The motivation of anti-Semitic thought relies deeply on lies, not only libels and slanders against the Jews (and others) but also obfuscations and omissions involving speakers and, plainly, invention involving familiar malignantly narcissistic self-aggrandizement. As people like to hide something or to get something — and sometimes what is to be hidden or gotten is small, but sometimes the shame or the theft is large — the related experience of fear, instilling it or suffering it, plays into the language and related behavior as well.
I’ve no need to repeat the lie that prompted the response. It was dismal, juvenile, scatological.
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.
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.”
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.”
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.
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.
Update: Wednesday, October 8, 2014
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
“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” —
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.”
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.
“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.
“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.”
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.
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.
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