I am suggesting that if rational peace were possible today — and you are rational in your thinking — it would have been achieved with the Oslo Accords or, later, when the Jews accepted their own ejection from Gaza.
Conveniently dropped from the “rational” discourse, which isn’t so rational if it avoids, covers, or masks the historic alliances, the more brutal forces of order, and the intellectual poisoning (disinformation fed to the Palestinians for incitement), in the region are elements difficult to deny. For simpletons and “useful idiots” — Stalin’s term for those he could control and use with his mouth — the narrative will start with colonizing and theft of the land by European Jews (even though land was purchased and Jewish agricultural development grew the population in paid Arab and Jewish labor; even though the Jewish presence / residence in the land spans thousands of years — 3,500 years in Gaza; even though Hebrew could have been borne and spoken nowhere else; even though 800,000 Jews ejected from Arab states — what happened to their property? — contributed to the formation of modern Israel — and the Hebrews are justifiably back in the Land of the Hebrews).
All of that in parenthesis seems tucked away in the arguments of the anti-Semitic.
Add: the “work” of the BDS movement, the Electronic Intifada, the nominal “peace movements” and leaders that sustain the middle east conflict — and most at cost to Palestinians more than anyone else! — by promoting the same vacuous words over and over and over again in true _Animal Farm_ fashion: “The Occupation” (“the brutal occupation . . . .”) when in fact Moscow literally produced Arafat to produce in turn a pretty good conflict business that has liberated no one but the corrupt and the criminal.
Husseini-Hitler?
Shrugged away.
Hamas anti-Semitism?
Masked away with apologies and professions of good intentions made by third parties.
Arab apartheid — evidenced in the camps and much confirmed by the brutality meted to Yarmouk in the course of the Syrian Tragedy?
Not a mention of responsibility for the diminishing of the rights and status of refugees — and note: all others spilling out of other wars are at worst most reluctantly maintained in camps as they meet other migration and resettlement challenges. Only the Palestinians have been singled out by the Arab world — or the former edition of it — for use as a weapon against the Jewish (Hebrew) State. For almost seventy years, the fate of the same have been suborned to the ambitions of royals leveraging fear and hatred of the Jews and interest in religious supersession to do it.
Look at it. Read about it. Weep. And then read the update . . . .
First, The Donald dissed Israel with the astonishing statement delivered by a diplomat that the Western Wall was a part of “the Israeli-occupied West Bank”.
“This isn’t your territory. This is in the West Bank. It is a private visit by the president, and it’s not your business,” responded one US official, according to the Times of Israel.
Israel’s Channel 2 identified the official as David Berns, the political counselor at the US Consulate in Jerusalem, and said he was accompanied by economic adviser Jonathan Shrier, who also was involved in the row.
BackChannels much appreciates the dogged primary journalism.
BackChannels also feels David Berns should have been briefed as to the significance and sovereign possession of the Western Wall. If he had been apprised of the history involved, then shame on him with little mercy for what he may be suffering through today.
Notes Aaron Klein writing for Breitbart and angling for another knock at the Obama Administration: “Berns is a career officer at the State Department who has been working at the U.S. Consulate since August 2015. In other words, he received his position there during the Obama administration. According to his LinkedIn profile, Berns served from January 2002 until present as a foreign service officer with the State Department.”
If you’re informed, you know what just took place, especially if you have been fighting ISIS as part of the “YPG” (People’s Protection Units) or “YPJ” Women’s Protection Units).
One correspondent noted that in the joint appearance, “The Donald cited PKK @ 5:20, whereas Erdoğan cited YPG/PYD @ 11:50.”
True.
In essence, Erdogan appears to have just gotten President Donald J. Trump to not only endorse his dictatorship but the potential for the continuing suppression and potential cultural annihilation of the Kurds who in his benighted opinion should have no defenses at all.
Regarding BackChannels statement about the Kurdish People’s struggle for a unified state:
. . . Turkey pretends on the surface that they are willing to help Kurdish President Barzani in Iraq but behind the scenes, they are doing everything in order to prevent an independent Kurdistan: “They view the Kurdistan issue as a matter of survival for them. As the Kurds of Syria move closer to America and walk away from the PKK and the Marxists, the Turks are trying to paint them as Marxists, Iranian agents, Assad agents and terrorists. It is all in order to prevent the Kurds of Syria from getting access to the sea. That is the primary reason why Erdogan came to the US.”
Sherkoh Abbas speaking on behalf of the Kurdish People and as quoted in the following publication and URL:
Slinging mud stops working when one catches the spatter and gives it a good look.
By way of research a decade ago, BackChannels has come to view the PKK as a marginalized organization with its leader Abdullah Ocalan sitting in a Turkish jail. The conflation of the old PKK with the whole of Kurdish forces and their aspirations may misguide the public. BackChannels will try to obtain an up-to-date clarification involving the integration of Kurdish political movements across the several suzerains maintained by adverse hosting/subjugating states.
Millions of Christians in the United States and the Jewish People recognize political defamation and demonization — and readers worldwide should as well. That the same may be meted to the Kurds by Turkish President Erdogan bodes ill for the western democracies against the feudal absolutism embraced and promoted by Moscow-Tehran.
President Erdogan has turned Turkey into a now de facto dictatorship while the ruling powers in Moscow have resumed their promotion of disingenuous speech — actually . . . lying — and the distribution of “active measures” and related propaganda (just look up “alternative media” and “alternative news” and the garbage that fills the minds of those who patronize the biggest dump of Orwellian “untruth” that has ever been milled out of a basement — where it should have stayed.
Update – On American Cooperation with Turkey on the Defeating of Kurdish Aspirations for Independence – May 17, 2017
DIYARBAKIR, Turkey — Armored vehicles flying American flags, American soldiers posing for photos with Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) militants and incessant reports on US-YPG relations have been the top news in Turkey in recent days, all suggesting that the United States was heading toward an alliance with the Kurds on the Syrian battlefield.
Turkish officials reacted sometimes harshly, sometimes more guardedly, to this alliance in the making. The US administration finally said the last word with statements from their officials that Washington had decided to give direct weapons assistance to the Kurds. Although American officials tried hard to explain that the weapons will be going to the Syrian Democratic Forces, everyone knows that the backbone of that force is the YPG. This radical decision by the Trump administration has naturally become a topic of international politics.
Perhaps “The Donald” at the podium was schmearing President Erdogan after all.
Yesterday, the day of initial publication for this post, BackChannels installed in the title the hedge, “Appearance of Betrayal”. With that, readers have perhaps entered a new era, not so much of “Fake News”, a term Trump’s Administration with autocratic tendencies has used to undermine faith in the mainstream media, but of high-level “Fake-Outs”.
KYIV, Ukraine—Using artillery, tanks, and rockets, combined Russian-separatist forces attacked Ukrainian forces along the front lines in eastern Ukraine on Sunday and early Monday morning, highlighting, once again, that the February 2015 cease-fire has failed.
“This is barbarism,” Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko said Monday in response to the attacks, according to a tweet from his press secretary, Svyatoslav Tsegolko.
WASHINGTON — President Trump cast doubt on whether Moscow is backing separatists engaged in the recent escalation of fighting in eastern Ukraine, appearing to side with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, who has long denied involvement in the conflict despite evidence to the contrary.
Mr. Trump said he did not take offense at the outbreak of a lethal bout of fighting in Ukraine that came within a day of a phone conversation he had with Mr. Putin, saying of the recent clashes, “we don’t really know exactly what that is.”
According to multiple accounts, the Trump campaign has successfully worked behind the scenes to make sure the new Republican platform would not pledge the lethal defensive weapons Ukraine has been pleading for from the United States. Trump’s forces have tabled a platform amendment that would call for maintaining or increasing sanctions against Russia, and have substituted “appropriate assistance” for “providing lethal defensive weapons” to Ukraine’s military. Removing sanctions and blocking lethal military assistance to Ukraine are the two primary goals of Putin’s foreign policy. The Republican platform is handing those goals to Putin on a golden platter.
Speaker of the House Paul Ryan
Senator Robert Menendez
Ambassador Nikki Hayley
Vice President Mike Pence
Tomorrow
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
Quote from Israeli Ambassador Ron Dermer: “We’re all on the same team, Americans and Israelis, Democrats and Republicans, Likud and other parties across the political spectrum . . . .”
Of course AIPAC has its own YouTube channel supporting the above suite of videos (BackChannels has no relationship with it), so the blog may stop here with at least today’s “pass along” of the recent footage.
Context: the talk was of Meir Kahane and involved a friend who knew him.
One may respect your living it — and I would recommend Giulio Meotti’s (compassionate, complete, factual, pro-Israel) account of the Baruch Goldstein attack for how that really worked — but that the politicians chose to trim the tendency toward incitement may speak volumes about the image Kahane produced in his own day. Not only should Jews not explain away terrorism, the entire community should note Russia’s long relationship with political terror as an appropriate tool in its realpolitik for upwards of 100 years, and then denounce it and distance themselves from it.
I used this excerpt from Walter Laqueur’s scholarship with the hope that Jews of Russian descent and memory and others involved in the scholarship will deflect a little bit of attention from the Arab anti-Semitism and follow the modern narrative back to Imperial Russian anti-Semitism and its dissemination and amplification in other cultures, starting with the “informing” of the Nazi’s worldview and moving on to what the Soviet managed to do to the middle east — and what is sustained today in Moscow’s relationship with Tehran and Hamas, Hezbollah, and PFLP, if not others.
So how long do you want to keep around one of the world most deceitful and ugly of sustained conflicts?
Hamas and the PLO will continue exploiting and suppressing their subjugated populations — these guys are not Freedom Watch and Human Rights Watch winners by a long stretch — and Israelis and the west will continue building and buying upgraded defense systems to handle the next generations of terrorist drones, rockets, and tunnels.
I’ll apologize for the coming cynicism right here, but it sometimes seems everyone making money on the conflict goes home happy compared to those made to believe that the Jews or the Arabs must be the cause of all their woes, and they must continue suffering until Hamas obliterates the Jews or the IDF “takes down” Hamas.
Left alone, the Middle East Conflict may be a politician’s best and most reliable evil system, efficient for generating income in some parts, pretty good for speechifying and promising the world to one constituency or another.
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.
God may have given man imagination for fun — and we may have given ourselves empiricism to outwit imagination and defend ourselves from our own God-given errors.
Accused of setting the Gatlinburg fires, or at least two of them: Keith Eugene Mann, 49, of Franklin, North Carolina.
Sorry, Russia; sorry, Mr. Putin — on this one, BackChannels may have been wrong . . . but this is how it may go with “hybrid warfare” and the keeping of kleptocratic fellow travelers like that Ayatollah Khamenei. With the appearance of a mysterious and large fire in an iconic American setting, one might well be found a little bit . . . touchy.
However, the Charlotte Observer piece wraps up with this note:
Officials have said some of the wildfires in the western part of the state are believed to be the work of arsonists. Gov. Pat McCrory has posted rewards up to $10,000 for information leading to the arrest of arsonists.
This note will have to be about national security and possibility in light of the “Phantoms of the Cold War” (e.g., Putin’s revival of the KGB, Russia’s behavior in Syria, and the invasion and, for the time being, annexation of Crimea) and the fact that “active measures”, “hybrid warfare”, the long Soviet relationship with terrorism and Moscow’s present inability to condemn Hamas as a terrorist organizations are real things.
Investigators (and armchair adventurers): leave no stone unturned.
Background — It Makes for Good Fiction, But It May Have Applied
Amid warnings from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that Israel will consider arson an act of terrorism, Israeli police have arrested at least 13 people suspected of starting a series of wildfires that have burned around the country for four days . . . .
There is video evidence that the Haifa fire was an act of arson, a spokesman for the Haifa Fire Department told Israel’s Channel 2 Friday.
A blaze Thursday in Zichron Ya’acov, about 20 miles south of Haifa, also was caused by arsonists, Minister of Public Security Gilad Erdan said Thursday.
Officials initially reported additional fire activity near the Park Headquarters area, as well as a spot fire between Elkmont and Newfound Gap Road off of the Sugarland Mountain Trail approximately 1 mile south of the Husky Gap Trail intersection.
Manipulation — “gaslighting” – has long been associated with “malignant narcissism“.
In the original sense of the word, the narcissist would rearrange his intended victim’s surroundings without the victim’s knowledge, an effort made to drive the same into madness.
For the purposes of political psychology, BackChannels applies the term to the creation of an entire “theater of the real”, i.e., and as with the “Moscow Apartment Bombings” (cited for background at the top of this post), the intent is to produce an event and spectacle designed to promote a political outcome favorable to the actor.
A near example would be that of the fireman-arsonist who sets the fire, so that he may later show up and share in the heroic glory of putting it out.
The disconnections between Moscow, the encouragement of the terrorism produced by others (or Moscow would have refused to meet with PFLP – Nov. 2014) and would have long ago designated Hamas a terrorist organizations — it has so far refused to take that step), may make the discovery of empirical linkage all but impossible — but revisit the “Moscow Apartment Bombings” and then have a look at the almost under-the-radar firebombings of Haifa and, potentially, the fires burning in the mountains in the vicinity of Gatlinburg, Tennessee, one of America’s true heartland locations, Dollywood and all.
Stockholm, Sweden
The Scandinavian country has been plagued with arsonist thugs setting vehicles alight, with hundreds of cars burning out since 2015.
In 2016 alone, more than 70 cars have been destroyed as police struggle to combat the increasing violence and criminal activity in the famously liberal country.
The latest video shows three cars in Hallunda in southern Stockholm engulfed by flames as firefighters battle to put out the blaze.
Is the hand of Moscow behind “Islamic Terrorism” in the United States?
Is there a “meta”connection between fires set in Haifa, Gatlinburg, and Stockholm?
BackChannels invites readers to explore its references and sources and weigh for themselves the depth of the presence of the “Phantoms of the Cold War”, if any, in the recent spate of arson with the public as target.
Well, the Jews are not “fighting the Arab World” — there’s a kind of defamation in that statement.
Israelis are defending themselves from those who wish to annihilate them — and considering who has been friendly toward and paying for Hamas and Hezbollah, well, gosh, it’s just not the Arab world after all.
Moscow-Tehran as an axis appears to want to maintain a common interest in positively medieval political absolutism. Somebody has learned how to make a lot of money (for themselves, their cronies, their lackeys, and their tools) that way.
Of course the Arab and Muslim worlds have within them strong anti-Semitic currents, but let’s go back to the 1920s and endemic 19th Century Russian anti-Semitism and the echoes of other medieval anti-Semitism, the same that compelled Herschel and others to entertain the idea of establishing a Jewish homeland in Israel, and come forward to three distinct aspects in the character of the 1920s: Stalin’s installment in power in Russia as the dominant state in the Soviet Union; the development in the universities of an intellectual path leading to Nazism; and the founding of the Muslim Brotherhood (1928).
The mercurial, paranoid seventy-four-year-old tyrant was certainly capable of ordering the mass deportations. During the Second World War, he removed Kalmyks, Chechens, Ingush, Karachays, Balkars, ethnic Germans, and Crimean Tatars from their homelands—more than two million Soviet citizens in all. He was no novice, either, when it came to purges and show trials. In the Pravda report, most of the accused “murderers in white smocks” were identified as Jewish and agents of the U.S. and Israel. There were further arrests of Soviet Jews, exemplars of “national and racist chauvinism.” Jews were dismissed from their jobs. They were insulted on the streets, in shops, and on public transportation, according to Arno Lustiger, author of “Stalin and the Jews.”
Within a short period of time, the MI6 launched a secret operation in which Mitrokhin and his family were smuggled to Britain. They landed in the country along with the KGB’s top secrets: tens of thousands of documents that Mitrokhin had copied and hidden in milk barrels and other containers in the floor of his two dachas, one of them in the suburbs of Moscow. Only a few people in Britain—led by then-Prime Minister John Major, who personally approved the operation—were aware of the package that had landed in their country that day.
This took place in 1992. Intelligence experts began analyzing the documents immediately and uncovered more and more revelations from Mitrokhin’s milk barrels. They included the wiretapping of former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s phone, stolen US nuclear secrets, and the deep and incredible infiltration of Germany and France’s political leadership.
As a result of these documents, KGB agents were apprehended all over the world, secret operation methods were exposed, and espionage operations—some dating back many years—were thwarted. The impact in Britain, the United States, and countries across Europe was immediate. The intelligence tumult that broke out affected Israel as well, but most of Mitrokhin’s documents about the KGB’s extensive activity in Israel have never been published. Until now.
