First, do not imagine the press and media -- any press and media -- to be anything other than a party among the parties of contention.  The press are as agenda-driven as anyone else with an agenda.  They are not event-driven:  atrocities committed by favored parties are media non-events, a characteristic that cuts across all political, religious and ideological boundaries.

      Second, do not imagine error or ineptitude, especially where it is the main apparent characteristic of an event.  Error and ineptitude pave the way to scape-goating, an easy way to conceal the strategic decision that led to the event.  Look instead at the effect of an event to see its cause:  the likely cause is intent to produce that effect.

      Third, do not imagine motives to be beyond what you yourself can conceive and understand, but do not imagine that events proceed from values and motives like your own:  such has not been the case.  Parties have all the motives of princes with none of their restraints:  look for a political or strategic purpose behind the personal desires or defects advanced to mask it.

      Fourth, before asking why a regime acts savagely, ask first why it does not.  The nature of police power in any party is to prevent, paralyze, and penalize savagery: savagery exists only when government fails in this purpose, which requires government to be ready to meet savagery on its own terms.  Why, then, does a capable force not do so?  Behind this is the answer to why it acts with savagery when and where it does.

      Fifth, do not imagine that you receive real answers when you ask questions:  ask questions to assess the answerer's capacity to perceive truth and integrity in telling it.  Seek answers in your own observations and in your own assessments based on your own judgment of what you are offered as "facts;" and reconsider the entirety whenever a new fact becomes available to you.  While truth is often apparent, "answers" seldom arise from it but from rather less; sometimes from ignorance, but always where the parties hold an advantage based on concealing the truth, which is most often.

      Sixth, do not imagine that you are actually threatened:  see that you are, why, how, and by whom, and continue to assess until you do.  Otherwise, until you have the facts, the most dangerous threat is your own imagination: your enemies capitalize on this precise fact.

      Seventh, Jews and Christians are warned to prepare for Armageddon by beating their swords into plowshares, Muslims for The Hour by becoming like the better son of Adam:  instead, Jews, Christians and Muslims -- many and few -- are actively promoting Apocalypse.  Avoid Messianic Apocalyptic Dementia, or believing that you (or those of your communion) are uniquely and divinely anointed and appointed to save the world, or a remnant, or to usher in a new world or a new message for the faithful, while this world falls away into the Fire.  This all-time favorite tool of deception is today a main event in media circuses and more often fatal.