Existential Forensics

Narrowly averted air disaster?

Or Propaganda Terror Staged by Existential Criminals.

ITEM S* => Abdulmutallab.<= 23 yoa …alleged attempt TO BLOW UP NWA Flight 253

Timing: 12.25.’09 (+7 days = 1.1.10) Spanning Christmas and New Years by terror

Strategic significance: Yemen  foreign and domestic threat (suddenly descends)

Symbolism: Father previously denounced son to FBI (big propaganda issue; as if to protect family name from jihad shame/retaliation, implying advance knowledge; echoing Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol plot) The family is linked to the UK.

Accomplices: a. escorted onto plane w/o passport at Amsterdam by well dressed man.
b. man reportedly videotaped entire flight, including flame scene. c. second man seen taken from Detroit airport in handcuffs; FBI denies arresting a second man.

Communicability: the “underwear bomber” touch. (cf. metaphysical metaphor*)

The impact of this event on the news cycles, bridging the duration from Christmas to New Years; plus its enormous – and unchallenged -- strategic significance, and other considerations; justifies the conclusion it is a staged propaganda stunt, planned and executed down to the last meticulous detail. A Rogue Sting of possible accomplices involved? or a Roguestein operation pulled on inner adversarial factions inside counter-terrorism agencies.

More Why? of it -- PIC-ing up double talk

W H Y ? - again



This single word was the Sunday BPSB headline of the story of anthropology Professor Richard Antoun’s death at the hands of 46 yr. old Saudi national BU graduate student, Abdulsalam Al-Zahrani. Antoun was Al-Zahrani’s thesis advisor, and was fatally stabbed 30 minutes after Al Zahrani had learned he could not transfer into the Philosophy Interpretation and Culture (PIC) program. Considering his thesis as well as symbolic nature of his act falls squarely in this domain, PIC is called upon to PIC it’s own brains in this case. The following begins to explain why “WHY? is owed. (Not to perpetuate responsibility)

****

“Why?”, headlined in large case letters without grammar (“unanswered questions” is printed below) can pose different questions, pertaining to cause, responsibility, or guilt (who can be blamed for what and punished).

These are not the same, as illustrated, for instance, by rip-tide undertow drowning. The cause is lungs filled with water due to inability to swim to shore; responsibility falls on the circumstances that set up the cause; and guilt falls on whoever failed to take proper precautions (not a question that arises if responsibility falls on an unpreventable ‘act of God’, e.g., muscle cramp).

In the case of Antoun’s death, stabbing with a 6’ kitchen knife is taken as reported cause. Assuming this is confirmed by forensic detail, the question of responsibility becomes: Why did Al Zahrani turned such a deliberate, sustained, violent attack on Antoun? Deliberate, because the knife was apparently brought for that purpose in case his transfer request was denied, which it was. This brings PIC into the circumstances responsible. If the transfer had gone through, Antoun would be alive – though this might be left among “unanswered questions” awaiting Al-Zahrani’s testimony. And if that were the case, the factor of ethnic-religious difference (Muslim vs. Jewish convert) which his thesis title evokes (“Sacred Voice, Profane Sight: The Senses, Cosmos, and Epistemology in Early Arabic Culture) falls among considerations of responsibility. Professor and student overlapped academic interests at: comparative religions; symbol systems; live-in knowledge of Mid East countries, politics, moral codes, mentality. The term “culture war” is used by some religious conservatives for what America is waging against Muslims. “Attack Iran with TV” urges Michael Ledeen of the American Enterprise Institute. It seems likely Al-Zahrani was driven to sustained maniacal, unstoppable, unremitting stabbing to act out a reversal of everything perceived as distinguishing Good from Evil. The liberal America Antoun represented would be identified with the polymorphously perverse television culture: Profane Sight. If his thesis was to bring the Sacred Voice of original Arab culture, perhaps through tonalities of its spoken language, and this was being silenced, the circumstances contain this as factor in assessing responsibility.

With this comes the question of guilty. Were circumstances set up so that this ethnic-religious conflict ostensibly responsible for Antoun’s death (assuming it was symbolic, not personal, as above) would inevitably break out? And here we can rule out ‘deliberately’, I think; it is not impossible, but surely unreasonable to seriously suppose there was a calculated plan to kill Antoun. But guilt-without-intent, say by reasonable planning deficit (“don’t turn stallions out in the same pasture” is barn rules), invokes the specter of liability issues. It is at this point that unanswered questions must be pressed.

It is a known fact that the U.S. is acting in concert with Israel in the Mid East to exercise cultural control. This makes the question of who speaks with sacred voice theological – and metaphysical. The sound of Allah’s name would match the sacral writing of “G-d” for “God” by some Jewish authors. If Al-Zahrani was called upon to state and defend his thesis in discourse that muted or glossed the deep spiritual distinction he was advancing, essentially silencing the sacred by the profane, he would be put in the position of one whose religious and scholarly identity would be drawn out, encouraged; then destroyed. Antoun’s existential/philosophical agenda was honorably known far and wide as mutual respect, tolerance, understanding, peace. Surely no guilt could be attached to that in itself. But in context it would be seen as duplicitous -- profane appearance silencing sacred sounds. Perhaps no one, no agency, exists whose responsibility is to foresee violent outbreaks. This one is so on-the-crease of many intersecting lines of conflict, however, it leaves the question of guilt still hanging, calling for answer to “Why?” that goes to theology and metaphysics.

-Sid Thomas, Associate Professor of Philosophy, emeritus
SUNY Binghamton

Black is the Ace of Spades

Black
is the Marriage of Opposites

Aim here:
To connect: (H1N1 Vax assault /Obamanazi surge speech) / e*1/ (NY Times columnist David Brooks on Hanukkah 12.11.09 / Antoun stabbed by Al Zahrani 12.4.09)

e*1 connects by carrying over the objective common factor in S*1 ( -/- ) to S*2(-/- ), this factor being irrational acts undertaken to combat cocked up enemies threatening our blood, soldiers abroad, virus shield at home (paranoid hypochondriacal fixation on poison-blood fantasy, aki Hitler’s Germany before WWII in which “the Jews” were projectively blamed for causing it). Obama is required to reverse the intent of Norway’s most prized international gift to wage unjust war for false peace. A celestial marriage of opposed forces momentarily spiraled visibly in its night sky, as if circling a black hole point of laser-radiation emitted. Metaphysical analysis consistent with known laws of physics would allow for this to be a manifestation, above, of the violent, irreconcilable psychic conflicts and anguish, below.

The stabbing of Professor Antoun in the circumstances first reported is another token of Light/Dark//Holy/Evil forces colliding with blood letting. It is The Blood – not signified in shootings -- and Why It Is Shed -- that sacralizes these violent contradictory 12.12.09 conjunctions. “Some Say I’ve got the blood of the lamb in my voice,” Bob Dylan sings, and I hear it. But tokens of wrongful unity, translated into contradictory texts for war, may threaten a psychic spiralic contraction, blasting earth with a Blackness.

Two texts from the NY Times uncannily elaborate these visuals. One is David Brook’s “The Hanukkah Story”, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/11/opinion/11brooks.html?scp=2&sq=David%20Brooks&st=cse
evoking overlay of Jewish and Christian December ‘holiday’ (ex: holy day) season, faint-praising Manachem Begin (tacitly) and the Maccabbees for “struggles that saved a people,” but “are dappled with tragic irony, complexity and unattractive choices.” The lesson of Hanukkah is not the lamp miracle of faithful supply which he says rabbis added “to give God at least a bit part in the proceedings.” This is the tough side of things. Brooks is here to tell us that “Hanukkah is the most adult of holidays. It commemorates an event in which the good guys did horrible things, and the bad guys did good things and in which everybody is flummoxed (Reagan word, isn’t it?) by insoluble conflicts that remain with us today. It’s a holiday that accurtely reflects how politics is, how history is, how life is.” So says DB. But I call this snake brain Jewish metaphysics, thankfully not the mindset of most who are smeared by his corrupted insouciance. The problem with evoking ultimate distinctions between blood-sealed sacrifices predicated on good and evil, right and wrong, then yanking any grounding in reality out from under these distinctions, is that it leaves one with nothing. It negates what it affirms: some distinctions make an ultimate difference, but both are a part of life, ultimately neither is better than the other. This is not a coherent rational position. It manifests the same blatant self-evident self-contradiction in asserting “There is more that one One True God.” (Brooks mentions that “the Jews had their one central idea: the idea of one true God.” But that is what Muslims call Allah.)

Self evident though it be, this point is routinely and deliberately ignored, therefore requiring reiteration. The consequence of not is predicating on a self-contradiction motivated by inclusive gee0hearted illusion. The One True God cannot be both the one worshipped by Muslims called Allah and that worshipped by the 1500 -1000 b.c Hebrews called YHWH/Elohim.

If the double talk itself was what Al-Zahrani was stabbing, then it perpetuates the threat of future killings not to understand that fact and cover that up. Yet that is what is under way by the failure to relate the stabbing to the thesis content. The double talk would consist not only in the contradiction of One True God used of two different objects, but in the contradiction between two projected absolute distinctions between Good and Evil or right and wrong behavior, as well. It is like saying “There are white, cows whose milk nourishes, and black whose milk poisons and you must make a choice in the dead of night.” Since at night all cows are black, the distinction is worthless. If you are alive when morning comes, you chose rightly; if you are not, the fact that you chose wrong would be of no possible concern except to those living.

The second article published by the NY Times as news analysis by author Scott Shane http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/12/us/12assess.html “New Cases Test Optimism on Extremism by U.S. Muslims". Content snippet: “The rampage in Fort Hood, Tex., and the account of Virginia men who went to Pakistan challenge the idea that U.S. Muslims are less vulnerable to radicalization than those in Europe.” Besides these, Shane cites the arrest of Afghanistan born Najibullah Zazi, David Coleman Headley of Pakistan-American descent living in Chicago, Bryant Neal Vinas, Muslim convert from Long Island, Somali-Americans from Minnesota. Taken all together, these perhaps count as an incipient up rising – except imminent threat seemed far off in space and time, if it existed at all. Most mind boggling was Shane’s addendum: “And there were cases of would-be terrorists who plotted attacks in Texas, Illinois and North Carolina with conspirators who turned out to be F.B.I informants.” In other words, sting operations. Maybe all were stings, or otherwise staged. Sting, the guitarist, performed in a Catholic church last Sunday. Notable by its absence was any mention of Binghamton’s slaying by a Saudi national the previous week. Maybe it lay outside the type of homegrown Islamic radical he was profiling, but there may well have been another reason for omitting it. If Al-Zahrani act is taken as stabbing the double-talk itself, a transcendental symbolic effort to end the system of BAIT / SWITCH – FROM program promising advancement according to scholarly merit in graduate work, TO a program that negated the full expression of positive religious force of his work, then Antoun would not be killed for the kind of individual he was, but as token/apotheosis of BAIT/ SWITCH duplicity screwing up not just his life but all humanity. Both are victims of Blackness manifesting at a metaphysical crease in reality their lives lay on either side of, forced into survival relations against one another by conflict of U.S.-Israeli vs Arabic-Muslim interests abroad, reflected here. Shane notes this dynamic: “A few analysts, in fact, argue that Mr. Obama’s decision to send more troops to Afghanistan—intended to prevent a terrorist haven there—could backfire.” Or blowback, as blackness striking. That Blackness could be understood as a Force entering the bloodstream, innervating muscle spasms of mindless involuntary slashing. That is how the hypothesis would explain the shift from academic into frenzied knife slayer – psychic invasion by transpersonal, sacred historical force. To whatever extent the U.S.-Israeli side is objectively wrong, to that extent the force in Al-Zahrani’s arm is empowered. It is not to be supposed that is something those charged with University administration are eager to see play out. That would be one more reason why Binghamton’s story is avoided in the MSM like the plague.

Speaking of which, and returning to the connection between H1N1 virus and jihadists, the Shane’s article laments: “with the alarming account of five young Virginia men who went to Pakistan seeking jihad , the notion that the United States has some immunity against homegrown terrorists is coming under new scrutiny.” The metaphor had to be chosen for its metaphysics: though blithely imagining ourselves previously healthy, immunity to Swine flu/Muslim extremist attack now must be discarded as myth (double gasp for breath).

"WHY?" -- Al Zahrani

In the interest of truth otherwise untold, I have written out “Why?” as clearly as I can see and state the answer..

1. Saudi national origin is not a major factor in what happened, unless something happened in the 30 minutes between seeing Price and stabbing Antoun (such as a third person). He may be presumed to have brought the knife with the purpose of using it if his transfer request was rejected. (Unlikely that he got it on campus)

2. The fact that Al-Zahrani turned on Antoun after gaining no relief from his personal situation from PIC indicates he (Antoun) represented the antithesis to Al-Zahrani’s work he was stuck with. The ‘sticking points’ would likely turn on Antoun’s interfaith peace activism, scheduled for a Sunday meeting;, conjoining Muslim, Jewish, Christian discussion of public holy day observances; and on Antoun’s role as thesis advisor, critic of its content. Non-academic people don’t understand how much the Ph.D. thesis intellectually defines its author, specifically titled in order to do so.

3. Al Zahrani’s thesis (reportedly) is “Sacred Voice, Profane Sight: The Senses, Cosmology, and Epistemology in Early Arabic Cculture.” The title alone lends it profound importance. Roughly translated, it suggests the concept that human voice sound, as in ullulation, singing, prayer, cursing, ordinary talk etc. shapes the mentality of nomads in the vast, mostly empty Saudi desert as sacred way of knowing. Sounds from outside reach tiny fetal eardrums in utero, retained by amygdalan memory it is now known, blending with hearth-earth sound after birth. Research into Arabiana, from the DNA to Mecca. By contrast, “profane sight” brings body appearance, narcissism, TV culture. Al Zahrani rage could be understood as directed against the profane for the sake of the sacred, as in the movie Taxi Driver when DeNiro's character gets sick of the street trash and starts shooting it up.

4. The cognitive dissonance of sacred sound suffusing profane sight bombarded planetary human consciousness through the contradiction of Obama accepting Norway’s Nobel Peace prize making a war speech. He delivered a double-reverse conjunction: the drone war + 30,000 fresh troops is neither a “just war” – will any Catholic say? -- nor an “imperative of peace” – will any Zionist say? Obama, speaking as from a black hole radiating blue spiral light, ‘double blacks’ these old world, pre-enlightened religious world views against the Muslim. Sound of blackness resonating in Al Zahrani piercing the bone matter where red blood cells form around nuclei, discarded after they enter the flow.

For Richard Antoun, colleague

In-depth background supporting Reversal Analysis (Man of peace representing war)

Too much was asked of the little bit of soul infused into Harpur College by the 60’s to sustain in the rapidly expanding State University of New York at Binghamton as a feeling-essence. Soul was always on the scarce side at Harpur College.

It’s as if the expansion and up-scaling of the physical facilities; university academic standing and outreach; sports programs; … had inflated a huge balloon with “BINGHAMTON UNIVERSITY” proudly written on its side with a promise, a whiff of something special inside that “used to be there”, maybe still is, if you know how to find it. Only to discover many privately hiding dashed hopes and dreams – though many finding these completed. Life on campus --the taste, feel, resonance of its movements; its past; the seasonal cycles along the river; intellectual rhythms – becomes a container of shared student-faculty-staff larger life under its name, ever presenting fresh, new, singular precious opportunities and responsibility to live up to them, each year, semester, class, classroom, lecture. My heart is with those who meet these today, Monday, Dec. 7, Pearl Harbor day, following Richard Antoun’s stabbing last Friday.

The Soul bequeathed by anti-Vietnam war 60’s freedom front created Harpur’s unique style of multicultural unity-in-diversity, climaxed by campus uprising against unauthorized military recruitment in ’69. Afterward, the moral superiority of the point of view opposed to Nixon-Republican killing fields provided oxygen* for expanded international (but undeviatingly Israeli-centric) cultural discourse. The jewel among New York State graduate schools, set on a hill overlooking the Susquehanna River, drawing a large number of Jewish students from downstate escaping the city; faculty of finest quality and recognitions.

It would be American New York liberalism at its best. And Richard Antoun would be among its finest representatives.

Against this background, what Al-Zahrani stabbed was the entire position of consciousness surviving in Antoun’s soul. His life work would be taken in memorium as redemptive apotheosis of on-campus international multicultural liberalism. In the narrative of popular understanding, the essential inner goodness of that life and its history will be glaringly contrasted with the violent, deranged Muslim fanatic. In Jungian terms, the psychodynamics is that of a one-sided conscious development getting stabbed by its dark, other side. In Freudian terms, stabbing would be the symbolic act through which the repressed returned.

The spirit of multicultural inclusiveness, unity-in-diversity of BINGHAMTON UNIVERSITY was asked to contain irreconcilable differences. Again, in Jungian terms, this would be a marriage of opposites, as in a contradictory conjunction. In Freudian terms, conflict resulting from One True (Father) God Oedipal super-ego complex, Muslim vs. Jewish, punishing themselves through each other.

What makes the differences irreconcilable is the contradiction between the text each uses for “God” – THE ONE TRUE -- which they agree on – and the token: their use of the name for different things. Two different and opposed things cannot both be THE ONE TRUE God. This is self evident. This self evident contradiction is glossed over by the self-validating predicate, THE ONE TRUE.. There cannot be two of these. THE TWO ONE TRUE GODs is a logical impossibility. This confers a sense of logical certainty to whatever it is taken to describe, by the principle that the negation of a self-contradiction is necessarily true (Aristotle). (Nec(~(p. ~p))) The gap in grammar between predicate and subject, allowing this logical construct to be predicable of Allah referred to by the Prophet, and Yhwh/Elohim referred to in the Old Testament Pentateuch, is psychosemiotic equivalent to the gap between text and token in sign use. “GOD” can be used in this self-contradictory way, as if two sides good-heartedly agreed to share logical self-condemnation by/through the Other.
"Mine is; your's isn't" is their respective actual text.

Perhaps this self-evident logical impasse might have been outgrown or culturally resolved without stabbing, if the U.S. had not made war in the Middle East. As it is, BU is asked to resolve differences, here, over which blood is shed, abroad. Binghamton earlier experienced the blowback of the Kosovo-Serbia war in a street brawl. Now, apparently, Harpur is hit by blowback of sectarian Muslim Saudi-Jordan conflicts in its offices. All in all, the philosophical bent of Antoun’s work appears aimed at reconciling just those differences based on religious fundamentalism of all sorts. This program can only succeed, however, if the notion of THE ONE TRUE GOD is stricken from public political discourse. As long as it is around, its will reproduce the very irreconcilable logical differences it’s use is intended to overcome.

Within Biblical religion, the antidote to this antinomial ONE TRUE GOD sign –use is the TRINITY, grounded in the Incarnation. It is impossible to over-estimate the difference this makes metaphysically. “God” no longer stands for something “out there” – the Creator over against the Creature; but something which, of its own initiative, has overcome the gap between Creator and Creature in some whose “in here” is Christian.