Many conversations in the social networks rely on partisan politics for argument — Democrats this, Republicans that. For the most part, the framing it time involves the period set by the run-up and aftermath of the Clinton v Trump election. BackChannels suggests that the greater challenges associated with “Islamic Terrorism”, America’s political polarization, and the advent of vicious Far Left and Far Right fascism span Administrations all the way back to the last day of the Cold War (Dec. 25, 1991) and therefore beg Americans to broaden their scope accordingly.
Try to set aside partisan information and opinion and look at the present international relations in the greater frame of the post-Cold War period begun on the morning of December 26, 1991, the day after the Soviet Union dissolved. Rather than write long (e.g., “We know today through writers like David Satter and scholars like Karen Dawisha . . . .”), I’d rather share one link to what has been really taking place with “Islamic Terrorism” and the “New Nationalism” x Russia’s interest in sustaining dictatorships and much of the related political dynamics of the medieval world.
Putin | Assad | Khamenei comprise a package, as it were, from the Soviet Era: they are each in their way a part of what has been left of it.
Putin | Orban | Erdogan | add the leadership in some former satellites reengaging with anti-Semitism — should open the window wide on the medeival revanche.
I feel quite Quixote-like fighting this post-Soviet battle for liberal democracy because what Putin has done is brought back authoritarian and fascist (Turkey) or nationalist (elsewhere in EU / NATO) leaders in a way way that has damaged interstate democratic cohesion.
Russia from before the Bolshevik Revolution and to this day has had a long history as a promoter of anti-Semitic ideas and as a host, motivator, manipulator, and sponsor of terrorism. I hope the “Reflexive Control” piece will open a window for greater curiosity that may then lead to greater perception of an east-west conflict in which Israel very much represents a democratic and humanist future where other forces have kept installed medieval tyranny.
The Obama-Trump Punch and Judy gets and takes a lot of attention, but the struggle for western democracy against Moscow’s eastern sham spans American (“I looked into his eyes”) Administrations.
At the closing press conference, in response to a question about whether he could trust Putin, Bush said, “I looked the man in the eye. I found him very straightforward and trustworthy – I was able to get a sense of his soul.” Bush’s top security aide Condoleezza Rice later wrote that Bush’s phrasing had been a serious mistake. “We were never able to escape the perception that the president had naïvely trusted Putin and then been betrayed.”
In her book, No Higher Honour, Condoleezza Rice would go on to say, “There was little room to convince critics that the circumstances of 2001 and the relationship with Vladimir Putin then were very different from what would come to pass.”
BackChannels submits that Putin was perceived differently in the White House by KGB design in those years and was not all different from the soul of the Soviet Union that had collapsed ten years earlier. For reference to the Soviet transition plan developed in the 1980s for the event of dissolving, I would recommend reading Karen Dawisha’s Putin’s Kleptocracy.
For an overview of Russian history and related authoritarian paternalism, BackChannels recommends from the Russian Section of its library the two volumes by Richard Pipes.
America as led by President Trump appears to be winning its battles but altogether losing its war against a potential tyranny in the making that has come in the form of a “New Nationalism”, i.e., a populist president who is himself autocratic and seemingly enthrall to and reliant on feudal aggrandizement, cunning, and dumb strength in both personal and public realms. As quoted from the Awesome Conversation and worth inserting here, the BackChannels piece on “Reflexive Control” and the rule of the manipulative and wealthy (like Medvedev) applies as regards the greater torque exerted by Russia, principally, and China as representing each their own politically unassailable business and leadership elites.
If Moscow believes it has taken the world forward by turning history’s clock backward, what has Washington done to freeze that totalitarian regress — and is it doing enough to keep from sliding into its own Orwellian (“Fake News!”) hell?
The American President — but not America’s governments in their totality — appears enmeshed in what ails most authoritarian regimes: questionable policies serving elites more than constituents, a host of political scandals, especially that “kompromat” thing that has come to associate the Trump brand with money laundering (for more, web search, say, “Trump, Felix Sater”) and philandering.
11/14/2010
3/29/2016
4/21/2017
Ours is a competitive world but also one bound by our human awareness of self and related facets of conscience, empathy, ethics, and morality. We’re aware of what we do and, perhaps, at the same time fearful of what we are capable of doing.
BackChannels believes that the Russian experience of the Mongol Invasion and related administration left their marks within Russian princes who would fear what any show of weakness might invite from the world around them while in the subjugated inspiring a festering crude anger and resentment. The vaunted “realpolitik” would then seem to have evolved from doing what works, and if criminality and main force and leverage appear to have worked, then then those devices may remain installed but deeply redolent of despair and disaffection and far opposite the inspiriting benefits of higher-integrity and rule-of-law democracy.
Moscow’s manipulation of “Information Space” beyond its boundaries is serious stuff, and the American public and other western democratic constituencies need to know it down to and through their grassroots.
Good examples of Russian manipulation can be seen in the Catalonian independence referendum and Brexit. Spanish Foreign Minister Alfonso Dastis announced that his government had confirmed that a propaganda campaign intended to destabilize Spain came from Russia and Venezuela. They used Twitter, Facebook, and other internet sites to publicize the separatist cause and swing public opinion to support it.
Researchers at the University of Edinburgh identified 419 accounts operating from the Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA) that attempted to influence British politics. Russian hackers also spread anti-Islamic sentiments in Great Britain after the recent terrorist attacks. According to The Guardian, hundreds of paid bloggers work around the clock at IRA “to flood Russian internet forums, social networks and the comments sections of western publications—sowing disinformation, praising the country’s president, Vladimir Putin, and raging at the west.” On Monday Theresa May addressed the issue in a speech, saying that Russia’s actions were “threatening the international order on which we all depend.”
Reliable, verifiable, and trusted news — “clear, accurate, and complete” — forms the very foundation of public impression and related decisionmaking, and to smear the entire industry bids only for absolute and tyrannical power. Around the world, however, what governments may withhold as secret from the press may not be known, or easily known, and from that comes a contest in democracies between governments and Real Press for general constituent and voter confidence in their elected government.
https://conflict-backchannels.com/library/russian-section/ – a backgrounder in the form of a bibliography listing the most accessible and enjoyable volumes on Cold War history and related political mafia and disinformation (and much else). Highly recommended: Disinformation by Pacepa and Rychlak and the Agnia Grigas work on Crimea.
Call BackChannels the work of an obsessive curiosity by the most accidental tourist in political science and political psychology. I’d say the editor would be a senior in high school, perhaps a junior in college, at this point . . . perhaps a little more sophisticated for breadth of awareness of related elements across regions (“culture, conflict, language, and psychology”) and ability to get the connections just about right.
For the once-Soviet inspired, manipulated (and paid) Hard Political Left whose most privileged of the Party would regard the same with contempt for being pliable and useful idiots:
Let me suggest this: we see opposed medieval forces in “Russia vs Turkey” but we don’t so easily discern “Medieval vs Modern” in Russia and Turkey vs NATO (I know Turkey is a NATO member but it may no longer be what a NATO member should be — distributed power, secular, reasoning).
Peacocks vs The People
While NATO focuses on the military defense of the democratic open societies of the west, its opposition, including NATO members Hungary and Turkey, appear to focus on authoritarianism, corruption (encouraged), cults of personality, and the greater encouragement of medieval conflicts involving modern weapon systems.
Troika Putin-Assad-Khamenei-(Baghdadi) have produced a whole theater of politics and combat (BackChannels titles the production “Assad vs The Terrorists”, also “The Syrian Tragedy”), and while the analyst’s perception may be that of a wickedly callous totalitarian and tyrannical bid to control the public perception of events, the public appears to be buying it: those who have incubated ISIS have now to enjoy the glory of destroying it over as long a period of time as may please them.
With Putin having extracted an apology from Erdogan over the Turkish response to aggressive Russian piloting (akin to Netanyahu’s apologizing for the defense of Israel against the Gaza Flotilla and weapons stored aboard the Mavi Marmara), Erdogan has appeared to stiffen his resolve to destroy democracy in Turkey and replace it with himself.
However, it will still be free and fair with an entire electorate free to publish and speak as it may, demonstrate where it may wish (with equal and fair permitting and wondrous order, for the most part, considering the emotions involved), and talk itself through its own national issues and sense of purpose, which is not to “rule the world” but perhaps produce a world less given to self-aggrandizing tyrants.
I’ve reserved “Fascist” from “Nationalism” with Trump because . . . he’s an American: BackChannels expects him to reject his role in the development of his own idolatrous cult of personality and to put Americans first in the representation of the many cultures, manners, and personalities that have co-produced America’s magnificent tapestry and its related wealth.
This curriculum is informed and inspired by many sources, including the Unitarian Universalist Association’s Standing on the Side of Love campaigns, the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee, Churches for Middle East Peace, World Council of Churches, the American Friends Service Committee, the Israel-Palestine Mission Network of the Presbyterian Church (USA), Just Vision, Jewish Voice for Peace, Open Hillel, Nakba Education Project, Zochrot, many Palestinian organizations working for peace with justice, the UUJME Newsletter, Kairos Palestine, Steadfast Hope, Zionism Unsettled, Middle East Research and Information Project Primer, and Phyllis Bennis’s Understanding the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict: A Primer. Links to information about these and other resources are in the lessons and/or the Resource page at the end of the guide and the UUJME website. We are inspired also by those who choose to implement this part of the UUJME Reflection & Learning Project, and wish you the best in this endeavor to stand on the side of love with the people of Israel-Palestine.
However, and with all that love accepted, let’s have a look at some of the other contributors to the curriculum promoted by the Unitarian Universalists for Justice in the Middle East (UUJME).
To advance their “justice and peace” initiatives, they collude with Islamic and Palestinian friends in a covert scheme to sabotage Israel. Their web of anti-Zionism extends throughout Europe, the Americas and Africa. While this may seem a bold assertion, it is nonetheless worth examining some undeniable evidence.
WCC is among the many coalitions of Christians that embrace the extreme left and the jihad agenda as appeasers and collaborators.
In 2008, the AFSC, along with other similarly minded religious groups, hosted a gala dinner with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as the guest of honor, despite Ahmadinejad’s Holocaust denial, anti-Semitism, and genocidal threats against the Jewish state. Ahmadinejad, however, is only the most extreme example of the AFSC making dubious friends. The participants in its BDS summer camp were mostly Palestinians or Palestinian-Americans associated with the group Students for Justice in Palestine—an organization notorious not only for its vicious rhetoric against Israel, but for going so far as shouting down pro-Israel speakers on campus and harassing Jewish students.
Washington Presbyterians who engage in dialogue with Jewish groups are scrambling to undo what they say is the damage caused by a congregational study guide assailing Zionism distributed by a group affiliated with their denomination.
Related: NGO Monitor. “The Role of Antisemitism in the Presbyterian Church (USA)’s Decision to Support Divestment.” June 25, 2014, updated March 31, 2016; Anti-Defamation League (ADL) reporting on tension within the Presbyterian Church (USA) and the offshoot Israel-Palestine Mission Network of the Presbyterian Church: “Polling data consistently show that “mainline” Protestants overwhelmingly support a safe and secure Israel, even while also being concerned about the situation of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. The efforts at the PC(USA) and other churches to pass divestment resolutions reflect the views of a minority of activists within those churches who take advantage of the structures of those churches to press their agenda.”
JVP, like other prominent Jewish anti-Zionist individuals and groups, uses its Jewish identity to deflect allegations of anti-Semitism leveled against the anti-Israel movement in order to provide it with a greater degree of legitimacy and credibility. In this guise JVP views itself as the “Jewish wing of the Palestinian Solidarity Movement (PSM)” and is an integral part of this anti-Israel coalition, serving as its “Jewish shield”, espousing the belief that if there are Jews demonizing Israel, it can’t possibly be anti-Semitic.
Also like other aggressively anti-Israel organizations, JVP members regularly attempt to shut down dissent by disrupting pro-Israel events such as a 2010 talk by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the events at a 2011 Taglit Birthright reunion in New York and the 2012 AIPAC conference. Brandeis University Prof. Ilan Troen, who calls JVP “self-appointed saints with no mass following”, explains that “If you’ve ever dealt with the JVP, they themselves are a semi-terrorist group, promoting the disruption of free speech and the inability of others to conduct public discourse.”
The JVP advisory board includes leaders in anti-Semitic and anti-Israel hate, such as Judith Butler, Noam Chomsky, and Sarah Schulman. All three of these anti-Israel advocates deny the Jewish right to self determination, legitimize the internationally recognized terrorist group Hamas, and support the destruction of the world’s only Jewish state.
Related in the news: Shahmoon, Shani. “Jewish Woman Forced to Hide From Anti-Israel Activists at UC-Irvine.” Observer News & Politics, May 20, 2016: “Earlier this month, Jewish and pro-Israel students found themselves caught in what they describe as a “fire of hate” and feelings of mourning as they observed Holocaust Remembrance Day. The Muslim Student Union, Jewish Voice for Peace, Students for Justice in Palestine and the American Indian Student Association just happened to organize a week of anti-Israel activity marketed under the title, “Anti-Zionism: The Roots of Oppression,” during the same week.”
. . . while Open Hillel phrases their intentions in the context of a free and unfettered debate (hence “open”), their events, speakers and partners actually seem to be far more interested in institutionalizing a set of radical opinions—and browbeating the mainstream into accepting it: That far from being a lonely liberal democracy facing daunting challenges from without and within, Israel is actually an illegitimate, oppressive, colonial state that might be better off not existing; and that Jewish students cannot truly understand it without teaming up with extreme pro-Palestinian groups.
While “Nakba” points to disaster it also brings up the uncomfortable matter of whipping legions to genocidal war and losing the same. In the immediate aftermath of “1948”, the Arab world took revenge on the Jewish residents of Arab states, and that history may be read about on this blog: Point of No Return.
. . . the group’s founder has written the following about his vision of the future:
When the refugees return, Jews will become a minority in the country. Israel as a Jewish state will change radically, and it will no longer be defined as such. Jews will no longer be able to determine their future…by themselves…. There may be Jews, most of them of European origin, who won’t be able to adjust to a non-Zionist reality, and prefer to use their other passport to move elsewhere…”
What’s a nice Jewish girl like Phyllis Bennis doing at the head of the class of anti-Zionist, anti-Israel, (anti-Semitic) leaders, the kind who stand shoulder to shoulder with those inclined to label the Jewish-majority state “Israhell”?
Here’s a partial transcript leading to Bennis’s becoming swept up in the radical politics of the Vietnam Era — her further transformation into parroting the catechisms of the New Old Now Old Far Out and Lost Left comes in the back half of the video:
The short answer is the Vietnam War. I grew up right through highschool with this focus on Zionism. That was my social environment. Those were my friends. That’s who I hung out with. And then I went away to college. And I started college in 1968, the big year, if you will, and in that context, I spent my first year being very much a serious student . . . you do grow up as a Jewish kid with . . . it’s all about education, all about getting good grades . . . so here I am, a seventeen year old kid, showing off, linking up with a group of graduate students and taking their courses, their postdoctoral seminars, thinking of myself as quite the intellectual, but by the end of my freshman year I’m suddenly immersed in the student movement, anti-war stuff . . . the Black Student Union had taken over the computer center the year before in the struggle to get an ethnic studies department on campus — I’m at the University of California in Santa Barbara — and suddenly I’m joining SDS [Students for Democratic Society], I’m part of the new student government . . . we have an alliance with the Latino movement and the Black Student Union, and we take over student government, and suddenly I’m the chair of the lectures committee . . . you know what the hell is that? I didn’t really know, but I had a budget of ten thousand dollars, which at that time was really a lot of money, to bring people to campus. So I brought Angela Davis, I brought half the defendants of the Chicago Conspiracy Trial, and the lawyers from the trial, and suddenly I was involved with meeting all these people I had only heard about, and school suddenly was not really about going to classes . . . none of us went to class very much. We were publishing an underground newspaper, and we were doing radio — we took over the campus radio station . . . .
In the region of historic anti-Semitism associated with Christianity and Islam resides the concept of “religious succession”, i.e.,the idea that one true church — one true connection with God — will and must displace less authentic, less true competitors, and that includes the Judaism from which Jesus emerged.
BackChannels believes Constantine and Muhammad have made their points and that a medieval portion of their following in legacy continues to take unholy license in the doing of their bidding.
What is to give the new fascists (whether out of the Christian Far Right, the Islamist camps, or the Far Left) pause for reconsideration?
Look to 21st Century sophistication in ethnology, linguistics, and psychology to help us appreciate and comprehend how our species develops and sustains its cultures. That dawning self-awareness and knowledge may well improve general resistance to medieval manipulation and unintentional support of the ambitions, martial powers, and sadism of feudal tyrants — the most malign of narcissists — in their contemporary forms.
This post started with but a single paragraph from the introduction to a full multi-part curriculum developed to lead Unitarian Universalist congregants in the discussion of the middle east conflict, but a glance back at the contributors to that program may tell what its politics are really about. As had a large portion of the Presbyterian Church (USA) in 2014, those most responsible in the Universalist Unitarian Association may wish to investigate who — and what — may be served by the subgroup curriculum disseminated through their organization.
Waitstill Sharp was a minister in the Unitarian church in Wellesley, Massachusetts. His wife, Martha, was a noted social worker. During World War II, Martha and Waitstill Sharp helped hundreds of people escape from Nazi persecution.
Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority in Israel, honored the Sharps as Righteous Among the Nations in 2006.
Trump the Businessman, not political scientist, and perhaps an ignoramus when it comes to the small wars linked to Islamists and the post-Soviet struggle to maintain in the world medieval “absolute power” — the power of despots — hasn’t a clue about the larger forces he’s encountered. He lives in the land of reaction: you-do | I-do. It’s a social game and in related psychology referred to as “transactional psychology”, but he’s oblivious to the chain that links together Putin, Assad, Khamenei, and Baghdadi and risks becoming himself a part of endless conflict in a medieval — “21st Century Feudal — context.
Trump’s “tough guy” posture mirrors Putin’s stance and plays into Putin’s own reactionary and 19th Century “New Nobility” vision.
Unlike Obama, Trump may not have access to the long narrative in realpolitik except through the few academics and advisors he may have summoned to brief him. American presidents, this one way or another, get seated at the helm of a big chunk of machinery perpetually running, and it’s not until one gets into that chair that deeper operating instructions and orientation become possible. For good reason, the outsider may not be able to see inside an administration’s machinery in its depths. While Americans continue to admire the productivity and strength of capital in the hands of a good businessman, the same values that produce that person may impede that “hard-nosed” personality’s approach to immense cultural and political transformation worldwide.
The Feudalists — Putin, Assad, Khamenei, Baghdadi, and their like worldwide — would like nothing more than the conflict that would perpetuate their stays in power and with it the grotesque enormity of their plunder. The cliches apply: “East vs West”; “Christianity vs Islam” (and with that, we might as well revisit “Catholics vs Protestants” while certainly witnessing today “Shiites vs Sunnis”); and the general “Clash of Civilizations”. The truth welling up out of the messes more resembles “Medieval Absolute Power” vs “Modern Democratic (and Meritocratic) Distributions of Power.”
“Medieval vs Modern” has long seemed to BackChannels the more true conflict axis.
“He was brainwashed and manipulated to the point where he spared no one. He didn’t spare the wife, he didn’t spare the child, he didn’t spare the rabbi. He killed the husband, attacked the wife, the child, and the rabbi until the police came and shot him dead.”
Related Online
During the past week terrorist attacks, which had been concentrated in greater Jerusalem, spread to other locations in Israel, including Kiryat Gat in the south, Tel Aviv, Afula in the north, and Gan Shmuel (near Hadera) and Raanana (in the center of the country). The attacks have been carried out by young lone terrorists, most of them from east Jerusalem, and some from Judea and Samaria. There were also two Israeli Arabs (from Nazareth and Um el-Fahm), Palestinians staying in Israel illegally, two women and two children. They were motivated for the most part by the lie spread by the Palestinian media that Israel allegedly threatened Al-Aqsa mosque, as well as by the frustration, desperation and anger of the younger generation. Generally speaking, the terrorists have not been operatives of any established terrorist organization, and the current wave of terrorism has not been directed by any organization, but rather is directly inspired by the intensive incitement accompanying it.
“The aggressive and growing Israeli attack against our people, land and holy places undermine peace and stability,” Abbas said in a televised speech, according to the official WAFA news agency. “This attack threatens to ignite the fuse of a religious war, which will burn everything — not only in the region (but) perhaps in the entire world.”
Political blackmail — intimidation, threat — may be expected from a leader who no longer has anything, not even peace, to offer the people he purports to represent, much less his counterparts in the west.
The centrist leader Yair Lapid, otherwise stridently secular, has found inspiration in Talmudic precepts: “The rabbis teach that if someone comes up against you to kill you, you should kill him first,” he said. “That should be our working model.” He added, “Don’t hesitate. Even at the start of an attack, shooting to kill is correct. If someone is brandishing a knife, shoot him. It’s part of Israel’s deterrence.”
About a month ago, Russian President Putin’s “Special Representative for the Middle East and Deputy Foreign Minister” Mikhail Bogdanov met with representatives of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and discussed, among other things, the stalled delivery of Russian S-300 missiles to Syria in 2012. Two days ago, the issue resurfaced in the news with the message that the delivery would go through.
Ahmed Meligy, speaking from the Egyptian historic and national experience, appears to understand the power words may have to sway large swaths of population, never mind that such words may be untrue. The medieval world may have found itself unburdened by the spreading of viciously absurd blood libels; this one between appears to deal instead in the more subtle aspects of disingenuous speech: sins of omission (as in the reporting of Israeli arrests but not the conspiracies or crimes that provoked them); emphasis on the death and injury of Palestinian miscreants and de-emphasis on the assaults that drew both an appropriate and narrowed response.
You can see what the New York Times is attempting from the headline.
“The Dueling Narratives of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict” is an attempt to provide journalistic “balance” on a story where none exists.
We could say a lot about the article, with its lopsided reliance on Palestinian sources and reference to Hanan Ashrawi’s charge that police had planted knives to frame innocent Palestinians (a charge she even admitted she had “no evidence” to back up.)
The PLO, Fatah and the Palestinian Authority have for decades used children as fodder to throw rocks, fireworks and explosives at soldiers, as bombers, as lookouts and couriers. Hamas has been even more brazen, publicizing its recruitment of an army of child soldiers. In the current wave of terrorism in Israel and Palestine, we have seen attackers as young as 13 years old.
In one of the most shocking examples, the mother of a Palestinian terrorist who was killed during an attack on a Jerusalem bus earlier this month pulled out a knife during a television interview and threatened to follow her son’s example.
“I am concealing this weapon for Israel. Watch out, Israel! Watch out!” exclaimed Umm Muhammad Shamasne while making stabbing gestures in an Oct. 22 interview on the Lebanese Al-Quds TV station.
The Institute for Palestine Studies published a detailed report on Gaza’s Tunnel Phenomenon in the summer of 2012. It reported that tunnel construction in Gaza has resulted in a large number of child deaths.
“At least 160 children have been killed in the tunnels, according to Hamas officials”
The author, Nicolas Pelham, explains that Hamas uses child laborers to build their terror tunnels because, “much as in Victorian coal mines, they are prized for their nimble bodies”.
During the first three weeks of October 2015, ten Israelis were killed and 112 wounded — eleven of them seriously — in 40 stabbing attacks, four shootings, and five vehicular attacks that took place throughout the country.
On October 23, however, BBC News told its audiences that Israelis are suffering from either a collective psychosis “characterised by delusions of persecution” or “unjustified suspicion and mistrust of other people” — depending on which definition of the word “paranoia” BBC editors intended with their headline that read: “Paranoia deepens wedge between Israelis and Palestinians.”
On Phillip Weiss’s contribution to anti-Semitic / anti-Zionist propaganda.
I’ve made an occasional reference to Weiss or the blog he founded, Mondoweiss, since then. Mondweiss is basically one-stop shopping for anti-Israel news. Anything bad that goes on in Israel will be publicized and exaggerated at Mondoweiss. If you want to know the far-left anti-Israel party line on any recent event, Mondoweiss is the place to go.
It’s more than possible these days to trace in the English language the intellectual seams of the New Old Now Old Far Out and Lost Left, the Left that died a little when the Soviet dissolved and is dying a lot as a feudal revanch as Putin’s buddy Assad drops barrel bombs on all non-combatant Syrians he thinks might oppose his dictatorship.
Kirkpatrick invariably seeks out the same poisonous wells. In the case of this article, these are: Human Rights Watch, a non-governmental organization in search of funds. Through attempting to interpret the facts about the New Egypt to fit its own theoretical notions of what constitutes the upholding of human rights. It is a private corporation in search of aggression through intervening in internal affairs via the human rights pearly gate. Ignoring that in countries in transition, like Egypt, the collective rights of the populace trump the rights of the individual.
BackChannels appreciates Dr. El-Ayouti’s piece as not being about Israel but about post-Islamist Egypt under al-Sisi and reporting favoring the Muslim Brotherhood and biased against the modernizing efforts of the central power of the state.
Unverified video uploaded to social networking sites purports to show fighting near Syria’s Yarmouk refugee camp, where Palestinians.
In this report, posted on the Internet on November 22, 2014 by the Palestinian Diaspora Media Center, refugees at the Yarmouk camp in Syria show how they pro.
Opposition activists say Syrian warplanes launched rockets at the Palestinian refugee camp known as Yarmouk.
At least 25 people have been killed in the Yarmouk refugee camp in southern Damascus. Syrian fighter-bombers fired at least one miss.
Red Brown . . . a little less Green, perhaps.
Published on Oct 9, 2014
In this moving video, NATO Review looks inside the KGB prison where Latvians were locked up, tortured or killed. We hear how today’s leading Latvians were affected by Soviet occupation. And we ask if they see echoes in today’s Russian aggression.
BackChannels 