RUTHFULLY YOURS

Turkey has turned its back on the West. To be fair, we in the West didn’t do much to prevent it.https://amgreatness.com/2017/11/19/turkey-is-no-ally/

When Turkey sought entry into the European Union, other members balked and resisted—though not without reason. Many Europeans were alarmed by the rise of Turkey’s Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP). The AKP sought to undo the reforms that made Turkey a modern, secular nation upon its independence in 1923. Up to that point, Turkey had been the seat of power for the Ottoman Empire—the last, great Islamic empire—and was dismantled after World War I. From 1923 onward, the country was ruled by a secular autocracy and became an integral component of NATO’s southern flank during the Cold War.

Now, Turkey is becoming fast friends with Russia and pushing the West away.

The move away from the West in Turkey began around 2002. Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his AKP Party burst onto the political scene, taking advantage of deep divisions within Turkish society. Erdogan supplanted the autocratic, secular junta that had ruled the country for decades.

Once firmly ensconced in power, Erdogan’s Islamists began methodically enacting “reforms” to make Turkey comport with traditional Islamic values. In the intervening years, Turkey has banned the sale of liquor, cracked down on any form of political opposition, and instituted a requirement for Turkish women to wear a headscarf—not exactly the stuff of European liberalism or Western freedom.

Today, Turkey is strengthening ties with China, as the Chinese carry out their One-Belt-One-Road-Initiative to link Eurasia as never before (under Beijing’s control, of course). In fact, President Erdogan has repeatedly said that Turkey’s future lies to its east, with the Turkish population in China and Central Asia, rather than in Europe and the West.

Turkey is currently purchasing Russian S-400 air defense batteries instead of Western-made systems, such as the U.S. Patriot missile, thereby complicating NATO’s collective defense measures. The Turkish government insists that it is only buying Russian-made air defense systems because Western governments balked at selling Patriot missiles to Ankara in 2015. That’s true. The reason is Turkey has a long history of doing illicit business with Iran and funding jihadist terror groups operating in Syria, including ISIS. The United States doesn’t want some of its best weapons falling into Iranian or jihadist hands.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan clearly sees Turks living in the West as a spearhead of Islam.

“Yes, integrate yourselves into German society but don’t assimilate yourselves. No one has the right to deprive us of our culture and our identity”, Erdogan told Turks in Germany as early as in 2011.

This assessment of Milli Görüs, however, does not seem to bother Danish authorities, who appear to see no problems with their cities becoming Islamized by the Turks. How many more mosques will it take?

“Islam cannot be either ‘moderate’ or ‘not moderate.’ Islam can only be one thing,” Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on November 9. “Recently the concept of ‘moderate Islam’ has received attention. But the patent of this concept originated in the West… They are now trying to pump up this idea again. What they really want to do is weaken Islam…”

Erdogan is working on strengthening Islam in the West, something he does, among other ways, by building Turkish mosques in Western countries. It is hardly surprising that he does not want the West to “weaken Islam”, but at the moment there seems little risk of that happening. The establishment of Turkish mosques in Western countries appears to be proceeding apace with very little opposition. Conversely, building Western churches in Turkey is inconceivable.

Erdogan clearly sees Turks living in the West as a spearhead of Islam. “Yes, integrate yourselves into German society but don’t assimilate yourselves. No one has the right to deprive us of our culture and our identity”, Erdogan told Turks in Germany as early as 2011. This year, he told Turks living in the West:

“Go live in better neighborhoods. Drive the best cars. Live in the best houses. Make not three, but five children. Because you are the future of Europe. That will be the best response to the injustices against you.”

At a recent luncheon promoting his new book, Victor Davis Hanson spoke of Russia’s decisive battles and losses in World War 2. Read Victors Davis Hanson-The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won rsk
Three quarters of a century ago, the most famous battle of the Second World War [2] began. More than four million combatants fought in the gargantuan struggle at Stalingrad between the Nazi and Soviet armies. Over 1.8 million became casualties. More Soviet soldiers died in the five-month battle than Americans in the entire war. But by February 2, 1943, when the Germans trapped in the city surrendered, it was clear that the momentum on the Eastern Front had shifted. The Germans would never fully recover.

Fourteen months before Stalingrad began, Hitler had launched Operation Barbarossa, the largest military offensive in human history. After two years of decisive victories over France, Poland and others, Hitler and the German High Command (Oberkommando des Heeres, or OKH), were confident that the Soviet Union would fall within six weeks. At first, their prediction seemed correct: the attack in June 1941 caught Stalin [4]unawares, and the Red Army unprepared. By December, the Red Army had suffered nearly five million casualties.

But despite enduring staggering losses, the Red Army continued to resist. In August 1941, senior members of the Wehrmacht began growing increasingly uneasy. The Chief of the OKH staff, General Franz Halder, noted in his diary that ““It is becoming ever more apparent that the Russian colossus…. Has been underestimated by us…. At the start of the war we reckoned with about 200 enemy divisions. Now we have already counted 360… When a dozen have been smashed, then the Russian puts up another dozen.”

In October, the Wehrmacht launched Operation Typhoon, the effort to take Moscow and end the war by Christmas. But as the weather grew bitterly cold, the German offensive ground to a halt, and was then pushed back by a Soviet counteroffensive. The front line froze in place some two hundred kilometers west of Moscow – and 1400 kilometers east of Berlin.

During the bitter winter months, the OKH began planning for a renewed counteroffensive in the spring, hoping to achieve the decisive victory that had evaded them in 1941. Thus was born Operation Blue, an attack to seize the oil fields of the Caucasus, and then drive on to the Volga. Launched in June 1942, it caught the Red Army off-guard, as they had expected a renewed push towards Moscow. Within two weeks, the Wehrmacht advanced more than 300 miles.

Hitler, increasingly directing military operations in Berlin, decided to shift his offensive in early August. For both symbolic and strategic reasons, he ordered the Sixth Army under General Friedrich von Paulus to advance towards the city of Stalingrad. By August 23, the Germans were in the suburbs, where fighting turned ferocious. Bombed into rubble by German aircraft and artillery, the city became impassable to tanks and ideal terrain for defenders.

As the Germans approached Stalingrad, Stalin issued Order No. 227, with its famous command: “Ni Shagu Nazad!” [Not One Step Backwards!]. This meant a horrific price for the Soviet defenders within the city of Stalingrad. Outnumbered and without air cover, the 62nd and 64th Soviet Armies suffered enormous losses: the 13th Guards Division, entering the battle with over 10,000 men, virtually ceased to exist; it suffered 80% casualties in its first week in the city alone.

In September, Stalin sent General Vasily Chuikov to take command of the embattled survivors of the 62nd Army in the city itself. They were tenaciously clinging to rubble on the west bank of the Volga, with only a few hundred meters between its front lines and the river to its back.

Our media and intelligentsia are always on alert to defend everything coming from Islam, from women’s veils to the “right not be offended” by cartoons. The same establishment, however, lies in a coma when it comes to Christian symbols under attack.

The West today keeps on hiding its deepest secret: that there is an Islamic war going on against our own Judeo-Christian civilization.

“They want Christianity eradicated, and they want to convert all Muslims to their crusade… They want it to be a holy war. And they want Christians gone. And I don’t think that narrative is getting the attention it should get…” — Piers Morgan, Daily Mail.

There are pictures one cannot forget — for instance, of Russian troops hoisting their flag over burning Berlin in 1945. It was the end of Nazism but the rise of Communism. Another photo is of U.S. Marines raising the American flag over the battle-scarred Japanese island of Iwo Jima.

Today the West faces another totalitarianism: radical Islam. One place that witnessed the new horror is Mount Sinjar in the Nineveh province of Iraq, once a home to religious minorities, especially Christians and Yazidis. Thousands of years of history changed when the jihadists of ISIS invaded Sinjar in August of 2014. They slaughtered men and enslaved girls and women. Christian churches were razed to the ground, and houses of worship, looted.

In 2016 alone, 90,000 Christians around the world were murdered for their faith, according to a report from the Center for the Study of Global Christianity. Between 2005 and 2015, 900,000 Christians were martyred. According to Open Doors, another Christian advocacy group, one out of every 12 Christians today experiences extreme persecution for their faith; the total comes to 215 million around the world.

“The persecution of Christians is real. It is global in scope, brutal in its nature, daily in its occurrence, and growing worse than ever”, said University of Notre Dame Professor Dan Philpott. A recent report by the World Council of Churches put the number of Christians left in Iraq at fewer than 250,000. “Christianity is finished”, said Canon Andrew White, the great vicar of Baghdad.

Last week, two events injected energy and excitement into what was beginning to look like an anemic end of the year in the Middle East as far as political developments are concerned.

The first event was the decision by the Saudi leadership to create a new mechanism to deal with alleged cases of corruption, embezzlement and influence-peddling.

The sheer number of cases referred to a special court on those charges was enough to capture the headlines. The fact that the 208 people under investigation included princes, prominent bureaucrats, and business tycoons intensified the event’s headline-grabbing potential.

But what really attracted world attention was the unexpectedness of the Saudi move.

Few, even among genuine or self-styled experts on Saudi Arabia, expected Riyadh to go right to the heart of the matter rather than dance around the issues as had been the norm in the past. Some observers, including many in Western think-tanks, warned of the danger of instability inherent in departure from old patterns of behavior.

However, the latest move is in accordance with the kingdom’s new strategy aimed at recruiting the concept of change as an ally rather than a threat.

It is possible to argue that because old methods didn’t produce the desired results, stability, which had been a key asset of the kingdom for decades, had morphed into stagnation. Thus, the new strategy is designed to end stagnation and prepare the path for a new form of stability capable of reflecting changed social, economic and political circumstances of the kingdom.

If Saudi Arabia is genuine in its declared desire to become an active member of the global system, the first thing it has to do is to offer the rule of law in the sense understood by most people around the world.

Trying to build an economy beyond oil, Saudi Arabia needs to attract massive foreign investment in both financial and technological domains. And that won’t be possible without a strong legal system backed by transparency, competition and equality of opportunities.