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Tag Archives: warfare

Excerpt – David Ramati on the Historic Western Experience with Islamic Aggression

24 Thursday Mar 2016

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

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Tags

conflict, history, Islamic Small Wars, political Islam, warfare

It is important to understand this history in order to understand what we are up against; our enemy has a long memory and seeks to avenge this defeat of its ancestors. The radical Islamists are not upset about our presence in their lands, nor are they especially upset about Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, nor about our “exploitation” of their oil fields, nor our invasion of Iraq. They are taking a much longer view, a view with vengeance in mind! They want vengeance for Tours, vengeance for Granada, vengeance for Vienna. They want to reinvigorate Islam, return to the days of pride and victory and submission by their foes. They want to establish the Caliphate and place the entire world under Sharia law. 9/11 was the first step in this process of re-establishing Jihad as a divine force of conversion and conquest but it will not be the last. If America, Europe and Israel fail to understand this, then they have made a fatal mistake in warfare in that they have failed to understand their enemy and even worse; they have failed to identify who their real enemy is.

Ramati, David. “The Ongoing War Against Islam.”  Academia.edu, n.d. Quoted with the permission of the author.


“Shimmer” always applies — not all Muslims (and Muslims appear most frequently the first victims of Islamist ambition) but some.  Which ones?  The perpetual question: Daniel Pipes’ “How Many Islamists?”

Considering the Islamist’s delusions of future grandeur a part of the “civilizational narcissism” and “malignant narcissism” integrated with their enterprise, BackChannels has tried to attach motivation to the medieval complex in which the power of God is believed to flow down to benighted mortals.  The view is one the modern world has long dismissed in practice (although a dozen European states remain kingdoms).

# # #

 

FTAC – A Comment on Crazy Hamas Determination

12 Saturday Jul 2014

Posted by commart in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Islamic Small Wars, Israel, Middle East, Political Psychology, Politics, Regions

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Tags

Gaza, Hamas, Israel, political psychology, warfare

Here’s one description of the beginning of the end for Berlin in the final days of WWII:

“The final chapter in the destruction of Hitler’s Third Reich began on April 16, 1945 when Stalin unleashed the brutal power of 20 armies, 6,300 tanks and 8,500 aircraft with the objective of crushing German resistance and capturing Berlin.”

The Japanese had the good fortune of having a religion and an emperor one step removed from battle. It took _two_ atomic bombs on top of the decimation of the state to bring the emperor to surrender a martial ambition that could not be left to fester and redevelop.

Think about these immense wars of the previous century: Germany — untold dead, rails cut, ports bombed, army defeated in area after area after area — and right to the last, until out of bullets (except two for Adolph and Eva — the last decent thing he ever did was marry and right afterward attended the double-murder, one of them his own), the Nazis fought. For Japan, battered by allied bombing raids, also pushed back, Hiroshima, where the first bomb was dropped, didn’t produced surrender. It took Nagasaki, and no one doubts that “Curtis” would have continued until nothing was left.

There’s madness in the heads of “malignant narcissists”, and some really cannot believe they’re evil or that they are losing until they’re gone, and I’m not certain even then that they’re convinced.


Related: http://www.history.com/topics/world-war-ii/bombing-of-hiroshima-and-nagasaki

Hamas secures weapons in a variety of built noncombatant / non-military locations.  Israel delivers warning calls and warning shots, and then what it bombs it destroys in its entirety.

Have the “bug-out bag” read and (even if without) flee: when that army comes knockin’, get out of its way.

Not coincidentally, Pakistan’s Defense Forces have been active recently in North Waziristan”

(CNN) — Pakistani troops launched a ground offensive against militants in the capital of the country’s North Waziristan area Monday, starting a new phase of a 16-day fight that has seen more than 450,000 people flee the area.

http://edition.cnn.com/2014/06/30/world/asia/pakistan-north-waziristan/ – (video) 7/1/2014.

# # #

 

Iraq’s New Nightmare Begins

01 Tuesday Jul 2014

Posted by commart in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Iraq, Islamic Small Wars, Middle East, Politics, Regions

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Tags

conflict, Iraq, ISIS, warfare

These have no idea what it is that’s coming for them:

The newly elected parliament convened with 255 out of 328 elected officials attending, which was enough for a legal quorum, the speaker said. But when many failed to return after the break, there were not enough members to continue.

CNN: Iraqi parliament delays first session as ISIS continues deadly march – 7/1/2014


Ditto.

” . . . and the chant becomes a dance . . . .”

From the related article: “They get about a week to 10 days of training, Nasir said.”

CNN: With little training but full of conviction, Iraq’s Shiites answer the call to arms – 6/30/2014.


The picture gets worse.

He talks at length about all of the Western-made equipment ISIS has captured during its various routs of the Iraqi army. “Look how much money America spends on fighting Islam, and it ends up going to us,” he crows. “Message to the people of the West: just keep giving and we will keep taking.”

Vox. ISIS mocks Obama in Michael Bay-style propaganda video – 7/1/2014.  Vox has imported the video to its page, so, to my friends around the world, if you want to see an ISIS representative in a ball cap and speaking American English, click through to it.


As ISIS has picked up “assets” in American machinery and weaponry, also Iraqi military uniforms, I was curious about the suggestion that the same were on the road to Damascus.

Is there an ISIS armored column gunning for Bashar al-Assad and his government?

Will U.S. arms shipments to “moderate” Syrian forces arrive in time to kill or capture that column and retake ownership of The Revolution?

Related: The American Conservative.  “The Folly of Arming the Syrian Opposition.”  6/30/2014.

Related: Mail Online.  “Does ISIS have a Scud missile? Islamic militants parade huge long-distance weapon in capital of newly-declared caliphate.”  7/1/2014: “‘Dawla Islamiyya (The Islamic State) has SCUD missile in #Raqqa. [God willing] its heading towards #Israel for a spectacular Eid ul fitr,’ an ISIS suspporter calling himself Ansar Udeen said on Twitter.”

About a week ago, Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi noted, “The upcoming battles will reveal the extent of ISIS’ maturity. Most probably, it will stop at the maximum extent in the south like it now with the North’s Kurds and it will rest a little benefiting from international incompetence” (Al-Aribya, June 24, 2014).

How else could resistance to the developing and expanding conflict be characterized?

The Iraqi Parliament, so it appears, can’t keep itself seated for even one day.

The call-up of tens of thousands of young men from Iraq’s south, Shiites, for the most part, appear to be getting a pep talk, a helmet, a firearm, and a ride toward wherever the action is, pretty much just enough to get themselves killed.

I would like to be more optimistic, of course, but the good spirit of going off to war, the preparations with uniforms, steel, and gun oil, play to vanity more than the necessities of what has to be just the ugliest and most heartbreaking business on earth.  For certain, I would not want to be an American military adviser handed recruits with two weeks (or much less) of “boot camp” behind them for a day’s work in an active field populated by so deeply a delusional and treacherous enemy, but perhaps that kind of challenge is what combat pay is all about.


From Sunday’s Guardian, this quote tells of a theme I’ve encountered elsewhere:

“We have Da’ash on one side,” said Abu Mustafa, a Baquba resident, using the colloquial word for Isis. “And we have Asa’ib ahl al-Haq on the other. I don’t know who to be more scared of.”
Even if held together for a time by Saddam Hussein’s power to manipulate his constituence and keep it roiled in fear, Iraq has been long divided by the Sunni-Shiite schism, and on that matter, never mind American secular ideals and military intervention, it has been laid open to Iranian and Saudi influence and related jockeying and meddling.  Into that rift has roared ISIS with inhuman and frankly incontinent bloodletting and cruelty, and the state is on the edge — beyond it, possibly — of reverting to the language and terms of the war with which it’s familiar, a reenactment in reality of the obsessive bidding for succession that attended the death of Muhammad, who having left advice about how to do everything else appears to have left out the matter of continuing his enterprise beyond his final breath.

In Wikipedese:

The historic background of the Sunni–Shia split lies in the schism that occurred when the Islamic prophet Muhammad died in the year 632, leading to a dispute over succession to Muhammad as a caliph of the Islamic community spread across various parts of the world, which led to the Battle of Siffin. The dispute intensified greatly after the Battle of Karbala, in which Hussein ibn Ali and his household were killed by the ruling Umayyad Caliph Yazid I, and the outcry for his revenge divided the early Islamic community.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shia%E2%80%93Sunni_relations

Related.  AP – Epoch Times. “Islamic State Declaration Could Lead to Sunni-Shia Schism” – 6/30/2014.

Although the headline sensationalizes the potential for an all-out Sunni-Shiite showdown, even in the field and among fellow Islamists, opinion of ISIS may run low.  From the same article:

“The gangs of al-Baghdadi are living in a fantasy world. They’re delusional. They want to establish a state but they don’t have the elements for it,” said Abdel-Rahman al-Shami, a spokesman for the Army of Islam, an Islamist rebel group. “You cannot establish a state through looting, sabotage and bombing.”

Cannot or should not?

We may be certain of “should not”.

# # #

Link

http://thediplomat.com/2014/06/in-iraq-isis-channels-mao/

25 Wednesday Jun 2014

Posted by commart in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

foreign affairs, Iraq, ISIS, political, politics, warfare

http://thediplomat.com/2014/06/in-iraq-isis-channels-mao/

It’s more like a Hezbollah or Viet Cong, which tries to win legitimacy, than an al-Qaeda, which is mostly interested in showy attacks and ideological purity. Few revolutionaries govern well, but ISIS may be an exception. Its ability to consolidate its territorial gains and make the transition to stable peacetime rule, whether over part or all of Iraq, is a revealing indicator to watch.

FTAC – The Not-So-New World of War

17 Monday Feb 2014

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

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

conflict, political, politics, war, warfare

Israel wishes noncombatants no harm. As Hezbollah has used the same to shield weapons and war materiel, the provocation for preemptive action would have to be imminent.

Note: we may be also in a new age of warfare, one in which the tonnage of weapons owned may be modified by a host of systems, arrangements of humans and machines, in the path of their deployment. As we may no longer live in a world in which we may wait on open hostilities, we are a world constantly at war and engaged with one another in contests off the surface record.

The inspiration had to do with an IDF depiction of threat posed by Hezbollah.  The correspondent on the thread had suggested a preemptive strike, but, as noted above, not so fast: fighting on the surface may be inappropriate when many other methods, tactics, and strategies have developed — or have been invited to develop — by way of the changing character of conflicted societies as well as changes in war fighting made possible by changes brought to the character of the content of armories.

# # #

Iraq – Animus, Instability, Repression – Challenging the State Concept

31 Tuesday Dec 2013

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

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Tags

analysis, civil war, factional, Iraq, political psychology, politics, warfare

Across the Islamic Small Wars, one may wonder about the validity of the state concept in “states” barely holding it together across inchoate and uncooperative political campuses.

In some places, the answer to “Why can’t y’all just get along?” is “We all just don’t want to get along.”

That’s Iraq.

Let’s take this imagined internal dialogue two steps further:

“We believe that something has been taken away from us, and we can steal it back with vengeance.”

*

“We believe we can achieve something greater and can force it into existence.”

* * *

Part of what binds the contemporary functioning democracies of “the west” may be the experience of the corruption and tyranny of the feudal systems that preceded them.  The collective memory contains the inspired eruption of deeply repressed contempt and hatred for “ruling classes” and with it the smell and taste of blood spilled  in ways and in volumes that would today cast al-Nusra in Syria as the pale ghost of a minor devil.

In essence, all those pretty open democracies so peacefully gathered around the Mediterranean have been no strangers to sectarian warfare, mass beheading, industrialized death by every nefarious means available, and settlement, at times, through only the complete destruction of an armed foe.

Those Europeans “all get along” amid battle scarred landscapes and in the presence of cemeteries ranked with men too young for death because well they know how sickening nasty the war business can get, and they no longer want any part of it — and if they must be part of it, it’s going to be as short and violent and decisive an engagement as it may be made.

______

We may be entering an area, or may be already within one, in which great private interests, no less than in feudal days albeit with greater subtlety, arrange their political environments out of sight of constituted and official governments.

Mafia defined by greed becomes the true underlying or hidden governing model, and the units of analysis: families and clans of note with business interests attending.

The politicians have handlers, payoff masters, as it were.

Perhaps.

In the letting of contracts and jobs, it may appear that nepotism trumps merit, and it may be so.

How to tell?

Who are the auditors and where are they?

Where are the journalists who report with integrity?

What is to temper power?

Where is the state leader brave and canny enough to promote an open conversation while carefully reigning in the only the elements intending to destroy core democratic political process?

______

The New York Times reports that the United States is quietly rushing dozens of Hellfire missiles and low-tech surveillance drones to Iraq “to help government forces combat an explosion of violence by a Qaeda-backed insurgency that is gaining territory in both western Iraq and neighboring Syria.”

This happens in the context of the deaths of more than 8,000 Iraqis in 2013, the highest level of violence since 2008.

The President Who Lost Iraq « Commentary Magazine – 12/26/2013.

* * *

Deputy Prime Minister Saleh al-Mutlaq told CNN that he was “shocked” to hear U.S. President Barack Obama greet al-Maliki at the White House on Monday as “the elected leader of a sovereign, self-reliant and democratic Iraq.”

Iraq’s leader becoming a new ‘dictator,’ deputy warns – CNN.com – 12/13/2013.

* * *

While Iraq’s Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has been catching flak as another Washington-sponsored dictator in the making, one cannot assign to him the year-long uptick in sectarian tit-for-tat violence and terror even if assertions launched against him should prove true.  Example: 

Leaders of the popular uprisings in 6 Sunni provinces told me that the wave of terror which has claimed the lives of 7,000 people so far this year in Iraq is his responsibility, because he controls the military, the police, the intelligence services and all aspects of security in the country. Iraq is rapidly spiralling down towards a renewed insurgency and Maliki’s only response is to marginalise the Kurds, label the Sunnis as terrorists and turn a blind-eye to the systematic discrimination and violence against other ethnic minority groups.

European MEP in Erbil says “Maliki’s authoritarian policies are tearing the country apart” – CNN iReport – 11/27/2013.

Is the hearsay true?

Prove it — or call it slander.

What would the most balanced leader do if (setting out with a fair neutral force at his disposal) he were confronted with crimes against his constituents — all of them in representation — accompanied by accusation of sectarian preference in the operations of his government promoting attacks that in turn promote revenge?

Would he investigate the crimes as crimes only wrapped in political or religious cover and go on with the business of producing an institutionally open, responsive, and responsible government?

Or would he revert to the loyalty of his own and reconstruct a government built on deep wells of suspicion expressed in the application of tyrannical force against all suspected challengers not of his own affiliation?

* * *

“Regretfully, the Arab revolutions were able to shake the dictatorships but were not able to fill the void in the right way,” Mr. Maliki said. “So a vacuum was created, and al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations were able to exploit it and to gain ground.”

Iraq’s Maliki Blames Rising Extremist Violence on Syria – Washington Wire – WSJ – 10/31/2013.

In the Arab world, deflections of responsibility inevitably produce harm.  They are part of lying (by omission: regulars here know the refrain: “to hide something; to get something”) as well as avoiding engagement with the values that in fact weaken the state in such a way as to make it a prize for factional contests through the usual means — intimidation, murder, terror — rather than a central forum for factional arguments in accord with Roberts Rules.

* * *

And the violence shows no sign of letting up. Suspected Sunni Islamist militants on Christmas day set off three bombs in the heavily Christian Dora district of the capital, killing at least 38, including 24 who died at the conclusion of a church service. Western regions of the country were on edge on Sunday after the Shia-dominated government’s security forces arrested a popular Sunni lawmaker and killed his brother and five guards in a raid.

International companies aim to set up shop in Iraq despite violence – FT.com – 12/29/2013.

The bungling, if it was that, doesn’t help in Iraq’s difficult environment — and is it possible to balance that “Shia-dominated . . . security force” with greater Sunni and Christian complements?

Beyond that, so one might urge: get over the sickness in the head that divides others in the world into those worthy of one’s respect and those deserving of contempt, and that to the extent that they may be slaughtered at will: God did not authorize the humans judging to make such judgments.

______

(Reuters) – Fighting erupted when Iraqi police broke up a Sunni Muslim protest camp in the western Anbar province on Monday, leaving at least 13 people dead, police and medical sources said.

The camp has been an irritant to Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki’s Shi’ite Muslim-led government since Sunni protesters set it up a year ago to demonstrate against what they see as marginalization of their sect.

Fighting erupts as Iraq police break up Sunni protest camp | Reuters – 12/30/2013.

* * *

Iraq’s security forces have almost entirely abandoned the successful formula of population-focused counter-insurgency developed by the US-led coalition, instead falling back on counter-productive traditional tactics such as mass arrests and collective punishment.

BBC News – Analysis: Iraq’s never-ending security crisis – 10/3/2013.

* * *

The Iraqi government is now making many of the same mistakes the United States made back then: It is alienating the Sunnis and occupying their communities with a heavy-handed, military-led approach that doesn’t differentiate between diehard militants and the mass of peaceable civilians.

Yes, Iraq Is Unraveling – Foreign Policy – Michael Knights – 5/15/2013.

______

The phrase “weak government” may itself be weak.

If the potential strength of a coalition of the moderate (well representative of population overall and intent on peace) does not display in firm martial ability, it invites fracturing along the more parochial lines associated with private financial, psychological, and religious agenda.

In essence, the state as a political whole may prove too weak to restrain the restive energies inhabiting its body — it literally cannot contain itself — and it then fails as a reliable political element.

Autocratic attempts to contain latent fracturing through repression may work as presently suggested by the Egyptian narrative that has developed between the army and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt’s still nascent, still potential democracy.

However, the same in Iraq, as the screws tighten, may isolate state authority and invite a civil contest so incoherent  with mixed factional motivations that the fighting cannot be resolved through compromise and accommodation — nor may it be won as the point of it becomes a continuous and ill-defined struggle beneath the delusion that there is something greater yet to be won when plainly there is not.

Peace is to be won first and foremost.

Without it, nothing else can be done.

# # #

FNS – Lebanon – Tanks Move in the Streets

24 Monday Jun 2013

Posted by commart in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Islamic Small Wars, Lebanon, Middle East, Politics, Regions

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Tags

combat, conflict, fighting, Islamic Small Wars, ISW, Lebanese, Lebanon, political, politics, sectarian, warfare

From AFP:

From Al Jazeera:

NOW.  “Live Coverage: Sidon fighting sparks tension.”  June 24, 2013.

Is comment necessary?

As mentioned yesterday, the natural drift of Syria’s bitching sectarian and factional conflict into the Lebanese sphere has both clarified and amplified the same tensions in Lebanon and those may not be quelled in a day or two.  In fact, the resentments and rivalries and perceived stakes have been building for years, and the passions surfacing into a hail of bullets do so distinctly absent of reason.

It’s the programming that fights.

Additional Reference

AFP Videos – English (YouTube)

Al Jazeera.  “Deadly fighting rages in Lebanon.”  June 24, 2013.

El Deeb, Sarah.  “Lebanon Clashes Leave At Least 16 Soldiers Dead at Sidon Mosque.”  Huffington Post, June 24, 2013:

The maverick cleric was little known until few years ago and his growing following was a symptom of the deep frustration among Sunnis who resent the Hezbollah-led Shiite ascendancy to power in Lebanon. Hezbollah and its allies dominate Lebanon’s government.

Siryoti, Daniel and David Baron.  “”Lebanon on the brink of war as sectarian violence enters second day.”  Israel Hayom, June 24, 2013.

Syria – No Good Dog

01 Monday Apr 2013

Posted by commart in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

civil war, sectarian, Syria, warfare

Where was Russia with Syria and the Assad family in the decades following the disintegration of the Soviet Union?

How did Maher Al-Assad come to head up an army irretrievably removed from normative discipline in operations?

How is it that the United States has been flying drones against Saudi-backed Sunni Islamists out on the Jihad warpath in the remote outbacks but in Syria supplies the same, or quite similar, with weapons? Continue reading →

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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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