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Tag Archives: Soviet Era

FTAC: MEC: Where’s the Hold-Up?

12 Sunday Aug 2018

Posted by commart in 21st Century Feudal, Also in Media, Anti-Semitism, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Gaza, Islamic Small Wars, Israel, Middle East, Palestinia, Political Spychology, Politics

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

history, middle east conflict, Palestinian KGB, Palestinians, Phantoms of the Soviet, PLO, political manipulation of the Palestinians, Soviet Era, YNet series

The Palestinians may end the occupation any day by ceding Israel to Israel and establishing peace between themselves in the Preoccupied Territories. Decency in governance would follow and the recognition of an authentic Palestinian state would follow on that.

What and who are holding up the Palestinians?


There’s no cliffhanger left in the above question.

YNET-KGB-ME-Series-graphic-for-reference-to-it

You can get there from here


On BackChannels —

Set: Palestinian KGB

–33–

Smart Alik! Skating Across the Era of Soviet Absurdities

22 Friday Jun 2018

Posted by commart in Books, Journal, Library, Philosophy, Political Psychology, Russia

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Tags

contemporary Russia, Jehovah's Witnesses, Orwellian state, Pentacostal Christians, refuseniks, religious persecution, Soviet Era, Soviet history, Soviet injustice, Soviet intolerance

6 x 9Polishchuk, Arkady.  Dancing on Thin Ice: Travails of a Russian Dissenter.  Los Angeles: DoppelHouse Press, 2018.

In the news at the time:


At the unusual session, General Shchelokov was said to have told the Jews that he had heard of the alleged beatings on a newscast by the British Broadcasting Corporation. He insisted that he was not in charge of security at the reception office.

“I would never permit beating,” Mr. Shcharansky quoted the minister as having said. “If it were my affair, I would arrest the organizers.”

Four of the Jews were missing tonight. They were Boris Chernobylsky, a radio engineer; Arkady Polishchuk, a former editor of the magazine Asia and Africa Today; Viktor Yelistratov and Mikhail Kremen, both also radio engineers. It was not known whether they had been arrested.


Simpler, David K. “Jews in Moscow Resume Visa Sit-In.” The New York Times, October 22, 1976.

The missing “refuseniks” plus one — Arkady Polishchuk notes in his account of that distant day that he had not applied for a visa but was with a crew that had — knew where they were, and the one doing the remembering through his memoir was in that place called pain.

A doctor in the Sklifosofsky Institute said that I had two cracked ribs and recommended to wind a towel around my trunk.  He refused to give me an x-ray film or a written reference.  An exhausted night nurse of this principal trauma center muttered, “If we give a reference to every hoodlum beaten in a street fight  the country would soon run out of ink and paper.”

They certainly had shortages of x-ray films and painkillers.

p. 211

Having been Jewish but not at the time a refusenik, Polishchuk would similarly take up the cause of Pentacostal Christians persecuted by the Soviet Union for their possession of faith.  With empathy and wry humor, he conveys what it’s like for the criminalized pious:

“The local KGB should pray for you every day,” I said.  “Without you, they would’ve stagnated here, without an increase in rank and salary.”

After this lively exchange of views on the role of light and darkness in the spiritual life of mankind, we all crossed the kitchen garden planted with heavenly potatoes, passed by green onions and fragrant dill, and, through a narrow opening in the fence, began making our way to the house of Vera Shchukin.  One by one or in pairs, we used the most roundabout paths between houses.  The village was asleep.  Almost all windows were now unlit.

I wiped sweat from my forehead and whispered to Goretoi, “Muggy.”

He said nothing.  I couldn’t stop talking.  “For how long have you been aware that this gathering is prohibited by articles 142 and 227 of the Criminal Code?”

“For as long as I’ve believed in my Savior,” he whispered.

p. 244


Near the time of this writing, Polishchuk’s telling of the plight of Pentecostal Christians may take on an eerie resonance as Capo, Colonel, President, Emperor Vladimir Putin’s government goes after the community of Jehova’s Witnesses in today’s  Russia:

“It began about 10 o’clock in the evening and didn’t wind up until 4 a.m.,” Tatyana Petrova said of the raid. “I didn’t see how it started because I was in the kitchen, but I heard my husband go to the door. I heard a woman introduce herself as someone from the electric company. She said she needed to read the meter. My husband opened the door and then a whole crowd of people pushed into the apartment.”

Filimonov, Andrei and Robert Coalson. “‘Extremist’ Faith: Russian Jehovah’s Witnesses Report Wave Of Police Raids, Detentions.” Radio Free Europe, June 15, 2018.


In Polishchuk’s day:

Children giggled and jostled each other in the ribs.  The men were pushed up against the walls.  Two old women sat close to the invisible gap between the door and its frame, in hope of catching a breath of fresh air.  On stools sat an old man, white as chalk, and two pregnant women.  One of them, with a hand-copied New Testament, offered me her chair, but I shook my head and clung to the wall.  When nearly forty persons had squeezed into the house, the deacon turned on the light, and ducked outside to check if it escaped to the street.

p. 244


Life’s a long enough journey for most, but in the Soviet Union, the unutterable sadness of situations posed against the boasted heroic strength of the state must have made it seem so much longer.  “Alik”, when referred to with affection, sent to write about a community for the blind discovers instead of a refuge for those so afflicted a familiar metaphor and dismal reality:  “. . . a leper colony.  There was nothing I could write about them.  I was frantically looking for a way to say at least half-truths about their everyday concerns instead of reporting on the contribution of the blind to our common cause of building socialism.”

In the wings always and frequently spotlighted: spooks . . .  KGB — as colleagues (around whom to be cautious) on publications; as agents sent to disconnect his home phone before the refusenik Natan Sharansky could relay a statement by Andrei Sakharov to a listener in Canada; as minders, followers, and thugs.

The games played in Putin’s courts today seem no different then they were then.  Polishchuk covered one of the trials of Dr. Mikhail Stern whose latest crime had been to give his son “a written permission” required in support of the application of the same to emigrate.  The whole becomes an absurd nightmare of examinations of minute evidence to none.

While the phantoms of the Soviet live on in the spiritual descendants of the KGB, perhaps the haunting swirls on in the earlier victims of their omnipresent bureaucracy, observation, manipulation, sabotage, entrapment and framing, capricious “justice”, and punishment.

Additional Reference

Wikipedia. “Soviet Dissidents”.

–33–

 

FTAC: MEC: Addressing the Brutal Preoccupation

08 Friday Jun 2018

Posted by commart in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Gaza, Islamic Small Wars, Israel, Political Psychology

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

intellectual history, intellectual poisoning, middle east conflict, Palestinians, Soviet Era

I may have developed a bad rep on FB for having had the audacity, however dull, to connect the dots back to the end of WWII and the coming “framing” and handling of the refugees of 1948 — the Palestinians — as useful for blocking the spread of democracy and liberalism and for making money for political elites in the Soviet manner. How we got to this point: https://conflict-backchannels.com/2018/02/06/set-palestinian-kgb-and-other-backchannels-observations-related-to-the-middle-east-conflict/

Some Palestinian cadre — the middle level of anti-Zionist leaders — know the page but have recovered   after the initial shock and picked right up with the broadcasting of the familiar Orwellian catechism — “brutal occupation”, “Zionazis” and all the rest. The language and narratives injected more than 70 years ago into the Soviet influenced portion of Arab culture has amounted to “intellectual poisoning” and is today visible.

All sides need to wrap up WWII, Russia’s historic issues with the Jews, and for the policymakers and scholars allow the truth sink in and live on.

The most basic reminder: Herzl’s launch of Zionism took place before even the start of the 20th Century; Jewish agriculture was capitalized in the region starting with land sales from Arabs to Jews for the development of crops. The effort worked, drew general labor, and enriched the region. Frequently overlooked: the expulsion of more than 800,000 Jews from Arab states after 1948).

Bottom line from long ago: Moscow cooked up programs for Arab dictatorships and for those who were to become the Palestinians. For Moscow, the Soviet Era ended in bankruptcy with an official dissolving on December 25, 1991. Putin’s Russia — often referred to as the “mafia state” — seems a bit surreal in its continuing partnerships with Damascus and Tehran.


–33–

FTAC: Palestinian History (To This Point) Compressed

15 Tuesday May 2018

Posted by commart in 21st Century Feudal, Anti-Semitism, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Gaza, Israel, Middle East, Palestinia, Political Psychology, Russia

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

exploiting the masses, Hamas, medieval v modern, middle east conflict, Palestinian, Palestinian history, PLO, political blackmail, Soviet Era, totalitarianism

The Palestinian liberation movement descends directly from the Soviet Era and Moscow’s interest in leveraging grievance into the political power familiar to the world’s most piratical dictatorships. This is not to excuse western perfidy on parts of the global far right in the 20th Century, but to note where the phoniness in Palestinian politics originated.

At the end of WWII, what Adolph could not hold, Uncle Joe picked up and although representing a very different system from that of the German fascists, the feudal authoritarianism was there to encourage similar drift associated with absolute power — or “political absolutism” — in the middle east. (Note regarding Moscow: two major revolutions, three governments, one-hundred years — and The Bear remains absolutely authoritarian, criminal, and totalitarian).

We know today the KGB’s relationship with Arafat and the PLO (also the pride Yuri Andropov took in the airline hijackings of the 1970s) and we have learned within the past couple years of Mahmoud Abbas’s own KGB record.

Keep loving Moscow — and you will love even more Palestinian suffering by way of its designs.

Note well that ALL Palestinian top leaders have become multi-millionaires while Khaled Mashaal and Ismail Haniyeh long ago developed reputations as billionaires.

The seduction, captivity, and suffering of the Palestinian main base has turned out a long-lived and powerful business for thieving elites and their systems of patronage.


Related on BackChannels

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2018/02/06/set-palestinian-kgb-and-other-backchannels-observations-related-to-the-middle-east-conflict/

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/09/23/ftac-these-too-are-palestinians/

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/03/08/bds-cult-modules/

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2015/10/12/ftac-tip-to-the-kgbs-amplification-of-middle-eastern-anti-semitism/

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2017/07/29/ftacantidote-to-what-poisoned-the-palestinians/

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/12/27/excerpt-1920s-the-spread-of-hate-russia-germany-laqueur/

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2017/12/29/ftac-middle-east-conflict-back-to-max-erwin-von-scheubner-richter-and-forward-to-the-plundering-of-palestinian-misery-by-palestinian-leadership-elites/

–33–

Books: Arkady Polishchuk’s _Dancing on Thin Ice_ Due Out July 3, 2018

14 Monday May 2018

Posted by commart in 21st Century Feudal, Books, Political Psychology, Russia

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Arkady Polishchuk, Christian persecution, Communism, Dancing on Thin Ice, disinformation, Soviet Era, totalitarianism

From the publisher’s promotion:

In this memoir, replete with Jewish humor and sardonic Russian irony, exiled Russian journalist and human rights advocate Arkady Polishchuk colorfully narrates his evolution as a dissenter and his work on behalf of persecuted Christians in 1970s Soviet Russia. Told primarily through dialog, this thrilling account puts the reader in the middle of a critical time in history, when thousands of people who had been denied emigration drew international attention while suffering human rights abuses, staged show trials, forced labor, and constant surveillance.

From 1950–1973, Polishchuk worked as a journalist for Russian state-run media and as an editor at Asia and Africa Today, where all foreign correspondents were KGB operatives using their cover jobs to meddle in international affairs. His close understanding of Russian propaganda makes this memoir especially eye-opening for American readers in today’s political climate.

https://doppelhouse.com/dancing-on-thin-ice/

–33–

FTAC: Palestinian Captivity: Thank Moscow for the PLO

19 Tuesday Dec 2017

Posted by commart in 21st Century Feudal, Anti-Semitism, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Gaza, Islamic Small Wars, Israel, Middle East, Palestinia, Philology

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

anti-Semitism, Arab-Soviet Produced Palestinian Captivity, middle east conflict, PLO, Soviet Era

It’s Russia that has used its power to keep the Palestinian leaders in loot and the Palestinian main base bereft. If the phrase “free will and determination” of Palestinians is to have any meaning at all, then the same must displace the kind of power (and repressive political methods) represented by both the PLO and Hamas. Otherwise, the population hasn’t any free will — only camps and containers to keep them suspended and held powerless by their own interlocutors.


BackChannels has practically produced a constructive module on this topic:

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/10/03/palestinian-kgb/
–
https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/09/23/ftac-these-too-are-palestinians/
–
https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/03/08/bds-cult-modules/
–
https://conflict-backchannels.com/2015/10/12/ftac-tip-to-the-kgbs-amplification-of-middle-eastern-anti-semitism/
–
https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/12/27/excerpt-1920s-the-spread-of-hate-russia-germany-laqueur/
–
https://conflict-backchannels.com/2017/07/29/ftac-antidote-to-what-poisoned-the-palestinians/
–
https://conflict-backchannels.com/category/anti-semitism/

 

It wold take multiple acts of willful ignorance to deny what the Soviet Union did in its day to contribute to the political abuse, channeling, and repression of what have become today’s Palestinians locked into camps, patronized (if part of what the Soviet picked up in relationships after the Nazis were defeated) or preserved to act as “human shields” in wars provoked by leaders who happily steal funds intended for their development and welfare.

–33–

 

FTAC: The PLO Remembered

05 Tuesday Dec 2017

Posted by commart in 21st Century Feudal, Anti-Semitism, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Epistemology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Islamic Small Wars, Israel, Jordan, Middle East, Palestinia, Politics

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

middle east conflict, PLO, Soviet Disinformation, Soviet Era, Soviet Political Manipulation, terrorism, Yasser Arafat

Source of inspiration:

Younis, Rami.  “Looted from Beirut 35 years ago, now on display in Tel Aviv.”  +972 Magazine, December 4, 2017.


“Similar to the destruction of Palestinian urbanization in 1948, the theft of Palestinian visual culture is another attempt by Israel to control the historical narrative and erase Palestinian history. “

And yet the authors of both the documentary and the gushing +972 promotion launch their criticisms from Hebrew University and Tel Aviv University with the help, frankly, of the IDF that could as well have kept its information out of the public sphere.

Palestinians may wish to revisit the real history behind Yasser Arafat —
https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/10/03/palestinian-kgb/ — who survived his repeatedly defeated troops and impoverished people to die himself with upwards of $100 million in loot (and about the same may be said of the living Abbas who has also built a remarkable system of patronage on the suffering of the Palestinian main base).

A few reminders about the PLO and perhaps the principle of evil.

http://www.encyclopedia.com/history/asia-and-africa/middle-eastern-history/black-september-group

http://www.merip.org/mer/mer119/dilemma-plo

http://www.camera.org/index.asp?x_article=795&x_context=7

For more on the Soviet role in the weaponizing of the Palestinian mind:

http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/103576/the-cold-wars-arab-spring


Referenced

Berlinski, Claire.  “The Cold War’s Arab Spring: How the Soviet’s Created Today’s Middle East.”  Tablet, June 20, 2012:

Two of Bukovsky’s documents appear in English for the first time in Behind the Desert Storm. The first is Yuri Andropov’s memo to Leonid Brezhnev in 1974 detailing a KGB meeting with Palestinian terrorist Wadie Haddad. It recommends that the Soviet government provide material support to Haddad’s Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. The second is the transcript of a 1984 Politburo meeting approving the shipment of 15 million rubles’ worth of weapons and ammunition to the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine in exchange for a collection of ancient art. The invention of modern terrorism: All credit is due to the Kremlin.

Borden, Sam.  “Long-Hidden Details Reveal Cruelty of 1972 Munich Attackers.”  The New York Times, December 1, 2015.

CAMERA.  “Yasir Arafat’s Timeline of Terror.”  November 13, 2004.

Cobban, Helena.  “The Dilemma of the PLO”.  Middle East Research and Information Project, Winter 2016.

Encyclopedia.com. “Black September”.


Link Modules Related on BackChannels

On the Disingenuous Cruelty of the BDS Movement

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/03/08/bds-cult-modules/

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/09/23/ftac-these-too-are-palestinians/

On the KGB’s Manipulation of Palestinian Politics and Mind

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/10/03/palestinian-kgb/

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2015/10/12/ftac-tip-to-the-kgbs-amplification-of-middle-eastern-anti-semitism/

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2017/07/29/ftac-antidote-to-what-poisoned-the-palestinians/

On Russia’s Endemic Medieval Anti-Semitic Habits and Related Defamation and the Development of Other Political Disinformation

https://conflict-backchannels.com/category/anti-semitism/

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/12/27/excerpt-1920s-the-spread-of-hate-russia-germany-laqueur/

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/11/28/a-short-page-referencing-works-by-or-associated-with-ion-mihai-pacepa/

 

–33–

 

 

FTAC: After the Cold War – An Observation

09 Thursday Nov 2017

Posted by commart in 21st Century Feudal, American Domestic Affairs, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Political Psychology, Politics, Russia, United States of America

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

absolute power, democracy, economic feudal estates, Police State, Russian history, Soviet Era

We may have misinterpreted the Cold War and most certainly misrepresented it as an ideological war predicated on the spread of “Communism” when, in fact, the tension has been always about autocratic / authoritarian political culture.

Open democratic systems strive to balance and limit the power of any one organization, party, or person to impress will on others without consent.

Dictatorships inherently represent police states, and the end of that kind of power becomes inevitably the power to visit suffering on others with impunity.

The “Empire” was Russia.

When the Cold War ended, the west may have opened its doors, its hearts, and its wallets to encourage democracy and the open market systems, and in some ways it started to work: the posture helped produced Kremlin adversary Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a part of the starting-gate mafia (to whom key state assets were sold) whose wealth transformed him into a modern and moderate capitalist politician.

The it’s-all-mine emperor-to-be (so today it seems) in the Kremlin disagreed with both liberalism and westernization and appears to have turned instead to building a feudal network of power to be distributed through the wealth of a massively enriched elite worldwide.

I have heard that Russia has exported as much as $3 trillion into western (rule-of-law) assets (I don’t have the time frame for that history of capital flight and seemingly quite compulsive and mad spending, the kind that doubles Trump’s money on a property and goes on to raze the mansion, thereby producing a $92 million undeveloped luxury beach front lot — it would be only money were it not also an investment tied to foreign wealth).

It would seem our businesses and properties may be working to benefit “Moscow” — Putin’s nobility — after all.


Richard Pipes book, referenced below, suggests that Russia’s princes adopted the outlook of the Mongols as regards power, property, and persons as the power of the same diminished over the land.  That early and traumatic experience with the Golden Horde appears then to have left its mark within the political culture that came to stand in its place.  By about 1702, the relationship between the powerful and the ruled had produced sufficient resentment and related insecurity for Tsar Peter I to issue a decree installing Russia’s first secret police organization:

According to its provisions, the head of the Preobrazhenskii Prikaz had the right to investigate at his discretion any institution and any individual, regardless of rank, and to take whatever steps he thought necessary to uncover pertinent information and forestall seditious acts . . . .  No one — not even the Senate which Peter had set up to supervise the country’s administration — had the right to inquire into its affairs.  In its chambers thousands were tortured and put to death, religious dissenters and drunks overheard to make disparaging remarks about the sovereign.  The uses of the police, however, were not confined to political offences, broadly defined as these were.  Whenever the government ran into any kind of difficulty, it tended to call upon its organs for help.  Thus, the complex task of managing the construction of St. Petersburg, after various unsuccessful attempts was in the end entrusted to that city’s police chief.

The Preobrazhenskii Prikaz seems to have been the first institution in history created to deal specifically and exclusively with political crimes.  The scope of its operations and its complete administrative independence mark it as the prototype of a basic organ of all modern police states.

Pipes, Richard. Russia Under the Old Regime: The History of Civilization.  P. 130.  New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1974.

Related in Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oprichnik
Era: Ivan the Terrible

Modern theories suggest that the motivating purpose for the organization and existence of the Oprichniki was to suppress people or groups opposed to the Tsar. Known to ride black horses and led by Ivan himself, the group was known to terrorize civilian populations.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Okhrana
Era: Alexander II, Alexander III / 1881-1917

Formed to combat political terrorism and left-wing revolutionary activity,[2] the Okhrana operated offices throughout the Russian Empire and satellite agencies in a number of foreign nations. It was concerned primarily with monitoring the activities of Russian revolutionaries abroad, including Paris, where Pyotr Rachkovsky was based (1884–1902).

The task was performed by multiple methods, including covert operations, undercover agents, and “perlustration”—reading of private correspondence. Even the Foreign Agency served this purpose. The Okhrana was notorious for its agents provocateurs, including Dr. Jacob Zhitomirsky (a leading Bolshevik and close associate of Vladimir Lenin), Yevno Azef, Roman Malinovsky and Dmitry Bogrov.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronology_of_Soviet_secret_police_agencies

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Russian_rulers

The Russian Section of the editor’s library offers additional and in-depth reading for those on the edges of Russian Studies, which were necessarily a big deal during the Cold War but another element much diminished when the end officially arrived on December 25, 1991.

–33–

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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.

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