zenpundit.com

[ by Charles Cameron — lightweight, feel free to ignore ]
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It isn’t Santa. It’s the image from Raffaello Pantucci‘s piece, Islamists in Africa emerge as threat to West, for the BBC. Raff’s a recently-minted Senior Research Fellow of the Royal United Services Institute.

Cognitive #FAIL on my part. Wishful thinking, perhaps?

For those studying war, insurgency, irregulars or terrorism ESOC will be extremely useful – and depending on your area of research, possibly invaluable – as a resource.

Small Wars Journal had this to say about ESOC:

.…ESOC identifies, compiles, and analyzes micro-level conflict data and information on insurgency, civil war, and other sources of politically motivated violence worldwide. ESOC was established in 2008 by practitioners and scholars concerned by the significant barriers and upfront costs that challenge efforts to conduct careful sub-national research on conflict. The ESOC website is designed to help overcome these obstacles and to empower the quality of research needed to inform better policy and enhance security and good governance around the world.

The ESOC team includes about forty researchers (current and former) and is led by six members: Eli Berman, James D. Fearon, Joseph H. Felter, David Laitin, Jacob N. Shapiro, and Jeremy M. Weinstein.

The website is organized by countries and research themes. The six country pages are: Afghanistan, Colombia, Iraq, Pakistan, the Philippines, and Vietnam. The content is structured according to five themes: Demographic/Socioeconomic, Geography, Infrastructure, Public Opinion, and Violence. The website currently hosts about 45 ESOC data files, over 35 ESOC peer-reviewed publications (with replication data), and ten working papers. The ESOC team has also posted links to many external data repositories and external readings that have proven useful for analysis. The website will be regularly updated with new micro-level conflict data and contextual information, as it is compiled and submitted by ESOC researchers.

One caution: based on my source who was one of the folks gathering data for part of this project, as with all quantitative method research, there are hidden qualitative decisions in who did the counting, how and by what yardstick. If you are drawing conclusions about big picture trends in insurgency or irregular warfare across periods of time you are good to go. If your research is sharply confined to a specific and narrowly defined historical case study (say one campaign, a battle, one district – whatever), then drill down into ESOC’s data and methodology to the granular level before drawing a conclusion vice your sources and data outside ESOC.

[ by Charles Cameron — Guardian reporting on Gaza and Mali, weighed in the balance and found wanting? — with Fox News for company ]
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I frankly don’t for a moment buy that Fox News is fair and balanced, but then I don’t know if any news source is, so let me try to be a little even-handed here myself, and take a gander at a couple of recent Guardian headlines, using my SPECS format to display them:

I’m not the first one to juxtapose these two headers — there’s a site called CiF Watch that monitors the Guardian (specifically) for signs of “antisemitism, and the assault on Israel’s legitimacy” and it brought these two Guardian posts together with the comments:

The contrasts in language, tone and narrative focus between a report by Harriet Sherwood on Israel’s November conflict with Hamas and a recent Guardian report on the French war against Islamists in Mali represent an exquisite illustration of the paper’s egregious double standards. …

In Sherwood’s report, the deaths of Palestinian children represent the overwhelming narrative focus. The fact that the IDF was attempting to target Hamas terrorists is only mentioned in the strap line, and even then is qualified with the word “believed”.

In the report by Hirsch and Hopkins, on the other hand, we are informed via the headline that militants are killed, while the deaths of Mali children are only noted at the end of the strap line.

On the one hand, I appreciate this kind of close reading as an analytic technique, while on the other I can’t really expect editors to check previous possibly comparable events to make sure their treatment of breaking news is immune from this kind of criticism.

That’s a quandary, IMO — but not yet a quagmire.

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Forget the question of whether Fox News is more or less biased than the Guardian — or should I call them Faux News and the Grauniad? — and just think again about our passions, about how they can blind us, and about how that blindness can manifest in emphases, in choice of words or images — in so many conscious and unconscious ways.

We need to deploy considerable mindfulness if we are to explore, read, filter, balance and comprehend the world around us — with anything like the nuance required for making wise (rather than lop-sided) choices…

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Sources:

Mali conflict: militants killed as French air strikes pound rebel camps, Jan. 13, 3012

Gaza: four children killed in single Israeli air strike, Nov. 18, 2012

[ by Charles Cameron — strange intersections between Islamic, Judaic and Christian teachers around the end times, also Yehuda Etzion of the Jewish Underground, and Habayit Hayehudi’s Jeremy Gimpel ]
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My guess is that at least one aspect of this screen-grab will surprise you — but it’s hard to say which!

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One possible surprise is a 2013 end times prediction from an Islamic source — but there are enough other surprises here to go around, I think…

Okay, here it is. I ran across two videos of rabbis on two sites connected with Islamic end times expectations today, and they’re causing a bit of a re-set in my thinking about the various alignments possible in the complex world of competing contemporary eschatologies.

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I imagine the rabbi in the first of the two videos is from Neturei Karta or Satmar, because at one point he says:

this country (Israel) does not have the right to exist

and refers to the State of Israel as “the origin of evil”.

There is obviously much more going on here, and I’m none too confident of the accuracy of the subtitles, so I’d appreciate any comments from those who know more about either the rabbi’s Jewish context or the Muslim eschatological site‘s place within the Mahdist spectrum.

2013? C’mon!

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The second video comes from Adnan Oktar / Harun Yahya. What’s most intriguing to me here is the rabbi’s assertion that “Islam is the religion of Adam himself” — the Noahide or universal faith into which we are all born according to Judaism. And once again, I’d appreciate any commentary on the participants and their respective contexts:

He’s definitely an interesting fellow, this Harun Yahya — his teachings on Mahdism feature a peaceable Mahdi, he has reached out in dialogue to Joel Richardson, the author of Mideast Beast: The Scriptural Case for an Islamic Antichrist, and his Jewish contacts include Adin Steinsaltz, Talmudic scholar par excellence and president of the revived Sanhedrin.

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By way of abrupt contrast, consider the inflammatory words of this current candidate for the Knesset, Jeremy Gimpel, drawn from a speech he gave in a Florida church in 2011:

Imagine if the Golden Dome – I’m being recorded so I can’t say ‘blown up’ – but let’s say the Dome was blown up, right? And we laid the cornerstone of the Temple in Jerusalem. Can you imagine? None of you would be here – all of you would be like, “I’m going to Israel, right?” No one would be here, it would be incredible!”

Alongside these of Harun Yahya, from his conversation with the rabbinic delegation from the Sanhedrin:

Out of a sense of collective responsibility for world peace and for all humanity we have found it timely to call to the World and exclaim that there is a way out for all peoples. It is etched in a call to all humanity: We are all the sons of one father, the descendants of Adam, and all humanity is but a single family. Peace among Nations will be achieved through building the House of G-d, where all peoples will serve as foreseen by King Solomon in his prayers at the dedication of the First Holy Temple. Come let us love and respect one another, and love and honor and hold our heavenly Father in awe. Let us establish a house of prayer in His name in order to worship and serve Him together, for the sake of His great compassion. He surely does not want the blood of His creations spilled, but prefers love and peace among all mankind. We pray to the Almighty Creator, that you harken to our Call. Together – each according to his or her ability – we shall work towards the building of the House of Prayer for All Nations on the Temple Mount in peace and mutual understanding.

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Further reading:

Hachrazah 5769 Tamuz 9 from the revived Sanhedrin site, a fascinating overview.

Joel Richardson, Muslim Leader wants Temple Rebuilt, WND

Haaretz, Is it the End of Days for Jeremy Gimpel?, also with fascinating detail

Note particularly, in Joel Richardson’s piece, this quote attributed to Rabbi Hollander:

It is said that the structure of the Dome in Haram E-Sharrif (the Temple Mount) was originally meant by (Caliph) Omar to be a House of Prayer for Jews, and the Al-Aqsa for Muslims.

When considering Gimpel’s remark, bear in mind also that Yehuda Etzion was imprisoned in the early 1980s for his part in a conspiracy to blow up the Dome of the Rock –a four year effort which included the recruitment of an air force pilot, the theft of military explosives, and the making of 28 bombs — oy — which was only called off when no rabbi could be found to give it his official blessing, and which resulted in a trial at which the judge praised the defendants for their “pioneering ethos”.

On this, see, eg:

David New, Holy War: The Rise of Militant Christian, Jewish and Islamic Fundamentalism, pp 154-56.

[ by Charles Cameron — what you see is what you get: WYSIWYG — and possibly also TEOTWAWKI ]
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See buildings, walls, handrails, reflections, rows of windows, and people he’s walking past vanish and reappear as a man dressed for mountain climbing sets out into a blizzard of snow, video snow and special effects…

Hat-tip — Shlok Vaidya.

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We knew that Iran could photoshop extra rockets into a widely distributed news image –

and that Russian dissidents could makeover Kirill as his friend Putin —

But the video above, with it’s vanishing and reappearing everythings? Simple — it’s a stunning portrayal of just what patience and skill can manage with video tampering using Photoshop CS5 or the like. Hence — this may also be the time to announce TEOTWAWKI. The end of the world as we know it. As we believe we know it.

You only need one of those effects, remember, to fake out a geopolitical tipping point…

Watcher, beware.

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But then there’s my friend Howard Rheingold, who points out that our whole world is a constructed reality:

We habitually think of the world we see as “out there,” but what we are seeing is really a mental model, a perceptual simulation that exists only in our brains. …

Cognitive simulation — mental model-making — is what humans do best. We do it so well that we tend to become locked into our own models of the world by a seamless web of unconscious beliefs and subtly molded perceptions. And computers are model-making tools par excellence, although they are only beginning to approach the point where people might confuse simulations with reality.

That’s a quote from his piece in Brenda Laurel‘s 1990 classic Art of Human-Computer Interface Design — and it seems to grow more prescient by the day!

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Three topics, at least somewhat related, we can maybe talk about later:

Who it was that spread the word about the Innocence of Muslims trainer.

The disputed Muhammad al-Durrah incident at the Netzarim junction. And

Zero Dark Thirty.