RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/10/turkish-president-erdogan-declares-jerusalem-has-hugh-fitzgerald/

Erdogan addressed the opening of the Turkish Parliament on October 1 with a ringing declaration that “Jerusalem Has Been Our City For Thousands of Years.” The “our” in “our city” seemed to refer now to the Turks, and now to the “Palestinian people.” The story is here.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan on Thursday implied that Jerusalem belongs to Turkey, referring to the Ottoman Empire’s control over the city for much of the modern era.

In this city that we had to leave in tears during the First World War, it is still possible to come across traces of the Ottoman resistance. So Jerusalem is our city, a city from us,” he told Turkish lawmakers during a major policy speech in Ankara. “Our first qibla [direction of prayer in Islam] al-Aqsa and the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem are the symbolic mosques of our faith. In addition, this city is home to the holy places of Christianity and Judaism.”

The Turks were the colonial masters of Jerusalem for 400 years, from 1516 to 1917, ruling over Muslim Arabs, Jews, and Christians too. If those 400 years of rule means that “Jerusalem is our [Turkish] city,” then what should we say about Istanbul, which as Constantinople was for more than a thousand years the richest and most important city in Christendom? Jerusalem has been lived in continuously by Jews for the last 3500 years; the archaeological evidence of that Jewish presence in the city has been found at thousands of sites – ancient synagogues, homes, tombstones, wine-presses, oil lamps, pottery – much of it with Hebrew inscriptions, with more such evidence being uncovered by archaeologists every year. Does President Erdogan expect the Western world to overlook all that? When Jerusalem was the first qibla, for just a few years before 624 A.D., when Muhammad replaced it with Mecca, Jews had already been living in Jerusalem for more than 2000 years.

The Ottoman Empire ruled over Jerusalem from 1516 to 1917. Modern Turkey, its successor state, has long stressed its enduring connection to the holy city, regularly condemning Israel’s alleged efforts to “judaize” it and the US administration’s December 2017 recognition of it as Israel’s capital. Jerusalem has been the capital of Israel since the country’s founding, and the Jewish people have thousands of years of history in the city, backed up by extensive archaeological finds.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/10/big-promises-macron-bruce-bawer/

Beset by Communist riots, the China plague, and a campaign-season spike in Trump Derangement Syndrome, Americans have rarely been so disinclined to look abroad. But despite our stateside navel-gazing, life in Europe goes on, for better or worse. Take France.

Last Friday, French president Emmanuel Macron delivered what, on the face of it, seemed to be a remarkable speech on Islam. Macron, it will be recalled, has played both sides of the fence on this one. In 2015, while serving as Minister of the Economy, he described mass immigration as “an economic opportunity” – this at a time when French suburbs were packed with Muslims who were quite obviously a huge economic liability. Macron pointedly dismissed French voters’ concern about the nation’s failure to integrate newcomers: “This is not a subject on which we must govern by the polls,” he said. “History has shown that when we sometimes follow the will of the people, especially in difficult times, we are wrong.” Of course, immigration policy in Western Europe has never have anything whatsoever to do with the will of the people.   

Two years later, Macron remained sanguine, chiding those who “confuse terrorists with asylum seekers and refugees” – as if terrorism were the only problem created by the influx of Muslims into Europe. 

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16602/china-minorities-assimilation

The principal feature of the “assimilation” program in ethnic areas is the eradication of native languages as a medium of instruction. All courses in minority regions are now taught in Mandarin….

The accounts of the CCP’s ethnic purification campaigns should serve as warning to Chinese Christians that recent sporadic examples of state security officials removing crosses from church steeples might be prologue to a much more intense campaign to suppress Christianity in China.

The CCP under Xi’s leadership will not tolerate any force or institution that might serve as a rally point for Chinese citizens who might be opposed to the Communist regime, or even be an alternate source of admiration to it.

Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Chairman Xi Jinping doubled down on his professed policy of ethnic assimilation on September 26 at a two-day party conference on Xinjiang.

In reality, the CCP policy in Xinjiang of “assimilation” resembles more the forced unity of cultural genocide. There is ample evidence that these same repressive policies are being applied in several other Chinese territories where ethnic minorities are prominent. Similar “assimilation” programs presently are being implemented in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, the Tibet Autonomous Region, and the Korean Autonomous Prefecture in China’s northeastern province of Jilin.

These “assimilation” projects were kept under wraps until they were abruptly revealed upon the opening of the new school year on September 1. The principal feature of the “assimilation” program in ethnic areas is the eradication of native languages as a medium of instruction. All courses in minority regions are now taught in Mandarin, the principal language of Han Chinese who comprise about 92% of the population.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-dialogue-with-pope-francis-11602026069?mod=opinion_lead_pos4

On Sunday Pope Francis released his encyclical Fratelli Tutti (“All Brothers”), meant to point a world reeling from Covid-19 in a more hopeful direction. Though ranging from war and nationalism to immigration and social dialogue based on “insult,” the document repeats his earlier indictments of capitalism. In particular he scores “those who would have had us believe that freedom of the market was sufficient to keep everything secure” after the pandemic hit.

The true answer to what ails us, he writes, is openness and dialogue. So in that spirit we would suggest that while the pope has many wise things to say, we’ve never met any market liberals who believe what Pope Francis attributes to them. Certainly Adam Smith—a professor of moral philosophy—did not believe the “dogma” that markets can “resolve every problem.” As Smith understood, the market depends on a rules-based legal order and the cultivation of virtues such as hard work, thrift, enterprise, and even what he saw as the religious virtue of benevolence.

In the wake of Covid-19, Pope Francis writes that the “fragility” of global capitalism has made the world more fragmented and unable to deal with the pandemic. But is that really true?

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).