The Israeli Defense Force (IDF) analysis has included review of Israeli military launch records; radar air activity tracking records; reverse-tracked rocket fire traced to the proximity of the hospital, i.e., rocket trajectory show the launch took place south of the hospital–and not far from it; and independent video of the actual failure of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad’s rocket.
In intercepted audio communications, launch controller-tracker officers note the location of launch as a cemetery behind the hospital . . . . So there’s the location south of the hospital–a cemetery!–and both cause and opportunity to lie about the attempt.
Regarding the matter of Hamas having lied to Palestinians to cover the shame attending a failed rocket launch (while blaming it on the other guy), the ways have always been several: cover, deflect, deny, erase, fabricate, frame, and omit.
For the narcissist, there is a dark mirror in language. He looks at his reflection in the pond, sees the sky behind him, and he believes he is gazing up toward heaven-and he goes on living in his own reflection.#MalignantNarcissists#PoliticalCriminals#MaligNarcs#PolitCrims
More may be involved than being merely vain or having some egotism in need of some judicious but also liberating trimming: most of us–all of us–wish most of all to be what we call “ourselves” at our best, and each according to his own best assessment of abilities–and if we become too full of ourselves (offstage), we may encounter reminders, including from our own self-observing selves, that we are not all that.
Let us sit and sip more quietly.
On the other hand, the clinically (NPD) and politically (malignantly) narcissistic have a tougher self-assignment, and that is to 1) hide the damage done to them when they were helpless or incapable of their own effective defense and 2) cover it with an undamaged and much more competent and greater courageous-heroic image that would be and which becomes their own New Person–The Greatest.
The greater achievement for The Greatest: validation confirmed by love, but a capital-V “Validation!” confirmed by the Applause and Roar of the Crowd–High-Powered VALIDATION!, Limitless and MIGHTY!
We have all the right to transform from children into pretty good adults, but The Greatest want a greatness beyond the boundaries of the good.
Terms one encounters for the malign: delusional, grandiose, messianic.
In casual description: beyond limits; without boundaries.
Eventually: criminal.
“Those who conceived this war want only one thing — to remain in power forever, live in pompous tasteless palaces, sail on yachts comparable in tonnage and cost to the entire Russian Navy, enjoying unlimited power and complete impunity,” Mr. Bondarev said in his email. “To achieve that they are willing to sacrifice as many lives as it takes.”
In the dark mirror of language, the most primary lie in service to the speaker’s image may be the inverted accusation–on this blog, the “Paranoid Delusional Narcissistic Reflection of Motivation”. The narcissist is always beautiful, good, and right, and the targets unfailingly bent and ugly even though by every objective measurement and view, the narcissist is the evil.
The Greatest must be the greatest as well–not merely pretty good or, son of a gun, lucky!
Image matters and the means to produce it may be obfuscated and covered over, and in the dark mirror, the lies–the lying–really takes off. Putin, poker faced, insists that Russia attacks only military targets.
The Greatest lie to aggrandize and enrich themselves, their cronies, families, and networks; to confuse the judgments of others; to perceptually control their fans, marks, and targets–and they lie most of all to hide their crimes.
One might wish that others posting in the world’s open and socially networked web environment would be responsible about it and take the additional 30-seconds it may take using Google search (or Bing, whatever) to check out claims. This particularly vicious sterilization-by-vaccine rumor has been in circulation for decades.
BC’s immediate response to the post follows.
Disinformation.
The story may be a good example of Soviet Era “Active Measures” carried forward into the post-Cold War period. It appears this claim has been in circulation for decades, and not only in Kenya but several other developing nations.
Take note of the nations involved — Mexico, Nicaragua, Tanzania, Philippines, Argentina, Bolivia — and their interaction with east-west (Moscow v Washington) conflict.
I cannot prove my thesis, such has been the nature of manipulation from “behind the curtains” down through the ages, but often enough, it would seem those who most claim to be interested in Justice turn out also to be the most obsessed with acquiring Absolute Power — and that “by any means necessary”.
Whatever the fine points of history may be — and the devils are always in the details — “framing” a medical miracle, whether vaccination for polio or vaccination for tetanus as an evil thing, would seem itself a deed most evil and intended to sow discord and fear. Why? Those who promote malicious perception may then portray themselves as the bearers of hope and order.
Related online and associated with similar partisan religious motivations:
Islam orders the Muslim to be honest to himself and others. This order repeatedly comes in the Noble Qur’an and the sayings of Prophet Muhammad (SAWS). Islam orders the Muslim to tell the truth even if it is against the teller’s interest. Orders him not to cheat or deceive other people. A Muslim is ordered by Allah to be honest in his words and deeds, privately and publicly alike.
Portions of The Other Side have been considered as Holocaust denial by some critics,[8] especially the parts disputing the accepted number of deaths in the Holocaust as well as the accusations that Zionist agitation was the cause of the Holocaust,[9] a charge that Abbas denies.[10]
When Abbas was appointed the Palestinian prime minister in 2003, he wrote that the “Holocaust was a terrible, unforgivable crime against the Jewish nation, a crime against humanity that cannot be accepted by humankind” and that he does not deny it,[11] and said that “When I wrote The Other Side … we were at war with Israel. Today I would not have made such remarks”.[12] More recently, in 2013 he reasserted that part of his thesis that “the Zionist movement had ties with the Nazis”.[13][14] In 2014, he stated the Holocaust was the “most heinous crime in the modern era”.[15]
Apparently, Mr. Abbas spreads lies when at war with Israel but shrugs through the truth when its suits him.
Or perhaps when it suits his family’s wallet.
These documents, reports from senior Fatah officials and Palestinian social media reveal extensive corruption at the highest levels — the Abbas family and a Palestinian elite manipulating the political and financial systems to benefit themselves at the expense of the people.
The architect of the Holocaust, Nazi mastermind Adolf Eichmann, was one of the first to deny its existence. While escaping the Nuremberg trials and evading international law, Eichmann befriended Nazi supporters in Argentina who published an anti-Semitic magazine titled “Der Weg,” or “The Way.” The magazine aimed to disprove what they called “the falsehood of the 6 million.” The magazine claimed the Holocaust was nothing but a libel, that there were never any gas chambers in Hitler’s Europe and that the Jews collaborated with the Third Reich in order to have another country for themselves after thousands of years in exile. According to Eichmann and the magazine’s publishers, the Jews were willing to sacrifice themselves to gain a national homeland.
Many Arabs were enthralled by this theory, and a young doctoral student by the name of Mahmoud Abbas, now the president of the Palestinian Authority, even wrote a dissertation on the subject titled, “The Other Side: The Secret Relationship between Nazism and Zionism,” which opened the door for several different conspiracies on the subject of the Holocaust to develop.
The Arabs were among the first Holocaust deniers to adopt Eichmann’s theory.
In the proverbial east, so it would appear, what may not be accomplished honestly may be accomplished through guile — and if not guile, plain lying and force.
One social trope BackChannels has heard regarding lying: “Any who lie to you don’t respect you.”
Fair enough.
BackChannels wonders to what extent those who lie to others, especially Palestinians who lie to Palestinians, respect even themselves.
Posted to YouTube by Human Rights Watch, August 29, 2016.
Expect updates to this post as more material comes together on Abbas representative of the end of a long cycle of totalitarian dictatorship — perhaps more gently, “authoritarian governance” — comes into view on the world stage. Today’s political crooks get covered in global media and come to look exactly as they have painted themselves throughout the course of their careers. Mahmoud Abbas? KGB — he has the record of it, and once marked is marked forever with that organization — so whose interests, apart from his own, is he really representing?
Abbas has also made for himself a record as a Holocaust denier although he has backed away from that lunacy — still, one may wonder how many unwarranted words — assertion of fact that just aren’t true — he has still to recover.
You may have your integrity before God; your adversary does not; he has loyalty leveraged by fear, greed, or need: the father can be a very bad father — and in that is the fighting.
The motivation of anti-Semitic thought relies deeply on lies, not only libels and slanders against the Jews (and others) but also obfuscations and omissions involving speakers and, plainly, invention involving familiar malignantly narcissistic self-aggrandizement. As people like to hide something or to get something — and sometimes what is to be hidden or gotten is small, but sometimes the shame or the theft is large — the related experience of fear, instilling it or suffering it, plays into the language and related behavior as well.
I’ve no need to repeat the lie that prompted the response. It was dismal, juvenile, scatological.
… when a celebrity is being devoured by the two-headed piranha of gossip and innuendo, I usually have minimal understanding of what they did, or were alleged to have done. Woody Allen is an exception.
I usually reserve this blog for really bad news, say that generated by terrorist revolutionaries throwing bakers into their own roaring ovens in Syria or, more recently, allegations of Burmese Rakhine (Buddhists) hanging Burmese Rohingya (Muslim) children as part of a real and ongoing “ethnic cleansing”; be that as it may, the theme connecting what drives conflict in the Islamic Small Wars and similar strife with Woody Allen’s domestic and celebrity travail involves integrity in speech: i.e., telling the truth.
In the above cited piece, Robert B. Weide combs through the allegations — the “two-headed piranha of gossip and innuendo” — that have clouded Woody Allen’s reputation for two decades, and I thought it a tour de force in methodical investigation and review, the kind of truth-telling, unvarnished, valid, and reliable, that makes the world a better place in which to live, a place in which some things may be known and some things — speech intended to manipulate and misdirect — dismissed.
The regions of belief beyond the empirical find their closed doors and with them their imaginations. We humans needs must live with what we cannot objectively know as well as with our vulnerabilities to suggestion and the guaranteed “accident” that on numerous occasions, we will guess and make the wrong call.
Some leaders indulge their constituents overmuch with license, flattery, and pandering
I’ll leave that one (from the awesome conversation) alone except to note that lying in the interest of political power never intends to serve the listeners.
BackChannels 