Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan threatened to challenge Greece’s sovereignty over several Aegean islands, sparking fresh tensions between the two countries, according to the Nordic Monitor organisation. This comes despite a recent visit by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to Greece, where he pledged to improve relations.
Fidan, in a letter to parliament, claimed that existing treaties regulating the status of the islands, including Mytilene, Chios, Samos, Icaria, Lemnos, and Samothrace, could be considered null and void if Greece does not fulfill its obligations. He cited the 1923 Lausanne Treaty and the 1947 Paris Peace Treaties, which established the islands’ demilitarized status.
Turkeyargues that Greece has violated these agreements by militarizing the islands, posing a security threat. Fidan warned, “The violation of the non-military status of the islands poses a serious threat to the security of Turkey and the region.”
This renewed threat follows similar statements from Fidan’s predecessor, Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu, in February 2022. Çavuşoğlu threatened to revoke Greece’s sovereignty over the islands if they continued to be militarized.
The situation in the Aegean Sea remains complex, and these renewed claims from Turkey raise concerns about potential escalation and threaten to undermine efforts to improve relations between the two countries.
In response Greece argued that its sovereignty in the islands is not conditional on any obligation whatsoever, including any obligation to demilitarize them. In a letter to the UNSC on July 28, 2021 Maria Theofili, the Greek ambassador to the UN, challenged the Turkish claims.
“Greece rejects all the Turkish allegations contained in the aforementioned letter with regard to the purported ‘material breach of its demilitarization obligations’, as well as the allegations that Greece’s sovereignty over the Eastern Aegean islands is conditional on their demilitarization, as totally unsubstantiated, arbitrary and in bad faith,” she said.
Fidan’s recent letter to parliament surfaced following criticism from the opposition in December, accusing the government of remaining silent in response to what it deemed provocative statements made by Greek officials regarding an islet called Zourafa (Ladoxera) in the Aegean Sea, the status of which is disputed by both sides.
In October 2023 both Turkey and Greece issued Notice to Airmen (NOTAM) warnings in the Aegean around the Zourafa islet, each claiming sovereignty in the area. Turkey’s military drill in the region between October 30 and November 2, accompanied by the issuance of a NOTAM, prompted Greece to issue a counter-NOTAM, asserting that part of the area covered by the Turkish NOTAM overlaps with Greek sovereign territory.
Athens claimed the Turkish NOTAM was null and void as it intruded into Greek airspace. Ankara responded by issuing a new NOTAM stating that the gun-firing area lies within Turkey’s sovereign territory and asserting that the initial NOTAM remains in effect.
Turkey and Greece frequently confront each other, primarily due to the failure to establish FIR (Flight Information Region) demarcation lines in the Aegean Sea, stemming from conflicting claims over territorial waters.
Turkish President Erdogan visited Greece on December 7, 2023, six years after his last visit, in what was seen as a charm offensive in diplomacy amid Turkey’s troubled relations with the United States. During the visit, the two sides signed the Athens Declaration on Friendly Relations and Good-Neighborliness, in which they stressed their commitment to fostering friendly relations, mutual respect, peaceful coexistence and understanding.
Veteran far-left campaigner ‘Gaza George’ Galloway declared both Labour and the Conservatives “are two sides of the same backside” who got “well and truly spanked” as he won the Rochdale by-election.
Former Labour MP Galloway thanked God for his victory and warned establishment parties in the UK that it isn’t just “bitterly angry” Muslims supporting his ideas, but millions of others as well as he said Keir Starmer’s Labour Party is “on notice”.
The hard-left populist, rebranded from ‘Gorgeous George’ for having been best known for his complex and very active love life now calls himself ‘Gaza George’ and has since made a career out of his very devotion to Palestine and representing a series of seats across the country by appealing to the interests of Muslim voters. He won a comfortable 39.7 per cent of the vote in Thursday’s by-election (special election), pulling comfortably ahead of the party of government the Conservatives who achieved 12 per cent, and Labour who got just 7.7 per cent for a candidate they’d disowned.
Rochdale now becomes the fourth parliamentary seat to have been represented by Galloway in 35 years, most of them following his expulsion from the Labour Party over his opposition to the war in Iraq, including meeting with Saddam Hussein twice, and advising British soldiers to refuse to follow orders.
That this election was a referendum for the people of Rochdale on their views on Gaza could hardly be disputed. Winning candidate Galloway opened his victory speech by remarking “this is for Gaza”, and is reported to have published campaign literature directly targeting Muslim voters. Among appeals noting “The people of Gaza don’t have a vote in this election, you do”, a Galloway-branded flyer read:
To the voters of the Muslim faith in Rochdale
A’Salaam o Aleukum [peace be unto you],
The last 130 days have shocked the ummah [global Islamic community] to its core… I, George Galloway, have fought for Muslims at home and abroad all of my life… have always come to the side of the people of Palestine in their agony… together, we can send a messadgfe that will be heard in all four corners of the world…
Meanwhile, both the Labour and Green Party candidates were dropped by their own parties after campaigning had begun for comments about Islam, Israel, Palestine, and the Gaza conflict. Reform UK, on the other hand, tried the opposite tactic, calling on the public to vote for “Rochdale not Gaza”, and pointing out that Galloway has never made bones about being “a friend of Hamas, the terrorist group”, and was rewarded with just six per cent of votes for his troubles.
Speaking at the count where his victory was announced in the early hours of Friday morning, Galloway — who will now be able to sit and speak in Britain’s Parliament for the rest of its term, probably until the autumn of this year — made clear what he believed his victory meant for British politics. He said:
Keir Starmer, this is for Gaza. And you will pay a high price for the role you have played in enabling, encouraging, and covering for the catastrophe currently going on in occupied Palestine in the Gaza Strip…. I want to tell Mr Starmer above all that the plates have shifted tonight… Keir Starmer’s problems just got 100 times more serious than they were before today.
This is going to spark a movement, a landslide, a shifting of the tectonic plates in scores of Parliamentary constituencies, beginning here in the North West… Labour is on notice that they have lost the confidence of millions of their voters who loyally and traditionally voted for them generation after generation.
Addressing claims about his campaigning style, Galloway insisted it wasn’t just Muslims who voted for him in the election. He went on:
I’ve heard some of the narrative being spun around this election result this evening. Yes it’s true that every Muslim is bitterly angry at Keir Starmer and his misnamed Labour Party, but you would be very foolish if you didn’t realise that millions of other citizens of our country are too. Keir Starmer and Rishi Sunak are two sides of the same backside, and they both got well and truly spanked tonight.
In terms of the near future, Galloway said he was putting the town councillors of Rochdale — who are overwhelmingly members of the Labour Party — “on notice” and said he would be campaigning to replace them with a “grand alliance” at the forthcoming local elections in three months. In terms of the national elections, Galloway said Labour Members of Parliament who had not conformed to his views on Palestine across the country were also “on notice” and he said he would be standing candidates against them, adding he would stand aside in cases where other candidates had a better chance of unseating a sitting Labour MP.
Responding to the timbre of campaigning in the Rochdale by-election, Reform UK made a substantial complaint about the behaviour of some in Rochdale, stating “the behaviour of certain candidates and their supporters in this contest fell very far short of this our traditional democratic standards”. The party cited death threats made — with an arrest already made during the campaign over them — as well as “racist abuse… daily intimidation nd slurs” and the blocking of candidates from hustings.
George Galloway is a great orator and very charismatic. But he is using that ability in a way that will divide our country. pic.twitter.com/V5UCKfPtVq
The party said in their statement: “In one incident, Reform UK business supporters were threatened with a firebomb attack if they distributed our leaflets. Menacing behaviour was a feature of the entire campaign, including outside polling stations on the day of the election itself. In this ugliest of contests, we are also concerned by the sudden increase in the size of the postal vote, which has jumped from 14,000 to some 23,000 in this constituency since the last general election.”
The result of the election, they said in a statement published before the results were even announced, should “act as a stark wake up call to those in power – and the entire electorate. This is Britain. We are supposed to be a beacon of democracy. This shameful contest has been more characteristic of a failed state.”
Party founder Nigel Farage, who had once campaigned alongside Galloway during the 2016 referendum campaign — Galloway’s support of the Brexit referendum may be seen as a throwback to the last century, when opposition to the European project was a primarily left-wing concern — also expressed his feelings on the election. He said on GB News: “George Galloway is perhaps the best orator I’ve ever heard… is enormously powerful, very charismatic, and even though I disagree with him profoundly on things, on a one-to-one basis I struggle not to like him.
“But I’m afraid he’s now using that power, that ability, that personality in a way that will divide our county horrendously. I’m old enough to remember what sectarian politics looked like in Northern Ireland, and I’m afraid it has come to England.”
George Galloway is a demagogue and conspiracy theorist, who has brought the politics of division and hate to every place he has ever stood for Parliament. His election is a dark day for the Jewish community in this country, and for British politics in general. pic.twitter.com/lbMwtEi65E
— Board of Deputies of British Jews (@BoardofDeputies) March 1, 2024
Farage’s remarks beg the question whether Galloway’s return to politics at this time where the Middle East is such a present feature of UK debate could leave the door open to a faith-based Islamic political party emerging. The United Kingdom would be following, in that case, the example of other European nations with large Muslim migration populations which have established their own Islamic or minority-rights parties, such as Denk in the Netherlands or a host of others, contesting elections with varying levels of success.
In many cases, these parties struggle to gain traction because established parties, for instance Labour-equivalent Social Democrat or Green Parties already do the job for them and have well-established party bureaucracies that can be expensive to replicate. This may not be the case in the United Kingdom, however, where Keir Starmer’s leadership of Labour has been characterised in part by a concerted effort to pull it away from the era of antisemitism scandals of the previous leader, Jeremy Corbyn.
Balancing the views of many moderates in the United Kingdom that antisemitism is wrong and attacks on Israel are a manifestation of those feelings, with the views of Muslim voters in the United Kingdom who have for many years been pretty reliably Labour supporters but whose own views on Israel-Gaza may be more sympathetic towards Palestine has proven to be a political tight-rope act for Starmer. The dropping of his own party’s candidate for this election over his spouting antisemitic tropes in private meetings is a strong example of the challenge facing the left-wing leader, as by taking the moral high road there he also doomed his party to lose the election and near-guaranteed Galloway’s win.
What would you say about a country that in 2023 saw 75 murders and 153 rapes every day for a grand total of 55,000 rapes and 27,375 murders in one year? I should add that authorities say that many of these crimes go unreported, so those figures are undoubtedly higher. With that said, I think it would be fair to describe this country as a literal hell on earth. This country is South Africa, once called the jewel of the African continent.
White farmers and other Whites are getting beaten, raped, and murdered there on an almost daily basis. Too many live in fear for their safety and lives. In addition, many are seeing their farms confiscated as happened in another Godforsaken country called Zimbabwe.
I guess the logical question becomes, where is the world outrage and concern that we saw for years over apartheid in that land? The harsh reality is, is that the world’s media has pretty much chosen to ignore it. I sense the reason for this attitude is because South Africa is now a Black-run country, and a significant number of the victims are white. Do you really expect the Media to report that this country has gone down the tubes ever since Black rule took over and that most of the other countries in Africa who received its freedom from the “evil” colonizers are now not fit to live in? No folks, it doesn’t fit the scenario.
To the media and most governments around the world, Black lives matter, illegal aliens’ lives matter, Muslim lives matter, but, White lives? You people are on your own!
My question to all these fools is what are you going to do when the barbarians and rabble are at your gate? The way things are going, it is just a matter of time.
In an interview with John Anderson last fall, Douglas Murray delivered a passionate denunciation of a plan by Muslim groups to host the so-called ‘Million Man March’ for Palestine on Remembrance Day.
“The soul of England, the soul of Britain, is about to be trampled on very, very visibly by people who are gleeful in their trampling,” he said with fierce contempt. “They have defaced and defiled all of our holy places, and I think that I know the British soul is awakening and stirring with rage at what these people are doing. These people came into our house—many of them broke into our house illegally. Many of them were never wanted here. They have come here; they have betrayed all of our attempts at hospitality; they’ve spat in our faces; and now they want to trample everything we have underfoot. No. No.”
It was magnificent to watch—provocative eloquence of that sort is rare these days. Murray’s analysis of the fifth column fomenting a rise in antisemitism unseen since the middle of the last century and the attitude of the anti-Western migrants who have arrived to enjoy the benefits of a civilization many detest is entirely accurate. But I couldn’t escape the feeling that Murray’s conclusion was too optimistic. A half-century into our society-wide experiment in secularization, I wonder if there are enough defenders to save the British—or Western—soul, if we indeed still have one. Murray and his co-belligerents are doing their best, but it feels, increasingly, like a last stand.
That feeling grew when we saw 300,000 pro-Palestine activists march through central London on Armistice Day, one of Britain’s biggest days of mass protest. A month later, a Daily Mail poll taken in the wake of a viral TikTok trend in which young people praised a letter by Osama bin Laden condemning the West found that one in five younger Americans has a positive view of bin Laden, scarcely two decades after 9/11. A staggering 12% of 18-29-year-olds said they had a “somewhat positive view” of bin Laden, while 8% said they had a “completely positive view.” Three in ten members of Generation Z said that bin Laden’s views were a “force for good.”
It is one thing to see Islamist immigrants in Western capitals spontaneously celebrating the slaughter and rape of Jewish families. That was grimly predictable. Muslims in London and elsewhere celebrated the 9/11 attacks, too. But to see kids praising bin Laden after he masterminded a plot to send planes filled with innocent people into towers filled with innocent people? Perhaps they are too young to remember the bloodcurdling, desperate phone calls made from the planes and towers to loved ones by Americans who realized they were going to die. Or the searing sight of the ‘jumpers’ who leapt from the towers rather than be burned alive. Or the 343 firefighters and first responders crushed when the towers collapsed.
Bin Laden did that, and twenty years later, he’s not only trending but trendy. Is it malignant stupidity? Western self-loathing? Both? To find such views in those who ‘came into our house’ is one thing. To discover that ‘the call is coming from inside the house’ is something else entirely.
Add to that the fact that conservatives and progressives are currently locked in a battle over what the soul of the West actually is. Conservatives increasingly bemoan the fact that the impact of the West on the world frequently has very little to do with ‘freedom’ or ‘democracy,’ which made up our core identity throughout the Cold War. Our primary exports are now LGBT ideology and abortion on demand, with wealthy Western countries engaging in a pernicious form of ideological neo-colonialism to force feticide, feminism, and a raft of LGBT ‘rights’ on countries with more socially conservative cultures. Many of us do not believe in what is being pushed globally under our flags and bemoan the insidious influence wielded by our representatives around the world. Is that now the ‘Western soul’?
Progressives, meanwhile, have successfully captured the institutions in most Western countries, but suffer from a strange schizophrenia in which they believe the West is evil while Western neo-colonial bullying of developing countries serves as the primary method of spreading their ideology worldwide. They hate America, but it is America demanding that other countries redefine marriage. They hate the UK, but the LGBT agenda is being forced on poor countries under the Union Jack. Progressives won ‘the long march through the institutions,’ but their self-loathing has only increased. Now, they march with the Islamists. Let’s call it the ‘long march of the lemmings.’
The weird rage of progressives proves that everything they achieve only makes them more miserable. Even when once-great empires hoist the rainbow flag, their hatred of the civilization they call home only burns hotter, and they insist that everything is somehow worse. Gender ideology is elevated to state dogma; still, they insist that a ‘trans genocide’ is underway. Their victories leave them more bitter than before because, upon attaining them, the God-shaped holes in their hearts remain utterly empty. But because they do not realize that the evil within us must be conquered, they call good evil and evil good and continue to the next fruitless crusade.
I write none of this to discourage defiance in the face of these collective forces. As I’ve noted before, there is perhaps no better time to be a counterrevolutionary. History moves behind the veil, and I often think of Leo Strauss’s critique of Edmund Burke, in which he advocated principled action even against enormous odds:
[Burke failed to understand] the nobility of last-ditch resistance. He does not consider that, in a way which no man can foresee, resistance in a forlorn position to the enemies of mankind, ‘going down with guns blazing and flags flying,’ may contribute greatly toward keeping awake the recollection of the immense loss sustained by mankind, may inspire and strengthen the desire and the hope for its recovery, and may become a beacon for those who humbly carry on the works of humanity in a seemingly endless valley of darkness and destruction.
I am not urging despair when I observe the ‘long march of the lemmings’; I am merely noting that I see precious few headed in the other direction at the moment. But as the great English poet Arthur Hugh Clough wrote so many years ago:
California school districts may continue to enforce prohibitions on teaching Critical Race Theory (CRT) and requirements that they notify parents about their children’s gender confusion while the case works its way through the courts, thanks to a judge’s ruling.
Last August, left-wing law firm Public Counsel filed a lawsuit against the Temecula Valley Unified School District (TVUSD) over its ban on CRT, the doctrine, rooted in Marxism, that race is a “socially constructed (culturally invented) category that is used to oppress and exploit people of color” through American institutions. The suit claimed that the policy against far-left ideology violated California children’s “right to education and to receive information,” as well as state learning standards that mandate discussion of racism and “inequality.”
Also last summer, the nearby Chino Valley Unified School District (CVUSD) Board of Education adopted rules requiring parents to be notified of a student’s request to identify with “a gender other than the student’s biological sex,” including the desire to use different pronouns or a different name, or to use locker rooms and/or restrooms that “do not align with the student’s biological sex.” The policy sparked death threats from irate LGBT activists, as well as pushback from state officials.
Now, the Los Angeles Times reports that Riverside County Superior Court Judge Eric Keen denied a request for a preliminary injunction against enforcing the CRT policy, rejecting arguments that it would create confusion about what can and cannot be discussed in classrooms. “It seems clear to the court that a person of ordinary intelligence would have a reasonable opportunity to know what is prohibited as what is prohibited is set out specifically in the resolution,” he said.
Keen also took the opportunity to affirm the parental notification policy, explaining that it applies equally to all students, is “gender neutral,” and “does not expressly single out transgender or gender-nonconforming students, as it applies to any student’s request to change their school official or unofficial records.” Temecula, Chino Valley, and Murrieta Valley have all adopted similar policies.
Studies find that more than 80% of children suffering gender dysphoria outgrow it on their own by late adolescence, and that even full “reassignment” surgery often fails to resolve gender-confused individuals’ heightened tendency to engage in self-harm and suicide — and may even exacerbate it, including by reinforcing their confusion and neglecting the actual root causes of their mental strife.
The danger of keeping parents in the dark about such situations is grimly illustrated in the story of Yaeli Martinez, a 19-year-old to whom “gender transitioning” was touted as a possible cure for her depression in high school, supported by a high school counselor who withheld what she was going through from her mother. The troubled girl killed herself after trying to live as a man for three years.
In recent years, these issues have helped fuel a parent backlash that has been credited with Republican gains in states like Florida and Virginia, whose current respective governors have taken leading roles in fighting back.
Foreign volunteer battalion in the Wehrmacht. Soldiers of the Free Arabian Legion in Greece, September 1943 – Wikimedia Commons , Bundesarchiv, Bild 101I-177-1465-16 / Schlickum / CC-BY-SA 3.0
It wasn’t the entirely non-white cast of Founding Fathers that brought down Google’s Gemini AI, but the diverse Nazis. The AI image generator demonstrated an unwillingness to depict white people in any role, but the one that outraged everyone was the black Nazi soldiers.
Multiple users had tested the AI and found that it produced entirely “diverse” galleries of pictures when asked to show the Founding Fathers, an “American woman” or an “Australian woman”, but then they asked Google’s AI to show what a Nazi German soldier looked like.
And he or she was very diverse indeed. “Google Chatbot’s A.I. Images Put People of Color in Nazi-Era Uniforms,” the New York Times fussed. Google paused the image generation capabilities to train its AI to make fewer black Nazis.
But the irony is that while the Founding Fathers were not particularly diverse, there were indeed black Nazi soldiers who were part of the Muslim Free Arabian Legion of Hitler’s Mufti. And they appear in historical photographs that were not generated by AI. The Muslim African soldiers were not representative of the typical Nazi German soldier, but they were quite real.
Unlike the racially diverse Founding Fathers.
The Nazi coalition brought together Latinos, Asians and Arab and African Muslims together to conquer the world and exterminate everyone they did not like. The Nazis were not “white supremacists”, like the DEI movement they believed that some groups were bad and others good. They judged people entirely by race, leading them to exterminate millions of Jews while at the same time focusing on outreach to the Tibetans and to Arab Muslims in the Middle East.
Gypsies, many of whom, like the Jews, would appear “white” to a DEI consultant, were massacred while Josephine Baker, an African-American singer, partied with the Nazi elite in Paris (while working for the French Resistance), and Chiang Wei-kuo, the son of Chinese nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek, served in the Wehrmacht before becoming a Taiwanese general.
Most of the peoples persecuted by the Nazi regime, Jews, Slavs and gypsies, look “white” by DEI standards while the Nazis embraced “non-white” Asians, Africans, Latinos and Arabs.
The Nazis were not white supremacists: they were Aryan supremacists believing that they were the descendants of a mythical ‘Asiatic people’ who had migrated across the world leaving traces of themselves everywhere. That’s why Hitler sided with the Japanese, whom he believed were ‘Aryan’ over the Russians who were ‘Slavs.” It’s why he glamorized the Muslim occupation of Spain over the Spanish whom he despised. He backed Japan over the U.S. because he believed that the Japanese were racially superior to the racially mixed inferior Americans.
Most of Hitler’s racial bets proved to be disastrously wrong. German soldiers were better on the offensive than Russian soldiers, but the Russians had better staying power. America’s ingenuity, based on a non-hierarchical multiculturalism that brought together soldiers, scientists and workers from different groups, broke Japan and then went on to wreck Germany. Finally, though he did not live to see this, Jewish militias defeated his Arab Muslim allies in Israel.
WWII was not a struggle between “white supremacy” and “diversity”, but between two diverse coalitions: one based on racial essentialism and one that was not. Nazi diversity, like the DEI movement, reduced people to their race. It classified some races as desirable or undesirable and assumed that membership in a race would predict the future performance of any individual.
The Allies did not make alliances based on their estimate of the racial qualities of peoples, but for reasons of strategy and convenience, which allowed them the greatest possible access to talent and flexibility. They were certainly not free of racism, but neither were they obsessed with it. At least until now when DEI is the latest fashionable ideology of racial essentialism to take hold of corporate and liberal elites who use it to define every element of employment and life.
DEI demands diversity within a framework of racial quotas and collective hostility every bit as rigorous as anything out of Nazi Germany. Organizations pledge that the racial essentialism of DEI is at the center of everything they do. That is why Google’s Gemini AI and its counterparts forcibly promote diversity in the form of racial quotas for the present, future and even the past.
Unlike black English queens or Founding Fathers, black Nazis rub DEI the wrong way. The point of diversity is not pluralism but to depict some races as noble and others as ignoble. Hamilton or Thor can be black, but not Hitler. It’s an approach that Hitler would have approved of in reverse.
And yet the diverse Nazis offer a warning about confusing racial essentialism with diversity.
A racial mythos, whether it’s Aryanism or the equally fictional Wakanda or La Raza, end the same way with racism, victimhood, violence, glorification, collectivism and then collapse. The myths of an glorious ancient past, a boundless future and the supremacy of the race serve as a cover for bad decisions, internal abuses and disguise the incompetence of its leaders.
The Nazis believed in the racial inevitability of the Thousand Year Reich while DEI believes in the Right Side of History. (Much as the Communists believed in their own inevitability.) But if history tells us anything, it’s that it isn’t inevitable. Propaganda, whether it’s made by Leni Riefenstahl, Sergei Eisenstein or AI, creates cultural illusions that fall apart at the touch of reality. Leaders and artists ought to know better than anyone that the future is made by individuals and yet they’re the most likely to believe that they are the vessels of the zeitgeist.
Diversity is at the heart of it the racial essentialism of the collective over the individual. And central to it is the idea that racial morality is also individual morality. Minorities, in DEI, can’t be racist. They also can’t be Nazis. But anyone who believes in race uber alles can be a Nazi.
Just ask the black Muslims who fought for Hitler, AI or DEI.
