RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16833/turkey-islamist-justice

It has been 7½ years after Elvan was killed in what appears to be a direct shot in the face. The Turkish state is still trying to make sure that not a single officer will be punished for the tragic death of a 15-year-old boy.

Worse, there is no sign of accountability within the Turkish public administration system.

The dramatic, undeniable scene was captured by a photographer, Abdurrahman Gök who later posted the photos. Gök is now facing trial for potential links with terror groups and could get up to 20 years in prison.

What about the officer who shot Kurkut?… a serious crimes court in Diyarbakır acquitted the defendant, a police officer, known only by his initials, Y.S.

Justice, apparently, is too scarce a commodity for Turkish extremists who are often busy protecting Palestinian terrorists and accusing civilized nations of modern barbarism. The Australian story could be an example of modern barbarism…. but it has a fair ending. The Turkish stories of medieval barbarism in the 21st century do not.

Barely a week after he pledged judicial and democratic reforms, Turkey’s strongman, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, typically rediscovered his Islamist self. He reminded the world, once again, how corrupt and hypocritical his understanding of universal justice is.

“We observe that the [Israeli] state terror against Palestinians goes on,” Erdoğan said in a speech in which he complained of injustice. “Arms up, Palestinian children are being murdered.”

A few days earlier, Erdoğan’s spokesman, Ibrahim Kalın, described the killing by the Australian Defence Force (ADF) of dozens of Afghan civilians as “modern barbarism.” The findings of a four-year inquiry by ADF indeed confirm Kalın’s description as barbarism: Junior soldiers were told to get their first kill by shooting prisoners, in a practice known as “blooding”; weapons and other items were planted near Afghan bodies to cover up crimes; and an additional two incidents could constitute a war crime of “cruel treatment.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/12/coercion-illegal-uk-katie-hopkins/

The British government once spent a lot of time denying there would ever be such a thing as an Immunity Passport in the UK. In fact, Cabinet Officer Michael Gove said there would never be a ‘vaccination passport’ in England earned by taking the COVID vaccine.

So it should come as absolutely no surprise to us, given the hypocrisy of politicians on both sides of the pond, to learn the UK will be issuing vaccination cards to everyone who has had the COVID ‘vaccine’ – and these cards must be kept on our person at all times.

Official images from the government show the card we will be required to carry. On the front, in large bold text, is the warning: ‘Make sure you keep this record card in your purse or wallet’.

My first thought is that these cards look remarkably easy to counterfeit and I better have a word with my mate Dodgy Dave down the docks to see if I can get my hands on one.

Isn’t it strange? We have never been given a card or required to carry one for any other vaccination or jab. Why is this COVID jab so different? Why do we need a card now?

The language used in this blatant infringement of our liberty is telling.

Foreign Office Minister James Cleverly has said millions of people in the UK will have their lives ‘unlocked’ by having the coronavirus jab and a card to prove it.

As soon as a politician starts using the words ‘unlocked’ and ‘freed up’ you can be certain the very opposite is true.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16840/terrorism-iran-europe

Now they [the Europeans] find themselves locked into what they know is a phoney and highly dangerous nuclear agreement that simply consigns confrontation with a nuclear-armed Iran to future generations.

They [the Iranian leadership] look at Europeans, as well as Americans, with contempt, as weak and decadent, lacking the courage or resolve to stick up for their own interests…. President Trump gave them pause for thought, especially when he ordered the death of Qasem Soleimani…. They have higher hopes of Biden, whom they expect to be more supine.

We can be sure the Supreme Leader has rejoiced at the results of his message: cowering in Europe, with only weak and token response, accompanied by a desperate, pleading assurance that the targets of his aggression are still his friends. If ever there was a lesson that appeasement fails and strength succeeds, surely this is it.

European governments must now show their own strength or face continued Iranian coercion — coercion that will be witnessed by malign actors around the world from Moscow to Beijing to Pyongyang, with obvious implications.

Can the Europeans really afford to allow such an egregiously hostile and manipulative regime as Tehran to acquire nuclear weapons?

Last month the trial began in Belgium of Assadolah Assadi and three other Iranians accused of planning a bomb attack in Paris in 2018. Since 2015 Assadi had been the most senior officer of Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security in Europe, at the time operating under diplomatic cover at the Iranian embassy in Vienna. He is the first Iranian government official to be tried by an EU country for terrorist offences, despite numerous attack attempts on EU soil ordered by Tehran.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16809/turkey-erdogan-threatens-europe

That a NATO member and European Union candidate, Turkey, is openly threatening the security of Westerners, is unprecedented.

One of the most abusive Ottoman practices was the institution of “devshirme,” also known as the “child levy” or “blood tax,” with which Christian boys were forcibly abducted from the conquered population, enslaved, converted to Islam and later trained as soldiers. Erdogan evidently sees the Ottoman occupation and abuse of European nations as Turkish “contributions” to Europe.

This current belligerence once again demonstrates major differences between Europe and Erdogan’s regime. It is a crisis between a mentality that respects a free press versus a mentality that jails critical journalists. It reveals a mentality that wants to preserve the safety of its citizens versus a mentality that aims to force others to submit to its demands through threats and use of terror. It is a mentality that stubbornly believes in violating and even trying to invade the territories of its neighbors versus one that tries to resolve issues through dialogue and negotiation.

It is Erdogan’s regime who targets the safety and freedoms of Europeans — as well as Armenians, Syrians, Iraqis, and many of his own Turks.

Europe has once again been targeted with Islamist terror attacks.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16818/france-under-attack

“If nothing changes, in a few decades, France will have submitted to Islam, and Islamic violence will probably be even greater than today. It is already almost impossible for the country’s leaders to react. They are hostages of a Muslim population that is less and less integrated and whose anger they do not want to arouse. They are under the gaze of groups that immediately denounce any criticism of Islam and under pressure from many countries in the Muslim world that France does not want to offend”. — Alan Wagner, “L’Europe face à l’islam”, interview on Tepa, August 2, 2020.

“For Muslims, Islamic law has God as its author. Any other legislator is illegitimate.” — Mohammed Hocine Benkheira, historian, Le Point, March 21, 2016.

“Macron… is still not able to pinpoint the real problem because it would be politically incorrect for him to do so… This is the problem with someone like Macron and what he’s saying… they can never acknowledge that what’s happening is integral or a part of authentic Islam….” — Raymond Ibrahim, “Islamic Terror in France”, SkyWatch TV, October 30, 2020.

“France still does not understand the reality it is facing. It believes that it has been struck by terrorists… but it is suffering a guerrilla war that is gradually gaining momentum…” — Algerian writer Boualem Sansal, lexpress.fr, October 18, 2020.

October 29. Nice, the main city on the French Riviera. A man in the Basilica of Notre-Dame-de-l’Assomption decapitates a woman and murders two other people while shouting “Allahu Akbar!” [“Allah is the greatest!”]

This is the second beheading in France by an extremist Muslim in less than a month. Two weeks earlier, on October 16, a middle school teacher, Samuel Paty, was beheaded in the suburbs of Paris after showing his students some Mohammad cartoons during a discussion on freedom of speech.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16831/iran-fakhrizadeh-revenge

We may be proved wrong, but our guess is that Tehran will do nothing to raise the degree of tension even by one notch….

Khamenei promised “hard revenge” for Soleimani’s death but has vowed nothing but “prosecution and punishment” of perpetrators. His emphasis is on “the continuation” of Fakhrizadeh’s work.

In other words, as long as our progress towards the “threshold” isn’t halted, we can grin and bear Fakhrizadeh’s martyrdom.

To hit back, or not to hit back?

This is the question that has heated up debate within Tehran’s ruling Khomeinist circles for almost a week. The debate was triggered by the assassination of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, a shadowy figure in the top echelons of Tehran’s murky establishment.

Despite an avalanche of obituaries and reports on the event, it is not yet quite clear who Fakhrizadeh was and what he was doing.

The official narrative started by introducing him as a military figure. He was, we were told, a brigadier-general and bore that title of Deputy Defense Minister. Then the Defense Minister, Brig. Gen. Amir Hatami spoke as if he hardly knew Fakhrizadeh while praising him for his unspecified “immense services”. The narrative then switched to presenting Fakhrizadeh as a nuclear scientist and thus a victim of “enemies who do not wish to slow down Iran’s progress in peaceful use of nuclear science.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2020/12/17/the-new-middle-east/

From Israel to the Gulf States to Iran, the troubled region is changing

‘Normalization” is the rather cumbersome jargon for what seems to be happening in the Middle East. For the time being, it’s to do with expectations. Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates have signed peace treaties with Israel. At the signing ceremony in the White House, the Arab foreign ministers looked like officials going about their business. The expression on the face of Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, was beatific.

For the Arabs, it is taboo to normalize anything with Israel. The sole exceptions are Egypt and Jordan, which signed peace treaties to mitigate their wartime losses. When Islamist soldiers then assassinated the Egyptian president, Anwar Sadat, the Egyptian treaty pretty much fell by the wayside. More to the point, the peace process known as the “Oslo Accords” had been negotiated in secret, and in 1993 a party was held on the White House lawn to mark that at last the Palestinians were coming to terms with Israel. Yasser Arafat signed for the Palestinians, but the ink was hardly dry on the page before he gave orders for an intifada, which translated into violent civil disobedience and cost hundreds of Israelis their lives. That’s not going to be repeated; times have changed, the look on Netanyahu’s face plainly signified. Bahrain and the UAE are too insignificant to be independent actors and too marginal to be harmed if normalization goes wrong. They are testing the waters. A grand reversal of alliances is getting under way.

It has long been common knowledge that Saudi Arabia and Israel are holding confidential talks. That is extraordinary enough. The Saudi Arabian public has a perception that Jews are as pernicious a people as any in the wide world. Learned imams appear on Saudi television to recite the age-old anti-Semitic fantasies, Hitler’s Mein Kampf is in the bookshops, and Jews are not allowed to enter the country. The supposition is that participants in these confidential talks are considering the conditions that might oblige Israel to intervene in a strictly Muslim struggle for supremacy between Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Iran. Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan has taken the Islamist position against the infidel Christians and the Jews. Iran de­vised the anti-American war cry “Death to the Great Satan” and the corresponding anti-Israeli war-cry “Death to the Little Satan.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16797/erdogan-bogus-democratic-reforms

Erdoğan’s new reform pledge came at a time when a former leader of a pro-Kurdish party, along with dozens of others, remains in jail for the past years. Almost all the elected Kurdish mayors have been replaced by government-appointed administrators. Hundreds of journalists, politicians and intellectuals spend jail time on absurdly flimsy charges.

Pro-government judges announce rulings in defiance of rulings from superior Turkish courts, including the Constitutional Court, and from the European Court of Human Rights. Those judges who dare make “undesirable verdicts” are probed and often get disciplinary punishments.

Erdoğan’s new charm offensive is deeply problematic. It is not genuine. It is too little too late. Just a few days after he launched his reform campaign, he refused calls for the release of a jailed Kurdish politician and a civil rights activist. “Erdoğan’s reform program survived only nine days,” said Bekir Ağırdır, a prominent political analyst and director of the research company KONDA.

Erdoğan has a serious predicament: He wants his country to keep suffering as a third world democracy while he hopes to lure foreign investment at the same amounts and terms as a Western democracy. That will not happen.

It is his favorite cycle: President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan recklessly widens Turkey’s democratic deficit, weakens institutions, refuses to acknowledge democratic checks and balances. He isolates Turkey mostly from its Western alliances and follows an irredentist foreign policy of trying to reclaim supposedly “lost” land. Turkey is at odds with both the United States and Europe.

Inevitably, political isolation causes economic isolation. The economy is on a downfall. Investors flee the country. Voters start to complain about the double-digit inflation and interest rates; the lira falls and falls; unemployment rises sharply. Erdogan rediscovers his reformist self and promises to democratize — presumably hoping, in vain, that he can reverse the economic downfall.