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Ruth King

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Turkey’s New Violent Political Culture by Burak Bekdil

By on June 11th, 2019

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14306/turkey-politics-violence

At the heart of the matter is a culture that programs most less-educated masses (and in Turkey average schooling is 6.5 years) into a) converting the “other” and, if that is not possible, b) physically hurting the “other.” A deep societal polarization since President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) came to power in 2002 has widened to frightening levels.
After opposition leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu was taken to a safehouse, members of the mob surrounded it and chanted, “Let’s burn down the house!”
Apparently each unpunished case of political violence committed on behalf of the dominant state ideology (Islamism) and its sacrosanct leader (Erdoğan) encourages the next. In May, a journalist critical of Erdoğan’s government and its nationalist allies was hospitalized after being attacked outside his home.

In most civilized countries, citizens go to the ballot box on election day — be it parliamentary, presidential or municipal — cast their votes, go home to watch news reporting the results and go to work the next day, some happy, some disappointed, to live in peace until the elections. Not in Turkey, where any political race looks more like warfare than simple democratic competition.

One reason is the dominance of identity politics in the country that has its roots deep in the 1950s, when Turkey evolved into multi-party politics. The fighting between “us” and “them” goes on since then. At the heart of the matter is a culture that programs most less-educated masses (and in Turkey average schooling is 6.5 years) into a) converting the “other” and, if that is not possible, b) physically hurting the “other.” A deep societal polarization since President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) came to power in 2002 has widened to frightening levels.

None of the incidents that opposition journalists are facing today is a coincidence. In September 2015, for instance, an angry group of AKP fans attacked the editorial headquarters of Hürriyet, Turkey’s largest newspaper, at that time an opposition media company. Smashing the building’s windows with sticks and stones, the crowd chanted: “Allah-u aqbar” (“God is great!”) as if they were in a religious war. In fact, they thought they were in one because Hürriyet at that time was a secular newspaper critical of Erdoğan. For a long time, security forces watched the incidents with only one police team. The crowd took down the flag of the Doğan Group (which then owned Hürriyet) and burned it. After repeated demands, extra police were dispatched. The AKP Istanbul deputy and the head of the AKP youth branch, Abdürrahim Boynukalın, was in the crowd. He announced on his Twitter account, “We are protesting false news in front of Hürriyet and we are reciting the Quran for our martyrs.” It was a jihad: attacking a newspaper…

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Greece: Is the Left-Wing Government Interfering in the Electoral Process? by Maria Polizoidou

By on June 11th, 2019

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14361/greece-election-interference

The most damning testimony of electoral fraud, however, came from Dimitris Mavros, managing director of the MRB polling company. In a radio interview on June 2, Mavros said that he had been under extreme pressure from Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras to manipulate the polls published by his firm….

On May 18, LA.O.S. Nationalist party leader Giorgos Karatzaferis also protested the government’s ostensible interference in the elections. Karatzaferis said that the vote could be slanted leftward by the swift granting of Greek citizenship to thousands of immigrants.

The crucial question now surrounds the extent to which Greek voters heading to the polls on July 7 to elect their next government can trust that their ballots will be counted — and reported — fairly.

The local elections held in Greece on May 26 cast doubt on the integrity of the powers-that-be in Athens, and raise questions about how fair the upcoming national elections, scheduled for July 7, will be.

During the lead-up to the local elections, suspicion had been rampant that the left-wing Syriza-led government was going to try to manipulate the outcome.

As Lefteris Avgenakis — secretary of the opposition New Democracy party — told SKAI TV on May 16:

“There is the fear and the feeling… [and] information that some [members of] Syriza are determined… to distort the election results… We are telling [the Greek public] that New Democracy will be there with electoral representatives to ensure that their votes will be those counted at the ballot box.”

The following day, on May 17, 2019, New Democracy President Kyriakos Mitsotakis attempted to distance himself from his party secretary’s statement, apparently to prevent possible delegitimization of what would become a victory for his conservative party. Mitsotakis insisted in an interview with Star TV that there “is no such issue” of potential ballot fraud. However, he added, “We urge the New Democrats to monitor the ballot boxes to help safeguard the electoral process.”

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

Remembering Operation Mole Cricket 19 37-year-old Israeli military victory reverberated far beyond the Mideast. Ari Lieberman

By on June 11th, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273964/remembering-operation-mole-cricket-19-ari-lieberman

June 9, 2019 marked the 37th anniversary of Operation Mole Cricket 19, a complex Israeli aerial undertaking that obliterated Syria’s air defense capabilities in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley. In the immediate term, Mole Cricket 19 gave the Israeli Air Force complete dominance over the skies of Lebanon, but the long term effects of Mole Cricket 19 were far more consequential.

The sequence of events leading up to the operation began in London, where a PLO terrorist hit squad attempted to assassinate, Shlomo Argov, who was Israel’s ambassador to the UK. That provocation sparked an Israeli reprisal raid against PLO elements in Lebanon. The PLO responded with indiscriminate rocket and artillery fire on Israeli communities in Galilee forcing much of the population into bomb shelters. On June 6, 1982 Israel answered the PLO’s aggression with a full-scale counter insurgency campaign aimed at creating a 40 kilometer buffer zone between PLO forces and Israel’s northern border. The overall operation was codenamed “Peace for Galilee” but the stage had been set for Operation Mole Cricket 19.

Israeli ground forces required tactical air support but the IAF was hampered by the presence of 19 Syrian surface-to-air missile batteries situated in the Bekaa Valley. The Syrians deployed a dense anti-aircraft umbrella consisting of SAM-2, SAM-3 and the SAM-6 missiles. The formidable SAM-6 caused considerable problems for the IAF during the Yom Kippur War, and the NATO alliance was still trying to figure out a way to defeat the system. On June 9, 1982 Israel showed NATO how to it and in an instant displayed to the world the West’s technological dominance over the decaying Soviet Union.

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HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

Terror in D.C. Media under-reports plot to imitate Nice truck rampage in America.Stephen Brown

By on June 11th, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273955/terror-dc-stephen-brown

In a vastly under-reported story by the mainstream media, the capital of the United States barely missed being the target of a Nice-like terrorism attack that killed 86 people and plunged France into grief and shock.

In that French city, in July, 2014, a Muslim terrorist drove a large truck down a popular promenade, deliberately smashing into as many innocent people out for a walk as possible, killing 86.

Jihadists have a bitter history of using vehicles to kill infidels in the West. Besides Nice, the Berlin Christmas market truck attack in 2016, for example, left 12 dead, while in 2017 a jihadist drove a van down a pedestrian promenade in Barcelona, killing 13.

It was now America’s turn.

In Washington, D.C. last March, Rondell Henry, 28, a native of Trinidad inspired by Islamic State videos of violence and death, was planning a Nice-like attack by running over a crowd of innocent people.

Henry, a naturalized American citizen who lived in Germantown, Maryland, had first driven to Virginia on March 26 where he stole a U-Haul truck he had tailed and which he intended to use as his murder weapon. He actually left his BMW parked near the parking garage where he stole the truck, probably considering it too small for his murderous purposes.

“The defendant appears to have formed a plot to harm large numbers of people and taken concrete steps to execute that plot,” said the U.S. attorney for Maryland.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

UCLA Daily Bruin Censors Facts About Student Links to Terrorists Dereliction of duty when faced with controversy. David Horowitz and Sara Dogan

By on June 11th, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273952/ucla-daily-bruin-censors-facts-about-student-links-david-horowitz

The UCLA Daily Bruin and its editorial staff have made a mockery of the concept of a free press, opening their pages to terrorist political organizations and closing them to the opponents of terrorist propaganda and Jew hatred. The Bruin’s allegiance to the destroy-Israel left and failure to observe the core principles of journalism in a democracy was glaringly obvious in its coverage of a recent student government ruling.

The resolution passed on Tuesday, May 21, by the UCLA Undergraduate Students Association asserted that—contrary to all evidence and a long history of spreading the genocidal lies of Hamas terrorists, and harassing Jewish students and their invited speakers— the group Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) is not anti-Semitic. The student council further condemned the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s newest report, “An Epidemic of Jew Hatred on Campus: the Top Ten Neo-Nazi Incidents” which was distributed in newspaper form on the UCLA campus, claiming that it made “racist and demonizing accusations of campus activism [against Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP)] being directly continuous with terrorism.” 

Since the Bruin failed to interview the targets of these slanders, David Horowitz immediately reached out to UCLA Daily Bruin Editor-in-Chief Jacob Preal to ask for an opportunity to respond to the resolution’s false and defamatory claims about the Freedom Center and its report.

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Colleges Committed to Ideological Diversity “10 colleges where you won’t have to walk on eggshells.” Walter Williams

By on June 11th, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273923/colleges-committed-ideological-diversity-walter-williams

EXCERPTS

The University of Chicago has set the gold standard on free speech and open inquiry. In 2014, it created its “Statement on Principles of Free Expression” (aka the Chicago Principles). Those principles provide the framework for thinking about the importance of dissent as well as the role of the university for establishing the platform for debate. University of Chicago president Robert Zimmer says, “We have an obligation to see that the greatest variety of perspectives is brought to bear on issues before us as scholars and citizens.” The Chicago Principles, or substantially similar ones, have been adopted by 55 schools across the nation. In June 2018, the University of Chicago received Heterodox Academy’s Institutional Excellence Award in recognition of its stellar culture and support for open inquiry.

Other colleges listed in the Mashek and Haidt article, where students won’t have to walk on eggshells include Arizona State University, Claremont McKenna College, Kansas State University, Kenyon College, Linn-Benton Community College, St. John’s College, University of Richmond and Purdue University. It’s worth noting that Mitch Daniels is president of Purdue University and former two-term governor of the state of Indiana. Daniels and his interim provost Jay Akridge wrote this message to the Purdue community: “At Purdue, we protect and promote the right to free and open inquiry in all matters and guarantee all members of the University community the broadest possible latitude to speak, write, listen challenge and learn.”

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IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

George Will Demands Open Borders: ‘I’m For As Much Immigration As The Economy Can Take’ By Michael van der Galien see note

By on June 11th, 2019

https://pjmedia.com/trending/george-will-demands-open-borders-im-for-as-much-immigration-as-the-economy-can-take/

The sesquipedalian (using long words, long-winded) Will was once a great journalist, but he has clearly lost his footing but retained his pomposity …..rsk

Establishment Conservative columnist and author George Will told Hill.TV yesterday morning that he supports as much immigration “as the economy can take.” According to Will, America needs mass immigration because of an aging workforce and millions of “unfilled jobs.”

Will was on the show because he has written a new book, The Conservative Sensibility. In this book, he argues that conservatives “made a wrong turn,” and he advocates a “return” to the principles of “small government.”

However, with “small government” Will doesn’t actually mean small government. What he does mean is cheap labor for Big Business. You see, according to Will, the entire system of entitlements is “here to stay.” The problem is “how to pay for them.” To do so, America needs a “dynamic” economic system, by which he means the capitalist free market system… and mass immigration.

“I believe immigration is an inherently entrepreneurial act,” Will said (much to the surprise of European watchers who see many ‘entrepreneurial immigrants’ from Syria come to Europa, after which they prefer to cash in welfare checks rather than get to work). “It’s people uprooting themselves, taking a risk for themselves and their families.”

“I think in a country in which baby boomers are retiring, where we have an aging workforce, where we have seven million unfilled jobs at the moment, and we have people clamoring to get into our country, to get to work, I’m for as much immigration as the economy can handle. The economy needs immigration just as much as the immigrants need the American economy.”

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IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

A Win at the Border

By on June 11th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/06/a-win-at-the-border/

“The New York Times had a report over the weekend throwing cold water on the deal, saying its component parts had already been agreed to months ago. It’s no secret that the U.S. has been pushing Mexico in this direction for a while (indeed, prior talks that the Times calls “secret” were publicly announced). It’s still an accomplishment to get Mexico to commit openly to fuller, more urgent cooperation with the U.S.”

President Trump evidently knows something about the art of the tariff threat. His unorthodox Twitter diplomacy has gotten Mexico to make potentially important public commitments on immigration enforcement.

Trump said he was going to slap steadily escalating tariffs on Mexico unless it did more to help with the border crisis, a threat with huge downside risks. If implemented, the tariffs would have been disruptive at a time when U.S. growth is perhaps slowing, been an economic gut-punch to an allied country whose stability is important to us, and probably precipitated a congressional revolt against the policy. Instead, Trump has a win that is likely more than a mere PR victory.

Mexico is devoting 6,000 troops to attempting to better police its own border with Guatemala. It’s unclear what this will produce, although it can’t hurt. More important is the extension of the Migration Protection Protocols (MPP), or the “remain in Mexico” policy. Under this arrangement, we can return asylum-seekers to Mexico while their claims — almost always ultimately rejected — are adjudicated. This avoids one of the biggest problems of our current policy, which allows asylum-seekers into the country, never to be removed, even if their claims are rejected and they are ordered deported.

Mexico wasn’t particularly enthusiastic about MPP and limited the number of asylum-seekers it would accept to a trickle. Now it is saying it will accept them with no restrictions. That’s a big deal, although our capacity to process the migrants for return is limited, and it remains to be seen how much Mexico will do to follow through on its commitment. The deal at least makes it possible, though, for us to prevent Central American family units from automatically gaining entry into the country, and thus it significantly reduces the incentive for a future flow of migrants.  

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FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Americans Aren’t Ready for Cold War II To prevail against China, the U.S. must better understand its rival—and itself. By Walter Russell Mead

By on June 11th, 2019

https://www.wsj.com/articles/americans-arent-ready-for-cold-war-ii-11560207604

A series of conversations with Trump administration officials at every level as well as leading Democrats points to two clear and disturbing conclusions. First, the U.S. is increasingly committed to a historic turn in its relations with China as opinion hardens on both sides of the aisle. Second, we aren’t ready for what is coming.

In some ways the situation is comparable to the mid-1940s, when the U.S. and the Soviet Union moved quickly from wartime alliance to Cold War. President Truman and a handful of State Department and War Department officials saw the clash coming early, but public opinion was slower to move. Winston Churchill’s now-famous “Iron Curtain” speech in March 1946 was widely criticized as too hawkish; Truman, who sat through the speech and applauded it, had to distance himself from Churchill’s hard line. It took the communist coup in Czechoslovakia in February 1948, the start of the Berlin Airlift in June, and the reinstitution of the draft in July to bring the reality of the Cold War home to the American public.

Today both Washington and Beijing are maneuvering themselves for some kind of long-term competition—but just as few observers in 1946 could imagine a four-decade global standoff, neither we nor the Chinese can predict the scale, scope or consequences of the emerging rivalry. It is likely both to echo the Cold War in some ways and to diverge radically from it in others.

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HISTORY, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

“Omar Amin” von Leers and the Islamization of Nazism by Andrew Bostom

By on June 10th, 2019

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/24000

Exclusive: How a Nazi disciple of the Mufti of Jerusalem converted to Islam and embraced the millenium-old Muslim ideology of destroying the West by Jihad.

Johannes “Omar Amin” von Leers (d. 1965), was a Nazi disciple of Hajj Amin el-Husseiniwho converted to Islam, found a haven in Egypt, and embraced a 1300 year-old ideology to destroy the Judeo-Christian West—Islamic jihad.

Sixty-four years ago, June 8, 1955, while still in exile in Argentina, Leers wrote a letter to W.E.B. DuBois, extolling Islam and African Muslim soldiers under WWI-era German colonial governance, as follows:  

“[The] German administration was openly in favor of Islam. No African became a color sergeant in the Askari Army [i.e., African soldiers fighting under German colonial leadership] who was not a steadfast Moslem. And also in Cameroon the Germans never forgot to give power and dignities to the Moslem Amirs of the North. The Germans were convinced Islam makes good soldiers and reliable men—and that a Moslem does not drink alcohol and therefore can be used for positions of confidence. An uncle of mine who was for a long time [an] officer in the Askari Army told me, when I was a boy, ‘You must know that Islam is the best religion for soldiers. By disgrace of history, we Germans have not go it [Islam] and now cannot change the situation. ..[I]n Africa, a negro converted religion often becomes the ape of the European, imitating him in his worst aspects—but Islam makes him a noble African with a feeling of his own dignity. As an officer I like better a noble African on my side in the battle, than an ape of mine.”

As I noted in my 2013 analysis of the first fully annotated English translation of Hajj Amin el-Husseini’s 1937 fatwa on the Jews—which re-affirms canonical Islam’s Jew-hating motifs used to foment murderous violence against them by Muhammad himself, since the advent of Islam, and till now—this seminal proclamation of incitement by the “Godfather” of the Palestinian Muslim movement, was pure Islamic dogma, devoid of any themes from the writings of Nazi racial theorists epitomized by von Leers’ 1936, “History on a Racial Basis”.

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