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Tag Archives: modern democracy

FTAC: South Africa: Look Twice Before Leaping on the White Right Bandwagon

17 Monday Dec 2018

Posted by commart in 21st Century Feudal, Africa, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, South Africa

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Historic Reversion, modern democracy, Moscow, New Feudalism, New Nationalism, New Nobility, Putin, Ramaphosa, South Africa, Sovereignty and Domain, White Right

There is also a democracy that needs to update in relation to national sovereignty from earlier and apartheid days.

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2018/08/27/unfiltered-south-african-president-ramaphosa-on-land-reform-parliament-on-the-same-earlier-this-year/

Although citing political motivations serve White Right claims, black raiders may as well be brigands for all anyone really cares. That police and other SA domestic defense services are inadequate may be true. The frontier qualities have not receded from the land space nor the need with it for fierce independence to be there.

Would South Africa become another Zimbabwe (God bless the farms of New Zealand and reference When A Crocodile Eats the Sun for that story)? That threat has been used as a bludgeon to stoke white fear, but the ousting of Jacob Zuma this past year may address that question, and the leader of accomplished businessman Cyril Ramaphosa should quell capitalist doubt.

President Putin appears to want a feudal world of absolute power repleted with racial and other forms of segregation. I urge taking a second look at South Africa’s working democracy and Cyril Ramaphosa’s concerns for the further development of a modern democratic African state.



Kurdistan: Themes

17 Tuesday Oct 2017

Posted by commart in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Iran, Iraq, Islamic Small Wars, Kurdistan, Middle East, Political Psychology, Politics, Regions, Syria

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Ante Feudal, conflict themes, Kurdistan, medieval v modern, modern democracy, modern democratic culture

1. Phantoms of the Soviet

Reference Abdullah Ocalan’s vision that misrepresents liberalism and true representative democratic process, which may in turn replicate what the Soviet axis always produced using “sweet words” combined with the rapacious temperament of the politically privileged in an autocratic system: kleptocratic strongmen in palaces and manipulated “masses” around them.

2. Phantoms of the Soviet – PKK

Related to the first point, the PKK set up in the Soviet Era with, apparently, related dogma for intellectual definition, and in that its presence in persons may persist beneath other banners, the same may serve to block western enthusiasm for an independent Kurdistan.  In other words and in relation to the Phantoms of the Soviet (a category referenced frequently on BackChannels in relation to other conflicts), the persistence of PKK ideas and actions, whether vengeful or provocative, cloud western support.  The only answer to that is to reconsider what is advanced in Kurdistan as regards practical ideals and political language (across languages) and adjusting for the distance in intellectual history between states of affairs in 1984 and those of this day.

3. Putin’s Feudal Revanche

Putin’s Russia represents another rapacious autocracy bent on producing conflict worldwide within a global system of feudal absolute power certain to drive wars of all against all.

The Federation represents Russia’s third flip — two revolutions, three governments — within 100 years  of the days of the tsars, and appears now to leverage deals on that basis, e.g., in range of Putin’s sway (and leveraged by the Turkish Stream energy pipeline project, Erdogan has diminished the democracy that initially empowered him and all but returned Turkey to a feudal estate from which he cannot be politically (by mere elections) ejected.

4. Moscow / Moscow-Tehran’s Totalitarian Approach to the Creation and Presentation of Conflict

Assad, as flanked by Putin and Khamenei, incubated Kurdistan’s enemy, ISIS.

The intent was to produce a large piece of theater, truly, that would make Assad look good — he envisioned and helped into power the enemy  wanted — while producing a major headache for the west. By remaining somewhat fixed in past arrangements and ideas, the Kurdish community has perhaps been maneuvered into aiding the devil that most seeks to control it (and everyone else).

🙂

Related term of art for look-up: “malignant narcissism“.

Related on BackChannels: https://conflict-backchannels.com/2017/03/11/reflexive-control-process-allahu-akbar-terrorism-new-nationalism-neo-feudalism/

5. State of Kurdish Administrative and Constitutional Development

It has been hard to see the coordinating and self-subordinating (“for the greater good”) character of Kurdish leaders to an overarching administrative and democratic (power checking, power displacing, power distributing, and culturally and politically evolving) system. The latent Kurdish state in fact that may be defined by the subordination of officials to greater institutional arrangements may be there, but the western / publishing-in-English journos haven’t laid out relationships, or I’ve missed that coverage, or the same is not wanted.

In deference to Ocalan’s “democratic communalist” vision, there may be little incentive (by way of example too) to bring western commercial elements and associated vulgarity into a culturally independent Kurdistan.  There are many other ways to pursue and sustain both cultural and political evolution and distributed economic development across a new polity (reference authors Brown, McRobie, Schumacher, among others).

Addendum to the Above: Found Posted on YouTube – October 17, 2017

6. Modern Kurdish Defense Considerations Against Adverse Feudal Estates

Much in favor of the defense of Kurdish independence may be the reversion of the Turkish government to feudalism and its history of persecution of the Kurds and others.  Clearly, the Kurdish community needs an effective defense against adverse egomaniac and ill-willed potentates.

7. Armed Proxies of Iranian Fascism

Washington needs to be pressed hard about the powering up and evident fielding of Iranian-backed Iraqi Shiite militia in the latest suppression of Kurdish independence. At this point, Moscow / Moscow-Tehran’s kleptocratic totalitarian ambition should be glaring, and the western public should join the Kurdish community in blocking greater Iranian fascism through armed proxies.

If there’s a secret to peace all around, it may be in the separation of the present western-backed governments from the external meddling of rogue dictatorships that wish to drag the region backward toward feudal barbarism using the most nefarious of political methods to do it. The leaders in that aggression have learned how to make money off the misery of others while they themselves remain remote from the nightmares they have created.

–33–

FTAC: Arafat and Potential for Revolutionary Palestinian Leadership in the Coming New Middle East – A Note

03 Sunday Sep 2017

Posted by commart in 21st Century Feudal, Anti-Semitism, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Gaza Suzerain, Islamic Small Wars, Israel, Middle East, Palestinia, Political Psychology

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Arafat, human rights, KGB history, malignant narcissism, Medieval Political Absolutism, modern democracy, Palestinian dignity, Palestinian leadership, Palestinian rights, political psychology

Excellent statement — let’s keep it grounded in the both the realpolitik of its day and what we know of leadership psychology today:

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/10/03/palestinian-kgb/

Russia has had a long history of virulent and institutionalized anti-Semitism. Before Arafat’s arrival, it used anti-Semitic sentiment to court its targets in the Arab world. https://conflict-backchannels.com/2015/10/12/ftac-tip-to-the-kgbs-amplification-of-middle-eastern-anti-semitism/ In addition to spreading the forgery and libel that was the _Protocols of the Elders of Zion_, it produce a propaganda campaign accompanied by sending trained agents and workers into the middle east to facilitate its own ends.

In states burdened today by the legacy of “medieval political absolutism”, the narcissistic egomaniac only appears to represent the cultural spirituality of the state, but the same presumptuously does as much at any and every cost to The People — and that may include what has happened to the Palestinian People.

https://conflict-backchannels.com/coins-and-other-terms/anthropolitical-psychology/malignant-narcissism/

The malign qualities in leadership may stem from damage done to the self-concept of the leader in childhood or youth as humiliation or similar injury finds an antidote in that person’s reinvention of personality and its appearance. In the context of militarized societies or others obsessed with honor, the observation that the people ultimately create the Great Leader — and the Great Leader becomes also their own Great Burden — would seem to have become in this era entirely predictable. 


The prompt: a discussion about why Arafat failed to set up conditions for a Palestinian democratic society.

The most basic and honest answer to that is this: Arafat’s handlers in Moscow forbid him any development of liberalism or democracy in territories to which he was assigned.  Instead, Moscow asserted its will to impose itself on the Palestinian People and produce a sustained conflict beneath which many would profit from long decades engaged in corruption, crime, and related patronage.  The would be no justice within the Palestinian community for the leadership and its cronies.

More recently, as noted in the BackChannels piece, “Palestinian KGB” (cited above), it has been revealed that Mahmoud Abbas has himself had KGB status — a fact of life that never goes away — and appears today to be as hamstrung in his political stance as his predecessor and probably for the same reason.  He may be representing modern Palestinian interests far less than the archaic medieval interests of Moscow in sustaining dictatorships and the related looting-by-leadership known to too many Soviet-style intimidated and subjugated populations worldwide.

For the greater base of the Palestinian people, the Middle East Conflict has been a good business for the Palestinian privileged by way of the favor of politically criminal Palestinian leaders.

Closely Related on BackChannels

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/09/23/ftac-these-too-are-palestinians/

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2017/07/29/ftac-antidote-to-what-poisoned-the-palestinians/


–33–

A Global Argument About the Future

19 Sunday Feb 2017

Posted by commart in 21st Century Feudal, American Domestic Affairs, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, International Development, Islamic Small Wars, Philosophy, Political Psychology, Politics, Russia, United States of America

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

21st Century Feudalism, 21st Century Neo-Feudalism, contemporary feudalism, modern democracy, Political Time

Medieval v Modern

♠

Medieval Political Absolutism v Modern Democratic and Checked Distribution of Power

♠

Medieval Dissimulation v Modern Integrity

♠

President Putin’s feudal Moscow has set the new low standard for the obliteration of human conscience, empathy, and reason.  His state has defied the open democracies of the west by perverting their politics into a polarized circus with the help of “Allahu Akbar Terrorism”, and to the extent that the open democracies have turned reflexively toward Right / Far Right Nationalism, that may be the measure of Putin’s success with the installing of a new feudalism in the once free and secure states of the post-WWII political order.

President Trump’s Drift Toward Feudalism

Posted by YNN February 16, 2017.

To be asked of President Trump: Still campaigning? Still defensive? Still bending the questions to yourself? Still missing policy?

Glaringly clear in the above video clip (now making rounds the in the “fake” — major, established, institutional, high-integrity — media, e.g., CNN’s take as alluded to in the above video) is President Trump’s refusal to offer assurance to Americans regarding the Jewish Community and with it the general security of America’s minority communities (that’s how equality works) or to offer insight into related domestic security policy.

To be asked of you: how far back toward feudalism — the rule of the strong, not the rule of law; the law of the absolute, not the law of the compassionate and reasoning; the way of the criminal in the death of conscience and consideration for others, not the way of the righteous in the embrace of human consciousness and conscience and related promotion of care for the dignity, freedom, and security of others — do you now wish to travel on your journey into the future?

What part of the civilizational past — absolutism, barbarism, caprice in the possession and application of political power — should  we wish today to have looming before us?


Islam

Those who believe they have been fighting Islam have been fighting the medieval signatures of the religion, e.g., the tirades against the infidel; the differentiation between believers and unbelievers; the subjugating of Christians and Jews to Muslim political will; and a reprehensible raft of barbaric punishments (like “contralateral amputation” for thievery) and repugnant misogynist and rigged legal precepts.

Islam needs moderation, modern interpretation, reform, and updating at the level of the mosque.

Should you happen to be Muslim bent on the destruction of Greco-Roman Judeo-Christian post-Enlightenment western civilization and its now representative democracies, for how long should you wish to wallow in the dismal blood-soaked pools of the feudal past?

And is feudalism the best you can do?

In BackChannels opinion, it is no accident that Moscow, Hezbollah, and Hamas (and Moscow and the New Nationalists — for a start: Erdogan, Le Pen, Orban, perhaps Trump — appear to have a relationship plus stakes in shared authoritarian narcissistic psychology.

To only the simple minded should it appear that the Ummah of Islam presents a unique destructive challenge to the modern world when in fact it is the entire feudal assembly of autocratic regimes — never forget what applies to dictatorships worldwide: “Different Talks — Same Walk!” — that serve to undermine the naturally progressive (and progressing) modern democracies of the world.

Various of the world’s Muslim-majority states have suffered mightily themselves from Islamist attacks.  Pakistan especially has had to weather mass murdering attacks against its Frontier Corp and other military targets, including an elementary school, also against numerous mosques, countless businesses, and tribal organizations.  These days, one may find at least one article 🙂 like this one in Pakistan’s premier defense publication:

The Times of Israel.  “From Anti-Zionist to Zionist: An Interview with Noor Dahri.” Redistributed in Pakistan Defense, April 28, 2016.

Call it a start or look for more article like it (for the sake of focus on this post, BackChannels will demur on the topic of Muslim states in or entering a transition toward a more globally cooperative peace and prosperity).


Medieval Signal: Anti-Semitism

On the left sidebar of this blog, BackChannels maintains a statement about anti-Semitism:

Caution: The possession of anti-Semitic / anti-Zionist thought may be the measure of the owner’s own enslavement to criminal and medieval absolute power.

There are many tropes today but here favored among them and in relation to the tension between the feudal world and the modern one, this one applies well: “What starts with the Jews never ends with the Jews”.

There’s a fine example of a variant here in a 2014 article appearing in the Irish Examiner: “It starts with the Jews.  It never ends with the Jews” (November 28, 2014).

Here’s another example, which BackChannels may have to retract but will dare the reprinting because the message is so applicable to understanding the barbarism of the feudal mode and the role played by “authoritarian” leaders — dictators in fact or resemblance, essentially — in bringing that excess of egotism and idolatry to full and cruel realization.

ottawajb-wiesquote-20061120

In the feudal mode, one may like and defend the Jews — see BackChannels on Putin’s “anti- anti-Semitism” — or excoriate the Jews (revisit Moscow’s relationships with Hamas, Hezbollah, Tehran), but the main thing is that the Jews be separated from others and deemed useful (usually because they’re perceived as being good with money for the realm of interest, or because they’re easy — and considered lucrative — targets for plunder and murder).


Feudalism and Rebellion

What soul not directly profiting from feudal (and unconscionable) behavior in any given institution would fail to rebel — or, worse, fail in spirit — against the iron fist of a modern fascism?

For economic disaster, dial into this era Putin’s update on feudalism, for Putin has driven down Russia’s cash reserves while increasing his state’s reliance on rule-of-law western financial institutions for keeping safe what reserves remain.  His ambition appears to be that of building a fully militarized state with internal defense economy to match.

For that, installing conflicts around the world for the benefit of one’s own Big Defense Economy might turn out a great business!

Russia is growing its military budget by roughly $10 billion next year, even as tumbling oil prices and sanctions from Europe and the United States will see Moscow slash its welfare spending by $6 billion in 2017, the Gazeta.ru news website reported Tuesday, citing a government source.

The Kremlin announced Monday it would decrease its welfare spending from $210 billion to $203 billion dollars. Alexandra Suslina, an economic analyst, said Russia has made defense and social spending its priorities, while all other spending would receive “whatever is leftover,” the Moscow Times reported. 

Source Link: http://www.ibtimes.com/russia-military-spending-moscow-spends-big-weapons-poverty-rate-grows-2426425 – 10/4/2016.

Defense aside, feudalism dampens the spirit for creating, purchasing, living.  The state, or the corrupt and powerful of the state, may take all of whatever one has created.

As much related to mafia, then state mafia, and related skimming or “take” has damped capital investment in Russia while for many years also adding to the encouragement of capital flight.  The too centralized a state and its power plus the “kleptocrat” at the controls ruins the exuberance produced by freedom and the concomitant dreaming and effort that produces cool and desirable new everything.

For souls who may come to believe — or worse, know — the “fix is in”, how great may be their effort to swing into the marketplaces confident in their own powers and the promise of rewards?

For the nominally Communist Soviet Union, methods had to be produced to keep people watched and inside the state (talk about an “open air prison”!) and in today’s uncertain ultra-nationalist imperial Russian Federation, something similar may be noted in the immense poverty spreading through a region with ample natural resources for producing basic industries and an affluent middle class throughout.

All that has gone wrong?

Idolatry of another “Great Leader” bent on looking good — more: heroic! — in state-controlled / state-inhibited press.


Additional Reference

What follows: excerpts or remarks related to the “charms” of feudal authoritarian control (of “the masses”).

Best advice: reconsider and revisit America’s founding documents.


At present, the authoritarianism business is booming. According to the Human Rights Foundation’s research, the citizens of 94 countries suffer under non-democratic regimes, meaning that 3.97 billion people are currently controlled by tyrants, absolute monarchs, military juntas or competitive authoritarians. That’s 53 percent of the world’s population. Statistically, then, authoritarianism is one of the largest — if not the largest — challenges facing humanity.

Kasparov, Garry and Thor Halvorssen.  “Why the rise of authoritarianism is a global catastrophe.”  The Washington Post, February 13, 2017.


POPULIST parties of both right and left, many pro-Russian, did well in last May’s European elections, taking between them a quarter of the seats. This has raised fears of a coherent pro-Russian block forming in Strasbourg.

In Greece, the now-ruling radical-left Syriza party leans towards Russia. On February 11th Nikos Kotzias, the new foreign minister, went to Moscow—his first visit to a foreign capital outside the European Union. Syriza is cool on sanctions against Russia, and opposed to expanding them. Another left-wing, broadly pro-Russian upstart is Podemos in Spain, which leads in the polls. Its leader has accused the West of double standards in dealing with Russia.

The Economist.  “In the Kremlin’s Pocket: Who Backs Putin, and Why.” February 12, 2015.


… As the Kremlin has spearheaded anti-gay and anti-abortion legislation, and as Putin has made moves to formalize the supremacy of the Russian Orthodox Church within Russia, so, too, have myriad members of far-right social conservative movements in the United States praised Putinist policy. Thankfully, such linkages have seen further coverage than the relations between the “alt-right” and secessionists — see, for instance, research from the University of South Florida’s Christopher Stroop — but it remains worth noting a few highlights of this relationship. For instance, according to Bryan Fischer, one of the most well-known faces of American Christian fundamentalism, Putin is the “lion of Christianity.” Paleoconservative politician Pat Buchanan, meanwhile, has alluded that God may be on Putin’s side. And Franklin Graham, the son of famed evangelist Billy Graham and perhaps America’s foremost remaining televangelist, recently visited Russia to praise Putin for remaining “steadfastly against the rising homosexual agenda” in Russia.

This tripartite blend, of white nationalists, of secessionists, of social conservatives, have all formed some of the primary bulwarks of the Trump campaign over the past few months, and there is little reason to believe they’ll refrain from supporting Trumpian policies moving forward. Moreover, all three have seen their leading proponents — those within the “alt-right,” most especially — construct rhetorical, organizational, and financial links with the Kremlin and Kremlin-financed groups over the past two years.

Michel, Casey.  “Beyond Trump and Putin: The American Alt-Right’s Love of the Kremlin’s Policies.”  The Diplomat, October 13, 2016.


Posted by Katehon Think Tank on March 4, 2016.

Related Interpretation

Salhani, Justin.  “‘Putin’s Rasputin’ has lauded Donald Trump as a ‘sensation’.”  Think Progress, December 15, 2016:

Widely referred to as Putin’s Rasputin, Dugin has also elaborated a Russian version of Manifest Destiny known as Eurasianism. Eurasianism is a totalitarian political ideology that “rejects the view that Russia is on the periphery of Europe, and on the contrary interprets the country’s geographic location as grounds for a kind of messianic ‘third way’,” according to a report released by the Wilson Center.


Aleksandr Dugin is a radical, Trump supporting, self-proclaimed philosopher from Russia. Traditionalism and cultural purity are two of his most valued philosophical tenets. And while his influence may be overstated in Russia, his ideology has infiltrated white nationalist circles in the United States and parts of Europe.

Salhani, Justin.  “The White Nationalist Movement’s Favorite Philosopher.”  Think Progress, December 19, 2016.


At a security conference in Munich on Friday, Mr. Poroshenko warned the West against “appeasement” of Russia, and some American experts say offering Russia any alternative to a two-year-old international agreement on Ukraine would be a mistake. The Trump administration has sent mixed signals about the conflict in Ukraine.

But given Mr. Trump’s praise for Mr. Putin, John Herbst, a former American ambassador to Ukraine, said he feared the new president might be too eager to mend relations with Russia at Ukraine’s expense — potentially with a plan like Mr. Artemenko’s.

Twohey, Megan and Scott Shane.  “A Back-Channel Plan for Ukraine and Russia, Courtesy of Trump Associates.”  The New York Times, February 19, 2017.


On Tuesday the Anne Frank Center released a statement denouncing Trump’s response to the anti-Semitic string of attacks as inadequate.

“The President’s sudden acknowledgment of Anti-Semitism is a Band-Aid on the cancer of Anti-Semitism that has infected his own administration,” the statement said. “His statement today is a pathetic asterisk of condescension after weeks in which he and his staff have committed grotesque acts and omissions reflecting Anti-Semitism, yet day after day have refused to apologize and correct the record. Make no mistake: The Anti-Semitism coming out of this Administration is the worst we have seen from any Administration. The White House repeatedly refused to mention Jews in its Holocaust remembrance, and had the audacity to take offense when the world pointed out the ramifications of Holocaust denial. And it was only yesterday, President’s Day, that Jewish Community Centers across the nation received bomb threats, and the President said absolutely nothing. When President Trump responds to Anti-Semitism proactively and in real time, and without pleas and pressure, that’s when we’ll be able to say this president has turned a corner. This is not that moment.”

Rozsa, Matthew.  “What universe are these people living in?”  Anne Frank Center blasts Sean Spicer for complaints over anti-Semitism whitewash.”  Salon, February 22, 2017.

–33–

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Caution: The possession of anti-Semitic / anti-Zionist thought may be the measure of the owner's own enslavement to criminal and medieval absolute power.
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Recent Posts

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Epigram

Hillel the Elder

"That which is distasteful to thee do not do to another. That is the whole of Torah. The rest is commentary. Now go and study."

"If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am not for others, what am I? If not now, when?"

"Whosoever destroys a soul, it is considered as if he destroyed an entire world. And whosoever that saves a life, it is considered as if he saved an entire world."

Oriana Fallaci
"Whether it comes from a despotic sovereign or an elected president, from a murderous general or a beloved leader, I see power as an inhuman and hateful phenomenon...I have always looked on disobedience toward the oppressive as the only way to use the miracle of having been born."

Talmud 7:16 as Quoted by Rishon Rishon in 2004
Qohelet Raba, 7:16

אכזרי סוף שנעשה אכזרי במקום רחמן

Kol mi shena`asa rahaman bimqom akhzari Sof shena`asa akhzari bimqom rahaman

All who are made to be compassionate in the place of the cruel In the end are made to be cruel in the place of the compassionate.

More colloquially translated: "Those who are kind to the cruel, in the end will be cruel to the kind."

Online Source: http://www.rishon-rishon.com/archives/044412.php

Abraham Isaac Kook

"The purely righteous do not complain about evil, rather they add justice.They do not complain about heresy, rather they add faith.They do not complain about ignorance, rather they add wisdom." From the pages of Arpilei Tohar.

Heinrich Heine
"Where books are burned, in the end people will be burned." -- From Almansor: A Tragedy (1823).

Simon Wiesenthal
Remark Made in the Ballroom of the Imperial Hotel, Vienna, Austria on the occasion of His 90th Birthday: "The Nazis are no more, but we are still here, singing and dancing."

Maimonides
"Truth does not become more true if the whole world were to accept it; nor does it become less true if the whole world were to reject it."

"The risk of a wrong decision is preferable to the terror of indecision."

Douglas Adams
"Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?" Epigram appearing in the dedication of Richard Dawkins' The GOD Delusion.

Thucydides
"The Nation that makes a great distinction between its scholars and its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools."

Milan Kundera
"The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting."

Malala Yousafzai
“The terrorists thought that they would change our aims and stop our ambitions but nothing changed in my life except this: weakness, fear and hopelessness died. Strength, power and courage was born.”

Tanit Nima Tinat
"Who could die of love?"

What I Have Said About the Jews

My people, not that I speak for them, I nonetheless describe as a "global ethnic commune with its heart in Jerusalem and soul in the Land of Israel."

We have never given up on God, nor have we ever given up on one another.

Many things we have given up, but no one misses, say, animal sacrifice, and as many things we have kept, so we have still to welcome our Sabbath on Friday at sunset and to rest all of Saturday until three stars appear in the sky.

Most of all, through 5,773 years, wherever life has taken us, through the greatest triumphs and the most awful tragedies, we have preserved our tribal identity and soul, and so shall we continue eternally.

Anti-Semitism / Anti-Zionism = Signal of Fascism

I may suggest that anti-Zionism / anti-Semitism are signal (a little bit) of fascist urges, and the Left -- I'm an old liberal: I know my heart -- has been vulnerable to manipulation by what appears to me as a "Red Brown Green Alliance" driven by a handful of powerful autocrats intent on sustaining a medieval worldview in service to their own glorification. (And there I will stop).
One hopes for knowledge to allay fear; one hopes for love to overmatch hate.

Too often, the security found in the parroting of a loyal lie outweighs the integrity to be earned in confronting and voicing an uncomfortable truth.

Those who make their followers believe absurdities may also make them commit atrocities.

Positively Orwellian: Comment Responding to Claim that the Arab Assault on Israel in 1948 Had Not Intended Annihilation

“Revisionism” is the most contemptible path that power takes to abet theft and hide shame by attempting to alter public perception of past events.

On Press Freedom, Commentary, and Journalism

In the free world, talent -- editors, graphic artists, researchers, writers -- gravitate toward the organizations that suit their interests and values. The result: high integrity and highly reliable reportage and both responsible and thoughtful reasoning.

This is not to suggest that partisan presses don't exist or that propaganda doesn't exist in the west, but any reader possessed of critical thinking ability and genuine independence -- not bought, not programmed -- is certainly free to evaluate the works of earnest reporters and scholars.

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