A discriminatory, over-and-above hatred, inexplicable in its hysteria and virulence whatever justification is adduced for it; an unreasoning, deranged and as far as I can see irreversible revulsion that is poisoning everything we are supposed to believe in here – the free exchange of opinions, the clear-headedness of thinkers and teachers, the fine tracery of social interdependence we call community relations, modernity of outlook, tolerance, truth. You can taste the toxins on your tongue.
Often in the rush that comes with appreciating a well known writer’s voice on a cogent topic, I’m wont to overlook the date or catch up with that detail after posting. Not this time. February 18, 2009 — the last war involving Hamas! Same evil — same useful idiots out on the street embarked on their very own experience of that syndrome well known to the Tutsi of Rwanda: Paranoid Delusional Narcissistic Reflection of Motivation AKA “Reflection” or “Reflection in a Mirror.”
Try a hall of mirrors, for this habitual mode known well to the rank and file of the New Old Now Old Far Out and Lost Left (start with the rabid anti-Semites of the International Solidarity Movements, please) would seem well related to both the grandiose messianic delusions of malignant narcissists and the methods launched against others to get whatever it is they want, never mind that whatever they get, it’s never enough, for the damage in their souls is located elsewhere: nonetheless — flattery and patronage on one hand; intimidation, theft, and murder on the other.
And in between, “Gaslighting” with that capital “G”, i.e., the effort to produce so closed and pervasive an information environment — add an equally perverse communal group-think environment (bounded by ostracism or violence) — that their marks actually swallow their garbage.
Would that the manipulation had to do with only garbage, but these that fabricate their own “hall of mirrors” without end, who aggrandize themselves on their martyrdom of children and whole families, have ways of “taking off” that bring ruin to their worlds.
The case I make with that date and the persistent relevance of Howard Jacobson’s fine observations: what Hamas does in setting itself up and what it does to others by way of exploiting their energies and ultimately ruining their lives has to do with “habits of mind”.
Break those habits in the head suspended in cliches and tropes, and the criminality and the warring will diminish; keep them going — another six months or another sixty-six years — and they will grind down the humanity that keeps those habits in its possession.
Related from Pat Condell and posted to YouTube today:
The title’s a bit heady and long for a brief compendium and observation on a blog . . . but on with it —
Old folk wisdom: “He who points the finger at others out to point it back at himself first.”
Mea culpa: the Israelis are not perfect, but in the site of God — or perhaps just one another, open courts, and an open democracy — they keep working on becoming better children of the universe and students of the universal in humanity.
Hamas, its associates, and its fans would seem to represent a different sort of unconscionable consciousness, one always accusing, deflecting, denying, and lying, for here is a short list of egregious accidental (on purpose?) and deliberately evil behaviors that have led to the injuring and killing of hundreds of residents of Gaza.
Shifa Hospital – Hamas Headquarters
On July 15, for example, William Booth of the Washington Post wrote that the hospital “has become a de facto headquarters for Hamas leaders, who can be seen in the hallways and offices.” Back in 2006, PBS even aired a documentary showing how gunmen roam the halls of the hospital, intimidate the staff, and deny them access to protected locations within the building—where the camera crew was obviously prohibited from filming.
The station said that a “Hamas Fajr-5 rocket aimed at central Israel, which was fired from a playground outside the Shifa hospital and exploded on the site causing casualties, had at least a 100 kg (220 lbs) warhead,” according to The Times of Israel.
Reporter Nir Devori of Channel 2 and analyst Ehud Yaari confirmed the carnage was most likely the result of a failed Fajr rocket launch — aimed at central Israel.
What kind of a monster would deliberately “shield” a war room, a control room, a bunker, with a hospital of ill and injured patients above it?
Among this blog’s key terms, “Facsimile Bipolar Political Sociopathy” takes a good run at the anomic aspect of Hamas, which appears not to care about the humanity of its constituents. From that alone, whether it cares much about God either: it shouts a lot, collects and keeps hundreds of millions of dollars in the pockets of its own, and it gets other people to die for its own grandiose delusions.
___
Hamas said the explosions were a “direct” strike by Israeli drones, while Israel said they were caused by failed militant rockets. “A short while ago Al-Shifa hospital was struck by a failed rocket attack launched by Gaza terror organizations,” the IDF said in a statement, adding that “there was no Israeli military activity in the area surrounding the hospital whatsoever. “
UNRWA has admitted that a Hamas misfired rocket hit a U.N.-run school in Beit Hanoun in northern Gaza, according to Channel 2′s Ehud Ya’ari, but an errant IDF artillery shell also may have hit the facility, where Gaza sources claim an estimated 17 children and United Nations personnel were killed and 200 others were wounded Thursday afternoon.
I like my month/day/year style more than Israel’s day/year/month, but beyond that, these two items tells that the Big Media Story was suspect from near start.
The results of the IDF forensic investigation naturally follows, and while its conclusions may be displeasing to some and suspect by anti-Semites (because they are what they are), the data will be around for independent examination when the fighting concludes.
___
The preliminary report indicates that militants fired anti-tank missiles at IDF soldiers, who then responded by firing several mortars in their direction.
The preliminary inquiry and footage indicate that a single errant mortar landed in the courtyard of the UNRWA school, when it was completely empty.
The Institute for Palestine Studies published a detailed report on Gaza’s Tunnel Phenomenon in the summer of 2012. It reported that tunnel construction in Gaza has resulted in a large number of child deaths.
“At least 160 children have been killed in the tunnels, according to Hamas officials”
The author, Nicolas Pelham, explains that Hamas uses child laborers to build their terror tunnels because, “much as in Victorian coal mines, they are prized for their nimble bodies”.
But there is no Iron Dome for tunnels. The tunnels give me real pause. It’s hard enough to imagine a situation in which your neighbours are quite intentionally trying to blow up your house and kill your children with rockets. But Hamas’s well-developed kidnapping strategy represents a whole other category of depravity. The handcuffs and tranquilizers are mere baroque, Pulp Fictionish details. The core depravity of Hamas is its longstanding policy of treating every Jew as a target for elimination.
Multiple media outlets report that Hamas’s offensive tunnel network – now known to have been composed of over forty attack tunnels dug underneath Israel’s border with the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip – was set to be activated during the Jewish High Holidays (September 24th) as a mass terror attack.
The attack was meant to generate as many as ten thousand casualties, men, women and particularly children and hundreds of captives. Explosives were particularly placed underneath kindergartens to make certain that these “institutions” would be the first struck, even before any thing else.
The tunnel-building program involved 800 million tons of concrete, according to reports on the web, the deaths of 160 Palestinian children (that would seem the minimum number known), about $1 million per project, so now we’re about looking at $40 million or more dollars worth of wreckage — completely wasted Gazan money, except for those who got paid working underground — and that’s probably another dismal story about exploitation (I wonder how much line-level workers made).
Involving Hamas Earlier in Time
I would like to have seen more snap in this calmly narrated video, but the point of it is clear: a violent incident of some kind within Gaza and independent of the IDF took place, killing and wounding a “cast” reassembled on a beach and filmed for anti-Israel propaganda.
Again: where the data persists and the investigative method is empirical, the dead may well tell a different story than the malignant narcissist would have you believe.
The mentality: aggrandizing, bloodsucking greedy, unrestrained sociopaths.
The world has seen this pattern repeated around the world, and while it would seem to be waking up to it, it may not be doing so with the strongest hand, the ambitions of the venal outstripping efforts to get at them before they do real damage as has been deeply experienced in places as different as Pakistan, Somalia, and Iraq.
After the evacuation, Israel opened up border crossings to facilitate commerce. The Palestinians were also given 3,000 greenhouses which had already been producing fruit and flowers for export for many years.
But Hamas chose not to invest in schools, trade, or infrastructure. Instead, it built an extensive network of tunnels to house thousands upon thousands of rockets and weapons, including newer, sophisticated ones from Iran and Syria. All the greenhouses were destroyed.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ali-a-rizvi/post_8056_b_5602701.html – 7/28/2014. I don’t agree with the nastiness covered by political politeness in the first point (or similar ploys): “Yes, there’s an unfair and illegal occupation there, and yes, it’s a human rights disaster” — for, no, there has been no Israeli occupation of Gaza since surrendering it to the refugees in 2005: there has been only a military cordon to keep out arms (which cordon appears to have failed despite its naval blockade and inspections of overland shipping. And the same cordon has not been illegal by any internationally agreed upon basis in law. That the Arab states arrange gang-ups in the UN and such anti-Semitic spectacles as the Durban conferences is just a fact of life, but that it happens doesn’t make it right.
From the start, the induction of the Syrian revolution cum civil war seems to have been intended to weaken Iran and the threat posed by its belligerent talk in the years preceding 2011 (or so) onset of the Syrian conflict. Putin, saddled with the neglected post-Soviet relationship with Syria, got forked in what must have then seemed like a nifty move to Washington: get moderate talk from the Sunni assembly of powers and prepare “regime change” for Syria, and good ol’ Putin should go along because he backs moderation and, nominally, democracy.
Bad call.
Because Putin is himself at heart an autocrat with mafia-style kleptocratic leanings. He sees himself in his real friends, and so the dictator Putin-Assad-Khamenei was born and post-Soviet Russia vs NATO reestablished (you saw the European extension of that axis in Ukraine via Putin-Yanukovych and it resonates again in new Russo-Sino energy cooperation).
Assad — sometimes I refer to him as President Asshat — viewing Syria as his exclusive sandbox and unwilling to compromise or share power with The People — either consciously or not formed up a familiar nationalist vs extremist war (the same as Mubarak vs Brotherhood): Through the filter of “malignant narcissism” the President-for-Life and the Caliph of All Islam are the same person (different talk — same walk) and what was moderate in Syria found itself bereft of its own defenses, without anything equivalent to an experienced armed organizations, and compromised some by its own endemic anti-Semitic anti-western habits of mind, which may be changing in the Washington lobbying zone but I’m not in town to catch the latest drift before it appears on the web.
Whatever Putin’s true relationship with the Assad family may be, his declining cooperation with the west has facilitated Syria’s becoming a huge trap for those of “Islamist / terrorist” mentality, whether emanating from Iran or Saudi Arabia: within the psychology involved, which perhaps involves living too deeply within one’s own dream, the interests of the constituency at large are somewhat invisible and far from paramount.
Words are cheap, and I’m verbose.
Part of the “FTAC” concept was to preserve some thought even though its usefulness or value might be highly questionable all the way down to worthless. Nonetheless, autodidact blogging affords a more stable platform for online “chatyping” than the more ephemeral Facebook threads.
In this instant, the underlying suggestion is that since Putin made his move again separating Russian interests from western ones by pursuing an imperial idea of himself, Syria has been one hot oven over which Russia has been better able to control the tinderbox than America by resupplying the known quantity that is Bashar al-Assad.
The Syrian constituency has been decimated in various ways, but the primary actors — the brutal dictator and equally energetic Shiite and Sunni extremists — seem to be out on the landscape happily killing one another (while Hamas, fat and corrupt, sets off rockets like firecrackers, with about the same results, and has become itself an emblem of kleptocratic moral vacuity).
The Free Syrian Army (FSA) may or may not represent the “mild, moderate, and middle” of Syrian humanity (let’s also add “modern” to that too alliterative — “mild, moderate, middle, and modern” — string.
It’s much easier — too much so — seeing the evidence of mass atrocity throughout the Syrian theater than it is seeing in potential the good tidings to come of the FSA.
Seemingly, then, the only lasting effects of air strikes are civilian casualties. As a recent Washington Post editorial argues, “The latest mini-war between Israel and the Hamas movement is as unwinnable for either side as previous rounds in 2009 and 2012.”
As usual, Washington’s response to the Israeli bombardment of Gaza has been little more than justification and support of Israel’s “right to defend itself,” as exemplified by the U.S. Administration’s stock condemnation of Hamas rocket attacks on Tuesday. What White House spokesman John Earnest failed to clarify, however, is whether Palestinians are also afforded the right to protection — and who exactly Washington is expecting to provide that protection.
Evil starts with a lie, and lying has to do always with hiding something or getting something.
We may not think of failing to mention the Hamas tactic and strategy to place noncombatants between its weapons manufacturing and storage elements and the Israeli Defense Forces, but, and we call as much a “sin of omission”, that’s exactly what it is.
To even think that sacrificing families and their children to portray them as victims of so-called Israeli aggression should pull a sympathetic response from anyone in Washington — apart from the Muslim Brotherhood — seems to me breathtaking.
http://www.danielpipes.org/14574/israel-hamas-war – 7/11/2014: “What explains this role reversal? Are Islamists so fanatical that they don’t mind losing? Are Zionists too worried about loss of life to fight? / Actually, Hamas leaders are quite rational. Periodically (2006, 2008, 2012), they decide to make war on Israel knowing full well that they will lose on the military battlefield but optimistic about winning in the political arena. Israeli leaders, conversely, assume they will win militarily but fear political defeat – bad press, United Nations resolutions, and so on.”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tag/hamas-human-shields/ – 7/14/2014; http://www.huffingtonpost.com/daniel-kohn/operation-human-shield_b_157837.html – 1/14/2009: ” When terrorists use areas such as schools to teach their children hatred and use places of worship to hide and store weapons, it is IMPOSSIBLE to keep civilians safe” (note from 2009 — the last time).
http://www.americanthinker.com/2014/07/surreal_in_the_middle_east_hamass_human_shields.html – 7/14/2014: “As with previous assaults and conflicts orchestrated by an array of regional Islamic terrorist groups against Israel, not much attention is being paid to the way Hamas uses its own Palestinian citizens as human shields, or its deliberate and intentioned strikes on Israeli civilian neighborhoods and population centers.”
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-28302539 – 7/14/2014: “Palestinian officials say at least 175 people in Gaza have been killed by Israeli air strikes since the offensive began last Tuesday. / Israel says nearly 1,000 rockets have been fired from Gaza in that time.”
http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_article.php?id=18803 – 7/15/2014: “The piece, titled “Lowest deeds from loftiest heights,” disregards the extensive efforts made by the Israel Defense Forces to avoid civilian casualties in Gaza Strip, as well as Hamas’ repeated use of Gazans as human shields.”
Documentary producer Corey Gil-Shuster has a raft of clips on YouTube. I happened to be watching this one from February 2014 this afternoon and thought it might fit in here. The Islamist Muslim claim focused on the Jewish persecution of Muslims would seem to play primarily with and to the criminal, deluded, and ignorant — or some combination thereof. Are there issues? Yes. Are they civilizational? Not really. The Arab barbarism displayed by the artifice of the Palestinian liberation movement has been consistent over the years, but it would seem the liberation wanted is liberation from either a racist pan-Arab nationalism beloved of dictators or a religious fanaticism reliant on a deeply anachronistic and decontextualized approach to Islam. The refugees of 1948 have been drowned between those two political streams.
The infantile aspect of dictatorship is to view the whole world as a responsive extension to one’s own glory and power. http://www.hrw.org/news/2012/10/03/gaza-arbitrary-arrests-torture-unfair-trials The social architecture spun around the “malignant narcissist” occupies the core drive of the Islamic Small Wars in their every form, from the Brotherhood in America to the shifts in destruction wrought in Syria by the Assad regime and the assembly of opposed fanatics (of those two sets: different talk — same walk: they are of the same personality invested in their own over-the-top absolute authority).
Compression and distillation may make for good web talk but quite dissatisfying scholarly consideration.
However, our Global Awesome Conversation would seem predicated on our ability to package thought — call it “signal” — with exceptional brevity.
“The final chapter in the destruction of Hitler’s Third Reich began on April 16, 1945 when Stalin unleashed the brutal power of 20 armies, 6,300 tanks and 8,500 aircraft with the objective of crushing German resistance and capturing Berlin.”
The Japanese had the good fortune of having a religion and an emperor one step removed from battle. It took _two_ atomic bombs on top of the decimation of the state to bring the emperor to surrender a martial ambition that could not be left to fester and redevelop.
Think about these immense wars of the previous century: Germany — untold dead, rails cut, ports bombed, army defeated in area after area after area — and right to the last, until out of bullets (except two for Adolph and Eva — the last decent thing he ever did was marry and right afterward attended the double-murder, one of them his own), the Nazis fought. For Japan, battered by allied bombing raids, also pushed back, Hiroshima, where the first bomb was dropped, didn’t produced surrender. It took Nagasaki, and no one doubts that “Curtis” would have continued until nothing was left.
There’s madness in the heads of “malignant narcissists”, and some really cannot believe they’re evil or that they are losing until they’re gone, and I’m not certain even then that they’re convinced.
Hamas secures weapons in a variety of built noncombatant / non-military locations. Israel delivers warning calls and warning shots, and then what it bombs it destroys in its entirety.
Have the “bug-out bag” read and (even if without) flee: when that army comes knockin’, get out of its way.
Not coincidentally, Pakistan’s Defense Forces have been active recently in North Waziristan”
(CNN) — Pakistani troops launched a ground offensive against militants in the capital of the country’s North Waziristan area Monday, starting a new phase of a 16-day fight that has seen more than 450,000 people flee the area.
Between communities, it involves, in part, choices in the tension that may exist between principled integrity. to which all nod with affirmation at first, and loyalty, which the powerful may abuse or abuse on the way to becoming powerful (as with mafia) and to which the less powerful but prudent, either as regards ambition or survival, pay heed.
When “Caliph Ibrahim” demands acknowledgment and fealty, he is doing what criminal “godfathers” have done long, long before him and what other dictators do beside him: he emasculates and subjugates any potential rivalry (and his self-aggrandizement has but one goal: continuous narcissistic supply, but that’s another topic). The main this is his WILL rather live with a loyal lie than venture with an uncomfortable truth.
Iran has remained deeply involved in arming Hezbollah, maintaining Bashar al-Assad, which has twisty politics but all would at this point acknowledged that he’s a proven a monstrous dictator as ever existed, and smuggling to Hamas (http://freebeacon.com/national-security/israeli-ambassador-hamas-using-iranian-rockets-to-attack-israel/). The ideals of Shiite Islam may differ but the realpolitik obsessed with the development and maintenance of absolute power and control would seem to make a lie of a friendly face, loyalty being ultimately the enforced principal of this kind of power.
Time buys all of us time to visit faith and reason together — because we are in it together — and through argument and conversation approach a stance through which we may diminish or even head off what looks like a coming train wreck. While we get to work on that, some things just get worse, and there’s little we can do to influence malevolent processes running beside our own reparative ones.
I have yet to retire from this mode, but know I need to do so.
In the meantime, I may stand by my observations, starting with the notion that languages are invented or incubated and sustained in some kind of bounded space. Some may remain near pure or aged in isolation; others become complex amalgams from many streams in speech, but they’re more than merely functional and far more than the same in all but sound. Along the way, perhaps, an unhampered “cultural technology” may be its own exclusive and heady world.
With English a somewhat globalized but far from universal medium for intellectual exchange, cultural differences in belief, cognition, and social behavior may become dramatically apparent but not easily accelerated toward compatibility or resolution, and we’re in that muddy region. Part of that involves the conceptual space between feudal comprehension and the related appreciation of power and associated criminality, such absolute power being likened to mafia rule, and modern reliance — perhaps too much so — on social idealism and principle. Nonetheless, for great cause, I’d much rather live in the modern world than crawl along in the feudal one or even have at command its levers that obligate pandering and patronage on one hand while encouraging immense brutality, ruthlessness, and sadism on the other.
To cross this bridge that crosses time demands a completely new and democratized bonding that itself becomes reflected in the next politics shaping the overall experience of the human journey.
Reminder: http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/book.asp?isbn=9780300127270 & http://www.meforum.org/522/the-smoking-gun-arab-immigration-into-palestine The easy story that makes thugs of Jews and victims of innocent Palestinian, may not be the true story — and it’s not: “The Palestinians who were forced out of their homes . . . .” What about the Palestinians who fled their homes in advance of Arab columns and the promised destruction of Israel and the Jews? How is it that Arab Muslims and Christians came to comprise 20 percent of Israel’s fully enfranchised citizenry? What does one make of the camps of Lebanon, Egypt, Jordan, and Syria (yesterday’s Syria) in which Arab states have penned and manipulated and diminished the very people their armies abandoned in the field?
The prompt was the opening sentence of a bit of advice to the Palestinian leadership.
Around thugs, I suppose, it’s easier to live with a loyal lie — and attempt to live out that lie — than it is to wrestle with an uncomfortable but reliable truth.
BackChannels 