Tag Archives: politics

FTAC – Insert: Humanism

02 Sunday Mar 2014

Posted by in Anti-Semitism, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Islamic Small Wars, Political Psychology, Politics, Religion

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In my last note, I’ve mentioned one of the “hate-peace peace groups” that might serve as a gateway to so many others. If you want chit-chat with Greta Berlin, one of the organizers of the Gaza Flotilla, she’s around; if with my generally conservative buddies. they’re in the mix too; if a whole other set, we might get it. “Humanism” — shall I refer to Felix Adler and “Ethical Culture” — provides a common thread across religious and state boundaries; however, it would support, if we’re really going to be good about this, cultural polyphony. The Roma should not be so abused! Nor the Jews. Nor the Rohingya of Burma. Wahhabi imperialism, Islamic expansionism — especially as the “Islamists” would have it, resurgent nationalisms (which has Hungarian Jobbik relating to Iranian roots, for pete’s sake), ensure we’re going to be in trouble for a while. Even so, we may pay more attention to autonomy, degrees of freedom, human dignity, human rights, and qualities of living — physical, psychological, and spiritual, across our 6,900 or so language cultures and adjust for co-evolution.

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I’m not the only one who tires of addressing, confronting, and arguing the issues (and the facts) of the “middle east conflict” (i.e., that would be the one involving The Jews, as the others, I suppose, want for less attention).

Felix Adler (professor) – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I caught my second wind šŸ™‚ in the 1980s with my “discovery” of Abraham Maslow while working on a Masters in “Outdoor Recreation Resources Management”. Ā Perhaps for this venue, Maslow’s suggestion that if one is to pursue greater health (with actualization), one ought to study healthy people as much as those beset by pathology.

The radical Jews — whoever gathered in the desert more than 5,000 years ago — produced a religion in which one God had dominion over all and no man — not even Moses, not even Abraham — was like Him.

God, from the Jewish beginning, was “Master of the Universe”.

Many, by comparison, could barely master his own emotions.

Anti-deification and conflation with God characterizes a Jewish approach to scripture, every passage of which enjoys close reading and vigorous ethical and moral argument. Ā Even “The Akedah” splits between the (option one) promotion of obedience and (option two) the call to speak back to God, which we today we refer to as “speaking truth to power.”

Jewish, Christian, Islamic humanism, social humanism, atheist humanism, secular humanism, etc. all suggest that while God has plans, we are none of us God, and if we wish to live in peace, a common peace, a peace for the democratic (small “D”) man, a peace for the Pacific Islander as well as the Iraqi, we’re going to have to help one another and, perhaps, quiet some of the egotism and noise, most ambitious and inventive, coursing through our minds, the gift of languages invented to cope with survival in bounded systems.

I can never too highly recommend reading Daniel Everett’s Don’t Sleep, There are Snakes or this thoughts inĀ Language: The Cultural Tool.

We’re a wild species, but our war technologies have exceeded many natural limitations, and they really can destroy humankind, while our advanced technologies have become comparatively fragile, “glass” plates beneath a blazing sun converting light to electricity.

We have a way to go, but, whatever we do, we’re going to go there together — and we’re not going to outwit God, nature, or the universe along the way.

Additional Reference

Linguistic Society of America | Advancing the Scientific Study of Language

World Council of Anthropological Associations – WCAA

Our Story | Esalen

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Assad will not be overthrown if ISIS is not overthrown.

02 Sunday Mar 2014

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Assad will not be overthrown if ISIS is not overthrown.

In addition to believe that cooperation with the Assad regime is the best way to struggle against jihadists and IslamistsĀ [1] extremists groups is to ignore the history of this regime in instrumentalizing and cooperating with them such as with jihadist groups after the Iraqi invasion by the USA in 2003 or Fateh el Islam in Lebanon in 2007, and to forget that the regime is the one to have freed most of the jihadists and Islamists extremists in the various amnesty calls since the beginning of the revolutionary process while democrat activists were kept in prison, assassinated and targeted by the security services.

FTAC – Israel – Response to Remarks Delegitmizing Israel

02 Sunday Mar 2014

Posted by in Anti-Semitism, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Israel, Philology, Philosophy, Political Psychology, Politics, Religion

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“Arabs were made to pay for the crimes of the Europeans by the creation of Israel.”

I know that is what has been heard and the fiction constructed around it total, but Zionism predates WWII, and thousands of Arabs were drawn before it to the agricultural fields of the nascent Jewish state.

If you believe statehood in the name of religion must go, then Rome must go, as must Pakistan, Saudi Arabia — well, actually all Islamic kingdoms and dictatorships — as the same have become “real headaches for the entire civilized world, completely engulfed in injustice and violence.”

The only “inescapable issue” in the reconstruction that is the modern State of Israel is the 5,000+ year existence of Jews and Jewish culture — beliefs, calendar, customs, language, religion — on the land and continuously. Ancient Israel, the Roman “Palestine”, and modern Israel have never been “Judenrein” (as some might wish).

Jews don’t “deserve a homeland” — Jews have a homeland.

Regarding terrorism, have a look independently into war and low-intensity conflict across 2,000 years.

Regarding genocide, let’s keep these two buddies in mind: http://www.tellthechildrenthetruth.com/…/2-mufti2_jpg… (Hussaini-Hitler handshake).

Also, you may want to look into how Ben Gurion crushed the terrorist Irgun at the earliest opportunity.

Your emphasis tells where you want to go (anti-Semitic / anti- Ziionist, actually, anti-justice) but the deeply poisonous programming and scripting that got you there has to this hour stayed out of the picture.

I beg you for patient new introspection and scholarship, for fresh ears and eyes, for skepticism in regard to a destructive loyalty.

I ask no less of myself and do read, say, Ma’an and look into issues having to do with the refugees of 1948 and their humanity, which one may believe better than that of their leaders who build and disseminate libels for a living.

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The response was to a writer in India who ran through the common anti-Semites screen, from declaring the State of Israel a colonial project directly and only corresponding to the destruction of the Jews of Europe in the Holocaust of World War II to suggesting the entire state should have been constructed elsewhere.

What a load of fictional crapola one wakes to if participating the “middle east conflict”, which has weirdly become the signifier for Israel’s conflict with the Arab world while the same Arab world melts down in conflicts within its portion of the Islamic Small Wars (e.g., signaled by political violence in Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, Yemen, Syria).

Nowhere is the “Religion of Peace”, nor the states founded on it, at peace, and not even within themselves, the Muslim Brotherhood gangs ever threatening established state power, the same state power incompletely in control of powerful families willing to back al-Qaeda and its affiliates and likenesses.

Additional Reference

Amin Al Husseini: Nazi Father of Jihad, Al Qaeda, Arafat, Saddam Hussein and the Muslim Brotherhood – Tell The Children The Truth – Homepage

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FTAC – Comment on Sochi and Syria

28 Friday Feb 2014

Posted by in Eurasia, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Islamic Small Wars, Middle East, Political Psychology, Politics, Regions, Russia

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ā€œIf costs are the benchmark for a ā€˜successfulā€™ Games,ā€ says Janice Forsyth, Director of the International Center for Olympic Studies at the University of Western Ontario, in London, Ontario, Canada, ā€œSochi is the most unsuccessful games in history, bar none.ā€ http://www.forbes.com/sites/andrewbender/2014/02/23/sochis-long-term-economic-impact-good-or-bad/

Countries invested in the Olympics — an amateur affair where sports are to enjoy contests to the side of politics with national pride second to pride in individual athletic striving and accomplishing.

The international press excoriated Sochi in regard to its encounter with substandard facilities; such as myself have tried keep Sochi and Syria in the same frame with the money front and center — i.e., a Russian pledge of $10 million for Syrian humanitarian aid while Sochi went forward with a $51 billion price tag.

Humanity is not what the Syrian civil war is about. It’s not about God either. It’s about despotism. Humanity would probably (that’s a validated probably, considering the numbers in casualties and refugees) not be in the middle of it. The obscenity of the treatment meted by both sides to the Palestinian Yarmouk Camp underscores the inhumanity displayed between contesting forces.

The world’s getting the message between Chinese and Russian Security Council complicity in relation to the Syrian Civil War.

Neither has interest in voting against a dynastic dictatorship; both have interest in containing or rebuffing Islam, which in the weird way described by Aboud Dandachi in the previous post, has both emphasizing and tacitly supporting the presence of al-Qaeda-type fighters as a demonstration of who is just as bad and promises to be far worse — and would be if they themselves were not there to block them. Ā In essence, these undemocratic political elite are attempting to curry favor with the global war watching public by keeping before their eyes the atrocious barbaric excesses of a foe that make themselves look the little bit better choice.

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From Syria – _The Doctor, the Eye Doctor, and Me_ – A Damning Statement

28 Friday Feb 2014

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Islamic Small Wars, Middle East, Political Psychology, Politics, Regions, Syria

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In the months that followed, it became very clear that the Eye Doctor was counting on attitudes like mine. His airforce bombed every part of the country, except those towns occupied by ISIS. His army fought every opposition brigade, but made sure to leave ISIS units well alone. ISIS in turn abducted even more opposition activists, murdered the commanders of other brigades, and generally left the regimeā€™s forces to do as they liked.

The Eye Doctor and ISIS feed off one another; the existence of one legitimized the continued existence of the other.

Amazon.com: The Doctor,The Eye Doctor and Me: Analogies and Parallels Between The World of Doctor Who and the Syrian Conflict. Ā eBook: Aboud Dandachi: Kindle StoreĀ – Kindle Edition, 94-101, 2/17/2014.

Also:Ā https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/409862Ā (free).

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This wry and lived history must surely become one of the classics of political science.

“The Doctor” is “Doctor Who” of perpetuated BBC legend, a doctor who in earthly television series years also happens to be 50 years old.

“The Eye Doctor” is, of course, ophthalmologist and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Dandachi, trapped in a hotel room in Tartus, Syria for 18 months becomes a Netizen hooked on the BBC program and able to apply his mad softwareĀ skilzĀ to watching it and helplessly drawing parallels between The Doctor’s and The Eye Doctor’s differing ways.

Should you be cursed with an ounce of sentiment for either al-Assad or the Islamist “armies” hanging off the stinging Medusa jellyfish that is al-Nusra and companions, Aboud Dandachi’s book will cure you of that.

Note: the author of this blog is an independent writer beholden to none, but I have had contact with Aboud Dandachi and learned about his book through him. Ā I risked my own $0.99 on obtaining it.

Dandachi sells his work quite well too:

Now, a word on politics. There will be political opinions expressed in this book . And they will be expressed strongly. They will be anti-Assad, and very much for the idea of his removal and that of his regime.

And if any reader should find that objectionable, then Iā€™m sorry.

Actually, Iā€™m not. Because nothing can come close to matching the offensiveness of hearing a murderous dictator who made refugees out of millions of Syrians, be described and pitied as a ā€œvictim of Zionist/ Wahabi/ CIA Imperialist Empire Building Neo-Con conspiracies. Now letā€™s go Occupy Wallstreet or somethingā€.

This book is not meant to be an exhaustive review of either Doctor Who or the Syrian revolution-turned -conflict.

So, inadvertently, the reader will have in Kindle hand a thorough, if perhaps not exhaustive, overview of how things got to be so thoroughly stupid in Syria.

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If the pro-regime areas in Homs felt under threat and under siege, fearful of retaliations for crimes committed by the regime they had become associated with, then with any luck, they would instinctively look to the regime for protection.

Dandachi, Aboud (2014-02-17). The Doctor,The Eye Doctor and Me: Analogies and Parallels Between The World of Doctor Who and the Syrian Conflict (Kindle Locations 1198-1199). Aboud Dandachi. Kindle Edition.

Assad’s “overreaction” to schoolkid heckling?

Knee jerk, possibly (my call after reading), for as Dandachi makes clear and with forceful argument, the proven more than ruthless dictator deliberately turned up the barbarism dial at the outsetĀ to inspire the armed insurrection for which his army had been built!

No wonder so many military officers and state officials have jumped ship across the years.

With no greaterĀ force majeure to intervene and all facets seemingly anti-western (not to mention deeply anti-Semitic, at least at face value), what has become an Assad vs Islamist war continues to burn through the productive center of Syrian society.

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. . . what was needed was for a way for the very people the regime depended on to suppress the demonstrations, to feel that they werenā€™t so much defending the regime, as defending their very lives, the lives of their communities and families. The men who made up the armed forces and security agencies had to be made to believe that the revolution posed an existential threat to them and all they held dear.

Going on and on about ā€œforeign conspiraciesā€ involving everyone from Zionist-Salafis to the NATO-Wicked Witch of the West could only be effective for a limited amount of time . . . .

Dandachi, Aboud (2014-02-17). The Doctor,The Eye Doctor and Me: Analogies and Parallels Between The World of Doctor Who and the Syrian Conflict (Kindle Locations 1145-1149). Aboud Dandachi. Kindle Edition.

Every sentence, paragraph bloc, page, and chapter read as well, much fulfilling Aristotle’s dictum “to educate, entertain, and delight.”

The Doctor (sort of) – Vid’ and URL to the Doctor Who Share List (YouTube)

Sonic Screwdriver (Trock Parody of Telephone by Lady Gaga) – YouTube

The Eye Doctor

Bashar al-Assad Interview with Fox News Part 4Syria: Syrian President Bashar al Assad Charlie Rose – YouTubeĀ – 2/26/2014:

“It doesn’t matter what they say, whether he is a dictator or a reformer. Ā Today you have propaganda. Ā Do they say the same word about their allies in the Gulf states? Ā Do they talk about dictatorship in the Gulf states? — We’re talking about Syria now — I know, but I have the right to answer about the other regimes, er, states, that they are much far from democracy than the Syrian state.”

Dandachi talks about the private money funding al-Nusra and ISIS and here in the above clip, Assad himself draws the convenient and logical comparison between his absolute rule and the same astonishingly narcissistic construct working through the wallets and minds of the forces arrayed against him.

Why should the President of Syria rollover to democracy when the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and Qatar and others retain equal interest in the similarly despotic accretion and expression of wealth?

No wonder there has been no intervening force of magnificent Doctor Who-like scale in Syria.

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Syria – Still No Army for the People

27 Thursday Feb 2014

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Fast News Share

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A jihadist group in Syria has demanded that Christians in the northern city of Raqqa pay a levy in gold and accept curbs on their faith, or face death.

BBC News – Syria crisis: ISIS imposes rules on Christians in Raqqa

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BEIRUT (AP) ā€” The main Western-backed Syrian opposition group demanded an investigation Thursday into an ambush by government forces that state media said killed 175 rebels near Damascus a day earlier.

The Syrian National Coalition disputed the government report, saying the people killed were civilians trying to escape the siege imposed by President Bashar Assad’s forces on suburbs of the Syrian capital.

Syrian group demands investigation into killings – Yahoo News

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How long may this go on?

I would guess until one army or another runs out of human targets or human shields.

There’s nothing stopping either from destroying the entire economic, physical, and social infrastructure and population of the nation, and they already hold captive and subjugated the same, and for the spirit, that may be as good as dead.

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FTAC – Coffee Advisory – A Long Note On Islam On Facebook On The Humanity of Humanity

26 Wednesday Feb 2014

Posted by in Anti-Semitism, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Islamic Small Wars, Philology, Political Psychology, Politics

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Here’s an interesting divide: do we choose the security of a loyal untruth over the presence of a disloyal but uncomfortable truth?

As you know, because you have read “Shimmer”, I track Pamela Geller as a friend (friendly) but not as the final word on Islam: I know and love too many “Islamic Humanists”, Muslim Americans living with all Americans no differently than Christian Americans or Jewish Americans or Sikh Americans or Hindu Americans (the list of religious affiliations and differentiation in America gets quite long). I enjoy the effort of Irshad Manji and and Mudar Zahran and others to know the location of their hearts and ethics and find it in their lives as Muslims.

The American anti-Jihad and counter-terrorism and related communities — not to mention the consultant-watchers of NSA and other organizations about — is fairly extensive and scholarly in their reading (I haven’t friend Robert Spencer) in their reading of Qur’an and Hadith in something like the manner in which those elements are interpreted by terrorists who are Muslim and who carry out their crimes with what they believe accords injunction found in the Qur’an.

Geller rakes muck, perhaps doesn’t follow up as meticulously as she should, and she writes with interest, so we may frame her in the “special interest” press, not far off the Coptic press, the Catholic one, the Jewish one, or, alas, the jihad ones with the black flags. Nonetheless, and having looked, I must accept Jeremy D. Mayer’s criticism, she’s on a right track IF we’re chatyping about al-Qaeda, al-Shabaab, Boko Haram, the Muslim Brotherhood as exemplified in the policies and practices demonstrated so swiftly by former Egyptian President Morsi, etc. She asks — as Sinem Tezyapar might ask — what kind of human, what kind of Muslim, troops into Mumbai, for example, and commits the atrocities committed there? Were those humans Muslims or not? New York – London – Madrid: same question. Westgate Shopping Mall, Nairobi, Kenya: Muslim? Not Muslim? Something else?

Here’s where I differ some from Pamela Geller: I’m willing to recognize the humanity in my humanist, reformation, trying hard Muslim friends because they recognize humanity in me, a Jew, a Zionist, and have in their deeds and in their words both goodness and integrity.

It’s that last word that the fighting — all of it, from the Gaza Strip to to whatever’s going on today in Iraq — is all about.

Is it permissible to deceive the infidel? Or not? In the name of Islam?

There’s a lot of money tied up in conflict, and not all of it — probably little of it — goes into fighting. It goes into extraordinary self-aggrandizement (count the number of Saddam’s palaces – and we rue the day we did business that way: that’s an era that has passed, God willing). It goes into “skimmers” who use their political power to dip their hands into the state’s wealth, or leverage it (Putin-Assad-Khamenei could not be more different in their talk, but for the character of their person, they are the same person, until one, and only one has the power today, turns around).

So what manner of Muslim these days – “Carlos” solidarity, OBL base, out into the universe with Rumi (I like him), tenuously holding on to balance like Musharraf, promoting the whole program like Zia Haq? This is hard stuff. The Jews, for the most part, are arranged differently: we don’t take the word of God at face value (because we believe He doesn’t want us to but rather means for us to discover His meaning from one generation to the next: it doesn’t give us a lot of room for launching offensives in the manner of Constantine or other generals; we don’t conflate men with God; and we search tirelessly for better answers in accord with Hillel’s question: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am not for others, WHAT am I?”

Pamela Geller isn’t about hate. She’s about love. So I believe are many others I have met and what they have in them may be less the province of religion and more the nature of a decent and still emerging humanity.

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Most conversations like the above that I’ve encountered take place in a spectrum of what I call “middle east hate-peace peace groups”. Ā Some are nasty. Ā It’s easy to meet through chatyping the most strident of Israeli nationalists and the worst of hidebound anti-Semites, not that I’m about to name names. Ā Some are closed and collegial and inclined to scrape up the documents and narratives of hurtful histories but, alas, with parochial spin.

I co-moderated one such group on another social network a long time ago (or, here in cyberspace, what seems like a long time ago). Ā Since then and with the memory of my first encounter with deeply embedded anti-Semitism have arrived at some thought that is close to the heart of this blog, i.e., that “attitudes and beliefs” are contingent on early language uptakeĀ programming — how we are taught to listen and to know what is important to listen to — andĀ scripting, which is the transmitted way of a (language) culture. Ā To navigate through and out of conflict that has its life primarily in the mind means addressing some early programming and scripting with the knowledge that some things need to become the artifacts of age left behind.

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