23 Monday Jun 2014
Iraqi Kurdish President Massoud Barzani gave his strongest-ever indication on Monday that his region would seek formal independence from the rest of Iraq.
22 Sunday Jun 2014
People, eventually will unite against any form of tyranny and dictatorship, be it religious fanaticism or other forms- as they did against puritans and the dictatorial rule of Oliver Cromwell, who was known as : a self-styled Puritan Moses-in England, the copy of which exists in Iran, the so called Khamenei; who ironically refers to himself as Supreme actually, and so on. However, it is the actual people of a country themselves that have to bring about and cause a democratic government rather than an outside force. This might be the main reason for people criticizing America, or any other country’s role for that matter, in terms of interfering in their internal affairs. Many Iranians, on the other hand, and here’s the irony; actually criticize America and other countries silence during the bloody green revolution that took place in Iran a decade ago and was against the tyranny of Ahmadinejad. They see America’s indifference to that secular movement as a green light to the continuation of the so called Islamic regime, which is not far from truth.
A big thank-you to my social network friend Tanit Nima Tinat.
My two-cent riff in reply —
The assumption that “regime change” and revolution may in order would seem to include the presumption that the change brought is what the people really wanted.
Americans have repeatedly given “blood and treasure” in the name of democracy and freedom for others, but once produced, whether in Iraq or in Afghanistan, it would seem up to The People and their own ethical and moral backbone to secure benefits obtained.
That may sound good to the ears, but the realpolitik of place includes themes not addressed by merely taking down a government.
Whether one speaks of Hamid Kharzai in Afghanistan or Nouri al-Maliki in Iraq, one confronts the sways of loyalties against the possession of integrity and merit, and the resulting nepotism undermines “equality, fraternity, and liberty” — and security most of all.
In the people, one also encounters various attitudes toward authority, which in the west turns up often skeptical and questioning, but elsewhere may be cowed or ingrained when it comes to obedience before the powerful. Such observation brings up the arch comment, “With democracy, people get the government they deserve!”
Of course, from the perspective of Christian-Greco-Judeo-Roman esprit, people may get worse than what they might be supposed to deserve. Some Germans may have well deserved Hitler, for example, but what Hitler brought to Germany and what Germans were made to suffer at his hands and then at the hands of the enemies made sails beyond comprehension.
And what to do about The People, many for whom the cleric’s words are yet today received as if from God Almighty himself?
Such faith — or fear, laziness, or weakness — makes obedience blind.
Note: in the Torah, while God sets out a test for Abraham, the purpose of the test is never defined, and the vaunted “test of obedience” may well have been equally a more a “test of conscience”, which Abraham fails.
Divine infallibility — caliphate, empire, kingdom, or papacy — ought to be left to just one indefinable, unreachable, irreducible, nearly inconceivable entity or symbol: God.
All else — and all others — are mortal.
If a constituency must assert, declare, and support a divine alliance and avatar with taxes, then perhaps too it should keep itself invested in its own freedom of conscience and armed with countervailing power as well.
Earlier today on Twitter, I asked in regard to Syria’s agony, “Who defended the humanity in the middle?”
Bashar al-Assad had an army; the al-Qaeda affiliates are armies: who was there to defend the interests of the happy homeowner?
For a while now, I’ve suggested that for the purposes of analytical political psychology, Bashar al-Assad and al-Nusra in Syria are of the same malignantly narcissistic personality: different talk — same walk.
With ISIS on the move in Iraq, the ability to entertain and perhaps recognize this thesis may be crucial to the future economic and spiritual well being of the large population beset with murderous forces all around them.
In effect the Islamic Small Wars may be reduced to the The Despotic vs The Democratic — and in realpolitik, absolutists and extremists against everyone else.
Whatever the despots win, they really do not give a shit about anyone, much less everyone, else. In fact, everyone else exists to serve them, adore them, aggrandize them. die for them, and generally keep them (and their families and favored old friends) in wealth and power beyond measure.
Remember: they are the dictator Putin-Assad-Khamenei, and together they are defending absolutism.
ISIS is defending that too.
Where the people have bought into what those people are selling, they’re done.
# # #
09 Monday Jun 2014
Related: U.S. Department of State. “Foreign Military Financing Account Summary.” Current
The United States has provided economic and military aid, respectively, to Jordan since 1951 and 1957. Total U.S. aid to Jordan through FY2013 amounted to approximately $13.83 billion. Levels of aid have fluctuated, increasing in response to threats faced by Jordan and decreasing during periods featuring political differences or reductions of aid worldwide. On September 22, 2008, the U.S. and Jordanian governments reached an agreement whereby the United States agreed to provide a total of $660 million in annual foreign assistance to Jordan over a five-year period, ending with FY2014. In the year ahead, both parties may try to reach a new five-year aid deal.
Under President Barack Obama-who seeks to expand PA paramilitary units-the United States has pledged to continue to pour hundreds of millions of dollars a year into Abbas’ coffers, with large sums dedicated to the security forces. This is despite objections from Congress and appeals by Palestinian human rights organizations. Obama has exercised waivers to continue to fund the PA security forces.
Bedein, David. “On the Brink: Decline of U.S. trained Palestinian Security Forces.” January 9, 2013
The unspoken truth is that the Palestinians, the country’s largest ethnic group, have developed a profound hatred of the regime and view the Hashemites as occupiers of eastern Palestine—intruders rather than legitimate rulers. This, in turn, makes a regime change in Jordan more likely than ever. Such a change, however, would not only be confined to the toppling of yet another Arab despot but would also open the door to the only viable peace solution—and one that has effectively existed for quite some time: a Palestinian state in Jordan.
Zahran, Mudar. “Jordan is Palestinian.” Middle East Quarterly, Winter 2012.
Coffman, Tamara. “The Obama Administration’s Middle East Policy.” Brookings, June 8, 2014.
# # #
06 Friday Jun 2014
These are the pages banned by PTA in collaboration with FB.
BackChannel’s source.
I asked my source for a top half-dozen elements blocked (filtered out) by Pakistan’s government with the complicity of the common carrier Facebook — generally liberal progressive organizations or personalities and their pages. The following is what he reported.
______
Laal (Red)
https://www.facebook.com/laalpak; https://www.youtube.com/user/Laalpakistan Breaking news: http://tribune.com.pk/story/718314/facebook-blocks-page-of-laal-rock-band-at-govt-request/ The screen capture posted below seems to indicate that whatever Pakistan’s GeoTV was carrying for “Laal”, it’s not available at the desktop.
Screen capture, Google search, Laal, Band.
Roshni (light/luminescence)
(May 9, 2013):
PTA bans Roshni – Pakistan’s most popular progressive Urdu FB page
;
Taliban Are Zaaliman (Tyrants)
Screen capture: Taliban is Zaliman post on PTA censorship. Read it and weep.
Bhensa (Buffalo)
“It is basically a satirical page which uses satire to hit religious orthodoxy and terrorist outfits,” says my source:
Saeen
Tip source: “OMG. Saeen has been taken down second time in 2 days.”
I reminded the source that the censorship may have blocked the site.
🙂
On trust, I’m leaving “Saeen” in even though I’m not certain what “Saeen” is may be, is, or was. It’s enough to know that something with a name, probably good, liberal, good natured, helpful, has been censored and intimidated by the State of Pakistan through the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority with the imprimatur of Dr. Syed Ismail Shah, who himself seems in “webpression” quite progressive himself (at the bottom of this post, you may see and hear him speak).
Zalaan
On Twitter as I type:
Lashkr e Bhangvi (a parody of LeJ)
https://www.facebook.com/LashkareBhangvi;
______
“Ministerial Programme 2014 interview with Syed Ismail Shah, Chairman of Pakistan regulator PTA.”
______
Nature abhors monocultures and encourages variance and adaptability all the way through. What is true in biology with regard to basic structures and their differentiation and elaboration in nature may be true also of the intellectual development of our gregarious species. I remind conversational partners often that our small planet supports an inventory of about 7,000 living languages, each one of them approaching, inventing, and seeing the world surrounding and the speaker speaking a little differently. With some trims for the survivability of the greater humanity, we should, imho, love and preserve as much of that thought as we may while with mind in mind also dancing and encouraging creativity, new invention, and altogether a more robust humanity.
# # #
02 Friday May 2014
Tags
Had the military in all its might been out there to punish or kill, the death toll would have been in the hundreds of thousands, period!
That is really all anyone needs to understand.
After weeks of pleading with the Morsi’s supporters to call it a day and join in as a possible element of the proposed solution to prevent a repeat of Syria ever taking place in Egypt, it all fell on deaf ears.
Egyptian writer Naima Nas had caught me in a stupid lie this morning on Facebook: a buddy in New Zealand had posted on the site a photograph of a half naked man being dragged through the streets with his ankles tied and hitched behind a motorbike in some godforsaken middle eastern context. Someone had drawn with a red pen a circle around the motorbike rider’s face and assigned the image to counterrevolutionary barbarism during the Second Egyptian Revolution, that which brought down President Mohamed Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood regime.
The message implicit in the promotion of the picture: the biker was the kind of bad dude apprehended by the Egyptian military and placed on the receiving end of recent mass death penalty decisions summarily doled out by Egyptian courts.
One problem: the photograph appears to have originated with an Hamas-oriented biker gang in relation to the execution of half a dozen persons suspected of spying for Israel (to see the series, web search “man dragged by motorbike, Gaza”).
I apologized for my too rapid “view-like-share” routine on Facebook that inadvertently promoted propaganda.
Apology accepted.
Here in the new neojournalism of the blogosphere, both informal pass-along and more considered analysis rely on mediated data — not what the writer-blogger-tweeter saw happen in the street, but what he saw of a recording of what happened in the street.
The difference between “being there” and almost being there through media is immense.
With observations like that in mind, I offered Ms. Nas, an Egyptian writing today from the United Kingdom, space on BackChannels. She knows her homeland, and while she may travel from it at times, it remains where she lives.
The latest a few hours ago dated from August 17 last year, so I suggested an update on the revolution to repair the revolution. The rapidly supplied response follows (edited heavily for look, lightly for voice, and otherwise left alone), and I’ve included an excerpt from the August piece as well.
____________
So What is Going on Now in Egypt?
by Naima Nas May 2, 2014 ______The disagreement between Egyptians as pro coup and anti coup intensifies.
It was not a coup but anyway! The human right activists despair. The number of suspects guilty or otherwise increases. The world leaders sway between support and condemnation. Etc, etc etc!
The only common denominator in all this, are the Egyptians whose lives are getting worse than terrible: the poor street vendors who just want to get through the day with enough to feed their children; the parents who are terrified to send their children to school in areas that have turned into a circus; the old pensioners who can’t afford to be knocked down in a crowd; and the women who are scared silly of being any where near a crowd.
I won’t bore you with what the reality of living in Egypt through hard times means and I will be very brief.
Yes, the intervention of the military in July was not an approved democratic procedure.
Yes, mature and real democracies have a process in place as an alternative to a strong group taking control. No, that was not an option in Egypt in July. And no, the military did not impose the situation.
The majority of Egyptians had had enough and needed the protection,from one another other if needs be.
And the military is the only one we trust with such a mission.
Had the military in all its might been out there to punish or kill, the death toll would have been in the hundreds of thousands, period!
That is really all anyone needs to understand.
After weeks of pleading with the Morsi’s supporters to call it a day and join in as possible element of the proposed solution to prevent a repeat of Syria ever taking place in Egypt, it all fell on deaf ears. With a nation paralised from the neck down there really was no option but to enforce an end of the weeks-long stand still.
The rest really is commentary, each tragic day leading to another.
We can spend hours listing who did what, when, to whom, and how, but that would be a waste of time.
The short version is this: it needs to stop.
The country needs to start functioning again, recover, and rebuild.
That requires a strong and trusted leadership that can inspire everyone.
No, I did not wish the presidency on the Sisi.
It is not a gift, it is an all consuming burden. Yes, we did beg him to take it on and thank God he did agree. You dont have to like him, you dont have to agree with me either, but you should understand that is/will be our choice.
Yes there are many people who do not agree with that; however, whatever the reason for disagreement is, the view is limited.
It is only with a bird’s eye view that Egypt can make sense — and the bird’s eye view is simply this: we cannot afford a civil war; we cannot afford another non-productive day; and we cannot afford the tailor made reports designed to shock the world over the “human rights” of one person when it suits, ignoring the human right of millions in the blind spot.
Negative!
Sorry!
So what now?
Well it is exams season, so how about the students go home and study something, the unemployed pick up a brush and clean something, the skilled, pick up a tool and fix something, and the rest of us will see if we can ask for amnesty for all whose hands are not still dripping with blood.
We need to get back on track, not with more protests but with work.
Egyptians have a lot of work to do, and none of it will be done in a permanent state of revolution.
It is simply not sustainable.
It is time to stop shouting and start doing.
And that is what is going on in Egypt.
___________
. . . . Millions –actual millions- of Egyptians were in the streets on the 30th of June 2013 effectively putting an end to the existing government.
–“That is not very democratic”
–“They are not allowed to do that” many decreed.
Well guess what?
They, the Egyptian People, did it!
They exercised their right to take back the power they surrendered via an election box, sealed it with an even larger number authorizing a new representative, and in doing so they added a brand new chapter to the book on democracy, a chapter the west is still debating whether or not it should be added.
Take your time there is no rush!
Now the paradox: we the Egyptians were –subconsciously at least- inspired by a tiny detail the government relied upon when attempting to rule, a very small point in Islamic/Eastern Law.
Now you are really confused!?
Let me explain: the same principle that forbids revolt against a fair and just ruler does permit the refusal to obey if the majority agrees he is neither fair nor just. The majority of Egyptians are Muslims who have understood that on a very deep level. And here is the icing on this exquisite cake. Amongst that majority there is a significant minority that is not Muslim yet still very Eastern and very Egyptian possibly even more Egyptian: our Coptic brothers. Their lives were not getting any better under that farcical performance, nor was it going to, so they hardly needed convincing. The outcome was possibly the most democratic action in a modern nation, as you have never seen before.
# # #
14 Monday Apr 2014
Tags
autocracy, dictatorship, Islam, narcissism, political, politics, theocracy
In Egypt, the government that “came to power in a fair election” represented the only party with a program at the time, such had been the character of Mubarak’s suppression of all political competition, and, indeed, it proved its identity in values by immediate rewriting the state’s constitution to serve its own most undemocratic ends. Notably, it not only maintained Mubarak’s torture chambers but made them its own.
While “the problem” may be labeled “authoritarianism” and attention deflected away from Islam thereby, the primary driver in both unconstrained military and theocratic ambition has been “malignant narcissism” AKA “political narcissism” AKA “civilizational narcissism”. In individuals diagnosed with “narcissistic personality disorder” the signal that is “grandiose messianic delusion” may be quite distinct; in politicians, the same in personality may be recognized too late or — as happens with dictators, secular or religious — abetted by the “gonna get something” mentality of their followers plus the naturally strident and normal narcissism of youth.
Result: ih conflict, the same mentality playing on both sides of the table (“different talk; same walk”).
Against both, the middle in humanity — sometimes I call that the “humanity of humanity” — needs to assert or reassert its interests, and that would seem to involve a unique struggle but one familiar to many of many religions: the revolution on the outside may need to be matched by another within the heart.
Inspiration for the above note: Rodrik, Dani. “The Problem is Authoritarianism, Not Islam.” World Affairs, August 12, 2013.
Q: Why narcissism?
A: Narcissistic mortification.
Causes and encouragements are more probably multivariate regarding contributing factors in producing, say, an actor-producer-director of a personality and a contemporary monster like the dictator Putin-Assad-Khamenei, which is not to suggest that all of their counterparts opposite their position in Syria are honky dory either.
In any case, Dani Rocrick’s essay well covers the “all-for-all” character of the open democracies, the Musketeer quality of my paraphrase extending easily from “government of the people, by the people, for the people.” However, as if with a sharp plane, he criticizes the authoritarianism on the surface of governance associated with the Muslim-majority states.
It may be noted of BackChannels that while I give portion of the “Islamic Small Wars” attention, such as the junta in Burma, Paul Biya in Cameroon, and Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe are never far from mind either, nor for that matter at this time is Russia’s President Putin, who appears to have been hastened along his predictable track by his commitment to Bashar al-Assad in the Syrian Civil War. “Washington” as if it had a mind rather than contained a collection of such, may have thought that Putin representing Russia’s interests in the middle east would have no investment in Ayatollah Khamenei’s client state and platform for Hezbollah, but it turns out that what Putin, Assad, and Khamenei value most are their respective positions as absolute authorities, achieved or in ambition, in each of their states. That quality also provides a political basis for greater cooperation between China and Russia.
Where fits Muhammad in this?
Approaching the eve of Passover today, some may be reminded that, “So We took retribution from them, and We drowned them in the sea because they denied Our signs and were heedless of them” (Quran 7:136).
Who is “We”?
The Jewish mythos acknowledges God alone as having parted the Red Sea with Moses as merely a leader: “Then Moses stretched out his hand over the sea, and all that night the Lord drove the sea back with a strong east wind and turned it into dry land. The waters were divided . . . . ” (Exodus 14:21).
Repeat: ” . . . all that night the Lord drove the sea back with a strong east wind . . . .”
Moses, recruited by God in the first place, speaking to Pharaoh as intermediary for God (for it would not do for God to speak to Pharaoh, Pharaoh having confused himself with God), and, by God’s will, leading the Jewish People and a “mixed multitude” down to the sea, may have in “Abracadabra” fashion reached out a foot or two over the lapping tide, but the language doesn’t change as regards who’s Boss, from beginning to the end, alpha-omega, and Who, exactly, “turned it into dry land”.
# # #
14 Monday Apr 2014
Tags
The Kremlin has returned to the criminal abuse of language in its effort to renew animus with the west and line its oligarch’s pockets with the proceeds attending conflict and contemplated conquest. Basically, the “Vertical of Power” has resuscitated Russian Imperialism.
Inspiration for the comment: an article on Chinese-Russian energy cooperation, which would seem out of left field given plenty of motivation by way of news out of Ukraine and Syria; however, in the back channel behind the back channel (are back channels recursive?), stands the unexplored thesis that the two great superpower dictatorships, Russia and China, understand one another better than they do their treacherous democratic open society partner on the Security Council.
Of course, the two mobsters are going to cut deals to cut out the nice guy.
This BackChannels blog signal travels to at least 112 nations, which provides me with a unique opportunity to pose a challenging question in development and with interest in improvement in the qualities of living across geopolitical space: choose, oh distant reader, how you wish to live: subjugated to economic and political elites whose judgment is capricious and powers strong enough to bend laws to suit their acquisitive, controlling, and unhealthily narcissistic wills? Or as constituent participants in governments possessed of greater integrity and capable of open public policy and law formulation subject to public or citizen’s audit?
With now state-controlled media and lots of propaganda money spread through the New Old Now Old and Far Out Left, Putin’s Russia will attempt to exploit language to produce renewed anti-American, anti-“western” (i.e., specifically pro-dictatorship) animus and xenophobia.
For the record here, the author of this blog enjoys zero (zilch, nada) political funding, and the only funding I may really want — not that I don’t need money — would be open online journalism or research grant money. In the universe of institutions, genuinely independent writers, research analysts, and scholars may be made to suffer — I know of no roof today beneath which to seek shelter — but the charm that comes with that fragility is intellectual freedom, a prize without price considering what media mercenaries have demonstrated do for the most tainted of paychecks.
I’ll go a little further to note than I am not the happiest of Americans in acknowledging the role Big Money plays in lobbying for laws and influencing Federal policy, but if, when, and where I may have specific complaint, I have confidence in my being able to research and write about the matter beholden to none and otherwise unfettered.
# # #
14 Monday Apr 2014
The teacher apologized forthrightly, promptly. Why persecute? How small should one wish to be? How limited a freedom (over arch and dark humor) in speech should we want? It would be hard criticizing Muslims, some of whom heralded the muzzling of Ayaan Hirsi Ali via a Brandeis executive decision last week, for touchiness if Jews (or some) were to be as miserably passive-aggressive and absent of the wherewithal to joust and riposte.
Inspiration for the observation: “‘I’ll send you to one of your gas chambers’, teacher tells Jewish student.” Metro, April 13, 2014.
One Facebooker wrote, “she should be fired!”
No, the teacher should not be fired.
The English language needs her right where she is.
I’d rather parry with a sharp tongue than weather the company of a humorless smiling always “PC” eduzombie.
# # #
BackChannels 