RUTHFULLY YOURS

The latest carnage in Turkey comes as President Erdogan prepares to face the voters in a contest it is almost impossible to believe he can win. Will the man who destroyed freedom of speech, debased the judiciary and rode roughshod over secularism accept the will of his people?
Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s despotic quest to become the indubitable boss of the Republic of Turkey, if the polls are to be believed, will be rejected at the November 1 parliamentary re-election. Even the Anatolian hinterland has, reputedly, gone cool on their one-time hero. Turkey’s homegrown demagogue increasingly appears to be more trouble than he is worth. Sectarian war, which Erdogan has been hell-bent on inciting since his Justice and Development Party (AKP) was denied a plurality at the June 7 parliamentary election, can hardly be in anybody’s interests except Erdogan’s. That is not to say, of course, that the crash-through-or-crash Erdogan is going to play by (what remains) of the rules of Turkish democracy and go quietly into the night.

Few modern-day politicians have been given the benefit of the doubt more than Erdogan. An Islamist firebrand in his days as mayor of Istanbul (1994 to 1998), he is on record from that period arguing “you cannot be secular and a Muslim” because “Allah, the creator of the Muslim, has absolute power and rule”. A four-month spell in jail in 1999 for contravening Turkey’s Kemalist (secular) constitution gave Erdogan a chance to rethink his political strategy and, until recently, he insisted that the ideology of the AKP was not Islamist but “social conservatism” mixed with “economic liberalism”.

Šid, Serbia — Mohammad Jamal al-Mousa would say his home was in Aleppo, but bombs from Bashar al-Assad’s planes razed the house. So now, just his family remains there, he says nervously. He thinks the place he left them is relatively safe. He still calls often.

Standing under the shelter of a tent where migrants can stop to charge their phones, he shows me their pictures. His two daughters, the eldest 10, pose grinning in matching white tights, black skirts, and red shirts. One has red bows in her pigtails. His son, a little younger, sits between them. The five-month-old baby boy isn’t pictured.

Al-Mousa worries most for his daughters, growing up not only under Assad’s repressive regime but also as the Islamic State seizes large portions of Syria.

“Can you imagine a child seven years old, who has to be fully covered in a hijab?” he asks me. “They took away her childhood. I want my daughters to be educated and happy. Now, my children are so small, but they’ve learned what a bomb is, and they can recognize warplanes.”

ISIS is expected to execute 180 Assyrian Christians kidnapped as a part of an ethnic-cleansing campaign, international monitors report.

The terrorist group “has specifically targeted Assyrians, looking to drive them out of their millennia-old communities,” according to the Christian Post. Reuters reports that the captives were taken from northeastern Syria in February, and that three of them were executed last month in conjunction with an Islamic holiday. Negotiations intended to secure their release for a ransom have been “suspended due to [ISIS’s] unbearable demands,” Assyrian Human Rights Network executive director Osama Edward said.

The news comes about two weeks after Russia began bombing actions in Syria to assist Bashar al-Assad’s embattled regime. Though the Kremlin claims the campaign is intended to fight terrorism in the country, Russian jets appear to be targeting the U.S.-backed anti-Assad rebels instead of ISIS. For months, the Obama administration has been bombing ISIS while calling for Assad’s departure from power, so Russia’s actions put the two nations at cross-purposes in Syria.

On Sunday, Russian president Vladimir Putin mocked President Obama’s efforts to bolster the Free Syrian Army (FSA). “It would have been better to give us $500 million,” Putin said. “At least we would have used it more effectively from the point of view of fighting international terrorism.”

How did Vladimir Putin — with his country reeling from falling oil prices, possessing only a second-rate military, in demographic free-fall, and suffering from an array of international sanctions — find himself the new play-maker of the Middle East?

Putin’s ascendency was not foreordained. It followed a series of major U.S. miscalculations and blunders of such magnitude that it almost seems they must have been deliberate.

What exactly was our road to perdition in the Middle East?

1. Reset with Putin

When Barack Obama came into office, the outgoing Bush administration had crafted a moderate response to Putin’s aggression in Ossetia. The U.S. had made missile-defense agreements with the Czech Republic and Poland. Some Georgian forces were airlifted by the U.S. from Afghanistan back home. Indeed, at the time, many liberals complained that America was too soft on Putin. Perhaps. But the Obama administration entered office claiming the exact opposite, suggesting that the Bush pushback was part of a needless American-caused estrangement from Russia.

Pushing the plastic reset button was Hillary Clinton’s sad gesture signaling Putin and his team that Bush was gone, that a new, more receptive administration was in power — and thus that relations must naturally improve. Putin was somewhat perplexed, given that he knew Russia was to blame for the new estrangement. Naturally, then, he saw the Obama–Clinton reset grandstanding as more critical of America’s past behavior than of Russia’s present aggression — a fact that fueled Putin’s further calculations that he could safely move into Crimea and Ukraine.

The chilling rhetoric from Iran Obama doesn’t want you to know about.

Ironically, as the financial rewards and the improved legitimacy that have resulted from Obama’s nuclear deal continue to benefit the Iranian ruling clerics, the Iranian political establishment’s hatred towards the United States is reaching its peak.

This week, the highest authority in the Islamic Republic, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, banned and forbade any further talks and negotiations between his country and the United States: “Negotiation with US is forbidden.”

In addition, he recently made his new e-book available for download in English. The Ayatollah points out: “The regional nations truly hate America and its European branch, England. This hatred is not limited to our people: all regional nations hate them … Why do they complain about being hated? Yes, we hate you.” The book advocates for annihilating America and Israel. It rants about how the Muslim world hates the US and Israel.

It seems as if in the minds of David Miller, Kevin MacDonald and Hilary Aked, a mysterious Jewish cabal is responsible for all the world’s ills.

Even Tony Blair, Miller argues, is in league with a sinister “international network” of Israeli settlers and American “Islamophobes.”

“A liberal Muslim is their trussed-up version of the enemy, the alien, the ‘other’.” — Nick Cohen, journalist.

Hilary Aked describes moderate Muslims as “native informants.” She also believes that a hidden Jewish network is responsible for the “Islamophobia industry.” She has frequently written for a Qatari-funded media group that is accused by Egyptian newspapers of being a Muslim Brotherhood front group.

Electronic Intifada is a prominent pro-Hamas publication, whose founder, Ali Abunimah, describes Palestinian leaders who talk with Israel as “collaborators.”

To fund his obsession with the “propaganda” ostensibly spread by Jews and anti-Islamist Muslims, Miller has received grants from the Economic and Social Research Council, a body funded by the British government. In 2012, Miller received £400,000 from the Council, as well as grants from groups affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas.

In what Washington Post executive editor Martin Baron is calling “an outrageous injustice,” WaPo reporter Jason Rezaian was convicted of espionage. The verdict was handed down two months ago, but because of the byzantine workings of the Iranian judicial system, it is only just now coming to light.

Rezaian was arrested along with his wife, an Iranian journalist, in July of 2014. He has been held at the notorious Evin prison since that time. For many months there were no charges filed against him, only learning of the espionage accusations in the spring of 2015.

President Hassan Rouhani has repeatedly suggested a prisoner exchange in recent weeks. He has said Iran might push to expedite freedom Rezaian and two other Iranian-Americans if the United States released Iranian citizens convicted of sanctions violations. Saeed Abedini of Boise, Idaho, is a pastor imprisoned for organizing home churches. Amir Hekmati of Flint, Mi. is a former Marine who has spent four years in prison since his arrest during a visit to see his grandmother.

If you’ve been following the news from Israel, you might have the impression that “violence” is killing a lot of people. As in this headline: “Palestinian Killed As Violence Continues.” Or this first paragraph: “Violence and bloodshed radiating outward from flash points in Jerusalem and the West Bank appear to be shifting gears and expanding, with Gaza increasingly drawn in.”

Read further, and you might also get a sense of who, according to Western media, is perpetrating “violence.” As in: “Two Palestinian Teenagers Shot by Israeli Police,” according to one headline. Or: “Israeli Retaliatory Strike in Gaza Kills Woman and Child, Palestinians Say,” according to another.

Such was the media’s way of describing two weeks of Palestinian assaults that began when Hamas killed a Jewish couple as they were driving with their four children in the northern West Bank. Two days later, a Palestinian teenager stabbed two Israelis to death in Jerusalem’s Old City, and also slashed a woman and a 2-year-old boy. Hours later, another knife-wielding Palestinian was shot and killed by Israeli police after he slashed a 15-year-old Israeli boy in the chest and back.

President Obama and his foreign-policy admirers—a dwindling lot—hoped that the nuclear deal would make Iran more open to cooperation in the Middle East and with the U.S. Mark this down as another case in which the world is disappointing the American President.
Iran’s judiciary on Monday announced that Jason Rezaian, the Washington Post’s Tehran correspondent, has been convicted. He was on trial for “espionage.” Security forces arrested Mr. Rezaian and his wife, journalist Yeganeh Salehi, in July 2014. Ms. Salehi was later released, but the regime has held Mr. Rezaian “in a black hole for 14 months,” as his brother, Ali, told us. Mr. Rezaian, a U.S. citizen, has been denied even the basic rights the regime sometimes affords political prisoners, including bail and phone calls.

A pair of suicide bombings ripped through a peace rally in Ankara on Saturday morning, killing at least 95 marchers and injuring hundreds. It was the deadliest terror attack in Turkey’s modern history and further evidence that a country that is supposed to be an anchor of Middle East stability is increasingly vulnerable to regional furies and its own domestic discontents.

No group had taken credit for the bombings by our deadline Sunday evening. Turkish security forces believe the attack was carried out either by Islamic State, the separatist Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) or one of the country’s resurgent left-wing terror outfits.