MESOPOTAMIA NEWS : THE LAST CHAPTER OF KURDISH WORKERS PARTY (PKK)
Deadly attacks stoke KDP-PKK tensions in Iraqi Kurdistan
Turkish Kurdish militants entrenched in Iraqi Kurdistan face mounting calls to leave the region after the killing of six members of the Iraqi Kurdish armed forces.
Mahmut Bozarslan@mahmutbozarslan June 16, 2021 AL MONITOR – DIYARBAKIR, Turkey — Tensions are flaring between the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), the main political group ruling Iraqi Kurdistan, and armed Kurdish militants from Turkey who are based in the region, rekindling fears of renewed intra-Kurdish fighting amid growing Turkish military pressure on the militants.
Lying at the core of the tensions are escalating Turkish cross-border operations against the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which has long used mountainous bases in Iraqi Kurdistan in its armed campaign against Ankara since 1984.
MESOPOTAMIA NEWS : SELECTED LANGUAGE & FORBIDDEN WORDS / DIE DIALEKTIK DER RE-ETHNISIERUNG DER MENSCHHEIT
Der Fluch der bösen Wörter
Wo statt der Dinge die Wörter für das Schlechte verantwortlich gemacht werden, lässt sich dieses nicht mehr bekämpfen. Über die neue Sprachmagie und ihre Tabuzonen.
Von Christoph Türcke 17 Juni 2021 FAZ
Worte können sehr böse sein und tief verletzen, aber das tun sie vornehmlich, wenn sie in bestimmten Situationen auf bestimmte Weise gezielt auf bestimmte Gruppen oder Individuen gerichtet werden. Seit das lateinische Wort für „schwarz“ (neger) nicht nur mit dunkler Hautfarbe, sondern nahezu automatisch auch mit Wildheit, Tierähnlichkeit, Zähmungsbedürftigkeit assoziiert wird, ist der Brauch, bestimmte Menschen mit diesem Wort anzureden, als menschenfeindlich zu meiden und anzuprangern.
Anprangern freilich kann man nichts, ohne es auch zu benennen. Daran zeigt sich: Worte sind nicht identisch mit ihrem jeweiligen Gebrauch. Man kann sie auch anders gebrauchen. Sie können abgrundböse sein, aber auch Abgrundböses brandmarken. Wer sie zu absoluter Eindeutigkeit zwingen will, verheddert sich. Das Wort „Mord“ ist nicht die Mordtat, es bezeichnet sie lediglich. Es kann zu ihr auffordern, wenn weitere Worte bejahend hinzutreten. Aber es deswegen aus der Sprache zu tilgen wäre absurd. Wie soll man Mord ahnden, wenn man ihn nicht benennen kann?
Unter der Überschrift political correctness erleben wir jedoch eine zunehmende Ontologisierung von Reizwörtern, als wären sie selbst gute oder böse Dinge. Die guten, etwa Diversität, gehören verstärkt, die bösen, wie das N-Wort oder das R-Wort (Rasse), eliminiert.
MESOPOTAMIA NEWS : OBAMA’S MAN FOR ISRAEL OF JEWISH ORIGIN Biden officially nominates Thomas Nides as ambassador to Israel
The nomination will now go to the Senate for confirmation.
(June 16, 2021 / JNS) U.S. President Joe Biden on Tuesday officially announced the nomination of Thomas Nides to serve as U.S. Ambassador to Israel.Nides, 60, has held prominent roles in the private and public sectors.
From 2010-2013, he served as the State Department’s Deputy Secretary of State for Management and Resources. As part of the Obama administration, Nides played a key role in the administration’s approval of an extension on loan guarantees worth billions of dollars for Israel.
MESOPOTAMIA NEWS : EUROPES PKK BOSS STATEMENT IN BRUSSELS – PKK ‘ready for dialogue’ with KDP: KCK board member
Karwan Faidhi Dri @KarwanFaidhiDri RUDAW
On June 5, two teams from a Peshmerga mine-clearing unit were traveling in the Amedi region of northern Duhok province. They came under attack and five were killed in possible rocket fire. The Peshmerga ministry blamed the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), saying their teams had fallen into a PKK trap on Mount Metina. The president of the Kurdistan Region called for a “limit” on the PKK in the Kurdistan Region.
The PKK denied they fired the fatal strike, but admitted to firing into the air, warning shots as the Peshmerga neared their position. The PKK is engaged in clashes with the Turkish army which launched two military operations against the PKK in northern Duhok province in April.
Relations between the PKK and the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), the ruling party in Duhok, have been tense for decades. The five Peshmerga deaths was the latest incident stoking fears of an intra-Kurdish war.
A senior official in a PKK umbrella organization said the group is “ready for dialogue” with the KDP.
“We want all the issues between Kurdish parties and organizations to be resolved through dialogue,” Zubeyir Aydar, a member of the board of directors of the Kurdistan Communities Union (KCK), told Rudaw in an interview two days before the Peshmerga were killed.
War between Kurds “is a red line,” he said.
The following is a translation of the full interview conducted on June 3, 2021. weiterlesen / click to continue
MESOPOTAMIA NEWS : ‘Authoritarian’ Turkey must take precedence over Russia, China in NATO summit – analyst
Jun 14 2021 07:52 Gmt+3 – AHVAL NEWS REPORT –
During Monday’s NATO summit, members of the alliance will most likely discuss, among other things, how they can deal with challenges posed by authoritarian powers like Russia and China. However, they must first deal with Turkey, an authoritarian state within NATO, wrote Blaise Misztal in The National Interest on Sunday.
Throughout his 19 years in power, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan convinced three U.S. presidents that his country was “crucial to achieving U.S. interests in the Middle East,” wrote Misztal, vice president for Policy at the Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA).
The Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations consequently came to believe that Erdoğan was a valuable partner for everything in the Middle East, from democracy promotion, helping fight the Islamic State, and countering Iran.
MESOPOTAMIA NEWS : WAKE UP ! SLEEPY JOE ! THE MEDITERRANEAN SHOULD BE ON JOE BIDEN’S MIND WHEN HE MEETS PUTIN
by Anna Borshchevskaya 19FortyFive June 14, 2021
Despite its consistent rhetoric toward Moscow, the administration has not yet demonstrated its strategic understanding that ceding too much operating space to Russia will hurt U.S. efforts to confront China.
As President Joe Biden is set to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin on June 16 in Geneva, there will be no reset, nor even a joint press conference. No doubt the latter bothers Putin, who uses these events as symbolic elevation of his status. It would appear the Biden administration has absorbed key lessons from his predecessors, Democrat and Republican alike, who sought to improve relations with Russia only to walk away disappointed. Yet the reality is less encouraging.
First, even without a joint press conference, a meeting is still a reward for Putin after a muted response to a series of Russian cyber intrusions and Kremlin-proxy aggression as domestic repression in Russia continues to grow. Despite bipartisan Congressional outcry, Biden gave up critical leverage by waiving sanctions against the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, Putin’s main geopolitical project in Europe. More fundamentally, however, Biden’s aim for a “stable, predictable relationship” with Russia, so he can focus more energy on China, suggests a misunderstanding of the Kremlin and its strategic calculus.
Putin prefers a degree of confrontation and conflict with the West to a stable relationship as it seeks accommodation and recognition as a great power with a “privileged” sphere of influence. But there is a deeper issue driving these demands. Putin rejects Western liberalism and seeks erosion of the US-led global order. To that end, he is looking not only to Europe but also the Mediterranean and the Middle East—what Russian rulers historically saw as a “vulnerable” southern underbelly. For the first time since 1972, Russia now has a major military base on the Mediterranean, and Moscow will continue to upgrade its regional military posture as part of Putin’s strategic global calculus of deterring the West.
MESOPOTAMIA NEWS RESULTS : Erdogan’s meeting with Biden more spin than substance
The two leaders’ first meeting as heads of state led to detailed discussions, but there were no breakthroughs.
Amberin Zaman AL MONITOR – June 14, 2021 – The long-awaited meeting today between Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and US President Joe Biden went pretty much as expected, with none of the big issues poisoning ties between the NATO allies getting resolved. The two leaders both said the 90-minute-long encounter on the margins of the NATO summit in Brussels had gone “very well” — Erdogan went as far as to claim that “We think that there are no issues within US-Turkey ties [that are unsolvable] and that areas of cooperation for us are greater than [our] problems.” However, Erdogan’s comments during a subsequent news conference offered little in the way of proof.
MESOPOTAMIA NEWS „MUST READ“ : Splits in Israeli Right led to fall of Netanyahu
June 14, 2021 by Jonathan Spyer JERUSALEM POST FOREIGN POLICY
Since the process whereby splits in the Israeli right have now resulted in the fall
of PM Netanyahu and the ending, for now at least, of Likud rule in Israel, I thought it might be an opportune time to repost this article of mine identifying the trend back in March. This is partly because there are few things that political analysts like to do more than saying ‘I told you so.’ But also I think the trends noted here remain relevant. I failed, of course, to see that Bennett would break his vow not to go with Lapid. Oh well.
Israelis go to the polls on March 23 in the fourth election since April 2019. Despite a general mood of public weariness, these elections promise to be something other than another stale rerun. A change, indeed, appears to be underway, which may result in a transfer of power. For the first time in Israeli electoral history, the main challengers to a Likud party prime minister’s continued reign will come from further to the right—not from the center or left.
MESOPOTAMIA NEWS „MUST READ“ : Splits in Israeli Right led to fall of Netanyahu
June 14, 2021 by Jonathan Spyer JERUSALEM POST FOREIGN POLICY
Since the process whereby splits in the Israeli right have now resulted in the fall
of PM Netanyahu and the ending, for now at least, of Likud rule in Israel, I thought it might be an opportune time to repost this article of mine identifying the trend back in March. This is partly because there are few things that political analysts like to do more than saying ‘I told you so.’ But also I think the trends noted here remain relevant. I failed, of course, to see that Bennett would break his vow not to go with Lapid. Oh well.
Israelis go to the polls on March 23 in the fourth election since April 2019. Despite a general mood of public weariness, these elections promise to be something other than another stale rerun. A change, indeed, appears to be underway, which may result in a transfer of power. For the first time in Israeli electoral history, the main challengers to a Likud party prime minister’s continued reign will come from further to the right—not from the center or left.
MESOPOTAMIA NEWS : The Economic Costs of Operation Guardian of the Walls
INSS Insight No. 1485, June 13, 2021 / ISRAEL By Manuel Trajtenberg & Tomer Fadlon INSS Insight No. 1485, June 13, 2021
The Israeli economy finally began to recover after a year of restrictions and lockdowns, when it was hit with the military operation in Gaza and the rioting in the Israeli cities with mixed Jewish-Arab populations. How much will the recent operation in Gaza cost the taxpayer? How do the costs of Operation Gaurdian of the Walls differ from the costs of Operation Protective Edge in 2014? And how is the experience of the COVID-19 crisis expected to lower the costs of the operation?
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