Battle of the Red Geezers - J. Robert Smith

by J. Robert Smith

Leftism, very much premised on youth back in the heady 60s, very much about ousting the old white guys in politics -- Republican and Democrat -- is today in the wrinkled hands of two Social Security eligible pols, the old white gal, Hillary Rodham Clinton, and the old white guy, Bernard “Bern” Sanders.

So, what happened to all those swell kids who were “down” with the revolution back in the 1960s? They grew up, and now they’ve grown old. Out went the love beads, bellbottoms, and acid trips (cheaper than cruises to Bimini). Most of those fist-pumping, LBJ and Nixon hating, protesting kids swapped central casting hippie costumes for suits and desk jobs.

Yet while you can take the kid out of the revolution, you can’t take the revolution out of the kid.  Or the geriatric. Ask Bernard and Hillary about that.

The irony is ripe to near rotting.  Leftism, very much premised on youth back in the heady 60s, very much about ousting the old white guys in politics -- Republican and Democrat -- is today in the wrinkled hands of two Social Security eligible pols, the old white gal, Hillary Rodham Clinton, and the old white guy, Bernard “Bern” Sanders. Well, the reds have always preached about cradle to grave.

Hill and Bern each want to lay claim to their party’s presidential nomination next year. Beyond that, the presidency. Both will shortly begin beating the stuffing out of each other. Both are reds, though per the spin, Bern is the purer red. 

Hill, goes the critique, is the compromised of the two. A crony capitalist underbelly afflicts William Jefferson Clinton’s 40-year bride… a grubby acquisitiveness -- and not just for power to make the world more compassionate, fairer, and equal -- is an itch Hill must scratch. Shakedowns -- err, speeches -- have made Bill and Hill mucho rich reds. Influence-peddling was added to the Clintons’ portfolio when Hill served as O’s secretary of state.   
                     
The fiction circulating among 73-year-old Bern’s fans is that he’s got a pure, youthful socialist heart. The seediness of day-to-day politics -- Bern’s held elective offices since 1981 -- doesn’t touch him. He never swallows principles to cut deals. He’s virginal, politically. The left never tires of mythmaking; its entire worldview is built on myths. Bern is currently a myth manufactured by the left that’s dutifully reported by the MSM. 

Bern’s getting a free ride. His warts and all are mostly under wraps. The nearing 68-year-old Hill is under fire for doing something convenient with her State Department emails. The convenience was doubtlessly aimed at eluding culpability. Shucks, in that Arkansas old white guy Democrat fashion, Hill and Bill are perpetually eluding culpability.

But Bern’s free ride will end, sure as there was a hammer and sickle on the Soviet flag.  Frontrunners are targets. If not leading Hill now, Bern is getting mighty close to acquiring the frontrunner tag. Soon -- very soon -- we’ll start hearing and reading things about Bern that will tarnish his pristine reputation. Moses will be exposed as having clay feet.

In fact, the scuttlebutt is that Hill’s campaign has deployed opposition researchers to Vermont to dig around about Bern’s lengthy past. This from the Vermont publication, Seven Days, dated July 1, 2015, and headlined: “Has Clinton Dispatched Oppo Researchers to UVM's Sanders Archive?” 

Librarians at the University of Vermont's special collections say interest is spiking in the "Bernard Sanders papers" -- 30 boxes of meticulously organized material documenting Sanders' eight years as mayor of Burlington.

Then this:

Last Thursday, two casually dressed twentysomethings were spotted combing through the Sanders files and decades-old Vermont newspapers. As they were on their way out the door at the end of the day, Seven Days asked what they were doing.

"No comment," said one of the young men, dressed in a T-shirt and flannel. "No comment."

The reporter’s suspicion: the guys were Clinton operatives.

You can bet your Norman Thomas bobble-head that Hill’s peeps are everywhere necessary to excavate anything that will yellow Bern’s snowy reputation. Not that reputation-tarnishing will matter to Bern’s true believers, many of whom are inexplicably young folk. Delusion is yet another device used by leftists to deflect hard realities. The young are particularly prone to delusion. 

It’s curious that in a culture so wed to the adolescent, so adverse to aging, so insistent that the old not only can, but should, be young in appearance (at heart runs second), the Democrats leading candidates look like a dowdy grandma and a Burlington corner grocer, circa 1950 -- you know, the curmudgeonly “Old Mister Overalls” or some such. 

Curious still that socialism, which spent much of the 20th Century attempting to convince the proletariat that it was progressive, futuristic, forward-looking -- bursting with vim, vigor, and vitality -- has devolved into dystopia. 

Racial tensions flare or explode where brotherhood is supposed to rein. Many among the proletariat get by on part-time jobs or unemployment checks. Washington government lists with gargantuan debt, and piles up more daily, threatening eventual capsize. Well-heeled bureaucrats ceaselessly act to expand their mandates while eating out the nation’s substance. Pols-turned-lobbyists and consultants get rich quick. The nation’s borders are comprised, intentionally flooded with job-stealing and welfare-subsisting illegals. National security is given short shrift.   

That, in part, is socialism -- i.e., progressivism -- in practice today. It’s the left’s version of the decline of the Roman Empire, not some uplifting of humanity and society to ever-greater heights. Where’s the perfection of the human, so ballyhooed in the left’s heyday?  Where’s the glorious future, once rhapsodized among lefties? Hmm?      

Socialism -- under whatever guise -- is, in fact, old, tired, creaky, squalid, and failed. Where, pray tell, is its death panel?

In the meanwhile, two geezer socialists vie to lead the party of doubled-down failed socialism into the 2016 presidential elections. Another of their ilk, Joe Biden (age 72), a preening buffoon with a mean streak, is mulling entry, presumably to rescue the Democrats from a politically hobbled Hill and Bern the Pure, but surely to simply aggrandize himself. Deeper in the wings lurks Liz Warren, a proud faux Native American and another “democratic” socialist. She’s a spry 66. Martin O’Malley (he of Putin shirtless virility) is just 52 and an also-ran. Presumably, his relative youth is a disqualifier.    

Ageism in any of this? Only to leftists eager to vilify anyone who deviates an iota from the party line. Age and experience can bring wisdom. Wisdom has always been a scarce commodity -- more so today, however. Hill’s and Bern’s wisdom consists of clichés and lies; hence, it’s no wisdom at all.  Just the same old, same old -- meaning greater trouble for a troubled nation if either is elected president.  

J. Robert Smith

Source: http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2015/08/battle_of_the_red_geezers.html

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

Putting Obama Over Country Is Treason - Daniel Greenfield

by Daniel Greenfield

Democrats must put country ahead of party.

“I think it's a bad deal and I've said so for several weeks now. I think we need to put country ahead of party,” Senator Jim Webb said. "It troubles me when I see all this debate about whether this is disloyalty to the president or the Democratic Party.”

Webb is a Democrat and he joins a number of other Democrats in criticizing a bad deal that even Obama admitted will allow Iran to get nuclear weapons after a number of years.

Obama and his cronies have pursued an extraordinary campaign of vilification against Republicans and Democrats who dared to question the deal that will allow Iran to upgrade its nuclear program and obtain ICBM missiles, that will fund its terrorist activities around the world and even lift sanctions on terrorists like Anis Naccache, who engaged in nuclear proliferation, over European protests.

The apocalyptic rhetoric out of the White House is meant to shut down the debate. Threats of war and accusations of treason are not the language of an administration that is confident in its own arguments.

Democrats and Republicans have been accused of treason, of warmongering and of making common cause with Iranian leaders who chant “Death to America” by this administration and its allies. These accusations are hysterical, unhinged and contradict themselves. If you take them literally, Obama and his allies are accusing critics of both wanting war with America’s enemies and collaborating with them.

Elected officials who don’t want money going to terrorists are traitors. Anyone who doesn’t want to escalate the conflict in the region by enabling Iran’s arms buildup is a warmonger. And those who think that Obama’s deal with a regime that chants “Death to America” is flawed are aligned with the enemy.

There’s so much abuse coming out of the White House that its officials can’t even coordinate a coherent smear campaign that makes any kind of sense. Senator Schumer is being tarred as a chickenhawk traitor who voted for the Iraq War and secretly works for Israel, but Senator Webb is a Vietnam veteran who was wounded in the war and whose son served in Iraq, but who opposed the Iraq War.

Is he also a chickenhawk traitor or is Obama Inc. going to assemble a different smear for every dissenting Democrat? If so it had better get started because the majority of the country opposes it.

Only 52 percent of Democrats support the deal. Are all the rest traitors too? Is the Democratic Party going to have purge most of its own treasonous base and only retain those fully loyal to Obama?

It is not treason to disagree with Obama. It is not treason for the Senate to assert its rightful powers under the Constitution. It is certainly not treason for the Senate to stand with the majority of Americans who oppose an agreement that will allow a terrorist state to control a deadly nuclear program.

America is not a monarchy. Dissent is not treason. It can be the highest form of patriotism. And if being pro-Israel is treason, then how are we to describe Biden and Kerry’s ties to the Iran Lobby?

We have seen this before. This is an administration that fights ruthlessly against any changes to deeply flawed plans even when they undermine the success of the policy they are meant to implement. That’s what happened with ObamaCare and the administration was forced to illegally tinker with it to try and make it work. It would apparently like to do that with the Iran deal, which is one more reason to distrust all the empty assurances. The deal that the Senate will vote on is not the deal that we will get.

Democrats face a choice between following Senator Webb’s sensible advice and putting country first or putting Obama first.

And that’s what this is really about.

Obama has hoarded unprecedented amounts of authority leading to constant power struggles with Congress, the Supreme Court and even within the White House. Obama is currently quarreling with his own Secretary of Defense and would like Congress to authorize him to free Gitmo terrorists without the approval of his own appointee. Is Obama’s own Secretary of Defense also a traitor?

Every former Secretary of Defense has been critical of Obama’s policies.

Obama fired Chuck Hagel for exactly the reason he is now feuding with his current Secretary of Defense. Former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said that the “the only military matter, apart from leaks, about which I ever sensed deep passion on his part was 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell.’”

Former Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta blamed Obama for the rise of ISIS.  “The White House was so eager to rid itself of Iraq that it was willing to withdraw rather than lock in arrangements that would preserve our influence and interests,” he wrote.

Was every man who served as Secretary of Defense under Obama a worthless traitor or was he the problem all along? Has putting Obama’s ego ahead of country been bad for our influence and interests?

Senate Democrats are on the cusp of a post-Obama era. They will be held accountable for what they do now, then. Five or ten years from now, no one will remember the angry threats from MoveOn, but they will remember that Senate Democrats put the ego of a lame duck politician ahead of their country.

When Iran tests its first nuclear bomb, Obama will be giving paid speeches and the cameras will be on them. They will be asked why they allowed this to happen. The blame for it will fall on them.

As the White House and its allies hurl accusations of treason at anyone who points out the flaws of the Iran nuclear sellout, Democrats must decide whether they are loyal to America or to Obama.

Do they put country first or party first?

Webb, Schumer and Menendez have set a fine example for other Senate Democrats by pointing out the flaws of the deal and how it needs to be improved. All of them have far more policy experience than Obama or his staffers, many of whom were jumped up from driving buses or writing speeches, to taking on the foreign policy of a nation. Are these men committing treason by speaking out against the deal?

Are they traitors? Or are those who put Obama and the Democratic Party ahead of the country betraying their duty? Did the majority of voters, who oppose the deal, elect them to rigidly follow the leader or to use their minds and experiences to represent their interests and look out for them?

We are not a nation of parties. We are a nation of people.

Republicans or Democrats, we know that when Iran’s leaders chant, “Death to America”, they mean it. We remember the Iran Hostage Crisis. We remember the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut.

We know that a deal that gives the regime responsible for these atrocities a zero breakout time to a nuclear bomb is a bad deal for America. And supporting a bad deal just because it’s Obama’s bad deal is a betrayal of our national security, a betrayal of our soldiers in harm’s way and a betrayal of our future.

It’s time for Senate Democrats to stop fearing accusations of disloyalty to Obama and put loyalty to their country first.

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam.

Source: http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/259762/putting-obama-over-country-treason-daniel-greenfield

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

Jeb Bush Takes On the Party of Defeat - Arnold Ahlert

by Arnold Ahlert

The true history of the Iraq War and the rise of ISIS that Obama and Hillary can't deny.

Click the following to order David Horowitz's "Party of Defeat" and "The Black Book of the American Left, Vol. III: The Great Betrayal." 

Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush got it right  regarding Iraq in a speech at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library Tuesday night. “That premature withdrawal was the fatal error, creating the void that ISIS moved in to fill,” he declared. “Where was the secretary of state, Secretary of State Clinton, in all of this? Like the president himself, she had opposed the surge, then joined in claiming credit for its success, then stood by as that hard-won victory by American and allied forces was thrown away.”

Unsurprisingly, Hillary Clinton senior policy adviser and former State Department aide Jake Sullivan leaped to Clinton’s defense. “This is a pretty bold attempt to rewrite history and reassign responsibility,” he said. “They cannot be allowed to escape responsibility for the real mistake here. They might hope we’ll all forget, but the American people remember.”

Perhaps the American people might remember that Hillary Clinton, along with other Democrats, including John Kerry, John Edwards, Joe Biden, and Chuck Schumer, voted to authorize the use of force in Iraq -- only to subsequently betray the American military’s commitment there for nothing more than crass political considerations. And as David Horowitz illuminates in his book "The Black Book of the American Left, Vol. III: The Great Betrayal,” these opponents of the war “attacked the moral character of the commander-in-chief and the mission both parties had endorsed,” resulting in a “devastating blow to American power and freedom from which they have yet to recover.” 

As Horowitz explains, the opposition to war in Iraq and the concomitant support for Saddam Hussein had been driven by the same communist-dominated mindset of leftists who supported our enemies in Vietnam and the Soviet Union prior to its disintegration. It is a mindset that was in search of another opportunity to denigrate America, and the war against the war on terror provided the perfect vehicle.

The Left’s collusion with America’s Islamist enemies began well before the Iraq War was launched. After the pushback following 9/11 began with the enormously successful rout of al Qaeda and the removal of the Taliban government in Afghanistan, leftists condemned George W. Bush’s war strategy and his assertion that we were dealing with an Iranian, Iraqi, and North Korean “axis of evil,” an observation that was as prescient as it was accurate. And in spite of 9/11, the Left’s reflexive antipathy towards increasing our intelligence capabilities to prevent a follow-up attack was twisted as a violation of the Constitution and racial profiling, while leftists like Noam Chomsky, Tariq Ali and Edward Said insisted the 9/11 atrocity was a logical response to the “root causes” engendered by American oppression, as opposed to religious jihad.

This view gained wide-ranging support on the Left following the invasion of Iraq. A war was subsequently waged by the Left at home to sabotage the war abroad. The New York Times published classified information that destroyed essential intelligence programs, anti-war demonstrations were organized by the same communist-backed leftists who opposed the Vietnam War, and Democrats and their media allies characterized any criticism of their efforts to undermine the war as beneath contempt. Yet such contempt was problematic, because “America has been attacked and American citizens have been slaughtered in their places of work,” Horowitz observed, noting the critical difference between Vietnam and 9/11. "Sympathy for an enemy 10,000 miles away in Vietnam was one thing. Sympathy for the architects of 9/11 is another.”

Nonetheless it persisted, aided and abetted by pro-Saddam academic shills and city councils in leftist-dominated towns passing resolutions refusing to cooperate with the Homeland Security Department. Hussein’s black Muslim sympathizers included South Central Los Angeles’s Hasan Akbar, who rolled three grenades into his fellow American soldiers’ tents killing one and wounding 15, and Louis Farrakhan, who traveled to Baghdad and insisted American Muslims were praying for Saddam’s victory. They were joined by the likes of Columbia anthropology professor Nicholas De Genova, who claimed the only true heroes “are those who find ways to defeat the U.S. military,” and International ANSWER, a Marxist-Leninist entity with ties to North Korea.

During election season, leftists in and out of the Democratic Party perpetuated the malicious "Bush lied, people died” campaign, courtesy of hypocrites like John Edwards and John Kerry who became anti-war supporters to bolster their 2004 presidential aspirations as they competed against anti-war candidate Howard Dean. Al Gore was equally despicable, tying his opposition to the Iraq war to the 2000 election, implying the recount in Florida was an effort to de-legitimize his claim to the White House.

The Left’s campaign to undermine the war included the central lie that we went into Iraq solely to eliminate weapons of mass destruction. However, Bush was worried about Saddam’s ability to acquire WMDs as he explained in his 2003 State of the Union address. He talked about the possibility of terrorists with WMDs that could bring this nation "a day of horror like none we have ever known.” "Some have said we must not act until the threat is imminent,” Bush continued. "Since when have terrorists and tyrants announced their intentions, politely putting us on notice before they strike?...Trusting in the sanity and restraint of Saddam Hussein is not a strategy, and it is not an option.” 

Even more important, the justification for that war were the 23 clauses contained in the congressional authorization and in U.N. resolution 1441. It was Democrats and their media allies who sought to reduce the 23 clauses to one.

The Democrats' agenda with respect to Iraq became one of defeatism, sabotage and surrender. Horowitz and co-author Ben Johnson chronicled the consequences of this mission in "Party of Defeat.”  The book details the rise of entities like Code Pink and Cindy Sheehan, defeatists such as Harry “the war is lost” Reid and Hillary Clinton, who was more than willing to attack the integrity of Iraq commander Gen. David Petraeus to further her 2008 presidential ambitions. We are reminded that Reid and Nancy Pelosi signed a letter insisting the surge had “failed to produce the intended results” before it was fully implemented, and that they urged a phased redeployment of American troops, even as they conceded the Iraqi Army was “uneven in their quality and reliability”—indicating they were perfectly willing to accept the possibility of the defeat Obama ultimately engineered. 

Democrats were so invested in losing the war in Iraq, Senator Dick Durbin discredited Gen. Petraeus’s report on the success of the surge, insisting, before he read the report, that even if the figures it contained were correct, “the conclusion is wrong.”

The "Party of Defeat" was written in 2008, and yet its warning about the premature withdrawal from Iraq precipitated by Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was spot on. “Iran would immediately reap the spoils and become the dominant power in the Middle East,” the authors wrote. What neither writer could foresee was a president and a Democratic Party so committed to our nation’s retreat from the world stage, they would actually assist Iran’s ascension, just as many of those same Democrats and their ideological forebears abetted the ascension of Communism and the ensuing bloodbath in Southeast Asia following our leftist-orchestrated retreat from Vietnam.

Democrats have been more than willing to take the tremendous sacrifices made by American men and women in harm’s way and throw them away for nothing more than political gain. There was a time in this country when politics stopped "at the water’s edge” with regard to national security in time of war. This time Democrats purposefully fomented internal divisions "greater than any the nation had experienced since the Civil War, and the betrayal by the Democrats of a war policy they had supported was without precedent in the history of America’s wars overseas,” Horowitz explains. Thus, Democrats own the loss of Iraq, the rise of ISIS and every other ugly permutation that will arise from their calculated capitulation.


Arnold Ahlert

Source: http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/259796/jeb-bush-takes-party-defeat-arnold-ahlert

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

Report: Iran's supreme leader opposes nuclear deal - AP and Israel Hayom Staff

by AP and Israel Hayom Staff

Iranian hard-liner Hossein Shariatmadari claims that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei "is not satisfied with the text" of the nuclear deal reached last month • Iran gives IAEA documents linked to probe of past Iranian nuclear weapons development activities.

Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei | Photo credit: AP

Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is opposed to a landmark nuclear deal reached with world powers last month, a prominent Iranian hard-liner claimed Saturday.

Hossein Shariatmadari, editor of the daily newspaper Kayhan and a representative of Khamenei, made the comments in an editorial Saturday. It was the first time someone publicly claimed where Khamenei, who has final say on all state matters, stands on the deal.

Khamenei has not publicly approved or disapproved of the deal. However, he has repeatedly offered words of support for Iran's nuclear negotiators. Moderates believe the deal would have never been reached without Khamenei's private approval.

Iran's parliament and the Supreme National Security Council will consider the agreement in the coming days. The deal calls for limiting Iran's nuclear program in exchange for lifting economic sanctions.

Shariatmadari said in the editorial that many parts of the deal threaten Iran's independence, security and "the sacred system of the Islamic republic of Iran" and would be "disastrous" if implemented.

He also referred to a speech by Khamenei last month during which the ayatollah said, "Whether this text is approved or disapproved, no one will be allowed to harm the main principles of the [ruling] Islamic system."

The editorial noted: "Using the phrase 'whether this text is approved or disapproved' shows his lack of trust in the text of the deal. If His Excellency had a positive view, he would have not insisted on the need for the text to be scrutinized through legal channels. ... It leaves no doubt that His Excellency is not satisfied with the text."

Another prominent hard-liner and Khamenei representative, Ayatollah Ahmad Alamolhoda, recently said the deal "crossed the red lines." He said Khamenei said outsiders should never be allowed access to Iran's security apparatus, but the deal violated that by allowing inspection of military sites.

However, Gen. Hassan Firouzabadi, the chief of staff of Iran's armed forces and a close Khamenei ally, backed the deal last week despite having concerns.

Meanwhile, Iran on Saturday gave the U.N. nuclear agency documents linked to the agency's probe of allegations that Iran tried to develop atomic arms, along with a confidential explanation that is unlikely to veer from previous Iranian denials of work on such weapons.

Announced by the International Atomic Energy Agency, the handover meets a key deadline Iran has committed to as part of the nuclear deal.

The July 14 deal's main focus is curbing Iran's present nuclear program that could be used to make weapons. But a subsidiary element obligates Iran to cooperate with the IAEA in its probe of the allegations.

The investigation has been essentially deadlocked for years with Iran asserting the allegations are based on false intelligence from the U.S., Israel and other adversaries. But Iran and the U.N. agency agreed last month to wrap up the investigation by December, when the IAEA plans to issue a final assessment on the allegations. Saturday was the target date for Tehran to provide the agency documents related to the probe and its version of what they mean.

Both Iran and the IAEA were upbeat when announcing the agreement last month. But Western diplomats from IAEA member nations who are familiar with the probe are doubtful that Iran will diverge from claiming that all its nuclear activities are -- and were -- peaceful, despite what they say is evidence to the contrary.

They say the agency will be able to report in December. But that assessment is unlikely to be unequivocal because chances are slim that Iran will present all the evidence the agency wants or give it the total freedom of movement it needs to follow up the allegations.

Still, the report is expected to be approved by the IAEA's board, which includes the United States and other world powers that negotiated the nuclear deal. It is believed they do not want to upend the deal and will see the December report as closing the books on the issue.

AP and Israel Hayom Staff

Source: http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_article.php?id=27613

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

Turkey's Racism Problem - Uzay Bulut

by Uzay Bulut

• The U.S. Department of State needs to analyze the Kurdish issue more closely and carefully. When they do, they will see that the problem should not be called "the Kurdish Issue;" it would be more just to call it "the Turkish Racism Problem."
• Kurds in Turkey have always been brutally oppressed, even when there was no organization called the PKK.
• Kurds are not the ones who started the war in Kurdistan. Kurdish leaders have openly and frequently made it clear that despite all of the state terror, mass murders and oppression they have been exposed to, they wish to live in peace with their Turkish, Arab and Persian neighbors. There is a war imposed on Kurds.

Turkey's authorities keep saying that the Turkish "security" forces do what they do -- arrest or kill Kurds -- only when Kurds carry out "terrorist" activities, or only when the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) attacks targets in Turkey. Nothing, however, could be farther from the truth. Turkey's attacks against Kurds have always been intense, even when the PKK declared unilateral ceasefires.

Regarding 2014, when there were no clashes between the Turkish military and the PKK, Faysal Sariyildiz, a Kurdish MP for the Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP), said, "During the last year, regarding the Kurdish issue, 3,490 people have been taken into custody, 880 people have been arrested and 25 people have been killed with police bullets."

"These attacks," said Mark Toner, spokesman for the U.S. Department of State, "are only exacerbating the continuation and the cycle of violence here. We want to see these attacks cease. We want to see the PKK renounce violence and re-engage in talks with the government of Turkey."

What Mr. Toner fails to understand -- although of course both sides should renounce violence and try to resolve the issue through dialogue, without bloodshed -- is that the cycle of violence intensified only after the Turkish military started a recent all-out assault on Qandil in Iraqi Kurdistan.

What the AKP government refers to as "the resolution process" started in 2012, when talks were allegedly held between the Turkey's National Intelligence Organization (MIT) and the leader of the PKK, Abdullah Ocalan, who has been imprisoned in Turkey since 1999.

Abdullah Ocalan, leader of the PKK, after his capture by Turkish special forces in 1999.

But since then, in terms of liberties and rights, what has changed for Kurds?

Before that, about eight or nine talks between the PKK and the MIT were held in Oslo, Norway between 2008 to 2011, a PKK authority said. During the talks, the PKK -- through the protocols Ocalan prepared -- demanded a constitutional resolution, peace, and the establishment of a "Commission on Investigation of Truth" that would investigate murders committed in the past. "But in June 2011, after the elections, the government saw itself as powerful again, so it stopped participating in the talks and stopped taking them seriously," the PKK authority said.

Again, during this process, no legal step was taken for recognition of Kurdish national rights.

Just this May, Turkey's president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan said in a public speech:

They [the HDP party] say that "When we come to power, we will abolish the Diyanet [Presidency of Religious Affairs]." Why? Because they have nothing to do with religion. They go as far as saying that Jerusalem belongs to Jews; they [the PKK] give education on Zoroastrianism at the camps on the mountains.[1]
The TRT [state-run Turkish Radio and Television Corporation] has a Kurdish TV channel. There are Kurdish language courses at universities. Our country does not have a Kurdish issue any more. But our Kurdish citizens have some issues. Those who want to make the resolution process all about the Kurdish issue are on about something else. They say 'We are the representatives of the Kurds.' No way! If you really are their representatives, clear up the dirt in the sidestreets."

Is this the language that someone who genuinely aims to achieve peace and provide democracy would use? First of all, Erdogan and his AKP party do not see the Kurdish issue as an ethnic or national problem. They seem to think that a Kurdish TV channel and a few courses at universities should be enough to resolve the issue. This shows that the root of the problem is not the Kurds' demands or violence. The root of the problem is traditional Turkish supremacism. The Turkish government evidently expects the indigenous Kurds to settle for whatever crumbs the government offers.

It is this supremacist mentality of Turkey that started and inflamed this problem, and created countless grievances in Kurdistan. The Turkish state wants to be the one to name the issue; to start and end it; to choose the way to resolve it or make it go on forever; to determine how Kurds will live and die; what Kurds can want and when they should stop; what language they can speak, and where and when.

Then, when Kurds resist, and say they want to be free and have a say in their own affairs in Kurdistan, Turkey dismisses them or blames them for being "terrorists" or "traitors."

The Kurdish PKK is an armed organization; and just like all armed organizations or groups, it uses violence as a tactic. But it does not aim to destroy Turkey or the Turkish people. It has declared several times that it is open to dialogue, negotiation and peaceful coexistence.

The Turkish government could also embrace a similar purpose: peace based on political equality and mutual respect. Turkey could abandon its destructive militaristic ways and start an open, transparent, genuine peace process that does not aim to destroy and annihilate Kurds and their militia. Killings will only bring more killings and more hatred. It is high time that Turkey stopped attacking Kurds and used the only method it has not used in its history: respecting the indigenous peoples of Anatolia and Mesopotamia.

Turkish state authorities seem to wish to make Kurds surrender without gaining any national rights or political status, and they call this "a peace process." That is not an oversimplification: The AKP has ruled Turkey since 2002 but has done nothing to recognize Kurdish self-rule. All the AKP did was to provide a few small changes, such as permitting a Kurdish TV channel, TRT-6. But even those are not legal reforms. Turkey is still ruled with the same constitution that the Turkish military drafted after the 1980 coup d'état.

In this fight, Kurds are the "rape victims." On their own ancestral lands, they have no national rights and no political status, and they do not even have the right to be fully educated in Kurdish. They are randomly murdered and arrested. Apparently, their lives have no value in the eyes of the Turkish state.

Turkey has a huge national problem because it does not see Kurds as an equal nation. This is how many Turks see the conflict:

• Turks are to have their own state -- a supreme one that has power over international politics -- but Kurds are not to have even autonomy.
• Turkish is to be a rich and respected language worldwide, but Kurds are not to have a single school where they can be educated fully in Kurdish.
• Turks are to have a powerful army; Kurds are to disarm their militia and are to just serve in the great army of Turks.

But even integration in the military does not seem to work. Many soldiers of Kurdish origin serving in the Turkish army reportedly commit "suicide" or are killed in "accidents." In 2012, for instance, out of the 42 soldiers who were officially reported to have killed themselves, 39 were Kurdish and one was Armenian, according to the lawyer Mazlum Orak.

The founders of the Turkish state also promoted Turkish nationalism to the full extent, while denying the very existence of Kurds in Turkey. They fully enforced a ban on Kurdish language, culture and geographical place names. They called Kurds "mountain Turks" and did not allow Kurds to establish legal political parties until the 1990s. Even after that, seven legal pro-Kurdish political parties were closed down by the Turkish constitutional court over 20 years. Scores of Kurdish villages were burned down by the Turkish army, and tens of thousands of Kurds were tortured or murdered wholesale.

Kurds in Turkey have therefore always been brutally oppressed even when there was no organization called the PKK.

Turkish sociologist Ismail Besikci, who was spent 17 years in prison for his writings on Kurds and Kurdistan, compared Turkey to South Africa. He concluded that Turkey's mentality "is much more racist" than South Africa's:

"What happened in South Africa in 1960s was that the white administration told the others: 'You are black; you will live separately from us. You will have separate neighborhoods, schools, hotels, and entertainment places. You will live outside of places where the white live; do not mix with whites.' And for that, they formed very large areas that were surrounded with wires. Those places had very limited infrastructure. The sewer system did not work; there were frequent electric power outages and water cuts. The schooling and health conditions were very insufficient. But the natives experienced their own identity. They lived the way they were. But Turkey tells Kurds: 'You will live with us but you will look like us. You will forget your identity. You will live with Turks but will look like Turks.' I am trying to say that this mentality is much more racist than the administration in South Africa."

Besikci noted that in the 1990s, Nelson Mandela was released from prison and was elected as the president of South Africa: "The president of the white administration that released Mandela from prison became the vice president of Mandela in the elections. South Africa is called the most racist state of the world but such a change happened there. This shows the official ideology there was flexible; it was not so strict."

Kurds are not the ones who started the war in Kurdistan. Kurdish leaders have openly and frequently made it clear that despite all of the state terror, mass murders and oppression they have been exposed to, they wish to live in peace with their Turkish, Arab and Persian neighbors. There is a war imposed on Kurds. And its results have been disastrous for Kurdistan.

The U.S. Department of State really needs to analyze the Kurdish issue more closely and carefully. When they do, they will see that the problem should actually not be called "the Kurdish Issue;" it would be more just to call it, "the Turkish Racism Problem."

Uzay Bulut, born and raised a Muslim, is a Turkish journalist based in Ankara.

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[1] Selahattin Demirtas, co-President of the HDP, had said in a public statement, "Religions have their centers. Muslims go to Kaaba in Mecca; Jews go to Jerusalem."

• Follow Uzay Bulut on Twitter

Uzay Bulut, born and raised a Muslim, is a Turkish journalist based in Ankara.

Source: http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/6351/turkey-racism-problem

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

Rush is wrong on Obama's 'legacy' interest in a nuclear Iran - Karin McQuillan

by Karin McQuillan

Obama has already handed the mullahs almost $12 billion this summer, to prove his good intentions to Iran.  That's already four times our annual military aid to Israel.  It is sixty times what Iran is spending annually to fund Hezb'allah, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and Syria's Bashar Assad.  Just think what mayhem they can accomplish with an extra $100 billion.

Rush has been arguing lately that Obama is pushing the Iran deal as his "legacy."  Rush doesn't get our truly anti-American president.  "Legacy" makes it sound as if Obama thinks the Iran deal is a positive accomplishment.  As if Obama believes his own speeches that it will stop a nuclear Iran, make the mullahs like us, and promote peace in the Middle East.  This is the school of thought that sees Obama as naïve or inept, but not evil.

To understand the true nature of the legacy President Obama is aiming for, we need only go back to the full quote of "God d**n America" from Obama's spiritual guide and mentor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright.

God d**n America for treating our citizens as less than human. God d**n America for as long as she acts like she is God and she is supreme.

This is Obama's gospel and chief motivating force as our commander in chief: to make sure America is no longer supreme.  He wants to cut us down to size by building up our biggest enemy, Iran.  He wants to reconfigure the power structure of the Middle East so that the one country over which we have zero leverage will become the hegemon.  Once a nuclear arms race gives both Sunnis and Shiites nuclear weapons, the Middle East will become impervious to our influence, as Russia and China are. 

We will no longer be the world power. 

And it's a twofer for Obama.  In such a Middle East, Israel will be in grave danger.  Obama loathes Israel because it is as a successful white Western outpost of civilization, making all the brown nations around it look even more like losers.  How terribly unfair.  Well, the Iran deal will correct that, too.

I'm sure everyone remembers the days after 9/11.  That Sunday, as a grief-stricken and solemnly patriotic America flooded into their churches, Obama's reverend said this:

We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye.  We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back to our own front yards. America's chickens are coming home to roost.

Imagine if the Reverend Wright and his acolyte, Obama, could have waved a magic wand and brought more of those chickens home to roost, by arming our worst enemy in the world with nuclear weapons.  That would teach a lesson about Hiroshima.  That would rebuke us for backing Israel instead of the savage Palestinian terrorists. 

Oh, wait.  Obama is now president.  He doesn't need a magic wand.  He just needs the Democratic Party to put partisanship over our national security and the stability of the Middle East.  He just needs his loyal Democrats to avert their eyes from the certainty of a terror rampage the likes of which the world has never seen.  All to avoid angering their voting base by dissing the first black president.

Senator Cruz is right when he says that by giving Iran $120 billion in sequestered funds, Obama will make himself "the world's leading financier of radical Islamic terrorism." 

Given the size of Iran's economy, that would be like handing America 1.7 trillion dollars.

Obama has already handed the mullahs almost $12 billion this summer, to prove his good intentions to Iran.  That's already four times our annual military aid to Israel.  It is sixty times what Iran is spending annually to fund Hezb'allah, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and Syria's Bashar Assad.  Just think what mayhem they can accomplish with an extra $100 billion.

Obama's answer to Senator Cruz?  "This is Iran's money."
Iran's money, Iran's right to spend it on terrorism, and God d**n America.
That is the "legacy" Obama has dreamed of his whole life.

Karin McQuillan

Source: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2015/08/rush_is_wrong_on_obamas_legacy_interest_in_a_nuclear_iran.html

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

Turkey's Multiple Wars - Burak Bekdil

by Burak Bekdil

• At home, the AKP is fighting tens of millions of secular Turks, atheists, Kurds, Alevis, the PKK, the DHKP-C and the clandestine network of Gülenists. Not a small list.
• In addition, Turkey does not have full ambassadorial-level diplomatic relations with Syria, Israel, Egypt, Libya and Yemen.

To avoid fighting multiple enemies at multiple fronts is an old military strategy. Particularly in the last five years, Turkey's Islamist rulers have chosen to do the opposite.

First, they deliberately polarized the society along pious-secular Muslim lines in order to reinforce their conservative voter base. In 2013, they brutally suppressed millions of demonstrators who took to the streets to protest the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP). They accused Israel and the West (including Western media, a German airline and even "intergalactic forces") of masterminding the protests.

At the end of 2013, the AKP broke up with its long-time political ally, the Gülenists, named after Fethullah Gülen, an influential Muslim preacher living in self-exile in the United States. Turkey's National Security Council recently added the Gülen movement into the country's list of terror organizations. In the past year and a half, law enforcement authorities have expelled, arrested, indicted or purged thousands of police officers, prosecutors and judges believed to be "Gülenists."

Today, in addition to the Gülenist "terrorists" the Turkish government is fighting, a Marxist-Leninist terror organization, DHKP-C and the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), the armed wing of the Kurdish political movement, have been fighting for self-rule or autonomy in Turkey's predominantly Kurdish southeast. A ceasefire came in 2013, after nearly 40,000 people were killed in clashes since 1984.

However, recently violence renewed after a jihadist suicide bomber killed 32 people at a meeting of young pro-Kurdish humanitarian activists, in a small Turkish town on the Syrian border, on July 20. Since then, not a day has passed without clashes between the security forces and PKK militants. Hundreds have already been killed or injured in this new wave of violence. Similarly, Alevis, who practice an offshoot of Shia Islam, and are often viewed as heretics by the AKP's Sunni Islamists, are increasingly tense as they remain deprived of even official recognition of their houses of worship.

At home, the AKP is fighting tens of millions of secular Turks, atheists, Kurds, Alevis, the PKK, the DHKP-C and the clandestine network of Gülenists. Not a small list.

When Syria looked relatively stable, Ankara was fighting a cold war against President Bashar al-Assad's regime in Damascus. Now, four years later, in addition to Assad, the Turks are also fighting a cold war against Syrian Kurds who have carved out a Kurdish zone across much of Turkey's border with Syria, and Turkey has recently officially joined the allied campaign to fight the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (IS), and an unknown number of al-Qaeda-linked groups operating in northern Syria. "How many different groups is Turkey fighting in Syria, in addition to Assad's regime? I wish I knew the answer," a senior security official told this author.

In its vicinity, Turkey has not had diplomatic relations with Cyprus since 1974, when Turkey invaded the northern third of the island; nor with Armenia since 1991, when it became independent during the dissolution of the Soviet Union. In addition, Turkey does not have full ambassadorial-level diplomatic relations with Syria, Israel, Egypt, Libya and Yemen.

On top of that, Turkey, which claims to be emerging as the leader of the Muslim world, has not held a political forum with the 22-nation Arab League since 2012, due to its political crisis with Egypt. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan does not recognize the legitimacy of Egypt's President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, and insists that Egypt's legitimate president is Mohamed Morsi, the imprisoned Muslim Brotherhood leader.

On August 4, the Arab League condemned Turkey's air strikes against PKK strongholds in northern Iraq, and called on Ankara to recognize the sovereignty of Iraq.

Turkey looks like a crowded, noisy house sitting in a notoriously noisy, volatile and violent neighborhood. Half of the people living in the house tend to pick up fights with the other half on a daily basis. The house is often on fire because of the fighting. But the householders are also in feuds with most of the dangerous folks living in the neighborhood. Gang fighting and ambushes break out daily, with most crimes remaining "unsolved."

Yet the big angry people in the Turkish house still believe that they will one day be the toughest guys in the neighborhood whom everyone fears and respects. They do not even realize that often they are just the neighborhood's bad joke.

The big angry people in the Turkish house still believe that they will one day be the toughest guys in the neighborhood whom everyone fears and respects. They do not even realize that often they are just the neighborhood's bad joke. Pictured above, Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan (left) and his political-ideological nemesis, Fethullah Gülen (right).

Burak Bekdil, based in Ankara, is a Turkish columnist for the Hürriyet Daily and a Fellow at the Middle East Forum.

Source: http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/6340/turkey-multiple-wars

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

Learning Chinese - Judith Bergman

by Judith Bergman

Although relations between China and Israel are obviously complex and have experienced both ups and downs since diplomatic relations were established in 1992, there can be no doubt that China views Israel as an important partner in many respects and the importance of this can hardly be overestimated.

 

Imagine a group of French, German, Scandinavian or British teenagers winning a grand prize for their outstanding schoolwork. The prize consists of the opportunity to travel to one out of a number of foreign countries and Israel is one of the countries on that list of possibilities. What is the likelihood that they will choose Israel over, say, the United States or Japan? 

From an increasingly early age, European youngsters are bombarded with anti-Israeli slogans and propaganda, sometimes even from their own schoolbooks. The chances of them thinking Israel would be a terrific place to travel and visit are -- unfortunately -- rather slim.

Imagine now, another group of teenagers from a very different place than Europe. Nineteen of them are going to be visiting Israel this week, as a reward for winning a prestigious science prize in their country. Given a choice of travel destinations, the teenagers chose Israel, where they will be attending a special 10-day workshop hosted by Israel's Weizmann Institute of Science. The teenagers will be accompanied by teachers, journalists, and by government officials. 

These teenagers are Chinese and their ethos and attitudes towards Israel -- as is obviously clear -- differs significantly from that of their European counterparts. Clearly, for them Israel represents a unique opportunity to learn and to grow. They will attend the Smart-Up Science Youth Camp, a collaboration between the Weizmann Institute's Davidson Institute of Science Education and Shirat Enterprises, which promotes joint high-tech ventures between Israeli and Chinese companies. They will also be meeting the 2009 Nobel Prize laureate in chemistry, Professor Ada Yonath.

Although relations between China and Israel are obviously complex and have experienced both ups and downs since diplomatic relations were established in 1992, there can be no doubt that China views Israel as an important partner in many respects and the importance of this can hardly be overestimated. 

"For China, Israel is never a small country, but rather, a happy and innovative startup nation with many cutting-edge technologies and rich experience in governing social affairs," wrote Chinese Ambassador to Israel Gao Yanping in an article in Jerusalem Post in April 2014, shortly before then-President Shimon Peres visited the country. 

China is Israel's fourth largest export target in the world and its first largest in Asia. In March 2015, a special Israel-China task force was launched by the Prime Minister's Office. The task force was launched after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's visit to China in May 2013, where it was decided to advance economic ties between Israel and China. 

At the time, Israel Export Institute Director General Ramzi Gabbay said, "The Chinese market is a strategic target for Israeli exporters. China's need to continue upgrading its technology infrastructures constitutes an opportunity for Israeli companies especially in fields that the Chinese government has set as development targets such as: Water technologies, the environment, medical equipment, high-tech industrial equipment, motor vehicles, software, etc. The Israel Export Institute has set for itself the goal of assisting Israeli exporters in forging relevant business links in order to break into the Chinese market."

The goal is to double Israeli exports to China within five years to approximately 5 billion dollars yearly.

Chinese tourism to Israel is another growing area, although a somewhat underdeveloped one with a tremendous potential for growth. Chinese travel abroad is booming and you will find Chinese tourists in even the smallest European outpost, but Israel has so far not realized the potential of Chinese globe-trotters. "To say that not much has been done to bring Chinese tourists to Israel is not true. It would be more correct to say that almost nothing has been done," says Tourism Minister Yariv Levin, who has been in office since May. 

According to a report in Haaretz on July 11, last year about 32,000 Chinese visited Israel, up 29% from 2013. The upward trend is continuing this year. During the first five months of 2015, 18,700 Chinese tourists visited Israel, a 35% increase over the same period in 2014.

However, since there are 107 million Chinese globe-trotters, Israel is getting a very small piece of the cake with only 18,700 Chinese travelers having visited Israel.

Part of the problem -- or at least so the Haaretz report claims -- is that Chinese travel comes with its own set of language and culinary issues, e.g. that Chinese travelers expect signs in Chinese, Chinese food, etc., yet this is not entirely true. For anyone traveling in Europe this past summer, it has been plain to see that Chinese travelers go everywhere, even to the smallest and most obscure islands in Scandinavia, without a Chinese sign or restaurant in sight. While it may hold true for older Chinese, one should not underestimate the desire of young Chinese people to see the world for themselves and to experience it, despite the lack of Chinese guides or familiar food.

Having said that, there are genuine linguistic barriers that cannot be overlooked, as Israelis and Chinese do not share a common language. There is every reason in the world for Israeli students to begin learning Chinese. 

Which brings us back to the visit of the nineteen Chinese students. It is cultural exchanges like that which create the basis for stronger cooperation in the future, as those Chinese students acquaint themselves with the real Israel and its many technological achievements.

Here is hoping that Western teenagers will one day jump as eagerly at the opportunity to visit Israel.

Judith Bergman is a writer and political analyst living in Israel.

Source: http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=13497

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Modern Day Slavery in Vietnam and Malaysia - Michael Benge

by Michael Benge

A coalition of national and international organizations in Asia has charged both Vietnam and Malaysia with “Modern Day Slavery” -- Vietnam for its “blood cashews” and Malaysia for its oil palm industry

In a Senate Committee on Foreign Relations hearing on August 6, Senators from both parties accused the Obama Administration of putting its Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) goals ahead of Malaysia’s modern-day slavery; however, this was just half of the equation.   A coalition of national and international organizations in Asia has charged both Vietnam and Malaysia with “Modern Day Slavery” -- Vietnam for its “blood cashews” and Malaysia for its oil palm industry; both are engaged in state-sponsored human-trafficking and indentured servitude. However, they are being rewarded by the US State Department that pretends these countries have “demonstrated sufficient progress on human rights” despite the fact that both have repeatedly “come under fire for paltry efforts” to reduce human rights abuses.

In the blood cashew industry, political prisoners are forced to work seven hours a day for $3 a month, for as long as seven years -- often resulting in serious injuries and even blindness -- to produce cashews to export to the US and other countries, an industry that brings Vietnam $1.5 Billion (US) per year. 

The State Department conducts foreign policy by supporting the Administration’s flavor of the month, and removes the names of favored countries from sanction lists based on their assurances, without hard evidence of “significant progress.” This brings to mind the idiom, “A leopard doesn’t change its spots.” The abusers simply change their actions from overt to covert while preventing outsiders from access to areas and people that might be inconvenient to those assurances.  Congress and human rights organizations, which supposedly monitor such abuses, issue reports and hold hearings, and then move on to the next ox to gore without effecting any changes. More than 20 years of diplomatic relations with Vietnam supplemented by ever-increasing economic aid have only purchased countless deceptions, broken promises, and endless oppression. Meanwhile, the regime’s leaders line their own pockets with money intended to improve the lives of the people.

On the human rights front, communist Vietnam continues its long-standing pattern of oppressing and abusing cyber-dissidents and any others who criticize the government, promote democratic reforms, or seek religious freedom by inflicting exorbitant fines, imprisonment of up to 17 years, and even death.  This shows no signs of lessening, according to recent reports by the State Department, Human Rights Watch (HRW) and others. Communist Vietnam has more than earned its inglorious title, “The Worst Human Rights Violator in Southeast Asia.”

A Tangled Web They Weave.

During his recent White House and Congressional visits, Vietnamese Communist Party chief Nguyen Phu Trong not only lobbied for the TPP, but also had the audacity to demand more money for Agent Orange reparations. The US is already giving millions of dollars for clean-up efforts in the areas most affected by Agent Orange spraying during the Vietnam War. Ironically, at the same time, Vietnam is spraying it or similar toxins on crops and farmland in Cambodia, in areas once known as the “Ho Chi Minh Trail,” in order to force Cambodian farmers there to leave their lands, according to a complaint recently filed with the UN.

The only economic leverage the US still has to pressure the repressive Vietnamese regime to desist in its religious persecution, repression of free speech, and censorship of online information is the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement (TPP), Nevertheless, President Obama is about to give it away.

Obama and his Administration are turning a convenient blind eye to the gross human rights abuses of both countries. Vietnam is a key component of its China containment policy. Malaysia  is a valuable US ally due to its prime position on the Strait of Malacca, through which more than 40% of the world’s trade and a third of its oil is shipped.  Mr. Obama, what about our former allies -- the freedom loving people of Vietnam? 
And the band plays on.


Michael Benge spent 11 years in Vietnam as a Foreign Service officer and is a student of Southeast Asian politics. He is very active in advocating for human rights, religious freedom, and democracy for the peoples of the region and has written extensively on these subjects.

Source: http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2015/08/modern_day_slavery_in_vietnam_and_malaysia.html

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.