RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14787/erdogan-elections-losses

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan promised party fans a clear election victory in Istanbul [on the June 23 rerun] — but lost, this time, by a margin of more than 800,000 votes, compared to only 13,000 in the original race.

“Your wrath stems from the fear in you.” — Meral Danış Baştas, Kurdish MP, replying to Erdoğan.

By using an administrative decision as a pretext to oust elected mayors, Erdogan is effectively nullifying millions of Kurdish votes. Moreover, if the ousted mayors actually had proven links to terrorist organizations, why were they allowed to run in an election in the first place?

This drama will probably continue: Kurds will elect their leaders, Erdoğan will sack them. Kurds again will elect their leaders, Erdoğan will sack them too. Kurds will vote for other leaders and Erdoğan will sack them too.

Erdoğan should sit down, think and find out: why do his country’s 20 million or so Kurds insist on invariably electing “terrorists” as mayors to their cities and towns, and defying his calls to do otherwise?

No one in the saner parts of the world has ever claimed that Turkey’s Islamist President, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, is a liberal democrat who never in the slightest rigged election results. But he was, at least, known to respect the ballot box. No longer. Erdoğan has taken to ridiculing even further whatever little remains of Turkey’s democratic culture.

Claiming vote-rigging, he pressured Turkey’s supreme election board for a recount of ballots cast on March 31 in Istanbul, Turkey biggest city, which boasts more than 10 million registered voters. His Justice and Development Party (AKP) had lost municipal elections in Istanbul by a small margin of 13,000 votes. This was the first time Erdoğan’s party had lost elections in Istanbul since 1994. The man who is notorious for saying “who wins Istanbul, wins Turkey” immediately ordered a rerun.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274810/uk-you-could-soon-be-arrested-crimes-you-havent-robert-spencer

Philip K. Dick’s story “The Minority Report,” made into a movie in 2002 directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Tom Cruise, takes us to a nightmarish Washington, DC, in the year 2054, where police arrest people based on crimes that psychics say they’re going to commit in the future. That dystopia could come to Britain 35 years early if the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change gets its way. According to the Guardian, the Institute has recommended that “a new law allowing for hate groups to be designated and punished before they turn to violence is needed in order to tackle far-right extremists.”

“Before they turn to violence” — that is, even if there is no indication that they will ever be violent.

The Guardian notes that the authors of Narratives of Hate: The Spectrum of Far-Right Worldviews in the UK, the Tony Blair Institute report calling for this, “acknowledge that the issue of linking violent and nonviolent extremism is contentious and steps would need to be taken to protect free speech.”

That’s window dressing meant to deceive the public into complacency. There is no way to criminalize certain opinions while protecting the freedom of speech.

The Guardian continues: “The law…would designate hate groups as organisations that spread intolerance and antipathy towards people of a different race, religion, gender or nationality, the report said.”

The danger of this is that it is universally taken for granted among the political and media elites that honest analysis of how jihadis use the texts and teachings of Islam to justify their actions and make recruits among peaceful Muslims constitutes spreading “intolerance and antipathy towards people of a different race, religion, gender or nationality.” Such analysis is consistently lumped together with racist groups, as if race hatred were the same thing as opposition to jihad mass murder and Sharia oppression of women, gays, and others.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274784/islam-wests-most-formidable-and-persistent-enemy-raymond-ibrahim

At the height of Western dominance over Islam in the early twentieth century, the European historian Hilaire Belloc (1870-1953) made a remarkably prescient observation that may have seemed exaggerated at the time:

Millions of modern people of the white civilization—that is, the civilization of Europe and America—have forgotten all about Islam. They have never come in contact with it. They take for granted that it is decaying, and that, anyway, it is just a foreign religion which will not concern them. It is, as a fact, the most formidable and persistent enemy which our civilization has had, and may at any moment become as large a menace in the future as it has been in the past (from Belloc’s The Great Heresies, 1938, emphasis added).

Anyone who doubts that Islam has been “the most formidable and persistent enemy which our civilization has had,” should familiarize themselves with Islam’s long offensive record vis-à-vis the West.   A succinct summary follows:

According to Islamic history, in 628, the Arabian founder of Islam, Muhammad, called on the Byzantine Emperor, Heraclius—the symbolic head of Christendom—to recant Christianity and embrace Islam.  The emperor refused, jihad was declared, and the Arabs invaded Christian Syria, defeating the imperial army at the pivotal Battle of Yarmuk in 636.

This victory enabled the Muslims to swarm in all directions, so that, less than a century later, they had conquered the greater, older, and richer part of Christendom, including Syria, Egypt, and North Africa.

Their drive into Europe from the east was repeatedly frustrated by the Walls of Constantinople; after the spectacularly failed siege of 717-718, many centuries would pass before any Muslim power thought to capture the imperial city. The Arabs did manage to invade Europe proper through and conquered Spain but were stopped at the Battle of Tours in 732 and eventually driven back south of the Pyrenees.