The New Islamic State (aka ISIS or ISIL)

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I haven’t been paying much attention to the latest crisis in the Middle East. That’s the one involving the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) or the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). The Levant, by the way, includes Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine, Israel, Cyprus and part of southern Turkey.

As of now, the Islamic State is more of a military force than a nation. They’re fundamentalist Sunni Muslims, mainly funded by sympathizers in Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey. Their apparent goal is to create a new Muslim empire or “caliphate”. So far, they control significant portions of Iraq and Syria. Lately, they’ve been putting extreme pressure on the Yezidis or Yazidis, a Kurdish-speaking ethnic group in northern Iraq. The Yezidis aren’t Muslims. They practice an ancient religion related to Zoroastrianism. To protect the Yezidis, the United States is now carrying out airlifts and airstrikes. President Obama doesn’t see a quick end to this latest conflict or American involvement.

Here are excerpts from an article by Patrick Cockburn in the London Review of Books:

As the attention of the world focused on Ukraine and Gaza, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) captured a third of Syria in addition to the quarter of Iraq it had seized in June. The frontiers of the new Caliphate declared by ISIS on 29 June are expanding by the day and now cover an area larger than Great Britain and inhabited by at least six million people… In a few weeks of fighting in Syria, ISIS has established itself as the dominant force in the Syrian opposition….The Caliphate may be poor and isolated but its oil wells and control of crucial roads provide a steady income in addition to the plunder of war.

The birth of the new state is the most radical change to the political geography of the Middle East since the Sykes-Picot Agreement was implemented in the aftermath of the First World War. Yet this explosive transformation has created surprisingly little alarm internationally or even among those in Iraq and Syria not yet under the rule of Isis. Politicians and diplomats tend to treat Isis as if it is a Bedouin raiding party that appears dramatically from the desert, wins spectacular victories and then retreats to its strongholds leaving the status quo little changed. Such a scenario is conceivable but is getting less and less likely as Isis consolidates its hold on its new conquests in an area that may soon stretch from Iran to the Mediterranean.

The very speed and unexpectedness of its rise make it easy for Western and regional leaders to hope that the fall of ISIS and the implosion of the Caliphate might be equally sudden and swift. But all the evidence is that this is wishful thinking and the trend is in the other direction, with the opponents of ISIS becoming weaker and less capable of resistance…

With weapons taken from the Iraqi army and the seizure of Syrian oil and gasfields, ISIS no longer needs so much outside help. For America, Britain and the Western powers, the rise of ISIS and the Caliphate is the ultimate disaster. Whatever they intended by their invasion of Iraq in 2003 and their efforts to get rid of Assad in Syria since 2011, it was not to see the creation of a jihadi state spanning northern Iraq and Syria run by a movement a hundred times bigger and much better organised than the al-Qaida of Osama bin Laden.

Calling the rise of ISIS or ISIL “the ultimate disaster” for the United States and Europe sounds more like overstatement than British understatement, but the creation of a fundamentalist Islamic state that aims to forge a new Muslim empire intolerant of religious minorities certainly isn’t good news. The vacuum we created by getting rid of Saddam Hussein seems to be filling up. 

A Guide to Reality, Part 14

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It’s been more than three months since I wrote about Alex Rosenberg’s The Atheist’s Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life Without Illusions. I left off part of the way through chapter 8, “The Brain Does Everything Without Thinking About Anything At All”. Having read the book once before, it’s been difficult going through it again, but I’m now going to finish chapter 8.

The principal thesis of Rosenberg’s book is that since the universe is nothing more than subatomic particles, much of what we take for granted about the world is illusory. In the case of the human brain, this means that the brain does its work without anything happening in the brain being “about” anything at all.

Rosenberg asks us to consider a computer:

Neither the … electrical charges in the computer’s motherboard nor the distribution of magnetic charges in the hard drive can be about anything, right? They are just like red octagons. They get interpreted by us [as stop signs or whatever] [187].

Electrical engineers and computer programmers assign meanings to a computer’s low-level states (“on” or “off”, or 32767, or the letter “w”), but those states have no meaning in themselves. It’s only because people are able to assign meanings to the states of a computer and then interpret those them that those states can be about anything, just the way a red octagonal sign with “STOP” on it only has meaning for those of us who know how to read a traffic sign.

But doesn’t that mean that the physical states of a computer can be about something? Doesn’t our interpretation of those states imply that those states are meaningful?

Rosenberg doesn’t think so. Earlier, he discussed how brain cells function as input/output devices. Now he compares the brain itself to a computer:

The brain is at least in part a computer. It’s composed of an unimaginably large number of electronic input/output circuits…The circuits transmit electrical outputs in different ways, depending on their electrical inputs and on how their parts… But that it is at least a computer is obvious from its anatomy and physiology right down to the individual neurons and their electrochemical on/off connections [188-189].

But if what’s inside a computer isn’t about anything, and your brain works like a computer, what’s inside your brain isn’t about anything either. It’s merely an enormous bunch of interconnected cells that have no intrinsic meaning. That’s Rosenberg’s conclusion.

To clarify his point, he then offers an analogy. The image in a still photograph doesn’t move. But string many photographs together, project them on a screen and you’ve got a motion picture. The motion we perceive in a movie, however, is an illusion. Creatures whose physiology worked faster than ours would simply see a succession of still pictures, not actors or objects in continuous motion. In similar fashion:

The illusion of aboutness projected by the neurons in our brain does not match any aboutness in the world. There isn’t any….There is no aboutness in reality [191].

So, despite what introspection tells us (or “screams” at us, using his term), our thoughts aren’t about anything either:

Consciousness is just another physical process. So, it has as much trouble producing aboutness as any other physical process. Introspection certainly produces the illusion of aboutness. But it’s got to be an illusion, since nothing physical can be about anything [193]. 

But doesn’t that mean The Atheist’s Guide to Reality isn’t about anything? Why bother reading it then?

Rosenberg’s answer is that his book isn’t “conveying statements”. It’s “rearranging neural circuits, removing inaccurate disinformation and replacing it with accurate information” [193]. But, we might ask, isn’t information “about” something? And isn’t the distinction between accurate and inaccurate information dependent on the idea that information can be about something in a more or less satisfactory manner?

At this point, I can’t remember why Rosenberg is so interested in convincing us that there is no real “aboutness” or what philosophers call “intentionality” in the world.

It’s certainly puzzling how our minds are able to assign meaning to and find meaning in the world. Being appreciative of science, I can accept that there is nothing in the universe but quarks, leptons and bosons when you get right down to it (or their component parts if there are any), but there are also arrangements of those things. Some of those arrangements are meaningful to us and some aren’t. The fact that scientists might and probably will explain our experience of aboutness in biological terms, and then in terms of chemistry, and then in terms of physics, doesn’t change the fact that Rosenberg’s book and the words I’m typing are about something.

When I started writing this post, I didn’t know if I’d work through any more chapters in The Atheist’s Guide to Reality (although if the universe is as deterministic as Rosenberg thinks – and I tend to think – that was decided some time ago). But now what I think I’m going to do is skip the next three chapters. They’re concerned with purpose (an illusion), the self (also an illusion), history (it’s blind) and the other social sciences, especially economics (they’re all myopic). Chapter 12, the final chapter, is called “Living With Scientism: Ethics, Politics, the Humanities, and Prozac as Needed”. That seems like a good place to stop.

General Sherman Has a Blog

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J J Brownyneal, “a resident of Indiana with an interest in history”, has a remarkable blog devoted to General William Tecumseh Sherman’s Civil War years. The entries are based on Sherman’s correspondence and other papers and are being posted in chronological order.

The first entry, for December 1, 1860, was posted on posted on December 25, 2010. It’s a letter Sherman wrote to his brother when Sherman was living and working in Louisiana. Abraham Lincoln had been elected but not yet sworn in as President:

The Convention will meet in January, and only ‘two questions will be agitated, Immediate dissolution, a declaration of State independence, and a General Convention of Southern States, with instructions to demand of the Northern States to repeal all laws hostile to slavery and pledges of future good behavior… the moment Louisiana assumes a position of hostility, then this becomes an arsenal and fort.

Let me hear the moment you think dissolution is inevitable. What Mississippi and Georgia do, this State will do likewise.

On August 2, 1864, Sherman was outside Atlanta. An entry for that date (posted today) includes his messages to other Union officers, with remarks like these:

If you have any negro regiments fit for duty I would like to have them in front of Nashville…

Losses in battle and sickness from work and weather is beginning to tell on the strength of my army.

Too many citizens manage to come to the front. Be even more stringent than heretofore. Grant no passes beyond Chattanooga, and only the smallest possible number that far.

Another entry for August 2 features a letter Sherman wrote to his wife:

I have for some days been occupying a good house on the Buckhead Road about 4 miles north of Atlanta but am going to move in the morning nearer to the Right to be nearer where I expect the next battle….

Somehow or other we cannot get Cavalry. The enemy takes all the horses of the Country and we have to buy and our People won’t sell. [Major General] Stoneman is also out with a cavalry force attempting to reach our prisoners confined at Andersonville, but since [Maj. Gen.] McCook’s misfortune I also have fears for his safety….

No Recruits are coming for the draft is not till September and then I suppose it will consist mostly of freed slaves & bought recruits that must be kept well to the Rear. I sometimes think our People do not deserve to succeed in War. They are so apathetic….

Atlanta is on high ground and the woods extend up to the forts which look strong and encircle the whole town. Most of the People are gone & it is now simply a big Fort. I have been a little sick today but feel better. Weather very hot.

By all accounts, Sherman was an excellent officer, although some of his actions in the South might qualify as war crimes today (his role in our treatment of the American Indians probably would). Of course, he also helped end a terrible war that was begun in order to protect and propagate an economic system based on the subjugation of millions. Fierce Patriot, a new biography of Sherman, has just been published and I plan to learn more about him by reading it.

One last thing: That scary burning of Atlanta depicted in Gone With the Wind wasn’t Sherman’s doing. It was Confederate General John Bell Hood who ordered the burning of both public buildings and military supplies on the night of September 1st, as his troops and some residents left the city.

Sherman’s army occupied Atlanta on September 2nd. All remaining civilians were ordered to evacuate. Later, on November 15, when Sherman moved on toward Savannah, he ordered the city’s remaining war resources, including a train depot, to be burned. According to a site called About North Georgia (probably not a regular purveyor of Yankee propaganda), Sherman’s burning of Atlanta was “significantly less than Hood’s Burning of Atlanta”.

Górecki on the Turnpike, Not the Turntable

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While leisurely gliding home on the New Jersey Turnpike this rainy afternoon, I gave up on the rock album in the CD player and tried the radio. Listener-sponsored, free-format rock? I don’t think so. Classic rock? Definitely not. Fortunately, Columbia University’s WKCR was playing something beautiful. It was a slow-moving work featuring a soprano and orchestra. If I’d heard the piece before, I didn’t remember what it was.

After 20 minutes or so, a young woman with very precise diction softly announced that we had been listening to Henryk Górecki’s Symphony No. 3, Opus 36, the Symphony of Sorrowful Songs. The orchestra was the London Sinfonietta and the soprano was Dawn Upshaw.

When I got home, Wikipedia kindly revealed that Henryk Górecki was a 20th century Polish composer. He wrote the piece in 1977, but neither he nor it became famous until 1992 when the very recording I’d heard was released. The album went to the top of the classical charts and has now sold more than one million copies, “vastly exceeding the expected lifetime sales of a typical symphonic recording by a 20th-century composer”.

Regarding its surprising commercial success, Gorecki once said: “Perhaps people find something they need in this piece of music…. Somehow I hit the right note, something they were missing. Something somewhere had been lost to them”.

One interesting aspect of this story is that, although Polish critics considered it a masterpiece, Gorecki’s Third Symphony didn’t fare well at all when it was first heard outside Poland, at least partly because it was a departure from his earlier dissonant compositions:

During the late 1970s and early 1980s, recordings and performances of the work were widely criticised by the press outside Poland.The symphony drew hostility from critics who felt that Górecki had moved too far away from the established avant-garde style…The world première … was reviewed by six western critics, all of them harshly dismissive. [One wrote] that the symphony “drags through three old folk melodies (and nothing else) for an endless 55 minutes”. Górecki himself recalled that, at the premiere, he sat next to a “prominent French musician” (… probably Pierre Boulez), who, after hearing the twenty-one repetitions of an A-major chord at the end of the symphony, loudly exclaimed “Merde!”

Nevertheless, the 1992 recording caught fire and may now be “the best selling contemporary classical record of all time”. (Maybe I’ll even buy a copy for cruising the Turnpike.) Since this is the age of Spotify and YouTube, however, a base financial transaction is no longer necessary in order to hear great music in the comfort of your own home:

A final note from Wikipedia: The popular success of the Symphony of Sorrowful Songs “has not generated similar interest in Górecki’s other works”. Thus, even in the world of contemporary classical music, it is possible to be a one-hit wonder.

Henryk Górecki died in 2010 at the age of 76 in Katowice, Silesia, Poland.

Final Words on Israel, Gaza, the West Bank and America

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Not being a Muslim or a Jew, I don’t feel any special kinship with the Palestinians or the Israelis. And since I’m not a Christian either, I don’t have any special interest in the so-called “Holy Land”.

Yet I can’t remember being this disturbed by a national or international event since the 2000 Presidential election fiasco and our subsequent fantasy-based invasion of Iraq.

I didn’t mention 9/11. I was in Lower Manhattan that morning and soon thereafter, but that astounding, horrible event didn’t traumatize me as much as the immense fuck-up and scandalous political-judicial decisions that gave us President George W. Bush, and the evil way in which Bush and bastards like Cheney and Rumsfeld used 9/11 to justify their criminal behavior (which, of course, led to much more death and destruction in Iraq than occurred earlier in New York City).

Men (of course it’s almost always us) insist on killing innocent people. 9/11 was another example of that. There were fanatics and ideologues who claimed it was justified, but they were easy to ignore. For some reason, I’m finding it very difficult to ignore what the Israeli government is doing to the Palestinians. It’s so patently wrong, yet so many apparently reasonable people claim it’s completely justified (blind allegiance will have that effect). In addition, writing this blog and trying to be accurate has made me read more about the situation, and the more I read, the angrier I get.

So, regarding accuracy: A few days ago, I cited a United Nations report that said there was an Israeli airstrike on June 11, before the three teenagers were kidnapped, which was followed by someone in Gaza firing rockets at Israel. I’ve since seen another account here that says the rockets were fired before the airstrike. I also cited a Times of Israel article stating that Hamas launched its first barrage of rockets since 2012 on June 30, apparently in retaliation for another Israel airstrike. That implies that the rockets fired earlier in June weren’t fired by Hamas. It’s been pointed out, however, that there are non-Hamas factions in Gaza that sometimes fire rockets (and that Hamas has sometimes stopped them from doing so). The obvious moral here is that it’s often unclear who is doing what in this conflict and who did it first (“truth is the first casualty of war”).

Nevertheless, who first attacked by airstrike or rocket isn’t the main issue. The much bigger story, which many of Israel’s defenders fail to understand or accept, is that Israel provoked this latest round of fighting.

Therefore, as befits an enterprise that Alexa currently ranks as the 13,378,330th most-visited website in the world, I’ll now express my final thoughts on Israel, Gaza and the West Bank, mainly by quoting people who write better and are better informed. Let’s all hope the ceasefire announced last night becomes permanent. (After adding that last sentence just now, I checked and see that last night’s planned 72-hour ceasefire has already been broken.)

Last week, Henry Siegman, a former national director of the American Jewish Congress, published an article called, simply enough, “Israel Provoked This War”.

There seems to be near-universal agreement in the United States with President Barack Obama’s observation that Israel, like every other country, has the right and obligation to defend its citizens from threats directed at them from beyond its borders. But this anodyne statement does not begin to address the political and moral issues raised by Israel’s bombings and land invasion of Gaza: [1] who violated the cease-fire agreement that was in place since November 2012 and [2] whether Israel’s civilian population could have been protected by nonviolent means that would not have placed Gaza’s civilian population at risk.

Siegman quotes a piece by Nathan Thrall, an analyst at the non-profit International Crisis Group, who wrote that:

The current escalation in Gaza is a direct result of the choice by Israel and the West to obstruct the implementation of the April 2014 Palestinian reconciliation agreement [between Hamas and the Palestine Liberation Organization]….Israel immediately sought to undermine the reconciliation agreement by preventing Hamas leaders and Gaza residents from obtaining the two most essential benefits of the deal: the payment of salaries to 43,000 civil servants who worked for the Hamas government and continue to administer Gaza…, and the easing of the suffocating border closures imposed by Israel and Egypt… For many Gazans, and not just Hamas supporters, it’s worth risking more bombardment and now the ground incursion, for a chance to change that unacceptable status quo. A cease-fire that fails to resolve the salary crisis and open Gaza’s border with Egypt will not last.

Siegman also quotes Yitzhak Laor, a writer for Haaretz. Here’s how Laor begins his article:

In the midst of events, with all the TV commotion enveloping the current crisis, one tends to forget the crux of the matter, the continuous chain linking it to previous steps – the foiling of negotiations with the Palestinians, refusal to release prisoners as agreed upon, incitement against their unity government and the expansion of settlements. All of these are part of [Israel’s] right-wing government’s plan to destroy any political entity in the occupied territories, turning the Palestinian people, at best, into a fragmented, marginalized people deprived of their rights.

Siegman concludes that the U.S. needs to exert more pressure on Israel, because the present Israeli government has no interest in a real two-state solution. Halting military aid to Israel would be a great start, of course, rather than resupplying Israel’s military with ammunition, as we shamefully did this week.

More recently, Rashid Khalidi, a professor at Columbia and a former adviser to the Palestinians, writing for The New Yorker called attention to Prime Minister Netanyahu’s statement at a press conference in Tel Aviv. Netanyahu said:

“I think the Israeli people understand now what I always say: that there cannot be a situation, under any agreement, in which we relinquish security control of the territory west of the River Jordan.”

Khalidi concludes that:

What is going on in Palestine today is not really about Hamas. It is not about rockets. It is not about “human shields” or terrorism or tunnels. It is about Israel’s permanent control over Palestinian land and Palestinian lives. That is what Netanyahu is really saying, and that is what he now admits he has “always” talked about. It is about an unswerving, decades-long Israeli policy of denying Palestine self-determination, freedom and sovereignty.

What Israel is doing in Gaza now is collective punishment. It is punishment for Gaza’s refusal to be a docile ghetto. It is punishment for the gall of Palestinians in unifying, and of Hamas and other factions in responding to Israel’s siege and its provocations with resistance, armed or otherwise, after Israel repeatedly reacted to unarmed protest with crushing force….

As Netanyahu’s own words show, … Israel will accept nothing short of the acquiescence of Palestinians to their own subordination. It will accept only a Palestinian “state” that is stripped of all the attributes of a real state: control over security, borders, airspace, maritime limits, contiguity, and, therefore, sovereignty. The twenty-three-year charade of the “peace process” has shown that this is all Israel is offering, with the full approval of Washington. Whenever the Palestinians have resisted that pathetic fate (as any nation would), Israel has punished them for their insolence.

On a more optimistic note, William Saletan sees promise in a plan to demilitarize Gaza in exchange for $50 billion in international aid. That’s 30 times Gaza’s gross domestic product. The demilitarization would be monitored by neutral observers. Whether either side would accept a plan like that is an excellent question.

My own conclusion is that Israel is reasonably satisfied with the status quo, even though it occasionally requires “mowing the grass” in Gaza, as Israeli pundits and officials often put it. The Israelis occasionally provoke a violent response from somebody in Gaza, as they did this time by conducting an extremely aggressive search for those kidnappers, and then use that violent response as justification for open warfare, all the while claiming self-defense.

Israel has occupied Gaza for close to 50 years, and so long as American politicians support the status quo, the situation in Gaza probably won’t change very much. Meanwhile, the Palestinians of the West Bank, who met Israel’s demands to renounce violence and acknowledge Israel’s right to exist, will continue to lose ground to Israeli settlers. For a startling look at how many Israeli settlements have been built in the West Bank on land that once belonged to the Palestinians, you can visit this page operated by Americans for Peace Now.

Peace out, as they say.