EDUCATION, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Turkey: Record-Breaking Purge in Academia by Burak Bekdil

Posted By on February 16th, 2017

Turkey suffered the largest decline in freedoms among 195 countries over the past year, according to Freedom House.

Erdogan’s academic purge is 38 times bigger in size than the generals’ after the 1980 military coup.

According to data compiled by Turkey Purge, PEN International, the Committee to Protect Journalists and the Stockholm Center for Freedom, 128,398 people have been sacked, while 91,658 are being detained.

Worse, neither the academics on the purge list nor their students were allowed to protest peacefully. Their attempted protest on February 10 at the School of Political Sciences in Ankara met a huge police force and was crushed.

You have all the freedoms you want — so long as you are a pro-Erdogan Islamist.

Nearly three centuries later — and slightly revising the historian Shelby Foote’s famous line — “A Turkish university, these days, is a group of buildings around a small library, a mosque and classrooms cleansed of unwanted scholars.”

The “Great Turkish Purge” launched by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Islamist, autocratic government in the aftermath of a coup attempt in July surprised many in its size. It should not have done. The failed putsch gave Erdogan’s government a golden opportunity to advance his crackdown on dissent of every kind. No wonder Erdogan, on the night of the attempt, said: “This [coup attempt] is a gift of God”.

In its annual “Freedom in the World” report, entitled “Populists and Autocrats: The Dual Threat to Global Democracy,” the Washington-based Freedom House said on January 31 that Turkey suffered the largest decline in freedoms among 195 countries over the past year. Turkey’s aggregate score declined 15 points to 38 out of 100 (the most free) — from having been in 53rd place in the 2016 report. It did manage to maintain its “partly free” status for “freedoms” together with 59 other countries. “[A]n attempted coup in July… led the government to declare a state of emergency and carry out mass arrests and firings of civil servants, academics, journalists, opposition figures, and other perceived enemies,” the report said.

Education Minister Ismet Yilmaz said that a total of 33,065 personnel have been dismissed from his ministry, most of them teachers, educators and administrative staff. Of those purged, 3,855 have been detained on charges of “terrorism”.

Qualitatively speaking, the situation at Turkish universities is no better. Most university presidents, appointed by Erdogan, staunchly ally with his party politics and dismiss academics they view as “Erdogan’s political adversaries.”

In the aftermath of a military coup d’état on September 12, 1980 (the third time the military took over in modern Turkish history), the generals issued decree no. 1402, dismissing a total of 120 scholars from the universities. By comparison, on February 7, Turkey’s “civilian” government issued a decree purging 330 scholars from universities. Erdogan’s public sector purge now amounts to around 100,000 officials, including nearly 5,000 university scholars. In other words, Erdogan’s academic purge is 38 times bigger in size than the generals’ after the 1980 coup. According to data compiled by Turkey Purge, PEN International, the Committee to Protect Journalists and the Stockholm Center for Freedom, 128,398 people have been sacked, while 91,658 are being detained.

Worse, neither the academics on the purge list nor their students were allowed to protest peacefully. Their attempted protest on February 10 at the School of Political Sciences in Ankara met a huge police force and was crushed. In the brawl, the police attacked the crowd; many in it were injured, manhandled, trapped in their robes and dragged along the ground.

One of the purged, Professor Yuksel Taskin, from an Istanbul department of journalism, tweeted: “This is a pure political ‘cleansing’. But my conscience is clear. Let my students know that I shall never, ever bow down!”

Professor Yuksel Taskin, who was recently purged from an Istanbul department of journalism, tweeted: “This is a pure political ‘cleansing’. But my conscience is clear. Let my students know that I shall never, ever bow down!” (Image source: Hakan YÜCEL video screenshot)

ISRAEL Comments turned off

The Arab-Israel Conflict: Back to the Future by Shoshana Bryen

Posted By on February 16th, 2017

What is commonly called the “Palestinian-Israeli conflict” is, in fact, the “Arab-Israel conflict.”

Jordan illegally annexed the West Bank in 1950, and from that time Palestinian nationalism has been deadly for the Kingdom.

“I call on the Palestinian people to elect new leaders, leaders not compromised by terror… to build a practicing democracy, based on tolerance and liberty. If the Palestinian people actively pursue these goals, America and the world will actively support their efforts…. A Palestinian state will never be created by terror — it will be built through reform. And reform must be more than cosmetic change, or veiled attempts to preserve the status quo.” — President George W. Bush, 2002.

“There’s no way a deal can be made if they’re not ready to acknowledge a very, very great and important country.” — President Donald J. Trump, 2017.

The burden, then, is on the Arab states and the Palestinians.

The optics, certainly, were fine. It was good to see an American president and an Israeli prime minister standing together on the podium with what appeared to be genuine good will. Most important, and promising for the future, perhaps, was how they dealt with the “two state solution” mantra. There was, for the first time in years, nuance in both the American and the Israeli position toward what has become a slogan without meaning.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Roger Franklin: The Fishwives’ Summit

Posted By on February 16th, 2017

The screaming match between Jacqui Lambie and Yassmin Abdel-Magied on Q&A was great television, but the same could be said of train-wreck footage. Its real value came later, when 49 Muslim organisations and sympathisers spelled out a presumptive right not merely to respect but deference.
Multicultural amity was in short supply on Monday night’s Q&A, which saw Tasmania’s Senator Jacqui Lambie doing the one thing at which she always excels, making herself deeply unpleasant. For starters there’s that voice, which rises at times to the guttural shriek of the last water going down an old bathtub’s plughole. When it drops an octave, there is the needless belligerence of a public bar blowhard. In terms of general comportment, you wouldn’t have her at your daughter’s wedding, not if it could be helped.

Sometimes, though, even the most wretched amongst us serve the cause of the common good, and such was the case when this small and loud explosive device detonated in the face of fellow guest Yassmin Abdel-Magied. For once Senator Lambie was being rude to the right person in the right place and for the right reason.

Briefly, Ms Abdel-Magied, who already has her own ABC cable show and was sent off on a recent taxpayer-funded junket to hijabber in some of the world’s worst despotisms about the joy of being Muslim in Australia, spent much of Q&A talking loudly and to little point about any number of topics about which she either knows nothing or chooses not to acquaint herself. From baseload power to the tenets of her religion and, of course, the imminence of catastrophic climate change, Ms Abdel-Magied streamed random cliches and pseudo-factoids rooted only in her imagination. When she suggested sharia law implied nothing more than praying five times a day and, further, that women are happy as Larry under Islam, what little in the way of good manners Senator Lambie had embraced on the night were flung aside. The exchange is segmented and analysed here by video blogger Progressing Backwards, whose clip would have been embedded for display on this page but for the narrator’s vulgarity in punctuating his thoughts with the procreative verb.

As a consequence of the women’s encounter, gripes the Australian Islamic Mission and 49 groups and individual signatories to an online petition, multiculturalism’s gorgeous mosaic is being pulverised, not merely by Senator Lambie but — and this bit is delicious — the ABC as well! According to the petition, compere Tony Jones should have gagged the garrulous Taswegian because, well, Muslims must not face, not ever, pointed questions about their creed and its compatability with hard-won Western norms like, for instance, the equality of women. More than that, the petition’s text all but demands that Islam be treated now and forever with a conspicuous and courteous deference. The petition is reproduced in full below, but this paragraph is especially worthy of note (emphasis added):

If Q&A wants to invite Muslim individuals to its forum, it should be able to guarantee a safe environment for them based on trustworthiness and comfort to speak in a platform that is rarely afforded to them, especially on issues concerning them.

muslim theologiantasmania intellectual IIThe irony is that the ABC has been doing just that since the Prophet was a lad, leading one to suspect — and please pardon the cynicism – that Ms Abdel-Magied owed her place on the panel as much to a winning smile and the glib giddiness of her manner than any wisdom she might then or previously have poured into the wells of human insight. Opinions may differ, and the applause of the typically unbalanced Q&A audience for Abdel-Magied’s defence of sharia’s alleged innocence suggests they very much do. But the inanity of her theological pronouncements might well lead others to conclude she is no better than an airhead whose prime credential is, you know, a photogenic otherness. Were she to team up with Waleed Aly and do the Leagues Clubs, they could be the Islamic George Burns & Gracie Allen. She’s the fun face of Islam, the girl with the lampshade on her head, the life of what the ABC in its habitual celebration of tokenism imagines to be the perfect multi-culti party.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

A Climate Scientist Is Smeared for Blowing the Whistle on ‘Corrected’ Data The scandal is growing, as Congress investigates and NOAA brings in outside experts to review a key study. By Julie Kelly

Posted By on February 16th, 2017

Less than 72 hours after a federal whistleblower exposed shocking misconduct at a key U.S. climate agency, the CEO of the nation’s top scientific group was already dismissing the matter as no biggie. On February 7, Rush Holt, head of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), told a congressional committee that allegations made by a high-level climate scientist were simply an “internal dispute between two factions” and insisted that the matter was “not the making of a big scandal.” (This was moments after Holt lectured the committee that science is “a set of principles dedicated to discovery,” and that it requires “humility in the face of evidence.” Who knew?)

Three days earlier, on February 4, John Bates, a former official with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) — he was in charge of that agency’s climate-data archive — posted a lengthy account detailing how a 2015 report on global warming was mishandled. In the blog Climate Etc., Bates wrote a specific and carefully sourced 4,100-word exposé that accuses Tom Karl, his ex-colleague at NOAA, of influencing the results and release of a crucial paper that purports to refute the pause in global warming. Karl’s study was published in Science in June 2015, just a few months before world leaders would meet in Paris to agree on a costly climate change pact; the international media and climate activists cheered Karl’s report as the final word disproving the global-warming pause.

But Bates, an acclaimed expert in atmospheric sciences who left NOAA last year, says there’s a lot more to the story. He reveals that “in every aspect of the preparation and release of the datasets, . . . we find Tom Karl’s thumb on the scale pushing for, and often insisting on, decisions that maximize warming.” Karl’s report was “an effort to discredit the notion of a global warming hiatus and rush to time the publication of the paper to influence national and international deliberations on climate policy.” Agency protocol to properly archive data was not followed, and the computer that processed the data had suffered a “complete failure,” according to Bates. In a lengthy interview published in the Daily Mail the next day, Bates said:

They had good data from buoys. And they threw it out and “corrected” it by using the bad data from ships. You never change good data to agree with bad, but that’s what they did — so as to make it look as if the sea was warmer.

MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

Land of Mine – A Review By Marilyn Penn

Posted By on February 16th, 2017

We first see Sergeant Rasmussen barking orders at a line of young, dispirited German prisoners of war. The Second World War has ended and the Danes have ordered German soldiers to clear the Danish coastline of millions of land mines planted there by the Nazis. Rasmussen’s reaction to seeing one of the POW’s carrying a Danish flag is to beat him to a merciless pulp, revealing the pent-up frustration and fury at the German occupation of his country. With his mustache and shrill shrieks, we get a subliminal reference to the Fuhrer who started WW II and we quickly understand that this is a movie that will unsettle our certain feelings about winners and losers and heroes and villains.

The 14 young soldiers under Rasmussen’s command are teenagers, obviously drafted by the Nazis towards the end of the war. Their adjustment to the brutal demands by the Sergeant has been seen before in other war films, most recently in Hacksaw Ridge. Despite the familiarity of this set-up, we feel our own tension mount, not letting up until much later in the film which is as much about the conversion of Rasmussen as it is about the fate of his charges. Their job is to clear the beach of thousands of mines after which they will have earned their discharge and be sent home. His job is to regain his humanity and relate to these German boys as people, not the hated enemy.

The success of this film resides in writer/director Martin Zandvliet’s ability to transcend the sanctimony of the previous sentence and manage to bring everything down to a very differentiated and personal set of relationships between the young men and the Sergeant, the young men among themselves and the Sergeant and his Commanding Officer. The very real tension of live mines capable of exploding at any moment adds a layer of suspenseful fear and tragic ramifications of the war even after its conclusion. No matter how many WW II movies you have seen, this is a searing and original story that most of us were not aware of. Zandvliet deserves enormous credit for sustaining the drama of the individuals as well as the moral and humanistic issues that resonate from their predicament. Land of Mine is one of the Oscar nominees for best foreign film – I give it my vote and hope it wins. Don’t miss it.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

The Three-Headed Hydra of the Middle East Trump has inherited a matrix of problems that primarily stem from Iran, Russia, and ISIS. By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on February 16th, 2017

The abrupt Obama administration pre-election pullout from Iraq in 2011, along with the administration’s failed reset with Russia and the Iran deal, created a three-headed hydra in the Middle East.

What makes the Middle East monster deadly is the interplay between the Iranian terrorist regime and its surrogates Hezbollah and the Assad regime; Russian president Vladimir Putin’s deployment of bombers into Syria and Iraq after a 40-year Russian hiatus in the region; and the medieval beheaders of the Islamic State.

Add into the brew anti-Americanism, genocide, millions of refugees, global terrorism, and nuclear weapons.

ISIS is simultaneously at war against the Assad regime, Iran and Iranian surrogates such Hezbollah, and Russian expeditionary forces. ISIS also seeks to energize terrorist attacks in the United States and Europe.

Stranger still, ISIS almost surely is receiving stealth support from Sunni nations in the Middle East, some of them ostensibly American allies.

This matrix gets even crazier.

The authors of reset policy during the Obama administration are now furious at President Trump for even talking about what they tried for years: reaching out to Putin. Yet in the Middle East, Russia is doing us a favor by attacking ISIS, even as it does no favors in saving the genocidal Assad regime that has murdered tens of thousands of innocents — along with lots of ISIS terrorists as well.

Iran is the sworn enemy of the United States, yet its foreign proxies attack our shared enemy, ISIS. The very troops who once blew up Americans in Iraq with shaped charges are for now de facto allies on the Syrian and Iraqi battlefields.

Given that there is now no political support for surging thousands more U.S. troops into Iraq to reverse the disastrous Obama-administration pullout, there are three strategic choices in dealing with the Middle East hydra, all of them bad:

One, hold our nose, and for now ally with Russia and Iran to destroy ISIS first. Then deal with the other rivalries later on. (The model is the American-Soviet alliance against Hitler that quickly morphed after 1945 into the Cold War.)

Two, work with the least awful of the three, which is probably Russia. (The model might be Henry Kissinger’s outreach to Mao’s China that left Moscow and Beijing at odds and confused over the role of the United States.)

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

REMEMBER THIS ABOUT RUSSIA DURING AN ELECTION? MARCH 27, 2012

Posted By on February 16th, 2017

https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304177104577305182847032866
Obama Appeal to Russia Caught Live
President Confides to Medvedev, After Conversation on Missile Shield, That He Will Have More Flexibility After Election

By
Laura Meckler and
Carol E. Lee
Updated March 27, 2012 8:03 a.m. ET

SEOUL—President Barack Obama was overheard confiding to Russia’s president that he would have to await his re-election before addressing the divisive issue of global missile defense, an unscripted moment that touched off a political backlash at home.

Mr. Obama told Russian President Dmitry Medvedev that he can’t resolve the issue before the November election, but that afterward, he would have more “flexibility.” The comments were picked up by a live microphone.

Republicans seized on the exchange to suggest that Mr. Obama may talk tough during the campaign but then cave to Moscow once re-elected. They also questioned what else Mr. Obama has in store for a second term that he doesn’t want to disclose now.

Sen. John McCain (R., Ariz.) said the words were those of “a real Etch A Sketch leader,” comparing them to a political adviser’s ill-fated comment last week that the campaign of GOP front-runner Mitt Romney would alter its positions for the general election, “like an Etch A Sketch.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Make the Flynn Tape Public Team Trump turns an empty narrative into a major scandal. By Andrew C. McCarthy

Posted By on February 16th, 2017

Let’s hear the tape.

The Flynn affair is a tale of intrigue, with head-spinning twists and turns, manipulative spies, narrative-weaving pols, and strategists who mostly outsmart themselves. It is easy to get lost in the weeds. There is one easy way to get to the bottom of it, though — one way to get a real sense of whether General Michael Flynn, the now-former national-security adviser, is a lying rogue who deceived every Trump administration official in sight, or the victim of an elaborate “deep state” scam whose real objective is to destroy not merely Flynn but the Trump presidency.

Let’s go to the audio tape: the government’s recording of a December 29, 2016, conversation, intercepted under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), that Flynn had with Sergey Kislyak, the Russian ambassador to the United States.

For now, the so-called deep state — the intelligence operatives and highly placed officials who run the United States government because they have the power to ruin their opposition — would apparently prefer that we not hear the tape. Many of them are Obama functionaries who are content to shape opinion by leaking their edited version of events to media allies. Some of them are Trump functionaries whose mishandling of what may be a tempest in a teapot has made them vulnerable less than four weeks into the new administration. Perhaps, they calculate, handing up Flynn’s scalp makes their problem go away. In reality, it is just whetting the opposition’s appetite.

Let’s end the intrigue and go to the tape.

As late as Tuesday, General Flynn was still denying what is being widely reported as settled fact, namely, that he spoke with the Russian ambassador specifically about “sanctions” imposed by President Obama. Since Flynn knows there is a recording of the conversation, it is a strange thing for him to deny. So is he telling the truth? Let’s find out.

Intelligence operatives leaked parts of Flynn’s conversation with Kislyak — a felony violation of federal law. Now, they’ll blithely tell us that that they can’t release the whole conversation because it is classified. Should we buy that?

I wouldn’t.

To understand the smoke and mirrors of scandal here, it is critical to recreate what was happening in this country on December 29, when Flynn, already designated as Trump’s national-security adviser but three weeks away from taking office, called the Russian ambassador.

Donald Trump had shocked the world on November 8 by winning the 2016 election. Unwilling to come to grips with their defeat — to acknowledge that they had nominated a hopelessly flawed candidate and, in their leftwing extremism, alienated the working-class voters who were once their party’s backbone — Democrats settled on an alternative rationalization: “Russia hacked the election.”

This narrative is utter nonsense. While the vile Putin regime probably did have a role in hacking the e-mail accounts of the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign manager John Podesta, they had not done a thing to compromise the actual voting process. And the embarrassing revelations published through WikiLeaks were not slanderous; they were true and accurate communications in which Democrats spoke candidly — meaning, they said things they wouldn’t want you to hear about.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Oregon Gov. Kate Brown And AG Ellen Rosenblum Blaze The Oregon Trail Of Political Patronage Adam Andrzejewski

Posted By on February 16th, 2017

As the state contemplates an income tax hike, Oregon’s elites line their pockets with taxpayer money.

In 2016, as politicians across America were fleeing voter wrath, Oregon’s governor and attorney general were blazing an unlikely trail – accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign donations from businesses with state contracts.

Since 1940, at the federal level, individuals and entities negotiating or working under federal contracts are prohibited from giving political cash to candidates, parties or committees. In Oregon, however, this political patronage is perfectly legal, at least for now.

Our analysis at American Transparency (OpenTheBooks.com) found207 state contractors gave $805,876 in campaign cash to Governor Kate Brown ($518,203) and Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum ($287,673) since 2012. These businesses hold lifetime state contracts worth at least $2.6 billion. State contractor donations to the governor and attorney general represent 57 percent of current cash on hand in their campaign committees.

We found the data by looking at a universe of companies or their affiliated employees funding Brown or Rosenblum’s campaigns since 2012. We then matched those company names with the contract database provided by the State of Oregon. It’s a trail of conflicts of interest paved with campaign cash and contractor payments.

Oregon Gov, Kate Brown speaks to the crowd of supporters after being elected at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland, Ore., on Tuesday, Nov. 8, 2016. (AP Photo/Steve Dykes)

We found 41 law firms holding state contracts with a lifetime value of nearly $50 million who gave political donations to Rosenblum ($196,093 in donations) and Brown ($89,958 in donations) since 2012. Oregon outsources legal work to these firms despite Rosenblum’s Department of Justiceemploying up to 1,228 staffers at an annual taxpayer cost of $74 million. Why put state employees to work when you can outsource it to potential donors? By comparison, the Attorneys General of Illinois and New York have 875 and 1,685 employees respectively.

State campaign disclosures show that firms themselves, or their affiliated partners, principals, and employees gave the following:

Markowitz Herbold PC – $25,084 in campaign donations to the governor and AG. Separately, the firm received new and amended state contracts valued at $13 million from 2013-2015.
Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP – $16,331 in campaign donations to the governor and AG. Separately, the firm held state contracts worth a lifetime value of $2.995 million.
Stoll, Stoll, Berne, Lokting & Shalchter PC – $15,617 in campaign donations to the governor and AG. Separately, the firm held contracts worth a lifetime value of $2.71 million.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Spies Keep Intelligence From Donald Trump on Leak Concerns Decision to withhold information underscores deep mistrust between intelligence community and president By Shane Harris and Carol E. Lee

Posted By on February 16th, 2017

U.S. intelligence officials have withheld sensitive intelligence from President Donald Trump because they are concerned it could be leaked or compromised, according to current and former officials familiar with the matter.

The officials’ decision to keep information from Mr. Trump underscores the deep mistrust that has developed between the intelligence community and the president over his team’s contacts with the Russian government, as well as the enmity he has shown toward U.S. spy agencies. On Wednesday, Mr. Trump accused the agencies of leaking information to undermine him.

In some of these cases of withheld information, officials have decided not to show Mr. Trump the sources and methods that the intelligence agencies use to collect information, the current and former officials said. Those sources and methods could include, for instance, the means that an agency uses to spy on a foreign government.
A White House official said: “There is nothing that leads us to believe that this is an accurate account of what is actually happening.”

A spokesman for the Office of Director of National Intelligence said: “Any suggestion that the U.S. intelligence community is withholding information and not providing the best possible intelligence to the president and his national security team is not true.”

Intelligence officials have in the past not told a president or members of Congress about the ins and outs of how they ply their trade. At times, they have decided that secrecy is essential for protecting a source, and that all a president needs to know is what that source revealed and what the intelligence community thinks is important about it.

But in these previous cases in which information was withheld, the decision wasn’t motivated by a concern about a president’s trustworthiness or discretion, the current and former officials said.

It wasn’t clear Wednesday how many times officials have held back information from Mr. Trump.