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* Giulio Meotti: Forget Free Speech: Rushdie's Fatwa Is Winning
* Amir Taheri: Turkey and the German Dream


** Forget Free Speech: Rushdie's Fatwa Is Winning ([link removed])
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by Giulio Meotti • August 21, 2022 at 5:00 am
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oneinstitute.org%2F18815%2Ffree-speech-rushdie-fatwa&pubid=ra-52f7af5809191749&ct=1&title=Forget+Free+Speech%3A+Rushdie%27s+Fatwa+Is+Winning [link removed]
* "If only more people could follow his example, instead of taking the path of appeasement in the name of cultural sensitivity, the long years of murder and mayhem wrought by the Islamists on the West might come to an end." — Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Unherd, August 7, 2022.
* [A] terrible and different reality: the fatwa is gaining ground...
* Islamic extremists in 2012 published a terrifying "most wanted list", like those of the FBI. Title: "Yes we can. A bullet a day keeps the infidel away.... " What happened to the faces and names on that list? They have been killed, left the public arena to protect themselves, or died under police protection.
* We do not even know they exist: our fearful conformist press never tells their amazing stories. They live among us, in Paris, London, Oslo, Copenhagen, Berlin, Amsterdam and all the other European capitals. They live according to a strict security protocol: they have to tell the police in advance what they will do during the day, who they will see and where they will go and, if any place is not considered safe, these victims are forced to change plans.
* "Anyone who criticizes Islamism must expect to be violently attacked in this country and without anyone being offended." — Jan Aleksander Karon, journalist, Tichys Einblick, August 20, 2022.
* "Give us his head," Islamists shouted outside a British school in Batley. They wanted to murder a teacher whose name we do not even know and who was forced to leave the school after heavy death threats. What was he guilty of? Having shown in class some of the Mohammed cartoons during a lesson on freedom of expression.
* All decent people should stand with Salman Rushdie and against his persecutors. Is it now a little bit clearer that radical Islam is today one of the biggest threats to Western culture and that we are not winning, but instead becoming like turkeys celebrating Thanksgiving?

"Salman Rushdie is a champion of free speech, bravely standing up for Western ideals when so many shy away from the fight. If only more people could follow his example, instead of taking the path of appeasement in the name of cultural sensitivity, the long years of murder and mayhem wrought by the Islamists on the West might come to an end." — Ayaan Hirsi Ali (pictured).

"Salman Rushdie is a champion of free speech, bravely standing up for Western ideals when so many shy away from the fight. If only more people could follow his example, instead of taking the path of appeasement in the name of cultural sensitivity, the long years of murder and mayhem wrought by the Islamists on the West might come to an end... I know all too well the threat Islamism poses. After I came out as an apostate, I was forced into a bubble of protection that still surrounds me to this day. I have 24-hour security. I still receive death threats. My friend, the sweet, vulgar, brilliant Theo Van Gogh was murdered simply for making a film with me. His attacker used a knife to stab a letter into Theo's chest: it said that I would be next".

That is how Ayaan Hirsi Ali reacted to the attempted murder of Salman Rushdie in Chautauqua, New York.

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** Turkey and the German Dream ([link removed])
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by Amir Taheri • August 21, 2022 at 4:00 am
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s://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18814/turkey-german-dream#print
* Instead of negotiating a fair share of newly found oil and gas reserves in the Aegean Sea with Cyprus and Greece, Erdogan has opted for pseudo-nationalistic saber-rattling that drives away would-be investors.
* Taking over the Muslim Brotherhood was supposed to complete Erdogan's victory over the Fethullah Gulen movement, leaving " the Sultan" as the unchallenged aspirant for the leadership of political Islam in and around the Mediterranean.
* Erdogan has expanded the war that Turkey has waged against Kurds for almost half a century to parts of Iraq and Syria. For the past five years, he has been trying to carve out a Turkish glacis in northern Syria's largely Kurdish region. Turkish experts believe that the adventure is costing around $10 billion a year, almost twice what Ankara gets from Brussels to keep Syrian refugees away from the EU dreamland.
* Erdogan apologists claim that he has put himself "at the center" of the new geostrategic "big game". Turkey, they say, remains a member of NATO but also a respected interlocutor for Russia. It can talk to the mullahs in Tehran and the mandarins in Beijing. Erdogan can also sell drones to Russians and Ukrainians to kill each other.
* Well, maybe. But anyone who tries to sit between two, not to say several, chairs risks ending up between chairs right on the floor.

To put it mildly, the Turkish economy is in dire straits. Instead of negotiating a fair share of newly found oil and gas reserves in the Aegean Sea with Cyprus and Greece, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has opted for pseudo-nationalistic saber-rattling that drives away would-be investors. Pictured: Erdogan speaks in Mersin, standing in front of the Abdulhamid Han gas exploration ship, on August 9, 2022. (Photo by Adem ALTAN / AFP) (Photo by ADEM ALTAN/AFP via Getty Images)

It was almost exactly 20 years ago when Kemal Dervis told a group of reporters in Ankara that in "in 20 years", Turkey would be one of Europe's two biggest economies alongside Germany.

Shortly after that remark, however, Dervis's brief tenure as Turkey's "economic miracle worker" in Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit's government was over. Dervis was not to become Turkey's Ludwig Erhard, the man who shaped West Germany's postwar economic revival, and Ecevit himself soon took his own curtain call.

Yet, at the time Dervis's prediction didn't sound too outlandish.

The radical reforms started under Prime Minister and President Turgut Ozal were given a wider scope helping to curb runaway inflation and attracting the largest inflow of direct foreign investment in Turkish history. The corruption that had gangrened the state-dominated rentier economy was also brought under control, while Dervis's clever measures saved the banking system from collapse.

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