Turkey uses Israeli-made Heron unmanned aerial vehicles in its military operation against Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) terrorists. (File photo)
A senior Turkish politician has called on the government for an immediate end to its intelligence cooperation with the United States and Israel, Press TV reports.
“Turkey’s reliance on Israel and the US for gathering intelligence in fight against the PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party) can create serious problems for Turkey,” Mustafa Yilmaz, the deputy leader of Turkey’s Felicity Party, said on Wednesday.
Yilmaz highlighted a recent botched airstrike in southeastern Turkey that killed 35 civilians as yet another proof that Ankara needs to develop its own defense and intelligence infrastructure and end reliance on Israel and the US in this regard.
“The question is that did Israel, or the intelligence it provided, mislead Turkey to carry out the airstrike? The issue should be closely reviewed,” he urged.
The remarks come amid Turkey’s military campaign against the Kurdish separatist militants of PKK which sees the Turkish army employ Israeli-made Heron and US-made Predator drones.
Yilmaz also called on Ankara to reconsider the list of its “strategic allies and partners,” that include the US and Israel. Washington and Tel Aviv are only after their own interests and do not respect the rights and borders of other countries, he noted.
The remarks come amid Turkish media reports that an Israeli spy drone was detected flying over a military zone in the southern province of Hatay in September.
The Heron drone has been reportedly hovering over the military command post for several hours in order to capture the pictures of radars and missile systems in the area.
After the aircraft was confirmed to be an Israeli drone, two Turkish F-16 fighter jets were scrambled from an airbase in the southeastern province of Diyarbakir to ward off the Israeli drone.
Turkish officials have not made any comment about the report.
MRS/JR
via PressTV – ‘Turkey must end US, Israel intel. coop’.
There are few people more passionate about online news than progressive talk show host Cenk Uygur. The Istanbul-born, New Jersey-bred talking head founded “The Young Turks” show on Sirius Satellite Radio in 2002. A few years later, it moved from the airwaves to the Internet, where it now logs about 1 million views daily.
Those are big numbers for a Web television talk show, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t room to grow. On Monday, “The Young Turks with Cenk Uygur,” a one-hour TV version of the Web show, premieres on the Al Gore-founded cable channel, Current. Uygur, an MSNBC alum who had a much publicized breakup with the network, will air on Current before the show of another ex-MSNBC personality, Keith Olbermann.
Between tapings of the show, Uygur chatted with POLITICO about his basketball skills, what it’s like to be a Jersey boy watching “Jersey Shore,” his dream guests and his love of fettuccine Alfredo pizza.
With “The Young Turks” online and “The Young Turks with Cenk Uygur” on Current, you have three hours of programming a day. That’s a long work day. What do you do to relax?
When I want to relax, it’s nine out of 10 times TV or movies. I love going to the movies and grabbing popcorn or watching “Mad Men,” “Boardwalk Empire” and “Breaking Bad.” I also play basketball on the weekends, and my favorite thing in the world is fantasy football, but tragic news: I got eliminated last week.
Do you think you could beat President Barack Obama in a one-on-one basketball game?
That would be an excellent contest. I’m not bad, and he’s not bad, and we are both old guys that are a little bit past our prime. We should do the Young Turks squad against the White House team. Or he can even take the whole Democratic Party and keep Reggie Love.
What three words would you use to describe Al Gore?
I recently met him. We’ve had a number of conversations that have been great. He cares so much about policy. Instead of worrying about corporate politics, I talk about policy with my boss. Three words to describe him would be strong, progressive, right. He’s right all the time.
“The Young Turks” YouTube channel has pulled in half a billion total views. What will be the biggest surprise for your online audience when it tunes into the Current version of the show?
Television is getting very robotic, fake, plastic, and viewers are not getting anything of value out of the standard cable news program. We go after politicians very, very aggressively. For our online audience, it will be similar in some ways. It will be irreverent, conversational, but we will be able to involve guests from all across the country, which we were limited to online.
Dream guest?
I want to interview Alec Baldwin. I don’t know why he hasn’t done [“The Young Turks”] yet. Come on the show, let’s go. The second is the exact opposite. I’ve always wanted to interview Nelson Mandela; he’s a living legend. And then, obviously, President Obama so I can ask him what happened. What happened to the guy [who] used to be the most inspirational guy? How did he become the least inspirational guy? If he was a wrestler, his nickname would be The Establishment.
Have you ever been bleeped out on air?
As aggressive as I am, no, I have never been bleeped out on air. I often ask where the line is before we go on air.
Favorite set meal?
In our world, that’s very important. If I get hungry, I get cranky on air. I mainly eat bananas. Both MSNBC and Current have a very funny video of me eating bananas on set.
Bananas? Wow, that’s very healthy.
Oh, that’s just a snack. I eat disastrously. I eat the worst kind of stuff. At our old studio, there was a restaurant with fettuccine Alfredo pizza. It was the most delicious thing on earth.
There seems to be a trend toward hiring political offspring as television contributors (Jenna Bush Hager, Chelsea Clinton, Meghan McCain). Is there any political son or daughter you’d like to have on the show?
We have Wes Clark Jr. as a contributor, but there is a huge difference between him and other folks. I think those other stations bring them in to have a facade of having young people on air, but they fit into the same old tired format. Wes is often times deeply controversial and very aggressive. He’s a blast to have on and the audience loves him. We use him because he’s terrific.
Your 1-year-old son is named Prometheus Maximus Uygur. Any nicknames?
Pro, Promo, some people call him Promy. But the longest lasting has been Boom Boom Boom. When we saw the ultrasound, we were looking at his heartbeat going boom, boom, boom, and said, “This kid is strong.”
Any guilty TV pleasures? “Keeping Up With the Kardashians,” “Hoarders,” “Real Housewives”? You were raised in New Jersey, maybe “Jersey Shore”?
You nailed it. And it’s not me, so I claim. My wife loves “Jersey Shore,” but when it’s on, I watch it more than she does. I’m like, “Can you believe Ronnie and Sammi got back together?” And she’s like, “Why are you so into it?” I grew up in Jersey. I’ve been to the Jersey Shore countless times. I’ve lived it. The Situation drives me crazy. He’s such a drama queen. … I guess Pauly D and Vinny are my favorite characters.
via Cenk Uygur airs It out – CLICK – POLITICO.com.
I appeared on this week’s edition of the Press TV show Remember Palestine. I used the platform that Press TV graciously provided me with to argue that those of us who want to bring an end to the Israel-Palestine conflict ought to capitalize on the evidence of Israeli involvement in 9/11 rather than neglect the subject because it is deemed by some to be “controversial”.
I think most would agree that without the U.S. government altering its stance vis-à-vis Israel that there is little hope for justice in Palestine. The only conceivable way of the U.S. undertaking a volte-face vis-à-vis Israel is if a sufficient proportion of the citizens of the U.S. become conscious of
a) the extent to which Israel and its affluent supporters are distorting U.S. Middle East policy as well as
b) the extent to which such pro-Israel forces lack any respect for the U.S. taxpayer.
Arabs and Muslims have been dehumanized and stigmatized in the Western media
Unfortunately, Arabs and Muslims have been dehumanized by opportunist journalists and careerist academicians who have jumped on the anti-Islam, pro-Israel bandwagon, post 9/11, which has resulted in a preponderance of U.S. citizens lacking any empathy with the beleaguered Palestinians and the other benighted inhabitants of the region.
I argued on Remember Palestine that the abundant evidence linking Israel to 9/11 provides the pro-Palestinian movement with a unique opportunity to foster such empathy among the U.S. body politic. Those in the pro-Palestinian movement, I argue, must stop shying away from the evidence linking Israel to 9/11 and must actively educate the people of the U.S. and other nations that nearly 3000 U.S. citizens were slain on 9/11 with the complicity of the Israeli government.
I suspect that many U.S. citizens would be unmoved if you informed them that 3000 or even 3 million Arabs and Muslims had been killed by Israel. Indeed Dr. Gideon Polya has deduced that the (largely Israeli concocted) 9/11 wars have resulted in the deaths of as many as 2.3 million Iraqis and 4.5 million Afghans and, yet, the anti-Islamic 9/11 wars continue unabated. The most recent phase of the 9/11 wars includes an illegal incursion into Libya and increased meddling in Syria. The main goal from the perspective of the Israeli government has been to foment sectarianism and civil war in the Middle East so those who dwell in the Middle East are fighting each other rather than the Israeli hegemon.
I am of the view that the pro-Palestinian movement ought to emphasize the fact that 3000 mostly Caucasian and non-Muslim U.S. citizens were killed on 9/11 with the complicity of the Israeli government. It’s not that U.S. or caucasian blood should be deemed more valuable than Palestinian or Arab blood. The Western media have created an intellectual environment where, in the eyes of many U.S. citizens, Palestinian and Arab blood isvalueless. Thus, those of us who are serious about promoting peace in the region ought to emphasize crimes of the Israeli government that will have the most efficacy in mobilizing support for the Palestinians.
It is likely that if enough U.S. citizens became aware of the Israeli involvement in 9/11 that they would begin to voice criticism of the U.S.-Israeli “special relationship.” Thus, this is the tack I am taking in most of my media appearances. I encourage others to do so.
Noam Chomsky, a self-proclaimed Zionist, perplexed many when, unburdened by evidence, he affirmed the official story of 9/11 within months of the terrorist atrocities
I very much hope that those academicians who focus on the Israel-Palestine conflict such as Norman Finkelstein, Stephen Walt, John Mearsheimer, Noam Chomsky, Ali Abunimah, Ilan Pappé and others will likewise acknowledge the evidence implicating Israel in 9/11 as this evidence could be decisive in ending the Israel-Palestine impasse. [For more on Chomsky’s 9/11 denialism, which was presaged by his dismissal of conspiracy in the death of JFK, see: http://www.veteranstoday.com/2011/12/18/the-assassination-of-cpl-pat-tillman-usa/]
Such scholars have since 9/11 presupposed the veracity of the official story of 9/11 and in doing so have based much of their scholarship on a false-premise, namely that bin-Laden and al-Qaeda were responsible for 9/11, when this theory, which is a conspiracy theory, has been debunked by numerous credible scholars including David Ray Griffin who has written ten books addressing very specific claims made by adherents to the official story of 9/11 demonstrating them to be inconsistent with the available evidence and in many cases even with the laws of physics and of aerodynamics. Indeed many ears should have pricked up when, in the immediate hours following 9/11, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine was blamed and footage of Palestinians dancing, albeit from 1993, was projected to the U.S. public.
I think history will not absolve those in the so called “pro-Palestinian” movement who have helped to suppress evidence implicating Israel in 9/11. Imagine if the Afrikaners, during the 1980s, out of desperation had killed 3000 Americans and blamed this act of terrorism on the ANC so as to make it’s enemies (in this case black africans) the perceived enemy of the American people thus justifying the continuance of the U.S.-South African “special relationship”. Would the anti-apartheid movement not have been feckless, indeed insane, if they had failed capitalized on this blunder of the pro-apartheid forces?
It does a disservice to the Palestinians and non-Palestinian victims of Israeli foreign policy to try to divorce the Palestine Question from the broader manifestations of the locus of power which James Petras has referred to as the “Zionist Power Configuration” (ZPC). This ZPC operates at both a global and local level as was indicated on 9/11. As Naomi Klein accurately wrote in the Guardian “[the] Likudisation of the world [is] the real legacy of 9/11.”
For those of us living in Western countries, especially in North America, the most efficient way for us to engender empathy with the Palestinians in the eyes of uninformed Westerners, especially U.S. citizens, is for us to illuminate Israel’s involvement in the massacre of U.S. citizens on 9/11. A failure to capitalize on Israel’s most egregious crimes and blunders is tantamount to complicity in the oppression of the Palestinians and the other victims of Israeli foreign policy.
As a young Turk in America, Batu Ekineigoly (e-kin-jo-la), 15, is comfortable with the similarities of the two cultures and courageous in understanding the differences. Batu is an exchange student from Istanbul and a sophomore at Galesburg High School.
“Christmas in Turkey is like New Year’s. We have Santa Claus and give gifts and do all those things, but I never knew that we celebrate it because it is Jesus’ birthday,” he said.
Ekineigoly’s host parents are the Rev. Jake and Rachel Chastain of Galesburg. Jake is youth minister at First Church of the Nazarene. Rachel is a nurse at Galesburg Cottage Hospital.
Ekineigoly has a passion for the performing and visual arts. He is on the swim team and performs or plays the piano whenever there is an opportunity. He has to decide if he wants to do the spring musical or go out for tennis.
In swimming he competes in the freestyle and backstroke and hopes to get his 50-yard freestyle time to under 30 seconds. His best time in the event is 37 seconds.
Academically, he said, “I’m good in math. I did pretty well in physics in Turkey but haven’t taken it here yet. I’m good at art and am taking drawing from Ms. Blakewell.”
His English is excellent, but it comes with a lot of work. He studied the language for seven years before coming to America and his family provided him with tutors along the way. “I watch English movies with subtitles in Turkish. That helps me understand the language.”
He cites American Studies with Mr. Bennewitz as an influential teacher. “I’ve read three novels and he taught so well that was interesting.”
Jake said Ekineigoly would read the work then go through the Sparks Notes on the Internet to get the synopsis to pull the meaning together.
He is interested in the American west and can speak about the westward expansion. “We learned about the Civil War. I like to watch cowboy movies with horses and bank robbers,” he said. “I learned that they are called Indians because Columbus thought he was in India when he discovered America.
“I learned about Jessie James and did a presentation on him. I dressed up like him and Jake and Rachel came and played and sang ‘The Ballad of Jessie James.’ ”
He also has done a study and presentation on Amelia Earhart in which his partner was Austin Strader.
“I’m really proud of collaborating with Austin on that project. I have a lot of knowledge of her childhood.”
Ekineigoly is also proud of his Turkish heritage and has learned well his history – from Genghis Khan’s conquest from the east to Constantine’s conquest from the west and more recently Mustafa Ataturk’s successful revolution against the Allied powers following World War I. He sees Ataturk as a great hero and founder of the Republic of Turkey and who brought democracy to the people in the early part of the 20h century.
“Ataturk could have declared himself King but he said, ‘our war is now,’ and he worked to modernize Turkey. He changed the language from Arabic to Turkish. He separated the public and business things from religious things.”
Ekineigoly’s father is a mechanical engineer with the German company Mann, and his mother is in the landscaping business that her father started. “We sell plants and design gardens.”
“My mother raised me freely and I hate people who try to restrict me,” he said.
The Chastains are from Green Bay, and while he doesn’t understand American football, he is being exposed to it.
“One of the first things we taught him was to say, ‘Go Pack Go,’ ” Rachel said.
Other differences he notes between Istanbul and Galesburg are the homes are in order and so proper. “It is so organized and flat. In Turkey, nothing is organized or planned and it’s not flat. The cars are pretty much the same.”
He will finish his studies on June 6, and return home.
“He’s a good kid. We love him. He has come a long way,” Rachel said.
via Turkish teen learns about Christmas – Galesburg, IL – The Register-Mail.
Istanbul-born cellist Efe Baltacigil and pianist Amy Yang played at the Turkish ambassador’s residence Friday. The concert, co-sponsored by the Embassy Series, highlighted two iconic sonatas by Ludwig van Beethoven: Op. 5, No. 1, in F and Op. 102, No. 2, in D. The musicians’ informed yet personal approach to this music beautifully underlined the composer’s groundbreaking liberation of the cello from its traditional supportive role — as in the Op. 5 — to its emerging reciprocal partnership with the piano — as in the Op. 102.
Baltacigil, the newly appointed principal cellist of the Seattle Symphony, combines an intense, gorgeous tone with a broad palette of timbres. In Op. 5, these qualities were carefully subdued to a quiet intimacy in accordance with the piano’s prominence. (Beethoven was a celebrated pianist himself.) Yang underscore dher command of the keyboard in music demanding the titanic power of the composer’s “Hammerklavier” sonata while exhibiting Op. 5’s full range of technical pizzazz and fluid scale passages. This was all the more remarkable because the pianist had to deal with a small, out-of-tune Steinway that lacked resonance. Particularly in the Op. 5 finale, the cellist met Beethoven’s playful presto temperament with a boldly impulsive bow matched by Yang’s incisive phrasing.
In Op. 102, the cello comes into its own against the piano. This was especially evident in the adagio, where Baltacigil missed no chance for sonorous passion to match Yang’s depth of expression.
Programmed between the Beethoven pieces, Maurice Ravel’s “Habanera” resonated with a tangy Iberian rhythmic pulse, and Antonin Dvorak’s “Silent Woods” was nicely done, with both players maintaining a marvelous legato from start to finish.
Porter is a freelance writer.
via Cellist Efe Baltacigil, pianist Amy Yang perform as part of Embassy Series – The Washington Post.
The Obama administration continues to deny that we are at war with Islamist jihadists. Indeed, the word “jihad” itself is forbidden in Obama-land if used to describe the Islamist warriors. At its highest levels, the Obama administration insists on using bland euphemisms rather than accurate language describing the Islamist ideology we are fighting.
As far as the Obama administration is concerned, the global war against Islamist killers is an “Overseas Contingency Operation.” The Fort Hood massacre, in which thirteen people were killed and dozens more wounded by an Islamist jihadist, is described by Obama officials as “workplace violence.”
In one of the most recent examples of political correctness gone amok, Paul Stockton, assistant defense secretary for homeland defense, refused to acknowledge that we are fighting a radical ideology that has anything to do with Islam. Asked during a joint Senate-House committee hearing last week, conducted by Rep. Peter King (R-NY) and Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-CT), whether “we are at war with violent Islamist extremism,” Stockton said “No sir. We are at war with al-Qaeda, its affiliates.” Stockton was then asked to at least concede that al-Qaeda is acting out violent Islamist extremism. Refusing to answer the question directly, he stuck to his talking point that “We are not at war with Islam.”
Stockton was spewing his nonsense at the same time as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s State Department hosted a three-day international conference in Washington, D.C., which included her friends from the 57-member Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), representatives from the Office of UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, and representatives from countries and international organizations “selected on the basis of their geographic, religious, and political diversity.” It turns out that more than a third of the countries selected were Muslim. The Arab League was represented in addition to the OIC. Religious diversity was not enough, however, to secure the Jewish state of Israel an invitation.
The purpose of the D.C. conference was to discuss ways to implement the provisions of a new United Nations resolution, the product of a deal reached between the OIC and the Obama administration, entitled “Combating Intolerance, Negative Stereotyping and Stigmatization of, and Discrimination, Incitement to Violence and Violence Against, Persons Based on Religion or Belief.”
The deal was for the OIC to at least temporarily put on hold its annual campaign to have the United Nations pass its “defamation of religions” resolutions, in favor of the “compromise” resolution passed by the UN Human Rights Council in March of this year and then passed by the UN General Assembly in November.
The title of the new “compromise” resolution may be different from the OIC’s “Combating defamation of religions” resolutions that the OIC has successfully steered through the UN over the last ten years or so. However, the net effect is that with the new UN resolution in hand and the full cooperation of the Obama administration, the OIC will actually be closer to achieving its objective, which to stamp out speech deemed offensive to Muslims.
Continuing the Obama administration’s submission to the OIC’s wishes, Clinton met with OIC officials in Istanbul last July, at a conference she co-hosted, to embark on what has become known as the “Istanbul Process.” The ostensible purpose of the Istanbul Process is to work with Muslim majority countries, the OIC and other interested nations on exploring specific steps to combat intolerance, negative stereotyping, discrimination and violence on the basis of religion or belief.
Clinton, in full spin mode, insisted that the new UN resolution was totally consistent with the free speech protections of the First Amendment, as opposed to the “defamation of religions” resolutions that the OIC was willing to have replaced. At the same time, Clinton assured the OIC that she was perfectly on board with using “some old-fashioned techniques of peer pressure and shaming, so that people don’t feel that they have the support to do what we abhor.” She also invited OIC representatives to Washington, D.C. to begin implementing the Istanbul Process, which culminated in last week’s three-day closed door conference.
The OIC, meanwhile, is engaging in a bait and switch game. Reporting after the meeting in Istanbul on what it expected to happen next, the OIC stated: “The upcoming [Washington] meetings . . . [will] help in enacting domestic laws for the countries involved in the issue, as well as formulating international laws preventing inciting hatred resulting from the continued defamation of religions.” In other words, banning “defamation of religions” was still on the OIC’s agenda, even if it had to be achieved through indirection.
About a month after the Istanbul meeting, OIC secretary general Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu insisted that “no one has the right to insult another for their beliefs or to incite hatred and prejudice.”
Is Hillary Clinton so obtuse that she fails to understand the OIC’s true intentions? Alternatively, is she trying to publicly assure American citizens that their First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and press are safe, while working behind the scenes with her OIC partners to find acceptable ways to stifle speech offensive to Muslims? I think the latter is the case, as the Obama administration examines employing legal mechanisms such as hate speech laws and vigorous enforcement of very broadly interpreted anti-discrimination laws, as well as using the “shaming” campaign Clinton talked up in Istanbul. Her actions are right in line with Barack Obama’s vow to the Muslim world in his June 2009 Cairo speech: “I consider it part of my responsibility as President of the United States to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam whenever they appear.”
Nina Shea, director of the Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom and serving as a commissioner on the official but independent U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, was invited to attend just the opening and closing sessions of last week’s conference. That was bad enough.
Shea was very concerned about the conference after it was first announced last July, seeing right through the OIC’s maneuvering. She came away even more concerned after she heard what was being said at the conference, beyond Hillary Clinton’s platitudes about the importance of free expression and religious tolerance. “It is a scandal that the US is partnering on an issue regarding free speech with an organization like the OIC that is committed to undermining free speech,” Shea concluded.
Here, in Shea’s own words, are some of the things she heard:
[L]egal and security officials of a delegation which will remain unnamed gave a sweeping overview of American founding principles on religious freedom and how they have been breached time and again in American history by attacks against a broad variety of religious minority groups — including now against Muslims. A raft of current cases was mentioned; America’s relative exemplary and distinctive achievement in upholding religious freedom in an emphatically pluralistic society was not. That same speaker reassured the audience, which was packed with diplomats from around the world, that the Obama administration is working diligently to prosecute American Islamophobes and is transforming the U.S. Justice Department into the conscience of the nation, though it could no doubt learn a thing or two from the assembled delegates on other ways to stop persistent religious intolerance in America.
As mentioned above, the three-day Washington, D.C. conference was closed to the public, with very little reporting on what went on – particularly on what transpired between the opening and closing sessions that Nina Shea attended. However, I did manage to learn of one illustrative closed break-out session that confirms Ms. Shea’s concerns. The session consisted of a review by U.S. Department of Homeland officials regarding the training that the department delivers to federal, state, and local law enforcement on “Countering Violent Extremism,” together with a mock training session. It was an exercise in multi-cultural and diversity training. Ignoring the Islamist source of the most dangerous acts of “violent extremism” today, the session showcased the kind of misleading, politically correct training that the Obama administration is pushing, including community outreach programs, guides for community interaction and discussion of purported stereotypes of religious communities.
The Obama administration is helping the OIC to immunize Islamist ideology and law from critical scrutiny, under the banner of combating “Islamophobia.” As a result, our First Amendment right of free expression – starting with expression that the Obama administration and the Islamists “abhor” – are in jeopardy.
