RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nysun.com/foreign/erdogan-seeking-to-relitigate-defeat-of-turks/91289/

Does it matter that Turkey appears to think that it can relitigate the outcome of World War I? That’s the question observers were forced to confront last week when its president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, opened that country’s parliament with a speech about the status of Jerusalem.

The Islamist government Mr. Erdoğan heads is among the leading boosters of the Palestinian war against Israel’s existence, as well as an ally of the Hamas terrorists in Gaza. The Turkish leader’s remarks, though, weren’t framed as a response to American recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital or the peace and normalization agreements reached between the Jewish state and the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain. Rather, he offered an argument that Jerusalem belongs to the Turks, rather than the Jews or the Arabs.

Neither Israel nor the United States is worried that Turkey will try to implement this absurd ambition. Yet the Erdoğan government’s recent moves, coupled with its outrageous statements, do call into question the Trump administration’s apparent belief that Turkey can or should be encouraged to continue on its present course.

The Jerusalem speech is — like Turkey’s alleged role in encouraging a renewal of fighting between Azerbaijan and Armenia, and its aggressive attitude towards the efforts of Greece, Cyprus, and Israel to work together on natural gas exploration in the Mediterranean — a signal that can’t be ignored. Either Mr. Trump or former Vice President Joe Biden will need to be as focused on the threat from Turkey in the future as they are on Iran.

http://www.settimananews.it/informazione-internazionale/the-pope-pompeo-and-new-vision-of-the-world/

The recent visit of the U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to the Holy See in Rome was considered an attempt to drag Pope Francis into the American election. From the Holy See’s point of view, Pompeo tried to step into a controversy about the Catholic Church, where some American Catholics doubt the Pope’s “moral authority” for his choices on China and on many other issues, like the environment, concern about wild capitalism, or being open to areas traditionally considered non-Catholic.

Pompeo published an article critical of Francis’ policy on China on the American conservative Catholic journal First Things. But doubts about the Pope’s “moral authority,” especially if so bluntly expressed in a journal at times critical of Francis, in fact hardly belong to Catholic way of thinking, which strongly feels unity with the Pope. Pompeo’s criticism immediately sound “protestant,” as it ignores the role of the Pope, and therefore created a massive rally of the Church for the Pope and against outside criticism. Father Lorenzo Prezzi eloquently explained the feelings in Rome.

Yet this tiff may be highly misunderstood. There is no real difference in many of their concerns between the U.S. and the Holy See on China. Both are worried about growing repression in China, and about closure and an inward-looking spiral there. There is a difference of analysis, priorities, and options for solutions between the two, but it’s not like Washington is worried about China and Rome doesn’t think about it. The recent interview of the Vatican Secretary of State Pietro Parolin also stresses these points.

It is however impossible and credibly unhealthy to think of having America and the Holy See toeing the same line. Dialectic between different positions is healthy and keeps everybody on his toes.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16526/turkey-greece-fifth-war

On August 28, a former MP from Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party, Metin Külünk, published a map of “Greater Turkey” which illustrates the extent of Turkey’s revisionist ambitions. It includes areas of Greece, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Syria, Iraq, Georgia and Armenia.

In a similarly threatening statement, Turkish Defense Minister Hulusi Akar provocatively advised Greece to remain silent “so as not to become a meze [snack] for the interests of others.”

Erdoğan’s fifth war would be one with no winners. But Erdoğan’s Turkey would be the bigger loser.

During the 20th century, the Turks and their traditional Aegean rivals, the Greeks, fought four conventional wars: The First Balkan War (1912-1913); the First World War (1914-1918); the Greco-Turkish War (1919-1922); and the Cyprus War (1974). So it is not the first time during an expanse of peace that newspapers across the world are telling their readers that the Aegean Sea is on the brink of war. “Peace” across the Aegean has always been cold-to-very-cold except for brief periods of relative warmth. It looks as if Turks and Greeks live in neighboring homes built on a centuries-long blood feud.

Charles King, in his book Midnight at the Pera Palace: The Birth of Modern Istanbul, wrote about the early post-Ottoman years in Istanbul and the nation-building efforts of the infant Republic of Turkey:

“Istanbul’s non-Muslim minorities fell from an estimated 56 percent in 1900 to 35 percent by the late 1920s. Other cities had more dramatic decreases. Izmir, the former Smyrna, went from 62% non-Muslim to 14%… But the demographic revolution changed virtually everything in the old minority neighborhoods of Istanbul. In the rush to leave, Greeks, Armenians and Jews dumped the contents of their houses and apartments onto the secondhand market, hoping to gain at least a small amount of cash before boarding a ship or train…

“Turkey as a whole became more Muslim, and more Turkish, more homogeneous and more rural — because of the flight of non-Muslim minorities from cities — than it had ever been. Some of the families who would go on to become the mainstays of Istanbul’s economy emerged [by]… keeping an eye on changing fortunes and translating political connections into economic advantage once the Greek and other minority businesses went up for sale. There was nothing necessarily dishonest about their dealings, but they rested on a massive transfer of wealth whose origins lay in the republic’s preference for national purity over the old cosmopolitanism of the imperial capital.”

After three wars at the beginning of the century, Turkish-Greek tensions would next explode in Cyprus, where Turkish and Greek Cypriots lived side by side and in peace until after the 1950s, when they started to slaughter each other. Ethnic strife led to the Turkish military operation in July 1974 that ended with its occupation of the northern third of the island. Cyprus has remained divided along ethnic lines ever since.

In 1996, the Turkish and Greek militaries came close to a hot engagement over sovereignty claims over a tiny islet in the southern Aegean Sea. A few years after successful U.S. mediation averted war, few Turks or Greeks even remembered the name of that 9.9-acre, uninhabited islet: Imia (Kardak in Turkish).

Today’s tensions, stretching from the Aegean to the Eastern Mediterranean, look more serious than two teenagers in a tug-of-war over a piece of rock.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/10/pope_francis_goes_full_communist.html

In an encyclical published on Sunday, Pope Francis announced that he’d had an epiphany thanks to the Wuhan virus: It’s time to ditch capitalism. But that’s not all. He believes, too, that in a time of a serious infectious disease, we should focus even harder on open borders.  And he blithely upended almost two millennia of Church doctrine by doing away with St. Augustine’s “just war” theory.

These actions reflect Francis’s Catholic upbringing within the communist “liberation theology” of the Latin American church. They may also show the effects of his ongoing alliance with Chinese communists and with Muslims.

Fox Business sums up the gist of Francis’s communist dreams (emphasis mine):

“Aside from the differing ways that various countries responded to the crisis, their inability to work together became quite evident,” Francis wrote. “Anyone who thinks that the only lesson to be learned was the need to improve what we were already doing, or to refine existing systems and regulations, is denying reality.”

He cited the grave loss of millions of jobs as a result of the virus as evidence of the need for politicians to listen to popular movements, unions and marginalized groups and to craft more just social and economic policies.

“The fragility of world systems in the face of the pandemic has demonstrated that not everything can be resolved by market freedom,” he wrote. “It is imperative to have a proactive economic policy directed at ‘promoting an economy that favours productive diversity and business creativity’ and makes it possible for jobs to be created, and not cut.”’

[snip]

As an outgrowth of that, Francis rejected the concept of an absolute right to property for individuals, stressing instead the “social purpose” and common good that must come from sharing the Earth’s resources. He repeated his criticism of the “perverse” global economic system, which he said consistently keeps the poor on the margins while enriching the few — an argument he made most fully in his 2015 landmark environmental encyclical “Laudato Sii” (Praised Be).

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/10/italy-muslim-migrant-murders-priest-pope-calls-robert-spencer/

The irrepressible Pope Francis is at it again: in his Angelus address last Sunday, he announced: “Today the Church celebrates the World Day of Migrants and Refugees. I greet the refugees and migrants present in the Square around the monument entitled ‘Angels, unawares,’ which I blessed last year.” He spoke with sympathy about “the internally displaced, who are forced to flee, as also happened to Jesus and his family. ‘Like Jesus, forced to flee,’ likewise the displaced, migrants. Our remembrance and our prayer to them, in a particular way, and to those who assist them,”

Yet this came just days after Mahmoudi Ridha, a Muslim migrant from Tunisia, murdered a Catholic priest in Italy, Fr. Roberto Malgesini. After killing Malgesini, Ridha crowed: “The priest died like a dog, that was right.” According to Church Militant, in the wake of the murder, “police have categorically rejected the Italian bishops’ claim” that Ridha “had mental problems.”

After the murder, Pope Francis, as determined as ever to ignore the grim reality of Islamic jihad, declared that Ridha was “a person in need” and “malata di testa,” which is bad Italian for either “sick in the head” or a “headache.”

“I am not sure if Pope Francis is being deliberately ambiguous or speaking poor Italian as he often does,” said an Italian linguist. “Of course, he wouldn’t like his pro-migrant, pro-Muslim narrative to be disrupted if the assassin were found to have jihadi motives.”

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/10/04/china_foreign_affairs_and_the_anti-ideology_delusion_144345.html

The China challenge has revived an old and often arid quarrel about the relationship in foreign affairs between ideas and interests. Reconsidering that quarrel in light of the ideas that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) professes and the interests the People’s Republic of China (PRC) pursues provides a fresh understanding of the threats that China poses to freedom. 

The extreme form of the debate is generally confined to the domain of political science professors in the field of international relations. On one side stand the so-called realists. 

They maintain that the distribution of power within the international system — including the logic of, and the interests inherent in, countries’ particular geopolitical circumstances — drives nation-state conduct. On the other side stand those classified as idealists. They contend that a country’s ideas — government officials’ leading principles and favored doctrines, the people’s customary opinions and perspectives, and the habits of heart and mind of both — provide the key to nation-state conduct. These pure views appear among commentators and policymakers in watered-down form as dominant intellectual tendencies.

The case of the CCP and of the Chinese nation that it despotically governs proves the wisdom of the common-sense view: as with individuals so too with nation-states, ideas and interests are inextricably connected. The ideas to which the CCP is committed — a distinctive blend of dogmatic Marxism-Leninism and extreme Chinese nationalism — undergird the regime’s dictatorial rule at home. These ideas also fuel the party’s ambition to bring under Beijing’s sovereign control formerly free and democratic Hong Kong, still free and democratic Taiwan, and areas of the South China Sea far beyond China’s internationally recognized territorial waters; animate the party’s schemes to lure nations around the world into relations of economic dependence; and drive the CCP’s plan to reshape international organizations so that they conform to the principles of socialism as the party has decreed them.

Last month in an important article in Foreign Affairs, Elbridge Colby and Robert D. Kaplan appeared at times to take exception to the common-sense view. In “The Ideology Delusion,” they offer salutary warnings about the wrong way to connect ideas and interests. Unfortunately, their well-taken points about the excesses of ideologically oriented foreign policy occasionally slide into the extravagant claim that the very attempt to understand state conduct and great-power competition in light of leaders’ and peoples’ ideas about politics and international relations reflects the delusion that ideas are pertinent to foreign affairs.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/frances-emmanuel-macron-targets-islamic-separatism-with-proposed-law-11601654320?mod=world_major_1_pos5

PARIS—French President Emmanuel Macron took aim at radical Islam Friday, announcing plans to outlaw what he called “Islamic separatism” in communities where he said religious laws are taking precedence over civil ones.

Mr. Macron said the law, if passed, would empower authorities to shut down associations and schools that he said indoctrinate children, and monitor foreign investment in religious organizations in France. It would also improve public services in poor suburbs, he said.

The bill, which will go before Parliament early next year, risks escalating tensions between Muslim groups in France and authorities who enforce the country’s strict secularism.

France began introducing bans on wearing Islamic dress such as face coverings in public areas years ago. Since then, the social and economic alienation of French Muslims has only deepened.

Groups that practice radical forms of Islam, Mr. Macron said, were trying to create a parallel society governed by different rules and values than those espoused by the Republic.

“What we need to take on is Islamic separatism,” Mr. Macron said, during a visit to Les Mureaux, a suburb northwest of Paris.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/pope-francis-calls-for-brotherhood-amid-covid-19-pandemic-11601806766

“Pope Francis’ major targets include what he calls the dogma of neoliberal economics and its promises of trickle-down prosperity. “The fragility of world systems in the face of the pandemic has demonstrated that not everything can be resolved by market freedom,” he writes. He calls for strengthening the United Nations and other multilateral structures to rein in a globalized economy beyond the power of nation states to regulate.”

ROME—Pope Francis offered his prescription for a host of ills plaguing societies around the world, including poverty, terrorism and racism, in a major document written in the shadow of the coronavirus pandemic.

“Fratelli tutti” (“Brothers, all”), released by the Vatican on Sunday, is only the third time Pope Francis has written an encyclical, one of the most authoritative genres of papal writing. The 43,000-word text echoes some of the major themes of his social teaching, including the rights of migrants and the poor, with a special urgency inspired by Covid-19.

“Once this health crisis passes, our worst response would be to plunge even more deeply into feverish consumerism and new forms of egoistic self-preservation,” the pope writes. “If only we might keep in mind all those elderly persons who died for lack of respirators, partly as result of the dismantling, year after year, of health-care systems.”

But he writes that the experience of the pandemic also offered hope in the examples of ordinary people—cleaners and supermarket workers as well as doctors, nurses and priests—who risked their lives to keep society going: “They understood that no one is saved alone.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/10/china-seeks-greater-control-over-united-nations-international-organizations/

As the U.N. approaches a century of existence, its chief challenge will be to grapple with authoritarian attempts to remake it from within.

D uring the U.N. General Assembly opening debate last month, the Chinese Communist Party’s effort to assume greater control over international organizations was on full display.

This year, “UNGA Week,” as the high-profile general debate of the assembly is called, took place primarily over video conference, and the in-person gatherings that make up the bread and butter of U.N. diplomacy prevented many important interactions. No matter for the Chinese delegation: In addition to general secretary Xi Jinping’s address to the Assembly, he participated in a side event on the U.N.’s 75th anniversary, and other Chinese foreign-affairs officials participated in other meetings throughout the week.Xi set the tone of the Chinese delegation’s message. Sadly, it’s been accepted by too much of the U.N. system, and by some smaller states that have yet to awaken to the brutality of the Chinese regime. As the U.N. turns 75 this year, the CCP made its case for why the country it rules over is a leading defender of the multilateral order. “When in competition, countries should not breach the moral standard and should comply with international norms,” Xi said, during his UNGA speech. “In particular, major countries should act like major countries.”

The CCP, of course, is gaslighting the world, and the authoritarian regime’s grip on international organizations is perhaps the biggest threat facing the principles laid out in the U.N. Charter. “How China Is Taking Over International Organizations, One Vote at a Time” was the title of a Wall Street Journal front page article this past Thursday morning. The piece described precisely what the headline suggests it would: the Chinese government’s co-optation of U.N. organizations, often by coercion, over the past several years.