• Home
  • About
  • Concepts, Coins, and Terms
    • Anthropolitical Psychology
      • Civilizational Narcissism
      • Conflict – Language Uptake – Social Programming and Scripting – A Suggestion
        • Language Uptake – Programming – On Learning to Listen
        • Mouth –> Ear –> Mind –> Heart System
        • Social Grammar
      • Facsimile Bipolar Political Sociopathy
      • Malignant Narcissism
      • Narcissistic Scripting
      • Normative Remirroring
      • Paranoid Delusional Narcissistic Reflection of Motivation
    • FTAC – “From The Awesome Conversation”
    • God Mob
    • Intellectual Battlespace
    • Islamic Small Wars
    • New Old Now Old Far Out and Lost Left
    • Political Spychology
    • Shimmer
    • Syndicate Red Brown Green
  • Library
    • About Language
    • Alpha by Author
    • Dicks and Spooks – Political Spychology
    • Judaism and Jewish Culture and Life
    • Russian Section
  • Comments and Contact
  • X of Interest
    • A-Z Links
    • Alpha – Zulu
      • Associated Articles of Governance – United States of America
      • Daniel L. Everett – Reading Highly Recommended
      • Khamenei and Iran – Assorted Reference
      • Lee Smith’s Comment on ‘Media Warfare’ in the Middle East
      • Lies are Told for Only Two Reasons
      • On Being a War Journalist — Francesca Borri in Syria – 7/1/2013
      • Putin and Russia — Assorted Reference

BackChannels

~ Conflict, Culture, Language, Psychology

BackChannels

Tag Archives: reformation

FTAC – Advertising by the Different Jihad’s Anti-Jihad

23 Thursday Apr 2015

Posted by commart in 21st Century Feudal, Anti-Semitism, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Islamic Small Wars, Politics, Religion, Syndicate Red Brown Green

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

anti-Semitism, Islam, reformation

Geller-TransBanner-tif-cr-524x

VICTORY!Judge rules for us in AFDI vs MTA:”The [MTA’s} theory is thoroughly unpersuasive” #WIN http://t.co/7nkCXIrTd7 pic.twitter.com/EtdlRs2kZL

— Pamela Geller (@PamelaGeller) April 21, 2015

If the screenshot banner copy is unclear or too small to read, it says, “‘Killing Jews is Worship that draws us close to Allah’ — Hamas MTV.  That’s His Jihad, What’s yours?”

 Comment From The Awesome Conversation

The Geller and Spencer and other anti-Jihad shows ask of Islam sufficient introspection and courage emphasize virtue, reform if necessary, and put both the 20th Century inspiration for the “Muslim Botherhood” and related poison-in-the-head out of business so that more of the world can get to work on other things.

However, the conflict and violence that assaults us daily by way of global media — and investment in this region of discussion — hasn’t only to do with Islam: it has to do with the interpretation of power — absolute and feudal or distributed and democratic. “Putin-Assad-Khamenei” are of a type, and Islam, especially in the middle east, has been “played” (ref.: Pacepa and Rychlak) and plays to their deeply medieval world vision and the image they have of themselves in it.

The Jews continuously, famously, remove themselves from cults of godlike personality and continue eternally in search of the Promised Land. Instead of imposing, the commune invites, and perhaps after Hillel, some ideas about a common humanity become borrowable but also political and little bit crooked (in Judaism, for example, all of the prophets are drawn as faulted humans, deeply so, and kept separate from God). For our grandiose delusional dictators fascists malignant narcissists, the limitation perhaps seems a deep affront and “control”, sadistic and total, becomes their thing. Must we have them? “Syndicate Red Brown Green” and NATO, more or less, are wrestling over it. Hamas is way down on the food chain (thank Khamenei, among others, for keeping it in business) but it’s leveraging some Islamic zeitgeist to produce chaos, fear, and sorrow around itself serves the larger press of the feudal mode.


Not only “the awesome conversation” elicits the above but also simply visiting these themes — conflict, culture, language, psychology — day after week after month after years: things come to the surface.  Some become so familiar as to become blog-based tropes:

No Moses — no Muhammad

Hillel the Elder –> Jesus, Paul, Constantine –> Muhammad

The Torah begins with God

The Torah, closely read, compels progressive ethical and moral argument

Syndicate Red Brown Green (post-Soviet neo-feudal Russia; new national socialists; Islamists)

Expect some items to show up on the “Alpha – Zulu” page of this blog.  Others may be simply plugged into meditative political writing as fit.

The tests of will in conflict that BackChannels has come to perceive has been very much within the medieval vs modern template, which would be fine if the medieval proved good.  The matter, however, has been complicated by a dark portion in psychology, i.e., the compulsive, endless, and helpless fascism and sadism of the malignant narcissist.  Too often, capricious power — power considering itself above all natural laws and inclined to create and make the same to suit itself without limits — comes to impose suffering on others with impunity.  It (!) appears to prize the annihilation of others and the erasing of time out of the urge to exist in a timeless world entirely of its own fashioning — and doing so it dooms itself to annihilation.

Additional Reference

Miller, Michael E.  “Killing Jews is worship posters will soon appear on NYC subways and buses.”  The Washington Post, April 22, 2014.

# # #

Link – Nomani – On the Intimidation of Criticism

21 Tuesday Apr 2015

Posted by commart in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Islamic Small Wars, Religion

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

feudalism, freedom of speech, Islam, reformation, religion

Alongside the honor brigade’s official channel, a community of self-styled blasphemy police — from anonymous blogs such as LoonWatch.com and Ikhras.com to a large and disparate cast of social-media activists — arose and began trying to control the debate on Islam. This wider corps throws the label of “Islamophobe” on pundits, journalists and others who dare to talk about extremist ideology in the religion. Their targets are as large as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and as small as me.

Nomani, Asra.  “Meet the honor brigade, an organized campaign to silence debate on Islam.”  The Washington Post, January 16, 2015.


The above article was mentioned by Ayaan Hirsi Ali in a video featured on another BackChannels post.

The more action taken against the classically liberal world, the more the medieval machinations grinding away at it and Islam’s future become clear.  Lightly linked here “malignant narcissism” within the realm of political psychology, the roots of intellectual stuckness, the propensity for deeply authoritarian and sadistic leadership, become increasingly clear.

As noted on that other post, the discussion of reformation in Islam has been taken up in an earnest fashion by New Age Islam and, of course, there is now no end to criticism from every direction, including from deep within Islam, of an Ummah beset with bloody conflicts and terrorist incidents from Afghanistan to Yemen.

# # #

Link+ – ISIS Backlash – Islam Forward

09 Tuesday Dec 2014

Posted by commart in Islamic Small Wars

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Islamic Small Wars, reformation

“Dear Mr. President, I must tell you that you are wrong about ISIL. You said ISIL speaks for no religion. I am a former Muslim. My dad is an imam. I have spent more than 20 years studying Islam. … I can tell you with confidence that ISIL speaks for Islam. … ISIL’s 10,000 members are all Muslims. … They come from different countries and have one common denominator: Islam. They are following Islam’s Prophet Muhammad in every detail. … They have called for a caliphate, which is a central doctrine in Sunni Islam.”

He continued: “I ask you, Mr. President, to stop being politically correct . . . .

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/07/opinion/sunday/thomas-l-friedman-how-isis-drives-muslims-from-islam.html – 12/6/2014.


(posted to YouTube 9/2/2014)

# # #

From Shiite Islam — Should Be Famous Last Words

18 Thursday Sep 2014

Posted by commart in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Islamic Small Wars, Politics

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Islam, islamic humanism, reformation, Revolution

Fahs emphasized that he backed the so-called Arab Spring from the very beginning: “I am human, I am Muslim, I am Lebanese and Arab, and I want reformation because our call for reformation includes liberation from tyrants, our call includes a renaissance which is free and not extremist in accordance with the framework of Islam.”

http://www.dailysabah.com/mideast/2014/09/17/shiite-scholar-claims-iran-behind-syrian-conflict – 9/17/2014.

Related:

http://www.dailystar.com.lb/News/Lebanon-News/2014/Sep-18/271087-anti-hezbollah-shiite-scholar-hani-fahs-dies.ashx#axzz3DiWcTZ8y – 9/18/2014.

# # #

FTAC – Solving the Problems of the World at the Dinner Table

27 Monday Jan 2014

Posted by commart in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Facsimile Bipolar Political Sociopathy, Islamic Small Wars, Politics, Psychology, Religion

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

four universal virtues, goodness, humanity, Islam, reform, reformation, virtue

For a global standard in values, I’ve been promoting just four virtues: compassion, humility, inclusion, integrity. With those four embraced, a lot of problems start to go away and more things can be done to get improvements in “qualities of living” for the living everywhere.

As regards Islamic Reformation, I sometimes want an Obi Wan moment to say to one proponent of one thing or another, “The goodness, K, is in you, not the Qur’an, the Torah, the Second Testament. God cannot be taken from the good, for such may be emergent within the humanity of humanity.

Referencing psychology, the keys on which I harp: bipolar and narcissistic personality disorders / “Facsimile Bipolar Political Sociopathy (the psychology of dictators) / “civilizational narcissism” Mobarak Haider’s term; in cognitive psychology and language behavior, one may note that while we don’t always see things the same way (the truth is we seldom do), we can look into that together and together diminish an entire class or dimension in contemporary armed conflict.

Oh how we used to fight, my father and me.

Today, he’s gone, and I get to win some.

At least in my own head.

And the “dinner table” — the forum for “lively” (brutal) political discussion:  Facebook.

If any readers should be with me on all of this: let’s keep it simple.

# # #

 

FTAC – A Note on A Coalescing Monotheist Humanism

23 Wednesday Oct 2013

Posted by commart in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Philology, Philosophy, Politics

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

humanity of humanity, monotheism, reformation

We may not like the cultural blender or centrifuge fashioning the humanity of humanity and coalescing most in the monotheist traditions around a monotheist humanism (the proposed universal values and virtues I apply for that are compassion, humility, inclusion, and integrity), but that may be where we’re going. The so-called “real” Islam, which carries the burden of the Banu Qurayza legend (was that a good thing or a bad thing? Was the slaughter just? Today, Aafia Siddiqui — heroine or villain?) or the “real” Christianity, which owes much of its “realness” to Constantine’s marches (that one had a colossus made of himself), or the “real” Judaism that preoccupies Kirs Joel in New York State spin out in schism, separation, and war. Those come apart and the “humanity of humanuty” recovers its main and progressing regions.

Every child born comes equipped with a legacy in culture, customs, family, language, and religion.  Perhaps the greater the separation from others, say the tribe from the greater family of man — or here the person from social anchorage — the more autonomously evolving, eclectic, and narcissistic.

The narcissistic bubble, the house of mirrors, even perhaps Plato’s cave afford freedom within their interior boundary responsive entirely to its inhabitants — or inhabitant — but introduce some cultural and political commerce to that sealed environment (and should you hear in that phrase an echo of the “sealed nectar”, enjoy the faint metonymy) and something is going to change.

In what direction always — and tragically after much fighting, shouting, suffering, and dying?

Call that the “humanity of humanity”.

Analog: Lincoln’s “better angels”.

Inspiration for the thought here: my uncle’s old Haggadah in which was stated in Jewish memory of the exodus from Egypt: “With each generation, a little more freedom is won.”

As we enter an era of dangerous and delicate energy technology, i.e., more nuclear power plants, expansive solar panel arrays, their vulnerability in war and our dependence on them for living plus improving qualities of living wants the clearing away of those who trouble lands with their own romantic mythos borne of deeply evolved isolation (evolved in thought in language) and once unhindered by any consideration of others.

______

Excerpt from Abraham Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address, Monday, March 4, 1861:

In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow-countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The Government will not assail you. You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors. You have no oath registered in heaven to destroy the Government, while I shall have the most solemn one to “preserve, protect, and defend it.”

I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

Notably, Lincoln’s message preceded the greater carnage of the Civil War.

The cynical may say he gambled.

The believing, however, may believe Lincoln knew and wrote the end of the matter at the beginning.

# # #

“Another Kind of Islam . . . .”

27 Friday Sep 2013

Posted by commart in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Islamic Small Wars, Philology, Philosophy, Politics, Psychology, Religion

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

channeling, conflict, humanism, idealism, invention, Islam, language, Muslim, progressivism, reformation, social grammar

Ahmed is convinced that only the Muslims themselves could be the answer to the “Islamists” and that the moderate Muslims must find the resources to counter what she called the “multi-head Medusa.”

“Only if we tell ourselves the truth, that the Islamists are a threat within us, can we confront them. The chasm between Muslims and Islamists is a deep one,” she said.

Israel Hayom | Muslim scholar: ‘I refuse to let Islam fall captive to the Islamists’ – by Reuven Berko, 9/27/2013

Between Islamic Jihad and Western Anti-Jihad, or perhaps better phrased, between the Islamist’s Believers and the More Strident of the Crusader West — that’s got the Kavkaz Center obsession working in it — reside the lives of approximately 1.2 billion persons.

Where the true religion mixes time in a forever present, leaving the virulent segment of believers forever fighting the Battle of the Trench, “another kind of Islam” would seem to want to join with the nations in progress across the many qualities of living.  As sensible as that may seem, as easy as it may be to do — just switch off the “contempt” and “hate” buttons — language-based perception — start with the child’s command of a globally antagonistic and misfitted social grammar; move on to the compression of time integrated with a powerfully romantic and barbaric scripture (for example, reference At-Tawba 29 — the binary or split Jihad/anti-Jihad views of the literature are abundant on the web); and wrap-up with alignment of ahadith, essential hearsay, to suit political interest, and don’t forget to add the black-and-white thinking (acceptable / not acceptable) accompanying it — precludes so convenient an answer.

______

Narrators who took the side of Abu Bakr and Umar rather than Ali, in the disputes over leadership that followed the death of Muhammad, are seen as unreliable by the Shia; narrations sourced to Ali and the family of Muhammad, and to their supporters, are preferred. Sunni scholars put trust in narrators, such as Aisha, whom Shia reject. Differences in hadith collections have contributed to differences in worship practices and shari’a law and have hardened the dividing line between the two traditions.

Hadith – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia – as viewed 9/27/2013.

With Muhammad’s death, apparently, the Religion of Peace seems to have become the Religion of Eternal Conflict, starting with the conflict between the Shiite and Sunni camps in their exercise of a) tribal choice in the b) absence of more clear successionary  instructions.  In the medieval fields of battle in an age much less comprehending of empiricism, enlightened reason (Shakespeare’s contribution to a pagan humanism that he would weave within and around the separate character of the Church — or ever mindful of it — more than 700 years later), it would be said that “God decides” even though what “decided” then (as now) would have been diplomacy, energy (brought to bear in battle), strategy, and steel.

The Jews have had issues with language too, but where the Torah teases minds into arguments — what is the meaning of an action, a passage, a moment? — injunctions to act as programmed in the adoption of attitudes and beliefs about others and with reference primarily to one’s own grandiose image as licensed to subjugate whole populations, a thing well demonstrated by either the invention or favored adoption of the Banu Quarayza legend, that behavior as primarily language behavior has and indeed has had other effects.

* * *

For Muslim readers, perhaps the toughest chapters deal with Muhammad’s slaughter of the Banu Qurayza. Fatah denounces the story as invented by influential scholar Ibn Ishaq nearly 100 years after the Prophet’s death. No archeological evidence supports it. No Jewish text corroborates it. Yet the story forms part of Islam’s Hadith literature and the Sira, the biography of the Prophet, and has come to be regarded as divine truth, Fatah says.

The problem, the author says, is that Islam lacks a tradition of questioning religious texts. So far, no Toronto imam has joined him to reject the Banu Qurayza story. So far, no mosque has invited him to speak.

The Jew Is Not My Enemy: Tarek Fatah | Toronto Star – by John Goddard, 11/19/2010

More than merely modernity or opportunity, the “humanity of humanity” — there will be a page on that here — has long tempered Islam in its treatment of Jews, albeit capriciously, much in line with the fate of the Jews left exposed to the will of more powerful others whenever and wherever Jews have been in the minority position, and that from Roman times to this day.

As with the quintessential Jewish desire to band in the desert — in human evolutionary reality, who were those people who first gathered together and determined a good way, their way, and way of life that would leave dictators to their fates — or, as with Haman, defeat them? — Islamic humanism and humanists seem to me a more natural course for Muslims than that conceived, promoted, and disciplined by the God Mob even though their stripe seems to have been there at the beginning.

There may be in the above thought a patently Jewish perspective, but a glance at Islam’s more beneficent and merciful humans, certainly more so than the miscreants often mentioned on this blog, tells of something deeply universal operating across cultures and languages as one slips into the modernity of any epoch:  Eman Fahad Al Nafjan, Irshad Manji, M. Zuhdi Jasser, Pervez Hoodbhoy, Mudar Zahran, Qanta Ahmed, Tarek Fatah have each taken firm stances against “Islamist” drift while deeply acknowledging or affirming their relationship with Islam.  With such good people and scholars, every one of them, one wants to know whether theirs collectively will become the voice of a powerful Muslim “silent majority” — I don’t think they are that today in the world’s Muslim-majority states — rather than the expression of a highly educated, intellectual, western-oriented elite, which (look ’em up on YouTube) is how some may be played by the more Brotherhoodly among zealous coreligionists.

______

It’s hard to look into the heart except through the mouth using for an instrument one’s ears.

Those I’ve named speak bravely, consistently, reliably and seem ever good voices and great souls.

They are influential in our global online village, and they’re not in the least alone — the fan base is pretty good, but perhaps its development may be likened to depositing vaporized precious metal on a suitable substrate — it takes a little bit of time and repetition to get from that process something solid and strong.

For the time being, I suspect the English speaking and Express Tribune reading Muslim complement to a still emerging global intelligentsia — we have each shared with the other a hearty “welcome aboard!” although aboard what may remain in contention — indeed comprises but a thin layer and kind in the amalgam of the earth-wide communicating whole.

Will Islamic humanism and humanists contain what needs to be contained?

Tune in (after the Sabbath).

Additional Reference

VCU Menorah Review, “An Open Letter to Tarek Fatah” by Richard Sherwin, Winter/Spring 2012.

The Jew is Not My Enemy: Unveiling the Myths that Fuel Muslim Anti-Semitism: Tarek Fatah: 9780771047848: Amazon.com: Books (2011)

Maimonides – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia – as viewed 9/27/2013:

During the reign of the Almoravids, the position of the Jews was free of significant abuses,[14] but after another Berber dynasty, the Almohads, conquered Córdoba in 1148, they abolished the dhimma status (i.e. state protection of life and wealth) in some of their territories. The loss of this protected status threatened the Jewish and Christian communities with conversion to Islam, death, or exile.[13]

Maimonides fled to Egypt and became the personal physician to the Kurdish general and sultan Saladin and his family.

Golden age of Jewish culture in Spain – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia – as viewed 9/27/2013:

The coexistence of Muslims, Jews, and Christians during this time is revered by many writers. Al-Andalus was a key center of Jewish life during the early Middle Ages, producing important scholars and one of the most stable and wealthy Jewish communities and a relatively educated society for the Muslim occupiers and their Jewish collaborators, as well as some Christians who openly collaborated with the Muslims and Jews. María Rosa Menocal, a specialist in Iberian literature at Yale University claims that “Tolerance was an inherent aspect of Andalusian society”.[1]

Islamic Humanism – Lenn E. Goodman – Oxford University Press

Islam And Terrorism: A Humanist View, by David Schafer, May/June 2002

# # #

FNS: Tarek Fatah: “It’s Time To Fight the Doctrine of Jihad”

23 Thursday May 2013

Posted by commart in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

anti-Jihad, criticism, Islam, Jihad, reformation

While ordinary Britons and non-Muslims around the world are bewildered by these never-ending acts of terrorism, the response of the leaders of the Islamic community is the tired old cliche — Islam is a religion of peace, and jihad is simply an “inner struggle.”

The fact these terrorists are motivated by one powerful belief — the doctrine of armed jihad against the “kuffar” (non-Muslims) — is disingenuously denied by Islamic clerics and leaders.

Fatah, Tarek.  “U.K. Beheading Shows: It’s Time to Fight the Doctrine of Jihad.”  The Blog – The Huffington Post, May 23, 2013.

Fight those who believe not in Allah nor the Last Day, nor hold that forbidden which hath been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger, nor acknowledge the religion of Truth, (even if they are) of the People of the Book, until they pay the Jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued.

By way of Wikipedia and from the translation of the Quran by Yusuf Ali.

I submit to you: a problem in the head remains a problem in language.

Not that there aren’t other combined biological and cognitive issues involved in the psychological organization of each person and then each person’s expression as a social spirit and member of our universally gregarious species.

I don’t know if we may be hurrying to discuss some things so far kept in the wings and given keen attention by “Islamists” and “anti-Jihadists” both.

Tom Trento of The United West:

M. Zuhdi Jasser (American Islamic Forum for Democracy):

Tarek Fatah

Tarek Fatah founded the Muslim Canadian Congress, so here I’ve continued on to a clip featuring Salma Siddiqui, a past president and current member of the board with that organization.

Evidently the conversation has been joined for a while, but there’s a difference between taking a stance and developing an evolutionary path in language away from disaster and transforming some portion (remember: the proportions  shimmer) of an enormous population in such a way that it takes responsibility for its fate and becomes reasoning and reasonable and just in its ethics and in its efforts to improve the local and regional qualities — physical, psychological, and spiritual — of living.

Islam, that “old time religion” part of it, at least, contains a trump card for play against the progressives and reformers: generations of investment in belief in the divine delivery of the Quran and in the holiness of Muhammad.

# # #

Ezra Levant with Tarek Fatah.  “War on the West: Meat Cleaver Madness.”  Interview.  Sun News, May 23, 2013.

← Older posts
  • Compassion
  • Empathy
  • Justice
  • Humility
  • Inclusion
  • Integrity
____________

Caution: The possession of anti-Semitic / anti-Zionist thought may be the measure of the owner's own enslavement to criminal and medieval absolute power.
___________

Diane Weber Bederman Recommends BackChannels on Facebook!

"If you want to read great ideas and great prose, check out this FB page: BackChannels. James S. Oppenheim is a brilliant writer Get a glass of wine or a cup of coffee, sit down and enjoy."

Recent Posts

  • FTAC Verbatim: American Laziness & Intellectual Poisoning
  • FNS (For Freedom): Cancel Culture, Dictatorship
  • FTAC: Dumb Americans and Racial Herding
  • FTAC: A Quick Comment on Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms
  • Authoritarianism, Feudal ‘New Nationalism’, Criminal Interests – An Erosion of Press Freedom
  • Bolton on Biden and Renewal of the JCPOA

Categories

  • 21st Century Feudal
  • 21st Century Modern
  • A Little Wisdom
  • Also in Media
  • American Domestic Affairs
  • Anti-Semitism
  • Asides
  • BCND – BackChannels News Day
  • Books
  • Conflict – Culture – Language – Psychology
  • COVID-19
  • Epistemology
  • Events and Other PSA's
  • Extreme Brown vs Red-Green
  • Fast News Share
  • foreign aid
  • Free Speech
  • FTAC
  • FTAC – From The Awesome Conversation
  • International Development
  • Islamic Small Wars
    • Gaza Suzerain
  • Journal
    • Library
  • Journalism
  • Links
  • Notes On Reading BackChannels
  • Philology
  • Philosophy
  • Poetry
  • Political Psychology
  • Political Spychology
  • Politics
  • Psychology
    • Facsimile Bipolar Political Sociopathy
  • Referral
  • Regions
    • Africa
      • Central African Republic
      • Kenya
      • Libya
      • Mali
      • Morocco
      • Nigeria
      • South Africa
      • Sudan
      • Tunisia
      • Zimbabwe
    • Asia
      • Afghanistan
      • Burma
      • China
      • India
      • Myanmar
      • North Korea
      • Pakistan
      • Turkey
    • Caribbean Basin
      • Cuba
    • Central America
      • El Salvador
      • Guatemala
      • Honduras
      • Mexico
    • Eastern Europe
    • Eurasia
      • Armenia
      • Azerbaijan
      • Russia
      • Ukrain
      • Ukraine
    • Europe
      • France
      • Hungary
      • Poland
    • Great Britain and United Kingdom
    • Iberian Peninsula
    • Middle East
      • Egypt
      • Gaza
      • Iran
      • Iraq
      • Israel
        • Palestinia
      • Jordan
      • Kurdistan
      • Lebanon
      • Palestinian Territories
      • Qatar
      • Saudi Arabia
      • Syria
      • United Arab Emirates
      • Yemen
    • North America
      • Canada
      • United States of America
    • Norther Europe
    • Northern Europe
      • Sweden
    • South America
      • Argentina
      • Brazil
      • Columbia
      • Ecuador
      • Venezuela
    • South Pacific
      • Australia
      • New Zealand
      • Papua New Guinea
      • West Papua
  • Religion
  • Spain
  • Syndicate Red Brown Green
  • transnational crime
  • Uncategorized
  • Visual Data

Europe

  • Defending History
  • Hungarian Spectrum
  • Yanukovych Leaks

Great Britain

  • Stand for Peace

Israeli and Jewish Affairs

  • Chloe Simone Valdary

Journals

  • Amil Imani
  • New Age Islam

Middle East

  • Human Rights & Democracy for Iran
  • Middle East Research and Information Project

Organizations

  • Anti-Slavery
  • Atlantic Council
  • Fight Hatred
  • Human Rights First Society
  • International Network Against Cyberhate
  • The Center for Victims of Torture

Meta

  • Register
  • Log in
  • Entries feed
  • Comments feed
  • WordPress.com

Epigram

Hillel the Elder

"That which is distasteful to thee do not do to another. That is the whole of Torah. The rest is commentary. Now go and study."

"If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am not for others, what am I? If not now, when?"

"Whosoever destroys a soul, it is considered as if he destroyed an entire world. And whosoever that saves a life, it is considered as if he saved an entire world."

Oriana Fallaci
"Whether it comes from a despotic sovereign or an elected president, from a murderous general or a beloved leader, I see power as an inhuman and hateful phenomenon...I have always looked on disobedience toward the oppressive as the only way to use the miracle of having been born."

Talmud 7:16 as Quoted by Rishon Rishon in 2004
Qohelet Raba, 7:16

אכזרי סוף שנעשה אכזרי במקום רחמן

Kol mi shena`asa rahaman bimqom akhzari Sof shena`asa akhzari bimqom rahaman

All who are made to be compassionate in the place of the cruel In the end are made to be cruel in the place of the compassionate.

More colloquially translated: "Those who are kind to the cruel, in the end will be cruel to the kind."

Online Source: http://www.rishon-rishon.com/archives/044412.php

Abraham Isaac Kook

"The purely righteous do not complain about evil, rather they add justice.They do not complain about heresy, rather they add faith.They do not complain about ignorance, rather they add wisdom." From the pages of Arpilei Tohar.

Heinrich Heine
"Where books are burned, in the end people will be burned." -- From Almansor: A Tragedy (1823).

Simon Wiesenthal
Remark Made in the Ballroom of the Imperial Hotel, Vienna, Austria on the occasion of His 90th Birthday: "The Nazis are no more, but we are still here, singing and dancing."

Maimonides
"Truth does not become more true if the whole world were to accept it; nor does it become less true if the whole world were to reject it."

"The risk of a wrong decision is preferable to the terror of indecision."

Douglas Adams
"Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?" Epigram appearing in the dedication of Richard Dawkins' The GOD Delusion.

Thucydides
"The Nation that makes a great distinction between its scholars and its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools."

Milan Kundera
"The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting."

Malala Yousafzai
“The terrorists thought that they would change our aims and stop our ambitions but nothing changed in my life except this: weakness, fear and hopelessness died. Strength, power and courage was born.”

Tanit Nima Tinat
"Who could die of love?"

What I Have Said About the Jews

My people, not that I speak for them, I nonetheless describe as a "global ethnic commune with its heart in Jerusalem and soul in the Land of Israel."

We have never given up on God, nor have we ever given up on one another.

Many things we have given up, but no one misses, say, animal sacrifice, and as many things we have kept, so we have still to welcome our Sabbath on Friday at sunset and to rest all of Saturday until three stars appear in the sky.

Most of all, through 5,773 years, wherever life has taken us, through the greatest triumphs and the most awful tragedies, we have preserved our tribal identity and soul, and so shall we continue eternally.

Anti-Semitism / Anti-Zionism = Signal of Fascism

I may suggest that anti-Zionism / anti-Semitism are signal (a little bit) of fascist urges, and the Left -- I'm an old liberal: I know my heart -- has been vulnerable to manipulation by what appears to me as a "Red Brown Green Alliance" driven by a handful of powerful autocrats intent on sustaining a medieval worldview in service to their own glorification. (And there I will stop).
One hopes for knowledge to allay fear; one hopes for love to overmatch hate.

Too often, the security found in the parroting of a loyal lie outweighs the integrity to be earned in confronting and voicing an uncomfortable truth.

Those who make their followers believe absurdities may also make them commit atrocities.

Positively Orwellian: Comment Responding to Claim that the Arab Assault on Israel in 1948 Had Not Intended Annihilation

“Revisionism” is the most contemptible path that power takes to abet theft and hide shame by attempting to alter public perception of past events.

On Press Freedom, Commentary, and Journalism

In the free world, talent -- editors, graphic artists, researchers, writers -- gravitate toward the organizations that suit their interests and values. The result: high integrity and highly reliable reportage and both responsible and thoughtful reasoning.

This is not to suggest that partisan presses don't exist or that propaganda doesn't exist in the west, but any reader possessed of critical thinking ability and genuine independence -- not bought, not programmed -- is certainly free to evaluate the works of earnest reporters and scholars.

Archives

Blog at WordPress.com.