Turkish flags in Palestine and Egypt: A new beginning

Turkish flags in Cairo and Gaza, and Palestinian flags in Istanbul and Ankara—things have come a full circle in about half a century. Turks and Palestinians are bound in blood, and the machinations of Lawrence of Arabia and the secularism of Kamal Pasha are now being overrun by events off the coast of Gaza City.

Iran was the most popular country in Palestine. President Ahmedinijad’s principled stand on Palestine has touched the hearts of Palestinians. Now another flag has fast becoming very popular in Palestine and Egypt—it is the red flag emblazoned with the white Crescent Star. The original Egyptian flag was a modified Turkish flag similar to the current Pakistani flag. The Egyptian flag was changed by Gamal Abdul Nasser and is today a non-descript tri-color with the Egyptian bird on it.

Blood is thicker than water, and after trying to disassociate itself from it former province, the Turks have once again come to the realization that Palestine lives in the heart of Turks and Turks live in the hearts of Arabs.

The flotilla trying to barge the Israeli embargo didn’t just happen. It materialized because of the hard work of Gul and Erdzogan. While 20 people were brutally murdered by the henchmen of Natenyahu, the ships were able to punch a hole in the brutal incarceration. While a new Irish ship sails with humanitarian supplies to the biggest jail in the world—Cairo is exploding with protest.

Turkey’s exponentially increasing diplomatic clout is definitely due to the opportunity of its location – for centuries a crossroads of trade routes between East and West, and for hundreds of years a symbiosis of Europe and Asia, for millennia an overlap of the Middle East and Central Asia—an extravaganza for people, ideas, trade, and now energy routes.

After decades of unbridled expanding economic growth, Turkey is being described the “new tiger of Europe. It underscores a sense of dynamism and confidence…. They are looking beyond the region.” Hampson

President Abdullah Gul traveled to Pakistan with billions of Dollars in cash, and set up plans to link up Islamabad to Istanbul by rail via Tehran. On a seminal voyage to Cameroon and Congo, he again took with him an entourage of some over a hundred businessmen increasing trade from $1.5 billion in 2001 to more than $10 billion last year.

Turkish Israeli relations are at an all time low. Defense relations are at a breaking point and economic relations are not improving.

In 1948 Turkey was the first country to recognize Israel, mostly as a reaction to the events of  1916-1922 at the demise of the Ottoman empire. 500,000 Arab soldiers had defected from the Ottoman Armies and sided with the revolt initiated by the British agent T. E. Lawrence “Lawrence of Arabia” circa 1916-1918.

The last Caliphs of the Ottomans had been offered a large sum of money and chance to continue this caliphate if they sold a Palestine to the Jews. The Caliphs refused and suffered the consequences.

The Ottoman Empire was broken up in 1918 and its parts parsed out to the European powers. Romanian, Bulgarian, Albanian, Bosnian, Serbian were thrown to the wolves and suffered unimaginable atrocities at the hands of their enemies. They faced the worst type of ethnic cleansing in the Caucus–Chechnya, Tartaristan, and Dagistan which are now Russian autonomous republics have faced genocide since the Red October revolution of 1917. Stalin murdered 10 million Muslims and forcibly deported all the fierce Tartars to Siberia. Most died, but some found their way back. The Central Asian provinces of Azerbaijan, Armenia, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan were handed over to the Soviets who tried to eliminate Islam fro these states.

After the Ottoman defeat The Turks went through a civil war. Some wanted to keep the Caliphate, others wanted to become part of Europe. Kemal Pasha’s forces supported by the European powers overpowered the popular Anwar Pasha who wanted to keep the Ottoman Caliphate. At the time the Europeans had promised Turkey that they would become part of Europe. However stirred of all her European possessions, Turkey has a rump presence in Europe.

Egypt – Tens of thousands of people across Egypt protested against Israel’s Gaza blockade on Friday, chanting pro-Hamas slogans in a sign of mounting rancour in the first Arab country to make peace with the Jewish state.

About 20,000 protesters gathered in the port city of Alexandria, waving Egyptian, Turkish and Palestinian flags in response to Israel’s raid on an aid ship bound for Gaza.

The protest, organized by Egypt’s most powerful opposition group, the Muslim Brotherhood, was unusual in a country where public demonstrations are often swiftly suppressed.

“Hamas, Hamas, you are the artillery and we are the bullets,” the protestors chanted, urging the Islamist group which rules Gaza to confront Israel.

About 10,000 people took part in a separate demonstration organized by the Brotherhood in Fayoum, a city south of Cairo, one of the rally’s planners said. A protest in the northern Sinai peninsula city of el-Arish drew hundreds more. Reuters.

The impotence of the pretenders in Cairo have been shamed by the common man into lifting the inhuman isolation of Gaza. Egyptian are up in arms and hopeful of the future, not because of Hasni Mubarak and his cabal—but because of the progeny of the Ottomans who still think of them as brothers. Palestinians now wish that the Ottoman Empire had been there to protect them from the ravages of the British Mandate, and the half a century of Israeli occupation.

The protestors carrying Turkish flags told the world that they prefer resolute rulers of Turkey to spineless corrupt presidents of Egypt.

• Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan told reporters in Santiago, Chile, that his government was demanding the NATO council gather to address a crisis that has already seen Israeli counterpart Benjamin Netanyahu cut short a visit to Canada and Washington where he had been due to meet with US President Barack Obama on Tuesday.

• Appathurai said in a statement that the military alliance is “deeply concerned about the loss of life” in international waters, with at least nine people — many Turks according to reports — killed and dozens more reported wounded.

• “NATO does not really have instruments with which to deal with the follow-up from this type of affair,” said a diplomat.

• “Turkey has not invoked article five which envisages all allies coming to the aid of a member country that is the victim of an attack.

• “But, given that numerous Turkish citizens appear to figure among the casualties, it is understandable that (Ankara) triggers political dialogue with its partners,” the diplomat added.

Israel sparked global outrage when its military killed nine Turkish activists during the Monday raid. Relations with Turkey have plunged to their lowest ebb since the two countries forged a strategic relationship in the 1990s.

Turkey‘s diplomatic confrontation with the Jewish state has since boosted its popularity among Arabs who long to see their own governments show similar resolve.

“Turkey, a thousand salutations. Long live Erdogan and long live the Turkish people,” the protestors chanted in Alexandria, referring to the Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan.

This week Egypt, which made peace with Israel in 1979, opened its Rafah border to allow aid convoys into the coastal strip — a move widely seen as an attempt to deflect criticism of its role in the blockade.

Cairo, coordinating with Israel, has allowed only limited crossing of the border since Hamas took control of Gaza in 2007.

A permanent opening would be a boost for Islamist Hamas, which shares roots with Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, and a blow to efforts by Israel and its Western allies to cripple them.

The Brotherhood is officially banned but tolerated by the Egyptian government. Its members, running as independents, hold a fifth of seats in the lower house of Egypt’s parliament. Reuters. (Additional reporting by Yusri Mohamed in el-Arish; Writing by Alexander Dziadosz in Cairo; Editing by Elizabeth Fullerton)

For a century the Turks were lured with the promise of Europe. Now, for the past decade the Turks know that the ephemeral illusion of Europe was simply a mirage. Turkey has now turned its attention to the East and is looking at building relations with the Turkic states with which it shares linguistic, ethnic and religious ties.

Another impetus might be Turkey’s repeatedly rebuffed attempts to join the European Union, says Fen Osler Hampson, an international affairs specialist at Carleton University in Ottawa. “It’s a way to show the public there are other things this government can do to stand tall,” says Mr. Hampson.

The decline of Ankara’s relations with Tel Aviv are linked to the revival of Turkish nationalism. Muslims all over the world have been waiting for the Turks to lead the Muslims and revive their past glory. The flotilla is but a beginning. Pakistan has educated about 30% to 40% of Palestinians, and the Pakistanis have protested against Israeli aggression. “Aik he suff main kharay ho gayeh Mahmud aur Ayaz”.

“Neel keh sahil seh ta ba khak e Kashgar—aik ho muslim haram kee pasabni keh leyeh”

Pakistani Nukes: Youm e Takbir defiantly screams “Don’t Mess with us”

RUPEENEWS

“Our military first policy calls for an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, retaliation for retaliation, ultra-hardline for hardline, war for war, total war for total war, nuclear war for nuclear war.” – Kim Jong-il

TOKYO – A little-noted fact about the second nuclear test conducted on May 25 by the Kim Jong-il administration of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) is that it was a highly successful fission trigger test for multi-megaton warheads.

These types of warheads can be detonated in outer space, far above the United States, evaporating its key targets. This is a significant indication of the supreme leader’s game plan for nuclear war with the crippled superpower and its allies, Japan and South Korea.

The North Korean Foreign Ministry on April 29 announced its plan to test-fire what it termed a long-awaited “intercontinental ballistic missile” (ICBM), the first public ICBM test after numerous missile tests, short-range, medium-range, and long-range, were conducted without notice.

On March 9, the General Staff of the nuclear-armed Korean People’s Army had begun preparing to launch simultaneous retaliatory strikes on the US, Japan and South Korea in response to their act of war.

Although no appropriate test site for a thermonuclear bomb is available on the Korean Peninsula, North Korean scientists and engineers are confident, as a series of computer simulations have proved that their hydrogen bombs will be operational. The North Korean message is that any soft spots of the US, Japan and South Korea’s defense lines will be used as the testing grounds for their thermonuclear weapons.

The Korean Central News Agency said on May 25 that the underground nuclear test was carried out at the request of nuclear scientists and engineers and reported:

The current nuclear test was safely conducted on a new higher level in terms of its explosive power and technology of its control and the results of the test helped satisfactorily settle the scientific and technological problems arising in further increasing the power of nuclear weapons and steadily developing nuclear technology.

John Pike, the founder and director of globalsecurity.org, told the Weekly Standard on October 19, 2006, that the North Korean nuclear test that year may have been a test of a “trigger device” for a much larger hydrogen bomb. Writing in the New York Times on April 7, 2009, he revealed that “North Korea’s low-yield nuclear test in October 2006 did “coincide with the sub-kiloton tests of the fission trigger for a hydrogen bomb”. He added, “possibly North Korea’s hydrogen bombs can be easily fitted on missiles”.

The Kim Jong-il administration has developed its global nuclear strike capability primarily as a deterrent to US invasion to keep the Korean Peninsula out of war. Secondly, it needs operational nuclear missiles targeted at US and Japanese targets in the event of a DPRK-US war.

The North Korean state-run newspaper, Minjo Joson, vowed on June 9 to use nuclear weapons in war as “merciless means of offense to deal retaliatory strikes” against anyone who “dares infringe upon the dignity and sovereignty of the DPRK even a bit”.

Scenario for nuclear war

After shifting to a plan B, Supreme Leader Kim Jong-il has put in place a nuclear game plan as a part of the plan’s military first policy to deal with nuclear rogue state America and its allies South Korea and Japan. (See Kim Jong-il shifts to plan B, Asia Times Online, May 21)

The nuclear game plan is designed firstly to militarily prevent the US from throwing a monkey wrench into the plans of the Kim Jong-il administration for economic prosperity by 2012 – the centenary of the birth of founding father Kim Il-sung – in a bid to complete its membership of the three elite clubs of nuclear, space and economic powers.

Its second aim is to win the hearts and minds of the 70 million Korean people, North, South and abroad, and leave little doubt in their eyes that Kim Jong-il has what it takes to neutralize and phase out the American presence in Korea. This will hasten the divided parts of ancestral Korean land – bequeathed by Dankun 5,000 years ago and Jumon 2,000 years ago – coming together under a confederal umbrella as a reunified state.

It is designed to impress upon the Korean population that Kim Jong-il is a Korean David heroically standing up to the American Goliath, that he can lead the epic effort to settle long-smoldering moral scores with the US over a more than 100-year-old grudge match that dates as far as the 1905 Taft-Katsura Agreement and the 1866 invasion of Korea by the USS General Sherman.

Third, Kim Jong-il has described the shift to plan B as a stern notice for the governments of the US and its junior allies that they cannot get away with their hostile behavior any longer, unless they are prepared to leave their booming economies consumed in a great conflagration of retaliatory thermonuclear attacks.

The game plan assumes that the US is unlikely to shake off its aggressive behavior until it is wiped off this planet. The Barack Obama administration has not taken much time to reveal its true colors, which are no different from the George W Bush administration. There have been four compelling signs:

First, the March 9-20 Key Resolve (Team Spirit) joint war games between the US and South Korea.

Second, the US-led United Nation Security Council’s (UNSC) condemnation of an innocuous April 5 satellite launch.

Third, the rehashing of counterfeit money charges that the US has failed to produce compelling evidence to support. As Newsweek wrote in its June 8 issue, “The Treasury Department couldn’t find a single shred of hard evidence pointing to North Korean production of counterfeit money.”

Fourth, the presence of Bush holdovers in the Obama administration, such as Stuart Levy, the architect of Bush-era financial sanctions intended to criminalize the DPRK.

Four types of hydrogen bomb raids

The game plan for nuclear war specifies four types of thermonuclear assault: (1) the bombing of operating nuclear power stations; (2) detonations of a hydrogen bombs in seas off the US, Japan and South Korea; (3) detonations of H-bombs in space far above their heartlands; and (4) thermonuclear attacks on their urban centers.

The first attack involves converting operating nuclear power plants on the coastline of the three countries into makeshift multi-megaton H-bombs.

The New York Times on January 24, 1994, quoted Paul Leventhal, president of the Nuclear Control Institute, warning that North Korea could easily launch de-facto hydrogen bomb attacks on South Korea.

“North Korean retaliation to bombing could result in vastly more fallout in the South than in the North … North Korean retaliatory bombing could bring Chernobyls multiplied.”

If bombed, one average operating nuclear power station is estimated to spew out as much deadly fallout as 150-180 H-bombs. Bombing one nuclear power station would render the Japanese archipelago and South Korea uninhabitable. Doing the same to the US may require bombing one plant on its west coast and another on its east coast.

Nothing is easier than bombing a power plant on a coastline. There is no need to use a ballistic missile. Primitive means will do the job.

The US has 103 operating nuclear power stations with onsite storage of a huge quantity of spent fuel rods and Japan has 53 operating atomic power stations. Japan has a stockpile of weapons-grade plutonium – enough to assemble more than 1,000 atomic bombs in a short period of time. South Korea has 20 operating nuclear power stations with onsite storage of a huge quantity of spent fuel rods.

The detonation of sea-borne or undersea H-bombs planted on the three countries’ continental shelves will trigger nuclear tsunamis with devastating consequences.

A 2006 RAND study of a ship-based 10-kiloton nuclear blast on the Port of Long Beach had some harrowing conclusions:

“Within the first 72 hours, the attack would devastate a vast portion of the Los Angeles metropolitan area. Because ground-burst explosions generate particularly large amounts of highly radioactive debris, fallout from the blast would cause much of the destruction. In some of the most dramatic possible outcomes:

Sixty thousand people might die instantly from the blast itself or quickly thereafter from radiation poisoning.

One hundred and fifty thousand more might be exposed to hazardous levels of radioactive water and sediment from the port, requiring emergency medical treatment.

The blast and subsequent fires might completely destroy the entire infrastructure and all ships in the Port of Long Beach and the adjoining Port of Los Angeles.

Six million people might try to evacuate the Los Angeles region.

Two to three million people might need relocation because fallout will have contaminated a 500-square-kilometer area.

Gasoline supplies might run critically short across the entire region because of the loss of Long Beach’s refineries – responsible for one-third of the gas west of the Rocky Mountains.

RAND projects that the economic costs would exceed $1 trillion.

The third possible attack, a high-altitude detonation of hydrogen bombs that would create a powerful electromagnetic pulse (EMP), would disrupt the communications and electrical infrastructure of the US, the whole of Japan, and South Korea.

Many of the essential systems needed to survive war would be knocked out, as computers are instantly rendered malfunctioning or unusable. Military and communications systems such as radars, antennas, and missiles, government offices, would be put out of use, as would energy sources such as nuclear power stations and transport and communications systems including airports, airplanes, railways, cars and cell phones.

Ironically the ubiquity of high-tech computing gadgets in the US, Japan and South Korea has made them most vulnerable to EMP attacks.

The last and fourth attack would be to order into action a global nuclear strike force of dozens of MIRVed ICBMs – each bearing a thermonuclear warhead on a prefixed target.

The Yongbyon nuclear site has always been a decoy to attract American attention and bring it into negotiations on a peace treaty to formally end the Korean War. Since as far back as the mid-1980, North Korea has assembled 100-300 nuclear warheads in an ultra-clandestine nuclear weapons program. The missiles can be mounted on medium-range missiles designed to be nuclear capable.

A prototype ICBM was assembled by the end of the 1980s. Two prototype ICBMs were test-fired on May 29, 1993, with one splashing down off Honolulu and the other off Guam. The Kim Jong-il administration gave an advance notice to the US government of the long-range missile test. But the American reaction was skeptical.

In April 2001, the Associated Press quoted Navy representative Mark Kirk’s “terrifying encounter in 1993 with what seemed possible nuclear attack” from North Korea. He recalled:

It was a no notice, no warning missile launch out of North Korea, and for the first and only time in my career in the NMJIC [National Military Joint Intelligence Center], I got to see all of the panoply of the United States military wake up in a few seconds.

We did not know what kind of missile it was, so the impact area, at the beginning, was the entire United States, and you thought about what we might be doing in the next 12 minutes: would we be notifying the president that we had lost an American city? We were going to know the answer in 12 minutes.

At first it still included the Pacific Coast, then it included Hawaii.

AP added: “Little was made of the 1993 launch at the time because it wasn’t determined until later that it likely flew over Japan and landed in the Pacific Ocean, Kirk said.”

It was not until 1998 that the US notified the Japanese government of the flyover of a North Korean long-range missile before splashing down off Hawaii. The US National Aeronautics and Space Administration quietly labeled the 1998 satellite launch a success.

According to a February 12, 2003, AP report, US intelligence had concluded a few years earlier that North Korea has a ballistic missile capable of hitting the western United States and possibly targets farther inland.

Kim Myong Chol is author of a number of books and papers in Korean, Japanese and English on North Korea, including Kim Jong-il’s Strategy for Reunification. He has a PhD from the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea’s Academy of Social Sciences and is often called an “unofficial” spokesman of Kim Jong-il and North Korea. Nuclear war is Kim Jong-il’s game plan By Kim Myong Chol

(Copyright 2009 Kim Myong Chol.)

50,000 Kashmiris detained under draconian law

In Indian occupied Kashmir, over fifty thousand civilians have been detained under the draconian law, Public Safety Act, during the last twenty one years of the uprising against Indian occupation.

This was revealed by the President of the Bar Association of the occupied territory, Mian Abdul Qayoom, while talking to Kashmir Media Service in Srinagar, today. The draconian law authorizes the occupation authorities to detain a person for a period up to two years without producing him before a court of law. Mian Abdul Qayoom said that presently 800 to 900 persons were behind the bars under the Public Safety Act and it was invoked against 250 Kashmiris only in the current year.

He said during a period of one year, the draconian law was slapped seven times on APHC leader, Shabbir Ahmed Shah, eight times on Mussarat Alam Butt and four times each on Muhammad Yousaf Mir, Ghulam Nabi Sumji, Hafizullah and Bilal Siddiqi.

Later, Mian Abdul Qayoom and the vice president of the Bar, Aijaz Beidar visited Bandipore to express solidarity with the families of illegally detained civilians.

Meanwhile, Sopore remained tense for the third day, today, over the killing of a youth. The locals told mediamen that the killing was the handiwork of Indian troops. All markets and educational institutions remained closed and transport was off the road. A bomb blast occurred, today, in the Hari Singh High Street area of Srinagar without causing any causality. An army trooper committed suicide by hanging himself on a ceiling fan at an army camp in Udhampur. This has brought the number of such deaths amongst the troops to 176 since January 2007.

In London, the Executive Director of Kashmir Centre, Professor Nazir Ahmed Shawl, in a statement, deplored the silence of the international community over the discovery of unnamed graves in the occupied territory.