"I’m surprised by it, it turns into some kind of global catastrophe where people are even coming up with theories to explain it.... It’s nonsense...."

"[T]here are people who have watched the videos and believe that I shared a bag of cocaine, that I had a 'mano a mano' with a Turkish president and that right now I’m having a fight with my wife. None of this is true.... So everyone needs to calm down and focus on the real news...."

Said Emmanuel Macron, quoted in "'It’s Nonsense': Macron Plays Down Video of Shove From Wife/The French president, Emmanuel Macron, was pushed in the face as he left a plane in Vietnam. The bigger issue, he said, was the reaction, part of a string of disinformation by 'crazy people'" (NYT).

How can so many things NOT be true? Such wacky things — all involving hands — and all caught on camera?

1. Here's the hand thing with Erdogan. Come on. That's not nothing!

2. Here's the hide-the-cocaine sleight of hand.

3. And here's the hand of his wife pushing him in the face.

How do all these things happen to one man?

"Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan has told Europe it will have to take the 'burden' of 'millions' of incoming migrants..."

"... as Greece today tried to fend off an 'invasion' of people after Turkey threw open its borders. More than 13,000 migrants have gathered on the Turkish side of the river which runs 125 miles along the frontier and separates them from Greece, and therefore the EU. Greek police were today firing tear gas at the crowds, as migrants tried to swim across the river or squeeze through fences at one of the few land crossings, although only dozens have succeeded so far. One child died when a dinghy boat capsized during a sea crossing, the Greek coast guard said today. Turkish security forces also claimed that a Syrian migrant had died from injuries after a clash with Greek security forces, but Athens has today branded the claim 'fake news.'.... Turkish leader Erdogan... [told] party supporters in Ankara: 'After we opened the doors, there were multiple calls saying "close the doors." I told them it's done. It's finished. The doors are now open. Now, you will have to take your share of the burden. Hundreds of thousands have crossed, soon we will it will reach millions'..."

The Daily Mail reports.

"The Cease-Fire in Syria Worked (More or Less)/Whatever the agreement was, it left the status quo in place, at least for the time being."

Writes Kathy Gilsinan in The Atlantic.

[I]t more or less worked... in the very narrow sense of stopping the worst of the Turkish onslaught against the Syrian Kurds for a time. Now there’s a different kind of order in place of the fighting: Syrian Kurdish forces have withdrawn from a chunk of territory near Syria’s border with Turkey; Russia has vowed to help Turkey push them from an area twice as large....

[I]t’s only become clearer that each of the key players—the U.S., Turkey, and the Syrian Kurdish leadership—all believe they agreed to different things....

By "all believe they agreed to different things," she means all assert something different about what was agreed to. No one is speaking the truth straight from their brain. Anything anyone says is to advance their interests.

Despite accusations that the United States had abandoned the Kurds, they seemed to have no intention of abandoning the United States....

Erdoğan may have received enough guarantees, from enough international backers, to maintain the cease-fire—or whatever it is—for now. He has managed to pull both Russia and the United States into effectively guaranteeing Turkish security along its border with Syria. He has, through three separate incursions into northern Syria since 2016, chopped up a stretch of contiguous Kurdish-held territory they had hoped to keep autonomous....

Of course, I don't know what is really happening, but I hope for the best. I hope Trump's decision works out well, and I wonder if Trump's antagonists are hoping it goes badly, hoping Trump fails.

It was in that context that I undertook the search of the archive discussed in the previous post. How awful it is for Americans to be rooting for the failure of an American military effort because that's how much they hate Trump and want him proved horribly, irrefutably wrong! That made me want to look back at what I'd written when Rush Limbaugh said — on the occasion of Obama's inauguration — "I hope he fails."

ADDED: It wasn't the Atlantic article that got me thinking in these terms this morning. It was this Trump tweet:

Big success on the Turkey/Syria Border. Safe Zone created! Ceasefire has held and combat missions have ended. Kurds are safe and have worked very nicely with us. Captured ISIS prisoners secured. I will be making a statement at 11:00 A.M. from the White House. Thank you!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 23, 2019

"It’s been … suggested that Turkey may have called America’s bluff, telling the president they are coming no matter what we did."

"If that’s so, we should know it. For it would tell us a great deal about how we should deal with Turkey, now and in the future.... Are we so weak and inept diplomatically that Turkey forced the hand of the United States of America? Turkey!?... I believe that it’s imperative that public hearings are held to answer these questions, and I hope the Senate is able to conduct those hearings next week."

Said Mitt Romney, quoted in "Sen. Mitt Romney raises a troubling theory about Trump and Turkey" (WaPo).

If that’s so, we should know it... Is that so? How can we know it? Romney is talking about reading Erdogan's mind in the past. But, whatever... more hearings! I wonder why. I can't help thinking that the reason for more hearings is to keep up the pressure on Trump and to undermine him to the maximum extent possible. Trump's decision already happened, and maybe it was less good than something else that might have been done, but what's the best way to move forward? Is it making Trump look as "weak and inept" as possible?

ADDED: Here's Trump falling for another con:

DEFEAT TERRORISM! https://t.co/8WbnLPgWIK

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 18, 2019

UPDATE, 6:36 PM: Trump tweeted this within the last hour:

pic.twitter.com/p5imhMJqS1

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 18, 2019

"Vice President Mike Pence on Thursday agreed to a deal with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan that accepted a Turkish military presence in a broad part of northern Syria in exchange for the promise of a five-day cease-fire..."

"... completing an abrupt reversal of American policy in the Syrian conflict. Emerging from close to five hours of talks after a hastily arranged trip to Ankara, the Turkish capital, Mr. Pence hailed the agreement as a diplomatic victory for President Trump, calling it a 'solution we believe will save lives.' The agreement 'ends the violence — which is what President Trump sent us here to do,' Mr. Pence said at a news conference at the ambassador’s residence. Turkey’s foreign minister, Mevlut Cavusoglu, immediately contradicted the description of the agreement, saying it was not a cease-fire at all, but merely a 'pause for our operation.' He added that 'as a result of our president’s skillful leadership, we got what we wanted.'"

The NYT reports the deal U.S. reached with Turkey.

Of course, Trump's critics will not stand down or give him any credit for doing anything right, so I like Trump's approach:

This is a great day for civilization. I am proud of the United States for sticking by me in following a necessary, but somewhat unconventional, path. People have been trying to make this “Deal” for many years. Millions of lives will be saved. Congratulations to ALL!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 17, 2019

He's acting like everyone supported him and congratulating everyone. This gets my "nice Trump" tag.

"Donald Trump's mixture of threats and locker-room banter infuriated Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan."

"His staff told the BBC that he threw the letter into the bin and launched the Syrian operation the same day. That could be proof there was no Trumpian green light. But ever since President Obama partnered up with the Syrian Kurds of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) against the jihadists of IS it was clear the arrangement would lead to problems with the Turks. That's because the SDF is very close to the Turkish Kurds of the PKK. Turkey says they are two halves of the same terror group. Presidents Erdogan and Trump discussed military action last December. Diplomatic sources here in Ankara suggest that Turkey's broader strategic objective was to detach the Kurds and the Americans. That, at any rate, has happened...."

BBC reports.

"On Monday, U.S. President Donald Trump called for an immediate ceasefire, announced increased tariffs on steel imports from Turkey, and imposed sanctions against Turkish government ministries and officials..."

"... in response to the ongoing military offensive in northern Syria that began after Trump withdrew U.S. forces in the area. Critics say Trump’s measures are just as likely to strengthen Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan as they are to hurt him....  Meanwhile, the European Union is mulling its own approach to the Turkish incursion in Syria.... Turkey will consider both the drilling sanctions and the EU’s reaction to the Turkish invasion to be 'part of the same European and Western attempt to undermine Turkey,' Dario Cristiani, a fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States, wrote in an email. While further economic sanctions could harm Turkey later, in the short term 'they will push Erdogan to be even more assertive and aggressive than he has been so far,' Cristiani said.... Vice President Mike Pence told reporters that Trump had demanded a ceasefire and said that he and National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien would soon travel to Turkey. Trump has also reportedly received a commitment from Erdogan that Turkish forces would not attack Kobani—a strategically significant city for the Kurds."

Foreign Policy reports.

There's a link to "Trump calls for cease-fire in northern Syria and imposes sanctions on Turkey" (WaPo). Excerpt:

Pence said that Erdogan and Trump spoke by phone on Monday and that the president “communicated to him very clearly that the United States of America wants Turkey to stop the invasion, to implement an immediate cease-fire and to begin to negotiate with Kurdish forces in Syria to bring an end to the violence.”...

The White House released a statement after the call that said Erdogan informed the president that Turkey “will soon be moving forward with its long-planned operation into Northern Syria” and that the United States did not support the move. The statement, however, made no mention of what Trump would do to oppose or stop Turkey’s aggression.

"Turkey will delay a planned offensive against Kurdish forces in Syria's northeast, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Friday, citing talks with the U.S. president and other officials."

WaPo reports this morning.

“We decided last week to launch a military incursion into the east of the Euphrates River and shared that information with the public,” Erdogan said at a meeting of the Turkish Exporters Assembly in Istanbul.

“Our phone call with President Trump, along with contacts between our diplomats and security officials and statements by the United States, have led us to wait a little longer,” he said, referring to a phone call between the two leaders last Friday.

Still, he said, Turkey's military is planning to launch the offensive in several months, with the aim of “eliminating” both the Kurdish YPG, or People's Protection Units, and Islamic State remnants.

"Saudi Arabia seeks death penalty for five suspects in killing of Jamal Khashoggi"/"Saudi Arabia distances crown prince from killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi."

The front page headline and the top-of-the-article headline in The Washington Post.

Saudi Arabia’s crown prince had no knowledge of the operation, Shaalan al-Shaalan, a spokesman for the prosecutor, said during a news conference in Riyadh, the Saudi capital. He said that 11 suspects had been indicted and that the authorities were seeking the death penalty for five of them. The order to kill Khashoggi, who had criticized the Saudi monarchy over the last year, had come from the leader of the Saudi team in Istanbul, Shaalan said, without naming any of the suspects.

Prosecutor Saud al-Mojeb’s conclusion — that the murder was authorized by a minor official — contradicted assertions by Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has said that the orders to kill Khashoggi had come from “the highest levels of the Saudi government,” without specifying exactly who was responsible.

"Turkey’s Leaks Are Undermining the Khashoggi Investigation/Only Erdogan can stop the confusing drip of information and misinformation."

Bloomberg reports.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, after initially announcing his personal interest in the case (“I am chasing”) has been more circumspect. This suggests that the Turkish leader is more carefully evaluating the leverage he now has over Saudi Arabia. It may be in his power to direct the finger of blame toward Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman or to help deflect the spotlight from him.

But while the Turkish president is being uncharacteristically careful with his words, there seems to have been little or no effort to stanch the leaks. The leaks, and the motivation behind them, have become subject of much speculation....

But the leaks serve nobody’s constructive purpose. They undermine the credibility of the investigation, and of Turkey’s impartiality....

How can it be asserted flatly that "the leaks serve nobody’s constructive purpose"? It's impossible to detect an interest that could be served? I find that highly implausible. Apparently, there is "much speculation" about the motivation behind the links, so what are the speculators talking about if "the leaks serve nobody’s constructive purpose"?

Or is "constructive" like the "true" in "no true Scotsman"? In other words, all that speculation is about who may be pursuing a destructive purpose.

"Her Turkish flag is in her pocket. If she becomes a martyr, God willing, she will be wrapped with it. She is ready for everything, aren’t you?"

The Turkish Presidet Recep Tayyip Erdogan makes political theater out of a 6-year-old girl, who tries to stand strong, while crying.



From "Erdogan Tells a Weeping Girl, 6, She’d Receive Honors if Martyred" (NYT):

She wore a maroon beret and a Turkish flag in her pocket, and had made a soldier’s salute during Mr. Erdogan’s televised speech, when he spotted her in the audience.

The maroon berets are fighting in Afrin, a Syrian enclave the Turks are trying to take from the Kurds, and when the president noticed the girl’s beret, he called her to the stage.

“Look, look, look, what is there? Girl, what are you doing there?” he called out. She held her salute, but her face began to crumple in anxiety as she was lifted out of the crowd to meet the president. “Here are our maroon berets. Look, we have our own maroon berets,” Mr. Erdogan said as she crossed the stage....

Mr. Erdogan’s remarks to the girl on Saturday drew criticism from some on social media, who felt that the talk of martyrdom was inappropriate for a child so young.

Who knows if she was crying out of fear of martyrdom, the strangeness of being plucked out of a crowd and displayed on stage, or overwhelming awe at meeting her glorious leader? Who knows if the Turkish people in general disapproved of this melodramatic theater?

In America, the President imagines his own readiness to accept martyrdom. He would — in his dream — run to take bullets to save schoolchildren. That's not happening right now, so there's nothing to be afraid of, only pride and glory to bask in. Might not the little 6-year-old girl — like the American President — feel exalted in this vision of martyrdom?

"Trump actually congratulated Erdogan on the outcome."

"Trump apparently thought it was a good thing that, despite all the flaws in the process, a bare majority of Turkey’s citizens voted to strengthen their populist leader. I don’t think any other post-Cold War president would have congratulated a democratic ally that held a flawed referendum leading to a less democratic outcome. This is not that far off from Trump congratulating Putin on a successful referendum result in Crimea if that event had been held in 2017 rather than 2014."

Writes Dan Drezner.

You'll get my respect when you figure out that seriously intended insults to a foreign leader cannot be a crime.

"In the end, German prosecutors decided that a satirical poem was just that, an act of hyperbole in the name of art — not a criminal attempt to insult a foreign leader, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey."

"Pirate Party’s leader detained in Germany for citing poem about Erdogan."

That's a real headline. There is a Pirate Party in Germany. The head of its Berlin branch — the delightfully named Bruno Kramm — was in fact arrested. "Citing" is a bit confusing. Kramm was caught talking about and quoting some of the poem by the German comedian Jan Boehmermann that mocked the Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and he was doing that in front of the Turkish embassy in Berlin as part of a rally. Like Boehmermann, Kramm was arrested under the provision of the German criminal code that prohibits insulting "organs and representatives of foreign states."

As one activist put it, the police had warned them against "performing critical dialectical analysis of the Boehmermann’s poem."

"If she decides the day after tomorrow that Mr. Böhmermann has exercised his right to satire... she risks offending a highly sensitive president who is trampling press freedom in his own country."

"But if she authorizes a court prosecution, there will be a powerful outcry inside Germany... It will be seen as a gesture of submission to the Turkish president.... We must be prepared for a new type of conflict which can arise in a radical digital media world... What is accepted in one cultural circle can be seen as a terrible insult in others."

Said the German media expert Bernhard Pörksen referring to German Chancellor Angela Merkel who feels pressure from President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to authorize the prosecution of Jan Böhmermann, who published a poem criticizing Erdogan.

We were talking the other day about a video on a German TV show that mocked Erdogan and that Erdogan sought to suppress. Böhmermann went out of his way to be more offensive and openly stated that the video wasn't offensive enough.

The video mockery Turkey's president Erdogan wants taken down from the internet.

I wouldn't have noticed that but for Ergogan's effort at suppression. The video comes from a German TV show, extra3. Note the mockery of Angela Merkel in the video.

Christiane Wirtz, a spokeswoman for Ms. Merkel, confirmed that the German ambassador to Ankara, Martin Erdmann, had been summoned on March 22 over the video.... German officials would not confirm reports that the Turkish side had requested that the video be taken down from the Internet.

But [Sawsan Chebli, a spokeswoman for Germany’s Foreign Ministr] said the ambassador and a deputy foreign minister, who called his Turkish counterpart on Tuesday, had “made clear that political satire in Germany is, of course, protected and therefore there is neither a necessity, nor a possibility, for the government to take action.”

The show’s reaction to the dispute was tongue-in-cheek. It posted a political cartoon showing a figure resembling Mr. Erdogan brandishing a fire extinguisher at a laptop, while threatening, “Either you erase this video, or I will extinguish the Internet.”

A doctor in Turkey, on trial for the crime of insulting President Recep Tayyip Erdogan by comparing him to Gollum in "Lord of the Rings"...

... mounts a defense based on the argument that Gollum is, if you understand the whole story, not a bad guy but good. The Turkish court has summoned literary experts to help with the analysis. If you don't know how "Lord of the Rings" ends, I must alert you to a huge spoiler in the 5th paragraph at the link.

The group [of experts] will comprise two academics, two behavioral scientists or psychologists and an expert on cinema and television productions...  Speaking to DHA Tuesday, [Bilgin Çiftçi’s lawyer Hicran] Danışman said the trial has turned into “a case of saving the pride of Gollum.”...

The president and his government “don’t have a sense of humor,” cartoonist Selcuk Erdem, whose magazine has been prosecuted for insulting Erdogan, told the BBC. “They don’t want — or like — freedom of speech or criticism.”

Here's what Çiftçi shared on Facebook that led to this prosecution:

Bu fotoğrafları paylaştığı için memuriyetten atılan Dr. Bilgin Çiftçi yalnız değildir! İlle bir işlem yapmak istiyorsanı...
Posted by Ateist Forum on Thursday, October 15, 2015

I'm torn. I'd like to help Çiftçi by saying, aw, that's cute. That's making Erdogan's slightly funny looks seem rather adorable. But I also want to say the repression of speech quite properly bites Erdogan in the ass, because it's propagating the very speech that annoys him.

"It was a lighthearted moment in the midst of a grim few days for the White House..."

But Obama's comical stylings didn't play as well this week as they have in the past. I'm reading "Obama puts Marines on umbrella duty, irking conservatives" only because I'm interested in figuring out why it's #1 on the "most popular" list in the sidebar at The Washington Post. Something cute about the headline, I thought. But reading it — and looking at that photograph of Obama intentionally clowning with the white-gloved Marine — I'm seeing something tragic. The old ways — that made us love him — don't work anymore. The gentle, slow-talking, stalling with "uhs" for Woody Allen-like timing:

"Uh I am going to go ahead and ask, folks, why don’t we get a couple of Marines — they’re going to look good next to us — just 'cause uh uh — I wanna — I’ve got a change of suits but I don’t know about uh uh uh our prime uh our prime minister. Uh there we go. That’s good. [To the reporters:] You guys, I’m sorry about but but let let let uh uh mmm uh let me uh uh uuuuhhh make sure that I answer a specific question...."

Turkish ironies: the Orhan Pamuk trial.

Yesterday, I wrote about the trial of Orhan Pamuk, and today, I see the trial has been put on hold. Perhaps the irony impressed the court: putting a writer on trial for damaging the image of the country damages the image of the country. Yet Turkey's prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan seems irony deaf when he complains:

"The EU at the moment is trying to put our judiciary under pressure ... Rightly or wrongly, the issue is in the courts.

"My views concerning freedom of expression are well known," he said. "I am a person who was a victim of a freedom of expression case."

Erdogan served four months in jail in 1999 for reciting what the courts deemed to be an inflammatory poem interpreted as being anti-secular. Turkey is a staunchly secular state.

Here's a collection of different opinons about the Pamuk trial in the Turkish newspapers.

The current New Yorker has a piece about the trial, written by Pamuk himself (and translated by Maureen Freely, who, I take it translated freely):

Comforted as I was by the interest in my predicament and by the generous gestures of support, there were also times when I felt uneasy about finding myself caught between my country and the rest of the world.

The hardest thing was to explain why a country officially committed to entry in the European Union would wish to imprison an author whose books were well known in Europe, and why it felt compelled to play out this drama (as Conrad might have said) “under Western eyes.” This paradox cannot be explained away as simple ignorance, jealousy, or intolerance, and it is not the only paradox. What am I to make of a country that insists that the Turks, unlike their Western neighbors, are a compassionate people, incapable of genocide, while nationalist political groups are pelting me with death threats? What is the logic behind a state that complains that its enemies spread false reports about the Ottoman legacy all over the globe while it prosecutes and imprisons one writer after another, thus propagating the image of the Terrible Turk worldwide?