[AsiaTimes] Erdogan is stupid to believe that he can support ISIS against the Syrian regime and contain it later, you observed when we last met. He is even stupider to believe that he can support ISIS against the Kurds, which is what he is doing at present. The Turkish analyst Burak Bekdil notes that ISIS terrorist attacks on Turkish soil have "so far mainly targeted President Erdogan's ideological/political foes: Alevis in the Reyhanli bombing, and the Kurdish political movement in four separate bomb attacks...Erdogan is hostage to jihadists of his own making." A war with the Kurds will tear Turkey apart.
Nothing can stop the demographic ascendancy of the Kurds, and it would seem an extreme of folly to ally with ISIS in order to stop the Kurds. But Erdogan cannot help himself. It is in his nature to do so. Turkey's attempt to construct a secular national identity under Kemal Ataturk and his successors failed, most of all because it ignored the Muslim hinterland of Anatolia, the so-called "black Turks" (as Erdogan describes himself). Erdogan and his party offered a different, "neo-Ottoman" identity for Turkey, blending with the assertion of Turkish leadership in the Muslim world.
Turkey embraced Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, which the Egyptian military expelled with overwhelming popular approval in July 2013 after the Brotherhood government brought Egypt's economy to the brink of collapse. Turkey embraced the Gazan terrorist group Hamas just before Hamas was humiliated in the 2014 rocket war with Israel. Turkey intervened unsuccessfully in Syria's civil war. At the same time Turkey helped Iran launder billions of dollars to circumvent international sanctions. Erdogan courted Russia for years, but an exasperated Vladimir Putin warned Erdogan last week that his support for ISIS would lead to war. "Turkey has gone from 'zero problems' to 'zero friends,'" wrote Piotr Zalewski in Foreign Policy.
To make matters worse, Turkey's debt-fueled economic boom has left Erdogan with a collapsing currency and stock market and a stagnant economy.
Nonethless, Erdogan seems to be doubling down on the same failed policy, using ISIS not only as a bludgeon against foreign enemies like Syria's Bashir al-Assad, but against domestic opponents as well. With ISIS in a full-scale war against Iranian Revolutionary Guards in Iraq, Turkey's support for the extremist Sunni organization brings Turkey's imperial fantasy into direct conflict with Iran's imperial fantasy.
It is in Erdogan's nature to do so. Like Persia, the rump of another failed empire, Turkey could choose to accept a gradual decline, and achieve a modest degree of prosperity as one Western terminus in the One Belt/One Road project. It could dispense with the Kurdish problem easily by encouraging the Kurdish southeast--an economically depressed and strategically irrelevant spur of the country--to secede and form part of a Kurdish state. That would require a different kind of Turkish identity, as different fron the Kemalist nationalism of the past as from the Islamic expansionism of the present.
This is not impossible; Turkey has an outward-looking, educated elite that has chafed under the brutal, reckless rule of the Anatolian hinterland. Egypt seemed lost to Islamic extremism under the Muslim Brotherhood regime of Mohamed Morsi, but now is governed by Gen. Fatah al-Sisi, who believes in reform of Islam to separate religion and state. Egypt's pan-Arabist ambitions of the 1960s were the main cause of instability in the region during the 1960s; Egypt has become a leading force for regional stability.
Western Asia needs more leaders like al-Sisi, who can put national prosperity and security ahead of the imperial fantasies of failed empires. Turkey and Iran, by contrast, have undermined their international position and damaged their economies by devoting their policy to imperial delusions rather than national self-interest. Their present governments cannot change their nature, but the countries can.
[DAWN] The dust had barely settled from the controversy over the PTI resignations and National Assembly Speaker Ayaz Sadiq is still being berated for having delayed accepting the PTI resignations when he has decided once again to "process" the resignations handed in by the MQM lot, instead of accepting them straightaway.
Ironically, it was August 2014, when the PML-N government faced the dharna and resignations of the PTI and a year later on Wednesday, it confronted another political party that chose to express its unhappiness by resigning from the parliament.
This time around the MQM rocked the capital by handing in its resignations from the National Assembly, the Senate and the Sindh provincial assembly.
Posted by: Fred ||
08/14/2015 00:00 ||
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[DAWN] EVEN when compared to the recent string of errors and misjudgements by the MQM, the decision to quit parliament and the Sindh assembly stands out as a particularly unwise move. The frustration and anger of the MQM leadership is apparent. There may in fact be some truth to the MQM allegations that the police and paramilitary crackdown on the party has led to unlawful actions against party members. Illegal detentions and torture in jug are not unheard of in the country. But if that is really the reason why the MQM has decided to resign from the assemblies it surely does little or nothing to address the MQM's complaint. The military-run operation against criminal elements in the MQM looks almost certain to continue. Once outside parliament and the Sindh assembly, the MQM will really have no platform from which to press its complaints. If anything, the party will be in an even worse position than it is right now.
Perhaps the MQM should also reflect on why it is unable to garner much public sympathy, especially outside its base. The MQM is a legitimate political party with a genuine voter base, but the party does have a dark side. At various points in the party's history, its Death Eater wing has virtually eclipsed the political side. the increasingly enormousAltaf Hussain ..The head of MQM in Pakistain, who has lived in London and hasn't laid eyes on Pakistain since Caesar made corporal. Judging from the size of him,he may be a Hutt... and senior party representatives have always denied all allegations of violence and extortion, but the denials are not really credible. The denizens of Bloody Karachi ...formerly the capital of Pakistain, now merely its most important port and financial center. It is among the largest cities in the world, with a population of 18 million, most of whom hate each other and many of whom are armed and dangerous... in particular are all too familiar with how the party has used violence and intimidation to perpetuate its control of the city. Blanket denials did not convince anyone in the past and they are unlikely to now. Consider that at no point has the MQM actually helped or aided the state in its quest to track down and arrest those who have kept entire neighbourhoods in a state of fear for many years, perhaps even decades.
Yet, even with the MQM's non-cooperation and belligerence, it should not be allowed to needlessly destabilise national politics. The federal government, possibly Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif ... served two non-consecutive terms as prime minister, heads the Pakistain Moslem League (Nawaz). Noted for his spectacular corruption, the 1998 Pak nuclear test, border war with India, and for being tossed by General Musharraf... himself, have done the right thing in not encouraging the speaker of the National Assembly to act immediately on the sudden move by MQM politicians. Just a week ago, it was the MQM that was trying to use its parliamentary prerogative to have the PTI ousted from parliament. That is hardly the sign of a party that finds assemblies to be pointless and irrelevant. The sensible approach is the same one that was used to get the MQM to back down on its motion to unseat the PTI: reach out to the senior MQM leadership and Mr Hussain, offer to address their genuine complaints, adjust the operation in Sindh to eliminate abuses where found -- and let the country put this unnecessary political crisis behind it.
Posted by: Fred ||
08/14/2015 00:00 ||
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[DAWN] A FEW muddy years, a clutch of complaints and some hither-thither investigation later, we are still in the process of finding out about the Kasur child abuse case. We are not too sure as yet since we have always known that this has been happening close to us. We are not ready to accept since we have been trained to overlook what is in our immediate vicinity and to try and reject what is staring us obscenely in our face.
Every child out there without appropriate protection is vulnerable. He or she is exposed to unhindered, often public, groping, by adult insinuation, and eventually, by touch: physical touch. We all know that. While on our way to respectable -- slightly securer -- positions in society, we have all been subjected to or, what is easier to accept, been witness to sexual abuse of some kind. Over a series of these incidents we have been taught about how to cloak these realities -- quite often as inevitable, if dark and ugly experiences, during our growing up years. Kasur seeks to cruelly lift the assiduously woven cover over a reality that is tough to encounter. In fear of our discovery, we react and cling to our shield reflexively.
The resistance that we put up against the revealing of the truth is a tribute to our ability to stand by our convention. This is a sex scandal but it is one that has been blown out of proportion, goes the refrain. There are complaints about abuse but there are not as many complaints as some of those who have been reporting on it would have us believe, some insist. The media is in agreement that a grave crime appears to have taken place but again, conveniently, there are some in the media who have been compelled by their reasons for exploiting a popular situation towards meeting their ends.
Continued on Page 49
Posted by: Fred ||
08/14/2015 00:00 ||
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The systematic rape of women and girls from the Yazidi religious minority has become deeply enmeshed in the organization and the radical theology of the Islamic State in the year since the group announced it was reviving slavery as an institution. Interviews with 21 women and girls who recently escaped the Islamic State, as well as an examination of the group’s official communications, illuminate how the practice has been enshrined in the group’s core tenets.
The trade in Yazidi women and girls has created a persistent infrastructure, with a network of warehouses where the victims are held, viewing rooms where they are inspected and marketed, and a dedicated fleet of buses used to transport them.
A total of 5,270 Yazidis were abducted last year, and at least 3,144 are still being held, according to community leaders. To handle them, the Islamic State has developed a detailed bureaucracy of sex slavery, including sales contracts notarized by the ISIS-run Islamic courts. And the practice has become an established recruiting tool to lure men from deeply conservative Muslim societies, where casual sex is taboo and dating is forbidden.
A growing body of internal policy memos and theological discussions has established guidelines for slavery, including a lengthy how-to manual issued by the Islamic State Research and Fatwa Department just last month. Repeatedly, the ISIS leadership has emphasized a narrow and selective reading of the Quran and other religious rulings to not only justify violence, but also to elevate and celebrate each sexual assault as spiritually beneficial, even virtuous.
Posted by: Whonter Darling of the Bunions4601 ||
08/14/2015 00:00 ||
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#1
Little has been heard from NOW/womyn in the U.S. regarding rape in Islamic countries and countries in transition such as Sweden and other European countries. Much of their time has been occupied with supporting the "Are you ready for Hillary campaign."
#2
Oh. Well. You know. That's their culture and we have to understand it before we condemn it. How do you define "slavery" after all. You can't say what they go through is worse than what blacks went through.
Posted by: Fred, channeling Helen Gurley Brown ||
08/14/2015 13:14 Comments ||
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#3
I wish I were a Muslim Prophet's wiener
That is what I'd really like to be
'Cause if I were Mohammed's mighty wiener
All you women would belong to me
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.
