"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."
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."
Notes
Care to Read What I Read?
I've embarked on a great reduction in privacy by bookmarking my web-based reading on the "delicious.com" utility. It may tip my hand as to what I have in mind for blogging, but the same may help friends and frenemies alike track my thinking: here is the URL:
Shabbat Shalom. May our arguments be resolved through perceptive words and good deeds only; may we live another week helpful to one another in relative peace.
Photography: Prints & Services
A gentle reminder: I'm in business as a producer of fine art prints and as a provider of shoot-for-fee services, including portraiture and weddings plus assigned photojournalism. My general location: intersection of I-70 and I-81; core camera system: Nikon; transportation: Mustang.
Effort in print-on-demand will not offset the production nor value of signed, limited edition prints made under my own hand. However, for very good convenience, price, and quality, print-on-demand may work out well for many fans and patrons.
Research Services
If you're engaged in funded research in conflict analysis or other areas that may be addressed here and wish to engage my mind in your project, feel welcome to drop me a note at jso@communicating-arts.com.
I'm not going to heavily invest here in an interview-by-interview analysis but note only that I may thin the boundary between my Facebook experience, where I pick up a great variety of circulated material, and this blog with which I feel I could be more active (on that theme, there's a post coming soon, lol).
In the meantime, thanks to Corey Gil-Shuster for putting this together and putting it Out There (on YouTube), so that we may see more (and more) of how our human family has been put together and continue thinking through how many things, not only the spat(s) in the middle east, may for others be made always, continuously, a little bit (or a lot) better as we sail through time together.
I was only nine years old when an Arab neighbor named Abdullahi tricked me into following him to a boat. The boat wound up in Northern Sudan where he gave me as a gift to his family. For three and a half years I was their slave going through something that no child should ever go through: brutal beatings and humiliations; working around the clock; sleeping on the ground with animals; eating the family’s left-overs. During those three years I was unable to say the word "no." All I could say was “yes,” “yes,” “yes.”
The United Nations knew about the enslavement of South Sudanese by the Arabs. Their own staff reported it. It took UNICEF – under pressure from the Jewish –led American Anti-Slavery Group — sixteen years to acknowledge what was happening. I want to publicly thank my friend Dr. Charles Jacobs for leading the anti-slavery fight.
"Israel announced in January that South Sudanese would no longer be allowed to stay now that they have their own country and offered to pay one thousand Euros for each person willing to leave voluntarily by March 31. To Mr. Deng, 53, that move was surprising in light of South Sudan’s having demonstrated its friendship for Israel, including by announcing it would establish an embassy in Jerusalem."
"On April 1, collective protection for south Sudan nationals is set to expire; Jerusalem District Court also issues an injunction forbidding any deportation of South Sudanese nationals before April 15."
" . . . A senior Foreign Ministry official said that the recommendation to extend the collective protection for the South Sudanese for another six month is due to the fact that the conditions for their return haven’t yet matured – not on the part of Israel and not on the part of South Sudan."
Even the most cursory comparison of Ben Lynfield's post with Barak Ravid's in the liberal Israeli news sheet Haaretz spells why one-source reading doesn't hack it on the Internet.
Even in the short post where I had started out to highlight Simon Deng's statement at Durban, plain rapid surface research leads not to a confused story but practically a news programming contest with debunk, deflect, overlook, and indict playing a role on one side and "clear, accurate, and complete" sustained on the other.
Thank God Haaretz chooses to tell completely and plainly its fragment of the overall story.
At the moment, without online data on the fate of the 700 Sudanese refugees hosted by Israel, I hesitate to guess but would gamble a little that deportation would have shown up on the web in the Christian special interest news while extension of "collective protection" would have less suited the successionary impulse in the same editors.
This and similar issues bring up a question I haven't found either a right time or right way of asking: what would be not right, individually or en masse, in any volunteered request for conversion to Judaism?
The question must loom somewhere in monotheist minds.
There are many good things in life to which we not only bring ourselves but block out the static of voices critical, fearful, or even jealous in regard to what we have resolved to undertake. All things being equal, with there being "no compulsion in religion", this one path in faith seems ever off the table when, in fact, it is never off the table for anyone who would wish to bring themselves to it.
We're going to teach those Jooooos a lesson in humility by embracing That Other suckled on the world's abundance of fear and hate and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
Taken at face value, recent remarks by U.S. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton go well beyond realignment with the Muslim world. They go all the way to appeasement, capitulation, and the taking up of that old pogromatic saw, "Kill the Jews!"
Panetta, for example, after a lengthy recounting key elements in U.S. cooperation in the Israeli security relationship during his December 2 speech at the Saban Center, goes on to drop this bomblet:
"And so I’ve been working with the leaders there, Minister Barak and others, to find ways to help Israel take steps which are profoundly in its interests.
For example, Israel can reach out and mend fences with those who share an interest in regional stability – countries like Turkey and Egypt, as well as Jordan. This is an important time to be able to develop and restore those key relationships in this crucial area. This is not impossible. If gestures are rebuked, the world will see those rebukes for what they are. That is exactly why Israel should pursue them" (Department of Defense).
Those who have been tracking Turkey's regress under its Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan know the man and his "Justice and Development Party" have gone after opposition businesses, journalists critical of his tenure, and generals, and of generals to the effect of losing an entire class of the breed while on the cusp of cutting defense contracts with Israel, a former $2 billion annual trade partner (Inbar, 2005; a more recent article in The Guardian, listed in reference, cites the trade economies value as $3.5 billion).
Not to be too distracted by that Guardian article, but the same (from September) contains this gem: "
"Israel's ambassador and other senior diplomats in Ankara have been ordered to leave by Wednesday, and diplomatic status has been downgraded to the lowest level.
On Monday dozens of Israelis were detained at Istanbul airport in what was perceived by Israel as punitive harassment. Passengers were questioned for up to two hours and some were strip-searched" (Sherwood, 2011).
On the surface of the world according to Panetta, "Israel can reach out and mend fences with . . . Turkey . . . ."
And, rightfully, the Jews say (even righteously), "Huh?"
Hillary Clinton too has found her way to comments critical of Israel (and perhaps Orthodox Judaism). Writing for Haaretz, Barak Ravid says, "She mentioned cases of IDF soldiers leaving during performances of female singers and the fact that females sit in the back of buses in certain places in Israel. Clinton said that some of these phenomena reminded her of Iran."
Heck, Hillary, you could have gone to Brooklyn to see about the same thing (Didymus, 2011).
The bogey of the much promoted conspiratorial Left (socialist left) plays some with heads on this too: we (lumpen conservatives) want to believe.
However, I have another way of filtering these events, but it's chancey.
It's this: 1) we -- Israel and the United States and most allies -- are well involved in several wars that may include unfinished business with remnant Soviet cabal, continuing large "Grand Game" competitions for oil and other resources in the Middle East and Africa, resurgent confrontations with the ghosts of the Third Reich, and Islam as the vessel of a political program guaranteed to keep hundreds of millions of minds and souls locked in medieval horrors, including the retrograde horror of medieval motivations (including our well promoted, well recognized, practically brand reliable anti-Semitism); and 2) the best way to progress is a) not to take on all the elephants (or eat them) all at once, or b) misguide everyone while drawing up plans to do that which none wish to do, which would include removing the Iranian threat, updating Arabic (black/white) concepts locked in language and Islam, and economically and socially integrating more of humanity into the west's programs of peace and prosperity.
In essence, we may be watching a double story that has political theater for a surface, a run-up to a higher intensity warfare partiallyl concealed in the wings, and the machinery of broad good intent (or evil -- it's hard to tell) grinding away beneath the floorboards.
Here are some things I know:
F-35 jet program: Israel retains the cockpit avionics, a decisive element in blocking or cloaking combat-related signals and much else in an active battlespace;
Israel has received "bunker-busting" bombs from the U.S., a once secret program now leaked, inked, and linked all over the place--probably a deliberate DOD/IDF signal, imho.
U.S. and Israel military cooperation in exercises, at minimum, have stepped up (as also mentioned by Panetta in the same speech cited by critics (in reference here, Smara Greenberg's article tells a part of that story. Suprising to me, it also includes this note: "Nevertheless, joint military exercises will not be enough to secure Israel's safety from physical and image damage within the international community, and it is important for the White House to stand for Israel publicly as well as privately, as it apparently does in the backrooms of military training bases." How about that? My thesis: the public story is opposite, a part of the diplomacy and timing of the institution of other plans).
Having watched Iranian influence take off in the wake of the war in Iraq and coinciding with its nuclear program development, it appears the U.S. naval presence in the Persion Gulf is swinging upward as well (by Obama's orders).
Unless my fellow armchair and professional analysts (armchair here -- pro wannabe) have taken some marching orders via a napkin, perhaps, passed under the table, I'm taking the popular notion that the Obama Administration is about show to heart, but the show to come may be quite different than the show he's been putting on from that first slighting of Netanyahu so long, and yet so very few years, ago.
Integrity, as the English would know it, runs into trouble with every inch of a concept like "double-story", which is to say practicing deceit albeit with perhaps noble intentions.
For Americans and Israelis (and Anglophiles and others), speaking straight -- scout's honor -- lays at the foundation of every democratic and open society, all agreeing to analogs of "Without the First Amendment, all of the others are worthless." The explosions and smokey shadows of armed conflicts, however, encourage secrets-keeping related to practical security tactics and strategies, and government's caught in such predicaments may become more opaque than previously experienced, drawing fire both for what they project and, more generally, for becoming more remote from the common constituency and difficult to interpret as to true intentions.
Reference
Debkafile. "Katyusha fire on Israel was Syrian warning. Turkey ready for any scenario." November 29, 2011. Not called out loud in the post, this would be part of the continued Russia (old Soviet) and NATO competition in the region, for which old Soviet pals have persisted in keeping Iran, also terror, and Syria as buffers and as hand-in-the-grand-game elements, the disappearance of the Soviet government covering over the persistence of state issues and, probably, long cultivated and reinforced social relationships in business and politics.
Among the smallest of countries--population: approximately 7.7 million Jewish and 1.6 million Christian, Druze, and Muslim citizens--Israel nonetheless mounts extensive emergency response and committed humanitarian missions worldwide.
* * *
In a gesture of care and support, one of the world's smallest nations is sending aid to the world's most populous nation in the form millions of dollars worth of equipment for earthquake relief. An Israeli plane carrying over 30 tons of medical equipment, water purification kits, electricity generators, tents and blankets took off on Monday for the Chinese city of Chengdu, which was devastated by a May 12 earthquake. The earthquake has left at least 62,664 people dead and an estimated five million homeless. 06/05/08 [3]
Commenting on the above, a YouTube watcher, "jimmyjameswang" wrote in response to the familiar bilge talk, "lol, Israel has been (secretly) a great friend of ours long before we start to develop our post war economy, and we sure were no 'world power' back than, we were poor and back ward and isolated. Quit trying to help the US to alienated us."
* * *
ADAPAZARI, Turkey, Aug. 26 — Amid the scenes of horror and death that have afflicted this city since the earthquake last week, the brightest sign of life is a field hospital operated by doctors and nurses from the Israeli Army.
Eight babies have been born here since the quake. One boy was named Israel, and one girl is called Ziona. Their names are symbols of how firmly the earthquake has sealed the alliance between Israel and Turkey. [4]
Turkey's political stance has changed since Stephen Kinzer published the above lead in The New York Times in 1999; however, Turkey's cooperation in the defeat of this year's Haifa fire may signal that some battles, perhaps especially those with nature, call for continuing humanitarian initiative and reciprocity.
* * *
Three years ago, fueled by a desire to arm myself with management skills for this career, I enrolled in an Israel-based Masters program in Community Leadership & Philanthropy Studies. Today, I am the Director of Volunteer Services at the Agahozo-Shalom Youth Village in Rwanda . . . From the moment I landed in Israel, not a day passed when I did not want to be there. Once again, I found Jewish peers who believed in the importance of social responsibility that extends beyond one’s own community [5].
Rachel Orstein, writer of the above quote, coordinated American and Israeli youth efforts to produce good through the Agahozo-Shalom Youth Village of rural Rwanda. The Israel-based institutional element supporting her effort, Masa Israel, sponsors more than 160 programs for young adults engaged in the development of Jewish identity and the investment in human capital in the process of community. [6]
* * *
In 2009, a total of 2,375 professionals from 110 countries participated in 99 courses in Israel, while 4,357 took part in 82 on-the-spot courses (in host countries) in a total of 35 countries. MASHAV experts were dispatched throughout the world on 89 short-term consultancies and humanitarian medical missions to 31 countries and eight long-term experts were serving on MASHAV demonstration projects around the world, in a total of seven countries. [7]
By continent, here are the complements in countries engaged with Israel's MASHAV development and humanitarian missions:
Asia and Oceania: Bhutan, China, India, Indonesia, Mongolia, Myanmar, Nauru, Nepal, Phillippines, Republic of Korea, Samoa, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Thailand, Tonga, Vanuatu, Vietnam.
Central Europe and Eurasia: Albania, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, Georgia, Hungary, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Moldova, Montenegro, Poland, Russian Federation, Serbia, Slovakia, Tajikstan, Ukraine, Uzbekistan.
Latin America and the Caribbean: Argentina, Bahamas, Belize, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Guyana, Haiti, Honduras, Jamaica, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, St. Kitts and Nevis, Uraguay, Venezuela.
Mediterranean Basic and the European Union: Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, Denmark, Finland, France, Greece, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Luxemburg, Malta, Netherlands, Switzerland, Turkey, United Kingdom.
Middle East and North Africa: Egypt, Jordan, Palestinian Authority (neutral aegis: Danish International Development Agency)
Some MASHAV programs may feature just one participant exchange; others as well involve dozens. Whatever the numbers involved, israeli and Jewish engagement with others everywhere in the world in the shadows of difficult circumstances and daunting problems seems rule, not exception.
Here is a little more about the Middle East program:
In 1999 an intergovernmental agreement for a Regional Agricultural Program was signed by Egypt, Israel, Jordan, and the Palestinian Authority with Denmark as initiator and main supporter. It started with great optimism. Following the success of a trilateral program involving Denmark, Egypt, and Israel, it was suggested to expand the program to include Jordan and the Palestinian Authority. All agreed, and representatives of the prospective partners met in Alexandria to select subjects and objectives of common interest to all partners. MASHAV and CINADCO represented Israel. [8]
I may not wish always to indulge in puff and paraphrasis, but here in response to the broad demonization of Israel and the impact of that rhetoric on Jews of the Diaspora, it seemed to me worthwhile to look over Israel's encouragement, sponsorship, and support of much needed development, emergency, and humanitarian mission programs worldwide.
8. Abileah, Benjamin. "The Middle East Regional Agricultural Program: Working for Peace Through Cooperation." MASHAV, n.d., circa 2004: http://mashav.mfa.gov.il/mfm/Data/84644.pdf
Make a new covenant with the whole of my body so that perhaps my right hand will stop saying God has chosen me' 'I am the first' 'I am the last' 'I am the best' while it stabs my left
If I were God - God forbid and forgive the analogy - how ridiculous would it be for my hands to quarrel each claiming it is me to the exclusion of the other?
Reading poems by Narda Azaria Dalgleish is like looking into a white hot implosion in which all divided reunites in the compressed plasma and dense gravity of a new consciousness.
Composing in the aftermath of the death of her son, Rotem Moria, in the October 7, 2004 Al Qaeda bombing of the Taba Hilton Hotel in the Sinai, one of a string of such bombings in Egypt at the time, Dalgleish found love and from it forged through her poetry a vision of a whole human existence suspended in divine encompassment.
Dalgeishe's book, I, Israel, Ask represents work created in the two years following the Taba Hilton Bombing, and it takes the form of a series of most traditional conversations with the All. In fact, if it is "Israel" that is delightfully pummeled with cleverly nudging riddles and unfettered declarations of affection, it may be less the State than the figure of Israel who was Jacob who also wrestled with God, and addressing that Israel in the title finds addressed in each poem God almighty himself.
How are You?
Oh instant, Oh breath, Oh place, Oh Love-to-be-known, how are you? what good news have you from He, who is unknowable, to me, who is none other than Him?
they said at the open portal, when you enter the Heart of Man place upon the altar of He who is unknowable the whole of existence in-question
Rotem Moria, pictured to the right, had been camping in the Sinai and was returning to Israel via the Taba border crossing (below) when he, with a friend, had walked into the Taba Hilton to use the bathroom.
How capricious and indescriminate God would seem at first, and indeed we may "place upon the altar . . . the whole of existence in-question," as one might say conventionally ("in question"), but with a startling twist we may also lend more weight to the mission and mystery that resides in inquiry itself ("in-question").
What art Thou?
And what art has Dalgleish created for--or because of--a mighty and perplexing Thou?
In an interview in The Times, journalist Libby Purves quotes Dalgleish as saying, "I went to the funeral in Israel and felt . . . extraordinary. Everything I have learnt, with a sense of certainty which has nothing to do with the intellect, was Love. It is not to do with one relative self in reference to another self. It is about what is real in every existence . . . . That is not to say that I was not grieving. Pain is not removed. But grief -- it strips you down."
Born in Tel Aviv in 1951, Dalgleish, arrived in Great Britain in the wake of a divorce in her twenties, put down roots after a while with an Englishman, opened a dress shop (as a designer) in Burford, Oxfordshire, and became involved in the Beshara School for Intensive Esoteric Education, which is located in the Scottish Borders. So it seems with "children of the 60's" that whether to, say, Esalan on the wings of the father of humanist psychology, Abraham Maslow, or to Beshara on the hopes for peace for all mankind, arrival, after one long, strange trip or another, has been certain, and the aspirations of all find expression through such souls removed to remote searching and thoughtful enclaves.
In Dalgleish's own words from correspondence:
My approach to peace making is very much in accord with JFK's quote on top of the page, from his commencement address at the American University, June 10, 1963.
"Let us examine our attitude toward peace itself. Too many of us think it is impossible. Too many think it unreal. But that is a dangerous, defeatist belief. It leads to the conclusion that war is inevitable ... that mankind is doomed ... that we are gripped by forces we cannot control. We need not accept that view. Our problems are manmade ... therefore, they can be solved by man. And man can be as big as he wants. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings. Man's reason and spirit have often solved the seemingly unsolvable ... and we believe they can do it again."
About a year or so ago, I came upon a long list of NGO's in the region, many of whom are Israelis making tremendous efforts to to overcome their fears and prejudice in order to learn how to make peace with the so called other, or enemy. As I was working online, sometimes up to 18 hours a day to research, select and create group pages, my heart would melt for the first time after years of ignorance and being subjected to one sided international media exposure ... for the first time I felt a kind of pride in being an Israeli and in belonging with these people ... I also felt a profound frustration that I could do nothing more than just showcase their work online ...
To begin with, I have, almost tyrannically, guarded the place from the possibility of frivolous discussions - hence no discussion happened. I suppose I was not ready to cope with people's possible protest, anger, or political divisive perspectives. Perhaps it was unwise of me to post that response, I apologize to you.
I am aware that no real peace making is possible without the grace of an acute listening to all points of view, however unpleasant. I really miss that kind of listening, very often when it's too late, and yet again forgotten by the force of habit ...
Call "an acute listening" an open reading, a ready state for an immense talent, a welcoming attitude toward possibility, including the possibility that one's enemies today may be working as hard to "overcome their fears and prejudice in order to learn how to make peace . . . ." In Dalgleish's universe made whole, a world healing and healed, the left and right hands know only cooperation--just the one Guidance--even while they fight a while longer.
In the worldwide war and peace camps, streams of conversation may work in the way of water across rocks, so continuous and full of suspended material the fluid, the rocks ultimately shape to friction, remaining where mettle and time prove stronger than the flow of abrasive thought but melting with slow certainty to suit where it may not. Dalgleish's poems in I, Israel, Ask have their own universal, resonant, and shaping power--we, as hard rocks, should all melt and meld a little bit with them.
Children in Haiti benefit from aid given by Israel's organization, IsraAID. One of the first to send humanitarian aid to Haiti following the earthquake that ravaged the country, Israel and its NGOs are still there - committed for the long haul. Credit: Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs via Flickr, September 21, 2010.
Nine months out from the country's devestating January 12 (2010) earthquake, the Haitian recovery and reconstruction record remains dismal [1]. However, persistent in efforts to ameliorate the country's suffering, Israeli NGOs remain active in recovery efforts, essentially bringing to Haiti expertise in areas ranging from rural agriculture and development to methods of addressing stress and psychological trauma [2].
A news page at Tevel b'Tzedek [3] tells how the thinking goes:
"When the earthquake in Haiti struck, leaving three hundred thousand dead and a million and a half people homeless, two of our Nepal program graduates felt that Tevel b'Tzedek had a role to play . . . ." [3]
Tevel b'Tzedek goes on to report opening in two Haitian camps three ad hoc schools for 460 children, and putting up in three camps tents large enough to function as community centers "for spreading crucial information and for a range of activities that help the earthquake victims once again feel a sense of belonging, learning and even joy" [3].
Sue Gallant, publishing in September (2010) on Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs web, notes that Israel's Trauma Coalition (ITC) has secured funding toward three ends: "Organizing the community to improve sanitation in the makeshift camps and finding donors for sanitation equipment; bringing back to school the many children who haven't rejoined an educational framework; and helping to establish a restaurant for the numerous injured people who are physically unable to wait in the long queues for food" [2].
Sent a 'what's new' earlier today, a representative from Nathan - Irelief, Einav Levy, wrote back (left as received):
Last month the last team came back after 10 delegations that worked there since the earth quake.
These teams dealt with medical aid, social support, medicin and enpowerment of the community.
In October 11 th, next team is being launched to Haiti to work in the field of rehabilitaion.
Next month another team will go in order to work on children's slavery.
In december we will start a program of agricultural education, and in january we suppose to open a community clinic in Cape Haitien.
The news out of Haiti has not been good. According to one source, a volunteer with an American church associated with an orphanage in-country, suggests much may be laid at the feet of a landed aristocracy that has kept itself empowered and wealthy with little regard for the island's population overall.
The Associated Press has stated bluntly, "Wealthy landowners vow the "new Haiti" will become yet another vast slum unless the government rebuilds on their terms."[4].
Still, what one may do, one does, and this in keeping with a kind and progressive ethics and humanitarianism.
Gleaned from Gallant's article, here is a short list of Israeli organizations continuing their involvement with Haiti in the improvement of its conditions.
Israeli Organizations Involved in Ongoing Haitian Recovery and Redevelopment (Sampling)
Damascus has a long and bloody history of intervention in Lebanon, and has made no secret of its hope to make its weaker neighbor part of Syria. Since the creation of contemporary Lebanon in 1920, most Syrians have never accepted modern Lebanon as a sovereign and independent state. The outbreak of the Lebanese Civil War in 1975 gave Damascus the opportunity to act on its belief that Lebanon and Syria are one. [1]
April 20 (Bloomberg) -- Iran has provided weapons and as much as $200 million a year to help the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah re-arm itself to levels beyond those in 2006, when the group waged a war with Israel, the Pentagon said. [2]
In southern Lebanon, Hezbollah has courted two lovers, and soon both may be asking much of it.
Call Hezbollah a blasting cap or powder keg, it has rebuilt its warmaking capability well enough to ignore the state interests of the rest of Lebanon and set itself off for Mssrs. Assad and Ahmadinejad, who having built their war boy toy may turn to fighting one another for control of it within the larger contexts or themes associated with the Islamic Small Wars in general and regional state politics in particular.
Left out in the cold: Druze leader and head of Lebanon's Progressive Socialist Party Walid Jumblatt and Maronite leader Nasrallah Butros Sfeir, at least.
Credit Nadim Gemayel, a Christian member of Lebanon's Parliament, with the following statement.
"It's abiding to the rules of the Iranian revolution," Gemayel said of the gorup. "But moreover, I think that with the support, of course, of the Iranian arms and the money and the financing of the Iranians and from the facilities that Syria is providing to Hezbollah, we are having a party -- a military party -- growing day after day and year after year -- especially after the war of 2006." [3]
Lebanon may soon be made to face new agonies, not from tree trimming Jews (busy on their own property, no less [4]), but from the rogue shadow government occupying southern Lebanon and its two state patrons who continue to seek expansion and influence through proxied military threat and effort.
I have heard of Ferenc Deák, an Hungarian statesman, a career legislator, whose spirit and works helped bring about the liberation and modernation of Hungary in the 19th Century, but know little about him today and mean to change that soon, for we often think that good ideas and great systems come about spontaneously, snatched out of the air by peculiarly resourceful minds, but they don't, or don't often, and if some do seem so would seem equally suspect.
While some may trust in magic, may most, and most of all leaders, place faith in diligent scholarship and responsible reflection.
Among Deák's accomplishments: the development of a system of public education that forged an intellectual movement that was to spread across Europe, influence Theodor Herzl in his conceptualization of a peaceful and persistent Zionism, and contribute to the success of such as Alexander Korda and Edward Teller.
While we might ask what in any of the democratic open societies could be more prosaic than a public library, we may be more wise to ask what could be more miraculous, for public libraries as, say, New Yorkers might know them would seem as exceptional in the world as they may seem common to those who have had the good fortune to access them.
What any given generation may take for granted in the way of common universal freedom, privilege, and right, be sure a previous generation put it there, whether constitution or library, deliberately and probably through struggles not much different than experienced today.
Here's a new wrinkle on books old enough to have fallen out of copyright: many are popping up online in multiple formats for the curious. Francis Deák, Hungarian statesman : a memoir.
From the preface by M. E. Grant Duff, Member of Parliament, York House, Twickenham (January 1880):
It is good to read the history of such men at all times, but never perhaps more than now, when a school has arisen and attained to no small measure of political power which pooh-poohs the idea that morality has anything to do with politics, or that there is any other test of statesmanship than obvious and immediate success.
From another work in which one finds Ferenc Deák mentioned, we have this:
One of the most interesting features of Hungarian liberalism was that its advocates were mainly noble members of the Hungarian State Assembly who pressured for reform while knowing that it would mean losing some of their privileges.
Source: Györe, Zoltán. "A Doctrine of 'Harmonization of Interest': the Basis of the Reform Policy of the Hungarian Liberals in the Vormärz." Ideology, Society and Values, n.d., p. 133.
Additional quick reference: Online Encyclopedia. "FRANCIS DEAK (FERENCZ), (1803-1876)". Originally appearing in Volume V07, Page 896 of the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica.
We have the immense fortune of visiting such as Ferenc Deák in books as well as discovering similar souls standing up and standing out, flamboyantly or quietly, some in political life, many not, on the World Wide Web.
Most importantly, we have a way through the globalized, if struggling, open online library of investigating, developing, and dispersing solutions to contemporary issues. those who visit and comment on 19th Century Hungary know the era's resonance in several of the world's contemporary ethnic and feudal struggles as well as the potential for a cultural blossoming out of them.
In light of the above video, which I think timeless, we have this also to consider:
BERLIN – Arab youths threw stones at a Jewish dance group during a street festival in Hannover, injuring one dancer and forcing the group to cancel its performance, German police and dance officials said Thursday. [1]
The span from Arab youth throwing rocks at a Jewish dance troupe in Germany is not so far to an adult spewing venom at Israel from a podium in Vienna:
Never mind the data that has come out in the weeks since the Mavi Marmara incident, nor the more sophisticated impression of Gaza provided through aid distribution reports, freelance photography by Gaza residents, and such as the Roots Club video, speaker Omar Al-Rawi, a member of Vienna's City Council [2}, will continue along his lines for the social benefits accompanying them, a simple exercise in the acquisition, development, and experience of raw narcissistic power.
"One last word. Today ten thousand people came with us. We also know that near here two hundred people are demonstrating for solidarity with Israel. We live in a free country and everybody can freely express their opinion. Two things I want to tell that group: First, they stated that this is the greatest anti-Semitic event. I say shame on you! for that statement. We reject that smear. Come here and see: here are anti-racists . . . straight people who are against anti-semitism, racism, and against Islamophobia."
The crowd then chants, "Terrorist Israel! Terrorist Israel!"
Let's take this behavior to the video's end:
"And the second thing I would like to tell those friends of Israel: He who is a good friend gives sincere counsel. He must tell his friend: "Dear friend you have gone too far. You are trespassing every limit. If you want this country to continue living in peace, it will not work without the rights of the Palestinians."
Remember this: the rights of the Palestinians today are in the hands of Hamas, legend to this moment for "extrajudicial killings" in Gaza, the Palestinian Authority, which has yet to change the genocidal charter of the Palestinian Liberation Organization from which it sprung in the spirit of Yassar Arrafat, the governments of Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Egypt that deny Palestinian refugees camped amidst their bailiwicks the full rights and privileges of citizenship, including access to jobs, and the UNRWA and a small host of disingenuous NGO's that administer humanitarian programs throughout the population but can't seem to put a lid on anti-Semitic, Judeophobic cartoons for children.
Clearly, there has evolved around Israel not a battle for land or for the betterment of Arabs in any progressive material or social aspect, but rather for the possession of language and the obliteration of thought and thoughtfulness itself.
This is what what the world buys into when it embraces the "Palestinian narrative":
Article 15: The liberation of Palestine, from an Arab viewpoint, is a national (qawmi) duty and it attempts to repel the Zionist and imperialist aggression against the Arab homeland, and aims at the elimination of Zionism in Palestine. Absolute responsibility for this falls upon the Arab nation - peoples and governments - with the Arab people of Palestine in the vanguard. Accordingly, the Arab nation must mobilize all its military, human, moral, and spiritual capabilities to participate actively with the Palestinian people in the liberation of Palestine. It must, particularly in the phase of the armed Palestinian revolution, offer and furnish the Palestinian people with all possible help, and material and human support, and make available to them the means and opportunities that will enable them to continue to carry out their leading role in the armed revolution, until they liberate their homeland.
Article 22: Zionism is a political movement organically associated with international imperialism and antagonistic to all action for liberation and to progressive movements in the world. It is racist and fanatic in its nature, aggressive, expansionist, and colonial in its aims, and fascist in its methods. Israel is the instrument of the Zionist movement, and geographical base for world imperialism placed strategically in the midst of the Arab homeland to combat the hopes of the Arab nation for liberation, unity, and progress. Israel is a constant source of threat vis-a-vis peace in the Middle East and the whole world. Since the liberation of Palestine will destroy the Zionist and imperialist presence and will contribute to the establishment of peace in the Middle East, the Palestinian people look for the support of all the progressive and peaceful forces and urge them all, irrespective of their affiliations and beliefs, to offer the Palestinian people all aid and support in their just struggle for the liberation of their homeland. [4]
Liberation from whom? And from what?
Those two questions may seem at first about people, political organizations, or governments, but, ultimately, they are more accurately about ideation and language and the psychology of fear expressed in tropes that insulate and sustain the same: "the Zionist movement" and "world imperialism" would seem to exist in their own metonymic cloud, a cluster of associations that reach toward opposites in "Arab nation for liberation, unity, and progress."
As good as such language may be made to sound, one may ask what of "liberation, unity, and progress" characterize today the essentially Judenrein states of, say, Algeria, Libya, and Syria.
Gasa, and this with Israel's acquiesence, has been made Judenrein too, and in it, Hamas has routed Fatah by force of arms, and the two to this day cannot agree on who is to represent whom and what.
The energy simmering up into the Middle East Conflict and threatening to boil over into World War III derives from language and the potential within it to poison the heart, blind reason, and dull compassion.
Failure to address the same--the poetics of contempt, violence, and capricious willfulness--enables all of the too familiar inhumane horrors, not the least of which may be having one's sworn "liberators" turn out one's next generation of petty dictators, jailers, state-sanctioned sadists, and thugs.
Go to the places where they hang homosexuals in squares and deny the rights of minorities.
Go to the places where there is no freedom of expression, no freedom of press, no independent courts and no human rights organizations. There are no human rights. Go to Teheran. Go to Gaza.
For those for whom human rights are truly important, you need to support the democratic and liberal Israel against these dark forces.
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