The Iranians, with their crashing rial economy, have been offering Beirut even more cash – from where, exactly, we don’t know – than the Americans, along with guns, agricultural and industrial assistance.
I’d assign the delusional surrealism to the narcissism involved in most politics middle east but may also note that the transnational narcotics and other smuggling businesses may be doing well for Hezbollah and whatever else Iran has going “behind the curtains” and “under the table”. The main player in pressuring up illicit funds from all sources has to be Moscow — and Moscow loves frozen conflicts as well as unsettled and weak governments. It doesn’t seem to know how to create much good, but it sure knows how to gin up a lot of cash ready for the laundry.
Iran has the industry; the west has the addicts and coke heads — and there may be the cash for the arms. I do wonder how that might actually look in numbers.
BackChannels source this morning relayed the following from Lagos, Nigeria in relation to raids by apparent herdsman against largely disarmed villages.
Since the first of the years, source claims, more than 500 Nigerians have been slaughtered in raids and no arrests have been made;
The number of Internally Displaced Persons associated with the conflict exceeds 200,000;
The Nigerian government has been repossessing simple weapons from villagers while attackers typically carrying AK-47s surround their targets and destroy buildings and stores with burning petrol;
The complement attending raids may average about 100 or more fighters;
Source of arms: Libya, other Arab nations, and Turkey.
In 2013, news reports mentioned a Hezbollah cell and weapons cache in Nigeria; the latest weapons seizure of similar scale in 2017 appears to have originated through Turkish channels.
Although Fulani herdsman have been blamed en masse for the aggression noted, BackChannels has heard suggestion that the weaponizing may devolve to the same forces backing extremist organizations elsewhere. The 2013 Hezbollah connection and the more recent 2017 interdiction involving Turkey would appear to support that thesis.
Recruitment into raiding units would also appear to correspond to conditions channeling fighters into rogue organizations elsewhere.
Dr. Omolade Adunbi, Assistant Professor, Political Anthropology, University of Michigan noted the following earlier this year in the publication Africa is a Country: “The question then becomes, how are these insurgents with no clarity of purpose able to recruit members into their dysfunctional group? The answer to this question is not far-fetched. First, the effect of climate change on the rise of social inequality in many parts of the country has meant the increased susceptibility of socially vulnerable groups to recruitment.”
Related on YouTube
Posted to YouTube 3/28/2014
Posted to YouTube 1/11/2018
Posted to YouTube 8/2/2016
BackChannels can never “vet” these videos, but most recognize this conflict in Nigeria as involving cattlemen, basically, and farmers. Less played may be the role played by religion in the conflict, which here has been made apparent:
Posted to YouTube 1/16/2018
Considering the 2013 Hezbollah weapons cache story, the latest interdiction of arms involving Turkish (criminal, of course) channeling, the claim of arms coming from Libya and more recent participation associated with Turkey and the activities of Moscow and Tehran in manipulating conflicts and extremism into existence (listen to the BBC interview of a once Soviet admiral on the Ogaden War), the drivers of this latest tragedy in Nigeria may start to surface.
The Turkish Ambassador to Nigeria, Mr. Hakan Cakil, in a meeting with the Comptroller-General of the Nigeria Customs Service, Col. Hameed Ali (rtd), over importation of four containers of pump-action rifles into Nigeria in last eight months vowed to help Nigeria fish out criminals behind the illegal arms shipment to Nigeria.
The question then becomes, how are these insurgents with no clarity of purpose able to recruit members into their dysfunctional group? The answer to this question is not far-fetched. First, the effect of climate change on the rise of social inequality in many parts of the country has meant the increased susceptibility of socially vulnerable groups to recruitment . . . .
On 4 December 2017, Nigeria’s air force sent fighter jets to fire rockets at villages as a “warning” to deter spiralling communal violence, as hundreds of herdsmen attacked at least five villages in Adamawa state to avenge the massacre of up to 51 members of their community, mostly children, the previous month in Kikan.
An Amnesty International team visited the villages in the aftermath of the air raids and gathered witness testimony from residents who described being attacked by a fighter jet and a military helicopter as they attempted to flee.
(Reuters) – Nigeria’s secret service say they have arrested a “terrorist cell” trained in Iran who planned to attack U.S. and Israeli targets in Africa’s most populous nation.
The State Security Service (SSS) said they arrested Abdullahi Mustapha Berende and two other Nigerians in December after Berende made several suspicious trips to Iran where he interacted with Iranians in a “high profile terrorist network”.
The National Chairman of Fulbe (Fulani) Development Association of Nigeria (FULDAN), Malam Ahmad Usman Bello, has declared that they cannot be defeated by any ethnic group in the country.
Bello made the remarks while speaking with Saturday Tribune in Kano, amid the widespread outcry against the murderous activities of Fulani herdsmen in Benue, Plateau and Taraba states and many other parts of the country.
The federal government is set to meet Turkish diplomats today over the spate of illegal importation of rifles from Turkey to Nigeria.
Nigeria Customs Service (NCS) Comptroller-General (CG) Col. Hameed Ali (retd) said this when he briefed reporters over the seizure of another 470 rifles at Tin-Can Island port in Lagos.
The body also said communal clashes have claimed over 700 lives since last year. AI made its position known in a statement issued on Monday. It stated that clashes between herdsmen and farmers in Adamawa, Benue, Taraba, Ondo and Kaduna states have resulted in 168 deaths in January alone.
Israel does not usually acknowledge foreign military actions, but Liberman told European diplomats Wednesday—the same day that the Mazzeh military airport near Damascus was reportedly hit by surface-to-surface missiles, and a week after two strikes elsewhere in Syria—that that his country was taking action to keep Hezbollah from acquiring “advanced weapons, military equipment and weapons of mass destruction.” His latest comments to the Knesset seemed to suggest that at least one of the strikes was in order to stop Hezbollah from acquiring chemical weapons.“
Our policies and our positions are very clear and are based on three red lines: We won’t allow any harm to the citizens of the State of Israel, we won’t allow any harm to the sovereignty of the State of Israel, and we will not allow the smuggling of high-quality advanced weapons and chemical weapons from Syria to Lebanon for Hezbollah,” Liberman told the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee.
The State Security Circuit of the Federal Supreme Court on Monday handed out varying jail terms to seven people for setting up a UAE cell of the banned Hezbollah group.
Three defendants were sentenced to life in jail, two got 15-year jail terms and two others were sentenced to 10 years in prison.
The court chaired by Judge Falah Al Hajiri also sentenced leader of Egypt’s banned Muslim Brotherhood group Esam Al Din Al Erian to five years in jail, in absentia.
According to political commentator with Russia’s Kommersant publishing house Sergei Strokan, there now exists a “Russia, Iran, Hezbollah military triangle” in Syria.
In a telephone interview with Al-Monitor, Strokan said, “Hezbollah can do some things that Russia can’t afford to do itself,” as putting “Russian boots on the ground [in Syria] is a subject of heated debate [within Russia].”
And the public may read about Hezbollah in Lebanon with the shadow of the Ayatollah moving about in the background, but it may take more work to grasp how Moscow works with Tehran to elevate Hezbollah’s influence in Lebanon while channeling its fighters into action in Syria.
Again, on general terms, the KGB Era catch-all “Active Measures” may preoccupy wonks — enthused amateurs and professionals in intelligence and foreign affairs — while barely signaling up through the background clamor set by the entertainment and sports industries. As much — specifically, public ignorance of the mechanisms involved in the KGB-style sustaining of “political absolutism” (try using that one down at the bar) by way of a totalitarian approach to a political theater of realpolitik — moves this chatter into more specialized but also open circles.
This is the stuff of political thrillers in films and novels.
In general, both Hezbollah and Hamas may be interpreted as the advanced troops of Tehran as ultimately backed by Moscow. Again, the prize: political absolute power and destruction of democracies and the decimation of the concept — as demonstrated in Syria — of human rights.
Shaharabani said that the July 2006 Lebanon War “was the longest Israel had experienced since its War of Independence in 1948,” but any future clash with Hezbollah will make those destructive 34 days pale by comparison. According to his FDD coauthors, the Israeli government estimates that Hezbollah has approximately 150,000 rockets today as opposed to the mere 14,000 it possessed prior to the 2006 conflict. Writing for the Weekly Standard, Vanderbilt University law professor Willy Stern said that this gives Hezbollah a “bigger arsenal than all NATO countries – except the United States – combined.”
The Obama Administration has played the weak hand in relation to overt confrontations while possibly working behind-the-scenes to kick the legs out from under the should-be-defunct Soviet arrangements. As I don’t live “behind the curtains” — or the doors of the CIA, Defense Department, and State and other national security and defense elements — I encounter the news with an analytical bent that really can’t confirm nor deny American weakness in the encounters with serious challenges. Neither, perhaps, can America’s enemies produce better estimates, so it would seem. In the end, the despots, the commanders, and their generals wage bets with every act of war. For these, if they don’t aggress in the face of weakness, they’re pussies (sorry); if they do and have their asses handed to them (eventually), they’re gone but with some grudging respect for following orders and going over the cliffs together. It’s a dubious honor, but so many belligerent “Armies of God” seem so completely invested in the medieval beliefs and visions that serve their handlers that they have no exit into the modern world. War, in essence, becomes for Hezbollah and others a loopy dead end.
The 21st Century’s investment in total in feudalism may be immense: it goes far beyond Hezbollah and into any number of “state capitalist” dictatorships (whatever the “ism” they preach) and criminal enterprises. Still, the medieval outlook and the barbarism associated with it, whether mafia, state mafia, or religious mafia, becomes less and less wanted given the modern tools enabling more fair distributions in power and greater security to the lawful through the earnest development and sustaining of “rule of law”.
Probably, the lands of the lawless have always to implode over internecine doubts, jealousies, suspicions, and rivalries. The depth of their tragedies, whether of Hitlerian or Stalinist proportions, may be measured in the suffering in extent and time of the constituencies made to ride along with maddened power inherently inherently malign and narcissistic.
The prompt was a comment suggesting Hezbollah’s possession of Syrian chemical weapons stocks, an issue that had been in the news in 2013 and appears more recently in The Wall Street Journal (July 23, 2015): http://www.wsj.com/articles/mission-to-purge-syria-of-chemical-weapons-comes-up-short-1437687744
Other of the Morning’s Remarks
Promotion of the Shiite vs Sunni feud promotes the medievalism endorsed by Putin, Assad, Khamenei, and Baghdadi whose own positions rest on sustaining political “absolute power” (dictatorship) for themselves!
From the modern and perhaps outside perspective, the medieval worldview brings its horrors to the surface in continuous and unresolvable conflicts. The medieval order has become today a ceaselessly demonstrated death machine.
With comparatively less headcount, a solid foundation in a single ethnolinguistic cohort, and thousands of years of varied history, the Jews have unhappily but successfully ejected much of what failed them over the years — animal sacrifice may serve as a convenient symbol of the abandonment of priestly magic. When the near 0-CE Hillel makes principle ascendent over ritual and works to improve convert access to Judaism, the religion “tails forward” (my opinion) to the Ethical Culture Movement associated with Felix Adler. It’s not the end of the story, God willing, nor a story about the abandonment of Judaism, but it is a story about staying the same and changing at the same time. Some beliefs, ideas, and rituals have well stood the tests of time, and time may disappear altogether between the lighting of the Sabbath candles between millennium.
The Qur’an’s promotion of the authoritative voice and injunction may make movement away from the medieval world more difficult. What I witness (by having been here day after day for years) are the channels, trials, and errors of a community that plainly will not travel further with the Muslim Brotherhood’s (et al.) guidance, but how people deal with Bad Baghdadi and similar others seems varied. Atheists, “apostates”, converts, modernists, reformists — everything but barbarians, and the barbarians (that go off to join ISIS or knock around in the killing fields — and the odd bombing — with Hezbollah) may be setting themselves up for slaughter. Many things will be tried as the future gets under everyone’s feet (as it apparently has in Egypt) and we hope a few things will work and peace will prevail between the “Abrahamic religions”.
Re. Obama: I don’t know that region that is “what’s really going on”, but it appears evident that Obama wants the world to police itself because he has most of American military policy focused on acute issues (like ISIS in Iraq) and covert and policing this-and-that in Somalia and other places where efforts only occasionally ping the headlines but have to have been continuous for those headlines to appear.
Re. Islam: it appears to have an issue with Baghdadi, Hezbollah, the Muslim Brotherhood Organizations, and with the medieval troika Putin-Assad-Khamenei — but ALL of that involves a potentially archaic feudal world from which modern souls should and do wish to depart. Getting more people across that bridge may be what the modern world needs to do to survive itself. However, that world appears flanked by two “superpowers” — Russia under Putin’s aegis and a China that straddles the medieval and modern worlds with the appropriation — via investment — of western assets and continuing “state capitalist” / political elite control of its nation, which might serve to keep away chaos from 800 million residents of the state.
Re. Trump: he’s a businessman, not a politician; he’s a pretend “tough guy”, a poker player, not a statesman; and I believe he’s ill-educated for leadership in the foreign policy of the United States. The world is not a China shop, but he’s a bull in it nonetheless and in need of a completely different education to come up to speed.
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Israel’s a strong state in command of its own defenses and related defense doctrine. However, as life need not be always a competition between similar entities, comparisons involving the cliches of Israeli prowess and Arab ineptness seem to me always questionable as well as certain to induce jealousies and resentments.
Immediate Arab states of affairs start with much greater populations and a more challenging melange of environmental and social themes. While the Hebrews have forged their lives apart, a kind of breakout or breakaway from despotism and disorder, Arab leaderships — and the latest suffered by the Persians — have wrestled long with systems of patronage and repression that have alternately kept the lid on darker forces or let them out, a bipolar political swinging fit to the medieval world that the modern might strive to attenuate but with a node for the scale and scope of the effort.
The BackChannels editor may cover a lot of topics in a day, but all talk and no reading (or play) makes for a dull pundit. More importantly, the greater the familiarity with political material, the stronger the need for more in-depth reading, other research, and talk, and that and other interest may slow the feed to this blog.
China’s martial ambitions have come up in social network chatter, of course, and that world too, this despite decades of development, investment, and trade, appears to remain committed to its possession of medieval absolute power and the related military force required to first defend it and then expand its influence and reach. The prompt for this note, which was made on the morning of January 8, 2016, was a January 7 article in the National Interest describing Chinese-Pakistani sea exercises involving submarines in anti-submarine warfare drills:
When you look at any state-of-the-art military machinery, you’re seeing the result of a long forward-looking process that started with talk, got the design bench, won funding, and produced a small industry in supplier contracts. In part, the incessant preparation for war _across the spectrum_ helps keep war in abeyance and the process of its part in aggression slow. Still, that process is there.
What I find frightening is after so many post-Nixon years of expanded investment and trade, the Chinese communist talk (despite all the mansions of Melbourne, AU sold to elites — plus ownership of the world’s largest bank) hasn’t changed a jot. Back-Channels observation of the defense of medieval political absolutism in relation to the Moscow-Damascus-Tehran axis of power may well apply to Moscow-Beijing. With Putin perhaps the Baghdadi of despotism, these old familiars may well be ganging up to force the United States and the world to accept what Assad plus the invasion of Crimea represent to Europe and the United States: i.e., the will of the despotic to impose themselves on the world at any cost to humanity.
If the United States had gambled on money as being the first principle of power, it appears to be losing its own shirt. Indeed, while the west has been kicking the legs out from under the old Soviet order (Moscow-Damascus-Tehran), a part of the arrangement may well be kicking back, and for the west, the distribution of money through constituent populations count for much more than it appears to in Moscow and Beijing (where Russian and Chinese development may be traded off for the ambitions of imposed military power and subsequent plunder, which may be the point of that power for those leaders).
LONDON — The United States pressed Argentina to end its investigation of Iranian complicity in the 1994 bombing of a Jewish center in which nearly 100 people were killed.
Western diplomatic sources said the administration of President Barack Obama urged Argentina on several occasions to either stop or limit the investigation into the bombing of the Argentine-Israeli Mutual Association in Buenos Aires. The sources said the U.S. appeals marked one of the demands by Iran for a reconciliation with Washington, Middle East Newsline reported.
“Argentina had hard evidence against at least one Iranian leader, which prevented him from traveling abroad,” a source said.
Earlier this month Nisman filed a criminal complaint in an Argentine court, alleging that President Cristina Kirchner and Foreign Minister Héctor Timerman had crafted a secret agreement with Iran to let the terrorists off the hook in exchange for Iranian oil largess and Iranian purchases of Argentine grain.
In an exclusive column, Jewish journalist Damian Pachter – who first reported on the death of the special prosecutor – recounts the intimidation, the sleepless nights, the agent who stalked him and his ultimate decision to head for Israel.
I knew Alberto Nisman from years researching Hezbollah activities in South America for my book Hezbollah: The Global Footprint of Lebanon’s Party of God. The idea that he would commit suicide just as the investigation into the 1994 attack is finally making headway simply does not comport with the man and his years-long, dogged commitment to bringing the perpetrators of this horrific act of terrorism to justice. After Nisman filed his complaint last week, Kirchner’s administration insisted that the charges “have no foundation,” but neither those charges nor the sudden, suspicious death of the prosecutor who brought them would be the first time the case was marred by political corruption and illegal activities at the highest levels.
In which world would you wish to live? The one of state mafia loaded strong with every criminal method of manipulation imaginable (to list a few: constituent infantilization, pandering, patronage; bribery, intimidation, jailing, murder; libel, slander, and theft; pervasive lying, nepotism, and secrecy) — or some other dragged out into the sun for a good look?
The Alberto Nisman murder story — it appears as I type that the state is changing its story — may accompany the sea monster surfacing of a new global fascism, the same that this blog has been suggesting with “Putin-Assad-Khamenei”, “Putin-Orban”, “Putin-Erdogan” — submitted to search engines, each pair will produce some cogent and interesting coverage — as well as the blog’s psych-lite approach to “malignant narcissism” and it’s weaving with what has been observed in relation to bipolar and narcissistic personality disorders and their extension into leadership and political psychology.
Additional Links
Mohsen Rabbani, an Iranian mullah and a former cultural attaché in Argentina, is a leading figure in spreading Islam in Latin America, particularly in Brazil. Rabbani, while in the service at the Iranian embassy in Buenos Aires, was involved in the planning and implementation of the deadly terrorist attack on the Asociacion Mutual Israelita Argentina (AMIA) Jewish cultural center of 1994 that resulted in 85 dead and more than 150 injured. Rabbani’s involvement in the bombing was persistently denied by Iranian authorities. In 2007, however, Interpol finally decided to issue a Red Notice for Rabbani, which is an arrest warrant with a view to extradite.
The man directly responsible for this cell-building operation in Argentina was the cultural attache of the Iranian embassy in Buenos Aires, Mohsen Rabbani. His job was supposedly to provide cultural and religious information. His real job, however — like that of the Iranian ambassador to Syria in 1983, Ali-Akbar Mohtashemi — was building the local terror network. A Shiite cleric, Rabbani gave a 1991 speech in a Buenos Aires convention hall before an audience of about 100 Argentinean right-wing advocates and Shiite Muslims. The front row was reserved for officials of the Iranian embassy, who beamed as Rabbani declared in schoolboy Spanish, “Israel must disappear from the face of the earth. http://books.google.com/books?id=KXa6qOt86OwC&pg=PA123
The “second row seat to history” gets a little bit incestuous digging out quotations quoting other quotations, so here BackChannels may rest on the Alberto Nisman murder mystery.
One more thing . . .
Argentina president Cristina Kirchner reversed her government’s position on the death of prosecutor Alberto Nisman, saying now that his death was not a suicide.
The reversal comes as evidence gathered by Nisman proving that the government covered up Iranian involvement in the 1994 suicide bombing of a Jewish community center was released on Thursday. Kirchner is saying that Nisman was killed to discredit her government and that the prosecutor was “misled” by people posing as intelligence agents who fed him wrong information.
