The writer,ZVI MAZEL, is a former Israeli ambassador to Egypt.
The fact is that the present crisis has its roots in the election which in 2002 brought Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Islamist party -- well known for its hostility to the Jews -- to power.
Erdogan dismantled one after the other the bulwarks built by Ataturk, father of modern Turkey, that ensured that the country would remain secular.
...Erdogan then tried to set up a strategic front under his leadership by strengthening ties with Syria and Iran. The ongoing popular uprising in Syria and Iran's growing estrangement from the West and its support for Syria demonstrated the fragility of those alliances.
...Though Turkey was now without any ally in the region, Erdogan went on boasting that it was the greatest power there and that its influence was felt in every country. His highly vocal attacks on Israel and his support for the Palestinians are to be seen as efforts to position himself in the Arab world -- a world made of countries torn by internal strife and so deeply divided that they would be shaky allies at best. He nevertheless went to Egypt to see whether a strategic alliance could be made with a country which had long been his rival.
The visit was not an unmitigated success. Though the Turkish leader, basking in popular applause, negotiated a number of commercial agreements, the ruling Supreme Military Council would not commit itself. Egypt has enough troubles of its own without taking a stand which would put it at cross purposes with the United States. Even the Muslim Brotherhood, Erdogan's longtime ally, was offended by his recommendation to turn Egypt into a secular democratic state, and declared in no uncertain terms that Turkey should mind its own business.
To put it in a nutshell, Turkey is not only isolated, it is facing serious troubles. Its alliance with Iran and with Syria is in ruin.
Turkey and Syria have reinforced the forces stationed at their border with Turkey. The Kurdish minority is still fighting for its independence; old conflicts with Armenia and Greece are smoldering with occasional flare-ups. Relations with Cyprus are tense since Turkey ordered that country to stop drilling for gas in the Mediterranean because of a potential infringement on the rights of the northern part of the country under Turkish occupation which is not recognized by the international community.
Turkish threats also prevented Lebanon from ratifying the agreement it had signed with Cyprus regarding their respective maritime borders.
The US and even Russia are clearly unhappy about Turkey meddling everywhere in the eastern Mediterranean.
According to information from Defencenet.gr, quoting a Russian FM spokesman.º Russia has sent two nuclear-powered submarines to patrol Eastern Mediterranean waters around Cyprus and enforce the island's right to explore for undersea oil and gas in its territorial waters.
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"Russia has sent two nuclear-powered submarines to patrol Eastern Mediterranean waters around Cyprus and enforce the island's right to explore for undersea oil and gas in its territorial waters."
Which Russia obviously must have a stake in. It's not like they'd enforce other nations "rights" out of the goodness of their black little hearts
Posted by: Barbara ||
09/18/2011 9:22 Comments ||
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Which Russia obviously must have a stake in.
I don't know. After years of human rights rhetoric used to justify sleazoid behavior, it's kinda refreshing to hear a country stating it acts to advance its interests.
h/t Instapundit
President Obama has been at pains to convince voters that he cares about jobs. It seems to be a hard sell.
But he certainly can demonstrate that he cares about certain jobs -- the 7 percent of private-sector jobs and 36 percent of public-sector jobs held by union members.
During his two years and nine months as president, he has worked time and again to increase the number of unionized jobs. As for nonunion jobs, who wants them?
Posted by: Mike Ramsey ||
09/18/2011 00:00 ||
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Too late to educate the man, he won't forward his transcrpts. Other than their well publicized primal instincts, ie, honey beer, dagga ciggy's, and food, where does one begin with Barry and Michelle?
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I think Anonymoose hit it with the poll being a trial balloon yesterday. This is how the Clinton's operate. Bill would love to get back in the worst way. It does appear movement in that direction. The media will protect her. The Democrats will vote for her. Then the world will laugh and carry on as they are doing now.
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That said, the Boer's remark is... shallow. The blame may reside with the President, but it's his staff that makes or breaks him. And they've done none too well. From the article Mike cited, an example:
Daley, an amiable schmoozer who had a dealmakers reputation during his years as Bill Clintons commerce secretary, has clearly had trouble maneuvering in a toxic, divided 2011 Washington that is even more dysfunctional than the divided Washington he left in 2000. No incident illustrated Daleys dilemma better than the kerfuffle over Obamas jobs speech. Daley, according to sources in both camps, simply assumed that Boehner and company would grant the presidents request as a matter of course, and that organizers of the POLITICO/NBC News debate would simply move their event an hour back and garner a larger lead-in audience for good measure.
When Daley called Boehner at around 10 a.m. on Aug. 31 to inform him of the presidents plans not to ask for his permission Boehner was polite but noncommittal and said he would get back in touch. After a few hours of tense waiting, the speaker released a letter objecting to the timing, prompting a second call from Daley to Boehner, who said he was facing opposition to the address in his ranks and a possible floor vote on the speech, according to a congressional source.
More telling is that all this started coming out about 16 months prior to the election. And it's a first term 'hit'; cascading damage doesn't start showing up usually until the second term.
[Dawn] WE are paying for our sins. Pray tell me how many times have you heard this explanation for the country's current travails?
Be it the floods ravaging the Sindh countryside or dengue fever spreading panic in Punjab's capital, whichever channel you switch to there is no escaping clergymen who are telling the hapless nation it is facing divine wrath, its dilemmas are of its own making .
If you don't make a living advancing faith-based arguments or feel bound by them, then perhaps you don't have what it takes to understand such statements. Frankly, you'll find yourself wholly at a loss to even assess the veracity of such assertions. So is this area off-limits for you?
Not really. There is no bar on applying common sense and coming up with your own conclusions. In all probability, these will be robust -- robust enough not to need faith to prop them up or edicts pledging retribution to shield them from potential challengers.
Inevitably this column tends to look at television news coverage of events simply because with our abysmally low literacy levels the medium assumes enhanced significance. This significance is magnified when we examine 24 X 7 TV's footprint.
This is precisely why the last few days were reassuring as they were depressing. The quality of coverage and the diversity of approaches spanned the entire spectrum, from the sublime to the ludicrous.
Some of my colleagues abandoned the safety and comfort of their offices, studios. One watched them standing in knee-deep water bringing live images into our homes of a tragedy that words alone could not encapsulate.
They helped focus attention on the core of the problem and the immediacy of the need to help those now encamped on narrow roads with water lapping the edge of the asphalt from either side, the tiny strip of dry road their only refuge.
Women and children, infirm and the elderly, all were brought to life, given a face no matter how contorted with pain it was.
The coverage was professional, objective. It was appreciative where the relief effort was satisfactory and unforgiving where it wasn't. The same could be said of the dengue fever coverage. Where good, it was surefooted, educational and informative.
It asked the right questions, raised public awareness, tried to stem the hysteria and zoomed in on the inadequacies of the system and talked to informed professionals about how the whole affair was being handled/could have been handled better.
In both these cases, the journalists were fulfilling the public service remit of their jobs. But there were others who spent major chunks of their programmes by asking 'Learned Elders of Islam' whether Paks were paying for their sins.
Never ones to shy away from such questions, the Learned Elders of Islam launched with apparent relish into how awfully sinful Paks were and the only way they could redeem themselves was by asking for forgiveness and taking the righteous path.
Of course, the Learned Elders of Islam were neither asked nor bothered to say themselves who had sinned and who was paying for this. It was all too general. When you actually profile the worst sufferer it appears that the biggest sinner in our land of the pure is the poor.
We saw hundreds of thousands of these emaciated sinners whose entire life's belongings could fit easily onto their bare heads for those small bundles propped up by their bony hands were all they seemed to have, apart from the odd animal and their family members.
Their clothes in tatters, their feet bare and their hungry, exhausted, even diseased faces were clearly telling a story. To me it was a tale less of divine wrath and more of man letting down man in dramatic, criminal neglect.
Would the Learned Elders of Islam advancing the divine wrath argument hold the opposite to be true as well? That the affluent, and particularly those among them who often have no explanation of how they came to their enormous wealth, are paragons of virtue and piety?For only they seem to belong to a select group to whom even the worse natural calamity is no more than a mere inconvenience, if that. Is it that their cry for forgiveness carries more weight than that of the shirtless?
A natural disaster is a natural disaster. Misgovernance is just that. An unjust society is the creation of man and man alone.
Greed where even those earning millions aren't interested in paying a pittance in tax is surely not ordained, neither is wealth acquisition via corrupt means.
So, let's please not invoke faith. Unless, of course, you have an agenda of preserving the status quo no matter how decrepit and decayed it has come to be. Delusion is the sin. Visions of grandeur, when the ground beneath us is giving, are a sin. One needs only a momentary pause to count a thousand sins that have brought us to the pass where we find ourselves. But no matter how diligently one looks for a different picture the same set of corrupt, greedy, power-hungry villains come into sharp focus. And where they exit, nature comes in.
My villains are never clad in tatters with their ribs sticking out as if to mock the blubber that has the audacity to assert that the dispossessed are atoning for their sins. It is incumbent on the media to show the way, to arm the have-nots with their rights in a democratic order rather than serve them a diet of the opiate.
Posted by: Fred ||
09/18/2011 00:00 ||
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Am I the only one who wonders how this writer is still alive?
For that matter I'm surprised the entire organizatiion hasn't been blown to pieces.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
Why is both Pravda on the Hudson (
Be it the floods ravaging the Sindh countryside or dengue fever spreading panic in 
This is precisely why the last few days were reassuring as they were depressing. The quality of coverage and the diversity of approaches spanned the entire spectrum, from the sublime to the ludicrous.
