The missiles, American officials warned, could one day be used by terrorist groups, some of them affiliated with Al Qaeda, to shoot down civilian aircraft.
But one country ignored this admonition: Qatar, the tiny, oil- and gas-rich emirate that has made itself the indispensable nation to rebel forces battling calcified Arab governments and that has been shipping arms to the Syrian rebels fighting the government of President Bashar al-Assad since 2011.
It’s mighty social of President Obama to allow others to strut their hour upon the global stage, which it appears Qatar may be doing as promotes a Sunni front in Syria by proxy.
As modern and shiny as Qatari money has made Qatar, onlookers may not be so certain about its mercenaries and their ability to restrain themselves. The alleged murder of Roula Adnan last week adds its bit of opprobrious behavior to the eating-the-heart video that went viral earlier in the month. I’ve hedged with “alleged” as the news reached me by way of Pakistan and involved as source a Syrian nationalist outlet given to headers like, “US Citizens Kill Deputy Head of Ministry of Education in Aleppo.”
We’re not going to have two essential empirical truths in a world integrating within the communal mind of the World Wide Web: whatever Qatar has enabled, even if spun over-the-top with canards out of the political playbooks of bomb throwers of the 1970s, what happened to Roula Adnan (and her neighbors) will come out.
And just before coming after Roula, the same “rebels”, the ones that the MSM is romanticizing broke into another home. They carried a man from Khalil family to the street and shot his hands and feet. Then they beaten up his wife and daughter, right in front of the neighbors. The terrorists wanted Syrians to witness the crime; they wanna scare us into submission.
As it does always, the fog of war will lift — but these days, it’s likely the curtains masking behind-the-scenes deals, wherever they have taken place, will be drawn back too.
Ahmed Nader (@ANaderGretly): “Egyptians, no matter what happens today, we shall be one hand, one voice, and one spirit. Don’t let the beards get you down.”
Aysha (@aysha_nur): “Dear international media! Move your dirty hands from #Egypt! Protesters won’t achieve their goal by creating anarchy!!”
Our total common web communications toolkit would seem to me to have bumped up a big notch today. A few minutes before catching the above on Twitter, I / we — if we were watching live streaming — saw a brief Tahrir Square flyover by helicopters while the crowd cheered beneath them.
What I’m hearing from the live feed: hypnotic in techno disco peak experience rhythm.
We know this crowd is going to move, and watching the live feed (Ustream), the Twitter feed, our Facebook walls, and all of that, whatever world is watching is going to move with it.
The “Second Row Seat to History” has just morphed into its own front-row position, albeit yet removed from the heat and sweat, the smell of the crowd, and, later — because it would have to be a miracle if shouting and stamping and making noise would suffice for the outer boundary of the energy of the event — the running, the battle, the blood, and the tears.
Hezbollah sources told the paper that Nasrallah requested full financial and military backing for the fighting in Syria in a meeting with Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.
The above may be news recently released, but given the pace of the combat in Syria and the spillover into Lebanon, it’s old news predating the battle for al-Qusayr.
However, one may take as signal Russia’s decision implemented today to retrieve its military from the naval base at Tartus.
MOSCOW (AP) — Russia has withdrawn all military personnel from its naval base in Syria and replaced them with civilian workers, the Defense Ministry said Thursday.
The ministry did not say when the switch at the base at Tartus took place or how many personnel were deployed there. The minor facility is Russia’s only naval outpost outside the former Soviet Union. It consists of several barracks and depots used to service Russian navy ships in the Mediterranean.
“We have neither servicemen nor civilians in Syria anymore. Or Russian military instructors assigned to units of the Syrian regular Army, for that matter,” a Russian defense ministry spokesperson is quoted as telling the Moscow business daily Vedomosti yesterday.”
Fred Weir points to Cyprus as an alternative achieving similar ends for Russian naval power and regional influence.
Put that together with this Euronews video from January this year (tipped by a CSM article):
While according to RT, “Russia’s Defense Ministry . . . blasted media reports about total evacuation as “extremely incorrect,” it’s difficult accepting the statement while looking at today’s breaking news and January apparent exodus of civilians by jet (RT, “Russian Defense Ministry refutes reports of Syria evacuation,” June 27, 2013). In fact, RT goes on to actually emphasize aspects of the surface or top story.
Putin’s interests, whether defined financially for the long term or in terms of impact on his reputation in history, which I think more important to him than casually acknowledged, are not with “Islamists” — not in Chechnya with the rebels of the Kavkaz Center variety, not with Iran with Ayatollah Khamenei and his nuclear ambitions that would be used to threaten Russia every bit as much — more — as NATO.
For Putin, the restoration of Russian grandeur and strength, plus strength in national and heroic self-concept, may involve navigating the balance between “bad boy” bravado and action with, actually (gasp!) even greater laudable strategy.
Whatever Putin does, he will be regarded as the bridge between the conniving, defunct, invasive police state that by the merit of the Russian People themselves had come to define the Soviet Union and this New Russian Federation that’s not about to take orders from Washington but might succeed in doing great right things on its own authority.
Most certainly, modern Russians will not want to be remembered for — or long associated with either — with the ravages of Maher al-Assad’s military, and while “the west” can take no pride in backing the kind of warrior that would cut out the liver out of his enemy and eat it, the Russian position, which appears to be decoupling from Syria, sails clear of the taint of that barbarism, albeit later than sooner with regard to the casualties and refugees of the war to date.
The problem with Syria, at the moment, and one of many problems within the Islamic Ummah, is that along the sectarian axis, neither side knows how to stop and both continue to walk toward a fire built on and sustained by their own unrestrained and unreasoning energies.
These days, the term “middle east conflict” would seem to refer to conflict and unrest in every state in the region but Israel.
Nonetheless, while Egypt roils and Syria burns and the King of Jordan fends off the seeding of perhaps a new class of secular Palestinian politico*, Qatar’s new head of state, Sheikh Tamim has this to say of the refugees of numerous Arab-led wars since 1948:
One day when our “Blue Dot” of a planet is a little more gathered together — that as opposed to riven with war — we may find common ground in five language principles:
Compassion
Humility
Integrity
Justice
Security
Of the four, the most difficult term and the one most relevant to autocracies seems to me to be “integrity” — just the power to be honest about ourselves and with others.
This is not as easy as it may sound. If it were, we would not have the fairy tale that is “The Emperor’s New Clothes”, which is in essence and for the ages a story about lying and power.
You know the rest of the story: Eve eats the apple, becomes conscious or comprehending, also self-conscious, and, with Adam joining her, possessed of conscience, out of which reaction, perhaps, come the fig leaves, a courtesy, each to the other, and practical too (God, a few sentences later, provides clothing made of skins — one imagines chamois — lending perhaps dignity and protection to their introduction to life as men and women would experience it forever after).
The “Middle East Conflict” — which is never about conflicts in the middle east but only about the creation of the Jews and Israel (or, lost in the Pharaohnic dawn, the gathering together beneath the unrestrained ego and violence of a tyrant)l — seems to me to be always about two things not at ease with one another: 1) the possession of good conscience in light of the knowledge of good and evil; 2) the testing of God for favor when the relationship needs to be the other way around.
*****
Where kings are concerned, I suspect there may be more to the story than meets either eyes or ears.
When God, being God, and with Torah received as divine message, hides the second tree — the Tree of Life that we are told is there but when it counts is not mentioned by the snake and, later, will be barred from access (by cherubim and an eternally revolving sword guarding the Garden left behind) — the sin of omission becomes a virtue: to have eaten of the Tree of Life also would have been too much, for God forbids it, and so protects His children.
*****
To be as gods, lower case that term, with nuclear capabilities, among other extraordinary but still human capacities, one might counsel also a prudent humility.
Carl Sagan’s clip about the “Pale Blue Dot” that is our planet viewed from space, has many renditions on the web — and there’s an entire film available too (somewhere — I’m going to be lazy here) — but this may do for essence.
LONDON — An opposition monitoring group that has tracked Syria’s widening civil war said on Wednesday that more than 100,000 people had died in the 27-month-old conflict, with pro-government forces taking far more casualties than rebels seeking the overthrow of President Bashar al-Assad, while civilians accounted for more than one-third of the overall fatalities, the biggest single category.
Perhaps the old days were better after all: assemble the armies on an open plain, send the warriors into it, and leave the noncombatants of both sides for the spoils of the winner.
Just kidding.
*****
“As always, numbers like these gloss over the many people who have been so grievously wounded, physically or psychologically, that they will never again live productive lives. What the latter figure amounts to in Syria is anyone’s guess. What’s certain is that it’s even larger than the death toll.”
Rajan Menon’s report on the suffering goes on to note 1.7 million refugees on top of 4 million Internally Displaced Persons, or 5.7 million displaced souls altogether, about 25 percent of Syria’s total population before the onset of serious hostilities (but I’m not sure I’m getting consistent numbers from any source published within the past two years).
*****
“In one trailer we meet 13-year-old Najwa. She curls back in the corner next to her husband, 19-year-old Khaled, and her mother, hardly saying a word.
Najwa is the youngest of three, her two older sisters in their late teens are also recently married.”
Evidently, grim statistics don’t tell a whole story, or not much of whatever is to be told at all.
*****
“The head of the International Terrorism Observatory think tank, Roland Jacquard, told Reuters Television the group appeared to be sending fighters abroad, likely to Syria.”
“Special informed sources from London revealed to the Palestinian al-Manar newspaper that the British security forces arrested early June a group of 11 terrorists in London who had come back from Syria where they were involved in the fighting there.”
While Israel’s cardinal military defense rule seems to remain, “Do not intervene; do not interfere” (DM Yaalon), Israel’s first virtue would seem to remain compassion to the extent that it may provide that.
“The two boys, 9 and 15 years old, were transferred to Ziv Hospital in Safed for treatment. The 9-year-old suffered moderate injuries from shrapnel wounds across his body and lost his right eye, according to a report by Maariv. The 15-year-old was listed in serious condition, according to the report.”
Every wounded Syrian is guarded by either an IDF soldier or by a civilian security guard in an attempt to isolate them from speaking with anyone unauthorized to do so who might photograph them or pass on their information to Syria, potentially harming them or their families upon their eventual return to Syria.
As stated, more than a 100 wounded Syrians have crossed the border in recent months. Some 70 of them have been taken to Israeli hospitals, and two have passed away as a result of their injuries.
After 2,000 years or so, Hillel’s negatively stated dictum seems to hold. “That which is distasteful to thee, do not do to another” — and certainly, the choice between enabling or denying access to hospital services related well to that.
*****
“The request came in a letter handed to Prime Minister’s Office Director-General Harel Locker at a meeting with Druze leaders on the Golan Heights Thursday. The letter included an unprecedented request for Israel to take in Druze students who had left the Golan and settled in Syria, Maariv reported.”
Druze along the Golan have served both in the IDF and in Syria’s defense forces according to their decisions about citizenship and location, and with the fighting as I’ve described — “Two mad wasps in a bell jar” — Israeli Druze are seeking sanctuary for their relatives.
God knows God would seem to give Jews the toughest ethical and survival challenges.
Both.
At the same time.
Providing infirmary to wounded to be turned back into the field — and who want to be returned to their land — is one thing.
Affording sanctuary to those endangered by this war that only loosely respects boundaries and seems absent of compassion and conscience both in relation to innocents, noncombatants, neutral parties, and so on makes for a more difficult decision.
The prime minister has repeatedly and constantly defied criticism leveled against the police for brutality against protesters during the Gezi Park unrest, despite the fact that the excessive use of police force during the unrest in the country since May 3 has resulted in the deaths of three protesters and one police officer and the injury of nearly 5,000 people.
While the world should not mistake accommodation, compassion, compromise, and kindness for weakness, the fear that a part of it may would seem to propel the opposite: the want of an iron fist.
Turks who may read about Prime Minister Erdogan in Huriyet have been delivered the impression of an autocrat, and one may expect further amplification and cleaving along that seam. On one side: a dangerous nationalism and the rise of a “strong man” in the too familiar vein, the kind that references “the interest rate lobby” without intending to refer to the Chinese (to whom the world’s largest bank belongs); on the other, a more compassionate, comprehending, and more inclusive humanity, the kind that with Moses and the Jews becomes the “mixed multitude” that leaves Pharaoh and abandons him to his fate.
Turks have grown disgruntled over the headstrong prime minister’s increasingly autocratic leadership and the opaque decision making of a powerful centralized state that is unresponsive to the needs of Turkish citizens, especially those outside Erdogan’s nationalist and Islamic coalition.
What Erdogan may represent is not only Erdogan’s problem.
This comes by way of another front, this one European:
After dark, the respectable mask slipped. While a Jobbik official watched, I was slapped in the head by a reveler annoyed that “Jews” were at his festival. He then poured a beer over my head. Although irritating and sticky, it could have been worse —I was in a forest at night surrounded by thousands of nationalists and stalls selling whips and axes.
For compassionate liberals, no more signal than “Islamist Virtue Party” is needed, for it resonates worldwide today with police units formed around “the promotion of virtue and the elimination of vice”. Moreover, in Islamic states, the same signals the room for maneuver given to venal “takfir” — those who accuse others of blasphemy, which in theocracies provides ever the accuser’s gateway to murder, theft, and revenge.
I feel inspired by the video featured on this post — fill in the blanks: “We have an internal problem that is ___________, and an external threat . . . the Jewish invasion . . . We know there is a global Zionist fund controlling the whole world, including the U.S. and the European Union . . . It is thanks to them that ________ has become a mess since ________.”
It would seem the political imposition of purity standards — nationalist, racist, or religious — pernicious and divisive from any perspective.
In the larger politics and its psychology, growing Hungarian and Turkish nationalism would seem to share similar characteristics: deflection of responsibility (blame it on the “interest rate lobby” and similarly convenient foils; craving for a uniform cast and homogeneous society (please, no freethinkers, liberals, or Gypsies); want of power and strength by way of a demonstrated and punishing will altogether lacking in compassion, empathy, and love (such a monstrous character is what is most demonstrated by the arrest of doctors attending wounded at demonstrations).
The Turkish Health Ministry demanded a list of all doctors who had treated injured demonstrators. The Turkish Medical Association (TBB) reported the demand.
“The doctors were only trying to help the protesters by giving them emergency medical aid in the clinic set up inside the Divan Hotel,” one witness told me. “The police marched right into the five-star hotel and arrested these doctors dressed in white lab coats. They were led off with their hand behind them, handcuffed.”
As mentioned yesterday, the natural drift of Syria’s bitching sectarian and factional conflict into the Lebanese sphere has both clarified and amplified the same tensions in Lebanon and those may not be quelled in a day or two. In fact, the resentments and rivalries and perceived stakes have been building for years, and the passions surfacing into a hail of bullets do so distinctly absent of reason.
The maverick cleric was little known until few years ago and his growing following was a symptom of the deep frustration among Sunnis who resent the Hezbollah-led Shiite ascendancy to power in Lebanon. Hezbollah and its allies dominate Lebanon’s government.
(Reuters) – Saudi Arabia, a staunch opponent of President Bashar al-Assad since early in Syria’s conflict, began supplying anti-aircraft missiles to rebels “on a small scale” about two months ago, a Gulf source said on Monday.
For those who value stability in the middle east, the least honest and most ruthless appear to be winning.
As the above quote suggests, Big Sunni Money plus the cultivation across many years of strategic and trade relationships in Great Britain, Europe, and the United States have put King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia not only into the fight in Syria but remarkably behind the NATO wheel.
Of course, this recent news (surfacing in the news) isn’t news at all to the businesses and states involved in Syria’s civil war, and it should be apparent to all onlookers that this double-track, double-story business of telling the public one story while facilitating another in private has brought us to the brink of a NATO vs. Russia confrontation in which Russia may now present a devilish gambit: better Assad and the continuing misery to be imposed by the dictatorship than the expansion of either Al Qaeda or Wahhabi Islam and the certain diminishing of nascent democracy, human dignity, and secular values in Syria accompanied by the heightening of tensions in Lebanon and,somewhere in the future, with Israel and the Jewish People.
To offset that impression, King Abdullah may have to back up the money with some combination of reassuring mouth and evidence of cultural and social evolution toward the contemporary in the Kingdom, certain injunctions of the Quran either notwithstanding or interpreted or aligned with a more free and liberal and greater western world.
Outlook
For the moment, if Iran’s nuclear program and global ambitions are the true target of the conflict in Syria, then the conflict and the human suffering plus political confusion driven by it, have yet some months to years to go.
In fact, the focusing of issues in the Syrian theater of a great portion of the drivers of the Islamic Small Wars — i.e., rivalries of various sort: Al Qaeda and Wahhabi Islam; Sunni and Shiite Islam; democracy, secular dictatorship and theocracy; Iranian and Saudi Arabian competition for greater spheres of influence; even Putin’s possible issues with aggrandizement, control, and wealth on one hand and his own humanity, moderation, and strength in restraint on the other– bodes ill for constituents — worldwide — whose concerns may be more with family, security, and employment scaled down to a common denominator in the common humanity than with the triumph of a king or an ayatollah.
It has been said that with the onset of war, nobody wins, and nowhere else across the killing fields of the Islamic Small Wars does that cynical sentiment seem more likely to be proven true than in Syria this day.
Initially emulating uprisings elsewhere in the Arab world, the protests quickly divided along sectarian lines, pitting members of the majority Shiite population against the Sunni ruling family’s security forces. Since then, February 14 members have apparently engaged in near-nightly clashes with police, resulting in more than 100 dead and 2,000 injured among civilians and security personnel.
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