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Tag Archives: terror

Aside

12 Tuesday Aug 2014

Posted by commart in Asides, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Islamic Small Wars, Politics

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

idolatry, Islam, Islamism, terror

One friend who has pursued her own course in conflict and Islamic studies suggests that al-Qaeda represents the authentic Islam and all else are trying to wriggle through it or reform and revolutionize its cultural technology. In that the Ummah is as broad and varied as one might expect a natural human system to be, Muslims on many paths have become the first victims of “those” Muslims, and, indeed, out of themselves must come the army that defeats the past.

While it surprises me that Baghdaddi has gotten as large as he has — he has the basics: an ample treasury and believing or compliant troops — what is coming for him and his followers may surprise him.

Regarding the psychological character of the tropes of Jew hate, I use the term “paranoid delusional narcissistic REFLECTION of motivation”. Their language is their sheet of music, and no attack on any physical body amounts to anything without effort to get in the way of that poetic programming.


Inspiration:

http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/mass_immigration_and_the_left_have_brought_jew_hatred_back_to_the_west/ 8/12/2014.

One hopes the “radical” (conservative) mosque message finds repudiation among the believers of a more modern cast, but the conservative kafir-side endorses a rightfully cautious paranoia: the speech presages a well-known, well-witnessed fascist evil.

The political program works probably works about the same way for the modern political and religious authority as it may have for Muhammad himself: it deeply manipulates and exploits the believing.  While Hamas, for example, places noncombatants as shields against Israeli strikes at its war making facilities, Khaled Mashaal works the levers from his billionaire’s safety in Doha, his wealth having come out of treating the residents of Gaza as a business enterprise.

One could travel from one Botherhood-promoting Muslim autocrat to another and find pretty much the same canards and abetting political and social structures in place.

# # #

Link

03 Sunday Aug 2014

Posted by commart in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology

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Tags

Gaza, Hamas, Hamas terrorizing Gaza, Left, politics, terror

Are they even aware that most of the Christian community in Gaza have fled –out of fear of Hamas? Gaza Christians were and are driven away by intimidation, death threats, forced conversions and scrutiny by Hamas “Torquemadas” who check to make sure these new converts are attending Mosque on a regular basis. Have they seen the videos recently smuggled out showing Hamas henchmen beating up Palestinian men, women and children trying to evacuate their homes, (as the IDF asked them to do), and being driven back inside by Hamas henchmen so their deaths can become fodder for naïve, unquestioning western eyes? For every Palestinian – except their most dedicated supporters, Hamas rule in Gaza has become akin to the inquisition. Has it ever occurred to these new lefties that their unquestioning support of Gaza is actually enabling Hamas and other similar tyrants to continue doing what they do best – namely rule through intimidation and terror?

http://israelsvoice.com/article.php?id=294&t=1407101450 – 8/3/2014

For good reason, I refer to it as the “New Old Now Old Far Out and Lost Left”.

# # #

On the War on Terror from the War on War

03 Thursday Oct 2013

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

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Tags

guerrilla warfare, insurgency, Islamic Small Wars, political anarchy, political erosion, terror, terrorism

Dying insurgencies are desperate to remind their enemies and potential supporters that they are still around and still to be feared.

Steven Metz – WPR Article | Strategic Horizons: Al-Qaida’s Resurgence, Like Its Demise, Is Greatly Exaggerated – 10/2/2013.

* * *

Once a powerful voice for electoral reform, a vocal critic of palace corruption, and the leading opponent of economic normalization with Israel, lately the Jordanian Brotherhood has seen its local influence and standing erode. Other Islamists, too, are finding it hard to capture the public’s attention.

David Schenker | The Rise and Fall of the Muslim Brotherhood in Jordan | Foreign Affairs – 10/20/2013.

______

The center wins.

Always.

Eventually.

That “eventually” is a problem, for “eventually” may turn out a long stretch.

“Eventually”, also, we all die, and let it be acknowledged: states and their complex machinery do too.

A long spell of anarchy aided by the juggernaut of a fanatic narcissistic and sociopath insurgency may leave the political body of a space woefully impoverished and scattered.

Of course, when it comes to civilians in a war zone, whatever does not destroy them may make them stronger.

Rice writes that in an eighteen-month period in 2007 and 2008, the mounting violence at the hands of the Shabaab caused eight hundred thousand people, including Jama’s mother, to flee the city. But Jama has remained, resolute to grow his business despite the “the sound of gunfire … so regular that Jama came to think of it as a drumbeat—the soundtrack to his new life.”

Slide Show: Ahmed Jama Keeps Serving in Mogadishu, Somalia : The New Yorker – 9/23/2013.

The slideshow is great, and if you click on the above link, you will find among the set of ten one captioned, “In some places, the epic destruction in Mogadishu resembles Stalingrad at the end of the Second World War.”

I think chances good the simile will naturally reverse to Stalingrad resembling Mogadishu toward the end of its agonies with Islamists and warlords and so many associated gangs with guns.

PAST IS NOT PRELUDE

Even while Al Shabaab’s assault on shoppers at Westgate Mall in Nairobi was unfolding, this was up online on the flip-side of all of that:

Somalia’s capital and the surrounding areas are home to several hundred thousand internally displaced people (IDPs). Despite a still volatile security situation, reconstruction and development are moving ahead at a rapid pace in Mogadishu. As a result, the city’s IDP residents, who were displaced by famine and conflict, are being evicted from their camps and pushed to Mogadishu’s periphery.

Blog – Photo Reports | Mogadishu’s IDPs Are Citizens, Too | Refugees International – 9/9/2013.

Imagine, Syrians (the four million of you who have not to imagine anything for living along this same path today), being moved by violence from homes in the city to camps in the surrounds and back again to the city devastated — and being unwelcome!

For a wannabe writer, I always thought patience a virtue; while busy writing — now I just wannabe paid — I’ve come to believe patience a crock and feel about the same when it comes to confronting conflict-inducing movements worldwide and the suffering caused or about to be caused by them.

From perhaps the triad of anthropological, political, and psychological perspectives, one may today see these whirlwinds and storms developing and better the weight of the center move to head them off than to be found sleeping when the same come crashing through.

Granted, whether with Said Barre’s political demise in Somalia or the archaic tottering of the Assad’s through the post-Soviet period, fate would seem more choice than choice.

However, globally connected, communicating, reasoning, arguing, one must ask whether what happened yesterday has also to happen tomorrow.

Past is not prelude.

Things change.

In the wake of Al Shabaab’s version of Mansonesque “helter skelter” in Nairobi comes this note, part of an appeal, from Mark Yarnell writing for Refugees International:

In an interview on Monday with the PBS NewsHour, Kenyan Foreign Minister Amina Mohamed stated that the government would not use the attack as a justification to end its role as a refugee host, and she affirmed that Kenya has “taken on international commitments to open our doors whenever anyone faces fear of persecution.”

This is encouraging, but in the days and weeks ahead, it will important to watch how Kenya’s security forces respond.

Mark Yarnell – Blog | Somalis Fear Reprisals Following Westgate Tragedy | Refugees International – 9/26/2013.

* * *

Regular readers here know the four virtues I promote: compassion, humility, inclusion, integrity.

“Islamists” and assorted others, including dictators, with other poisons in their mouth-ear-mind-heart systems will continue their rampages and ravages around the world, but perhaps we have started seeing them in ways not possible even five years ago, and that broadened perception may change how they’re addressed, confronted, and stopped some day.

Eventually.

______

Related Today: The Weekly Wonk | Homeland Delusions & BlackBuried » The Weekly Wonk (audio podcast) – 10/3/2013, with Peter Bergen.

Peter Berget – Opinion: Al Qaeda’s potent force in Syria – CNN.com – 8/30/2013

# # #

Quote

Kenya – “No Negotiations with Terrorists”

24 Tuesday Sep 2013

Posted by commart in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Israel, Kenya

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

defense doctrine, Israel, Kenya, terror, terrorism

Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta, whose nephew and his fiancé were among the victims, maintained a policy that Israel introduced to the world in the Entebbe raid and then abandoned in recent years – no negotiations with terrorists. “We will not negotiate with terrorists,” said Colonel Cyrus Oguna, a Kenyan military spokesman.

The Jewish Press » » Kenya, Unlike Israel, ‘Does not Negotiate with Terrorists’ (Video) 9/23/2013

______

The doors will close.

The noose will tighten.

# # #

Pakistan – (Perhaps) Overshadowed – The Bombing of a Church in Peshawar

23 Monday Sep 2013

Posted by commart in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Islamic Small Wars, Israel, Kenya, Pakistan, Psychology

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Tags

Islam, Islamist, Israeli democracy, Kenya, Pakistan, terror, terrorism

Such extreme violence against minorities tends to be perpetrated by the country’s many and various militant organisations. The group that claimed responsibility for this latest attack has links to the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan and said it was acting in retaliation for drone strikes. Yet the problem runs far deeper than a few rogue elements. Disturbingly, these extremist groups, which have been allowed to operate by successive governments, do have an impact on the national debate. This has contributed to increasing intolerance across society.

Peshawar church bombings show the deadly outcome of religious intolerance | Samira Shackle | Comment is free | theguardian.com 9/23/2013

In south central Pennsylvania this afternoon, the news on the television mounted in a corner beneath the ceiling of the diner where I was enjoying a late lunch hung on the tragedy playing out in Nairobi’s Westgate Mall.  This other story involving a death toll greater than Westgate — 85 as opposed to 68 — and targeting a Christian community and its sacred space may have had a different presence, less visceral, less important for having taken place in Muslim-majority Pakistan and having involved a less affluent and cosmopolitan community.

Perhaps.

Or perhaps we are more used to hearing of Islamist outrages in Pakistan — something in the realm of Islamic arm twisting and terror happens every day or every other day in Pakistan’s part of the Islamic Small Wars — and then, again, it’s a Muslim state and one with an outlook very different from Christian Kenya’s with its historic and decent relationship with Israel.

***

Their 52-year-old father had been looking forward to it, particularly the period after the service when the congregation spills out into the enclosed courtyard to chat.

“He was looking forward to seeing his friends,” said Joel.

Pakistani Christians mourn 85 killed in suicide bombings at Peshawar church | World news | theguardian.com 9/23/2013

It’s convenient, I suppose, for this old bleeding heart to bleed for everyone at the desktop: in my pseudo-solopsist online existence, all of the Islamic Small Wars (and a few others) occupy the same space, about 24-inches from eyes to screen.  In real space, are they not on just one planet?  Are they not coinciding, if not colliding, in time?

Is there anything that would make the murder of a 52-year-old father returning to church in Peshawar any less horrific and tragic than that of his doppelgänger gone shopping for a few hours in a mall in Nairobi?

Perhaps Pakistanis who now must admit the state’s declared religion has been hewed to, commandeered, perverted, or merely exploited (choose any option) by those “who would fly planes into office building” or blow up wedding processions, funerals, or parishioners gathering after services at church should lend attention to the more harmonious and tolerant values of the west and of the Christians.  And of the Jews.  And, perhaps, infidel others ever so much more at peace with the wide, wide world and themselves.

Until provoked.

______

▶ Dr Qanta Ahmed – Israel TV’s Foreign News Magazine – Roim Olam – YouTube 9/23/2013

Additional Reference

Kenya Westgate mall hostage standoff continues; death toll hits 68 – CBS News 9/22/2013

Why Israel is advising Kenya in mall attack response – CSMonitor.com 9/23/2013:

Israeli interests in Kenya run deep. According to the website of Israel’s embassy in Nairobi, Israel has provided technical assistance in areas such as agriculture and medicine for decades, in some cases going back to the days before Kenyan independence in 1963.

###

FNS – Westgate Mall – Nairobi – Updated

23 Monday Sep 2013

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

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Al Shabaab, exceeding limits, Islamic Small Wars, Kenya, news, overview, terror, terrorism, victims, Westgate Mall

Mr Langdon, 33, and Ms Yavuz, a Harvard PhD who worked to help battle malarial disease on the continent, travelled from Uganda to Nairobi, because they believed there was “no safer place” in Africa to have their baby, which was due in weeks.

It was a simple decision that unwittingly intertwined their fates with those of hundreds of innocent people in a mall where days of gunfire and lobbed grenades would leave 69 people dead.

Somali extremists extinguish two lives dedicated to Africa’s poor | The Australian 9/24/2013

***

BBC News – Nairobi Westgate attack: Victims are ‘unarmed innocent citizens’ – YouTube 9/23/2013

***

The Shabaab fighters were warning Muslims to leave and questioned people about their faith. Muslims were separated from non-Muslims; the non-Muslims were executed. Some Shabaab fighters were heard yelling “Allahu Akbar,” or “God is Greatest,” as they gunned down innocent civilians.

Shabaab suicide teams target civilians in assault on Kenyan mall – The Long War Journal 9/21/2013

***

The terror attack on a Kenyan shopping centre that has left 68 dead was being led by the white English widow of a 7/7 bomber, it was claimed last night.

Soldiers said a white woman wearing a veil was shouting orders to gunmen in Arabic during the bloody massacre inside the Westgate shopping mall in Nairobi.

Terror in Kenya ‘led by white widow’: shocking picture shows terrified little girl fleeing mall massacre | Mail Online 9/22/2013

***

▶ Kenya Shopping Mall Siege Continues: Terrorists reportedly cornered as smoke billows from mall – YouTube 9/23/2013

***

“We knew the shopping center is owned by Israelis and renowned as a place where many Israelis hang out,” Lopez told Maariv. “Four of the restaurants there are also owned by Israelis and many Israelis are employed in the place. They were our main concern—but we also support our Kenyan friends and ready to assist in whichever way they ask.”

The Jewish Press » » 3 Israelis Escape as Nairobi Shopping Center Attack Continues 9/22/2013

***

During the attack, Al Shabaab’s Arabic Twitter account quoted the Koran, “Plant firmly our feet and give us victory over (Al-Kafireen) the disbelieving people.” (Koran 2:250). The Kuffar, the non-Muslims of Westgate, included small children.

In the Name of Islam | FrontPage Magazine 9/23/2013

***

When I posted on this event yesterday, the death toll was 59.

Kenya Westgate mall hostage standoff continues; death toll hits 68 – CBS News 9/22/2013

***

NAIROBI, Kenya–I will travel to Ghana to be present at the burial of Kofi Awoonor. I will because he is a great Ghanaian poet. I will because he is a remarkable African thinker and mentor. I will because he traveled to Jamaica from Ghana to bury my father, his dear friend and mentor, in 1984. I will because he is my uncle, my mother’s cousin.

Poet Kofi Awoonor Killed In Terrorist Attack at Nairobi Mall – Speakeasy – WSJ 9/22/2013

Related: Ghanaian poet Kofi Awoonor among Westgate mall victims | World news | theguardian.com 9/23/2013

***

Dang works for the restaurant guide “Eat Out Kenya” and was meeting coworkers at Nairobi’s upscale Westgate Mall when gunfire broke out Saturday. Terrorists with ties to al-Qaida unloaded a flood of gunfire and grenades into crowds of unsuspecting shoppers. Those who were not hit dodged bullets and crawled to safety.

10News – New social media posts give updates on Elaine Dang, San Diegan injured in Kenya mall hostage crisis – 10News.com – News 9/23/2013

NBC 7 (San Diego Woman Among Victims Injured in Kenya Mall Attack | NBC 7 San Diego 9/22/2013 )  reported that Dang, a native of San Diego, a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, who is recovering from her injuries, had also worked for the New Leaders Council, Teach for America, and “taught high school students on a Native American reservation in New Mexico.”

***

▶ BBC News – Nairobi Westgate attack: Who are the al-Shabab militants? – YouTube

Additional Reference

Kenyan forces have located militants in shopping mall, says president | World news | theguardian.com 9/22/2013

# # #

Edward Snowden Tells on Big Brother

10 Monday Jun 2013

Posted by commart in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

crime, Internet, NSA, privacy, terror

Poitras, Laura and Glenn Greenwald.  “NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden: ‘I don’t want to live in a society that does these sort of things’.”  Video.  The Guardian, June 9, 2013.

Expect Edward Snowden’s breach of his NSA nondisclosure agreement to burn its way around the world.

What is freedom if it is not the ownership of one’s communications with assumed privacy?

What is security if it is not the state’s ability to operate “listening posts” to detect malice against those it has been charged to defend?

I have said of the Islamic Small Wars, and as much may be said of all organized crime and political terror, that they are wars for poets and detectives, the former because 1) what takes place in the mind takes place in language, and 2) what takes place in real space involves the most private forms of collusion and operational communication.

The recapitulation of international web traffic that starts at the Internet’s trunk lines, the robotic sifting for strings and patterns or known quantities, one might call them .  . . I’m not sure that bothers me so much.

I am more concerned when the FBI ignores or overrides a valid and reliable Russian intelligence tip-off and Boston marathoners and their families and friends lose their lives or legs: what motivated that negligence before the fact?

I’m also annoyed a little bit about the web bots watching my online shopping and pressing me to buy whatever I’ve browsed on every other Facebook or online news page.

In the end, if we don’t like so much electronic snooping, we can, I suppose, resume living locally and hope the bar, the coffee shop, the barber’s chair, and the local park are not infested with bugs that never bite but only listen.

# # #

FTAC – A Note on Refusing to Legitimize Murder One

28 Thursday Feb 2013

Posted by commart in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

assassination, atrocity, conflict, Islam, murder, Pakistan, sectarian, Shia, terror, terrorism

A correspondent in Pakistan brought this incident and publication to my attention:

Reference: http://pakshia.com/en/shia-killing-pakistan/lahore-sipah-e-sahaba-terrorists-open-fire-shiite-doctor-and-son-martyred/ –>

“A famous Eye-Specialist Dr. Ali Haider, and his 11 year-old son Murtaza Ali Haider, was martyred Saudi-funded terrorists of Sipah-e-Sahaba and Punjab Government-backed Taliban opened fire on their car in Lahore’s Kinal Road.”

My return:

Bookmarked: Islam, Sectarian Conflict. 😦 Without a broad and common law enforcement (paramilitary) umbrella, this atrocious criminality would seem without end.

The special interest press reports these items also as a badge of honor and claim of grievous injustice — both fair enough — but the effect may be to encourage and sustain more of the same in cycle. Some groups — “Pallywood”, for sure, the remote Catholic press, maybe, sometimes — make stuff up: pure propaganda; but this is not.

It may be one reason Obama’s Administration has approached violence associated with Islamic Jihad or a Muslim defensive posture (e.g., Fort Hood Massacre) as clinically criminal — these events add up to “murder in the first degree” and nothing else — rather than legitimize them as culturally, politically, or socially expressive.

I mentioned posting the exchange to this blog.

So done.

As I had mentioned Fort Hood in the exchange, I may mention here that on Facebook, the Coalition of Fort Hood Heroes: More Than Remembrance wants the same sense of the crime — that is, a Muslim American military officer upset with the American military mission in Afghanistan opened fire on his (unarmed) brothers and sisters in uniform while shouting “Allahu Akbar” all the way through.

Just another “gun nut”?

Same category as any other mass shooting (i.e., the “mass shooting”, “massacre”, or “rampage” category — plain force of nature)?

Aviva Shen’s “A Timeline of Mass Shootings in the U.S. Since Columbine” (ThinkProgress, December 14, 2012) provides an overview of the same kind of crime variously motivated.  Stateside racially-motivated killings may come closest to the sectarian experience (of similar crimes) within the Islamic Small Wars.

Where nationality, race, or religion — a simple generalized “discriminator” — provides excuse for aggression and murder, no one wins.  In fact, such violence would seem to backfire and set off an “antibody” type reaction in the populations surrounding events.  Every assassination, every ambush of the innocent and of the unarmed, becomes — or should become — cause for a different kind of courage.

Whether such crimes should be stripped of the rhetorical filigree that would make them more grounded (in something, even poison) if no less hateful, I don’t know.

In the west, this ploy goes both ways: legislators and states on the modern track have a still new classification in “hate crimes” and may add to recognized felonies additional penalties for a crime having been anti-gay, anti-Jewish, anti-Muslim, and so on.

At the same time and as demonstrated by the Obama Administration in its handling of the context or framing of the Fort Hood Massacre, taking the chief contributor to cause — ideological conviction and identification within the Islamic frame (or a version of it) — and officially minimizing its role in the crime has become a part of the Administration’s display of appeasement, courtship, and denial in the American (Christian-majority nation) relationship with Islam or Muslim-majority states and the internal wiring that keeps many of the same (from Afghanistan to Yemen) slipping in pools of their own blood.

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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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