RUTHFULLY YOURS

Turkey suffered its 10th terrorist attack in less than a year on Tuesday when a coordinated suicide assault on Istanbul’s Ataturk Airport killed 41 people and injured more than 200. The choice of target is noteworthy. Ataturk airport is one of the world’s busiest, processing some 42 million passengers and 314,000 commercial flights last year. Among the dead were citizens of China, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Ukraine and Uzbekistan, in addition to Turkish nationals. As terrorist atrocities go, it’s hard to get more global than that.

All of this suggests the attack was the work of Islamic State, though the group hasn’t taken credit at this writing. It fits a template of recent Islamic State attacks on the Brussels airport in March, on tourists near Istanbul’s Blue Mosque in January, the downing of the Russian airliner over the Sinai peninsula in October, and the Bardo National Museum in Tunis in March 2015.

These terrorist spectaculars achieve multiple aims at once: They inflict casualties on multiple nationalities, shake confidence in government security forces, harm local economies and demonstrate the reach of Islamic State.

That should temper hopes that Islamic State’s recent military setbacks in Iraq will offer relief from these sorts of attacks. The opposite might be true. Islamic State has now been territorially entrenched for years in Iraq and Syria, during which it has been able to radicalize and train thousands of recruits, including many with foreign passports. These jihadists will be paying lethal calls on crowded civilian targets for many more years, a deadly price for the Obama Administration’s gradualist policy against Islamic State and its willingness to allow Syria to descend into chaos.

The Turkish government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan also bears responsibility for allowing Islamic State to gain strength. Much like Pakistani strongman Zia ul-Haq, who made a bargain with jihadists in the 1980s so long as they attacked his enemies in Afghanistan and India, the Turkish government largely looked the other way as Syria-bound jihadists used Turkey as a staging ground and entry point for waging war against the Assad regime. Turkey has also been friendly with the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas, in the fatal conceit that terrorism is legitimate so long as it is targeting someone other than you.

This week’s agreement between Ankara and Jerusalem to resume normal diplomatic relations after a six-year hiatus is a sign that Mr. Erdogan may have begun to appreciate the consequences of that conceit, as well as the need for capable regional allies. Mr. Erdogan also seems to have understood that Turkey’s most dangerous enemies are Islamic State jihadists, not the Kurdish separatists on whom he has trained most of his fire. One reason to doubt Kurdish responsibility for Tuesday’s attack is that the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, generally targets Turkish police and military personnel, not civilians and foreigners.

For the second year in a row, Egyptian television is portraying Jews in a positive light during Ramadan, much to the chagrin of some of the public and members of the country’s media, pro-Israel blogger Elder of Ziyon reported on Tuesday.

According to the report, this year’s series that is relatively sympathetic to the Tribe – through one of its characters — is called “Mammon and Associates.” Egyptian press coverage of the backlash the show has elicited includes a “defense” of the show’s directors, who – Elder of Ziyon paraphrases – “are generally uniformly anti-Zionist and against any sort of ‘normalization’ with Israel,” quick to make a distinction between Jews and the Jewish state.

Last year, as Elder of Ziyon reported at the time, an Egyptian actress portraying the role of a Jewish woman in a series launched on Ramadan, released a statement to assure viewers that the show’s intention was not to “beautify the face of Israel.”

Menna Shalabi, co-star of “Haret al-Yahood” (“Jewish Quarter”) – a historical drama about Egypt’s vanished Jewish community – “pleaded for critics and the public not to rush to judgment on the work before its full release.”

Elder of Ziyon quoted a Times of Israel description of the series, launched on June 18, 2015 for the Ramadan holiday:

The plot … unfolds in Cairo between two landmark events in 20th century Egyptian history: the 1952 Revolution — which replaced the ruling monarchy with the militaristic Free Officers Movement led by Muhammad Naguib and Gamal Abdel Nasser — and the 1956 Suez Crisis, known in Israel as the Kadesh Operation and in Egypt as the Tripartite Aggression.

It depicts a love story between Ali, an Egyptian army officer played by Iyad Nassar, and Laila, a young Jewish woman, played by Mona Shalabi. As one might expect, the romance is marred by the rising wave of Egyptian nationalism and the social tensions brought about by the creation of Israel.

The story of Orlando shooter Omar Mateen, like those of countless other “homegrown” terrorists, is now familiar to the point of cliché. The parents immigrate to the West filled with hope, but their children fail to thrive. They may be successful in some things and fit in with others of their generation, but only superficially.

Sometimes they are soccer-playing, rap-aspiring, beer-drinking lads from the neighborhood, whose failures often lead first to car theft and drug dealing. Other times they are outwardly successful, but the contradictions between the terms of that success and an inner reality or aspiration become too much to bear.

Within them is a grain of sand that irritates, which forces them to seek out that which they believe is missing in themselves. It is a means of overcoming individualism, the self, and becoming part of something much larger. It is a path to meaning.

Passions begin to burn over causes, indignities, injustices; the world does not work the way is it supposed to. Visions of perfection begin to loom but the means of realization require commitment to secrecy, lies, and double lives, to violence and inflicting pain. A sense of authenticity and being whole grows until, in a flash, rage explodes outward.

The stories of most ‘homegrown’ Muslim terrorists are all too familiar.

The base instincts of their insecurities, misogyny, homophobia, and anti-Semitism are given useful scriptural context and legitimation by local mosque sermons. The videos they view online extol jihad with heroic visions of Muslim warriors past and present.

Sometimes outward behavior changes in ways obvious to co-workers, such as the adoption of Islamic dress, strange statements about Islamic supremacism, and complaints about Western “decadence.” They become indignant when questioned or mocked by friends about their increasing religiosity.

In a search for authenticity, they make all-important visits to Saudi Arabia or the homelands of their parents, places they left as children or knew not at all, in search of answers about themselves, anxious to understand their place. But they find they belong nowhere, except in the world that ISIS claims to be remaking. And they return home with a fire in them, having either enlisted in a larger plot or with their own smoldering inside. Then the countdown begins.

https://www.crowdrise.com/help-vladimir-bukovsky-brave-putin-critic1

There are crimes that are unspeakable and accusations that endure time’s long howl because they are so profoundly disturbing. To be accused of the unspeakable is to be marked with a sign that can wipe out a person’s entire life’s work and reduce their voice to ash. When a man is so brave that his courage and fortitude have forced a totalitarian empire to flinch and to begin dissolution—invoking the unspeakable is often the only way to silence that voice and to rewrite history. You can help us keep this from happening to a great truth teller and dissident hero with your support today.

Who: Vladimir Bukovsky, whom The New York Times called “the most widely known prisoner of conscience in the Soviet Union,”and “a hero of almost legendary proportion among the Soviet dissident movement,” is fighting to preserve his legacy.

Bukovsky earned this legacy as a writer and political dissident whom Soviet leaders repeatedly sent to prisons, labor camps and sanitariums — a total of 12 years in captivity — to stop him from spreading the truth about the totalitarian system in the Soviet Union. As a young man, arrested for the “crime” of organizing a poetry reading in Mayakovsky Square in Moscow, he was sent to a psikhushka, a fraudulent psychiatric hospital where troublemakers were often locked up without trial, their writings and political activism dismissed by doctors as the fevered product of schizophrenia.

Instead of folding, Bukovsky found a way to smuggle official documents detailing the medical deception of the psikhushka to the West. The revelation that the USSR was putting political dissidents into mental institutions caused such a widespread uproar in the United States that Yuri Andropov—head of the KGB and future head of the USSR—hastened to chastise Americans, claiming they didn’t understand that the real source of terror was not the government of the USSR but Bukovsky.

However, his acts of “terror” are carried out with only words. Words of integrity and enormous courage, as Bukovsky has been an active and diligent witness to the repression of authoritarian governments and strongmen since he was in his late teens. He revealed the mechanisms of a society in thrall to surveillance and propaganda, kept in poverty and enslaved by the state—with words. Whether in his book, To Build A Castle, about his long periods of imprisonment under the USSR, or his essay in The Washington Post which warned Americans that torture at Abu Ghraib risked making official cruelty as acceptable to them as it had become to many weary Russians —Bukovsky has never shirked the imperative to write truth.