“It isn’t healthy to get so sensitive over words.” Actually: opposite, Hatem Ade, because language is what has brought us (from secret group to global society in perhaps concentric circles) to this pass. There are so many directions to go as regards “words have a power”, but let me suggest this distillation: language is a natural human behavior; it is a cultural invention that abets survival within the bounds of each language society; and the cultural invention becomes a cultural suspension.
We literally live in language.
Every autocrat — malignant narcissist, political cabal — understands the primacy that language has in their ascent to power and their remaining in power, and not one of the type fails to overlook the information atmosphere in which their people — their subjects or subjugated people (eventually, it’s up to the people to decide which they are) — exist.
The above premise is never far from thought in every piece on this blog.
It’s there in the mention that the Islamic Small Wars are chiefly about integrity (and it is not okay to lie either to Muslims through patronizing speech or non-Muslims in deceitful speech).
It’s there in the idea that political reports from despotic regime (and their state-controlled media) must be greeted with deep skepticism because the political purposes of powerful controllers and influencing agents naturally corrupt the gathering and expression of observation sensitive to such interests.
It’s there in the notion that the generational transmission of language includes a “social grammar”, i.e., quietly discerned and internalized social rules about speech and what works in relation to needs and what might be met with cuffing.
For a long time now, I have quipped about “the dictator Putin-Assad-Khamenei: together they are defending political absolutism.”
With the Russian foray into Ukraine, it appears that intuition may have steered me straight; however, taking that same intuition a step further, I wonder if the top theokleptocrat in Iran may not be holding the greater hand in global sway.
BackChannels may try to tease out of vast global web soup more of the state-driven meddling promoting the cultivation of socialist-nationalist movements such as that of Hungary’s Orban, but I’m not certain the web will yield to such a line of inquiry.
I cannot vet field videos from the Ukraine conflict but may note that they’re popping online rapidly from wherever there has been activity. Of course, people post as today’s video yesterday’s destroyed bridge. 😦
Scrolling news for Donetsk at ostro.org, 8/30/2014/1833 ET.
“The mindset of war must change,” Mr Bush said on Wednesday. “It is a different type of battlefield. It is a different type of war.” The battles, he said, “will be fought visibly sometimes, and sometimes we’ll never see what may be taking place”.
Thirteen years and less than 11 months later, it is turning out that the full suite of contemporary wars are “a different type of war”.
Syria’s frustrated revolt cum civil war has turned out a battle between autocratic personalities, or a frankly whacked out dictator against equally savage Islamists, in large part, and the country and its people be damned, which they have been.
Ukraine’s revolt against Russomafia don Yanukovych played to the script but — this as infant governments often do — invited obvious nibbling by the colonel president emperor chief in Moscow, who also appears to have programmatically returned the once modern RT to old Pravda days (while also creating an FSB internal security service more populated per Russian than the old KGB), and today we’re almost back to “conventional war”, except that learning about the Severtsky Donets River, which first entailed learning about its existence, I have well out in the provinces outside of Washington, D.C., broadband, Google Maps, some kind of translator, and instant access to Russian language publications online.
This “different type of war” has created a different type of war tourism, also commentary, and reportage.
Where are we going?
More toward the despotic than democratic, I would say given that there are simply more governments internally operating along feudal rather than modern democratic lines, and these may have recognized in one another — as with the dictator Putin-Assad-Khamenei, an axis in conflict if ever there was — mutual interest in the defense of political absolutism.
Last week, in what strikes me as an echo of Putin-Medvedev, former Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan became President Erdogan in the presence of a cooperating Prime Minister Davutoglu. Such personalities would seem other than get-along, compromise, facilitate, and cooperate kind of guys. They’re more “or else!” in the way of malignant narcissists elsewhere and, unfortunately, everywhere.
The shades and shadows of the former Soviet Union may be living on in Russia’s assault on Ukraine. The deception and lying on the part of the Kremlin, which denied a military presence in Ukraine up to the moment (and beyond) in which the same became implausible, and since I have read that “Novosvitlivka”, about an hour west of the Severtsky Donets River that serves as a border between Russia and Ukraine, has been flattened by tanks — every house shot at — I should hope the “implausible denial” stage has been passed and Russia’s Putin may admit plainly, but with his customary charm, to playing at war — and not just war as usual, but his own “different kind of war”.
While that different kind of war takes shape, this perhaps different kind of writer will be watching it with you . . . on Twitter, Facebook, Google+ (perhaps), the World Wide Web (where else?), and across numerous foreign publications either in English or roughly translated to it.
We’re getting close to real-time reportage too, i.e., from battlefield to me to you inside of 30 minutes. The big guys get to do that. We little guys still get to figure it out.
“As the dust clears from the conflict I’m sure many people in Gaza will be asking why did Hamas reject a month ago what it accepted today, and if it had accepted then what it accepted now, how much bloodshed could have been avoided.”
Colonel President Emperor Putin has placed self-propelled artillery in several locations around Ukraine’s border, and with paratroopers, among other methods, he has probed Ukraine’s and NATO’s defense reflexes. Probably, he has found the knees weak in response to and by comparison with his ambitions.
Although most world leaders have not actually come out and said so, Ukraine is being invaded. That’s according to Ukrainian politicians and military officials, NATO representatives, and, privately, officials in Washington.
Mr Putin does the big lies, while his foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, trudges on a treadmill of deception that never stops. He was labouring along as usual yesterday, dismissing reports that Russian regular troops were fighting in Ukraine as “conjectures”. Not once, he continued in his po-faced way, “have any facts been presented to us”. Why Europe and America have to some extent gone along with this chicanery is not that mysterious.
The presence of Russian military personnel in Ukraine is now beyond dispute, everywhere except in Russia. On Thursday, NATO released satellite imagery of Russian combat troops operating inside Ukraine’s borders, prompting mild international expressions of concern about the deteriorating situation. Russian paratroopers have been filmed discussing their operations in Ukraine. In a press conference on Wednesday, captured Russian soldiers said they entered Ukrainian territory “in convoys. Not on the roads but through the fields.”
I may suggest this: the dictators Putin, Putin-Assad-Khamenei, Putin (Yanukovich yesterday, perhaps Orban tomorrow) do not come equipped with off switches or reverse gears: they will run their interior programs and scripts forward until impeded, stopped, reversed, and destroyed while their enterprises are transformed.
If enabled forward, their programs will end in the control and subjugation of others and that too, as with ISIS, will end in the destruction of humanity with unbridled sadism.
It may not look so bad at first, but cast a glance at Syria with Sochi by its side: tell me what you see.
(Russia pledged $10 million for Syrian humanitarian relief during the run up to the Olympic Games; Putin then spent $51 billion on the games).
Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday said that Crimea is “indispensable to Russia,” reminding listeners that “Russia is one of the most powerful nuclear nations.”
Ukraine’s president today declared that a “Russian invasion” of his country was underway and the United Nations’ Security Council called an emergency session to discuss the latest crisis involving allegations of Russia’s overt support for Ukrainian rebels.
“There is no doubt that this is not a homegrown, indigenous uprising in eastern Ukraine. The separatists are backed, trained, armed, financed by Russia,” Obama said.
Russian actions will be a main topic for the summit of NATO leaders next week in Wales, Obama said.
“Russia doesn’t make anything,” Mr. Obama went on. “Immigrants aren’t rushing to Moscow for opportunities. The life expectancy of the Russian male is around 60 years old. The population is shrinking.”
Levada polls conducted in the second week of March show just how effective the state propaganda machine has been: A majority of Russians believe that Ukraine has no legitimate government, that Russian speakers in Ukraine are in danger and that blame for the crisis in Crimea lies squarely with Ukrainian nationalists. Only 6 percent of Russians are “definitely opposed” to a military invasion of Ukraine.
Despite the fact that 70% of respondents admit that they do not understand, do not understand the essence of the processes taking place in Ukraine, the majority (63%) believe that “the federal Russian media as a whole or for the most part objective coverage of events taking place in Ukraine or the Crimea.
Kasim Hafeez understands hate. Growing up with a father who believed “Hitler was a great man whose one mistake was that he did not kill enough Jews,” the British-born Muslim of Pakistani descent has experienced firsthand how an innocent child becomes an Islamist dedicated to the death and destruction of those who are different.
Hafeez, who intended to become a Jihadist, was “saved” after reading The Case for Israel by Alan Dershowitz and then taking a trip to the Jewish State to justify his life by proving the Harvard professor wrong.
….in 2009 a Swedish report came out exposing some Israeli troops of selling organs of Palestinians who died in their custody.
(Around the 1:15 mark of the video.)
The reference is to a completely made up tabloid style article in an obscure Swedish paper, that even the author admitted was not based on any evidence.
How did that error in judgment occur in the first place?
It may be too soon to suggest that Prince al-Waleed bin Talal’s Kingdom Holdings investment in Time-Warner has gravitational pull down in the news room, but we may be getting to the point where the public will want to know more about how journalists write the news and with what level of balance, introspection, and integrity.
There has been much discussion recently of Hamas attempts to intimidate reporters. Any veteran of the press corps here knows the intimidation is real, and I saw it in action myself as an editor on the AP news desk. During the 2008-2009 Gaza fighting I personally erased a key detail—that Hamas fighters were dressed as civilians and being counted as civilians in the death toll—because of a threat to our reporter in Gaza. (The policy was then, and remains, not to inform readers that the story is censored unless the censorship is Israeli. Earlier this month, the AP’s Jerusalem news editor reported and submitted a story on Hamas intimidation; the story was shunted into deep freeze by his superiors and has not been published.)
Matti Friedman’s story for Tablet has been getting around the web this morning. Breathtaking in scope, Friedman’s tell-all turns media policy in the Gaza-based Hamas-driven conflict inside-out. A recent Cif Watch article relayed here played up the highlights.
Journalism ethics professors and historians take note: You are bearing witness, with few exceptions, to some of the most abysmal overseas reporting since Hearst’s New York Journal in 1898 got us into the Spanish-American War and Walter Duranty of the New York Times was ignoring Stalin’s crimes in the 1930s. “We’re not just talking bad journalism,” says Weiss. “We’re talking about journalism that functions as a tool of a terrorist organization, Hamas: breathlessly pushing its narrative, whether cowed by its threats, sympathetic to its cause, or simply ignorant.”
CAMERA: “Zakaria’s indirect main point may have been about the NYC mosque. But his more immediate point — that Hezbollah respects the Jews and is merely opposed to Israel’s “occupation of Arab lands” — dramatically misinformed viewers about the radical and anti-Semitic nature of the Lebanese terror group. Hezbollah has repeatedly made clear not only its opposition to Israel’s very existence, but also its contempt for Jews.” (http://www.camera.org/index.asp?x_context=3&x_outlet=14&x_article=1912 – 8/26/2010).
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Abu Omar al-Shishani: (6:50) “Christians are welcome to khilafa. They only pay protection money.” (Interview dated: 8/18/2014).
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Hezbollah mouthpiece or ISIS commander, it appears such Jihad Muslims must have always the upper hand, ownership of the universe, and, back on earth, the plundering and subjugation of all others.
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Despite Zakaria’s defense of Hezbollah’s alleged decency as regards freedom of religion, “contempt for Jews” would seem matched elsewhere along the same Islamist seam by contempt for Christians. Of course, the matter of “dhimmitude” is well known in association with “Islamic Jihad” whether Shiite- or Sunni-based. Why a western writer should wish to diminish its import and promote Hezbollah as the soul of a generous humanity begs for answers.
Fast blogging merely marks a note on the day’s passing news.
Beneath the pain and smoke of conflict, it takes investigation along audit lines to ferret out relationships between state-level adversaries and their activities — direct propaganda, influence on general reportage, ownership and sponsorship of academic assets — campuses, institutions, departments and their research funding — and that may be beyond both my pocketbook and purview. Whether it’s noodling around the Internet on “Iran, Zakaria” or outlining the contours of the International Solidarity Movement, as much demands focused time on a system that moves at light speed.
All of which may be my way of complaining, “Ain’t no low hanging fruit no more”.
🙂
Whether with Time Magazine publishing in a video an updated anti-Semitic “blood libel” or Fareed Zakariah praising the love and moderation toward Jews exhibited by Hezbollah (oy vey!), I would like to know what has compelled or influenced that gaslighting happy faced lunacy.
BackChannels 