PESHAWAR: Two children, a journalist and six police officials among 16 people killed and dozens others including women and children were injured in a blast at a political rally of Awami National Party (ANP) in Peshawar on Wednesday, DawnNews reported.
The bomb blast took place in Yakatoot, a congested neighbourhood of Peshawar, just after the arrival of senior ANP leader Ghulam Ahmed Bilour.
It was the fourth deadly attack on politicians or political parties in three days as the country prepares to hold historic polls on May 11.
Thanks to Pakistani politician Akbaruddin Owaisi’s Facebook fan page for the tip.
Police had booked cases in Nirmal in Adilabad and Nizamabad districts against the legislator after he allegedly used inflammatory and derogatory language against a community during his public speeches in December last year.
Should the figures be 100,000 rather than 300,000 Persian Jews prior to the establishment of the State of Israel?
I don’t know.
By any count, it seems fewer than 10,000 have chosen to remain in Iran.
Iran itself trots out the Neturei Karta — http://www.adl.org/extremism/karta/ — a cult, a fringe, at best, in the Jewish community both in Israel and the Diaspora.
[Responding to how I feel about five Israel deaths or 100 Palestinian deaths]:
“What bothers me most is not that Arabs kill our children, but that they force us to kill theirs.” Golda Meir, National Press Club, Washington, D.C., 1957.
The Jews I know have never felt differently.
Don’t you think it’s time to stop lobbing rockets at Israel? At the Jews?
Contemplating the destruction of the Jews?
Demonizing the Jews?
Hamas, heavily taxing its constituents, including “tunnel millionaires”, moving goods inbound and outbound with the cooperation of the IDF, purchasing electricity from Israel, ferrying its sick to Israeli hospitals when necessary, etc., nonetheless launched more than 1000 rockets, some supplied by Iran with a range of 45 miles, into Israel in 2012. Targets: any Israeli: Muslim, Christian, Jewish, adult or child, man or woman.
And then by design, Hamas has kept their own in harm’s way, launching within 1/2 block of residences, gasoline stations, schools, mosques, etc.
Hamas and Israel have entered a ceasefire at this time.
We’ll see how it holds up.
Trust the Jews, at least, for having the integrity to keep their side of the bargain (as they did ejecting their own from Gaza in 2005, a bid to “trade land for peace,” leaving Gaza Judenfrei).
“We believe the universe was created for Mohammed, and we have the right to be the darlings of the universe. We darlings of the universe are your darlings by right, and you are very kind to us that you will keep us your darlings.
“The liberal intellectuals, the liberal politicians, the liberal middle class of the modern civilization or modern world, which has given a hope of survival to mankind, is committing its suicide instead of ensuring the future of mankind by pampering my ego, which says the universe belongs to me without any work that I do. I may do nothing. I was created a Muslim, so the extreme virtue I have committed just by being born: I came to the world, I have done this great favor that I was born, and I was born as a Muslim, so it is my right to be the most superior human being in the world.
“I can go with a penguin dress and a turban on my head and say, “No, I will not work, five times a day I will go for prayer. You pay me the wages because I am following my religion, and you must be ashamed of yourself that you object to my religion if you do.
“These are not my sarcastic remarks. These are the feelings of a genuine Muslim.”
Mobarak Haider urging Islamic reform and encouraging pressure on Islam to reform or evolve — to lose its narcissistic fix and change — September 24, 2012, Peace House, Oslo, Norway (quoted from the second video in the following series).
From the last video: “Hizb-ut-Tahrir” will never accept the responsibility for any act of terror, but they will prepare the Muslim mind to never go or act against that act of terror.”
Those who remember, know the band well and true name of the music: Yes and “I’ve Seen All Good People”.
Theirs was a part of the ethos of the English-borne 1970s.
And here, 2012, far from those halcyon days, their art for the ears continues to resonate.
“Don’t surround yourself with yourself” — I should take the advice and perhaps others should take it for themselves as well.
My interest in the narcissistic dimension of political psychology started off with the direct and real space experience of personalities exhibiting mild to severe bipolar disorder and narcissistic personality disorder while in cyberspace I happened to be surfing conflicts and discovering for myself any number of autocratic regimes and the mess and misery they were able to bring to their hapless constituents.
(For this blog, the “Conflict – Culture – Language – Psychology” category should suffice, as I hope the whole production will not be so all over the place as the other, which I had created to showcase some other things I could do).
(In science, it is generally taken as a good thing to arrive at similar observations and insights by way of separate tracks — remember: theories stand until disproved, always, but they may be strengthened too by the arrival of new data — and that appears to be what has happened).
To move on: politics draw a variety of social competitors — advisers, leaders, warriors — and among the same, some may carry within themselves the over-the-top, unconstrained, boundary-confused, and often sadistic egotism of the malignant narcissist, and these too full of themselves no one needs.
As I type this, the intelligence of the world moves quickly in tens upon tens of thousands of communications per hour, and so it is I happen to participate in the Facebook presence of the Rationalist Society of Pakistan (the organizational site has been listed to the left). One of my Facebook buddies, Lakhkar Khan Hoti, posted there a statement by President Obama extolling the contributions made by Islam to humanity, which I interpret as part of the President’s promise to “extend the hand of peace” to Islam, and requested comment.
As professionals in a social-networking community may do, the original poster was asked to cite his source.
“To the Muslim world, we seek a new way forward, based on mutual interest and mutual respect.
To those leaders around the globe who seek to sow conflict or blame their society’s ills on the West, know that your people will judge you on what you can build, not what you destroy.”
There are some things humans — individually, in aggregate, without regard to legacy — may wish to entertain as twined language, technology, and trade capacities continue to contract and integrate lives and lifestyles across our ever gregarious species. Start with the meaning and significance of self-concept in relation to others and whether certain degrees of glorious narcissistic self-aggrandizement have a place in anyone’s better future, not least of all Pakistan’s.
My interest in political psychology and the dimension referred to as “narcissism” was inspired by encountering in my web-borne travels so many tawdry dictatorships — the junta in Burma; Robert Mugabe (thank him for reintroducing cholera to his people) in Zimbabwe; Paul Biya whose French connections and chateau keep him comfy while his people starve in Cameroon; etc. Copy and paste “African Dictator” into your browser, and you should come up with a blog titled and devoted to just that subject, quite colorful. And awful.
One might suggest there’s some difference too between overt religiosity and deep and rightly cherished spirituality.
There may be a good track in humanity enforced by our natural and overwhelming propensity to enjoy one another despite whatever hardships we may be enduring.
Where conditions have become untenable, whether by the hand of Pharaoh or through the failure of ambition as represented by the will to war — other ideas and policies proving bankrupt beneath the hands of lost autocrats and warmongers both — most people resign themselves to suffering or leave for what they hope will prove a healthier situation.
A bully anywhere — schoolyard, saloon, state, tribe, region — drives humanity away, and one may suggest that even God’s love goes with those who leave.
Time and again, and without understanding the sources of their own ruin, time reduces the malignant and all they have done to rags and relics, not to mention the diminishing of their reputation down into the class of assorted “bad examples” in lessons to new generations.
Haider, Mobarak. Taliban: The Tip of a Holy Iceberg. Pakistan: Saanjh, 2008 (Urdu), 2010 (English).
An experience embraced over time becomes an education, and so in this my fifth year of the most obscure blogging, I may graduate (by my own authority, naturally) from generalist to specialist, from being many things to many people (three dimensional fellow: writer, photographer, musician) to settling down between the desktop, library, and Skype, and forging ahead not only with what has been incubated on Facebook — every you-know-what has an opinion, of course — but narrowing even those lively rounds down to a more in-depth and perceptive tracking and analysis of the conflicts blazing away beneath an umbrella I call the “Islamic Small Wars”, that band of civil conflict and terror that has established a cold or hot presence in every Muslim-majority state and produced misery along the interface with western and other cultures.
I may not confine myself to that interest, dictators and junta and crooked oligarchs serving equally well for mindful entertainment and colorful data on which to mull the human condition and the autocrat’s propensity for mad self-adoration and aggrandizement.
We’ll see how this goes, and if it goes well, I suppose I shall have to archive and close the high school version of my foray into foreign affairs: Oppenheim Arts & Letters.
I’ll put up an “About” page soon, but, right now, I’m reading the above noted book by Mobarak Haider, and it is answering questions, filling in gaps, making sense of many things having to do with the architecture and character of the Islamic Small Wars,
I don’t want to review Haider’s book in this post — I’m still reading it, for one thing — but have wanted to play with this blog concept for a while.
The industry that has taken on the name “anti-Jihad” has grown extensively around the art of righteous complaint, and for that there has been no lack of material for squawking. What perhaps has been lacking would seem a less aligned perspective in a mind moving off the field and down into the engine room of the soul, which, incidentally, Haider does quite well, and searching out and perhaps arguing for answers.
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