RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13519/abbas-hamas-palestinians-syria

The Action Group for Palestinians of Syria says that according to its research, there are at least 1,711 Palestinians being held in Syrian prisons.

The plight of the Palestinians in Syria is not difficult to fathom. What is difficult to fathom is: Where are the international media when those Palestinians are being brutalized?

One can make up excuses for the apathy of the international community toward the atrocities the Palestinians are facing in Syria. However, the indifference of Palestinian leaders to the suffering of their own people is harder to justify.

As the reports about the Palestinian victims were emerging, Abbas was in Cairo socializing with famous Egyptian actors and actresses.

It has been another tragic year for Palestinians living in Syria, but the international community, including pro-Palestinian advocacy groups and mainstream media in the West, seem to have missed the misery.

The latest reports from Syria reveal that 82 Palestinians have died as a result of brutal torture in prisons run by the Syrian government in 2018. The report states that a total of 556 Palestinians have been tortured to death while being held in various Syrian prisons the past few years.

According to the Action Group for Palestinians of Syria (AGPS), a human rights watchdog organization that was established to monitor the situation of Palestinian refugees in war-torn Syria, the real number of the Palestinians tortured to death could be higher: those are just the ones they know about; the Syrian authorities do not provide any details about detainees. In addition, AGPS pointed out, the families of the victims are afraid to announce the deaths of their sons and daughters for fear of being targeted by the Syrian authorities.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13518/turkey-scolds-europe

“It is… futile… to discuss Islam using geographical or cultural adjectives, such as European Islam, French Islam, moderate Islam, etc.” — Ali Erbaş, the head of Turkey’s state religious authority, the Diyanet.

The Diyanet does not even recognize Judaism and Christianity as authentic faiths — as is immediately apparent on its official website. In the Diyanet’s interpretation of the verse [Quran, Al-Baqarah 140], the religious figures whom Jews believe to be their prophets, and the religion of Jesus, all originated with Islam: “Ibrahim was neither Jewish nor Christian. He was a Hanafi Muslim… It is the religion of Tawhid [oneness of Allah] that Allah sent to humanity from the very beginning [of time] and that is the most suitable for human nature. So it is completely contrary to facts to claim that [the prophets] were Jewish or Christian…”

How ironic that this is the same Erbaş who claimed at the conference in Cologne that the “increase in anti-Islamic discourse and actions… threaten European multiculturalism,” while the Diyanet is responsible for decrees that do not allow for the slightest bit of multiculturalism in Turkey. In fact, all religious and ethnic minorities in Turkey are persecuted with the blessing of the Diyanet.

The Diyanet’s president’s recent rant against Europe — from a podium in Cologne, no less — was disingenuous, false and a perfect example of projection. It is European liberalism that is under assault, not the other way around.

At a recent conference in Cologne on the future of Europe’s Muslims, Ali Erbaş, the head of Turkey’s state religious authority, the Diyanet, railed against what he called the “increase in anti-Islamic discourse and actions… [that] threaten European multiculturalism.”

In his keynote address to the conference, hosted by Turkey’s main Islamic body in Germany, DITIB — based in the Cologne Central Mosque, which Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan inaugurated during a visit to Germany in September — Erbaş declared:

“… racism, social exclusion… xenophobia, attacks against mosques… [and] discriminatory discourse and actions disregard human life and honor… restrict [Muslims’] rights, make social and cultural institutions dysfunctional and harm the common morality and conscience of humanity.”

https://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/2019/January/44/1/magazine/article/10845926/

The Paris Peace Conference opened at the Palace of Versailles 100 years ago (January 18, 1919). It was the most ambitious gathering of its kind in history: Leaders and diplomats of 27 nations convened to shape the future, a mere ten weeks after the Armistice. Far from reestablishing order in Europe and the world after over four years of unprecedented carnage and destruction, however, it produced a flawed treaty that contained the seeds of another, even more destructive war a generation later.

A major weakness of the Versailles system was that two great European powers were not present. Germany and her allies were excluded until after the details of all the peace treaties had been agreed upon by the Big Four—France, Britain, the United States, and Italy—and presented as faits accomplis to each of them separately. Russia was not invited because the Bolsheviks had signed their separate peace with the Central Powers at Brest-Litovsk in March 1918.

Brest-Litovsk was an important precursor of Versailles. Ludendorff’s generals had formulated extremely harsh terms that were seen as excessive even by the German civilian negotiators. This convinced the Entente powers that no reasonable agreement could be reached with Germany, and that they had to fight for an outright victory. By imposing a Carthaginian peace on Russia, the Germans ensured that they could not count on anyone’s lenience when things went wrong for them. When they later complained that Versailles was too harsh, the Allies could point out that it was in fact far less brutal than the terms imposed on Russia.

When the German army finally gave up in 1918 (the stab-in-the-back myth notwithstanding), what with the Kaiser abdicating and the Armistice signed, many Germans hoped that they would be treated as Bourbon France was treated in Vienna in 1815, where Talleyrand was a key player. This was not to be. Germany’s egregious behavior before and during the war, including the execution of thousands of French and Belgian civilians, the introduction of poison gas, unrestricted submarine warfare, and the comprehensive destruction of occupied areas in the east and west alike, made a peace of reconciliation politically impossible.