What both administrations fail to realize is that the West is already at war, whether it wants to be or not. It may not be a war we recognize, but it is a war. This war seeks, at home and abroad, to erode our values, our democracy, and our institutional strength; to dilute our ability to sort fact from fiction, or moral right from wrong; and to convince us to make decisions against our own best interests.
Those on the Russian frontier, like my friends from Ukraine and Estonia, have already seen the Kremlin’s new toolkit at work.
4. Don’t listen to “realists.” Self-described “realists” have suggested that Russia be given a free hand in the former Soviet republics in return for cooperation on issues that are vital to U.S. and Western security. This call to make a “deal,” in addition to its blatant immorality, ignores the fact that it makes sense to reach an understanding only with those who will keep their side of the bargain. The fact that the Russians are seeking to deny the former Soviet republics their rights as sovereign nations is all the indication one needs that an unenforceable “gentleman’s agreement” to cooperate with the West will be violated the minute it ceases to be to Russia’s advantage. The rejection of a moral framework for relations, meanwhile, will set the stage and help provide the justification for new and more outrageous Russian demands in the future.
It allows or even tricks Hutu into accusing Tutsi of planning the genocide of the Hutu, but when this happens, it is actually the Hutu who have in mind the slaughter of the Tutsi in their entirety.
The dark mirror in language has a poisonous base: all it takes, it seems, is a small suggestion that God favors . . . blue eyes, for example, not green, and an elaborating process takes over . . . blue eyes and blonde, pure of heart and race, superior to all the rest of mankind, and ready to prove it out of factories melting ore and transforming it into cold steel.
The dark mirror in language confuses the mind: it convinces the Ayatollah dressed in white that he is God’s emissary today even while he runs Evin Prison and doles out patronage to thugs who then keep suppressed the more true revolutionary forces of Iran; it convinces Hamas who agreeing to truce in 2009 that it may continue launching rockets at Israeli residential space — more than 1,000 of such attacks in 2012 alone — because it believes it has a divine right and cause, one that allows it to exceed limits not only as regards its ambitions for the Jews (articulated: genocide right to the last Jew hiding behind a rock or tree) but in regard to the minds and bodies of its own children and women whom it keeps placed around its weapons and materiel stores and before itself in battle.
The Jewish story begins not with conquest but with fleeing an ugly condition — enslavement in Egypt under Pharaoh. With the direct intercession of God and with the company of a great mixed multitude. Canaan and the Canaanites were in the future and for 40 years the hard scrabble of desert was to be the reward for leaving Egypt.
In the archaeology, Canaanite and Hebrew artifacts have been found in proximity, but, not yet, evidence of a battle royal, suggesting perhaps that the story is an idealization, a template, an illustration of an historic change in ways of life. Again, for reading, The Peace and Violence of Judaism (Oxford University Press) provides a straightforward compilation, neither always pretty nor ugly, of the defense and military doctrine of the Israelite.
For the record, about 20 percent of the population of modern Israel is Muslim and Muslims at their own discretion may elect to serve in the Israeli Defense Forces, and some do.
“Muslims who determine the worth of women as half that of men . . . Jews who would determine that their study of the All may require (lesser) others to support them: these may be the first distorted mirrors in the hall of dark mirrors that would make Hamas and the haredi liberating forces–and all others “kafir”–such are the opposite mirrors that ascribe to the other one’s own worst and most distorted contemplations.
Those mirrors are there because the writers of the monotheist foundation texts found a way to elevate their audiences into an atmosphere engineered around divine right. Jews and the gentiles, Believers and the “kafir”, the righteous and holy and the sinners–how deep those divides that for their existence rely on not much more than stubborn ideation or “habits of mind” and the political power that comes of wielding intellectual levers and wedges that divide some humans from others in accord with their literary endowments.”
My perception of conditions have change but not my comprehension of the natural basis for the pursuit of health, individuation, and freedom.
J. — wade into academe and you wade into a flood tide of anti-Semitic ranting.
What do you want to do about it?
Report it to CAMERA, Honest Reporting?
Kick it around in the peace groups?
For any close reader, the sophistry shows up in the first paragraph: “Just recall the final TV debate as Barack Obama and Mitt Romney competed to prove who could pander more to the pro-Israel side while treating Palestinians as if they didn’t exist.”
This is well-recognized false witness and slander, but because it targets a people and a state — the Jewish People and Israel — there are no legal remedies. The cultural remedy is to make ourselves honestly known through ourselves around the world.
More we cannot do.
God, although I know you don’t believe, or Nature, and that should suffice, inspired in us a great mission in a world much larger than ourselves, and we have been on it for 5,000 years — perhaps I should say only 5,000 years — and we have eased, fully, close to 3 billion people to monotheism, not that 2.85 billion give a rip about thanking us for their better tracks.
That, of course, is their problem.
I may publish this on BackChannels, it makes me so angry and, as the Jew-baiting writer might calculate, a little bit helpless as to how to approach the repair of this form of bigotry and hate. Such behavior in language stems from a deeply embedded social grammar — it is not a reasoning behavior but one rigidly set in attitudes and emotions — acquired by children in their earliest years, including probably some weeks in the womb with their ears turned on.
Regarding responses to familiar anti-Semitic rants, I wouldn’t mind seeing a WordPress or other blog architected specifically to rebuff the favored mud of the day.
For those specifically interested in language behavior and attitudes, I’ve a blog I’d like to boost in that area — http://conflict-backchannels.com. In relation to that, I’ve been more active in the Pakistani community than Israel’s, but the work is the same: there are those who reason with integrity (and we find one another in this affinity-encouraging environment) and those who reason their wills or willpower and do so disingenuously.
I’m a strong free speech advocate and really don’t want to shut anyone up (or have anyone banned from the commons, online or in real space) but rather help produce the community, worldwide, in which bigoted and intemperate loons find themselves making themselves smaller and in their “actions” (as old communist’s might say) transforming themselves into common criminals.
I started out a romantic in many ways, but age plus a little education has taught me to look at the numbers when looking at the many characteristics — amplitude, frequency, distribution, intensity — of an adverse signal.
Also the Hebe’s GB’s (of the boat show persuasion should any need the hint) provide for armoring and training. I got into this area with an Ozraeli just a few years ago and had never encountered The Bigot (or the bigots) so closely, if ever.
I’d no idea there were so many dozens influencing thousands to millions unable to contain or restrain either themselves or their hate.
I have shared a reading log through “delicious” for a while, but with this blog I’m inclined to try posting each day, or for every few days, a rolling list of articles, the kind of thing I had intended for the “Fast News Share (FNS) category. This seems like it might be less disruptive to the blog as well as more pleasant for the reader stopping by in his own newsy meandering through the conflict arena and related subjects. –jso
Possibly intended to assure or incite westerners in the MEMRI fashion, Quradhawi is telling a story about political and sectarian Islam without fully comprehending the post-WWII arrangements that today have Syria’s nuts — seriously as well as every possible pun intended — in a vice.
Posted by MEMRI, October 15, 2012.
In the post-WWII world, Syria has been Russia’s client and buffer for decades, and the mixed bag of a revolution in Syria has threatened to bring Russia and NATO into conflict. Recognizing that, both have agreed to stand off while Russia fulfills its contractual obligations with the Assad regime (for economic and military support) and the United States, probably most unhappy with this state of affairs, fears Turkey tugging on its leash to drag into a war in which it has little interest.
Within Islam in the middle east, large rivalries defined as Shia vs. Sunni and Arab vs. Turkish vs. Iranian (I’m not going to endorse the morally hideous regime there by linking it with “Persian”, even though that is what it wants) will keep blood flowing in Syria because there is no solution to the kinds of problems combatants (from the dictator to the shia to the sunni to the Turk, the Arab, and the Iranian) have in their heads.
War in Syria involves the power of language and promises expressed.
One — to be clear, everyone — would inherit their power by family or ethnic or sectarian assignation, not by building the same painstakingly on good business and good deeds all around.
Interfering with transformation: the locked down mind cultivated by multiple literary clerical bodies insulated from criticism through a haut posturing developed to reject the same out of hand.
Well, the Malala Yousufzai backlash took all of … five minutes. The outpouring of shock and outrage over the Taleban’s attempted assassination of the teenager who advocated for girls education has been replaced with a campaign of character assassination and conspiracy theories.
A Times correspondent ending a three-year assignment reflects on the fears and horrors, but also on the beauty and people that will make her miss Afghanistan.
By Laura King, Los Angeles Times
October 22, 2012, 5:04 p.m.
KABUL, Afghanistan — After years of comings and goings, almost everything about leaving Kabul is familiar: the ride through dusty dawn streets, skirting past old men on bicycles and boys in horse-drawn carts, the long airport trudge through four luggage screenings and pat-downs, the way the plane’s wingtips seem to almost scrape the jagged peaks surrounding the city.
Everything is the same — but the knowledge that this is the last time.
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