Saturday, January 3, 2015

Erdogan in Wonderland: "Freedom" in Turkey


Gatestone Institute
Facebook  Twitter  RSS

In this mailing:

Erdogan in Wonderland: "Freedom" in Turkey

by Burak Bekdil  •  January 3, 2015 at 5:00 am
Erdogan can be very sure of himself when he claims that Turkey has the world's freest press. But then there are facts.
Police detained a 16-year-old boy for "insult," with the prosecutors asking for up to four years in prison. He allegedly said that he considered Erdogan as "the leader of corruption, bribery and theft."
A Turkish journalist and anchorwoman, Sedef Kabas, was detained after a tweet in which she called on citizens not to forget the name of the judge who dropped, apparently under government pressure, a high-profile corruption probe against Erdogan, his four cabinet ministers at the time, their sons and a shady businessman.
Pinar Turenç, head of Turkey's Press Council, portrayed the "world's freest country" as: "Censorship, self-censorship... injuries, use of tear gas, batons, journalists... who are being tried under or without arrest, and bans of media publications.... a really serious picture for law and democracy."
Activists from Amnesty International-Turkey protest limits on freedom of expression. (Image source: Amnesty International-Turkey)
Apparently, there are lies, statistics -- and Turkish lies.
Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan thinks that he can claim the world is flat and everybody will believe him. He has little idea how he ridicules his own country when he sounds like former North Korean and Iranian presidents Kim Jong-il ("If I am being talked about, I must be doing the right things.") and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad ("In Iran, we don't have homosexuals.")
"We used to think that he [Erdogan] resorts to such rhetoric for domestic consumption. Now we tend to think that he lives in a make-believe world, a kind of parallel universe," a European ambassador told this author over another jaw-dropping Erdogan speech.

Could Obama Swing the Israeli Election?

by Steven J. Rosen  •  January 3, 2015 at 4:00 am
Most Israelis do not think the rise of Hamas, Hezbollah and ISIS makes this a great time to sign an agreement requiring the Israel Defense Force to leave the West Bank.
When Israel's former Prime Minister pulled every soldier and every settler out of Gaza in 2005, what happened after that withdrawal was the opposite of "land for peace."
It does not inspire confidence that just signing a piece of paper will bring real peace.
The theory that friction will weaken Netanyahu is unproven; the reverse could happen.
Let's pretend to like each other... President Barack Obama walks across the tarmac with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at Ben Gurion International Airport in Israel, March 20, 2013. (Image source: White House/Pete Souza)
This is the first time since 2009 that the Obama Administration may think it has a credible opportunity to replace Benjamin Netanyahu with an Israeli government prepared to make more concessions to the Palestinians. The idea that Obama could have a more compliant partner in Jerusalem for the final eighteen months of his presidency has to excite his closest aides as they reach for achievements to crown the President's legacy.
This new perception, that Netanyahu can be toppled, has emerged suddenly as the subject of audible whispers in Europe as well as Washington.

To subscribe to the this mailing list, go to http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/list_subscribe.php
14 East 60 St., Suite 1001, New York, NY 10022

No comments:

Post a Comment