On Monday, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan received the Al-Gaddafi International Prize for Human Rights. Past recipients of the award named for the Libyan dictator include such renowned human rights abusers as former Cuban leader Fidel Castro and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.
It’s hardly shocking that in a world where countries like Libya win seats on the UN Human Rights Council and Saudi Arabia is elected to a seat on the board of UN Women, that Gaddafi had the chutzpah to name a human rights honor after himself. However, I’m amazed that Erdogan can accept such a prize with a straight face. While he has proclaimed himself a champion against injustice, he is in reality the head of a country that sponsors the illegal occupation of northern Cyprus, persecutes its own Kurdish minority and has an appalling record on freedom of the press.
Monday’s award ceremony speaks not only to Turkey’s further movement away from the family of democratic nations and closer to totalitarian ones in the Muslim world, but also to Erdogan’s willingness to simply ignore reality. To claim he is a defender of human rights is simply absurd. It’d be fine if he lived in a fantasy world, but alas he lives in this real world, where he spends an inordinate amount of time slamming Israel for perceived rights abuses, while ignoring the actual crimes of his friends and neighbors. It comes as no surprise that in the recently released WikiLeaks, U.S. diplomats described Erdogan as a “fundamentalist” who “simply hates Israel.”
Libya giving the Turkish PM an award for human rights is like Exxon giving BP an award for environmental safety standards. It would be funny, if it weren’t true.
Meir Javedanfar offers these observations on the talks scheduled next week over Iran’s nuclear program - which, given the recent provocations on the Korean peninsula by the Pyongyang regime, will be of heightened interest and sensitivity.
Both the P5+1 and Iran are attending these talks because they are an essential part of their dual track policies toward each other. Without such an approach, their respective strategies would collapse.
Iran’s dual track approach involves a diplomatic channel that allows it access to direct negotiations with the P5+1, while also supporting foes of the West-especially those of the United States-in places such as Iraq, Afghanistan and Lebanon. Iran hopes this twin approach will gradually coerce the West into accepting its terms.
But the West also pursues a dual strategy. Despite the talks being widely seen as dead before they’ve even started, it still needs to keep the talks going as it provides Iran a channel through which come to the negotiating table. The second track consists of the sanctions that it hopes will coerce Iran into complying with demands over its nuclear programme.
With both sides pursuing dual but competing approaches, it’s going to be all about who has the most stamina.
The devastating forest fire in northern Israel which killed 40 prison wardens who were traveling through the area on a bus has brought forth an encouraging international response. Ynet reports:
Israeli authorities are expecting to receive some 20 firefighting aircraft Thursday night from Greece, Cyprus Spain, Croatia, Azerbaijan and Russia to help in the effort to contain the northern blaze that claimed at least 40 lives.
And this:
Despite the great diplomatic tensions vis-à-vis Israel, Turkish officials announced that they too will be sending two firefighting airplanes.
It should be recalled that Israeli rescue teams are usually among the first to arrive in disaster areas - as they did, for example, following the terrible earthquake in Turkey in 1999. Notwithstanding the political calculations that invariably contribute to a decision to send humanitarian aid, it’s heartening to see similar urgency in responding to Israel during its hour of need.
Voltaire - anti-Semite that he was - should be alive today to mock the hypocrisy of the new high priests calling anathema on the heads of Jews in Israel.
So says Denis Macshane in a searing op-ed which marks “Buycott Israel” day. For what it’s worth, my personal view is that you should buy Israeli goods because they are worth buying - but as long as there’s a BDS campaign, initiatives like this one can play a valuable role. If you’re in the United States, visit here for shopping tips.
One of the few merits of the Wikileaks project is that it puts the obvious and already well-known on the front pages. Take Iran and its nuclear program, for example. Everybody who takes an interest in such matters and is not blinded by hatred of Jews running their own affairs knows that most Arab states are far more worried about the nuclear ambitions of the ayatollahs than they are about Israel and would be quietly pleased if the US and/or Israel put an end to them using whatever means necessary.
Continue reading ‘Wikileaks: Shock Revelations! Bomb Iran Now Say Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Bahrain’
Do you believe in an ideology? Putting it slightly more strongly, are you a follower of an ideology? I guess for most people the answer is “no” to both. Ideologies are generally felt to be bad, false and deceptive and those who follow them to be fanatics of some kind, unable to see things as they really are and act accordingly, in a calm manner and with their minds unclouded by mysterious and undisprovable notions.
Continue reading ‘A.B. Yehoshua, Zionism And Ideology’
Writing a few days ago for the indispensable Jewish Ideas Daily about UNESCO’s decision to approve Muslim denial of any Jewish connection to biblical sites in Israel by classifying Rachel’s Tomb, near Bethlehem, as a mosque, Alex Joffe mentioned the critically important work of the Israeli scholar, Yitzhak Reiter, in documenting “…the modern Islamic tradition according to which Jerusalem was never associated with the Jews.”
Author and journalist Stefan Frank has conducted an extensive interview with Professor Reiter, who teaches at Ashkelon Academic College and is a senior fellow of the Jerusalem Institute for Israel Studies, which we are pleased to publish here.
Continue reading ‘Rachel’s Tomb: An Interview with Professor Yitzhak Reiter’
Last week the Philadelphia BDS movement claimed a small victory by apparently pressuring Strauss, the Israel-based co-owners of Sabra hummus, to remove from their English language website their statement of support for the IDF’s Golani Brigade.
I was ready to attack Strauss for this apparently shameful act, but today the support is back up.
Now if only they would bring back their spicy pickles.
Z Word contributor Karl Pfeifer draws my attention to this important article by Yale Professor Eva S. Balogh. It’s about a demonstration organized by neo-fascist Jobbik Party at the Budapest statue of Count Mihály Károlyi, the democratically-elected leader of Hungary after World War One, and a much-detested figure on the far right.
Continue reading ‘Jobbik’s Anti-Zionist Antisemitism’
Over at The Propagandist, Jonathon Narvey confronts a brand new, and decidedly stinky, conspiracy theory: that those shadowy Zionists, and not Islamist terrorists, were behind the shocking massacre of 58 Iraqi Christian worshippers at the Sayedat al-Najat Cathedral in Baghdad on October 31. Writes Jonathon: “This is a useful example of a larger phenomenon that makes brokering peace between Islamic states and Western ones, or dealing with Islamist terror, state-sanctioned or otherwise, so much more difficult. A broad swathe of humanity throughout the Islamic world, particularly their political leaders and intellectual class, believes in blood-curdling fairy tales. And they project the worst aspects of Islamism’s brutalities upon its victims.”
Read it all.
Here’s my latest piece on The Huffington Post.
When I read this report on the Electronic Intifada website claiming that the largest pension fund in The Netherlands had divested from the Israeli companies in its portfolio, it struck me that the campaign to subject Israel to a regime of Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions - BDS for short - had hit a milestone. No longer, I said to myself, is this a matter of campus gesture politics. The long-awaited South Africa effect is finally manifesting.
Then it occurred to me that the story might not be true. I contacted the fund’s managers, the Dutch company PGGM, and they confirmed my suspicions.
Continue reading ‘Another Israel Divestment Hoax’
Solomonia rightly draws attention to this remarkable lecture by Robert Bernstein, the founder of Human Rights Watch. Bernstein, you’ll remember, published an op-ed in the New York Times in October 2009 in which he eviscerated HRW for “helping those who wish to turn Israel into a pariah state.”
Continue reading ‘Robert Bernstein on Human Rights in the Middle East’
This is a sensitive time of the year for Spanish fascists. Their two biggest heroes both died on the 20th of November. José Antonio Primo de Rivera (say “José Antonio” in any discussion about modern Spain and everyone will know who you are talking about), the founder of the Spanish Falange, was executed by firing squad on November 20th 1936 after having been found guilty of insurrection and conspiracy against the Republic. Francisco Franco Bahamonde died of old age on the 20th of November, 1975 after having ruled Spain with unsurpassed brutality and cunning since 1939.
Continue reading ‘Remembering Franco And José Antonio’
Is Iran’s government sponsoring an Internet site that extols the German Nazis, their history and achievements, including the antisemitism that the current Iranian regime also supports? Or is it merely permitting one to operate in a highly censored communications’ system?Here are the facts. There is a discussion group site entitled IranNazi that has an Iranian internet URL. It is written in Persian and seems to have begun on August 24. All the material on the site is pro-Nazi and features pictures of Adolph Hitler, the swastika, and goose-stepping German soldiers. There is an English-language part as well.
Read more from Barry Rubin here.
Curious about the whois details? Here they are:
Continue reading ‘The Nazi Website Registered in Iran’
This one has been doing the email rounds rather feverishly today, and now Jeff Goldberg has run with it:
Well, this is certainly disconcerting: The New Israel Fund, a left-leaning organization I admire (it funds all sorts of civil liberties groups in Israel), states that, on the one hand, the anti-Israel boycott movement (the BDS movement, for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) is pursuing a counterproductive and inflammatory strategy, but on the other, it will continue to fund groups that support BDS, so long as they don’t support BDS too much. Here are the weasel words, so you can judge NIF’s position for yourself:
Continue reading ‘The New Israel Fund and BDS’
