12 Thursday Dec 2013
Posted in Uncategorized
Tags
blasphemy, human rights, Iran, medieval society, political murder, politics, psychology, religion
They were convicted of “enmity with God”, which is a common charge made against critics of the government.
22 Friday Nov 2013
Moses merely facilitates God’s design in that story — and keep in mind we read these stories very carefully and a little differently — and what we notice is that God, being God, knows what’s going to happen to Pharaoh.
Moses, of course, has no idea what’s going to happen to Pharaoh.
And the reader, reading for the first time or the hundredth, may note that Pharaoh, all said and done after the tenth plague, the slaughtering of the first born, is not conquered so much as abandoned, then isolated, then left to see his pursuing army drowned.
Quite a story.
The Jews don’t get Egypt — and they don’t get off easy either: for their suffering, they get 40 years wandering in the wilderness; and Moses never makes it across the Jordan to the Promised Land. In exchange, I guess, the Jews and the “mixed multitude that left with them — get to own themselves in their next generation.
Today we ask, “what was Pharaoh?”
Whatever the answer to that, we leave it behind us, locked in history, gone forever.
For many Pakistanis, I may be the first conservative Jew with whom they have chatyped or met face to face via Skype.
I had not intended to engage in “Torah study” or to spew homilies; yet these conversations about civility — which today having to do with polite speech helped launch the above observation (my correspondent noted, “It often reminds me [of] the blessed words of the Holy Prophet Moses ( Peace and blessings be upon him ), while addressing the Pharaoh in delivering the divine Message of the All-Mighty to him” — and ethics, faith, and morality come up and I engage with abbreviated knowledge, talent, and tools I have at hand.
Judaism’s emphasis on compelling ethical argument, each line and passage urging us to examine and fight — with words — over the meaning intended produces its analogs in law and social behavior and comportment. Hillel the Elder’s update, which is how I think about his work in the interpretation of law, has sealed a great philosophy into the Greco-Roman architecture of the western character and its humanity.
For a blog frequently referencing “malignant narcissism” the trace back to Pharaoh stands first in the line of channel markers denoting the worst inhumanity imaginable — and then some — experienced by the Jews and others. If today for the Jews we should stop at Hitler while mulling over resurgent and similar nationalism in Hungary, I would ask why not afford and expand these ideas to Syrians deeply suffering between a ruthless dictator losing his state and an equally ruthless and ugly religious juggernaut murdering its way into taking it over? The part of Arab public relations that demonizes the Jews only does so to keep the promise and reality of freedom and political equality and significance — equal voice, individual, family, and community in the operations of place and state — from displacing its captive souls.
# # #
06 Wednesday Nov 2013
The urgent post-9/11 intelligence directive became: “Do more, do better, do it differently, and do it now.” In the wake of the Boston Marathon bombing—a scant two months before Snowden’s first leaks—the FBI was accused of not doing enough to track suspected terrorist sympathizers (even though those suspicions had come from the Russian intelligence service formerly known as the KGB). Two events, two contradictory reactions by the American public: one demanding that the government take action to identify and defeat terrorist threats, the other wary and untrusting of that same government.
What It Takes: In Defense of the NSA | World Affairs Journal – November/December 2013.
______
Burning Man 2013 : Truth is Beauty – YouTube – Posted 9/2/2013.
______
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,
‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’
625. Ode on a Grecian Urn. John Keats. The Oxford Book of English Verse
_____
Truth IS beautiful.
Deception is what is ugly.
Those who promote fear and do so with deceit also on occasion promote the “black swan” theory, the idea that nature produces an improbable event — like life on earth, for example, or two schnooks setting off compression cooker bombs cruelly designed to cut the legs from beneath marathon runners.
The grim review of improvised explosive devices deployed to encourage the adoption of “Islamic values” — or to discourage and subjugate others in the name of Islam — suggests such events are less “black swans”, or “bolts out of the blue” — another trite analog that works — than whole flocks of malevolent black crows.
Sorry crows.
We know when Hitchcock isn’t maligning you, you’re actually playful creatures.
______
In online chatyping, the subject of secrecy in Jihad / anti-Jihad activities and other spheres has come up, and I’ve playfully suggested the obvious: change computers and location, persona and voice.
Simple.
The day of the jackals has arrived.
Revert thoughts and data to paper — then burn the paper and rely on memory.
Some professions, say the performing arts, place premiums on memorization as the fundamental part of the craft.
Notably, in English literary arts, a part of the graduate examinations involve questions about who you know and what you know about them, but “who” and “them” may number among the thousands of characters of historic fictions.
In Arabic literature, I am guessing, the “who” and “them” may be the souls legend from earlier generations.
Indeed, my favorite correspondent on many subtopics Islamic suggests that operational code will only drill more deeply into remote corners of Islamic scripture, commentary, and law. The scholars of interest (believing themselves ” . . . more powerful against the devil than one thousand worshipers”) would seem suspected of having their own communications, command, and control language subculture, and that in Arabic, within the depths of Arabic, and tucked away and harbored like precious and useful intellectual metal.
______
Beginning with George Washington’s first State of the Union Address, in which he requested a secret fund for clandestine activities, intelligence has been an instrument to achieve the broad goals of the American people and the policies advanced by their duly elected representatives.
What It Takes: In Defense of the NSA | World Affairs Journal (as cited above)
Deception is easy.
Put on a mask and other elements of costume; alter the walk and the talk; step out of primary character and into some other creature; and work it for a while.
Truth is hard.
One has to live with it and in the company of others who challenge and entertain about the same observations and perceptions. If, whatever it may be, proves relentlessly reliable and obstreperously valid — true! and whether we like it or not — it acquires a stability all its own and needs no help by way of arms, punishments, and threats.
The truth is not belief but a stubborn “is” and unmindful and uncaring of whatever human investment may be in it or not.
In the quotation section to the left of where you’re reading, you will find this from 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.”
And I thought I was being original.
Be that as it may, the deceitful, I believe, persist in bending truth to will, the better to beatify and glorify themselves, to make themselves legend, eternally regarded — and that if not in greater social realities than their own heads and small and deeply isolated circles.
______
In recent months also, I have read of lineage traced back to King David, an argument for the divine allocation of the right to rule over others.
No cyber or real space visit to a sanitarium was involved.
As a Jew, I have been gently but firmly reminded of God’s demands for animal sacrifice and the restoration of Judaism to literal Levitican standards.
Again, no cyber or real space visit to a sanitarium was involved.
If such beliefs, levers, and sentiments have been suspended by mind in the language cherished by some minds, in just how many heads do the same arrangements persist?
What was read?
What was heard?
What was consequently formulated (about royal bloodlines, say, or irrational obligations and rituals)?
While I believe the human capacity for language invention and the invention of language-congruent cultural behavior bounded only by the necessities of place and responses to them plus desire and its many facets, I believe also that symbolic arrangements in language may be mapped, comprehended, and remapped. When that remapping has taken place in the natural development of a culture, and, say, “twerking” makes its way from youth novelty to something boring old grandmother used to do, we note the remarkable ability and flexibility English has for adaptive evolution; when force comes to erase or overlay a culture and its language, we think of that as cultural warfare and the prize is what is prised from the possession of the minds targeted.
______
In Tim Shorrock’s Spies for Hire, the annual budget cited for secret U.S. intelligence operations in their totality was $52 billion.
I hope there is some money in that green ocean for poets.
______
Alfred Hitchcock’s”The Birds” in 1 minute, and 40 seconds. – YouTube – Posted 12/4/2006.
# # #
24 Thursday Oct 2013
Tags
detective work, domestic security, equal application of the law, freedom of speech, hate groups, intelligence, religion, social tolerance
My correspondent in Pakistan sent me the link to an anti-Semitic (anti-Black, anti-Muslim, etc.) hate page and asked “How do you deal with these white supremists?
______
Nice people . . . .
We let them talk all they want.
The timbre of the surrounding culture is such that when they’re found out, individually, their business and social prospects may be minimized by natural normative social processes. They’re sickness — and that’s most American, not only Jews but most Christians as well, view it — is such that they’re liable to gravitate to their own intellectual kind.
If the group has any history in crime or violence, the police will monitor minimally through ex-con or probation relationships with individuals (not with the group), and if more attention is needed, the old joke about FBI COINTELPRO applies: “How do you get to meet an FBI agent?” — “Attend a KKK meeting!”
If the organization commits a crime, the whole law enforcement community will be up its ass pretty damn quick to make arrests on the crime and conspiracy to commit it.
If the organization has developed a criminal history, then even reformed, it’s probably infiltrated and tracked. The old “COINTELPRO” — a term that may be looked up — involved some dirty tricks bordering on entrapment but always inspiring mistrust and paranoia within the targeted group.
Oddly enough and relevant here, it’s unknown to what extent the still new Federal intelligence and security communities have going on with the Muslim Brotherhood in America (incidentally, there are no holds reading Chechnya’s Kavkaz Center or Al Qaeda’s Inspire feeds). On the surface, it appears that the Administration has hired and integrated into its departments key Brotherhood figures like Mohamed Elibiary — http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/atlas_shrugs/2013/09/muslim-brotherhood-supporter-gets-homeland-security-promotion.html — and given out promotions. I think the intent was to elevate, integrate, and surround with the greater polygot American culture the mentality involved. That too seems not to be going so well and the conservative right press harps on these Obama decisions quite a bit.
I’ve been convinced for a while that the Obama Administration has been playing a deeply deceptive politics abroad and at home, so it hasn’t endorsed the Saudis — and their being upset about that has been in the news this week — nor has it abandoned Israel, but we are worried about Iran’s steps toward failproof defense of its nuclear war making capability, which it may do by acquiring a civilian reactor too dangerous when active for destruction or dismantling. The workaround, since Russia wants to sell the Ayatollah on its part of the nuclear business, Chernobyl notwithstanding, has been to mess with the intellectual capacity in human talent and machinery involved in the pursuit of those aims. There Israel and the U.S. may diverge, for the Israelis feel that an endless policy of half measures will lead to their own destruction.
Back to other hate groups, Islamic Jihad in America, and “homeland security” — I think the aim of responsible government, such as it may be (some voters believe it absent and the country already “sold down the river”, a colloquial phrase having to do with shipping slaves from pleasant Kentucky to the markets of New Orleans) — is to treat political threat and violence engineered by Muslims no differently than it does Christian ideologues and any number of cults and gangs similarly involved with their own weird tribal politics and the posture taken against the rest of the world. If there’s a problem with that, it may be that the Muslim Brotherhood is latched to a major religion, has decades of organizational history behind it, and has a vision for mankind to rival the Nazis in its supremacist aspect.
Shimmer applies. If the scale and tempo of violence — any group or cause — American politicians and the government will ramp up the pressure to suppress that form of political exuberance. Apparently, an annual atrocity or two may not produce sufficient cause to, for example, revisit laws on sedition. The concern remains that what we do for one mob and its cause, we must do for all. For the most part, instead of criminalizing the politics, we wait for the politics to become criminal, and then we take apart the organizations.
In national religious politics: https://conflict-backchannels.com/2013/10/17/richardson-texas-imam-leaves-dallas-central-mosque-quietly/ The imam has been noted as one of the 500 most influential Muslims in the world, so there’s an intelligence story in there that I’m unlikely to pry apart. Maybe the crackdown on the Brotherhood in Egypt involved information that impugned the imam; maybe the Wahhabi thrust in the politics unseated the stance he represented, and he was forced from power; perhaps some other aspect in politics or state needs, including Erdogan’s interest in supporting the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, call him back to Istanbul; perhaps he really did take an early and quiet retirement, all the better to avoid hoopla and the long crediting in speech in public of mentors and associates along the way.
The true topic is a combine of national mission — egalitarian secular democracy here — and national security, so whether white dudes in basements talking about The Jew over their beer or the leader of the largest mosque in Texas, we’re trying to look at them the same way, guaranty the freedom of the law abiding, including the most hateful of the law abiding or the most contemptuous of others, if that, and keep our radars hot, as it were, for criminal activity.
And that’s how we deal with all of that! 🙂
Whew.
______
I credit the same correspondent with awakening me to the politics 101 phrase “behind the curtains,” and with that in mind and much impression garnered from years of blogging feel confident about President Obama’s dividing political surface from political real story.
I’m equally confident about the conservative right’s beyond-the-pale demonizing of the American President and note that not with an overabundance of respect for the office — that would be other than American too — but with numerous second looks into the rationale for moving figures like Elibiary into the Administration’s ranks. The far right cries “Infiltration!” I happen to think such moves make for closer looks and for a look at administrative integration as a potentially culturally transforming process.
What doesn’t work only teaches us more than we knew when we started.
Were it not for greed — and that may be a subject for other writing on this blog — the American political system would be a greater joy for working, but even so, it’s very good at what it does, and what it does, by and large, is produce an Awesome Discourse (a little more important than merely the Awesome Conversation, lol) sustaining a productive domestic tranquility.
In America, so far and far past the Civil War, we’re still much inclined to reach for our quills rather than our quivers when it comes to domestic politics.
# # #
22 Tuesday Oct 2013
Tags
The ideology writ culturally large (Quran + Hadith + Sectarian Emotion) affords license and then the character and chemistry of a certain kind of zealot does the rest. Whether that zealot represents a diseased branch of the whole or an ever latent perverse florescence is a part of “shimmer”, and if it’s always there, the religion will continue to fail as observed and measured by the external conflicts it foments and the internal violence it hosts.
Yesterday’s “Islamist” bombing of a bus in Volgograd becomes unfortunately another defining moment in the fate of Islam in the world even though it represents a comparatively thin “intelligraphic” band of Muslims, i.e., those engaged in murder integrated with a religious program, whether by Quran-based imperative, the inspiration of an Hadith, or culture-wide invention and emulation (shared cultural attitude).
Related: BBC News – Russia bus bomb: Volgograd blast kills six – 10/21/2012.
Beside the thin band of evildoers actively plotting violence — one may imagine the Rings of Saturn here — there seems to be a broader one of affiliates and sponsors bent on imposing Muslim will on non-Muslims or producing shadow governments tuned to Muslim Brotherhood imperatives regardless of surrounding cultural, economic, political, and social states of affairs.
# # #
10 Thursday Oct 2013
Tags
civilizational narcissism, malignant narcissism, narcissism, ouroboros, psychology, religion, systems analysis
One appreciates your resolve, would that the instructions, historically enforced, regarding dhimmi status for Jews and Christians were absent from the text. That one element alone lends dignity to the Muslim’s position at the expense of Christians and Jews, not to mention what’s in store for everyone else. It’s a flattering concept; it probably feels large (as in “living large”) but that seems to me a facet of an unbridled and untenable narcissism of a sort to which the world, Muslims first, must respond.
Islam shimmers with this aspect that may embrace and welcome in one part while also reserving to itself the mission to destroy others without restraint. That part today it wishes to cast off, which it must to save itself culturally and socially, but its head meets its tail in this again and again and again across time. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouroboros
Civilizational narcissism and the Ouroboros would seem thematic kin.
With either, we may drown in our own reflection or, same thing, devour ourselves, such is the nature of all closed ideological and tribal systems.
A good architect would not only design in some path of retreat out of his magnum opus but also a gateway to other gardens and a window to other worlds.
Ouroboros – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Force of Reason: Oriana Fallaci: 9780847827534: Amazon.com: Books — This volume starts with an overview of Islamic aggression in Europe.
Running in circles – latimes.com – by Ed Park – 12/2/2007:
In “The Origins and History of Consciousness,” he writes, “It slays, weds, and impregnates itself. It is man and woman, begetting and conceiving, devouring and giving birth, active and passive, above and below, at once.”
# # #
04 Wednesday Sep 2013
“The Mosques are our barracks; the minarets our bayonets. The domes are our helms. The believers are our soldiers”
This was the Islamist poem quoted by the mayor of Siirt, Turkey in December 1997. Charged with using inflammatory speech, he was ejected from office and sentenced to jail by the Ankara High Court.
Today he is president [STET] of Turkey. During a decade in office, he has slowly but inexorably pushed secular Turkey, a member of NATO, toward an unabashedly Islamist future.
Only a few years ago, conservative “Islamophobes” would raise the call for “moderate Muslims”: where are you? why do you not protest? why are you silent on Osama Bin Laden and so many, too many, murderous acts against unarmed others whom you do not know?
Times change.
Islamic humanism and pluralism, or perhaps I should put the “humanism and pluralism” first, restating all of a contemporary and thoughtful cast as “Humanist and Pluralist” (to be followed by cultural-ethnic-religious affiliation from “Atheist” to “Polytheist”).
One way or the other, we’re stuck with “us” — all of us — and we know that in the main “humanity of humanity” that we are not murderers and should not be so beset by those whom we know are exactly that and nothing much beyond.
Wikipedia. “Recep Tayyip Erdoğan”:
He was given a ten-month prison sentence (of which he served less than four months, from 24 March 1999 to 27 July 1999)[21] for reciting a poem in Siirt in December 1997, which, under article 312/2 of the Turkish penal code was regarded as an incitement to commit an offense and incitement to religious or racial hatred.[22] It included verses translated as “The mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets our bayonets and the faithful our soldiers….”[10] The aforementioned verses, however, are not in the original version of the poem. The poem was from a work written by Ziya Gökalp, a pan-Turkish activist of the early 20th century.[7] Erdoğan claimed the poem had been approved by the education ministry to be published in textbooks.[23] With the conviction, Erdoğan was forced to give up his mayoral position. The conviction also stipulated a political ban, which prevented him from participating in parliamentary elections. He completed his sentence on 24 July 1999.
Note: Turkey’s current President is Abdullah Gül; Erdoğan serves as Prime Minister.
Antepli, Imam Abdullah. “Only in America . . .” Huffington Post, September 5, 2013:
However, I say in full confidence and pride that the secular democracy and civic society that the U.S.A. has produced so far are still the healthiest on earth and the best available attempt to understand God’s pluralistic creation of humanity.
Additional Reference
# # #
29 Monday Jul 2013
Tags
democracy, ethical, ethics, modernity, Pakistan, political, political alignment, politics, religion, Turkey
For the biggest form of blasphemy that we all almost always commit is to force another to live in fear for believing, speaking, thinking and sometimes even existing, as we justify it in the name of our faith or stand silent as we bear witness.
No videos, sketches or hate speeches have hurt Islam more than the reckless army of blood thirsty goons justifying vandalism in the name of religion.
Saleem, Sana. “In Pursuit of Clarity.” Dawn, July 29, 2013.
As I have said in previous articles, a devout government must always support such principles as libertarianism, modernity and valuing women, beauty, art and science. It must not allow the slightest pressure or measure or reference reminiscent of pressure. It must turn its back on the possibility of radicalism and, as a “devout” administration, must apply democracy in the most perfect manner. We must admit that Mohamed Morsi and Recep Tayyip Erdogan have made errors on this.
Kocaman, Aylin. “A simple but burdensome word: Islamist.” Al-Ahram Weekly, July 23, 2013.
The World Wide Web has turned out a global mirror. Signal sent — signal returned: in language, we see ourselves as others (not always remote) may see us.
If the latest sentiments out of Pakistan and Turkey prove sustained, that thing called “The West” may have to resign itself to following rather than leading in the realm of ethical and moral investigation and righteousness, no doubt, however, while welcoming the competition.
# # #
BackChannels 