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Tag Archives: political psychology

Abbas – Gaslighting Gaza and the World at Large

28 Sunday Sep 2014

Posted by commart in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Gaza, Islamic Small Wars, Israel, Middle East, Political Psychology, Regions

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gaslighting, malignant narcissism, middle east conflict, political psychology

What I have been calling “The Islamic Small Wars” — the internecine competitions and interfaces within Muslim-majority political space running from Afghanistan to Yemen — have been wars about integrity — basic truth telling — requiring armies of poets and detectives for fighting and resolving.

______

Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen,

In this year, proclaimed by the United Nations General Assembly as the International Year of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, Israel has chosen to make it a year of a new war of genocide perpetrated against the Palestinian people.

http://www.timesofisrael.com/full-text-of-abbas-speech-to-un/ – 9/26/2014

A bold gambit but it may be filtered by BackChannels’ own concept in political psychology: “Paranoid Delusional Narcissistic Reflection of Motivation”.

Abbas’s words are just not true.

Moreover, they may be proven untrue, the Jews being the absolute worst genocidiers on the planet: before they kill you, they afford you basic services, emergency and sophisticated specialized health services (in which all patients are treated absent of politics), Internet access, freedom of speech sufficient to sustain adverse public relations and research organizations (like B’Tsalem).

What may be true is the greater the hate encountered in anti-Semitic / anti-Zionist cant (there is no difference between those two), the greater the opportunities for Israel’s expansion.

The Abbas speech may be investigated and laid out purple phrase by phrase (“Amidst a torrent of massacres and storms of massive destruction” — not one mention of the more than 10,000 rockets launched from Gaza since 2005 and every two to few years to launched at a tempo sufficient to call the same an assault against Israel’s children).

Sins of omission are not the only sins evident in Abbas’s speech before the UN.

Note the demonizing of Israel, the “reflections in a mirror” — a very dark and most primitive mirror in language — in such well-known canards as “However, and as usual, the Israeli government did not miss the opportunity to undermine the chance for peace” — never mind those tunnels illegally and surreptitiously built (with child labor, 160 accidentally killed or deliberately murdered in the process) to assault Israeli communities.

Add to that demonizing simple Arab refusal of just responsibility for the Arab refugees of 1948:

Israel refuses to end its occupation of the State of Palestine since 1967, but rather seeks its continuation and entrenchment, and rejects the Palestinian state and refuses to find a just solution to the plight of the Palestine refugees.

Neither the Jewish community (worldwide) nor Israel created or sustained the refugee camps now well established as cantonments denied basic rights (in varying degree) in Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, and Egypt (and note well the Arab tenderness displayed recently toward the refugees of the Yarmouk Camp in Syria).

BackChannels no longer casually employs the term “Palestinian”.

As neither Egypt nor Jordan will absorb nor take responsibility for the constituents of (Judenfrei since 2005) Gaza, I refer to the same as “Gazans”).

Given the lying going on around Gazans — allegedly on their behalf but never beyond sacrificing them (individuals, family, finances, and property) as the pawns of Hamas’s supersessionary war against Judaism, one might expect them to become independent in their own right and to insist on the development for themselves of an independent, modern, responsible, responsive, and transparent democratic government.

Judea may be more complicated with its historic flow-down from the Soviet’s brand of poison (not only the Palestinian Liberation Organization, in spirit, remains present but a simple right-click of the mouse is all one needs to reach the airliner-hijacking Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the effects of the anti-Semitic New Old Now Old Far Out and Lost Left lingering long on the landscape, still leveraging the language of the refugees, which comes in the Abbas speech as, ” . . . against Israel’s policies of occupation, apartheid and colonial settlement . . . .’

The lie that is self-aggrandizing speech is there in that portion: one wonders just how large the combined International and Palestinian Solidarity Movements really are.

Investigating consultant and journalist Lee Kaplan has told me about the seeding of these groups on America’s college campuses and their access to student activity funds, which is fair under the precepts of freedom of speech in a truly open democracy, but we didn’t get to how really small these movements may be despite their broad distribution and the money pumped into them for priming.


The phrase comes from the 1940’s film Gaslight, in which an abusive husband deliberately dims the gaslights in the house, but when his wife comments on it he tells her she’s imagining it, that the lights never dimmed at all.

Gaslighting is one of the most insiduous, viscious, nasty and effective forms of emotional and psychological abuse.

http://www.daughtersofnarcissisticmothers.com/gaslighting.html


Transporting psychology — the study of individual mind and mentality — into politics may have inherent issues in both psychology and politics: for example, are we now going to filter or judge politicians in relation to our concept of “malignant narcissism”, which in turn would seem to inform the psychology of dictatorship?  At the same time, what choice has the world suffering war between brutal and sometimes immense despotic personalities?

(Of Bashar al-Assad and opponent (in general terms) al-Nusra, I have often remarked: “Different talk — same walk”.

The two together, Assad and al-Nusra — and the advent of BadDaddy and the Islamic Hate represent where the path of the malignantly narcissistic winds up — have burned out and left scorched the middle humanity of the historic Syrian state — factually speaking, about 9 million Syrians have been displaced in the fighting between the tyrant and the zealots [about 200,000 souls have been separated from life altogether]).


What I have been calling “The Islamic Small Wars” — the internecine competitions and interfaces within Muslim-majority political space running from Afghanistan to Yemen — have been wars about integrity — basic truth telling — requiring armies of poets and detectives for fighting and resolving.

Some people lie.

That’s a sad fact of life, and criminals and politicians both often draw the pointing fingers on the basis of their affiliations, ambitions, and reputations.  Less acknowledged and less stated: observations about culture-wide denial, dissimulation, false assertion, and hapless vulnerability to the beguiling and patronizing sweetness of an evil tongue.

Often, in many quarters of the world, if not most, a loyal lie may be preferred to an uncomfortable truth, for shows of loyalty may draw immediate rewards, from praise to patronage, while relaying a critical or damaging truth may be met with punishment, including that of a swift death.

Additional Reference

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-09-27/us-slams-as-offensive-abbas-speech-on-israel/5773628 – 9/27/2014

Recommended Reading

Anderston, Hans Christian.  “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” (1837).  Jean Hersholt, Translator.

Chayes, Sarah.  The Punishment of Virtue: Inside Afghanistan After the Taliban.  Penguin Press HC, 2006.

Karsh, Efraim.  Palestine Betrayed.  New Haven, Yale University Press, 2010.

Morris, Benny.  1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War.  New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008.

Phillips, Melanie.  The World Turned Upside Down: The Global Battle over God, Truth, and Power.  Encounter, Books, 2010.

Recommended Web Searches

Arafat’s invention, “Palestinian”

Gaza, rocket fire

Hamas abuses human rights
Hamas arrests protesters
Hamas, human shields
Hamas, Haniyeh, wealth
Hamas, Iran
Hamas, Mashaal, wealth
Hamas, political oppression
Hamas, Qatar

Hamas, tunnels, children
Hamas, wealth

israeli hospital services haniyeh granddaughter

Jewish Exodus from Arab Lands

Mahmoud Abbas, anti-Semitism

Psychology, gaslighting
Psychology, magical thinking
Psychology, malignant narcissism
Psychology, narcissistic mortification
Psychology, narcissistic personality disorder

Reuters, Khamenei, wealth

Syrian Civil War, Yarmouk Camp


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FTAC – On the Ideas of Genocide and War

14 Sunday Sep 2014

Posted by commart in Anti-Semitism, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Political Psychology, Politics

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anti-Semitism, genocide, language, political psychology

“X” appears here careful to avoid the misappropriation of the term “genocide”, which really refers to a categorical cultural-racial basis for the elimination of an entire people. In such a frame, the Tutsi of Rwanda were the target of genocidal Hutu mania. Similarly, the white Arab onslaughts brought against the black animists of Darfur similarly constitutes “genocide” —

http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0714/p09s02-coop.html.

The perception of “war crime” cannot hinge on carnage alone, nor some whacked out ideas about fairness in the parity of death counts. The war against war entails the destruction of one party’s will to war, or, if failing that, ability to make war. If one were to suggest that WWII was excessive in every aspect by every party in every respect, one would have difficulty arguing against that and the necessity of having in place, at least, a United Nations and an International Criminal Court. Of course, neither have proven of much use in Syria or against ISIS in Iraq, but at least we have them, and in time, we may have each other in such a way as to forestall the empowerment of personalities who lead themselves, their nations, and all surrounding into immense destruction.

Notably, the forces massed against Berlin (at the end of WWII) — and with an immense Russian force doing the honors — may suggest what it has taken in the past to eliminate the grandiose messianic will driving such war. That will, fear, drive, motivation, etc. exceeds limits, does not reason, would seem to fight to and perhaps even beyond death — and then it may work against an energy equal to its challenge and, eventually, greater than itself.


If hate were shit, and it is, a lot of people would seem to be walking around with a load in their pants.

A part of the psychology addressed in the generation of bigoted rhetoric lays out within the “paranoid delusional narcissistic reflection of motivation“.  How that becomes pattern in behavior and indicative of habits of mind, I wouldn’t hazard to guess but would suggest the language process associated with the same resides in childhood and a natural cowardice and imagination inclined to package fear borne by objects in such a way to push them away from the personal atmosphere.

I barely understand adults.

🙂

I don’t understand children.

However, to understand adults — to “get” an anti-Semite or other form of vociferous bigot — it might help to delve into the formation of language-sustained beliefs and attitudes adopted in childhood, and the coming into existence of some socially grammatical, rule-deriving, and later rule-based response to natural fears and emotional needs.

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FTAC – The Question was “Why ISIS Now?”

05 Friday Sep 2014

Posted by commart in Facsimile Bipolar Political Sociopathy, Islamic Small Wars, Political Psychology

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malignant narcissism, political psychology

I would prefer venturing a metaphysical answer, but possibly the truth is practical: modern transportation x communications plus the unrest you mention create opportunity for the loose (with energy) to be seduced and moved to the fields of battle, which battle exists primarily in correspondence with a kind of personality. Aligned with Hitler’s famous question, “Who says I am not under the special protection of God?” are so many others asserting the validity of their own cosmic favor, whether of blood or “blood and soil”, of scholarly pedigree (who studied with whom), of nationalist superiority (so the Dallas mosque appears to have traded away a Turkish imam — Yusuf Kavakci — or one recently, an American, schooled — or groomed — in KSA). As an Out There malignant narcissist, Baghdadi in his craziness chose to exceed more limits than anyone else and press his case along the political lines of the Islamic political program _as her perceives it_ by asserting a direct line of descent from Muhammad and citing every aspect of legitimacy congruent with that assertion.

In the secular version of a similar but very different story, Viktor Orban in Hungary has been laying the groundwork for an autocratic nationalist socialist regime, claiming that such an organization produces greater wealth than would a democracy (which is true when the wealth is stolen under cover of an encompassing ideology). “Khamenei-Putin-Orban” has been the line I’ve been drawing on that, and while it doesn’t make sense in terms of state interests or ends, it makes sense in personality and the desire of each to maintain their unique feudal systems.


I’m not a know-it-all.

I’m a frustrated writer who has developed a broad awareness of some things and seems to enjoy spinning out these in-a-nutshell opinions.  The part having to do with “the malignant narcissist” has held up well lo these many years; other aspects having to do with the complicity of followers and of the silent plus, at times, the genius of these loose or unhinged personalities seem to me much more troublesome.

One understands in motivation the want of greatness in one career or another, and then too one may recognize the “reparative narcissist” as well as the malignant one, but how the malignant keep sucking in their shock troops and getting their barbed wire around the lives of tens of thousands of luckless souls, from Gaza to Waziristan, only God, nature, and the universe may know.

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FTAC – Adjusted Western Engagement In the Islamic Small Wars

04 Thursday Sep 2014

Posted by commart in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology

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Tags

Islamic Small Wars, Obama's insouciance, political psychology, politics

My friends in Islam are wrestling with what to do with ISIS, and the talk is not about joining.

Some are trying to find their way between persecution as Shiites and cooperation with Sunni Kurdish Peshmerga, for example. We don’t appreciate the crevasses in multiple self-concepts (x religion x sect x nation x locality x external relationships) involved in making what are both political and personal military decisions.

By way of mistaken aggregation, simple prejudice may misguide our perception of true states of affairs.

On the Sunni side in the middle east, every stable regime plus every peaceful human subscribed by legacy now finds status divided according to the word of Baghdadi: either accept his authority as caliph to rule over all Islam or prepare for battle with his forces. The irony of that possession has a cosmic ghastliness to it: who among theocratic or clerically authorized autocrats would not claim the same favor and infallibility?

The President’s lank position, so far, is to leave the matter of becoming resolved up to Muslims involved de facto in these wars, albeit with the exception of either protecting patently American assets, as in Iraq, or encouraging the moderate among the revolutionary forces assailing Assad in Syria. If boundaries are broached, as has happened some in Israel’s Golan, then additional measures have to be taken to maintain the geographical parameter of the heavy fighting (associated terrorism in foreign lands then becomes the province of established government agencies developed to address domestic threats).

I think Obama’s play between personal engagement and insouciant disengagement is a part of his stage management: why shouldn’t the rest of the world, and as it yearns to be free, police and defend itself?


People make up their minds about the world and themselves as they go along.  Culture, experience, and information both lead and push all of us down or chosen or programmed paths, but left alone in mind, the mind has its own life and, predominantly, survival mission: it faces quandaries posed by the malignant, and often it fails and becomes the patsy or tool of the vicious; sometimes too, it rises to the occasion and takes a giant step forward from where it has been pinned by history, circumstance, and time.

Related Reference

http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2014/09/02/dont-expect-peshmerga-fighters-to-beat-the-islamic-state – 9/4/2014.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/09/04/us-mideast-israel-syria-idUSKBN0GZ1CG20140904 – 9/4/2014.

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Journalism – CNN – Brian Stelter Interviews Matti Friedman on Gaza War Coverage

02 Tuesday Sep 2014

Posted by commart in Anti-Semitism, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Islamic Small Wars, Journalism, Political Psychology

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

conflict, integrity, Israel, journalism, language, loyalty, media bias, political psychology

(9/1/2014)

Related on BackChannels: “A Comment on Anti-Semitic Reportage” – 8/26/2014.

Matti Friedman’s related article on Tablet: “An Insider’s Guide to the Most Important Story on Earth A former AP correspondent explains how and why reporters get Israel so wrong, and why it matters” — 8/26/2014.


With reference to language behavior, the Islamic Small Wars bring to observation the profound divide between the principle of loyalty at any price, starting with lying, and the principle of integrity — truth telling — at some known price, including the loss of access to power.  This arrangement works because the tyrant’s power — the power developed by the malignant narcissist — is about control based in the enforcement of fidelity to the narcissist as central to survival and the narcissist’s subsequent enjoyment thereby of limitless narcissistic supply.

Simply put: where despotism is ascendant, it is easier to live with a loyal lie than weather the consequences of telling an uncomfortable truth.

That such a form in power corrupts western institutions, i.e., as with Hamas tacit arrangements with the UNRWA that have the terrorist organizations stockpiling rockets in UNRWA schools; also as with Hamas tactics in war including the direction and inhibition of once independent journalists, appears to come about through some combination of greed (the press wants the story and is willing to settle for a constrained slice of it) and weakness (as perhaps journalists and their organizations wish to come through physically unscathed and politically in position to go out again with the same skewing constraints in place).

Such journalism may be the best practicable under a circumstance managed by Hamas, but it’s also a compromised journalism that has bought into evil,  even so, and diminished itself and made its product less trustworthy for that.

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Invaded – Ukraine’s Bad Day

29 Friday Aug 2014

Posted by commart in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Politics

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Tags

invasion, political psychology, politics, Putin, Russia, Ukraine

Colonel President Emperor Putin has placed self-propelled artillery in several locations around Ukraine’s border, and with paratroopers, among other methods, he has probed Ukraine’s and NATO’s defense reflexes.  Probably, he has found the knees weak in response to and by comparison with his ambitions.

*

As I type: Russia has launched its invasion of Ukraine beyond question.

Related:

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-28966679


Although most world leaders have not actually come out and said so, Ukraine is being invaded. That’s according to Ukrainian politicians and military officials, NATO representatives, and, privately, officials in Washington.

http://www.defenseone.com/threats/2014/08/invasion-ukraine-maps-satellite-photos-and-video/92813/ – 8/29/2014.


Mr Putin does the big lies, while his foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, trudges on a treadmill of deception that never stops. He was labouring along as usual yesterday, dismissing reports that Russian regular troops were fighting in Ukraine as “conjectures”. Not once, he continued in his po-faced way, “have any facts been presented to us”. Why Europe and America have to some extent gone along with this chicanery is not that mysterious.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/aug/29/guardian-view-on-russian-incursions-ukraine – 8/29/2014.


The presence of Russian military personnel in Ukraine is now beyond dispute, everywhere except in Russia. On Thursday, NATO released satellite imagery of Russian combat troops operating inside Ukraine’s borders, prompting mild international expressions of concern about the deteriorating situation. Russian paratroopers have been filmed discussing their operations in Ukraine. In a press conference on Wednesday, captured Russian soldiers said they entered Ukrainian territory “in convoys. Not on the roads but through the fields.”

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/119260/russias-invasion-ukraine-evidence-convincing-putin-denies


I may suggest this: the dictators Putin, Putin-Assad-Khamenei, Putin (Yanukovich yesterday, perhaps Orban tomorrow) do not come equipped with off switches or reverse gears: they will run their interior programs and scripts forward until impeded, stopped, reversed, and destroyed while their enterprises are transformed.

If enabled forward, their programs will end in the control and subjugation of others and that too, as with ISIS, will end in the destruction of humanity with unbridled sadism.

It may not look so bad at first, but cast a glance at Syria with Sochi by its side: tell me what you see.

(Russia pledged $10 million for Syrian humanitarian relief during the run up to the Olympic Games; Putin then spent $51 billion on the games).


Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday said that Crimea is “indispensable to Russia,” reminding listeners that “Russia is one of the most powerful nuclear nations.”

“This is a reality, not just words,” Putin said.

http://mashable.com/2014/08/29/putin-crimea-ukraine-invasion/ – 8/29/2014.



” . . . regulars . . . Russian troops with Russian weapons . . .” (CNN, YT poster James Nguyen – 8/29/2014).


Ukraine’s president today declared that a “Russian invasion” of his country was underway and the United Nations’ Security Council called an emergency session to discuss the latest crisis involving allegations of Russia’s overt support for Ukrainian rebels.

http://abcnews.go.com/International/russian-invasion-ukraine-prompts-emergency-meeting/story?id=25156827 – 8/29/2014.


“There is no doubt that this is not a homegrown, indigenous uprising in eastern Ukraine. The separatists are backed, trained, armed, financed by Russia,” Obama said.

Russian actions will be a main topic for the summit of NATO leaders next week in Wales, Obama said.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/russian-and-ukraine-troops-battle-in-south-prompting-fears-of-widescale-invasion/2014/08/28/04b614f4-9a6e-40f4-aa21-4f49104cf0e4_story.html – 8/28/2014.


For the bully, social interaction is all about proving himself a winner by making other people feel that they are the losers.

http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/04/vladimir-putin-narcissist/360544/ – 4/15/2014.


“Russia doesn’t make anything,” Mr. Obama went on. “Immigrants aren’t rushing to Moscow for opportunities. The life expectancy of the Russian male is around 60 years old. The population is shrinking.”

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/aug/4/obama-jabs-putin-russia-doesnt-make-anything/#ixzz3BnEF5X5T


Levada polls conducted in the second week of March show just how effective the state propaganda machine has been: A majority of Russians believe that Ukraine has no legitimate government, that Russian speakers in Ukraine are in danger and that blame for the crisis in Crimea lies squarely with Ukrainian nationalists. Only 6 percent of Russians are “definitely opposed” to a military invasion of Ukraine.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/putin-wins-in-russia-only-by-escalating-his-war-rhetoric/2014/03/14/65db1c80-ab91-11e3-98f6-8e3c562f9996_story.html – 3/14/2014.


Despite the fact that 70% of respondents admit that they do not understand, do not understand the essence of the processes taking place in Ukraine, the majority (63%) believe that “the federal Russian media as a whole or for the most part objective coverage of events taking place in Ukraine or the Crimea.

http://www.levada.ru/13-03-2014/situatsiya-v-ukraine-i-v-krymu – 3/13/2014.

Additional Reference

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-propelled_artillery

http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(14)61424-0/fulltext – 8/30/2014 – “Ukraine: health workers fear for their safety”

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-28978699 – “Ukraine to seek NATO membership, says PM Yatsenyuk. – 8/29/2014.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/checkpoint/wp/2014/08/28/nato-these-new-satellite-images-show-russian-troops-in-and-around-ukraine/ – 8/28/2014.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/reported-russian-border-incursions/2014/08/26/d940c324-2d4a-11e4-9b98-848790384093_graphic.html – 8/26/2014.

http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2014/03/11/inside-mind-vladimir-putin-russian-president-no-simple-thug/ – 3/11/2014.

 

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Link

28 Thursday Aug 2014

Posted by commart in Anti-Semitism, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Islamic Small Wars, Political Psychology, Religion

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

conflict, political psychology, politics

Kasim Hafeez understands hate. Growing up with a father who believed “Hitler was a great man whose one mistake was that he did not kill enough Jews,” the British-born Muslim of Pakistani descent has experienced firsthand how an innocent child becomes an Islamist dedicated to the death and destruction of those who are different.

Hafeez, who intended to become a Jihadist, was “saved” after reading The Case for Israel by Alan Dershowitz and then taking a trip to the Jewish State to justify his life by proving the Harvard professor wrong.

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Peace/2014/08/20/Muslim-works-with-Jews-to-save-Christians-in-the-Middle-East/ – 8/20/2014.

Aside

07 Thursday Aug 2014

Posted by commart in FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Political Psychology

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

conflict, criminality, despotism, political psychology

Our “malignant narcissists” — self-aggrandizing, grandiose, messianic personalities who prize for themselves the absolute control of others (like that dictator “Putin-Assad-Khamenei”) — work hard to script and limit the intellectual experience of their marks. They do that by producing with force (intimidation) and wealth a pervasive information environment around themselves and in foreign states an alternative press, which is really their press.


When next we see a “Gaza Flotilla” or an “Apartheid Week” demonstration, it’s worth giving some thought to the character in personality involved in the mounting of the same.

Over the past two weeks, I’ve seen coordination lists for the kind of “actions” that “make the news”.  There’s nothing spontaneous about them or actually mysterious as regards the motivations for involvement.  The argument is only about power, not actually doing anything for anyone, and just back of that argument are despots and fascists who through their rhetoric convey perhaps love and family (of a sort) to those who would and do follow them.

However, the history of the same follows a familiar program, and none should be surprised by either the accumulation of wealth or ruin brought to others attending the life of, say, a Mugabe, the junta in Burma, a Putin with a “mafia state”, a Khamenei, a Khaled Mashaal (worth billions of dollars today), and so on.

The despotic tend also to be demonic.

Assault videos posted by ISIS online become their own reflection: in essence, they put on display exactly what they look like.

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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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