In an article entitled “Why is the US still helping Turkey sabotage its role in Syria?” the Jerusalem Post highlighted that the Trump administration often enables Turkey’s aggressive behavior against Greece.

“Washington sent its most pro-Turkey diplomat to Ankara this week as Turkey’s regime hosted Hamas leaders in a red-carpet ceremony in Istanbul,” wrote Seth Frantzman for the Jerusalem Post. “Former US ambassador James Jeffrey, who is now the US envoy for Syria and the anti-ISIS campaign, went to Turkey and said the US had ‘proved our value in many fields outside of Syria.’”

Frantzman highlighted that Jeffrey’s comments “are the latest in his endless praise of Turkey and never holding the country to account” and that the American diplomat said his comment were the US trying “to prove its value to Turkey.”

“Usually, smaller countries like Turkey are expected to prove their values as allies to the US, but in the Ankara-Washington relationship, it is the other way around,” the Jerusalem Post highlighted.

However, most interestingly is that the Israeli newspaper highlighted how the administration of US President Donald Trump has a long history of appeasing Turkey, including at Greece’s expense.

“Some in the Trump administration are very close to Ankara and often appear to enable Turkey’s increasingly aggressive behavior against Greece, its invasions of Syria, bombing of Iraq and bashing of Israel,” Frantzman wrote.

For close observers of Turkish-American relations, Trump’s appeasement for Turkish aggression is glaringly obvious.

Trump said last Monday that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan listens to him, as reported by Greek City Times.

“I don’t like saying this publicly, but it happens to be true. I get along with him and he listens,” Trump said, which led many to question why the American president has not told Turkey to deescalate its hostilities with Greece.

John Bolton, the former National Security Advisor for Trump, described in his book ‘The Room Where It Happened’ that the relationship between the American president and Erdoğan was a “bromance,” especially as Trump agreed to help hide Turkey breaching US-imposed sanctions on Iran.

Meanwhile, Erdoğan was again praised by U.S. President Donald Trump, this time at an event with an American pastor who was illegally imprisoned and taken hostage in Turkey for over two years.

Pastor Andrew Brunson, who was arrested in October 2016 in Turkey and held for two years on charges of complicity with the Fethullah Gülen movement and the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), was told by Trump two days ago that “I have to say, to me, President Erdoğan was very good.”

American taxpayers have paid another bill to President Donald Trump’s resorts and clubs because he couldn’t accommodate the necessary security that travels with the U.S. leader. 

According to the Washington Post’s Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter David Fahrenthold, there was another hefty bill paid by taxpayers because Trump prefers to spend his weekends at his own properties instead of in Washington.

Fahrenthold described a trip to Mar-a-Lago where all of the rooms near the president were booked, putting Secret Service in a difficult position.

I do have a Beach Cabana available,” a Mar-a-Lago staff member told the Secret Service while planning for a March 2017 visit. “Across the street at the Beach Club, North end of the pool.”

Recently obtained emails showed that the Secret Service took a different tactic the next time, renting out rooms near Trump’s for two weeks at a time so that the club couldn’t rent them out to others.

“Saying ‘no’ to the Secret Service had made it a better customer,” wrote the Post. “The agency was paying for rooms on nights when Trump wasn’t even visiting — to be ready just in case Trump decided to go, one former Trump administration official said.”

A brilliant money-making plot for the president.

It was his third week on the job when Trump fled to Mar-a-Lago, costing more than most people make in two months. 

“On that trip, the Secret Service reserved a house, a cottage, two suites and two hotel rooms from the club to guard the president, according to newly released documents,” said the Post. “The Secret Service paid $10,660 for the weekend, federal records show. The Secret Service declined to comment for this article.

In the nearly four years Trump has been in office, he has spent the equivalent of one year at his own properties.

“Through these trips, Trump has brought the Trump Organization a stream of private revenue from federal agencies and GOP campaign groups,” said the report. “Federal spending records show that taxpayers have paid Trump’s businesses more than $900,000 since he took office. At least $570,000 came as a result of the president’s travel, according to a Post analysis.”

The Post obtained 265 pages of receipts and emails from the Secret Service in response to a lawsuit. Federal spending records showing the detailed breakdown of how the Trump Organization is profiting off of the Secret Service.

“In addition to the rentals at Mar-a-Lago, the documents show that the Trump Organization charged daily ‘resort fees’ to Secret Service agents guarding Vice President Pence in Las Vegas and in another instance asked agents to pay a $1,300 ‘furniture removal charge’ during a presidential visit to a Trump resort in Scotland.”

The documents also show the payments that the Trump Org. scored from Republican and conservative groups hosting meetings or events at Trump properties. They’ve totaled at least $3.8 million in fees, the Post determined. 

Trump “tried to award the massive Group of Seven summit to his Doral resort in Miami, dropping the idea after a public backlash,” the Post recalled. “He filmed video messages for big-spending private clients at Mar-a-Lago. He suggested that Pence visit a Trump property in Ireland, according to the vice president’s chief of staff. Pence then shuttled back and forth across Ireland, at U.S. taxpayer expense, to do government business on one coast and stay at Trump’s hotel on the other.”

Read the extensive report at the Washington Post.

Germany’s foreign minister has called for an end to military maneuvers in the Mediterranean Sea, as a dispute between Turkey and Greece escalates. Turkey said it would carry out shooting drills there.

Germany’s foreign minister on Thursday called for an end to military maneuvers in the eastern Mediterranean Sea, as Turkey announced it would hold exercises there next week amid tensions with fellow NATO member Greece. 

“We need a diplomatic solution for this conflict … Nobody will solve this conflict with war ships in the eastern Mediterranean,” German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said at an informal meeting of EU foreign ministers in Berlin.

Earlier in the day, German Chancellor Angela Merkel called the dispute between Turkey and Greece “deeply concerning.”

“Germany has striven to contribute to deescalation,” she said. 

Maas flew between Athens and Ankara earlier this week in an attempt to mediate dialogue between the parties. 

Greece and Turkey are vying for control of valuable natural gas reserves, recently discovered off the shores of Crete and Cyprus.

Turkey calls out French involvement

The warning from Germany followed news that Turkey would hold firing exercises in the eastern Mediterranean next week, the latest development in its military tit-for-tat with Greece. 

The Turkish navy on Thursday said it will hold shooting exercises off the coast of Iskenderun, northeast of Cyprus, on September 1 and 2.

France on Wednesday joined Greece, Italy and Cyprus in conducting military exercises in the area. 

A spokesman for Turkey’s Foreign Ministry, Hami Aksoy, said by deploying French military aircraft to Cyprus, France had violated treaties put in place following the island’s independence from the UK in 1960.

France’s behavior was dangerously encouraging Greece and Cyprus to escalate tensions, Aksoy said.

Cyprus has existed under divided rule since 1974, when a Greek-inspired coup triggered an invasion from Turkey and the installment of a de-facto Turkish Cypriot state in the island’s north — albeit one only formally recognized by Turkey to this day. It unilaterally declared its independence in 1983.

The squabble over energy resources has reignited past conflicts between Turkey and Greece. The two countries nearly went to war in 1996 over uninhabited islands in the Aegean Sea. 

kp/msh (dpa, Reuters)

It has been a busy day for Greek Defense Minister Nikos Panagiotopoulos who informed the European Union’s Defense Ministers and NATO’s head about the current situation with Turkey in the East Mediterranean.

“At the Informal Meeting of the EU Defense Ministers, I informed my counterparts extensively, the Secretary General of NATO Jens Stoltenberg and Deputy Secretary General of the UN Jean – Pierre Lacroix, on the developments in the Eastern Mediterranean and the provocative actions by Turkey in an area of ​​the Greek continental shelf,” Greek Defense Minister Nikos Panagiotopoulos said on Twitter.

However, in speaking with Stoltenberg, Panagiotopoulos did not shy away from telling the NATO head that the Alliance’s equal treatment of Greece and Turkey, in spite of the latter’s war mongering and provocations, is not “acceptable.”

“NATO’s policy of equal distances is detrimental to our country, but also to the cohesion of the Alliance, and therefore is not acceptable,” Panagiotopoulos told Stoltenberg.

The Minister of National Defense participated in the Informal Meeting of the Ministers of Defense of the European Union that took place today in Berlin. He briefed his counterparts, as well as NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg and UN Under-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Operations Jean-Pierre Lacroix, about the latest developments in the East Mediterranean following provocative actions by Turkey.

During the first Working Session, Panagiotopoulos pointed out the challenges of security and stability in the East Mediterranean from Turkey’s delinquent behavior within the Greek continental shelf. He stressed that Turkey’s general stance and its destabilizing illegal actions in the East Mediterranean constitute a blatant violation of Greece’s sovereign rights and pose the risk of escalating tensions in the region.

The Minister also made it clear to his counterparts that Greece, with absolute respect for international law, consistently faces the current challenge and fully defends its national sovereignty and the external borders of the EU, highlighting the important and difficult task of the Greek Armed Forces. However, he also stressed the European Union’s commitment to maximum vigilance and its role in order to restore the environment of peace, security and stability in the region.

During the discussion on EU co-operation with partners in the operational part of the Common Security and Defense Policy, Panagiotopoulos particularly noted that cooperation with third countries must presuppose that the latter share the principles and values ​​of the Union while acknowledging the consistently positive and constructive EU cooperation.

YEREVAN. – A little while ago, rescuers pulled another person out of the rubble as a result of Wednesday’s explosion in a Yerevan building

According to preliminary information, he is a 56-year-old man.

He was stretchered to a waiting ambulance on a stretcher; his body was completely covered.

As reported earlier, the National Center for Crisis Management of Armenia received a report Wednesday morning that an explosion had taken place in a Yerevan building due to a natural gas leak, and the building had partially collapsed.

First responders were dispatched to the scene.

Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and Minister of Emergency Situations Feliks Tsolakyan were also there.

Earlier, two persons were rescued from the rubble and 19 others were evacuated.

The two injured were hospitalized. Doctors say one of them—Svetlana S. (born in 1949)—is in moderate condition, whereas the other—a man about 50 years old—is in critical condition.

On Tuesday, The New York Times editorial board excoriated President Donald Trump’s FDA commissioner, Stephen Hahn, for the “fuzzy math” he used to justify an emergency authorization for an unproven convalescent plasma treatment for coronavirus.

Hahn, the board noted, was forced to apologize for his false claim that data showed the treatment could save 35 out of 100 infected people.

“The survival benefit Dr. Hahn initially mentioned applies only to a narrow subset of patients: Those younger than 80 years old who were hospitalized but not on ventilators and who received plasma with high levels of antibodies within three days of diagnosis were 35 percent less likely to die than those who received plasma with low levels of antibodies,” wrote the board. “If the former group of patients were compared instead to the wider population, the benefit would shrink considerably. Dr. Hahn knows this — or at least he ought to.”

“Dr. Hahn could have stood by leaders from the National Institutes of Health who advised hitting pause on the use of convalescent plasma until more data was available. Or he could have defended F.D.A. scientists who advised moving forward even though data was limited,” wrote the board. “Instead, he followed his boss’s lead, propping up victorious statements with fuzzy numbers.”

Trump has repeatedly gone against medical advice, including his support for hydroxychloroquine as a COVID-19 cure, which has been broadly discredited. His FDA revoked emergency use authorization for this treatment in early summer, and cautions against its use due to potential heart damage.

“In a world where disinfectant therapy is discussed with a straight face, the difference between relative and absolute may indeed seem small,” wrote the board. “But even small compromises with the truth can have big consequences for public trust, and for the course of global pandemics. It’s worrisome that a doctor in charge of one of the nation’s top regulatory agencies — who will play a leading role in the coming decisions about which vaccines are safe and effective enough to be injected into Americans’ bodies — doesn’t seem to realize that.”

You can read more here.

Pastor Andrew Brunson was sentenced to decades in prison by Erdogan’s regime.

Donald Trump on Monday night told a man who had been held hostage in Turkey for two years that the Turkish leader who imprisoned him was “very good.”

During the first night of the Republican National Convention, Trump spoke at the White house with several former hostages whom his administration had helped release. One of the participants was Andrew Brunson, an evangelical pastor who was put in a Turkish prison in 2016 on spying charges.

Brunson was arrested and sentenced to decades in jail by brutal Turkish dictator Recep Tayyip Erdogan in 2016. Vice President Mike Pence has called Brunson an “innocent man of faith,” saying there was in fact “no credible evidence against him” to support Turkish officials’ charges of spying.

Turkey eventually agreed to release Brunson in 2018.

Trump on Monday night first bragged of his own accomplishments in securing the hostages’ release, saying, “We worked very hard on it, Ambassador [Robert] O’Brien and others. And I will tell you — we’re very proud of the job we did.”

Then he invited Brunson to briefly tell his story.

Brunson noted that he had been “held in Turkey” and that Trump “took unprecedented steps, actually, to secure my release.”

Trump responded bewilderingly, calling Erdogan “very good.”

From the first night of the 2020 Republican National Convention:

Donald Trump: 28 years, right? They had you scheduled for a long time, Andrew. We had to get you back.

And I have to say that, to me, President Erdogan was very good.

I know they had you scheduled for a long time are you were a very innocent person. And he, ultimately after we had a few conversations, he agreed. So we appreciate that and we appreciate the people of Turkey.

And you still appreciate the people of Turkey, I understand, right?

More than a dozen Trump administration officials, current and former, described a clandestine relationship between Jared Kushner and the CEO of a Kremlin sovereign wealth fund.

Erin Banco, National Security Reporter

On a late afternoon in March, a large military aircraft bearing the Russian Federation insignia descended into John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York City. Its mission: to deliver personal protective equipment and ventilators to nearby hospitals scrambling to treat patients during the peak of the coronavirus pandemic. 

Gov. Andrew Cuomo had pleaded for weeks with the federal government for additional resources, particularly ventilators, to treat the thousands of COVID-19 patients across the state. Yet news of the Russian delivery surprised those in the governor’s office working to obtain additional medical equipment. They’d thought the ventilator support would come from the U.S. stockpile or from an American company.

Officials in the U.S. State Department were surprised, too. Despite a department press release announcing the delivery, several senior officials working on the Russia portfolio in the department and elsewhere in the national security apparatus were unaware exactly how the 45 ventilators had ended up on American soil. Half of the shipment was paid for by the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF), one of the country’s sovereign wealth funds, which is under U.S. sanctions. (The sanctions do not prohibit all transactions between U.S. entities and the firm, but they have limited the fund’s interactions with American businesses.) And the fund’s CEO, Kirill Dmitriev, had been scrutinized by Congress and former special counsel Robert Mueller for his communications with Trump transition officials shortly after Moscow had meddled in the 2016 election.

For years, the Trump administration had attempted to find ways to cooperate with Russia on the world stage but largely failed in those efforts because Moscow has continued to engage in activity that threatens U.S. national security, from hacking operations to reportedly offering bounties on American soldiers in Afghanistan. A public display of Russian supplies being offloaded caught some officials in the Trump administration off guard. 

But there was a simple answer to the whodunit. The Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA) told The Daily Beast it had assigned the State Department “to represent the U.S. in the transaction with the Government of Russia.” But it was President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who helped facilitate the ventilator delivery, according to two senior administration officials. During the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, Kushner headed “Project Airbridge”—the medical supply delivery program that worked to fast-track the delivery of personal protective equipment and other medical supplies by using federal funding to underwrite the cost of shipping. In an effort to supply New York City hospitals with the medical equipment they needed, Kushner looked in multiple places for the equipment and found a safe bet in Moscow, those officials said. While the State Department had been involved in the logistics of the onboarding and offloading, it was Kushner who helped strike the deal.

The ventilators turned out to be faulty and were cast aside by officials in New York and New Jersey, according to local officials who spoke with The Daily Beast. During that same time period, the city of Los Angeles was told by representatives of the federal government that it had lost a bid for N95 masks to a Russian entity, according to two people familiar with the matter. The L.A. officials were never told the Russian outfit’s name. 

Kushner held the details of the New York shipment closely and accelerated the order by leaning on his personal relationship with Dmitriev, a confidant of President Vladimir Putin who’d been dispatched to make inroads with the inexperienced 2016 Trump transition team. 

Dmitriev was one of the main participants in the infamous January 2017 Seychelles meeting with former Blackwater CEO Erik Prince, in which the two discussed a roadmap for U.S.-Russia cooperation in the new administration. In the years since, Kushner and Dmitriev have communicated—often at a distance, and at times through intermediaries—about ways the U.S. and Russia could work together. The conversations have touched on everything from creating a joint business council to increase investment, to working on a Middle East peace deal, to helping lead negotiations on a recent OPEC deal, to delivering those medical supplies, according to multiple senior officials. 

Source: https://www.thedailybeast.com/jared-kushners-private-channel-with-putins-money-man-kirill-dmitriev?via=twitter_page

Axel Çorlu, an academic born in Smyrni (Σμύρνη, Turkish: İzmir), created controversy on Twitter in a thread where he denounced the Turkish government’s decision to convert Chora church into a mosque and questioned Turkish citizens connections to Central Asia.

The academic that also speaks fluent Greek explained that the narrative of modern Turkish identity prevents them from identifying with the land they live on because Turkish citizens believe they are descended from Central Asian Turks, rather than Turkified natives of Anatolia.

It is estimated that millions in Turkey today are Turkfied Greeks, Armenians and other Anatolian people who were Islamified and Turkified by the ruling Turkish elite. For this reason, Turkish citizens in their thousands are returning to their Greek, Armenian and Anatolian roots.

“On Chora and its conversion to a mosque, beyond the technical issues about preservation, a point I have been insistently making on the creation of the modern Turkish identity and the narrative that feeds it have to be taken into consideration. This narrative prevents Turkish people from being able to identify fully with the lands they live on, and promotes a “conquest” mentality that excludes everything that existed there before the arrival of the Seljuks,” said Dr. Çorlu.

On #Chora and its conversion to a mosque, beyond the technical issues about preservation, a point I have been insistently making on the creation of the modern #Turkish identity and the narrative that feeds it have to be taken into consideration. This narrative prevents Turkish… pic.twitter.com/dS6WjMM1j4

— Axel Bertamini-Corluyan (@AxelCorlu) August 21, 2020

“This bizarre narrative is so strong that many Turkish people believe they are descendants of Turkic peoples from Central Asia, even though historians have long pointed out the population imbalance between agricultural civilizations and nomadic peoples (i.e. multiple waves of nomadic migration occurred over millennia, but settled people outnumber them by a vast margin) and that the number of Turkic peoples entering Anatolia was definitely less than 10% of its population, and more likely to be even a smaller fraction. This is important to teach to people not because identity should be based on race, or dna, but because they process it this way,” said the Turkish-born professor.

“Unless this primitive, wrong-headed, and just wrong approach to Turkish identity is made to unravel, it is not possible for the majority of the Turkish people to truly, fully embrace their legacy, the legacy of their lands. When we have more people talking about being descendants of the Byzantines, Hellenistic synthesis, and the many native peoples of the land rather than claiming direct descent from Central Asia, we will have the beginning of a more inclusive, thorough construction of identity that prevents atrocities like this,” he said.

“And to make it clear again, I am never suggesting that connecting dna to identity is a healthy way of doing things. But this is how most people process it, and their perspective does change when they receive results. So it is one way of unraveling the Central Asian mythos. The healthier way would be through education and a thorough discussion of how artificially modern Turkish identity was created, of course. Until we achieve this, this never-ending hunger for conquest will not end,” the professor in Byzantine and Ottoman Studies continued.

When many Turkish people look at the Hagia Sophia or Chora, they see something that belonged to the “other,” something that their ancestors vanquished and conquered to create space for their existence. If they saw them, felt them as part of their own souls, their own identities, and realized that the Ottomans themselves were in many ways a continuation of the Byzantines, who were the continuation of older syntheses of the land, how different their approach to their own legacy would be. Nothing changes attitudes like “ownership,” the academic added.

“Friends, colleagues, acquaintances, interested people; thank you for such enthusiasm, I’m greatly encouraged. Just wanted to say that obviously there are many aspects I cannot squeeze into a thread. A proper article that explains my logic and covers other issues is on its way,” Çorlu concluded.