I’m more often associating anti-Semitism with pagan revival under the cover of “national socialist” movements that repeatedly prove fascist, i.e., the hate of the Jews links to criminal impulses that would propel cults of personality. The leaders of such movements use more codified programs to leverage those impulses for their own narcissistic aggrandizement abetted by plunder. It wouldn’t be so promoted if it didn’t work not only against the Jews but those poisoned by the same in relation to their own subjugation by those claiming to have their interests at heart. Putin, who early in life had older Jewish caretakers and teachers, would seem to block this idea, but the Russian history plus some of the ploys used in Crimea would fit, and then one might move on to Assad, Khamenei, Jobbik in Hungary and Orban’s own pursuit of absolute authority, and then also Erdogan, who every time he panics plays the familiar cards. We tend to confront anti-Semitism as a bad attitude, and it is that, but to the piratical, it’s a useful and reliable old tool.
Reduced to the simplest structural statement: constituencies invest in beliefs and attitudes; narcissistic leaders then manipulate the same to create and control the image of the world in which their people live, and while doing that, they make out like the bandits that they are.
. . . Shole Pakravan, said Wednesday morning that her daughter has heard nothing about the execution and is being pressured to sign a document that denies there was any attempt at rape and that there was no third party present at the time of the alleged murder.
As if more proof were needed of Ayatollah Khamenei’s ______ (you fill it it in — the writer’s tired), the entire world has now the spectacle of this smiley old white haired fella torturing a young woman not only by denying her an inherent right to an authoritative, honest, fair, just, and open — and openly audited — trial before the Iranian public but by degrading and humiliating her all the way to the gallows — or freedom, God willing.
Reyhaneh Jabbari’s first lawyer, Mohammad Mostafaei, had apparently made it clear that Jabbari’s death sentence was signed by the courts even after the evidence had been destroyed or went “missing.” Possibly those who signed her death sentence in the Islamic Republic of Iran are not even sure of Jabbari’s guilt themselves, or could be just trying to blame her for the murder, regardless.
The government announced that the execution will be postponed but did not give any indication the sentence had been overturned. It also did not disclose if any future execution date had been set.
Jabbari, who has already served seven years in prison, claims Sarbandi drugged her and attempted to have physical contact with her.
Modafe website 31 Aug 2010 News Report- (Human right Lawyer Mr Mostafaei’s Official site)
Reyhaneh Jabbari is a girl from Iran. She is now 22 years old and has been in Tehran’s Evin prison where the last Wednesday of every month a number of prisoners are hanging. She has spent the best years of her life in the prison and she will. Maybe some other days of her life have left.
Proposed film title: “Iranimania II: Death Cult Hanging Orgy!”
Each of the above reports, published in 2009, 2011, and 2014, comments on the acceleration of the rate of hangings by the Iranian regime: more arrests, more “trials”, more hangings, never fewer, often if not predominantly similarly unjust — and when a hanging is “unjust” it is only a common act of murder.
What I have been calling “The Islamic Small Wars” — the internecine competitions and interfaces within Muslim-majority political space running from Afghanistan to Yemen — have been wars about integrity — basic truth telling — requiring armies of poets and detectives for fighting and resolving.
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Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen,
In this year, proclaimed by the United Nations General Assembly as the International Year of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, Israel has chosen to make it a year of a new war of genocide perpetrated against the Palestinian people.
Moreover, they may be proven untrue, the Jews being the absolute worst genocidiers on the planet: before they kill you, they afford you basic services, emergency and sophisticated specialized health services (in which all patients are treated absent of politics), Internet access, freedom of speech sufficient to sustain adverse public relations and research organizations (like B’Tsalem).
What may be true is the greater the hate encountered in anti-Semitic / anti-Zionist cant (there is no difference between those two), the greater the opportunities for Israel’s expansion.
The Abbas speech may be investigated and laid out purple phrase by phrase (“Amidst a torrent of massacres and storms of massive destruction” — not one mention of the more than 10,000 rockets launched from Gaza since 2005 and every two to few years to launched at a tempo sufficient to call the same an assault against Israel’s children).
Sins of omission are not the only sins evident in Abbas’s speech before the UN.
Note the demonizing of Israel, the “reflections in a mirror” — a very dark and most primitive mirror in language — in such well-known canards as “However, and as usual, the Israeli government did not miss the opportunity to undermine the chance for peace” — never mind those tunnels illegally and surreptitiously built (with child labor, 160 accidentally killed or deliberately murdered in the process) to assault Israeli communities.
Add to that demonizing simple Arab refusal of just responsibility for the Arab refugees of 1948:
Israel refuses to end its occupation of the State of Palestine since 1967, but rather seeks its continuation and entrenchment, and rejects the Palestinian state and refuses to find a just solution to the plight of the Palestine refugees.
BackChannels no longer casually employs the term “Palestinian”.
As neither Egypt nor Jordan will absorb nor take responsibility for the constituents of (Judenfrei since 2005) Gaza, I refer to the same as “Gazans”).
Given the lying going on around Gazans — allegedly on their behalf but never beyond sacrificing them (individuals, family, finances, and property) as the pawns of Hamas’s supersessionary war against Judaism, one might expect them to become independent in their own right and to insist on the development for themselves of an independent, modern, responsible, responsive, and transparent democratic government.
Judea may be more complicated with its historic flow-down from the Soviet’s brand of poison (not only the Palestinian Liberation Organization, in spirit, remains present but a simple right-click of the mouse is all one needs to reach the airliner-hijacking Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the effects of the anti-Semitic New Old Now Old Far Out and Lost Left lingering long on the landscape, still leveraging the language of the refugees, which comes in the Abbas speech as, ” . . . against Israel’s policies of occupation, apartheid and colonial settlement . . . .’
The lie that is self-aggrandizing speech is there in that portion: one wonders just how large the combined International and Palestinian Solidarity Movements really are.
Investigating consultant and journalist Lee Kaplan has told me about the seeding of these groups on America’s college campuses and their access to student activity funds, which is fair under the precepts of freedom of speech in a truly open democracy, but we didn’t get to how really small these movements may be despite their broad distribution and the money pumped into them for priming.
The phrase comes from the 1940’s film Gaslight, in which an abusive husband deliberately dims the gaslights in the house, but when his wife comments on it he tells her she’s imagining it, that the lights never dimmed at all.
Gaslighting is one of the most insiduous, viscious, nasty and effective forms of emotional and psychological abuse.
Transporting psychology — the study of individual mind and mentality — into politics may have inherent issues in both psychology and politics: for example, are we now going to filter or judge politicians in relation to our concept of “malignant narcissism”, which in turn would seem to inform the psychology of dictatorship? At the same time, what choice has the world suffering war between brutal and sometimes immense despotic personalities?
(Of Bashar al-Assad and opponent (in general terms) al-Nusra, I have often remarked: “Different talk — same walk”.
The two together, Assad and al-Nusra — and the advent of BadDaddy and the Islamic Hate represent where the path of the malignantly narcissistic winds up — have burned out and left scorched the middle humanity of the historic Syrian state — factually speaking, about 9 million Syrians have been displaced in the fighting between the tyrant and the zealots [about 200,000 souls have been separated from life altogether]).
What I have been calling “The Islamic Small Wars” — the internecine competitions and interfaces within Muslim-majority political space running from Afghanistan to Yemen — have been wars about integrity — basic truth telling — requiring armies of poets and detectives for fighting and resolving.
Some people lie.
That’s a sad fact of life, and criminals and politicians both often draw the pointing fingers on the basis of their affiliations, ambitions, and reputations. Less acknowledged and less stated: observations about culture-wide denial, dissimulation, false assertion, and hapless vulnerability to the beguiling and patronizing sweetness of an evil tongue.
Often, in many quarters of the world, if not most, a loyal lie may be preferred to an uncomfortable truth, for shows of loyalty may draw immediate rewards, from praise to patronage, while relaying a critical or damaging truth may be met with punishment, including that of a swift death.
I would prefer venturing a metaphysical answer, but possibly the truth is practical: modern transportation x communications plus the unrest you mention create opportunity for the loose (with energy) to be seduced and moved to the fields of battle, which battle exists primarily in correspondence with a kind of personality. Aligned with Hitler’s famous question, “Who says I am not under the special protection of God?” are so many others asserting the validity of their own cosmic favor, whether of blood or “blood and soil”, of scholarly pedigree (who studied with whom), of nationalist superiority (so the Dallas mosque appears to have traded away a Turkish imam — Yusuf Kavakci — or one recently, an American, schooled — or groomed — in KSA). As an Out There malignant narcissist, Baghdadi in his craziness chose to exceed more limits than anyone else and press his case along the political lines of the Islamic political program _as her perceives it_ by asserting a direct line of descent from Muhammad and citing every aspect of legitimacy congruent with that assertion.
In the secular version of a similar but very different story, Viktor Orban in Hungary has been laying the groundwork for an autocratic nationalist socialist regime, claiming that such an organization produces greater wealth than would a democracy (which is true when the wealth is stolen under cover of an encompassing ideology). “Khamenei-Putin-Orban” has been the line I’ve been drawing on that, and while it doesn’t make sense in terms of state interests or ends, it makes sense in personality and the desire of each to maintain their unique feudal systems.
I’m not a know-it-all.
I’m a frustrated writer who has developed a broad awareness of some things and seems to enjoy spinning out these in-a-nutshell opinions. The part having to do with “the malignant narcissist” has held up well lo these many years; other aspects having to do with the complicity of followers and of the silent plus, at times, the genius of these loose or unhinged personalities seem to me much more troublesome.
One understands in motivation the want of greatness in one career or another, and then too one may recognize the “reparative narcissist” as well as the malignant one, but how the malignant keep sucking in their shock troops and getting their barbed wire around the lives of tens of thousands of luckless souls, from Gaza to Waziristan, only God, nature, and the universe may know.
What I attempt to address, in general, is a deeply feudal intellectual environment and system that subjugates and destroys humanity by promoting and sustaining in its place the ruthless force that is the will of tyrants.
There’s portal enough right here for covering the region from “narcissistic mortification” to “malignant narcissism” to “narcissistic supply”.
We may not fully understand how or why fascists develop their “popularity” through the subjugation and sadistic control of their minions, but they do, and while events on the ground play out, some will circle these processes in mind — and processes in political psychology — to continuously draw down the reach and scope of that deeply anti-human, anti-God, and anti-social but globally distributed behavior.
The “Gaza Boat Show” and Mavi Marmara incident trace back to deeply anti-Semitic and terrorist enthusiasms, and not only should there not have been a “compensation package” — plain political extortion! — drawn from Israel, but this drift in Turkish politics should have been stopped cold by the Turks themselves exactly when and where it started. God willing, most will understand the only true axis in conflict and conflicted Islamic-majority state politics has to do with the despotic vs the democratic. What PM Erdogan’s government and courts have done: despotic. Evil.
In politics, anti-Semitism has become the signal of the criminal and weak: it’s expressed through disingenuous speech enforced, when it can be, by the tactics of political mafia. In Turkey, Prime Minister Erdogan has been tripped in his tracks a time or two by a passionate Kamalist and otherwise mixed opposition, but when the heat in the streets diminishes, he returns to the comfort of his script.
Appeasement fails to appease the needs of such a personality, and, in fact, encourages its development.
Speaking to the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations forum in Vienna on Wednesday, Erdoğan made the following remark: “Just as with Zionism, anti-Semitism and fascism, it has become impossible not to see Islamophobia as a crime against humanity.”
Whatever Prime Minister Erdogan may be thinking, and that may include possession of the favor of God as affirmed by Turkish realpolitik, his personality would seem to be asking a fair political question: why stop if not stopped?
As dictatorships inspire or motivate conflicts worldwide, it may be worth taking a moment to delve into the psychology involved. Getting a handle on “malignant narcissism”, “narcissistic supply”, “narcissistic mortification” and similar other terms may help open some windows and let in some insight into how cycles of despotism and subjugation come about, how they work, and why they are so difficult to diminish.
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In political psychology, one might find the principles simple enough but the machinery complex and difficult to take apart and rebuild.
As much may characterize the experiences of the states now collected under the rubric “Arab Spring” and those continuing to suffer along within systems of corruption, despotism, and patronage.
To readers even loosely in the field, whether in academe or, as I seem to be, in pseudo-academe, a model like, oh let’s just make one up, “dictatorship –> narcissism –> political and social control of others –> sadism” may beg a “so what else you got?” but what informs that apprehension may not be universal: do the subjugated know that those they have entrusted with their destiny are actually using them to abet their own aggrandizement and glorification?
Have those in the path of a Bashar al-Assad (there are many like him today) understand what echo in themselves facilitates his progress while compromising their own in their efforts to defend their people.
In the olden days, one could flee a troubled space, wander around lost for a while, perhaps create a more congenial environment for one’s own, but in a world compressed intellectually by the system on which you are reading this and physically by jets and supertankers and superhighways, where is the someplace else?
Well, there is a someplace else: the language of the mind, i.e., that which informs political concepts, including self-concept and ideas about others plus ideas about the world.
The Internet has brought about the appearance of a new global intelligentsia — with Facebook buddies from Riyadh to Islamabad, I think I can support that suggestion — and if we can take a firm step where the dynamics of dictatorship are concerned, we might allay, diminish, or eliminate much sorrow otherwise guaranteed by our ignorance with regard to a basic political and social psychology concept.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel telephoned Putin the other day and found him out of touch with reality. “In another world,” she said. He lives, like the Ottoman sultan of old, in a Topkapi Palace of his own creation.
I would not begrudge the wealthy their compounds, but how they get them or, if having gotten lucky — right place, right time, right man — like Khodorkovsky, how they manage the windfall might matter some to the surrounding public.
Khodorkovsky, of course, queried Putin directly over corruption, and the rest is history + pardon before Sochi + life in voluntary exile.
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Speaking of Khodorkovsky, it appears he’s back in politics!
Among those best of breed in state-based thieving, Viktor Yanukovych, (former?) owner of the above-toured “tea house” — barely earns a ribbon, but he knows himself well enough to have skedaddled back to the shelter from whence he came.
I doubt Yanukovych will get his country back. Regarding his private properties, I’ve no idea whether any or all may be considered seized by the revolution or held for legal private reoccupation.
To Putin’s credit, ownership has been long denied and press played to the effect that some unknown other Russian oligarch owns the place.
Uh huh.
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As representatives of the Ukrainian Navy command in Sevastopol, nobody swore self-proclaimed “government of Crimea” and left the service. In addition, there were no cases dizertirstva Ukrainian military in Crimea, except the fact of treason former commander of the Ukrainian Navy Denis Berezovsky, writes TSN .
In the middle east’s “Arab Spring”, revolutions have gone the way of the decisions made by senior military in the states involved. Mubarak’s army, for example, failed to intercede on behalf of his attempt to establish a family dynasty; however, having given the Muslim Brotherhood it’s chance to lead Egypt to glory, it chose to support the Egyptian People in ejecting Morsi’s party and dealing back to itself the shepherding of the state back to modernity and renewed hopes for a more earnest and moderate and helpful democracy.
Ukraine’s military would seem know the state it represents.
According to the results of a 2010 opinion poll, 74% of Russians did not fully trust the official version of events.
A group of victims and their relatives sued the Russian government, demanding an open investigation into the case and declassification of the relevant information. In January 2003 the Tverskoy court in Moscow rejected the claims.
