RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19802/erdogan-europe

Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan talks about an “evil West” but wants to become part of it — perhaps to “improve” it?

Erdoğan needs money. He needs it now, and preferably from Western markets instead of one-off cash injections from Russia and friendly Gulf states.

Erdoğan aims to… [k]eep within the EU membership process, which he calculates may give Turkey better borrowing options on international markets, as well as the possibility of sending 84 million more Turks into Europe and potentially changing its prevailing religion.

Could [Erdoğan] be hoping that the U.S. Congress will endorse the sale of F-16 Block 70 fighter jets to Turkey? There will be many horse-trading moments during the process, but this is the beginning of a new tactical warfare between Erdogan’s Turkey and the West.

“The Swedes were too eager to receive Erdoğan’s blessing and Erdoğan used that yearning to tie them down. Remember Gulliver in the Land of Lilliput?” — Eugene Kogan, defense expert, Tbilisi, Georgia, to the author, July 10, 2023.

If logic worked in politics, the question to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan should have been: Why has your country had so passionately sought out, in vain, membership in the European Union?

Erdoğan talks about an “evil West” but wants to become part of it — perhaps to “improve” it? Why did Turkey send its 15,000 sons, only to greet with honor 700 dead soldiers in a war that took place 8,000 km away on the Korean Peninsula? Turkey has been a full member candidate for the EU since 1987, but the Korean military campaign earned it NATO membership in 1952.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19800/pakistan-forced-marriage-conversion

Imagine if you are a child from a persecuted religious minority living in one of the world’s most oppressive countries. The country’s majority culture and institutions are largely shaped by a religious ideology that has no regard for anything outside that system, as well as a record of mistreating women and girls.

Sadly, the government of Pakistan appears complicit in these and other crimes: it fails to provide women and children with required legal protection. A bill to criminalize forced religious conversions has been presented in the Sindh Assembly at least three times (2016, 2019 and 2021). Each time, it was rejected.

Any military or economic cooperation with Pakistan should be conditioned on Pakistan’s improvement of human rights and liberties for minorities, and a respect for international law. A government that is complicit in the abduction, forced religious conversion, sexual abuse and coerced “marriages” of minority children should not be considered qualified to benefit from any aid or cooperation from the West.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19798/france-chaos

The riots grew bigger. Schools and theaters were destroyed…. churches were burned to the ground; graffiti in red paint on a church in Marseilles declared: “Mohammed was the last prophet”. Bank branches were ransacked and ATMs opened with chainsaws. Slogans were shouted: “death to the police”, “death to France”, “death to the Jews!”

“We are Muslims,” one angry protester shouted, “if the police kill us we have the right to kill; it is written in the Koran!”

Since the 1970s, France has welcomed an ever-increasing number of immigrants from the Muslim world… Only a tiny minority have assimilated into French society. The others live as they lived in their countries of origin. — Sorbonne University Professor Bernard Rougier, author of the book Les territoires conquis de l’islamisme (“The Conquered Territories of Islamism”).

Radical imams came from the Muslim world and allege that France is guilty of having colonized their countries, that Muslims should continue to live according to the law of Islam and that, in the imams’ view, France should pay for its crimes. Many politicians have told the newcomers that France is racist and had exploited them.

Criminal gangs formed and began ruling these neighborhoods. Radical imams justified the gangs’ criminal activities by claiming that the French must pay for what they did in the Muslim world. French political leaders closed their eyes. Meanwhile, these Muslim neighborhoods have grown and crime from them increased.

During the riots of 2005, then President Jacques Chirac asked imams to restore calm and promised to give even more money to Muslim neighborhoods. The police were ordered not to intervene in them at all; they fell entirely under the control of gangs and imams. It was then that these neighborhoods effectively became lawless “no-go zones” (zones urbaines sensibles), of which there are 750.

President Emmanuel Macron suggested that creating a “French Islam,” supposedly quite different from Islam in the rest of the world, would be the solution, but he quickly gave up on that plan. He then said he wanted to fight against what he called “Islamic separatism” (the no-go zones, neighborhoods where Muslims live separately from the rest of the population). He, too, has done nothing.

Macron seems to imagine that he has found explanations for these problems: Parents of rioters, he said, do not exercise their parental authority, and video games poison the minds of young people. His comments seemed completely disconnected from reality…

“The violence is increasing day by day… those who run our country must imperatively find the courage necessary to eradicate the dangers.” — Open letter by 20 retired French army generals to the French government and Macron, April 26, 2023.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19784/french-malaise

These riots did start with the killing of a 17-year boy of Algerian ancestry by the police. But the killing was not racially motivated and, as protesters made clear, what was at issue was police brutality rather than racial hatred… [T]he root cause of the anger that provoked the riots was a deep dissatisfaction with the way the country is governed.

What has happened in France in the past five or six decades is a major change in the balance of power between the state and society. French society today is far better educated, self-confident, better informed and more enterprising than the French state, which has become costlier, less efficient and more arrogant.

The suburbs that burned are precisely the ones that the French state has invested more than 30 billion euros in “improving” over the past 20 years. The result has been the creation of a whole generation of “assisted” people whose ethnic and/or religious backgrounds are treated as heirlooms to justify government handout in various guises.

But just as man can’t live on bread alone, he won’t be grateful and obedient by handouts alone.

Judging by France’s recent history, the month of June should be a quiet moment when people prepare for summer holidays in exotic places. Protest marches, riots and even revolutions usually take place in the spring, with May being the hottest month for political gesticulations. The baccalaureate exams are over, the annual bonuses are paid and the fruit-picking is over. Thus, the riots of the past two weeks that produced mayhem in Parisian suburbs and a dozen other places across France came like bolt out of the blue.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19781/riots-again-in-france

These responses — skirting due process at the highest levels of government — show the fear that the suburbs instill in those in power: the fear of a generalized conflagration, the fear of another death, the fear that control of the situation is slipping away, the fear of the inability to control these uprisings or the root causes that breed them.

Some of these suburbs have long since become lawless zones, or rather zones of “alternative law,” where drug kingpins and Muslim imams now rule the roost, and where the police only move in force from time to time. In some neighborhoods, drug dealers have set up physical obstacles that make it difficult for the police to gain access when they decide to intervene by force, when the authorities can pretend that they still control something.

It is necessary to deal with the cause — excessive and uncontrolled immigration — both legal (through family reunification and the right of asylum) and illegal. When you are faced with a leak in a boat that is on the verge of sinking, as French society is, you not only have to have to bail out the water, but also plug the breach.

There are “two Frances” facing each other. One is violent, ready to riot at the first opportunity, encouraged by political parties who see it as an electoral reservoir. The other, still in the majority, is dignified and peaceful, outraged by the behavior of these young people of immigrant origin — but who remain silent and do nothing.

France seems slowly heading for civil war.

Following the killing of a 17-year-old boy, France is once again the scene of riots that reflect the gulf between traditional France and the suburbs — the result of immigration over the last 40 years.

Nahel Merzouk was killed by police. He was being chased in Nanterre, near Paris, by two policemen on a motorcycle for traffic violations and refusal to stop the car he was driving. After Merzouk was forced to stop the car due to traffic congestion, the policemen approached his car and drew their weapons. Merzouk then drove off, at which point one of the policemen fired his weapon at the car, fatally wounding Merzouk. If Merzouk had followed the orders of the police, he would not have died.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/after-the-french-riots/

So the latest round of rioting in France seems at last to have burned itself out. In the end, it didn’t expand into a Muslim revolution; it didn’t succeed in overthrowing the French Republic; it didn’t lead to the first transformation of a Western republic into a sharia state. But this doesn’t mean that France won’t eventually be brought down in such a way, and sooner rather than later. All it will take is one more minor police action that triggers the nation’s Muslims into a tsunami of fierce and extraordinary violence – a tsunami that, unlike this time, doesn’t end until it makes the Reign of Terror look like a scene from Gigi.

Certainly the cooling-off of Muslim rage owed nothing whatsoever to the efforts of Emmanuel Macron or any other French leader. Nor did it owe anything to the French electorate which – although it’s been offered the opportunity in recent years to install in the Élysée Palace a principled and intrepid agent of change like Marine le Pen, Valérie Pécresse, or Éric Zemmour – has instead voted repeatedly for more of the same. Voted, that is, for hopeless establishment types like Macron, who over the years has spoken out of both sides of his mouth on the immigration issue – celebrating Muslim imports as an economic boon, then formulating a five-point program to defeat “Islamic separatism,” then “clarifying” his plan with a declaration of his deep respect for the Islamic faith.

Well, there’s one positive thing to be said about last week’s riots: they brought Western Europe’s alarming predicament into focus in a manner that few events in recent years have succeeded in doing, and, one can only hope, have opened the eyes of a considerable number of people who’d previously managed to avoid facing up to reality. How many people? Who knows?

Even before the rioting, to be sure, most Frenchmen understood very well what they were up against. Although heroic truth-tellers like Zemmour have been condemned in the French media for promoting the so-called “replacement theory” – i.e., the belief that native Europeans are being gradually supplanted by foreign peoples whose mass immigration over recent decades is the consequence of policies instituted by political elites without the consent of the populace. In fact, surveys have shown that most Frenchmen subscribe to the “replacement theory.”

https://thefederalist.com/2023/07/06/heres-what-you-need-to-know-about-frances-summer-of-love-riots/

The ongoing situation in France bears a striking resemblance to the Black Lives Matter and Antifa violence that engulfed American cities following the May 2020 death of George Floyd.

French authorities have estimated that rioters have burned or looted more than 1,100 public and private buildings over the past week in their violent response to a police shooting involving a 17-year-old French citizen of Algerian descent.

On Wednesday, a French news outlet reported that, according to the country’s Ministry of the Interior, roughly 1,105 buildings including police stations, town halls, and schools have been assaulted since riots began on June 27. French Economy Minister Bruno Le Maire told a CNN affiliate that more than 1,000 businesses have been “vandalised, attacked or set on fire.” The damages are estimated to cost over $1 billion.

The impetus for the nationwide violence occurred on June 27, when a French police officer shot and killed 17-year-old “Nahel M.” during a traffic stop. While exact details of the situation remain unclear, early reports indicate the situation unfolded after police pulled the young man over in a Paris suburb for allegedly breaking traffic rules. According to Fox News, police have reportedly claimed Nahel “drove his car at one of the officers, while the video [of the incident] shows one of the officers pointing a weapon at him and saying, ‘You are going to get a bullet in the head.’”

“The officer then appears to shoot Nahel as the car suddenly pulls away, traveling only a short distance before crashing, with Nahel dying at the scene. Police took the offending officer into custody and opened an investigation into charges of voluntary manslaughter, with charges brought against him on Friday,” the Fox report reads. The officer’s lawyers have since claimed their client meant to shoot Nahel in the leg but was bumped into when the car took off and did not intend to kill him.