As Haaretz reported, “He says the choice of Dheisheh for the Israeli students was not meant to suggest there was an equivalence or even a direct link between the Holocaust and the Nakba. They were chosen as the symbolic events that have deeply affected the psyche on both sides of the conflict.” The aim was to build mutual empathy and understanding through an appreciation of events central to the other side’s narratives and self-understanding.
None of this played well on the Palestinian street. Holocaust deniers asserted that Dajani was trying to brainwash his students by disseminating the fabrication that the Holocaust was real. He was denounced as a traitor and collaborator by students and others and warned not to enter Ramallah. The faculty union cancelled his membership.
The “single state” solution fails not for enmity but for comprehension of what is represented by the Hebrews living in the land of the Hebrews.
Language as a cultural technology evolves within a people in somewhat isolated social space sufficient to invent their way of getting along among themselves and with the surrounding earth. For each ethnolinguistic cultural cohort on the planet, there is a land, a someplace, from whence it came.
So the Hebrews are back in the Land of the Hebrews: Israel. There are also Baloch, Pashtun (“B’ni Israel”, self-defined), and Kurds who have a relationship with the land that made them, and they too have some political issues involving their autonomy and survival as a people.
The Jordanian Arabs and the migrant workers caught between armies in 1948 have been deeply manipulated by powerful forces within and outside of Arab culture. The Russian KGB’s invention of Arafat, an Egyptian, and the PLO either is or should be history well known to scholars who have devoted themselves to studying and solving the “middle east conflict” (never the others ongoing — and “hot” — at the moment). The contemporary and feudal Russian story, that which has had Mikhail Bogdanov entertaining PFLP in Moscow (Nov. 2014) while the state refuses to acknowledge either Hamas or Hezbollah as terrorist organizations, should be taken into account.
It’s not the Israelis or Palestinian People (again: somewhat isolated in time and space — long enough to create new language 🙂 ) who sustain the middle east conflict: all along, it has been those who misinform, mis-educate, and maliciously “program” socially captive innocents in service to their own feudal-medieval aggrandizement (and financial enrichment).
This blog now has plenty of data for backing up its opinion about what has created and what sustains the “Middle East Conflict (MEC)”. From the vicious narcissism that would hold refugees in camps (Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, Egypt) and separated from general state populations (a genuinely apartheid policy) to the Soviet distribution of anti-Semitic propaganda and, yes, the invention of Arafat, the MEC has come to represent medievalism at its greed-laden best.
Look into UNRWA spending and tunnel smuggling, and then take another look at who got the loot.
1. Anti-Semitism serves feudal power. It is a tool for the manipulation and direction of mobs. Note: Ismail Haniyeh and Khaled Mashaal are billionaires today, which begs the question: who has really occupied what? The PLO and PFLP have been Moscow projects from the beginning and the encouragement of an anti-Semitic middle east a major part of the Soviet program, which medieval / oligarchal phantoms we are fighting today.
2. Nationalism tends toward fascism (ask any of the more western-oriented opposition in Hungary about that). In Israel, the Hebrews, +5,000 years together, are back in the Land of the Hebrews, and they have been taught a long lesson by way of the leaders and fans of the “International Solidarity” and “Palestinian Solidarity” garbage (that’s the word for them): the complaint about Israel has never been about Israel — it has been always about Jewish existence itself, not only in Israel but anywhere on the planet.
3. Go back to Moses the Lawgiver and go forward to Hillel the Elder who to accommodate the restive of a decaying Rome made Judaism more about principle than ritual and more accessible to converts. Then: Jesus, Paul, Constantine; then: Muhammad. Those who really hate the Jews hate the law and humanity. The may hate themselves. Boco Haram, ISIS, Hamas, Hezbollah: call them the “God Mob” because intimidation, theft, and murder on one side and pandering and patronage on the other appears to be what each has best demonstrated in organizational lives short and long.
As much verbiage as BackChannels spools onto the threads of The Awesome Conversation, the social network chatyping fest, it wonders who compressed it may make a packet of thought.
Anti-Semitism : Feudal Mentality
Perhaps that should be enough.
It has been deeply disappointing watching some Syrians (for the most part, not friends, but others the “friends of friends”) refuse to struggle with the anti-Semitic expression that not only accompanies their suffering but plays directly into hands of the medieval troika, Putin – Assad – Khamenei, each of whom have pegged their survival on irrational mob behavior and, indeed, feudal wars that for being so intellectually bereft that they cannot resolve through violence.
Some prefer the engines of war to the machinery of peace.
A moderate Syrian opposition site had played a cartoon showing Putin, Khamenei, and Netanyahu in bed together while Assad lay on the floor. Never mind the nonsense in which the leader of an open democracy shares the same mattress as the two despots, the intent to harm Israel absent of reason stands signal of the too familiar sickness and the fascism to which it connects.
Anti-Semitic hate contributes directly to the medieval worldview promoted by Putin, Assad, and Khamenei. Israel’s arrangements with Russia over Syria have been defensive and perfunctory. Before the Soviet Union dissolved (December 1991), this is how it manipulated latent Jew Hate in the middle east into the Baathist dictatorships — from one of which Assad has descended. In fact, Assad is counting on Syrian anti-Semitism to contribute to his stay in power. https://conflict-backchannels.com/…/ftac-tip-to-the…/
Those deep into the polarization(s) don’t understand that what Putin, Khamenei, and Assad are trying to cement for the future and for themselves is the medieval worldview. The tough decision shouldn’t be where to stand up, i.e., against feudalism and fascism, but rather how to lead or navigate the medieval world into a more productive — helpful, peaceful, prosperous — and modern global reality.
Conflicts consume attention and destroy time, so the drivers and engines leading to political polarization have to be impeded or slowed down as well.
Some BackChannels posts function as markers — brief remarks; “scraped” reference to other publications that become teasers (made you click!); commentary that turns old the moment read but remains as a snapshot of response to a part of the news of the day — and that above serves as a marker.
Via BackChannels — perhaps especially in the section “21st Century Feudal” — one catches a glimpse of 19th Century Russia revisited in Putin’s Moscow, the same as alluded to or referenced in the volumes of “The Russian Section”. The New Russian Security State is a medieval complex promoting spectacle (like the $51 billion Winter Olympics at Sochi) and political theater (like “Assad vs The Terrorists” AKA “Assad OR The Terrorists”) while failing to produce government responsive to Russians (some would add the term “outside of Moscow”) or responsible to humanity in general. It has taken BackChannels, which is not edited by an hoary Cold Warrior or newly sprung political science major, some time to see the Great Picture aligning a malignant narcissism with an epic that has laid waste to a nation before a horrified and benumbed global audience.
Projected against the backdrop of this bizarre stage: an image of a Russian bishop (unidentified) blessing rockets intended to kill moderate and modern Syrians, not “The Terrorists” incubated into today’s “Daesh”. The exact context of the image (in the linked Business Insider piece) has been contested but the message — there mere act of Christian religious authority blessing weapons intended for extremist Muslim targets — cannot but endorse the medieval script, would that history itself have kept its most bloody religious wars contained.
On stage, center and right: an endless, horrific, and obscene stream of the momento mori of war brought to the innocent, infant and adult: beheaded, burnt, crushed, mangled, poisoned, riddled, and sliced.
The post-Soviet, neo-feudal arc of power connecting Moscow, Damascus, and Tehran continues to blame the bloodletting on the west (even though last November — 2014 — it was Moscow entertaining the listed terrorist organization “PFLP”; even though it was then Assad’s, and today Russia’s, bombing priority to preference the mixed and moderate Free Syrian Army (FSA) as targets in bombing runs and spare Daesh as hornets to fill up Syria and lash against her neighbors should the Assad regime be plainly overrun).
Responsible oligarchy focused on internal development may survive Syria by way of the complexity of the numbers subject to authoritarian systems and the difficulty, for example, of offering the methods of democracy to such as the Muslim Brotherhood, an organization ever ready for elections followed by proving itself as demonic as advertised (in Egypt in 2013: so done), but the Moscow story now differs quite from that: Bloomberg Business has spotted the contraction of the Russian economy at 4.6 percent (8/10/2015).
However one may read or skim the above cited articles, business life (and employment) appears simply more tenable, perhaps even pleasant, in the west: more markets for high tech innovators, whether as labor or the heads of new businesses; the power to passively contribute to reduced global oil pricing — by way of North American Energy Independence for Canada and the United States — and, in relation to conflict, imposing sanctions that could only be imposed by the lawful (in banking, business, and trade) on the unlawful — and “unlawful” is what medieval “absolute power” — the rule of the despotic and piratical — has been always about.
The Syrian war and related conflict are about the persistence of feudal and medieval “absolute power” in the 21st Century. To maintain that illusion, but one bloody and miserable enough — I can’t imagine how it could be more miserable for Syrians — Colonel President Emperor Putin, Ayatollah Khamenei, and the Tyrant Assad have had to produce on the ground a play and strategy fit to their own grandiose and inhuman delusions: “Assad vs The Terrorists”.
So far, they have brought about what they wanted — and needed — to create.
In the post-Soviet but neo-feudal Russian period, Putin now has an enhanced military position in Syria, and that presumably suits his desire for empire. Handily enough, Ayatollah Khamenei has gotten out of the deal a foil — a kind of chess opponent for him — in the creation of ISIS against which he may now set loose more Revolutionary Guard and Iraqi Shiite militia (the two are together in this): as long as the Great Shiite vs Sunni Battle burns between himself and Baghdadi, he’s in business and may continuing his plundering of Iran. Of The Tyrant Assad, what may one say? How glorious that it turns out himself standing off (in view of the west) the butchery of the al-Qaeda types, who themselves have also a dreadful program.
From an ethical and moral standpoint — from Pharaoh, another tyrant, to this day — everything is wrong about Syria, and the only people who can really fix conditions and themselves are . . . Syrians.
In the 20th Century: Stalin-Hitler (before Hitler betrayed Stalin). In this one: Putin-Khamenei (Assad depends on both). These men need to be seen for what they are, what they represent, and what they have hauled with them into our century, and Syrians would be wise, perhaps, to understand their own complicity in the development of their power. It’s good to leave them with their egomania, their cowardly hate, and their sadism.
Visual coverage of the Syrian Tragedy: lurid.
Painful.
The cause of it: a medieval “will to power” accompanied in the people by insularity and culturally transmitted contempt for others matched to fear and hatred of the Jews and of the west. When trouble came and the same raised a cry and reached out for help, it appears the world most hated stood aside while the curtain rose on “Assad vs The Terrorists” and darkness came to their seared land.
One hopes that for those who reached across borders and those who have reached back that those mental conditions — habits of mind, learned social grammar, misperception, and fear of the condemnation of one’s own perverse society — will change.
BEIRUT, Lebanon — Syrian military helicopters dropped barrels packed with explosives in the government’s latest air raids on rebel-held areas of the northern Syrian city of Aleppo on Saturday, killing at least 23 people, including a family trapped in a burning car, activists said.
In neighboring Lebanon, a car bomb blew up near a gas station in a Shiite town, killing at least three people, in the latest attack linked to the war in Syria.
Ahmad al-Hamoud, Vice Commander of Ahfad Hamza Battalion for Special Missions, al-Sultan al-Fatih Brigade, told VDC that many kinds of the barrel bombs used by the regime forces had been recognizable. These included:
1- Regular Russian-made Barrels. These are believed to have been used by the Russian Army in the middle of the previous century. They were brought from Russia ‘ready to use’. The regime has owned them for decades. Their weight ranges between 300 to 500 kg and they’re filled with TNT and metallic scraps. There’re extremely destructive, yet their range is more limited than that of the other kinds.
2- Medium Destruction Barrels. These are believed to be made by the regime in ‘Defense Factories’ in al-Safira, in the Valley of al-Waha. Most of the helicopters taking off from this valley dropped these barrels on the districts of Aleppo. The weight of these barrels ranges from 400 to 500 kg.
3- Highly Destructive Barrels. These are the most dangerous and destructive of all. Weighing more than 600 kg, they take many shapes like containers, cisterns and, in some cases, green rubbish containers.
Barrel bombs are improvised weapons: oil drums or similar canisters filled with explosives and metal fragments. They are dropped without guidance from helicopters hovering just above antiaircraft range, typically hitting the ground with huge explosions and the widespread diffusion of deadly shrapnel. They pulverize neighborhoods, destroy entire buildings and leave broad strips of death and destruction.
Footage has emerged showing the Syrian regime using explosive “barrel bombs” on civilian neighbourhoods, killing hundreds, while its representatives attended peace talks at Geneva.
Filmed by activists in the southern Damascus suburb of Daraya, the ten minute video is a compilation of footage showing barrels, loaded with TNT, being dropped on the neighbourhood during the week the Geneva II conference was convened.
Nongovernmental organizations researching and working in Syria, including Human Rights Watch and the Syrian Civil Defense, testified during the meeting. Staffan de Mistura, the United Nations special envoy on Syria, said in a video message that the Syrian government is responsible for the use of barrel bombs and that at the rate the weapons are being used, there won’t be any civilians left in Syria.
Government forces and pro-government militia continue to conduct widespread attacks on civilians, systematically committing murder, torture, rape and enforced disappearance as crimes against humanity. Government forces have committed gross violations of human rights and the war crimes of murder, hostage-taking, torture, rape and sexual violence, recruiting and using children in hostilities and targeting civilians in sniper attacks. Government forces disregarded the special protection accorded to hospitals, medical and humanitarian personnel and cultural property. Aleppo was subjected to a campaign of barrel bombing that targeted entire areas and spread terror among civilians. Government forces used incendiary weapons, causing superfluous injury and unnecessary suffering, in violation of international humanitarian law. Indiscriminate and disproportionate aerial bombardment and shelling caused large-scale arbitrary displacement. Government forces and pro-government militia perpetrated massacres.
Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. “Report of the independent international commission of inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic.” Human Rights Council, 25th Session, Agenda Item 4, February 12, 2014.
While the Assad opposition masks off its own excesses, and, as always in the Islamic Small Wars, it’s hard “seeing” who is fighting exactly for what and how they’re doing it, warrior band by band, and sometimes person by person, there are no doubts as regards the smashing of large business, education, religious, and residential areas packed with noncombatant Syrians.
As Syrian Muslim and Jewish relationships develop — a perhaps “unheard of” now heard of — and Syrian anti-Semitism and anti-westernism comes more into focus as one impediment among several to western intercession, the scales may tip in the direction of the cosmopolitan and modern and therefore away from the medieval worldview that forms the basis for the despotism displayed by Putin, Assad, and Khamenei on the Shiite axis and al-Nusra and ISIS and others on the Sunni complement that serves the former as foils for the cooked up theatrical “Assad vs The Terrorists”.
In Syria, the center could not hold and the rough beast rose to savage the land.
Blame Berezovsky (the wealthy man who effectively upgraded Putin’s political clout — http://www.thedailybeast.com/…/how-boris-berezovsky…). The Russians, as a people, and Afghanistan as a financial black hole for military expansion, managed to derail the Soviet (dissolved December 26, 1991); however, hardline privileged had already produced a plan to outlive the Soviet (reference: Karen Dawisha – http://www.miamioh.edu/…/cultural…/putins-russia/ – and the results of that today plus the Islamist stance of the opposition (Assad needed “the terrorists” for his play, “Assad vs The Terrorists”) has led to today’s mass murder and destruction in Syria.
Compression and distillation matter.
The ability of the average victims of fascist and feudal sociopaths may depend on a quick pickup on critical information — accurate, clear, complete (delivered honesty and with the highest integrity) — and the independent discernment and both personal and public political decision making it enables.
A good telegraphy should open on to new worlds, truth revealing and trustworthy.
For those with the necessary time and resources (and intellectual freedom), the Russian Section of the Library of this blog provides ample reference for seeing the Putin machinery as it worked across the president’s years in power and across the arc of the impositions of the Soviet Era.
For those horrified by the destruction wrought by Assad in Syria and determined to address it, BackChannels suggests addressing first endemic Syrian anti-Semitism and anti-westernism, which may contribute to blocking greater western intercession — actually, at the moment, any intercession — in Syria.
“. . . we trust the Russians. They proved throughout the crisis, the last four years, they proved they are honest, transparent, and have principles . . . .”
Without Putin, Bashar al-Assad as a dynastic leader would have been finished in 2011. However, instead of appropriately responding to Syrian complaints at the time and the yearning for a voice in their own governance, Assad chose to arrest and torture children. All that has changed in the past four years has been the scope in breadth and cruelty of the punishment meted to noncombatant Syrians.
At the outset, President Vladimir Putin’s post-Soviet neo-feudal Russia presented a block to the start of the erosion of the Assad family’s absolute ruling power; next: Assad cultivated ISIS by selectively not bombing the al-Qaeda Typicals in their infancy, which then dealt to himself a glorious piece — in his warped eyes — of political theater, “Assad vs The Terrorist”. Putin, Assad, and Khamenei each knew “The Terrorists”, which have largely turned out to be ISIS, although many other and similar organizations exist in the field, would present an even more difficult challenge to the west.
For Khamenei, nothing could sustain an Islamic theocratic tyranny in Iran quite like the prospect and reality of a continuous Great Shiite vs Sunni Battle, for which ISIS would conveniently serve as foil to the further expression and regional projection of Iranian Shiite power.
For the west, perhaps, there is less of “reset” in what has taken place in Syria and more of pressing the collapse of Soviet-style “state capitalism” in the form of an oligarchy — a “new nobility” — brought into existence and managed by Putin. From that perspective, Russia has stalled in Syria and Crimea — and given the price of oil at the well these days — or the evident callousness of the Russian leadership — it may not want the burden of settling either conflict or reconstructing that which it has helped destroy, both “hot spots” being more effective at bleeding the west of financial resources and focus. With U.S. President Obama shrugging away much of that form of challenge — or seeming to do that — that tack may not be going so well.
Similar observations may be made in regard to Iran’s position.
Even though it will see immense cash flow for the “nuclear deal”, the regime will have to deal with greater greed around itself as well as its unpopular extension through wars by proxy in the region.
Who knows but that Hezbollah will tire of its men dying for the ambitions of the Ayatollah.
Still, nothing will change all that fast.
While Putin, Assad, and Khamenei together defend “absolute power”, the suffering accompanying that psychology — and what ISIS means to bring to Syrians, i.e., greater tyranny in the name of God, will be even worse — will grow worse: the “Eye Doctor” has lost himself in his own inverted fantasia, a world in which Putin’s Russia has proven “honest, transparent, and principled” (tell that to Ukrainians) and Syrians suffer primarily at the hands of “The Terrorists” and not beneath the barrel bombs dropped on the most helpless of them by Assad’s own air force.
The “additional reference” section may be at this point outmoded by a very good and quick Google search engine. We can find what we may want to read in flash; whether we can find the conversation we need to have as quickly remains to be seen.
