"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 [email protected].
Free speech -- here in the U.S., the First Amendment concept -- has been argued around the world in the wake of rioting in Muslim-majority states associated, in part, with a clip on YouTube, "The Innocents of Muslims".
While that's been batted around elsewhere, and I have been involved with related chatyping on Facebook, I thought to run this interview here and on Backchannels as argument, introduction, orientation, and reminder having to do with what free speech in a free society means and that through the mouth of one of the western champions of the concept.
Posted to YouTube September 23, 2012. -->
Gentleman: this decade is about the web-enabled appearance and development of a democratized global intelligentsia patched together by affinities in interests and outlooks and, probably, soon to become bonded as that aggregating influence feeds back through events, outputs in media, including e-publications -- the emerging pamphlets of our age -- and, ultimately, policy-informing consensus responding to this still emerging online smorgasbord. View the video -->
I am trying to wean myself away from Facebook, and it's not easy: I have many relationships there, enjoy them, and find the chatyping often stimulating. However, as I focus down in this area of "conflict, culture, language, and psychology", the want of books prevails and the yearning to write at greater length, fiction or nonfiction, becomes more prevalent. With age and habits, such transitions may take time, but as much seems to be happening.
In the meantime, before I write my masterpiece for the e-reader, I've this thought to share from a threadchat within Facebook's "Rationalist Society of Pakistan":
We generally experience grammar, linguistic and social, fully installed: our babbling infants have ways of letting us know they have acquired ability to speak a basic lexicon and, shortly after, express themselves in phrases or sentences. We're amazed! Those tiny mewling things can do more than foul their diapers. We don't stop to think about underlying or, to borrow from our computing age, "lower-level source code" and the solidification of ever more fundamental emotion, language, and social relationships. My guess is the basis for overarching, lifetime, and lifestyle attitudes and beliefs may be anchored in that pre-expressive region.
Will the mewling infant turn out an abstract or literal thinker?
Will the same take orders without question? Or incline toward questioning orders?
How will authority be received?
How will having authority be handled?
When the same picks out of the clutter of noise such terms as "Punjabi" or "Baloch" or "Jew" or "Pachtun" what else in inflection, in the chemistry of the body, in next words, in their amplification and emphasis, will accompany the discovery of nouns?
If we think we flatter ourselves if we view only ourselves and, I'll try this for individual effect on environment, our "life regions" of influence, what may be done within a family, what may be done to influence elementary and higher education programs as responsible for a culture-wide intellectual state of affairs.
Nature may be the larger force and presence.
Nonetheless, the relationship between earliest family experience and first expression in language may be an area worth a look IF one wants to change so much of what comes of that earliest experience.
We may not only read hearts through the mouths attached to them, we obtain our own hearts from speech and, probably, even before we know what we are hearing -- and then, so very young, perhaps even before we know what we are saying.
"Our nation is at war against a far-reaching network of violence and hatred. "1
Obama, when he voiced the above in his Inaugural Address (January 20, 2009) did not say precisely how extensive, how large, how virulent that far-reaching network was, but he may have known he would have a hand in shaping in every dimension the conflict involving it.
Obama goes on to say this:
"To the Muslim world, we seek a new way forward, based on mutual interest and mutual respect.
To those leaders around the globe who seek to sow conflict or blame their society's ills on the West, know that your people will judge you on what you can build, not what you destroy."
Then a little later, and with Presidental butt firmly planted in the Oval Office, came the realpolitik.
"The snub marked a fresh low in US-Israeli relations and appeared designed to show Mr Netanyahu how low his stock had fallen in Washington after he refused to back down in a row over Jewish construction in east Jerusalem."2
I may bet my co-religionists remember that.
Today, however, I wonder if the same was not by design and mutual.
The conservative press and right-aligned anti-Jihad have weighed in factually and heavily on the Obama Administration's perfidious liaison with almost all things Muslim Brotherhood (short of such as Anwar al-Awlaki, the violence-inciting cleric who fled Virginia for Yemen and bought a missile for his bloody capacious mouth).3
Let's move on.
Remember this exchange?
In one pointed confrontation on foreign policy, Obama bluntly challenged McCain's steadiness. "This is a guy who sang bomb, bomb, bomb Iran, who called for the annihilation of North Korea — that I don't think is an example of speaking softly." That came after McCain accused him of foolishly threatening to invade Pakistan and said, "I'm not going to telegraph my punches, which is what Sen. Obama did."4
Perhaps a certain somebody not only adept at debate but perceptive about a whole scene took a lesson -- or already had that lesson -- ahead of the need for it.
I have found the Obama Administration the most opaque in memory, one guaranteed to promote discomfort among all who have been raised with a version of "Talk straight. Say what you mean. Mean what you say. Act accordingly."
We're aware of the difference between image and substance in politics, but it's generally a little different, more about in-house promises and betrayals. Here things are a little different: we have a President on reach-out and a vigorous conservative press rightfully and righteously dogging him every step of the way.
Here's a good example and fit perfect to my thinking: in a recent editorial in The Jerusalem Post, Caroline Glick asks, "Why is the Obama administration shunning potential allies and empowering enemies? Why has the administration gotten it wrong everywhere?8
Glick's tone alone may be helpful to what I believe are the two underlying tenets of the Obama Administration in its ownership of the "War on Terror" and ownership of the official American state relationship with Islamic-majority states and their constituent elements.
1. Orchestrate everything and be careful to keep the front stage lit and the back stage dark.
2. With regard to the "War on Terror", produce the least war possible with Islam while pressing closely and persistently with all active representatives.
In autocratic states, the idea of a "double story" covers the behavior of providing the public with a convenient, encouraging, and generally patronizing narrative while stealing from the same mercilessly and shamelessly.
In good ol' democratic American -- proven across generatons to swap out its leadership every two, four, and eight years -- and with an election coming to help with 20/20 hindsight Obama's moves have been most suited to the above noted modus operandi:
a) extend to Islam the hand of peace;
b) give Israel the cold shoulder, even snub the Prime Minister, and make sure all of that makes Big Media news;
c) distill out "the terrorists" where possible, investigate, "sting", and kill (drone operations in Pakistan; CIA and military administrative proxy counter-terrorism in Somalia) as necessary;
d) draw the Muslim Brotherhood into power and, well, see how they like it;
e) make way for change in the direction of the statements laid out in the Inaugural Address.
One more thing:
f) drive the right wing absolutely nuts!
Mission accomplished?
If this view fits, it makes sense of many things, including Israel's Defense Minister Ehud Barak recently telling CNN's Wolf Blitzer: ""This administration under President Obama is doing in regard to our security more than anything that I can remember in the past," Barak said, later adding "it doesn't mean that we agree on everything."5
This is a view that also fits a) the DOD-IDF entanglement in the new F-35 fighter program that redounds to Israel's credit as regards control and customization of critical cockpit avionics, b) delivery and debugging (watch those fuses, guys) of the GBU-28 bunker busting bombs (plus chit-chat about aerial refueling for long-range operations), and c) mutual mumness on notable hacks of computer systems associated with Iranian nuclear-involved projects.
This is also the view that fits the continuing American commitment to Somalia in its full court press against Al Shabaab.7
One could take this state by state, Yemen to Syria, with always the same result: state destabilization leading to internecine conflicts with the Muslim Brotherhood surfacing and stepping up to its plate to perhaps show the world what it really is all about.
That's a scary thought, but it seems to be what is happening.
The good news for Obama: while Obama may be held to his own Inaugural words -- again, "To those leaders around the globe who seek to sow conflict or blame their society's ills on the West, know that your people will judge you on what you can build, not what you destroy" -- it's really the Muslim Brotherhood and so many conflicted parties that have been handed the test.
For this first term in general, the story on the surface -- we might call it "Obama Abandons Israel!" -- shouts louder and more in the direction of the general public than the defense procurement minutae that actually makes more sense but to a much smaller community of defense and security tracking geeks.
And that may be as planned from Obama's first day in office.
A Sideshow Called "Shimmer"
The arrival of pain brings with it a certain set of questions.
! What is it?
! How large is it?
! Where is it?
! How dangerous is it?
In 2005, Daniel Pipes took a whack at answering "How Many Islamists?"6
Pipes' answer then was 10 to 15 percent and provided his reasoning. Since then, he's updated the piece as various polls have weighed in on the issue.
I've been using the term "islamic Small Wars" to describe the internecine warfare within Islamic-majority states and along the many troubled interfaces between the Ummah and others that have to do, more or less, and perhaps superficially with how humans should live (more substantially, perhaps, with who has power over whom).
Be that as it may, within that framework, the term "shimmer" applies to the guerilla-style, low-intensity, "hard" and "soft Jihad" observation and observed paranoia created by the mirage-like presence of a thing that appears and disappears in common awareness and consciousness.
Everyone knows the inscription on the verbal shield: "Islam is the Religion of Peace!"
Uh huh.
And the good among the believers may thank 9/11, London, Madrid, and Mumbai for fixing that forever in the kaffir mind and then go on to add to those atrocious events the sorry history and current image of violence soaking through the regions most heavily invested in so peaceful a way.
In releation to the thesis of "producing the least war possible," Obama has stepped off with a bold defense of Islam and of Muslims -- and he's patronized Muslim interests in the Middle East Conflict, most notably with his stance, or absence of it, on Jerusalem as the capital of Israel (which it is, but he's not saying and pushing) -- and a related integration of the same, among them persons of intense popular interest into his Administration (lately, Huma Abedin has been in the hot spot, but last year around this time Tarek Fatah's mention of three Brotherhood associated personalities in the White House made the conservative rounds, one of which I've referenced here9) .
In effect, by handing Al Qaeda to the military and attempting to keep the Brotherhood (by right-side standards, suspect relations) to himself, Obama has responded to "shimmer" in his own way, limiting military activity in the War on Terror, improving the cost-benefit ratio of that effort directly, producing greater preparedness for wider field operations if necessary, and widening the scope for social interaction and normative processes to do their thing, would only they would do it favorably and altogether more quickly for the ideals associated with liberal and open democracies and human rights worldwide.
Shimmer involves sighting the army that isn't on the horizon -- and then is -- and then fades again from view.
Or reappears.
Shimmer may interact with the Obama double-story in this Orwellian way: the worse the Administration's stance looks for Israel, the worse it really is for those in Islam who most want to destroy the Jews, convert the kaffir, and create the caliphate, i.e., Obama's discomforting "realignment with Islam" may serve to draw away more moderate and temperate energies from less contained personalities and their organizations.
Is it working?
Yet?
The experience of the regime in Iran may provide benchmarks for this strategy. It has been rightly made a pariah among states; it has been taught that it cannot fully control its technology over which it seems to express the greatest need for autonomy (what else is new?) and state pride; and its pockets may not reach quite so far as they did a few years ago, which is not a good thing for a state running on patronage.
The whole world has been and will be watching the fate of the Islamic Revolution in Iran.
In essence for the post-9/11 environment, the presence, expansion, and inclusion of Islam in the American quilt and elsewhere in the world will continue being troubled by questions about adherence to faith and modification and reformation of the same.
Alternative: no modification but social accommodation by Muslims within pluralist and secular cultural and political environments -- that would be Earth, of course -- as a work around, but in the long run, this because Buhddists, Christians, Hindus, and Jews and and world full of others have no want of enslavement or subordination to Muslims.
The faithful of many faiths, and the unbelievers, whoever and wherever they may be, will stay, but the Dhimmi concept will most certainly have to go.
I don't have a crystal ball but may cautiously suggest this much: the possession of strong good conscience sufficient to forestall excess, reduce barbarism, extend compassion and aid to all in need, and contribute to a common global human defense will grow across many channels and divisions.
To prattle on, greater consciousness and conscience itself may represent evolutionary preferences, and that's not going to be adequately expressed or represented by any cultural or religious monolith.
We're a most clever, gregarious, and inventive species.
Thank God!
Do note: the Jews have experienced and promoted the broadest range in good and great ideas and inspirations, and they're not about to be alone in that.
This stimulus for this piece was a comment to the general effect, "They really believe (such unimaginable stuff) over there!"
Can you believe it?
After reading both of Daniel Everett's books, yes, I can, but here in my own words a slant on the OA&L topic area -- "Conflict, Culture, Language, and Psychology" -- to which it relates.
----
All cultures are language machines and all languages develop within commune-level social isolation, specifically geophysical barriers, possibly with the pull of psychological and social affinity. For the west to work with Islam -- or for Islam to have some better influence on what is not Islam -- any civilizing effort involves 1) quelling the opportunism and violence attending great changes in the old barriers and 2) altering behaviors and customs in language and underlying ideation to null out some truly malevolent and maladapted ambitions.
As tools, the languages within which cultures swim and suspend themselves across generations have one helpful flaw, and it's one I think the Islamic-majority states find themselves fighting most: they're held together by symbolic relationships, some more stable than others, but when something changes, and it may be a small thing, everything else may drift around that change.
In the few years in which I've dabbled in "conflict, culture, language, and psychology", I've never found cause to abandon two primary views: it takes detectives (all synonyms apply) to lay out the vines in private relationships that convey one kind of war materiel or another to an end use, and then it takes poets (clerics, scholars, intelligentsia, call them what you want) to refashion and repair language and language-driven interpreting and perceiving behaviors.
That's a little clinical, even for me, but we are yet a wild species.
If made in the "image of God", well that's nice to think and as Jew I enjoy as much, but, really, delve even a little bit into anthropology and linguistics, and you may find a case for the worst of what is possible becoming probable _in comparative isolation_.
-----
I've only lightly edited the note, adding a couple of words for clarity, splitting a paragraph or two for readability. Be that as it may, in retrospect, the paragraphs look like a critic's takeaway from Lord of the Flies. Indeed, in Goldman's classic, the energies of adolescent boys in isolation lead to the invention of a culture involving the shadows of many societies. Of course, the British Navy arrives to restore the lost boys to their former civilization, but what powers work their way through the adult cultures of the world, only God knows and nature handily provides.
Why not beheading?
Wny not contralatteral amputation?
Why not four wives?
Why not constant, endless, and pointless warfare?
Why not ayatollah, caliphs, dictators, emperors, kings, and other tyrants?
The universe shows no care.
All things, even the least just and most horrific, remain ever possible and, given some neglect by the more comprehending, conscienable, and empathetic of souls, ever more likely to happen.
For those who walked away from Pharaoh but unlike Moses find Pharaoh's army still in pursuit, set your lines, shoulder the burdens of a more benevolent and responsible civilization, and keep up the good work!
Al Jazeera's lede on this story: "A mentally unstable homeless man was beaten to death before his body was set on fire for allegedly burning pages from the Quran in central Pakistan, police said." [1]
Above (I'm assuming you've clicked on the link): does that look like a man "beaten to death" to you?
The tip for this story came from a Pakistani Facebook acquaintance (now friended), and it appears the more accurate description and interpretation came from a Catholic news source, Spero, which covers Catholic interests worldwide. Here is the lede from that source:
"A man accused of blasphemy, according to Islamic religious law, was extra-judicially killed in Pakistan outside a police station in the Chani Ghoth area of theBahawalpur region in the Punjab." [2]
At least the framework moved from "beating" to "killing".
Note on the photograph: I was not able to find IPTC creator and copyright information, but added to the jpeg file the Spero News link. It's as compelling a photo as war photography ever serves and may be further scrutinized (technically) for authenticity.
Always my first complaint and secret relief as regards my own blog: I'm "reporting" from the second row seat to history!
Thank God.
But however I may feel about my fringe journalism career, it's not the "front row seat to history" and that creates some problems for vetting the details of dramatic imagery and news.
In any case, according to Spero News, " . . . mobs surrounded the police station baying for the life of the alleged blasphemer. The mob blocked the main highway through the town and broke down the gates of the police station, attacking the officers and injuring Station House Officer Ghulam Mohudin Gajjar along with four guards. Superintendent Ahmedpur also sustained injuries. All told, some 15 officers were injured in the melee and are now in hospital."
Nothing like the completely unjust lynching of an innocent ("mentally ill" -- the two stories agree on that) for trivial cause, the burning of a few pages of a book, never a good thing -- my people don't burn books -- but weight the "who" against the "what" and "what happened next".
Islam's clerical, news, and security communities must take ownership of this not-so-godly primitive insanity that they themselves have been instrumental in installing and encouraging to the point where it has the power -- as at Lal Masjid not too many years ago -- to eat them alive.
Not that being beaten to death would have been better, AJ, but why not report this death for what it was -- an unwell man, Ghulam Abbas, God rest his soul, wrested from police protection (and held for a thing so small on a pretense so stupid I don't even wish to type about it), soaked with kerosene, and set on fire to burn alive?
Of course, only say so if that's the truth.
This is all I have:
Photographer: unknown.
Victim: Ghulam Abbas
Location: police station, Chani Ghoth, Pakistan.
Date: around July 6, 2012
POC: Deputy Superintendent of Police Ahmedpur.
Veracity: Experience plus a Google-based search suggests the story is making the rounds via Facebook and the Blogosphere.
My contact's complaint: where is Big Media on this?
For my part, I'm less worried about Big Media missing the story and more concerned with the special interest Catholic and Islamic (and other) press concocting, promoting, modifying, painting whatever has happened Out There -- even in Pakistan, this is Out There -- to suit agendas revolving around their own legitimacy and growth.
To my Muslims friends on Facebook and elsewhere: I am sorry, but God has put you on the frontier in humanity. The Jews and Israel are old establishment: we've been working on this business (you know the analog: " . . . God favors those who restrain themselves") for a few thousand years. What's going on in Chani Ghoth is the edge, and it should not be confused with anyone's future.
Despite Muhammad's invocation, "God favors those who restrain themselves," it has been interesting since I've been tracking the Islamic Small Wars -- about four years -- discerning how egotism (especially in regard to God's most personal favoring), narcissism, and sociopathy (complete lack of consideration for and empathy with others) play out in each theater.
Recently, I accidentally re-posted (on Facebook) the news of the execution of John Allen Muhammad, the Washington beltway sniper, and in retrospect see in him all of the hallmarks of one who would spoil for and provoke a large scale religious war. I can only imagine that in his head, he and his sidekick were the volunteer advanced guard working on the fringes of the Great Satan, licensed by God Almighty himself to murder with impunity.
My blog features a section titled, "Facsimile Bipolar Political Sociopathy" that tries to tease out this delusional, messianic, sociopathic narcissism that goes along with -- and this familiar on the individual level to those diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder -- loss of containment. So far off the norms are these types that the instructive "God favors those who restrain themselves" proves always true because from both evolutionary and social perspectives, modest strong self-containment is in the normative region of human nature and accounts for much that we call good behavior.
In the reference section of this post, all I've done is a quick look-up of two other American Muslim terrorists, each name and story becoming a window into the mentality driving such crimes.
Speaking as the "bum of the family" -- I think I got that notion from my dad . . . not that I believe it, but I, perhaps the family too, has paid a price for my being a pretty good photographer, writer, and musician -- the idea that I and my fellow humans possess ambition, identity, and a personal sense of mission, hidden or acknowledged, in our lives seems common, and those who "lose it" or "go off the deep end" or "have a breakdown" have, I believe, a great sense of their own theater while throwing caution, credit, and reputation (also their integrity, honor, and humanity) to the winds.
These that stain themselves before Allah with the want or reception of innocent blood may fit the same social-psychological class.
As mentioned early in the Facsimile Bipolar Political Sociopathy (FBPS) section, one must differentiate between the concerns psychology has with its focus on the individual's experience involving the mind and the social and political curiosity expressed in the FBPS concept.
Palestinian Authority police employed brute force to break up a second day of protesting in Ramallah on Sunday, with activists and eyewitnesses claiming police assaulted both male and female protesters with batons and chains, the Jerusalem Post reported. [1]
One of the journalists beaten was Saed Hawari, a Reuters cameraman. Although the Washington Post picked up on the story, it’s strange that I haven’t seen Reuters mention the attack on their own photographer. Unless I missed something, the radio silence is a tremendous disservice — both to readers, and to Reuters itself. [2]
From what I may glean between the two reports cited, protesters in Ramallah, incensed by the prospect of an eminent meeting between Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Vice Prime Minister Shaul Mofaz found themselves on the receiving end of Palestinian Authority riot police.
How is this for twisted?
The complaint launched by Honest Reporting's Pesach Benson, and which I encounted in one of my Facebook groups, first thing this late morning, was that Reuters would have been quick to report Israeli police brutality, but over this protest, hardly a word.
There may be some editorial desk bias working to suppress the reporting of this incident in which Abbas, his police, and Israeli interests seem -- finally, for once -- aligned!
Of course, after so many rancorous years blanketed with anti-Zionist screeds and soaked in anti-Israeli animus, a Palestinian Authority accommodation, overture, or turnaround on the "two-state solution" isn't going to be easy, as every inch of such a pivot defies generations of political programming.
While Honest Reporting has focused on the violence of the violent protest and perceived "biased" in relation to underreporting about what riot police do, the more central story, indeed a thorny one, may have to do with explaining how the Abbas Administration came to suppress exactly the sort of anti-Israel, anti-peace riot for which it has programmed its people for decades.
Since Hamas gained control of the Gaza Strip in June 2007, Lieutenant General Keith Dayton, head of the USSC since November 2005, and the State Department’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs (INL) have helped with the “gendarmerie-style” training of West Bank-based PA security personnel. As of June 2009, approximately 400 Presidential Guardsmen and 2,200 National Security Forces troops have been trained at the Jordan International Police Training Center (JIPTC) near Amman. All troops, new or already serving, are vetted for terrorist links, human rights violations, and/or criminal records by the State Department, Israel, Jordan, and the PA before they are admitted to U.S.-sponsored training courses at JIPTC. Approximately $395 million in U.S. funds have been reprogrammed or appropriated through the International Narcotics Control and Law Enforcement (INCLE) account for training, non-lethal equipment, facilities, and strategic planning assistance for the PA forces, and for PA criminal justice sector reform projects, including $100 million for FY2010 pursuant to the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2010 (P.L. 111-117). [3]
Those are some expensive Palestinian Authority "thugs".
Call them what you want: what they're doing beating up the recorders and scribblers at a protest fueled by the deeply programmed fear and hate of peace with Israel, that Jewish State, I don't know, but I'm aware of some large moving parts surrounding this story:
An American President approaching election season;
Authorization of more than 800 new Israeli housing units on Israel's soil;
Ascent of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt;
Islamic Small Wars turmoil throughout the region.
My guess is Obama could do with a little peace, and there are now many and pervasive peace-trending elements in the comparatively confined Israel-Palestine conflict arena, and I mention them often in Facebook forums, citing transaction or trade in business, education, and health sectors. Here I will try something a little different -- in a section titled, "West Bank, 2007-2011", Wikipedia offers a ten-paragraph wrap of improved conditions for the region [4]. Here is the first:
In 2007, the economy in the West Bank improved gradually. Economic growth for the occupied areas reached about 4-5% and unemployment dropped about 3%. Israeli figures indicated that wages in the West Bank rose more than 20% in 2008 and trade rose about 35%. Tourism in Bethlehem increased to about twice its previous levels, and tourism increased by 50% in Jericho.[15] Life expectancy is 73.4, placing the territories 77th in the world, compared with a life expectancy of 72.5 in Jordan, and 71.8 in Turkey.[16]
If there's anyone in the economic development field following this story, it should read sensibly: the productive interests are not in revenues in sustained conflict to the extent they may have been five or more years ago.
Oh my how the times they are a'changin'.
Well may we see the head of the old Palestine Liberation Organization, the new Palestinian Authority as boss of a joint American, Jordanian, Israeli, Palestinian "gendarmerie-style" security force defending a growing economy against escalations in conflict and the sabotage of those it helped to educate, motivate, and train to destroy the better interests -- in growing affluence and real spiritual liberation --of its own future.
Thrall, Nathan. "Our Man in Palestine." The New York Review of Books, September 16, 2010: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/oct/14/our-man-palestine/?pagination=false -- This piece, about two years old, provides a terrific summary of the force dynamics and political currents and flows at work around General Dayton's peace and security creating project. This is its last paragraph:
In October, Dayton will retire and be replaced by a three-star Air Force general, Michael Moeller. During the next year, Moeller is scheduled to receive the USSC’s largest ever appropriation.61 His task, as the deadlines for both the Fayyad plan and the end of Israeli–Palestinian negotiations approach, will be to advance two irreconcilable goals: building a Palestinian force that can guarantee Israeli security while also lessening the perception that the US is firmly supporting what many residents of the West Bank, like the independent politician Mustafa Barghouti, have come to describe not as one occupation but two.
Remember, the piece was cobbled together in 2010, and we are about two years forward of it. I suppose I will have to look up the coverage of "Michael Moeller", but even so, yesterday's anti-peace protests, the response by the Palestinian Authority security forces, the economic development boasts on the West Bank, and the truth about how this very small patch of earth works, despite the political rancor and the positions and postures of those prominent in the news, seem to line up and in a most predictable way: cooperate with the Jews, with Israel, and its alliances and, lo and behold, many real things improve -- employment, health, justice, and peace -- because they can with that direction and cannot in the other.
In regard to life for Arab Americans in Dearborn, Michigan, one voice says at 1:40, "You can practice your faith and live your culture with very little interference from anyone."
That is the American voice I know.
I have said the same myself of all the things I have done in Maryland, from backpacking to country-western dancing to singing in restaurants and at festivals.
Outside the bounds of intimate relationships, no one has ever asked me anywhere or at any junction in my life with the intent to judge the answer, "Who are you people?"
I've never asked that question either in relation to work or recreation.
In the personal realm, it took a long and, in the end, tragic journey to suggest the answer might matter in how one may feel alone in company or entertain the prospect of raising children with views alien, even absurd, to one's own outlook.
How far should I now go with that? I ask myself.
How far should we Americans go with it, and should we do so as was once done with the prospects of, gasp, miscegenation?
How, really, do we, again American citizens, wish to transmit ourselves and recapitulate our culture . . . or divide ourselves and destroy our culture?
The centerpiece of the above clip is a t-shirt featuring a cartoon of a little boy pissing on the Israeli flag. The seller? Predictably, the table's sponsorship tells the answer you were ready to hear: www.freepali.com (a truthful antidote [the real talk online, elsewhere, around the world, is about integrity] may be found at http://www.camera.org/).
Here I may ask my Christian friends on the far seething right: is the best you can do is go to an ethnic general Arab street festival specifically to seek out the sideshow cousins of the Viva Palestina bunch?
Some questions come up: what percentage of exhibitor space seems to have been represented by similar groups festival-wide? What part of the festival seemed engaged in demonstrative and vocal anti-Israel ranting? Any? How frequently were anti-Semitic remarks heard or overheard without being elicited? Any? Be honest.
I don't much like the featured t-shirt, of course, but I may like even less the manipulation of it as a symbol used to represent or taint the timbre of an American ethnic street festival in its totality.
To make claims one way or the other, someone should do some serious and persistent visiting in Dearborn with sufficient research to tell his fellow Americans how it is in Dearborn clearly, accurately, completely.
Cited at the end of the clip -- Surrah 9:29, this one:
“Those who do not believe in Allah and the Last Day – even though they were given the scriptures, and who do not hold as unlawful that which Allah and His Messenger have declared to be unlawful, and who do not follow the true religion (Deen Al-Haque) – fight against them until they pay tribute (Al-Jizyah, protection tax or exemption tax) out of their hands and are utterly subdued.”
Cue the dhimmitude.
It's a real problem, and no Muslim American needs be told how American Christians, Jews (we People of the Book) and others feel about the concept, but there's a time and place in which to bring this most chauvanist of thorns into focus. For an Americanized Muslim-friendly interpretation of the same, here's the page source from which I copied the Surrah:
The explanation cited ends with this, "Payment of Jizyah is a symbol of accepting to live under Islamic law; this is what it means to be subdued. This is the same as the taxes all Americans have to pay."
We American Christians, Jews, and others are not so dumb.
We are not living under Islamic law and have neither need nor wish to accommodate dhimmitude, the jizyah, or such fine old ideas as "contralatteral amputation".
In how we read Surrah 9:29, we even may have something in common with Osama Bin Laden, albiet from different sides of this most vicious equation (were it transplated to our American soil, which is today a Christian-majority land, pluralist, secular, and tolerant as regards the possession of every faith and the peacefully practiced legacy of every ethnic endowment).
But here also I doubt my Muslim fellow Americans are so dumb either.
The inspiration for challenge -- and fighting, if we want to go that direction -- remains, but most who "live their faith and culture" in Dearborn must also be aware of the many ancient and historic contributions to American heritage from every corner of the globe that has buttressed that freedom and the security associated with it.
It's a likeable bio, imho, and he's got a good manner before the camera, and yet he has invited a question an IDF soldier might ask on Friday afternoon across the barbed wire from the weekly Bil'in "happening" sort of protest, which generally leads to everyone's picking up more experience with teargas cannisters -- this at about 3:29:
"And if last year went bad, why are you here?"
I doubt a quiet chat about the Middle East Conflict (or current events in Egypt, Syria, and Yemen) comprised the purpose of attendance at this large community-wide Arab American street festival.
Because of my cool "MAG" ("man bag", a canvas "guide bag" from L. L. Bean), I'm able to carry a Lumix point-and-shoot everywhere I go, and here I'm sure if I were to go to this street festival without the intent to preach, prosyletize, or provoke but, like anyone else, to enjoy the food, take a few pictures, even buy a few t-shirts and go home, I'm sure all would be fine.
What might happen next?
Well, if you promote hate and some casual witness has the quotes, the notes, and the photographs from public space to tell that tale -- the story the t-shirt maker chose to tell -- there might not be too much to say beyond defending your right to have bought into, maintained and created a little extra hate in the world (certainly so in your target's views).
But showing up at the same ethnic public festival to play The Jew (my kippuh, my tallis, please -- other things I don't wear every day in public . . . for me, specifically? Friday night services, thank you) and provoke a fight?
I wouldn't think that very . . . Jewish.
I'll go a little farther here, however: if I were an Hassidic Jew or an Amish or Mennonite tourist or perhaps a Sikh -- any of these known to dress every day in a manner in keeping with their traditions --then dressed as always, I would not change a thing, nor, here in America -- this is our magic! -- expect a scene to be made of it by the festival's American Arab hosts and constituents.
I would hope to show up to enjoy the festival, not to provoke that question: "It went bad last year. Why are you here?"
Having myself been born Jewish, God may have (wisely) spared me David Wood's mission, as I and mine have not been encouraged to preach or prosyletize our faith (but, with some effort, you can join us if you really, really, really want to).
I think Moses, that most humble man, would take you along on the Jewish People's flight from Pharoah (remember: what Moses led from bondage was a "mixed multitude", not Jews only) but he wouldn't go bangin' on your door to tell you how wrong you were to remain within the capricious power of that most notable and possibly the first and most astounding of the world's malignant narcissists.
An estimated 300,000 people from the United States and Canada are expected to attend this annual event, which is one of the largest street festivals in the United States. Why not bring the kids and join the fun?
Enter the Arabic Idol contest – or sit in the audience as local talent competes for the title. Shop the bazaar, where Middle Eastern artisans showcase their crafts and clothing for purchase. Hungry? Grab some authentic Middle Eastern cuisine; there's plenty here!
I ask you, my reasonable fellow Americans and (thank you, Facebook) global travelers from Riyadh to Lahore to London (I'm sure I must know someone there) to Tel Aviv: does that plug from Metroparent sound like the bleeding edge of dhimmi-creating, jizyah-imposing Islamic Jihad to you?
Me neither.
"It is the most vibrant time of the year," said American Arab Chamber of Commerce Executive Director Fay Beydoun. "Every year more and more people of all races and cultures are joining us in celebrating our rich heritage. It also adds an economic boost to the local economy."
From time to time, I have cause to tell a fellow Jew, "I just spent 40 years wandering in the American Wildness."
For those raised while seated in pews, I'd have to confess to engaging in political solidarity at the Native American Sun Dance, to having a strong heart in the inipe (probably, that would kill me today), to leaving a ribbon twisted on a cedar branch to represent the memory of an ancestor (a grandmother, specifically), skinny dipping (in the Potomac), dancing and hiking and probably howling too beneath the moon -- okay, I was young once too) before finally facing the prospect of the Transubstantiated Wafer and running home to my Booklined 'hood, the cup of wine, the two familiar candlesticks at sunset Friday night . . . .
Yes, I do like the wild westness of my stil sprawling American Wildness, but God yet keep me having to acknowledge the necessity of the United West: "It is the ONLY tax-exempt organization in the world devoted to uncovering, exposing and dismantling the enemy operation with strategic academic, confrontational, resistance focused activism" (https://www.facebook.com/theunitedwest/info).
Well then, Tom Trento (we have 35 Facebook buddies in common today), let's start by doing something with those who hear, say, something like this: "We will not move toward cancelling these treaties, but on the other side: they also have to respect this agreement, the peace treaty between us and Israel have always been violated by the Israelis" (Egyptian President Morsi at 1:20 on http://youtu.be/ybg6qTQhWhk).
I really don't want to comment on the comments beneath the above comment on a YouTube video to ask "When and how has Israel ever abrogated any part of its treaty with Egypt"?
But someone should do it and at the same time suggest the lying, which is pandering, is there to make the listener feel good about himself (it's so good to have a scapegoat, non?) without doing a single thing for him.
In the above clip, yes, we can see the act and believe we have seen a street altercation in which an Arab man spits on a Jewish videographer.
Just like that.
Nonetheless, I'm curious about what happened before that happened?
Was the videographer official press (with the ribbon around the neck and the ID tag dangling from the end of it)? Did he say something? Did he make a big deal out of his being Jewish? (So what)? Or did the spitting man spit "just like that"?
Any who was the spitter?
Anyone talk to him?
Clear, accurate, complete, please.
Many moons ago, I took a bottle of wine and a tambourine in a book bag down to the Adams Morgan Festival in Washington, D.C., and feeling pretty good with the former volunteered (you know what I mean) to put the latter to use playing along a while with one of the bands on stage. No less than than these day, and probably more so in those younger days, I was pretty good! But, "Hey man, that's not a part of our sound" -- I got the message (your loss, buddy).
Again, this from the guy in gray early in the video: "If you behave respectfully, you don't invite or provoke violent behavior, then there's no . . . ." -- "It doesn't matter how we preach . . . ."
Dude: stop shakin' that tambourine!
"You're only going to put the police in jeapardy . . . ."
Now there's a thought whose pattern I recognize!
It goes like this: If I through my actions or speech should set out to offend and bad things happen to me because of what I have incited in others -- and you knew I was going to do it -- it's your fault for letting me do it or not holding them back!
This behavior has been noted often in relation to the Middle East Conflict -- if the fires you have set, the stones you have thrown, the murderous plans on which you have conspired return to sting you with rubber bullets, or real ones, or arrests (let's not even escalage to military intervention), stop whining: you have gotten what you -- no one else -- set out to get.
Take it up a notch (2:14):
"Nobody on earth would like what you're doing."
"God does."
Are you sure about that?
Did the two of you have a good talk recently?
What did He say to you?
This where I reach for the transitive concept inspired by descriptions of Bipolar Disorder and Narcissistic Personality Disorder, and to which I refer as Facsimile Bipolar Political Sociopathy -- it's not a mood thing or an individual and personal thing, which would keep it in the psychologist's office, but something socially related in which a person acts with great disregard for others in a cause that has in it the prospect of self-aggrandizement.
Someone setting out to blow himself up on a streetcorner (for God) may not be much different (psychologically, socially) from one setting out to convert the heathen (for God) -- only for both it's this or that modern public with passersby going about their business and patching their lives together (convenient streetcorner) or kids, teens, and families (another reason not to approve of that damning anti-Semitic t-shirt) entertaining themselves at their own ethnic and open-to-the-public street festival.
Next, from "Martyrsnudiebar": "PIG'S HEAD AT DEARBORN ARAB FESTIVAL 2012/ARAB YOUTH THROWING THINGS AT CHRISTIAN."
Do, please, click on the YouTube URL for the video and read the comments on that page.
Ignorant?
East, west, north, and south!
Oy vey, have we got some work to do!
Is this about kiddies?
When I go out to sing, I take the straw fishing hat with the buffalo bone and turqoise headband (made in China) and it works for those Buffet and Marley tunes and otherwise says to everyone else in the bar, you know, like all four of them, "oh, dude, like, um, he's the entertainment around here."
(Actually, with regard to my weekly gig on the south side, we're getting to be like family, only much, much better for me).
So here's this kaffiya-wearing guy wielding a Bible at that big Arab festival in Dearborn, Michigan . . . whoa -- how cool is that!?
Whether in the theater or the street theater, one can walk away.
Fringe politics attract fringe people -- people with issues you can't see until you hear what comes out of their mouths, or they get up in costume inappropriately, or start heavily abusing their credit cards.
So what's the bottom line?
Urban festival; 300,000 AMERICAN patrons; a handful of provacateurs; a few right-side videos that probably play out to informed others as I've responded here.
I suppose we shall see.
Don't get me started on the New Old Now Old and Far Out and Lost Left that has seen this Old Liberal -- true, Earth First!er even . . . well, I had a subscription . . . fall behind and become reborn a New Independent.
In sum, I don't like this business, familiar to Pallywood and evidently adopted here in the U.S.A., of provoking peaceful souls while armed with one's own video cameras prepared to record the bite, if it comes.
My plea to the right sliders: for four years, since 2009 at least, you have leveraged the Dearborn Arab International Festival to produce a political sideshow that, frankly, looks produced, a reflection of personal fears and ambitions not borne out by either the promotion or timbre of the festival or even those who confront you, rightly, mildly, with "If it didn't work out so well last year, why are you here"?
My plea to the festival goers and the Arab sponsors and constituents in attendance: pay them no mind.
My call on the actions of the Dearborn police in forestalling further provocations and escalations: good work!
I prefer to believe in God rather than not, and I am careful to keep up with science and what careful and rigorous research has to tell us about nature and the universe. There is no incompatibility between the intuitive belief and faith in God and the expression of freedom in it -- the freedom to choose this way -- and attention also to the little bit that we as representatives each of our species can observe and know about our world. God is greater than ourselves. We should be humble but not without consciousness and as much perception and conscience as we may be able to experience.
As God and nature and the universe intended.
I shouldn't be so lazy with my blog (even with leukemia, a warm apartment, or a recent bottle of beer for an excuse)!
However, I find the Great Facebook Conversation stimulating, and it leads to the kind of articulation, a bit grandiose but not more or less so than many writers before me (and many to come) that i do. I hate to lose in the magnetic slipstreams of online chat threads what I type into compressed packets of thought.
Communicating Arts - Main Web Site