Displaying posts published in

August 2018

New Heights of Turkish Hypocrisy by Uzay Bulut

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12817/turkish-hypocrisy

According to a 2015 news report, there were only 1,244 Greeks left in Istanbul at that time. In addition, even those tiny minorities are reportedly leaving Turkey in increasing numbers, to escape the instability and aggression they suffer in the country.

Many Muslim Turks who are on the receiving end of Erdogan’s human-rights abuses, seem shocked by the current undemocratic events in Turkey. They should not be; such abuses have been going on in the country for decades. The Turks are likely to continue living under the oppression that they themselves have created.

Erdogan needs to be reminded that it is not Israel — a vibrant and flourishing democracy with equal rights for all its citizens — whose behavior is reminiscent of dark chapters in history. It is Turkey.

During a parliamentary meeting of his ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) on July 24, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan called Israel the “most Zionist, fascist, and racist state in the world.” Referring to the recent passage by Israel’s Knesset of the “Basic Law: Israel as the Nation State of the Jewish People,” Erdogan attacked the Israeli government’s view as “no different from Hitler’s obsession with the Aryan race.”

In fact, there is nothing “fascist” or “racist” in Israel’s new law. On the contrary, as David Hazony noted in the Forward:

“This law has been in the works at least since the early 2000s, a time when two major forces arose that threatened the Zionist project as it was historically understood. The first was the rise of ‘post-Zionism,’ a small but passionate intellectual-political movement that explicitly repudiated the idea of a ‘Jewish state’ and sought to transform the country into a “state of all its citizens” by stripping it of any connection to Jewish history, peoplehood, or symbolism.

Hamas Blackmail, Media Silence by Bassam Tawil

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12808/hamas-corruption-media-silence

Hamas’s strategy is to remain in power forever; to achieve that goal, it is prepared to do anything. Hamas has always acted out of its own narrow interests while holding the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip hostage to its extremist ideology and repressive regime.

“Those who claim to be confronting Israel are nothing but corrupt, extortionist bribe-takers. Today, every politician in the Gaza Strip is well aware of the fact that the corruption at the border crossings has become the norm of the official establishment, and not actions by individuals or a certain apparatus.” — Hassan Asfour, former Palestinian Authority minister, human rights activist and political columnist.

Here one always needs to ask: where is the role of the international media in exposing Hamas’s corruption and exploitation of its own people? Why is it that the mainstream media in the West does not want to pay any attention to what Asfour and other Palestinians are saying? The answer is always simple: As far as foreign journalists are concerned, if Israel is not the one asking for bribes or blackmailing the Palestinians, there is no story there.

Hamas, the Palestinian Islamist group that rules the Gaza Strip, says it wants Israel and Egypt to keep the border crossings with its coastal territory open on a permanent basis. The message that Hamas has been relaying to Israel and Egypt has been along the lines of: If you seek a cease-fire, you must reopen, on a permanent basis, the Kerem Shalom commercial border crossing (with Israel) and the Rafah terminal along the border with Egypt.

It is worth noting that the Kerem Shalom border crossing has been open for most of the time in the past few years, with Israel allowing the entry of goods and medical supplies into the Gaza Strip. Recently, Israel shut down the border crossing temporarily, but only after Palestinian rioters had set the terminal on fire at least twice in the previous weeks. Israel’s decision temporarily to shut down the Kerem Shalom also came in response to hundreds of kite and balloon arson attacks launched from the Gaza Strip against Israel, and which have set fire to more than 30,000 dunams (more than 7,400 acres) of land in southern Israel

The Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Model Loses in the Midwest If socialism is so popular, why aren’t the socialists winning? Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270979/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-model-loses-midwest-daniel-greenfield

“Abdul El-Sayed’s Campaign Is a Test for Leftism in the Midwest,” New York Magazine declared.

That was on Sunday.

On Monday, ThinkProgress called El-Sayed’s campaign one to prove “Democratic socialism can win in the Midwest.”

On Tuesday, socialism and leftism failed the Midwest test.

Bernie Sanders, socialism’s confused grandpa, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, socialism’s new model, had flown out to campaign for El-Sayed’s gubernatorial campaign in Michigan. A Guardian article sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation had dubbed the Muslim socialist candidate, “The New Obama”.

El-Sayed had run on socialized medicine under its current misleading brand of “Medicare for All.” It had proven financially unviable everywhere from Vermont to California. And Michigan’s finances make it an especially terrible candidate for socialized medicine. But socialism is having a moment. Or is it?

Bernie Sanders, Linda Sarsour and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and the entire left, couldn’t manage to drag El-Sayed over the finish line in a state with a large Muslim population. And El-Sayed didn’t just lose.

He lost badly.

The media had been trying to build up El-Sayed as another Ocasio-Cortez while repeatedly claiming that there was a tight race. The election showed that there had never actually been much of a competition.

El-Sayed isn’t socialism’s only Midwestern misfire. A few days ago, the New York Times was touting Cori Bush as the woman to pull off Ocasio-Cortez’s playbook in the “heartland”. Like El-Sayed, Cori Bush was running on a $15 minimum wage, “Medicare for All” and free college.

Bush was a Black Lives Matter organizer. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez came to campaign for her. Like Cortez, Bush was supposed to beat Rep. Lacy Clay, a CBC hack welded to his seat by identity politics, by applying the same insurgent tactics that had allowed Cortez to beat Rep. Joe Crowley in New York.

The Ancient War Between the Press and the President By Victor Davis HansonAMERIC

https://amgreatness.com/2018/08/09/the-ancient-war-between-

The ancient war between the press and the president

The media are furious that President Trump serially decries “fake news.” He often rants that journalists who traffic in it are “enemies of the people.”

Reporters have compared Trump to mass murderers such as Stalin and Hitler because of his dislike of the press.

Trump may be crude to reporters, but journalists are also not so innocent. They have brought much of the present calumny upon themselves in a variety of ways.

The media seem to have little concern that their coverage is biased even though polls show that the vast majority of Americans believe the media intentionally reports fake news.

Indeed, fake news is not a Trump exaggeration. Despite coverage to the contrary, Trump did not remove a bust of Martin Luther King Jr. from the Oval Office. Testimony by former FBI Director James Comey revealed that senior Trump campaign officials did not consult “senior Russian intelligence officials,” as the New York Times reported. Putin denied having compromising information on Trump during an NBC interview after an earlier NBC report said Putin did not deny having such information.

Despite hysterical reports that in testimony before Congress, Comey would refute Trump’s claim that Comey had assured him he was not under investigation, Comey instead confirmed Trump’s story.