RUTHFULLY YOURS

Burak Bekdil, one of Turkey’s leading journalists, was recently fired from Turkey’s leading newspaper after 29 years, for writing what was taking place in Turkey for Gatestone. He is a Fellow at the Middle East Forum.

“Erdogan’s claims that ‘There is no Islamic terror’ have left several Islamic terror organizations heart-broken. A press release from al-Qaeda’s press office read: ‘The prime minister’s remarks are very discouraging. We are doing our best!'” – Zaytung (satire website).

In 2010, Barack Obama referred to Turkey as a “great Muslim democracy”. Obama should have seen that a democracy is a democracy — without any religious prefix. He would see in later years the difference between a democracy and a Muslim democracy.

Turkey’s strongman, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, may have exhibited all possible features of political Islam since he came to power fifteen years ago, but at least he has been bold and honest about his understanding of Islamism: There is no moderate Islam, he recently said again.

This comment does not mark any U-turn, or a radical deviation from his earlier freshman-self back in the 2000s. The problem is that his Western “allies” have stubbornly preferred to turn a blind eye to his poster-child Islamism. Worse, they still do.

Several years ago, Erdogan’s ideological-self clearly stated that “Turkey is not a country where moderate Islam prevails.” In the same speech, his pragmatic-self — the one that wanted to look pretty to a chorus of Western praise — added that, “We are Muslims who have found a middle road”. But which “middle road?”

In the several years that followed, Erdogan proudly exhibited another feature of Islamism in a make-believe assertion: Muslims never do wrong; if a Muslim does wrong then he is not Muslim.

Hillary Clinton’s favorite Central American was back in the news this week, as Honduras painstakingly counted ballots in front of international observers and tried to discern, with utmost transparency, the winner of the Nov. 26 presidential election.

Amid the tension, left-wing candidate Salvador Nasralla cried fraud and called for an uprising. Soon, like a bad centavo, pro-Chávez Honduran former President Manuel Zelaya turned up in the midst of one angry mob.

Recall that in 2009 Mr. Zelaya was kicked out of the country, with the support of his own party, for violating the constitution. Mrs. Clinton, who was then secretary of state, tried and failed to force Honduras to take Mr. Zelaya back. Last week he was seen again, wearing his signature cowboy hat and leading a bunch of hooligans trying to break into the warehouse where the electoral authorities had stored ballots and tally sheets from around the country for counting. The raid did not succeed, but the incident captured the spirit of Zelaya-Nasralla politics.

Mr. Nasralla, a former game-show host, ran against incumbent center-right President Juan Orlando Hernández. By Friday it looked like Mr. Hernández had narrowly won. Mr. Nasralla seemed sure of it too. That’s when he announced that his supporters would stay in the streets for years in protest unless he was declared the winner. With no concession, the uncertainty dragged on. CONTINUE AT SITE

http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/2017/12/another-muslim-zionist-speaks-out.html The trend exemplified by this Kuwaiti writer and this one finds favour with this Pakistani Muslim: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdMstCuV-LQ

These illegal immigrants “come to Europe looking for ‘opportunities,’ but do not accept any of the responsibilities of an open democracy. They usually engage in all kinds of smuggling: Drugs, trafficking, and even ‘jihad.’ We cannot allow that.” — Former Greek Prime Minister Antonis Samaras.

“Jihadists are ideologues… They see the world as a battle between believers and unbelievers.” Therefore no one is “immune” to their agenda. — François Heisbourg, IISS Council Chair at the London-based International Institute of Strategic Studies.

Appeasing radical Muslims through open-border policies — and by surrendering national identity to multiculturalism — has the opposite of the intended effect. Allowing unfettered entry, rather than causing the immigrants to integrate and liberalize, and leading to friendly ties with Muslim-majority countries, has instead led to their further radicalization.

At a recent conference in Rome, held by the think tank European Ideas Network (EIN), former Greek Prime Minister Antonis Samaras, a member of the Hellenic Parliament, declared:

“European democracies in the Mediterranean are in danger of being swept away by a tsunami of uncontrolled immigration. We cannot allow this. Our societies cannot stand it. The European Union itself cannot stand it… [More than] one million ‘foreigners’ passed then [2015] through Greece and ended up in various countries of the European Union, mainly in Northern and Central Europe. Some of them were real refugees, from Syria and Iraq. But most of them were illegal immigrants from other countries of the world. Today it is estimated that the true refugees that are still coming are 20% of the total or fewer. The rest are illegal immigrants.”

These illegal immigrants, he said, “come to Europe looking for ‘opportunities,’ but do not accept any of the responsibilities of an open democracy.”

“They usually engage in all kinds of smuggling: Drugs, trafficking, and even ‘jihad.’ We cannot allow that. Freedom and the openness of our societies also entail responsibilities. And full respect to our laws, of course. ‘Moochers’ of our democratic system can destroy it.”

An Anglican minister has sparked outrage after calling for Christians to pray for Prince George, who is four years old, to grow up to be gay, in order to advance the cause of gay rights in the Church.

The minister, Rev. Kelvin Holdsworth, is known for making controversial statements, however speculating about the sexuality of a child to make a political point proved too much for many people.

“To use prayer as a mechanism for wishing this on Prince George is an unkind and destructive thing to do,” Gavin Ashenden, a Christian Episcopal Church missionary bishop, told the BBC. “It doesn’t have the prince’s best interests at heart, but uses him as a gender-political football.”

“Prince George is four years old,” wrote Twitter user MadWorldOfSam. “Praying for someone to be gay is just as bad as praying for them to be straight. Whoever he is sexually attracted to when he grows up shouldn’t matter. Damaging this kid by putting pressure on him to be gay will do more harm than good.”

In 1890, the nearly-defeated Native Americans of the northern plains embraced a religious movement commonly translated as “Ghost Dance”, which promised to unify the Indian peoples and drive out European settlers. After the disastrous battle at Wounded Knee in December of that year the movement collapsed and Indian resistance to settlement faded into insignificance. It is tempting to dismiss the New Nationalism as a sort of Ghost Dance in which enervated and encircled traditionalists offer a final hopeless last stand against the inevitable encroachment of the globalised economy and postmodern culture. No one seems more confused about the import of the New Nationalism than the nationalists themselves. In Germany, the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) is a coalition brought together by anger at the Merkel government’s decision to admit well over a million Middle Eastern migrants, but otherwise has no unifying characteristic. After a brief moment in the sun that included dinner with President Trump and a star slot at America’s leading conservative conference last February, Nigel Farage has fallen off America’s radar, and his most prominent admirer in the Trump White House, Steve Bannon, has left the Administration.

Mr Farage campaigned under the Cross of St George rather than the Union Jack; that is, as an English nationalist. But the United Kingdom is not a nation so much as an imperial monarchy, whose head of state is the sovereign of 32 countries. If the Brexit vote embodied more than passing rancour at the meddlesome European Union, what sort of national sentiment does it express? Does President Donald Trump’s call for “America First” mean anything more than a bilateral approach to trade negotiations rather than the multilateralism of the recent past? If that is the case, any change is more likely to be superficial rather than substantive. Mr Trump seems less interested in defining himself than the pundits whose job it is to pigeonhole him. He is neither the creature of the alt-Right nor an Establishment mogul in mufti, but a pragmatist more in the mode of Franklin Delano Roosevelt than Ronald Reagan.

The one European movement that can be termed “nationalist” in the strict sense of the term, namely Catalan independence, has occasioned scant resonance among populist parties on either side of the Atlantic. The Catalans have their own language, after all, and never wanted to be part of Spain; to the extent that a pro-independence majority is in doubt, it is due to immigration into Catalonia from other parts of Spain. Marine Le Pen, the defeated National Front candidate, took the side of the Spanish central government against the Catalans. The Scots Nationalists endorsed the Catalans’ right to hold an independence referendum, a costless call after having lost their own. The Catalans make the formerly separatist Lega Lombarda in Italy squeamish.

There has been considerable interest in the direction of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s ongoing “reimagining” of the State Department, but for all the conversations about the future of American diplomacy, what has been underaddressed is how our oldest Cabinet agency is preparing to deal with the new, but foreseeable, diplomatic challenges presented by emerging technology.

While at the Department, I joined the effort to establish a Coordinator for Cyber Issues reporting directly to the Secretary, because no single bureau was able to represent all of the interests that the U.S. has in the cyber domain, including economic, military, intelligence, and freedom of expression-related issues. In 2011, the United States became the first country to assign a senior diplomat the task of focusing on cyber issues; allies and competitors alike have since set up similar positions, thus moving the international community forward – albeit in fits and starts – in developing norms and standards. Creating an office to focus on international cyber policy was a clear example of senior State Department officials anticipating where our interconnected world was headed and allocating resources to meet the challenge in a truly strategic, long-term manner.

Secretary Tillerson eliminated the Coordinator for Cyber Issues position earlier this year, but Reps. Ed Royce, R-Calif., and Eliot Engel, D-N.Y., the chairman and ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, along with 15 other representatives, have co-sponsored the Cyber Diplomacy Act of 2017 to re-establish it and require the Secretary of State to develop an international strategy for cyberspace. While it is encouraging to see a coordinated push by Congress to ensure the U.S. can fully pursue its national interests in the cyber domain, this move would merely allow us to get back to the former status quo.

Meanwhile, technological innovation in other realms continues at a furious pace. China is spending billions of dollars to surpass the United States as the world leader in artificial intelligence by 2030, with an eye towards improving its economy and matching our military prowess. Russian President Vladimir Putin believes the country with the best AI “will become the ruler of the world,” and Moscow recently made clear that it opposes international efforts to ban lethal autonomous weapons.

The Russian government will build an “independent internet” for use by itself, Brazil, India, China, and South Africa — the so-called BRICS nations — “in the event of global internet malfunctions,” the Russian news site RT reported on Tuesday. More precisely, Moscow intends to create an alternative to the global Domain Name System, or DNS, the directory that helps the browser on your computer or smartphone connect to the website server or other computer that you’re trying to reach. The Russians cited national security concerns, but the real reason may have more to do with Moscow’s own plans for offensive cyber operations.

According to RT, the Russian Security Council discussed the idea during its October meeting, saying that “the increased capabilities of western nations to conduct offensive operations in the informational space as well as the increased readiness to exercise these capabilities pose a serious threat to Russia’s security.” Russian President Vladimir Putin has set a date of August 1, 2018, to complete the alternative DNS.

Why are they doing it? Russia, along with China, has long pushed for national governments to assert more control over the DNS and net governance in general, via the UN International Telecommunication Union, or ITU. Then, as now, the Russian and Chinese arguments were rooted in national security. But were DNS to be turned over to the ITU, dictatorships would be able to much better monitor dissidents, stifle dissent, and control the information environment in their countries. For example, Western tech companies could be forced to keep data and servers physically within those countries, and thus become entangled in vast citizen-monitoring programs.

In 2014, the U.S. cleverly announced it would give control of the DNS database to a non-governmental international body of stakeholders, a process to be run by the California-based Internet Corporation of Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN.

“Now, when China stands up and says, ‘We want a seat at the table of internet governance,’ the U.S. can say, ‘No. The internet should be stateless.’ They’re in a much stronger position to make that argument today than they were before,” Matthew Prince, co-founder of the company Cloudflare, told Defense One at the time.