RUTHFULLY YOURS

Just like the Christian, Jewish, and Yazidi communities in Turkey, Alevis have also been victims of Islamic supremacism for centuries — both in the Ottoman Empire and in the Republic of Turkey.

In Istanbul, the door of an Alevi family was vandalized with a red symbol. “Get out, heathen” and “Islam” were written on the door.

Turkey’s membership in the NATO since 1952, its negotiations for full membership to the EU since 2005, and its countless military, economic, and diplomatic agreements with the West, have done nothing to reduce the persecution against religious minorities in the country.

Pressures against the Alevi community in Turkey are becoming alarmingly commonplace.

Just like the Christian, Jewish, and Yazidi communities in Turkey, Alevis have also been victims of Islamic supremacism for centuries — both in the Ottoman Empire and in the Republic of Turkey.

Alevis are a religious minority Turkey with a distinct faith, philosophy, and culture that largely upholds secularism and humanism. Turkey’s Alevi community is estimated in the tens of millions — up to 25% of the population, making up the country’s largest minority. But the number is only an approximation, because legally, Alevis in Turkey are “non-existent”. The Turkish government does not officially recognize them, so it does not include them in a census and counts them as “Muslims.”

Recently, officials at the Istanbul airport seized the passport of Fatma Tunç, the wife of a dissident author, Aziz Tunç. Mrs. Tunç was preparing to board a plane to Germany when she was told by officials that her passport has been cancelled because “there are dangerous people in her family” and that for her to travel outside of Turkey, her husband and son would have to return. Aziz Tunç’s passport has also been cancelled due to his being prosecuted at a political trial in Turkey.

Mr. Tunç, a columnist and the author of two books about the 1978 Alevi massacre in the city of Maraş in southeastern Turkey, and his son, have been living in exile in Germany for the past two years, as a result of government persecution. “This is downright hostage-taking,” he said.

The alliance between Saudi Arabia and the United States seems intended to contain the Iranian regime, and not, as falsely advertised by President Barack Obama, to prevent a nuclear program.

Leaders of Western Europe know exactly what the mullahs’ regime is, and what its goals and activities are. They know it is the world’s main sponsor of Islamic terrorism. They know the disastrous state of Iran’s society and economy, but they prefer to play deaf and dumb. All they think about, it seems, are the contracts they sign with the mullahs to get more money. They do not care about the suffering of Iranians; the chaos, massacres and destruction caused by the regime. They know that the nuclear deal is constantly violated by the self-policing regime, and that a nuclear bomb is in the making. They are aware that the regime has close ties with North Korea, and that both are global threats.

The EU’s chief diplomat, Federica Mogherini, has hypocritically called “all parties concerned to abstain from violence”, as if there were a moral equivalence between unarmed protesters and killer militias with weapons of war. Meanwhile, in Iranian prisons, protesters were being arrested and tortured to death.

Leaders of Western Europe like to boast how they respect human rights, yet they are the ones trampling on them.

It is hard to know exactly the current situation in Iran, but the uprising seems to be fading . The mullahs’ regime might survive a little longer.

The overthrow of a totalitarian regime takes place when the security forces — which ensure the survival of a regime that has been ruling through repression and fear — begin to falter, or else when the number of angry people becomes so big that a tidal wave sweeps away all in its path.

This time, Iranian security forces remained loyal to the regime and angry people were too few. The regime could manage the situation by killing a few dozen protesters, arresting four thousand more, torturing and murdering some of them, and cutting off access to digital networks. It is a defeat not only for the Iranian people, but for all who defend freedom.

Fifty years ago Alexander Dubček began the ill-fated bid to reform the government of what was then Czechoslovakia. In August, 1968, the experiment was crushed by Soviet tanks. Today, with communism’s apologists still peddling myth and equivalency, a refresher course in tyranny.

I’ve had a couple of non-tourist encounters with Czechs from the Communist era. One I recall well from seven years ago; the other more spectacular encounter was 50 years ago and I have no memory of it whatsoever. Still, it’s detailed in print in The West Australian of June 14, 1969, so it must have happened.[i]

In late 2010, my wife and I were on a slow train from Munich to Prague and got talking to an elderly Czech lady, who gave us her potted life story. She told it all as though it was nothing exceptional. Her husband was arrested in the Communist era for saying something uncomplimentary about the regime and was sentenced to two years hard labor digging out underground coal from seams little more than half a metre thick. On release he couldn’t get a normal job anywhere and in desperation he took work in a uranium mine. After a while the uranium dust gave him cancer and he died, she said. Their five children also couldn’t get higher educations or jobs because they were tainted by their father’s prison record. Four got out to West Germany and settled there. She’d just been visiting them.

She was talking about the time before the “Prague Spring” of liberalization that began in early 1968 and ended abruptly in late August when the Soviets and their Polish, Hungarian and Bulgarian allies invaded with 200,000 troops and 2000 tanks. There was only minor resistance but 70 Czechs were killed and about 250 wounded. Passive resistance continued well into 1969. This is the background to my other Czech encounter.

To suppress any vestige of free speech, the Soviets’ first target was the Czech TV, radio and press. Editors were forced to agree to a new ‘temporary’ censorship regime where the media’s prime role was to support the new hard-line Communist leaders. Any dissent led to closure of the media outlet or worse. By April 1969 censorship became total and continued until the ‘Velvet Revolution’ twenty years later, which brought democracy to the republic.

Forty years before our chat with the lady on the train, I had spent an afternoon interviewing a young Czech journalist stuck in Perth a few days on his way back to Prague. At that point the last liberties in the Czech republic were being snuffed out by the pro-Soviet regime.

Indian prime minister Narendra Modi has earned a deserved reputation as a no-nonsense opponent of appeasement. His expansion of the India-Israel relationship and personal affinity with President Donald Trump and Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu have strengthened that perception. The latest evidence that it is more than a perception came this week, when Modi’s government discontinued half-century-old government subsidies provided to Muslim pilgrims going on the Hajj. The Hajj is an annual Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca that Muslims must carry out at least once, so long as they are physically and financially able – artificial conditions that the subsidy is intended to create.

That’s right: the government of India has been spending badly needed funds for one religious community’s annual pilgrimage. (There is even a special terminal in New Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International Airport exclusively for Hajj pilgrims, which is closed for most of the year.) Since 2008, about 120,000 Muslims have utilized the government money to go on the Hajj, according to the Indian government, costing the Indian people almost a half-billion dollars in the last five years alone. This money now will be used for educational purposes, especially for girls who have been particularly underserved in accordance with community practice.

The popular uprisings in Iran make it a sure bet that the Islamic Republic’s government will eventually collapse. That possibility in a nuclear Iran should have many in Washington losing sleep. What will happen to Iran’s centrifuges, enriched uranium, warhead designs and ballistic-missile technologies if the mullahs are toppled? What will happen to Iran’s scientists who are suddenly unemployed? Western governments should prepare.

The Islamic Republic was never the island of stability its Western enablers made it out to be. In the early 1980s, vengeful mullahs purged liberals and secularists who had naively joined Islamists to overthrow the shah. This produced a generation of young Iranians highly skeptical of their clerical elders. Students rebelled in 1999, the middle class in 2009. Last month tens of thousands of working-class Iranians finally decided they’d had enough.

These demonstrations must have been particularly unsettling for the clerical oligarchs, because the lower classes were supposed to be the mainstay of their power. For decades, the Islamic Republic has sought to tether this class to clerical rule by expanding the welfare state. Yet that welfare state is jeopardized by corruption and foreign adventures. Corrupt men of God are always more galling than crooked monarchs and army officers.

The Islamic Republic is no ordinary dictatorship heading toward the dust bin of history. In 2015 it was effectively granted a license by the U.S. and the other world powers to expand its nuclear program. The deal has not impeded Iran’s efforts to modernize its nuclear apparatus. Under the watchful eye of Ali Akbar Salehi, the MIT-educated head of Iran’s atomic program, Iran continues to enrich uranium, develop advanced centrifuges, test ballistic missiles, and train engineers. The regime, which has continuously lied about its ambition to acquire nuclear weapons, is determined to build an industrial-sized uranium-enrichment infrastructure equipped with cutting-edge technology and manned by a capable cadre of scientists.

Thanks to the nuclear deal, Iran could be the first country to undergo a violent revolution while in possession of an extensive nuclear network. The world has been lucky that the two nuclear states that collapsed did so peacefully. At the Cold War’s end Mikhail Gorbachev managed to liquidate the Soviet Union while safeguarding its atomic apparatus. In South Africa, the apartheid regime dismantled and destroyed its nuclear capability before handing over power to the majority.

Iran’s mullahs won’t go as quietly as Russia’s commissars and South Africa’s racists. These are men who claim to know the mind of God and have no compunction about shedding blood. The Islamic Republic will surely experience a prolonged period of internal strife, nationwide violence and ethnic separatism as it unwinds its theocratic experiment. In such circumstances, the command-and-control structure of the Iranian nuclear program may break down. Its enriched uranium and advanced centrifuges could go missing. And Iran’s enterprising scientists may find lucrative employment in unsavory places like North Korea and Pakistan. CONTINUE AT SITE

President Trump seemingly served notice Friday that the days are dwindling for Barack Obama’s Iran agreement. Although deal proponents also gained time to pursue “fixes,” this is a forlorn option. No fix will remedy the diplomatic Waterloo Mr. Obama negotiated. Democrats will reject anything that endangers his prized international contrivance, and the Europeans are more interested in trade with Tehran than a stronger agreement.

There is an even more fundamental obstacle: Iran. Negotiating with Congress and Europe will not modify the actual deal’s terms, which Iran (buttressed by Russia and China) has no interest in changing. Increased inspections, for example, is a nonstarter for Tehran. Mr. Obama gave the ayatollahs what they wanted; they will not give it back.

Most important, there is no evidence Iran’s intention to obtain deliverable nuclear weapons has wavered. None of the proposed “fixes” change this basic, unanswerable reality.

Spending the next 120 days negotiating with ourselves will leave the West mired in stasis. Mr. Trump correctly sees Mr. Obama’s deal as a massive strategic blunder, but his advisers have inexplicably persuaded him not to withdraw. Last fall, deciding whether to reimpose sanctions and decertify the deal under the Corker-Cardin legislation, the administration also opted to keep the door open to “fixes”—a punt on third down. Let’s hope Friday’s decision is not another punt.

The Iran agreement rests on inadequate knowledge and fundamentally flawed premises. Mr. Obama threw away any prospect of learning basic facts about Iran’s capabilities. Provisions for international inspection of suspected military-related nuclear facilities are utterly inadequate, and the U.S. is likely not even aware of all the locations. Little is known, at least publicly, about longstanding Iranian-North Korean cooperation on nuclear and ballistic-missile technology. It is foolish to play down Tehran’s threat because of Pyongyang’s provocations. They are two sides of the same coin.

Some proponents of “strengthening” the deal propose to eliminate its sunset provisions. That would achieve nothing. Tehran’s nuclear menace, especially given the Pyongyang connection, is here now, not 10 years away. One bizarre idea is amending the Corker-Cardin law to avoid the certification headache every 90 days. Tehran would endorse this proposal, but it is like taking aspirin to relieve the pain of a sucking chest wound.