RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12599/turkey-election-results

Despite Erdoğan’s clear victory, his ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) performed worse than expected.

Erdoğan may not be too happy having to share power.

The national joy over the re-election of a man known best to the rest of the world for his authoritarian, sometimes despotic rule, is not surprising in a country where average schooling is a mere 6.5 years.

Millions of anti-Erdoğan Turks are now terrified of the prospect of further torment under an Islamist-nationalist coalition show run by a president with effectively no checks and balances.

Nothing could have better explained the Turks’ joy over their president’s election victory on June 24 than a cartoon that depicts a cheering crowd with three lines in speech balloons: “It was a near thing,” one says. “We would almost become free.” And the last one says: “Down with freedoms!”

Turkey’s Islamist strongman, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, won 52.5% of the national vote in presidential elections on June 24. That marks a slight rise from 51.8% he won in presidential elections of August 2014. More than 25 million Turks voted for Erdoğan’s presidency. His closest rival, social democrat Muharrem Ince, an energetic former schoolteacher, won less than 16 million votes, or nearly 31% of the national vote.

The opposition candidate admitted that the election was fair. There have been no reports of fraud from international observers, at least so far.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270555/sweden-open-business-bruce-bawer

I try to be careful about these things, so I won’t give a thumbs-up – yet – to the new party Alternativ für Sverige. I want to know more about them. That said, the party leader, Gustav Kasselstrand, is saying all the right things. “What you read about Sweden on alternative news platforms is true,” he told an interviewer recently. “We are facing problems more severe than ever before in our history, where Swedes face a situation of being a minority within 20 years if nothing is done to stop the replacement of our people.” He added: “I would describe the problems in Sweden as some kind of low-intensive civil war (with gradually increasing intensity for each day).”

While I’m not yet sure what to make of Kasselstrand and his party, I do know what to make of the establishment they’re taking on. It’s a gang of liars. Case in point: recently the Council for the Promotion of Sweden Abroad – a joint effort by Sweden’s Ministry for Foreign Affairs, Ministry of Enterprise and Innovation, Ministry of Culture, the Swedish Institute, Business Sweden and Visit Sweden – distributed a manual, Sharing Sweden, which explains to Swedish entrepreneurs how to attract tourism, business development, investment, trade, “cultural and scientific exchange,” and the like. The thrust is to project a “strong image of Sweden abroad.” This, admits the Council, is not easy nowadays, because, and I quote, “Sweden has been affected in recent years by negative rumours and in some cases outright disinformation, particularly in the areas of migration and integration.”

“Negative rumours”? “Outright disinformation”? Translation: the horrifying truth about our national mess of an immigration and integration policy has gotten out, and if we want to attract vacationers, investors, etc., we’ve got to double down on the denial.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/25th-american-sickened-by-mysterious-attacks-on-u-s-diplomats-in-cuba-china/

Another U.S. diplomat has been confirmed to be suffering from the same ill health effects as embassy personnel sickened by mysterious attacks in Cuba and China.

The State Department first heard about the incidents in late 2016 and news broke last summer that they believed a sonic device outside the range of audible sound was targeted at the residences of U.S. diplomats, operating either inside or outside their homes. Officials have been investigating whether a third country looking for “payback” against the U.S. was involved, possibly with the assistance of Cuban security services. Those affected suffered “cognitive, vestibular, and oculomotor dysfunction, along with auditory symptoms, sleep abnormalities, and headache,” and were left with conditions including mild traumatic brain injury and permanent hearing loss.

Press secretary Heather Nauert said last August that the U.S. personnel were being treated and “the incidents are no longer occurring.”

The first medically confirmed case since August, learned by the State Department late this morning, brings the total of affected members of the diplomatic community in Havana up to 25.

On June 21, Nauert told reporters at today’s State Department briefing, “following a comprehensive medical evaluation, one U.S. diplomat working at the U.S. Embassy Havana was medically confirmed to have experienced health effects similar to those that were reported by members of the U.S. Havana diplomatic community.”

The Cuban government was notified of the “occurrence,” she said, on May 29 and “assured us that they will continue to take this seriously and are continuing their investigation.”

“We strongly remind the Cuban government of its responsibility under the Vienna Convention to protect our diplomats.”

One other potentially affected employee who was also medically evacuated to the United States is still being evaluated at this time.

Nauert confirmed that a “number of individuals have returned to the United States from China” for medical testing of their symptoms and “some of them still do remain under evaluation at this point.”

“From China, we have one medically confirmed case at this point — one medically confirmed case. It does not mean that that number won’t change, but that is where it stands at this time,” she said. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/06/sultan_erdogan_invincible_and_doomed.html

By far the most interesting thing about Sunday’s Turkish elections was the endless speculations by pundits left and right about what would happen if Recep Tayyip Erdoğan were to lose. These clueless if numerous pontificators forgot to ask themselves a simple question: when was the last time an Islamist dictator in full control of state power lost an election? Mindless as they are, these idle meditations have little to tell us about Turkey but a lot about the West’s (and Europe’s, especially) failure or unwillingness to understand what Erdoğan is and is all about. For NATO and the West, the inevitable harsh payment due is just around the corner.

In the meantime, Turkey has a new sultan who can and will do whatever he seemingly wants – except that the time of sultans is long past, and this one is preprogrammed for failure.

In the old Ottoman days, upon the anointment of the new sultan, all male pretenders were dispatched with a silken cord. Now they are simply put in jail as “terrorists.” In the old days, all the sultan had to do was run to the largely ignorant ulema to be told why introducing the printing press is a great sacrilege, but it took centuries for the empire to become the “sick man of Europe” and a technological and military anachronism. Today, the sultan is forced to dispatch his flunkies to the captains of finance in London to explain why raising the despised interest rates sharply will calm the markets and to plead for continued funds flow.

Herein lies the new sultan’s ineluctable vulnerability and the cause of his inevitable demise. A dyed-in-the-wool Islamist, he depends for the very economic survival of the obscurantist polity he is building on the hated Western secular society and markets. Take away his privileges as a member of the European Customs Union, and Turkey becomes but a run-of-the-mill Middle Eastern satrapy. It is a match made in Islamist Hell, and that is where it will end. Unlike with the old Ottoman empire, a version of which he is trying to recreate, it will not take long.