The Daily Jot: 2021-06-13

Monday, June 14, 2021

THIS JUST IN! JONAH AND THE WHALE AND JESUS AND CINDERELLA!

BULLY BOY PRESS & CEDRIC'S BIG MIX -- THE KOOL AID TABLE

On Friday, a man found himself inside the mouth of a whale.

No, it wasn’t an ancient Hebrew prophet fleeing a God-given quest to the Assyrian city of Nineveh.

This time it was a Cape Cod fisherman, Michael Packard, 56, diving for lobster off the coast of Provincetown, Massachusetts.

[. . .]

Packard estimated he spent about 30 seconds inside before the creature spit him back out.

Being swallowed by a humpback whale is an exceedingly rare occurrence according to experts. Enough so that it’s considered practically nonexistent.

REACHED FOR COMMENT AT THE G-7, U.S. PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN TOLD THESE REPORTERS, "I HADN'T HEARD. SO JONAH AND THE WHALE, HUH? WILL I'LL BELIEVE WHEN WE SEE JESUS FINDING CINDERELLA VIA THAT GLASS SLIPPER AND FIGURING OUT SHE'S THE ONE HE TOOK TO PROM."

PROM? JESUS AND CINDERELLA?

WE TRIED TO CORRECT THE PRESIDENT, HOWEVER, JOE HAD ALREADY LEFT THE BUILDING -- OR AT LEAST HIS BRAIN HAD -- AS HE NOW LAUNCHED INTO A LONG-WINDED TALE OF HIS HAIRY LEGS AND CORN POP.

FROM THE TCI WIRE:

Kurdistan Junis Tweets:

"The population of Afrin was once at least 96 % Kurdish. Following the Turkish occupation, most of them were displaced, & the proportion of the Kurdish population fell to around 25 %. ". If this isn't genocide, what is it then ?!!!!

"In south Kurdistan, they have established tens of military and intelligence bases and outposts to be used against the interests of our people," Elyana Elyan remarked this week regarding Turkey's illegal actions in the semi-autonomous Kurdistan Region of Iraq.

The Kurdish People's Assembly Tweets:

The Turkish military is attempting genocide against Kurds in South Kurdistan, targeting civilians and a large refugee camp. Ask your MP to sign an Early Day Motion condemning Turkey’s actions, and to speak up in favour of an arms embargo on Turkey:

What is going on? Insisting that they must defend themselves from the PKK, the government of Turkey is violating international law by sending troops into Iraq on raids and other missions and bombing the Kurdistan Region with war planes and drones. PKK? The what? The PKK is one of many Kurdish groups which supports and fights for a Kurdish homeland. Aaron Hess (International Socialist Review) described them in 2008, "The PKK emerged in 1984 as a major force in response to Turkey's oppression of its Kurdish population. Since the late 1970s, Turkey has waged a relentless war of attrition that has killed tens of thousands of Kurds and driven millions from their homes. The Kurds are the world's largest stateless population -- whose main population concentration straddles Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Syria -- and have been the victims of imperialist wars and manipulation since the colonial period. While Turkey has granted limited rights to the Kurds in recent years in order to accommodate the European Union, which it seeks to join, even these are now at risk." The Kurdistan Regional Government in Iraq has been a concern to Turkey because they fear that if it ever moves from semi-autonomous to fully independent -- such as if Iraq was to break up into three regions -- then that would encourage the Kurdish population in Turkey. For that reason, Turkey is overly interested in all things Iraq. So much so that they signed an agreement with the US government in 2007 to share intelligence which the Turkish military has been using when launching bomb raids. However, this has not prevented the loss of civilian life in northern Iraq. Aaron Hess noted, "The Turkish establishment sees growing Kurdish power in Iraq as one step down the road to a mass separatist movement of Kurds within Turkey itself, fighting to unify a greater Kurdistan. In late October 2007, Turkey's daily newspaper Hurriyet accused the prime minister of the KRG, Massoud Barzani, of turning the 'Kurdish dream' into a 'Turkish nightmare'."

While Turkey pretends the problems started with the emergence of the PKK, they are lying. The PKK is not an initiating incident. It is a response to Turkey's long persecution of the Kurds -- perscuetion of the Kurds in Turkey and elsewhere.

Sirwan Renas (Washington Kurdish Institute) offers his take:

The foundations of Kurdish nationalism in contemporary history can be traced back to the historical transition from pre-modern empire political system to the modern state-building order in the Middle East. In regard to Islamism, what makes Kurdish nationalism different from its rival nationalisms is the contemporary historical context through which it emerged.

The Arab, Turkish, and Persian/Iranian nationalisms are state nationalisms that were constructed in opposition to Western colonialism — namely, British and France — at the beginning of the twentieth century and the domination of the United State in the aftermath of World War II. In contrast, Kurdish nationalism is a stateless nationalism aimed at the creation of the state of Kurdistan, and, thus, it emerged in opposition to the domination of Turkish, Iranian, Iraqi, and Syrian states — not the domination of Western powers. While for Turks, Arabs, and Persians, Western powers were seen as interventionists and occupiers, for Kurds the Turkish, Iranian, Iraqi, and Syrian states were perceived as occupiers. Even though Britain and France played a major role in dividing Kurdistan, for Kurds, it was their occupying authoritarian states that suppressed almost every Kurdish liberation movement throughout the twentieth century— a brutal suppression that led to all kinds of violations of human rights, from denying their fundamental rights to practice their language and culture and the possession of their homeland to mass killings, chemical bombings, ethnic cleansings, and genocides. The fact that the Kurdish national rights have been violated by the occupying states (not Western colonialists) made a significant difference in how Kurds perceive Islamism.

Kurds do not have any state of their own to identify themselves with, nor do they identify themselves with any of the pre-modern Islamic empires or with any of the modern occupying states. That is not to say that Kurds have played no active role in the Islamic empires. Saladin Ayyubi, the founder of the Ayyubid dynasty, for example, led the Muslim military campaign against the Crusaders in the Levant. However, Kurds do not identify themselves with the Ayyubid dynasty and it has not become a basis for Kurdish nationalism. On the contrary, Turks identify themselves with the Ottoman Empire, Persians with the Safavid Empire, and Arabs with many Islamic dynasties since the birth of Islam.

The transitional period from pre-modern empires to modern states in the Middle East is a crucial moment that helps us to understand how Kurdish nationalism and Islamism were affected by this historical context. It is widely believed that nationalism as a political ideology is a modern phenomenon.