Said the pumpkin to the turkey

That would be impeachable!

"President Trump is thinking outside the box!"

What else is new, Lindsey? Senator Lindsey Graham is now expressing optimism, after talking with Trump. Reuters reports,

Republican U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham, who has been one of the most vocal critics of President Donald Trump’s decision to move U.S. troops out of northeastern Syria, said on Sunday he now believed “historic solutions” were possible.

In an interview with Fox News, Graham said a conversation he had with Trump over the weekend had fueled his optimism that a solution could be reached where the security of Turkey and the Kurds was guaranteed and fighters from Islamic State contained.

“I am increasingly optimistic that we can have some historic solutions in Syria that have eluded us for years if we play our cards right,” Graham said on “Sunday Morning Futures.”

Graham said Trump was prepared to use U.S. air power over a demilitarized zone occupied by international forces, adding that the use of air power could help ensure Islamic State fighters who had been held in the area did not “break out.”

Senator Jim Inhofe, a Republican who chairs the Senate Armed Services Committee, said on Saturday that Trump understood the need for the United States to maintain air power in the region.

“The U.S. must retain air power to keep the pressure on ISIS, prevent our adversaries Russia and Iran from exploiting this situation and protect our partners on the ground,” he said in a statement. ISIS is an acronym for Islamic State.

Graham also said he believed the United States and Kurdish forces long allied with Washington could establish a venture to modernize Syrian oil fields, with the revenue flowing to the Kurds. “President Trump is thinking outside the box,” Graham said of Trump’s thinking on oil.

“The president appreciates what the Kurds have done,” Graham added. “He wants to make sure ISIS does not come back. I expect we will continue to partner with the Kurds in eastern Syria to make sure ISIS does not re-emerge.”

Graham, referring to the Kurdish fighters in the region, previously warned that Trump’s decision to pull out U.S. troops would lead to their “destruction.”

"Complicated business, folks, complicated business!"

In the Conservative Treehouse, Sundance explains,

...As a gatekeeper between radical Islamist elements and Europe, President Erdogan holds the ultimate leverage and blackmail over his NATO allies. If Europe does not acquiesce to the whims of Erodogan, he can open the gates and flood the EU with extremists. Erdogan loves to play this power game against the EU and ultimately against the U.S.

President Obama embraced President Erdogan because ideologically the Obama administration and Erdogan both supported political Islam, The Muslim Brotherhood.

Erdogan’s regional arch-nemesis is Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi. As a general al Sisi had to deal with the outcomes of Muslim Brotherhood extremism, and ultimately remove Mohamed Morsi from office. President Sisi formed the Arab coalition that is now aligned with President Donald Trump against the radical elements of political Islam known as The Muslim Brotherhood.

The U.S. Arab coalition includes Israel, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar and Yemen. Additionally, the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) are aligned against the radical elements within political Islam (The Brotherhood), and the U.S. is supporting the coalition with self-defense military purchases.

...Unfortunately, Europe will not defend itself; will not kick Erdogan out of NATO; will not take their own ISIS fighters back for trial and punishment; and instead, just like Lindsey Graham, the EU demands the U.S. remain as perpetual zookeepers.

...Instead, President Trump is going to support the Arab coalition and the GCC that has been assembling a military coalition to protect itself from the Muslim Brotherhood.

That is why President Trump is willing to support Saudi Arabia with more troops, while withdrawing from Syria where the U.S. was having to stand alone to protect the interests of Europeans who will not protect themselves.

In one regional area the U.S. will support and defend Israel, Egypt and Jordan. In the Southern region the U.S. will support the Gulf Cooperation Council (Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman, Yemen, Bahrain and Qatar).

...Instead, President Trump is going to support the Arab coalition and the GCC that has been assembling a military coalition to protect itself from the Muslim Brotherhood.

That is why President Trump is willing to support Saudi Arabia with more troops, while withdrawing from Syria where the U.S. was having to stand alone to protect the interests of Europeans who will not protect themselves.

In one regional area the U.S. will support and defend Israel, Egypt and Jordan. In the Southern region the U.S. will support the Gulf Cooperation Council (Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman, Yemen, Bahrain and Qatar).

At 4:11 p.m. yesterday Sundance wrote on Twitter, "President Trump's decision will likely mean the Kurds will form an agreement with Bashir Assad. This is a good thing. Assad and the Kurds will be united against Turkey. They can work the rest out within internal Syrian politics."

At 4:19 p.m. yesterday, the BBC announced that the Kurds and Syria made a deal in which Syrian government forces will be deployed along Syria's northern border "to halt Turkey's assault."
Read more here.


"Complicated business, folks, complicated business!"

"Trump avoided war with Turkey this week. And he began extracting America from an open-ended commitment to the Kurds it never made and never intended to fulfill."

Carolyn Glick wrote in FrontPage Magazine,

The war in Syria broke out in 2011 as a popular insurrection by Syrian Sunnis against the Iranian-sponsored regime of President Bashar Assad. The Obama administration responded by declaring US support for Assad’s overthrow. But the declaration was empty. The administration sat on its thumbs as the regime’s atrocities mounted. It supported a feckless Turkish effort to raise a resistance army dominated by jihadist elements aligned with the Muslim Brotherhood.

President Barack Obama infamously issued his “red line” regarding the use of chemical weapons against civilians by Assad, which he repudiated the moment it was crossed.

As ISIS forces gathered in Iraq and Syria, Obama shrugged them off as a “JV squad.” When the JVs in ISIS took over a third of Iraqi and Syrian territory, Obama did nothing.

As Lee Smith recalled in January in The New York Post, Obama only decided to do something about ISIS in late 2014 after the group beheaded a number of American journalists and posted their decapitations on social media.

The timing was problematic for Obama.

In 2014 Obama was negotiating his nuclear deal with Iran. The deal, falsely presented as a nonproliferation pact, actually enabled Iran – the world’s greatest state sponsor of terrorism – to develop both nuclear weapons and the missile systems required to deliver them. The true purpose of the deal was not to block Iran’s nuclear aspirations but to realign US Middle East policy away from the Sunnis and Israel and toward Iran.

...Under President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey has stood against the US and its interests far more often than it has stood with it. Across a spectrum of issues, from Israel to human rights, Hamas and ISIS to Turkish aggression against Cyprus, Greece, and Israel in the Eastern Mediterranean, to upholding US economic sanctions against Iran and beyond, for nearly 20 years, Erdoğan’s Turkey has distinguished itself as a strategic threat to America’s core interests and policies and those of its closest allies in the Middle East.

...Despite the compelling, ever-growing body of evidence that the time has come to reassess US-Turkish ties, the Pentagon refuses to engage the issue. The Pentagon has rejected the suggestion that the US remove its nuclear weapons from Incirlik airbase in Turkey or diminish Incirlik’s centrality to US air operations in Central Asia and the Middle East. The same is true of US dependence on Turkish naval bases.

Given the Pentagon’s position, there is no chance that the US would consider entering an armed conflict with Turkey on behalf of the Kurds.

The Kurds are a tragic people. The Kurds, who live as persecuted minorities in Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran, have been denied the right of self-determination for the past hundred years. But then, the Kurds have squandered every opportunity they have had to assert independence. The closest they came to achieving self-determination was in Iraq in 2017. In Iraqi Kurdistan, the Kurds have governed themselves effectively since 1992. In 2017, they overwhelmingly passed a referendum calling for Iraqi Kurdistan to secede from Iraq and form an independent state. Instead of joining forces to achieve their long-held dream, the Kurdish leaders in Iraq worked against one another. One faction, in alliance with Iran, blocked implementation of the referendum and then did nothing as Kurdish-controlled Kirkuk was overrun by Iraqi government forces.

The Kurds in Iraq are far more capable of defending themselves than the Kurds of Syria. Taking on the defense of Syria’s Kurds would commit the US to an open-ended presence in Syria and justify Turkish antagonism. America’s interests would not be advanced. They would be harmed, particularly in light of the YPG’s selling trait for Obama – its warm ties to Assad and Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps.

The hard truth is that the 50 US soldiers along the Syrian-Turkish border were a fake tripwire. Neither Trump nor the US military had any intention of sacrificing US forces to either block a Turkish invasion of Syria or foment deeper US involvement in the event of a Turkish invasion.

Apparently, in the course of his phone call with Trump on Sunday, Erdoğan called Trump’s bluff. Trump’s announcement following the call made clear that the US would not sacrifice its soldiers to stop Erdoğan’s planned invasion of the border zone.

But Trump also made clear that the US did not support the Turkish move. In subsequent statements, Trump repeatedly pledged to destroy the Turkish economy if Turkey commits atrocities against the Kurds.

If the Pentagon can be brought on board, Trump’s threats can easily be used as a means to formally diminish the long-hollow US alliance with Turkey.

Here it is critical to note that Trump did not remove US forces from Syria. They are still deployed along the border crossing between Jordan, Iraq, and Syria to block Iran from moving forces and materiel to Syria and Lebanon. They are still blocking Russian and Syrian forces from taking over the oil fields along the eastern bank of the Euphrates. Aside from defeating ISIS, these missions are the principle strategic achievements of the US forces in Syria. For now, they are being maintained. Will Turkey’s invasion enable ISIS to reassert itself in Syria and beyond? Perhaps. But here too, as Trump made clear this week, it is not America’s job to serve as the permanent jailor of ISIS. European forces are just as capable of serving as guards as Americans are. America’s role is not to stay in Syria forever. It is to beat down threats to US and world security as they emerge and then let others – Turks, Kurds, Europeans, Russians, UN peacekeepers – maintain the new, safer status quo.

...The best move Trump can make now in light of the fake narrative of his treachery toward the Kurds is to finally retaliate against Iran. A well-conceived and limited US strike against Iranian missile and drone installations would restore America’s posture as the dominant power in the Persian Gulf and prevent the further destabilization of the Saudi regime and the backsliding of the UAE toward Iran.

As for Syria, it is impossible to know what the future holds for the Kurds, the Turks, the Iranians, Assad, or anyone else. But what is clear enough is that Trump avoided war with Turkey this week. And he began extracting America from an open-ended commitment to the Kurds it never made and never intended to fulfill.

Read more here.

WSJ video critical of President Trump for pulling out of Syria

Staying ahead of the critics

President Trump invited our military leaders and their spouses to dinner at the White House tonight. Before the dinner, he and the military leaders spent time with the press. Of course, the first question was about Syria. Sundance has the full transcript at the Conservative Treehouse. Trump did not mince words. Neither did he mince words on the second question, which was about the second "whistleblower."

Turkey, the Kurds, ISIS, impeachment, and much more from Scott Adams

Scott talks about a lot today. I was most interested in what he would say about Trump's desire to pull out of Syria. The concern is that Turkey will go kill all the Kurds in the "safe zone." Scott doesn't believe it. He notes that U.S. troops will be embedded with the Turkish troops. Turkey knows that we will move decisively against them if they attack the Kurds. Trump is really good at making tough decisions. We can't stay there forever. The other thing that can't go on is leaving!

Part of the agreement is that we will turn over a large number of ISIS prisoners to Turkey. Scott believes Turkey will eventually kill them all. These ISIS people wanted to torture, kill, rape and enslave the people of Turkey. Killing them would not be genocide.

The media says the Pentagon was blindsided. It is up to the civilian president to make the decision. We do not have a government that can be trusted! Scott said Trump had two terrible decisions and he made one.

Impeachment? The Democrats have painted themselves in a corner. Byron York reports in the Washington Examiner that the impeachment hearings will be private! If you are backing the team that wants to impeach the president based on secret testimony, you're not on the right team!

Michael Moore is urging Michelle Obama to get in the race! He says Warren can't win. Scott still thinks that would leave Harris as the candidate. After the lousy way she has campaigned, Scott still believes her problems are fixable and she could end up winning the Democrat nomination. Like the Republicans were, the Democratic party is split. Trump pulled the party mostly together by not starting wars, appointing constitutional judges, cutting taxes, etc.

Trump: Aluminum and steel tariffs on Turkey will be doubled

Diana Stancy Correll reports in The Washington Examiner,

The U.S. is doubling tariffs on steel and aluminum imports from Turkey, President Trump announced Friday as he admitted the relationship with the NATO ally were strained.

“I have just authorized a doubling of Tariffs on Steel and Aluminum with respect to Turkey as their currency, the Turkish Lira, slides rapidly downward against our very strong Dollar! Aluminum will now be 20% and Steel 50%. Our relations with Turkey are not good at this time!” Trump tweeted.

The Trump administration has implemented broad-based tariffs of 25 percent tariff on steel and 10 percent tariff on aluminum. The lira continued to drop as Trump tweeted about raising the tariffs for Turkey, by as much as 14 percent against the U.S. dollar on Friday.

The tension between the U.S. and Turkey has increased as the Trump administration has called for the release of Andrew Brunson, a 50-year-old evangelical Christian pastor from North Carolina. He was detained in 2016 after he was blamed for assisting rebels in a coup. He has denied charges that say he engaged in espionage and collusion with terrorist organizations.

Last month, Brunson was released from prison and is currently on house arrest due to “health problems,” Turkey's official Anadolu news agency reported.

Read more here.

A tweet from Sean Davis

Question: given the discussion surrounding Russia, Montenegro, and Article 5 of NATO, if Israel were to strike Turkish vessels or assets providing material support to Hamas or other terrorist entities, would the U.S. be required to militarily defend Turkey? Why or why not?

— Sean Davis (@seanmdav) July 18, 2018

Time to end some sham alliances?

Headline for a story at Jihad Watch by Robert Spencer:

Turkey leaks secret details of U.S. troop locations in northern Syria

Spencer writes,

It is as I have said for years: the U.S. should reconfigure its international alliances to deal realistically with the jihad threat, getting closer to nations that also face that threat, and ending the sham alliance with jihad-promoting states such as Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Turkey. Turkey is, as it has shown here, in no sense an ally. The pretense benefits the U.S. not at all.

Erdogan

“Turkey Spills Out Secret Details Of US Troop Locations,” by Jonah Bennett, Daily Caller News Foundation, July 19, 2017 (thanks to the Geller Report):

Turkey has decided to knock the U.S. via its state news agency by leaking out secret details of U.S. troop locations in northern Syria.

Anadolu news agency published a list of 10 U.S. military installations in northern Syria and even included details about the number of troops in specific areas, which is a shocking move for a NATO ally, The Daily Beast reports.

Erdogan continues to consolidate power in Turkey

At The Conservative Treehouse, Sundance helps us understand yesterday's election results in Turkey, and much more.

Turkish President Recep Erdogan is quick to declare victory today, albeit by a narrow margin, as a national referendum to consolidate power passes during a national vote.

[…] The 18 constitutional amendments that will come into effect after the next election, scheduled for 2019, will abolish the office of the prime minister and hand sweeping executive powers to the president.



Having watched the Erdogan objectives play out over the past six to eight years the approach he has taken has been highly effective.

Erdogan essentially imported a base of support consisting of mostly Muslim Brotherhood political supporters to aid his desire to transform Turkey from a secular nation into a more Islamic dictatorial endeavor.

He may never fully achieve the goal of recreating the Ottoman Empire, but that doesn’t mean there is going to be anything less than toxic turmoil ahead for Turkey and the EU as his endeavors continue to be successful.



Recep Erdogan knew he would not be able to accomplish his long term objectives without a fundamental transformation of the voting base in Turkey. It is somewhat analogous to the Democrats political objectives with open-border migration from South American and Mexico into the U.S.

One of the more obvious points of reference which evidenced this approach was when Erdogan provided safe harbor for the leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood, as a terrorist network, after the Gulf States finally kicked them out of Qatar.

The Brotherhood leadership was exiled into Qatar from Egypt following the removal of Mohammed Morsi. After approximately three years of launching the political narrative to protect their terrorist activity from Qatar, the Gulf States finally agreed it was no longer acceptable -or in their best interests- to allow the Brotherhood hospice there.

Recep Erdogan immediately stepped-up and provided them a home.

Speaking of homes, check out Erdogan's, made of white marble!

Read more here.

Do we expect to get the truth from Hillary Clinton?

Andrew McCarthy writes in National Review,

As U.S. armed forces attack ISIS in Libya, WikiLeaks is poised to remind us that ISIS is in Libya — indeed, that ISIS is ISIS — thanks to disastrous policies championed by Hillary Clinton as President Obama’s secretary of state. Also raised, yet again, is the specter of Mrs. Clinton’s lying to Congress and the American people — this time regarding a matter some of us have been trying for years to get answers about: What mission was so important the United States kept personnel in the jihadist hellhole of Benghazi in 2012?

Specifically, did that mission involve arming the Syrian “rebels” — including al-Qaeda and forces that became ISIS — just as, at Mrs. Clinton’s urging, our government had armed Libyan “rebels” (again, jihadists) to catastrophic effect?

It has been less than two weeks since WikiLeaks rocked the Clinton campaign on the eve of the Democratic convention by leaking hacked e-mails illuminating DNC efforts to rig the nomination chase in Clinton’s favor. Now the organization’s founder, Julian Assange, has announced that WikiLeaks is soon to publish highly sensitive government e-mails that demonstrate Hillary Clinton’s key participation in efforts to arm jihadists in Syria. Just as in Libya, where Mrs. Clinton championed the strategy of arming Islamist “rebels,” the Syrian “rebels” who ultimately received weapons included the Muslim Brotherhood, al-Qaeda, and ISIS.

...what is known is outrageous and has not been given nearly enough attention — largely because Beltway Republicans were complicit in the Obama-Clinton policy of allying with Islamists, and thus have shown no interest in probing the inevitably disastrous fallout.

As I have been pointing out for years, for example, we have never gotten to the bottom of why the State Department, under Mrs. Clinton’s direction, had an installation in Benghazi, one of the world’s most dangerous places for Americans.

The Obama administration, like the Bush administration, had touted Qaddafi as a key counterterrorism ally against rabidly anti-American jihadists in eastern Libya. Nevertheless, Secretary Clinton led the policy shift in which our government changed sides in Libya — shifting support to the Muslim Brotherhood and its allies, just as Mrs. Clinton had urged shifting U.S. support to the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. In Libya, this included arming “rebels,” who naturally included a heavy concentration of jihadists.

As I’ve recounted, to topple Qaddafi on behalf of the Islamists, the Obama administration — which did not seek congressional authorization for its offensive war (and preposterously maintained that bombing another country’s government was not really “war” anyway) — had to flout a United Nations resolution. The U.N. had agreed only to military operations for the purpose of protecting civilians, not offensive operations against the regime. Besides arming jihadists, the administration took no meaningful steps to make sure that Qaddafi’s military arsenals did not fall into terrorist hands. The regime was toppled and Qaddafi was brutally murdered — prompting Secretary Clinton’s bizarrely giddy quip, “We came, we saw, he died.” As some of us not-so-giddy types had warned would happen, Libya then became a safe haven for terrorists who turned on the American and Western forces that had cleared the path for them.

In small compass, this is the story of J. Christopher Stevens, the U.S. ambassador killed in the Benghazi massacre. As Business Insider’s Michael B. Kelley recounts, before becoming ambassador, Stevens was the Obama administration’s official liaison to Qaddafi’s Islamist opposition in Libya, including its al-Qaeda-linked groups. The latter included the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG). Stevens worked directly with a top LIFG leader, Abdelhakim Belhadj.

...In the months leading up to the attack on the State Department facility, and on the even more shadowy CIA outpost a little over a mile away, jihadists in eastern Libya conducted a series of attacks against Western targets — including, on June 6, 2012, a bomb detonated just outside the State Department compound. The British government and the International Red Cross pulled their personnel out; yet the Obama administration left U.S. government personnel in, despite grossly inadequate security precautions. Why? I believe that one significant mission was the coordination of weapons transfers from Libya to Syrian jihadists.

Remember the state of play in mid 2012. Obama was locked in a tight reelection race. He was falsely claiming that he had “decimated” al-Qaeda (which was actually thriving); that he was ending American wars (which were actually intensifying as he drew troops down despite ground conditions); and that his pro-Islamist policies were helping forge democracy in places like Egypt (then under Muslim Brotherhood rule) and Libya (which had disintegrated into a failed state under domination by Islamist militias). Prior to the November election, if Obama had openly announced that his administration was arming Syrian Islamists, it would have been highly controversial. It would have spotlighted how that same policy had failed in Libya, a fact to which neither the media nor Republicans had called public attention. This, no doubt, is why reports that Obama was “launching a covert operation to send weapons to Syrian rebels for the first time” (as the Times of London’s Christina Lamb put it) did not appear until immediately after Obama had won a second term.

Were Obama, Clinton, and others in the administration steering arms to Syrian jihadists before that time?

Recall that in mid 2012, Obama was also feeling heat — from the Islamist regimes he was appeasing, from Beltway Republicans, and even from some in his own administration, apparently including Secretary Clinton — for not doing enough to help the “rebels” drive Assad from power in Syria. There was a good explanation for this reluctance: Our government knew that the Syrian “rebels,” like the Libyan “rebels,” teemed with jihadists. Not only has this fact long been notorious; Judicial Watch managed to wangle from the government an August 2012 Defense Department memo that flatly states, “The Salafist [sic], the Muslim Brotherhood, and AQI [i.e., al-Qaeda in Iraq] are the major forces driving the insurgency in Syria.” The memo elaborates that its reference to AQI incorporates both Jaish al-Nusra (which is al-Qaeda’s main affiliate in Syria) and the Islamic State (the breakaway “caliphate” spawned by AQI).

...Putting aside the administration’s recklessness in failing to keep Qaddafi’s arsenals out of jihadist hands, what are the “other things” that the State Department and the CIA were up to?

...Were U.S. personnel stationed as sitting ducks in Benghazi in order to help supply weapons to Syria, where it was inevitable they would fall into the hands of America’s enemies? Perhaps we’ll soon find out.

Read more here.

Similarities

Bookworm writes,

What made the coup an inevitable failure is that Erdogan spent years purging the military of secular leaders and replacing them with leaders sympathetic to his own political philosophy. We have a similar situation here at home.

Obama has spent years purging the American military of conservative leaders and replacing them with leaders who believe that the military’s primary goal isn’t defending America against her enemies but is, instead, to use it as a vehicle to promote the so-called “war against climate change” and gender madness, both to the detriment of military readiness. Meanwhile, on the home front, Obama has armed the federal civil service (a bastion of Left-leaning union members who had no problem using the IRS’s vast powers to silence conservatives in an election year) to the point at which they’re more heavily weaponized than the Marines. The only difference between a weaponized IRS, EPA, FCC, or FDA, on the one hand, and the Marines, on the other hand, is that I’d still bet my money on the Marines in hand-to-hand fighting.

A lot of people worry that, if Trump is rising in the polls, Obama will declare martial law at the end of October, either because of another terrorist attack by a member of the religion of “peace” or because of more outrages by the BLM movement. Two years ago, I would have scoffed. Today, I agree that this scenario is within the realm of possibility.

However, if Hillary is ahead in the polls, the election will go forward, and we’ll end up with the most corrupt woman in American political history having at her command an emasculated, left-Leaning military and a heavily armed bureaucracy at her beck and call. And honestly, if the next president has that kind of firepower, ask yourself this: Would you rather have Trump, who does love America, or Hillary, a hard-core Leftist, in control of that arsenal?

Read more here.

Anti-coup

The Zman observes that the media are having a hard time

fitting the attempted coup in Turkey into their standard narrative. Turkey is supposed to be different from the rest of the Muslim world. Turkey is a real country with elections and globalism. Sure, the political leaderships sounds a lot like the lunatics from the Arab world, but that’s just an act. It’s their version of boob bait for the bubbas. Instead of guns and abortion, their rednecks want to hear about Allah and the Jews. Turkey is a real country, not a banana republic.

Following along via SkyNews, the BBC and CNN, I had to laugh at the confusion of the news people covering this thing. They did not know which side they were supposed to support. Initially, they were just baffled, as they don’t know anything about the world that is not fed to them through their earpieces. They were reduced to stuttering through live images of people walking around the streets waving flags. Then Obama came out in defense of the Islamists and the rest of NATO followed suit. Instantly, the new media was anti-coup.

...Erdogan is the leader of the new order, the Islamists that believe they can have a modern technological society, under medieval Islamic moral codes.

...The Turks are faced with a choice. They can be fully Western and go quietly into that good night. Or, they can be Eastern and fight against the dying of the light. The former means modern technology and prosperity, for a little while at least. The latter means men in robes ordering homosexuals thrown off buildings. That’s what’s happening inside Turkey today. It’s a version of what’s happening in the West, but only in a country that culturally is closer to Byzantium than Brussels.

Read more here.

The coup in Turkey has failed

Michael Van Der Galien writes at PJ Media that the coup in Turkey has failed.

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 were taken over. The only broadcaster that 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.

Read more here.

Martial law in Turkey takes Erdogan's government by surprise

Oliver Tempest writes for Asia Times,

An apparent attempted coup by elements in the Turkish Armed Forces rocked Turkey unexpectedly late on Friday evening, affecting the country’s two main cities, Ankara and Istanbul.

Streets were closed as were the bridges across the Bosphorus in Istanbul and Istanbul and Ankara airports. Turkey’s state radio and television went off the air for three hours. But other broadcasters continued, though their output suggested that they were as confused as anyone else about the course of events in the country.

Around midnight, an announcement on Turkish State Radio and Television said that the Turkish Armed Forces had taken over and that a body calling itself “The Peace in the Country Council” had taken over the government and declared martial law.

...Erdogan rallies supporters

TV stations showed the president appealing from a cell phone on FaceTime to the people to go into the streets and squares and demonstrate on behalf of democracy. The president is believed to be staying on holiday on the coast of Western Turkey. There was no explanation for the apparent absence of normal presidential communications support.

“I appeal to the leaders of all political parties who believe in democracy to support democracy,” Erdogan said. Using FaceTime he told reporters that he had not faced any attempt to restrain him so far.

Compared to Turkey’s military coups in 1960 and 1980, today’s attempted takeover looks relatively amateurish, suggesting that it is probably led by a group of junior officers rather than the top generals. A statement from the government news agency Anatolia says that General Hulusi Akar, the chief of general staff, is being held hostage by other officers. There was no sign that a news blackout, traditionally a feature of a successful Turkish military coup, had been imposed and TV channels and websites continued to discuss the situation.

Under these circumstances the prospects of the coup-makers’ ability to take control of the country looks highly doubtful and might depend on the use of wide-scale force — something which would almost certainly be fatal to their chances of success.

Read more here.

Coup underway in Turkey

There is an attempted coup in Turkey by the military against Islamofascist President Erdogan. Some information can be found here.

Erdogan and Putin: mirror images

victor Davis Hanson writes at National Review,

Turkey has become a favorite stop abroad for Obama to lecture his fellow Americans about their ethical shortcomings, from past treatment of Native Americans to their present supposed xenophobia over not accepting Syrian refugees en masse. Yet the more Obama has appeased Erdogan, the more anti-Western and anti-American Turkey has become.

Erdogan has insidiously eroded Turkish democracy, free speech, and human rights. He is turning the once-secular state into an Islamic nation. Thousands of Turkish soccer fans recently shouted “Allahu Akbar” when asked for a moment of silence to honor the victims of the Paris terrorist attacks. So much for NATO solidarity.

...Small, vulnerable nations and peoples of the region — Armenians, Greeks, and Kurds — used to be terrified of Turkish aggression. They are starting to become afraid again under Erdogan’s new Islamic militancy.

...Turkey now demands justice from Russia for violating Turkish airspace. But no country in the world violates foreign airspace as often as Turkey. A Greek defense analyst counted 2,244 times that Turkey violated Greek airspace in 2014 — an average of more than six violations per day. The Erdogan government believes that the way to solve disagreement with fellow NATO member Greece over a few disputed Aegean islands and oil finds is to send up its much larger air force to bully the Greeks — especially after their recent financial meltdown.

...Suddenly, Turkey’s NATO membership is important to Erdogan in his dispute with Putin. But the real irony is that the autocratic Erdogan is the dictatorial Putin’s mirror image. No two leaders deserve each other more.

Read more here.

To trust the wolf with the sheep

Burak Bekdil writes at The Gatestone Institute,

Sadly, the free world feels compelled to partner with the wrong country in its fight against Islamic terror.

...The host of this year's G-20 summit, which came right after the Nov. 13 Paris attacks, was Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. In his usual Sunni supremacist language, he accused the victims of jihad rather than the jihadists. "New tragedies will be inevitable," he said, "if the rising racism in Europe and other countries is not stopped. Racism, coupled with enmity against Islam, is the greatest disaster, the greatest threat."

...Anyone under the impression that the whole world stands in solidarity with Paris should think again. Hundreds of Turkish fans booed and chanted "Allahu Akbar" ("Allah is greater" in Arabic) during a moment of silence for the Paris attack victims before a Turkey-Greece soccer friendly. Once again, the Turks were exhibiting solidarity with the terrorists, not their "infidel" victims.

...More recently, on Nov. 21, Turkish police had to deploy 1,500 policemen so that Turkish fans could not harm the visiting Israeli women's national basketball team. One thousand five hundred police officers at a women's basketball game! Despite that, Turkish fans threw objects at Israeli players as they were singing Israel's national anthem. Fans also booed the Israeli players while others applauded the fans who threw the objects.

Unsurprisingly, Turkish fans waved Palestinian flags. Israeli women basketball players were barred from leaving their hotel other than for training and the game.

...How should Erdogan fight Islamic terror – something he does not believe exists? One of Erdogan's famous remarks is, "there is no Islamic terror." But he thinks that "just like fascism," Zionism is a crime against humanity.


Turkish President (then Prime Minister) Recep Tayyip Erdogan, right, meeting with Hamas leaders Khaled Mashaal (center) and Ismail Haniyeh on June 18, 2013, in Ankara, Turkey. One of Erdogan's famous remarks is, "there is no Islamic terror." (Image source: Turkey Prime Minister's Press Office)

There is a Turkish saying that could perhaps describe the free world's alliance with Erdogan's Turkey against jihadist terror: "Kuzuyu kurda emanet etmek" ("to trust the wolf with the sheep").

Burak Bekdil, based in Ankara, is a Turkish columnist for the Hürriyet Daily and a Fellow at the Middle East Forum.

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