The Russian state’s history of political criminality — that which has driven the upending of its governments twice in the past 100 years — has sat at the base of the middle east conflict and helped kept it collecting money for those it blessed: Yasser Arafat, Mahmoud Abbas, Ismail Haniyeh, and Khaled Mashaal.
I don’t know if the state of affairs will straighten out with Donald J. Trump in office, but the more word gets around, the more likely it will.
Once you know — and perhaps once Moscow knows the popular west knows — and once the Palestinians know — this game with the refugees should be over.
Noting the KGB history may not change Arab culpability for sustaining the refugees as an apartheid population in relation to their own states, but two legs of the old table have been removed by time — Saddam Hussein and Muammar Qaddafi, both state sponsors of terrorism.
If the 1920s may be noted as the launch period for the Muslim Brotherhood, the umbrella organization beneath which al-Qaeda and others have developed, then this new way of looking at the old conflict also starts to put away an entire era of warfare that needs finally to be consigned more largely to the 20th Century.
Both the creation of the document, commentary on it, and the voting that ensued refused to acknowledge Moscow’s old hand in the creation of the Middle East Conflict.
And the other guy. And BackChannels hopes the “other guy” proves an American and very, very cool about it.
Despite the conservative grousing about it, we need our United Nations.
Despite “everything being negotiable” — but is everything really negotiable? — Syria needs peace and a program for detoxifying from old Soviet Era poison (including its famous promotion of anti-Semitism); and Ukraine needs to remain sovereign across all of its designated lands.
And NATO and the United States of America represent a necessary and unified concept for the defense of democracy and freedom in the world — real freedom, not state-approved bunk fashioned out of some idiot’s totalitarian mixture of intimidation and patronage.
As always with dictators, “The Emperor’s New Clothes” applies well to ethically, morally, and spiritually vacuous systems of power.
A fast glance online suggests that Stalin and Hitler hated one another and bought into their own heady non-aggression pact for practical (even if delusional) purposes.
Of course, in the BackChannels way of looking at some politics through the lens of related psychology (see “Malignant Narcissism” and other ideas in “Anthropolitical Psychology” on this blog), one may view Stalin and Hitler as two malignant narcissists explosively engaged with one another. It was not a pretty site, that World War II, but the basis for affinity between the two dictators in shared anti-Semitism, anger with the greater world (it’s always against them, non?), the “paranoid delusional reflection of motivation“, and so on may have less visibly bonded the two just as today Putin, Assad, and Khamenei would seem to have wildly different state interests while yet sharing in the creation of greater chaos, destruction, and injustice in the world (for confirmation, just ask any Syrian refugee you happen to meet).
We call upon President Janos Ader and Prime Minister Viktor Orban to recall the award to Mr. Bayer.Hungary was a country plagued with antisemitism during WWII. The infamous Arrow Cross Militia were Hitler’s henchmen and oftentimes, they were more vicious than the Nazis themselves.It was precisely in Hungary, where Raoul Wallenberg, the young Swede, embarked in an unprecedented life-saving operation which actually spared the lives of scores of Jews and other innocent victims of the Nazis and their Hungarian partners.
Any form of racism and discrimination should not be rewarded but strongly condemned. Instead, it seems that seven decades later, the present Hungarian government has learned very little from Raoul Wallenberg’s legacy. This should be immediately rectified and addressed.
Despite the unspeakable tragedies that my father experienced in Hungary during that darkest time of history, he never lost his love for his native homeland. During nearly three decades of Congressional service, Tom Lantos was a stalwart advocate for a free and democratic Hungary and a devoted friend to the Hungarian people. He passed his deep love of Hungary on to his children and grandchildren, many of whom have both studied and worked in Hungary. I am keeping that flame of love alive for the great-grandchildren who never met my father as I teach the language, the history, and the songs of Hungary to my own grandchildren.
The Knight’s Cross, which was bestowed on me by Prime Minister Bajnai, was a great honor that I hoped one day to pass on to my sons and daughters. It gives me real sorrow that I will not be able to do this. However, the government’s decision to award the Knight’s Cross to Zsolt Bayer has sullied this noble award. Mr. Bayer’s despicable record of overt and hateful anti-Semitism and racism is beneath contempt. He deserves censure, not honor, for his loathsome writings and speech. Indeed, earlier this year the publication he writes for was fined for engaging in hate speech on account of his words. I feel compelled to join the many others who have denounced the shamefulness of granting this state honor to a hate-filled xenophobe like Zsolt Bayer. Accordingly, with a heavy heart, I am returning the Knight’s Cross to the government of Hungary.
The IRA was in contact with Red Army intelligence officers in London and New York, and it was in the former that the monthly stipend was handed over. The IRA’s senior officer in London passed along military intelligence, including specifications of British submarine detection sonar and aeroplane engines for bombers, military journals and manuals, and gas masks. In addition he arranged false passports for Soviet agents and even for a communist operative to travel to Romania in the guise of an Irish woollens salesman! It was in New York, however, that the Soviets got the most valuable information, from an IRA agent code-named ‘Mr Jones’. Jones’s sources likely included serving members of the US military, as he was able to provide reports of the army’s chemical weapons service, state-of-the-art gas masks, machine-gun and aeroplane engine specifications, and reports from the navy, air service and army. In Jones’s estimation, Soviet intelligence in the US would have been ‘helpless’ without the information he supplied.
According to the account which he gave to the Hebrew writer, Reuben Brainin, less than a year before his death, Herzl was attracted to the Messiah legends of the Jews from early adolescence. At the age of twelve, he had a “wonderful dream,” which he recounted as follows:
The King-Messiah came, a glorious and majestic old man, took me in his arms and swept off with me on the wings of the wind. On one of the shining clouds we encountered the figure of Moses. The features were familiar to me out of my childhood in the statue by Michelangelo. The Messiah called to Moses: “It is for this child that I have prayed!” And to me he said: “Go and declare to the Jews that I shall come soon and perform great wonders and great deeds for my people and for the whole world!” 19
Shortly after this dream Herzl read a popular science book which presented electricity as the new King-Messiah which would liberate the nations and all mankind from servitude. At first he was indignant but then he began to wonder if electricity might not be the promised redeemer and decided to become an engineer—a childhood ambition which he never fulfilled. What is striking in this dream is the strong identification with Moses, with the Exodus from Egypt and technological advances that could totally transform the lives of humanity. It is precisely such a fusion of tradition and modernity, the idea of a new Jewish exodus and the Promethean redemption of mankind through the Zionist enterprise, that provided the élan vital of Herzl’s project.
Such essays are passed to BackChannels along with the day’s feed in news. Although so much reading online makes for a fragmented educational and informational experience, the fragments, when they are true — valid and reliable — do come together in three-dimensional mosaic. The Torah, commentaries, histories far and near, and current events test each sentence.
Are dreams such as that of the “King-Messiah” poppycock?
Having attained and age in which cynicism and skepticism greet sentimentality too often, the BackChannels editor might say, “Probably so”, but let’s see where it goes. However, the sentence, “It is precisely such a fusion of tradition and modernity, the idea of a new Jewish exodus and the Promethean redemption of mankind through the Zionist enterprise, that provided the élan vital of Herzl’s project” has its weight supported by Israel’s exuberant contributions to the world in the creation and manufacturing of the broadest spectrum of new and continuously improved technologies.
Masked off by our own reading and research habits as well as general busyness with information is the history of Russian and Soviet anti-Semitism and its influence throughout the political campus of the Left and Far Left to this day.
There are many portals today through which to pick up on the history of Soviet anti-Semitism, Soviet-supported terrorism, and the relationship of the Soviet to the International and Palestinian Solidarity organizations and their radical movements. I usually — and here may — blog such links as the following:
Where the focus is narrowed to influence of the Soviet on Middle Eastern politics and on Islam, one will find reported by Pacepa the Soviet’s massive promotion of anti-Semitism in the Arab sphere.
The former lawyer has vowed to be “the British Muslim who takes the fight to extremists.” Yet the Labour Party under leader Jeremy Corbyn has veered sharply to the left on these matters, and Mr. Khan has been an enabler of that transformation.
Abdel-Al—who lives in occupied East Jerusalem—is visiting Chicago this week at the invitation of the United Electrical Workers (UE), the U.S. Palestinian Community Network, and Jewish Voice for Peace to enlist the support of the U.S. labor movement in the Palestinian liberation struggle. He addressed standing-room-only audiences of rank-and-file unionists at last weekend’s Labor Notes conference and again on Tuesday night at the local UE Hall.
The campaign for ‘Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions’ (BDS) against the Israeli government gains ground every day while defenders of the Palestinian Occupation seem to be able to do no more that trot out the same tired charges of anti-Semitism against its proponents!
As George Bisharat points out in the article below, the charge of anti-Semitism is completely without substance. Indeed there has been a tragic history of persecution of Jewish people for which all of us Europeans rightly feel a sense of shame. Even so, for Zionist politicians to manipulate this shame to justify the persecution of Palestinian people is reprehensible, and it’s a tactic that is becoming increasingly transparent to the Western public.
Perhaps the most significant thing about Bisharat’s article is that it appeared in the Chicago Tribune. Indeed the BDS is going mainstream!
The above paragraph had been posted as prelude to “Applause for the academic boycott of Israel” by George Bisharat (the two are on the same page, i.e., same link).
Those who read across publications may find similar claims, tropes, and strategies in play. The picture is generally stark with the charge of brutality always leveled on the Jews:
U.S. enabling of Israel, particularly in its colonial expansion into the West Bank, has voided the two-state option and fostered a single functioning state there in which only Jews enjoy relative security, prosperity, and full political rights, while Palestinians suffer gradations of oppression.
Never mind the Soviet KGB-invented Arafat and the Palestinian Liberation Organization, today’s Palestinian Authority; and never mind the genocidal — and Palestinian plundering — Hamas. The presence of the two disappears when Israelis / Zionists / Jews seem much preferred in the target sites.
Corey Gil-Shuster has been video interviewing Israelis and Palestinians — and anyone else within range — for years on the widest variety of questions having to do with the middle east conflict and justice in Israel. Here’s a short example from 2012:
Posted to YouTube May 9, 2012.
Finally about the promotion of impoverished Palestinians beneath the “brutal occupation” — there’s a lot more to that story that includes Hamas billionaires, but this may suffice for a glimpse into the reality of luxury development in Gaza: PRICO Real Estate Development Company.
It is important to understand this history in order to understand what we are up against; our enemy has a long memory and seeks to avenge this defeat of its ancestors. The radical Islamists are not upset about our presence in their lands, nor are they especially upset about Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, nor about our “exploitation” of their oil fields, nor our invasion of Iraq. They are taking a much longer view, a view with vengeance in mind! They want vengeance for Tours, vengeance for Granada, vengeance for Vienna. They want to reinvigorate Islam, return to the days of pride and victory and submission by their foes. They want to establish the Caliphate and place the entire world under Sharia law. 9/11 was the first step in this process of re-establishing Jihad as a divine force of conversion and conquest but it will not be the last. If America, Europe and Israel fail to understand this, then they have made a fatal mistake in warfare in that they have failed to understand their enemy and even worse; they have failed to identify who their real enemy is.
“Shimmer” always applies — not all Muslims (and Muslims appear most frequently the first victims of Islamist ambition) but some. Which ones? The perpetual question: Daniel Pipes’ “How Many Islamists?”
Considering the Islamist’s delusions of future grandeur a part of the “civilizational narcissism” and “malignant narcissism” integrated with their enterprise, BackChannels has tried to attach motivation to the medieval complex in which the power of God is believed to flow down to benighted mortals. The view is one the modern world has long dismissed in practice (although a dozen European states remain kingdoms).
The story begins with “A Factual Overview of the September 11 Border Story.” This introduction summarizes many of the key facts of the hijackers’ entry into the United States. In it, we endeavor to dispel the myth that their entry into the United States was “clean and legal.” It was not. Three hijackers carried passports with indicators of Islamic extremism linked to al Qaeda; two others carried passports manipulated in a fraudulent manner. It is likely that several more hijackers carried passports with similar fraudulent manipulation. Two hijackers lied on their visa applications. Once in the United States, two hijackers violated the terms of their visas. One overstayed his visa. And all but one obtained some form of state identification. We know that six of the hijackers used these state issued identifications to check in for their flights on September 11. Three of them were fraudulently obtained.
Of late, BackChannels’ reading has involved turning from one chilling, albeit bureaucratise nonfiction, page to the next. Perhaps with the right coffee or spirits, another reader might set aside the latest McCarry (I’ll have to read him) or Silva (plenty of that here for the winter) and settle into the kind of obscure monograph that packs a moan a minute:
Once the operation was under way, the conspirators attempted to enter the United States 34 times over 21 months, through nine airports. They succeeded all but once. Border inspectors at U.S. airports were unaware of the potential significance of indicators of possible terrorist affiliation in conspirators’ passports and had no information about fraudulent travel stamps possibly associated with al Qaeda. No inspectors or agents were trained in terrorist travel intelligence and document practices. The culture at the airports was one of travel facilitation and lax enforcement, with the exception of programs to interdict drug couriers and known criminals.
Enough said — the staff report “9/11 and Terrorist Travel” is online, free, and, if it’s read, certain to add old flavor to the latest web chat about immigration and travel into the United States.
Reading at length — reading for hours — is practically a lost art but one nonetheless practiced around BackChannels. The source of the tip to the publication cited above:
BackChannels 