“But make sure you pray istikhara^1,2 and see how you feel before jumping into anything. In the end it’s all with Allah, right?”

‘Of course, Ahlam nodded with fervour. She believed in the power of istikhara to steer a course of action, as they all had been instructed to. But Abida was sometimes unsure if she referenced him with real feeling or because the situation seemed to necessitate it.

‘..She said insha’Allah³ when making any statement pertaining to a future event

‘..masha’Allah when cooing at someone’s baby or sharing a photo of a sunset online and

‘..alhamdulillah⁴ for any crisis averted, no matter how minute

‘She had chosen to dress this way, and with this choice came expectations of behaviour. She could swear and laugh and rage, she could be inappropriate and wild, but to the world she would still be defined by this cloak, this fabric.’

..from Zeynab Gamieldien The Scope of Permissibility 2023 ⁵

The road to both a genocidal and an ecocidal hell-on-earth is literally paved – by double-mouthed shysters, advertising copywriters, city lawyers and consultants to government, these last supplying members of parliaments and congresses and neoliberal business cabals trading in human bodies and landscape (as they call it) in 193 countries because they need to be told what to think, say, write and do to ensure their re-election. How else would they know in a world where all electronic communications have been turned over in toto to marketing mostly not-ecologically-sustainable for more than another 2 or 3 years of junk consumer and self- and other-harm product and intelligent leadership everywhere has been siloed away from the public eye, marginalised, these hard-working people’s contributions magnanimously trashed, and its inspirational frontrunners and great teachers commonly wasted-away by security-services caseworked with bad diets, childish play therapies, pharmaceutical drugs, years of imprisonment or immediately killed?

(2) Soft words – hard questions.. Robert Fisk The Independent 8 July 2006

“When I worked at The Times – in the free, pre-Murdoch days – I enjoyed life as Middle East correspondent under the leadership of a bearded foreign news editor called Ivan Barnes. This brilliant, immensely humorous man – blessedly still with us – was a connoisseur of weasel words, get-out clauses and semantic humbug, and one of his favourite questions was this; What do you think of a man who begins each statement with the words, ‘To be completely frank and open with you’? You can see his point. ‘If someone promises to be frank with you – completely frank, mark you – then what is he being the rest of the time?’ Barnes would ask. ‘As for completely…’ On balance, I agree that the key word is ‘completely.’ It reeks of 100 per cent, of totality, of black and white. It is also, I notice, one of Blair’s favourite words – along with⁷ ‘absolutely.’ Blair is always being completely and absolutely honest with us. He is always absolutely convinced he was right to invade Iraq (even when the rest of the world completely realises the opposite).⁸ He is always completely and absolutely certain of his own integrity. I call this the ‘Ho-ho’ factor.

“So all the Fisk radar warnings went off this week when Blair told us that ‘we have got to address the completely false sense of grievance against the West’ felt by Muslims. Completely, Muslims’ ‘sense of grievance’ – fury might be a better word – is ‘completely’ false. Is it? We are screwing up Afghanistan, destroying tens of thousands of lives in Itraq, and America now has a military presence in Turkey, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Jordan, Egypt, Algeria, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, Yemen and Oman – and Muslim grievance is ‘completely’ false. No, look at Blair’s statement again. He doesn’t suggest there is even a grievance. It is a false ‘sense’ of grievance. Anyone who understands mendacity knows exactly what Blair comprehends all too well: that Muslims do have a ‘sense’ of grievance and that it is not false at all.

“It’s odd, though, how folk think they can get away with this stuff. Take my old chum Professor Alan Dershowitz, who announced on the evening of 11 September 2001 that I was a ‘dangerous man’ because I asked the question ‘why’ about the international crimes against humanity in the United States. This week, in an article in The Independent, Dershowitz was at it again. I especially enjoyed his description of a standard US military torture, ‘waterboarding.’ He described it as a technique that produces a ‘near-drowning’ experience.’ Ho-ho. You bet it does. He says that this is torture. But why the word ‘technique?’ Why does it ‘produce’ an ‘experience?’ Actually, the experience is one of drowning, not ‘near-drowning’ – that’s the point of this vile practice.⁹“I love these key phrases which are littered throughout Dershowitz’s article, so soft and gentle: ‘the nature of permissible [ hey Zeynab 🙂 ] interrogation,’ ‘questionable means,’ ‘latitude’ (as in ‘should more latitude be afforded to interrogators in the preventive (sic)¹⁰context’), ‘sometimes excessive efforts’ and so on. All this, mark you, is premised on one totally misleadistatement. ‘Weapons of mass destruction in the hands of suicide terrorists with no fear of death and no home address have rendered useless the deterrent threat of mass retaliation.’ True – if such people existed. But there simply hasn’t been any suicide terrorist with a weapon of mass destruction¹¹– not ever…

“The whole torture fandango gathers weasel words like moss. Take a reference in the Wall Street Journal to torture last month as ‘aggressive interrogation techniques.’ ‘Technique’ again, please note. I suppose that’s what you can claim the US soldier was applying when he last year stuffed an Iraqi general upside-down in a sleeping bag, sat on his chest and killed him. Take again Çeku, the brutal KLA leader who has popped up as Kosovo’s prime minister, but is still wanted for war crimes by Belgrade. The Financial Times did a wonderful portrait of him,, in which he was described as a ‘slim and youthful .. Mr Çeku, 44, exudes an effortless authority born of long experience as a military commander.’ Ho ho. You bet he does.

“Chris Hitchens got in on the act last month when he tried to explain why the slaughter of twenty-four Iraqi civilians at Haditha didn’t mean a return to the days of My Lai massacres.¹² So here we go. ‘Unjust though the assumption may prove to be, let us imagine that on November 19th, 2005, US Marines of Kilo company did indeed crack up and cut loose in Haditha…’ Get it? Their comrades had just been killed by insurgents. So the Americans may have ‘cracked up’ and ‘cut loose.’ Later, Hitcens describes the massacre at Haditha as ‘a white-hot few minutes,’ and later still he talks of a ‘coalition soldier who relieves his rage by discharging a clip.’ A few seconds later and he is is going on about the ‘alleged rampage.^’13 Rampage! Ho ho. The point, of course, is that it takes much more than a ‘clip’ of ammunition to kill twenty-four civilians. And it takes a long time – not a ‘few’ miniutes.- to go from room to room, amid the shrieking children who are being slaughtered and the women who are trying to protect themselves from murder, to blast that many people to death. Some rampage.

“So what does it take to run the earth these days? Effortless authority, I supposed. A little bit of ‘excess,’ plenty of ‘technique’ and a mere clip of ammunition. Completely and absolutely.”

John Blundell 🦘🇦🇺

Economy, Sociology, Human Health, 2-5 set Event Fact Object Affect Call Quantum Maths, Learning-, Healing-, Growth-, Upskilling- & Living Culture Neurolinguistics, Philosophy of Authentic Ecologically-anchored 21st Century Science

.¹ at tail-end of Essay Heading (1) at this difficult time في هذا الوقت العصيب

² Salat al-Istikhaara (Arabic: صلاة الاستخارة), which translates to Prayer of Seeking Counsel, is a prayer recited by Muslims who are in need of guidance from  God Almighty (Allah) when facing a decision in their life. The prayer, known as salah in Arabic is performed in two units of prayer or raka’ah followed by the supplication of Salat al-Istikhaara….

³ إِنْ شَاءَ ٱللّٰهُ‎ • (ʔin šāʔa llāhu) God willing; inshallah, if it is God’s will (literally, “if God has willed [it]”

⁴ Alhamdulillah (Arabic: ٱلْحَمْدُ لِلَّٰهِ, al-Ḥamdu lillāh) is an Arabic phrase meaning “praise be to God“,^[1] sometimes translated as “thank God”.^[2] This phrase is called Tahmid (Arabic: تَحْمِيد, lit. ‘Praising’).^[3] A longer variant of the phrase is al-ḥamdu l-illāhi rabbi l-ʿālamīn (ٱلْحَمْدُ لِلَّٰهِ رَبِّ ٱلْعَالَمِينَ), meaning “all praise is due to God, Lord of all the worlds”, the very first verse of Surah Al-Fatiha, the opening chapter of Al-Qur’an.

⁵ https://ultimopress.com.au/products/scope-of-permissibility

^{6 Robert Fisk (12 July 1946 – 30 October 2020) was an English writer and journalist.[1][2] He was critical of United States foreign policy in the Middle East, and the Israeli government’s treatment of Palestinians @Wikipedia}

⁷ [the near manic or at least feverish usage by contemporary Australians apparently in fear of assault, public ridicule and/ or summary dismissal from their jobs by politically powerful others who may be watching or at least listening in]

8 My italics & bolding - who in this country particulary atm with any grit, laughs or recent history in them could have resisted that?

⁹ Readers will forgive me inserting another Australian cringeing pusillanimous journalism Reality Check at this point – the more you study up on our putrid history of supposed professionals on $250k salaries doing the absolutely unquestioning bidding of any psychopath who happens to be passing by seeking donations & assorted ideologically fascist shysters from the USA – or, Heavens, Great Britain, whoops ‘the UK,’ Old Chap, the easier it is to see why we have a Prime Minister who figures Mr Assange should be killed because such barbarity will please the variously demented or otherwise seriously unwell old rich people whose electoral support he’s himself thick enough to believe his party needs to win re-election. Yes, this federal government amongst its other achieves is of course doing flying motorcars, exciting new coal mines and, curiously the ploughing in of the entire top one-third of the Northern Territory on behalf of the 1965 Norman Bourlag’ Green Revolution

¹⁰Oh Australia – oh Australian Labor Party federal ministers O’Neil, Giles & Watt – you Mark Latham 2004 aspirational KPMG people may choose to discard your language and culture for a mess of e-commerce Start Up high national inflation-rate/ big alpha imvestment returns but don’t you dare lay a finger on ours

¹¹New era mathematicians and lethal student-enemies of military-industrial-scientific era false-eqivalences mechanomph-geomorph cartoon graveyard econometrics immediately spot this as an erroneous almost certainly neurodegenerative (in this instance delusional or hallucinogenic) Scale fail. Happy Moses Maimomides/ 9th century Islamic al-Khwarizmi Algebra Day cum ‘World Mental Health Day,’ team الحمد لله رب العالمين : alhamdulillahi rabbi al alameen

¹²Comparisons are odious – since 1440 in England so they say but for goodness sake don’t waste precious study-time reading up on the malodourous plethora of essentially idiosyncratic, discursive, derivative a-historic post-fact fictitious & phoney ‘literary’ internet read-outs on the aphorism. – though you could maybe find out what Oscar Wilde had to c’est about it (?) – myself I say We don’t have time for any personal vanity-project self-indulgence – above all when so much of this Gates-Bezos-Bannon internet junk is tailored by ideological totalitarian DOGS, contrived for the twin-towering purposes of getting consumers to pay for it and to ACCELERATE Big Oil’s ecocidal AND genocidal fossil-fuel burning orgy as TENS of millions of otherwise decent middle class people hop along like play-bunnies, pre-schoolers or lewdly, obscenely deranged proto-human cartoon characters themselves, streaming, binge-watching & chilling out after ‘Workin’ for the Man’ kidding themselves it’s authentic research and ‘good for’ their Bertrand Russel, HG Wells & George Bernard Shaw 1920s minds for Christ’s loving sake.. Go Here: make a quick study on odious comparisons AS false eqivalences – this time it’s reminiscent not specifically of the Algebra Algo man Al-Khwarizmi 780 – c850 but of he who put metaphysics way down the list of Learnings for Humanity – last, wasn’t it?

¹³ my italics