RUTHFULLY YOURS

Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is losing his nerve. After a year of silence, the self-proclaimed caliph of Islamic State released an audio recording Wednesday in which he urged his fighters to stand firm in Mosul as the U.S.-backed coalition closed in. “The value of staying on your land with honor is a thousand times better than the price of retreating with shame,” he thundered.

Next door, Jordanians watch the Mosul operation with enthusiasm and unease. As Information Minister Mohammad al-Momani puts it in an interview in Amman this week, “To us the Mosul operation is a cornerstone in the whole fight against terrorism.” Mosul also raises discomfiting questions about what form jihadism will take after Islamic State is defeated, and how that might threaten Jordan, America’s most reliable Arab ally.

Roiling Amman now are reports that many Islamic State fighters are “shaving their beards” to blend in as coalition forces draw near. An estimated 2,500 Jordanians have joined Islamic State, and alarms rang last week after the jihadist army overran half of Rutba, a city about 70 miles from the Jordanian border in western Iraq. “These groups are rooted now in Syria and Iraq, and Jordan will be a target once the space in Syria and Iraq closes,” says counterterror analyst Amer al-Sabaileh.

This is why border security is foremost among Amman’s priorities. Some 1.5 million refugees from the wars in Syria and Iraq have already flooded Jordan, straining resources and patience in a small nation that unlike many of its neighbors isn’t blessed with oil wealth. Jordanians recognize the magnitude of the risk if even a minuscule fraction of the newcomers is linked to Islamic State. They aren’t keen to accept more.

The upside is that officials here have a good sense of what goes on beyond their frontiers. The Obama administration has been a relatively decent steward of the Amman-Washington alliance, and thanks in part to U.S. assistance, the Jordanian security apparatus is battle-ready for any territorial attempts. “We’ve been at war with Daesh in our northern and eastern borders for four years,” says Mr. Momani, using the Arabic acronym for Islamic State. “So we are in a strong position to defend our borders.”

Jordan also faces an internal threat underscored by two Islamic State assaults in June against military and intelligence targets that killed 11 soldiers and officers in total. In coming years Jordan will likely face an uptick in such attacks, the product of the “collapse of ISIS and the rise of ISIS 2.0,” says Mr. Sabaileh, the terrorism analyst. Both the remnants of the old Islamic State and its successor group, he says, will have an incentive to stage brutal, sophisticated attacks—the former to demonstrate it is still in the game, the latter to prove its jihadist chops. CONTINUE AT SITE

“Let us see how your Islamist friend [Erdogan] behaves after crushing the secular establishment.” — The author to a friend, 2004.

To insist on the borders Turkey accepted in the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne “is the greatest injustice to be done to the country and to the nation.” — Turkey’s President, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, October 19, 2016.

Erdogan’s newfound claims seem to refer not only to wish to regain hegemony to the west (Greece) but also about the south (Syria) and the southeast (Iraq). Turkey evidently wishes to be part of an Iraqi- and Kurdish-led offensive against Mosul, controlled since 2014 by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

Sipping his ouzo at a café in Athens on a warm afternoon in 2004, a Greek diplomat friend smiled and said:

“You are wrong about Erdogan. He will reform Turkey’s democratic culture, align it with the European Union, strengthen its ties with NATO and pursue a pro-peace policy in this part of the world. Meanwhile he will crush the secular army establishment and Turkey will no longer be a threat to any of its neighbors.”

I said: “Let us see how your Islamist friend [Erdogan] behaves after crushing the secular establishment.”

Twelve years later, I still enjoy our peaceful ouzo sessions with the same Greek friend. But things do not look equally peaceful between Turkey and its neighbors, including Greece.

Speaking at a public rally on October 22, President Erdogan said that “We did not accept our borders voluntarily.” He went on to say, “At the time [when the current borders were drawn] we may have agreed to it but the real mistake is to surrender to that sacrifice.” What does all that mean?

The Atlantic Council, founded in 1961 to encourage civic engagement in transatlantic security, is now blaming the West for “Islamophobia,” along with notorious Islam apologists like Karen Armstrong.

“What we want to do today is debunk myths,” stated Atlantic Council President Frederick Kempeat the Washington, DC, organization’s October 20 event “Islamophobia: Overcoming Myths and Engaging in a Better Conversation.” Yet the panelists merely offered hackneyed arguments diverting attention from current Islamist threats, casting disrepute on an Atlantic Council once founded to stimulate civic engagement in transatlantic security.

Vuslat Doðan Sabancý, publisher of the leading Turkish newspaper Hürriyet, dismissed any legitimate concerns about Islamic doctrine by stating that “Islamophobia…stems from phobia, which is a fear of the unknown.” British religion writer and notorious Islam apologist Karen Armstrong similarly spoke of a “phobia, an irrational fear, it is not based on reason, it is based on a gut feeling.” Blurring distinctions between critiquing a belief system like Islam and ethnic prejudice, Kempe discussed the “line between security concerns and racism.”

For Sabancý, the “answer is very simple. Let’s get rid of the phobia…let’s get to know each other,” yet her appeal for intercultural dialogue contained limits evoking “Islamophobia’s” totalitarian nature. “Freedom of speech is the backbone of democracy, but it should not be exercised at the cost of attacking one’s dignity, it should not be exercised at the cost of attacking one’s faith either, because dignity is also a human right,” she stated. This rather unusual position for a publisher paralleled Dr. Mehmet Aydin, former head of Turkey’s Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet). He warned that when “saying nasty things about the prophet” Muhammad of Islam, “you have to be very careful…we have to respect the values of other cultures.”

The panelists exhibited no such concern for European security measures amidst millions of Muslim refugees overwhelming Europe with various economic and terrorism worries. “This is going to take its place in history as the most disgraceful human act,” Sabancý stated with reference to Europe’s new zeal for border barriers. “It doesn’t seem long ago, does it, when we were cheering because the Berlin wall was being torn down,” Armstrong contrasted.

Armstrong evoked ominous historical analogies of epochs in which “there have been these explosions of hatred of certain groups, just think of the Crusades,” where Crusaders “slaughtered Muslims with great joy.” This common slander (see President Barack Obama) of Crusaders as mere bloodthirsty aggressors preceded her trite Nazism invocation while discussing the Ayatollah Khomeini’s 1989 fatwa calling for British writer Salman Rushdie’s death. At the time, she was “appalled by the way British intellectuals, the great and the good, segued away from a denunciation of the fatwa to an out and out denunciation of Islam itself. I said to myself we have learned nothing in Europe since the 1930s.”

Armstrong’s imagination somehow juxtaposed justifiable outrage in the United Kingdom and elsewhere at lethal Islamic blasphemy doctrine with the subsequent 1990s eruption of the Balkans bloodbath. “There were concentration camps again on the outskirts of Europe, this time with Muslims in them,” she stated. Apparently unaware of any Balkan wars, including the Ottoman Empire’s jihad conquests, she superficially described the prior history of a region “where Muslims, Jews, and Christians had coexisted amicably for centuries.”

The UN is the mothership of injustice and radical global Islamization.

As the UN does not recognize the historical presence and continuity of the Jewish people in their land, the next people on the menu in UNESCO’s food chain are most likely the Greeks and then the Italians. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan already said as much last week.

No one would be surprised if UNESCO, to institutionalize the Islamic presence in the international community, claims that Greeks have nothing to do with the Acropolis and the Parthenon, and that Italy has no historical ties to the Colosseum in Rome.

With the rate of admission of Muslims into Greece, by 2050 the Greeks will be a minority in their own country.

The Greek media chose not to inform the Greek people on the attitude of their politicians towards the Jewish nation because it would expose their preference for Islam over Israel, and the Greek people might not see this choice in a positive light.

How can Greece credibly ask for help from the global community on the issue of Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, when the politicians themselves maintain a neutral attitude on the virtually identical issue of the Jerusalem’s Temple Mount?

When the news arrived that UNESCO does not recognize the connection of the Jewish people to Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, it brought to mind that the UN is the mothership of injustice and radical global Islamization. Its members, which include the large bloc of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) — 56 Islamic nations plus “Palestine” — evidently believe that if they want to transform the Western world into an Islamic colony, first they must bring down the State of Israel. This resembles the suggestion in ancient Greece of the exiled Greek general, Demaratos, to the king of Persia, Xerxes: If you want Greece to fall, first you have to destroy the Spartans.

If Jerusalem falls into the hands of Islam, the rest of the world will presumably fall. UNESCO’s decision is not only nonsensical from a historical perspective (Islam did not even exist at the time of ancient Jerusalem), basically it is also a strategic move against the cultural foundations of the West.

As the UN does not recognize the historical presence and continuity of the Jewish people in their land, the next people on the menu in UNESCO’s food chain are most likely the Greeks and then the Italians. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan already said as much last week.

Before Turks could digest so many undemocratic practices they had to face in one week, they woke up only to learn that scores of journalists at a newspaper critical of Erdogan had been detained. On October 31, police raided the homes of 11 people, including executives and journalists of Cumhuriyet newspaper, after prosecutors initiated a probe against them on “terrorism” charges.

“This is about … abolishing all universal values… The most explicit indications of it are the growing pressure against the Turkish press and the policies to destroy it. This is the process of the destruction of free thought.” — The Contemporary Journalists Association.

Both fascism and communism exercised a large influence on the Arab “Baathist” ideology — “resurrection” in Arabic, and which started as a nationalist, Sunni Arab movement to combat Western colonial rule and to promote modernization. In Iraq, the despotic Baathist regime survived 35 years, largely under the leadership of Saddam Hussein. In Syria, it is still struggling under the tyranny of President Bashar al-Assad. These days a non-Arab, but Islamist version of the Baathist ideology is flourishing in an otherwise unlikely country: candidate for membership in the European Union (EU), Turkey.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s increasing authoritarianism is killing Turkey’s already slim chances of finding itself a place in the world’s more civilized clubs and turning the country more and more into a “Baathist” regime.

In 2004 Erdogan’s government abolished the death penalty as part of his ambitions at the time to join the EU. Twelve years later, on Oct. 29, 2016, Erdogan addressed fans of his party, and said he would ratify a bill reinstating capital punishment once it passed in parliament despite objections it might spark in the West. He said: “Soon, our government will bring (the bill) to parliament … It’s what the people say that matters, not what the West thinks”.