#a front

I have called the boycott movement against Israel (BDS) the ‘siege engine’ of the radical Islamic terror groups. Read this exclusive (Israel Coalition) research that proves that the BDS movement is part of the machinery of war:

The Global Campaign to Return to Palestine

There is an NGO that acts as an ‘umbrella group’ for a global network of Palestinian solidarity organisations. It is called ‘the Global Campaign to Return to Palestine‘. The Facebook page in English has 95,000 likes. There is an Arabic page as well (792,000 likes). The main website is in Arabic. The NGO was set up in 2013 in Beirut.

There is a small private Facebook Group – the GCRP Working Group, which is run by ‘Mohammad Abo Alabed’ who is based in Beirut. Alabed’s timeline is full of pro-Assad, Islamist, terrorist-supporting messaging.

The key individual of the GCRP is the General Coordinator, Sheikh Yousef Abbas.

The Sheikh

Whilst digging for more on the Sheikh I discovered that when he is not ‘General Coordinator of the Global Campaign to Return to Palestine’, Yousef Abbas is ‘President of the Syrian Islamic Knowledge Foundation’. In this role he says:

“Support for the Palestinian resistance and its people until the final victory over the Zionist enemy is achieved.” (2018 interview with the Iranian Islamist news outlet ‘Taghrib News’)

His output is always Islamist facing – and the only interviews of him are on pro-Hezbollah, pro-Iranian outlets such as Al Mayadeen. The Sheikh is a pro-Iranian / Hezbollah Islamist and clearly part of the Iranian support network in the region.

The friends of the Sheikh

If you are a leading member of an Iranian-supported Islamist terror group in the Middle East – Sheikh Yousef Abbas is probably on your list of friends.

Top left – With General Coordinator of the Islamic Action Front in Lebanon, Sheikh Zuhair Al-Ju’id (believes that violence, terrorism option is “the most effective way to regain the land occupied by the enemy.)

Top right – General Secretary of the Union of Resistance Scholars – and pro-Hezbollah cleric, Sheikh Maher Hammoud

Bottom left – With Sheikh Naeem Qasim – Deputy secretary-general of Hezbollah

"When an individual enters the presence of others, they commonly seek to acquire information about him or to bring into play information about him already possessed." -Goffman  This is constantly present when competitive players enter the playing field of a game.  It is especially true, when a game requires strategic skill to out do the other player(s) such through the means of confusing, misleading the player, antagonizing, insulting, etc., essentially putting on an act.  The players who are truly competitive will calculate and observe their opponents because it is within his or her interests to control the conduct of other player(s), especially their responsive play toward him or her.

The competitive player will often put on an act of sorts, a bluff as to who he or she is and how they wish the other player(s) to think of them and how they perceive them.  In Goffman's The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life  he states, "He may wish them to think highly of him, or to think that he thinks highly of them or to perceive how in fact he feels toward them, or to obtain no clear-cut impression; he may wish to ensure sufficient harmony so that the interaction can be sustained, or to defraud, get rid of, confuse, mislead, antagonize or insult them.  Regardless of the particular objective which the individual has in mind and of his motive for having this objective, it will be in his interests to control the conduct of the others, especially their responsive treatment of him."  Goffman relates this to everyday life in how people put forth what they want others to see, but I believe this is true for any competitive player in games.  

In order to be successful in a game such as poker, the players need to be able to bluff when they don't necessarily have the best of hands.  This way they can string along other players possibly who have worst hands or even better but believe they can get those players to fold at the last possible second thus enabling the bluffing player to win all the money being gambled.  This relates back to putting on an act to control the conduct of the other player(s).  In order to make a successful bluff, Ashley Adams states "there are six general matters the player needs to consider whether or not to bluff: your opponents, your image, the betting history of the hand, your position, the strength of your hand, and the size of the bet."  By accounting for all of these and the player's ability to act and deceive, the bluffing player can potentially win the most rounds aka the most money.  

In any strategic game, the players want to deceive their competitors into thinking they are doing something else in order to mislead them and play into their hands.  This goes back to Goffman's quote at the beginning, where individuals commonly seek information about others when they enter another's presence.  In order to play strategic games, the players do not want to give away how they plan to play or deceive their competitors.  They only give the necessarily information along with what they want the competitor to think.  But in order to master a strategic game, the player needs to be able to calculate all the possibilities relatively quickly and read their opponent in figuring out what they are going to play or figure out how to get their opponent to play a certain way making it easier to predict the outcome and determining your best point of action.  The player also does not want the other player(s) to easily be able to predict their moves, so it is in their best interest to not always adopt the same strategy.  Nick Bentley writes an interesting article titled: How to Jedi Master Any Strategy Game which goes into more detail on how to go about winning a strategic game.  Which I highly suggest reading as a starter if you as a player are interested at becoming a great strategy game player.  But once you as a player understand the basic mechanics of strategy games, you can then apply them to almost any strategy game and succeed more often than not. 

To become a great strategy game player; you as a player need to be always somewhat on guard when entering a playing field in order to deceive your opponents into thinking you are not playing as you seem.  You need to be able to gather as much information on your opponent(s) as well as deceive them into thinking what you want them to think.  You as a player, need to be able to quickly and effectively come up with every possible outcome and be able to counter it. And if per say you make a blunder be able to quickly recover.  Thus apply what Goffman's talks about in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life to your strategic game play and you as a player shall go far.  

Reference:

Goffman - The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life

http://www.pokerology.com/lessons/bluffing-in-poker/