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Erdogan’s Neo-Ottoman Plans by Burak Bekdil

“Let us see how your Islamist friend [Erdogan] behaves after crushing the secular establishment.” — The author to a friend, 2004.

To insist on the borders Turkey accepted in the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne “is the greatest injustice to be done to the country and to the nation.” — Turkey’s President, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, October 19, 2016.

Erdogan’s newfound claims seem to refer not only to wish to regain hegemony to the west (Greece) but also about the south (Syria) and the southeast (Iraq). Turkey evidently wishes to be part of an Iraqi- and Kurdish-led offensive against Mosul, controlled since 2014 by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

Sipping his ouzo at a café in Athens on a warm afternoon in 2004, a Greek diplomat friend smiled and said:

“You are wrong about Erdogan. He will reform Turkey’s democratic culture, align it with the European Union, strengthen its ties with NATO and pursue a pro-peace policy in this part of the world. Meanwhile he will crush the secular army establishment and Turkey will no longer be a threat to any of its neighbors.”

I said: “Let us see how your Islamist friend [Erdogan] behaves after crushing the secular establishment.”

Twelve years later, I still enjoy our peaceful ouzo sessions with the same Greek friend. But things do not look equally peaceful between Turkey and its neighbors, including Greece.

Speaking at a public rally on October 22, President Erdogan said that “We did not accept our borders voluntarily.” He went on to say, “At the time [when the current borders were drawn] we may have agreed to it but the real mistake is to surrender to that sacrifice.” What does all that mean?

Israel Concerned over Rising Russian Military Role in the Region Asharq Al-Awsat see note by Janet Levy

From e-pal Janet Levy :”Russia’s growing military presence in the Middle East coupled with its long-standing support for the Arab-Palestinians at the U.N. has Israeli leaders deeply troubled. Recently, Russia added ground troops, aircraft, missiles and drones to its arsenal in the region and will soon deliver the S-300 and S-400 missile systems to Egypt, Syria and Iran. To make matters worse, they have threatened to target any entity that threatens Russian or Syrian forces. Also disturbing is the fact that Russian leadership had the temerity to characterize Israel’s response to the UNESCO resolution denying any Jewish and Christian ties to the Temple Mount as “emotional and unjustified.” (Christians take note: Your holy sites are in jeopardy. Not supporting Jews and Israel is suicidal).It appears that the Jewish State has jumped from the “frying pan to the fire.”

“Tel Aviv- Israeli-Russian relations have witnessed tension because of the

growing Russian military existence in Syria and the Mediterranean and the
continuous Russian support for the Palestinian cause at the United Nations.

Political sources in Tel Aviv said that PM Benjamin Netanyahu has conveyed
his concerns to Russian President Vladimir Putin. The subject was also
tackled during a meeting held between Russian and Israeli officials at the
Israeli Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem.

Sources said that Netanyahu talked with Putin ten days ago, and requested
him to renew the conditions of the military coordination between them and to
refrain from supporting anti-Israeli and anti-Jewish resolutions at the U.N.

They said that Amir Eshel, the commander of the Israeli Air Force, also
visited Moscow to discuss military issues.

During their meetings, Israeli officials revealed their main political
concern, which is the possibility of voting on the Israeli-Palestinian issue
at the United Nations. According to a senior Israeli official, Tel Aviv has
declared that it opposes any intervention in the peace talks especially from
the Security Council.

Atlantic Council Blames the West’s “Islamophobia”: Andrew Harrod

The Atlantic Council, founded in 1961 to encourage civic engagement in transatlantic security, is now blaming the West for “Islamophobia,” along with notorious Islam apologists like Karen Armstrong.

“What we want to do today is debunk myths,” stated Atlantic Council President Frederick Kempeat the Washington, DC, organization’s October 20 event “Islamophobia: Overcoming Myths and Engaging in a Better Conversation.” Yet the panelists merely offered hackneyed arguments diverting attention from current Islamist threats, casting disrepute on an Atlantic Council once founded to stimulate civic engagement in transatlantic security.

Vuslat Doðan Sabancý, publisher of the leading Turkish newspaper Hürriyet, dismissed any legitimate concerns about Islamic doctrine by stating that “Islamophobia…stems from phobia, which is a fear of the unknown.” British religion writer and notorious Islam apologist Karen Armstrong similarly spoke of a “phobia, an irrational fear, it is not based on reason, it is based on a gut feeling.” Blurring distinctions between critiquing a belief system like Islam and ethnic prejudice, Kempe discussed the “line between security concerns and racism.”

For Sabancý, the “answer is very simple. Let’s get rid of the phobia…let’s get to know each other,” yet her appeal for intercultural dialogue contained limits evoking “Islamophobia’s” totalitarian nature. “Freedom of speech is the backbone of democracy, but it should not be exercised at the cost of attacking one’s dignity, it should not be exercised at the cost of attacking one’s faith either, because dignity is also a human right,” she stated. This rather unusual position for a publisher paralleled Dr. Mehmet Aydin, former head of Turkey’s Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet). He warned that when “saying nasty things about the prophet” Muhammad of Islam, “you have to be very careful…we have to respect the values of other cultures.”

The panelists exhibited no such concern for European security measures amidst millions of Muslim refugees overwhelming Europe with various economic and terrorism worries. “This is going to take its place in history as the most disgraceful human act,” Sabancý stated with reference to Europe’s new zeal for border barriers. “It doesn’t seem long ago, does it, when we were cheering because the Berlin wall was being torn down,” Armstrong contrasted.

Armstrong evoked ominous historical analogies of epochs in which “there have been these explosions of hatred of certain groups, just think of the Crusades,” where Crusaders “slaughtered Muslims with great joy.” This common slander (see President Barack Obama) of Crusaders as mere bloodthirsty aggressors preceded her trite Nazism invocation while discussing the Ayatollah Khomeini’s 1989 fatwa calling for British writer Salman Rushdie’s death. At the time, she was “appalled by the way British intellectuals, the great and the good, segued away from a denunciation of the fatwa to an out and out denunciation of Islam itself. I said to myself we have learned nothing in Europe since the 1930s.”

Armstrong’s imagination somehow juxtaposed justifiable outrage in the United Kingdom and elsewhere at lethal Islamic blasphemy doctrine with the subsequent 1990s eruption of the Balkans bloodbath. “There were concentration camps again on the outskirts of Europe, this time with Muslims in them,” she stated. Apparently unaware of any Balkan wars, including the Ottoman Empire’s jihad conquests, she superficially described the prior history of a region “where Muslims, Jews, and Christians had coexisted amicably for centuries.”

Netanyahu’s Critical Foreign Tour Israel’s strategic repositioning. Caroline Glick

The unraveling of the US electorate comes against the backdrop of the diminution of US military power.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s upcoming trips to Australia, Singapore, Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan might be the most significant diplomatic visits he makes in his tenure in office. The trips will take place against the backdrop of two major international shifts that cast Israel into uncharted waters as a small state with a dizzying array of strategic threats arrayed against it. The states that he will visit are all well-positioned to help Israel navigate its next moves.

The first shift is the US’s political crackup.

Next week American voters will choose their next president. The major candidates, Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton and Republican nominee Donald Trump, are the weakest candidates to have ever stood for the highest office in the land. Their rise is a testament to the weakening, if not the unraveling of the glue that has held America together since the Civil War.

The unraveling of the US electorate comes against the backdrop of the diminution of US military power. The US’s multi-trillion dollar investment in inconclusive if not failed wars in the Middle East over the past 15 years has come at the expense of military modernization. The F-35 program has sucked up the majority of the remaining research and development funds.

And it has yet to produce a reliable airplane.

Worse, the F-35’s long and problematic gestation period has given Russia and China the time and opportunity to develop air defense systems capable of neutralizing the F-35’s stealth systems.

Those systems were supposed to be its chief advantage as the next generation fighter for the US and its allies.

The deterioration of the US’s military capabilities has gone hand in hand with the US’s apparent loss of strategic rationality.

This is apparent worldwide, but is nowhere more obvious than in the Middle East.

President Barack Obama’s decision to effectively abandon the US’s major allies in the Middle East in favor of cultivating ties with Iran has made the region far more dangerous to the US and its spurned allies than it was eight years ago.

True, in theory, Obama’s decision to prefer the Shi’ites to the Sunnis makes sense given the totalitarian and imperial nature of Sunni jihadism. But in light of the genocidal, totalitarian and imperial nature of the current Iranian regime, his move made no sense and its impact has been massively destructive.

UN Plan to Turn the World into an Islamic Colony? by Maria Polizoidou

The UN is the mothership of injustice and radical global Islamization.

As the UN does not recognize the historical presence and continuity of the Jewish people in their land, the next people on the menu in UNESCO’s food chain are most likely the Greeks and then the Italians. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan already said as much last week.

No one would be surprised if UNESCO, to institutionalize the Islamic presence in the international community, claims that Greeks have nothing to do with the Acropolis and the Parthenon, and that Italy has no historical ties to the Colosseum in Rome.

With the rate of admission of Muslims into Greece, by 2050 the Greeks will be a minority in their own country.

The Greek media chose not to inform the Greek people on the attitude of their politicians towards the Jewish nation because it would expose their preference for Islam over Israel, and the Greek people might not see this choice in a positive light.

How can Greece credibly ask for help from the global community on the issue of Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, when the politicians themselves maintain a neutral attitude on the virtually identical issue of the Jerusalem’s Temple Mount?

When the news arrived that UNESCO does not recognize the connection of the Jewish people to Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, it brought to mind that the UN is the mothership of injustice and radical global Islamization. Its members, which include the large bloc of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) — 56 Islamic nations plus “Palestine” — evidently believe that if they want to transform the Western world into an Islamic colony, first they must bring down the State of Israel. This resembles the suggestion in ancient Greece of the exiled Greek general, Demaratos, to the king of Persia, Xerxes: If you want Greece to fall, first you have to destroy the Spartans.

If Jerusalem falls into the hands of Islam, the rest of the world will presumably fall. UNESCO’s decision is not only nonsensical from a historical perspective (Islam did not even exist at the time of ancient Jerusalem), basically it is also a strategic move against the cultural foundations of the West.

As the UN does not recognize the historical presence and continuity of the Jewish people in their land, the next people on the menu in UNESCO’s food chain are most likely the Greeks and then the Italians. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan already said as much last week.

Turkey: Erdogan’s Galloping Despotism by Burak Bekdil

Before Turks could digest so many undemocratic practices they had to face in one week, they woke up only to learn that scores of journalists at a newspaper critical of Erdogan had been detained. On October 31, police raided the homes of 11 people, including executives and journalists of Cumhuriyet newspaper, after prosecutors initiated a probe against them on “terrorism” charges.

“This is about … abolishing all universal values… The most explicit indications of it are the growing pressure against the Turkish press and the policies to destroy it. This is the process of the destruction of free thought.” — The Contemporary Journalists Association.

Both fascism and communism exercised a large influence on the Arab “Baathist” ideology — “resurrection” in Arabic, and which started as a nationalist, Sunni Arab movement to combat Western colonial rule and to promote modernization. In Iraq, the despotic Baathist regime survived 35 years, largely under the leadership of Saddam Hussein. In Syria, it is still struggling under the tyranny of President Bashar al-Assad. These days a non-Arab, but Islamist version of the Baathist ideology is flourishing in an otherwise unlikely country: candidate for membership in the European Union (EU), Turkey.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s increasing authoritarianism is killing Turkey’s already slim chances of finding itself a place in the world’s more civilized clubs and turning the country more and more into a “Baathist” regime.

In 2004 Erdogan’s government abolished the death penalty as part of his ambitions at the time to join the EU. Twelve years later, on Oct. 29, 2016, Erdogan addressed fans of his party, and said he would ratify a bill reinstating capital punishment once it passed in parliament despite objections it might spark in the West. He said: “Soon, our government will bring (the bill) to parliament … It’s what the people say that matters, not what the West thinks”.

Michael Angwin : How Green Activists Nuked Themselves

The anti-nuclear movement had everything going for it, from copious funding and the support of international NGOs to sympathetic press coverage and parliamentary supporters. Yet its crusade petered out, laid low by bogus science and ardent, absolutist ratbaggery.
Australia’s environmental warriors have failed in their campaigns over the past 40 years to stop the Australia’s uranium mining industry. In the past decade in particular, the anti-uranium movement has suffered devastating defeats, as uranium mining has expanded with bi-partisan support from Labor and conservative parties. It’s instructive to analyse why.

The anti-uranium movement operated on a permanent basis through the nation’s foremost environmental organisations and hundreds of other smaller organisations. It had access to considerable financial resources[1], to sympathetic media and to Commonwealth and state parliamentary sympathisers. It was gifted three nuclear accidents as a platform for its advocacy.

Given these propitious circumstances, how did the movement fail so completely to impede the development of Australia’s nuclear industry? What accounts for this monumental failure of policy, strategy and tactics? First, let’s look at the past decade’s landmark political decisions in support of uranium. The process began with the Howard Coalition government, and the ALP followed suit.

The centre-left Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, endorsed uranium mining and exports ten days after Japan’s Fukushima nuclear plant was destroyed by a tsunami
Eight months later, Ms Gillard announced her government would export uranium to India, a non-signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, contrary to ALP policy. Shortly after, the policy fell humbly into line with her decision
Four uranium projects were approved under mainstream environmental laws, despite the close involvement of the anti-uranium movement in the assessment process
In 2016, South Australia’s centre-left government began to implement a Royal Commission report that endorsed SA as a suitable place for a global nuclear waste repository.

The anti-uranium movement emerged in the early 1970s to protest French nuclear testing in the Pacific. The movement next turned its attention to domestic uranium mining, using the Fraser government’s decision to permit mining at Ranger as a focus for activism. By the end of the 1970s, an anti-uranium strategy had emerged: frame uranium as a class-based issue and connect it with a broader political assault on the capitalist status quo; establish many small, local opposition groups; coordinate their activities; frame the movement as large, vigorous and publicly-supported; focus on emotions, especially fear; and target traditional land owners as a key point of resistance to mining.

However, even as insiders conceded at the time, ‘the ’70s movement did not fundamentally threaten Australia’s nuclear industry’.[2] The movement declined during the 1980s. The rise and decline of the Nuclear Disarmament Party paved the way for the co-option of the anti-uranium movement by the Labor Party[3]. The movement then declined even more rapidly, and uranium economics became much more important in shaping uranium development.

By the mid-1980s, anti-uranium activism tried a more mainstream advocacy strategy of influencing public opinion.[4] By the late-1990s, the movement’s strategy had become, by default, ‘isolated campaigning’.[5] While some environmental NGOs continued to fund full-time ‘anti-nuclear campaigners’, isolated campaigning has become the norm.

Why did it fail? A first clue is found in this history. The policy, strategy and tactics of the movement were shaped by Marxist ideological[6] beliefs. This never appealed to a mainstream Australian audience, which is more interested in workable solutions for real problems. The anti-uranium movement also faced the global failure of its founding ideology: in the 1980s, the Cold War ended and Soviet communism collapsed.

The ideological failure of the anti-uranium movement was accompanied by a long series of startling policy, strategy and tactical errors, particularly in making claims that had no credibility. For example, anti-nuclear crusader Helen Caldicott once claimed[7] a Howard/Bush conspiracy, involving the owners of the Alice Springs-to-Darwin railway, to store America’s nuclear waste at Muckaty Station, once proposed as the Federal government’s low-level nuclear waste site. This vast claim was based on the small fact that a subsidiary of Halliburton, a company with which former US vice-president Dick Cheney was once associated, was one of the handful of companies in a joint venture, to operate the rail road. There are many examples of this kind, and they illustrate the weakness of the anti-uranium movement’s advocacy: policy makers won’t take you seriously if you prosecute your case with selective facts, used out of context and without perspective.

How al-Qaeda and ISIS Have Been Weighing in on Our Presidential Election By Bridget Johnson

If some countries are taking a vested interest in tinkering with the U.S. presidential election, terror groups have been generally taking a hands-off approach to next week’s vote.

After all, al-Qaeda reasoned, the next occupant of the White House is six of one and half a dozen of the other to them.

In its mid-May issue of the English-language Inspire magazine, after Donald Trump had secured enough votes for the GOP nomination, editor-in-chief Yahya Ibrahim noted that “today America is in a season of presidential elections, which will define the winning party to the presidency.”

“This may cause a slight difference to the American citizens but for us it is still the same story; this is because between a foolish candidate that openly declare[s] his enmity towards Islam and a candidate pretending to be a friend of Islam, thousands of Muslims continue to die as a result of the inhuman American policies in Islamic lands,” Ibrahim wrote for the al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula publication.

“After America failed to impose its direct domination and rule under the excuse of countering terrorism. And after America was exhausted in fighting many wars with Islamic groups. And after realizing that it is losing a battle rather than winning, they began to think of making arrangements on how to retreat from our lands ‘safely.’ America found that the best way to achieve this is by igniting the region with sectarian wars.”

Ibrahim decried “the dirty politics of America, led by the Democratic Party under the leadership of Obama.”

“And on the other hand we have the Republicans, who openly kill, fight and declare enmity towards Islam under the banner of the crusade,” the editor continued. “The Democrats smile at the Muslims while stabbing them at their backs.”

In a separate article, former Guantanamo inmate Ibrahim al-Qosi, who was transferred back to his home country Sudan in 2012 and joined AQAP two years later, wrote that 9/11 changed American politics “with regards to strengthening the rightist, white, racial and widespread-armed militias who are weary of the federal government internal and external policies.”

“These militias who think that the federal government in Washington does not serve the interest of the general white Anglo-Saxon American community of the protestant Christianity denomination,” al-Qosi added. “In addition to that they see the federal government serve the interests of the Jews and other minorities whom, according to them, must be curbed and get rid from power.”

The rest of AQAP’s Inspire publications throughout campaign season have been guides with practical tips for jihadists after the Orlando and Nice attacks, as well as a special issue about France banning the burkini on beaches.

There was no October surprise from ISIS in an attempt to influence the election; the ground offensive by coalition forces to recapture Mosul began mid-month, which could spark global revenge attacks. But the terror group’s official communications are centered around Mosul right now.

Germany Grapples With Refugee Tips in Terror Probes Officials welcome the efforts to track suspected criminals or Islamic State supporters, but say not all tips are helpful By Ruth Bender and Mohammad Nour Alakraa

BERLIN—When Syrian terror suspect Jaber Albakr escaped a police raid in the Eastern German town of Chemnitz in October, authorities posted an Arabic version of their wanted notice online 30 hours later.

By then, hundreds of Syrians had already shared their own translation on social media. Two days later, it was three Syrian refugees who captured and turned in the suspect.

“I came from a place where many people were killed; I don’t want anyone to die here,” said Abdalaziz al-Hamza, one of the first Syrians to post his translation of the notice on Facebook.

Refugees from the war-torn Middle East have been banding together to hound suspected terrorists and war criminals hiding among the nearly two million who have settled in Europe over the last two years, most of them in Germany.

The help, which ranges from tipoffs in immigration interviews to networks of amateur investigators, has been both a blessing and a burden for officials.

In Frankfurt, a Syrian human rights activist is collecting files on suspected war criminals and Islamists. In Bavaria, a refugee is sharing information on his former Islamic State captors. Online, refugees are posting pictures of suspected war criminals at a pace authorities can barely keep up with.

Some of the information from refugees is invaluable, security officials said, given authorities are often investigating crimes rooted in distant and inaccessible countries. But many of the tips are vague or unsubstantiated, evidence that is too thin to justify an investigation let alone a trial.

And some have been found to be false alarms based on personal agendas, leading at times to a fruitless strain on already tight resources, the officials said. The patchy effectiveness of the efforts has frustrated both the refugees offering the help, and officials still figuring out how to best use it.

“We have to be careful, we can’t simply go after someone just because one person thinks he did something,” said Jochen Hollmann, head of the state intelligence agency in Saxony-Anhalt.

In Germany, authorities have received 445 tips on potential terror and Islamist supporters over the past 18 months, and another 1,250 on suspected war criminals alone this year, according to the federal criminal agency BKA. Of the 445, 80 have led to in-depth investigations, the BKA said.

Islamic State has boasted of directing three attacks in Germany this year—two by refugees this summer and a murder by an unidentified knife-wielding suspect in Hamburg in October. The militant group claimed the Hamburg attack last weekend, and authorities said they are looking into the claim. CONTINUE AT SITE

Tehran’s Man in Beirut Lebanon’s new president is an ally of the Iran-backed terror group.

Lawmakers in Beirut agreed to elect Lebanon’s next President on Monday, breaking a deadlock that had crippled government for 29 months. The decisive vote was cast in Tehran. Iran wanted a Lebanese President who would be an ally of Hezbollah, the Shiite terror group that its chief proxy in the country. It found one in the 81-year-old former general Michel Aoun.

Under Lebanon’s explicitly sectarian political system, the President must be a Maronite Christian, while the Prime Minister is a Sunni and the Speaker of Parliament a Shiite. But in recent years Hezbollah has exercised a veto over Lebanese politics and tilted the balance in Tehran’s favor. It helps that Iran funds Hezbollah to the tune of around $200 million annually and supplies it with tens of thousands of missiles, making the group the strongest armed force in Lebanon.

Hezbollah’s presence in Lebanon allows Tehran to threaten Israel and defend Syria’s Assad regime, pillars of Iranian regional strategy. Mr. Aoun, though a Maronite, enjoys close ties with Hezbollah and isn’t likely to press the group to disarm. His Free Patriotic Movement party signed a memorandum of understanding with Hezbollah in 2006, and his rhetoric and positions are usually aligned with the Shiite group.

Mr. Aoun’s election marks a détente between Hezbollah and many in the Maronite community who have come to view the group and its Iranian backers as protectors amid a Syrian civil war that has flooded Lebanon with more than a million refugees, most of them Sunnis. It also represents a personal humiliation for Saad Hariri, who will again serve as Prime Minister under the deal. Hezbollah and agents of the Assad regime assassinated Mr. Hariri’s father, former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, in a 2005 car bombing.