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Newmag to publish French writer Valerie Manteau’s fiction novel about Hrant Dink

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On September 15, 2020 Hrant Dink would turn 66. In commemoration of his anniversary, Newmag informs that Valerie Manteau’s fiction novel “The Furrow” will be published. The translation and publication of the novel is  supported by the Embassy of France in Armenia and the French Institute. 

35-year-old Valerie Manteau is a popular journalist and columnist. In 2008-2013  she worked for the popular magazine Charlie Hebdo.  

Hrant Dink is at the heart of the latest work by French writer and journalist Valérie Manteau, entitled Le Sillon. Living in Istanbul since 2017, the novelist sets out to find traces of the journalist and his heritage. Mixing autobiographical story and work of memory, this novel received one of the highest French literary awards, the Renaudot Prize, in 2018. Le Sillon is literally the French translation of the name Agos, the journal of Hrant Dink.

Valerie Manteau’s second novel has remarkable depth. In a masterful depiction of the unknown, a love story dotted with impossibilities commingles with a world on the verge of the abyss and with the life of a murdered journalist. 

A young woman meets up with her lover in Istanbul. While the city is slowly decaying amidst its contradictions and the violence of the regime, some are still fighting for their freedom. As she wanders around, this woman discovers the story of Hrant Dink, an Armenian journalist murdered in Turkey because of his aspiration for peace. 

Frederick Martin, French publisher and director of the publishing house Le Tripode, said, “When I first read Valérie Manteau’s The Furrow, I was so impressed by it that I decided to make it the only book that our independent publishing house, Le Tripode, would publish during August and September 2018. A few months later, the book received one of the most prestigious literary prizes in France, the Prix Renaudot. It’s impossible to say whether this book is a novel or an autobiography. And yes, it’s as much a feminist text as it is an essayistic reflection on the tensions between the East and the West. And yes, it is within this fusion of coarseness and elegance that something distinctly French flourishes (even if I have some doubts about this). And yes, more than anything, it succeeds, with unflinching nerve, at interweaving the intimacy of a love story with a stirring defense of democracy against populism through the figure of an extraordinary man, Hrant Dink”. 

The book not only received an authoritative award, but was also warmly acclaimed by critics. Here are a few:   

Virginie Despentes, French writer and novelist: “The writing is direct and sincere and it immediately had me hooked. I love how she portrays Turkey, she describes what could happen in France tomorrow.”

Annie Ernaux, French writer: “Inside Le Sillon dwells a frantic, violent and menacing world ; a world that is nevertheless very much alive. Its story approaches the collective experience in the best possible way : through the intimate everyday life of the individual.”

Dany Laferrière, Haitian-Canadian novelist and journalist: “I was delighted [to read the book], even if the theme is serious. An outlook, a style and a generosity that brought out emotions in me that I hadn’t felt before.” 

Yann Perrreau, Les Inrocks “Her honesty brings Emmanuel Carrère to mind, the use of “me”  that becomes all the more delicate and painful since this “me” is stripped naked, revealing all of its imperfections and defaults. It is a novel about a failure, but nothing is more beautiful than the stories that end badly because their themes surpass them.” 

Alexandra Schwartzbrod, Libération  “Valérie Manteau combines an autobiographical love story and an investigation into Hrant Drink, the Armenian journalist who was assassinated in 2007.”

The translation of the book into Armenian has already begun. Samvel Gasparyan is translating it. Samvel previously has translated Charles Aznavour’s books for Newmag. Now the translation is in process. “This is not only a book about Hrant Dink, but also about Turkey as a whole, its cities and problems. I think we are dealing with a very interesting writer both in terms of language and approach. This is a very beautiful, lexically rich book. This is not an ordinary book. This is a truly extraordinary novel with original structure and an inner dynamic.”

On this occasion the Embassy of France made a statement. “The Embassy of France in Armenia has the honor to announce its support for the translation and publication in Armenian “The Furrow” by Newmag publishing house. It will be released in January 2021 to commemorate the Hrant Dink assassination”.  

Source: tert.am

Here’s one of the most disturbing details from Woodward’s Trump book that people are missing

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The coronavirus bombshells in Bob Woodward’s new book, “Rage,” due out September 15, are so explosive that they have somewhat overshadowed other important parts of the book — for example, the veteran journalist/author’s reporting on President Donald Trump’s foreign policy decisions. And Woodward, according to the Guardian’s Julian Borger, describes some of the ways in which Sen. Lindsey Graham, former Defense Secretary James Mattis and others tried to rein Trump in on foreign policy.

“Rage” is based in part on a series of interviews that Woodward conducted with Trump from December 2019-July 2020. Woodward reports that on February 7, Trump told him that COVID-19 was five times “more deadly” than the flu — although he was publicly claiming, in February, that the novel coronavirus didn’t pose a major threat to the United States. Not surprisingly, Woodward’s damning coronavirus revelations have dominated cable news discussions of “Rage.” But other parts of “Rage” are important as well, and Borger notes some of Woodward’s reporting on Trump’s foreign policy decisions.

Four days before the January 3, 2020 drone strike that killed Iranian military Qasem Soleimani, Graham and Trump discussed Iran. Graham, according to Woodward, warned Trump that killing Soleimani would be a “giant step” and told the president, “How about hitting someone a level below Soleimani, which would be much easier for everyone to absorb?”

But the attack went ahead, and Soleimani was killed.

One of the most disturbing revelations in “Rage”,” which hasn’t gotten enough attention, is how seriously Mattis feared a nuclear confrontation with North Korea. Mattis was so worried, Borger writes, that he “took to sleeping in his gym clothes and having a flashing light and bell installed in his bathroom in case a missile alert happened when he was in the shower.”

Mattis, discussing that possibility, told Woodward, “You’re going to incinerate a couple million people. No person has the right to kill a million people, as far as I’m concerned. Yet that’s what I have to confront.”

The New Yorker previous reported that Mattis played a key part in preventing the U.S. and North Korea from entering a “war footing”:

According to multiple senior officials, in early January the President asked his staff to present him with a range of evacuation plans for the approximately two hundred thousand American civilians who live in South Korea. (On TV, Senator Lindsey Graham was calling for dependents of U.S. soldiers there to be brought home.) Any evacuation would send a profoundly alarming signal to South Korea, and inevitably put the U.S. and North Korea on a war footing. McMaster and his staff dutifully began gathering options for the President. The deliberations were scuttled only after Mattis and Kelly intervened.

In the fall of 2017, McMaster was planning a private session to develop military options for the possibility of conflict with North Korea: a war game, with Trump in attendance, at the Presidential retreat in Camp David. McMaster asked Mattis to send officers and planners. Mattis ignored him. “He prevented the thing from happening,” the former senior Administration official told me. Later, Mattis kept General John Nicholson, the commander of American forces in Afghanistan, from meeting with Trump.

Administration officials speculate that Mattis was trying to avoid a war, or that he simply wanted to control the flow of information, so that the President could not make ill-advised decisions. “There are a lot of people in the Administration who want to limit the President’s options because they don’t want the President to get anything done,” the former senior Administration official told me.

Mattis declined to comment for the record, but a former senior national-security official told me, without confirming any incidents, that a strategy had evolved. “The President thinks out loud,” he said. “Do you treat it like an order? Or do you treat it as part of a longer conversation? We treated it as part of a longer conversation.” By allowing Trump to talk without acting, he said, “we prevented a lot of bad things from happening.” In 2017, Mattis and his staff helped forestall a complete withdrawal of American forces from both Afghanistan and Syria

Istanbul Pogroms of 1955 Not Forgotten: Sirapian Publishes French-Language Book

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byAram Arkun

PARIS – Among other notable historical anniversaries with significance for Armenians, this year brings the 65th anniversary of the pogroms in Istanbul on September 6-7, 1955. They had an important impact on the ethnic makeup of Istanbul and served to stiffen the resolve of many Greeks, Armenians and Jews to emigrate from Turkey. Varoujan Sirapian’s new book, Les pogroms de 6-7 septembre 1955, Istanbul-Izmir (Paris: Sigest, 2020) provides the basic information on these events for French-language readers, as there have been few works in French on this topic.

The book relies on three major sources, the massive academic study by Speros Vryonis, Jr., The Mechanism of Catastrophe (New York: Greekworks.com, 2005), Güven Dilek’s analysis in 6-7 Eylül Olayları (Tarih Vakfı, 2005), and the collection of photographs and documents of the Fahri Çöker archive (6-7 Eylül Olayları: Fotograflar-Belgeler, Tarih Vakfı, 2005), as well as a variety of articles and authors. More than half of the 176-page book consists of photographs of the violence and its aftermath, along with reproductions of articles in newspapers and some of the documents from Çöker’s archives.

Sirapian said he had been planning his publication for some 10 years. Among the causes for this long delay was the need to obtain permission from Turkish publisher Tarih Vakfı to reproduce materials from the two aforementioned key books.

This is a work of outline and summation, not of original research, intended for a broad audience, but it does add several personal anecdotes as new source material. One such example concerns the author himself, who as an almost-10-year-old boy was jolted into realizing that the stories about what happened in 1915 and earlier to the Armenians were not just ancient history, but events that could recur. It made him realize that he had to leave his native country, but it took him 10 more years to become an adult and find the means to do so, and settle in France.

This story is similar to that of many other Armenians of varying ages. I can attest that my own father, already an adult at the time, after witnessing the destruction of the pogroms and pillaging, like the author, decided that Turkey was not a country in which one could form a family and raise a new generation of children safely.

Sirapian, based on his sources, reports that the events of September 6-7 were organized and deliberate. A manufactured incident, a false flag attack on the revered Mustafa Kemal Ataturk’s home in Thessaloniki, Greece, served as a spark for protests in non-Muslim neighborhoods of Istanbul which then turned into looting, rioting and violence. There were similar incidents in Izmir, and smaller events in a few other parts of Turkey. Sirapian enumerates facts establishing that the riots were planned beforehand.

Prime Minister Adnan Menderes and his Democratic Party were complicit, and tried to counter the declining popularity of his government by recourse to extreme nationalism. It also allowed Turkey to play a stronger role in the London Tripartite Conference on Cyprus which was taking place at this same time. Internationally, Great Britain benefited from this Turkish nationalism, which weakened the Greek hold on Cyprus, prevented the unification of Cyprus with Greece, and allowed the British to keep military bases in Cyprus.

Sirapian places the pogroms in the context of the long history of ethno-religious homogenization in Turkey and cites several incidents which occurred decades after them to indicate that this is still an ongoing process. These include the massacre of Alevis in Sivas in 1993 and the assassination of Hrant Dink in Istanbul in January 2007.

In addition to being motivated to commemorate an event which in a few decades will no longer have any living witnesses, Sirapian writes that he wishes this book to be a call to vigilance against the racism and xenophobia that are inculcated in children from a young age in Turkey and exported from Turkey to Europe. He cites Turkish writers and intellectuals like Hasan Cemal, Taner Akçam and Baskin Oran who point to the inability to confront skeletons in Turkey’s closet like the Armenian and Kurdish questions as a factor in allowing the continuance of ultranationalist behavior.

On the fiftieth anniversary of the 1955 pogroms, an exhibition of photographs of the violence was protested and egged by ultranationalists yelling slogans like “Traitors to the country!” A similar mentality, Sirapian points out, is seen in the recent conversion of Hagia Sophia to a mosque.

Now, Sirapian fears, the same mentality is being promulgated in Europe among people of Turkish descent with support by the Turkish government. It certainly poses a threat to European Armenians. Sirapian cites the example of the declarations of an ultranationalist Turk in Décines, France, which were disseminated this summer on YouTube, calling for Turkey’s leaders to provide Turks in France arms and monthly money to “do what is necessary throughout France” and counter the actions of the Armenians. The Committee for the Defense of the Armenian Cause (CDCA) has initiated a lawsuit against the latter.

Ultimately, Sirapian concludes, this Turkish ultranationalism in alliance with Islamism is not just dangerous for Armenians, but threatens the foundations of the French republic and European values.

The Author

Author Sirapian has had an interesting and variegated career. He studied at the Mekhitarist School in Istanbul as a youth and graduated Robert College, an American institution. He studied Byzantine history at Istanbul Edebiyat Universitesi [Literature University] from 1966 to 1970. Sirapian also performed as a guitarist in a band and recorded several records.

Further Work on the 1955 Events and Turkish Ultranationalism

In an interview, Sirapian considered his book only a first step to call attention to the 1955 events, and hoped that other younger writers might prepare more detailed works in French.

As far as the dangers of Turkish ultranationalism spreading its influence, Sirapian exclaimed that France is the soft underbelly of Europe where extremist Turks can strike more easily than elsewhere. Armenians only recently have started treating this situation seriously, according to Sirapian.

Most recently, at the end of August, a monument to the composer Gomidas in Paris which commemorates the Armenian Genocide was defaced with the words “It is false.” Sirapian said, “Armenians have woken up finally. We have to follow events closely.” He pointed out that it is a positive development that Armenian Genocide denier Maxime Gauin for the ninth time lost a lawsuit for defamation against the director of the French-Armenian publication Les Nouvelles d’Arménie and one of his writers, Sam Tilbian.

Sirapian concluded, “Other incidents are going to take place, and we must give an answer to every step they take.” At the same time, he emphasized that what is most important is to attempt to keep Armenia and Artsakh safe.

Source: https://mirrorspectator.com/2020/09/10/istanbul-pogroms-of-1955-not-forgotten-sirapian-publishes-french-language-book/

‘Enraged Trump supporters vowed to kill me’: Michael Cohen reveals what happened after he flipped

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Donald Trump’s former personal attorney says he has received hundreds of death threats after flipping on the president of the United States.

Cohen revealed the threats in the forward to his forthcoming book “Disloyal: A Memoir. The true story of the former personal attorney to President Donald J. Trump.

“The President of the United States wanted me dead,” the forward begins. “Or, let me say it the way Donald Trump would: He wouldn’t mind if I was dead. That was how Trump talked. Like a mob boss, using language carefully calibrated to convey his desires and demands, while at the same time employing deliberate indirection to insulate himself and avoid actually ordering a hit on his former personal attorney, confidant, consigliere, and, at least in my heart, adopted son.”

“Ever since I had flipped and agreed to cooperate with Robert Mueller and the Special Counsel’s Office, the death threats had come by the hundreds,” Cohen revealed. “On my cell phone, by email, snail mail, in tweets, on Facebook, enraged Trump supporters vowed to kill me, and I took those threats very seriously.”

“The President called me a rat and tweeted angry accusations at me, as well as my family. All rats deserve to die, I was told. I was a lowlife Judas they were going to hunt down. I was driving because I couldn’t fly or take the train to Washington. If I had, I was sure I would be mobbed or attacked. For weeks, walking the streets of Manhattan, I was convinced that someone was going to ram me with their car. I was exactly the person Trump was talking about when he said he could shoot and kill someone on 5th Avenue and get away with it,” Cohen wrote.

The forward also reveals allegations of deviant sex acts and a backchannel to Putin.

Amazon Halts Sale of Armenian Genocide Denial Book

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BY SHUNT JARCHAFJIAN

In recent weeks we have seen and heard much about the need to address the historical vestiges of tyranny. For some it might mean taking down statues of confederate leaders, the renaming of sports franchises, or the rebranding of Aunt Jemima pancake syrup. I for one decided to view this issue from the perspective of an Armenian. It meant addressing the misinformation campaigns run by the governments of Turkey and Azerbaijan.

Armenian Genocide denial comes in many forms. From chartered planes flying banners with denialist statements over our yearly protest at the Turkish Embassy to junk websites spewing the denialist rhetoric of the republic of turkey. One of the most dangerous forms of genocide denial is when we see it surface in academia.

Every year the government of Turkey spends millions of dollars on a failed campaign to deny the Armenian genocide. The dollars are funneled through think tanks, lobbyists, marketing groups, and institutions that fund academics. Its no secret that Turkey spent millions to fund “the Institute of Turkish Studies” to act as an academic front for the Turkish state.

Funding academia to rewrite and revise history is a sad attempt to hide the Republic of Turkey’s own culpability. Funding Turkish studies chairs at American universities and issuing grants to “historians” serves one purpose only, to buy history. There are certain “academics” who have earned a name for themselves by catering to the Turkish state’s denialist agenda by publishing “history” books that aim to undermine genocide recognition efforts and promote hate.

Interestingly enough, this problem is not one unique to Armenians. I recently read an article in the Jewish Chronicle about how Jewish interest groups pressured Amazon to remove literature that denied the holocaust.

The books referenced in the article were removed, but Amazon did not make an official statement acknowledging the removal.

I was curious to see if literature denying the Armenian Genocide was being sold on Amazon.  Usually such books have vague and misleading titles such as “Armenian history and the question of genocide,” or “The story behind Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story.” I didn’t need to search much until I stumbled upon the most blatant of all genocide denial books, “Armenian Genocide, A Big Lie” by Dr. A.N. Cora.

Here it was, fictitious denialist propaganda, being sold by the world’s largest bookseller, right alongside books written by reputable historians. It should be a crime to cut a tree to print this garbage.

Searching for literature on the topic of the Armenian Genocide such not yield fiction published by genocide deniers.

On June 12th I sent an email to Jeff Bezos that read in part:

”When searching for literature on the Armenian Genocide, Amazon.com search results yield many books authored by Genocide denialists and historical revisionist who wish to peddle hate-inspiring propaganda. Every day that this literature is available and promoted by Amazon.com is another day that Amazon is profiting from the trade in titles promoting Genocide denial and Anti-Armenian conspiracies and myths.

The Armenian Genocide is thoroughly researched and well-documented. Denying it is simply offensive and serves to kindle hate and anti-Armenian sentiments.

Amazon has policies to address offensive material and products that promote, incite, or glorify hate or violence towards any person or group.

Many authors of hate literature use misleading and deceptive titles, intentionally making it harder to separate from honest scholarly works. Those who wish to inflict pain on the survivors of genocide do not want to see any road blocks to the dissemination of hate literature.

I hope Amazon holds true to its stated principles and makes the appropriate changes necessary to address this issue. Now more than ever we must come together and better understand each other as human beings, and there is no substitute for having a foundation of knowledge based on Truth”

I soon received the following reply from someone on the Tech Support Executive Customer Relations team: “Jeff Bezos received your email and I’m responding on his behalf.”

About a week later the title was no longer listed on Amazon.

Unlike the article In the Jewish Chronicle, where Amazon did not acknowledge that it had removed the title, Amazon wrote back on June 30th stating:

“Thank you for bringing this matter to our attention and your patience while we further reviewed this title.

The book you mentioned, “The Armenian Genocide, A Big Lie” by Dr. A.N. Cora, has been removed from our website.

If there are any other specific titles you would like us to review, please reply to this email.

Thanks for choosing Amazon.”

I would like to praise Amazon in taking quick action to address the issue. I hope that they will take similar action on other titles that I have recommended for review.

I call on my compatriots to join in the fight for truth and justice. Our cause is not one championed by others. The Armenian Cause needs a new generation of guardians. We must strengthen the progress made by past generations and ensure that we do not lose ground in our fight against crimes against humanity. One person and a few emails can make a difference. There are many other fronts to this battle, from combating the destruction of our cemeteries and khachkars in Nakhichevan, to ensuring that consumers make informed decisions when confronted by Turkish products. The purchase of these products serves to enrich the Republic of Turkey and enable it to prolong its occupation of Western Armenia and its centuries long destruction of our cultural heritage. Lamenting about injustice is just as simple as taking action, so instead of just complaining, take action next time your confronted by something on the internet or in your local grocery store.

‘Sociopath’, ‘clown’: 7 unflattering anecdotes from Mary Trump’s book.

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By Josh Lederman and Dareh Gregorian

A new book by President Donald Trump’s niece — which his family sued to stop from being published — paints the president as an emotionally damaged narcissist who’s cheated to get ahead and who is unable to “experience the entire spectrum of human emotion.”

“Donald’s pathologies are so complex and his behaviors so often inexplicable that coming up with an accurate and comprehensive diagnosis would require a full battery of psychological and neuropsychological tests that he’ll never sit for,” Mary Trump writes in her book, “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man.”

NBC News obtained a copy of the book. Her publisher describes the author as a clinical psychologist.

Among the revelations and allegations:

  • Mary Trump paints Donald Trump’s father Fred Trump as emotionally abusive and says he caused lasting damage to both her father, Fred Trump Jr., and to the future president, his younger brother. “The only reason Donald escaped the same fate is that his personality served his father’s purpose. That’s what sociopaths do: They co-opt others and use them toward their own ends – ruthlessly and efficiently, with no tolerance for dissent or resistance,” she wrote. “Fred destroyed Donald, too, but not by snuffing him out as he did Freddy; instead, he short-circuited Donald’s ability to develop and experience the entire spectrum of human emotion. By limiting Donald’s access to his own feelings and rendering many of them unacceptable, Fred perverted his son’s perception of the world and damaged his ability to live in it.”
  • Donald Trump had no issue cheating his way to success. He would have his sister Maryanne do his homework for him, and hired a ringer to take his SAT test for him, the book says.”To hedge his bets (Donald) enlisted Joe Shapiro, a smart kid with a reputation for being a good test taker, to take his SATs for him. That was much easier to pull off in the days before photo IDs and computerized records. Donald, who never lacked for funds, paid his buddy well,” Mary Trump wrote.
  • “For some of the Trump kids, lying was a way of life, and for Fred’s oldest son, lying was defensive – not simply a way to circumvent his father’s disapproval or to avoid punishment, as it was for the others, but a way to survive,” Mary Trump wrote. “For Donald, lying was primarily a mode of self-aggrandizement meant to convince other people he was better than he actually was.”
  • After her father had the heart attack that would kill him, Mary Trump said Donald Trump didn’t go with him to the hospital and didn’t go to visit, and instead had “gone to the movies.”
  • Mary Trump acknowledged helping The New York Times with its prize-winning investigation into the president’s tax history. “I hadn’t fully grasped how much of a risk I was taking. If anybody in my family found out what I was doing, there would be repercussions — I knew how vindictive they were – but there was no way to gauge how serious the consequences might be,” she wrote. “I had to take Donald down.”
  • Donald Trump’s sister, Maryanne Trump Berry, wasn’t exactly supportive of his 2016 campaign. “He’s a clown,” the now-retired federal court judge told Mary, according to the book. “This will never happen.” Mary said she told her aunt she couldn’t believe people were buying his claim that he was a self-made man, and questioned what he’d ever accomplished on his own. “Well,” the aunt replied, “he has had five bankruptcies.”
  • A devout Catholic, Berry was irate that evangelicals were supporting her brother, and questioned what was “wrong with them.” “The only time Donald went to church was when the cameras were there. It’s mind-boggling. He has no principles. None!” the book quotes Trump’s sister as saying.

The president’s brother, Robert Trump, went to court last month to stop the book from being published, arguing it violated a non-disclosure agreement that Mary Trump signed back in 2001.

The agreement was part of a settlement in an ugly court fight that Mary Trump and her brother, Fred Trump III, had launched over their grandfather’s estate. Mary and Fred’s father, Fred Trump Jr., had died in 1984, and they said they had been shortchanged in his will thanks to the family’s machinations.

The court fight included allegations that Donald Trump and his two surviving siblings cut off family medical coverage for Mary and her brother, who was married and had a young child with a neurological disorder.

“When he sued us, we said, ‘Why should we give him medical coverage?'” Donald Trump told New York Daily News then, referring to Fred Trump III.

In an interview with Axios last month, the president said the NDA his niece signed is “very powerful” and “covers everything.” “She’s not allowed to write a book,” he said.

A New York state judge initially agreed, issuing a temporary restraining order to stop the book’s publication, but a state appeals court reversed that order. The publisher, Simon & Schuster, moved up the publication date by two weeks, from July 28 to July 14, citing the “high demand and extraordinary interest in this book.”

White House deputy press secretary Sarah Matthews pushed back on some of Mary Trump’s allegations on Tuesday.

“The President describes the relationship he had with his father as warm and said his father was very good to him. He said his father was loving and not at all hard on him as a child. Also, the absurd SAT allegation is completely false,” she said in a statement.

White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany told reporters she had not yet seen the book, but called it “a book of falsehoods.

Harsh book about Trump family by president’s niece, Mary Trump, can be published, judge rules

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Mary Trump’s explosive book about her uncle, “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man,” is set to hit shelves on July 28.

By Dartunorro Clark

A New York state judge closed one chapter on an attempt to block a book by President Donald Trump’s niece that paints a harsh portrait of Trump and their family’s history and ruled it can hit store shelves.

Judge Alan D. Scheinkman, a New York appellate judge reversed a lower court’s decision from this week that issued a temporary restraining order on the book.

Mary Trump’s book about her uncle, “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man,” is a potential bestseller, with tens of thousands of copies shipped before its July 28 publication. The book has also been at the top of online lists for book pre-sales.

“We support Mary L. Trump’s right to tell her story in Too Much and Never Enough , a work of great interest and importance to the national discourse that fully deserves to be published for the benefit of the American public,” said Adam Rothberg, a spokesperson for the company. “As all know, there are well-established precedents against prior restraint and pre-publication injunctions, and we remain confident that the preliminary injunction will be denied.”

Robert Trump, the president’s younger brother, filed a suit in late June in New York in Queens County Surrogate court, where the estate of the president’s father, Fred Trump Sr., was settled after his death in 1999. However, the judge tossed the case out because it was not the proper venue for the dispute.

Lawyers for Robert Trump quickly re-filed a claim in Dutchess County Supreme Court in upstate New York, where he lives. Robert Trump argues that his niece, Mary Trump, violated a confidentiality agreement that barred her from writing the kind of tell-all book that she describes.

Judge Hal B. Greenwald had initially issued a temporary injunction after Robert Trump re-filed in court in upstate New York. Robert Trump has argued that Mary Trump is not allowed to publish anything about her family as part of a settlement agreement in Fred Trump Sr.’s inheritance case.

The publisher, Simon & Schuster, said in a filing on Tuesday that it had already printed 75,000 copies, and more copies are being made.

Simon & Schuster said in court documents that it be unconstitutional to stop publication and that it was unaware that Mary Trump had signed a nondisclosure agreement with her family. The company also believes that it is not liable if she breached the agreement.

“We did not learn anything about Ms. Trump signing any agreement concerning her ability to speak about her litigation with her family until shortly after press broke concerning Ms. Trump’s Book about two weeks ago, well after the Book had been accepted, put into production, and printing had begun,” Jonathan Karp, the CEO of Simon & Schuster, said in an affidavit filed Tuesday. “And we never saw any purported agreement until this action was filed against Ms. Trump and Simon & Schuster.”

Karp said in his affidavit that Mary Trump revealed to the company she leaked Trump’s tax returns to the New York Times for its 2018 investigation, which later won the Pulitzer Prince. Karp argued that since “no litigation” was taken after Trump’s tax returns were leaked the company was “entirely confident in Ms. Trump’s ability to tell her story regarding her own family

Breaking News: Bolton Book Expose Trump big Time, Says Trump Impeachment Inquiry Missed Other Troubling Actions

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By Peter Baker

John R. Bolton was President Trump’s national security adviser for 17 months. Mr. Trump asked if Finland was part of Russia, Mr. Bolton wrote in his new book.Credit…Doug Mills/The New York Times

In his new book, John R. Bolton, the former national security adviser, describes episodes where the president sought to halt criminal inquiries. He also says President Trump’s loyalists mocked him behind his back.

John R. Bolton, the former national security adviser, says in his new book that the House in its impeachment inquiry should have investigated President Trump not just for pressuring Ukraine to incriminate his domestic foes but for a variety of instances when he sought to intervene in law enforcement matters for political reasons.

Mr. Bolton describes several episodes where the president expressed willingness to halt criminal investigations “to, in effect, give personal favors to dictators he liked,” citing cases involving major firms in China and Turkey. “The pattern looked like obstruction of justice as a way of life, which we couldn’t accept,” Mr. Bolton writes, adding that he reported his concerns to Attorney General William P. Barr.

Mr. Bolton also adds a striking new allegation by saying that Mr. Trump overtly linked trade negotiations to his own political fortunes by asking President Xi Jinping of China to buy a lot of American agricultural products to help him win farm states in this year’s election. Mr. Trump, he writes, was “pleading with Xi to ensure he’d win. He stressed the importance of farmers, and increased Chinese purchases of soybeans and wheat in the electoral outcome.”

The book, “The Room Where It Happened,” was obtained by The New York Times in advance of its scheduled publication next Tuesday and has already become a political lightning rod in the thick of an election campaign and a No. 1 best seller on Amazon.com even before it hits the bookstores. The Justice Department filed a last-minute lawsuit against Mr. Bolton this week seeking to stop publication even as Mr. Trump’s critics complained that Mr. Bolton should have come forward during impeachment proceedings rather than save his account for a $2 million book contract.

While other books by journalists, lower-level former aides and even an anonymous senior official have revealed much about the Trump White House, Mr. Bolton’s volume is the first tell-all memoir by such a high-ranking official who participated in major foreign policy events and has a lifetime of conservative credentials. It is a withering portrait of a president ignorant of even basic facts about the world, susceptible to transparent flattery by authoritarian leaders manipulating him and prone to false statements, foul-mouthed eruptions and snap decisions that aides try to manage or reverse.

Mr. Trump did not seem to know, for example, that Britain is a nuclear power and asked if Finland is part of Russia, Mr. Bolton writes. He came closer to withdrawing the United States from NATO than previously known. Even top advisers who position themselves as unswervingly loyal mock him behind his back. During Mr. Trump’s 2018 meeting with North Korea’s leader, according to the book, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo slipped Mr. Bolton a note disparaging the president, saying, “He is so full of shit.”

A month later, Mr. Bolton writes, Mr. Pompeo dismissed the president’s North Korea diplomacy, declaring that there was “zero probability of success.”

Intelligence briefings with the president were a waste of time “since much of the time was spent listening to Trump, rather than Trump listening to the briefers.” Mr. Trump likes pitting staff members against one another, at one point telling Mr. Bolton that former Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson had once referred to Nikki R. Haley, then the ambassador to the United Nations, by a sexist obscenity — an assertion Mr. Bolton seemed to doubt but found telling that the president would make it.

Mr. Trump said so many things that were wrong or false that Mr. Bolton in the book regularly includes phrases like “(the opposite of the truth)” following some quote from the president. And Mr. Trump in this telling has no overarching philosophy of governance or foreign policy but rather a series of gut-driven instincts that sometimes mirrored Mr. Bolton’s but other times were, in his view, dangerous and reckless.

“His thinking was like an archipelago of dots (like individual real estate deals), leaving the rest of us to discern — or create — policy,” Mr. Bolton writes. “That had its pros and cons.”

Mr. Bolton is a complicated, controversial figure. A former official under Presidents Ronald Reagan, George Bush and George W. Bush who rose to United Nations ambassador, he has been one of the most vocal advocates for a hard-line foreign policy, a supporter of the Iraq war who has favored possible military action against rogue states like North Korea and Iran.

Like Mr. Tillerson and other officials who went to work for Mr. Trump believing they could manage him, Mr. Bolton agreed to become the president’s third national security adviser in 2018 thinking he understood the risks and limits. But unlike some of the so-called “axis of adults,” as he calls Mr. Tillerson and former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, who tried to minimize what they saw as the damage of the president’s tenure, Mr. Bolton sought to use his 17 months in the White House to accomplish policy goals that were important to him, like withdrawing the United States from a host of international agreements he considers flawed, like the Iran nuclear accord, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty and others.

Mr. Bolton thought Mr. Trump’s diplomatic flirtation with the likes of North Korea’s Kim Jong-un and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia were ill-advised and even “foolish” and spent much of his tenure trying to stop the president from making what he deemed bad deals. He eventually resigned last September — Mr. Trump claimed he fired him — after they clashed over Iran, North Korea, Ukraine and a peace deal with the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Mr. Bolton did not agree to testify during the House impeachment inquiry last fall, saying he would wait to see if a judge would rule that former aides like him should do so over White House objections. But after the House impeached Mr. Trump for pressuring Ukraine to publicly announce investigations into Democrats, including former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., while withholding security aid, Mr. Bolton offered to testify in the Senate trial if subpoenaed.

Senate Republicans blocked calling Mr. Bolton as a witness even after The Times reported in January that his then-unpublished book confirmed that Mr. Trump linked the suspended security aid to his insistence that Ukraine investigate his political rivals. The Senate went on to acquit Mr. Trump almost entirely along party lines. But Mr. Bolton engendered great anger among critics of the president for not making his account public before now.

The book confirms House testimony that Mr. Bolton was wary all along of the president’s actions with regard to Ukraine and that Mr. Trump explicitly linked the security aid to investigations involving Mr. Biden and Hillary Clinton. On Aug. 20, Mr. Bolton writes, Mr. Trump “said he wasn’t in favor of sending them anything until all the Russia-investigation materials related to Clinton and Biden had been turned over.” Mr. Bolton writes that he, Mr. Pompeo and Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper tried eight to 10 times to get Mr. Trump to release the aid.

Mr. Bolton, however, had nothing but scorn for the House Democrats who impeached Mr. Trump, saying they committed “impeachment malpractice” by limiting their inquiry to the Ukraine matter and moving too quickly for their own political reasons. Instead, he said they should have also looked at how Mr. Trump was willing to intervene in investigations into companies like Turkey’s Halkbank to curry favor with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey or China’s ZTE to favor Mr. Xi.

Mr. Trump married politics with policy during a meeting with Mr. Xi on the sidelines of the Group of 20 summit meeting in Osaka, Japan, last summer, according to the book. Mr. Xi told Mr. Trump that unnamed political figures in the United States were trying to spark a new cold war with China.

“Trump immediately assumed Xi meant the Democrats,” Mr. Bolton writes. “Trump said approvingly that there was great hostility among the Democrats. He then, stunningly, turned the conversation to the coming U.S. presidential election, alluding to China’s economic capability to affect the ongoing campaigns, pleading with Xi to ensure he’d win.” Mr. Bolton says he would print Mr. Trump’s exact words “but the government’s prepublication review process has decided otherwise.”

Mr. Bolton does not say these are necessarily impeachable offenses and adds that he does not know everything that happened with regard to all of these episodes, but he reported them to Mr. Barr and Pat A. Cipollone, the White House counsel. They should have been investigated by the House, he said, and at the very least suggested abuses of a president’s duty to put the nation’s interests ahead of his own.

“A president may not misuse the national government’s legitimate powers by defining his own personal interest as synonymous with the national interest, or by inventing pretexts to mask the pursuit of personal interest under the guide of national interest,” Mr. Bolton writes. “Had the House not focused solely on the Ukraine aspects of Trump’s confusion of his personal interests,” he adds, then “there might have been a greater chance to persuade others that ‘high crimes and misdemeanors’ had been perpetrated.”

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/17/us/politics/bolton-book-trump-impeached.html?campaign_id=60&emc=edit_na_20200617&instance_id=0&nl=breaking-news&ref=cta&regi_id=49769097&segment_id=31156&user_id=ed77ee1e9ba027a35313df268f99ef3e

Turkish Instinct or the Praise of Genocide – Radical Islam and the Armenian Genocide

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By Wahi Khachikyan,

Where are the Armenians of the Armenian highland? Where on earth have they gone? How did they disappear? How is it that of the 7 million Armenians existing in the 14th century was left only two million by 1920, that otherwise, if no genocides were inflicted, should have counted as much as 75 million people today, instead of 10? Communism and Nazism could implement such a racist and xenophobic ideology only for 70 and 25 years, respectively, causing that amount of human and material damage and aberration we all know. No other genocide has ever lasted so many centuries and no other state has perpetrated as many genocides against as many ethnicities as Turkey. An estimated 11 million Armenians have been reportedly exterminated from 1065 to 1923, through a mechanism of cyclical genocides. More than 4 million Christians endured genocide and died at the hands of the Turks between 1890 and 1923. Let us not forget the scope and brutality of the events that exterminated the three-quarter of the Armenian people, reduced the Armenian homeland and its colossal cultural heritage to rubbles. Armenia was then occupied and partitioned among neighboring countries. More than 3 thousand Armenian churches were either confiscated, destroyed, dilapidated, blown up, turned into stores, stables or mosques, intentionally left to fall into disrepair or ruination.

Ottoman-Turkish, Pan-Turkist, and radical Islamist establishments have never concealed a certain fascination, glorification, and praise for genocide, to the point to elevating it to a state-adopted strategy-dogma, to a mystification extent, supported with a contributive and elusive ideology: denial. And genocide deniers are three times more likely to commit genocide again than other governments. Neither Armenian nor Turkish historiography have ever reported even fringe elements of Turkish establishment and political school of thought open to dialog with Armenians, much less a sympathizer, if at all.

Historically, all genocide committing countries have manifested resentment and promoted reconciliation with the survivors, except for Turkey, thus holding the truth hostage through denial and distortive misinformation, preventing even its own people from accessing to genocide historical information – although 15 years ago, only 2% of Turkish population knew and accepted the truth, presently 15% – and threatening the international community of any recognition consequences. Somebody has to invite Turkey to rationality, responsibility, and consciousness. If the Armenians were to be assimilated, Islamized and Turkified, genocide wouldn’t happen. Ottoman Turkey lost the war and the empire but gained the battle against the Armenians. An estimated 6 to 8 million hidden or crypto Armenians, the progeny of the orphans and the Islamized Armenians who survived, will be challenging Turkey in the foreseeable future: whims of history.

Since the Ottoman-Turks incursions into Asia Minor, genocide never ceased, nor the Christian community took the trouble to protect the first Christian nation-state on earth. To quote Martin Luther King “In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends” …

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‘Un-American’ anti-lockdown protesters hammered by Army veteran for appropriating military gear to make their point

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In a Memorial Day column for the Washington Post, military vet Drew Garza — who served three tours in Iraq and Afghanistan among other deployments — hammered anti-lockdown protesters who have appropriated a quasi-military style of dress while sometimes carrying “un-American” flags at lockdown rallies.

According to the U.S. Army vet who is now a Tillman scholar at George Washington University, protesters who adorn themselves in military-style garb while carrying high-powered weapons to protest stay-at-home orders designed to stem the spread of the coronavirus pandemic is a personal affront to those who have actually served.

Saying the protestors are wearing an amalgam of military styles not specific to any American service branch, Garza referred to it as the “Uniform” to make his point.

“I took comfort in my Army uniform. Not a physical comfort, because that certainly was never synonymous with Army-issue items, but a comfort of familiarity. I suffered in that gear, and it became a part of me. Some veterans can’t wait to take off their uniform, but I didn’t want to live without mine,” he wrote. “‘The Uniform’ is my term for the look some protesters have adopted in recent years. It is not a specific military uniform but often a mix of non-government-issue, third-party combat gear. There are usually lots of accessories and pouches; patches of varying political rancor; and flags that are rarely red, white and blue.”

Writing “To my eye, the overall look is a caricature of a Special Operations warfighter, like those in video games,” he added, “The Uniform has become a fixture in political storms and crises. People in these outfits show up to political events, where they scream and scowl. They demand freedom as they wield assault rifles. They reject criticism as un-American. Some carry flags that are un-American. In a country where minorities are killed for mistaken perceptions, they protest in a protective ether of unrecognized privilege.”

Explaining his “discomfort” with protesters wearing tactical gear he continued, “Those wearing it are attempting to make their appearance speak for them, sometimes without the service that normally gives power to that voice. Over our nation’s history, the sacrifice and commitment of military service have made it a source of integrity and wisdom.”

“Millions of Americans have stood in uniform and watched innocent people suffer. Sometimes we could help; sometimes we were helpless. Some of us wore the same gear for weeks straight with no showers or laundry. We know the permanent coloring inflicted by months of billowing dust and sand. Uniforms get dirty — covered in hydraulic oil, mud, blood. Still, we wear them as we serve,” he elaborated before stating, “Citizens have every right to be angry at government responses that are unclear, insufficient or unwarranted. Citizens have every right to protest — to speak from their personal pain. They don’t need gear to speak for them.”

“When I see the Uniform engaged in protest, I understand that it is intended to convey a message,” he added before concluding, “But this appearance, reappropriated in anger, rings hollow.”

You can read the whole piece here.