Another Friday, another LinkSwarm, heavy on Benghazi and Presidential race news:
The meerkat keeper is a great opening sentence. But this, from the Times, is the best this year. pic.twitter.com/MwG72hn49K
— Stephen Spencer (@sspencer_63) October 15, 2015
I take a look at the Internet Movie Database Bottom 100 List from time to time. Recently I was surprised to see a film called Kod Adı: K.O.Z. shoot to the top (it’s currently ranked the third worst film ever made), wince I had never heard of it. Turns out it’s a propaganda film by Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s scumbag Islamist government in Turkey.
Let’s look at a few user reviews:
This is presumably the worst propaganda film ever shot in the entire history of cinema. It gives a highly biased and re-written account of the recent political corruption scandals in Turkey; the so-called 17-25 December corruption and bribery investigations in the year of 2013. What happened in reality was that, despite obvious evidence, the barefaced government officials including the back-then prime minister (the current president of the republic) insisted to call the investigations as a coup d’etat, and produced a surrealistic storyline to cover the allegations. The film intends to prove the unbelievable and mind-blowing theses of the government.
If anybody is curious about this movie and wonders why there are so many negative comments about it, that’s because it’s the “WORST” movie ever, I mean it. It’s completely waste of time, don’t even spend your time to watch it if you still haven’t. This movie itself is the proof of how much Turkey resembles Nazi Germany nowadays.
Dear IMDb! please add a no star option cause if I give this film one star this will be an insult for the films which deserve one star. This is the worst and most disinformatic film I ever watched in my life. Please surf on facebook chatting with friends or what instead of watching this film cause it really really full of lyings and I and the people of Turkey is sure that this film is ordered by the current government of Turkey ruled by dictator Erdogan and the government even can put you in prison if you have a poll company and the resutl of you poll is against the gov. There are a lot of journalist are in prison in Turkey that there sine is to write against the gov. And there are hundereds of legal sound and video recording of Erdogan and his ministers that are particpiating in the Turkey’s big corruption in the history, instead of answering for their corruption they put the polices in jail. and the government bought more than 90% of the media and even republic media are used actively against the people in Turkey and in this situation how can you believe this film that when asked the director about the film that is biased, he answered that I have chosen my side. Long Live Tolerance, dialogue and peace in the world.
It’s obvious that English is not the first language of many reviewers (which makes sense, since it’s a Turkish film), but they seem united in pronouncing it and incompetently made and a wretched piece of propaganda for a brutal, corrupt dictatorship.
So Turkey has evidently started bombing the Islamic State, but also started bombing the Kurds, our allies against the Islamic State (and Turkey’s restive minority).
But via Jihad Watch comes word that Turkey has secretly been doing deals with the Islamic State on the side as well.
In November, a former ISIS member told Newsweek that the group was essentially given free rein by Turkey’s army.
“ISIS commanders told us to fear nothing at all because there was full cooperation with the Turks,” the fighter said. “ISIS saw the Turkish army as its ally especially when it came to attacking the Kurds in Syria.”
But as the alleged arrangements progressed, Turkey allowed the group to establish a major presence within the country — and created a huge problem for itself.
“The longer this has persisted, the more difficult it has become for the Turks to crack down [on ISIS] because there is the risk of a counter strike, of blowback,” Jonathan Schanzer, a former counterterrorism analyst for the US Treasury Department, explained to Business Insider in November.
“You have a lot of people now that are invested in the business of extremism in Turkey,” Schanzer added. “If you start to challenge that, it raises significant questions of whether” the militants, their benefactors, and other war profiteers would tolerate the crackdown.”
“War Nerd” Gary Brecher says not to be fooled by the Islamic State strikes Turkey is actually going after the Kurds, linking to a regional source that claims the overwhelming majority of the airstrikes were against the Kurdish PKK, not the Islamic State.
Says Brecher:
Nobody much likes the Kurds, especially Erdogan’s AK party. In fact, the AKP hates the Kurds so much that this shared hobby of Kurd-killing has been the beginning of a beautiful friendship between the Turkish military and IS. IS fighters have always been able to move easily over the Turkish border, and there are persistent reports that Erdogan’s daughter herself is playing their Florence Nightingale, patching up those rapists’ boo-boos in one of the quasi-secret hospitals along the border.
The AKP’s position is simple: They hate the Kurds, period. Islamic State also hates the Kurds. So Erdogan has to force himself to mouth even the slightest objection to IS, whereas the spittle really flies when he starts ranting against the Kurdish PKK/YPG.
Given what we know of Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government (they’re Islamist scumbags) and Turkey historically (they hate and fear the Kurds), Turkey bombing the Kurds while pretending to bomb the Islamic State seems the more likely scenario.
“The past two years have been the most violent and repressive in Egypt’s contemporary history.” True, but by and large the Egyptians themselves don’t seem to mind. Why?
Yet despite this bleak security outlook, Egypt is more politically stable than it’s been in years. Unlike the divided regimes that collapsed in the face of mass protests in January 2011 and June 2013, the Sisi regime is internally unified. And the various state institutions and civil groups that constitute the regime will likely remain tightly aligned for one basic reason: they view the Muslim Brotherhood as a significant threat to their respective interests and thus see the regime’s crackdown on the organization as essential to their own survival.
Lucky for Egypt (and the world) that Morsi and his Muslim Brothers were such idiots. They could have gotten a lot further Islamicising Egypt had they followed Erdogan’s incrementalist model…
So say the tea leaves from early results. If it holds up, that would be pretty big (and good) news, especially since it would slow Erdogan’s attempts to fully Islamize Turkey, as well as thwart his attempt to change the constitution to give himself more power. The pro-Kurdish People’s Democratic Party is also on track to surpass the 10% voting threshold for representation, which is also good news.
NRO has running updates. Civilian death toll at 245, security forces death toll at 43.
Here’s your generic Middle East conflict video montage:
(Note: I originally had a completely different generic Middle East conflict video montage there, but AFP evidently doesn’t like embedding videos.)
It was always wishful thinking that the Muslim Brotherhood was going to relinquish its grip on power without a fight. The only question now is how many dead, and how many of its top leadership the Egyptian military is going to kill.
Egypt should count itself lucky that Mohammed Morsi was so stupidly impatient. If he had only followed Erdogan’s lead, he could have slowly but steadily consolidated his rule while pushing the military out of the picture. Now he’s toast, and we can only hope his fellow Islamists get pushed out of power-sharing entirely.
Too much going on, so here’s a LinkSwarm to start your day:
Some people have wondered why Egypt’s high court, doing the military leadership’s bidding, just invalidated the Egyptian parliament, even though the Muslim Brotherhood’s popularity, though strong, seemed to be on the wan. I think the simplest explanation is not that they were afraid of losing their grip on Egyptian society (though that’s probably part of the equation), but that the Egypt’s military leadership prefers not be be killed. I don’t mean this in a metaphorical sense, I mean that there was real (and probably justified) fear that a government lead by Muslim Brotherhood would lead, in very short order, to the liquidation of the military leadership. I think they were facing not one but two existential threats.
First, as shown in Turkey, when a nation’s existing military leadership also acts as an independent power base, islamists are only willing to tolerate potential threats to their own rule as long as they have to. Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s islamist AKP has moved to put vast swathes of Turkey’s previously independent military leadership on trail for blocking Islamist aims in the past. Egypt’s military is just as strong a power center (albeit one considerably less scrupulous than Turkey’s); how long do you think it would take the Muslim Brotherhood to move against the military leadership after they had consolidated power? My guess is not long at all, and the military knew it too.
Second, if we take the Muslim Brotherhood at their word, it’s obvious they’re itching for another war against Israel. And why not? They regard the “Zionist Entity” as a literal affront against God, one that must be wiped off the face of the earth. Moreover, what better way to tighten control over the levers of governmental powers than with a war against a hated enemy? There are are all sorts of ways to use “emergency wartime decrees” to eliminate opposition figures and seize direct control of businesses and ministries when everyone’s focused on the military action.
And who would bear the brunt of any war against Israel? The hated military. Win, and members of the Muslim Brotherhood government are heroes to Muslims all over the world. Lose, and it could only be attributable to traitorous disloyalty by the military leadership, which would be immediately purged.
And make no mistake about: Egypt would lose. Badly. No matter how they may try to spin the 1973 Yom Kipur War as a victory, the Egyptian military got it’s ass handed to it in all four of the Arab-Israeli Wars. The Six Day War was particularly brutal, with Israel destroying all the Arab air forces arrayed against it, most on the ground, and decisively crushing Egyptian forces in the Sinai while taking minimal casualties; they could even have taken Cairo were it not for frantic pleas of the U.S. and heavy threats from the Soviet Union. Egypt lost the Yom Kippur War as well, but actually managed to bloody Israel’s nose in the Sinai, using effective anti-tank tactics to inflict real damage on the IDF before being overwhelmed. This would be pretty much the only instance where an Arab army stood toe-to-toe with the IDF (even temporarily) until the 2006 war on Lebanon, which Hezbollah would survive despite being badly mauled.
The Egyptian military knows it would lose any war against Israel for the foreseeable future (even discounting Israel’s likely nuclear weapons arsenal), and it knows the best way to prevent one is to prevent the Muslim Brotherhood from coming to power. Strangely enough, in this instance the Egyptian military leadership is actually acting in the best interests of the nation, even if the end result also happens to be saving their own hide.