|
WaPo Gives Campaign Space To Main Sponsor Of ISIS Who Also Jails More Journalists Than Anyone Else
Turkey's president Recep Tayyip Erdogan uses the recent terrorist attack in Christchurch, New Zealand to whip up support for local elections in Turkey:
It begins with dramatic music, edited in for effect.
Then stills of the manifesto posted by the gunman in New Zealand before his terror attack, highlighting and translating the sections targeting Turkey.
The video streamed live by the attacker comes next, shooting his way into a Christchurch mosque, before blurred images with the sound of automatic gunfire.
And then a cut to Turkey's opposition leader, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, talking of "terrorism rooted in the Islamic world".
The crowd boos wildly, galvanised by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has now shown the footage during at least eight election rallies.
In a Washington Post op-ed published today Erdogan goes further.
bigger
Erdogan compares the Australian terrorist who killed 50 people in a mosque in Christchurch with the Islamic State:
The Christchurch massacre’s alleged perpetrator attempted to legitimize his twisted views by distorting world history and the Christian faith. He sought to plant seeds of hate among fellow humans.
…
In this regard, we must establish that there is absolutely no difference between the murderer who killed innocent people in New Zealand and those who have carried out terrorist acts in Turkey, France, Indonesia and elsewhere.
There is of course a big difference. While the murderer in New Zealand, Brenton Harrison Tarrant, visited fascist groups in many countries including Turkey, he was not part of a larger organization or even a terrorist state. There is no evidence so far that he had any big sponsors.
The Islamic State and the ten-thousands of fanatics who established it had by contrast a large sponsor who enabled its killings.
His name is Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Researchers of the International Center for the Study of Violent Extremism (ICSVE) recently interviewed an ISIS emir, Abu Mansour al Maghrebi, who essentially served as the ISIS ambassador to Turkey. Abu Mansour, an electric engineer from Morocco, was captured 1.5 years ago and is held in Iraq:
“My job in Raqqa was dealing with the international cases,” Abu Mansour al Maghrebi recalls of his three years serving ISIS. “My issue [duties] was our [Islamic State’s] relationship with Turkish intelligence. Actually, this started when I was working at the borders,” he explains, harking back to the first job he undertook for ISIS before becoming an ISIS emir and, seemingly, their ambassador to Turkey.
…
“[My job was] guarding the borders between Syria and Turkey and to receive the fighters,” Abu Mansour explains, smiling at being recognized as more powerful than he was originally conveying. “I oversaw reception at Tal Abyad, Aleppo, Idlib, all their borders,” he answers.
Some 40,000 foreign fighters came to Syria via Turkey. Most of them joined the Islamic State. It was also Turkey that cared for wounded ISIS fighters:
“There were some agreements and understandings between the Turkish intelligence and ISIS emni about the border gates, for the people who got injured,” Abu Mansour continues. “I had direct meeting with the MIT [the Turkish National Intelligence Organization], many meetings with them.”
…
When we ask who exactly in the Turkish government was meeting ISIS members, he states, “There were teams. Some represent the Turkish intel, some represent the Turkish Army. There were teams from 3-5 different groups. Most meetings were in Turkey in military posts or their offices. It depended on the issue. Sometimes we meet each week. It depends on what was going on. Most of the meetings were close to the borders, some in Ankara, some in Gaziantep.”
Turkish intelligence sent cars to the border to accompany the ISIS ambassador to the various meetings in Turkey. These meetings included high level people:
[A]s he continues, we learn that his “diplomatic” reach on behalf of ISIS extended even to the president of Turkey himself. “I was about to meet him but I did not. One of his intelligence officers said Erdogan wants to see you privately but it didn’t happen.”
For Turkey ISIS was useful to suppress the Kurds and to achieve Erdogan's bigger aim of annexing the north of Syria to Turkey.
There are many more details in the interview about Turkish support for ISIS. Some of them may be wrong but most are supported by a large volume of other reporting. Foreigners reached the Islamic State through Turkey. Its weapons and other supplies came from their. ISIS' main income source was oil that Turkey bought. There was direct coordination between Turkey and ISIS in several large operations against the Syrian state.
Without Turkish support the Islamic State in Syria could not have been formed or existed.
That Jeff Bezos' blog, the Washington Post, allows Erdogan to spew lies about Turkey's relations and his personal support for ISIS is bad.
That it does so shortly before the strongly contested elections in Turkey is even worse. Why is it promoting a Muslim Brotherhood fanatic opposed by a secular opposition?
Last year the Committee to Protect Journalists found that Turkey incarcerates more writers than any other state:
Even as Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been the fiercest critic of Saudi Arabia for the murder of Khashoggi, his government continued to jail more journalists than any other on the planet. […] For the third consecutive year, every journalist imprisoned in Turkey is facing anti-state charges.
The Washington Post's slogan, seen above Erdogan's op-ed, is "Democracy Dies in Darkness". The hypocrisy of publishing his screed stinks to high heaven.
@ Posted by: Anne Jaclard | Mar 20, 2019 7:47:33 PM | 50
Depend on what criteria you define “dictator”.
Originally, a dictator was a magistrate nominated by the Senatus on a main political objective. Generally, this objective was to organize new elections (in this sense, he was more like the Venezuelan interim president), but not always: in the Second Punic War, a dictator (Quintus Fabius Maximus) was elected to regroup the Roman army (legions) in order to avoid total anihilation at the hands of the Carthaginians. After that, dictators would serve was the legal device to advance personal interests in the end of the Old Republic and in the New Republic (Gaius Julius Caesar being the last Republican dicatator).
What impressed about the dictator was his powers: he had no colleague, just a subordinate (the Magister Equitum), and walked with 24 lictors (the double of the consul, which there were only two at each time, thus representing his absolute power). His imperium didn’t cease when he entered the Pomerium and not even the Senate could veto his decisions.
Except for the period that ended the Republic, the dictator, in practice, had limited powers. And for a simple reason: de facto power in Rome wasn’t in the Law, but in the patronage system: the meetings of the Senatus and the Tribune of the Plebs were just, majorly, formalities to ratify what was already decided in “daily politics”, i.e. exchange of favors and bribes. The dictator could be legally all-powerful, but he was still just a man: he was a senator, he had a family, he had debts, he had credits, he had land, he had a social life etc etc. In that sense, the nomination of a dictator in Rome was more of a moment of temporary “democratic centralism” than anything else.
That’s a very different concept of dictator than the one used nowadays.
In my opinion, a dictator since the 20th Century must have these two characteristics:
1) he has to be backed by an alien power decisively, i.e. the dicator may or may not have significant popular support, but he may not have popular support large enough to not depend on a foreign superpower backing, in the form of direct and indirect lethal power;
2) he has to be blessed by the alien power backing him, i.e. the dictator must be, at the end of the day, a counterrevolutionary, an anti-popular leader overall, because he’s implementing a foreign, necessarily unpopular, agenda (if it was popular, there would be no need for foreign funding for it; it would win the elections naturally). Long story short, he has to be a puppet of some alien superpower.
In that sense, a modern dictator is more akin to an Ancient puppet king than an Ancient dictator. I think Latin American generals chose the term “dictator” because it had a connotation of “restoring the order”, but this is, of course, nonsense. I think that’s why some modern pundits like to use the more broad term “satrap” to designate a puppet ruler in a Third World country — it covers both the traditional military dictator and the neoliberal puppets who are elected through fraud and propaganda warfare.
Now, I don’t think Bashar al-Assad fills any of those criteria.
First, you have to take into account that modern Syria is an artificial country, drawn up by the Sykes-Picot Treaty. The aim was to put together hostile tribes so as to keep those countries divided and thus easier to rule. The same tactic was used in Africa and we can see until now that it works wonderfully. Western style representative democracy is impossible in Syria. Even in this impossible scenario, Assad made the feat to congregate all the minorites to his side, making up to 30% of the total Syrian population. He also has some support from the Sunni majority, I suppose. So, he’s actually more democratic than all the Western capitalist puppets piled up; what he’s done is nothing short of a miracle, since Syria is a country that was designed to fail.
Second, he wouldn’t depend on Russian support if Syria existed in a vacuum. What I mean by that is that Russian support was essential to block a counter-revolution, not a revolution, funded by another alien superpower: the USA. If you take out the USA from the equation, it’s hard to imagine a democratic scenario in Syria where Bashar al-Assad would not be victorious.
Third, he’s a nationalist. He’s not advancing some kind of Russo-Chinese hidden agenda in Syria. He’s only working with them up to where he needs to guarantee his people the prosperity they want, thus only up to the point where he needs to run from the USA. It’s not like Syria was some kind of Norway before he took power and he ran down the country’s economy just to please some kind of Russo-Chinese elite (as what happened in Latin America).
Posted by: vk | Mar 21 2019 0:42 utc | 55
>>>>> Pft | Mar 20, 2019 7:16:50 PM | 47
From the video it looked like the shooter was pulled from the car already wearing cuffs as both hands are behind him when he is forced to the ground face first
The “arrest” video doesn’t show the actual arrest but events after the arrest. In British law which defined New Zealand law, an arrest takes place when a constable puts his hand on the perp, normally on the shoulder. That is why one British slang term for it is “feeling the collar”. Also, he is the prisoner of the constable who arrested him which explains why it’s the country constable who is manhandling him even after the heavy brigade has arrived.
He was most likely cuffed as soon as he left the vehicle and then dragged to the position where he was seen in the video, so him already being cuffed is nothing remarkable. As for why he was dragged away from his vehicle, there were viable rumours that there were bombs in the car, and no policeman wants to be blown up particularly for this type of scum.
He had shot his rifle while in the car in the earlier video. Maybe he was dazed or out of ammo.
He’d fired his gun through the passenger side window which means there was room for him to manipulate his weapon. Switching from that to shooting out of the driver’s side window would be difficult. Getting a long weapon like an AR-15 clone or FN FAL out of any vehicle safely is not easy. It why the military typically issue vehicle crews with sub-machine guns, machine pistols or carbine versions of assault rifles and it’s why the British army have a very health obsession with bullpup rifles.
No real description has been given of his capture though which seems strange although maybe a gag order.
Quite common in British law to respect the right to privacy of the perp. Particularly after the Cliff Richard incident.
Maybe he was dazed or out of ammo.
Poor guy, a “country” constable (a person he no doubt regarded as a natural ally) had just driven a police car into his car and the perp wasn’t wearing a seat belt. There are decent non-racist police in the rest of the world.
No picture of the guys face that was captured. Its all fogged over by judges order, .how can we verify who he is? Perhaps the real shooter has flown off to do another op.
The police probably want to investigate further so releasing pictures of his face could compromise any identification evidence, so they probably applied to the judge for an order to stop pictures being published of him. There really is nothing to see here so moving on……
This guy had quite a travel history to places where his services are in demand.
Says who? Some wingnut blog? If he’s made such claims on social media then he’s very likely a fantasist
Professional killer IMO based on the live video.
The thing that frightened me about the main video was not the death as I seen a few corpses over the years and have little empathy with other people. No, it was the banality and ordinariness of it all. A man buys a semi-automatic rifle and a few hundred rounds of ammunition and with minimal training can walk into an unsecured building and kill fifty people without any problem because they’re different to him. Anybody who’s played realistic first-person shoot’em ups such as Call of Duty, Medal of Honor or similar games probably has a good idea of what they’re capable of.
Generally, with any article about this incident that mentions automatic fire the author is talking out of his arse and should be ignored.
Posted by: Ghost Ship | Mar 21 2019 11:07 utc | 90
|
