Communicating Arts - Main Web SiteAbout the following: I may owe Anwaar Hussein of the Truth Spring blog an apology for not sending him a complaint ahead of a conclusion. In this instance, my comment's links and perhaps length were (as suspected further on in the text) enough to derail the whole as spam by the target blog's automated programming, so I have heard from Anwaar via e-mail (the post appears in full there now, as intended).
My impression was that of having been baited in a comment thread and then blocked from posting.
What to do when a robot, a computer program, has done the blocking: Retract here? Repost over there?
In that what follows is the story of a story as perceived when written, I'm going to let it stand but with this preface and a note: what follows may have to do with one drive and two behaviors--1) the delegitimization of Israel, which, unfortunately for the world at large, continues to patronize, Arab Muslim sentiment around the world, 2) habitual refusal to acknowledge culpability for actions others may take in their own defense, and 3) quite shared, the aggressive tone of two strident writers thrown together on one page, a macrocosmic analog that works always from attitudes expressed in language outward toward combative political action.
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Admin Says:
Hmmmm!
If I was sure what Oppenheim is saying, it would have been easier to respond to. In the absence of that I can only guess the following;
a. He has confused the whole point of the article. He has missed that the scribe is highlighting the super power approved international thuggery of one nation. And that this article is not about religious fanaticism per se.
b. Oppenheim has not confused the argument in the article but sincerely feels that highlighting the criminal offenses of a rogue nation is tantamount to giving tacit approval to religious fanaticism. And that this must not be done.
c. Oppenheim supports such murders by states and would not mind if the spooks of Iraq, North Korea and Iran–the ‘axis of evil’ countries–got together with those from Afghanistan and Libya and dispatched one or some of his previous presidents to kingdom come. These states, after all, have enough grudge to justify the act.
Now which one of the above is true? Perhaps Oppenheim would come back to explain or maybe someone else would take up the cudgels on his/her behalf.
Waiting………
I haven't encountered this sort of online behavior until this past Sunday. The "Admin": Anwaar Hussein of Truth Spring, which journal I've had listed for some time in the left-hand column of this blog.
The article implied and to which I responded was this one:
Hussain, Anwaar. "To Zion an Eye Looks." Truth Spring, March 3, 2010: http://truthspring.info/2010/03/03/to-zion-an-eye-looks/#more-1716
Recounting the murder in Dubai of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, who had been suspected of shuttling between Hamas and Iran's Revolutionary Guard for weapons procurement, Hussain convicts Israel out of hand and ends with an unfortunate but familiar enough gem to any who swim in the waters of Middle East peace discussions:
Many eyes, some dead some still alive, now look to Zion and its patron to explain how one country can act as an international thug, take another people’s land, kill them when they struggle to get a piece of it back, stop at virtually nothing, and, this time, draw five other countries into the bloody games of espionage that it plays and gets not a rap on the knuckles where a sledge hammer is long due.
And here, in response, is what prompted the administrator's remarks:
Oppenheim Says:
“In the 1970’s, he joined the Muslim Brotherhood, and in the 1980’s, he was reported to have been involved in sabotaging coffee shops where gambling was taking place.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahmoud_al-Mabhouh
How difficult it must be to decry fanaticism in one instance and tacitly approve of it with silence in the next.
Mahmoud, whose death has brought Egyptian and Jordanian operations under scrutiny as well as those of Israel, seems to have acted as a linchpin between those who wish to blow themselves up (and take all the others they can with them) and Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, of whom hundreds of thousands of Iranians seem to have tired.
One may wonder which Islam finds favor here.
The above posted beneath the article on Thursday, March 4, and I left it awaiting moderator approval.
A fellow blogger who more conscientously visits the Truth Spring blog (slogan: "Truth exists, falsehood has to be invented") let me know the following Sunday that, indeed, the note had posted and drawn a response.
My Sunday afternoon response to that response in a moment, but here I note it is Tuesday, plain old "ages" in cybertime, and the same has not posted while the impression that I would demur, to put it politely, has been sustained.
Here is that timely if perhaps too chummy response:
Anwaar -- I have kept the Sabbath, that is all.
Efforts to delegitimize and demonize Israel have been generally so passionate as to prove little more than presumptuous.
As with the altogether dismissible Goldstone report, this now out of Dubai may and probably will melt into confusion.
Such as Mahmoud al-Mabhouh make enemies, so much so they become fugitive for some(before his murder, al-Mabhouh had in pursuit the states of Egypt and Jordan as well as Israel) and for untrustworthy others candidates for false flag operations.
In this now muddled affair, two Palestinians, Ahmad Hasnin and Anwar Shekhaiber, have been dragged behind Israel for allegedly providing logistical support for the murder while the most strident of accusing voices remains that of Hamas, and in the arena of extrajudicial killing, Hamas has done so much so well for so long in Gaza as to have no credible rivals for the practice in the region.
This source is Israeli: http://www.btselem.org/english/statistics/casualties_data.asp?Category=25®ion=TER ,
This one is Palestinian: http://www.maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=208221
Search string applied: "Gaza Hamas extrajudicial killing".
Last month, the BBC noted, "The Jerusalem Post reported suspicions voiced across the region that the Palestinian Authority, run by Hamas's rival organisation Fatah, might have had a hand in the attack" before going on to indulge its own penchant for a good spook story:
"All this leads to another question: Does the hit team's detailed knowledge of his itinerary, the lack of bodyguards and the possibility he was comfortable travelling on his own identity, paint a scenario where Mr Mabhouh was served up to his assassins in Dubai by people he trusted?"
Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/8521942.stm
Let's talk about this rhetoric " . . . super power approved international thuggery of one nation."
Honestly, I don't know how Iran gets away with what it does to its own people and with its meddling in the region.
One might hope a "superpower" would intervene, but none has yet, at least not visibly.
Of course, away from the ambitiously hijacked old Persia, admissions of culpability on the Arab Muslim side of the familiar bickering seldom surface.
Should we now "Google" Abdel Wael Zwaiter, Ghassan Kanafani, Wadie Haddad, et al., we may find, at least online, the same ambiguous notes--and notes of ambiguous notes--while something like the truth continues to reside in investigator notes, court records, and in unpublished jottings by journalists, all of which do no one much good kept dark. Until we have peace enough to bring to light state secrets all around, we may speculate endlessly on behalf of one agenda or another.
On this web page, " . . . approved international thuggery of one nation" says more about rhetoric than it does factual reality, and in doing so, it leaves out the better part of the story, which here would seem to revolve around the perception of al-Mabhouh's threat to regional security, not merely that of Israel alone, and detection of the social engineering and reach of the Islamic Revolution in Iran.
We may move on to " . . . highlighting the criminal offense of a rogue nation . . . ." another passionate condemnation having for its basis the sound of itself.
Egypt, Jordan, and Israel, among others, have each the obligation of securing their own citizen's defense, and a man who, allegedly but perhaps less allegedly and more truly than others, trades in arms to promote the viability of war in the region draws their attention.
As mentioned, al-Mabhouh was a pursued man, and that not by Israel alone.
As regards the statement on the "Axis of Evil" states--Iraq, North Korea, Iran--Iraquis of late have braved polls threatened by other than Americans (or Egyptians, Jordanians, Israelis, Danish cartoonists, etc.) while Iranians, quite familiar with the ways of their regime, its record of serial murders, and the suppression of public protest, have been fighting gamely for a less medieval and ungodly governance (reference, any given day: http://www.iranhumanrights.org/).
North Korea, way outside Islam and distinctly idolatrous as regards its leadership, would seem the odd rogue out here for having for its threat profile the will of a mere family, an army, and its head, Kim Jong II, a 68-year-old figure who has most recently sought "bear gall bladder, rhinoceros horn and musk" for what ails him, all healthy alternatives, so anyone sane may suppose, to the pleasures taken by the dictator in the contemplated launching of nukes against the south. (Reference quoted for the remedies: http://www.chinapost.com.tw/asia/korea/2010/02/16/244952/Questions-about.htm).
Perhaps I had exceded my word limit (that's a real possibility).
I don't know, but I do know I returned to Truth Spring and posted the above the day after Sabbath, a quite different act from my implied disappearance from the fray altogether.
Standing for little other than murder, al-Mabhouh's name will float away on the litter of historical footnotes--who seems already to have become of far less interest than whodunit--but efforts to delegitimize and demonize Israel (and the Jews) will persist for some time, for such have their roots in fabrication heavily fertilized by indignance, jealousy, hate, and vanity, and for all those most human ills little cure has been found.
For any inclined to books, I may recommend the following:
- Meir-Levi, David. History Upside Down: The Roots of Palestinian Fascism and the Myth of Israeli Aggression. New York: Encounter Books, 2007.
- Morris, Benny. 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008.
- Shepherd, Robin. A State Beyond the Pale: Europe's Problem with Israel. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2009.
David Meir-Levi drums up the usual suspect rhetoric and demolishes it; Benny Morris, who may answer to God and history and not much else between, recounts in factual terms the construction and populating of Israel through the period prior to statehood as well as submitting data from the war; Robin Shepherd lays out the broad political architecture undergirding attitudes and related stances taken toward the Jewish state.
For robust and at times ingenious online conversation across the tender divides, I may recommend a visit to http://www.mepeace.org/; for fact-checking and independent but not disinterested ombudsmanship, many organizations listed to the left may be helpful, but CAMERA and Honest Reporting might take first clicks for engaging media smears.
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