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Tag Archives: politics

Link – Anti-Semitism, Politically Malignant Narcissism, Fascist Manipulation

30 Sunday Nov 2014

Posted by commart in Anti-Semitism, Gaza Suzerain, Journalism

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

conformance, journalism, politics

In these circles, in my experience, a distaste for Israel has come to be something between an acceptable prejudice and a prerequisite for entry. I don’t mean a critical approach to Israeli policies or to the ham-fisted government currently in charge in this country, but a belief that to some extent the Jews of Israel are a symbol of the world’s ills, particularly those connected to nationalism, militarism, colonialism, and racism—an idea quickly becoming one of the central elements of the “progressive” Western zeitgeist, spreading from the European left to American college campuses and intellectuals, including journalists.

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/11/how-the-media-makes-the-israel-story/383262/ – 11/30/2014.


When it comes to Israel (and the “Joooooos”), manipulation may lay on the other side of conformance.

Related:

http://www.algemeiner.com/2014/12/01/israeli-watchdog-ngo-monitor-censored-by-ap-and-other-major-outlets/ – 12/1/2014.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2348191/EXCLUSIVE-KGB-operation-seeded-Muslim-countries-anti-American-anti-Jewish-propaganda-1970s-laying-groundwork-Islamist-terrorism-U-S-Israeli-targets.html – 6/25/2013.

Pacepa, Ion Mihai and Rychlak, Ronald J. Disinformation. Washington, D.C.: WND Books, 2013.

# # #

FTAC – Ferguson – Post-Soviet Communist Manipulation

26 Wednesday Nov 2014

Posted by commart in Anti-Semitism, Politics, United States of America

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Fergusen, hate speech, political agitation, politics

The looters are criminals operating under the cover of a political cause, which is not unlike what kleptocrats are doing when they promote anti-Semitism throughout their states. There’s plunder in sight, dead ahead!

The facts of the matter:

“For more than three months, the grand jury — made up of seven men and five women, nine white and three black — heard evidence into the shooting. They met 25 times and heard from 60 witnesses, McCulloch said. They considered charges ranging from first-degree murder to involuntary manslaughter. In a criminal trial, jurors must decide a crime has been committed beyond a reasonable doubt. But here, those jurors needed only to feel there was probable cause that Wilson had committed a crime.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/grand-jury-reaches-decision-in-case-of-ferguson-officer/2014/11/24/de48e7e4-71d7-11e4-893f-86bd390a3340_story.html – 11/25/2014.


At a 1930 Comintern conference in Moscow, a resolution was passed calling for the creation of a Soviet-controlled “Soviet Negro Republic” among America’s Southern states. That’s correct — the Soviet Comintern, working through American communists, crafted plans to create a segregated “separate Negro state” in the South. The Soviet goal was to foment an African-American uprising within the South, which, in turn, would join with a workers’ uprising in the North. When the revolution was deemed ripe, the two forces would seize and reconstitute America as a Soviet sister state.

http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2014/08/communists_descend_on_ferguson.html – 8/22/2014.


As I write, the lead piece at People’s World, the flagship publication of CPUSA and the successor to the Soviet-funded and directed Daily Worker, is a promotion to rile up the American left for a Ferguson rally this weekend.

http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2014/10/communists_continue_to_agitate_on_ferguson.html – 10/9/2014: “What’s wrong is to see communists once again cynically exploiting prayer. These folks have always despised religion. And yet, they’ve also always exploited the religious.”


Hate is an American industry.

One hopes that it is a fringe industry and, in fact, driven by foreign agitation and domestic useful idiots.  That makes it easier to more confidently (and rightly) wag the moralizing finger at a revanchist lawless Russian feudal estate pumping millions of dollars today into World Wide Web disinformation and local old line communist and poor-exploiting American agitprop.

However, a look up of the reflection that is The Occidental Observer may tell that the same appears to flourish as homegrown.  Plainly, there is an extensive body of vicious xenophobic political thought left loose in America to promote ill will toward others on the basis of creed, race, or religion.  Perhaps to the extent that either far left or right camps becomes active or growing, their reflections meet them in amplitude.


And yet, the Rev. Sharptons of the world flooded in, insisting, in effect, that Wilson was indeed guilty, and never mind the facts. (Even President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder encouraged resentment of the “injustice” perpetrated by a white police officer.)

These flame-throwers told folks to take the accusations against Wilson as fact and to protest until the day he was thrown in jail. Protest, you see, was essential — merely because a white cop had shot and killed a black teen. No other facts were needed.

http://nypost.com/2014/11/25/there-was-an-indictment-in-ferguson/ – 11/25/2014.


But, because I have lately lapsed into a clinically confirmed paranoia, instantly I wanted to know if the parading demonstrators wanted to attack Jews.

So, I watched. Sure enough, along came a chubby and disagreeable-looking young man holding a hand-made placard that said, “Ferguson = Gaza = Wounded Knee,” which I took to be an endorsement of the goals proclaimed by Hamas, the renowned anti-civil rights organization. And I continued to watch. But the young man appeared to be alone.

http://tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/187271/ferguson-on-the-hudson – 11/26/2014.


How then can we strike a balance between on the one hand reacting viscerally to the images from Ferguson, which point to the long and constantly replenished history of police assaults on black bodies, and the images of Israel’s murderous rampage in Gaza, an assault continuous with Israel’s history of oppression and persecution of an entire people, while on the other hand resisting drawing too quickly an immediate, provocative, but inexact parallel?

http://www.salon.com/2014/08/22/ferguson_and_gaza_the_definitive_study_of_how_they_are_and_are_not_similar/ – 8/22/2014.

The author delivers envenomed language in passing (” . . . Israel’s murderous rampage in Gaza . . . .”) with the confidence of a show trial’s jailer, judge, jury, and executioner.


We have so many dead black bodies in this country, Megyn, not because cops are shooting them, but because other black people are shooting them. And the left is selling a false narrative pretending that the opposite is true.

http://dailycaller.com/2014/11/25/jason-riley-on-ferguson-black-on-black-crime-issue-at-hand-its-not-about-the-cops-video/ – 11/25/2014.

Update December 15, 2014

Another reprehensible outcome, which shocked even those of us accustomed to battling anti-Israel sentiment and anti-Semitism, was that many anti-Israel activists drew parallels between the situation in Ferguson and that in Gaza, and co-opted the tragedy, joining demonstrations to push their own agenda. Sadly, the opinion that it was all part of a shared struggle gained some traction and was also shared by an NFL player recently on social media. I don’t expect that I must explain that there are absolutely no parallels between the two scenarios: Israel is not on trial, and it is especially not being put in the dock by people who seek its very destruction. These events, which have now been reinforced with a second lack of indictment in the death of Eric Garner in New York, do expose the shameless hijacking of the tragedies and struggles of other people to demonize Israel by so-called pro-Palestinian groups.

http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/the-hypocrisy-of-solidarity-gaza-to-ferguson/ – 12/15/2014 – Kasim Hafeez

# # #

Link

13 Thursday Nov 2014

Posted by commart in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

anti-Americanism, Pakistan, politics, propaganda

In fact, the present-day phenomenon in this context has become an obligatory part of populist rhetoric in which American involvement is blamed for everything — from terrorist attacks, to the energy crises, to perhaps even the outbreak of dengue fever!

“Anti-Americanism in Pakistan: A brief history”
Nadeem F. Paracha

http://www.dawn.com/news/1144214


Reading highly recommended.

FTAC – There Are Handlers . . . .

13 Thursday Nov 2014

Posted by commart in A Little Wisdom, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC, Political Psychology, Politics

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

21st Century Neo-Feudalism, despotism, feudalism, foreign affairs, politics

There are . . . “handlers”. The adversely aligned organizations are their tools. The power and wealth involved are immense — look up “Setad”; enjoy Karen Dawisha’s still new book — and the traceback from street violence to a number of palaces should start to become clear. Perhaps: confront not the UN but 21st Century Neo-Feudalism.


“Adversely aligned” to Israel, the west, rule of law, human rights, dignity, autonomy, freedom : aligned to barbarism, criminality, mafia, rule of might, and malignantly and viciously narcissistic aggrandizement.


I think N’s on the right track as regards the relationship between corruption at the top and the driving of ideological, nationalist, or religious violence in the field or on the street except where the violence is counter to political mafia and manipulation.

# # #

FTAC – Good Influence

10 Monday Nov 2014

Posted by commart in FTAC, Politics

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

politics

I’ve had mixed feelings about Tom Trento — I follow him on Facebook but have not friended him — ever since he drove up to Arab festival in Dearborn as an observer-provocateur. In response, I made friends with Dearborn mover and shaker Ron Amen; however, sigh, these far left and right alignments do not work well for me. If through “ethos, logos, and pathos” defeating one’s most strident (but reasoning) critic makes for progress, Trento is a strong critic of Islam where criticism is needed and, perhaps, reform or strong directional emphasis involving literature extant may respond to it.

“If I am not for myself, who will be for me?”

We cheerlead our own. We enjoy our fans. It’s good to have a good cultural and ethnic program and to feel good about it.

“If I am not for others, what am I?”

Helping others — other cultures and ethnic enclaves — grow into their own good program may come with the territory.

In the west, “Judeo-Christian” (+ “Greco-Roman”) alignment may be where history has delivered us.

What about everyone else?

Hillel’s Question No. 2 applies.

In the first stages of Facebook uptake — desktop computing meets broadband meets the “social network” — Qanta Ahmed asked, more or less, “What now? What do we do with this?” My response: “Good influence.”

As Jews, perhaps we talk about ourselves too much; however, we don’t conquer or proselytize but through thought. Good influence.

I’m going to add here a friend from Papua New Guinea, a nation that when the Christian ethnologists and linguists arrived supported more than 850 separate language cultures, some living within miles of one another and unaware of the existence of the neighbor.

I am personally going to turn into a “people who garden” if I can ever get into a house . . . . 🙂

I am for, at least in principle, the Baloch, the Kurds, Shiite Islam, Sufi Islam, truth-telling people wherever they are, however governed and organized, and I hope we will together say goodbye to a few more political criminals and organizations (like al-Qaeda and ISIS, like Setad in Iran, like “MoscVegas” in Russia) in my lifetime.

“With every generation, a little more freedom is won.”

I hope here that’s what we’re working on.


FTAC – Without Conscience

30 Thursday Oct 2014

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

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

conflict, ISIS, Islamic Small Wars, politics, slavery

The world that needs to do something is the world itself, and there’s plenty of it to overwhelm every corner of Islamic Jihad. However, two of the superpowers are invested in despotism themselves — China, quietly; Russia, now famously — and whether in Syria or Iraq, the middle that wished to become modern either has not had the wherewithal to power itself or, as where ISIS has penetrated, remains deeply committed to a deeply medieval script and teleology. Add some Really Big Money to the formula plus bribes and intimidation — don’t leave out the most parochial interests — and no one moves.

In the lawless, also, there is of course an ethical and moral lostness. The Qur’an read as explicit instruction and untempered by the presence of a greater human conscience affords zero navigational assistance. The black flag of piracy flies where there is no conscionable law.


The inspiration for the above comment:

They have been subjected to physical and sexual violence, including systematic rape and sex slavery. They’ve been exposed in markets in Mosul and in Raqqa, Syria, carrying price tags.

http://edition.cnn.com/2014/10/30/world/meast/isis-female-slaves/index.html

Never Again?

Wake up.

Related Reference

That the Islamic State has enslaved Yazidi women and children it captured is an established fact. For example, a United Nations report found that “300 [Yazidi] women had been forced into slavery.” Now, in its slick multi-language journal Dabiq, the terrorist group offers its theological justification for this practice.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/390390/isis-boasts-its-yazidi-slaves-daniel-pipes – 10/16/2014


But one ugly, deadly and recurrent reality check persists: genocide. Genocide has occurred so often and so uncontested in the last fifty years that an epithet more apt in describing recent events than the oft-chanted “Never Again” is in fact “Again and Again.” The gap between the promise and the practice of the last fifty years is dispiriting indeed. How can this be?

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/karadzic/genocide/neveragain.html – by Samantha Power, n.d.


“Early this morning we found those corpses and we have been told by some Islamic State militants that ‘those people are from Sahwa, who fought your brothers the Islamic State, and this is the punishment of anybody fighting Islamic State’,” an eyewitness said.

Tribal sheikhs from Albu Nimr say both sets of victims were among more than 300 men aged between 18 and 55 who were seized by Islamic State this week.

http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/content/hundreds-iraqi-tribesmen-opposed-islamic-state-found-mass-graves – 10/30/2014.

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+Political Psychology – Ayaan Hirsi Ali – Yale – September 2014

27 Monday Oct 2014

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

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, fascism, Islam, politics, religion


What follows is a casual list, this and that, slapped together while listening to the above.

Taliban: The Tip of a Holy Iceberg by Mobarak Haider

Malignant Narcissism – List of Wikipedia Primers Associated with Narcissism

Mariam Yahia Ibrahim Ishag

“How Many Islamists” by Daniel Pipes (2003)

Leaders and Their Followers in a Dangerous World: The Psychology of Political Behavior (Cornell University Press, 2004) by Jerrold M. Post

Mahmoud Mohammed Taha

Nasr Abu Zayd

Kafir

FTAC – Take Down that Wall – Comment on Intellectual Poisoning

27 Monday Oct 2014

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

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

cultural-political structure, ideology, kleptocracy, politics

Here’s a suggested schematic for the big story behind so much indoctrination. Billionaires –> nationalist / religious state dictators –> control, enforcement, and expansion organizations that include elements that attend to intellectual development and resources, internal and external.

Out of that model and through separable national socialist and Islamist pipelines come old Fatah and Hamas and emerging Jobbik (Hungary) and obvious ISIS. At the evident top: Putin-Khamenei. Behind the scenes: extraordinarily wealth personalities much enriched by criminality in state politics.

The commandeering of intellectual resources, whether targeting the kindergarten or college campus, is a part of sustaining criminal power. Where audience is captive or deeply susceptible, indoctrination and training go deep, so much so that the poison turns the world upside down. Where less area (geopolitical space) is captive, then intellectual skirmishing takes place with perhaps discouraging results.

I think a part of the answer to kind of bigotry and conflict addressed here may be to drive highest-integrity information — most open, tested, reviewed, criticized, most probable, etc. — into otherwise closed societies and the minds that have been kept closed by them. “B” may be living in a world of lies and mirrors that she cannot see for having been deeply manipulated within it. Those who wish for peace, who want an honest future (and it may be different than immediately contemplated) may have to disassemble that intellectual wall.


A racket’s a racket.

Ali Khamenei

Mojtaba Khamenei

Putin’s Kleptocracy


Gold-flecked ice cream wasn’t part of the picture that Shiite Muslim clerics painted during the Iranian Revolution, when they promised to lift the poor by distributing the country’s vast oil income equally across society.

But more than three decades later, record oil profits have brought in billions of dollars, and some people here are enjoying that decadent dessert. The trouble is, it’s just a small group of wealthy Iranians. Despite the promises of the revolution, many here say the gap between rich and poor has never seemed wider.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle-east/irans-rich-eat-ice-cream-covered-in-gold-as-poor-struggle-to-survive/2011/07/20/gIQAYKUmwI_story.html – 8/6/2011.


The economy bears more than a little resemblance to the crony capitalism that sprouted from the wreck of the Soviet Union. The 1979 revolution expropriated the assets of foreign investors and the nation’s wealthiest families; oil had long been nationalized, but the mullahs seized virtually everything else of value–banks, hotels, car and chemical companies, makers of drugs and consumer goods. What distinguishes Iran is that many of these assets were given to Islamic charitable foundations, controlled by the clerics. According to businessmen and former foundation executives, the charities now serve as slush funds for the mullahs and their supporters.

Iran has other lethal secrets besides its nuclear program, now the subject of prying international eyes. Dozens of interviews with businessmen, merchants, economists and former ministers and other top government officials reveal a picture of a dictatorship run by a shadow government that–the U.S. State Department suspects–finances terrorist groups abroad through a shadow foreign policy. Its economy is dominated by shadow business empires and its power is protected by a shadow army of enforcers.

http://www.forbes.com/global/2003/0721/024.html – 7/21/2003.


More than political criminality and cronyism are at play here.

The intellectual subjugation of entire constituencies is thematic throughout the range of the Islamic Small Wars and now in the development of a post-Hitlerian nationalism and national socialism in relation to the Russian nationalist stance on which Putin has relied for popular legitimacy.  Axes of power Khamenie-Putin and Putin-Orban (the same as would have been Putin-Yanukovych had there not been the revolution in Ukraine) and Putin-Assad represent the development and expansion of immense piratical wealth and power far at the expense of ordinary people.

So far, neither the European Union nor the United States nor anyone or anything else has gone so far as to explicate these drifts and relationships for popular overview although with Russia, the articles and books by academics and journalists have produced a handy few volumes for anyone’s home library (more on that later).

Related:

http://news.yahoo.com/bianna-golodryga-interviews-garry-kasparov-093317385.html – 9/30/2014.

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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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