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January 2023

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Turkey: Putin’s Open Door for Harming Western Interests by Burak Bekdil

By on January 20th, 2023

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19314/turkey-putin-western-interests

For Putin, Erdoğan’s friendship is growing ever more important — and vice versa.

Turkey has refused to join Western sanctions against Russia over Ukraine, thereby throwing a lifeline to Putin. Turkish skies remain open to Russian airlines and its doors open to hundreds of thousands of Russians and their money. Turkish exports to Russia are surging. In July alone, exports to Russia shot up by a dizzying 75% year-on-year.

Russian cash helped plug the growing hole in Turkey’s foreign currency reserves — at a time when Erdoğan needs foreign money for the country’s ailing economy before the presidential and parliamentary elections this June.

In March, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu said that Russian oligarchs were welcome in Turkey. In October, the Financial Times reported that between January and August 2021, a record $28 billion from unclear origins had flowed into Turkey.

“Putin’s goal remains anchoring Erdoğan more and more to Russia through a vast mesh of mutually beneficial operations in the fields of defense, energy, trade, and finance… By doing this, Putin is comforting an embattled incumbent president and is openly bolstering Erdoğan’s position in the upcoming elections…. [T]he world is witnessing the Russian president using Turkey for his own benefits.” — Marc Pierini, senior fellow at Carnegie Europe and a former EU Ambassador to Ankara, August 30, 2022.

The Erdoğan-Putin bond has two main pillars. One is pragmatism: They both strategically, politically and economically benefit. The other is ideological: They both hate the West.

Turkish Islamists, especially neo-Ottomans, have historically hated Russia — both Czarist and Soviet. Similarly, Russians and Soviets have never been great fans of the Turks — both Ottoman and republican. Today, however, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, with a big foot in NATO, is exhibiting a pro-Russian tilt never seen before, and at a time when Russian President Vladimir Putin is seen as an existential threat to Western interests. What is the secret behind this sudden marriage?

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Insanity On Display?

By on January 20th, 2023

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/01/20/insanity-on-display/

John Kerry, former senator, former secretary of state, and now chief climate alarmist for the Biden administration, said in so many words Tuesday during his World Economic Forum rant that it’s too late to save the planet from global warming. Yet he claimed climate programs still need more “money, money, money, money, money, money, money.” The only reason he’s not the worst person in the world is because he has so much competition at Davos.

What Kerry actually said was that he is “not convinced we’re going to get there in time to do what the scientists said, which is avoid the worst consequences of the crisis,” meaning that he doubts that the global temperature will stay under the cap of 1.5 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial temperature set by scientists (though it is actually a random figure with no scientific support).

Yet he continues to crusade for a cause that hopes to strip Westerners of both their wealth – yes, according to the United Press International, he said “money” seven times – and freedom to move about.

With absolutely zero self-awareness, the man who flies in private jets, has multiple homes (which most of us would consider mansions) and more cars than most families, and up until a few years ago owned a yacht, preached about “the way we live,” and thundered against “the incredible sort of destructive process of growth the way we interpret it.” He called it “robber-baron growth.”

But his luxurious lifestyle and those of the other wealthy men and women fighting global warming must be OK, because he assured members of his fawning audience that they are all special, “a select group of human beings” who “are able to sit in a room and come together and, uh, actually talk about saving the planet.”

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

Ruthie Blum:Tom Friedman’s lies, damned lies and statistics – opinion No, Tom, Biden ought to be told that the Jewish state isn’t “changing its fundamental character.

By on January 20th, 2023

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-729063

In his latest disingenuous profession of concern for the welfare of the Jewish state, New York Times columnist Tom Friedman appealed to President Joe Biden to “stop Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his extremist coalition from turning Israel into an illiberal bastion of zealotry.”

He began his mock memo by informing Biden that “Israel is on the verge of a historic transformation – from a full-fledged democracy to something less, and from a stabilizing force in the region to a destabilizing one.”

“Israel is on the verge of a historic transformation – from a full-fledged democracy to something less, and from a stabilizing force in the region to a destabilizing one.”

Tom Friedman

Both his plea to the president and depiction of the situation in Israel were amusing. In the first place, Biden is barely capable of stringing together a coherent sentence, let alone taking on a job that’s not in his purview and none of his business. 

Secondly, Friedman has always been critical of Israeli behavior that didn’t involve capitulation to a Palestinian entity bent on destroying the Jewish state. In other words, his breast-beating about the new government in Jerusalem was as old and false as the rest of his tirade. 

Tom Friedman’s breast-beating about the new Israeli government is old and false

One ploy was to dismiss the victory of the Netanyahu camp by claiming that it won by a “sliver” of the votes. He performed this trick by citing data on the ballots cast for parties that didn’t make it into the Knesset. Among these were Balad and Meretz, both on the far Left – the former an openly anti-Zionist Arab faction and the latter a post-Zionist Jewish one.  

Treating the fact that neither passed the electoral threshold as a mere mathematical mishap rather than a reflection of the Left’s failure, he pointed to the “5,000-person anti-government demonstration [that] grew to 80,000 over the weekend” prior to the publication of his January 17 piece. 

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