RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13715/turkey-jihadist-literature

“It is really sorrowful to live in a country that silences, prosecutes, jails its authors and forces them to live in exile,” Hasan Cemal wrote in January.

It is worse than “sorrowful,” however, that writers in Turkey who promote jihad are given a pass.

The Turkish journalist Hasan Cemal recently bemoaned that a publishing house rejected his latest book, Sorrow, on the grounds that it would lead to the imprisonment of both the author and the publisher for expressing liberal views antithetical to the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. According to Cemal, the works of other well-known writers in Turkey — such as Oya Baydar, Nedim Gürsel, Aslı Erdoğan, Baskın Oran and Nurcan Baysal — have met a similar fate, for the same reason.

Not all authors and publishers in Turkey, however, live in such fear. For instance, the Turkish translation of the book Al-Wala’ Wal-Bara (“Loving and Hating for the Sake of Allah Alone”), written by al Qaeda chief Ayman al-Zawahiri, are freely published by Beyaz Minare and distributed by Benli.

Many other publishers and media outlets in Turkey that not only promote violent jihad, but also maintain ties to terrorist organizations, continue functioning. The staff of the magazine İslam Dünyası (“Islamic World”), for instance, was under indictment in 2012 for links to al Qaeda.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272788/rushdie-fatwa-thirty-years-later-bruce-bawer

Thirty years ago today, the then ruler of Iran, the Ayatollah Khomeini, sent a valentine to Salman Rushdie in the form of a fatwa.

Rushdie, born in 1947 in Bombay (now Mumbai), had attended Cambridge, settled in Britain, and become famous with his second novel, Midnight’s Children (1981). His fourth novel, The Satanic Verses (1988), featured a storyline about Muhammed and the Koran that was deemed blasphemous throughout the Muslim world, leading the novel to be banned in over a dozen countries. The fatwa condemned Rushdie, his publishers, and his editors to death, and called on “all valiant Muslims wherever they may be in the world to kill them without delay, so that no one will dare insult the sacred beliefs of Muslims henceforth.” Khomeini’s government announced that anyone who assassinated Rushdie would receive $6 million, if he survived, and instant martyrdom in Heaven, if he didn’t. The fact that Rushdie, an outspoken leftist, had joined many other cultural-elite types in supporting the overthrow of the Shah apparently didn’t impress Khomeini enough to keep him from ordering Rushdie’s murder.

At that time, the word fatwa was unfamiliar outside the Muslim world. Indeed, for most people in the West, the idea of the long arm of Islam reaching out from that primitive corner of the planet and into the civilized West was a relatively new idea – even though, in historical terms, it was a very old idea, dating back to Islam’s seventh-century founding. Even the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre was widely seen not as a strike against the Free World that was motivated by Islamic ideology but, rather, as an act of Palestinian Jew-hatred

https://www.wsj.com/articles/italys-salvini-rises-with-fiery-words-and-pragmatic-decisions-11550066401

Far-right lnterior Minister Matteo Salvini strolled through a crowd of supporters in the main square of this southern Abruzzo town. Leaping on stage to campaign for regional elections, Mr. Salvini took aim at prosecutors who have charged him with kidnapping 177 African migrants last year after he refused to let them disembark from a rescue ship.

“They will have to put me on trial for the next 20 years, because I’ll go on blocking the migrants ships,” Mr. Salvini told the cheering crowd last week. “If they think they are scaring somebody, they chose the wrong person.”

In practice, though, Mr. Salvini is working to preserve his immunity against prosecution as a member of Italy’s Senate. His electioneering effort worked. On Sunday, a far-right candidate for governor backed by Mr. Salvini’s League party won the Abruzzo election.

Mr. Salvini is one of the fastest-rising politicians in a major European Union country. He has turned the League, a moribund regional movement in Italy’s north, into the nation’s most popular political force. His combative anti-immigration rhetoric and down-to-earth persona on social media have tapped anger at Italy’s aloof, ineffectual political establishment in swaths of Italian society.
A look at Mr. Salvini’s decisions in power suggests he is more of a pragmatist than his rhetoric implies.

Next, he says, he wants to take the EU by storm in this May’s European Parliament elections. He has become the central figure in efforts to build a pan-European alliance of nationalists and nativists, including politicians such as France’s Marine Le Pen and Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban. It’s unclear, though, whether Europe’s disparate far-right parties can unite, and what their aims would be.

Mr. Salvini, a bearded 45-year-old former journalist, has built his rise on the image of a revolutionary chief, or “the Captain,” as his devoted fans call him. In recent years he has promised to overthrow Rome’s rotten political class, to split Italy’s richer north from the rest of the country, and to take Italy out of the euro.