The Case against 'Occupied Palestinian Territory' - Steve Apfel

 

by Steve Apfel

Zahir Muhsein: “The Palestinian people do not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the State of Israel for our Arab unity.

The Presidents of the European Union and South Africa made the common claim: Israel occupies Palestinian territory. They sought to stop the ‘wrongful’ labelling, ‘Product of Israel’ and substitute it with, ‘Made in a settlement in the ‘Occupied Palestinian Territories’ (OPT)

Martin Schulz, ex President of the EU, warned Israel that Europe will have its way.

"There is enormous pressure, also in the European Parliament, to label products because a lot of my colleagues consider the settlements illegal. They think the rule should be that products coming from regions with an illegal status couldn’t have normal access to the European market."

Advocate for Israel

My Lord, the court will hear evidence that the real estate given the name, ‘Occupied Palestinian Territory’ (OPT) is not real. There are two hard reasons for that:

(1) War records turn up nothing to support the name.

(2) Law and statutes turn up nothing to support it.

Evidence will be led that OPT reflects a political policy or aspiration. There really is no Palestinian territory to be occupied.

Evidence will be led that the move to debar Israeli products made in the ‘OPT’ has everything to do with lobby groups and politics but nothing to do with informing and protecting the customer. To the contrary, the label would trick unwary customers. It would also cast suspicion on any product labelled thus, and be used as a backdoor trade boycott of Israel.

To begin, certain facts of history are too real to dispute. In the 1948 War Egypt took the Gaza Strip, and Jordan took Judea and Samaria, the so-named “West Bank.” Egypt did not claim sovereignty in Gaza, but in 1950 Jordan annexed Judea and Samaria. The annexation was not recognized by the international community, other than Pakistan and the UK. Even the Arab countries objected to what Jordan did. They threatened to kick it out of the Arab League.

After the Six Day War in June 1967 the territories,which were earmarked for the national home of the Jewish people by the (binding) Mandate Charter of San Remo of 1920, finally came under Israeli control. So much for the foundation facts.

With My Lord’s permission I call my first witness. Professor Judge Stephen M Schwebel was elected to the ICC in January 1981. He was subsequently re-elected twice, serving as president of the court from 1997–2000:

"A state [Israel] acting in lawful exercise of its right of self-defense may seize and occupy foreign territory as long as such seizure and occupation are necessary to its self-defence. Where the prior holder of territory had seized that territory unlawfully [Jordan], the state which subsequently takes that territory in the lawful exercise of self-defence has, against that prior holder, a better title. As between Israel, acting defensively in 1948 and 1967, on the one hand, and her Arab neighbours, acting aggressively, in 1948 and 1967, on the other, Israel has the better title in the territory… including the whole of Jerusalem, than do Jordan and Egypt.

"You hear that, Mr Presidents. Israel has more right than Jordan to be occupying the 'West Bank' and more right than Egypt to be occupying Gaza. Or had more right: today not one Jew blights the landscape of Gaza."

No “Palestinian” territory up to now. But don’t lose hope. It could be ahead of us, though the signs are not good. For 19 long years Jordan ruled the 'West Bank'. Between 1948 and 1967 it had the opportunity to create Palestine on the 'West Bank'. It did not. A crying shame, because then you could aver, with some credibility, that Israel occupies Palestinian territory. If only Jordan had not made 'West Bank' dwellers become citizens of Jordan.

So Mr Presidents, here you are, required to explain when and how the territories became Palestinian and occupied by Israel.

But wait. That would be putting the cart before the horse. You’d best tell the court at what point the Palestinians emerged as a people. After all, there must be a people by that name to claim their territory. I want you to refer to a single international instrument that refers to the Palestinian people.

No?

How about starting in 1922 with the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine? It gave Britain, the mandatory power, the following obligation:

“The Administration of Palestine, while ensuring that the rights and position of other sections of the population are not prejudiced, shall facilitate Jewish immigration under suitable conditions and shall encourage, in co-operation with the Jewish agency…close settlement by Jews, on the land…”

No Palestinians, only “other sections of the population.” Let’s move on. Shall we try November 1947 and UN General Assembly Resolution No. 181. It provided for “Independent Arab and Jewish States and the Special International Regime for the City of Jerusalem…”

Note: an Arab not a Palestinian state. But try and try again.

The year 1967 would be the next time to look. By now Israel has taken Judea and Samaria off Jordan’s hands, and become the occupying power. Hopefully now we shall find the Palestinian people.

The place to look for them would be in UN Security Council Resolution 242 which contained proposals of the UN Security Council for resolving the “Arab-Israeli conflict.”

Note the word ‘Arab’. Nowhere in the UN resolution can we find a party to the conflict called the Palestinians. The resolution was adopted to end the state of belligerency then existing between the “States concerned”: Israel, Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. No Palestinian people before 1967!

My Lord, at this point I can do no better than call on a Palestinian leader. Zahir Muhsein was head of the PLO Military Department and a member of the PLO Executive Committee:

“The Palestinian people do not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the State of Israel for our Arab unity. In reality, today, there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese….The moment we reclaim our right to …Palestine, we will not wait …to unite Palestine and Jordan.”

Of course they won’t wait. Under Jordanian control for 19 years, Arab leaders in the territories were more than happy to be under Jordanian rule.

But let’s go past 1967 and see if we cannot give the Palestinian Arabs a right to have a state in the occupied territory. You shall not, Mr Presidents, be felled by the facts of history, however indisputable, or the opinion of one jurist, however exalted.

We call on Professor Talia Einhorn, from the T.M.C. Asser Institute for international law in The Hague.

“There is nothing in international law that requires a Palestinian state between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean, not even the UN Partition Resolution of November 29, 1947…it is merely a recommendation and nothing more…. The fact that the Arab states did not accept the Partition Plan voids the recommendation of any legal basis.”

Thank you, Professor Einhorn. Still no sign of Palestinian territories.

To take us forward I now call on Alan Baker, the legal counsel for Israel in the drafting of the Oslo Accords. Perhaps the agreements still in force may give the Palestinians a right to the occupied territories.

Mr. Baker, could you start with the 1947 Partition Plan. Explain to the court why the Palestinians have no land to call their own.

“Had the Arabs accepted the Plan of Partition, passed by the UN in 1947, they too would have had a state, and that would have been the end to Jewish rights of settlement in Judea and Samaria (the West Bank). But the Arabs did not accept the Plan. Hence those Jewish rights to settle the “West Bank” did not end. Jewish settlements are not illegal.

"In 1993 Rabin and Arafat signed the declaration of principles on the White House lawn. This aimed to: “Establish a Palestinian Interim Self-Government Authority, the elected Council for the Palestinian people…for a transitional period not exceeding five years, leading to a permanent settlement. Observe: The Declaration made no mention of a Palestinian state as the goal; nor did it call for a cessation of Jewish settlement activity.

"Then, in 1995, Israel and the Palestinian Authority (PA) entered into an interim agreement. Again there was no mention of a Palestinian state as the final goal. It provided only for an unspecified “outcome. “Neither side shall initiate or take any step that will change the status of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip pending the outcome of …negotiations. Neither party shall be deemed… to have renounced or waived any of its existing rights, claims or positions.”

Thank you, Mr. Baker. So when Israel signed the 1995 interim agreement, in force to this day, it did not renounce any of its rights or claims to the occupied territories.

Summing up

My Lord, as much as the Presidents of the European Union and South Africa want Gaza and the 'West Bank' to belong to the Palestinians, they cannot. There simply is no Palestinian territory for Israel to occupy. Territories by that name are no more than a political objective, an aspiration, a denial of events and the law.

 

Steve Apfel is an economist and costing specialist, but most of all a prolific author of fiction and non-fiction. His blog, ‘Balaam’s curse’ https://enemiesofzion.wordpress.com/ is followed in Europe, America, Canada, Asia, S. Africa, Israel, Australia and New Zealand.

Source: https://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/309140

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How Civil Rights Made America a Critical Race Theocracy - Daniel Greenfield

 

by Daniel Greenfield

Civil rights isn’t just regulating what you do, but how you think.

 

When Obama wanted to defend his ties to Jeremiah Wright, he began his speech by denouncing America's "original sin of slavery". The phrase is widely and unthinkingly used. And its consequences are the 1619 Project and critical race theory. If slavery is America’s original sin, then the purpose of America and her people becomes striving to atone for that primal sin.

Suburban Democrat housewives reading Robin DiAngelo and corporate struggle sessions forcing members to affiliate by race are just striving to atone for America’s “original sin”.

And if they resemble a cult, it’s because civil rights moved from the legal to the spiritual.

Dismantling the legal infrastructure of segregation took on religious and psychological overtones. The legitimacy of ending school segregation was tainted by psychosocial nonsense like the ‘Doll Study’ which found that children preferred white dolls to black dolls. Even then the original sin of civil rights was that its more academic proponents could not properly define rights, and sought affirmative remedies that transformed how we thought rather than what we did.

What we do can be in the legitimate purview of government, what we think is not. And yet over the years civil rights became obsessed with the origins of discrimination in the human mind.

Countless tests were devised, many absurd, (“What color is a gorilla’s skin underneath the fur?” one particularly awkward racist test for racism asked) that were meant to measure our thoughts.

The less racist our society became in function, the more civil rights fixated on a gestalt of psychosocial racism which explained racial disparities by blaming hidden thoughts leading to assumptions that perpetrated systemic racism even as its white perpetrators remained unaware.

The truly dangerous part of this conclusion was that the focus of discrimination had moved from actions to thoughts. Critical race theory is being imposed on everyone from schoolchildren to soldiers because civil rights violations had been redefined from the physical to the mental. Civil rights was no longer fighting separate drinking fountains, but unconscious and implicit biases.

The National Guard wasn’t being sent to open up schools, but to open up the human mind.

When the government tells you what to do, it risks becoming a tyranny, but when it starts telling you what to think, it becomes a theocracy. Critical race theory, like most of America’s experiments in secular theocracy, came out of academia whose experts have failed miserably when it comes to tangible policy results, but excel at telling people what to think.

The original sin of academia is constructing grand theories. The social sciences found the root causes for its grand theories in the interface between society and psychology. Their solutions begin with having the government change how people live and then when that doesn’t work, changing how they think.

The sociologists who wrecked the black industrial communities of the north with welfare refused to accept responsibility for the disaster they helped cause and instead began blaming racial disparities on the hidden workings of society and the human mind.

While academic civil rights was psychoanalyzing America, the civil rights movement had soured from Martin Luther King Jr’s Christian emphasis on national redemption across racial lines to the Islamic tribalism of Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam in whose mythology black people were chosen and white people were a tainted race created through eugenic breeding. America was an evil empire doomed to be destroyed by the arrival of UFOs protecting the master race.

The next generation of activist clergy was outwardly Christian, but had come either directly, like Jeremiah Wright, Obama’s mentor, or indirectly like James Hal Cone, Warnock’s mentor, through the racist ideology of the Nation of Islam. When Jeremiah Wright shrieked, "God Damn America! That’s in the Bible," he meant it literally with America as Babylon and Rome. To the Black Hebrew Israelites, whose movement has been linked to a number of recent terrorist attacks, America is Edom. The common theme is that America is a mythic evil to be destroyed.

The set of ideas that people associate with critical race theory fuses the two corrupt successors of the civil rights movement, academic racial psychoanalysis and racial nationalism, through the writings of second generation black nationalists who had come through academia, like Ibram X. Kendi, and journalism, like Ta-Nehisi Coates and the 1619 Project’s Nikole Hannah-Jones.

The modern proponents of critical race theory fuse academic beliefs in subconscious systemic racism and black nationalist convictions that America and white people are inherently evil.

That’s where critical race theory becomes critical race theocracy.

This brand of ‘wokeness’ is legitimately theological because its origins lie as much in black religious identitarian movements as in the academic jargon in which it cloaks its racism. The synthesis of the two very different literary genres results in strange poetry, personal confessionals wrapped in bad sociology and worse history, mythic appeals and nonsense jargon, that runs through everything from the 1619 Project to ‘Between the World and Me’.

Critical race theory’s defenders insist that it’s an academic movement, that its proponents are experts, and that it just wants to discuss its ideas, but it operates like a theocracy, silencing and suppressing opponents, critics, and even insufficiently radical supporters. Its entire rationale is built on denying that anyone can legitimately disagree with it or that debate is even possible. A movement that dismisses reason and objectivity as forms of oppressive whiteness has no interest in dialogue, only in terrorizing its way to power as racial nationalists seek to do.

The Nazis decreed theories and creative works off limits because they believed that ideas could not be separated from the race of their creators. Critical race activists agree that theories and works carry the race of their creators in their intellectual DNA. The Nazis banned some works over ‘Jewishness’ while critical race theory activists seek to ban them over their ‘whiteness’.

The most brutal theocracies are those which are the most pessimistic about human nature. The Nazis believed that people were animals who could never transcend their biology, Islamists believe that people must be ruthlessly conquered and ruled to bring peace, and leftists believe that power relations doom humanity to cycles of exploitation without an enlightened tyranny.

Critical race theory is infused with the academic pessimism of the Left, the identitarian racial pessimism of black nationalists, and the spiritual pessimism of black nationalist theology. It exists in a perpetual state of struggle and its exceptionalism is rooted in its victimhood. It needs white people as an ultimate enemy whose existence gives it its negative meaning.

Whiteness abstracts white people as a perpetual enemy for a racial and a spiritual struggle.

America’s fall into the grip of this racist theocracy obsessed with a struggle against whiteness, driven by racial paranoia and moral despair, is a direct legacy of the intellectual and moral failings of the aftermath of the civil rights era. These failings were as much white as they were black. While the black family disintegrated in the grip of the welfare state, white elites lost their religion and built an alternative culture whose meaning came from politics and pop culture.

Wokeness is just the horrid synthesis of white secularism and black nationalism, of a society where music is worship, politics is religion, self-medicating is meditation, and activism is faith. The endless narcissistic refractions only produced a victimhood culture whose great crusade is enforcing conformity through the only means possible in a fragmented society that has lost its moral and intellectual underpinnings: online bullying and political terrorism.

Kingian civil rights is inaccessible to a secular society with no concept of forgiveness or humility. It’s also inaccessible to people whose warped version of religion teaches them to hate others.

To paraphrase John Adams, "Civil rights was made only for a moral and religious people, it is wholly inadequate for any other." Critical race theory is the inadequacy of a political society trying to come to grips with moral and religious questions, but with no other tools than power and the abstractions of a scientism that is suited to studying distant galaxies, but not people.

The Founding Fathers, now the enemies of critical race theory whose statues are being torn down, were humble enough to limit the ambit of government to the realm of government. And they made it clear that it was not their role to tell people what to think or to believe.

America held together through conflicts that should have torn the country apart because we fought over the nature of government, not over the nature of man. The Confederate statues that have occasioned so much ire were the legacy of a country that was able to knit together its wounds as former enemies forgave and honored each other in the aftermath of its worst war.

Even when we were a moral and religious people, we did not go to war over what was in our souls. The leftist theocracy terrorizing millions of Americans is particularly unfit to judge souls, but the intellectual failures of academia and the moral failures of elite culture and leftist clergy has localized the failures of the black community in the psychosocial gestalt of systemic racism.

The only way to save black people then becomes controlling how everyone thinks.

Liberal theology had made the civil rights movement into the epochal moral event of America as their ancestors had made the civil war the defining event that transformed the soul of the nation. This was exactly the brand of moral narcissism that Lincoln found so frustrating about the abolitionists long before their distant descendants put on black and began toppling his statues.

Civil rights became a force that gave white liberals meaning. And that was another way of saying that civil rights became a religion. The devolution of civil rights legislation from inhibiting state discrimination based on race to enforcing state discrimination based on race was the trajectory of a theocracy based on the same sort of realpolitik that corrupts religions.

The Founding Fathers removed government restraint while the new theology of civil rights imposes government restraint, first over actions, then over ideas, and finally over thoughts.

Equality has made way for equity and the human mind is the new lunch counter. The only way to achieve civil rights is, as in the Soviet Union, Communist China, Cuba, and every leftist tyranny, by removing civil rights from all and distributing them to the most deserving. The hypocritical corruption of the system demands not just tyranny, but theocracy, not just control over bodies, but over the minds whose owners might question this self-serving arrangement.

What was once a supremely achievable goal, the end of government restraint, has made way for the usual unachievable utopian goal of an ideal society of the supremely enlightened.

The paradoxes of critical race theory come from its paradoxical intellectual origins through the social science academics who believe that everyone can be reeducated and the black nationalists who believe that white people are inescapably evil. They compromise by believing that white people are inescapably evil and must be constantly reeducated anyway.

It’s a compromise that allows white leftists to pursue meaning through civil rights and black nationalists to pursue racial identitarianism while leaving out non-misanthropes of all races.

Ending this nightmare will require confronting the corruption of civil rights. Positive rights lead to tyranny and negative rights to freedom. When we define rights as things the government does for us, rather than things the government stops doing to us, we all end up as slaves. Civil rights cannot and should not be used to achieve equity by chasing racial disparities. That sociological and theological rabbit hole inevitably takes us into the realms of psychology and sin.

Those are places where the government does not belong and should not be allowed to venture.

Critical race theory is less a theory than a theocracy, but both a theory and a theocracy can be torn down by attacking its fundamental assumptions. The failure to challenge theories leads to theocracies. If we want to defeat this theocracy, we need to start with its fundamental assumptions about white evil and black victimhood, and about an original sin that passes not only from fathers to sons, but from plantation owners to recent immigrants.

America and Europe did not invent slavery, but they were the first to comprehensively destroy it. The presumption of guilt that traces every Third World blight or domestic inadequacy to some combination of colonialism, imperialism, and other nonsensical ‘ism’ is false and wrong. We do not need to constantly redeem ourselves for doing what no other civilization managed to do.

We already have.

There is no room for a racial theocracy in America, not in our colleges, our institutions, or our military. Its existence is a declaration of war on not only our past, but our present and our future.

Destroying a village won’t save it and destroying civil rights in the name of civil rights is a farce.

When civil rights isn’t regulating how you treat others, but how you think about them, and how you think about the theories that explain why they’re the victims, that’s an uncivil theocracy.

 

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.

Source: https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/07/how-civil-rights-made-america-critical-race-daniel-greenfield/

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George Soros has been aggressively targeting Israel - Eric Kaufman

 

by Eric Kaufman

Over the past several decades, the left-wing billionaire has been attempting to discredit the Jewish state and weaken the pro-Israel lobby's influence in Washington.

The defeat of Israel's longest-serving Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, demonstrated the rising political influence of both Israeli Arabs (for the first time, a Palestinian [sic] party is a member of a government coalition) and the anti-Israel lobby in America.  Since Democrats returned to power, U.S.-Israel relations have rapidly deteriorated.  Trump, who recognized Jerusalem as the capital of the Jewish state and the Golan Heights as part of Israel, might have been the most pro-Israeli president in American history.  Most Democrats, by contrast, are known to be critical of ex–prime minister Netanyahu's policies while the more progressive ones express openly anti-Semitic sentiments.

Despite Biden's public support for Israel amid the latest clashes between the Israelis and Palestinians, America's left-wing lawmakers appear to blame Israel, rather than Hamas terrorists, for the violence.  To push the Biden administration to rethink its relationship with Israel, pro-Palestinian American elites have been using proxies.  Many of these proxies get their funding from George Soros.

Over the past several decades, the left-wing billionaire has been attempting to discredit the Jewish state and weaken the pro-Israel lobby's influence in Washington.  It was revealed in 2016 that Soros's organization, then known as the Open Society Institute, had begun an ambitious project in 2009 to persuade Europe and the U.S. to "hold Israel accountable" for violations of international law.

The leftist business mogul never criticizes Palestine or Hamas in his speeches while pouring millions of dollars into anti-Israeli initiatives.  According to the NGO Monitor:

OSF [Open Society Foundations] has also provided funding to Palestinian NGOs Al-Haq the Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR), both of which have links to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a terrorist organization designated as such by the US, EU, Canada, and Israel.

These NGOs are leaders in anti-Israel lawfare campaigns.

The NGO Monitor also highlights that Soros's foundations provide financial assistance to the American and European organizations tied to the global anti-Jewish movement BDS, such as the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) and the American Friends Service Committee.  Other Soros money funds a hard-left "Jewish" group called Bend the Arc, which supports progressive Democrats Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, both of whom accused Israel of "terrorism" during the most recent clashes with Hamas.

Finally, as the New York Times proudly informed its readers, the OSF finances the Black Lives Matter movement, yet another tool in Soros's war against the Jewish state.  According to the New York Post, BLM has thrown its full support behind the Palestinians in the ongoing bloody conflict between Hamas and Israel.  The protest group harshly spreads anti-Semitic statements referring to Israel as "an apartheid state."  BLM activists also blame the Israel police for training American cops to commit racist acts of murder while advocating "the eradication of Israel."

Apparently, Soros's influence goes beyond this.  Here's the OSF list of donations to various NGOs from 2015 to 2018 to promote its anti-Israel agenda (go to the link for a larger version).

The OSF's 2020 budget was valued at over $1.2 billion and divided among seven regions.  It allocated $34.3 million to projects in the Middle East and North Africa.  Soros's foundations still provide grants to controversial and politicized NGOs engaged in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, including Breaking the Silence, Gisha, and the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI).

OSF has as its goal financing outlets and journalists to present and promote a distorted version of the conflict based only on the Palestinian narrative.  It's no coincidence that the OSF gave money to political activist Michael Sfard to write his book The Gate and The Wall: Israel, Palestine and The Legal Battle for Human Rights.

Soros-funded organizations have also orchestrated pro-Palestinian demonstrations and protests in Israel, America, and Europe (see, e.g., this article about bail funding).  The NGOs' activities, along with the rise of violence, have increased tensions in the region and certainly influenced the outcome of the 2021 Israeli elections.  It remains to be seen whether Israel's new prime minister, Naftali Bennett, will allow Soros-supported radical groups to undermine or even destroy the Jewish state.

Image: George Soros (cropped).  YouTube screen grab.

To comment, you can find the MeWe post for this article here.

 

Eric Kaufman

Source: https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/07/george_soros_has_been_aggressively_targeting_israel.html

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China Lays Out Blueprint for Taiwan Invasion - Daniel Greenfield

 

by Daniel Greenfield

The takeover of Hong Kong has destroyed the lie that there is going to be One China under Two Systems. There's only one China under the rule of the Communist Party.

 

The question isn't whether China will invade Taiwan, it's increasingly a question of when.

Under the friendly Biden regime, the Communist dictatorship has ramped up its campaign of military intimidation, exhausting Taiwan's air force, and demonstrating air superiority. After finalizing its conquest of Hong Kong, while ignoring weak protests from the rest of the world, it's signaling to Taiwan that it has a choice between voluntarily joining China or being conquered. The takeover of Hong Kong has destroyed the lie that there is going to be One China under Two Systems. There's only one China under the rule of the Communist Party.

 A magazine in China published the outline of a three-stage invasion of Taiwan to mark the centenary of the Chinese Communist Party, as Beijing pushes rhetoric about completing reunification with the island nation.

"We must solemnly warn some people that the road of Taiwan independence only leads to a dead end," the magazine stated on Weibo, according to the report.

According to Naval and Merchant Ships, ballistic missile attacks in the first round would destroy Taiwan's data gathering capabilities, including at airports.

China's short-range ballistic missile, the DF-16, would be deployed in addition to munitions dispensers.

"The attacks against Taiwan's airports would continue until [Chinese] surface troops had accomplished an assault landing," the magazine distributed by the China State Shipbuilding Corporation said.

The second stage of the attack would include cruise missile attacks, including the YJ-91 and CJ-10, launched from land, ships and submarines. People's Liberation Army surface ships would use drones to survey the damage afterward.

The third and final stage would consist of artillery strikes from ships and on-land forces to remove "any remaining obstacles," the article said.

Xi Jinping said Thursday on the Party's centenary that he stands by "an unshakable commitment" to unify China and Taiwan, according to state media.

Nice of Xi to paraphrase Hitler and Stalin without providing proper attribution. 

The bottom line though is that China faces an increasingly weakened America. And it's doubtful that the United States would have actually gone to war to defend Taiwan at any time except maybe under Reagan or George W. Bush. We might put some assets in the general area in the hope that the PRC wouldn't directly provoke a war, but the problem with bluffing when everyone knows you're bluffing is painfully obvious.

China tested the world by ruthlessly suppressing mass civilian protests in Hong Kong. It's now going to drill down to remove any vestiges of free speech and root out Christianity, much the way that Putin is doing with dissident Christian groups in Russia. And then on to Taiwan.

The PRC doesn't actually want to invade Taiwan. It hopes to bring a government to power that would cut a deal with China even as it eliminates any conceivable basis for believing that it would be bound by any such deal. But between the usual useful idiots, the actual agents of China, and people who understand that there may be no Plan B, that may very well happen. 

And the United States has no meaningful response except formal condemnations.  

 

Daniel Greenfield

Source: https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2021/07/china-lays-out-blueprint-taiwan-invasion-daniel-greenfield/

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Recent Petitions Singling Out Israel for Condemnation Are Anti-Semitic - Alan M. Dershowitz

 

by Alan M. Dershowitz

Bassam Eid: "I'm a Palestinian who grew up in a UNWRA refugee camp outside of Jerusalem.... Let me say this as directly as I can: Rep. Omar does not know what she is talking about.

• The bigots who promote these petitions, and the useful idiots who sign them, cannot possibly be motivated by a concern for universal human rights. If they were, they would focus on nations with really horrendous human rights records, such as Iran, which hangs gays, China, which imprisons Muslim dissidents, Russia, which murders dissenters, Saudi Arabia, which oppresses women, Syria, which gases its own people, as well as Palestinians, and many other nations that face no external threats.

• Israel, on the other hand, faces existential threats, and acts in self-defense. It does more to protect innocent civilians than any country faced with comparable threats. Yet it is the only country that is subject to petitions by teachers unions, faculty senates, student bodies, and other groups....

• "Criticizing Israel is not anti-Semitic, and saying so is vile. But singling out Israel for opprobrium and international sanction out of all proportion to any other party in the Middle East is anti-Semitic, and not saying so is dishonest." — Thomas L. Friedman.

• There is an old joke about a Hitler rally in which the Fuhrer shouts out a rhetorical question: "Who is to blame for all of Germany's evils?" And before the crowd can shout "the Jews," a man in the front row screams out: "The bicycle riders." Hitler stops and turns to the man and asks him, "Why the bicycle riders?" To which the man responds, "Why the Jews?" .... There is no good response.

• Therefore, let us stop pretending that these hateful, one sided and mendacious petitions are anything but what they are: anti-Semitic bigotry, pure and simple. History will judge the bigots behind them harshly. So should all decent people today.

Pictured: Alan Dershowitz speaks in the United States Senate on January 27, 2020. (Photo by Senate Television via Getty Images)

Let there be no doubt that the recent spate of one-sided petitions singling out Israel for condemnation are motivated by hatred of Israel, precisely because it is the nation state of the Jewish people.

The bigots who promote these petitions, and the useful idiots who sign them, cannot possibly be motivated by a concern for universal human rights. If they were, they would focus on nations with really horrendous human rights records, such as Iran, which hangs gays, China, which imprisons Muslim dissidents, Russia, which murders dissenters, Saudi Arabia, which oppresses women, Syria, which gases its own people, as well as Palestinians, and many other nations that face no external threats. Israel, on the other hand, faces existential threats, and acts in self-defense. It does more to protect innocent civilians than any country faced with comparable threats. Yet it is the only country that is subject to petitions by teachers unions, faculty senates, student bodies, and other groups that seem to focus more on Israel than on their own mission to improve the lives of their members.

I am not talking here about criticism of Israeli policies, I support such criticism, as I do criticism of American policies, but there is a vast difference -- in tone, in content, nastiness and yes, in bigotry -- between legitimate criticism and the demonization that these petitions direct against the nation state of the Jewish people.

As Thomas L. Friedman, a frequent critic of Israel policies wrote:

"Criticizing Israel is not anti-Semitic, and saying so is vile. But singling out Israel for opprobrium and international sanction out of all proportion to any other party in the Middle East is anti-Semitic, and not saying so is dishonest."

So let's call a bigot a bigot and anti-Semite an anti-Semite. Let's not mince our words. I challenge any of those who have organized these one-sided petitions to justify "Why Israel?" There is an old joke about a Hitler rally in which the Fuhrer shouts out a rhetorical question: "Who is to blame for all of Germany's evils?" And before the crowd can shout "the Jews," a man in the front row screams out: "The bicycle riders." Hitler stops and turns to the man and asks him, "Why the bicycle riders?" To which the man responds, "Why the Jews?" I am now shouting that question to the bigots who promote these hateful petitions: "Why the nation state of the Jewish People?" There is no good response.

The fact that the United States provides funding to Israel does not explain the hatred. The United States provides considerable funding to Jordan, Egypt, and now the Palestinian Authority. Moreover, Israel gives back as much as it gets to American national security. If the United States were to suddenly to cut off all aid to Israel, the petitions would not stop, the hatred would not abate and the bigotry would not end. Surely the justification has nothing to do with the comparative records of various countries, or with the manner by which the United Nations divided the British mandate into to potential states: one for the Jewish residents of the area; and one for the Arab residents— which the Jews accepted and the Arabs waged war.

Nor is it based on support for the Palestinians, as a people. These same petition writers and signers have been notably silent about the 4,000 Palestinians who were recently killed by Syria. Nor were they heard from when Jordan killed thousands of Palestinians or when Hamas murdered members of the Palestinian Authority during its coup in the Gaza Strip. This is not about the Palestinians; it is about the Jews. And it is about hatred toward the Jews and their state.

Some of the writers and signers are themselves Jews, but that does not excuse their self-hating bigotry. Even if one could argue that Jews have a special obligation to be critical of their own state, that would not justify the bigotry shown by so many non-Jews, both in the United States and in Europe.

If you do not believe me, read what a Palestinian human rights activist, Bassem Eid, says about "the squad" and other bigoted demonizers of Israel:

"I'm a Palestinian who grew up in a UNWRA refugee camp outside of Jerusalem.... Let me say this as directly as I can: Rep. Omar does not know what she is talking about. Worse, for years, Rep. Omar has been engaged in not arguing any facts, but simply throwing out dirty anti-Semitic epithets, a mirror image of the anti-Semitism by "white supremacists" she claims to decry.

"Politicians like Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez spend a considerable amount of time attacking Israel for the supposed harm it inflicts on Palestinians. If they truly care about the wellbeing of Palestinians, they ought to focus their attention elsewhere. These days, the vast majority of suffering Palestinians experience is the direct result of the corruption of the Palestinian Authority and the influence of the terrorist group Hamas....."

Therefore, let us stop pretending that these hateful, one sided and mendacious petitions are anything but what they are: anti-Semitic bigotry, pure and simple. History will judge the bigots behind them harshly. So should all decent people today.

• Follow Alan M. Dershowitz on Twitter and Facebook

 

Alan M. Dershowitz is the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law, Emeritus at Harvard Law School and author of the book, The Case Against the New Censorship: Protecting Free Speech from Big Tech, Progressives and Universities, Hot Books, April 20, 2021. His podcast, "The Dershow," can be seen on Spotify, Apple, iTunes and YouTube. He is the Jack Roth Charitable Foundation Fellow at Gatestone Institute.

Source: https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17519/israel-petitions-antisemitic

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Schooled in Hate - Richard L. Cravatts

 

by Richard L. Cravatts

Teaching black kids in public schools to hate the police.

 

When some 200 parents crowded into a highly charged, heated Loudoun County, Virginia school board hearing on June 22^nd to air their displeasure with curricula and teaching in area schools, they were expressing the same discontent that parents across the country have more increasingly begun to feel as they witness the radical ideology that informs much of public-school education today. Though one teacher did give a powerful statement on how she disagreed with the hijacking of education by a core group of teachers with a leftist, extreme ideology, the school board, and presumably a majority of the district’s teachers, were obdurate in their defense of current practices in public school education.

At hand in this case was a debate about transgender policy proposals requiring Loudoun County Public Schools employees to use students’ preferred names or pronouns. The use of artificial pronouns, randomly chosen by children or adults who arbitrarily decide to shift their gender, and the whole emphasis on transgender rights and how they impact decisions about school bathrooms, among other items, is part of the chronic indoctrination taking place in schools where woke teachers, captivated by paroxysms of tolerance, virtue signaling, and political correctness, have attempted to deflect parental opposition and tailor instruction so that students receive a highly-politicized, radical education—much of what passes for learning being little more than in-school training for activism and a new generation obsessed with race and their role as either oppressed or oppressor,

The scene at the Loudoun County meeting has been playing out with increasing frequency around the country, with parents expressing similar sentiment about their unhappiness with the content and ideology behind much of what passes today as pedagogy. Rather than being understanding of parents’ concerns, teachers and school boards are increasingly combative, pushing back against parental complaints, rejecting suggestions for more transparency with curricula and teaching materials, and expressing outright indignation at the notion that parents—the very taxpayers who pay the salaries for teachers and bloated school system bureaucracies—should push back against the practices of the Nanny State, a society in which the government, not the family, instructs on morality, culture, race, sexuality, and faith—much more than the reading, writing, and arithmetic that public school education was nominally created to teach.

More troubling is the fact that educators keep pushing the boundaries of acceptable content for curricula, widely incorporating, as one current problematic topic, critical race theory (CRT) into teaching so that black students are taught they are victims and oppressed by virtue of their blackness alone and white children taught that they are the privileged oppressors by virtue of the color of their skin.

CRT has gained traction by race-obsessed educators seeking “restorative justice” or racial equity, with the unproven assumption that making permanent victims out of minority students and guilt-tripping white kids because of their alleged privilege somehow ameliorates and transcends racism, but many are unconvinced that CRT is anything more than leftist ideology designed to shift power to marginalized groups by maligning and labeling the white majority as irredeemable racists.

The obsession with race in public school instruction gained even more oxygen with the ascent of the Black Lives Matter movement, and the renewed focus on racial injustices exposed by the death last year of George Floyd gave new urgency and justification to further indoctrinating children about racism, and, after several of the high-profile police shootings of black suspects, law enforcement’s interaction with black America.

As part of National Black Lives Matter at School Week, an ethnic studies “Identity Lesson” from the Seattle Public School system, for example, “Do Black Lives Matter in America?,” designed for use with 4^th and 5^th graders, had the obviously biased theme of “Police Violence” and was clearly designed to instill in young minds a mistrust of and contempt for police officers.

The lesson plan instructs that “Students will use current statistical data to determine whether black people are being treated fairly by American law enforcement” after they have been helpfully provided with a one-sided view of police-involved shootings on a website called Mapping Police Violence, in which police enforcing the law, of course, is characterized as “violence.” The elementary school children led to the inflammatory website discover in bold headlines that “Police have killed 482 people in 2021,” “Black people are most likely to be killed by police,” “Police violence is changing over time,” “Police killed Black people at higher rates than white people in 47 of the 50 largest US cities,” “There is no accountability” for police who shoot black suspects, and even if black criminals are committing crimes, so-called police violence is actually “not about crime” because “Levels of violent crime in US cities do not determine rates of police violence.”

Is this a productive and useful message to drill into young students’ minds: that police are predominantly racist murderers who randomly kill black young men without any justification? That there is an epidemic of so-called police violence in America’s urban centers that focuses almost exclusively on black suspects?

Is mistrust of law enforcement a positive message for any students, and especially for black students in inner-city neighborhoods where their interaction with police officers is statistically more likely? Will not these preconceived, ill-advised, and factually incorrect attitudes about police behavior be likely to make black adolescents disrespect law enforcement? Might it subtly encourage them to resist arrest in the event they are stopped and questioned? Make them more apt to believe that criminal behavior is justifiable if the law enforcement establishment is itself immoral, murderous, dangerous to minorities, and acts in illegal ways on a regular basis?

In fact, the narrative that white police officers are killing unarmed, innocent young black men at a rate that is excessive and based on racism is a complete inversion of the truth. There are approximately 10 million arrests annually and out of that number only 1000 suspects are shot and killed by police; a Washington Post database indicated that actually, since 2015, ninety-one percent of black men killed in police shootings were armed and that only 2% of the victims of police shootings were unarmed black men.

The Washington Post’s database also revealed that, far from there being an epidemic of killings by police of unarmed black people, as the media and BLM movement have been widely and loudly claiming, in 2019, there were actually only 14 unarmed black victims (compared to 25 unarmed white victims). And those 14 black victims, while being unarmed, may well have been resisting arrest, assaulting the police officer, going for a weapon, or about to harm either himself or others. That they were unarmed did not mean they were not engaged in, or had previously been engaged in, criminal behavior.

Apparently, the conclusion that teachers wish children to come to, revealed by the Seattle lesson plan as one example, is that there is widespread, blatant racism in the behavior of white police officers that compels them to use disproportionate deadly force against black people in an unjust, illegal, immoral way.

There is, of course, an alternate interpretation of those facts, one which is actually the truthful conclusion that one would come to when honestly reviewing that data. Black people, it is true, are only 13% of the U.S. population, but they also make up 60% of prison populations. Are those high numbers the result of racism on the part of the entire criminal justice system, including police officers, or could it be something else? Could it be that black men are killed in interactions with law enforcement because they are more likely to be involved in criminal activity? That would also explain why they are over-represented in prison populations, as well. But this has nothing to do with the racism of white police officers and everything to do with the behavior of black men.

So, instead of having an elaborate graph indicating the national locations of police shootings where a black person was shot, educators’ way of driving home this misleading and false narrative of police racism toward black people, it might have been just as instructive, for instance, to have a graph indicating the frequency and location of shootings where black people were killed, not by police, but by other black people. Unlike the minuscule percentage of instances where white police killed black men, the percentage of black people killed by other black people, according to the FBI's Universal Crime Report, is a staggering 90%.

Instead of instilling fear in impressionable children about murderous police officers looking for black victims, they may be better served by understanding that black-on-black crime is a far more grievous and prevalent problem than the rare, though still unfortunate, instances when unarmed suspects are shot by the police. In Cook County, home to Chicago, for example, out of the 875 victims who died from gun violence last year, 78% were black, even though only slightly more than 26% of Cook County’s residents are black. A 2019 report by the Stanley Manne Children’s Research Institute noted that while the number of adolescents killed by a firearm in Chicago in 2016 was approximately three times the national rate, for Chicago’s young black men between the ages of 15 and 19, that rate was nearly 50 times the national rate between 2013 and 2017.

Perhaps some of these young black men, who frequently grow up in fatherless homes (estimated to include over 57% of black children) and join gangs as part of their adolescent development, would be less likely to enter that life and embrace criminal behavior if they were taught personal responsibility, morality, a striving for academic and professional success, and a desire to become a productive member of society instead of being indoctrinated in classrooms by counter-factual information about an endemically racist, murderous law enforcement system which is not to be trusted and which has malign intentions whenever it interacts with the black community.

Obviously, police brutality, and especially if it is inspired by racism, is something that should be universally denounced, just as it generally is—including by law enforcement itself which does not wish for its ranks to be tarnished by the misbehavior of a very few bad actors. But an elementary school curriculum that portrays all law enforcement as being capriciously violent; that asserts white police officers target and disfavor black suspects in the enforcement of justice; that suggests that police officers unnecessarily use deadly, dangerous tactics against suspects during  arrests, particularly with black suspects; that promotes the notion that incarcerated minorities are in prison without justification and as a result of their skin color; that lends credibility to the naïve and dangerous idea that “restorative justice” requires defunding police departments and substituting them with some kinder, gentler form of social protection; and that convinces black children to never trust law enforcement and the justice system because it is irredeemably racist and will never treat them fairly—all of these ideas, clearly articulated in the Seattle school system example, serve absolutely no purpose in helping minority children prepare for roles as citizens in what should be a color-blind society.

When did it become the appropriate role of public school teachers to be social activists who promote a left-wing, radical view of law enforcement to impressionable children? Why are these biased, toxic views of police being taught at all to grammar school-aged children, particularly when so much of the content is either lacking context, contorted, or counter-factual? Why the obsessive focus on black interaction, and only black interaction, with law enforcement and the one-sided approach which vilifies and condemns white officers?

If teachers want to assume the responsibility for teaching morals and tolerance, they might better concentrate on building a child’s self-esteem in a way that, instead of labeling them as a perennial victim in a racist society controlled by white privilege, encourages the development of productive individuals with the ability to embrace opportunity in a color-blind society in which they can prosper and co-exist with their non-minority peers.

 

Richard L. Cravatts, Ph.D., a Freedom Center Journalism Fellow in Academic Free Speech and President Emeritus of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, is the author of Dispatches From the Campus War Against Israel and Jews.

Source: https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/07/schooled-hate-richard-l-cravatts/

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Gleichschaltung and American Marxism - Milli Sands

 

by Milli Sands

Bringing all systems into line.

Gleichschaltung.

Huh?

Gleichschaltung is a German word meaning "coordination," "making the same," "bringing into line."  It was the Nazi policy enforcing political conformity in all sectors of society.

Gleichschaltung comprised:

1. Distorted, manipulative language intended to confuse; think Ministry of Propaganda in 1984.  (E.g., infinite genders, or global cooling begetting global warming begetting climate change.)

2. Media conformity with totalitarian postures. (E.g., Big Tech, Brownstream Media — i.e., CNN/MSNBC/CBS/NBC/ABC/WaPo/NYT/NPR.)

3. Controlled interpersonal communication — e.g., politically controlled jargon.  (Politically correct language, cancel culture.)

4. Manipulating the population to the point that it can no longer distinguish truth from lies.  (Fake news; per AOC, "We're going to have to figure out how we rein in our media environment so you can't just spew disinformation and misinformation.")

5. Banning the expression of conventional religious viewpoints.  (E.g., Little Sisters of the Poor.  See also Hobby Lobby and Chick-fil-A.)

6. Re-educating students in the ways of state philosophy.  (Critical Race Theory.)

7. Rewriting history (e.g., 1619 Project, removing/demolishing statues, the Rotunda is racist, renaming schools.)

8. Scientism — the twisting of the scientific method to support the political agendas of the party and special interest groups.  (E.g., Green New Deal.)

Sound familiar?

Here is another place you can play this game.  View this presentation at Prezi.  Substitute "Democrats/Progressives/Democrat Socialists" for "Nazis" and "Hitler."  Substitute "America/Americans" for "Germany/Germans."

Sound familiar-er? 

As an independent, I am open to hearing all sides.  I have listened and I have heard what the positions of the current regime are.  They appear, to me, to be heading in the direction of a knowable, predictable, logical conclusion.

We have the record.

It is documented in In the Garden of Beasts by Erik Larson (of The Devil in the White City fame).  Thus far, it is the best book chronicling the current administration that I have found.  This book says it better and more comprehensively than I believe I can.  Coincidentally, it demonstrates how remarkably a country can change in a mere four years.

(And, in case anyone is interested, the best history that I have found of the prior Democrat regime is Allen Drury's Come Nineveh, Come Tyre — although the book arguably has a somewhat happier ending.)

If you checked the copyrights, you are perhaps wondering how two books that antedate the respective administrations could be such accurate histories.  Easy.  If you consider the work of the great sci-fi writers (and others) as the history of the future, it all makes sense.  For example, neither Musk nor Waymo came up with the idea of an autonomous car.  This is true for many other "projects of tomorrow."  In fact, one could probably say with some accuracy that the entities making "the future" happen today just accomplished the technical innovations that reified other people's ideas.

Mark R. Levin has a scheduled book release for July 13.  On its Amazon page, his newest effort, American Marxism, is described thusly:

In American Marxism, Levin explains how the core elements of Marxist ideology are now pervasive in American society and culture — from our schools, the press, and corporations, to Hollywood, the Democratic Party, and the Biden presidency — and how it is often cloaked in deceptive labels like "progressivism," "democratic socialism," "social activism," and more.  With his characteristic trenchant analysis, Levin digs into the psychology and tactics of these movements[.]

Knowing "core elements," "psychology," and "tactics" is all well and good.

What is not mentioned is an exploration of the process used — i.e., Gleichschaltung.  Maybe he will deal with it; maybe he won't.  Either way, Larson's book, heavy with citations and documentation from original sources, can only add to what you might read in Levin's book.  It will tell you what occurs in real life when Gleichschaltung happens.  It serves this function well as a standalone read.

American Marxism?  Probably.

American Gleichschaltung?  Definitely.

One would do well to get up to speed on Gleichschaltung because the administration is flooring it.

Image: Das Bundesarchiv.

To comment, you can find the MeWe post for this article here.

 

Milli Sands

Source: https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/07/gleichschaltung_and_american_marxism.html

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A Mobster and Turkey's Arms Shipments to Jihadis - Burak Bekdil

 

by Burak Bekdil

Peker's revelations included claims that Erdoğan's senior entourage had been involved in illegal business dealings in northern Syria, and in collaboration with senior al-Nusra officials.

• Erdoğan's government claimed the cargo was humanitarian aid to Turkoman locals in Syria but then filed criminal charges against the editors Cumhuriyet, for being members of a "terrorist organization," espionage and revealing state secrets.... The prosecution asked for life sentences for two Cumhuriyet editors. Since then, Can Dündar, then-editor-in-chief, has been living in Germany in exile.

• At the beginning of May, Sedat Peker, a convicted Turkish mob boss and a fierce supporter of Erdoğan -- until now -- began posting videos on social media in which he made uncorroborated accusations of corruption, murder and drug-running against top politicians.

• After weeks of silence, Erdoğan... ordered prosecutors and judges to investigate and establish that all of Peker's claims were lies and a smear campaign against his government. Who will trust the independence of a legal probe when the president has already ordered its verdict?

A notorious mob boss has just added to the nightmares of Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Sedat Peker, a convicted criminal who was a fierce supporter of Erdoğan -- until now -- recently began posting a series of videos on social media in which he made uncorroborated accusations of corruption, murder and drug-running against top politicians. Millions of Turks have tuned in to watch. Pictured: A photograph, taken on May 26, 2021 on a mobile phone, shows Peker speaking on his YouTube channel. (Photo by Ozan Kose/AFP via Getty Images)

On January 19, 2014, the Turkish Gendarmerie command in southern Turkey searched three trucks heading for Syria. Accompanying the trucks were Turkish intelligence officers; the trucks had a bizarre cargo: In the first container, were 25-30 missiles or rockets and 10-15 crates loaded with ammunition; and in the second, 20-25 missiles or rockets, 20-25 crates of mortar rounds and anti-aircraft ammunition in five or six sacks. The crates had markings in the Cyrillic alphabet. One of the drivers testified that the cargo had been loaded onto the trucks from a foreign airplane at Ankara's Esenboğa Airport and that, "We carried similar loads several times before."

It was evident that the arms were bound for jihadists fighting against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's regional nemesis. Nearly two years later, Erdoğan would almost confess to the arms shipments. "What does it matter," he said in November 2015, "if it [the cargo] was arms or not?"

In May 2015, the secular daily newspaper Cumhuriyet published on its front page photographic evidence of arms deliveries by the Turkish intelligence services to Islamist groups in Syria. Erdoğan's government claimed the cargo was humanitarian aid to Turkoman locals in Syria but then filed criminal charges against the editors Cumhuriyet, for being members of a "terrorist organization," espionage and revealing state secrets.

No one at the time dared ask why humanitarian aid to an ethnic group in a country engulfed by civil war was a state secret, and why would spies publish secret material in a newspaper instead of handing it over to their foreign controllers?

"He who ran this story will pay heavily for it," Erdoğan said in a public speech. The prosecution asked for life sentences for two Cumhuriyet editors. Since then, Can Dündar, then-editor-in-chief, has been living in Germany in exile.

In December 2015, Russia claimed that Turkey was supporting the Islamic State through trading the jihadists' oil, their main source of income. In March 2016, another report claimed that total supplies sent by Turkey to terrorists in Syria in 2015 included 2,500 tons of ammonium nitrate; 456 tons of potassium nitrate; 75 tons of aluminum powder; sodium nitrate; glycerin; and nitric acid. The report stated:

"In order to pass through the border controls unimpeded, effectively with the complicity of the Turkish authorities, products are processed for companies that are purportedly registered in Jordan and Iraq ... Registration and processing of the cargo are organized at customs posts in the [Turkish] cities of Antalya, Gaziantep and Mersin. Once the necessary procedures have been carried out, the goods pass unhindered through the border crossings at Cilvegözü and Öncüpınar."

Fast forward to the present. At the beginning of May 2021, Sedat Peker, a convicted Turkish mob boss and a fierce supporter of Erdoğan -- until now -- began posting a series of videos on social media in which he made uncorroborated accusations of corruption, murder and drug-running against top politicians. Millions of Turks have tuned in to watch. The first seven videos Peker posted were viewed on YouTube more than 56 million times. Peker posted an eighth and promised more.

In the eighth video, Peker detailed how Erdoğan's government sent arms shipments to jihadis in Syria:

"The intelligence agency's trucks... contained (among other things) drones, military uniforms, bullet-proof vests, radios... I offered my own trucks [to the government] for humanitarian help for the Turkoman [a Turkic ethnicity who speaks Turkish]. They used my trucks without telling me what they sent to Syria. We knew they shipped arms. But that was normal... They were Peker's trucks, not Turkish intelligence's [in case something went wrong]... They went to Syria in my name, without any customs registration between Turkey and Syria. I saw Turkoman people thanking me in videos they posted on social media. Or so I thought. Then I realized that the Turkoman people were speaking Arabic. Then I learned that my trucks had been used to send [military equipment] to al-Nusra."

Jabhat Al-Nusra was a Salafist-Jihadist group fighting in Syria. In December 2012, the U.S. State Department designated it a foreign terrorist organization, and in April 2013, it became the official Syrian branch of al-Qaeda. In July 2016, al-Nusra formally re-branded itself from Jabhat al-Nusra to Jabhat Fatah al-Sham.

In January 2017, Jabhat Fatah al-Sham rebranded yet again when it merged with several other groups — Harakat Nour al-Din al-Zinki, Liwa al-Haq, Jaysh al-Sunna, and Jabhat Ansar al-Din — to establish HTS. In 2018, HTS was designated by the United States as a terrorist organization, with the UN Security Council including it as a sanctioned entity linked to the Islamic State, al‑Qaeda, and associated individuals and groups.

In his eighth video, the Turkish mobster Peker claims that the Erdoğan government sent arms shipments to al-Nusra through SADAT, a Turkish military consultancy company. SADAT defines its mission as "providing consultancy and military training services at the international defense and interior security sector."

Critics, however, including opposition lawmakers, have been inquiring about SADAT's activities, suspecting its real mission may be to train official or unofficial paramilitary forces to fight Erdoğan's multitude of wars inside and outside Turkey.

SADAT is owned by retired general Adnan Tanrıverdi, who was appointed in August 2016 as Erdoğan's chief military advisor. In 2020, he quit. Tanrıverdi had been forced to resign earlier, in 1996, from the military due to "suspected radical Islamist activities." In a 2009 speech, Tanrıverdi said:

"To defeat Israel, the country must be forced into defensive warfare, all of its forces must be engaged and the war must be prolonged.

"What should Turkey do? The resistance units in Gaza should be supported by anti-tank and low-altitude anti-aircraft weapons.

"Turkey, Iran, Syria, the Iraqi Resistance Organization and Palestine should form the nucleus of a defense structure. Within this context the formation of an Islamic rapid reaction force consisting of an amphibious brigade, an armored brigade and an airborne brigade should be encouraged."

Peker's revelations included claims that Erdoğan's senior entourage had been involved in illegal business dealings in northern Syria, and in collaboration with senior al-Nusra officials. Peker said Abu Abdurrahman was in charge of al-Nusra's trade with Turkey. "I am talking about billions of dollars," he said. "Including trading aluminum, tea, sugar, copper, smuggled oil, scrap metal, second-hand cars." Peker claimed the Turkish official in charge of trading with al-Nusra was Metin Kıratlı, head of administrative affairs at the presidency.

After weeks of silence, Erdoğan denied Peker's claims, but not in a convincing way. He ordered prosecutors and judges to investigate and establish that all of Peker's claims were lies and a smear campaign against his government. Who will trust the independence of a legal probe when the president has already ordered its verdict?

According to Avrasya, a polling company, 78% of Turks who vote for the opposition believe in "all revelations of Peker." That is not surprising. Avrasya's research also found that nearly a quarter of Erdoğan's voters also believe that all of Peker's revelations are true. A notorious mob leader has just added to Erdoğan's nightmares.

 

Burak Bekdil, one of Turkey's leading journalists, was recently fired from the country's most noted newspaper after 29 years, for writing in Gatestone what is taking place in Turkey. He is a Fellow at the Middle East Forum.

Source: https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17430/turkey-arms-shipments-jihadis

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