In this mailing:
- Burak Bekdil: Poor Friendless Erdoğan
- Kenneth Sikorski: Finland Cozies Up to Iran
by Burak Bekdil • April 30, 2019 at 5:00 am
In reality, with the exception of Qatar's emir, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, and Venezuela's troubled man, Nicolás Maduro, Erdoğan is increasingly friendless.
China's ambassador to Ankara, Deng Li, diplomatically showed Turkey the most frightening stick. Deng told Reuters: "If you choose a non-constructive path, it will negatively affect mutual trust and understanding and will be reflected in commercial and economic relations."
It was a shock to the Turkish president to wake up the other day and learn that the genocide suspect whom he embraced as "brother", President Omar al-Bashir of Sudan, had been ousted by a coup d'état.
With the exception of Qatar's emir, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, and Venezuela's troubled man, Nicolás Maduro, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is increasingly friendless. (Photo by Amilcar Orfali/Getty Images)
"World leaders hail Erdoğan on local vote win," the news headline ran, referring to the outcome of Turkey's local elections on March 31. They laboriously ignored that President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's Islamist AKP party lost in all of Turkey's three biggest cities -- and for the first time in 25 years in Ankara and Istanbul. They were nevertheless able to find one element to hail regarding Turkey's strongman. But, "world leaders?"
Here is the full list: Russia's President Vladimir Putin, Azerbaijan's President Ilham Aliyev, Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, tripartite Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina Chairman Milorad Dodik, former Bosniak member of the Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina Bakir Izetbegovic, Guinean President Alpha Conde, and Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama.
Those gentlemen are "world leaders," according to Erdoğan's propaganda machinery.
by Kenneth Sikorski • April 30, 2019 at 4:00 am
Just a little more than ten years ago, Finland's flagship telecommunications company, Nokia, was found to have sold to Tehran surveillance technology, which was used a year later to suppress dissident demonstrators' use of social media.
"[T]here are two documented instances where [the Finnish company] Cargotec-tied cranes have been used for public executions." — United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI) press release.
How Finland behaves today is eerily reminiscent of its behavior with the Soviet Union during the Cold War. During that time, Finnish politicians, academics and journalists practiced self-censorship. They knew whom not to talk about, let alone criticize. Today it is criticism of Islam that is aggressively prosecuted under the guise of combating "hate-speech" or "disparaging of religious groups". It is the same M.O., just a different place and time.
Pictured: Finnish President Sauli Niinistö (left) with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, in Tehran, on October 26, 2016. (Image source: Office of the President of the Republic of Finland)
There is a special saying in Finland describing a person's naïvety: it is called being "blue-eyed". Unfortunately, there is not a saying that describes the same trait for an entire political class.
Successive Finnish governments could be accurately described as extremely "blue-eyed," especially during the last decade or so in their relations with Iran.
Part of the problem seems to lie with Finnish politicians, who seem truly to believe that having a dialogue -- any dialogue -- regardless of who is on the opposite side of the table, is better than having no dialogue at all. So you can easily end up with the equivalent of a businessman trying to reach an agreement with Al Capone, while each holds completely different assumptions about the underlying terms of an agreement, including whether agreements are even meant to be kept.
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