RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14359/turkey-attacks-journalists

“We sincerely hope that, in the coming weeks… journalists across the country will be able to disseminate news and information without fear of retaliation…. Attacks like those against Demirağ and Özyol, if left unpunished, will have a serious chilling effect on the country’s journalists and further strengthen a climate of fear, which seriously hinders Turkey’s credibility as a democracy…” — Letter sent by The International Press Institute along with 20 other press freedom and freedom of expression organizations, to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, May 16, 2019.

Less than a week after that letter was sent, Ergin Çevik, the editor-in chief of the Güney Haberci news site, was badly beaten in Antalya by three assailants. Those detained in relation with the attack were released on probation.

On May 24, Hakan Denizli, founder of the Adana-based daily, Egemen, was the victim of an armed assault, which landed him in intensive care. On May 26, Sabahattin Önkibar, a columnist for the Odatv news site, was beaten while on his way home from work. Önkibar filed a complaint, yet the four suspects who were detained by police were subsequently released.

Journalists also face the risk of losing their jobs if the government does not approve of their reporting.

A new trend of physically attacking journalists has been emerging in Turkey. The country has already incarcerated of at least 146 members of the media, who are in prison serving sentences or are in pre-trial detention. A number of recent assaults not only illustrate this trend, but suggest approval for it on the part of Turkish authorities.

The first victim of this type of violence was Yavuz Selim Demirağ, a columnist for the Yeni Çağ daily, who was attacked in front of his house in Ankara on May 10 by a group of assailants with baseball bats.

Turkey’s Journalists’ Association (TGC) immediately issued a statement calling for the perpetrators to be brought to justice, and laying blame for the attack on the atmosphere created by the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

“The constant targeting of newspapers and journalists by politicians having difficulty embracing freedom of the press, thought and expression plays a major role in such attacks,” the TGC statement read.

As if to vindicate the statement, the six suspects arrested and taken into custody for the assault on Demirağ were shortly released on the grounds that “Demirağ had not been at risk of death.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2019/06/24/land-and-demagogy-in-africa/

An author’s up-close view of how disregarding property rights entrenches misery

In starting to confiscate land from white farmers without compensation, the South African government is acting in one of Africa’s most destructive patterns. But to make that case I need the testimony of a most special inside-outsider, who died a number of years ago.

My friend John Broom, white and British-born, was a partner in the Zimbabwean branch of Deloitte & Touche, and then a long-term exile to South Africa and the finance director of the Quaker Peace Center. In 2000, shortly after the Zimbabwean farm invasions began, he nudged me into visiting his modest apartment in a Cape Town suburb: He had things he needed to say to me. Arriving, I found he had a small album lying ready on a table. It was a folder for business cards, more than a hundred of them from the Eighties, and he invited me to page through while he explained what this and that card represented.

Some of the businesses would have been small and ordinary — a picture-framing service and a gift shop, for example. The cards of individuals whose lines of work I couldn’t have identified on my own proved far more interesting. This guy, said John, was an engineer overseas, an expert in processing gold. He explained that, as a rule, Africa controlled too few stages in the addition of value to the raw commodities it produced. Gold, a big part of this natural wealth, was a painful example. Why couldn’t there be a broad-based jewelry trade in a place like Zimbabwe?

John was one of those people who know everybody’s business. He was talking to me because he knew I was stringing for a South African investigative magazine that I found too politically correct (it even supported President Thabo Mbeki in his AIDS denial) and also publishing in conservative journals back in the States. I was going to listen to him about the essential post-liberation role of capitalism.

About the gold processor, God alone knows how John had connected the dots over thousands of miles, but the 1979 end of the black–white civil conflict in Rhodesia, which turned it into liberated Zimbabwe and saw the lifting of international sanctions, coincided with the retirement of this man, whose wife wanted him out of the kitchen. He had agreed to set up shop in Zimbabwe if John would write him the business plan and obtain a license from the new government.

http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/2019/06/dirty-predatory-reptilian-vile-wicked.html

Gee! Nobody’s perfect, but that’s a bit thick!

It’s what this devastatingly handsome young fella thinks of “the enemies” of Iran, and he lists those enemies in ascending order of, well, all those things, “the Zionists” (now, ain’t that a surprise?) being the worst of all.To quote the translator and uploader, Memri.org:

‘Ayatollah Alireza Ebadi, Khamenei’s representative in the Iranian city of Birjand, said in a May 31, 2019 Friday sermon that aired on Khorasan Jonoobi TV (Iran) that Iran’s “impure and evil” enemy are a “fusion” of Jews and polytheists, and he described it as a dirty, predatory, reptilian, satanic, vile, and wicked “crossbreed of dogs and wolves” that has “pounced on the convoy of humanity.”
 He said that the U.S. was built by oppressive Europeans on the graves of 80 million indigenous people, but that the Zionists are the worst of Iran’s enemies.
 Ayatollah Ebadi then told a story about a doctor who wanted to cure himself of feeling connected to the village fool, and Ebadi said that, likewise, anyone who is attached to the West and its “dirty, anti-human, liberal-democratic ideology that has destroyed the world” should cure themselves.’

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oafFiOonf4Y)

From the distracted, embarrassed looks on some of the listeners’ faces, I’d wager that not everyone takes what he’s saying too seriously …

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/06/11/rise-fall-oxfam-billion-pound-charity-mired-sex-scandal/

“”Controversies would follow. For example, Scarlett Johansson, the Hollywood actress, quit as an Oxfam ambassador in a row over her endorsement of an Israeli company operating in the West Bank. She had, said the actress, a “fundamental difference of opinion” with the charity.”

The mixed bag of academics, Quakers and general do-gooders who had gathered inside the Old Library at the University Church in Oxford on October 5 1942 had wanted to help the people of Greece.

The country, occupied by the Nazis and subjected to an Allied naval blockade, was suffering a catastrophic famine. From humble origins – the meeting was chaired by the local vicar Dick Milford – a £1 billion a year international aid empire would be born; an empire whose tentacles stretch into politics, entertainment and trade and which grew so large it covered up a sex scandal that, when it finally became public, almost brought it down.

The Oxford Committee for Famine Relief, first begun almost 77 years ago and later shortened to the nifty moniker Oxfam, is now far more than just a famine relief charity. Oxfam is a brand. And now a damaged one.

Its first shop at 17 Broad Street in Oxford, set up in 1948 also doubled up as its headquarters. Now Oxfam operates almost 750 shops in the UK – by comparison Waitrose runs half that number of outlets – that includes not only regular charity stores but specialist bookshops and furniture stores and even boutiques selling bridal wear.

Oxfam puts on its own music festival – called Oxjam – and even provides stewarding for Glastonbury. In the 1960s, Oxfam rolled out its first international franchise to Canada and there are now 19 Oxfam ‘confederations’ working in 90 countries worldwide.

The charity, under the 24-year stewardship of Leslie Kirkley, grew in the 1950s from a “local charity to a world-renowned aid agency”.  In the late 1970s Oxfam effectively got political, launching its first campaigns’ department and followed that with reports on topics that included “Bitter Pills”, which examined the relationship between pharmaceutical companies and poverty.

Controversies would follow. For example, Scarlett Johansson, the Hollywood actress, quit as an Oxfam ambassador in a row over her endorsement of an Israeli company operating in the West Bank. She had, said the actress, a “fundamental difference of opinion” with the charity.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/06/10/to-beat-china-recognize-taiwan/

The Sino-American trade war is only just beginning. Initial reports show that the American side is faring better than the Chinese, but these reports are hardly conclusive. As David P. Goldman has assessed, China still has a great deal of maneuvering room with which to bludgeon the United States.

What Washington needs in its ongoing trade war is greater leverage. And, that leverage will not be found in the economic realm.

True leverage would keep China’s leadership off-balance. To that end, the United States should recognize Taiwan’s independence.

Beijing has long insisted that Taiwan is part of China and that the two “will be united” . . . someday. Chinese President Xi Jinping, moreover, won’t rule out the use of force in achieving this long-standing aim. Beijing believes it is a fait accompli that Taiwan will be returned to Chinese rule just as the British ultimately gave up prosperous Hong Kong. And once Taiwan is brought under its dominion, China will have secured its maritime border.

One China, Two Systems?
The United States, for its part, has for 40 years tried to thread the needle between appeasing China and backing Taiwan’s independence in all but name.

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…

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.”

https://www.steynonline.com/9438/brexit-for-cokeheads

I look at the race to succeed Theresa May as Tory leader and I wonder, to modify our Sunday Poem, where are the squares of yesteryear? No Conservative seeking to maintain political viability wants to seem too disconnected from the debauchery of contemporary Britain. So it has become the habit to confess to “youthful indiscretions”, “youthful” being a term of art stretching easily into late middle age.

This time round the craze is for drug-fiend Tories. Of this week’s crop of alleged leadership contenders, Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt says he had a cannabis lassi while backpacking in India; International Development Secretary Rory Stewart admits he puffed on an opium pipe at an Iranian wedding; my old boss Boris Johnson claims to have snorted icing sugar at Oxford; former Brexit Secretary Dominic Raab discloses he’s tried cannabis but never any “Class A drugs”; and, just to put the hallucinogenic icing on the psychotropic trifle, the Environment Secretary Michael Gove reveals he only does “Class A drugs”.

Mr Gove purports to have taken cocaine as a “young journalist” twenty years ago – that’s to say, when he was in his thirties and working for The Times. He applied for a job round about that time at a publication for which I then wrote, and the chum of mine who took the interview reported back that Gove was one of the most boring men he’d ever had the misfortune to sit through lunch with. If he was snorting in the bog between the soup and fish, it evidently didn’t add any sparkle to his repartee. For American readers, the notion of Michael Gove as a cokehead is roughly analogous to discovering Mike Pence spends his weekends in a gay leather bar: It renders the very concept of transgression pointless. Given what he’s like on his face, the idea of Gove off his face is too surreal to contemplate.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/06/09/iran-linked-terrorists-caught-stockpiling-explosives-north-west/

Terrorists linked to Iran were caught stockpiling tonnes of explosive materials on the outskirts of London in a secret British bomb factory, The Telegraph can reveal.

Radicals linked to Hizbollah, the Lebanese militant group, stashed thousands of disposable ice packs containing ammonium nitrate – a common ingredient in homemade bombs.

The plot was uncovered by MI5 and the Metropolitan Police in the autumn of 2015, just months after the UK signed up to the Iran nuclear deal. Three metric tonnes of ammonium nitrate was discovered – more than was used in the Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 people and damaged hundreds of buildings.

Police raided four properties in north-west London – three businesses and a home – and a man in his 40s was arrested on suspicion of plotting terrorism.

The man was eventually released without charge. Well-placed sources said the plot had been disrupted by a covert intelligence operation rather than seeking a prosecution.

The discovery was so serious that David Cameron and Theresa May, then the prime minister and home secretary, were personally briefed on what had been found.