10 Saturday Jan 2015
The French have not yet grasped the reality that radical Islamic terror rooted in the Middle East, but nurtured by misguided politics on their own soil, may begin by targeting free speech, authority as personified by the fallen policemen and women, and Jews but, as with all totalitarian ideologies, it eventually targets everyone who do not bend to their will.
http://israeltheviewfromhere.blogspot.co.il/2015/01/january-9-2015-was-kristallnacht-for.html – 1/10/2015.
10 Monday Nov 2014
Agents Doha-Moscow-Tehran
Anti-Semitism
Blackmail
Bribery
Enslavement & Infantilization
Intimidation
Lies & Manipulation
Pandering
Patronage
Shunning – Theft – Murder
21 Tuesday Oct 2014
Let me suggest four parts or elements that get the machinery working:
1. “Malignant Narcissism” / “Civilizational Narcissism” / relatives of “Narcissistic Personality Disorder” / “Bipolar Disorders” (“grandiose, messianic delusion”) –> each of the labels may represent a straying of innate human energy plus some craziness. The application to conflicts within the “Islamic Small Wars” context should be apparent with some meditation but outside of that, the same applies to variants of “National Socialist” presence, e.g., Putin in Russia, Jobbik in Hungary.
2. “Cultural Poetics and Social Grammar” — words do have a power and poison put in the ears or set before the eyes gets into children very early in the development of language plus self-concept. Good adults are careful with what they impart to their children, and, perhaps, good politicians must be careful with their words, but bad parents and bad politicians — there are lots of “BadDaddy’s” — may have cause to hide something shameful in themselves, to deflect attention away from themselves, to keep on stage a glorious image of themselves in the eyes of others, starting with their children.
3. Ideological Political Programming — the conservative’s abhorrence of dhimmi status, poll taxes, state discrimination speaks to that and may make something of a match between old Stalinist Soviet practices and some notes in Islam that seek the transformation of whole populations using central absolute authority and political torque to do it.
4. Cultural linguistics or language behavior –and as behavior, this may differ from “poetics” (the arrangements of symbols that make language possible). When we listen, when we read: how much do we memorize, parrot, ingest and sustain as stable? How much do we create, invent, question?
When Jews greet “The Binding of Isaac” (“The Akedah”, and bear with me on Isaac), a minority opinion notes that perhaps Abraham should have talked back to God (!) instead of setting off to carry out His instructions without hesitation.
Listen and obey? Listen and question?
Narcissism, cultural programming, political programming, and language behavior as behavior (we’re part of as wild a species as any) would be the four anchors of any approach or analysis of ISIS, the Muslim Brotherhood, and Hezbollah.
Notably, both Putin and Khamenei operate deeply piratical regimes beneath the cloaks of nationalism and religiosity. They have different trajectories as persons and as representatives of very different states, but they are similar in the pursuit and maintenance of absolute power — absolute control, as if from God — and they apply the same sets of tools for doing that.
I fear overdoing the knowledge part of this kind of view for the fascism it might inspire, if as much has not happened already in the intellectual warrens of governments invested in part in social control. However, considering the Loud Fascism evident in the wild and the necessity of reducing the same in number and force, the above suggests four useful ways of approaching rogue leaders, their psychology, and their movements.
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13 Monday Oct 2014
The alternative axis of power — “Putin-Assad-Khamenei”, which may be more accurately expressed as “Khamenei-Putin-Assad” — is predicated entirely on the destruction of Jewish ethics, morality, and thought that has contributed mightily to the intellectual construction of the Judeo-Christian / Greco-Roman west. The west did not start out where it has arrived, but where it has arrived — equal rights, human rights, rule of law (rather than of men), democracy rather than despotism, etc. — stands as an affront to piratical dictatorships worldwide. Catch on and hang on or let go and get lost (so ISIS — bank robbers, plunderers extraordinaire — can pick you up) that sense of dignity in self and dignity in others might well be, ultimately, the “gift of the Jews”, from Moses to Muhammad in those parts speaking to the “better angels of our nature”. Putin, Assad, Khamenei are each believers in political absolutism. So is Baghdaddi. They may not know that they are really fighting together on the same side.
The tropes are going to take over, e.g., “Putin-Assad-Khamenei: together they are defending political absolutism.”
There’s some truth in them.
Perhaps they – so many repeated kernels, ideas, and puns – just need a page of their own.
Be that as it may, conflict involving “the west” may ultimately devolve to democracy vs despotism.
The details may be complicated, God knows, but the theme may be also just that simple.
Either have a voice in the governance of one’s geopolitical space — or not; either be free among those free to say yes and no to life’s challenges and opportunities — or be enslaved and have a host of decisions already made for you. Such choosing between good and evil should be stark, but for some torn between a lonely idealism and the seductions set out by tyrants — or promoted by their agents, manipulations, and money — such choosing becomes deeply confused.
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07 Tuesday Oct 2014
Tags
political, political absolutism, political psychology, political sadism, politics, Rayhaneh Jabbari
Ayatollah Khamenei’s regime had granted Reyhaneh Jabbari a stay on execution to October 8, 2014.
As I type, it is about 9 p.m. in Tehran.
The known facts of her case are clear and simple: a male boss plied her with a date rape drug, took her to a deserted space, and attempted to rape her. Rayhaneh Jabbari fought back. Whether she only injured him (with a small knife) or killed him has not been discerned: given the ethical and procedural issues attending the case, the pack of human rights groups who tally the most egregious miscarriages of justice have been following the Jabbari’s story for years.
Facebook pages, petitions, blog posts (like this one), attention across the global press have been to little avail other than to have delayed Jabbari’s execution to about this hour.
With more than 700 executions during his tenure, Rouhani has even surpassed Ahmadinejad’s statistics, and has virtually doubled the rate of executions. Dozens of public executions, mass hangings in prison courtyards, and clandestine and undocumented murders of prisoners are what define Rouhani’s notion of human rights improvement.
The combined Khamenei-Rouhani “charm offensive” should by now have now transformed into an “offensive charm”, i.e., a charm offending a greater world, including a greater Persian world within the state, a world still in possession of conscience and heart and still sensitive to and outraged by theft.
Fox News journalist Lisa Daftari has maintained a page on Rayhaneh Jabbari.
Reuters has had online great coverage of the (often stolen) “Assets of the Ayatollah”.
After a while, one must ask: where does this ayatollah-thing live where it cannot see its own true image?
From the “Chain Murders of Iran” to the horrors of Evin Prison, the regime would appear to sweat evil:
“To many Iranians, the concept of Evin prison is synonymous with political repression and torture,”Gissou Nia, executive director of the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center, told FoxNews.com. “Today, anyone who is perceived to be a threat to the Iranian regime, including human rights defenders … is kept within the confines of Evin and other notorious prisons in Iran.”
http://www.foxnews.com/world/2013/01/28/inside-evin-look-at-world-most-notorious-political-prison/ – 1/23/2013.
From a recent Daftari interview with Rayhaneh’s mother:
“The countdown has begun. It’s hell. It’s the worst feeling. I can’t be awake facing this reality and I can’t go to sleep,” she said. “When people see that someone (is) drowning, some rush to rescue and some who are indifferent stay away and say that ‘let’s not get involved because if we do we will get our pants or feet soaked in water.’ I can shout and shout that my daughter is in danger, but everybody knows what the right thing is to do for my daughter in this situation.”
http://www.foxnews.com/world/2014/10/02/execution-iranian-woman-accused-killing-attacker-back-on-says-mom/ – 10/2/1013.
A note of hope has appeared today in the L.A. Times:
Authorities were seeking consent from the family of the victim to vacate the capital judgment against Reyhaneh Jabbari, according to an Iranian judiciary spokesman, Gholamhossein Mohseni-Ejei, who made the comments at his weekly news conference.
Meanwhile, the semiofficial Iranian Students News Agency quoted Justice Minister Mostafa Pourmohammadi as saying that the hanging of Jabbari would be put off for at least a month.
http://www.latimes.com/world/middleeast/la-fg-iranian-woman-death-penalty-20141006-story.html – 10/7/2014.
Is there really hope in that story?
Why were things discussed today not undertaken months or years ago?
To hold over someone’s head the power of life and death — to hold over the world’s head the power of life and death — one might wonder how that feels?
For an answer, ask the sociopath and sadist — the one or the two — best positioned to know the answer to that question but don’t hope for a conversation: next to killing innocents, lying, smiling, and thieving (from those who trust them most) would seem their next best and most proven talents.
In order to save her daughter’s life, Pakravan published the contents of this call on social media and asked the public for help. In fact, the execution was postponed, in Pakravan’s opinion, because of the public pressure, she told DW.
Now only one thing can save her daughter: if the slain man’s family pardons Jabbari. But Sarbandi’s family of refuses to do this on the grounds that Jabbari dragged his good name through the mud with allegations of rape.
http://www.dw.de/the-last-word-in-iranian-justice-revenge/a-17982603 – 8/3/2014.
IF Sarbandi is but an alleged rapist, how can Rayaneh Jabbari be other than an alleged murderess?
There is no justice Ayatollah Khamenei’s Iran, only darkness and capricious and sadistic raw power.
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18 Monday Aug 2014
Citing as models Singapore, China, India, Turkey and Russia, Mr. Orban added: “We have to abandon liberal methods and principles of organizing a society, as well as the liberal way to look at the world.”
The Hungarian leader traced his extraordinary conclusion to the global financial crisis, which he said had exposed the weakness of Western societies and mandated “a race to invent a state that is most capable of making a nation successful.” He was particularly scathing about the United States, claiming that “the strength of American soft power is deteriorating, because liberal values today incorporate corruption, sex and violence.”
3. Call German Prime Minister Angela Merkel
to discuss a) Greek political and economic
conditions, as well as the need for Troika
policies to blunt the suffering caused by
austerity and to defuse the appeal of
extremism; and b) coordinating policies on
Hungary.
4. Instruct the Director of National Intelligence
to investigate allegations of Russian and
Iranian financial or other support of
European far-right parties and present a
classified assessment of whether the
Kremlin is attempting to use such parties to
undermine the European Union or thwart
further NATO expansion. Release an
unclassified version to Congress and the
public.
5. At the North Atlantic Council meeting at the
2014 NATO Summit, express concern
about the rise of neo-fascist parties in
Europe and its impact on security and good
governance in NATO member countries and
the strength of the Alliance. Instruct the U.S.
Ambassador to NATO and senior military
officials to raise these concerns—especially
with regard to Hungary and Greece—with
their European counterparts.
http://www.humanrightsfirst.org/sites/default/files/HRF-report-We-Are-Not-Nazis-But.pdf – August 2014.
Off-the-cuff and fast blogging brought “canaries in the cave’ to mind, but in actuality the editorial board of The Washington Post and the downtown think-tank Human Rights First have voices far greater than metaphorical canaries in coal mines. However, as with the lesser birds, they are both sending a warning and should be heard loud and clear.
When referencing “the dictator Putin-Assad-Khamenei”, I had for a while to note the other axis of power that was Putin-Yanukovych. Yanukovych’s now long gone from Ukraine (online, we are all living dog years [more animals, egads]) but the principle remains: the despots know how to gang up on the democratic among souls, and in league, they are force with which to be reckoned.
I wonder if in Syria, Bashar the Butcher al-Assad didn’t give al-Nusra and the young ISIS a break in order to clear the field of the moderate and ensure his war would leave one despot, preferably himself, or another standing, which would suit defending the indefensible principle that is “political absolutism”.
Regarding Iranian and Russian sabotage, potential or real, of NATO, a review of Turkey’s position in relation to fascist Islamism and the Islamic State, which is using for its headquarters Turkey’s embassy in Mosul, Iraq, would seem also in order.
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