P&D Geopolitical Edition

By Rich Kozlovich

As is well known Hamas launched a surprise attack against an unarmed defenseless civilian population performing vile acts on men, women, and children, even baking a baby alive in an oven and filming it to the great pleasure of Gazans.  They initially attacked wearing some form of uniform, but as soon as they became the targets they dumped those uniforms as they had no desire to have a standup fight with armed and trained military personnel.  Killing defenseless men, women and children is so much easier.   

Now it's a war of attrition, and some are questioning who will survive, Hamas or Israel?  Get real, Hamas is doomed in Gaza, and even the Gazans are marching against them.  Not in favor of Israel mind you, just in favor of their own self interests, they would still dance in the streets if more coffins with dead Israeli hostages were paraded through the streets.   There are no innocents in Gaza, and in spite of Hamas claims 70% of casualties have been women and children, that's another lie, it turns out "72% of casualties are male, a demographic that aligns with Hamas combatants."

 In Turkey President Erdogan arrested his political opponent in the upcoming election and Erdogan's regime has taking on all the ear marks of the Iranian model of government, and an awful lot of people are really unhappy about that, triggering massive demonstrations involving hundreds of thousands of people, as the author goes on to say:

The arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu, the leading political rival of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, on corruption charges — after being accused of both corruption and terrorism — marks yet another sign that Turkey is becoming the next Iran: A state where elections are tightly controlled, rigged in advance and reduced to a democratic façade without free and fair campaign conditions.

Turkey’s Islamist ruler has not yet established an official Turkish equivalent of Iran’s Guardian Council — a 12-member body that vets all candidates in elections and disqualifies those who pose a perceived threat to the mullah regime. However, the arrest of İmamoğlu, following the earlier imprisonment of popular Kurdish political leader Selahattin Demirtaş, who has been in jail since 2016, confirms that a de facto Guardian Council is taking shape in Turkey.

Turkey is becoming a state where elections are tightly controlled, rigged in advance, and reduced to a democratic façade without free and fair campaign conditions.

Notice the pattern playing out here worldwide.  Erdogan weaponized the justice system, wants to rewrite their constitution eliminating their legislative structure to install him as the absolute ruler, a "theocratic dictator".

While there may be some validity to charges of corruption against İmamoglu, corruption is so wide spread in Turkey's political sphere that would be expected, but it's only allowed for those who support Erdogan.

Will these demonstrations alter Turkey's political structure?  We'll see, as every tool of oppression is being used against anyone who stands against Erdogan.  But I think it needs to be understood none of this is really about Democracy as we know it.  It's about changing who's in charge for their own benefit.  Corruption in government isn't an anomaly throughout the Middle East and Africa, it's the rule, and it's a rule the group in power wants to exploit to the limits, and even beyond.

Anything said by Erdogan that may sound reasonable and conciliatory, is simply not to be taken seriously.  Remember, Iran is the model for what Erdogan is doing, and just like Khomeini who talked about bringing democracy to Iran and had no desire to become Iran's ruler, it was a deliberate lie.  A lie that was reported by a gullible media, after all they really liked the idea the pro-American government of the Shah of Iran was deposed.

In Turkey Erdogan has manipulated the tax system to punish anyone who disagrees or challenges him and fines any newspaper massively for reporting the facts about his polices, aims, and goals.   The media that remains spews out adoring accolades of Erdogan's greatness, and the tens of millions of children who've gone through their education system have been properly indoctrinated to be pro Erdogan supporters, all of which makes these massive demonstrations even more amazing.

Support for terrorist groups is part of Erdogan's foreign policy, and it's time the west recognized that, but Turkey is a member of NATO and that can't be ignored.  Their support of violent terrorist jihadi groups has to be addressed by declaring Turkey a supporter of terrorists, and such a designation should be the touchstone for all negotiations and dealings with Turkey. 

Observations From the Back Row

By Rich Kozlovich  

Well, the Wisconsin Supreme Court election has been resolved, the far left radical, Susan Crawford has won, which was characterized with verbiage the outcome would "affect the entire destiny of humanity," because it would impact the outcome of the midterms.  Well, three things.  First, I think that's hyperbole.  Second, Wisconsin has an issue with voter fraud, so the outcome shouldn't be that much of a shocker.  Third, Wisconsin isn't going to carry the the nation or the world anywhere.  

It's clear neither Russia, Ukraine, or the rest of Europe want a peace deal, and there's even been talk if it looks as if Russia starts running over Ukraine, they'll explode their nuclear plants making Ukraine uninhabitable.  Now that's really insane.  

We already know about the corrupt efforts in the US to put Trump in jail to prevent him from running for a second term, and the corrupt judicial coup d’etat’ Democrats are employing to destroy Trump's presidency, and this is clearly a pattern of behavior for leftists/tyrants worldwide.  Lawfare, corruption of the rule of law, and worse against political opponents.  In Russia Putin's rival, Alexei Navalny, was arrested and died in prison, and no one doubts he was murdered.  In Brazil they've arrested Jair Bolsonaro for allegedly plotting a coup and asks, where's my crime? 

Romania arrested Câlin Georgescu, which halted elections because it looked as if he was going to win.  In Turkey the demonstrations are huge, numbering hundreds of thousands, and some are claiming over a million, because Erdogan arrested his opponent, Ekrem Imamoglu, on trumped up charges, and now in France's Le Pen has been found guilty of embezzlement and the court is forbidding her from running in the election.  But this is France, and Le Pen is surging in the polls and she's adamant she will not let the election be ‘stolen’ by judges.

One outrage after another: Europe is lost - From banning Marine Le Pen from the French presidency to negating Romania's election, Europe is a mess.

 Vance Vindicated: Warnings About EU Proven Prophetic After Le Pen Ban - Vice President JD Vance was correct in warning of attacks on democracy and liberty in Europe, supporters claimed, as populist National Rally leader Marine Le Pen was banned from running in the French presidential election..

Democracy Denied - Democracy is imperiled across what used to be known as the Free World. In France, Marine Le Pen, who likely would have won that country’s next presidential election, has been prosecuted and found guilty of embezzlement, and barred from running for office for five years–until after the 2027 presidential election, in other words............In Brazil, former President Jair Bolsonaro is charged with attempting a coup, after some of his supporters “stormed” government buildings following his 2022 re-election defeat. Bolsonaro was out of the country when the alleged “storming” occurred. ............In Germany, the entire political system has been distorted to achieve a single goal: keeping the Alternative For Germany...............

From the beginning of the covid scare I stated it was scare mongering for political purposes, and it wasn't long before we knew these shots were not vaccines, but genetic manipulating chemical compounds that were going to impact humanity negatively for many years to come.  I had said this was our thalidomide era, only much, much worse, and every week more information comes forth to prove that to be true.

The nitwit brigade is ever with us as  Yvette Clarke  Chairwoman of the Congressional Black Caucus claims Trump and Musk are nuts getting rid of all these amazing people in these agencies since these bureaucrats are efficiency experts!  Remarkable! Well, why were they caught destroying evidence of funding to the Taliban?   Why was the FBI trying to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop scandal?

1. Department of Education Investigates California for Allowing Schools to Hide Students’ ‘Gender Identity’ from Parents
2. DOGE Updates Leaderboard Showcasing Savings of $130 Billion
3. DOGE Leader Speaks Out About Waste, Fraud, and Abuse Musk: Law Says Money Can’t Be Wasted, Has to Be ‘Spent Correctly ‘One Outrageous Thing After Another’
4. DOGE: Department of Labor Cancels $577 Million in ‘America Last’ Grants Includes Funding for ‘Gender Equity in the Mexican Workplace’
5. State Department Officially Notifies Congress That USAID Has Been Dissolved
6. DOL Cancels $577M in Useless Grants…

None of that seems to indicate competence at any level, or perhaps they were just dogging it?  Personally I go for both, incompetence and sloth.  

The real insurrection wasn't January 6th, it's the judicial misconduct that's destroying the rule of law.

“Currently, district court judges have assumed the mantle of Secretary of Defense, Secretary of State, Secretary of Homeland Security and Commander-in-Chief. Each day, they change the foreign policy, economic, staffing and national security policies of the Administration. Each day, the  nation arises to see what the craziest unelected local federal judge has decided the policies of the government of the United States shall be. It is madness. It is lunacy. It is pure lawlessness. It is the gravest assault on democracy. It must end and will end.” —Stephen Miller, U.S. Homeland Security Advisor

Personally, I get a kick out of this.  ICE Walks Into a Boston Courtroom, Arrests an Illegal Alien During His Trial and Hauls Him Away.  Apparently the judge was outraged and found them in contempt, but I doubt if they care, this was a message that needed to be sent.  You can't hide!  We will find you, and we will arrest you!  The secondary message is the courts may make pronouncements, but it's the executive that carries out enforcement.  At some point the judiciary needs to start asking themselves some pertinent questions.

1. What happens when the executive branch simply starts saying "no" to their pronouncements?  The Pravda media can no longer help them as no one cares what they have to say.
2. What happens when the Congress starts passing laws to restrict their jurisdiction, which the Constitution gives them the right to do?  
3. What happens when the public has so little respect for the judiciary they refuse to adhere their pronouncements?  That's the question that should scare everyone. 
   

Is western civilization on the verge of upheaval and pushback over the insanity the left has imposed on the world?  Lars Møller thinks so saying:

American politics, not to mention European, has long been characterized by leaders who dared not stand up for Western civilization in an unequivocal way. At last, however, Americans may declare to the rest of the world where anti-Western forces are constantly on the lookout for signs of weakness: “You shall know us by our resolve.”

One of the things these demonstrations in Turkey are generating is a serious concern for economic stabilization and Turkey’s foreign relations.  In South East Asia China's sabre rattling conduct is causing kick back from it's neighbors, and that will have a long term negative impact on China in a lot arenas.  As for their military build up and antics around Taiwan.... it just doesn't matter, that's all show and no go.  They they know it, and so to does Taiwan, and they're making sure China keeps understanding it's all for show by adding their first bunch of 66 F-16 fighters to their air force.  Unlike Ukraine, they get it. 

 

Trump's tariffs initially cause a lot of chest thumping haranguing, but everyday the geopolitical sites tell how after their virtue signally, they quietly come to terms, and that will be the story that's going to play out from now on. 

 

Finally, Sen. Cory Booker talked on the Senate floor for over 24 hours because.... he's an idiot.  It was called a hyperbolic, theatrical rant against Trump, but it wasn't a filibusterer, it was a stunt. To do what? Show off?

 

 The end result?  Trump is still President, the Congress is still controlled by the Republicans and no one cared what he had to say.   How do I know?   Can anyone show me one quote the Pravda media feels is so compelling it's repeating it?  The "Democrats are still stuck in the muck, with a toxic brand", and their approval ratings are continuing to drop.  Imagine that!

 

Sweden’s Path to NATO Accession and Its 40-year PKK Problem

By: Colonel (ret.) Rich Outzen

February 2, 2023

The Turkish government insists that Sweden significantly change its permissive approach to the Partiya Karkaren Kurdistan (PKK, or Kurdish Workers’ Party) and other anti-Turkey groups as a condition for Ankara’s approval of Stockholm’s application for NATO membership. Western commentators have attributed the position of the Turkish government to upcoming Turkish elections, opposition to free speech, and/or visceral reaction to political provocateurs (Associated Press, January 19; Bloomberg, January 26; jonathanturley.org, January 24). However, the demands laid out by Ankara in the June 2022 Trilateral Memorandum stem from longstanding Turkish concerns over PKK support activities in Sweden and decades of Sweden formally proscribing, but still practically tolerating, the group (tccb.gov.tr, June 28, 2022). Most Western analysts have begun covering this story recently, but a look at the backstory is necessary when considering Turkish objections to the PKK’s presence in Sweden and its implications for NATO enlargement................To Read More....

My Take - As you read this it becomes obvious Sweden got themselves in this mess with their stupid immigration policies, and now the Kurds have so much power they can actually threaten Sweden's leaders with renewed terrorist actions if the don't go along with what they want.  Maybe they deserve the Russians.  

As for Turkey, if NATO's leadership had any backbone they'd threaten to refuse aid to Turkey over this last massive earthquake if they didn't knock off their demands over Sweden, but truth be told, there's not a nation in Europe with NATO membership right now that deserves to be there.  

They're all a bunch of losers hiding under America's umbrella of defense, all the while undermining America every step of the way.  America needs to go home and let this whole gaggle of babbling idiots suffer the consequences of their stupidity. 

Stop and think about this.  If Russia actually dominated all of Europe how long before Europe became bankrupt?  If Russia dominated all of Europe, how long before Russia went broke?  If Russia dominated all of Europe how long could they control it?  Russia's broke, it's demographically collapsing, and their entire leadership is almost as incompetent as the Biden administration. 

 

 

Turkey’s Crimes Against Humanity Under ICC Spotlight

Sinan Ciddi  |  Mar 07, 2023 

Turkey is facing difficult times, really difficult times. The numerous earthquakes which struck ten provinces in the southeastern part of the country killed tens of thousands, made 1.25 million homeless and destroyed entire cities. Pre-earthquake Turkey was already amid a crippling economic crisis, rapidly eroding the country’s middle class, typified by high inflation (85 % in 2022). If all this was not bad enough, the country is now under a different but not altogether unfamiliar spotlight: The International Criminal Court (ICC) in the Hague has been asked to investigate the extent to which the Turkish government has committed crimes against humanity. 

To recap, the ICC is a “permanent international court established to investigate, prosecute and try individuals accused of committing the most serious crimes of concern to the international community as a whole: the crime of genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and the crime of aggression.” According to the Guardian newspaper, legal experts are accusing the government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan of having carried out “torture, state-sponsored kidnapping, and wrongful imprisonment of about 200,000 people.” .............To Read More....

Erdogan: Sweden Can’t Join NATO if Quran-Burning Is Allowed

Suzan Fraser and Jari Tanner, Associated Press, February 1, 2023

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan reaffirmed Wednesday that Turkey won’t allow Sweden to join the NATO military alliance as long as the Scandinavian country permits protests desecrating Islam’s holy book to take place.

Turkey, which had already been holding off approving Sweden and Finland’s membership in the Western military alliance, has been infuriated by a series of separate demonstrations in Stockholm. In one case a solitary anti-Islam activist burned the Quran outside the Turkish Embassy, while in an unconnected protest an effigy of Erdogan was hanged. Even before that, Ankara had been pressing Sweden and Finland to crack down on exiled members of Kurdish and other groups it sees as terrorists, and to allow arms sales to Turkey.

Turkey has indefinitely postponed a key meeting in Brussels that would have discussed the two Nordic countries’ NATO entry.  “Sweden, don’t even bother! As long as you allow my holy book, the Quran, to be burned and torn, and you do so together with your security forces, we will not say ‘yes’ to your entry into NATO,” Erdogan said in a speech to his ruling party’s legislators...........To Read More...

Turkey Seeks to Bury the ‘Current Byzantines’

July 5, 2022 By Raymond Ibrahim

On May 29, 2022 in Istanbul and other cities in Turkey, elaborate celebrations were held to commemorate the 569th anniversary of the Islamic conquest of Constantinople in 1453.  During these neo-Ottoman celebrations, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan declared that “As our ancestors buried Byzantium, let us hope that today, by building our vision for 2053, we also manage to put in the time warp of history the current Byzantines who are plotting against us.”

In order to understand the troubling significance of this otherwise cryptic remark -- most Westerners are today totally unaware of the history between Muslim Turkey and Christian Byzantium -- some background is necessary.

Towards the end of the first millennium, the Turks, whose origins lay in the steppes of Asia, had become Muslim and began to raid and conquer portions of Asia Minor, which was then and had been for a millennium Greek and Christian.  By the end of the 14th century they had conquered it entirely and began eying Constantinople, just across the Bosporus.  Although generations of Turks repeatedly besieged it, it would fall to Muhammad II (or “Mehmet”), Erdogan’s hero............Turkey Seeks to Bury the ‘Current Byzantines’

 

Turkey: Freedom of Religion Only for Islam

The ideological refusal to recognize the freedom of speech of “kafirs” and “infidels.”

Wed May 11, 2022 Uzay Bulut 9 comments

Turkey has long been heralded by the international media as a “secular” and “modern” country. But in reality, it is the absolute opposite. Non-Muslim communities – Christians, Jews, Alevis, Yazidis, agnostics, deists, atheists, and all others – are systematically victimized by discriminatory acts, including violations of their human rights, their convictions, their faith, and their freedom of speech.

A 2022 report by the Norwegian Helsinki Committee’s Freedom of Belief Initiative, entitled “An Appeal to Move Forward from Aspirations to Actions: Monitoring Report on the Right to Freedom of Religion or Belief in Turkey,” reveals Turkey’s decades-long abuses against non-Muslim communities across the country.

The Committee lists some of the violations of the rights of non-Muslims:...........

Islam does not allow freedom of religion and threatens the death penalty for apostasy. As the website “The Religion of Peace” (ROP) puts it, “The only freedom of belief in Islam is the freedom to become Muslim.” The ROP website also notes: .......... 

It is the Islamic government of Turkey and much of its Islamic society that are responsible for this continual prejudice and abuse of human rights. Dissidents living under such Islamic dictatorships, however, are not allowed to have public debates about these issues, because of the ideological refusal to recognize their freedom of speech if they are “kafirs” or “infidels” and ever dared to question historic facts, and above all, Islam...............To Read More....

 

Turkey Praises—and Seeks to Emulate?—a Mass-Murdering, Pedophilic, Slave-Trader

What a people’s “hero” says about them.

Jun 10, 2021 Raymond Ibrahim 25 comments

Turning churches into mosques is very much on Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s mind these days. Last Friday, June 4, he “spoke of the Turkish legacy of conquest and the conversion of the Hagia Sophia [into a mosque] during a mosque opening in the city of Zonguldak on Friday.” In his own words, “the re-opening of the Hagia Sophia as a mosque is important, as it is a legacy of conquest.” Thus, while the West falls all over itself to disavow any “conquest” its ancestors may have engaged in—for example, the “conquest of the Americas” at the hands of the “genocidal” Columbus—here is the president of Turkey praising the violent conquests committed by his Muslim ancestors. 

The significance of this dichotomy, and what it portends for the future, is in need of acknowledgement. As a case study, take Erdoğan’s stance towards Turkey’s greatest jihadis of history—men whose atrocious deeds would shame ISIS. Last summer, while celebrating his decree to transform the Hagia Sophia—which for a millennium had functioned as Eastern Christendom’s greatest basilica—into a mosque, Erdoğan repeatedly saluted Sultan Muhammad al-Fatah (“the Conqueror,” 1432-1481) for violently transforming Christian Constantinople into Islamic Istanbul........To Read More....

The World as I See It: Russia and the Unending "Arc of Instability"

By Rich Kozlovich 

Mr. Ridvan Bari Urcosta, of Geopolitical Futures posted this piece, The Arc of Instability in Eastern Europe, which I thought was an excellent analysis.  A subscription to Geopolitical futures is required, and I highly recommend it, but I'm going to cover the highlights along with my take on the parties and issues involved.

I liked his highlighting the conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh, which isn’t being presented in the news much, if at all, and could become a flash point.  I especially liked his highlighting the Kievan Rus history.  That is, in my opinion, an important piece of history that needs to be understood when dealing with Russia, Eastern Europe, the barrier nations and Turkey.

I will say this.  The West is incapable of resolving the issues surrounding the barrier countries of Russia, and those of what was the Soviet Union.  The social paradigms for the west and these nations are just too different and too far away.

The natural social paradigms - both positive and negative - make Russia and Turkey the natural arbiters there - as much as I hate to admit it.

Furthermore, I keep asking what benefit does America, or the West for that matter, gain from interfering in these countries’ internal problems, which are historically unending?  Not only do we not have the expertise to fix it, neither does anyone else, including themselves, and those efforts are expensive.  Let Russia, Turkey and the countries involved pay to fix it.  If they can!  And understand this. Border disputes are now cropping up constantly in what was once part of the Soviet Union. 

When they became independent, they became aware of their needs, wants, and cultural differences, which were not permitted under the rule of the Soviets.  Now those divisions are highlighted among states like Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, and that kind of problem is pandemic throughout central Asia, and has always been a problem as long as there was no overriding ruling power. 

The West, that being especially the Western European nations, are leaky vessels as allies, even when doing something is in their own benefit.  They’re disjointed in their thinking and goals, and that’s been the historical paradigm for Europe forever.  Including Western kings helping and supporting the Ottoman Empire attacking Christian kingdoms in Europe when they thought it was to their benefit. 

Here's my take on these events.  Both Russia and Turkey are broke, neither have truly effective militaries, especially Russia, whose demographic pyramid is all out of whack and the 15 to 50 demographic is filled with alcoholics, drug users, victims of AIDS and drug resistant TB.

Neither are natural capital generators, and even if these barrier countries collapse into tyrannies, why does that matter to the United States?  Either economically, militarily or socially?

It's not our job to fix the world.  Jews have a term for it: Tikkun Olam:

 "A Jewish concept defined by acts of kindness performed to perfect or repair the world. The phrase is found in the Mishnah, a body of classical rabbinic teachings. It is often used when discussing issues of social policy, ensuring a safeguard to those who may be at a disadvantage."

Well, we've tried that and it fails over the long run due to three things.  Geography, demography, and economics.  

We’re too far away, we’re mostly confused about the issues all these various populations have, as a result we don't have the answers to their problems, and finally, we don’t have the money.  If we did understand the social complexities, and if we did have the money, it wouldn’t matter as all these endeavors are Lewis Carroll rabbit holes that can never be fixed or filled, and all that's presented here is applicable to Afghanistan and the western and American military units leaving, which I will address in another piece. 

History is the foundation of truth, because truth has a historical foundation and context, and everything we're told should have some resemblance to what we see going on in reality.  If what's presented to us fails in either of those categories - it's wrong.  And we need to start understanding that.

The Dissident - Sundance's Hottest Documentary is Turkish Government Propaganda

By Daniel Greenfield  Wednesday, April 01, 2020 2 Comments @ Sultan Knish Blog

“If you haven’t seen The Dissident, I hope you will," Hillary Clinton told the folks at the Sundance Film Festival. The Dissident is Sundance's hottest documentary. It's also Turkish government propaganda.

Hillary's comments at Sundance exposed a chunk of the fake news problem surrounding The Dissident.

"We just learned about the pacing of malware on Jeff Bezos' phone, ironically technology created in Israel and sold to the Saudi government," she falsely claimed.

Despite these false claims made by the Washington Post, a paper owned by Bezos, which has spread conspiracy theories trying to blame the exposure of his affair on entire countries, the actual report when reviewed by cybersecurity experts found no actual malware of any kind on the billionaire’s phone.

The hack of the billionaire’s phone that wasn’t is an example of the fake news vortex surrounding the death of Jamal Khashoggi. Bezos cronies have alleged that the Amazon boss had his affair exposed by the Saudis in retaliation for the Post’s decision to run Qatari Islamist propaganda by Khashoggi.

The Dissident is the latest effort at mythologizing Khashoggi, a former Saudi stooge, terror propagandist, bigot, and friend of Osama bin Laden, by Islamist interests operating out of Qatar and Turkey. Jamal Khashoggi was not a journalist: he was producing pro-Islamist and anti-Saudi propaganda for the Qatar Foundation, a pro-terror organization, which helped draft his articles and dictated their content.

There are actual dissidents and actual journalists in prison in Islamist tyrannies like Turkey. But instead of telling their stories, The Dissident and its director, Bryan Fogel, turned to Turkey’s Islamist regime.

Bryan Fogel claims to care deeply about human rights. He cares so deeply that he ignored the tens of thousands of political prisoners in Turkey, journalists, judges, professors, and Kurds, to lobby the regime to help him make a propaganda flick about Khashoggi. Nor is Fogel at all ashamed of toadying to Turkey.

Articles about The Dissident boast of how Fogel received “unprecedented access” to material from the Turkish government and its intelligence apparatus. Any filmmaker gushing about getting exclusive access to CIA materials while making a completely uncritical documentary about its role would face a torrent of criticism. Yet The Dissident has met with equally uncritical praise even as it boasts of its access and parrots propaganda from a despotic regime which is engaged in ethnic cleansing at home and abroad.

"I was building a relationship with the Turkish government who at the end of the day saw the power they could have in this story if they allowed me to tell it, rather than it coming out through Turkish media," Bryan Fogel admitted.

What Fogel was offering Erdogan and his cronies was a credible whitewashing of their propaganda.

The false narrative of Khashoggi as a political dissident, rather than an Islamist bigot, would be more effective if it came from a seemingly independent filmmaker rather than the Turkish state which, after Erdogan’s Reichstag coup, had destroyed the country’s last vestiges of an independent press.

Asked about Erdogan's human rights abuses, Fogel shrugged them off.

"You have to know when to pick your battles depending on that story you’re telling… This was not the film to focus on other political matters and in this case Turkey has been a superhero. I felt very strongly that this wasn’t the film to go down political rabbit holes," he insisted.

Turkey’s lack of an independent press, its ethnic cleansing of Kurds, and its 48,924 political prisoners would be one of those “political rabbit holes” that Fogel didn’t want to explore. The Leni Riefenstahl of Sundance was telling a story about the regime’s political martyr, its Horst Wessel, and noting that Hitler and Goebbels aren’t very nice people would be a political rabbit hole that would ruin the whole tale.

You either care about human rights or you don’t. If Fogel cared about human rights, then the UN special rapporteur’s report documenting the Erdogan regime’s torture of professors, journalists, officers, and many others would have made a much better and more important documentary than The Dissident. It’s a story that has never been told, and, unlike Khashoggi’s myth, never will be told at any major level.

Fogel pawning out his camera to Erdogan’s regime while refusing to discuss its abuses is an indictment.

Orwell Productions, Fogel’s company, mistakes 1984 for a guide, rather than a warning. The Dissident is Orwellian, political propaganda, the same discredited lies, dressed up with special effects and a human interest angle, on behalf of a dictator who has eliminated actual dissidents in his own country.

"I needed the world to see and fall in love with Jamal and understand this man was not Muslim Brotherhood or an al-Qaeda sympathiser or all these things being presented by Saudi Arabia or being written about by the alt press in the United States," Fogel tells an interviewer.

The plain facts of the matter are that Khashoggi was both of these things which The Dissident is denying.

Fogel, the director of Jewtopia, may be in love with Khashoggi, but the Islamist would have loathed him.

Jamal Khashoggi, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, which had allied with Nazi Germany and continues to celebrate Hitler, promoted the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and defended Holocaust denial. He tweeted, “everything can be ended by the rule of Assad and the rule of the Jews.”

All this vile stuff could be found on Khashoggi’s own Twitter account, not the “alt press”.

The Dissident is yet another exercise in historical revisionism by a powerful industry built on repeating the same lies: in Fogel’s Riefenstahlesque case with digital special effects and Turkish propaganda.

Khashoggi's journalistic career began when he followed his old friend Osama bin Laden to Afghanistan on behalf of a man listed by the Treasury Department as one of “the world’s foremost terrorist financiers”. There he churned out Jihadi propaganda like, “Arab Mujahadeen in Afghanistan II: Exemplifies the Unity of Islamic Ummah”. Afterward he became a stooge for the Saudi state for the likes of Prince Turki bin Faisal, who was linked to Al Qaeda, and blamed 9/11 on American support for Israel.

Jamal Khashoggi became a dissident, not because he wanted a freer Saudi Arabia, but because Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman had turned on Islamists like Khashoggi and his Muslim Brotherhood pals.

“Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman should get rid of his complex against the Muslim Brotherhood and stop treating them as the enemy or a threat to Saudi Arabia,” Khashoggi had complained, and urged a confrontation with Israel instead.

After the Saudis were no longer interested in funding Islamist dreams of world conquest, Khashoggi went to work for the regimes in Qatar and Turkey who were more than happy to step in. He was a dissident in the same way that former Communists in Russia or old Nazis in Argentina are dissidents.

Saudi Arabia under MBS has become more liberal for the average person while Turkey under Erdogan has become more tyrannical. In Saudi Arabia, women have become more able to vote and drive. Meanwhile the number of women being murdered in Turkey for their gender is continuing to rise. And the perpetrators under Erdogan’s Islamist regime often receive little more than a slap on the wrist.

The Dissident and Fogel weigh in on the side of dragging Saudi Arabia back while tossing away the reforms that Islamists loathe, all the while falsely depicting this as a struggle between autocracy and democracy. This same Islamist lie led to the Arab Spring and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, the rise of ISIS, the rape of little girls, and the use of chemical weapons against civilians.

But the liars can’t get enough of that lie.

The Dissident is not a courageous defense of human rights. It’s another echo in an echo chamber run by Qatar and Turkey. Instead of telling the stories of the protesters who battled Erdogan’s thugs in the streets, professors tortured in gymnasiums, and journalists jailed for reporting on the regime’s corruption, Bryan Fogel chose the profitable route of amplifying the narratives of Erdogan’s regime.

In interviews, Bryan Fogel had the chutzpah to suggest that his life is at risk for making The Dissident.

"So far I’m OK,” the self-promoting hack claimed. "I have this strange nightmare that Putin calls Mohammed bin Salman and goes, ‘Hey buddy, this American filmmaker, he’s causing us lots of problems. You know, look, maybe we do something.’"

There will be no assassins coming to the Orwell Productions offices in Santa Monica near the beach. The praise from figures like Hillary Clinton will keep rolling in as the echo chamber pressures Netflix to distribute The Dissident as part of a larger campaign of informational warfare against a reformist Saudi government. If it wins, a new Saudi government will be more likely to support terrorism against Americans, Europeans, and Israelis. Like Horst Wessel, Jamal Khashoggi is an Islamist martyr whose death is being used as the engine to overthrow a government and kill hundreds of thousands of people.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.  Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.  Thank you for reading.

The Humanitarian Weapons of Refugees

Posted by Daniel Greenfield Thursday, March 12, 2020 5 Comments @ Sultan Knish Blog

71 years after NATO was founded to watch for an invasion, the invaders came from a NATO country.

After Turkey’s brutal Islamist regime suffered setbacks in its grandiose scheme to rebuild the Ottoman Empire by invading Syria, it decided to launch an invasion of a much softer target.

Interior Minister Süleyman Soylu has, with sublime chutzpah, kept a running count of the number of Muslim migrants invading Europe through Adrianople (renamed Edirne by its Turkish Islamic occupiers) on his Twitter account. At last count, the number of invaders was 100,577.

Soylu’s tweets are the equivalent of sending ransom notes while holding a gun to the head of the EU.

That 100,000 is a down payment. Turkey’s Islamist regime is threatening an invasion of millions. And NATO is absolutely helpless to stop a NATO country from masterminding an invasion of Europe.

"Hundreds of thousands have crossed, soon it will reach millions," Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the brutal Islamist thug fantasizing about becoming the next Caliph by rebuilding the Ottoman Empire, declared.

There’s nothing spontaneous about this invasion of Greece by tens of thousands of migrants where the new ‘Gates of Fire’ are shoddy fences under assault by mobs throwing stones, bars, and firebombs.

And a moral assault by crying women pinching and burning their children to make them weep.

Turkey’s media, firmly under Islamist control after Erdogan’s Reichstag coup in 2016 allowed the greasy butcher to purge the last resistance to his rule, loudly urged announced that the invasion was here.

The European media, just as firmly under party line control, has been feeding a steady stream of staged photos and videos of crying women and children. Crowd photos show masses of young men. The women and children are there purely as human shields and sacrifices. Women in hijabs wail and cry on photogenic rocky shores while media freelancers elbow each to get the best shots. Children are made to cry by burning them and killed outright to guilt the infidels into selling out the future of their children.

There is already a dead migrant child. Who killed it? The migrants overturned the boat to avoid being returned by the Greek coast guard. The child went in the water and despite the best medical efforts in Europe, died. But mere cold facts like these are impossible for the average westerner to comprehend.

What kind of people are capable of drowning their own children for access to Europe’s welfare state?

To quote Colonel Kurtz, "I realized they were stronger than we, because they could stand that these were not monsters, these were men... trained cadres." Drowning children or strapping bombs to them is a monstrously inconceivable crime to civilized people who no longer really believe in anything anymore.

The Alawites of Syria, their Shiite allies from Lebanon and Iran, will defend their borders. As the Turks discovered the hard way. They will lie, cheat, and steal, and die and kill to protect those borders.

And the Europeans will ask you for your papers. If you refuse, they will eventually let you in anyway.

America lost every war in the last three generations because we were willing to die, but not to kill. The Europeans are neither willing to die nor kill. And so, the continent is being overrun by those who are.

In WW2, Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, as a last resort, turned to child soldiers as the war was lost. But being forced to face them did not make us question our morality. We understood that the monsters are the ones who dispatch children to fight their wars, not the soldiers who are forced to face them.

Seeing child soldiers made us determined to end the evil horrors of the Nazi eugenic breeding houses and concentration camps, and the Japanese biological experiments, mass rape, and ritual cannibalism.

By the time Vietnam came around, our elites no longer knew what they believed in anymore. When the enemy did horrifying things, it convinced us that we must be the monsters because they very clearly believed in something so compelling that they could do these things. And we didn’t believe in anything.

Erdogan, in his billion-dollar palace surrounded by costumed guards, understands this. So does the migrant hurling a cinder block at a border guard. Westerners won’t fight for their countries. They will.

When the EU envoys go to negotiate with Erdogan, they will be up against a man who had the last independent military, police, and judicial leaders rounded up, and anally raped by Islamist thugs.

Whom do you want to bet on?

Last time, the Euros gave him nearly $7 billion. This time the price will be a whole lot higher. And no matter how much Danegeld is paid to the Sharia Vikings, the migrant streams will march on.

As to war.

Erdogan and the Islamists of the world are using refugees as a weapon because they know that Europe has the technology and the infrastructure to resist military forces, but can’t resist mere bodies.

Migrants are a weapon. They’re one of the more potent human missiles in the arsenal of globalism which has shifted the future from the technocratic upstarts of western civilization with their skyscrapers and empty houses of worship, to the old civilizations of Asia which have the relentless will to take them.

The latest invasion of Europe is a blatant move to extract more money for Turkey’s corrupt failing economy whose chief purpose appears to be supplying wealth to the Islamist nomenklatura, and to force countries already staggering under the weight of previous migrant invasions to help Turkey out in the Sunni-Shiite war set off by its invasion of Syria. But these are mere details of the political moment.

Western humanitarian nations want to fight their wars with bombs and tanks, but their ruthless eastern enemies prefer to fight them with humanitarian weapons. Muslim countries dispatch refugees, and when they turn terrorist, pay for their lawyers. The Russians and Qataris hack their way into poorly defended databases and disguise the attacks as leaks from journalists, and human rights activists.

Latin American countries send huge chunks of their populations to come to America and send back checks. Our elites blanch at being accused of locking children in cages. But the migrants, knowing that families will be immediately released, buy or steal children, as their golden tickets to the welfare state. And we are the monsters for wanting to apply DNA tests before releasing them to their captors.

Nobody wants to fight us on our own terms. And why should they? Who’s going to try to punch the giant in his armored chest when he has a glass jaw? Why bother equipping 30,000 men with rifles, when you can just dump them ashore, accompanied by a few women and children, for a successful invasion?

Resisting humanitarian warfare requires drawing firm lines between ‘us’ and ‘them’. That’s the line that globalism erases. And if there’s no line, then their crimes are evidence of the evils of our society.

Wars are won only by those nations, peoples, and people who can draw that line.

If there is no “us”, then what are we fighting for? If there are no nations, why defend their borders? If all beliefs are equal, then great conviction establishes moral superiority over those with lesser conviction. It doesn’t matter if the belief is in the supremacy of Sharia law and the descendants of Mohammed.

The EU established that there are no nations. The Ummah and Caliph Erdogan are taking it at its word.

And the Europeans protest against the mass invasion by tens of thousands of migrants, not because it’s bad for Europe, but because it’s bad for the migrants to have the burden of doing all the invading. They tell Erdogan, who would drown every one of them, that it’s not the best solution to the refugee crisis.

Erdogan sees the millions of migrants as Turkish national assets. Cannon fodder to be used in asserting his Ottoman dreams at the expense of Europe. The Europeans care more about them than he does. That’s what makes them effective weapons. When fighting monsters, humanity becomes a weakness.

American police officers were prevented from fighting crime because of all the people who would be locked up and maybe even shot. And now Baltimore has racked up 50 murders in just two months. Our soldiers were prevented from killing terrorists to save civilian lives, and thousands of our soldiers, and countless civilians died, and entire regions devolved into savage bloodlands of ethnic cleansing.

Europe allowed its cities to be swarmed before and thousands of women were raped, bombs and vehicles were used as weapons in crowded streets, and it still hasn’t learned to say “no” and mean it.

The members of the Ummah at the gates of Greece know what they believe. The thugs throwing stones, and the wailing women burning their children to make them cry, combine a perfect conviction in the providence of Allah, with the selfish collectivism of the family group into which they were born.

The EU believes in the selfish collectivism of its bureaucracy. But free health care, free education, and a short work week isn’t something you fight and die for. Once upon a time, hungry people did. But, as Nietzsche said, “Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral.” The hungry became obese burghers. With their appetites sated, they turned into moralizers filled with platitudes, but no actual beliefs.

They are not about to fight for what they have, because they aren’t hungry yet, and they believe in nothing except the power of socialist goodness that enables them to have their goodies. If they understood how finite those goodies are, they might fight, but then they wouldn’t be socialists.

Refugees are a weapon. But not one that comfortable people in prosperous societies understand. And by the time they come to understand what is happening, it may be because they will be the refugees.

When you believe in nothing, and family is an empty word, then you will only fight for what you have.

Einstein reportedly said, "I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones."

World War III was fought and won with humanitarian weapons. That’s why World War IV is already being fought with sticks and stones on the borders of Europe.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.  Thank you for reading.

Claim That Trump Lacks a Strategy Rings False

By CONRAD BLACK, Special to the Sun | January 7, 2020

The Democratic charge that the Trump administration has no strategy for the Middle East is obviously false. It has elaborated a strategy that includes Russia and Turkey.

The problem the administration has faced is that Russia as an issue has been so aggravated by Democratic myth-makers, with the (presumably) inadvertent cooperation of some congressional Republicans, that it has been difficult for Mr. Trump to deal with Russia sensibly without exciting partisan hysteria and crowding the Democratic television news networks with the tiresome faces and voices of President Obama’s now-discredited intelligence chiefs (James Clapper and John Brennan), beating the old tambourines about Russia determining U.S. elections.

The basic American conceptual problem with this whole complex of issues is that the United States has legitimate interests in the Middle East and has reasonable ambitions for a civilized relationship with Russia and Turkey, but the President has also pledged to extract the country from, and stay out of, permanent wars in the region. These are valid objectives that can be reconciled, but not easily.

Nothing could have more perfectly illustrated the stark bankruptcy of George W. Bush’s Iraq War than the Iraqi parliament’s vote over the weekend to tell the United States to withdraw its forces from Iraq. It is a non-binding resolution, taken without the Kurdish and Sunni legislators present, and the next government will presumably not act on it, but it does indicate that in the Middle East, as in Europe, the states patched together after World War I have all failed.........To Read More....

Don’t Romanticize the Kurds

A wake-up call about extensive Kurdish human rights violations.

Oct 16, 2019 Andrew Bostom 154

Uninformed savants across the political spectrum have pilloried President Trump for his eminently rational decision to draw down the U.S. troop commitment (initially, only 25, as it turns out!) to the Syrian morass (whose “dynamic” has remained largely unchanged since the late 1940s).

Most of the ire directed at Mr. Trump has to do with hand-wringing over our “Kurdish allies,” even after the President warned Turkey not to engage in its habitual behaviors — since Ataturk created his ethno-racst state — towards the Kurds. Regardless, here are a few salient points one should bear in mind about the Kurds which the hand-wringers conveniently ignore in their hagiographies:Kurdish predatory mass killings of Christians and Yazidis are well-characterized and went on for centuries. Grinding persecution continues to this day, as can be gleaned from detailed reports by both Assyrian and Yazidi organizations (here; here; here)


[*] Kurdish “region(s)” were ethnically cleansed of Jews by the late 19th/early 20th centuries in a series a pogroms, compounded by constant grinding persecution including enslavement of Jewish families handed over between generations of Kurds as “family property”. (p. 658; p. 108)

[*] The Kurds of Turkey, brutally oppressed (here) by Ataturk’s ugly ethno-racist Turkish supremacist state (here), since the 1920s, ongoing, evolved their own brutal (here) Marxist terror organization, the PKK, to combat this oppression. Those Marxist PKK elements are the fighting backbone of the Syrian Kurds whom the U.S. is now claimed to be “abandoning”.

[*] Kurds of Iraqi “Kurdistan” have enshrined the Sharia (“This Constitution confirms and respects the Islamic identity of the majority of the people of Iraqi Kurdistan. It considers the principles of Islamic Sharia as one of the main sources of legislation… It is not allowed to enact a law inconsistent with the provisions of the fundamentals of Islam,” Articles 6 & 7) and even apply it to Kurdish conscientious objectors to Islam who escape their Kurdish Muslim paradise and flee to the West. (here; here)

[*] 50% of Kurdistan’s women undergo FGM, sanctioned by the Sharia.............To Read More....
 

Turkey Agrees to Cease-Fire

Will it stop the bloodshed and help prevent the resurgence of ISIS?

Fri Oct 18, 2019 Joseph Klein  144

President Trump’s critics have regularly blasted his style of diplomacy, in which he combines bad cop, good cop rhetoric with the use of sanctions and tariffs to exert maximum economic pressure on the party he is trying to influence. This style was on display again this past week as President Trump tried to navigate the outbreak of conflict between Turkey and the Syrian Kurds that the president’s critics blame on his decision to withdraw U.S. troops from northeast Syria. Before President Trump proceeded with completing the troop withdrawal, he sent a letter to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan strongly encouraging him to make a good deal with the Kurds while threatening Turkey with economic devastation if it persists with its military operation against the Kurds.

Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo followed up with a visit to Ankara, where they secured an agreement to end the violence for now between Turkey and the Kurds in Syria pending the establishment of an expanded “safe zone” that Turkey has been seeking. While Turkish forces and allied Syrian insurgents halt their offensive, the Syrian Kurd forces would be expected to surrender their positions 20 miles from the Turkey-Syria border. As part of the deal, the U.S. will not put new sanctions in place and end the current sanctions if a real ceasefire endures.

Turkey is referring to the negotiated deal as a “pause,” not a full-fledged “ceasefire.” Vice President Pence used the term “pause” in his own remarks. He declared, “The Turkish side will pause Operation Peace Spring in order to allow for the withdrawal of YPG forces from the safe zone for 120 hours,” referring to the Syrian Democratic Forces' People Protection Units, a primarily Kurdish militia. “All military operations under operation peace spring will be paused, and operation peace spring will be halted entirely on completion of the withdrawal. Our administration has already been in contact with Syrian defense forces, and we have already begun to facilitate their safe withdrawal from the nearly 20-mile wide safe zone area South of the Turkish border in Syria.” ........To Read More....

Turkey Threatens to Reignite European Migrant Crisis

by Soeren Kern July 31, 2019

• "We are facing the biggest wave of migration in history. If we open the floodgates, no European government will be able to survive for more than six months. We advise them not to try our patience." — Turkish Interior Minister Süleyman Soylu.
• "Turkey is fully committed to the objective of EU membership... The finalization of the Visa Liberalization Dialogue process which will allow our citizens to travel to the Schengen area without a visa, is our first priority." — Statement released by the Turkish Foreign Ministry, May 9, 2019.
• "This doesn't mean that I have anything against the Turks.... But if we begin to explain it — that Turkey is in Europe — European school students will have to be told that the European border lies in Syria. Where's common sense? ... Can Turkey be regarded a European country culturally, historically, and economically speaking? If we say that, we want the European Union's death." — Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy.
• If the EU approves the visa waiver, tens of millions of Turks will gain immediate and unimpeded access to Europe's passport-free zone. Critics of visa liberalization fear that millions of Turkish nationals may end up migrating to Europe. The Austrian newsmagazine, Wochenblick, reported that 11 million Turks are living in poverty and "many of them are dreaming of moving to central Europe."

Turkey has threatened to re-open the floodgates of mass migration to Europe unless Turkish nationals are granted visa-free travel to the European Union. The EU agreed to visa liberalization in a March 2016 EU-Turkey migrant deal in which Ankara pledged to stem the flow of migrants to Europe.
European officials insist that while Turkey has reduced the flow of migrants, it has not yet met all of the requirements for visa liberalization. Moreover, EU foreign ministers on July 15 decided to halt high-level talks with Ankara as part of sanctions over Turkish oil and gas drilling off the coast of Cyprus.

In an interview with Turkish television channel TGRT Haber on July 22, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Çavuşoğlu said that Turkey was backing out of the migrant deal because the EU had failed to honor its pledge to grant Turkish passport holders visa-free access to 26 European countries. "We have suspended the readmission agreement," he said. "We will not wait at the EU's door.".........To Read More....

Hong Kong teeters on the edge of a mass slaughter

August 4, 2019 By Thomas Lifson

While Americans are focusing on two horrible mass shootings in our country, the situation in Hong Kong is getting downright scary. The people there have been officially warned that troops will fire upon them, via a video posted to the official social media account of the People’s Liberation Army portraying PLA troops shooting at rioters.........To Read More....

My Take - And what exactly does the NYT think America should do about it?  Let's face it, Xi doesn't  care what anyone thinks.  If he starts shooting people down in Hong Kong's streets it will further impact his economy negatively.  He knows that.  He also knows that if Hong Kong independence becomes a focal point for the rest of China's society he could find himself in trouble, and out of power.  That's his real focus. Keeping himself and his tyrannical political machine in control.  He doesn't care what you call it either. 

Call it communism, socialism or whatever you wish to call his government, it's his government, and he intends to make sure it remains his government having turned himself into another Mao.  He doesn't care how many people he has to kill, he doesn't care if a failing economy causes starvation any more than N. Korea's lunatic leadership cares about their starving masses. He cares only about the one thing all leftist dictators care about.  How to get and hold power. 

Will the international community respond to mass violence against Hong Kong residents negatively? Not much more than token jabbering.

Recently China has come out and decided that forcing Muslims in China to eat pork and drink alcohol will prevent terrorism. Both alcohol and pork consumption are proscribed by the Koran. What was the world's response? Sixteen Muslim nations decided it was just fine, including Turkey's leader Ergogan, who decided his economic relationship with China was far more important than some silly law in the Koran. Now if women were to start refusing to wear the hijab in Iran, then that would require big prison sentences. But Muslims forced to eat pork and drink alcohol in China, wellllllll.....what's the big deal?

Twenty two countries sent a letter to the United Nations condemning this action by the Chinese government, but they were incapable of getting one Muslim controlled nation to sign on to the letter. If he can get Muslims to agree that forcing other Muslims to disobey the Koran, he believes he can get the rest of the world to ignore any mass slaughter his troops carry out in Hong Kong. 

What did the world do when China forced Christians to replace Jesus pictures with images of Mao and Xi Jinping? Nothing!

What did the world do when China decided it should pick China's Catholic Bishops? Nothing!  Why?  The Pope signed off on it.  Irrespective of the fact it was "both a violation of the Church’s own canon law and a prescription for a puppet episcopate".  The world did nothing. 

China will crack down on Hong Kong irrespective of any international kick back.  The only negative for the Chinese government is Hong Kong will never again be the cash generator for China it is now, and the reason why is this crackdown will be the ultimate slippery slope to same kind of total control they exert in the mainland. 

Erdogan's Setback Could Yet Tilt Turkey to U.S.

By BENNY AVNI, Special to the Sun | June 25, 2019

Turkish voters dealt the country's once-invincible president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a sharp slap in the face Saturday. America should use the moment to nudge Ankara, a NATO member and erstwhile stalwart of the Atlantic alliance, back into the Western fold.

An opposition mayoral contestant in Istanbul, Ekrem Imamoglu, handsomely beat Mr. Erdogan's favored candidate by a 9-point margin. This came after Mr. Erdogan's Justice and Development Party, or AKP, canceled the results of an earlier election and ordered a redo because its candidate lost the first time around..........To Read More...

The World as I See it: Algeria, Syria and Turkey

By Rich Kozlovich

Geopolitical Futures reports for this last week are insightful. Syrian Militias are no longer being funded by Iran to the same extant they were. As a result their fighters are not being paid, their families aren't being cared for and it appears even the quality of their food isn't good.  That was inevitable as it was clear Middle East economics was based on oil. and that's not going to do it for them any longer.  And since there's not one Islam dominated nation in the world that's a natural capital generator this should have been expected. 

I have to assume this is an across the board situation for all the many terrorist factions that are like a Hydra. When you cut off one head two grow from the stump. But that growth can only occur if there’s money pouring into these groups.

For years I’ve been saying the only way to contain these Islamic terrorists is to keep them broke and keep them over there.

Turkey is going through a small but growing economic crisis due to excess spending that was intended to grow the economy, which made many believe Turkey was a bigger power in the Middle East than I thought it was.  Erdogan's meddling is going to cost them big time now, and I don't think this is going get any better in the forseeable future 

They're playing a dangerous economic game involving Trump and Russia, in an apparent attempt to show they don’t need the U.S. with their wanting to purchase military hardware from Russia. That’s gong to back fire on them as the U.S. doesn’t need the parts they’re producing to build F-35 aircraft. Why they’re letting these loons do it in the first place is a puzzle to me, but ending that will certainly have an impact on them and others. They need to get this. We don’t need them, they need us.

I kept a steady course in believing there’s only one country in the Middle East that’s a true capital generator, and that’s Israel. Turkey is now contracting its economy and it has a load of debt, and the value of their currency is dropping steadily. This isn’t a good time for Erdogan, especially since elections are just around the corner.

Here’s the question. What does he do if his party loses the election?

As the world’s economy contracts, and Trumps trade sanctions around the world will hasten that, Turkey and all these Islamic tyrannies will start to suffer even further, especially since they no longer control the world’s oil supply, or the cost of it.  

As time goes by Algeria may become important news as Algerians are unhappy with their political system, and no one sees a way out. That needs watching for all the newsies out there and I’m convinced France may be dragged into this in some way.

Based on other information by Geopolitical Futures outlining the unending protests in Algerian history they're still not happy even though their current President has dropped out of running for another term. Fundamentally, once again, they're not a true capital generating nation.  They're economy is an oil based economy, and oil isn't going to cut it any longer.  I expect this to grow, and their military, which has stayed out of all this, may become involved. 

It seems to me there are two questions that need to be asked: 

• What do they really want?
• What will replace what they have?

I think that answer is they don't know for both questions.

Up Date:  In Turkey it appears Erdogan's party, the AKP,  is facing some serious defeats in the election. They appear to have lost the mayor's race in Ankara and most likely Istanbul.   Geopolitical Futures points out that Turkey is a complicated nation with strong internal divisions between the secular minded and the religious minded and of course the Kurds, but at this point Erdogan is still in charge, and still holds a majority in Turkey, but it's clear to me they're going to have some serious economic issue within the next five years that may actually split the nation into regionally autonomous areas.

In Algeria the President is going to step down and it appears there's going to be a peaceful transition of power, but it still remains unclear what everyone wants in Algeria, with the exception of a violent overthrow of the government.  All the disasters of the "Arab Spring" cause may have made an in presession on the Algerians, and at least they don't want that.

The Ugly Terror Truth About Jamal Khashoggi

Posted by Daniel Greenfield 0 Comments Tuesday, October 16, 2018 @ Sultan Knish Blog

In high school, Jamal Khashoggi had a good friend. His name was Osama bin Laden.

“We were hoping to establish an Islamic state anywhere,” Khashoggi reminisced about their time together in the Muslim Brotherhood. “We believed that the first one would lead to another, and that would have a domino effect which could reverse the history of mankind.”

The friendship endured with Jamal Khashoggi following Osama bin Laden to Afghanistan. Khashoggi credited Adel Batterjee, listed at one time as one of “the world’s foremost terrorist financiers” by the Treasury Department, with bringing him to Afghanistan to report on the fighting.

The media calls Khashoggi a journalist, but his writings from 80s Afghanistan read as Jihadist propaganda with titles like, "Arab Mujahadeen in Afghanistan II: Exemplifies the Unity of Islamic Ummah".

And when Osama bin Laden set up Al Qaeda, he called Khashoggi with the details.

After Afghanistan, Jamal Khashoggi went to work as a media adviser for former Saudi intel boss, Prince Turki bin Faisal, alleged to have links to Al Qaeda. Those allegations came from, among others, Zacarias Moussaoui, the alleged twentieth hijacker.

When the other 19 hijackers perpetrated the attacks of September 11, Khashoggi wrote that the Saudis would not “give in” to American “demands” for “unconditional condemnation” and “total cooperation”.

"Saudis tend to link the ugliness of what happened in New York and Washington with what has happened and continues to happen in Palestine. It is time that the United States comes to understand the effect of its foreign policy and the consequences of that policy," he declared.

"A Muslim cannot be happy with the suffering of others. Even if this suffering is that of Americans who neglected the suffering of Palestinians for half a century."

That’s the real Khashoggi, a cynical and manipulative apologist for Islamic terrorism, not the mythical martyred dissident whose disappearance the media has spent the worst part of a week raving about.

Jamal Khashoggi was not a moderate. Some describe him as the leader of the Saudi Muslim Brotherhood. The Islamist network admires Hitler and seeks to impose Islamic law around the world. Nor was he a supporter of freedom of the press. In one of his Al Jazeera appearances, he complained that the Saudi government was allowing some journalists to report positively on Israel.

His final project, DAWN or Democracy for the Arab World Now was meant to aid Islamists. According to Azzam Al-Tamimi, an old Muslim Brotherhood ally aiding Jamal, "The Muslim Brothers and Islamists were the biggest victims of the foiled Arab spring." Al-Tamimi has endorsed suicide bombings.

But unlike Osama bin Laden, Khashoggi did not use the Muslim Brotherhood as a gateway drug to the pure and uncut violence of Al Qaeda or ISIS. He was still betting on a political takeover.

As he recently put it, “Democracy and political Islam go together.”

Khashoggi went on making the case for the Islamic state of the Muslim Brotherhood. He went on making that case even as the Saudis decided that the Brotherhood had become too dangerous.

Like his old friend, Jamal Khashoggi went into exile in a friendly Islamist country. Osama bin Laden found refuge in Pakistan and Khashoggi ended up in Turkey. The Khashoggi family had originated from Turkey. And Turkey was swiftly becoming the leading Sunni Islamist power in the region. Living in Turkey put Khashoggi at the intersection of the Turkish-Qatari backers of the Brotherhood and the Western media.

His disappearance has touched off fury and anger from the Islamist regime that harbored him. And it has also set off an unprecedented firestorm of rage and grief by the American media which adored him.

Media spin describes Khashoggi as a dissident. And he certainly was that. But so was Osama bin Laden.

What Khashoggi wasn’t, was a moderate. No more so than the Muslim Brotherhood. He wasn’t a proponent of human rights, but of Islamic rule. He could be found on Al Jazeera, Qatar’s Jihadist propaganda network, bemoaning Saudi opposition to the Brotherhood and its friendliness to Israel.

"Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman should get rid of his complex against the Muslim Brotherhood and stop treating them as the enemy or a threat to Saudi Arabia," he complained, and urged the Saudis to fight Israel instead.

Jamal Khashoggi’s career of spouting Muslim Brotherhood propaganda for his new Turkish and Qatari masters came to an end in a curious way. Before Khashoggi allegedly entered the Saudi embassy, from which Turkey claims that he disappeared, he told his Turkish fiancé to call Yasin Aktay if he didn’t return.

Before the summer coup of 2016, Turkey was said to have 50,000 political prisoners. Many of them were members of the country’s oppressed Kurdish minority which is deprived of its most basic civil rights. These include even the use of their own language. Doing so can carry a prison sentence.

In that terrible summer, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey’s Islamic tyrant, finished securing his absolute hold on power with the coup as his Reichstag fire. The alleged coup became a blank check for the mass arrest and torture of countless thousands of political prisoners. Amnesty International estimated that 50,000 had been detained. The UN listed a figure as high as 180,000. They included 300 journalists.

Lawyers described clients being brought to them covered in blood.

Erdogan went after professors, judges, law enforcement, the military and the last remnants of a free press. A Human Rights Watch report documented electric shocks, beatings with truncheons and rubber hoses, and rape by Erdogan’s Islamic thugs. Heads were banged against walls. Men were forced to kneel on burning hot asphalt. Medical reports showed skull fractures, damage to testicles and dehydration.

The media didn’t show any of the hysterical outrage at these crimes that it has over the disappearance of Jamal Khashoggi. The media cares more about Khashoggi, a former media mouthpiece of the Saudi regime before it turned on his Muslim Brotherhood brothers, than about 300 Turkish reporters.

It’s not hypocrisy, it’s consistency.

Erdogan and Khashoggi are both militant Islamic activists. And their opponents, the victims of Erdogan’s Reichstag fire and the new Saudi king, had fallen afoul of them for being insufficiently militantly Islamist.

The media will always take the side of Islamists over non-Islamists. That’s why it bleeds for Khashoggi.

There was a reason why Jamal Khashoggi felt so comfortable in Turkey, while actual journalists in the country were terrified of being locked up, tortured and disappeared. If that was the fate that befell Khashoggi, it was a commonplace one in Turkey. And it may have been carried out by his own Turkish allies who decided that their Saudi subversive had more value as a false flag martyr than a house guest.

The media’s disproportionate outrage over Khashoggi has nothing to do with human rights. If it did, the media would have been just as outraged at the arrests and torture of tens of thousands in Turkey.

It’s not. And it won’t be.

And the politicians shrilly urging that we punish the Saudis never thought about curtailing arms sales to Turkey. Many of the same politicians were unhappy when President Trump used economic pressure on Erdogan in an effort to free American hostages, like Pastor Andrew Brunson, being held by Turkey.

This is about Islam.

The struggle between Saudi Arabia and the UAE on the one hand, and Turkey, Qatar and Iran on the other, is the next stage of the Arab Spring. And, from Yemen to Turkey, the media has made no secret of being on the Islamist side. Its outrage over Khashoggi, like its claims of a human rights crisis over the Saudi bombings in Yemen, are not journalism, they’re the political spin of the Islamist axis.

The media has reported every claim of victimhood by the Muslim Brotherhood and Qatar’s Al Jazeera propaganda arm, while giving as little attention as possible to the victims of Muslim Brotherhood church bombings. Its coverage of Israel has been little more than terrorist propaganda since Osama was in diapers. Its coverage of the Khashoggi case is every bit as dishonest as its slanted attacks on the Saudi embargo of Qatar, as its propaganda about the wars in Yemen and Libya, and just as devoid of context.

The Khashoggi case demands context.

Before the media and the politicians who listen to it drag the United States into a conflict with Saudi Arabia over a Muslim Brotherhood activist based on the word of an enemy country still holding Americans hostage, we deserve the context.

And we deserve the truth.

The media wants the Saudis to answer questions about Jamal Khashoggi. But maybe the media should be forced to answer why the Washington Post was working with a Muslim Brotherhood propagandist?

The real mystery isn’t Khashoggi’s disappearance. It’s why Republicans aren’t asking those questions.

The media’s relationship with Khashoggi is far more damning than anything the Saudis might have done to him. And the media should be held accountable for its relationship with Osama bin Laden’s old friend.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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Throughout history, Muslims never far from violence

Istanbul - 'a city gone mad'.

Bill Federer About | Email | Archive 

 

Constantinople was the capital of the eastern Roman Christian world since Emperor Constantine in 330 A.D. It was conquered by the Muslim Sultan Mehmet II on May 29, 1453.  In the fall of Constantinople, tens of thousands of Christians were raped, killed, enslaved or deported.

The largest Christian church in the world for nearly a thousand years, Hagai Sophia, was converted into a mosque. Muslims covered the church’s four acres of beautiful Bible-themed gold mosaics with whitewash and Qur’an verses, and surrounded the church with Islamic minarets. The Turkish government has never offered to give ownership of the church back to Christians.

Five centuries later, in 1930, Constantinople was renamed Istanbul, derived from the Greek name “stanbul” meaning “the city.”...............Ataturk ended the religious caliphate, thus preventing Muslim religious leaders from controlling government affairs. In an effort to cut ties with the fundamentalist past, he introduced the western use of last names, replaced Arabic Islamic names with Turkish names. Ataturk abolished use of Arabic and Persian script, replacing it with the Latin alphabet. He abolished turbans and fezes (the red felt cap with a black tassel) and required men to wear western pants and suits. Ataturk banned beards on men, and even required Muslim prayer leaders to be beardless. He replaced Arabic muezzin’s call to prayer and made praying a private affair. He abolished sharia courts, and made Friday a workday, instituting the “weekend” of Saturday and Sunday. 

Ataturk outlawed polygamy and elevated the status of women, appointing the first female judges, and insisting on education of girls. He abolished women wearing of scarves,veils, chadors or burqas – the full-length body dress worn by Muslim women – and requiring women to wear skirts................Read more