Turkey

Monday

Rod Liddle

Martyrdom: a new comic strip for Turkish kids

Thrilling news arrives from Turkey, where it is being reported that a government body has issued comic books to the nation’s children telling them how bloody marvellous it is to become an Islamic martyr. ‘I really want to be a martyr, daddy,’ one child asks its idiotic parent. Well you can be, daddy replies, if you want it enough. The book goes on to say: ‘May God bless our martyrs, may their graves be full with holy light, (as well as detonated body parts).’ Well ok, it didn’t say the bit in brackets – that was my helpful addition. The book was got up by the Diyanet, the Turkish Presidency

Friday

Rose Asani

‘You even stop thinking of your own family’: meet the Isis fighters addicted to amphetamine

‘We would fight them, slaughter them,’ Aadheen told me. ‘The moment we take a pill we would stop thinking about anything.’ The pill he’s referring to is Captagon, an amphetamine that’s said to fuel some of the brutality associated with Isis. In November last year, Turkish authorities seized 11 million Captagon pills on the Syrian border. In the same month, a Saudi prince was arrested after two tonnes of Captagon pills were found in cases being loaded onto a private jet. Aadheen is a former Isis member; he’s now a drug addict in hiding. We met late at night in a safe house arranged by his dealer, close to the Syrian border. Aadheen sat silently in the

Wednesday

The Spectator

Letters | 23 March 2016

PC and abortion Sir: It is heartwarming that Simon Barnes’s son should not suffer the stigma experienced by those with Down’s syndrome in earlier generations (‘In praise of PC’, 19 March). But is it not ironic that in this kinder, more generous and respectful age, over 90 per cent of fetuses diagnosed with Down’s are aborted? Rather than hiding the children away, we now ensure that most of them are not even born. If political correctness had really become sane, surely our kindness, generosity and respect would extend to the womb as well? Matthew Hosier Poole, Dorset Naming conditions Sir: Simon Barnes, makes a couple of assumptions which do not

Thursday

Yvo Fitzherbert

Desperate straits

 Istanbul Shops in a rundown neighbourhood sell fake life jackets to refugees planning to brave the Aegean Sea. Last year, nearly 4,000 refugees died trying to make this journey. ‘But what am I to do?’ says Erkan, a shopkeeper, as he pushes me out of his shop. ‘I tell them they are fake but the poor souls continue to buy them. The genuine ones don’t sell so well.’ We’re in the suburb of Aksaray, the makeshift centre of the smuggling trade in the city. Here the language is Arabic and the restaurants are Syrian. A town square serves as a hub for migration brokers. This is where dreams are sold.

Tuesday

Douglas Murray

Cameron’s support for Turkey’s EU membership should worry us all

David Cameron this morning claimed that people who wish to leave the EU are ‘taking a risk with people’s jobs, taking a risk with families’ finances.’ Well then let us consider an even bigger risk that David Cameron is taking. In a visit to Turkey in 2010 our own Prime Minister announced that he would do everything he could to ensure Turkey entered the EU. Speaking as a guest of the country’s Islamist Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, our own PM said, ‘Turkey deserves its place at the top table of European politics – and that is what I will fight for.’ Since then he has indeed been fighting to

Thursday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 10 March 2016

Home The Bank of England arranged for banks to be able to borrow as much money as they needed around the date of the EU referendum, lest there should be a bank run. After saying in a speech that Britain’s long-term prospects could be ‘brighter’ outside the EU, John Longworth was suspended as director-general of the British Chamber of Commerce, from which he then resigned so that he could speak freely. Four arrests followed the explosion of a bomb in Belfast, which wounded a prison officer working at Maghaberry Prison near Lisburn in Co. Antrim. The law against smoking in public buildings does not apply to prisons in England and

The Spectator

Turkey’s blackmail

Looked at from the narrow perspective of how to deal with the lethal business of human trafficking across the Aegean, this week’s deal between the EU and Turkey shows some encouraging signs. Slowly, the EU seems to be realising that the surest way to stop migrants dying in unseaworthy boats is to adopt similar measures to those used by Tony Abbott the former Australian Prime Minister: turn back the boats, and deport those who land illegally. The Australians paid Malaysia to help handle the migrant problem. The EU is paying Turkey more than £4 billion over the next three years to contain 2.5 million refugees. The problem, however, is that

Wednesday

Melanie McDonagh

How would Turkey’s EU membership stem the flow of migrants?

Stop me if I haven’t got this right. But as I understand it, as a result of the deal that the EU struck with Turkey earlier this week to get it to keep more migrants who’d otherwise end up in Greece and then Germany, the EU will now be expediting the process whereby Turkey becomes an EU member even though only three per cent of it is actually European. So…in order to stem a flow of migrants that could, at worst, amount to over a million people this year, we are admitting to the EU a country with a population of 75 million, any of whom would then have the right

Saturday

Jodie Ginsberg

Turkey’s assault on press freedom is the act of a dictatorship, not a democracy

When Vice News journalist Mohammed Ismael Rasool was detained by Turkish authorities last August, I wrote to a friend in Turkey to ask for his help. I remarked in passing on the worsening situation for press freedom in the country: ‘Yes, getting much worse,’ he replied. ‘At some stage they will come after us, too. Then we will need your help.’ This prediction of darker times ahead proved right much more quickly than any of us foresaw. On Friday, after months of arrests and detentions of prominent journalists, the country hit a new low: courts seized control of opposition newspaper Zaman, one of Turkey’s leading media outlets. Police fired teargas and

Friday

Maria Wilczek

When the EU is no longer able to bribe Turkey, the blackmail will begin

As James Forsyth mentioned earlier this week, things could get much worse in Turkey. Indeed, they will. Europe’s hope that Turkey will continue to soak up migrants is at best naive; at worst, irresponsible. Europe desperately needs Turkey to serve as a migrant waiting room on its borders. In exchange, it has offered an acceleration of the EU admission process. In November, Turkey was promised visa-free travel to the Schengen zone by 2016. In December, after five years of standstill, negotiations concerning economic and monetary policies linked to Turkey’s EU membership were reopened. This entire deal rests on the peculiar idea that, if given the chance, Turkey would be a Europhile with the zeal of

Monday

James Forsyth

How the migrant crisis could get much worse

Angela Merkel gave a defiant interview last night in which she defended her handling of the refugee crisis. She declared, ‘I have no Plan B’—worryingly, I suspect this is true. But how much worse the refugee crisis could become worse is made clear in leaked minutes of a meeting between the President of Turkey Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Donald Tusk and Jean-Claude Juncker. As Bloomberg columnist Marc Champion points out, Erdogan is determined to get far more out of the EU than the 3 billion Euros it is currently offering. He tells them that if the offer is for only 3 billion, the conversation might as well end there: “We

Thursday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 18 February 2016

Home David Cameron, the Prime Minister, spent time in Brussels before a meeting of the European Council to see what it would allow him to bring home for voters in a referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union. The board of HSBC voted to keep its headquarters in Britain. Sir John Vickers, who headed the Independent Commission on Banking, said that Bank of England proposals for bank capital reserves were ‘less strong than what the ICB recommended’. The annual rate of inflation, measured by the Consumer Prices Index, rose to 0.3 per cent in January, compared with 0.2 per cent in December. Unemployment fell by 60,000 to 1.69 million. A

Owen Matthews

Putin’s great game

[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/putinsendgameinsyria/media.mp3″ title=”Putin’s endgame in Syria”] Listen [/audioplayer] Russia’s bombing of the city of Aleppo this week sent a clear message: Vladimir Putin is now in charge of the endgame in Syria. Moscow’s plan — essentially, to restore its ally Bashar al-Assad to power — is quickly becoming a reality that the rest of the world will have to accept. America, Britain and the rest may not be comfortable with Putin’s ambitions in the Middle East, or his methods of achieving them. But the idea of backing a ‘moderate opposition’ in Syria has been proved a fantasy that leaves the field to Putin and Assad. The Syrian partial ceasefire, brokered

Thursday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 11 February 2016

Home David Cameron, the Prime Minister, said that if Britain left the European Union, France could stop allowing British officials to make immigration checks on the French side of the border, and, his spokesman predicted: ‘You have potentially thousands of asylum seekers camped out in northern France who could be here almost overnight.’ Mr Cameron denounced the way prisons are being run by his administration: ‘Current levels of prison violence, drug-taking and self-harm should shame us all.’ Junior doctors went on strike again for 24 hours. Twelve men of Pakistani heritage were jailed for up to 20 years for the rape and sexual abuse of a girl when she was

Laura Pitel

Turkey can’t cope. Can we?

[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/thenextrefugeecrisis/media.mp3″ title=”Laura Pitel and Migration Watch’s Alanna Thomas discuss the second migrant crisis”] Listen [/audioplayer]In Istanbul, signs of the Syrian influx are everywhere. Syrian mothers sit on pavements clutching babies wrapped in blankets; children from Homs, Syria’s most completely devastated city, push their way through packed tram carriages begging for coins. Arabic adverts offer rooms for rent. It’s almost inconceivable how many Syrians Turkey has taken in as refugees — around 2.5 million of them so far. That’s almost three times the number who have sought refuge in Europe. And while the Turks are hospitable, Turkey has more than any country should bear. Yet still more refugees arrive. This

Thursday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 28 January 2016

Home Donald Tusk, the president of the European Council, prepared a paper on the four areas of concern between Britain and the European Union, as formulated by David Cameron, the British Prime Minister, for the EU to chew on at a summit in February. Nicola Sturgeon, the leader of the Scottish National Party, said that to hold a referendum on the EU in June would be ‘disrespectful’ to elections being held in Scotland. Tony Blair, the former prime minister, said he thought Scotland would leave the Union if the United Kingdom voted to leave the EU. Lord Parkinson, who as Cecil Parkinson was party chairman when the Conservatives won a

John Butler

Turkey’s climate of fear

   Istanbul Few AK party supporters hanker after the Isis way of life: for many of them, it would be a death sentence Turkey is less and less a democracy, more and more a paranoid one-party state. If you don’t believe that, look at what happens to those who draw attention to the government’s failures and crimes. The editors of Cumhuriyet, a centre-left broadsheet, have been delivering their editorials from jail since November. A statement issued this month by the Izmir Society of Journalists claimed that 31 journalists were in prison while 234 were in legal limbo awaiting trial. Over the course of last year, they added, 15 television channels

Thursday

Yvo Fitzherbert

National pride is blinding Turkey to the threat from Isis

On Tuesday, Isis’s strategy in Turkey changed. Nabil Fadli, a 28-year-old Saudi national linked to Isis, blew himself up in the heart of Sultanahmet, a tourist district of Istanbul. 11 tourists were killed, including ten Germans. In some ways, it was familiar: this was Isis’s fourth successful attack on Turkish soil since June. Previous bombs, however, had targeted pro-Kurdish and leftist groups: one, last July, targeted Suruç in the Kurdish south-east; in October, another took over 100 lives in at a peace rally in Ankara. The perpetrators of both these attacks were traced back to an Isis cell in the Turkish city of Adıyaman, and the government was criticised for failing

Monday

Richard Galustian

Iran may have the upper hand in the Middle East’s power struggle

It isn’t just Iran who have been angered by the execution of Shia cleric Nimr al-Nimr. Protests have erupted in Bahrain, Lebanon, Pakistan and Iraq, all places where the 1400-year-old Shia-Sunni divide remains a faultline. Iran’s reaction may seem uncompromising, with Ayatollah Khamenei tweeting: ‘The unjustly spilt blood of this martyr will have quick consequences’; but they have also sounded a note of caution. President Rouhani called for the arrest of the mob who stormed the Saudi embassy buildings. Perhaps he knows that, in the long run, Iran’s star is rising and the Saudis’ is falling. In January of last year, Douglas Murray observed in The Spectator that ‘the region’s two most ambitious centres of

Thursday

Toby Young

Tis the season for disagreeing with your spouse about everything

The older I get, the more Scrooge-like I become. I’m dyspeptic, misanthropic, curmudgeonly, parsimonious and unsentimental. Caroline, by contrast, is even-tempered, sweet-natured, charitable, generous and easily moved. Yet paradoxically, I love Christmas, whereas she regards it as a time of year to be endured rather than enjoyed. This inevitably leads to a number of arguments and, as with everything else connected with the festival, they’ve become ritualised. So here are the rows that are guaranteed to occur in the Young household at this time of year. The season always begins with a heated discussion about external lighting. My ideal is to go Full Chav, with a giant neon-lit Santa plastered