Archive for July 16, 2016

The Obama Factor (9)

July 16, 2016

The Obama Factor (9), Power LineScott Johnson, July 16, 2016

At a White House diplomatic corps reception yesterday afternoon that included France’s ambassador to the United States, President Obama spoke about the massacre in Nice. The White House has posted the text of his remarks. Obama’s remarks may be slightly more vacuous than yada yada. Referring to ISIS, he vowed that “we are going to destroy this vile terrorist organization.” Stirring words, followed by this:

And in contrast to these terrorists who only know how to kill and destroy, we’re going to win this fight by building; by never giving up on diplomacy to end the Syrian civil war; by working with partners around the world, including Muslim communities, to push back against hateful ideologies that twist and distort Islam — a religion that teaches peace and justice and compassion. We will defeat these ideologies by offering a better vision of development and economic progress, so people, especially young people, have more hope and opportunity and are less susceptible to extremism and violence in the first place. And we will continue to promote political opportunity and democracy so citizens have a say in their future.

And we will win this fight by staying true to our values…

“Staying true to our values” harks back to Obama’s hilariously mistaken exposition of Winston Churchill at his first press conference, which I wrote about in “Obama veers into the Daily Ditch.” Obama remains steadfastly unaffected by events. The song remains the same.

JOHN adds: Obama echoes the immortal words of the oft-ridiculed–but not oft enough–Frenchman:

They’ve got guns, but we’ve got flowers.

Turkey: Coup Has Failed, Erdogan More Powerful Than Ever

July 16, 2016

Turkey: Coup Has Failed, Erdogan More Powerful Than Ever, PJ MediaMichael Van Der Galien, July 16, 2016

(But please see also, Analyzing Turkey and the threat of lone wolf attacks. — DM)

Turkey coupTurkish soldiers secure the area as supporters of Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan protest in Istanbul’s Taksim square, early Saturday, July 16, 2016. (AP Photo/Emrah Gurel)

Izmir, Turkey — It’s a done deal: the military coup has failed. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his AK Parti remain in power and vow to take revenge against those behind the coup.

Or, perhaps better said: against those they say are behind it.

Now that the coup has clearly failed, we can conclude that this must have been the most incompetent attempted takeover in Turkey’s troubled history. When part of the military launched their offensive last night (Turkish time), I immediately checked news channels supporting President Erdogan. Surprisingly, none of them was taken over. The only broadcaster who was taken over was TRT Haber, the state news channel. But NTV and other channels supporting Erdogan were left alone.

That was remarkable, but what struck me even more was the fact that these channels — especially NTV — were able to talk to the president and the prime minister. That’s strange, to put it mildly. Normally, when the military stages a coup, the civilian rulers are among the first to be arrested. After all, as long as the country’s civilian leadership are free, they can tell forces supportive of them what to do… and they can even tell the people to rise up against the coup.

And that’s exactly what happened. Both Prime Minister Binali Yildirim and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan called into news programs and told their supporters to go out on the streets and fight back against the soldiers. A short while later, streets in the big cities (Ankara and Izmir) were flooded with Erdogan-supporters, who even climbed on top of tanks. Fast forward a few hours and it was officially announced that the coup had failed, and that Erdogan and his AK Party remained in power. About 1500 soldiers were arrested.

As I wrote on Twitter yesterday, there were three options:

  1. The coup was staged by a small group within the military, which would severely limit their ability to strike.
  2. The coup was staged by the entire military, which meant Erdogan’s chances of surviving politically were extremely small.
  3. The coup was a set-up. Think the Reichstag fire.

The main argument against option number three is that there was some very serious fighting taking place, including massive explosions. Dozens of people have been killed. If this was a fake coup, it probably was the bloodiest one ever. That’s why many people are skeptical about this option, and believe it was just an incompetent attempt at a military takeover.

The general feeling in Izmir — a city with 3 million inhabitants who are generally not pro-Erdogan at all — is that it was a real coup attempt, but that the officers behind it were incredibly amateurish. Friends on the streets and cafés are literally telling me:

It was a real attempt, but they were stupid.

Shortly after the attempted coup, Erdogan and Yildirim immediately blamed a disgraced Islamic scholar, Fethullah Gulen, who now lives in Pennsylvania. Gulen and Erdogan were longtime allies, who shared a dream of Islamizing Turkey, but had a falling out several years ago. Ever since, Erdogan has blamed Gulen for pretty much every problem in Turkey, including a major controversy about cabinet members (including Erdogan, and his family) possibly stealing millions of dollars. In the years after, Gulen became Erdogan’s enemy number one, which is undoubtedly why he’s blamed for yesterday’s coup.

Proof that Gulen is indeed behind it hasn’t been presented, however. In fact, the Gulen group denies any involvement. You could imagine that, if they did support it, they’d call on their followers to support the takeover. They did no such thing.

The same goes for the leaders of Turkey’s official opposition parties. The secular CHP and the nationalist MHP aligned with the AKP to condemn the coup. Some in the West have expressed shock at that: if they’re opposed to Erdogan, why didn’t they support the coup? The answer is, of course, that Turkey has had two military takeovers in the recent past (1960s and 1980s): both were very bloody and absolutely horrendous, not just for the ousted governments, but also for the average Turk. People weren’t allowed to leave their homes, not even to buy food and drinks, and many innocent civilians were rounded up by the military. Once in prison, many of them either died or were severely tortured.

It’s not very strange that even the country’s opposition parties don’t wish a repeat of that. No person in his right mind would.

When the coup was still going on, one Twitter user tweeted this:

This coup attempt, whether it succeeded or failed, ensured Turkey would be more autocratic moving forward.

I’m afraid that Yousef was, and is, right. If the military would’ve succeeded, Turkey would now have been a military dictatorship. Regardless of where you stand on Erdogan, that would’ve meant major changes for the Turkish people. A lockdown would’ve been put in place, people would’ve been imprisoned in their own homes. In fact, I went out at 2 a.m. to a local market to buy as much food, milk, eggs, and so on as I could. I did this because, in past coups, people had to stay indoors for many days. Some people, who couldn’t take care of themselves, actually died from hunger, or so I’ve been told by Turks. After that first phase, the military always rounded up all those they thought were loyal to the former government. Mass imprisonments, torture and killings were everyday events.

In other words, even if you oppose Erdogan, it’s difficult if not impossible to celebrate a military coup.

Of course we now have to see what Erdogan’s government will do. More than 100 soldiers involved in the coup have been killed, military commanders were taken hostage, and Erdogan has vowed revenge. As anyone with even a bit of knowledge of history knows, the crackdowns after a failed coup can be as bad as the crackdown after a successful military takeover. Erdogan already wanted to change Turkey’s constitution and change the system into a so-called presidential system, meaning most if not all power would reside in his office. Nobody doubts that this is exactly what’ll happen now: he’ll draw all power to himself and ignite a major cleansing, possibly not only of the military and police forces, but also in politics itself.

The only possibly conclusion, then, is: no matter what, democracy will suffer a major setback in Turkey. We can only hope and pray that the consequences will be less severe than I fear.

France: The Coming Civil War

July 16, 2016

France: The Coming Civil War, Gatestone InstituteYves Mamou, July 16, 2016

♦ For French President François Hollande, the enemy is an abstraction: “terrorism” or “fanatics”.

♦ Instead, the French president reaffirms his determination to military actionsabroad: “We are going to reinforce our actions in Syria and Iraq,” the president said after the Nice attack.So confronted with this failure of our elite who were elected to guide the country across nationals and internationals dangers, how astonishing is it if paramilitary groups are organizing themselves to retaliate?

♦ “Western elites, with a suicidal obstinacy, oppose naming the enemy. Confronted with attacks in Brussels or Paris, they prefer to imagine a philosophical fight between democracy and terrorism, between an open society and fanaticism, between civilization and barbarism”. — Mathieu Bock-Côté, sociologist, in Le Figaro

♦ In France, the global elites made a choice. They decided that the “bad” voters in France were unreasonable people too stupid to see the beauties of a society open to people who often who do not want to assimilate, who want you to assimilate to them, and who threaten to kill you if you do not.

♦ Similarly, the British took the first tool that was given to them to express their disappointment at living in a society they did not like anymore. They did not vote to say: “Kill all these Muslims who are transforming my country or stealing my job or soaking up my taxes”. They were just protesting a society that a global elite had begun to transform without their consent.

♦ The global elite made a choice: they took the side against their own old and poor because those people did not want to vote for them any longer. They also made a choice not to fight Islamism because Muslims vote collectively for this global elite.

 

1697French police shoot dead a Tunisian-born Islamist terrorist who murdered 84 people in Nice, France, July 14, 2016. (Image source: Sky News video screenshot)

“We are on the verge of a civil war.” That quote did not come from a fanatic or a lunatic. No, it came from head of France’s homeland security, the DGSI (Direction générale de la sécurité intérieure), Patrick Calvar. He has, in fact, spoken of the risk of a civil war many times. On July 12th, he warned a commission of members of parliament, in charge of a survey about the terrorist attacks of 2015, about it.

In May 2016, he delivered almost the same message to another commission of members of parliament, this tme in charge of national defense. “Europe,” he said, “is in danger. Extremism is on the rise everywhere, and we are now turning our attention to some far-right movements who are preparing a confrontation”.

What kind of confrontation? “Intercommunity confrontations,” he said — polite for “a war against Muslims.” “One or two more terrorist attacks,” he added, “and we may well see a civil war.”

In February 2016, in front of a senate commission in charge of intelligence information, he said again: ” We are looking now at far-right extremists who are just waiting for more terrorist attacks to engage in violent confrontation”.

No one knows if the truck terrorist, who plowed into the July 14th Bastille Day crowd in Nice and killed more than 80 people, will be the trigger for a French civil war, but it might help to look at what creates the risk of one in France and other countries, such as Germany or Sweden.

The main reason is the failure of the state.

1. France is at War but the Enemy is Never Named.

France is the main target of repeated Islamist attacks; the more important Islamist terrorist bloodbaths took place at the magazine Charlie Hebdo and the Hypercacher supermarket of Vincennes (2015); the Bataclan, its nearby restaurants and the Stade de France stadium, (2015); the failed attack on theThalys train; the beheading of Hervé Cornara (2015); the murders at a school in Toulouse (2012); the three week torture and murder of young Ilan Halimi (2006); the assassination of two policemen in Magnanville in June (2016), and now the truck-ramming in Nice, on the day commemorating the French Revolution of 1789.

Most of those attacks were committed by French Muslims: citizens on their way back from Syria (the Kouachi brothers at Charlie Hebdo), or by French Islamists (Larossi Abballa who killed a police family in Magnanville last June) who later claimed their allegiance to Islamic State (ISIS). The truck killer in Nice was also French, of Tunisian descent, living quietly in Nice until he decided to murder more than 80 people and wound dozens more.

At each of these tragic episodes, the head of state, President François Hollande, refused to name the enemy, refused to name Islamism — and especially refused to name French Islamists — as the enemy of French citizens.

For Hollande, the enemy is an abstraction: “terrorism” or “fanatics”. Even when the president does dare to name “Islamism” the enemy, he refuses to say he will close all Salafist mosques, prohibit the Muslim Brotherhood and Salafist organizations in France, or ban veils for women. No, instead, the French president reaffirms his determination for military actions … abroad: “We are going to reinforce our actions in Syria and Iraq,” the president said after the Nice attack.

For France’s head of state, the deployment of soldiers on the national ground is for defensive actions only: a dissuasive policy, not an offensive rearmament of the Republic against an internal enemy.

So confronted with this failure by our elite — who were elected to guide the country across national and international dangers — how astonishing is it if paramilitary groups are organizing themselves to retaliate?

As Mathieu Bock-Côté, a sociologist in France and Canada says in Le Figaro: “Western elites, with a suicidal obstinacy, oppose naming the enemy. Confronted by attacks in Brussels or Paris, they prefer to imagine a philosophical fight between democracy and terrorism, between an open society and fanaticism, between civilization and barbarism”.

2. The Civil War Has Already Begun and Nobody Wants to Name It.

The civil war began sixteen years ago, with the second Intifada. When Palestinians invented suicide attacks in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, French Muslims began to terrorize Jews living peacefully in France. For sixteen years, Jews — in France —were slaughtered, attacked, tortured and stabbed by French Muslim citizens supposedly to avenge Palestinian people in the West Bank.

When a group of French citizens who are Muslims declares war on another group of French citizens who are Jews, what do you call it?

For the French establishment, it is not a civil war, just a regrettable misunderstanding between two “ethnic” communities.

Until now, no one has wanted to establish a connection between these attacks and the murderous attack in Nice against people who were not necessarily Jews — and name it as it should be named: a civil war.

For the very politically correct French establishment, the danger of a civil war will begin only if anyone retaliates against French Muslims; if everyone just submits to their demands, everything is all right. Until now, no one thinks that the terrorist attacks against Jews by French Muslims; against Charlie Hebdo’s journalists by French Muslims; against an entrepreneur who was beheaded a year ago by a French Muslim; against young Ilan Halimi by a group of Muslims; against schoolchildren in Toulouse by a French Muslim; against the passengers on the Thalys train by a French Muslim, against the innocent people in Nice by a French Muslim were the symptoms of a civil war. These bloodbaths remain, still today something like a climatic catastrophe, a kind of tragic mistake.

3- The French Establishment Considers the Enemy the Poor the Old and the Disappointed

In France, who most complains about Muslim immigration? Who most suffers from local Islamism? Who most likes to drink a glass of wine or eat a ham-and-butter sandwich? The poor and the old who live close to Muslim communities, because they do not have the money to move someplace else.

Today, as a result, millions of the poor and the old in France are ready to elect Marine Le Pen, president of the rightist Front National, as the next president of the Republic for the simple reason that the only party that wants to fight illegal immigration is the Front National.

Because, however, these French old and poor want to vote for the Front National, they have become the enemy of the French establishment, right and left. What is the Front National saying to these people? “We are going to restore France as a nation of French people”. And the poor and the old believe it – because they have no choice.

Similarly, the poor and the old in Britain had no choice but to vote for Brexit. They took the first tool given them to express their disappointment at living in a society they did not like anymore. They did not vote to say, “Kill these Muslims who are transforming my country, stealing my job and soaking up my taxes”. They were just protesting a society that a global elite had begun to transform without their consent.

In France, the global elites made a choice. They decided that the “bad” voters in France were unreasonable people too stupid to see the beauties of a society open to people who often who do not want to assimilate, who want you to assimilate to them, and who threaten to kill you if you do not.

The global elites made another choice: they took the side against their own old and poor because those people did not want to vote for them any longer. The global elites also chose not to fight Islamism, because Muslims vote globally for the global elite. Muslims in Europe also offer a big “carrot” to the global elite: they vote collectively.

In France, 93% of Muslims voted for the current president, François Hollande, in 2012. In Sweden, the Social Democrats reported that 75% of Swedish Muslims voted for them in the general election of 2006; and studies show that the “red-green” bloc gets 80-90% of the Muslim vote.

4. Is the Civil War Inevitable? Yes!

If the establishment does not want to see that civil war was already declared by extremist Muslims first — if they do not want to see that the enemy is not the Front National in France, the AfD in Germany, or the Sweden Democrats — but Islamism in France, in Belgium, in Great Britain, in Sweden — then a civil war will happen.

France, like Germany and Sweden, has a military and police strong enough to fight against an internal Islamist enemy. But first, they have to name it and take measures against it. If they do not — if they leave their native citizens in despair, with no other means than to arm themselves and retaliate – yes, civil war is inevitable.

 

France: Another truck bomb parked near Nice defused, Muslim arrested

July 16, 2016

France: Another truck bomb parked near Nice defused, Muslim arrested

ByPamela Geller on July 15, 2016

Source: France: Another truck bomb parked near Nice defused, Muslim arrested | Pamela Geller

While Western elites are flapping their tongues praising Islam and warning us to do the same, jihadis are setting the world on fire.

The blood is still in the streets of Nice and Muslim soldiers are setting off bombs.

“France: Another truck bomb parked near Nice defused, Muslim suspect arrested,” By Robert Spencer, July 15, 2016
All-out war. All-out jihad. But France, says its Prime Minister, is just going to have to get used to it.

“VID: Another Truck Bomb Parked near Nice Defused, One Suspect Arrested,” Al-Alam, July 15, 2016 (thanks to Lookmann):

The French Special Forces defused an explosive-laden truck parked on a highway near Nice, local media reports. A bomb disposal operation was conducted on a highway near Nice where a truck attack occurred Thursday night.

French police have detained one person during a search raid of the suspected driver’s house, who careened through crowds of people in Nice on Thursday night, iTele TV channel reports.

“We have seen policemen in masks take someone away, we don’t know who it was,” an iTele correspondent reported.

The correspondent also confirmed, that a bomb squad detonated a suspicious parcel while raiding a truck parked near the house…

Analyzing Turkey and the threat of lone wolf attacks

July 16, 2016