RUTHFULLY YOURS

Instead of trying to silence the global voice against his increasingly autocratic governance, and oppressing millions who do not respect him, Erdogan could try to earn respect by having a little mercy on dissidents.

Although there has been no ruling so far that Fethullah Gulen was the mastermind behind the attempted coup, 150,000 people have been purged, and they, their families and perhaps a million Turks are decrying Erdogan’s unjust behavior.

So, officially, they remain “terrorists”, even though they were acquitted of charges of terrorism.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is in an odd mood: He is trying to convince the international community that he is not Hitler. Most recently, Erdogan’s government ordered Google to de-list more than 40 URLs that reported about the Turkish government’s recent crackdown on journalists and other critics that compared Turkey’s president to Hitler.

Instead of trying to silence the global voice against his increasingly autocratic governance, and oppressing millions who do not respect him, he could try to earn respect by having a little mercy on dissidents. That is probably too much to expect from someone who once infamously said that “If you pity you will be pitied”.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is trying to convince the international community that he is not Hitler. (Photo by Elif Sogut/Getty Images)

In the aftermath of a failed coup against his government in July 2016, Erdogan has dismissed 150,000 public employees, citing their alleged links with Fethullah Gulen, a Muslim cleric in self-exile in Pennsylvania, whom Erdogan claims was the mastermind behind the attempted putsch. The Ankara government also has arrested more than 50,000 people on the same charges.

Although there has been no ruling so far that Gulen was, in fact, the mastermind behind the attempted coup, 150,000 people have been purged, and they, their families and perhaps a million Turks are decrying Erdogan’s unjust behavior. The victims are not only the “Gulenists”: The purge has targeted a wide spectrum of dissidents including anti-Islamist leftists of different views. In just one week in May, Turkey’s Interior Ministry said, 1,284 suspects were detained in “counter-terrorism raids”.

About terrorism and Islamist violence, Christian leaders offer only words of relativism and moral equivalence. Is it possible that after two recent big massacres of Christians, Catholic leaders have not a single word of courage and honor, but only the same offer of the other cheek?

Our secular elites condemn proselytizing only when it is practiced by Christians, never when practiced by Muslims.

In Syria and Iraq, there are dozens, if not hundreds, of places of Christian worship that Islamic fundamentalists have demolished in the past three years. These images, along with the mass decapitations and the rape of the minorities, shock the public, it seems, for one day.

We do not yet know enough about the three terrorists who, saying “This is for Allah!”, killed and wounded so many in London on June 4, but consider these two recent scenes:

Scene one: Manchester, United Kingdom, the “free world”. A British-born Muslim terrorist prays in a former church. All around him, the Christian sites and congregations accepted being turned into Islamic sites. The day after, this terrorist goes on a rampage, murdering 22 concert-goers.

Scene two: Minya, Egypt, the “unfree world”. An Islamist terror group stops a bus full of Christian pilgrims. The terrorists demand that their victims recite the Islamic creed, the shahaada. The Christians refuse to abandon Christianity and become Muslims. The Islamists murder them, one by one.

What do these scenes tell us? Christians resist Islam more in the Middle East than in Europe.

Salman Abedi, the British terrorist who massacred 22 innocent men, women and children at the Manchester Arena, could, every day, enter what was once a beautiful Christian church, consecrated in 1883. It was desecrated in the 1960s, during a great wave of secularization. People still remember the Methodist Church that it was until it was bought by the local Syrian Muslim community to make it a place of Islamic worship, the Didsbury Mosque. One can still see the typical architecture of a church, from the bell tower to the windows. But inside, instead of an altar, Abedi would be headed to the mihrab, the niche in the mosque that indicates the direction of Mecca. The pulpit is still there, but it is no longer used by a Christian pastor. It is used by the imam for the Khutba, the Islamic prayer.

Outside the Didsbury Mosque there is a sign announcing: “Do you want to know more about Islam? Come and socialize”. Such a sign for Christianity would be unthinkable in any European city. Our secular elites condemn proselytizing only when it is practiced by Christians, never when practiced by Muslims. On YouTube, an Islamist organization celebrates “the church converted to a mosque”. Instead of the times for Mass, there is another sign: “Prayer Room for Men”.

A few days after the Manchester attack, Islamists again struck Christians; this time, pilgrims in Egypt. That attack took place after Pope Francis’s trip to Egypt, where he offered the local suffering Christians only a vague condemnation of “every form of hatred in the name of religion”. The head of the Catholic Church evidently did not have the courage to address the question of Islamic fundamentalism, as had his predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI, at Regensburg.

LONDON—The third terror attack in Britain in as many months laid bare a growing challenge to Europe’s police and intelligence agencies and prompted Prime Minister Theresa May to say tolerance of Islamist extremism in the country had gone too far.

The attack, which killed seven people and was claimed by Islamic State, interrupted the campaigning for national elections for a second time and shook confidence in the country’s counterterrorism strategy, which Mrs. May said would be reviewed.

“Since the emergence of the threat from Islamist-inspired terrorism, our country has made significant progress in disrupting plots and protecting the public. But it is time to say enough is enough,” Mrs. May said on Sunday.

Mrs. May warned that more must be done to stop people from becoming radicalized, pointing out that attackers have been inspired by those that have come before, often using unsophisticated means.

She added that in the U.K. there is “too much tolerance” of extremism and more must be done to stamp it out, saying the government will consider lengthier prison sentences for extremist-related offenses.

She took aim at internet companies for what she said was allowing extremism—a “perversion” of the Islamic faith—to flourish online.

“We cannot allow this ideology the safe space it needs to breed. Yet that is precisely what the internet and the big companies that provide internet based services provide,” Mrs. May said.

With voting set for Thursday, campaigning will resume on Monday, with security issues likely to take center stage. For Mrs. May, the issue is a double-edged sword: As a former Home Secretary from 2010 to 2016, she knows the issue inside out. But any lapses that emerge from investigations of possible failings by the police or security services could also be laid at her door.

Three knife-wielding men carried out the deadly rampage in the capital Saturday night, plowing a rented white van into pedestrians on London Bridge and then indiscriminately stabbing people in a lively area of pubs and restaurants nearby. In addition to those killed, dozens were injured, with 21 of them in critical condition on Sunday.

Police ended the violence by shooting and killing the assailants just eight minutes after they received the first reports of the bridge incident.

Islamic State on Sunday said on its official Amaq news agency that a “covert unit” had carried out the attack.

Police haven’t released the identities of the three men. At least one of the men was born in Pakistan, a Western security official said. It wasn’t clear when the man came to Britain or whether he had acquired British citizenship. CONTINUE AT SITE

Saturday’s terror attack in the heart of London, Britain’s third murderous assault in 72 days, poses a difficult choice for free societies: Do more to contain this internal Islamist insurgency now, or risk a political backlash that will result in even more draconian limits on civil liberties.

No group had taken responsibility by midday Sunday, but the operation that killed seven and wounded 48 bore the hallmarks of recent jihadist atrocities. The London Bridge area and nearby Borough Market are packed with bars and restaurants popular with tourists and young people. The three alleged perpetrators rammed a van into pedestrians, then began stabbing people before police shot them.

Prime Minister Theresa May said Saturday’s attack wasn’t directly linked to the suicide bombing committed by Salman Abedi at a pop concert in Manchester last month. But the three attacks in succession show why governments must target the threat at its roots, in self-isolating Muslim communities that reject mainstream values and create homegrown or Islamic State-inspired radicals like Abedi.

On this front, Mrs. May is well ahead of many of her European counterparts. The Prime Minister in a speech Sunday morning outlined a new counterterror strategy that puts ideology and Muslim integration at the forefront. The trio of recent attacks in Britain, she said, were “bound together by the single evil ideology of Islamist extremism.”

Mrs. May went on to call for a battle of ideas against Islamism and tough love for British Muslims who have failed to confront radicals in their mosques and community centers. Said the Prime Minister: “We need to live our lives not in a series of separated, segregated communities, but as one truly United Kingdom.”

Mrs. May suggested this would involve “difficult and often embarrassing conversations” with the Muslim community, and she is right. This has to include an end to political coddling of so-called soft Islamist groups and imams who treat candor about the Islamist threat as anti-Muslim or refuse to identify radicals in their midst.

The president of Venezuela, whose government shoots protesters in the street, recently thanked the international community for its “universal vote of confidence” in that country’s commitment to human rights.

The Cuban deputy foreign minister, whose government imprisons thousands of political opponents, once said Cuba has historic prestige “in the promotion and protection of all human rights.”
How can these people get away with saying such things? Because they have been elected to the U.N. Human Rights Council, whose members are — on paper — charged with “upholding the highest standards” of human rights.

Last month, a U.S. Senate subcommittee met to consider whether the United States should remain a part of the council. Expert witnesses shared their viewpoints, not on the question of whether America supports human rights — of course we do, and very strongly. The question was whether the Human Rights Council actually supports human rights or is merely a showcase for dictatorships that use their membership to whitewash brutality.

When the council focuses on human rights instead of politics, it advances important causes. In North Korea, its attention has led to action on human rights abuses. In Syria, it has established a commission on the atrocities of Bashar al-Assad’s regime.

All too often, however, the victims of the world’s most egregious human rights violations are ignored by the very organization that is supposed to protect them.

Venezuela is a member of the council despite the systematic destruction of civil society by the government of Nicolás Maduro through arbitrary detention, torture and blatant violations of freedom of the press and expression. Mothers are forced to dig through trash cans to feed their children. This is a crisis that has been 18 years in the making. And yet, not once has the Human Rights Council seen fit to condemn Venezuela.

Cuba’s government strictly controls the media and severely restricts the Cuban people’s access to the Internet. Thousands are arbitrarily detained each year, with some political prisoners serving long sentences. Yet Cuba has never been condemned by the council; it, too, is a member.In 2014, Russia invaded Ukraine and took over Crimea. This illegal occupation resulted in thousands of civilian deaths and injuries, as well as arbitrary detentions. No special meeting of the Human Rights Council was called, and the abuses continue to mount.

The council has been given a great responsibility. It has been charged with using the moral power of universal human rights to be the world’s advocate for the most vulnerable among us. The United Nations must reclaim the legitimacy of this organization.

For all of us, this is an urgent task. Human rights are central to the mission of the United Nations. Not only are they the right thing to promote, they are also the smart thing to promote. In April, I dedicated the U.S. presidency of the U.N. Security Council to making the connection between human rights and peace and security.

Next week, I will travel to Geneva to address the Human Rights Council about the United States’ concerns.