RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/10/free-canan-kaftancioglu-mark-tapson/

A month ago, Canan Kaftancioglu, a leading secular politician in Turkey and a critic of Islam, was sentenced to nine years, eight months and 20 days in prison on the transparently political charge of “insulting” authoritarian President Recep Erdogan and the Turkish state in social media posts dating back several years, as well as the Orwellian charge of “spreading terror propaganda.” This inspired a young Turkish activist named Kursat Christoff Pekgoz here in the United States to launch an online petition to bring attention to this injustice and help secure Kaftancioglu’s freedom.

Pekgoz recently wrote about this for FrontPage Mag here, and I reached out to him for more details.

Mark Tapson: Can you give us a little background about yourself and your own activism in Turkey, as well as your activism since coming here to the United States?

Kursat Pekgoz: I grew up in Turkey fin de siècle, during the late 1990s and throughout the 2000s. I took up various human rights causes as I became increasingly concerned with Erdogan’s tyranny, and my focus was mainly the civil rights of religious minorities. Some of my past efforts include: attending protests against Islamists (2007), attending Turkan Saylan’s funeral (2009), active participation in a forum/protest against compulsory Islamic education (2010), working as a pro bono teacher for secularist CYDD (2009-2010), attending the Gezi protests as a volunteer/bodyguard (2013), advocacy against electoral fraud (2014), signing a human rights declaration to protest the persecution of Kurdish civilians (2016), and visiting the Armenian Genocide memorial (2017). I have advanced degrees in Molecular Biology and English Literature. I have studied seven languages (English, Turkish, Ancient Greek, Russian, Latin, German, French).

Will the last man in Turtle Bay please turn out the lights?

Venezuela, Poland and Sudan amongst 14 new Human Rights Council members

I like how the UN’s own house news headlines the fact that Venezuela, a brutal socialist dictatorship full of starving people, worthless money and whose people are fleeing by the millions, has been elected to the UN Human Rights Council.

And then there’s Sudan, which is responsible for actual genocide.

Africa had four seats up for grabs, and four candidates, who were duly elected: Libya, Mauritania, Namibia and Sudan

As Hillel Neuer of UN Watch has pointed out, Mauritania has sizable numbers of slaves.

The UN has a slave state, a genocidal Muslim tyranny, and a murderous socialist tyranny on its Human Rights Council. And the only qualification for a seat is who kills and oppresses the most people, and violates the most human rights.

UN Watch is calling for a campaign to remove Venezuela. But the next review will inevitably condemn the human rights violations of America and Israel, while praising Venezuela for its commitment to social justice.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/boris-gets-brussels-to-say-yes-11571340220

There’s still no guarantee the United Kingdom will leave the European Union by the current Oct. 31 deadline, but Prime Minister Boris Johnson deserves credit for negotiating an exit agreement many wrote off as impossible. The question now is whether he can win over Parliament.

“The negotiators reached an agreement on a revised Protocol on Ireland/Northern Ireland and on a revised Political Declaration,” European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker wrote in a letter Thursday. He’s referring to negotiations to prevent a hard border on the island of Ireland, which is divided between the independent Irish Republic and Northern Ireland, which is part of the U.K. The 1998 Good Friday Agreement relies on a frictionless border between the two countries.

Mr. Johnson managed to scrap a U.K.-wide backstop, which could have kept the country in the EU customs union indefinitely. Now the backstop essentially is limited to Northern Ireland, and the Northern Ireland Assembly will vote on the arrangement every four years.

Mr. Johnson accepted nonbinding language about maintaining a level-playing field with the EU on competition. This will create tension if London tries to turn the U.K. into a low-tax alternative to the Continent, but that can be dealt with later. The deal isn’t perfect, but neither are the alternatives of another aimless withdrawal extension, an economically damaging no-deal Brexit, or a new referendum that would poison British politics for a generation.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/an-election-for-the-boo-birds/

As Canada approaches its October 21 federal election, it is obvious that it would take someone like Donald Trump to rescue this country from a crater of socialist lies, faddist memes, rampant welfarism, “social justice” debauchery, climate boondoggles, economic bankruptcy, unsustainable immigration, and, in short, a veritable Pandora’s Box of cultural and political ills.

The leaders of our traditional parties can only be charitably described as, to be blunt, imbeciles or scoundrels, or both. Much has been written about Liberal prime minister Justin Trudeau as Canada’s Embarrassment-in-Chief, a bezomian who has regularly beclowned himself in public, praised China’s “basic dictatorship,” assured us that budgets balance themselves, embroiled himself in scandals, been found in violation of the Conflict of Interest Act, bribed the media with the promise of a $600 million gift, and indebted Canada’s future generations to the tune of $685.5 billion and counting—indeed, Trudeau is projected to be the largest debt accumulator in Canadian history. No wonder he has recently been endorsed by Barack Obama.

A self-promoting paragon of virtue, photos have recently surfaced of Trudeau in blackface, which the press is frenetically excusing. Like the opportunistic cullion that he is, Trudeau’s latest hijinks involve his wearing a bulletproof vest at a Liberal rally in response to an alleged security threat whose source has not been identified—unless, of course, as Rebel News journalist Sheila Gunn Reid points out, quoting a Liberal flak on CBC TV, we blame Conservative free-speechers, yellow-vesters and the little that remains of an honest media. Ezra Levant’s just released The Librano$—merging the words “Liberals” and “Sopranos”—tells us all we need to know about Trudeau’s corruption and unfitness for office.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15035/saudi-arabia-palestinians-disappearing

The Geneva-based Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor (Euro-Med), a youth-led independent organization that advocates for human rights across Europe and the Middle East, said it has collected names of about 60 Palestinians detained by the Saudi authorities in recent months

Euro-Med said it considers the “practices of the Saudi authorities a flagrant violation of the requirements of justice, which guarantees everyone the right to a fair trial, including knowing charges against and the right to defense and access to a lawyer… [and] affirms that the relevant authorities do not comply with the international legal rules that guarantee the simplest rights of litigation for any individual…”

The Saudi authorities have offered no explanation for the widespread campaign targeting Palestinians in the kingdom. It appears that PA President Mahmoud Abbas and his officials in Ramallah fear that any critique of this behavior would jeopardize the financial handouts and political support they receive from Saudi Arabia…. For Palestinian leaders, Saudi money and political backing far outweigh the fate of a few dozen Palestinians held without trial in an Arab country.

It is only Palestinians who are held by Israel for terrorist-related crimes who Abbas and his friends remember to mention in their endless litanies of complaints.

Dozens of Palestinians have been “disappearing” in Saudi Arabia in recent months and are believed are being held in detention in the kingdom’s prisons, according to Palestinian sources and international human rights organizations.

The Palestinian Authority (PA) leadership in the West Bank, which regularly condemns Israel for arresting Palestinians suspected of involvement in terrorism and other anti-Israel activities, has been reluctant to speak out against the Saudi purge of Palestinians, ostensibly for security reasons, not to harm its relations with the kingdom.

The PA is not only keeping mum about the unprecedented Saudi crackdown, but it is also trying to prevent the families of the detainees from protesting in public. Last week, the PA’s Preventive Security Service summoned the family of Palestinian engineer Abdullah Odeh, being held in a Saudi prison, and warned them not to protest their son’s detention.