18 Sunday May 2014
“Mohammed Dajani Speaks on Refusing to Be A Bystander”
Related: WASATIA: The Middle Road
Mohammed S. Dajani Daoudi is the al-Quds University professor who has taken Palestinian students to Auschwitz, and been mightily criticized for it from within the anti-Semitic ranks of extremist and far left Palestinian advocacy.
Related: “Why Palestinians Should Learn About the Holocaust”; and by Robert Staloff, Among the Righteous: Lost Stories from the Holocaust’s Long Reach into Arab Lands (2006).
14 Wednesday May 2014
I call that other force “the humanity of humanity” but while hoping the same aggregates toward the middle, mild, and moderate one also confronts immense cowardice and lethargy in the face of violent ambition. At one point, for example, an estimated 10,000 al-Shabaab fighters making a mess in Somalia had displaced, in effect, some 1.25 million Somalis to camps in Kenya and to make-do camps around Mogadishu. How is it the same were not organized — governed, self-governing — to stop “The Youth” in their tracks at first appearance? Of course, political anarchy and the individual interests of competing warlords and such then maintained conditions for an AQ-type landing or development.
Each of the societies hosting what I call the “Islamic Small Wars” exists with an incoherence sufficient to keep its destructive miscreants in business — and in business with money supply drawn from combinations of criminal activities (“narcoterrorism”) and rogue but princely largesse.
Ambivalent or difficult injunctive text may be neutral in the manner of a Rorschach — it maintains many things corresponding to the innate character of the reader, and it’s the reader that drives the character of the text into some kind of social reality.
I’m loath to reflect here on commands, demands, and judgments in scripture but may suggest for improved relations and peace that open and far ranging discussion — whatever it is, drag it out into the sun and let’s have a look at it together — may be the best aid in navigating OUR way toward something better.
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My old rabbi, a conservative with a lefty past, said he liked Reform Judaism because it “forces you to think”.
Perhaps some of us who read the Torah fresh find that it neither directs nor instructs but more often puzzles and thereby asks that we bring as much as we may to understanding something that we have just experienced through it. In effect, and running on very little familiarity with the five books, my close reading of the Adam and Eve story would suggest it is not about the “loss of innocence” and very far from “original sin”: instead, it’s about the gift and onset of human consciousness, self-consciousness, and conscience. God says to Eve that if she eats of the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, she will die, and the snake tells her she won’t die — and they have both told the truth!
What Eve does with that bite of the apple is transform.
Not to go on with that exegesis here, the point is the story refuses to dictate its message.
Moreover, if one chooses to do a close-reading crawl through the two well-known sections (Genesis 2 and 3), one may discover many puzzles in the way of comprehension: why, for example, does the snake mention just one tree to Eve when there are two — the other is the Tree of Life — planted in same place? The Church, for another example, may connect the fig leaves with shame, but why not mutual regard, for, when it comes to dressing for success, God sews for his two daring children — whom He is about to dispatch into human life — their first useful and protective clothing?
And so it goes.
The effect on the mind: deep aggravation and perturbation.
Should not God have told us about how we’re supposed to live?
Oh no — that would have been too easy and perhaps too cruel: we are forced instead to think through our way and the way ahead.
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13 Tuesday May 2014
“It is ridiculous that Israel opens Jerusalem for foreign tourists, while millions of Palestinian Christians and Muslims are being banned from entering their occupied capital,” said Nabil Shaath, a confidant of the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas.” — We humans do ourselves in with our mouths, and our mouths do in others through their ears. When hate is the cause, the cause is poison, the body politic, should it care to care for itself, takes appropriate measures.
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Inspiration for that thought: Pomegranate: The Middle East. “Caught in the middle: Christians in Israel-Palestine.” Blog. The Economist, May 12, 2014.
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12 Monday May 2014
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The assembly of “Islamic Jihad” beneath or sharing the Muslim Brotherhood and Hezbollah banners effectively goad Islam to wake and stand from the center of its humanity and for the rest of the world with Islam to bond across the center.
It’s not going well in or around the hot conflict zones.
The center has not held.
The persistence, strength, and viability of dictatorship on general terms (e.g., “Putin-Assad-Khamenei”) has not waned; the want of Arab Muslim exclusivity in a war of all against all (possibly 90 percent of the schoolgirls kidnapped were Christian and “fight them . . . jizya . . . humbled” alone would have sufficed for license) has been powered up by energy earnings the west wants to recover in trade; and no bonded army of Christians, Jews, Muslims, and others has appeared in the field with the possible exceptions of U.S. / NATO intervention — post-Enlightenment secular states operating armies reflective of their national and international make-up — and an expansion of western buy-in creating or strengthening helpful alliance, e.g., Israel-India with moderation and modification in the Muslim-majority states, e.g., Pakistan and Turkey.
China’s not far outside of all of this either — it too has a vested interest in dictatorship while it’s issues with Islam on its flanks seems well managed enough for brushing aside. China’s role is “the money”, and it has been doing business with its eyes closed (e.g., as in Sudan) except where an absolute authoritarianism similar to its own has been challenged.
Perhaps as Uncle Sam has learned — and one way of the other, however’s he’s set up, whoever his handlers, if he has them, Obama knows — fighting Boko Haram isn’t about money alone: it’s about something in the concept of a “common humanity” that needs to surface, discover affinity and “common cause”, and then work to diminish the challenges and disruptions posed by so many “malignant narcissists” parading beneath so many banners — and with language fitted to the support of their too lofty contempt.
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I had really set out this morning to take a glance at political psychology, narcissism, and the role played by contempt in states of affairs (because to the criminally elevated, contempt both defends the damaged and feels good besides). However, in the way of life online with Facebook, the deflections and distractions are the first things met.
On sorting the political psychology, I got as far as “discovering” Macalester Bell, who last year published the book title for the age: Hard Feelings: The Moral Psychology of Contempt (Oxford UP, 2013). The Oxford price appears half that of the Amazon hardcover quote, so maybe, but not right now . . . what’s really needed here (in western Maryland) is a brick-and-mortar conflict and peace studies library with a wing devoted to political psychology (anyone want to talk?).
Be that as it may, other intelligent work showed up quick on the radar: from Canada, Nora Gold’s Fields of Exile, a novel developed around the experience of anti-Semitism on campus.
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Talmud teaches the need for many voices. The Gemara takes us on a journey of debates through the centuries, deconstructing the smallest detail-pilpul. In the Talmud we are given the majority as well as the minority view to examine. Some of the comments may cause discomfort-but so be it, as we are a people judged by our actions, not our feelings.
Bederman, Diane Weber. “The Second Catastrophe”. The Times of Israel, May 11, 2014.
“The Awesome Conversation”, which name I’ve given the Facebook chatyping but may well extend that idea to Google+ and every other platform for cultural and political salon, hosts all voices, some perhaps more predominantly loathed than others, but it’s important that they are heard as censorship knows only the ends, ultimately, of the censorious, whom, if self-appointed, may be themselves The Problem.
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The “Ghost Army” — that’s the Russian Army that should have intervened in Syria to modify the Assad regime and bring Syria toward democracy without wildly altering its demographics.
Instead: “Putin-Assad-Khamenei” have risen to the defense of absolutism, well demonstrating that the dictator had an army and a mixed host of moderate revolutionary and Islamic extremist revolutionaries could raise armies but not sort their differences toward a robust common sense of cause. A fair portion of the millions of Syrians stranded between hotheads have been made the casualties and refugees of general warfare, and while they may enjoy an army of NGOs and experienced refugee camp administrators, the same would seem still incoherent as to ends (including the want of destroying Israel, which anti-Semitic raving no longer suffices for social bonding) and unable to wrest back their lands from either the heartless dictator or the vacuous Islamist.
The ghost army in Nigeria has form — at least there is an army to deploy against Boko Haram — but it may not have yet the virtue of a passion for addressing so evil a devotion to brigandage as that displayed by Boko Loco’s criminal mentality as abetted by Qur’anic injunction: “Fight those who do not believe in Allah or in the Last Day and who do not consider unlawful what Allah and His Messenger have made unlawful and who do not adopt the religion of truth from those who were given the Scripture – [fight] until they give the jizyah willingly while they are humbled” (Surat 9:29).
In Loco’s upside-down world, the Loco are the righteous.
Elsewhere, from Afghanistan to Brandeis (I’m thinking about the still recent Ayaan Hirsi Ali brouhaha and the possible effects of Prince al-Waleed’s wealth) to Crimea / Ukraine, The Money would seem the morality, and armies, ghost or not, and their generals (and presidents) must be paid — or paid off — and left in power to rule as they may see fit. That is their most personal contest (so Hitler asked famously, “Who says I am not under the special protection of God?”). From Karzai to Yanukovych, the leaders are not all alike although the degree of their corruption may be a common issue: in real time, in “realpolitik”, what forms up in arms beneath their sway spells the future for constituents (x area-squared) affected by their ambitions, behavior, outlooks, and proclivities.
One day, perhaps, the Ghost Army will appear across the span of the Islamic Small Wars but what divisions and patrols there may be today would seem to be faltering before evil.
Fox News: “New video appears to show kidnapped Nigerian schoolgirls praying to Allah.” May 12, 2014.
The bitter truth is that regardless of wherever you come from, whatever your faith is and whichever side of the political divide you stand, we all have a duty to get to the bottom of this matter, join forces, close ranks, find out what is really going on and bring this nightmare to an end. We must join hands with all men and women of goodwill and, together, we must fight this insidious evil that seeks to envelop our land and overwhelm our people.
But the Palestinian Authority [PA] leadership and many Palestinians obviously don’t share this view. In fact, they see the participation of Palestinians in an event commemorating Israeli victims of violence as an act of treason.
The PA government in the West Bank — who do not miss any opportunity to tell Westerners that they remain committed to peace and coexistence with Israel — even went as far as disbanding the Palestinian branch of Combatants For Peace in June 2013.
Who has the real army?
National Post. “‘They cut hands, cut heads, play with corpses’; Islamic extremists fighting brutal war against Kurds in Syria.” May 11, 2013: “Residents of this new Islamist state are living in conditions of extraordinary brutality. Christians in Raqqa must pay a special tax — the jizya — in accordance with Shariah law. Anyone caught drinking alcohol is imprisoned and tortured.”
Halper, Daniel. “#BringBackOurDignity.” The Weekly Standard, May 12, 2014: “My editorial this week ended with a coda praising Ayaan Hirsi Ali and, in effect, daring Hillary Clinton to stand up for someone who, as the savagery of Boko Haram has reminded us, has been so right about Islamist terror.”
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06 Tuesday May 2014
Yesterday’s New York Times featured an interview with the pro-Russian militia in Ukraine, and in the reporter’s straight estimation they were on their own, defending against threats to their ethnic status and cross-border relationships, and experienced in the Soviet and Russian armies — but they were not armed or paid by Russia.
This is not to say that “Putin-Assad-Khamenei” / Putin-Yanukovych” and the body of relationships developed around the “vertical of power”, a euphemism for the law under Putin’s leadership, should be given a light touch: Dictatorship / kleptocracy itself has stakes across the Russia’s (Putin’s) axis of power.
However, although some Russian nationalists may match their counterparts in Hungary as regards attitudes about Jews, in principle, Vladimir Putin has never been associated with other than a straight secularism deeply devoted to other aspects of Slavic culture and life. His visit to Israel and the Wailing Wall have been well regarded — there are some nifty YouTube videos available for that; his defense establishment’s procurement includes Israeli manufactured avionics, at least.
Is Putin playing for Jerusalem?
🙂
At the moment, he could steal some affection from the Obama Administration.
However, I think the foreign affairs layout more complex but partially distilled to the defense of the natural legitimacy of autocracy (corruption, manipulation, oligarchy, patronage) worldwide.
The basic background reading around here: https://conflict-backchannels.com/library/russian-section/ — I’d do more with funding supporting focus, but I’m not about to ascend to the heights of multilingual scholars: for who’s around, visit the Brookings Institute.
Putin, whom I have called “the best Bond villain ever — and he already has the nukes”, has a good deal of charisma, part of which involves what may be universal feelings about grandeur and its expression in great empire, great states, and great estates.
We have a long conversation ahead on how Versailles gets built, by whom, using what methods.
Obviously, the turns of Kasparov and Khodorkovsky have not yet come — and current FSB staffing exceeds in headcount per capita that of the old KGB (and the press is again “state managed”, heavily so).
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All that above is just my impression chatyped out in about seven minutes.
As mentioned but worth mentioning again, in my vast estate of 850-sq.ft., I much appreciate what I have come to call “19th Century modern” — and, believe me, this related to playing guitar and singing quite well, I am as a guest ever at home in the confines of mansions, sailboats, and big ol’ farmsteads.
Would the world rather not have its great castles, cathedrals, estates, mosques, and palaces?
Would it not wish to read in history and in real time the legends (and scandals) involving the powerful and wealthy?
Related: Brennan, Morgan. “The Most Expensive Billionaires Homes in the World.” Forbes, March 29, 2013.
I may achieve yet, so I do hope, but with a mind matched to a great library (850-sq.ft., 2,000 volumes), one may well travel into these atmosphere — and with a guitar visit now and then.
While Putin, for whom my space would be a broom closet, if that, has skewered Russia around the “vertical of power”, he has made it also glamorous (that $51 billion splurged on the winter Olympics at Sochi may have its positive resonance long after the Syrian Civil War has expired) while making himself legendary.
Post-Soviet resurgent 19th Century Imperial Russia will turn itself right-side-up with time, but Putin reminds that decision rests with himself and Russia, not with Russia as an expression or extension of western ethics and values. While he has backed a despot in Syria, aligned himself with the kleptocrat in Iran, and may be tangled in his own mafia nets with Yanukovych’s route from Ukraine, he has nonetheless maintained the modernity and secularism of a modern state with its boisterous energies intact — and when the day comes that he’s gone, it will go on talking about him a long, long time.
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04 Sunday May 2014
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I’ll go straight to the point. Why is Boko Haram pummelling us from every angle and we are so helpless? Why are we being battered and bruised? How can insurgents roam so freely within our territory, take over military barracks, slaughter teenage students in their hostels, abduct hundreds of young girls without trace for three weeks, burn down their schools, kill our soldiers at will, attack and kill innocent citizens at any location of their choice and then we are here, unable to stop them? How did Boko Haram become so powerful that the state is becoming powerless? How can the tail be wagging the dog when it should be the other way round?
http://www.ynaija.com/simon-kolawole-how-did-boko-haram-become-so-powerful/ – May 4, 2014.
Related: http://www.ynaija.com/mark-amaza-9-questions-we-should-be-asking-about-chibok-yissueoftheweek/ – May 4, 2014.
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“Nigerians have never been lucky in the department of leadership,” Ndibe says. “There is this old joke in Nigeria about the football coach who was asked how his team was going to win a game, and he said, ‘We’re going to fumble our way to victory.’ It seems to me that is the same ethos that drives Nigerian affairs.”
http://www.thetakeaway.org/story/nigerian-author-reflects-tragic-kidnapping/ – May 2, 2014.
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02 Friday May 2014
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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.
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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.
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. . . . 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.
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01 Thursday May 2014
“All for All” is a better deal the “All Against All”.
The spirits of each monotheist construction — taken as divine, oral history, written history, scholarly poetics, etc. — have each their ways of talking out of both sides of their mouths.
In the bloody American civil war, both sides held their Bible high.
To help everyone get off the self-destroying triangle and on to a better interlock (I’m about to change the popular perception of the Star of David, lol), I refer often to the intellectual who challenged, revolutionized, and revitalized the Judaism of his day and whose thought set the stage for Jesus, Paul, and Constantine and later Muhammad: Hillel the Elder.
http://www.amazon.com/Hillel-Not-When-Jewish-Encounters/dp/0805242813
I can take myself — mind and spirit — more deeply into this area only with funding that covers the specialization, as much in this area (reading-writing) and other parts of my life absorb greater time and energy. So far, we don’t have robust mechanisms for getting beneath independent scholarship. So I’m kind of stuck. Nonetheless, I hope a few will venture into Hillel’s thought not merely as a rabbi but a mortal “Everyman” of his era intent on developing wisdom within the sphere of divinity, as the conversations we have with one another may be also perceived as part of humanity’s great conversation with God, nature, and the universe.
Our survival as a species may also encourage greater emphasis on greater bonding over universalized principles and values, e.g., “The Universal Declaration of Human Rights” against those who would degrade or negate them.
Such has been part of my reasoning when aggregating “Putin-Assad-Khamenei” as a unit representing autocratic absolutism that by its nature indulges in and promotes kleptocratic state-exploiting and state-based theft serving the grandiose aspirations or needs of the “great leader”.
Dictatorship.
The bands of this theme, the despotic vs the democratic, the malignantly narcissistic vs a still boisterous humanity but one capable of containing itself and keeping itself within bounds as regards the exploitation and subjugation of others, are global.
Putiin-Assad and others at polar extremes have wanted to cast their conflict set as “secular vs religious” or, in their own eyes, perhaps, “Heroic Secularism” vs “Heroic Religiosity”.
That’s a small war, generally, and for many reasons having to do with the appeal of the cause and true motivation of the individual. In light of such, I’ve called the current set of conflicts infused with religious dogma and confused by it “The Islamic Small Wars”; however, the same may not comprise The War — shall I type “The True War”? — which is the defense of a varied humanity overall — a creative and gregarious species supporting about 6,980 languages and the cultural perception and self-concept each represents — from greater subjugation by the despotic through he set of mafia-type methods and systems — first, they make you shut up (state control of the press): then deceit, flattery, intimidation, patronage, and murder — that produce and sustain idolatrous totalitarianism.
That’s the bare bones script I see.
The story to come is what the reader writes in the course of the political aspect of his living.
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BackChannels 