09 Thursday Oct 2014
Posted in International Development
Tags
Posted on YouTube 10/1/2014)
Althought Vice Ambassador Deek addresses the Palestinians at about 10:30 on the clip, what he has to say of the middle east and its migrations sets the stage for that.
Transcript online at “med Israel for fred”.
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07 Tuesday Oct 2014
Tags
political, political absolutism, political psychology, political sadism, politics, Rayhaneh Jabbari
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.
Fox News journalist Lisa Daftari has maintained a page on Rayhaneh Jabbari.
Reuters has had online great coverage of the (often stolen) “Assets of the Ayatollah”.
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.”
http://www.foxnews.com/world/2013/01/28/inside-evin-look-at-world-most-notorious-political-prison/ – 1/23/2013.
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.”
http://www.foxnews.com/world/2014/10/02/execution-iranian-woman-accused-killing-attacker-back-on-says-mom/ – 10/2/1013.
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.
http://www.latimes.com/world/middleeast/la-fg-iranian-woman-death-penalty-20141006-story.html – 10/7/2014.
Is there really hope in that story?
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.
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.
http://www.dw.de/the-last-word-in-iranian-justice-revenge/a-17982603 – 8/3/2014.
IF Sarbandi is but an alleged rapist, how can Rayaneh Jabbari be other than an alleged murderess?
There is no justice Ayatollah Khamenei’s Iran, only darkness and capricious and sadistic raw power.
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01 Wednesday Oct 2014
” . . . agents of Iranian security guard have transferred Mr. Kazemeini Boroujerdi to an unknown place in order to execute him soon.”
http://www.bamazadi.org/2014/10/mrboroujerdi-was-transferred-to-unknown.html#more – 10/1/2014
He reportedly first expressed his opposition to the theocratic nature of the Islamic government of Iran under which Islamic jurists rule or provide “guardianship” in 1994. He has been quoted as saying Iranians “are loyal to the fundamentals of the true religion and the Prophet’s mission”, but are “tired of the religion of politics and political slogans.”[1]
Boroujerdi and many of his followers were arrested in Tehran on October 8, 2006, following a clash between police and hundreds of his followers. Iranian officials charged him with having claimed to be a representative of Muhammad al-Mahdi, a venerated figure in Shi’i Islam, a charge he denies.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hossein_Kazemeyni_Boroujerdi – as viewed 10/1/2014.
I have been told there are others today in similar danger to Boroujerdi and Jabbari.
One may recall here that the (malignant) narcissist is never wrong — or so sensitive to criticism as to suppress as much of that as possible. In the medieval mode in which Ayatollah Khamenei exists, this sort of thing, a combination of rivalry accompanied by excoriating observations, may have been what compelled the Grand Ayatollah to push another ayatollah off stage:
Of course, you were correct when you said that international sanctions could not accomplish a damn thing! Not only because you and your cronies and support system in general, suffered no setback; your provinces of Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and Bahrain also weren’t bothered, because they blatantly looted and pillaged the God given wealth and natural resources of our defenseless nation and laughed their way to the bank, while stripping them of their economic independence and their will to think freely.
You have filled these thirty five years of contemporary history with your disgrace and deceit; and the names and memories of the sons of Iran have been written in blood which is the legacy of an antiquated dictatorship that operates in the dark ages.
http://www.bamazadi.org/2014/05/kazemeini-boroujerdi-to-khamenei-it-is.html – 5/19/2014.
Words are eternal in several ways.
Installed in books, they have shelf lives.
Installed in minds, they have a life in memory.
Uttered in politics, even if not remembered, they may develop influence, which may prove more powerful than mere encrustation in ink as thoughts take on lives of their own, passing from mouth to ear to mind to heart, one from the other, again and again, across the world and possibly out into the universe to God’s own ears.
That’s influence.
http://www.reuters.com/investigates/iran/#article/part1 – 11/11/2013
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27 Saturday Sep 2014
The foreign assault on western intellectual assets and channels hardly looks an assault: it arrives with money, lots of it, and funds primary academic and media jobs that in turn boost portions of the economies of the open democracies. Although in the United States that spending may look like Washington-business-as-usual, the yellow flags are going up. Mainstream journalists and conservative intellectuals have found cause to revisit foreign state interests and related facilities and research grant funding only superficially intended to foster greater depth with integrity in the key policy analyses by the hires that benefit from those paychecks.
Related excerpts follow with the post capped by a 25-minute talk by Mitchel Bard on his findings related to influence from the middle east.
More than a dozen prominent Washington research groups have received tens of millions of dollars from foreign governments in recent years while pushing United States government officials to adopt policies that often reflect the donors’ priorities, an investigation by The New York Times has found.
The money is increasingly transforming the once-staid think-tank world into a muscular arm of foreign governments’ lobbying in Washington. And it has set off troubling questions about intellectual freedom: Some scholars say they have been pressured to reach conclusions friendly to the government financing the research.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/07/us/politics/foreign-powers-buy-influence-at-think-tanks.html – 9/6/2014.
Let Brookings take Qatar’s money—or Russia’s, or China’s, or Burma’s, or Saudi Arabia’s—if it wants. But make them own it. Make them disclose it.
http://freebeacon.com/columns/this-is-not-what-democracy-looks-like/ – 9/19/2014
The Times article exposed — astonishingly — the corruption of liberal establishments such as the Brookings Institution, the Center for American Progress, and the National Democratic Institute. How honest, honorable, and unexpected from a newspaper that has become the nation’s billboard for unthinking liberal bromides. Conversely, the exposé found not a penny going to conservative institutions such as the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and the Hudson Institute.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/387939/think-tanks-sale-or-rent-daniel-pipes – 9/15/2014.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Agents_Registration_Act
Bard, Mitchel. The Arab Lobby. Broadside Books, 2011.
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27 Saturday Sep 2014
Freedom of speech is nowhere completely free. The law excludes conspiracy and incitement to commit crimes, or, as with shouting “Fire!” in a crowded theater, to produce mayhem. In wartime, and a part of Islam seems committed to warring continuously with the west, democratic and open societies may also choose to outlaw seditious speech while tightening up on that traitorous speech related to spying.
As Choudary believes himself Muslim, as do the host of Brotherhood and Hezbollah elements, he speaks as if Muslim while embracing a regressive and retrograde agenda for all others. I doubt his case will produce much sympathy, if any, outside of Islamic circles.
While one may swear to defend to the death disagreeable political speech, the threat of imminent death associated with the speaker’s rant may draw the limit on that that principle and sentiment.
All the men were held on suspicion of being a member of, or backing a banned terrorist group and supporting terrorism. The alleged offences, which come under two counter- terrorism acts, carry a maximum penalty of seven years’ imprisonment.
Choudary was arrested at an unknown location after fleeing his home two weeks ago in the middle of the night in the wake of threats from far-Right groups.
Just hours before he was held, he posted a burst of nine inflammatory messages on Twitter, branding the US bombing raids as a ‘rallying call for Muslims’ and labelling the actions of Western governments in Muslim countries as ‘terrorism’.
We will probably hear in relation to Choudary’s arrest the same sociopathic cant reserved for Aafia Siddiqui, by temperament a different kind of plotter but with much the same destruction, hate, and mayhem in mind.
http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/sep/26/anjem-choudary-released-on-bail – 9/26/2014.
Not to make light of court decisions made between fair modern British law and a feudal demagogue and rabble-rouser, perhaps the Crown has done right by treating Choudary no differently than anyone else.
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12 Friday Sep 2014
The foundations of the invisible wall surrounding Assad start about here:
“In a gloomy interrogation room the children were beaten and bloodied, burned and had their fingernails pulled out by grown men working for a regime whose unchecked brutality appears increasingly to be sowing the seeds of its undoing.”
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/middle-east/110423/syria-assad-protests-daraa
And then it builds to about here:
“But there is something legitimately scary about the weapon’s do-it-yourself ethos and its new systematic deployment against the neighborhoods of Aleppo. It speaks to the regime’s single-minded focus on finding new ways to kill, its narrow and obsessive pursuit of mayhem and destruction as seemingly official strategy in the conflict that has run for nearly three years now.”
Being a merely “bloody dictator” in a conflict cauldron that has in it argument over despotism, democracy, egotism, goodness, God, morality, and narcissism (finally) is not merely a bad position.
The condemnation backed by astounding imagery and numbers to match may not be overcome with exigent maneuvering.
I know: faced with Hitler, one might be eager to bargain with Stalin.
Call that yesterday.
This day with Assad having produced a war that has brought al-Qaeda affiliates and such to his doorstep and that has incubated and loosed ISIS on the world, may be different.
How happy should one be to be led by Assad today?
That’s not my question to answer. It’s a question for Syrians to answer for themselves in whatever condition and place the war now finds them.
If “Assad or Burn It” was the slogan, it has been working a long time, and once burned — in whatever portion — what then?
What now?
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11 Thursday Sep 2014
One may differentiate between casual audience comfortable with the world it knows and humanist-intellectual audience with amateur or professional background and buy-in with regard to shaping the next world.
If you are here, you are either between those broad classes or in the latter, and if there’s even just a tiny bit of appropriate education or training back there, then you may be trusted to read critically, to both demand and sift data, to argue about dimensions and variables with a subject of interest, to engage in introspection and reflection as well as judgment, and to think broadly about what would be helpful — anthropologically, ethnographically, evolutionary — in the creation of a greater, more peaceful, more progressive global commune.
The prompt was a piece in Honest Reporting about pandering.
Pandering is a form in lying predicated on the enforcement of loyalty by the panderer. The seminal fairy tale that is “The Emperor’s New Clothes” applies; it really is not a favor to be told how brave, glorious, and self-sacrificing one is by a personality inclined to sacrifice you in the interest of their own aggrandizement and unbridled glorification.
With the review of media coverage of the latest war in Gaza, the political skewing of the news devolves both to overt Hamas intimidation of the press and the reluctance of the same to either give up a story or taint the same with an acknowledgment of the compromise of their integrity.
Compromised journalism comprises its casual audience.
As suggested at the top of this post, not all audience is casual. In fact, while a vast global intelligentsia has come into being with the development of the World Wide Web — the numbers may be low but the distribution must certainly be global — a large analytical class has also been present in the world either with partisan loyalties or greater humanist and spiritual motives. From the “desk analysts” of national security bureaus to the latest in NGO do-gooders, there are plenty of readers who read for data and the arguably most accurate picture they may obtain from the same. While some things lend themselves to a technocratic objectivity, from conventional defense arrangements to road building coupled with economic development, other themes require a broadened vision of humanity — that “anthropolitical psychology” I’ve mentioned on this blog — and also a world of poetry and consideration for the remaining 7,000 or so living languages in the contemporary human inventory and the cultures and individuals suspended in them in time.
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04 Thursday Sep 2014
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.
http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2014/09/02/dont-expect-peshmerga-fighters-to-beat-the-islamic-state – 9/4/2014.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/09/04/us-mideast-israel-syria-idUSKBN0GZ1CG20140904 – 9/4/2014.
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