RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17180/what-makes-erdogan-tick

At the end of the year, there was a Turkey in deep stages of cold-to-colder-war with the EU (in particular, with EU members Greece, Cyprus and France), Israel, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, General Khalifa Haftar of Libya and the United States (over the S-400 dispute).

Not one of these state actors stepped back and appeased Erdoğan or changed policy in the face of Turkish hostilities.

In December, the Trump administration announced that the U.S. would sanction Turkey for its purchase of the Russian-made S-400 surface-to-air missile system….

All that must have made Erdoğan tick. Apparently cornered, Erdoğan launched a new charm offensive in November. He said Turkey’s future was in Europe – quite a radical departure from his usual histrionics that Europe is Islamophobic, fascist, racist and Europeans are “remnants of Nazis.”

Erdoğan’s tough guy manners have finally been decrypted by state and non-state actors in the former Ottoman lands.

“Erdoğan will not back down until you show him teeth. That’s what we did when we negotiated the (Syrian) ceasefire in October of 2019. We were ready to crush the economy.” — James Jeffrey, former U.S. special envoy for Syria (and former ambassador to Ankara), Al Monitor

A comparative analysis of where Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s aggressive war-mongering and assertive foreign policy — based on an imaginary Superpower Turkey — stood a year ago, and today’s relative Turkish composure at all problematic fronts should give us invaluable lessons on dealing with the wannabe sultan. The events during the past year offer precious experimental confrontations that reveal an answer to a question that concerns a rich menu of nations: What makes Erdoğan tick?

Erdoğan has threatened Europe several times with “sending millions of refugees your way.” On February 27, 2020, the Turkish government finally pressed the button to execute the threat: Millions of (mostly Syrian) migrants on Turkish soil were now free to travel to Europe; Turkish border gates were now open. Tens of thousands of these migrants (not only Syrians) were given free bus rides from Istanbul to Turkey’s land borders with Bulgaria and Greece, about 150 miles west of the Istanbul. In a declaration that looked more like propaganda talk than reality, Turkish Interior Minister Süleyman Soylu chimed in on March 1, 2020 that, in a span of three days, 100,000 refugees had already crossed the borders into Europe.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17270/france-macron-radicalism

There are also teachers who, possibly because they are scared, choose to bow their heads, give up teaching certain subjects and — when students shout anti-Semitic and anti-Western insults — to act as if they hear nothing. It has become almost impossible in most French high schools to talk about either Israel or the Holocaust.

Most journalists seem to prefer avoiding all discussion of the advance of radical Islam in France. They know that those who do so are immediately called “racists” or “Islamophobes” and are often threatened, prosecuted, sentenced to heavy fines or fired from their place of work.

Even though what the journalist Éric Zemmour said was accurate and verifiable, the CSA (Superior Audiovisual Council), said that to state certain facts constitutes an “incitement to racial hatred”.

In 2015, a French journalist compared the National Rally Party to the Islamic State. [National Rally President] Marine Le Pen responded by posting on Twitter two photographs of crimes committed by the Islamic State and added, “This is Islamic State”…. In court, the judge asked Le Pen, “Do you consider that these photos violate human dignity?”. Le Pen replied, “It is the crime that violates human dignity, it is not its photographic reproduction”.

“Fourteen months before the presidential deadline of 2022, … the supposition is that … Marine Le Pen, will necessarily be in the second round of the election and that whoever will face her is no longer guaranteed to win”. — Le Monde, March 22, 2021.

November 1, 2020. Didier Lemaire, a high school teacher who works in Trappes, a small town west of Paris, published an open letter in the left-wing magazine Le Nouvel Observateur. He spoke of the murder of Samuel Paty, another teacher, savagely beheaded two weeks earlier by a Muslim extremist. He denounced the submission of the French authorities to religious intimidation and the impossibility of the French school system being able to transmit any real knowledge of history or to give students the intellectual means to think freely. He said that in just a few years, the situation in the city where he worked has deteriorated markedly. Lemaire wrote:

“The year I arrived in the high school where I teach, the city’s synagogue had just been burned down and Jewish families forced to leave. After the 2015 and 2016 attacks in France, I got involved in preventive actions…. In 2018, seeing that my efforts collided with forces much more powerful than me, I wrote to the President of the Republic to ask him to act urgently to protect our students from the ideological and social pressure exerted on them, a pressure which gradually withdraws them from the national community. Unfortunately, no action was taken….

https://www.theepochtimes.com/how-a-political-prisoner-of-17-years-resisted-communist-cubas-persecution_3765484.html

After 17 years of political persecution and imprisonment at the hands of the Cuban communist regime, and having ultimately found refuge in the United States, Jorge Luis Antonis reflected on what he learned and what helped him resist oppression during a very difficult period in his life.

It was March 15, 1990. Luis was 25 years old. He and a number of others were enthusiastic about reforms and events at the time in Eastern Europe that signaled the fall of communism, such as the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall and the impending total collapse of the Soviet Union.

That day, Luis recalled being in a public venue where a broadcast was underway showing a speech Cuban dictator Raul Castro was delivering about the upcoming Fourth Congress of the Cuban Communist Party.

“I took the opportunity to openly declare myself as political opposition,” Luis told The Epoch Times’ “Crossroads” program, in Spanish.

Since Fidel Castro came to power in Cuba in 1959, citizens were systematically denied fundamental freedoms such as speech, association and assembly, movement, due process, and privacy. By 1990, nothing had changed—civil and political rights were still a figment of the imagination.

“Back then, it was a real defiance of the regime because there was basically no opposition activists, there were no human rights groups, or independent journalists,” Luis explained. “And there, I started shouting slogans in favor of change, in favor of democracy, in favor of respect for human rights. I was beaten brutally and I was sentenced to prison, charged with ‘verbal enemy propaganda.’”