New Islamist Members Of European Fatwa Council Show Growing influence Of Turkish Muslim Brotherhood in EU.

New Islamist Turkish Members Of European Fatwa Council Show Growing influence Of Global Muslim Brotherhood in EU. (globalmbwatch).

Dutch journalist Carel Brendel has published an article analyzing some of the recent membership changes at the European Council for Fatwa and Research (ECFR). According to his report, two of the newly appointed Turkish members representing a strengthening of the alliance between the Global Muslim Brotherhood and the Turkish regime of Recep Tayyip Erdogan:

Ekrem Keles is a senior member of Diyanet, the Turkish Presidency of Religious Affairs that supervises mosques and abroad. According to Turkish media, he is chairman of the Supreme Council for Religious Affairs. The English site of the pro-Erdogan Tukse Daily newspaper Sabah said Keles is “deputy head” of Diyanet.

It appears from the list on the ECFR website Keles is now an official member of the European Council for Fatwa and Research (ECFR). In a 2010 list of ECFR members, there was no Turkish membership. The appointment of Keles means two things- the collaboration between the Erdogan regime and the Muslim Brotherhood has again become a little more intense. And more importantly, the long arm of Ankara interferes with the affairs of all Muslims in Europe.

In 2010 Mustafa Mullaoglu was already on the list, but as a German representative. He has a Turkish background. The German TV channel SWR called him in 2007, “a top official responsible for religious issues of Milli Gorus,” the Turkish version of the Muslim Brotherhood. At a meeting in Hamm, North Rhine-Westphalia, Mullaoglu praised the Ottoman Empire as the ideal form of government.


Meanwhile Mullaoglu moved to Austria where he is a Mufti for the the national umbrella Islamic group, the Islamische Glaubensgemeinschaft in Österreich (IGGIÖ). Earlier this year Mollaoglu received criticism because he ruled that the wearing of  the headscarf hHijab) for women is a religious commandment. 

Austrian State Minister Muna Duzdar called this position “an attack on freedom and the empowerment of women”. The IGGiÖ was often accused in the past of ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, but always put off the accusation as “conspiracy theories” . Yet critics always place the IGGÏO “in the atmosphere of the Muslim Brotherhood.” Curiously, the Austrian media have very little written about the IGGiÖ  mufti as a member of Qaradawi’s fatwa council. Read the full story here.

For more in depth info on the Global Muslim brotherhood working follow GlobalMBwatch.

Qatar and Turkey put most of their eggs in the Islamist basket.

Qatar and Turkey put most of their eggs in the Islamist basket. (The National).

                                       Qatar’s troubles are rooted in its support for Islamists.

A new geopolitical settlement has emerged in the Middle East since the 2011 Arab uprisings. This realignment remains largely overlooked, even though much of what ails the region today can be better explained through it, instead of the traditional rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran or the sectarian tension between Shia and Sunni.

The countries of the region can be divided into two camps: one that seeks to advance its foreign interests through the support of Islamists, and one whose foreign policy is guided by opposition to the rise of Islamists.

Countries in each of the camps are not necessarily aligned with each other so they do not form together on one side. This, understandably, makes it hard for policymakers and observers to view the region.

But it is this realignment that could provide clarity to the United States as it recalibrates its approach in the region. Support or opposition to Islamists informs the foreign policies of the Middle East’s main powers. For some of those countries, it is the single greatest foreign policy driver.

Before 2011, the US used to refer to countries such as Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Egypt as the moderate states. They had a pragmatic outlook towards the Arab­Israeli conflict, unlike the dogmatic position of countries like Iran and Syria.

After 2011, though, those countries took on deeper roles in their neighbourhood. Events in Libya, Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain and Syria compelled those countries to take specific positions to counter the political and religious waves that swept the region. Any label based on their past policies can no longer properly capture the nature of their role.

Iran, from the other camp, was no longer able to sustain its old position of presenting itself as having a cross­sectarian agenda against Israel, working with Shia and Sunni Islamists to advance the Palestinian cause.

Instead, it was forced to adopt an aggressively narrow policy defined by attempts to maintain or expand its reach through Shia militias.

Qatar and Turkey also put most of their eggs in the Islamist basket. In Syria, they supported some of the most extremist forces in the conflict. They also took the side of Islamists in the Libyan conflict, and backed the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and elsewhere.

The pro­Islamist camp is less cohesive than the anti­Islamist side. But this camp supports various incarnations of Islamism in the Middle East, and that is what makes them part of the same problem.

And the different positions each of these camps has towards Islamists help explain conflicts in the region, more than the Saudi­Iran rivalry. The conflicts in Libya and Syria could be explained through the prism of support or opposition to Islamists, as could other conflicts in the region today. Read the full story here.

Video - Undercover in Idlib - Syria. AL QAEDA very much in control.

HT:        https://twitter.com/jenanmoussa/status/864400455958441985

Is Erdogan’s War on Syrian Kurds Becoming a War on the United States?

Is Erdogan’s War on Syrian Kurds Becoming a War on the United States? (TheNation).

President Erdogan seems to believe he can bully Trump into abandoning his allies in the fight against ISIS.

The Trump administration was unusually subdued this week after the Turkish air force launched a bombing campaign against facilities of the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) in northern Syria.

The State Department said it “asked” Turkey to stop killing US allies in the fight against ISIL (ISIS, or the Islamic State). The Pentagon complained that Turkey not only hit its allies but failed to coordinate with the US Air Force, which is flying in the area. In essence, Turkey acted as a hostile power against the US war effort. In the aftermath, a fierce firefight has broken out at the Syrian-Turkish border between YPG forces and Turkish army units operating in northern Syria.

Washington has been deeply frustrated by Turkey’s unwillingness to devote significant resources to rolling up ISIL. Erdogan’s priority has been attempting to destroy the PKK, and attacking what he sees as its Syrian Kurdish allies. Ankara fears that for the sake of defeating al-Baghdadi in Raqqa, the United States is helping to create an autonomous Syrian Kurdistan, which in turn may act as a model for Turkish Kurds, some 20 percent of the population of Turkey. In fact, separatist sentiments are not very widespread among Turkish Kurds, though economic discontent over government neglect of the hardscrabble southeast is. Erdogan has displaced some 350,000 Kurds with his current campaign, however, and is polarizing his country on several fronts at once.

The United States cannot hope to retain credibility as a battlefield ally of YPG fighters risking all to take on ISIL if it cannot even protect them from a NATO member like Turkey. Erdogan appears to believe that he can bully Trump into abandoning the Syrian Kurds as allies. It remains to be seen if he has calculated correctly. Read the full story here.

Turkey's Referendum 'The day after': Abundant signs of manipulation.

Turkey's Referendum 'The day after': Abundant signs of manipulation. (Freedomhouse).

Turkey’s Supreme Electoral Council (YSK) announced last night that the “Yes” vote had won, but by a slim margin: 51.4 percent to 48.6 percent amid high turnout. The ideologically diverse opposition—the secular-nationalist Republican People’s Party (CHP), the left-wing and pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), and a dissident faction of the religious-nationalist Nationalist Action Party (MHP) represented by Meral Akşener—all cried fraud.

During the day, videos circulating on social media showed scattered violations across the country. Monitors were denied access to polling stations; two men entered one booth and put multiple ballots into the same box; poll workers were seen stamping multiple ballots “Yes.”

Most shockingly, as the polls were about to close, the YSK announced that it would accept votes that had not received the official seal of the local polling station—in other words, the stamp that proves the ballot came from the polling station, and not from somewhere else. The YSK explained the decision by claiming that a number of stations had used the wrong stamp by accident, but it also noted that the decision was based on complaints from the AKP, and was taken “so that the will of the voter could be heard.”

The opposition claims that several million such votes were accepted, enough to swing the outcome. There is no way to know: The YSK admits that it is not sure how many were accepted, and the ballots may have been stamped during the counting anyway, rendering them indistinguishable from properly validated votes.

The preliminary conclusions of the international observation mission of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe/Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (OSCE/ODIHR) were harsh. 

Even with its characteristic understatement, the mission could not avoid describing the extent of the damage to Turkey’s electoral system. The report observed that the campaign took place on an unlevel playing field, in an atmosphere where fundamental freedoms had been curtailed. 

Most strikingly for Turkey, whose reputation as a democracy has increasingly rested on the narrow credential of fairly counted votes, the mission expressed sharp concerns about the administration of the referendum. 

The YSK’s decisions were nontransparent, and many were not even published; the mission said that the last-minute decision to allow unstamped ballots to be counted as valid removed an important safeguard against fraud and contradicted Turkish law. OSCE/ODIHR statements do not get much stronger. 

Erdoğan today said that the next referendum could be to reintroduce the death penalty, and cast Sunday’s vote as a rebuke of the West. 

With his domestic legitimacy weakened, he will lean more and more on the notion that Turkey is under threat from external enemies, as he did throughout the last month of the campaign. Since 2013, Turkey has been living through a series of deepening crises that are largely of Erdoğan’s making. 

The unfortunate outcome of this flawed referendum is that the current crisis will now grow even more profound.Read the full story here.

Erdogan’s AKP Party’s main mouthpiece: "Erdogan is now ‘the Caliph’ who needed to be trusted and obeyed.

Erdogan’s AKP Party’s main mouthpiece: "Erdogan is now ‘the Caliph’ who needed to be trusted and obeyed.' (Shoebat).

With the expected victory, Yeni Safak’s journalist, Ergün Yıldırım, on Resurrection Sunday began publishing to push the cult of Erdogan, proclaiming him as part and parcel of God Himself, saying that Erdogan is now ‘the Holy Spirit’ and ‘Caliph’ who needed to be trusted and obeyed while the Ottoman Turkey ‘resurrects’ from the dead. Yeni Safak is not some lunatic blogger, it is Erdogan’s AKP Party’s main mouthpiece.

In the article, Yıldırım began to redefine a new era for Islam under the newly resurrected ‘Caliphate’ dividing the societal structure in what he termed as “the subject” (the Caliph) who is “God the Holy Spirit” and literally calling him “our Lord” while “the slave” becomes the rest of the people needed to simply trust and obey their god and savior:

'God addresses nations the same way that he addresses individuals in our Holy Book. He regards them as the subject, for example, he says, "the societies that think," and "the society that changes itself." The subject is the fate/destiny of the person, thus when a society is the subject, it too has a destiny. The person that is the subject is the khaliph. He is a piece of God's spirit, he uses his will. He chooses good or evil.'

Turkey has been sentenced to act according to the will of other societies for the past 200 years. They have been tamed with authority, parties, fears and powers.

“ Now We are waking up to our own fate. We are breaking free from our [western] chains. We are waking up [from the dead] to existence. We are waking up in general. In the darkest of times we hear our poet Akif saying, ‘Wake up Muslim society.’ We are rising. We are being reborn. Every birth is a scream and we are screaming too. This is our final scream. It is the scream of birth and existence.

Today the nation will scream for the last time. It is the day that society will once again exist with its own fate. It is the day that we will leave the TIH Desert for the last time. It is the day we are honored with being a nation again. It is the last time we say “yes” to our Lord [Erdogan] calling out, “Aren’t I your Lord [God]?” Hmmmm.....And the 48.5 % who did not vote for Erdogan? Will they be 'disposed' of? Read the full story here.