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02 Wednesday Jul 2014

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Islamic Small Wars, Jordan, Middle East, Religion

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Loud and hysterical shouts of “Allah akbar”, “To Jihad”, “there is none save Allah and the Shiites are his foes”, “He who fights for Jihad is loved by Allah”, “The Sunnis are Allah’s beloved”, “Allah is our god and not theirs (the Shiites’)”, “The Shiite god is Satan”, “Death is better than humiliation”, “With blood and spirit will we redeem you, Islam”, “Jihad is our way”, “Jihad state forever”, “O Shiite rulers, we are coming for you”, were heard at the demonstration and to serve as proof of its serious intentions, shots were fired in the air.

http://www.breakingisraelnews.com/17392/next-goal-isis-jordan/#4LD4DctJ2PeE2CAj.99 – 7/1/2014.

Related: http://www.breakingisraelnews.com/17298/isis-one-step-closer-israel-jihadist-threat-looms/#BpZ7re2ZeZcegetz.97 6/29/2014.

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Aside

02 Wednesday Jul 2014

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

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Assertion

“They will scream about their loss of freedoms.”

Response

And they will be told by a central power — ayatollah, caliph, king, or president-for-life — to shut up.

In many systems — not all! — unquestioning obedience to God (which is not sealed in the Jewish ethos) has been already conflated with obedience to a human claiming to represent the Almighty.

Get the habits going in behavior and language, keep the cruelty in punishment high for dissent, and it’s all over.

I have vacillated a long time about the nature of Islam, as have many within the Ummah and many would-be dhimmi and kaifir, but what we are seeing suggests that al-Qaeda to ISIS represents an “Old Islam” — a how to scrape up the criminal and dispossessed, bring in the powerful to become more powerful, and expand the enterprise while growing more powerful and wealthy on plunder. It’s been there in the Banu Qurayza legend, which some among the revolutionary — the real radicals are the moderates — try to dispossess, and it’s at play in Iraq with the internecine warfare culminating in the want of a unified system beneath a single authority.

Ambivalence within the communities mentioned may stem from consideration of the possibility that such as ISIS works (as a tip of the spear) and that as long as one is Sunni, one is safe, and, therefore, why be upset about the gung-ho armed with Qurans, Kalashnikovs, and great glorious dreams of empire?

An anti-Jihad friend from elsewhere provided the quoted material for this post: https://conflict-backchannels.com/2014/07/01/a-correspondents-observation-regarding-the-difference-between-real-and-radical-islam/

On both the true radical and Shiite angles, I would welcome Abbas Zaidi’s or Dean Mousavi’s comments.

Obama seems to want to leave this kind of warfare alone — consign it to the Middle East and North Africa (and the more Goons of the Dictator and Fanatics of Islam killed in Syria, the better, but, gosh, too bad about the people) — but I think most of humanity, and on this we too should be +95 percent want to see this evil and the excuses for its license with everyone else quelled and in any which way that works. The suffering is too much — and in the end, in displaced persons, in crime, in political anarchy, in disruption, the whole world pays the price for this deeply barbaric and medieval nonsense.

And the beat goes on.

So it goes.

Any old cliche will do for these days and issues that go on and on and on without substantial address nor an inch of change.

Also from the same conversation, my part preceding the above passage: “The silent may believe they will benefit ultimately from the political program in a system of expansion that strikes me as deeply bigoted, coercive, deceptive, and egregious on general terms.”

Related Reference

http://blogs.reuters.com/faithworld/2014/07/02/growing-concern-in-muslim-world-about-islamist-militancy-pew-survey/ – 7/2/2014.

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/2014/07/its-not-occupation-its-islam.html – 7/2/2014: “I raised my children on the knees of the (Islamic) religion, they are religious guys, honest and clean-handed, and their goal is to bring the victory of Islam,” the mother of one of the Hamas killers said. Not a Palestinian nation. Not a Two State Solution. Not forty percent of this and sixty percent of that. The victory of Islam.”

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Aside

02 Wednesday Jul 2014

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Philology, Political Psychology, Religion

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I invest in the idea that contemporary Jewish ethics are reinforced by two fundamental statements by Hillel the Elder, the family man 🙂 who lived ten years into the Common Era: “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”). and “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am not for others, WHAT am I?” If not now, when?” Whether or not any Jewish action, conversation, or thought traces back to those statements directly, both would seem part of the Jewish spirit, and both would seem evidenced in the long, long history of Jewish social activism.

We do not know what we are dealing with?

Yes we do.

We’ve had a lot of experience since Pharaoh.

We’re getting better at comprehending the psychology involved with “monsters” who are, all said and done with every dictator ever vanquished and the worst among the same living, merely human after all. We may not be able to see what has set a “malignant narcissist” on his course, but we can label the type and take a hard look at how they work with language and how we (humans) are culturally programmed in relation to language behavior and content.

With the Haggadah with which I grew up, we cried, symbolically, for the Egyptian lives lost in the exodus and would go on to note that “with every generation, a little more freedom is won.” Lo these many years and laden with inexpressible costs and sorrows, we find those words still true.

From the sidebar of my blog:

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.”

Indees, we are still “singing and dancing” and we will go on singing and dancing, but we are mindful of our neighbor’s suffering too, and however we might feel about it for a moment — say from Afghanistan to Gaza to Iraq — we’ll help them to greater freedom and greater lives too.

“If I am not for others, what am I?”

That’s what we’re about.

We can travel into the uptake of Jewish thought after Hillel into Christian and Muslim communities and related paths taken by Constantine and Muhammad, but “the base” — the authentic — has been and will be eternally Jewish. Perhaps the same in human thought needs to be dis-embedded from ethnic rivalry.

Aside

02 Wednesday Jul 2014

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

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And just a moment on the murder of an Arab teen in the vicinity of Jerusalem, an abhorrent act some — not only some Muslims, Jews as well — have skidded into calling an act of revenge far in advance of investigation. My response elsewhere to that:

http://www.timesofisrael.com/riots-in-east-jerusalem-after-body-of-arab-teen-found/ with some events, passions overrule reason — and due process of law. However, so the second part of the headline screams, “Netanyahu calls for swift probe into ‘abominable murder’ of Arab 16-year-old . . . .”

This is the argument against all vigilantism: First, make good law; then let the forces upholding that law do their work.

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Aside

02 Wednesday Jul 2014

Posted by in Anti-Semitism, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Islamic Small Wars, Middle East, Philology, Philosophy, Politics, Regions

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Excerpted from a gem of an essay —

Said rolled American racism and European colonialism into one mélange of white oppression of darker-skinned peoples. He was not the only thinker to have forged this amalgam, but his unique further contribution was to represent “Orientals” as the epitome of the dark-skinned; Muslims as the modal Orientals; Arabs as the essential Muslims; and, finally, Palestinians as the ultimate Arabs. Abracadabra—Israel was transformed from a redemptive refuge from two thousand years of persecution to the very embodiment of white supremacy.

Muravchik, Joshua.  “Enough Said: The False Scholarship of Edward Said.”  World Affairs, March/April 2013.

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Aside

19 Thursday Jun 2014

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Iraq, Middle East, Regions

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Compiled Fast Reference: ISIS: 6/19/2014

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ISIS, wild and cruel, has proven through its criminality and inhumanity incapable of governance except through continued sadism.  Call it deeply intoxicated by brute power, it is as it displays itself.

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Although the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) — a marauding army of Sunni Muslim jihadists — has turned south toward Baghdad, Kurds in the semi-autonomous oil-rich northeast expect that they may have to face their fellow Sunnis, who left a trail of death and destruction in overrunning the Iraqi army in taking the cities of Tikrit and Mosul.

http://www.foxnews.com/world/2014/06/19/kurds-outgunned-by-fanatical-isis-hope-looming-baghdad-battle-buys-time-for/ 6/6/2014.

The crisis caused by the sudden advance of the Isis insurgents has driven world crude prices past $114 a barrel in recent days and led to warnings of shortages from industry experts.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jun/18/dwindling-iraq-oil-reserves-cause-price-spike 6/18/2014.

. . .  nearly 100 militants had been killed as his forces repelled wave after wave of attacks since Tuesday.

http://www.foxnews.com/world/2014/06/19/witness-claims-isis-flag-flies-over-key-iraq-refinery-baghdad-says-soldiers/ 6/19/2014.

 . . . a stark illustration of one of the most alarming aspects of ISIS’s rise: the group’s growing ability to fund its own operations through bank heists, extortion, kidnappings, and other tactics more commonly associated with the mob than with violent Islamist extremists.

http://complex.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2014/06/16/isis_uses_mafia_tactics_to_fund_its_own_operations_without_help_from_persian_gulf_d 6/16/2014.

ISIS appears to be as well-endowed economically as any such group can be endowed by conquest, by plunder and by voluntary contributions. How do they make their money?

http://wlrn.org/post/how-isis-endowed-conquest-stocks-its-war-chest 6/18/2014.

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Aside

17 Tuesday Jun 2014

Posted by in Anti-Semitism, Philology, Philosophy, Religion

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We touched on this theme briefly at a synagogue planning meeting last night. In addition to reaching communities at the edges of our regional service area and bringing in also unaffiliated Jews, there was mention of the want of the passion to promote the distinctive wonderful qualities of the Jews as a community.

Not yet approached but on my mind very much as the very stamp of the “secularized” (in truth, I believe) American Jew: I want a Judaism and Jewish ethos more easily accessed and enjoyed on a more universalized basis. I’m not particularly Christian-friendly in this and also flatly reject Muhammad’s all-of-the-prophets-were-Muslim confusion, but as Judaism promotes a deep ethical and moral conversation between man and God and man and man, it may be a beacon beyond itself.

Generals Constantine and Muhammad built empires on the backbone of the Torah, but perhaps they did not build a better backbone in thought themselves.

With that said, “Jewish rejectionism” (of other faiths) also inspires anti-Semitic sentiment. A more welcoming religion might offset that.

A “beacon beyond itself’ — Judaism and the great conversation it invokes has been that, the basis for three great religions and inseparable from them.

No Moses?

No Muhammad.

It’s that simple.

Why not revisit the qualities of the base?

I’m a little more than half way through Fassihi’s book on Iraq — it seems I have mostly experienced the world through the technology of the the book, thousands of them — and when I’m done, I may well trim back to a second tour through the Torah.

In the process of this thinking out loud, I shared the draft with multifaith chaplain and writer Diane Weber Bederman,  who then responded in this way:

I don’t see Judaism as rejectionist. I see it as a religion that says, believe in your God. The Noachide laws. It is a trusting religion that trusts in your beliefs. Unlike others who demean other religions we accept them That is the revolutionary change that Jews brought out of the desert. Caring for the other. Not by changing the other but by accepting the other. Which must not be confused with moral and cultural relativism

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