RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.jns.org/iran-reports-electrical-incident-at-natanz-a-day-after-advanced-centrifuges-spun-up

The accident caused no casualties or pollution and is under investigation, says Atomic Energy Organization of Iran spokesman • Former top Israeli defense official: “Israeli attack can’t be ruled out.”

Iranian state media reported an “incident” at Iran’s Natanz nuclear facility on Sunday, a day after advanced uranium-enrichment centrifuges were spun up at the site as part of its “National Nuclear Technology Day.”

Atomic Energy Organization of Iran spokesman Behrouz Kamalvandi told Iran’s Fars News Agency that the incident involved the electricity distribution network at the facility, and had caused no casualties or pollution.

The accident is under investigation, and additional information will be announced later, he said.

Giora Eiland, a former head of the Israel Defense Forces Operations Branch, said that the power outage could have been sabotage.

“According to reports, this was not a power cut that you can solve by flicking a switch back up,” he told Army Radio.

Eiland, who is also a former head of Israel’s National Security Council, said that the installation of new equipment at the facility might have created an opportunity for a potential attacker, “whether through cyber [means] or through other damaging means placed in centrifuges ahead of time.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17180/what-makes-erdogan-tick

At the end of the year, there was a Turkey in deep stages of cold-to-colder-war with the EU (in particular, with EU members Greece, Cyprus and France), Israel, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, General Khalifa Haftar of Libya and the United States (over the S-400 dispute).

Not one of these state actors stepped back and appeased Erdoğan or changed policy in the face of Turkish hostilities.

In December, the Trump administration announced that the U.S. would sanction Turkey for its purchase of the Russian-made S-400 surface-to-air missile system….

All that must have made Erdoğan tick. Apparently cornered, Erdoğan launched a new charm offensive in November. He said Turkey’s future was in Europe – quite a radical departure from his usual histrionics that Europe is Islamophobic, fascist, racist and Europeans are “remnants of Nazis.”

Erdoğan’s tough guy manners have finally been decrypted by state and non-state actors in the former Ottoman lands.

“Erdoğan will not back down until you show him teeth. That’s what we did when we negotiated the (Syrian) ceasefire in October of 2019. We were ready to crush the economy.” — James Jeffrey, former U.S. special envoy for Syria (and former ambassador to Ankara), Al Monitor

A comparative analysis of where Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s aggressive war-mongering and assertive foreign policy — based on an imaginary Superpower Turkey — stood a year ago, and today’s relative Turkish composure at all problematic fronts should give us invaluable lessons on dealing with the wannabe sultan. The events during the past year offer precious experimental confrontations that reveal an answer to a question that concerns a rich menu of nations: What makes Erdoğan tick?

Erdoğan has threatened Europe several times with “sending millions of refugees your way.” On February 27, 2020, the Turkish government finally pressed the button to execute the threat: Millions of (mostly Syrian) migrants on Turkish soil were now free to travel to Europe; Turkish border gates were now open. Tens of thousands of these migrants (not only Syrians) were given free bus rides from Istanbul to Turkey’s land borders with Bulgaria and Greece, about 150 miles west of the Istanbul. In a declaration that looked more like propaganda talk than reality, Turkish Interior Minister Süleyman Soylu chimed in on March 1, 2020 that, in a span of three days, 100,000 refugees had already crossed the borders into Europe.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17270/france-macron-radicalism

There are also teachers who, possibly because they are scared, choose to bow their heads, give up teaching certain subjects and — when students shout anti-Semitic and anti-Western insults — to act as if they hear nothing. It has become almost impossible in most French high schools to talk about either Israel or the Holocaust.

Most journalists seem to prefer avoiding all discussion of the advance of radical Islam in France. They know that those who do so are immediately called “racists” or “Islamophobes” and are often threatened, prosecuted, sentenced to heavy fines or fired from their place of work.

Even though what the journalist Éric Zemmour said was accurate and verifiable, the CSA (Superior Audiovisual Council), said that to state certain facts constitutes an “incitement to racial hatred”.

In 2015, a French journalist compared the National Rally Party to the Islamic State. [National Rally President] Marine Le Pen responded by posting on Twitter two photographs of crimes committed by the Islamic State and added, “This is Islamic State”…. In court, the judge asked Le Pen, “Do you consider that these photos violate human dignity?”. Le Pen replied, “It is the crime that violates human dignity, it is not its photographic reproduction”.

“Fourteen months before the presidential deadline of 2022, … the supposition is that … Marine Le Pen, will necessarily be in the second round of the election and that whoever will face her is no longer guaranteed to win”. — Le Monde, March 22, 2021.

November 1, 2020. Didier Lemaire, a high school teacher who works in Trappes, a small town west of Paris, published an open letter in the left-wing magazine Le Nouvel Observateur. He spoke of the murder of Samuel Paty, another teacher, savagely beheaded two weeks earlier by a Muslim extremist. He denounced the submission of the French authorities to religious intimidation and the impossibility of the French school system being able to transmit any real knowledge of history or to give students the intellectual means to think freely. He said that in just a few years, the situation in the city where he worked has deteriorated markedly. Lemaire wrote:

“The year I arrived in the high school where I teach, the city’s synagogue had just been burned down and Jewish families forced to leave. After the 2015 and 2016 attacks in France, I got involved in preventive actions…. In 2018, seeing that my efforts collided with forces much more powerful than me, I wrote to the President of the Republic to ask him to act urgently to protect our students from the ideological and social pressure exerted on them, a pressure which gradually withdraws them from the national community. Unfortunately, no action was taken….