RUTHFULLY YOURS

On Sunday, the Islamic Republic announced the arrest of eight women whose photographs were featured on Instagram. The models reportedly failed to adhere to stifling Islamic style dress codes rigorously enforced by Iran’s oppressive mullahs. More specifically, they posed without wearing religiously sanctioned head scarves designed to cover exposed hair.

Following her arrest, one of the models was forced to appear on Iranian TV in the presence of two prosecutors. Wearing a black head scarf and matching black gloves, she was recorded – almost certainly under duress – sanctioning the government’s Orwellian-like actions, warning other Iranian women that they “can be certain that no man would want to marry a model whose fame has come by losing her honor.” As an aside, when Iranian navy pirates operating off Farsi Island kidnapped 10 U.S. Navy sailors in the Arabian Gulf in January, they forced a female sailor into Sharia compliance, requiring her to don a hijab.

The arrests come in the midst of a yet another government crackdown on social media and dissent. The anti-social media operation, ominously codenamed “Spider II” has thus far netted dozens of models, photographers, makeup artists and other dangerous enemies of the state. Also arrested was Iranian blogger Mahdi Boutorabi who reportedly covered Iran’s rigged 2009 elections. It appears that periodically, the mullahs get bored or insecure and conjure up ways to make the lives of their citizens more miserable.

But the Islamic Republic’s absurdity doesn’t end there. Iran’s Revolutionary Guard bizarrely accused reality star (and not much else) Kim Kardashian-West of being behind the nefarious plot to undermine or otherwise taint the morals of Iran’s young women.

In third world democracies such as Turkey, there is a vast gap between what laws say and how they are enforced.

“As many as 2,000 individuals — reporters, celebrities, academics and students — are reportedly being officially investigated on charges of insulting President Recep Tayyip Erdogan or spreading ‘terrorist propaganda.'” — “Reporters Without Borders” Report.

The EU must understand that it has too little, if any, leverage on a country that is going full speed toward darker days of Islamist authoritarianism.

With or without legal amendments to its anti-terror laws or a deal with the EU, Erdogan’s Turkey will de facto follow the path of Islamist autocracies, where any kind of dissent amounts to terrorism and treason.

Turkey and the European Union (EU) have been negotiating a deal that ostensibly would stem the flow of hundreds of thousands of migrants into Europe; Turkey, on its part, would bring dozens of laws and regulations, including its draconian anti-terror laws, in line with Europe’s; and nearly 80 million Turks would then be given visa-free travel to the EU’s borderless Schengen zone. But now, as Turkey refuses to amend its anti-terror laws, the deal seems to be facing a stalemate.

That is hardly the heart of the matter. In reality, both Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the EU are pursuing a deal that will not work.

“It can be expected that, as soon as Turkish citizens will obtain visa-free entry to the EU, foreign nationals will start trying to obtain Turkish passports … or use the identities of Turkish citizens, or to obtain by fraud the Turkish citizenship. This possibility may attract not only irregular migrants, but also criminals or terrorists.” — Leaked European Commission report, quoted in the Telegraph, May 17, 2016.

According to the Telegraph, the EU report adds that as a result of the deal, the Turkish mafia, which traffics vast volumes of drugs, sex slaves, illegal firearms and refugees into Europe, may undergo “direct territorial expansion towards the EU.”

“If they make the wrong decision, we will send the refugees.” — Burhan Kuzu, senior adviser to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Erdogan is now demanding that the EU immediately hand over three billion euros ($3.4 billion) so that Turkish authorities can spend it as they see fit. The EU insists that the funds be transferred through international aid agencies in accordance with strict rules on how the aid can be spent. This prompted Erdogan to accuse the EU of “mocking the dignity” of the Turkish nation.

The EU-Turkey migrant deal, designed to halt the flow of migrants from Turkey to Greece, is falling apart just two months after it was reached. European officials are now looking for a back-up plan.

The March 18 deal was negotiated in great haste by European leaders desperate to gain control over a migration crisis in which more than one million migrants from Africa, Asia and the Middle East poured into Europe in 2015.

London Mayor Sadiq Khan has called moderate Muslims “Uncle Toms” – not quite what one would expect to hear from a supposed advocate of equality.

The irony of course is that to show you are not a racist, you are using racist terminology. Is that what an anti-racist should sound like?

Name-calling is usually just a form political blackmail designed to close down a discussion before it has even begun. What it does not wish to take into consideration is that someone might simply have a different opinion.

Every candidate’s record on terrorism should be questioned. It is the public’s right. Just because Khan happens to be Muslim, does that entitle him to special treatment? Why should one not be able to ask Khan the same questions one might ask any other politician?

Many are hailing the election of London’s new mayor, Sadiq Khan, admirably the “son of a Pakistani bus driver,” as the sign of a new, tolerant London and that Britain’s Black and minority ethnic communities are making progress.

But there are concerns. Khan has called moderate Muslims “Uncle Toms” – not quite what one would expect to hear from a supposed advocate of equality.

The irony of course is that to show you are not a racist, you are using racist terminology. Is that what an anti-racist should sound like?

Branding someone an “Uncle Tom” also implies that the poor primate cannot think independently or formulate an opinion apart from his ethnicity. Basically, the accusation would seem an attempt to intimidate those within a community to conform to whatever the group-think is; anyone who disagrees must therefore be a traitor. But name-calling is usually just a form political blackmail designed to close down discussion before it even begins. It seemingly does not wish to take into account that someone might just have a different opinion.

My father, Richard Lakin, a 76-year-old retired elementary-school principal from Connecticut, was on a bus in Jerusalem last October when two young Palestinian men boarded and began shooting and stabbing passengers indiscriminately. Two passengers were killed that awful day and 16 injured, including my father. Despite the efforts of first responders and the nurses and doctors at Hadassah Ein Kerem Hospital, my father died two weeks later. He had been shot in the head and stabbed multiple times in the head, face, chest and stomach.

Over the past seven months I’ve spent a lot of time trying to understand what would cause two educated Palestinian men in their early 20s to board a public bus and butcher a group of innocent civilians, many of them senior citizens. I’m sorry to report that the Palestinian reaction to the attack has led me to believe that the “peace process” is more one-sided than ever.
Richard Lakin died in October 2015, two weeks after he was critically wounded in a Palestinian terrorist attack on a public bus in Jerusalem. ENLARGE
Richard Lakin died in October 2015, two weeks after he was critically wounded in a Palestinian terrorist attack on a public bus in Jerusalem. Photo: Associated Press

My father grew up a fighter for civil rights in America. He took those values with him in 1984 when he emigrated to Jerusalem, where he taught English to Arabs and Jews. He was a kind, gentle-hearted man who dedicated his life to education and promoting peaceful coexistence.

Yet Palestinian newspapers praised Baha Alyan, one of the terrorists who murdered my father, as a “martyr and intellectual.” Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has met with the families of the attackers and praised them as “martyrs.” A Palestinian scout leader said Baha Alyan, who was shot and killed by a security guard before he could kill more innocent passengers, was “an example for every scout.”

Muhammad Alyan, the father of Baha Alyan, has been invited to speak at Palestinian schools and universities about his son the “martyr.” He recently spoke to children at Jabel Mukaber Elementary School in East Jerusalem, about a half a mile from where my father lived. Tragically, many Palestinian children, perhaps most, are still taught to honor terrorists and fight for the destruction of Israel. CONTINUE AT SITE

BERLIN—A German court on Tuesday banned a comedian from repeating large sections of a satirical text about Recep Tayyip Erdogan, handing the Turkish President a partial victory in his efforts to silence mockery and criticism in Germany of his person and policies.

The regional Hamburg court ruling on a complaint by the Turkish president said the text by comedian Jan Böhmermann qualified as satire and that those parts of it targeted at the president’s policies or leadership could be quoted.

However, the bulk of the text was described by the court as religiously disparaging, “reflecting prejudice of a racist nature” and containing sexual content. Those parts breached Mr. Erdogan’s rights and couldn’t be repeated, the court said.
The lawyer representing Mr. Erdogan in this case couldn’t be reached for comment, but Ralf Höcker, a lawyer representing the president in a separate but related case welcomed the decision. “Racist insults aren’t covered by the right to freedom of opinion,” said Mr. Höcker. “That’s this decision’s important message.” The Turkish President’s office declined to comment.

The court order, or preliminary injunction, can be appealed.

Meanwhile, Christian Schertz, a lawyer for Mr. Böhmermann, said the court had failed to grasp the comedian’s ironic detachment.

“The regional court of Hamburg makes the mistake of dissecting the poem and taking out and banning certain remarks that it regards as being degrading. This isn’t possible in the field of artistic freedom. Instead, the poem must be considered in its entirety and in the context of the (television) show.” CONTINUE AT SITE

The week of Israel’s 68th anniversary, NATO invited Israel – and three other countries – to “establish diplomatic missions to NATO headquarters.” This is not NATO membership, something to which Israel does not aspire, but recognition that Israel has something to offer the Atlantic Alliance. Prime Minister Netanyahu said, “The countries of the world want to cooperate with us because of our determined struggle against terrorism, because of our technological knowledge, our intelligence deployment and other reasons.”

It may have something to do with the revelation that Israel had warned Brussels of lax airport security before the terror attack at Zavantem Airport in March. Or the discovery that Israel had offered France a tracking system for terror suspects after the Charlie Hebdo/kosher supermarket attacks and nearly a year before the September bombings that killed 130 people in Paris. France had declined. An Israeli source said, “French authorities liked it, but (an official) came back and said there was a higher-level instruction not to buy Israeli technology… the discussion just stopped.”

It may have something to do with NATO member Turkey’s increasingly perilous position in the Middle East. Facing increased Kurdish restiveness, spillover from the Syrian war, ISIS imposed genocide, and increasingly strained relations with Russia over Syria and Ngorno-Karabakh, restoring security cooperation with Israel might be a lifeline for Ankara. This would account for Turkey dropping its opposition to Israel’s NATO mission.

Or maybe NATO is reverting to its previous view of Israel as a security partner and moving closer to the traditional American position, regardless of the increasingly shrill tenor of European politics (we’re not the only ones). There is history here.

The Islamic State, Al-Qaeda, American pundit-comedian Jon Stewart, U.S. Vice-President Joe Biden, and the president of Iraqi Kurdistan, all agree that the Sykes-Picot Agreement, a secret plan for dividing up the Middle East signed by France and Britain 100 years ago today, was a bad thing.

But was it?

Certainly there were losers: the Kurds for example, or 1.3 million ethnic Greeks driven out of Anatolia by the Turks.

But others, such as The Economist magazine, argue that the chaos of the Middle East is very much the fault of the regimes there. “Lots of countries have blossomed despite traumatic histories: South Korea and Poland, for example – not to mention Israel,” argues The Economist.

Below I attach seven articles on the hundredth anniversary of the Sykes-Picot agreement, containing a variety of views. There are extracts first, for those who don’t have time to read the articles in full.

It is worth noting that today is also significant in that it marks the 50th anniversary of another globally important event, the beginning of China’s murderous Cultural Revolution.

(Please note that my hand is still injured, it is hard to type, and I may not be able to reply to emails.)

“Populism is a disease of the elites, imposed by them on the people as they struggle to maintain control, and the present crisis and popular revolt is best seen as a reaction to this.”

We are cursed with a bi-partisan political class that will say and do anything it believes might secure the hearts, minds and votes of those whose self-interest matches its own desire to remain in power. Principles and the common good? They count for nothing
“A permanent crisis in governance across the democratic world”. That is the threat we face, according to Greg Sheridan in an excellent article, “Populism diminishing democracies”. Sheridan is one of the few political commentators capable of seeing the big picture. While most journalists focus on trivia, Sheridan is able to analyse Australian politics in the context of a range of ominous global trends that will shape the future far more profoundly than Bill Shorten’s ‘man boobs’ or Malcolm Turnbull’s ‘harbourside mansion’. But is Sheridan correct? Is the crisis one of populism, as primal forces are unleashed within Western societies? Or is the crisis actually caused by the failure of the elites in those societies?

Populism, of both the left and the right, is Sheridan’s concern, and he attempts to define it and account for its emergence. Across the democratic world, the centre of the political spectrum is increasingly being deserted in favour of “gross, vulgar, hyper-partisan populism [which] is winning victory after victory for irrational hatreds and prejudices.” He cites the presidential victory of Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, the success of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders in the US, the impeachment of Brazil’s President Dilma Rousseff, the victory of Norbert Hofer of the far-right Freedom Party in the first round of the Austrian presidential elections, the accompanying shift of Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic to the ‘illiberal right’, and the embrace of naked populism by the previously economically rationalist UK Independence Party.

Only six countries voted no: the United States, Estonia, Germany, Lithuania, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom. France, Spain, Sweden, Slovenia accepted the text and voted yes. The resolution was presented with the support of several Muslim countries – some often described as “moderate” : Egypt, Tunisia and Morocco.

What

UNESCO’s resolution is not only biased : it is negationist. All traces of Jewish presence in Jerusalem and Judea in ancient times are striped at the stroke of a pen.

is worrisome is that only six Western countries were ready to reject a totally poisonous, fraudulent resolution.

UNESCO is a branch of the United Nations, and the United Nations is an organization where democracies are in the minority, surrounded by a huge majority of ​​dictatorships and authoritarian regimes imbued with hatred toward the West. Israel is virtually the only country designated as guilty of violation of Human Rights by the so-called Human Rights Council, and where, in 2009, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was welcomed as a hero.

On April 11, 2016, the Executive Board of UNESCO adopted a resolution called “Occupied Palestine.” The title immediately exposes it as a biased document. That is not surprising. All the texts adopted by UNESCO concerning the Middle East are biased.

However, those who read it carefully can see that a further step was taken.

UNESCO’s resolution is not only biased: it is negationist. All traces of Jewish presence in Jerusalem and Judea in ancient times are striped at the stroke of a pen. The Temple Mount is never mentioned. It is only called by the name al-Aqsa Mosque / Haram al Sharif. The name “Western Wall” is placed between quotation marks, to indicate that it is a non-valid name: Al Buraq Wall is used without quotation marks. The graves of Jewish cemeteries are described as “false tombs.”