Thursday, September 25, 2014

How Turkey Plans to "Combat Anti-Semitism"


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How Turkey Plans to "Combat Anti-Semitism"

by Burak Bekdil  •  September 25, 2014 at 5:00 am
In Turkey, hate speech is a crime only if it is committed against Muslim Turks.
The penalty for failing to pay the tax [only for Jews] should be the revocation of the Jew's business and the seizure of his property. — Faruk Kose, columnist for Yeni Akit, honored with a permanent seat aboard Turkish President Erdogan's private jet.
President Barack Obama talks with then Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in a previous meeting, in Washington, Dec. 7, 2009. [Official White House Photo]
At the beginning of September, President Barack Obama met with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on the sidelines of the NATO Summit in Wales. After the meeting, the White House said in a statement: "They exchanged views on how best to cooperate in the struggle against ISIL [Islamic State of Iraq and Levant/Syria] and violent extremism in Iraq and Syria, and on the need for strengthened measures against foreign fighters transiting to and from the battlefield." What could be more normal if the U.S. president discussed measures against extremism with the president of a country that now borders ISIS?
But it was bizarre that Obama and Erdogan also discussed one topic that was neither NATO- nor ISIS-related. The White House said: "The President and President Erdogan also discussed the importance of building tolerant and inclusive societies and combatting the scourge of anti-Semitism."

#BurnISISFlagChallenge in Kosovo

by Stephen Schwartz  •  September 25, 2014 at 4:00 am
They said their protest [against ISIS] was directed against criminality by terrorists, not against religious feelings among ordinary Muslims. — RTK, Kosovo state broadcast.
"[T]he U.S. is distrusted, disliked and even hated by all the regimes it is dealing with." — Ahmed Rashid, Financial Times, London.
Young Muslims in the Balkans, like the two investigative reporters, Visar Duriqi and Artan Haraqija, who were threatened by Islamists, deserve to be supported and protected.
On September 8, about 20 members of the Kosovo Democratic Youth, a wing of the Democratic Party of Kosovo (known by its Albanian initials as the PDK), set fire to an "Islamic State" [IS] flag in Prishtina, the country's capital. In doing so, they participated in a campaign that began in Lebanon and has swept Arab countries, called the #BurnISISFlagChallenge, and inspired apparently by the "ice-bucket challenge" to support medical research. The PDK is the dominant political force in the Balkan republic, and is led by veterans of the Kosovo Liberation Army [KLA] in the 1998-99 war.

The Right to Protest the Metropolitan Opera Decision to Put on "The Death of Klinghoffer"

by Alan M. Dershowitz  •  September 24, 2014 at 3:15 pm
On Monday night I stood in front of the Metropolitan Opera listening to hundreds of Jewish and non-Jewish protesters who were aggrieved by the decision of the Metropolitan Opera to produce a work called The Death of Klinghoffer by John Adams.
The plot of the opera centers on the cold-blooded murder of an elderly, wheelchair bound, Jewish-American man, who had taken a cruise with his dying wife to celebrate their 36th wedding anniversary.  Palestinian terrorists selected him for execution because he was Jewish, shot him and dumped his body into the sea.  It was not the televised beheading of a journalist or an aid worker who had volunteered to perform an important function in a dangerous area.  But it was at least as brutal and unjustified, precisely because Leon Klinghoffer was an ordinary tourist, who simply happened to be Jewish.

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