Cartoon In Saudi Daily: An Increasingly Exposed Israel Fans Flames Of War In Kurdistan To Strike At Turkey Source: Al-Watan, Saudi Arabia, June 21, 2010 via thememriblog.org
This week Turkish forces invaded Iraq and its warplanes bombed 7 Kurdish villages killing a teenage girl and wounding her mother and 3 year old sister. A week ago Iran had done the same things, killing a 14 year old girl and a 45 year old woman. There are no shouts of protest. No worldwide demonstrations. The Obama administration and the media did not deliver any lectures on disproportionate force. Not even when Erdogan vowed to drown the Kurdish rebels "in their own blood". Instead Ambassador James J. Jeffrey slavishly rushed to assure Turkey's Thug in Chief Erdogan that the PKK was also America's enemy and promised to "urgently" review any request for help against them. No such help was offered to the Kurds, whose villages were being bombed from the sky using planes sold to Turkey by the United States. Despite the fact that Iraqi Kurds, unlike Turkey, supported the US liberation of Iraq. Because that's what friends of the United States get from the Obama Administration. A kick in the face. And what our enemies get is a slobbering kiss on the cheek.
As part of its demagogic assault on Israel, the Islamist regime has now claimed that Israel is fomenting a coup within Turkey. I can state for a fact that this isn't true. There will be no coup for several reasons: the armed forces are intimidated by verbal attacks and arrests, its leaders don't want to set off a civil war, and they know that no Western government-and especially the United States-would support them.
What's really happening is a coup against the armed forces through lies, arrests, and political pressure by the Islamist regime. But that doesn't mean the generals and soldiers are happy with the destruction of the republic created by Kemal Ataturk and of Turkish democracy in general.via rubinreports.blogspot.com
Another discontented institution the regime wants to crush is the Foreign Ministry. Now several retired ambassadors have publicly complained about how demagogue-in-chief Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is pursuing against them. They watch in sadness as the Islamist regime throws away decades'-old connections with the West in pursuit of his effort to be Iran's number-one ally.via rubinreports.blogspot.com
For months and up to the very last minute, Obama privately encouraged Erdogan to negotiate with Iran for some kind of deal. This was a terribly stupid thing to do since Obama should have understood that Erdogan is now very close to Tehran. But the Turkish prime minister was eager to play an important international role and to help his friends in Tehran, as well as scoring points with the United States.
The PKK is a terrorist organization, but it is not our enemy and it does not have anything to do with us. Any reason for providing aid to Turkey against the PKK ended with the Cold War. Especially considering Turkey's shakedown of the US during the Kosovo operation and its refusal to support US forces in the liberation of Iraq. The United States has no reason to provide military assistance to a regime that is not willing to do the same.
While the US has consistently backed Turkey against the PKK-- the Turkish regime has in response accused the US of supporting the PKK in order to divide Turkey. Ankara knows very well that this is a lie, but it is part of a domestic campaign aimed at demonizing the US. Just as the chairman of the ruling AKP Islamist party, Hüseyin Çelik, has accused Israel of being behind the PKK bombing in İskenderun (legally Syrian territory, in practice occupied Kurdistan) in order to continue the regime's campaign of hateful incitement. (This is particularly ironic as Turkey is actually using Israeli drones against the Kurdish rebels, and Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu helped Turkey capture PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan.) Further exploiting the more recent Istanbul bus bombing for all it's worth, Erdogan accused everyone from the media to his own political opposition of being tied up with the attacks.
The hypocrisy here is rather pungent as bus bombings were a common tool of the Hamas terrorist organization, which is closely supported by Erdogan. As a radical Islamist, Erdogan's ties to terrorism run deep. Not only was he personally jailed, but Erdogan and his AKP party are tied up with Yassin Qadi, a Saudi businessman who was marked by the US Treasury as a "Specially Designated Global Terrorist"who funneled millions of dollars to Osama bin Laden. Cuneyt Zapsu, a co-founder of the AKP party and an Erdogan advisor, meanwhile only passed along 300,000 dollars to Al Queda, through Qadi.
Meanwhile in a country where members of a Kurdish youth choir as young as 12 were arrested and faced years in prison for singing a Kurdish folk song, that also happens to be the anthem of the anthem of Iraq's Kurdistan Regional Government at the San Francisco International Music Festival in 2007-- Al Queda openly publishes its own magazine, "Kaide" out of an office in the middle of Istanbul. This is no accident. Erdogan claims there's no such thing as Islamic terrorism, just as he claimed that there's no such thing as genocide by Muslims, when he welcomed Sudan's mass murdering leader, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, who is wanted for crimes against humanity. What Erdogan has done is legitimize Muslim terrorism and genocide. Even as he rants about Kurdish attacks on Turkey.
It's understandable why Erdogan and his regime would be worried about the Kurds. Turkey occupies and rules over 12 million of them. And those are the official statistics of a regime which at one time actually criminalized any attempt to list separate Kurdish populations. Suggesting that the real numbers may be far higher. But the real question is why we should care. Erdogan and the AKP are pushing Turkey on an anti-American path. Meanwhile the Kurds are vital to stabilizing Iraq. Which suggests that perhaps we should be focusing more on the rights of the Kurds, than the demands of the Turks.
But the US and Europe have turned a blind eye to everything Turkey does. Even when Erdogan openly threatened to ethnically cleanse Armenians again, if they complained about Turkey's original genocide of their people, in the presence of UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown. Nor did Brown raise the subject with Erdogan. Unlike when Israeli soldiers board a Turkish boat sent to aid Hamas, are stabbed and beaten and defend themselves, then the British government quickly demanded answers from Israel. That is because like every Islamist regime, Turkey gets a free pass to do whatever it likes, whether it's occupying Cyprus, invading Iraq and bombing villages there, or imprisoning 12 year olds for singing folk songs. And Turkey's pipeline power doesn't hurt either, as Europe finds itself on the wrong end of energy based hydraulic despotism.
Germany may keep Turkey out of the EU, not that Europe would have survived more than a decade of a state of affairs in which a Muslim population in the tens of millions, half of whom earns 20 dollars a month suddenly had access to every country in the EU. But the apologetics being penned for Turkey in the Western media claiming that Turkey's move to the Islamist camp is the act of a spurned EU lover, have it wrong. This was a long range and well financed effort accomplished by the same Saudis who funded Al Queda. Turkey once made the transition from Imperialism to Fascism. Now it is going from Fascism to Islamism.
Meanwhile European humanitarians and American liberals will continue vocally denouncing Israel for every talking point sent their way by Hamas. But suppose they spare a glance for 12 million Kurds living under Erdogan's oppression. Or its Armenians who dare not lift their heads. Or the continuing occupation of Cyprus. Or perhaps the ongoing imprisonment of Leyla Zana, who on becoming the first woman elected to the Turkish parliament was sentenced to ten years in jail for taking her oath in Kurdish. Despite winning the Sakharov Prize and being nominated twice for the Nobel Peace Prize, Zana is still in jail today. Perhaps in between declaring boycotts against Israel (though of course they oppose collective punishment) such "luminaries" as Ken Loach, John Berger, Iain Banks, Eve Ensler and Danny Glover might give a thought for her, and for what an actual totalitarian regime that occupies the lands of other people and suppresses their identities looks like.
But of course that would require integrity, which is in rather short supply among those folks. That is the same reason why human rights has become a sham. Why genocide could go on in the Sudan, while human rights groups panhandling for donations in Saudi Arabia, have focused mainly on raving and ranting against Israel. It's why the Human Rights Council at the UN features such notable defenders of human rights as Saudi Arabia, Cuba and Russia. And why Erdogan feels free to conduct a state of terror at home, and even invade Iraq, because he knows that he will never be held accountable for it.
via Daniel Greefield via docstalk.blogspot.comWe showed the Turkish that they could fool us for decades.
Turkish guest workers saw this all firsthand. Which made the idea that Turkey had to be secular in order for Turks to benefit from the modern world seem all the more absurd. That sort of thinking might have made sense back in the day when Her Majesty's Armies were administering an empire, but not when Islamist preachers were hectoring the masses and jeering at returning soldiers in the heart of her kingdom.
CHP (The Republican People’s Party) : created
in 1923 by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, is now
led by Mr. Kemal Kilicdaroglu. It has been a stronger centre-left
party since its fusion, in February 1995, with the then main left-wing
party SHP. The fusion has however prompted many ex-SHP politicians to defect
from the CHP party and join the DSP ranks. Many blamed the former for not being left-wing enough: Mr. Baykal, leader of CHP until May 2010, was indeed in favor of liberal economic policies and of the Customs Union in general. Following the general elections of April 1999, CHP - which obtained only 8.7% of the votes - disappeared from the Parliament for the first time in its history. ex-leader Mr. Baykal was seen as the responsible of this defeat and he lost the control of the party after the Extraordinary Grand Congress of CHP and he resigned. During the elections of 2002, ex-leader Mr. Baykal re-gained his seat and they were able to get 19.39% of the votes, thus became the second and the main opposition party in the parliament. In 2007 they joined their forces with DSP and got 20,88% of the votes, bringing in 112 deputies. After the elections, members from DSP have left the party and returned to their original party. via allaboutturkey.com
Turkish politicians from the Republican People’s Party and the ruling Ak Party fight during a debate last May in the Turkish parliament in Ankara
AKP (Justice
and Development Party) : Founded in 2001 as a pro-Islamist party by
Mr. Erdogan and
Mr. Gul, AKP gradually gained higher votes in
each local and general elections surprising other political parties. In 2002
they won 34,3% of the total votes and became as the first party from the polls, with
Abdullah Gül first as the Premiere, then Tayyip Erdogan after
his political ban ended. All three coalition parties eliminated.
CHP emerged as main opposition. For the first time in almost two decades,
AKP ended up forming a single-party government.
AKP rejects the "Islamist" label and claims that it is a
pro-Western mainstream party with a "conservative" social agenda but also a firm
commitment to liberal market economy and European Union membership. In the elections of 2007 they got 46,58% of the total votes and won the elections for the second time, bringing in 341 deputies. via allaboutturkey.com
