No need to date links in this compilation: I believe all were published today, and some within a few hours or an hour of this news watching typing that goes on around here most days.
What to say to Pandora: “Don’t open the box! Don’t look!”
The “fast scan” takes about an hour at human speed, ignores specific situations, and gets an “ah hah!” moment when one realizes that for causes that are often neither meaningful nor justifiable by those blowing themselves up, pulling triggers, and waving knives (is that still done?), conflict would seem just another natural cause of death.
From Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, people just plain don’t like other people.
Dress up the hate with poetry or scripture, crude talk, politico talk, lies, or a whole lot of truth, somebody’s got it in for somebody else by clan, class, ethnicity, nationality, race, or religion — no need to get personal: just box it, label it, and tear it apart!
The truth is, as Phuketwan first revealed on October 21, that Thai authorities pretend to deport the Rohingya, taking their names and fingerprints for the record, then actually deliver them into the arms of people traffickers.
I don’t know what the sordid truth is out of Burma, but I know it’s bad and should be — now has — a place on the open source conflict overview circuit.
“If you want to disarm the anti-balaka, it is better to first disarm the Seleka,” said resident Ngaro Nadine. “It is the Seleka who have been massacring and killing. Now it is the anti-balaka who are strong.”
Brig. Gen. Alaa Mahmoud said 33 tourists from South Korea were on the bus and had visited the Greek Orthodox Monastery of St. Catherine’s, in the Sinai Peninsula. The bus was headed to Israel and was waiting in line near a border crossing, he said.
PESHAWAR, Pakistan — A faction of the Pakistani Taliban said Sunday that it executed 23 paramilitary soldiers who have been held captive since 2010, even as other elements of the militant group continue preliminary peace talks with the country’s government.
“They can’t have it both ways,” the senior official said of the Russians. “They can’t say they’re in favor of negotiations in Geneva and a transitional governing body with full executive authority and humanitarian access and have a happy Olympics, and then be part and parcel of supporting this regime as it kills people in the most brutal way.”
The ministry said a National Guard patrol was sent to investigate reports that a civilian and a prison warden had been shot dead at a roadblock set up by armed men in Jendouba.
“Upon their arrival, terrorist elements opened fire,” killing two policemen and wounding another two, it said.
Turkey has spent at least $2.5 billion on serving these guests since the war began and hosts around 600,000 Syrian refugees – around a quarter of all Syrian refugees. While many reside in the camps, a little over half have opted to settle in urban settlers and make their own living.
Earlier this month, the Turkish army opened fire on a convoy of Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) – a jihadist group active in Iraq and Syria. This was in retaliation for a series of cross-border strikes that hit Turkish soil. Turkey has also warned of possible terrorist attacks in Istanbul after receiving intelligence that al-Qaeda-linked jihadists were planning to disrupt the Syrian peace talks.
No one claimed responsibility for the attack, but Yemen is grappling with a growing threat from one of al Qaeda’s most active wings, which has killed hundreds of people in assaults on state and military facilities in the past two years.
According to Hungarian newspapers, the xenophobic, anti-Semitic party Jobbik (“The Righter”), which has three seats in the European Parliament, has launched a campaign to expunge from textbooks the accepted theory according to which Hungarians are a Finno-Ugric people, and replace it with one according to which they are related to the Huns, Avars and Scythians, Indo-Iranian nomads that inhabited large parts of the Eurasian steppe in the first half of the first millennium C.E.
Magyar Post and Iran Post have released a joint stamp.Iranian-Hungarian stamp The Hungarian issue uses the same designs as the Iranian stamps and is due to be released on December 31, 2010. On the 80 ft Hungarian stamp there are Termeh motifs from Yazd and on the 240 ft stamp Jazygian (jász) embroidery motifs are shown. The background printing of both stamps has the colors of the national flag of the respective country, and the inscriptions are in both Hungarian and Persian.
Instead of courting American investment, Jobbik’s Zoltan Balczo, the deputy speaker of parliament, recently led a protest in front of the U.S. Embassy to express solidarity with Iran. He accused Israel of manipulating the U.S. government, saying “the tail should not wag the dog.”
This sentiment was more explicitly expressed in an interview by Marton Gyongyosi, Jobbik’s foreign policy chief and co-chair of the Hungarian parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee: “It is not that hard to see the control of the Zionist lobby over U.S. lawmakers and the American President.”
The spokesman for Jobbik questioned if more than 400,000 Hungarian Jews were really murdered or deported during the Holocaust, and said that it has become a political business to elevate the numbers. He also told a British newspaper that Israeli treatment of the Palestinians is a “Nazi system” and compared Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman to Joseph Goebbels. “The Jews don’t have the right to talk about what happened in the Second World War,” he said.
Hungary always had a far right movement. During the war it was the ARROW CROSS Party, which was funded by Hitler around the same time he started funding the Mufti of Jerusalem. About 1931-33. By 1944 they were in control of the country, as the pro German dictator, Admiral Horthy was no longer trusted by the Nazis, so the Nazis invaded the country in 1944.
430,000 Jews were sent off between 43 and early 45 to the camps. Mostly Auschwitz, but also to the Russian front as human shields. Today about 200,000 remain.
The appearance of anti-Semitic movements in any state should set off alarms, but not necessary for Jews only. The surfacing of bigots and their rants bodes ill for the defense of values more helpful to the body politic.
Hungarians who are not a part of Jobbick know this.
Reza Shah Pahlavi became obessed and seduced by Htilers’ concept of racial purity. He began researching the fact that both Germans and Persians are Persians are from same the Aryan (Indo-european) race.
Because he became seduced by Hitler’s ideology of racial purity, Reza Shah Pahlavi draws attention to the fact that both Germans and Persians are from the Aryan (Indo-european) race. He renames Persia and calls it Iran (in reference to the Aryan race).
“The Persian people and their leaders are considered pariahs in the eyes of the West, which serves Israeli interests,” said Marton Gyongyosi, Jobbik’s foreign policy chief, at a pro-Iran demonstration organized by the party in December at the US Embassy in Budapest. “This is why we have solidarity with the peaceful nation of Iran and turn to her with an open heart.”
Press TV, Iran’s government-run English-language satellite news network, has taken its usual viciously anti-Semitic conspiracy theories a step further. It now claims not only that Jews are to blame for the Holocaust, but also that because Jews did not learn from their supposed wrongs in Nazi Germany that “American Zionists” are “incubating another Hitler.”
The November 9 article, “American Zionists incubating another Hitler,” was written by a Press TV columnist named M.I. Bhat, who also writes for the conspiratorial anti-Semitic website Veterans Today. The Press TV piece was additionally published two days earlier in Veterans Today under the title “Are American Jews incubating another Hitler?”
Considering the ravages of World War II and, ultimately, its effects on the German People themselves, it’s a wonder that within the constituency of any European power the same bogus political philosophy should take hold, albeit with less reference, if any, to Hitler or “Hitlerism”.
However, it appears that Hungary’s Jobbik Party has been helped along by those who have to some extent mastered a system of patronage:
He disturbingly concludes his article by implying another Holocaust is coming, this time to American Jews. Bhat writes, “how neatly this description [of how Jewish control and manipulation resulted in all of Germany’s ills] depicts the current state of affairs of the United States! …Zionists don’t seem to draw any lessons from their past actions and experiences.” Bhat asks, “If description above [sic] of the post-WWI Germany is what led the Germans to rally behind Hitler, should it then surprise Zionists or the world at large if America pops up its own Hitler?”
Iran’s Hezbollah program is a global enterprise; it should surprise no one that the regime would attempt to reproduce its anti-Semitic obsessions in other states. A portion of Hungary, apparently, has succumbed; in America, Americans are not only not so dumb, I, we, and they are both practical and vigilant, heightening the penalties for hate crimes, watching the news carefully, and tracking the numbers — in the U.S., more of crime than of organizations that sometimes care to brag impacts and numbers they just don’t have and can’t get.
To assist the practical slaughter of Jews and Christians, al-Husseini built an army of Muslim volunteer units for the Waffen-SS (the combat units of the dread SS) to operate for the Nazi cause in the Balkans. While the appeal for volunteers from among Muslims always struggled to meet the demands for new recruits, al-Husseini was able to organize three divisions of Bosnian Muslims who were then trained as elements of the Waffen-SS.
Mr Langdon, 33, and Ms Yavuz, a Harvard PhD who worked to help battle malarial disease on the continent, travelled from Uganda to Nairobi, because they believed there was “no safer place” in Africa to have their baby, which was due in weeks.
It was a simple decision that unwittingly intertwined their fates with those of hundreds of innocent people in a mall where days of gunfire and lobbed grenades would leave 69 people dead.
The Shabaab fighters were warning Muslims to leave and questioned people about their faith. Muslims were separated from non-Muslims; the non-Muslims were executed. Some Shabaab fighters were heard yelling “Allahu Akbar,” or “God is Greatest,” as they gunned down innocent civilians.
The terror attack on a Kenyan shopping centre that has left 68 dead was being led by the white English widow of a 7/7 bomber, it was claimed last night.
Soldiers said a white woman wearing a veil was shouting orders to gunmen in Arabic during the bloody massacre inside the Westgate shopping mall in Nairobi.
“We knew the shopping center is owned by Israelis and renowned as a place where many Israelis hang out,” Lopez told Maariv. “Four of the restaurants there are also owned by Israelis and many Israelis are employed in the place. They were our main concern—but we also support our Kenyan friends and ready to assist in whichever way they ask.”
During the attack, Al Shabaab’s Arabic Twitter account quoted the Koran, “Plant firmly our feet and give us victory over (Al-Kafireen) the disbelieving people.” (Koran 2:250). The Kuffar, the non-Muslims of Westgate, included small children.
NAIROBI, Kenya–I will travel to Ghana to be present at the burial of Kofi Awoonor. I will because he is a great Ghanaian poet. I will because he is a remarkable African thinker and mentor. I will because he traveled to Jamaica from Ghana to bury my father, his dear friend and mentor, in 1984. I will because he is my uncle, my mother’s cousin.
Dang works for the restaurant guide “Eat Out Kenya” and was meeting coworkers at Nairobi’s upscale Westgate Mall when gunfire broke out Saturday. Terrorists with ties to al-Qaida unloaded a flood of gunfire and grenades into crowds of unsuspecting shoppers. Those who were not hit dodged bullets and crawled to safety.
In consideration of the previous post, the binary choices for Egypt should seem clear.
If the economic benefits and humanism of modernity suit, the medieval complex in self-concept and tyrannical rule will cease; if not, Islam, as “Islamists” would have it, goes so against the grain of humanity that Egypt will suffer as every region has that has hosted, tolerated, or succumbed to this deeply programmed form in political narcissism: from Afghanistan to Somalia, Islamism as Al Shabaab or Boko Haram and others install it serves primarily themselves . . . until it just does not and they are booted by all of the forces they are most accustomed to blaming, this always excluding their own contribution to their own fate (” . . . and do not exceed the limits, surely Allah does not love those who exceed the limits . . . .’).
However I may continue with this blogging, I’m inclined to become increasing informal with it in the interest of becoming more timely and, in some respects, more flexible with these hot summer days.
My prediction: the story may be underplayed today — the above is the most recent clip I could find on YouTube (I’m still looking forward to the day when Facebook or “buddies” share their cell phone feeds with me directly) — and it will get large.
Shortly after his election, Egyptian President Morsi stepped off with a libel launched at Israel, professing to uphold Egypt’s treaty with Israel while accusing Israel of violating its terms many times (not true, I’m happy to report — the clip may be found embedded with this BackChannels piece: https://conflict-backchannels.com/2012/09/28/fb-a-note-on-gellers-poster/).
Remember: evil begins with a lie.
Sometimes it is a small lie, something not-quite-right slipped into a sentence (“Everybody knows that . . . . .”); sometimes, it is large lie and (everybody knows that) the Martian American Zionist European Kaffir Imperialists are the source of all evil (plus monsoons, floods, earthquakes, colds and flue) everywhere in the universe.
Oddly enough, for lack of intellectual armoring or rigor, for misplaced or misdirected loyalties, perhaps for money — business, loot, patronage — people buy the worst lies, believing, hoping, perhaps, that their lives will get better if only something other than themselves were changed in relation to themselves and their environment.
Such misguided faith never works but leads always to greater suffering (a favorite, most convenient, and rather clinical and neutral example: Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, a dictatorship that got its start with a just complaint but then kept going and going and going with a big mouth, patronage, and thugs) and, inevitably, a lot of people who want to leave or promote revolution, usually both.
Morsi has so far done what dictators may be expected to do, including replacing the generals he inherited, but who knows who’s loose in the junior officer’s corps — or elsewhere in the country.
Scott Pelley, Anchor, CBS Evening News: “The Israelis say that civilians are being killed because Hamas militants are hiding among the civilians. What have you seen?”
Charlie D’Agata, CBS Journalists in Gaza City: “Hamas will tell you that that is absolutely not the case, but we know it is the case. The attack on the tv tower today, they were aiming at a person from the Islamic Jihad. People from that group had to admit that, yes indeed, that person was hiding among journalists.”
BackChannels 