Solsticewitch13's BOS

http://www.stonegateinstitute.org/2955/turkish-islamist-regime-condone-massacre

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The talk about "Jordan is Palestine" only plays into the hands of those who seek to turn the kingdom into a radical state that would most probably be affiliated with Iran or the Muslim Brotherhood.

Those who support the idea of turning Jordan into a Palestinian state need to be think carefully about the consequences of such a move.

A Palestinian state in Jordan would only be a source of even further instability and tension in the Middle East.

The royal family in Jordan has always been friendly to Israel and the West. Like his father, the late King Hussein, King Abdullah II is probably Israel's best friend and ally in the Arab and Islamic world.

The long border between Israel and Jordan has been relatively quite over the past few decades -- thanks to the Jordanian authorities' tremendous efforts to prevent terror attacks from their territories.

Turning Jordan into Palestine would mean the loss of a moderate and rational Arab leader at a time when Islamists are rising to power in Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco and Libya.

It would mean the creation of a third state for the Palestinians, who already have two entities - one in the West Bank and another in the Gaza Strip.

A Palestinian state in Jordan would be run by either Hamas or Fatah -- the two parties that have failed their people again and again in the past few decades. In any event, whoever replaces the royal family in Jordan would not be as moderate, pragmatic and open-minded as the Hashemites.

The Jordanian monarch has displayed courage by resisting pressure from wealthy Arab countries like Qatar to allow Hamas, after it was thrown out of Syria, to establish its headquarters in Amman.

King Abdullah II, who since the beginning of the "Arab Spring" has been forced to tackle growing unrest in his kingdom, should also be commended for resisting immense pressure from Muslim Brotherhood and many Jordanians and Palestinians to cut off diplomatic ties with Israel.

Security cooperation between Israel and Jordan has always been strong: the two countries face the same challenges, threats and enemies.

King Abdullah II and his father have prevented Hamas from establishing terror bases in the kingdom.

In 1999, King Hussein did not hesitate to expel Hamas leaders after closing down their offices in Amman.

A few years later, the Jordanians thwarted plans by Hamas to smuggle weapons into the kingdom for the purpose of launching terror attacks against Israel.

The king already has too many problems at home. The talk about "Jordan is Palestine" and "Palestine is Jordan" only aggravates these problems and plays into the hands of those who would turn the kingdom into a radical state that would probably be afflicted with Iran or the Muslim Brotherhood.

Related Topics: Khaled Abu Toameh

Turkish Islamist Regime Set to Condone Massacre

by Stephen Schwartz
March 19, 2012 at 4:00 am

http://www.stonegateinstitute.org/2950/responsibility-to-protect

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The official explanation for the decision to abandon the Sivas prosecution held that the massacre was not a "crime against humanity".

The Turkish government of prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the so-called Justice and Development Party or AKP has provoked a major controversy by its ambivalence, after indicating, on March 13, that it would not pursue a legal case against Islamists for a 1993 arson attack that killed 37 people, most of them members of the Alevi Muslim minority.

The atrocity occurred when a mob of enraged Sunni Muslims assaulted the Madimak Hotel in the east-central city of Sivas. Alevis -- who adhere to a heterodox faith combining pre-Islamic Turkish and Kurdish traditions, plus Shiism and spiritual Sufism -- are committed secularists and notable proponents of gender equality. The attack on the hotel was motivated in part by participation in an Alevi cultural festival at the facility by the late Aziz Nesin, a popular author and translator of Salman Rushdie's novel The Satanic Verses into Turkish. Nesin escaped the blaze set by the extremists; he died in 1995, at 79. Apart from those killed by the flames in the hotel, 60 people were injured in the incident, and 17 more died in anti-fundamentalist protests after the crime.

Sivas, an ancient city known as Sebasteia, and long a center of Armenian culture, now stands as symbolic of Turkish Sunni violence against the Alevis. While the Alevis share the same complaints of discrimination suffered by Armenian and Greek Christians in the country, members of this liberal, dissenting Muslim sect count up to 20 million Turkish citizens, or a quarter of the country's total population. They are therefore more threatening to Islamist clerical and political bigots than the Christians.

The Erdogan government let slip disingenuously that it intended to drop charges against five accused perpetrators of the 1993 Sivas murders. Two more are now dead, including the former mayor of the city, who was a member of Erdogan's party. Thirty people were condemned to execution for the attack, but their sentences were reduced to life imprisonment.

The official explanation for the decision to abandon the Sivas prosecution held that the massacre was not a "crime against humanity," and therefore is subject to a 15-year statute of limitations. But while Turkey under Erdogan and the AKP claim to adhere to Western values, in most countries, homicide – especially mass murder, and incitement to it – are not covered by any statute of limitations.

In the American South, after decades, racists involved in lethal terrorist acts against civil rights volunteers during the 1960s have been brought to justice. Nazis and their collaborators in the Holocaust, once they are found, regardless of their age, are still captured and arraigned. In the aftermath of the Balkan conflicts and other attempts at genocide over the past 20 years, war criminals have been caught and sent to the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia and similar bodies at The Hague. It has been argued that the same fate awaits the bloodthirsty Syrian dictator Bashar Al-Assad and his cohorts.

Turkey, however, regardless of its posturing against the Damascus tyrant, is different. The suggestion that the accused in the Sivas tragedy would escape a reckoning fits the "soft" fundamentalist direction Erdogan and his party, affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood, have imposed on their citizens.

Outrage over the apparent impunity enjoyed by radicals, murdering in the name of Sunnism, and inflicting continued oppression on Alevis and others of whom they disapprove, led to new confrontations with Turkish police last week. President Abdullah Gul, an AKP stalwart, was moved to declare that the Sivas events remain to be clarified, suggesting that Erdogan's followers might back away from such an obvious injustice. Further, Deputy Prime Minister Bekir Bozdag denied that a statute of limitations could be applied in the Sivas fatalities.

Kemal Kilicdaroglu, leader of the main secular opposition force, the Republican People's Party (known by its Turkish initials as the CHP), commented sharply, "I am sure Prime Minister Erdogan is happy (and) relieved at such a proposed court decision. This is an affront to humanity, and this is where the polarization of society starts." Kilicdaroglu noted that some of the defense lawyers for the Sivas Sunni agitators are legislators representing Erdogan's AKP.

The accommodation of Sunni Muslim radicals in the Sivas case came as both Erdogan and the AKP face condemnation over obvious abuses of the justice system and other state institutions. Ahmet Sik and Nedim Sener, two leading journalists imprisoned in a murky series of proceedings during which hundreds of secularist media, military, and minority figures have been indicted for alleged subversion, were released on Monday, the day before the gambit to exculpate the Sivas plotters was announced.

Sik was targeted by the AKP for exposing the penetration of Turkish police agencies by a powerful Islamist movement headed by Fethullah Gulen, a purported Sufi living in the U.S. Two less prominent media personalities, Sait Cakir and Coskun Musluk, were also set free after being jailed in the same convoluted campaign of repression. But AKP allegations against the journalists have not been dropped: while they have been let out of prison, they still face trials.

In public education, where Erdogan and the AKP have promoted an Islamist agenda painstakingly, the Ankara authorities announced that they will replace the established eight-year primary curriculum with a split structure under which students will be permitted to complete four years each in primary and secondary schools. Between the ages of 10 and 14, young people would then be allowed to matriculate in "imam-hatip" schools, which train Muslim clerics and Friday preachers. Turkish parents expressed anxiety that such a "reform" would encourage girls, in particular, to leave school after only four years.

A probable consequence of such a new educational standard would be an increase in child marriages – a major blight on Turkish society, and a devastating setback for women.

"Responsibility to Protect"

by Shoshana Bryen
March 19, 2012 at 3:30 am

http://www.stonegateinstitute.org/2954/pkk-encryption-team-caught-in-northern-iraq

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If Syria and Egypt have nothing to fear from the President of the United States, what will Iran fear?

"What is being done in Homs [Syria] . . . is simply appalling and shouldn't be allowed to stand in our world," said British Prime Minister David Cameron in Washington. The British, he said, are cataloguing "these crimes," and Assad should "always remember that international law has got a long reach and a long memory."

Standing next to Mr. Cameron, President Obama demanded that Bashar al-Asad step down while reassuring him that the U.S. is unlikely actually to do anything about the porblem. "The best thing we can do right now is to make sure that the international community continues to unify around the fact that what the Syrian regime is doing is unacceptable."

Really? That's the BEST we can do? Who out there doesn't think what the Syrians are doing is unacceptable? The Russians? They know perfectly well it is morally unacceptable; they just don't care because a larger Russian interest is involved. As in Chechnya. As when the French and Germans said they were opposed to the Iraq war for moral reasons while they were taking Oil-for-Food kickbacks from Saddam.

But despite the fact that PM Cameron is "appalled" by things Mr. Obama has called "unacceptable," the President and various American officials have recently offered a host of reasons no one should expect us to do anything about them.

The US needs "permission" from the UN and the Arab League, along with NATO agreement (though perhaps not the agreement of Congress)
It would take 75,000 soldiers to contain Syria's chemical arsenal
There could be a civil war. [In support of Mr. Obama, the French government added yesterday that, "If we give arms to a certain faction of the Syrian opposition, we would make a civil war among Christians, Alawites, Sunnis and Shiites."]
Al-Qaeda is part of the Syrian opposition
Russian-supplied Syrian air defenses are formidable.

Most of those points are debatable (there's already a civil war and no proof of al-Qaeda involvement). All are largely irrelevant if, indeed, there is a responsibility to stop the perpetrators of what, by most accounts, amounts to war crimes. The United States and our British ally have to determine whether R2P (Responsibility to Protect) is actually only R2PATF (Responsibility to Punish after the Fact).

There is something to be said for the trials of Slobodan Milosevic and Ratko Mladich after the Bosnia war, and the 92 indictments that followed the Rwanda massacres. There is less to commend the indictment of Omar Bashir of Sudan, who remains in charge of Sudan after the depredations in Darfur, Nuba, South Sudan and the Beja people in the east. And there is nothing that helps the victims of any of the above.

The administration should want al-Asad and other despotic leaders – not to mention our friends – to believe that the United States and its allies in the West mean what they say. At the moment, the bad guys, at least, have no reason to.

In the wake of charges against American pro-democracy workers in Egypt and revocation of their exit visas, Congress determined to withhold U.S. aid until the State Department certified that the country was "making progress in basic freedoms and human rights." Although one would be hard-pressed to see progress, The Washington Post reports that Secretary of State Clinton is close to announcing that she will bypass Congress and hand over $1.5 billion in mostly military aid.

She will, according to sources in the article, claim "national security" grounds, fearing that continuing to withhold the money will make the military junta and the Muslim Brotherhood even angrier with the U.S. than they already are. That, and most of the money is tied up in existing defense contracts with U.S. firms.

So, U.S. aid no longer serves the goals of U.S. foreign policy may have, it is a) a blackmail payoff against further Egyptian anti-Americanism and b) a "shovel ready" jobs program. Neither shows American backbone.

If Syria and Egypt have nothing to fear from the President of the United States, what will Iranian fear? Still standing with Mr. Cameron, President Obama followed up on his determination not to inconvenience al-Asad with what The Washington Post called a "stern warning" that Tehran "must meet its international obligations or face the consequences."

Yeah, right.

Shoshana Bryen is Senior Director of The Jewish Policy Center. She was previously Senior Director of JINSA and author of JINSA Reports form 1995-2011.

Related Topics: Shoshana Bryen

PKK Encryption Team Caught in Northern Iraq
And more from the Turkish Press

by AK Group
March 19, 2012 at 3:00 am