RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13299/erdogan-charm-offensive

“Turkey remains the world’s worst jailer for the second consecutive year, with 73 journalists behind bars, compared with 81 last year. Dozens more still face trial, and fresh arrests take place regularly.” — The Committee to Protect Journalists, December 2017.

For Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, apparently, as for the Saudis, there are “good journalists” and “bad journalists.” He often refers to the latter group as “terrorists” and “traitors.”

Erdoğan has tried so hard to use the murder of the Saudi journalist, Khashoggi, for a charm offensive mission to polish his badly tarnished image in the Western world. He is still trying hard to play the game. Sorry, Mr. President: It just does not work.

For weeks after the October 2 disappearance of a Saudi journalist, Jamal Khashoggi, after he entered the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has behaved like the leader of a Western democracy: He feared there might have been a murder of the Saudi journalist, which Saudi officials later admitted; speaking loud and louder, he asked the Saudi authorities to bring the journalist’s killers to justice; he offered them a trial in Turkey, and asked for their extradition; he urged the House of Saud to find and hand over to justice those who may have ordered the murder. He also shared audio evidence of the murder with Western leaders. Yet Erdoğan’s public image in the more civilized parts of the world looks closer to that of the Saudi royals than to any Western leader. For that, he has can only himself to blame.

“Erdoğan championing the basic human rights of a journalist” sounds grossly oxymoronic. In its annual report in December, the Committee to Protect Journalists wrote:

“Turkey remains the world’s worst jailer for the second consecutive year, with 73 journalists behind bars, compared with 81 last year. Dozens more still face trial, and fresh arrests take place regularly”.

In Turkey, during the two-year state of emergency after a failed coup against Erdoğan’s government in July 2016, more than 100,000 people have been imprisoned, including academics, lawyers, journalists and opposition politicians. More than 50,000 people remain in prison, according to Amnesty International, and 100,000 have been purged from government service. The Vienna-based International Press Institute tweeted on Oct. 25: “Gruesome nature of #Khashoggi murder should not distract from #Turkey’s own persecution of journalists”.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271938/islam-classes-germany-hugh-fitzgerald

DORTMUND, Germany — It was the second week of Islam class, and the teacher, Mansur Seddiqzai, stood in front of a roomful of Muslim teens and pointed to the sentence on the chalkboard behind him: “Islam does not belong to Germany.”

He scanned the room and asked, “Who said this?”

Hands shot up. “The AfD?” one student with a navy blue headscarf said, referring to Germany’s far-right anti-refugee party. “No,” Seddiqzai shook his head. “Seehofer,” tried another. “Yes, and who is that?” “A minister,” said a third.

Finally, someone put it all together, identifying Horst Seehofer, the head of Bavaria’s conservative Christian Social Union and Chancellor Angela Merkel’s interior minister and coalition partner, who has on multiple occasions threatened to torpedo her government over the issue of immigration.

“Yes, that’s right,” Seddiqzai said, turning to the others. “And what do you think? Is he correct?”

The article on teaching Islam to Muslims in German schools starts right off the bat by affixing labels to the AfD party: “far-right” and “anti-refugee.” The party is not “far-right” in any meaningful sense, unless of course being critical of Islam is enough to make a person or a party “far right.” Nor is the party “anti-refugee,” but rather, “anti-Muslim refugees.” There is a difference.

Then comes the remark made by Horst Seehofer, a Bavarian politician and a putative poster-child for intolerance. He is quoted as saying “Islam does not belong to Germany.” We are meant to be offended by this remark, not to stop and consider what Seehofer meant. The teacher, Mansur Seddiqzai, might have told his students that Seehofer had both a historical and an ideological justification for his remarks. First, Muslims were never part of Germany’s history until the 1960s, with the influx of Turkish gastarbeiter, male guest workers, who came to work in West Germany’s mines and factories, sent money home, and upon retirement most moved back to their families in Turkey. It is only in the last few decades that vast numbers of Muslim migrants, including families, have been allowed in to Germany, with the consequences we can all see. Second, ideologically Islam was never part of Germany’s religious, political, or intellectual history, but rightly regarded as an alien creed. Third, Seehofer may also have been thinking of how Muslims themselves are taught to regard non-Muslims — that is, with contempt and hostility — and further told to keep their distance from them, not to befriend them, for “they are friends only with each other.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-best-bad-brexit-deal-1542239961

Theresa May has finally struck a deal with Brussels for Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union, and it reminds us of what Winston Churchill said about democracy—the worst form of government except for all the others.

Mrs. May sold the plan to her balky cabinet in a five-hour meeting on Wednesday. And if her plan survives vetting in Parliament, the policy outline will manage Britain’s departure from the EU, with a second round of talks on the post-Brexit trading relationship to come.

Most details aren’t controversial. Those include provisions on the status of EU citizens in Britain and Brits living in the EU, and the money Britain will contribute to the EU budget under commitments made before the 2016 Brexit referendum.

The rub concerns the indefinite trading agreement that Brussels demanded to avoid imposing a hard border between Northern Ireland, which is part of the U.K., and the Republic of Ireland that is remaining in the EU. Mrs. May has agreed that the entire U.K. will remain within the EU customs union if some other U.K.-EU trade deal isn’t struck. Britain will accept some EU regulations, and economic rules still could diverge over time between Northern Ireland and the rest of the U.K.

Pro-Brexit Tories are right to call this a bad deal—“vassal state stuff,” in the words of the always colorful Brexiteer Boris Johnson. It limits Britain’s ability to negotiate its own trade deals unless Britain can first negotiate a new trading arrangement with Brussels.

But it’s the best, and currently the only, serious option on the table. Reimposing a hard border for Northern Ireland, which would be necessary without a withdrawal deal, would renege on Britain’s commitments under the Good Friday peace agreement of 1998 and risk re-igniting sectarian strife. Britain also has refused to accept a Brussels proposal to create a new customs border between Northern Ireland and the rest of the U.K., though this would make the most economic sense.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/its-a-crisis-of-civilization-in-mexico-250-000-dead-37-400-missing-1542213374?cx_testId=16&cx_testVariant=cx&cx_artPos=3&cx_tag=collabctx&cx_navSource=newsReel#cxrecs_s

EL FUERTE, Mexico—One recent day, a line of grieving mothers armed with picks and shovels worked their way across a muddy field looking for Mexico’s dead and missing, their own children among them.

“It smells bad here,” said Lizbeth Ortega, a member of Las Rastreadoras de El Fuerte, or the Trackers of El Fuerte, a group of mothers who look for missing people.

The mothers literally wear their pain. Some don white T-shirts, like Ms. Ortega’s, which has a blown-up photograph of her daughter Zumiko, kidnapped almost three years ago and still missing. On the back, her shirt says “I’ll search for you until I find you.”

Other mothers wear green shirts with the words “Promise Fulfilled.” They are the ones who have found the bodies of their missing children.

That day, the mothers scoured the site outside El Fuerte, a town in Sinaloa state, on Mexico’s northern Pacific Coast, looking for one of two men presumably kidnapped by cartel gunmen in recent weeks. One body had already been found in a field. The women believed the other may be nearby. In the end, they came up empty.

“This is my life,” said Mirna Medina, a forceful woman who holds the group together. “Digging up holes.”

Her son, who sold CDs by a gas station, was kidnapped in 2014. Three years later to the day, she and the other mothers of the search group dug up his remains. “I felt his presence,” she said, remembering the day and breaking out in tears. “I wanted to find him alive, but at least I found him.”

Some 37,000 people in Mexico are categorized as “missing” by the government. The vast majority are believed to be dead, victims of the country’s spiraling violence that has claimed more than 250,000 lives since 2006. The country’s murder rate has more than doubled to 26 per 100,000 residents, five times the U.S. figure.

Because the missing aren’t counted as part of the country’s official murder tally, it is likely Mexico’s rate itself is higher.