“This is as far as possible from a popular revolution in Syria. Who can deny this is a US-run proxy war?” Ali Abunimah tweeted a week ago.

Yes, I can picture John McCain, George Soros, and Gene Sharp, huddled in the basement of the White House, planning attacks against Syrian government forces and handling the logistics of weapon transfers to America’s mercenary fighters in the Al Nasra Front. It is a front after all, and we all know who lurks behind these kinds of fronts: the CIA.

How can we be sure this is not a popular revolution? “Because popular revolutions aren’t trained by the CIA in Jordan.”

Indeed. An armed uprising instigated by Syria and Iran’s enemies in Jordan, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Israel, and the United States, would be nothing more than a proxy war if this was where the opposition to Assad had actually first coalesced. But it didn’t — and Abunimah knows as much; he’s just decided that with the war having become so ugly and reasons for hope so few, it’s easier to go back to singing straight from the old anti-imperialist songbook.

Meanwhile, the BBC provides more fodder to those who decry this “proxy war“:

Over the past few months the Americans – without being obliged to announce any policy changes involving military commitments – have apparently tipped the wink to their regional allies, mainly Qatar, Turkey and Saudi Arabia, to step up the quantity and quality of arms supplies to the rebels.

At the same time, the Americans are reported to be involved in helping train supposedly moderate Free Syrian Army (FSA) elements in Jordan and sending them across the border into southern Syria, where the rebels, enjoying better anti-air and anti-armour weapons than before, have begun to make gains that are being compared to their advances in the far north.

With western support being made contingent on loyalty to the FSA and the opposition National Coalition, this has clearly put pressure on the Nusra Front and other jihadi groups.

Many of their followers are believed to have joined up opportunistically because the front had more resources and experience than the other groups.

With that trend now apparently starting to reverse and more resources being routed through the “moderate” groups, al-Qaeda may have judged it timely to remind the jihadists where their loyalties and objectives lie, lest they be lured away.

Knowing that the west is nervous about providing the Free Syrian Army and other “mainstream” rebel groups with serious, balance-tilting weaponry for fear that it may fall into the hands of the radicals, al-Qaeda may have decided deliberately to contaminate the entire opposition by association, and deter western arms to the moderates, in order to preserve the jihadis’ ascendancy on the ground.

The nascent struggle between radicals and others in the opposition is bound to become more acute as regime change moves closer to reality, and if unresolved, will intensify further after it happens, possibly for a long time.

The problem with the concept of a proxy war is that it implies that most of the men with guns and heavier weapons fighting Assad forces are serving as agents of foreign powers — that they are as the Syrian government insists, mercenaries and terrorists.

The reality is that the outside powers, much as they would like to control what happens in Syria, are acutely aware that supplying weapons and determining how they get used are two very different things. Moreover, the high degree of pragmatism among Syria’s fighters means that selective support — arming so-called “moderates” — will not simply have the desired effect of strengthening the “good guys” and weakening the “bad guys.” Instead, it is fueling a struggle within the opposition.

Some conspiracy theorists may argue that this is a divide-and-rule strategy designed to prolong Assad’s rule. I am more inclined to believe that it reflects the simplistic political calculations of politicians in the U.S. and elsewhere whose primary concern is that they neither look impotent nor be accused of supporting terrorism.

As for the ideological purists who will only support a revolution untainted by outside support, the privilege of being able to define a just cause in this way only seems to belong to those who have the luxury of being outside the conflict.

The scene above, which comes from Steven Spielberg’s Munich, depicts the murder of Wael Zuaiter, a Palestinian intellectual and representative of Fatah who was not known to have any connections to terrorism. He was shot in Rome by Israeli secret service agents on October 16, 1972, in revenge for the killing of 11 Israeli athletes and coaches by Palestinian members of Black September during the Olympic Games six weeks earlier.

Spielberg goes to some length to humanize Zuaiter’s murder. The Mossad agents are portrayed as experiencing ambivalence about killing an unarmed man in cold blood. They pause before shooting him several times in the chest.

But the evidence suggests the killing was much more clinical, including a shot to the head.

Thus began Operation Wrath of God whose goal was not only to avenge the deaths of Israel’s athletes but to terrorize Palestinian militants. The campaign continued for twenty years involving shootings and bombings, killing intended targets and some mistaken, along with innocent bystanders, as Mossad fought terrorism with terrorism.

The problem with sanctioning a policy of assassination is that assassins are murderers and governments that authorize murder are flirting with tyranny. Democracy can’t be sustained if those in power believe they can suspend the rule of law whenever it seems convenient.

When President Obama authorizes a drone strike in Pakistan, Yemen, or anywhere else, he is ordering members of the CIA to engage in murder. The targets might not be as transparently unthreatening as was Wael Zuaiter and the method of killing might be so obviously murder as is a bullet to the head at point-blank range. Indeed, this is what makes drone warfare a salable policy: the fact that rather than having the appearance of cold-blooded killing, it looks like military operations carried out on the battlefield — even though these attacks are taking place in locations where the United States is not at war. There are no bullet-ridden bodies, no autopsies, no police investigations, no agents on the run or in prison, and no trials.

And even now, when the use of drones is being widely questioned and a New York Times reporter can write in a matter of way that for this administration “killing is more convenient than capture,” there is little prospect that Obama’s authorization of murder will face legal scrutiny. Instead, the CIA is in the process of quietly handing over to the Pentagon responsibility for drone operations.

Questions about whether Obama’s kill list and the deaths of more than 3,000 people involve any kind of criminality will never be addressed and America can retain its sense of innocence with the soothing thought that whatever was done, was done in order to save precious American lives.

“There is no such thing as ‘Islamophobia.’ This is a term of propaganda designed to protect Islam from the forces of secularism by conflating all criticism of it with racism and xenophobia.” — Sam Harris in an email exchange with Glenn Greenwald.

Let’s unpack that statement.

To establish whether there is indeed no such thing as Islamophobia, we’ll need a reasonably uncontroversial definition of the term.

The etymology is transparent and so a literal interpretation seems sufficient, which is to say, Islamophobia is an irrational fear of Islam.

Those who say that there is such a thing as Islamophobia would also say that the fear of Islam which it embodies also often expresses itself as hatred of Islam. Indeed, Harris himself is quite explicit in expressing hatred for Islamic doctrine. His concern, apparently, is that his hatred of Islam should not be confused for a hatred of Muslims:

Needless to say, there are people who hate Arabs, Somalis, and other immigrants from predominantly Muslim societies for racist reasons. But if you can’t distinguish that sort of blind bigotry from a hatred and concern for dangerous, divisive, and irrational ideas — like a belief in martyrdom, or a notion of male “honor” that entails the virtual enslavement of women and girls — you are doing real harm to our public conversation. Everything I have ever said about Islam refers to the content and consequences of its doctrine.

So, Harris is straightforward is saying that he hates Islamic doctrine, but he doesn’t hate Muslims. And since I don’t think he would regard it as misrepresentation to suggest that he draws no distinction between Islamic doctrine and Islam, it’s reasonable to conclude that he hates Islam.

Presumably, when Harris says there is no such thing as Islamophobia, he is not denying that some people hate Islam — he is denying that this hatred is irrational.

For those of us who think that there really is such a thing as Islamophobia, Pastor Terry Jones serves as a classic example of its expression. Like Sam Harris, Jones claims he hates Islam but bears no animosity towards Muslims — both employ the popular evangelical gambit: hate the sin, love the sinner.

Here’s Jones’ latest message pressing a common theme among those accused of being Islamophobic: their fear that Muslims are taking over America.

This sounds like Islamophobia to me, but maybe I’m not as rational as Harris.

But how rational is he? In what he presents as a rational approach to airport security, he says: “We should profile Muslims, or anyone who looks like he or she could conceivably be Muslim”.

David Headley, a Pakistani-American convicted of helping plan the 2008 Mumbai attacks; Ziad Jarrah, hijacker-pilot of United Airlines Flight 93 on September 11, 2001; Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the so-called 'underwear bomber, arrested on December 25, 2009.

Dr. Ferhan Asghar at a Muslim center in West Chester, Ohio, with his wife, Pakeeza, and daughters Zara, left, and Emaan.

If, in accordance with Harris’ recommendation, TSA officers want to start profiling Muslims, it’s easy to see which of the above individuals will face closer scrutiny: the ones who “look like Muslims.” And the result will be no less absurd than searches conducted on eighty-year-old grandmothers.

Profiling doesn’t have to be racist (though it most often is) — it’s just plain stupid. How does a screening process get streamlined and made more efficient by narrowing the range of suspects to 1.5 billion individuals?

“Imagine how fatuous it would be to fight a war against the IRA and yet refuse to profile the Irish? And yet this is how we seem to be fighting our war against Islamic terrorism.”

And what do “the Irish” look like Mr Rationality? Plenty of the IRA’s members were British citizens and plenty of their supporters were Americans.

Which brings me to what bugs me most about Harris: he postures with the gravitas of a learned intellectual and yet when you strip away the über-rational styling, he can at times sound about as smart as Terry Jones.

The Associated Press has taken the bold move of proscribing the use of “illegal immigrant” in an update to its widely used style guide.

Except in direct quotes essential to the story, use illegal only to refer to an action, not a person: illegal immigration, but not illegal immigrant.

Even though (if I had the power) I’d burn all style guides including AP’s — they provide an unnecessary regimentation to writers whose attention would be better focused simply on writing well rather than in conformity with the petty dictates of a style guide — I think AP’s decision is good if it has the effect of making journalists think more carefully about the implications of the language they use. So far, I have yet to see evidence of this effect.

“AP apparently now feels that there’s no acceptable way to refer to people who are in the country illegally. Neither ‘undocumented immigrant’ nor ‘unauthorized immigrant,’ is acceptable, and neither is anything else. Labels are flatly not allowed, despite the fact that we label people all the time. Kevin Drum is a blogger. Barack Obama is a politician. Etc.” writes Mother Jones blogger, Kevin Drum.

“Some argue that use of the word ‘illegal’ carries a negative connotation and suggests criminality,” writes MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell, as though it’s debatable whether the term really is loaded in this way.

Although AP appears to be rejecting all labels, it seems to me that it isn’t labels per se that are the issue — it is labels that people would generally not apply to themselves.

Why would someone who grew up in this country — as many such immigrants have — and has known no other home, call themselves ‘illegal’ or accept such being tarred with such a slur? “Illegal immigrant,” just like every other pejorative, is a finger and a scowl directed at someone else.

“Someone who crosses our borders illegally is here illegally,” Republican Sen. John McCain said. “You can call it whatever you want to, but it’s illegal.”

The head of Homeland Security has no objection to the use of the term “illegal immigrant.”

When speaking to reporters, it said: “I don’t really get caught up in the vocabulary wars. They are immigrants who are here illegally. It’s an illegal immigrant.” The entity in charge of immigration control also said: “They are immigrants who are here without documents. That’s an undocumented immigrant.” (I’m assuming Janet Napolitano won’t mind being referred to as “it” since it apparently doesn’t see anything dehumanizing in referring to people as, “It’s an illegal immigrant.”)

Although it may come as news to John McCain, a lot of people living in America illegally, actually crossed the border legally. They came into the U.S. through New York or some other point of entry, were fully documented with a valid passport and a valid entry visa but instead of leaving before their visa expired, they decided to stay. Many of these “illegals” are invisible. Invisible why? Because they are white.

“Illegal immigrant” is more than a technical description of someone’s status in the eyes of the immigration system. It’s code for unwelcome Latino. Even though the people being referred to harvest our food, care for our children, mow our lawns, wash our cars, clean our tables, and make up one of the most productive segments of American society — and even though in terms of their own ancestry which traces back thousands of years on this continent, these are to my eye the real Americans — these are people that much of white America still denigrates by branding them “illegal.”

AP’s move might not do much to elevate the status of people who deserve to be raised up rather than put down, but it’s a nudge in the right direction.

In a survey of the expanding understanding of non-human consciousness, John Jeremiah Sullivan concludes: If we put aside the self-awareness standard — and really, how arbitrary and arrogant is that, to take the attribute of consciousness we happen to possess over all creatures and set it atop the hierarchy, proclaiming it the very definition of consciousness (Georg Christoph Lichtenberg wrote something wise in his notebooks, to the effect of: only a man can draw a self-portrait, but only a man wants to) — it becomes possible to say at least the following: the overwhelming tendency of all this scientific work, of its results, has been toward more consciousness. More species having it, and species having more of it than assumed. This was made boldly clear when the “Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness” pointed out that those “neurological substrates” necessary for consciousness (whatever “consciousness” is) belong to “all mammals and birds, and many other creatures, including octopuses.” The animal kingdom is symphonic with mental activity, and of its millions of wavelengths, we’re born able to understand the minutest sliver. The least we can do is have a proper respect for our ignorance.

The philosopher Thomas Nagel wrote an essay in 1974 titled, “What Is It Like To Be a Bat?”, in which he put forward perhaps the least overweening, most useful definition of “animal consciousness” ever written, one that channels Spinoza’s phrase about “that nature belonging to him wherein he has his being.” Animal consciousness occurs, Nagel wrote, when “there is something that it is to be that organism — something it is like for the organism.” The strangeness of his syntax carries the genuine texture of the problem. We’ll probably never be able to step far enough outside of our species-reality to say much about what is going on with them, beyond saying how like or unlike us they are. Many things are conscious on the earth, and we are one, and our consciousness feels like this; one of the things it causes us to do is doubt the existence of the consciousness of the other millions of species. But it also allows us to imagine a time when we might stop doing that.

In Michel de Montaigne’s excellent passage on animal minds in the “Apology for Raymond Sebond”, in which he writes about playing with his cat and wonders who is playing with whom, there is a funny and deceptively profound final sentence: “We divert each other with monkey tricks,” he writes. Meaning he and the cat. Both human being and cat are compared with a third animal. They are monkeys to each other, strange animals to each other. (The man is all but literally a monkey to the cat.) All three creatures involved in Montaigne’s metaphor are revealed as points on a continuum, and none of them understands the others very well. This is what the study of animal consciousness can teach us, finally — that we possess an animal consciousness.

To ask whether animals have consciousness is often turned into a question about if and how they think.

That creatures as small as a fruit fly do indeed exhibit evidence of sophisticated cognitive processes is intriguing, but the question that engages philosophers and scientists less than what the brains of other creatures compute is the seemingly imponderable question of what they feel.

The experience of feeling — whether it is ones own feelings or the feelings of others — is the preeminent concern of humans in general when it comes to the question of consciousness.

Consider this imaginary scenario: You are about to undergo surgery and the anesthesiologist tells you that with newly approved drugs it is no longer necessary to be fully anesthetized and you have a choice of drugs.

One drug blocks feelings. Your body will become numb. You will feel neither pain nor fear but you will be able to talk to the surgeon and understand what she is telling you as the procedure progresses.

An alternative drug paralyses the body and blocks discursive thought but you will feel everything. You will feel pain and most likely terror but none of these feelings will provoke thoughts and neither within your mind nor through speech will you be able to articulate anything. Because your cognitive processes have been shut down in this way, once the drug has worn off you will have no decipherable memory of what occurred.

Basically, with one drug you will feel nothing but remember everything and with the other you will feel everything but remember nothing.

That’s not much of a choice since the preeminent concern of just about anyone receiving surgery is that during the procedure they will feel nothing.

I’m calling this an imaginary scenario, but the chances are that a lot of people who have faced surgery will have entertained this very idea: what if the effect of the anesthetic is merely that it causes paralysis and that you end up feeling everything?

That possibility isn’t just the product of fearful imagination; it’s a reality and it has a name: “anesthesia awareness” — something that an estimated one or two per thousand patients experience every year in the United States. And while it’s an issue that understandably concerns patients and doctors, it points to an underlying fact about the nature of consciousness.

What matters is what we feel. Our ability to reflect on our feelings, to have memories, engage in analysis, and even the experience of self-identity — all of this is secondary to the primary experience of feeling.

Needless to say, life demands that we cultivate the ability to marginalize our own feelings, to recognize their transience, understand they can be misleading, and to cultivate the ability to endure unpleasant feelings. Yet none of this negates the fact that life as it is felt, almost always trumps thought — the stuff which in many ways and much of the time is little more than the effervescence of consciousness.

What do non-human animals feel?

Neuroscientists have no doubt accumulated useful data that will lead towards scientific answers to that question, but a non-scientific answer is readily available.

Our capacity to experience empathy is not the ability to engage in emotional conjecture. We do not posit the feelings of others and on that basis draw logical conclusions about their nature. To have empathy is to recognize the feelings of others directly. It is a kind of sixth sense. Moreover, as every pet owner can attest, this feeling-attunement is a faculty not limited to humans. Indeed, it seems possible that human beings with their cognitively cluttered consciousness, may have a tendency to often become empathically impaired. Ideation crowds out sensation.

If they had the thoughts to articulate what they daily observe, the question might be reversed as animals asked of us: are you really conscious? Could a creature that causes so much harm to its fellows and to the environment on which all life depends truly be more conscious than all others, or is it, as all the evidence suggests, mired in a collective and highly destructive state of unconsciousness?