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In this mailing:
* Guy Millière: France: Macron Gave Up Fighting Radicalism
* Burak Bekdil: What Makes Erdogan Tick?
* Amir Taheri: Iran: Between Illusion and Reality


** France: Macron Gave Up Fighting Radicalism ([link removed])
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by Guy Millière • April 11, 2021 at 5:00 am
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* There are also teachers who, possibly because they are scared, choose to bow their heads, give up teaching certain subjects and -- when students shout anti-Semitic and anti-Western insults -- to act as if they hear nothing. It has become almost impossible in most French high schools to talk about either Israel or the Holocaust.
* Most journalists seem to prefer avoiding all discussion of the advance of radical Islam in France. They know that those who do so are immediately called "racists" or "Islamophobes" and are often threatened, prosecuted, sentenced to heavy fines or fired from their place of work.
* Even though what the journalist Éric Zemmour said was accurate and verifiable, the CSA (Superior Audiovisual Council), said that to state certain facts constitutes an "incitement to racial hatred".
* In 2015, a French journalist compared the National Rally Party to the Islamic State. [National Rally President] Marine Le Pen responded by posting on Twitter two photographs of crimes committed by the Islamic State and added, "This is Islamic State".... In court, the judge asked Le Pen, "Do you consider that these photos violate human dignity?". Le Pen replied, "It is the crime that violates human dignity, it is not its photographic reproduction".
* "Fourteen months before the presidential deadline of 2022, ... the supposition is that ... Marine Le Pen, will necessarily be in the second round of the election and that whoever will face her is no longer guaranteed to win". — Le Monde, March 22, 2021.

Éric Zemmour (pictured), one of the only journalists in France who still speaks freely about the advance of radical Islam, is brought into court at least once a year. The fines imposed on him come to 10,000 euros ($11,800) each time. (Photo by Lionel Bonaventure/AFP via Getty Images)

November 1, 2020. Didier Lemaire, a high school teacher who works in Trappes, a small town west of Paris, published an open letter in the left-wing magazine Le Nouvel Observateur. He spoke of the murder of Samuel Paty, another teacher, savagely beheaded two weeks earlier by a Muslim extremist. He denounced the submission of the French authorities to religious intimidation and the impossibility of the French school system being able to transmit any real knowledge of history or to give students the intellectual means to think freely. He said that in just a few years, the situation in the city where he worked has deteriorated markedly. Lemaire wrote:

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** What Makes Erdogan Tick? ([link removed])
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by Burak Bekdil • April 11, 2021 at 5:00 am
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* At the end of the year, there was a Turkey in deep stages of cold-to-colder-war with the EU (in particular, with EU members Greece, Cyprus and France), Israel, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, General Khalifa Haftar of Libya and the United States (over the S-400 dispute).
* Not one of these state actors stepped back and appeased Erdoğan or changed policy in the face of Turkish hostilities.
* In December, the Trump administration announced that the U.S. would sanction Turkey ([link removed]) for its purchase of the Russian-made S-400 surface-to-air missile system....
* All that must have made Erdoğan tick. Apparently cornered, Erdoğan launched a new charm offensive in November. He said Turkey's future was in Europe – quite a radical departure from his usual histrionics that Europe is Islamophobic, fascist, racist and Europeans are "remnants of Nazis."
* Erdoğan's tough guy manners have finally been decrypted by state and non-state actors in the former Ottoman lands.
* "Erdoğan will not back down until you show him teeth. That's what we did when we negotiated the (Syrian) ceasefire in October of 2019. We were ready to crush the economy." -- James Jeffrey, former U.S. special envoy for Syria (and former ambassador to Ankara), Al Monitor

A comparative analysis of where Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's aggressive war-mongering and assertive foreign policy -- based on an imaginary Superpower Turkey -- stood a year ago, and today's relative Turkish composure at all problematic fronts should give us invaluable lessons on dealing with the wannabe sultan. The events during the past year offer precious experimental confrontations that reveal an answer to a question that concerns a rich menu of nations: What makes Erdoğan tick?

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** Iran: Between Illusion and Reality ([link removed])
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by Amir Taheri • April 11, 2021 at 4:00 am
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* As for voter turnout, we now know that the regime has set the stage for an "historic event". Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps chief Gen. Hussein Salami says the "Supreme Guide" has ordered "an epoch-making turnout" that his force will help assemble.
* [I]t is clear that the "Supreme Guide" will not tolerate the slightest deviation from the course he has set: a revolution that he claims is moving from strength to strength. "Today we are stronger and America is weaker," he said recently. One of his ideological gurus, Dr. Hassan Abbasi, aka "Dr. Kissinger of Islam", goes further: "America is the sunset power," he says. "We are the sunrise power!"
* [The coming election] could end the illusion that the Khomeinist regime might change course and seize opportunity offered to it to re-join the global mainstream.... The four-decade pursuit of "behavior change in Tehran" would have to be reviewed.
* Khamenei speaks of a "conspiracy" to force Iran to become a "normal nation" like everyone else and vows to never allow that to happen.
* The Khomeinist system isn't a Middle Eastern version of the people-based Scandinavian Social Democracy.... It is a despotism of the medieval kind with a pseudo-modern varnish borrowed from misunderstood Marxism.
* The replacement of illusion with reality, no matter how bitter, may be good news after all.

Iran's upcoming presidential election could end the illusion that the Khomeinist regime might change course and seize the opportunity offered to it to re-join the global mainstream. (Image source: iStock)

The old script is out of the files and dusted, the décor shined and up, and the puppet-master testing the strings and flexing his fingers. But something is still missing: new puppets to make the show attractive to those who have seen the same old puppets once too often.

Got it? We are talking of the presidential election in the Islamic Republic in Iran, scheduled for June but so far attracting little attention. In previous versions of the show, interest in it started up to two years before polling day as rival factions within the regime mobilized to reach for the prize or at least make an impression. On at least two occasions the rigmarole produced one pleasantly surprising result and one unexpectedly horrible one. On a third occasion, it triggered a nationwide uprising that pushed the Khomeinist regime to the edge of collapse.

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