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Hezbollah families: Our sons are cannon fodder for Assad

09 Sunday Mar 2014

Posted by commart in Uncategorized

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conflict, Hezbollah, political, political psychology, politics, Syria

Hezbollah families: Our sons are cannon fodder for Assad

Families of Hezbollah fighters in south Lebanon are growing increasingly angry that their sons are being sent to fight and die for Syrian President Bashar Assad, the Saudi Arabian newspaper Al Watan reported over the weekend.

Guest Post – Asad Khan – When “FATA” Came Calling To Islamabad

05 Wednesday Mar 2014

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

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commentary, conflict, Islamabad bombing, Pakistan, political, politics, Taliban

FATA has been in the eye of the storm for the past 10 years and other than drones, bombs and shells, what pacification measures have the government taken, other than to be scared witless of the terror merchants and their cronies?

______

The news to which the commentary responds:Suicide attack on Pakistan court leaves 11 people dead days after Taliban announced month-long ceasefire | Mail Online – 3/3/2014.

On that horrific and too familiar a kind of story, one of my friends in Islamabad, Asad Khan, who states on his Facebook page, “every human has the right to communicate with the creator, in the manner s/he thinks best . . . “, provided me permission to relay his thoughts here.

As an editor in this process, I’ve added paragraph breaks to help ease the reading, question marks to the interrogative statements, and applied rote grammatical corrections (“has” to “have” for example) where needed.

“MPAs” refers to members of the Provincial Assembly; “MNAs” to members of the National Assembly.  There are a few other acronyms sprinkled about (“FC” refers to “Frontier Corps”), but the reader is online too and look-up works fast.

Guest Post by Asad Khan

The Police Service is the most vilified, most underfunded, most politically manipulated, probably most demoralized, and most undertrained of all government services.

With this background of our own home grown “keystone cops”, should we be surprised that the terrorists came calling to the courts and turned it into a shooting gallery, shooting innocent people as if they were sitting ducks.

I think what has happened in Islamabad should not come as a surprise to anyone, least of all to the current political leadership. I have always expounded the view that we should have job descriptions and selection criteria for ministers and other leaders and policy makers. For example what are the qualifications of the interior minister, other than the fact that a whole bunch of nincompoops have voted him to the national assembly on false promises?

The same holds true for the rest of that galaxy of greats and near greats that adorn the corridors of power in Islamabad.

First of all I would like to ask the interior minister to define the roles of the police departments/service, the FC and various other “law enforcement” agencies that he lords over?

Probably he will not know the answers to this/these question(s).

Next what is the internal security policy for the nation as whole, not just Raiwind, Lahore, and Punjab in that order, and not just security for the star spangled generals, judges, ministers and MPAS or MNAS?

Does the interior minister know the shelf life of a cartridge in the bandolier of a Police Constable, or when it was purchased, and to how many rain falls and sun shines that cartridge has been exposed to?

Probably it is beneath the dignity of that snotty, arrogant minister to know such trivia.

Why must the Police Constable die in the line of duty protecting a judge who does not value his (police constable’s) life?

What has the government done for Malakand, post 2009 conflict other than some nicely written fraudulent reports?

FATA has been in the eye of the storm for the past 10 years and other than drones, bombs and shells, what pacification measures have the government taken, other than to be scared witless of the terror merchants and their cronies?

We are adopting the line of appeasement not because of our love for the Taliban, but because we are scared blue of them.

Has the Interior Minister, or the PM or the CM ever been to the funeral of a police constable or an FC jawan killed in the line of duty in KPK?

I don’t think so.

Has a survey ever been conducted to know the views of the police or the FC?

I don’t think so.

If I were a Police constable or an FC jawan I would not throw my life away for the protection of some judge or politician.

Have the powers that be ever stood in the shoes of a police constable and thought of these things?

The post-event inquiries ordered by the Head Judge, the PM, CM and what not make me laugh.

It is a joke on the nation.

Pakistan can only get out of the morass it is in if we have honest, decent men and women at the helm of affairs, but unfortunately this will never be. The West is rooting for parliamentary democracy because they know that this sham “democracy” is our nemesis and will be the cause of our eventual downfall. Robber barons will keep on replacing one another and this game of musical chairs will keep on going, and we will keep on sinking deeper and deeper until the sands of time will cover us and there will be no trace left, and the freebooters will take their loot and head West, to out their miserable lives there.

For the present, this country is being run by mafias and unless their hold is broken, and they are made accountable for their actions, we can bid sayonara to any hope for the better.

# # #

West Papua – Indonesian Child Trafficking for Islam – Mass Graves

05 Wednesday Mar 2014

Posted by commart in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Islamic Small Wars, Papua New Guinea, Politics, Regions, Religion, South Pacific

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conflict, genocide, Indonesia, Islam, Islamic Small Wars, Papua New Guinea, political, politics, United Nations, West Papua

Their story is more evidence that Christian children are being taken from West Papua and converted to Islam – a practice officially denied after being revealed in Fairfax Media’s Good Weekend magazine last year. It also makes clear for the first time that knowledge of the practice reaches high into the upper echelons of Indonesia’s political elite.

The religious conversion of any young child is illegal in Indonesia, and the United Nations deems any transfer of a minor, even for education, as trafficking.

Papuan children taken to Jakarta to be converted to Islam – 3/2/2014.

* * *

West_Papua_Mass_Grave

Posted on Facebook by the Free West Papua Campaign, March 3, 2014: “Indonesian police and plainclothes police can be seen taking sickening “trophy photos” of the corpses of West Papuan people they have just stripped and murdered and thrown into a drainage ditch used as a makeshift mass grave in the middle of a highlands village.
According to sources, this is in the Central Highlands of West Papua, possibly the Puncak Jaya region and was taken relatively recently.
What appears to be the National flag of West Papua, the Morning Star can be seen raised behind the horror. The raising of this flag has been made illegal by Indonesia and carries a 15 year jail sentence.
As this photo has just emerged, we are currently finding out as much as possible about the details and cannot yet verify the exact date and location but what is for sure is that this photo, taken in the highlands of West Papua is 100% real and genuine, hard evidence of Indonesia’s 21st century apartheid and genocide in West Papua.”

I have yet to download a conflict photo loaded with EXIF/IPTC verbal data identifying the camera used, the photographer, and photographer’s title and caption.  Most often too, these incendiary images come out of the special interest press representing religious denominations and organizations that repeat their use or transpose images taken in one place to captions representing another event.  The Free West Papua Campaign, however, insists itself on locating the specific photographer who took it, when, and where.  It believes in the veracity of the image enough to question its exact provenance, and therefore I believe in its accuracy too.

UPDATE, OCTOBER 16, 2017: for those coming off third-party sites using the above photograph — one has actually disinformed its public by putting “Rohingya Muslims” in place of West Papuans in its headline — I’m no longer certain of the forensic quality of the photograph: the bodies look related in hands-behind-head security postures; the police could just be checking ID in a most humiliating manner; or there could be some mix of dead and living.  One had to be there, of course, and the one who was there to take the picture has not apparently distributed the same with captioning data intact. 

______

How BackChannels views the West Papua Conflict: on the border between the Muslim and Christian worlds, the indigenous of West Papua struggle to keep their culture and land intact, refusing forced conversion and assimilation to the Muslim-majority state whose international boundary has overrun their property.

As is common and familiar to Muslim-majority states worldwide, the tack pursued with regard to West Papuans has been than of cultural annihilation and political suppression.

Coming from an American of European descent, this layout of the story would seem hypocritical, for as West Papuans may be to Indonesia, so Native Americans would seem to have been to European colonizing forces.  However, these days, the Native Americans of the United States have title to reservation as well private properties, the freedom to arrange themselves and worship as they see fit, and in all other aspects to own businesses and enjoy or hate the American tapestry as they see fit within the bounds of the common law, which codes revolve most around the freedom and security of all persons.

America’s Native Americans are not getting their continent back, of course, but they are supported in their endeavors related to the defense of culture, family, property, and religion, the same as any, and every, American.

Coming from a Jewish background that includes lending attention to Israel as the unique cultural, political, and religious homeland of the Jews, the bond between the true indigenous of a land and indigenous elsewhere might apply, albeit in the progressive Jewish manner with adaptation toward modernity — some things will stay with the people forever in freedom, and some (like cannibalism) may recede into history.

In the larger scheme, our planet supports 6,900+ living languages, and it loses a few each month: it should be sustaining those few and perhaps working to encourage separable language evolution or new language development although natural language behavior is not like biology: we’re just not going to ship a healthy population of humans to an island, cut them off from social commerce, and visit them again in a thousand years (if they have survived their own company).

______

JONAH WENDA (voiceover): They were picked from different places like school, gardens, on the road and even taken from their home and kill them and throw them in the bush.

PM – More details emerge on West Papua massacre allegation 28/05/2013

* * *

In May, Indonesia’s human rights record was assessed under the UN Universal Periodic Review. The government rejected key recommendations to review specific laws and decrees which restrict the rights to freedom of expression and thought, conscience and religion. In July, Indonesia reported to the CEDAW Committee. In November, Indonesia adopted the ASEAN Human Rights Declaration, despite serious concerns that it fell short of international standards.

Amnesty International | Working to Protect Human Rights, n.d.

Additional Reference

Alleged mass killings in West Papua – ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) – 5/24/2013: “Shootings have become so frequent that locals have taken to calling it the ‘Gaza Strip’.” / Indonesian counter-terrorist unit accused of mass killing in disputed Papua province – ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) – 5/24/2013.

Indonesia rejects Papua mass killing accusations – Australia Network News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) – 5/27/2014.

PM – More details emerge on West Papua massacre allegation 28/05/2013: “The Indonesian Embassy in Canberra has issued a blanket denial, describing the reported violence as rumours and lies. / But the ABC has been provided further information that tells a different story, as Peter Lloyd reports.”

Related to the history of the West Papua Conflict: Searching for the truth about a massacre in West Papua – 16/12/2013

(3) Free West Papua Campaign (Facebook).

Free West Papua – Campaign for a free and independent West Papua

Wamena – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia / Communal conflict in Wamena kills four | The Jakarta Post – 5/31/2014 / Mako Tabuni – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia / Approach on Papua slammed – 6/16/2012: “Meanwhile, Tabuni’s family collected the activist’s body from the Bhayangkara Police Hospital, ahead of the burial planned for Saturday in Wamena.” / Police urged to publicise the photo of Mako Tabuni’s bag | West Papua Media Alerts – 6/26/2012 /

A Message To The United Nations From The Family Of Opinus Tabuni – YouTube – 12/29/2012: “An estimated 100,000 Papuans having died since the Indonesian government took control of the disputed province in what is widely considered a sham 1969 United Nations observed referendum.”

# # #

FTAC – Coffee Advisory – A Long Note On Islam On Facebook On The Humanity of Humanity

26 Wednesday Feb 2014

Posted by commart in Anti-Semitism, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Islamic Small Wars, Philology, Political Psychology, Politics

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conflict, Islam, Islamic Small Wars, language, philology, political, politics, programming, scripting, tribalism

Here’s an interesting divide: do we choose the security of a loyal untruth over the presence of a disloyal but uncomfortable truth?

As you know, because you have read “Shimmer”, I track Pamela Geller as a friend (friendly) but not as the final word on Islam: I know and love too many “Islamic Humanists”, Muslim Americans living with all Americans no differently than Christian Americans or Jewish Americans or Sikh Americans or Hindu Americans (the list of religious affiliations and differentiation in America gets quite long). I enjoy the effort of Irshad Manji and and Mudar Zahran and others to know the location of their hearts and ethics and find it in their lives as Muslims.

The American anti-Jihad and counter-terrorism and related communities — not to mention the consultant-watchers of NSA and other organizations about — is fairly extensive and scholarly in their reading (I haven’t friend Robert Spencer) in their reading of Qur’an and Hadith in something like the manner in which those elements are interpreted by terrorists who are Muslim and who carry out their crimes with what they believe accords injunction found in the Qur’an.

Geller rakes muck, perhaps doesn’t follow up as meticulously as she should, and she writes with interest, so we may frame her in the “special interest” press, not far off the Coptic press, the Catholic one, the Jewish one, or, alas, the jihad ones with the black flags. Nonetheless, and having looked, I must accept Jeremy D. Mayer’s criticism, she’s on a right track IF we’re chatyping about al-Qaeda, al-Shabaab, Boko Haram, the Muslim Brotherhood as exemplified in the policies and practices demonstrated so swiftly by former Egyptian President Morsi, etc. She asks — as Sinem Tezyapar might ask — what kind of human, what kind of Muslim, troops into Mumbai, for example, and commits the atrocities committed there? Were those humans Muslims or not? New York – London – Madrid: same question. Westgate Shopping Mall, Nairobi, Kenya: Muslim? Not Muslim? Something else?

Here’s where I differ some from Pamela Geller: I’m willing to recognize the humanity in my humanist, reformation, trying hard Muslim friends because they recognize humanity in me, a Jew, a Zionist, and have in their deeds and in their words both goodness and integrity.

It’s that last word that the fighting — all of it, from the Gaza Strip to to whatever’s going on today in Iraq — is all about.

Is it permissible to deceive the infidel? Or not? In the name of Islam?

There’s a lot of money tied up in conflict, and not all of it — probably little of it — goes into fighting. It goes into extraordinary self-aggrandizement (count the number of Saddam’s palaces – and we rue the day we did business that way: that’s an era that has passed, God willing). It goes into “skimmers” who use their political power to dip their hands into the state’s wealth, or leverage it (Putin-Assad-Khamenei could not be more different in their talk, but for the character of their person, they are the same person, until one, and only one has the power today, turns around).

So what manner of Muslim these days – “Carlos” solidarity, OBL base, out into the universe with Rumi (I like him), tenuously holding on to balance like Musharraf, promoting the whole program like Zia Haq? This is hard stuff. The Jews, for the most part, are arranged differently: we don’t take the word of God at face value (because we believe He doesn’t want us to but rather means for us to discover His meaning from one generation to the next: it doesn’t give us a lot of room for launching offensives in the manner of Constantine or other generals; we don’t conflate men with God; and we search tirelessly for better answers in accord with Hillel’s question: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am not for others, WHAT am I?”

Pamela Geller isn’t about hate. She’s about love. So I believe are many others I have met and what they have in them may be less the province of religion and more the nature of a decent and still emerging humanity.

* * *

Most conversations like the above that I’ve encountered take place in a spectrum of what I call “middle east hate-peace peace groups”.  Some are nasty.  It’s easy to meet through chatyping the most strident of Israeli nationalists and the worst of hidebound anti-Semites, not that I’m about to name names.  Some are closed and collegial and inclined to scrape up the documents and narratives of hurtful histories but, alas, with parochial spin.

I co-moderated one such group on another social network a long time ago (or, here in cyberspace, what seems like a long time ago).  Since then and with the memory of my first encounter with deeply embedded anti-Semitism have arrived at some thought that is close to the heart of this blog, i.e., that “attitudes and beliefs” are contingent on early language uptake programming — how we are taught to listen and to know what is important to listen to — and scripting, which is the transmitted way of a (language) culture.  To navigate through and out of conflict that has its life primarily in the mind means addressing some early programming and scripting with the knowledge that some things need to become the artifacts of age left behind.

# # #

Link

http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/diane-bederman/north-korea_b_4790325.html

25 Tuesday Feb 2014

Posted by commart in Uncategorized

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conflict, genocide, humanism, political, politics, willful ignorance

http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/diane-bederman/north-korea_b_4790325.html

Religious intolerance against the Muslim Rohingya minority and Christians from the Chin and Kachin minorities continues despite the pleas of a dozen former Nobel Peace laureates urging “an international, independent investigation of the anti-Muslim violence in Burma” June 2013.

Syria – Foreign Fighters – Two-Way Channels

25 Tuesday Feb 2014

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

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conflict, foreign jihad, Syria

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DM96XaOJ854 – 15/2014.

_______

What if Abdul Wahid Majid had deliberately detonated his bomb early?

*

Relatives told how the dad-of-three was a former lorry driver had worked for the Highways Agency but gave up his job six months ago to join a convoy running aid into Syria.

Abdul Waheed Majeed: First picture of ‘Mad Max’ Brit who ‘blew himself up in Syrian prison break’ – Mirror Online – 2/12/2014.

*

Someone asks Majeed to give final words, but Majeed says, in English, that he “is not a very good speaker” and “his tongue has, got like a knot in it.” He then notes that anything he says “should come from the heart.” “I can’t do it,” he says.

Related: Jihadists release video of British suicide bomber in Syria – The Long War Journal – 2/14/2014.

*

While the west worries about the return of citizen-cum-“foreign jihadis” to their own soil, they may be overlooking the notion that the same carry their Dutch, English, or other national zeitgeist with them on their way to taking part in “charity work” in Syria’s civil war.

*

Clapper, citing the intelligence community’s new Worldwide Threat Assessment, estimated that 1,600 militant groups were operating inside the war-torn country, including a sizable chunk of extremists. Between the 75,000 to 110,000 fighters inside Syria, “about 26,000 we’d rate as extremists,” he said.

Intel Chiefs: Syria a ‘Huge Magnet’ for International Terrorists – 1/29/2014.

James Clapper‘s citing 26,000 western irregulars in the Syrian theater as extremists would seem to leave between 49,000 and  84,000 of the same as other than “extreme.”

So, if they are not extreme, what are they?

Evidently, among other things, good for suicide missions.

* * *

 The most prominent casualty amongst this foreign fighter contingent was Omar Hammami, the American who rose within al-Shabaab to become its unofficial poster-boy. Increasingly angered by what he saw as the “authoritarian” approach adopted by Godane, he lashed out through videos and on his Twitter account, claiming he was under threat from the Shabaab leadership. Hammami survived one attempt on his life before succumbing to an assassin’s bullet on September 12. Dying alongside him was Osama al-Britani, a British-Pakistani national believed to be Habib Ghani, a long-standing British fighter in the region who was closely linked to the semi-mythical “white widow” Samantha Lewthwaite, widow of one of the July 7, 2005 bombers of London’s underground system (Daily Mail, September 13).

Refworld | Foreign Fighters in Somalia and al-Shabaab’s Internal Purge – 12/3/2013.

*

One year ago, American foreign fighter Omar Hammami detailed how Shabaab and al Qaeda betrayed and sought to kill him in Somalia (See here). Shabaab did this because Omar suspected Godane was killing off al Qaeda leaders and foreign fighters that had traveled to Somalia. Omar’s prophecy came true when Shabaab killed him in September 2013.

The past month we’ve again seen unprecedented infighting amongst al Qaeda affiliates, this time in Syria.

American Foreign Fighter Details How al Qaeda’s Nusra Betrayed Him In Syria – Selected Wisdom – video included – 2/12/2014.

What’s going on as regards betrayal of foreign fighters in the field?

I’d gamble on corrupting power of money plus the canny manipulation of this latest update on “cannon fodder”.

# # #

Syria – Nasty Business

24 Monday Feb 2014

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

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conflict, political, politics, Syria

On the death of Abu Khaled al-Suri yesterday:

Observatory chief Rami Abdel Rahman said he died along with six others when a fighter from the rival Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) group blew himself up at an Ahrar al-Sham post in al-Halq.

Senior al-Qaeda commander killed in Syria – Middle East – Al Jazeera English – 2/24/2014.

* * *

Why the dictator is not to be endorsed:

“Two simultaneous raids hit Neshabieh first. People were pulling the bodies of a women and her two children from one house when the planes came back and hit the crowed, killing another nine,” activist Abu Sakr told Reuters from the area.

Air raids in central Syria kill 18: activists | Reuters – 2/24/2014.

* * *

“Back outside, even the hardiest can’t stand anymore fighting.”

Syria Rebels and Assad’s forces face off in Zabanani – YouTube – 2/24/2014.

* * *

The US Secretary of State, John Kerry, made it clear from the beginning that Washington wants peace negotiations to be primarily about “transition” and the end of the government of President Bashar Al Assad.

But, since Assad’s army controls most population centres and main roads in Syria, this radical change in the balance of power will not happen until the rebels stop losing and start winning on the battlefield.

Times of Oman | Column :: Syria may see years of warfare before peace – Patrick Cockburn – 2/24/2014.

Cockburn’s use of quotation marks in this next paragraph echoes what I have stumbled upon in relation to the Free Syria Media / Army / National Coalition:

The “moderate” opposition — support for which was reportedly discussed at a two-day meeting in Washington of Western and Arab intelligence chiefs this month — is supposedly going to overwhelm the radicals and fight the government all at the same time. But repackaging some rebel warlords as moderates, simply because they are backed by the West and its regional allies, will be largely a PR ploy and unconvincing to Syrians.

It’s proving unconvincing to westerners too.

Related: Syria – “Moderate” Jew Hate | BackChannels – 2/21/2014.

* * *

Moment of a shell landed in Yabroud Syria Impressive video – YouTube – 2/24/2014.

* * *

February 23, 2014: China and Russia surprised everyone yesterday and went along with a UN resolution calling for the Syrian government and the rebels to provide access for humanitarian aid throughout Syria. To make this happen the UN had to, at Russian and Chinese request, take out clauses calling for war crimes, largely committed by the government, to be punished.

Syria: The Killathon Continues – 2/23/2014.

To get humanitarian aid to Syrians, it appears one must tacitly approve the tactics applied by dictators to their deeply subjugated constituents.

The “Killathon” article goes on to make quite a few useful observations, but this one spells the humanity of the regimes with a stake in Assad’s political survival:

Quds has been busy in Syria for over two years. Rebels accuse Iran of helping the government of adopt savage new tactics in the fighting around Damascus and elsewhere. These new methods involved mass killings of civilians, especially military age men, during daytime raids into pro-rebel villages . . . Now the rebels are facing “special troops” trained and advised by the Iranians. Rebels have seen Iranian transport aircraft landing at airports all over the country to deliver weapons, equipment and ammunition. These aircraft come in via Iraq, which refuses to do anything to stop them.

Iran’s latest forward operating base: Iraq!

That’s really not surprising.

Iranians Dial Up Presence in Syria – WSJ.com – 9/16/2013: “The busloads of Shiite militiamen from Iraq, Syria and other Arab states have been arriving at the Iranian base in recent weeks, under cover of darkness, for instruction in urban warfare and the teachings of Iran’s clerics, according to Iranian military figures and residents in the area.”

Update to December: Syria’s Assad ‘has secret Iraq oil lifeline’ – Middle East – Al Jazeera English – 12/24/2013 / Exclusive: Assad’s secret oil lifeline: Iraqi crude from Egypt | Reuters – 12/23/2014: “The Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad has received substantial imports of Iraqi crude oil from an Egyptian port in the last nine months, shipping and payments documents show, part of an under-the-radar trade that has kept his military running despite Western sanctions.”

I’ve no idea who’s “winning” in Syria, but I’m pretty sure Syrians are losing.

*

From the Reuter’s piece cited: “Each ship switched off its satellite signals just before the delivery date in Syria, then reappeared on satellite tracking shortly after.”

Now that’s mafia style.

*

Referring to the likes of Mr. Jaber, the ministry official said, “Even if you want the Statue of Liberty, there are those who can bring it for you at the right price.”

Syrian Businessmen Help Assad Regime Survive – WSJ.com – 5/24/2014.

The “Mr. Jaber” appears to be the brother of the other cited, Mohammed, not Ayman.

Odd note: I have heard of “suitcases full of money” traveling around the middle east, but the WSJ piece would be the first in which I’ve seen mention of the same so specifically: “Almost every month, he flies to Baghdad with suitcases filled with hundreds of thousands of dollars of cash on behalf of the government, he said—showing a slip for a recent million-dollar deposit in an Iraqi bank. Wire transfers aren’t an option because of sanctions.”

# # #

Curtain Up: The Beginning of the End of an Age of Dictatorships?

20 Thursday Feb 2014

Posted by commart in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Political Psychology, Politics

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conflict, global culture, Internet, political, politics, psychology, web culture

Well, it’s not over yet.

🙂

It’s hardly begun.

______

What’s going on in Venezuela in a nutshell (English version) – YouTube – 2/14/2014.

______

The Centre for Counterintelligence and Security Studies maintains a “Global Threat Assessment” map that fairly well covers political turmoil worldwide, although I would add the persecution of the Burmese Rohingya to it (possible BackChannels slogan: “No People Left Behind”).

Then too I might want to work in resurgent eastern European nationalism (Hungary, Lithuania) but such complexity leads to specific foreign desks: again, our ability to survey may far outstrip any near potential to intervene between the repressed and subjugated and their tyrants.

Also, a map illustrating combined democratic and human rights levels of success might look quite different from one focused on international conflict.  We would have to work in Cameroon (Paul Biya) and Zimbabwe (Robert Mugabe) for that and perhaps give South Africa (Jacob Zuma) a bit of a once over too.

* * *

How are we of the democratic open societies doing?

Not so well.

We may glimpse all of it all at once, it’s true, but we may neither focus nor attend to it all at once.

In the week the above video has aired on YouTube, more than 2.1 million viewers have accessed it, which is kind of cool with our brave new high-bandwidth-Internet world, but what can those do?

Ask the same question about  the deep and expanding hellhole in Syria.

We know we know we know.

We can send band-aids (and the Israelis can put them on the Syrian injured it has today in its hospitals), but we can’t (yet) quell it.

Still, we’re connected and where others are in real trouble, we may either hear them or know they are screaming:

NORTH KOREA’S four main political prison camps are known only as No. 14, No. 15, No. 16 and No. 25. All are modern-day gulags. According to a new report from the United Nations Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in North Korea, the population of the camps, now about 80,000 to 120,000 people, may have declined somewhat because of releases from a fifth camp, but also because the remaining prisoners are being exterminated.

North Korea’s crimes against humanity have ‘no parallel’ today – The Washington Post – 2/19/2014.

We — a fragile but growing and robust global political intelligentsia — are all over this stuff.

I’ve promoted a concept here: “malignant narcissism” and a lightweight approach, perhaps, toward the psychology of the dictator, the followers, and, ultimately, the better tendencies of the humanity of humanity.

Has that been helpful?

I don’t know.

We shall see.

# # #

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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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