RUTHFULLY YOURS

Erdogan came to office in 2003 with a policy of “zero problems with neighbors,” but has since led Turkey to problems with most, if not all, of them.

Turkey’s foreign policy choices and current crises have combined to make Erdogan reach out to Israel for help.

Israel has weighed the price and found it acceptable: Israel will pay Turkey $20 million; Turkey will expel the Hamas leadership from Istanbul and will buy Israeli gas.

The restoration of relations with Israel is less a political reconciliation than an admission of the utter bankruptcy of Turkey’s last five years of diplomatic endeavor.

The announcement of the restoration of Israel-Turkish relations should be seen in the context of Turkey having nowhere else to go.

Turkey’s relations with Israel have been strained, to put it mildly, since 2010 when, through a non-profit organization, Turkey funded the 2010 Gaza Flotilla aimed at breaking the Israeli-Egyptian blockade of the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip.

After a bloody confrontation, which ended in the deaths of nine Turks, Turkey demanded that Israel be tried in the International Criminal Court (ICC) and subjected to UN sanction. The ICC ruled that Israel’s actions did not constitute war crimes. In addition, the UN’s Palmer Commission concluded that the blockade of Gaza was legal, and that the IDF commandos who boarded the Mavi Marmara ship had faced “organized and violent resistance from a group of passengers,” and were therefore required to use force for their own protection. The commission, however, did label the commandos’ force “excessive and unreasonable.”

For my male readers, can I ask you a question? Have you ever, purely by accident, fallen inside a woman? I ask because this is what seemed to have happened to Saudi millionaire Ehsan Abdulaziz, who was accused of raping a woman. He was cleared of all charges when he made it clear that he accidently fell inside of her.

A Saudi millionaire has been cleared of raping a teenager after claiming he might have accidentally penetrated the 18-year-old when he tripped and fell.

Property developer Ehsan Abdulaziz, 46, was accused of forcing himself on the young woman as she slept off a night of drinking on the sofa in his plush flat in Maida Vale, west London.

He had already had sex with her 24-year-old friend and said he might have fallen on top of the teenager while his penis was poking out the top of his underwear.

Married father-of-one Mr Abdulaziz was cleared of one count of rape following a trial at Southwark Crown Court. …

“What was once unthinkable is now unstoppable,” boasted U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. More ominous words were never spoken.

Ban was congratulating himself and nearly two hundred of his global elite cohorts on their achievement in signing the Paris Agreement on climate change. In classic progressive style, however, his pep rally sloganeering was also a none-too-subtle threat, à la “Forward.” For as the Agreement makes perfectly clear, the “what” that was once unthinkable, but is now seemingly unstoppable, is the world’s drunken march into international neo-Marxism, aka global tyranny.

The great revolution of political progressivism was its creation of an intermediary mechanism, the administrative state, to filter the relation between the oppressors and the oppressed. The regulatory bureaucracy depersonalizes tyranny, diluting its real meaning with legalistic paperwork and soporific incrementalism. The bureaucratic labyrinth, with its officious, abstract, uncommunicative language, is the perfect guardian for the craven greed and power lust that occupy the offices on the top floor but dare not show their true faces in a “democratic” society.

With the exception of Namibia and Botswana, post colonial Africa, once hailed as the “emerging Continent” is now submerged in tyranny, poverty, human rights abuses, and spreading Islamic jihad… ….rsk

NAIROBI, Kenya—Rwandan voters are expected on Friday to approve a constitutional amendment that would allow President Paul Kagame to stay in office for nearly two more decades, the latest bid by an African leader to push beyond established term limits.

Mr. Kagame has effectively ruled Rwanda since his rebel force ended the country’s 1994 genocide. The current constitution says his presidential tenure that began in 2000 must end in 2017. Though he hasn’t said outright that he will run again, he has said that the country should follow the will of the people. State media routinely trumpet his popularity.

He is far from alone. Across Africa, constitutions are being revised and elections delayed as a number of heads of state decide they aren’t quite done yet.

“This is the biggest challenge that we have across the continent: the challenge of saying, ‘Yes it’s time for this one to move on,’” said Yolande Bouka, a researcher with South Africa’s Institute for Security Studies whose coverage includes Rwanda, Burundi and Congo.

After Nigerian elections in April that saw an incumbent accept defeat for the first time in the country’s history, many activists hoped that Africa’s largest economy would usher in a new era of democracy on a continent infamous for rigged elections and lifetime presidents.

Donald Trump’s bizarre proposal to bar all Muslim immigrants from the U.S. has overshadowed a more legitimate concern regarding religion and immigration: Middle East Christians who are desperate to escape the genocidal campaign against them by Islamic State.

Islamist terror attacks like the ones in Paris and San Bernardino, Calif., have underlined the need for more and better vetting of refugees from the Middle East who seek safety in the U.S. But with tens of thousands pushing at the gate, who should to get first preference?

In our view, as rabbis, any immediate admissions should focus on providing a haven for the remnants of historic Christian communities of the Middle East. Christians in Iraq and Syria have been suffering longer than other groups, and are fleeing not just for safety but because they have been targeted for extinction. In a region strewn with desperate people, their situation is even more dire. Christians (and Yazidis, ethnic Kurds who follow a pre-Islamic religion) have long been targeted by Muslim groups—not only Islamic State, or ISIS—for ethnic cleansing. Churches have been burned, priests arrested.

Hungary and Greece have broken ranks with the European Union in signalling they want nothing to do with the recently introduced EU labelling laws requiring Jewish products originating in Judea and Samaria (West Bank), East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights to have special labels and not be marked “made in Israel”.

These decisions follow hard on the heels of European Parliament delegation for relations with Israel chairman – Fulvio Martusciello – warning:

“The decision to label products was a mistake. Europe is loud about Israel, but quiet about 200 other conflicts around the world.”

Hungarian Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó announced Hungary’s decision:

“We do not support the decision to make a special mark on products coming from the West Bank or the Golan Heights. This step is inefficient and illogical. It would only hurt attempts to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”

Greece’s decision was communicated by letter from its Foreign Minister to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu after a visit by Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras to Israel – when extensive bilateral cooperation in economic matters, technology, science, education, trade, energy, and agriculture were concluded.

Islamist extremist Harry S. wasn’t in Syria for long. But during his stay there, he claims, Islamic State leaders repeatedly tried to recruit him to commit terror attacks in Germany. Security officials believe he could be telling the truth.

It was an early summer morning in the Syrian desert, with not a cloud in the sky, when Mohamed Mahmoud asked those gathered around him: “Here are some prisoners. Which of you wants to waste them?”

Not long before, Islamic State (IS) had taken the city of Palmyra, and now jihadists from Germany and Austria were to participate in the executions of some of the prisoners taken in the operation. They drove to the site of the executions in Toyota pick-ups, bringing along an IS camera team in order to document the atrocity in the city of antique ruins. Even then, Mohamed Mahmoud was known to German security officials for his repeated propaganda-video calls to join the jihad. On that early summer day in Palmyra, though, he didn’t just incite others. He grabbed a Kalashnikov himself and began firing. That day, Mahmoud and his group of executioners are thought to have killed six or seven prisoners.

The story comes from someone who was in Palmyra on that day: Harry S., a 27-year-old from Bremen. “I saw it all,” he says.

Harry S. returned to Germany from Syria and is now in investigative custody. He has told security officials everything about the brief time he spent with Islamic State and has also demonstrated his readiness to deliver extensive testimony to German public prosecutors. He stands accused of membership in a terrorist group. His lawyer Udo Würtz declined to offer a detailed response when contacted, but said of his client: “He wants to come clean.”

Obama is betting the last of his foreign policy cred on beating ISIS by fixing Syria through a peace process that brings together Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and just about everybody who is anybody in the international terrorism and regime change racket to fight the ISIS war that he doesn’t want to fight.

There’s just one little problem. Nobody on the guest list wants to fix Syria. They want to control it.

The reason that ISIS exists is the same reason that Syria can’t be fixed. ISIS didn’t get so big because Muslims are angry about our foreign policy. It got huge because Sunni Muslims hate Shiite Muslims.

Al Qaeda in Iraq didn’t become popular because it killed American soldiers, but because it suicide bombed Iraqi Shiites. It really took off once there was a civil war underway between Syrian Shiites and Sunni Islamists.

Osama bin Laden wanted Al Qaeda in Iraq to focus on Americans, not Shiites. Zarqawi knew better. Al Qaeda’s base in Iraq was a Sunni population that hated their Shiite and Kurdish neighbors even more than they hated the American soldiers trying to keep the peace between them. By massacring Shiites, Al Qaeda in Iraq stopped being another franchise of a goofy Saudi rich kid making snuff videos for Qatar’s fake Al Jazeera news network and instead became the protectors of the Sunni minority.

Tensions are running high in the northern English town of Ashton-under-Lyne after a video circulating online showed a gang of what is reported as British-Pakistani youths attacking young “white girls” at a bus stop.

The incident, which occured in the town just outside of Manchester, has led to a number of groups calling for a ‘march’ or ‘rally’ in the town this coming Saturday, with the English Defence League quickly setting up an ‘Ashton-Under-Lyne’ branch of the group.

The video, which has been removed from YouTube but can still be found on LiveLeak, describes the incident last night as, “This is a video that has been taken in Ashton Under Lyne, England that shows a gang of Muslim youths attacking a group of white kids. Just before the filming had started one of the muslim youths had punched one of the white girls in the face. This is becoming a regular occurence on the streets of the UK.”