One friend who has pursued her own course in conflict and Islamic studies suggests that al-Qaeda represents the authentic Islam and all else are trying to wriggle through it or reform and revolutionize its cultural technology. In that the Ummah is as broad and varied as one might expect a natural human system to be, Muslims on many paths have become the first victims of “those” Muslims, and, indeed, out of themselves must come the army that defeats the past.
While it surprises me that Baghdaddi has gotten as large as he has — he has the basics: an ample treasury and believing or compliant troops — what is coming for him and his followers may surprise him.
Regarding the psychological character of the tropes of Jew hate, I use the term “paranoid delusional narcissistic REFLECTION of motivation”. Their language is their sheet of music, and no attack on any physical body amounts to anything without effort to get in the way of that poetic programming.
One hopes the “radical” (conservative) mosque message finds repudiation among the believers of a more modern cast, but the conservative kafir-side endorses a rightfully cautious paranoia: the speech presages a well-known, well-witnessed fascist evil.
The political program works probably works about the same way for the modern political and religious authority as it may have for Muhammad himself: it deeply manipulates and exploits the believing. While Hamas, for example, places noncombatants as shields against Israeli strikes at its war making facilities, Khaled Mashaal works the levers from his billionaire’s safety in Doha, his wealth having come out of treating the residents of Gaza as a business enterprise.
One could travel from one Botherhood-promoting Muslim autocrat to another and find pretty much the same canards and abetting political and social structures in place.
Victims of honor crimes are silenced. Victims of honor crimes are shamed. Victims of honor crimes are made pariahs. And, often, victims of honor crimes are extinguished. This week, Honor Diaries, a documentary focusing on the global manifestations of honor violence, was itself silenced, when two American universities — the University of Michigan at Dearborn and the University of Illinois in Chicago — canceled planned screenings. With this act of censorship, the movie has become a metaphor for its message. Just like the women and girls it portrays, the movie has been silenced and its progenitors shamed.
For more than fifty years, Giacomo Debenedetti’s October 16, 1943 has been considered one of the best and most accurate accounts of the shockingly brief and efficient roundup of more than one thousand Roman Jews from the oldest Jewish community in Europe for the gas chambers of Auschwitz.
The earliest documentary evidence relating to Jews in Rome is Valerius Maximus’ Factorum ac Dictorum Memorabilium stating that the Praetor Gnaeus Cornelius Hispanus expelled the Chaldaeans, astrologers, and some Jews from Rome in 139 B.C. In 63 B.C. Pompey conquered Jerusalem and brought an unknown number of Jewish prisoners of war to Rome. Trastevere was the chief Jewish quarter: (STET)
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There is a brighter side to the story of the Holocaust in Rome though. The Nazis arrested only 1,259 Jews in the October 16 raid. In the following months, they were able to arrest only a few hundred more, even after offering cash rewards. The total number of Roman Jews exterminated was approximately 1,970.20 Over eighty percent of the Roman Jews survived the Holocaust. None were killed before the German occupation. The total number of Italian Jews known to have been killed during the Holocaust is 7,922 out of approximately 40,000. Again, over eighty percent survived.
There was no “brighter side to the story” — what if only “1,259” (and “1,970.20” is not an approximation) persons had included your family, friends, associates?
The perhaps inherent youth factor implicit in Daniel T. Murphy’s Masters thesis (1993) may fit with how the Jews of Rome on October 16, 1943 were rounded up by lists developed in accord with Italian racial laws enforced under the fascist government preceding the interim government of Prime Minister Pietro Badoglio, who in his flight from imminent German army occupation would leave the same intact — “Badoglio’s bureaucrats refused to destroy their many lists of Jewish names and addresses” says historian Susan Zuccotti as quoted by translator Estelle Gilson, translator of Debenedetti’s book — for their Nazi successors.
Enriching the experience of reading Giacomo Debenedetti’s gem in Holocaust lore are Estelle Gilson’s introduction plus an end-note, “The Fate of the Roman Jewish Libraries”, and an historic preface by Alberto Moravia.
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Contrary to general opinion, Jews are not distrustful by nature. Or to put it more clearly, they are distrustful in the same degree that they are perceptive about small matters, but credulous and disastrously ingenuous when it comes to large ones. In regard to the Germans, they were ingenuous, almost ostentatiously so. There are several possible reasons for this. Convinced by centuries of experience that it is their fate to be treated like dogs, Jews have a desperate need for human sympathy; and to solicit it, they offer it. To trust people, to rely on them, to believe in their promises, is precisely such a proof of sympathy. Will they behave this way with the Germans? Yes, unfortunately. With the Germans there would also come into play the classic Jewish attitude toward authority. Even before the first fall of Jerusalem, authority has exercised absolute, arbitrary, and inscrutable power of life and death over Jews. This has operated in such a way that both in their conscious and unconscious minds authority has assumed the form of an exclusive, jealous, and omnipresent God. To distrust His promises, whether good or bad, is to fall into sin for which sooner or later one will have to pay, even if that sin remains unexpressed, and is only an intention, or a mumbled complaint. And finally, the fundamental idea of Judaism is justice. The mission of the Jews was to bring this idea to Eastern civilization. Renan makes this expressly the theme of his interpretation of the entire history of Israel, including the great eschatological statements, including the Messianic wait, and the promise that on that Day of the Lord, tomorrow or who knows when, He will light His dawn at the height of the millennia precisely to bring back the reign of justice upon this earth.
For these reasons, Rome’s Jews had a certain kind of faith in the Germans . . . .
So sad, so tragic, so horrifying a story as Debenedetti tells continues today in the anti-Semitic / anti-Zionist rants and machinations of political movements as diverse as Arab Baathism and resurgent eastern European nationalism.
Enlarged in scope, the same immense black cloud descends on the Christian west, on the Christian communities of the middle east under assault today by the forces funded along the Muslims Brotherhood and Wahhabi fronts with their black flags flying where once stood crosses, and on Muslim communities worldwide as a red death explodes in unpredictable but numerous roadside and suicide bombings, assassinations, and countless beheading.
Before the onslaughts of al-Qaeda and Company, who is not a Jew?
This blogger, having read this extraordinary book, October 16, 1943 / Eight Jews, is to return to the news of similar persecutions taking place right now worldwide.
In sum, Syria embodies multi-layered “spider web-like “ networks of Sunni and Shia militias and paramilitary forces, and this can only continue to plunge Syria into violence and chaos not unlike the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990), although Syria’s war is at least 100 times worse and intense and potentially will last a lot longer.
The supporters of these proxy rebel groups, like Saudi Arabia, the UAE , and other GCC states on the Sunni jihadists’ side, and Iran on the Shia side, have no regard for the innocent civilians suffering horrifically in Syria and also as refugees in neighboring countries. These proxy supporters are as guilty of atrocities as Bashar al-Assad. All sides are guilty of war crimes
In the order encountered in the above article: The Islamic State of Iraq and Sham (ISIS); Free Syrian Army; Ahrar al-Sham; Jaysh al-Islam; Suqour al-Sham; Liwa al-Tawhid; Liwa al-Haqq; Ansar al-Sham; Kurdish Islamic Front; Hezbollah; Revolutionary Guard Corps.
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“I want to say to the clerics to fear Allah. They have destroyed people. They have destroyed families. They have destroyed all people. They have destroyed young people. They lie to them and lure them. For what? For Jihad for the sake of Allah. All this is nothing but slander and brainwashing.”
We can thus say with high confidence that at least 1,200 European Muslims have gone to Syria since the start of the war. This is a remarkable figure; we are talking about the largest European Muslim foreign fighter contingent to any conflict in modern history.
Hey, guys, let’s put on a war and see who shows up!
The Mohammad Must Off Ya Club, partially invited by the Old Soviet Boys Network and the Shiite Propeller Beanies — everyone’s making money but the fighters, and some of those are making money too — have found their calling in Syria:
Explosive weapons, including bombs, killed seven in 10 of the more than 11,000 Syrian children under the age of 17 who have died in Syria’s brutal civil war, according to a report released on Sunday . . . Most often, they were killed by explosives, but also from executions and torture. Since March 2011, 113,735 civilians and combatants have been killed in the Syrian conflict.
Exercise your imagination with this factoid from the above cited Al Jazeera piece:
Small arms fire from guns and rifles accounted for 2,806, or 26.5 percent, of the children killed, with 764 children who were executed and 398 killed by fire from a sniper. And among those children who were executed, 112 were tortured, including some infants.
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Upon arrival in Syria, the mercenaries were told that their employers were private individuals, not the Syrian government, and the weapons they were told they’d be given, including T-72 tanks, were replaced by antiquated tanks that didn’t run, and by makeshift armored vehicles with machine guns. Also, they soon learned that instead of guarding oil fields, they were supposed to be recapturing them from jihadists.
Oh what a tangled web we weave when what we do best is set out to murder and deceive.
For money.
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St Petersburg newspaper Fontanka interviewed some mercenaries who said that they were lured by a promise to get $4,000 per month and a solemn oath that the first salary would be transferred within days.
They were taken on a flight to Beirut, Lebanon and from there they were transferred by cars to Damascus. When they reached the Syrian border they traveled with a convoy of local guardsmen. In Damascus they were taken to a local hotel. The following day they were transferred by a plane to Latakia, and from there to a Syrian military base.
The Islamic Small Wars are no longer about infidels, Islam, or states: they’are about kinds of persons, sometimes the absolute autocrats one feels comfortable referring to as “malignant narcissists”; sometimes common bandits, murderers, psychos, and thieves taking the opportunity to cloak themselves in patriotism or religion; sometimes nothing more than young men in the hormonal sway of grandiose messianic delusions.
Perhaps it will turn out a good thing to have had them gathered so in one bloody place.
They’re all easier to see that way — and what a spectacle they make of themselves.
While the malignancies do the chop-chop and Kalashnikov war dances, Oxfam on Syria notes the following:
The UN estimates that almost 7 million Syrians inside of Syria are in need of assistance, including 4.25 million internally displaced.
Thousands continue to flee Syria daily.
The total number of refugees in neighboring countries is now more than 2.2 million.
It is estimated that the population of Lebanon has increased by more than 25% and the population of Jordan by 6%. This is putting extreme pressure on local infrastructure.
“One 24-year-old man, suspected of organising journeys to Syria, was in touch with several “fixers” who facilitated travel between Turkey and Syria, while another previously fought with an Islamist group in Syria, the sources said.”
In casual and often jocular language typical of messages on social media, the authors paint a rosy picture of life on the front, stressing the pious atmosphere and the sense of brotherhood-in-arms shared by the fighters. They note that recruits may come with their wives and children, and stress the practical advantages of joining the jihad community in Syria, such as the prospect of finding a bride and the low cost of living.
In terms of the British media, it may have something to do with the fact that Britain is home to at the very least 1.2 million Pakistani Muslims. The other reason is that the plight of Pakistani Christians is largely overlooked by our mainstream media — both tabloid and ‘serious’. As for the British government, the plight of Christians in Pakistan is almost literally completely ignored.
American Thinker may have overlooked the “just like us” factor and how the online chatyping and journaling classes may have better related to the comparatively affluent, educated, and sophisticated consumers doing their western thing in the romantic and predominantly Christian capital of Kenya while finding Peshawar yet remote in space and time, a curiosity flickering yet a little farther from the center of consciousness and concern.
Credit Paul Austin Murphy, however, for looking into the other mirror: the history of long-transmitted Muslim attitudes toward Jews and Christians and others.
It’s no surprise, then, that al-Shabaab singled out Muslims for life and the rest for death in this latest event in the 1,400-year-long jihad against the ‘unbeliever’. Witnesses have said that the killers told all the Muslims to leave. One Kenyan survivor, a Elijah Lamau, said: “They came and said: ‘If you are Muslim, stand up. We’ve come to rescue you’.”
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