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Tag Archives: history

FTAC: Middle East Conflict: Harmonizing on One Page

02 Tuesday Oct 2018

Posted by commart in 21st Century Feudal, Anti-Semitism, Books, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Gaza, Islamic Small Wars, Israel, Middle East, Palestinia, Philology, Philosophy, Political Psychology, Politics

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espistemology, history, MEC, middle east conflict, scholarly integriy, truth

The issue: the symmetrical treatment of history such that Israelis and Palestinians should teach both “The Holocaust” and “The Nakba”.

Rubbish.

Israelis and Palestinians would do well to research and teach history in the direction of nonpartisan and well substantiated truth.


The idea that “history is written by the victors” should be today an artifact of the medieval world, i.e., the world of “absolute power” and thuggish personalities.

In the modern world — and should it wish to be a good one — scholarly integrity should matter most of all (and Muhammad himself is reputed to have said, “One scholar is worth more against the devil than one thousands worshippers”).

The barbarism known to history — medieval rape and rapine, ethnic cleansing, genocide — need not be known to the future, but as much becomes the province of those alive today. If Muslim Fulani gangs and war parties wish to continue their program of razing Christian farming villages — and kidnapping, raping, and slaughtering the residents — that is really up to them, there being no sufficient power (yet) to stop them where they roam, plan, and execute foul deeds.

Integrity, rightness, and righteousness should have qualities that transcend small interests. As often as we may find that not true, we may hope that one day as much will be true.

https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300172348/palestine-betrayed


–33–

FTAC: MEC: Where’s the Hold-Up?

12 Sunday Aug 2018

Posted by commart in 21st Century Feudal, Also in Media, Anti-Semitism, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Gaza, Islamic Small Wars, Israel, Middle East, Palestinia, Political Spychology, Politics

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history, middle east conflict, Palestinian KGB, Palestinians, Phantoms of the Soviet, PLO, political manipulation of the Palestinians, Soviet Era, YNet series

The Palestinians may end the occupation any day by ceding Israel to Israel and establishing peace between themselves in the Preoccupied Territories. Decency in governance would follow and the recognition of an authentic Palestinian state would follow on that.

What and who are holding up the Palestinians?


There’s no cliffhanger left in the above question.

YNET-KGB-ME-Series-graphic-for-reference-to-it

You can get there from here


On BackChannels —

Set: Palestinian KGB

–33–

Excerpt: _Stasiland_: How That Life Goes On

11 Sunday Mar 2018

Posted by commart in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Political Psychology, Political Spychology, Politics

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GDR, German Democratic Republic, history, Insiderkomitee, phantom socialism, Phantoms of the Soviet, politics, post-Cold War, Society for the Protection of Civil rights and the Dignity of Man, Soviet / post-Soviet politics

funder-guardian

Guardian first book award 2003 – online: MacDonogh, Giles.  “The spy’s the limit.”  The Guardian, June 7, 2003.


He tells me he worked from 1961 to 1990 at the ministry of Potsdam, exclusively in counter-espionage.  He picks up the thesis and reads its title:

The Work of the Ministry for State Security on the Defence Against Intelligence Infiltration by the Secret Services of the NATO States against the GDR.  Presented from the Viewpoint of a Member of the Division for Counter-Espionage, Regional Administration, Potsdam.

‘This is a discussion paper I wrote based on my work at the ministry.  If you read this, you will learn a lot of what you want to know.’

I flick to the front page, and see that the paper was written in 1994 for the ‘Potsdam Working Group of the Insiderkomitee for the Reexamination of the History of the Ministry for State Security, Inc.’

— In BackChannels experience of the eternal present online (and in the library), herewith a gush —

Author Anna Funder has put together a delightfully cringey-queasy how-it-was  — Stasiland, Harper Perennial; Reprint edition, 2011(German Edition, 2006; first published in 2002 as suggested above)  — on the German Democratic Republic (GDR, 1949-1990), and along with remembrance of assorted adventures and certain manners and methods in suffering comes this eyebrow-raiser.

Insiderkomitee?

1994?

“‘ . . . we have changed our name to the ‘Society for the Protection of Civil Rights and the Dignity of Man’.”

Okay, then.

Here’s a chill —

Funder-commentary

Moore, Nicole and Christina Spittel.  Australian Literature in the German Democratic Republic: Reading through the Iron Curtain.  Pp. 224-225.  London & New York: Anthem Press, 2016

Link to the above on Google Books.

For corroboration here in the open source, another writer, Gary Bruce, has made mention of the same ghost:

The organization of former Stasi officers known as the Insider-Komitee, whose self-styled objective is to restore “balance” to the current literature on the Stasi by writing “objective” history of the Ministry for State Security, assisted me in locating an important Stasi officer for interview.

Bruce, Gary.  The Firm: The Inside Story of the Stasi. P. 33.  New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.  Link: Google Books.

As resources appear fairly wide open to the curious on the web, BackChannels will wrap up the gawking now that it has stumbled across the tracks of at least a few others, and including those of the author her brave self, for she acknowledges, “My great mistake was to imagine that the stories of resistance, courage and decency would be well received by Germans” — for who would show up at the launching of Stasiland in the ballroom “of the former Stasi Offices in Leipzig”?

The first two rows of seats were filled with ex-Stasi (or perhaps ex-Party) men. I know this because they were in the ex-Stasi (or ex-Party) uniform, which consists of polyester trousers with a nice firm crease, a bomber jacket and a significant amount of Brylcreem. They were sitting in their former ballroom, legs splayed, arms crossed, looking daggers at us.

Funder, Anna.  “Sound of silence.”  TLS, October 12, 2016.

The same crew would later make a show of walking out on the event.

An observation higher up in the above cited piece precedes the willies and seems more worth remembering:

When I encountered Miriam, Julia, Frau Paul and Klaus Renft, what they told me was deeply thrilling. Not only in the sense of the bravery it took to climb the Berlin Wall or dig an underground tunnel or defy a governmental declaration that you “no longer exist”. The thrill was more fundamental. I felt I was witnessing, alive and breathing and drinking coffee opposite me, heroic human decency.



Referenced and Related on the Web

Betts, Paul.  “Socialism, Social Rights, and Human Rights: The Case of East Germany.”  Humanity Journal, June 11, 2014.


MacDonogh, Giles.  “The spy’s the limit.”  The Guardian, June 7, 2003.

The GDR was a furtive and insidious tyranny. Through the Stasi it pried into every aspect of your life. It possessed armies of spies, paid and unpaid. Some estimates run as high as one for every six and a half members of the population. Any attempt to achieve success in East Germany involved a pact with the devil – you paid with your soul if you wanted to attend a university, enter a sports-club, become a lawyer or a clergyman or marry a foreigner – like Funder’s friend Julia. You could only avoid contact with the regime if you opted out, and went into “inner emigration” – not an option for the ambitious.

This was a regime ruled by dour old men – Marxisten-Senilisten.


Wikipedia.  “Stasiland” (bold added to excerpt):

Stasiland has been published in sixty nine countries and translated into a dozen languages. It was shortlisted for many awards in the UK and Australia, among them the Age Book of the Year Awards, the Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards, the Guardian First Book Award 2003, the South Australian Festival Awards for Literature (Innovation in Writing) 2004, the Index Freedom of Expression Awards 2004, and the W.H. Heinemann Award 2004. In June 2004 it was awarded the world’s biggest prize for non-fiction, the Samuel Johnson Prize.


–33–

FTAC: Middle East Conflict: Bring “Moscow” to Account for Palestinian Suffering

31 Tuesday Oct 2017

Posted by commart in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Gaza, Islamic Small Wars, Israel, Palestinia, Politics, Russia

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east v west, Gaza, history, history with integrity, intellectual history, Israel, liberalism, middle east politics, Moscow, Russia, Russian history, Soviet Era, West Bank

The prompt: “The Palestinians went to Poland . . . the Israelis went to refugee camps . . . .”

A Palestinian professor had taken a group of students to Auschwitz, and on the other side, Israelis have toured Palestinian camps — so both statements are true but leave out the third and fourth parties (Soviet Era Moscow and the the post-WWII and 1948 Arab leaderships) responsible for the Arab Apartheid and political conditioning that have produced generations (70 years worth) of confined, politically programmed, and emotionally “weaponized” Palestinians — also unemployed and trapped.


It would be better if Palestinian and Israelis would travel to Moscow and ask Mr. Putin directly why the Soviet Union chose to block democracy and liberalism by transforming a post-war refugee situation into a People Resistance movement that would go on to cover another system for making money and distributing the same through systems of patronage.

Now that Palestinians have had a glimpse of the Jewish history of persecution in Europe (and in Russia) and Israelis have seen how Hamas and the PLO actually regard their people, it would be helpful as well to revisit both Arab and Soviet history at the end of WWII — and then work to get that history more securely into the past, fixed there, remember there, and, ultimately, dismissed in the interest of regional peace and cooperation.


Related on BackChannels

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/10/03/palestinian-kgb/

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2017/07/29/ftac-antidote-to-what-poisoned-the-palestinians/

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/12/27/excerpt-1920s-the-spread-of-hate-russia-germany-laqueur/

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/03/08/bds-cult-modules/

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/09/23/ftac-these-too-are-palestinians/

End “The Occupation”?

End the preoccupation with the Jews — and End the Hate (once engineered by Moscow).

One may also consider the business of producing and sustaining conflicts for politically criminal profiteering by way of corruption, skimming, and smuggling.

–33–

FTAC – Reflection – Moscow – Terrorism

04 Wednesday Jan 2017

Posted by commart in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Politics, Russia

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

false flag operation, history, ISIL, Moscow, Russia, Taliban, terrorism

Imaginative, Jackson’s movie, but this is more the history I know:

1> http://www.the-american-interest.com/2016/05/19/how-putin-became-president/

2> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_and_the_Soviet_Union

3> https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/12/09/syria-assad-isil-background/

4> Definitely not yesterday’s news:

http://thediplomat.com/2017/01/how-russia-may-approach-the-taliban-and-afghanistan-in-2017/

Forget about books and movies. Put on the thinking cap. What comes together for you from well known history and the high-integrity independent press?


–33–

Excerpt – 1920s – The Spread of Hate – Russia -> Germany | An Excerpt from Laqueur

27 Tuesday Dec 2016

Posted by commart in 21st Century Feudal, Anti-Semitism, Books, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Political Psychology, Politics, Psychology, Religion

≈ 28 Comments

Tags

anti-Semitism, cultural transfer, history, intellectual history, intellectual poisoning, intellectual transfer, Russia and Germany, Vinberg, Walter Laqueur

Excerpted from Walter Laqueur’s Russia and Germany: A Century of Conflict (1965) in the interest of understanding anti-Semitic ideation as a transferable cultural technology useful for controlling and leveraging mobs.  Of course, for anti-Semitic theorists, expression may not be so cold but rather driven by their own malignant narcissism and related contempt, defensiveness, and paranoia  — and Paranoid Delusional Narcissistic Reflection of Motivation — that goes with it.

Wikipedia has an entry on the benighted star of the following paragraph:  Fyodor Viktorovich Vinberg


Vinberg was a most loyal and devoted subject of his Tsar and his writings are full of invective against all Russian politicians, particularly of the centre and the right, who had been deficient in this respect.  Shortly before the October revolution, Vinberg took part in a conspiracy to overthrow the provisional government, was arrested and sent to the Peter and Paul fortress.  There he had ample time to write his diaries and to bring some order into his ideas; like Hitler in Landsberg prison, he then and there prepared himself for his future political and publicist career. Vinberg was released, or escaped, in 1918, and went first to the Ukraine and later to Germany, where he systematically developed his ideas in the short-lived Berlin newspaper, Prizyv, the yearbook Luch Sveta (A Ray of Light), published first in Berlin and subsequently in Yugoslavia, his book Krestny Put (Via Dolorosa), and a number of other writings.  Vinberg’s ideas can be summarized as follows:

  1. The Jews are the source of all evil.  They must be exterminated.
  2. The liberals and the constitutional monarchists are responsible for Russia’s ruin.  Any form of democracy and republican regime is bad.  A strong dictatorship is needed, for the people are stupid and bad and can never be trusted.
  3. Russia and Germany must unite in order to crush the revolution.
  4. The Catholic and Orthodox Churches must unite against the combined power of the Judeo-masonic sects now operating as a new International.

. . . In his ‘Berlin letters’ published in Luch Sveta, we learn that nature loves the strong, the brave, the agile, those who act and do not talk; she loathes weakness and democratic half measures.  Vinberg has only contempt for the masses, and his only criticism of Nicholas II is that the late Tsar unduly idealized the muzhik, and the Russian people in general, who are really a good for nothing lot and deserve to be punished for having betrayed their Tsar.  The people will always remain a blind, ignorant, senseless mass which has never and nowhere understood anything apart from the crudest material needs.

Laqueur, Walter.  Russia and Germany: A Century of Conflict.  P. 115.  Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown and Company, 1965.

Starting well before Vinberg and moving far past him, Laqueur connects the dots between the Tsar’s White Russian loyalists and emigres who had carried from the experience of the royals the anti-Semitic cant and nurtured racial contempt and supremacism of that medieval world.  The transfer of thought from Vinberg to Germany’s Rosenberg ensues.

What Rosenberg says of Jews and Jewish history can be traced, chapter and verse, to Vinberg’s ‘Berlin letters’ of 1919: the Jewish religion is highly aristocratic; the Jews have been engaged for many hundreds of years in a struggle against the gentile aristocracies; they use in this fight democratic, liberal, and socialist doctrines which act as a poison in the non-Jewish body politic.  Thus they destroyed the Roman empire through the deadly injection of democratic-Jewish Christianity . . . . (op. cit. p 116)

And on goes Walter Laqueur’s documentation of the intellectual history involving the transfer of such thought from the Russian experience and invention into a German culture soon to embrace Nazism.

 Vinberg died in February 1927, and did not witness his ideas coming to fruition.  His views are of historical interest because they constitute something in the nature of a half-way house between the old Black Hundred and National Socialism (op. cit. p. 117).

Related Reference

Alpha History.  “19th Century Anti-Semitism”.

Kellogg, Michael.  The Russian Roots of Nazism: White Émigrés and the Making of National Socialism, 1917–1945.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005; online 2009.

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.  “Pogroms”.


The Aufbau Vereinigung (Reconstruction Organisation) was a Munich-based counterrevolutionary conspiratorial group formed in the aftermath of the German occupation of the Ukraine in 1918 and of the Latvian Intervention of 1919. It brought together White Russian émigrés and early German National Socialists who aimed to overthrow the governments of Germany and the Soviet Union, replacing them with authoritarian régimes of the far right. The group was originally known as Die Bruecke (The Bridge). Aufbau was also the name of a periodical it brought out.[1]

According to Michael Kellogg,[2] the Aufbau Vereinigung was a vital influence on the development of Nazi ideology in the years before the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923 as well as financing NSDAP with, for example, funds from Henry Ford. It gave Hitler the idea of a vast Jewish conspiracy, involving a close alliance between international finance and Bolshevism and threatening disaster for mankind.[3] Recent research on Hitler’s early years in Vienna (1905-1913) appears to have shown that his antisemitism was at that time far less developed than it became under the new influences.[4]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aufbau_Vereinigung


Additional Wikipedia Reference

Wikipedia.  “Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter”.

As Hitler’s close associate, the white emigre Scheubner-Richter, familiar with private wealth and the defense of its productive assets, may have positioned the early Nazi movement as strongly anti-Semitic and anti-Communist.

Wikipedia.  “White émigré”.

White émigrés were, generally speaking, anticommunist and did not consider the Soviet Union and its legacy to be Russian at its core, a position which was reflective of their Russian Nationalist sympathies; they did not tend to recognise the demands of Ukrainian, Georgian and other minority groups for self-determination[citation needed] but yearned for the resurrection of the Russian Empire. They consider the period of 1917 to 1991 to have been a period of occupation by the Soviet regime which was internationalist and anti-Christian. They used the tsarist tricolour (white-blue-red) as their national flag, for example, and some organizations used the flag of the Imperial Russian Navy.

A significant percentage of white émigrés may be described as monarchists, although many adopted a position of being “unpredetermined” (“nepredreshentsi”), believing that Russia’s political structure should be determined by popular plebiscite.

Many white émigrés believed that their mission was to preserve the pre-revolutionary Russian culture and way of life while living abroad, in order to return this influence to Russian culture after the fall of the USSR. Many symbols of the White emigres were reintroduced as symbols of the post-Soviet Russia, such as the Byzantine eagle and the Russian tricolour.

The second Wikipedia piece may fill out the image of a region in which an entire class of residents have been forced to disperse while retaining the beliefs, principles, and values of their former lives.

–33–

FTAC – Moscow’s Presence in the Middle East Conflict

24 Saturday Dec 2016

Posted by commart in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Gaza Suzerain, Islamic Small Wars, Israel, Middle East, Palestinia, Political Spychology, Politics

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

history, KGB manipulation, MEC, middle east conflict, Palestinian movement, Russia

Here’s a different perspective:

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2015/10/12/ftac-tip-to-the-kgbs-amplification-of-middle-eastern-anti-semitism/

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/10/03/palestinian-kgb/

Soviet Era Moscow and “Putin’s Moscow” today both defend and represent a medieval political absolutism laced with criminal and kleptocratic features.

As long as Moscow’s role in engineering the invention of Arafat and the PLO goes unnoticed, and as long as it remains masked off from conversations like this one, there will be no solution to the “middle east conflict”. It’s a money maker for the leaders, clans, and cronies who sustain it at cost to the Palestinians.


Related Reference

On BackChannels – Fast Links

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2015/10/12/ftac-tip-to-the-kgbs-amplification-of-middle-eastern-anti-semitism/

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/11/11/ftac-why-the-middle-east-conflict-will-be-drawn-down-if-it-is-drawn-down/

Elsewhere On the Internet

Danan, Deborah.  “Gaza’s Millionaires and Billionaires — How Hamas’s Leaders Got Rich Quick.”  The Algemeiner, July 28, 2014.

Greenfield, Daniel.  “Palestinian Authority: 1,700 Hamas Millionaires in Gaza.”  FrontPage Magazine, March 24, 2014.

Lightening, S. M.  “4 Hamas Billionaires and 600 Millionaires Turning Civilian Suffering Into Hard Cash.” Jewish Business News, July 25, 2014.

Toameh, Khaled Abu.  “How Many Millionaires Live in the “Impoverished” Gaza Strip?”  Gatestone Institute, August 30, 2012.

Toameh, Khaled Abu.  “How Much is Mahmoud Abbas Worth?  Try $100 Million.”  Gatestone Institute, May 18, 2012.

–33–

Also in Media: “Journalists as Witnesses at Hungarian Revolution” | RealClearHistory | Jefferson Flanders | November 4, 2016

23 Friday Dec 2016

Posted by commart in 21st Century Feudal, Also in Media, Free Speech, Hungary, Politics

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Cold War, free press, history, Hungarian Revolution, Hungary, journalism

The mass media coverage of the Hungarian Revolution offered an object lesson in the value of a free press. As the faltering Communist regime lost control of the borders, foreign correspondents were able to enter the country. Once there, the absence of government “minders” and censors allowed journalists to report what they saw, “without fear or favor of friend or foe.” The result: a balanced, independent, and accurate account of what was happening on the ground in Hungary.

Source: Journalists as Witnesses at Hungarian Revolution | RealClearHistory – 11/4/2016.

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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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