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Erdogan, Hamas, Islamism, medieval v modern, Militant Islam, NATO, Turkey
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16 Wednesday May 2018
Tag Archives: Islamism
FTAC: Nigeria: Boko Haram Convert-or-Die; Fulani Land Pirates Devouring Nigeria’s Christian Margin; Lost Confidence in Governance and Security
24 Saturday Mar 2018
Of the 110 schoolgirls kidnapped in Dapchi in February, 104 were released by the Boko Haram, five died during the kidnap while one remains with the terrorists for allegedly refusing to put on a hijab and renounce her Christian faith.
Her name: Aisha Adamu.
Her killers wear masks and appear to have no names.
From The Awesome Conversation —
The Ummah of Islam has bloody edges, and the Christian community of Nigeria appears to be an edge. The “Fulani Land Pirates” — that’s what I’m calling them — are nibbling away Nigerian Christian territory with rape and rapine, and the Christian community disarmed by the state is become “internally displaced”, currently by about 200,000 souls in relation to the Land Pirates, about 2 million in relation to Boko Haram, who have got a kind of game going: abduct, convert or kill, and return the sworn converts to their parents.
There are multiple levels in these conflicts — locally, Boko Haram is a scourge; however, the arms are Kalashnikov, generally speaking; we know today that Moscow arms and backs the Taliban in Afghanistan; we know that the same defends politically absolute systems, AKA “dictatorships”, and we know that the sponsors in the surrounds of these fighting elements, emir, general this or that, fit that description.
My call: it’s not overpopulation or too much imagination that drive the Islamic Small Wars, although that would be true for producing recruits for war parties: Nigeria provides dual images — the assaults of the Fulani Land Pirates in one part, the barbarism practiced by Boko Haram in the other — of the Islamist program of conquest “by the sword” in action.
Whatever reassurances and sweet words may come from the “leadership” may appear more and more as cover.
The marauders keep getting away — and refreshed with arms and funding keep returning too.
Posted to YouTube on February 26, 2018 — before the return of most of the schoolgirls: ” . . . and just asking how could our daughters be left unprotected to be taken again . . .?
Related Reference
CNN. “Inside Nigeria’s internal displacement camps”. Africa View, January 11, 2017.
Speaking in tears, the middle-aged resident of Jumbam, a village 2km away from Dapchi, said rather than the Nigerian soldiers combating the insurgents after they came back to drop the girls, the soldiers simply “watched with folded arms while the insurgents left triumphantly.”
The resident spoken was the father of Aisha Adamu, Adamu Jumbam.
The report involved 3,455 household surveys and 46 focus group discussions across 12 local government areas in Borno State. Most of the IDPs surveyed expressed fears about security as their main reasons for not wanting to return home.
Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari has claimed on several occasions that Boko Haram—which has fractured into at least two major factions—was no longer a fighting force in Nigeria. But the militants have continued to launch attacks and have been solely responsible for some 700 deaths so far in 2017, according to the Council on Foreign Relations.
Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre. “Nigeria IDP Figures Analysis — As of December 31, 2015 —
IDMC estimates that there are almost 2,152,000 internally displaced people (IDPs) in Nigeria as of 31 December 2015 . . . .
Of the total figure of IDPs, the assessment indicates that 12.6 per cent were displaced due to communal clashes, 2.4 per cent by natural disasters and 85 per cent as a result of insurgency attacks by Islamists. The decrease in the percentage of IDPs who were displaced by insurgency from 95.3 per cent in August to 85 per cent in December 2015 and the increase in the numbers of those displaced by communal clashes from 4.6 per cent to 10.1 per cent in October were due to the inclusion of five additional States witnessing communal violence more than insurgency by Islamist groups.
But a source who also participated in the negotiations with Boko Haram that led to release of over 80 Chibok girls in 2017 told SaharaReporters that the federal government not only made the ransom payment of five million euros to the insurgents, it also exchanged some Boko Haram prisoners in return for the Dapchi girls.
However, the lie that no ransom was paid to secure the return of the Dapchi girls followed a consistent pattern of such under the table millions of dollars payments by the Nigerian government to Boko Haram to secure freedom of abductees, especially since the advent of the Buhari administration.
Addendum – More From the Awesome Conversation
Moscow’s hidden hand may be behind both conflicts — Boko Haram and the Fulani Land Pirates — for the still medieval Russian state appears to promote “political absolutism” — the power of the tyrant to destroy both property and persons with impunity — worldwide. In such systems, the state exists to serve the Great Leader who may hold his position beneath a banner and program essentially swallowed by the public. As regards dictatorships, one may say: “Different Talks — Same Walk!” Always.
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FTAC: A Note on War, Cultural Preservation and Transformation
28 Monday Aug 2017
Some filling in on the intellectual history of Nazism and the spread of anti-Semitic myth seems in order:
Plainly, the defeat of “Nazi Germany” neither displaced the German language nor the German People (in their majority) but it did transform Germany into a modern and multicultural state haunted by and reacting to the crimes of the mid-20th Century.
The brutal, cowardly, and underhanded methods developed by the Nazis in their achievement and expression of martial and political power may remain — and I hope they remain – unparalleled in intensity and scope in history. Lesser cabal, like ISIL, and some states, as with Russia’s behavior in Syria, may prove equally sadistic but lesser in reach, not that we don’t pay attention.
Regarding Islam and “how many Islamists” — Daniel Pipes has been publishing on that question since 2005 — there are some approaches to coming up with percentages, but the bottom line is that Muslims would seem first in the way of jihadi violence, and so much so that their own security interests focus on keeping the Muslim Brotherhood and their relations neutralized and largely out of power.
The Moscow-Tehran relationship with Hamas and Hezbollah and others and the histories both centers of power have had with terrorism might encourage a good look those two and their historic promotions of anti-Semitism plus participation (state sponsorship for) associated with terrorism.
The prompt: an Islamophobic tirade blanketing all absent of resolving observation and reflection.
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Also in Media: “Can Ayaan Hirsi Ali Liberate Islam from Islamism?” | by Andrew Harrod | Religious Freedom Coalition | July 20, 2017
21 Friday Jul 2017
“Dawa is to the Islamists of today what the ‘long march through the institutions’ was to twentieth-century Marxists,” writes Ayaan Hirsi Ali in her latest monograph, The Challenge of Dawa: Political Islam as Ideology and Movement and How to Counter It. In it the Somali-born political activist accurately analyzes the threat of, and necessary response to, Islam’s faith-based political ideology, yet the feasibility of her desire to reform this “Islamism” out of Islam is questionable.
Analyzing dawa’s call to Islam, Ali calls for a “paradigm shift that recognizes how violent jihad is intertwined with the ideological infrastructure of dawa,” the “subversive, indoctrinating precursor to jihad.” Reflecting a commonplace myopic focus on jihadists, President George W. Bush “often referred to a ‘war on terror,’ but terror is a tactic that can be used for a variety of ideological objectives.” Accordingly, “nonviolent and violent Islamists differ only on tactics; they share the same goal, which is to establish an unfree society ruled by strict sharia law.”
Source: Can Ayaan Hirsi Ali Liberate Islam from Islamism?
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Also in Media: “Aren’t You Tired of Writing Your Stupid Articles?” Georgetown Prof Jonathan Brown Expels Critic From Lecture | Andrew Harrod | February 9, 2017
09 Thursday Feb 2017
“Aren’t you tired of writing your stupid articles?”
I recall Georgetown University’s Alwaleed bin Talal Chair of Islamic Civilization, Jonathan A. C. Brown, saying that to me on February 7 at Herndon, Virginia’s International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT). Brown’s brief angry remarks quickly led to my expulsion from his imminent lecture, “Islam and the Problem of Slavery”: an indication of how he and his fellow Islamism apologists handle opposing views.
Read the whole thing — “Aren’t You Tired of Writing Your Stupid Articles?” Georgetown Prof Jonathan Brown Expels Critic From Lecture – 2/9/2017.
Jihadi Talk – The Dictionary by Nancy Hartevelt Kobrin
17 Tuesday Jan 2017
Tags
counterterrorism, cultural psychology, Islam, Islamism, Jihad, jihadi talk, Jihadism, language and terrorism, political psychology, psychoanalysis, terrorism
From the introduction:
The purpose of this dictionary is to explain the confusing and terrifying behavior of the jihadis by bringing to light their unconscious motivation. What is missing in their mental development that makes an entire group enact such vicious crimes not only against humanity but even their own people? The reservoir of their rage arises from problems nested in early maternal attachment in shame–honor cultures ― the early mother/infant bonding attachment, the first relationship in life. This is the real driver of the terrorism. While there has been a voluminous amount of material written about terrorism, little hinges on how to decode the meaning of the terrorists’ aberrant behavior from the perspective of early childhood development and trauma.
One has to be cautious not to “diagnosis” an entire group of people, but given the amount of destruction, cruelty, sadism, and revenge leading to heinous crimes against humanity, in this case I make an exception. Daesh, The Islamic State, helped me uncover a borderline psychotic diagnosis for jihadis because their behavior is so out of bounds in terms of morality and ethics that it has revealed its own psychosis. Others in the Arab world are aware of this and realize that they have created a tiger whose tail they are now bound to ride. Hezbollah and Iranian extremism has also been blatant in its wanton destruction and, in fact, has been a major funder of Sunni violence even though they are Shia. Almost worse than the terrorist attacks themselves is the jihadis’ lack of empathy and concern for the pain they cause. Jihadis are incapable of walking in the shoes of others. They may appear to be empathic, but it is only what I refer to as pseudo-empathy.
Kobrin’s writing is as entertaining as its interpretations of language are educating and loaded with insight.
Here’s a portion from the first “A” — for “Acting Out”:
Acting out is a process frequently seen in play therapy, where children have the opportunity to play out their most violent behavior and repressed fantasies. Often these acts are attacks against the mother, who is seen as the source of painful dependency needs and nurturing. The breast that is needed is also the breast that needs to be destroyed — e.g., beheadings, rage against their mothers, the need to get rid of her, to violently separate from her. Jihadis manifest extreme attention-seeking behavior . . . . “watching somebody else doing an action is just like doing the action yourself.”
On a late page (271-272) — and all between appears just as well grounded and rich in perspective — comes this gem associated with “Neoteny”:
The Islamic suicide terrorists and all their accessories to the crime — the engineer bomb maker, the recruiter, the sender, the escort, the charismatic leader, their mothers and fathers, their uncles, the clan, the tribe, the umma — are terrified because they, too, have been “neotenized”. They are developmentally arrested and have never been allowed to separate, individuate, mature, or be free, independent, self-sufficient, confident, and competent human beings. They live their early lives in the throes of terrorizing and shaming child-rearing practices. If one never separates psychologically, they are left with group think, a kind of herd mentality. The family, the community, and the culture embody and accept bad behavior as normative . . . .
For all curious as how it is that Islam, the Religion of Peace seems to be somewhere always wading in blood and unimaginable cruelty, The Jihadi Dictionary delivers answers and explanations aplenty — and they would seem to work.
BackChannels Aside
BackChannels has long maintained that Moscow today “plays” the Jihadists by using their own motivations, proclivities, tendencies, and weaknesses to incite, manipulate, and position the same in service to Moscow’s own medieval ends. As much fits with Soviet Russia’s long history of involvement with terrorism and certainly this blog’s observation of Assad’s engineering the incubation of ISIL.
If the jihadist were not so predictable, the same would not be so useful to the politicians, like Assad, who have figured out how to get some use out of them.
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Also in Media: “Islamism’s Recurring Back to the Future Failure” – Religious Freedom Coalition – November 17 2016
18 Friday Nov 2016
Egypt’s “Muslim Brotherhood is done,” stated the native Egyptian Copt and Hudson Institute Islamism expert Samuel Tadros on November 2 at McLean, Virginia’s Westminster Institute. Yet his presentation “The Future of Islamism in Egypt” before an audience of about 30 ominously examined how the dangerous ideology of Islamism would continue to outlive repeated failures by the Muslim Brotherhood and other organizations.
Tadros noted that the failure of the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamists to hold power in various Arab nations following the misnamed 2011 “Arab Spring” popular overthrow of Arab dictators. Accordingly, “people were happy to talk about the end of Islamism,” a “phenomenon that the Arabic-speaking world had suffered from for generations.” Particularly in Egypt, following the July 3, 2013 military overthrow of the Muslim Brotherhood government, state repression facing the Muslim Brotherhood “today is much larger than anything they have faced in the past,” with thousands of Muslim Brotherhood members either jailed or exiled.
Source: Islamism’s Recurring Back to the Future Failure – 11/17/2016.
FTAC – Muslims – “No to Hatred, No to Violence, No to Terrorism”
17 Wednesday Aug 2016
Tags
21st Century Neo-Feudalism, absolute power, dictatorship, Islam, Islamic reform, Islamism, medievalism, political absolutism, Putin, Putinism
On Monday, The Independent had run a piece online by Matt Payton titled, “More than 30,000 Muslims from across the world meet in the UK to reject ISIS and Islamic extremism” (August 15, 2016). Some in the Awesome Conversation were pleased by the sight of women in full abaya holding placards reading
NO TO HATRED
NO TO VIOLENCE
NO TO TERRORISM
The things the “Islamists” do go against the grain of humanity — that’s just how I feel about that criminality — and the appropriate response by Muslims is repudiation.
What next?
Cultural blending, differentiation, and separation — there’s wisdom in recognizing and maintaining boundaries and margins in a world supporting about 7,000 living languages and what each represents. (Note that Putin plays the ethnolinguistic cultural defense and evolution card _against_ political boundaries, effectively violating margins. Also: Back-Channels credits Assad with the incubation of ISIS through deselection for bombing and combat earlier in Syria and also notes that Russia continues to maintain Soviet Era relationships with at least Hamas, Hezbollah, and PFLP. Muslims have not only to repudiate the fascist ambitions of the Muslim Brotherhood organizations — that’s in that “No” to hatred, violence, and terrorism — but also to grasp Moscow’s role in the grooming and manipulation of such organizations as weapons focused toward the modern democracies).
Posted to YouTube by the Daily Mail, Aug. 4, 2016.
BackChannels argument that Assad incubated ISIS rests on a Newsweek report and successive and validating news coverage coming out of the Syrian Conflict and Tragedy.
In the following video clip, President Putin notes, “That if you would like to stop the flow of migrants into Europe, if you want for them to live in their own countries, then you must return sovereignty to those countries where it has been taken away.”
Think about that.
Under whose sovereign command were Syrian children arrested and tortured in 2011?
Whose sovereign air force “barrel bombed” Syrian noncombatants?
Because of the incubating of ISIS as useful tool, BackChannels has long regarded the “Syrian Conflict and Tragedy” as a complete theater of politics and war managed off the post-Soviet Moscow hub, i.e., by Putin, Assad, and Khamenei, and by each to their own advantage but the common cause of sustaining medieval political absolutism in their respective states.
Different Talks?
Same Walk.
Perhaps this is where that “walk” always leads:
Posted to YouTube by RT, January 20, 2016.
Under whose sovereignty were the airplanes flown, the tanks driven?
At time mark 1:44 on President Putin’s April 2016 St. Petersburg address, the President says of western criticism and opprobrium associated with both the incursion in Crimea and the conduct of the Syrian Civil War, “They realised that such destructive behaviour against our country was never going to work but nevertheless they’d like to silence our success.”
With a small nod toward conciliation, one may note of the YouTube video of Homs and the link immediately following that leads to an L.A. Times piece about the city that it had indeed been occupied by rebel forces and would be subject to state assault. Nonetheless, the intertwined battles for Syria and against the open democracies of the west have not gone so well for Moscow and its clients IF measured by areas of control, community wellbeing, and economic contribution or so many other benchmarks familiar where peace prevails and governments abet development.
Links
http://www.businessinsider.com/nearly-80-of-russias-syria-strikes-dont-target-isis-2015-10 – 10/22/2015
http://syriadirect.org/news/russian-jets-purportedly-target-relatives-of-fsa-affiliated-fighters-on-jordan-border/ – 7/13/2016:
“There were families members of Usud a-Sharqiya there,” said spokesman Younis Salama. “But does that justify them bombing the camp?”
Jaysh Usud a-Sharqiya primarily fights the Islamic State in Syria’s eastern desert region.
Last month, Russian aircraft reportedly targeted another FSA group, the New Syrian Army, in Deir e-Zor province. Moscow did not comment on either attack.
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/how-schoolboys-began-the-syrian-revolution/ – 4/26/2011:
The local secret police soon arrested 15 boys between the ages of 10 and 15, detaining them under the control of Gen. Atef Najeeb, a cousin of President Bashar al-Assad.
In a gloomy interrogation room the children were beaten and bloodied, burned and had their fingernails pulled out by grown men working for a regime whose unchecked brutality appears increasingly to be sowing the seeds of its undoing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Syrian_Civil_War_barrel_bomb_attacks
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BackChannels 