Oppenheim Arts & Letters

Israel Supports America's Fourth of July (2007)

Source: YouTube poster "Embulby104". "4th of July in Israel." July 15, 2007: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GI9j9_8JJeo

Relations may seem strained today, but any American, however poor or wealthy, however anti-Semitic or even "Islamist", has more of freedom, privilege, and right in common with every one of Israel's Arab Christian, Muslim, and Jewish citizens whom history has gathered in her unique space and from the many varied corners of the earth. Opportunities for education in Israel are open--the standards are academic ability, not bloodline; it's economy is expressive, open, and vibrant; it shares the unhappiness of those in its midst whose leaders keep them chained in political limbo.  However, the state serves them too and as best it may, and this despite the daily barrage of hate, lies, and propaganda fostered by those who would just as soon she not exist.

Happy Birthday, America, and long live you and every single one of the democratic, open, plural, and tolerant societies with whom you share the spirit of freedom on earth.

# # #

Iran - Moaveni's Foreshadowing

As had been expected, Rafsanjani came first, with 21 percent of the vote, but he was trailed closely by an obscure candidate, the former mayor of Tehran Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, with 19 percent; Mehdi Karroubi, a dark-horse reformist candidate, took 17 percent.  I shook my head at the television in Beirut, confused.  Not a single person I had spoken to in Tehran the days before the election had uttered the name Ahmadinejad.

Moaveni, Azadeh.  Honeymoon in Tehran: Two Years of Love and Danger in Iran.  New York: Random House, 2009.

# # #

Iraq - The Language Culture Puzzle

That "great victory," as he calls it, is the June 30 withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq's cities. That "foreign presence," as he calls it, is the United States — the thousands of mainly young American men who have fought a vicious enemy under the harshest conditions for more than six long years, with 4,321 Americans killed, many thousands wounded, often grievously so, and some small, tortured number wrongfully ensnared by the U.S. military justice system in apparent deference to Iraqi political considerations.

"Ingrate" doesn't begin to describe this al-Maliki creep — or, as all too many conservatives and Bush loyalists persist in thinking of him, our Iraqi "ally." But let's skip the labels and stick to the implications of the Iraqi prime minister's rhetoric: He has transformed long-term American sacrifice on Iraq's behalf into a residual "foreign presence" over which he now declares Iraqi victory.  [1]

Columnist Diana West has slammed into hardest and thickest wall in the Islamic Small Wars: the difference between a dispassionate development of language in the evolving open societies for the beauty of it, for brotherhood, equality, justic, and truth, for its own ideal and accommodating organic qualities and the alternative exploitation of language to serve the speaker by pandering to the main body of his listeners for the purpose of keeping it subject.

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has been fast to climb back on the old horse: Iraq is Islam; Islam has enemies, including the Great Satan; Iraq will always defeat its enemies.  Such words may comfort and mollify Iraqis, but they're not going to modernize or update the society in terms of its ethics, plurality, or tolerance.

For most states and statesmen in the Middle East, alliance with Israel and the United States continues to serve as an invitation for bombs and bullets.

One cannot drive a tank into the Qur'an plus the 1400 years of related development of an insular, insulated, corrupt, and powerful lliterary culture.

Furthermore, onne cannot bomb away the revenue stream produced by the khums and zakat and subsequent and autocratic flows, partial or large, of Big Payola to cronies and favored families, a system of patronage and loyalty most apparent today in Iran as it shuts down its proto-democratic movement (much as the Islamic Revolution did the secular communists, socialists, and internationalists of its early years).

Iraq?

Iraq has been hiding itself from the "regime change" through this period of U.S. withdrawal, a sort of high-level taqiyya for the culture Saddam Hussein wrestled with throughout his tenure.

Supposedly, the term "taqiyyah is derived from this verse of the Quran : "Let not the believers take disbelievers for their friends in preference to believers. Whoso doeth that hath no connection with Allah unless (it be) that ye but guard yourselves against them [tattaqu minhum. from the same root tqy as taqiyah], taking (as it were) security [tuqatan. again from the same root as taqiyah]. Allah biddeth you beware (only) of Himself. Unto Allah is the journeying" (Quran, III, 28). This history would appear to indicate that Taqiyah is especially allowed in the case of dealings with nonbelievers. [2]

I've pulled this from similar recent news:

“Foreign forces have to withdraw from the cities totally,” said Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki. “This is a victory that should be celebrated in feasts and festivals.”

It was the first time so many commanders had gathered in Baghdad to meet Mr. Maliki. Iraqi and foreign reporters were invited, but when a senior American military officer arrived, a major general from Mr. Maliki’s Office of the Commander in Chief told him to leave. “We apologize to you, but this is an Iraqi meeting and you’re not invited,” the general said. Neither officer would give his name. [3]

Language is a cultural technology.

As a technology, it has its forms and levers, its core concepts and values, but it has another and more fluid aspect: language is also the suspension in which cultures exist. 

Languages lend reference, sign, and symbol to our swimming through the world.  They define how we may perceive and describe many things, and while we may consciously coin, forge, and invent many additions and alterations to one langugage or another, each has in its larger aspect an organic nature (i.e., the existance of a language needs must precede detection of its grammar).

For the modern, today's mission is to grasp the language and language culture developed around the Qur'an and its aspects extant in the most conflicted areas of its reach, and reformulate its evolved misguidance.  Whatever the militant reasoning, and however complicated by human personality, the agenda has not been working out in Gaza, the West Bank, Iran, Pakistan, or Somalia, and as much has been rejected recently in Lebanon.

The New York Times article goes on to note, "Mr. Maliki’s careful avoidance of the topic of his government’s continued dependence is clearly a political tactic as he positions himself for Iraq’s national elections in January, and United States officials do not believe it reflects any personal enmity toward the Americans."

That may be all good and well, but it will be hard to separate the posturing from the posture; moreover, at least today, it is not possible to separate or cordon Mohammad's broad Islamic instruction and narrative and the profound internal disagreements associated with it from the comparatively delicate and socially integrating requirements of more complex and productive contemporary political, social, and technology systems and their cultures. 

Moreover, in addition to state failures singalled by disruptive conflicts in Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, and Somalia (for a start), the world must face a complicating third source of societal cancer: the entrenchment of many corrupt "cultures of impunity" or political mobsterism that dot the globe from the Philippines to Russia.  While that's another subject, and one I will get to soon, it's hard to displace popular yearnings across Islam for something like a just and peaceful society as laid out in a 7th Century blueprint while one's own affluent or more privileged society may be riddled with criminal trade in arms and narcotics, gray areas across the banking and investment landscapes, and nascent aristocracies reliant on favors and nepotism for position.

Reference

1. West, Diana.  "Iraq is victorious . . . over the 'foreign' U.S.?"  Jewish World Review, Insight, July 3, 2009: http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0709/west070309.php3

2. Encyclopedia of the Middle East.  "Taqiya": http://www.mideastweb.org/Middle-East-Encyclopedia/taqiyah.htm

3. Nordland, Rod and Marc Santora.  "Iraq Leader Omits a Bit in Lauding U.S. Pullout."  The New York Times, June 11, 2009: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/12/world/middleeast/12iraq.html

# # #

Iran - The Press - The Minder and Global Supraconscious Communication

How things come together in my life is a mystery to me.  Perhaps unconscious processes behind decisions lead to certain heightened moments in this library, garden, theater, and portal I'm happy to call home.

Though Mr. X occupied such a central place in my work life, the institution ostensibly charged with dealing with foreign reporters belonged to an entirely different branch of government.  The foreign press office of the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance issued journalists' credentials and handled the numerous bureaucratic details involved in writing even the simplest story.  If I wanted to visit a seminary, meet the foreign minister, or travel to a sensitive border region, I would need the press office's approval and assistance.  During especially busy times, reporting an election or a cover story, for example, I might call its staff as many as tent times in one day.  But although the press office--run by sensible, hardworking people who understood the news business--nominally handled journalists' affairs, it was really Mr. X and his employer, the Ministry of Intelligence, who had final say over whether a reporter was permitted to work.  Even I had a hard time understanding the balance of power between the two, and perhaps they did as well. [1]

More than geophysical fault lines coarse beneath the hardpack supporting Tehran. 

Azadeh Moaveni's overview of Iranian society starts where it should: with the journalist's state-appointed "minder" and the mighty gatekeeper (and fisher) of informaton compiled about the state and representing it, Iran's Ministry of Intelligence.

Frankly, I thought what I had ordered from Amazon was going to be a novel.

I have another synergistic unexpected in the way of pleasant surprises: when I started this summer's home-based Alfred Hitchcock Festival, a de facto experience associated with Netflix's relational and weighted video selection system, I felt the schedule would make for a fine tutorial in filmmaking, and it has, but I didn't expect the tie-in with the Islamic Small Wars and conflict as an ever-present and overarching element in human life.  The cinematic charms of Rear Window, Strangers on a Train, Dial "M" for Murder, and Psycho revolve around entirely around personal passions and problems; not so the mysterious The Birds, on which which I recently commented, the arch romance and spy thriller North by Northwest and even less so, Foreign Correspondent, which I started watching last night--that one gets into the deception business right away as the journalist-protagonist, a New York crime reporter, gets pushed into a role as a foreign correspondent under a pseudonym provided by his publisher on the cusp of WWII.

When referring to "God" I've often played with "God or nature", a pickup from the Heinrich Böll short story "Murk's Collected Silences" (click here for my comments on it), and here I feel there may be something in human consciousness and that of the living earth, if not the universe, that binds us into various modes in such a way as to have us say, "There's something in the air": financial distress, global warming, or war, we feel or get the signal.

Whether or not our signals are defined solely by our media and social (conversational) loops makes a large question. 

My call: leave room for accident, inspiration, and intuition.

-----

Last month, after it raised a brood, I had to remove a robin's nest from my balcony and make sure the breeding pair did not return to build another nest.  When I found my solution, a plant pot turned upside-down in the corner of the balcony where the nest had been laid on a railing, Mr. Robin was on a branch watching from about 20 yards. 

Let me tell you: we exchanged looks--and he turned his back to me as a pissed-off cat would to its owner.

I have an M.A. in "Outdoor Recreation Resources Management"--it is not my way to anthropomorphise robins; I have another M.A. in "English Language and Literature", and it is my way to listen, receive, and empathize.

I felt bad for the robin, and I think he knew it and hated me anyway, but the deck (and the woods beyond) are why I chose to live in this apartment--and good thing for it because that robin taught me something about well understood interspecies signals.

What I may wonder--and sciency may be getting us there--is how much communication may take place in regions we may not be able to humanly observe but in which we may be able to exchange and receive signal.

Plug another piece into this puzzle: this past Sunday, 60 Minutes ran a feature on scientific efforts to "read minds" using appropriate brain scanning technology and a computer interface that synched observation of activity in the brain with patterns associated with the experience of objects and language and with memory and recognition.  In addition to the computer doing quite well (matching its pattern-based knowledge with those generated by the show's own volunteer 100 percent), one expert acknowledged the existence already of remote scanning technology--a technology that may scan some brain activity from some distance--in its experimental infancy.

Who is to say our communicating may be restricted or bounded by our conversational, media, and immediate personal experiences?

Such may be the common wisdom, but both intuition and instruments may well be on the way to telling us something else. 

Cited Reference

1.  Moaveni, Azadeh.  Honeymoon in Tehran: Two Years of Love and Danger in Iran.  New York: Random House, 2009.

2. Finklestein, Shari, Producer.  "Mind Reading."  60 Minutes, March 24, 2009: http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=4697682n

# # #

Iran Curtain Draws Up-Tempo Hacks

The wonks may not have gotten it: even with no nukes in sight, contemporary warfare moves at the speed of light.

Warfare over the control of narrative generated by factual or fabricated data; warfare generating lists of allies and enemies; warfare bypassing geography, built assets, and natural resources and heading straight for hearts and minds to liberate or intimidate them has caught on to the battle over boxes and wires (and fiber optic cable) that facilitate rapid transfers of data, ideas, and strategies that in turn inform minds forming up their next physical encounter or mission.

Accompanying the rapid transfers of intelligence--and I use that term in a pure sense--across Iran's conflicted culture and its diaspora are home field activities that would seem to be running on their own fast clock: population sweeps contributing to detentions; potential imminent acts of intimidation, murder, or torture; the production and dissemination of state propaganda and matched countermeasures from its opposition: all of these are now tuned to computer networking access, bandwidth, security, and speed.

Yesterday, Amnesty International noted this:

On 16 June, following the arrest of Mohsen Aminzadeh, Abdollah Ramazanadeh and Mostafa Tajzadeh and other leading opposition figures, Intelligence Minister Gholam Hossein Mohseni Ejeie reportedly told the Fars news agency that 26 "masterminds" suspected to be involved in post-election unrest had been arrested. It is not known whether Mohsen Aminzadeh, Abdollah Ramazanadeh and Mostafa Tajzadeh are among the 26 referred to.

“Such statements, including by those in influential clerical positions, add to the already worrying signs that the authorities in Iran are preparing to eradicate any form of peaceful political opposition, including by trying these political leaders on trumped-up and vaguely worded charges,” said Hassiba Hadj Sahraoui. “We call on the Supreme Leader to give clear instructions to all government and judicial officials not to torture people within their custody, and urge him and the security services to guarantee the safety of every detainee, including by clarifying their whereabouts, allowing immediate access to families and lawyers and any medical care that may be needed.” [1] 

This fits with my now old rubric: "The warfare that makes the news may not be the warfare that makes the war."

Security roundups make the news--no question about that--but frantic and scattered efforts to build in and around Iran a shadow communicating system and to populate it with, I'll call them, "data providers", may turn out a process hidden in the ersatz desktop or laptop laboratories of hundreds, if not thousands, of quietly, even stealthily, committed computer nerds.

New to me--everything is, every day--it may be nothing new to those whose business it has been to "work the issues" on all things having to do with the Internet and networked communications. 

Heads Up to our regular readers. Next week's issue of Infowar Monitor will focus on the theme of "#Netwar". We will pull together the brightest minds in the noosphere [what we're calling the noocracy] to answer questions about the concept of netwar with an eye on the unfolding events in #Iran and other regions. [2]

There are hints in this of Fifth Generation Warfare (5GW) as well.  Within the Information Warfare Monitor web, "gregw" posted a note about his firm "Psiphon":

The Iranians' furor was ignited by the work of our company, Psiphon, which is based in Canada and has actively engaged in a campaign to help Iranians bypass their country's filters and exercise basic human rights of access to information and freedom of speech. On average, one Iranian per minute has signed up to our "right-2know" nodes -- customized websites pushed into Iran that contain access to BBC Persian and Radio Farda -- and more than 15,000 have used our service since the crisis began.

However, we have received no support from the Canadian government -- not even a note of thanks. As far as we know, the Canadian government does not even have a cyberspace strategy (of promoting access to information and freedom of speech) about which a country like Iran would be irritated. As Canadians, we wish it did. [3]

I'll stop here for the time being, not for lack of curiosity but for time.

Cited Reference

1. Amnesty International.  "Iran: Detained Political Leaders at Riskof Torture, Possibly to Force "Confessions."  June 29, 2009: http://www.amnesty.org/en/news-and-updates/news/detained-political-leaders-at-risk-of-torture-20090629

2. Information Warfare Monitor.  "#netwar".  July 1, 2009: http://128.100.171.10/index.php

3. Deibert, Ronald and Rafal Rohozinski.  "Ottawa needs a strategy for cyberwar."  Information Warfare Monitor, July 1, 2009: http://128.100.171.10/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=2393&mode=thread&order=0&thold=0

Other Reference

AVAAZ.  "Iran - help break the blackout."  June 30, 2009: http://linksunten.indymedia.org/de/node/8464

Esguerra, Richard.  "Help Protesters in Iran: Run a Tor Bridge or a Tor Relay."  Electronic Frontier Foundation, June 29, 2009: http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/06/help-protesters-iran-run-tor-relays-bridges

Spiess, Kevin.  "Iranian political strife sparks limited cyber-warfare."  Neoseeker, June 15, 2009: http://www.neoseeker.com/news/11001-iranian-political-strife-sparks-limited-cyber-warfare/

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Jewish Life - Eskesta - Ethiopian Shoulder Dance

Source: YouTube poster "RuthEshel". "Beta Dance Troupe, Israel - Nefas", October 9, 2008: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1BmKKYMJ7k

"Ethiopian Jewry, the Beta-Israel community, was often known by the name “Falasha,” which in Amharic means foreigner and is a term of derision given them by Ethiopians. No one knew of the community’s existence for hundreds of years. Prior to the Christian era in Ethiopia, a Jewish kingdom is said to have existed in the region of Axum in northwest Ethiopia. For three centuries, from the 13th-16th, the Jews of Ethiopia did battle with the Christians who tried to force them to convert. The last independent stronghold of the community, in the Semien mountains, fell in the 17th century. Many Jews converted to Christianity; but a minority, who lived in small villages, maintained their Judaism under difficult conditions of persecution." [1]

"Beta" means "house" and "Beta Israel" the "House of Israel".

In The Jewish Mind scholar Raphael Patai distills Judaism to a milky crystalline essence of four parts consisting of two beliefs and two duties: "They are the belief in the one God; the belief in the special relationship between God and Israel; the duty toward God; and the duty toward one's fellow man." [2, p.10]

Source: YouTube poster "DolfRabus".  "Eskesta Dance Theater, Haifa, Israel; Dir.: Dr. Ruth Eshel."  July 3, 2008: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vUYJuiQeRFA

Beta Israel, Balankab, Ethiopia

Cited Reference

1. Beta Dance Troup: Tradition and Innovation: http://www.beta-eskesta.com/ and http://www.beta-eskesta.com/AboutUs.aspx?id=2

2. Patai, Raphael. The Jewish Mind. London and New York: Jason Aronson, 1977.

3. The Beta Yisrael village of Balankab, Ethiopia; woodcut From H. A. Stern, Wanderings Among the Falashas in Abyssinia London, 1862; reprinted in the 1901-1906 Jewish Encyclopedia, now in the public domain.

Other Reference

Jewish Women's Archive. "Ruth Eshel": http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/author/eshel-ruth

Jewish Virtual Library. "The History of Ethiopian Jews": http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Judaism/ejhist.html

Wikipedia: "Beta Israel": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beta_Israel

# # #

Black Widows, Black Crows, White Gulls - Hitchcock's Metaconflict

I'll list the Hitchcok films I've watched in June and glance at what else Netflix is sending my way soon enough, but last night's watching The Birds struck me as particularly pertinent to the Islamic Small Wars. 

The avian war party in the film features in addition to crows its share of white gulls as well as other species of bird (those sparrows sure knew how to mess up a living room), but all arrive--scouts, squadrons, and main body--as a mission-oriented force of nature.  From the first seagull's peck that draws blood from Melanie Daniel's scalp, an act of terror if every there was, to the family's grim retreat from the manse on Bodega Bay, there's much that relates to Islamist and other terror.

Black widows: Chechen suicide bombers whose husbands had been martyred [1].  Director Hitchcock and writers Du Maurier and Evan Hunter probably did not have anything like terrorism in mind as they developed the work, and yet in their insight into the mysteries of conflict, and especially conflict remote from the post-Medieval, post-Renaissance, post-Age-of-Reason mind of the modern, which would characterized the 1960's audience for Hitchcock's films, they may have produced a predictive or prescient metaphor. 

Indeed the war involving violent Jihad--its haphazard attacks, suicide bombers, renewals of anti-Semitic rhetoric, and its onslaughts, as that suffered this spring in North Waziristan in Pakistan--may have unfathomable qualities save to those deeply engaged in Islamic studies, and even that with concentration in the language of Jihad and the realpolitik of rogue communities, movements, and even governments.

This passage, which plays shortly before the attack on the village, and one or two others particularly stand out (Sholes captains a fleet of fishing boats; Mrs. Bundy is an amateur ornithologist; Melanie is the rich lady who only drove up to "Bodega Bay" the previous day to fall in love with a lawyer she had met in San Francisco).

SHOLES
I'm only telling you what happened
to my boat.

MRS. BUNDY
The gulls were after your fish, Mr. 
Sholes. Really, let's be logical
about this.

MELANIE
What were the crows after at the
school?

MRS. BUNDY
What do you think they were after,
Miss...?

MELANIE
Daniels. I think they were after the
children.

MRS. BUNDY
For what purpose?

MELANIE
To...
(she hesitates)
To kill them.

There is a long silence.

MRS. BUNDY
Why?

Another silence.

MELANIE
I don't know why.

MRS. BUNDY
I thought not. Birds have been on
this planet since archaeopteryx,
Miss Daniels; a hundred and twenty
million years ago!

A TRAVELING SALESMAN ENTERS, goes to bar, listens.

MRS. BUNDY
Doesn't it seem odd that they'd wait
all that time to start a... a war
against humanity?

MELANIE
No one called it a war!

SALESMAN
Scotch, light on the water.

MRS. BUNDY
You and Mr. Sholes seem to be implying
as much.

[1]
-----

Following the attack on the village, Melanie and Mitch return to the restaurant, and Melanie gets a talking to from a woman with two frightened children in tow (in the script referenced here, this section had not yet been built--I've transcribed the passage):

WOMAN

Why are they doing this?

Why are they doing this?

(to Melanie) They said when you got here the whole thing started.

Who are you?

What are you?

Where did you come from?

I think you're the cause of all this.

I think you're evil.

Evil!

Melanie slaps the woman and the drama continues.

Sound familiar?

It would to a Jew--at least to this one--and it plays with the present leveraging of Israel as the cause of Arab and other Islamic discontent, i.e., the convenient scapegoat, the familiar cause in the dark mirror of their own autocratic evil and violence.

Finally, after Mitch has made his way from house to garage and into Melanie's roadster, he turns on the radio, and finds a news broadcast (also transcribed from the DVD).

ANNOUNCER

The bird attacks have subsided for the time being.  Bodega Bay seems to be the center though there are reports of similar attacks on Sebastopal and from Santa Rosa.  Bodega Bay has been cordoned off by roadblocks.  Most of the townspeople have managed to get out while there are still some isolated pockets of people.  No decisions have been announced yet as to what the next step will be, but there has been some disccuion as to whether the military should go in.  It appears that the bird attacks come in waves with long intervals between.  The reason for this does not seem clear as yet.

Mitch turns off the radio at that point and the drama moves towards its chilling final scenes.

There is Hitchcock's inexplicable avian war. 

Cussed nature?  Revenge for eating chicken?  Outrage at Melanie Daniels' adventurous and forward behavior?  Well, the audience will never know and neither will the players.

It only appears that "the bird attacks come in waves with long intervals between."

Cited Reference

1. CNN. "Chechnya's 'black widow' bombers." July 11, 2003: http://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/europe/07/11/russia.black.widows/index.html

2. Maurier, Daphne Du (story) and Evan Hunter (screenplay).  "The Birds."  Final Draft, 2nd Revision, March 2, 1962.  Via Script-O-Rama: http://www.script-o-rama.com/movie_scripts/b/the-birds-script-screenplay.html

Hitchcock, Alfred, Dir.  The Birds.  Universal Pictures, 1963.

Other Reference

CNN.  "Moscow blast kills bomb expert."  February 6, 2004: http://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/europe/07/10/moscow.bomb/index.html

CNN. "Two Moscow concert bombers kill 14."  July 5, 2009: http://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/europe/07/05/russia.blast/index.html

# # #

West Bank Do-Good for Um a-Rihan

Um a-Rihan is home to 50 Palestinian families and until now has not been connected to a proper sewage system. The wetlands will not only prevent pollution to the aquifer but will also provide the village residents with purified water for their crops.

Work began there last week to lay the pipes and connect all of the homes to the purification pools.

The IDF is reviewing the project and may even use the method for some of its outlying bases throughout the West Bank.

Katz, Yaakov.  "Wetlands in the West Bank."  The Jerusalem Post, June 28, 2009: http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1245924951675&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull

As I've said and may say often, the peaceful have a way of progressing around the violent.

The Japanese government has funded the project.  An Israeli engineer, a former Tel Aviv city council member, and the IDF's Civil Administration element provide oversight and permitting.

# # #

Persian History and Communications Technology

What isn't "passed along" on the web when the same defines the social boundary of the intellectual experience?

I will get out of here one day.

:)

Michael Rubin has posted a scholarly wrap on the relationship between the advent of certain technologies in Iran and their influence on its politics:

Rubin, Michael.  "Iran, technology, and revolution."  Middle East Strategy at Harvard, June 25, 2009: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/mesh/

To tease you, here's a paragraph from the piece, an anecdote from another era:

As the Shah cracked down, a broad array of constitutionalists, nationalists, liberals, clerics, and Bakhtiari tribesmen coordinated their actions by wire. The Shah’s forces sought to cut the wires, but the network was too vast, and not entirely under the government’s control. Importantly, the telegraph extended across the frontier into what now is Iraq. Senior clerics cabled instructions from Najaf and Karbala.

-----

Less observed may be the role technology on the contemporary perception and exploitation of time.

For example, one may note of the Islamic Small Wars in general that the world travels fast around their comparatively localized disasters. 

Apply the familiar cancer metaphor: until it kills you, you live.

So far, the world less affected by the Islamist Front has been doing quite well.  It has still time to wallow in news of the death of Michael Jackson and return attention to weightier issues at leisure.

Less comforting: some processes that once took N time to accomplish--everything from setting up meetings to setting up battles--may require but a fraction of that time today.  One may imagine that as little as 100 years ago, an autocratic regime faced with a revolt would have to send out its spies, compile its handwritten notes, and possibly turn the same into typed lists ready for hand-off to its goons. 

Today: set up a compelling piece of web-based bait--could be a Jihadi web site or a false revolutionary one--and collect the IP's that enter in the spirit of solidarity.

Ambush works, unfortunately, and where military organizations have had time to methodically produce their "trusted others", civilians with mere hopes and passions and the desire for trust--to be trusted; to trust someone else--make easy game.

Even less comforting than that: the more we look, and the more we express ourselves, perhaps, the less we do, and the less we're likely to get done.

In the Islamic Small Wars, he who has the agenda--and all of the elements that may be defined as part of the Islamic Revolution in Iran have potent agendas, including the will to empire--has the initiative.

For U.S. Homeland Security or, say, the government of Pakistan and its somewhat secularized military, there may be no effective defensive posture in anything like "the long run": for a ruthless and unpredictable foe, there are always more targets, civilian or defense makes no difference, than may be directly defended.  At some point, the disinterested must become highly interested and focused on who is killing them or threatening the same, and there is no other course than to engage fully and relentlessly.

The Islamic Small Wars, every one of them, represent civil wars pitting at least a few ideas about contemporary political administration against medieval ideals and practices.  Even the Islamist president of Somalia, Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed, seems to want to establish and consolidate a state within defined borders: the opposition Shabaab seems most to want to press on and on and on as mindlessly and as sociopathic as can be.

Moreover, in the realpolitik of feudal systems--the same as now well entrenched in Iran--the development of networks of inducted individuals, families, and organizations has never been so accelerated. One may borrow here from Orwell or Star Trek and the entity known as "Borg": Iran's Revolutionary Guards, its Quds Force, and Basij Militia have in their court much powerful information processing machinery for organizing and facilitating the dismantling of internal resistance to them.

To sum up, I think Iran's "Velvet Revolution" has brought in response an iron fisted tragedy, and it is the sort of tragedy that threatens to engulf those not particularly or directly effected by it or interested in it.  Moreover, the speed at which it may do that has been altered by the pace and scale of computer-networked communications.

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Iran - In the Kingdom of Qods

Iran's ruling clergy has widened its crackdown on the opposition since a bitterly disputed June 12 presidential election, and scattered protests have replaced the initial mass rallies.

The official Web site of opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi, his main tool of communicating with his supporters, was hacked Friday, leaving it blank, an aide said. [1]

Iran's news blackout continues.  Prefacing the article in which the above statement appears: " Iranian authorities have barred journalists for international news organizations from reporting on the streets and ordered them to stay in their offices. This report is based on the accounts of witnesses reached in Iran and official statements carried on Iranian media."

The Qur'an suggests that in war one "fight in the way of Allah those who fight you. But do not transgress limits. Truly Allah loves not the transgressors" (Qur'an 2:190).

One may wonder what cruelty--shot in the heart for being present at a peaceful demonstration, beaten with clubs, thrown off of a bridge--does not "transgress limits".

Cited Reference

1. CBS News - U.S. & World.  "Iranian Cleric: Some in Unrest Should Be Executed."  June 26, 2009: http://cbs5.com/national/iran.protests.crackdown.2.1060679.html

Other Reference

Wehrey, Frederic, Jerrold D. Green, Brian Nichiporuk, Alireza Nader, Lydia Hansell, Rasool Nafisi, S.R. Bohandy.  The Rise of the Pasdaran: Assessing the Domestic Roles of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Gaurds Corps.  RAND National Defense Research Institute, 2009: http://www.rand.org/pubs/monographs/2008/RAND_MG821.pdf

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