and all.
One thing changing, so I hope, is our propensity for judging the whole by a part — as when some talk about “those people”, who could be any — should be deeply degraded by far ranging conversation and greater knowledge, and that to the point where we can look at who and what specifically account for violent criminal and political adventures in this day.
In that vein, one may see that Bashar al-Assad and al-Nusra, for example, form a dark Janus: different talk – same walk. They’re not good people, and they are very similar in how they work as personalities. Knowing that, you would think the crushed middle would fight back with instant resolve, but it’s taking time for that middle to form its own robust defenses.
As missiles rained down on a growing number of Israeli communities this morning and Israel launched a major operation against Gaza, four young children from Gaza were making their way to Holon for lifesaving heart treatment.
Despite threats by Hamas to attack Tel Aviv with rocket-fire, volunteer doctors at the Israeli non-profit organization Save a Child’s Heart (SACH), worked to bring the four children – all under the age of five – to Wolfson Medical Center on the outskirts of Tel Aviv for vital treatment.
These have no idea what it is that’s coming for them:
The newly elected parliament convened with 255 out of 328 elected officials attending, which was enough for a legal quorum, the speaker said. But when many failed to return after the break, there were not enough members to continue.
He talks at length about all of the Western-made equipment ISIS has captured during its various routs of the Iraqi army. “Look how much money America spends on fighting Islam, and it ends up going to us,” he crows. “Message to the people of the West: just keep giving and we will keep taking.”
Vox. ISIS mocks Obama in Michael Bay-style propaganda video – 7/1/2014. Vox has imported the video to its page, so, to my friends around the world, if you want to see an ISIS representative in a ball cap and speaking American English, click through to it.
As ISIS has picked up “assets” in American machinery and weaponry, also Iraqi military uniforms, I was curious about the suggestion that the same were on the road to Damascus.
Is there an ISIS armored column gunning for Bashar al-Assad and his government?
Will U.S. arms shipments to “moderate” Syrian forces arrive in time to kill or capture that column and retake ownership of The Revolution?
About a week ago, Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi noted, “The upcoming battles will reveal the extent of ISIS’ maturity. Most probably, it will stop at the maximum extent in the south like it now with the North’s Kurds and it will rest a little benefiting from international incompetence” (Al-Aribya, June 24, 2014).
How else could resistance to the developing and expanding conflict be characterized?
The Iraqi Parliament, so it appears, can’t keep itself seated for even one day.
The call-up of tens of thousands of young men from Iraq’s south, Shiites, for the most part, appear to be getting a pep talk, a helmet, a firearm, and a ride toward wherever the action is, pretty much just enough to get themselves killed.
I would like to be more optimistic, of course, but the good spirit of going off to war, the preparations with uniforms, steel, and gun oil, play to vanity more than the necessities of what has to be just the ugliest and most heartbreaking business on earth. For certain, I would not want to be an American military adviser handed recruits with two weeks (or much less) of “boot camp” behind them for a day’s work in an active field populated by so deeply a delusional and treacherous enemy, but perhaps that kind of challenge is what combat pay is all about.
From Sunday’s Guardian, this quote tells of a theme I’ve encountered elsewhere:
“We have Da’ash on one side,” said Abu Mustafa, a Baquba resident, using the colloquial word for Isis. “And we have Asa’ib ahl al-Haq on the other. I don’t know who to be more scared of.”
Even if held together for a time by Saddam Hussein’s power to manipulate his constituence and keep it roiled in fear, Iraq has been long divided by the Sunni-Shiite schism, and on that matter, never mind American secular ideals and military intervention, it has been laid open to Iranian and Saudi influence and related jockeying and meddling. Into that rift has roared ISIS with inhuman and frankly incontinent bloodletting and cruelty, and the state is on the edge — beyond it, possibly — of reverting to the language and terms of the war with which it’s familiar, a reenactment in reality of the obsessive bidding for succession that attended the death of Muhammad, who having left advice about how to do everything else appears to have left out the matter of continuing his enterprise beyond his final breath.
In Wikipedese:
The historic background of the Sunni–Shia split lies in the schism that occurred when the Islamic prophet Muhammad died in the year 632, leading to a dispute over succession to Muhammad as a caliph of the Islamic community spread across various parts of the world, which led to the Battle of Siffin. The dispute intensified greatly after the Battle of Karbala, in which Hussein ibn Ali and his household were killed by the ruling Umayyad Caliph Yazid I, and the outcry for his revenge divided the early Islamic community.
Although the headline sensationalizes the potential for an all-out Sunni-Shiite showdown, even in the field and among fellow Islamists, opinion of ISIS may run low. From the same article:
“The gangs of al-Baghdadi are living in a fantasy world. They’re delusional. They want to establish a state but they don’t have the elements for it,” said Abdel-Rahman al-Shami, a spokesman for the Army of Islam, an Islamist rebel group. “You cannot establish a state through looting, sabotage and bombing.”
The difference in conflict axis discriminator may be found in the confusion between the worldview and intentions of personality (as with Ahmadinejad or Khamenei, also Assad, also Putin) and affinity or affiliation with nominal class (Shiite). While the American approach repeatedly tries to null discrimination by class (so our Protestants and Catholics now get along as regards the civil purpose that is governance), I don’t think that either the surface of the American leadership either pursues or promotes analysis in political psychology with an emphasis on our troubling “malignant narcissists” and, with ISIS, plain criminal sociopaths and psychopaths.
Whether Pope or Ayatollah, their respective adherents invest a great deal of faith in their perception and judgment, and sometimes to the extent of treating the same as infallible, at which point the same pick up the medieval chips, and unbridled, or nearly so, they can bring great damage to others.
To obtain freedom of worship within a secular system may mean addressing the despotic in persons — and specific organizational personalities — and channeling the same off to positions more safe for everyone else. In that regard, ISIS represents the criminal side of egotism unchecked and way beyond limits. That what they do works its way through an affiliate community, sufficient for the same to demur from battle with them, speaks to normative and social grammar. Barbarians and pirates may be criminals to all whose paths cross with theirs, but within their own enclaves, they are the normative reality. They think they’re just fine — and that God loves them most of all.
This is related to “civilizational narcissism”. Mobarak Haider has continued fighting the good fight against what I call the “God Mob” — the mafia that leverages religious faith into immense — and deadly and often soul deadening — power over others.
The chat had to do with Iraq, the Sunni-Shiite schism, and, loosely, the ISIS alignment with Sunni Islam. Be that as it may, the response corresponds with the interests of this blog, its notes in the area of “conflict, culture, language, and psychology”, and its cycling to and around “malignant narcissism” and the psychology of dictatorship and fascism.
Rodney King’s question, “Can’t we all just get along?” has been long answered in the main: not only “Yes, we can” but “yes, we do!”
Most of the time in America, it’s true: we are not at one another’s throats except all across the board and through the complex labyrinth’s of open civil and criminal courts.
We Americans have all the problems of the rest of the world but in much, much smaller measure, and for those smaller measures — whether having to do with blowing up abortion clinics or blowing up marathons at the finish line — we have our Federal Bureau of Investigation.
The lethal mix of external influence and incursion has also, alas, led to our supporting a massive domestic and foreign intelligence apparatus.
Still, that’s not because of us — it’s because of the world Out There!
Why can’t all the rest of you just get along?
🙂
The truth is most do but not on the basis of religious or other common affinity but rather according to moderate-middle sensibilities and temperaments that may be then free and secure to distill issues and promote policies and law that work for most on the basis of their shared general humanity.
Those that cannot do that deform into other and malignant souls.
Environments that encourage and sustain the latter, however, distress and mire themselves in conflict defined by dismal rounds of rule and subjugation.
If we’re not looking at ISIS or related al-Qaeda-type company, what are we seeing?
And if we are seeing a fighter following the script to replace all else with Islam, what then?
The west may not begrudge an Islamic motive for regime changing Bashar al-Assad, but it’s not about to swap out the Queen of England for anything remotely resembling a caliph.
Perhaps the youth are too youthful in their investment in faith in the inevitability of their own glorious future, which may be interpreted as a facet of Mobarak Haider’s term for the Taliban’s problem: “civilizational narcissism”.
Even confined x choice x fate to the “second row seat to history”, I’m not particularly thrilled with recycling Facebook and Twitter posts, i.e., other people’s news, and it’s with some apology to VICE that I note that.
However — wow! — what a decent piece of reporting and much needed in the Syrian theater that has been played by Putin-Assad-Khamenei to pit the malignantly narcissistic Great Leader against, albeit in some part, an equally malignant rebel force marching beneath the banner of Islam.
Perhaps what is needed is an overview of the “moderate” revolutionary forces today laying claim to cohesion in the field and legitimacy as the basis for the governance of a New Syria.
(8:21): “Terrorists and ISIS want to make this place just like all the others by killing and committing crimes here.”
VICE interviewer Danny Gold tweets as @DGisSERIOUS.
The web would seem to be coming along for near real time experience of the world’s war zones. This environment from field signal to page makeup to Twitter publicity to blog to reader is not another generation’s evening network news: I’m not holding my breath but am waiting for the waves of live remote feeds to come marching over the virtual berms at any time.
Par for the middle east course and evident in the above clip: deeply shared Kurdish and Arab tribal animus, and that with each attempting to align the other with ISIS (of the two, I would suggest the Kurds have the more coherent view of the fighting and how it will play both to their autonomy, defense, and expansion).
The “love of the land” also plays in the Kurdish script as regards how things should be and, therefore, how events should unfold for the Kurds as a people free — self-determining — in their own lands.
We shall see how that motivation plays in the coming days.
ISIS appears to be its own wild and piratical machine.
In fact, ISIS reminds me of the al-Shabaab saga in Somalia in which Islamic anarchists, essentially, have long terrorized the state, at times controlling the bulk of it, at others finding their footprint reduced to their southern reaches. To this day, they’re still part of the Somali landscape and proven capable of instigating or conducting attacks on targets in their vicinity. One expects that even a smashed ISIS will continue spinning around Iraq’s landscape as a human version of the chemist’s “free radical”.
While ISIS makes progress in Iraq it has also gotten itself surrounded by either natural enemies or enemies it has been making on its beyond-all-limits killing spree in Iraq. It’s presence has urged a nation to its feet, but the same today has many different kinds of feet, and they seem not to want to advance in the same direction.
Externals: the dictator Putin-Assad-Khamenei becomes now the dictator Khamenei-Assad-Putin driving a Russia-aligned Shiite bloc against the Saudi sphere’s NATO-aligned Sunni bloc, the same that was to have produced a modern people’s revolution in Syria. Probably, that alignment has run its course, worn itself out, and pushed the White House into deep reconsideration of how to sort out the middle east for its own sake, for oil, and for NATO’s existence and the values it promotes.
Aside: America’s chief oil suppliers have been Canada and Mexico, and as American energy policy produces greater flexibility in access to crude, one may expect related politics to follow.
Back to Iraq: It turns out deposing Saddam the Tyrannical was the easy part. Then too, perhaps the way in always is, for everything else having to do with the middle east has been twisted up, torn apart, patched back together, and totally fucked up beyond all repair (FUBAR).
BackChannels 