I don’t think we’re destroyed, (name withheld): our bombers cover the earth daily; our satellite and other security systems are up 24/7/365; our armed forces have taken some hits in the area of “largeness”, but at the same time they have reinvented themselves in “force-multiplying” technology; our security industry, which includes at least 17 major active institutions is probably better knit together today than at any other time in their turf-divided histories; and we seem to have the capability of operating out of the spotlight.
Some programs run in the background.
I believe that this material — http://www.stripes.com/…/cia-special-ops-cooperate-to… — would not have been released to the public unless the CIA and military had agreed to “leak it” — i.e., to inform ISIS fighters as to just how closely they have been infiltrated and monitored. This has taken place, albeit off the Big Media radar, throughout the course of the Obama Administration. As such, the data argues against the conservative arguments involving appeasement.
I think what has happened is that the west has met and adjusted its tactics to the medievalism represented by, sigh, “Putin-Assad-Khamenei” and also distant rivals in Pakistan and elsewhere. We are the “Modern” at war with the “Medieval”. Time is the New Space, and we are fighting with these “emperors” and “new nobility” over the essential future models of governance. Colonel President Emperor Putin has found himself — and put himself — center stage in the defense of political “absolute power”. We, the west, remain and stand by “classical liberalism”: we believe in personhood for everyone: the despotic seem to believe that they — each — are the only persons who really matter.
I didn’t vote for Obama because of the Far (Out) Left connections and his experience with the Wright stuff . . . but I firmly believe that he is responsible to the major American institutions — DOD / NASA (that set the standards for the nation) and then the layers of bureaucracy that will survive him and other American Presidents to come. In that way, our democracy captures our elected leaders: they can talk all they want, and they can maneuver quite a bit, but once in the driver’s seat, the chief administrator’s chair, they’re cushioned or padded by all that has preceded them and constrained by other political forces. That despots don’t want that kind of position, and they’re fighting it all the way down.
Some Muslims — and Muslim to Judaism converts that I have encountered — believe that a “clash of civilizations” is taking form. I take a broader view: the medieval past has inconveniences a great part of humanity, and the Moderns (and the Progressives) have a problem with that. So do the clerics and dictators who counsel Obedience — or Else! The autocratic or despotic — malignant narcissists, all of them — fear their own dawning irrelevance.
The Syrian war and related conflict are about the persistence of feudal and medieval “absolute power” in the 21st Century. To maintain that illusion, but one bloody and miserable enough — I can’t imagine how it could be more miserable for Syrians — Colonel President Emperor Putin, Ayatollah Khamenei, and the Tyrant Assad have had to produce on the ground a play and strategy fit to their own grandiose and inhuman delusions: “Assad vs The Terrorists”.
So far, they have brought about what they wanted — and needed — to create.
In the post-Soviet but neo-feudal Russian period, Putin now has an enhanced military position in Syria, and that presumably suits his desire for empire. Handily enough, Ayatollah Khamenei has gotten out of the deal a foil — a kind of chess opponent for him — in the creation of ISIS against which he may now set loose more Revolutionary Guard and Iraqi Shiite militia (the two are together in this): as long as the Great Shiite vs Sunni Battle burns between himself and Baghdadi, he’s in business and may continuing his plundering of Iran. Of The Tyrant Assad, what may one say? How glorious that it turns out himself standing off (in view of the west) the butchery of the al-Qaeda types, who themselves have also a dreadful program.
From an ethical and moral standpoint — from Pharaoh, another tyrant, to this day — everything is wrong about Syria, and the only people who can really fix conditions and themselves are . . . Syrians.
In the 20th Century: Stalin-Hitler (before Hitler betrayed Stalin). In this one: Putin-Khamenei (Assad depends on both). These men need to be seen for what they are, what they represent, and what they have hauled with them into our century, and Syrians would be wise, perhaps, to understand their own complicity in the development of their power. It’s good to leave them with their egomania, their cowardly hate, and their sadism.
Visual coverage of the Syrian Tragedy: lurid.
Painful.
The cause of it: a medieval “will to power” accompanied in the people by insularity and culturally transmitted contempt for others matched to fear and hatred of the Jews and of the west. When trouble came and the same raised a cry and reached out for help, it appears the world most hated stood aside while the curtain rose on “Assad vs The Terrorists” and darkness came to their seared land.
One hopes that for those who reached across borders and those who have reached back that those mental conditions — habits of mind, learned social grammar, misperception, and fear of the condemnation of one’s own perverse society — will change.
BEIRUT, Lebanon — Syrian military helicopters dropped barrels packed with explosives in the government’s latest air raids on rebel-held areas of the northern Syrian city of Aleppo on Saturday, killing at least 23 people, including a family trapped in a burning car, activists said.
In neighboring Lebanon, a car bomb blew up near a gas station in a Shiite town, killing at least three people, in the latest attack linked to the war in Syria.
Ahmad al-Hamoud, Vice Commander of Ahfad Hamza Battalion for Special Missions, al-Sultan al-Fatih Brigade, told VDC that many kinds of the barrel bombs used by the regime forces had been recognizable. These included:
1- Regular Russian-made Barrels. These are believed to have been used by the Russian Army in the middle of the previous century. They were brought from Russia ‘ready to use’. The regime has owned them for decades. Their weight ranges between 300 to 500 kg and they’re filled with TNT and metallic scraps. There’re extremely destructive, yet their range is more limited than that of the other kinds.
2- Medium Destruction Barrels. These are believed to be made by the regime in ‘Defense Factories’ in al-Safira, in the Valley of al-Waha. Most of the helicopters taking off from this valley dropped these barrels on the districts of Aleppo. The weight of these barrels ranges from 400 to 500 kg.
3- Highly Destructive Barrels. These are the most dangerous and destructive of all. Weighing more than 600 kg, they take many shapes like containers, cisterns and, in some cases, green rubbish containers.
Barrel bombs are improvised weapons: oil drums or similar canisters filled with explosives and metal fragments. They are dropped without guidance from helicopters hovering just above antiaircraft range, typically hitting the ground with huge explosions and the widespread diffusion of deadly shrapnel. They pulverize neighborhoods, destroy entire buildings and leave broad strips of death and destruction.
Footage has emerged showing the Syrian regime using explosive “barrel bombs” on civilian neighbourhoods, killing hundreds, while its representatives attended peace talks at Geneva.
Filmed by activists in the southern Damascus suburb of Daraya, the ten minute video is a compilation of footage showing barrels, loaded with TNT, being dropped on the neighbourhood during the week the Geneva II conference was convened.
Nongovernmental organizations researching and working in Syria, including Human Rights Watch and the Syrian Civil Defense, testified during the meeting. Staffan de Mistura, the United Nations special envoy on Syria, said in a video message that the Syrian government is responsible for the use of barrel bombs and that at the rate the weapons are being used, there won’t be any civilians left in Syria.
Government forces and pro-government militia continue to conduct widespread attacks on civilians, systematically committing murder, torture, rape and enforced disappearance as crimes against humanity. Government forces have committed gross violations of human rights and the war crimes of murder, hostage-taking, torture, rape and sexual violence, recruiting and using children in hostilities and targeting civilians in sniper attacks. Government forces disregarded the special protection accorded to hospitals, medical and humanitarian personnel and cultural property. Aleppo was subjected to a campaign of barrel bombing that targeted entire areas and spread terror among civilians. Government forces used incendiary weapons, causing superfluous injury and unnecessary suffering, in violation of international humanitarian law. Indiscriminate and disproportionate aerial bombardment and shelling caused large-scale arbitrary displacement. Government forces and pro-government militia perpetrated massacres.
Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. “Report of the independent international commission of inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic.” Human Rights Council, 25th Session, Agenda Item 4, February 12, 2014.
While the Assad opposition masks off its own excesses, and, as always in the Islamic Small Wars, it’s hard “seeing” who is fighting exactly for what and how they’re doing it, warrior band by band, and sometimes person by person, there are no doubts as regards the smashing of large business, education, religious, and residential areas packed with noncombatant Syrians.
As Syrian Muslim and Jewish relationships develop — a perhaps “unheard of” now heard of — and Syrian anti-Semitism and anti-westernism comes more into focus as one impediment among several to western intercession, the scales may tip in the direction of the cosmopolitan and modern and therefore away from the medieval worldview that forms the basis for the despotism displayed by Putin, Assad, and Khamenei on the Shiite axis and al-Nusra and ISIS and others on the Sunni complement that serves the former as foils for the cooked up theatrical “Assad vs The Terrorists”.
In Syria, the center could not hold and the rough beast rose to savage the land.
The Palestinians in Yarmouk are unlucky, mainly because they are being attacked and killed by Muslims, and not by Israel. An Israeli attack on the camp would have drawn worldwide condemnation and protests, with Palestinian and Arab leaders rushing to seek the intervention of the UN Security Council and the international community.
The Palestinians in Yarmouk are unlucky because their leaders in the Palestinian Authority and Hamas are still busy fighting each other over power and money. This is a power struggle that has been going on since Hamas drove the PA out of the Gaza Strip in the summer of 2007.
Setting aside the fine points of Islamist rivalry that may exist between Daesh and Hamas, the absurdity and obscenity of the destruction of the Palestinian Yarmouk Camp may serve to highlight the sociopathic character of the despots who brought it about: Putin, Assad, Khamenei.
Aboud Dandachi’s observations regarding the perverting of Syria’s Arab Spring into an extremist’s civil war are borne out by the advance of the al-Qaeda spin-off that is Daesh and the more than equal measure of punishment meted to Yarmouk by the Assad (“Or Burn It”) regime. All of the Arab accusation and handwringing on behalf of the (descendants of) refugees of 1948 have been betrayed as convenient loud mouthiness. In the pinch, not one militant or military Arab hand stood to defend — to hold dear and keep safe — the larger population of Yarmouk.
If the reader should happen to be thinking like a healthy human being, this might be a good time to put on the mantle of any of a number of malign narcissistic sociopaths and start to think like a ringleader, a showman, a producer of conflict to be delivered, described, and framed in the cause of one’s own self-aggrandizing political theater.
Related Reference
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said the mayhem has turned Yarmouk into “the deepest circle of hell.”
“A refugee camp is beginning to resemble a death camp,” Ban told reporters at the U.N., adding that the residents, including 3,500 children, are being used as human shields by armed elements inside Yarmouk and government forces outside it.
You cannot understand the Islamic State’s assault on the camp or what it means unless you also consider how Bashar al-Assad, as a gift to the Palestinian people, turned a thriving neighborhood of hundreds of thousands of people into a desperate population of 18,000 waiting to die. We cannot stop what happened in Yarmouk from repeating itself elsewhere unless we save the 600,000 besieged civilians whom Assad is starving to death.
At the time, the full scale of the group’s collusion with the Assad regime was not yet well known, and it was perceived as an independent Al-Qaeda group with dreams of a 21st century caliphate, which they started to impose on Raqqa.
In mid-2012, Hezbollah entered Syria, ostensibly to safeguard a regime that was vital in supporting its operations in the region. Once thought of as the ‘axis of resistance’ against Israel, their intervention, coupled with their ally’s brutal siege on Yarmouk, has damaged the movement’s popularity among Palestinians from Syria.
Published about a year ago, this piece seems practically quaint by the standards of horror being visited today by Daesh on the beleaguered Palestinians.
Reports also say that several Palestinians including an imam have been beheaded by Isis. Grisly pictures posted on social media shows severed heads hung on spikes inside the refugee camps.
For many, the bottom line on the Banu Qurayza legend — Tarek Fatah denies its authenticity, others embrace it and like it — involves the unconditional surrender of the Jewish tribe followed by the mass slaughter of all of the males (down to the youngest with but a single pubic hair). It stands as the echo in history of what ISIS is doing today and right to the letter of the script as read by Baghdaddi (who may be dead by now . . . we are uncertain of that state of affairs today).
The above noted PBS piece starts this way:
“Judaism was already well established in Medina two centuries before Muhammad’s birth. Although influential, the Jews did not rule the oasis. Rather, they were clients of two large Arab tribes there, the Khazraj and the Aws Allah, who protected them in return for feudal loyalty. Medina’s Jews were expert jewelers, and weapons and armor makers. There were many Jewish clans-some records indicate more than twenty, of which three were prominent-the Banu Nadir, the Banu Qaynuqa, and the Banu Qurayza.
“Various traditions uphold different views, and it is unclear whether Medina’s Jewish clans were Arabized Jews or Arabs who practiced Jewish monotheism. Certainly they were Arabic speakers with Arab names. They followed the fundamental precepts of the Torah, though scholars question their familiarity with the Talmud and Jewish scholarship, and there is a suggestion in the Qur’an that they may have embraced unorthodox beliefs, such as considering the Prophet Ezra the son of God.”
There are now many contradictory renditions of the Banu Qurayza legend and analysis on the web, but that may serve to underscore my argument that part of the world is fighting over survival through corrupted allegiance — the telling of loyal lies — and the risks of promoting an integrity that has God and the ideal — the true — as its standard. We hope for the latter because it serves all universally. It’s better to have honest reporting, honest scholarship, research with integrity, and, perhaps with the Banu Qurayza, the wisdom to say one doesn’t know how the Qurayza lives.
Historically, the Jews as merchants developing wealth have done so because of a circumspect trustworthiness — i.e., people with whom one can do earnest business. The medieval persecutions inevitably apply leverage based in religion — the Spanish Inquisition and the Spanish Expulsion serve as example — to shun, murder, and plunder the Jews for the wealth they have developed. That’s how it works, has always worked, and probably how it worked in the 7th Century: simple theft and murder cloaked in religion.
The Awesome Conversation may become a clear conversation about power, loyalty, idealism, and God.
Within the context of the Islamic Small Wars, there’s political litmus in how one relates to certain symbols, and the Banu Qurayza Legend is one of them. Some embrace the story — a great victory (met with unconditional surrender followed by mass slaughter) — and some, like Tarek Fatah, find it so inexecrable that it needs to be downplayed and written out of the lore being dragged into the future.
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