Tidbits and notes posted on FB and Twitter. Part 221
Note: I take notes of books I read and comment on events and edit sentences that fit my style. I pa attention to researched documentaries and serious links I receive. The page is long and growing like crazy, and the sections I post contains a month-old events that are worth refreshing your memory
The basic concept of wealth at all times was: The privileges of buying services and Not just goods. Like having better opportunities to meet with powerful decision makers, buying better equipped prison cells and services, buying better education systems and health systems….
A secular, progressive region in Afrin has been conquered. A Canton with different religions and ethnic groups, with an egalitarian and parity constitution, and living peacefully side by side, is now at the mercy of barbaric, fanatic Islamists hired by this fascist and Moslem Brotherhood Erdogan of Turkey. All with the support of colonial powers wanting to exploit the vast hydrocarbon wealth in North Eat Syria.
Le grand absent du tutoiement etait le Tu: Olivia ne s’adressait meme plus a quelqu’un “Bon, c’est fini, ces corrections?”
Une personne meprisante cherche partout des gens naifs, des malades… et en trouve facilement.
“Soyez econome de votre mepris: il y a beaucoup de necessiteux”
La haine est proche de l’amour, quand le mepris lui est etranger
L’ imbecile se decouvre a son obsssession d’avoir le mot de la fin: “La betise, c’est de conclure”
I watched Bunuel’s film “The obscure object of Desire”. When a woman is seriously scared of having intercourse, she can drive a one-directional male to craziness by her imaginative tricks. He can have everything but the forbidden target, but the animal has to satisfy his reproductive instinct, any which way.
La gourmandise sacree’: La pamoison eprouvee’ par certaines saintes du 13eme siecle au moment d’avaler l’hostie?
Limaza al kol mousser yaakhod ezen min Allah ta yi2oulou 7ayala shi? Fakkro martayn 2abel ma tarsh2o
Mouwatinaat wa mouwatineen tofraneen: 7atta saalat saghirat ma t3abet. Drouri kel tonzimaat madaniyyat tetbana sakef Nahass al 3ali 7atta yetla3ha tartousheh?
Posted on: December 20, 2016
30 Years Later, Photos of Hama massacre Emerge From Killings In Syria
Why now? Why never shown before? Political alliances then? Where are the bodies in these pictures? The world was more prude? Facts were known? By whom?
In 1980, the Syrian Moslem Brotherhood launched a series of bloody attacks on Syrian army and police forces. Hafez Assad was in contact with Turkey and Egypt (hotbed of Moslem Brotherhood) in order to reach a negotiated settlement. At no avail. Hama was then surrounded and the insurrection put down. The Syrian Brotherhood was persecuted for decades after the insurrection and many fled to Turkey and the Gulf Emirates.
Currently, No Gulf States or Saudi Kingdom are willing to welcome Syrian refugees, although they were the ones who funded all these extremists factions and armed them with Western weapons
Wikileaks has recently divulged documents testifying that Turkey’s Erdogan is the power behind ISIS and supported its expansion in Iraq in order to control the Kurds there and to impress on Syria to include the Brotherhood in the government.
Syria’s President Hafez Assad brutally crushed an uprising in the central city of Hama in 1982. The event was remarkable not just for the scale of the violence, but also because virtually no photos were published.
As Syrians mark the 30th anniversary, some long-hidden photos are emerging on the Internet, but their origins are difficult, if not impossible, to trace.
In some instances, the photos are of well-known sites in Hama and former residents confirmed the locations. In other instances, there was virtually no information available.
A former Hama resident, Abu Aljude, provided some photos and directed NPR to others.
Syria’s protest generation is obsessed with images.
Thousands of videos have been posted on YouTube during the 10-month revolt against President Bashar Assad’s regime, even as regime snipers take deadly aim at the photographers.
The smugglers who carry critical medical supplies to underground clinics in protest cities also smuggle in cameras hidden in baseball caps and pocket pens. The obsession comes from the conviction that documenting the brutality will stop it — this time.
This is all part of the legacy of the Hama massacre of February 1982, the last time Syrians rose up against the rule of the Assad family.
The facts of that event are well-known, but the photographic evidence has been scant. Then, Syria’s branch of the Muslim Brotherhood led an uprising centered in Hama, a central city of around 400,000.
In response, President Hafez Assad, the father of the current president, ordered 12,000 troops to besiege the city. That force was led by Hafez Assad’s brother Rifaat. He supervised the shelling that reduced parts of Hama to rubble. Those not killed in the tank and air assault were rounded up. Those not executed were jailed for years.
To this day, the death toll is in dispute and is at best an estimate.
Human rights groups, which were not present during the slaughter, have put the toll at around 10,000 dead or more. The Muslim Brotherhood claims 40,000 died in Hama, with 100,000 expelled and 15,000 who disappeared. The number of missing has never been acknowledged by the Syrian leadership. (Was it acknowledge by any international institution?)
Details Emerged Slowly
In the weeks and months that followed, news of the events in Hama dribbled out. But there were virtually no photos or any international reaction.
Yet Hama stands as a defining moment in the Middle East. It is regarded as perhaps the single deadliest act by any Arab government against its own people in the modern Middle East, a shadow that haunts the Assad regime to this day.
And now, three decades later, photos from Hama in 1982 are beginning to circulate on the Internet. One of the people compiling photos of Hama is Abu Aljude, who was a 16-year-old living in Hama at the time of the slaughter.
“It took three weeks. We stayed in school overnight because we couldn’t walk back home. We walked over dead bodies. There were bodies in the streets,” says Abu Aljude, now a medical technical expert living in California.
“I wonder if dying then is less painful than surviving it and living the memories,” he says. Abu Aljude still has relatives in Hama and fears they could face reprisals if his full name were revealed.
Many of the Hama survivors fled to the United Arab Emirates, including Firas Tayar.
“When the soldiers came, they took my father, then they came back to take my brother. They killed them,” says Tayar. “My mother cried and said, ‘Please leave me the rest of my children.’ ”
Tayar says the images of burning bodies in the streets are burned into his memory. “They hammered it, they ended it,” Tayar says of the regime’s scorched-earth policy that put down the rebellion.
While the Syrian army was still laying siege to Hama, Abu Aljude and other members of his family fled for Saudi Arabia. As he was preparing to go, a neighbor handed over snapshots of the savage destruction to Abu Aljude for safekeeping.
“I had pictures,” says Abu Aljude, “but I didn’t know what to do with them.”
Daily Videos Of Current Violence
These photos are part of the slim documentation of Hama. But these days, the yellowed pictures of Hama in 1982 are making it to the Internet, along with the current cellphone videos of the latest assaults by the security forces on Hama and other restive towns.
A new generation under siege has modern tools to document and distribute recordings of regime brutality, but increasingly wonders whether the images make any difference as the world looks on.
“Politically, it has affected the Assad regime. But does it bring in the cavalry? No,” says Andrew Tabler, a Syrian expert and author of a recent book, In the Lion’s Den: An Eyewitness Account of Washington’s Battle with Syria.
(Note: The siege of Hama coincided with the pre-emptive invasion of Israel to Lebanon. Israel even entered the Capital Beirut and remained in south Lebanon till 2000)
He believes the thousands of videos have constrained the Assad regime to some degree.
When President Hafez Assad unleashed the air force on the Syrian population in 1982, he had no real worries about “outside interference.”
But with the Arab uprisings of the past year, it has been a very different story. When Arab autocrats have employed brutal tactics, these actions have immediately been turned into videos and photographs that have stirred up additional opposition, both domestically and abroad.
In Syria, more than 5,000 people have been killed since last spring, according to human rights groups and the Syrian opposition. The daily death toll has been at a level that has provoked considerable outrage inside the country and around the world. But so far, there’s been no direct intervention from a divided international community.
A widely circulated tweet from the current uprising, which refers to the restive city of Homs, makes the point: “Homs 2011 = Hama 1982, but slowly, slowly.”
In his book, Tabler writes that after the 1982 assault on Hama, “the regime also launched a sweeping campaign of arrests — not only of suspected Brotherhood members but virtually all regime opponents, including communists and Arab nationalists who hated the Brotherhood as much as the regime.”
Hama Crackdown A Warning To Others
The Hama revolt began as a sectarian challenge, with the Sunni Muslims of the Brotherhood against the minority Alawite sect that dominates the regime and the upper ranks of the military. After it was crushed, it then became a lesson to any challenger to Assad family rule.
The “Hama example” stood firm until the spring of 2011. A new generation, armed only with cameras in the early days of the revolution, gambled that images could help them succeed where the Hama uprising had failed.
“This is revolutionary karma. It’s payback,” says Tabler, who explains that this new generation has a direct link to the events in Hama years ago. (A direct link to Turkey’s Erdogan expansionist dreams into Syria and Iraq)
After the decisive crackdown back then, the Syrian economy plunged into a deep recession. A terrorized population dared no further unrest and did not speak about the events, even in whispers.
“Many Syrians were forced to stay home,” writes Tabler, “causing a decade-long increase in birthrates.” Every Arab country has a youth bulge, but the “Hama effect” put Syria in the top 20 fastest growing populations in the world, which created a population “time bomb.” The generation on the streets today, says Tabler, is a demographic wave, “the residue from that crackdown has come to haunt the country.”
After 10 months, grass-roots organizers of this uprising issued a joint statement ahead of the anniversary of the Hama massacre. For the first time in 30 years, “We hold a remembrance for this anniversary and the Hama victims inside Syria.”
The protests, scheduled for Friday around the country, are being called “Pardon, Hama … Forgive Us.” The aim is to show that a memory, even if long suppressed, is as powerful as a current image.
Posted on: June 8, 2014
Hot posts this week (May 18/2014)
Perception of Morsi and Moslem Brotherhood by Urban Egyptians?
“i read some articles of your blog and it’s really smart… however this (above) article confusing me to the core.
In fact I don’t care about this leftofacist nomo choko but i will be really disappointed if this is your opinion… The muslim brotherhood is an islamofacist entity and collaborating with islamofacists worldwide .
1- their supporters openly wave al Qaeda flags and wear bin laden t shirts.
2- Morsy and his lunatic sheikhs and TV channels preached hatred violence toward Egyptian Shiaa Moslems , Egyptian Christians , jews , and all Egyptian people.
3- Morsy bring lunatic salafi wahabi imams from Saudi Arabia and Qatar to preach violence and hatred in the main Egyptian state TV! and all his channels .
4- Morsy and his brotherhood was convicted of treason according to lower Egyptian court when he was in power: he collaborate with islamofacist terrorist international groups “hamas , hizbollah , alqaeda” to kill Egyptian army officers , police officers , and Egyptian citizens … attacking Egyptian jails to free him and his terrorist group.
5- He gave orders to release all convicted islamofacist terrorists from jails .
6- Morsy , his brotherhood and his salafi wahabbi sheykhs openly support the killing of shia muslims and the results were the killing , slaying of 4 Egyptian shia muslim imams in Egypt. It’s the first killing of shia muslims in egypt in the last 1000 years ! I have the video but i don’t want to share it here it’s very graphic very disturbing video of the supporters of morsy killing egyptian shia muslims …(the video was displayed in many channels)
7- His brotherhood accused egyptian christians as “the only force running the opposition parties out of hate to islam ” which is a pure lie and ultra ignorant hate speech by the lunatic bortherhood and their terrorist salafi wahabi supporters. The results was the burning of 40 church and killing of many Egyptian christians.
8- Morsy and his brotherhood and salafi wahabis condemned the egyptian judges openly and accused them of corruption without any evidence .
9- Morsy and his brotherhood and his salafi wahabi sheykhs called egyptians who oppose them “infidels kafirs deserve death ” and this lunatic ex president even quote such terrorist jihadi salafi wahabi fatwas on his official FB page!
10- They tailor-made a Constitution out of their own islamofacist beliefs and rejected all others who refused this made up constitution: the constitution was only made for muslim salafi sunnis and deny the rights of christians , bahais , shia and anyone else .
The list of scandals and terrorist islamofacist activities are endless and i can’t write everything here .
i don’t think that smart man like you would support the muslim brotherhood and salafi wahabis…
Today’s violence in Egypt is claiming hundreds of lives, worsening the country’s already dire political crisis and putting the United States in a quandary.
It’s also another chapter in a years-long story that can be difficult to follow even for those of us glued to it. You might have found yourself wondering what Egypt’s crisis is all about, why there’s a crisis at all, or even where Egypt is located on the map.
Admit it, and fire up your questions: not everyone has the time or energy to keep up with big, complicated foreign stories.
This story is important and critical. Here are samples of the most basic answers to your most basic questions.
First, a disclaimer: Egypt and its history are really complicated; this is not an exhaustive account of that entire story, just some background, written so that anyone can understand it.
Max Fisher published this August 14, 2013 in The Washington Post World Views (with slight editing):
(Laris Karklis/The Washington Post)
1. What is Egypt?
Egypt is a country in the northeastern corner of Africa, but it’s considered part of the Middle East. It’s about the size of Texas and New Mexico combined and has a population of 85 million. Egyptians are mostly Arab and mostly Muslim, although about 10% are Christian Copts. Egyptians are very proud of their history and culture; they are among the world’s first great civilizations.
You might have heard of Egypt from its ancient pyramids and Sphinx, but Egyptians are still changing the world today. In the 20th century, they were in the forefront of the founding of two ideological movements that reshaped – are still reshaping, at this moment – the entire Middle East: Arab nationalism and Islamism.
2. Why are people in Egypt killing each other?
There’s been a lot of political instability since early 2011, when you probably saw the footage of a million-plus protesters gathered in Cairo Tahrir Square (Liberation) to demand that the president of 30 years, Hosni Mubarak, step down.
Mubarak did and that opened up a big power struggle that hasn’t been anywhere near resolved. It’s not just people at the top of the government fighting among one another, it’s lots of regular people who have very different visions for where they want their country to go.
Today is the latest round in a two-and-a-half-year fight over what kind of country Egypt will be. Regular people tend to express their political will by protesting (keep in mind that democracy is really new and untested in Egypt), and because Egyptian security forces have a long track record of violence against civilians, the “fight for Egypt’s future” isn’t just a metaphor. Often, it’s an actual physical confrontation that happens on the street.
3. Why are they fighting today specifically?
Egyptian security forces assaulted two sprawling sit-in camps (of the ousted Moslem Brotherhood from reigning) in downtown Cairo this morning and tried to disperse the protesters. The protesters fought back.
So far, the casualties are rising every day. The assault “to clear” the squares left over 560 killed (officially) and 4,000 injured. A lot of them apparently civilians shot by live ammunition rounds used by security forces.
The protesters were there in support of former president Mohamed Morsi, who was deposed in a military coup in early July (the military is still in charge). Morsi hails from the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist group to which a number of the protesters in today’s clashes belong. He was also the country’s first democratically elected leader.
4. If the military staged a coup against Egypt’s first democratically elected leader, then all those Egyptians who protested in 2011 for democracy must be furious, right?
Actually, no. A whole lot of Egyptians, especially the liberal groups that led the 2011 revolution, were happy about the coup. A number of them were even calling on the military-led government to break up the largely peaceful pro-Morsi protest camp, even though there were children present and no one thought it would disperse without bloodshed.
There are two things to understand here.
First is that Morsi did not do a good job as president. He had a difficult task, sure, but he really bungled the economy, which was already in free fall.
(Morsi didn’t receive any financial aid from either the rich Arab States or the IMF or the US and European countries. After the military coup, the new government received $12 bn within a week from the rich monarchic Arab States)
Morsi did precious little to include non-Islamists, and took some very serious steps away from democracy, including arresting journalists and pushing through an alarming constitutional change that granted him sweeping powers. (No political parties accepted to join the Morsi government)
The second thing to understand is that Egypt is starkly divided, and has been for decades, between those two very different ideologies I mentioned. Many Egyptians don’t just dislike Morsi’s abuses of power, they dislike the entire Islamist movement he represents.
What you’re seeing today is a particularly bloody manifestation of that divide, which goes far deeper than liberals distrusting Morsi because he was a bad president. (The army is a class by itself and enjoys vast privileges, facilities and independent enterprises…)
5. This stuff about ideologies sounds complicated. Can you just tell me why Egypt is such a mess right now?
The thing about today’s crisis is that it has to do with basic stuff like the breakdown of public order and some really ham-fisted governance by the military. But it also has to do with a 60-year-old ideological conflict that’s never really been resolved.
ack in the years just after World War II, Egypt was ruled by a king who was widely seen as a British pawn. Egyptians didn’t like that. They also didn’t like losing the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, and they wanted a way out of their long period of national humiliation.
A lot of them were turning to a movement called the Muslim Brotherhood (founded in the 20’s), which argued, and still argues, that Islamic devotion and unity are the ultimate answer. Their ideas, and their campaign for an Islamic government, are called Islamism.
Both of those movements swept through the Middle East, transforming it.
Arab Nationalists took power in several countries; the Syrian regime today is one of them, and so was the regime headed by Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi.
Islamism also expanded in many countries, and sprouted some violent offshoots. But the two movements prescribe very different paths to the Middle East’s salvation, see themselves as mutually exclusive and have competed, at times violently, ever since. That is particularly true of Egypt, and has been since Nasser took power in 1952.
And that’s why you’re seeing many Egyptian liberals so happy about a military coup that displaced the democracy they fought to establish: Those liberals are closely linked to secular Arab nationalism, which means that they both revere the military and hate the Muslim Brotherhood, maybe even more than they crave democracy. Old habits die hard.
6. Getting really complicated? Do you need to take a music break?
Egyptian pop culture dominates the Arab world, in part because Egypt is so populous and in part because it’s really good. Their most celebrated singer is Omm Kalthoum (known as Planet of the Orient), whom Egyptians revere in the way that Italian-Americans do Frank Sinatra. Her recordings can sound a bit dated. Here is a cover by the contemporary singer Amal Maher:
7. Lots of people are upset with the U.S. for not doing more to support democracy in Egypt. What’s the deal?
The United States is a close political and military ally of Egypt and has been since 1979, when President Jimmy Carter engineered an historic peace treaty between Egypt and Israel (Sadat and Begin) that involved, among other things, enormous U.S. payouts to both countries as long as they promised not to fight any more wars. That also required the U.S. to look the other way on Egypt’s military authoritarianism and its bad human rights record. It was the Cold War, and supporting friendly dictatorships was in style. And we’ve basically been stuck there ever since.
The Obama administration most recently drew withering criticism for refusing to call the military’s July 3 ouster of the president a “coup.” Doing so would likely require the U.S. to cut its billion-plus dollars in annual military aid to Egypt. That is also why you’re seeing the White House appearing very hesitant about responding to today’s violence with actual consequences.
Sure, the U.S. wants democracy in Egypt? And it wants leverage with the Egyptian government even more? That has been true of every administration since Carter.
It was not actually until the Obama administration that the U.S. came to accept the idea that Islamists, who have been a big political force in Egypt for almost a century now, should play a role in governing. But they’re sticking with the status quo; no one wants to be the administration that “lost” Egypt.
8. Are you getting depressed. Surely someone wants Egypt to be a peaceful and inclusive democracy?
Not really. Most Egyptians are way too preoccupied with their ideological divide to imagine a government that might bridge it. Self-described liberals seem to prefer a secular nationalist government, even if it’s the military regime in power today, as long as it keeps Islamists out.
The Islamists, for their part, were more than happy to push out anyone who disagreed with them once they took power in 2012 through a democratic process that their leader appeared very willing to corrupt.
Both movements are so big and popular that neither one of them can rule without at least attempting to include the other. But neither appears willing to do that.
When I asked Steven Cook, an Egypt expert at the Council on Foreign Relations, what he made of the liberals’ embrace of the military coup and why he had started referring to them as “alleged liberal groups,” he wrote as part of his response, “I think Amr Hamzawy and Hossam Bahgat are the only true liberals in Egypt.”
9. And What happens next?
No one has any idea, but it looks bad. There are 3 things that most analysts seem to agree on. Any or all of these could prove wrong, but they’re the most common, short-term predictions:
1• The military-led government will keep cracking down on the Muslim Brotherhood and stirring up preexisting public animosity toward the group, both of which they’ve been doing since the 1950s.
2• The U.S. will call for a peaceful and inclusive democratic transition, as Secretary of State John Kerry did this afternoon, but will refrain from punishing the Egyptian military for fear of losing leverage.
3• The real, underlying problems — ideological division and a free-falling economy — are only going to get worse.
In the aggregate, these point to more violence and more instability but probably not a significant escalation of either. Medium-term, with some U.S. pressure, there will probably be a military-dominated political process that might stagger in the direction of a troubled democracy. Longer-term, who knows?
As the highly respected Egypt expert and Century Foundation scholar Michael Hanna told me recently, “Egypt might just be ungovernable.”
Note: Before the latest bloody crackdown, a feasible alternative would have been to bring back Morsi for another year, after a parliamentary election. Unless a drastic deal is reached with the Moslem Brotherhood movement, Egypt might be sinking into a civil war within a very populous State.
That is despite Morsi’s lack of understanding of how to properly mix religion and politics. And how to avoid marginalizing a large segment of Egypt’s population.
Interview published on RT this July 12, 2013
RT: The overthrow of Morsi has been called a coup, but clearly he had massive popular support, so is that strictly the term to be used here?
Karl Sharro: Absolutely. We have to look not only at popular presence on the street, but at procedure. The army was involved: tanks and armored personnel carriers were driven around, and the leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood were arrested – including the president. There is no other way to describe this than a coup. So I think that needs to be made very clear.
RT: The Muslim Brotherhood keeps saying ‘resist the army’; they are calling for peaceful revolt, but we live in the real world. Every time this happens there is bloodshed.
KS: Unfortunately this is the kind of situation where the military had, in its reaction to the popular uprising, contrived to create. But let’s remember what the real interest here is. It’s not the continuation of the democratic revolution. The military stepping in and effectively carrying out this coup is to stop the spread of the January popular uprising.
Aand in my book, that would include people taking power and resorting to a democratic process. What we saw there is exactly the opposite, which is canceling the results of democratic elections.
RT: What would you say were the failings of Morsi’s term in power? We talked about the economy and what went wrong, but it wasn’t just that.
KS: There was a host of failures. I don’t want to give the impression that I’m a supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood: I’m usually critical both, of the role of religion that they brought into politics and of their lack of competence in administering the country and managing the transition towards democracy, reviving the economy and the sectarian language they’ve used consistently.
There is a huge host of problems and a lack of ability for President Morsi to step up and represent the entire Egyptian population – the people that voted and represented him – and the other camp as well. So I think there are huge failings, none of which justify a military coup against him
RT: And religion was one of the key parts that went wrong for him, no?
KS: Yes, absolutely. I think that alienated both people like Christians and secularists, but also Muslim people who don’t think religion should be brought into politics in such a crass manner. But at the end of the day, the Muslim Brotherhood was elected with people knowing who they were. And not only did they win the presidential elections – with the help, of course, of people from other political affiliations – but they also won the parliamentary election, the results of which were canceled and the parliament was also annulled and disbanded.
There’s a host of grievances, and they reflect on that period in the Egyptian transition when there wasn’t a single authority that was in control. But having said that, Egypt should have been given the chance to transition towards a more democratic future, and carry out the process and for the Muslim Brotherhood to be kicked out of office by resorting to that democratic process – not by military means.
RT: What should the Muslim Brotherhood do now? The interim government is saying there will be new elections and a new parliament early next year. Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood are saying they don’t want anything to do with that. But should they get in on it while they still can?
KS: That’s a tactical decision that at the end of the day will be up to them. But what we have to look at is that by participating in that process they would be legitimizing this sort of coup, which is something we’ve seen already when Western governments – America and Europe – lectured us for a long time about the merits of democracy.
You can’t legitimize that as the Muslim Brotherhood and I think a form of boycotting might be the tactical choice, but that will be done down the road, in the realm of details, because nobody can say conclusively there wouldn’t be some kind of deals to bring the Muslim Brotherhood back in one shape or another, because the military doesn’t want to be in the front row leading the country, so it will seek to cover itself and bring some sort of civilian legitimacy to it.
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT
Adonis Diaries 
Notes and comments on FB and Twitter. Part 49
Posted by: adonis49 on: July 26, 2017
Notes and comments on FB and Twitter. Part 49
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