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Turkey: Torture, Sexual Abuse Rampant in Prisons by Uzay Bulut

Posted By on September 10th, 2018

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12959/turkey-prisons-torture-sexual-abuse

Inmates in a jail in Şanlıurfa in southeast Turkey tell of the plight of 27-year-old Uğur Yeloğlu, who they say has been isolated and tortured so badly since his imprisonment seven months ago that his level of functioning is like that of a baby.

Yeloğlu was arrested in Istanbul in January for allegedly “aiding a terrorist organization.” His lawyer, Abdülkadir Aslan, said that in spite of the many months his client has been in jail, his indictment has not yet been prepared by prosecutors: “The investigation file is also marked ‘confidential,’ so we do not know what it contains.”

“Prisoners are beaten up and sometimes killed, when they refuse to roll-call standing up, give military salute, reject strip searches, or ask to see a doctor.” — Report by the opposition Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP).

In the early 2000s, after the Justice and Development Party (AKP) first came to power in Turkey, its leader, then Prime Minister (now President) Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, proclaimed a policy of “zero tolerance” for torture.

In June of this year, Turkish Justice Minister Abdulhamit Gül repeated the same mantra. “We — as the AKP government — are implementing a policy of zero tolerance for torture,” he said.

Statements by many prisoners, their lawyers and human-rights defenders, however, tell a much different story; victim and witness accounts reveal that torture and other forms of unlawful abuse are increasingly widespread in Turkish jails and prisons. Inmates in a jail in Şanlıurfa in southeast Turkey, for example, tell of the plight of 27-year-old Uğur Yeloğlu, who they say has been isolated and tortured so badly since his imprisonment seven months ago that his level of functioning is like that of a baby. He has apparently lost his memory and is unable to walk, or even eat, on his own. In addition, these inmates said, the prison’s healthcare staff are lax in their treatment of him.

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The Circus of Resistance By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on September 10th, 2018

https://amgreatness.com/2018/09/09/the-circus-of

The resistance to Donald Trump was warring on all fronts last week.

Democratic senators vied with pop-up protestors in the U.S. Senate gallery to disrupt and, if possible, to derail the confirmation hearings of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. U.S. SenatorCory Booker (D-N.J.) played Spartacus, but could not even get the script right as he claimed to be bravely releasing classified information that was already declassified. I cannot remember another example of a senator who wanted to break the law but could not figure out how to do it.

Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), former Harvard Law Professor who still insists she is of Native American heritage, called for the president to be removed by invoking the 25th Amendment. Apparently fabricating an ethnic identity is sane, and getting out of the Iran deal or the Paris Climate Accord is insanity and grounds for removal.

Barack Obama decided that ex-presidents should attack current presidents, and thereby reminded the country why Trump was elected. The author of the Russian “reset”and the hot-mic collusionary offer criticized Trump for being soft on Putin. The president who never achieved annualized 3 percent GDP growth (and is the first president since 1933 who can claim this “distinction”) also claimed Trump’s roaring economy was due to Obama-era policies (e.g., raising taxes, Obamacare, more regulations, and “you didn’t build that” commentaries). Fresh from trashing his successor in a funeral speech, the ever audacious Obama called for more decorum.

Bruce Ohr, once number four at the Department of Justice, and whose wife was working with Christopher Steele on the Fusion GPS file (a fact he has never disclosed willingly), now more or less has made a mockery of the FBI narrative of when, why, and how it began surveilling American citizens and infiltrating the Trump campaign. Ohr apparently has testified that well before the election, and well before the application of FISA warrants, he was working with the FBI, the already discredited Christopher Steele, and a Russian oligarch either to smear candidate Trump, or to facilitate the entry into the United States of a once barred and questionable Russian grandee, or both.

Nike hired NFL renegade Colin Kaepernick to peddle its sports products. For all its billion-dollar market research, it apparently did not know what Donald Trump’s animal cunning had almost immediately surmised: a majority of Americans do not appreciate the pampered multimillionaire Kaepernick sanctioning violence against the police by wearing “pig” socks, or mocking the National Anthem by taking a knee. Nike could just as well have hired Bowe Bergdahl to push its sneakers.

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Fall Madness – Hurricanes and Global Warming By Brian C. Joondeph

Posted By on September 10th, 2018

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/09/fall_madness__hurricanes_and_global_warming.html

Fall is officially upon us with the passing of Labor Day. After this seasonal landmark, we are not supposed to wear white. I’m surprised CNN’s Don Lemon hasn’t found something racist in this tradition.

Football season has started, kneeling players and all. It’s been a busy week for the media as we are now less than two months away from the critical Congressional midterm elections. The media is not taking a knee; instead, they are on full offense with the Bob Woodward book and the anonymous NY Times op-ed, both full-fledged assaults on President Trump.

Fall is also hurricane season which means not only football jerseys coming out of the closet, but the hackneyed global warming doomsday predictions. The left-wing media, however, may not give hurricane season its due since there are more important stories to cover, like Colin Kaepernick, the Bret Kavanaugh confirmation circus, and Pocahontas wanting to invoke the 25th Amendment to remove President Trump.

Tropical Storm Florence is in the Caribbean and heading toward Florida, with early storms Helene and Isaac hanging out off the coast of Africa, deciding whether to huff and puff, or really blow the house down.

Florence, not yet a hurricane, but expected to become one, looks like it will impact the Carolinas. Or maybe up the US coast. Or possibly Florida. Or maybe harmlessly out to sea. The spaghetti models show all the possibilities. Here are the complied guesses from Weathernerds.

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Senator Booker Quotes Violent Racist Who Urged Murder of Jews, White People “The only good Zionist is a dead Zionist we must take a lesson from Hitler”

Posted By on September 10th, 2018

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271268/senator-booker-quotes-violent-racist-who-urged-daniel-greenfield

Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing was the beginning of the Democrat 2020 primaries, and the winner was the Senate Democrat who yelled the worst possible thing.

That was Senator Cory Booker.

Unlike some Senate Dems, Booker didn’t just confine his attack to Brett Kavanaugh, a mild-mannered man widely beloved by both the Democrats and Republicans who worked with him, he went for broke.

The Founding Fathers were racist geniuses, Booker insisted. Their constitution was flawed. Originalism, interpreting the Constitution as it was written, rather than whatever social justice activist the Dems had managed to plant on the bench, is going to be racist and sexist, because its authors were deplorables.

“Native Americans were referred to as savages, women weren’t referred to at all, African Americans were referred to as fractions of human beings. As one civil-rights activist used to say ‘constitutu, constitu, I can only say three-fifths of the word,’” Booker bloviated.

Who is this “civil rights activist”? A violent racist who had called Adolf Hitler “the greatest white man”.

You can see why Booker might have hesitated a bit when using him to bolster his claim that the Founding Fathers of this country were flawed racist sexist men. Even though, unlike Booker’s civil rights hero, they didn’t admire Hitler or call for the mass murder of Jews.

HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

9 Steps to Successfully Counter Jihad The crucial strategies that will turn the dire conflict in America’s favor. Jamie Glazov

Posted By on September 10th, 2018

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271287/9-steps-successfully-counter-jihad-jamie-glazov

Editors’ note: We are, reprinting below Frontpage editor Jamie Glazov’s July 12, 2016 Breitbart article, “9 Steps to Successfully Counter Jihad”. Having written the article in the closing chapter of the disastrous Obama administration, the author recognizes and celebrates the life-saving turn-around disposition that the Trump administration has brought in to counter Jihad.

9 Steps to Successfully Counter Jihad.
By Jamie Glazov

While the Obama administration continues to allow the Muslim Brotherhood to direct American foreign policy and, therefore, to implement “strategies” that render America defenseless in the face of Jihad and stealth Jihad, there are some alternative strategies that have the potential to turn this catastrophic situation around completely in America’s favor.

Below are 9 concrete steps that, if implemented by a future American administration, would make a big difference in preserving our civilization and in defending Americans from terrorism:

1. Label the Enemy and Make a Threat Assessment.

The Obama administration continues to refuse to label our enemy and, therefore, it continues to enable our defeat in the terror war. It is urgent that we name our enemy (i.e. Islamic Jihad) and definitively identify what ideology inspires our enemy (i.e. Islamic law).

2. Scrap “Countering Violent Extremism.”

“Countering Violent Extremism” is the pathetic and destructive focus of the Obama administration in allegedly fighting the terror war. On the one hand, this “focus” is vague to the point of being meaningless and completely incapacitates us. On the other hand, this focus allows the administration to perpetuate the destructive fantasy that there are other types of “extremists” — who just happen to be the Left’s political opponents — that pose a great threat to the country.

For example, as Stephen Coughlin has revealed, the “violent extremists” the administration is clearly worried about are the “right-wing Islamophobes” whom the administration obviously considers to be the real threat to American security.

The “Countering Violent Extremism” is trash and needs to be thrown in the garbage.

3. Stop “Partnering” With Muslim Brotherhood Front Groups.

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Oslo at Twenty-Five: The History of a Delusion A reflection on the immense dangers of national self-deception. Kenneth Levin

Posted By on September 10th, 2018

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271284/oslo-twenty-five-history-delusion-kenneth-levin
Twenty-five years ago, the world watched as Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin shook hands with Palestinian leader and arch-terrorist Yasser Arafat on the White House lawn. The Oslo process, launched with the September 13, 1993 signing of the Declaration of Principles as President Clinton looked on, was supposed to lead to genuine peace between Israel and the Palestinians. It never happened because Oslo was based on a delusion, a false belief by many Israelis that they had a partner for peace.

The truth was readily evident. On the evening of the White House ceremony, Arafat broadcast a speech on Jordanian television assuring Palestinians, and the Arab world more broadly, that they should understand Oslo in terms of the Palestine National Council’s 1974 decision. This was a reference to the so-called “plan of phases,” according to which the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) would acquire whatever territory it could by negotiations, then use that land as a base for pursuing Israel’s annihilation.

Why did Oslo’s supporters deny the truth? The Arab siege of Israel had been underway for nearly half a century, since the Jewish State’s founding. Invariably under conditions of such chronic besiegement – whether involving minorities marginalized and victimized by the surrounding majority or small states whose neighbors seek their destruction – elements of the population under assault will shun reality. They will fool themselves into believing that sufficient self-reform and concessions will win relief. They do so out of desperate longing for respite and despite typically overwhelming evidence in the rhetoric and actions of their attackers that the besieged are merely indulging in wishful thinking.

The traditional position of left-leaning Israeli parties had been that Israel needed to await a peace partner who would renounce terror and recognize Israel’s right to exist. But in the years preceding Oslo, this reasonable stance had eroded in the face of the unrelenting siege and the Left’s alienation from governments in which, since 1977, the right-leaning Likud had largely dominated. Growing numbers on the Israeli Left – including an overwhelming majority within the nation’s academic, cultural and media elites – concluded the major impediment to peace was the Israeli Right and its unwillingness to make necessary concessions. The Labor Party’s victory in the 1992 election gave the Left the opportunity to act on its delusion.

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Serena Williams, a Pathetic Meltdown and Victimhood A haunting glimpse into the Left’s morbid victimology hierarchy. Matthew Vadum

Posted By on September 10th, 2018

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271285/serena-williams-pathetic-meltdown-and-victimhood-matthew-vadum

Left-wingers say no criticism of tennis player Serena Williams should be allowed for her high-profile meltdown Saturday at the 2018 women’s U.S. Open final because she is a double-minority – female and black – and should therefore be immune to criticism.

National Organization for Women (NOW) President Toni Van Pelt launched into a fact-free rant.

“In what was a blatantly racist and sexist move, tennis umpire Carlos Ramos unfairly penalized Serena Williams in an abhorrent display of male dominance and discrimination. This would not have happened if Serena Williams was a man,” she said. “She would have been cheered and chided for ‘gamesmanship.’ Male tennis stars are reminding us that they have ‘done much worse’ and have not been penalized.”

Washington Post screed writer Sally Jenkins cried sexism, whining that a male tennis official “took what began as a minor infraction and turned it into one of the nastiest and most emotional controversies in the history of tennis, all because he couldn’t take a woman speaking sharply to him.”

Ignoring the facts at hand, former tennis player Billie Jean King moaned about the unfairness of it all.

“When a woman is emotional, she’s ‘hysterical’ and she’s penalized for it,” King tweeted. “When a man does the same, he’s ‘outspoken’ and there are no repercussions. Thank you, Serena Williams, for calling out this double standard. More voices are needed to do the same.”

Williams tried to cast herself as Susan B. Anthony.

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A Modest Proposal for ‘Anonymous’ By Claudia Rosett

Posted By on September 10th, 2018

https://pjmedia.com/claudiarosett/a-modest-proposal-for-anonymous/

As a means of spreading mistrust, confusion and distraction within the Trump administration, last week’s New York Times op-ed by “Anonymous” was a master stroke. Vladimir Putin himself could hardly have done better. Suspicion is rife and the administration has been left to rummage through its own ranks for this incognito writer who claims and lauds subversion of the president by his own high-level staff. Relays of senior officials have been left to deny authorship, without being able to prove the truth of their denials unless the real author is discovered.

As Ambassador Nikki Haley accurately summed it up in a Sept. 7 op-ed in the Washington Post, this anonymous writer, described by the Times as “a senior official,” has sowed mistrust among thousands of government workers, who had nothing to do with this article. Anonymous has encouraged America’s adversaries to, as Haley puts it, “promote their hostile claims about the stability of our government,” and unfairly cast doubt on the president himself “in a way that cannot be directly refuted because the anonymous acccuser’s credibility and knowledge cannot be judged.”

The Times tells us this op-ed escapade required anonymity because the author, if identified, would be in jeopardy of losing a federal job. That alone suggests the Times is willing to vouch for an author with an odd set of priorities. But surely there’s more to it. The titillating use of “Anonymous” has brought a gush of extraordinary attention to the Times, and one might wonder if there will be special credit inhouse for anyone on its editorial staff who had a hand in ferrying the op-ed from the anonymous writer — this erstwhile conservative champion of “free minds, free markets and free people” — to the public page. While the contents of the op-ed brought nothing new to the rumor mills or furor of America’s political debate, the tease of anonymity, combined with the label of “senior official,” has become clickbait galore. In effect, the platform of a government job has been leveraged here to serve the personal agenda of an individual within the administration. When the medium for this sort of behavior is money, it’s called corruption.

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Sweden’s Political Warning The Sweden Democrats finish third on an anti-immigration platform.

Posted By on September 10th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/swedens-political-warning-1536531909

Swedes went to the polls on Sunday and although it will take some time for a ruling coalition to emerge, the biggest immediate winner appears to be the party that won’t form a government. The Sweden Democrats, born as a far-right political movement and now an anti-immigration party, garnered a little under 18% of the vote. That third-place finish is their best electoral result.

The governing party is still likely to be either the first-place center-left Social Democrats or the second-place center-right Moderate Party, the anchors of Swedish politics for decades. But they will govern with reduced vote tallies, and no coalition is likely to enjoy a majority in parliament.

As in so many recent European elections, the authority of mainstream parties is eroding. The Moderates were the biggest losers Sunday compared to 2014, down 3.5 points to 20%. The ruling Social Democrats have been hemorrhaging voters for years. Their better-than-expected result Sunday is that they finished at 28%, three percentage points down from the last election but well shy of the 40% tally they used to achieve.

The Sweden Democrats have won over many disaffected working-class voters, as the party’s share of the vote has risen from under 6% in 2010. Others have shifted to the Left coalition, a far-left faction whose vote total also rose more than two percentage points Sunday.

Many commentators—and more than a few Swedish and European Union politicians—will mourn growing support for the “far right” by Sweden’s historically tolerant voters. That misses much of the story.

ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Trump Administration to Close Palestine Liberation Organization Office in Washington National security adviser John Bolton also plans to threaten sanctions against International Criminal Court, in a Monday speech By Michael R. Gordon

Posted By on September 10th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/trump-administration-to-close-palestine-liberation-organization-office-in-washington-1536546125

The Trump administration is expected to announce Monday that it will close the Palestine Liberation Organization’s office in Washington, administration officials said Sunday night, widening a U.S. campaign of pressure amid stalled Middle East peace efforts.

“The United States will always stand with our friend and ally, Israel,” national security adviser John Bolton planned to say in prepared remarks he is scheduled to deliver Monday, according a draft reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

“The Trump administration will not keep the office open when the Palestinians refuse to take steps to start direct and meaningful negotiations with Israel,” he planned to add.

PLO mission officials couldn’t be reached for comment late Sunday.

Mr. Bolton also planned to threaten to impose sanctions against the International Criminal Court if it moves ahead with investigations of the U.S. and Israel.

“If the court comes after us, Israel or other allies, we will not sit quietly,” Mr. Bolton planned to say, according to his prepared remarks.

Among the responses, Mr. Bolton says, the U.S. would ban ICC judges and prosecutors from entering the country.

“We will sanction their funds in the U.S. financial system, and we will prosecute them in the U.S. criminal system,” Mr. Bolton adds. “We will do the same for any company or state that assists an ICC investigation of Americans.”

The PLO office in Washington has long been the focus of controversy. The Trump administration warned last year that it might close the office after Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas called for the investigation and prosecution of Israeli officials by the ICC and other bodies.

Saeb Erekat, a senior Palestinian Authority negotiator responded at the time that such a move would undermine prospects for peace. The PLO opened its mission in Washington in 1994 and joined the ICC after receiving observer state status at the U.N. in 2012.