It is not “inevitable” in any civil war—no matter how brutal—that one side murder foreigners. Certainly, the GIA’s murdering foreigners—even during the brutal Algerian civil war—was not “inevitable”. It was a choice; it was the wrong choice…
Middle East
The Coup Attempt in Turkey.
The attempted coup d’etat in Turkey has failed and the repercussions will follow.
Edward Luttwak has an important column on why it happened and why it failed.
The failure was so sudden and the coup was so poorly organized that some have questioned whether it was a false flag operation.
A US-based Turkish cleric accused of plotting a coup to overthrow the Ankara government has claimed President Recep Erdogan staged the rebellion himself to justify a major clampdown on opposition forces.
Fethullah Gulen, who was a former key ally of Erdogan has been blamed by the politician of using his contacts to develop a ‘parallel structure’ to overthrow the state.
Erdogan has called on US President Barack Obama to extradite Gulen, who is based in Pennsylvania.
Erdogan has requested the US turn over the imam who has been living in Pennsylvania. Why ?
Luttwak has a pretty good explanation.
The country’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, was left free to call out his followers to resist the attempted military coup, first by iPhone and then in something resembling a televised press conference at Istanbul’s airport. It was richly ironic that he was speaking under the official portrait of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of Turkey’s modern secular state, because Erdogan’s overriding aim since entering politics has been to replace it with an Islamic republic by measures across the board: from closing secular high schools so as to drive pupils into Islamic schools to creeping alcohol prohibitions to a frenzied program of mosque-building everywhere — including major ex-church museums and university campuses, where, until recently, headscarves were prohibited.
When we were in Istanbul ten years ago, Hagia Sophia, the original Christian church that has been converted to a mosque after Constantinople fell to the Turks in 1453, was being converted to a museum.
The huge panels of calligraphy were being removed and, beneath the panels, the workmen were finding that the previous workmen in 1453 had carefully preserved the mosaics being covered, possibly anticipating the city would be retaken by the Byzantines.
Few of the mosaics survived but a few could be seen. That one is above a door into the church.
Will the restoration continue under Erdogan ? I wonder. I also wonder how many tourists there will be to see it if it continues.
More from Luttwak.
Erdogan has been doing everything possible to dismantle Turkey’s fragile democracy: from ordering the arrest of journalists who criticized him, including the outright seizure and closure of the country’s largest newspaper, Zaman, to the very exercise of presidential power, since Turkey is not a presidential republic like the United States or France, but rather a parliamentary republic like Germany or Italy, with a mostly ceremonial president and the real power left to the prime minister. Unable to change the constitution because his Justice and Development Party (AKP) does not have enough votes in parliament, Erdogan instead installed the slavishly obedient (and mustachioed) Binali Yildirim as prime minister — his predecessor, Ahmet Davutoglu, had been very loyal, but not quite a slave — and further subverted the constitutional order by convening cabinet meetings under his own chairmanship in his new 1,000-room palace: a multibillion-dollar, 3.2 million-square-foot monstrosity (the White House is approximately 55,000 square feet), which was built without authorized funding or legal permits in a nature reserve.
I think Turkey is lost to the West and modern civilization. I saw those angry young men when we were entering mosques, like the Blue Mosque, where they kept angry and careful watch to see that we took off shoes and women wore head scarves. Now, they are running the country,
The Federal Government’s “BIG LIE” About Muslim Terrorism in Orlando
In its public relations on Omar Mateen’s attack in the Pulse night club in Orlando, the federal government is engaged in a propaganda technique know as “The Big Lie”. That is, it’s stating an untruth often enough to get people to believe it.
The Big Lie in this case, stated by both FBI Director James Comey and President Obama is that Omar Mateen was a “lone wolf” that “self-radicalized over the Internet.”
It is four days after the Pulse attack. Omar Mateen spent 18 days in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in 2011 and 2012. There is no way that all the associates of Mateen in those two trips can be known in four days. Nor what if any training or Islamist materials Mateen might have received on small items like USB drives while on those trips.
See if you can spot all the weasel words from this Fox News story passage quoting the Saudi Ministry of the Interior —
A Saudi Ministry of Interior spokesman confirmed that Mateen twice performed the umrah Islamic pilgrimage and that travel records showed he also visited the United Arab Emirates on one of the trips. But he said Saudi officials, who closely surveil tourists deemed to be a terror threat, had no evidence Mateen traveled to Yemen of made contact with known extremists during his visits to the Kingdom.”
Weasel Phrase #1 & questions raised —
Mateen twice performed the umrah Islamic pilgrimage…
- Did Mateen attend Mosques or other Islamic organizations in Saudi Arabia with ‘extremist’ connections?
- Did people who became extremists after 2011 to 2012 attend Saudi Mosques or other Islamic organizations at the same time as Mateen or travel with Mateen?
Weasel Phrase #2 & questions raised —
…had no evidence Mateen traveled to Yemen or made contact with known extremists during his visits to the Kingdom.
1. Would the Saudis know if Mateen meet ‘known extremists’ in the UAE?
2. Did people who the UAE consider ‘extremists’ meet Mateen?
3. Did Mateen attend mosques or other Islamic organizations in the UAE with extremist connections, and at the same time as then-unknown ‘extremists’?
Given the simple questions raised above, there is absolutely no reasonable way that Pres. Obama and the FBI Director stating that Omar Mateen “self-radicalized” can be considered as anything but a deliberate lie after only four days of investigation.
LOGICAL CONCLUSIONS
Given the use of the Big Lie on Orlando by FBI Director James Comey, we now have to assume all the following about organizations, politics and near-future events.
- FBI Director James Comey is President Obama’s partisan “good dog” in the same sense that Attorney General Loretta Lynch, Director of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson, and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper are.
- The federal government’s top priority in dealing with Muslim terrorism in the USA will remain political correctness in surveillance before attacks and narrative damage control after attacks, rather than prevention of attacks.
- There will be an increasing number of domestic Muslim terrorist attacks because of the Obama administration’s open-borders immigration policy and refusal to properly vet this immigrant stream for radical Islamic Terrorists.
- Republicans now see DHS and FBI counterintelligence as an utterly Democratic partisan organization like the IRS.
- The first Republican-majority government after the San Bernardino and Orlando terrorist attacks will see a new, independent, federal counterintelligence agency with an utterly partisan GOP senior leadership established.
- And last, there will be no indictment of Hillary Clinton over her illegal e-mail server unless and until Donald Trump wins the presidency.
Make your preparations for the future accordingly.
Quote of the Day
Obama isn’t much of a defender of the United States in word or deed. He prefers to stand up for the good name of Islam. When it comes to the defense of Islam, he’s got his heart is in it.
-Scott Johnson: “Obama’s Heart”, at Power Line
It May Not Matter
Via Instapundit, this Weekly Standard piece on the next Hezbollah-Israel war is a bit naive. Yes, it is wise for Israel to make preemptive PR efforts to justify its self-defense against the missile attacks that Hezbollah will certainly launch from densely populated civilian areas in any future war, with the intent of maximizing civilian casualties for propaganda purposes. However, a USA that is led by a Democratic administration that is at best lukewarm about Israel, and that may be predisposed to seek accommodations from Israel’s enemies, will not necessarily do much to help Israel in such an event. Obama was obviously hostile to Israel during the 2014 Gaza war, even though he was careful not to say so publicly and to frame his anti-Israel actions in deniable terms. Would a Hillary administration, anchored as Obama’s is in far-left Democratic Party politics, be much better? It might be, since Obama’s anti-Israel/anti-Jewish animus is extreme for an American president, and he was trying to appease Iran for much of his presidency. Hillary is unlikely to be so eager to accommodate Israel’s (and America’s) enemies. OTOH, the US Left is now thoroughly hostile to Israel as well as to any US action to protect its traditional overseas interests. So, who knows.