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In this mailing:
by Uzay Bulut
• July 19, 2015 at 5:00 am
- What does the
Turkish army -- this flamboyant member of the NATO -- want from the
small Kurdish village of Roboski?
- The West
should apply pressure on Turkey to act humanely, morally and
responsibly towards Kurds and other minorities. We all know that the
Obama administration will never do that. But there are thousands of
activists, academics, and universities who just turn a blind to the
plight of Kurds as if their maltreatment is perfectly normal.
- There are
many "activists" like that. Their universities are filled
with events bashing Israel. But if you ask them, they do not even
know what is done to Kurds by their Turkish rulers. These activists
are either ignorant or hypocritical. Their activism has nothing to
do with caring about human beings; it is just about hating the Jews.
When Turkey condemns Israel for "committing massacres,"
Israelis should start lecturing Turkey about tens of thousands of
dead Kurds and about how Turkey still treats them.
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The funeral procession for the victims of the 2011
Roboski massacre in Turkey.
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During Turkey's elections on June 7, the pro-Kurdish Peoples'
Democratic Party (HDP) won a great victory by securing 13% of the vote,
which allowed its candidates to occupy 80 seats in the 550-seat
parliament of Turkey -- not all of them are Kurdish, some are Turkish or
of other ethnic groups. In any normal country, this would be welcomed by
state authorities as a potential way to resolve a huge national issue in
a non-violent manner for the benefit of both peoples, Kurds and Turks.
Sadly, Turkey does not seem to be about to do so. The recent
incidents in which Ferhat Encu, a Kurdish deputy from the HDP, was
threatened, insulted and beaten by Turkish soldiers in the Kurdish
village of Roboski (Uludere) in the Kurdish-majority province of Sirnak
are another manifestation of that. (Video of the incident: here and here,
and here.)
by Guy Millière
• July 19, 2015 at 4:00 am
- "I'll
see you guys in New York." — Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi,
self-declared "Caliph" of ISIS.
- On May 23,
2013, U.S. President Barack Obama declared that the "war on
terror" was over.
- In a public
opinion survey conducted in 2006, in Egypt, Pakistan, Morocco and Indonesia,
two third of respondents supported the idea of "uniting
all Muslim countries in a new caliphate."
- On June 8,
2015, President Obama said his administration had "no strategy
yet" for dealing with the Islamic State. The Islamic State does
have a strategy.
- For now,
Western countries are, at best, on the defensive. They dare not even
identify the enemy. Rather than cautionary vigilance in the face of
danger, today's Western leaders are choosing willful blindness and
appeasement.
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Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, then and now.
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Saint Quentin Fallavier, France, June 26. A man, Yassin Salhi,
decapitates another man, Hervé Cornara, his boss. He lifts the head he
has just severed, takes a selfie, sends the picture to one of his jihadi
friends in Syria, and pins the head to a fence, next to the black flag of
the Islamic State. He then attempts to trigger a deadly explosion in a
factory manufacturing industrial gases, but fails. Had he succeeded, he
could have caused a regional disaster akin to the accident that occurred
in Seveso, Italy, in 1976.
The same day, another man, Seifeddine Rezgui, goes to a beach in
Sousse, Tunisia. He unearths an assault rifle he earlier had buried in
the sand. He kills thirty-nine tourists, mainly British, and wounds forty
others. He is shot and killed by the police. Before the shooting spree,
he had sent a selfie, smiling, rifle in hand, next to the black flag of
the Islamic State. He sends the picture to a jihadi friend in Syria, just
as Yassin Salhi did.
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