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[ by Charles Cameron — observing with interest the slow turning of the tides ]
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That was then:

When King George V went to Nepal in 1911, he killed 39 tigers, 18 rhinoceroses and 4 bears. http://t.co/J462ghqHKA pic.twitter.com/qCQzsGFqOy

— Anup Kaphle (@AnupKaphle) August 3, 2015

This is now:

Meet the houbara bustard, an endangered bird native to #Pakistan and threatened by a prince #BBCNewsday pic.twitter.com/5q3ZAgHVdz

— BBC World Service (@bbcworldservice) April 25, 2014

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To be honest, the best graphic match would have been one between Anup Kaphle‘s imag of George V‘s kill in Nepal:

and Declan Walsh‘s picture of a Pakistani hunting party’s trove of houbara bustards —

I just couldn’t resist the BBC’s amazing picture of the bustard in their tweet, though — hence my choice in the DoubleTweet above.

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Truoble in paradise for a Saudi prince:

Fahd bin Sultan bin Abdul Aziz, the governor of Tabuk province — along with his entourage had killed 2,100 houbara over 21 days during last year’s hunt, according to an official report leaked to the Pakistani news media, or about 20 times more than his allocated quota.

That’s from Walsh’s piece. Also:

Cargo planes fly tents and luxury jeeps into custom-built desert airstrips, followed by private jets carrying the kings and princes of Persian Gulf countries along with their precious charges: expensive hunting falcons that are used to kill the white-plumed houbara.

And in case a tie-in with counterterrorism might be appropriate, given my usual interests, there’s this —

In recent times the hunts have also played a role, albeit unwitting, in the United States’s war against Al Qaeda.

Osama bin Laden took refuge at a houbara hunting camp in western Afghanistan in the late 1990s, by several accounts, at a time when the C.I.A. was plotting to assassinate him with a missile strike.

[ by Charles Cameron — a double instance of form signalling significant (!) content ]
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Here are two self-referential quotes from Barbara Ehrenreich‘s Guardian post today, In America, only the rich can afford to write about poverty — the first being the title of her piece, the second a sentence from it:

As I have noted before, whenever you see a property of form such as the ouroboros or serpent biting its tail, pay attention: something of significance may well be going on. Further, if a pattern such as this crops up in writing, painting, cinema, etc, it’s a likely indicator of an artist who values the medium as well as the message.

And that goes double when the same pattern is displayed twice.

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Oh, and once you’ve read Ehrenreich’s piece, please feel free to pay me to write about the things I am both passionate and informed about..

[ by Charles Cameron — from Tractate Sanhedrin and Grotius to Gershon Scholem and the power of names ]
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I ran across Yonatan Mendel‘s post, Kill Him First, in the Jewish Quarterly today while searching for the Habrew of the phrase get up early to kill him first, which I wanted to pair with the quote from Hugo Grotius which is pretty obviously derived from it:

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I arrived at that page, in other words, looking for the phrase Ha-Ba le-Horgekha Hashkem le-Horgo, and was glad to find it there, along with a fascinating narrative of some of the times it has been quoted in recent Israeli political circles:

Following the Second Lebanon War, Ehud Yatom, a Likud MK, explained the asymmetrical death toll of 44 Israeli civilians and 1,191 Lebanese civilians with the same trump card: ‘and if someone comes to kill you, get up early to kill him first.’ It has been used by Minister of Strategic Affairs Moshe Ya’alon when addressing university students about their military reserve service and by Minister of Public Security Avi Dichter when lecturing about IDF strategy. It was also the explanation provided by Minister of Minorities Avishai Braverman for the assassination of a Hamas leader in Dubai. Even Ayoub Kara, a Druze MK from Likud, has used it. When asked about the Iranian nuclear plan Kara showed little originality: ‘I think an attack on Iran will be justifi ed’, he said, ‘since if someone comes to kill you, get up early to kill him first.’

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But, but.

That’s not the real treasure. For me, the real treasure is in the quote that heads Mendel’s article, from the great schoilar of Kabbalah Gershom Scholem in his 1926 letter to Franz Rosenzweig, On Our Language: A Confession. Here’s Mendel’s quote:

The people here are not aware of the significance of their acts. They only think they have turned Hebrew into a secular language. That they have released the apocalyptic sting out of it… but God will not remain silent in the language in which he was invoked again and again, thousands of times, to return into our lives.

Scholem’s whole letter is a powerful poetic testament:

Language is name. The power of language is enclosed in the name; the abyss of language is sealed within it..

[ by Charles Cameron — “the most contested piece of real-estate on earth” ]
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On the one hand:

On the other..

End-Time Battle for the Temple Mount

As Jews fasted on Tisha B’Av (Av 9) mourning the destruction of the First and Second Temples, hundreds of Jewish visitors made pilgrimage to the Temple site.

In preparation for Jews visiting the Mount on the annual fast, armed Muslim youth barricaded themselves in the Al-Aqsa Mosque. Several dozen Arab masked rioters attacked Israeli police, hurling rocks and setting off fireworks into the crowd of responders, wounding several officers.

After defusing the situation and arresting three to six participants, Israeli police found a trove of makeshift weapons in the Al-Aqsa Mosque — Molotov cocktails, firecrackers, concrete blocks, stones, and planks, with which they planned to attack Jewish mourners. [ .. ]

One of those mourners was Agriculture Minister Uri Ariel, who has in the past emphasized that there is a “need to build a real Temple on the Temple Mount.”

scripturally..

Isaiah 2:2–3:

In the last days, the mountain of the Lord’s Temple will be established as the highest of the mountains; it will be exalted above the hills, and all nations will stream to it. Many peoples will come and say, “Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the Temple of the God of Jacob.”

and / or..

Qur’an 17.1:

Exalted is He who took His Servant by night from al-Masjid al-haram to al-Masjid al-Aqsa, whose surroundings We have blessed, to show him of Our signs. Indeed, He is the Hearing, the Seeing.

and in not unrelated news:

Israel Detains Meir Kahane’s Grandson, a Scion of Jewish Militancy

He has the pedigree: Meir Ettinger is a grandson and the namesake of Meir Kahane, the slain American-Israeli rabbi considered the father of far-right Jewish militancy. [ .. ]

He also has the ideology: In a series of Bible-quoting blog posts that amount to a manifesto, Mr. Ettinger calls for the “dispossession of gentiles” who inhabit the Holy Land and the replacement of the modern Israeli state with a new “kingdom of Israel” ruled by the laws of the Torah.

“The key is not to seek to delay the explosion,” he wrote on July 22, “but to try to bring it on as soon as possible and on our own initiative.”

[ by Charles Cameron — an Ahmadinejad revival, and if so a reference to note? ]
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It could be no more than an artifact of translation, but there’s a phrase in this account of a possible Mahmoud Ahmadinejad comeback that catches my attention:

“God willing, victory and a very bright future awaits us. However, there will be bumps and satanic obstacles in our path,” the diminutive former leader, sporting his trademark close-cropped beard and sports coat, told some 400 supporters in Tehran. “One should not forget that the U.S. is our enemy.”

It’s those two words, bright future, that caught my attention.

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I’m reminded of the Bright Future Institute in Qom:

The Bright Future Institute was established in early 2004 by a number of scholars and masters of Islamic seminaries in the holy city of Qom with a view to develop the culture of Intizaror Awaiting Imam Mahdi a.s and to increase the knowledge about him both in iranand abroad by supporting research and cultural works of other scholars. this institute is a non-profit making, independent research centre which promotes efforts to reject wrong ideas about imam Mahdi by holding discussion sessions and also by preparing scientific answers to respond to superstitions surrounding him.

Scott Peterson, in his book Let the Swords Encircle Me: Iran, A Journey Behind the Headlines, explains (p. 307):

Launched in 2004, the Bright Future Institute in Qom was the eighth of its kind in Iran designed to study and even speed the Mahdi’s return. It quickly became the largest and most influential. “People are anxious to know: When and how will he rise? And what must they do in order to receive this worldwide salvation?” explained Ali Lari, a keen-eyed cleric at the Bright Future Institute. “The timing is not clear, but the conditions are more specific. There is a saying: ‘Whenever the students are ready, the teacher will come.’”

A Mahdist think tank! This is the outfit that Tim Furnish visited for one of their earler Mahdism conferences.

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Back to the possible Ahmadinejad revival. I don’t know that it will amount to anything, and my guess would not be worth much in any case — but if the ex-President does in fact manage a revival, and if that translated phrase wasn’t in fact just an artifact of translation, then “God willing, victory and a very bright future awaits us” is a Mahdist reference, and wpould be quite clearly such to Ahmadinejad’s supporters.

Not too surprising, but worth this brief note, I think.