CAIR suing Greg Abbott

That's the big story, to me, out of Strangeabbott declaring the Council on American-Islamic Relations, and the Muslim Brotherhood, as "transnational terror organizations" then directing his butt-flunkies at DPS to open an criminal investigation against both.

That latter is clearly a page out of Donald the Demented's playbook.

The former? First, since Strangeabbott is not a president of a country (contra Tex-ass exceptionalism of the Texas nationalist type of wet dreams) is nugatory, first of all. 

It's also baseless, even per Donald the Demented's State Department:

Neither the Muslim Brotherhood nor CAIR is listed on the U.S. State Department’s list of terrorist groups.

There you are. 

It's also bullshit:

Abbott also said the investigation will target people or groups “who unlawfully impose Sharia law,” which he said violates the Texas Constitution.

Because these groups don't do that. 

Speaking of? This part:

Murtaza Sutarwalla, president of the Muslim Bar Association of Houston, spoke at the same news conference and rejected Abbott’s “repeated claims that the Sharia law is banned in Texas.”

Is true. 

Federal law allows the use of private religious law between consenting private religious individuals and authorities.   

Strangeabbott is either legally ignorant himself, playing off others' ignorance, or some combination. 

Ditto for him attempting to fuse and conflate CAIR and the Muslim Brotherhood. 

Here's the bottom-line legal angle:

Abbott’s declaration opens up an array of potential constitutional issues, said Emily Berman, a professor at the University of Houston Law Center. Limiting property purchases based on viewpoints and religious affiliation could prove problematic under the First Amendment and the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause. 

“What is the motivation of these designations?” Berman said. “Is it about their religious views? Is it about their viewpoints on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which would be another First Amendment red flag? You can’t discriminate on the basis of someone’s viewpoint.” 

The designation also raises due process concerns, Berman said, given that it’s not clear how groups can formally challenge the designation. 

The U.S. Secretary of State holds the power to designate a group a foreign terrorist organization, though they must notify Congress and publish the designation in the Federal Register. An organization can appeal that designation within 30 days of that publication. 

It’s not clear whether such a process exists at the state level. In the order, Abbott said he consulted with Freeman Martin, Texas Department of Public Safety director, and the state’s Homeland Security Council to determine whether to make the designation as required under state law. Whether groups can appeal the state-level designations is unclear. 

It’s possible CAIR, for example, could challenge the law in court by arguing the state is overstepping its bounds by making laws around national security matters, Berman said.

Period. End of story. 

The second story? 

As I told Kuff in commenting on his Off the Kuff story about Abbott's original proclamation, we all know what this is about: Palestine and Palestinians. The dog that IS barking, repeatedly, in Texas and that Kuff refuses to write about. And, Kuff and other Democraps who refuse to talk about the barking dog only encourage mouthbreathers like Strangeabbott and Legiscritter Cole Hefner.

Happy Thanksgiving, you bigotry and genocide fellow traveler. 

See, Abbott is one of many modern American conservative cafeteria Catholics who have approached modern fundagelical Protestants on many issues, including Israel and Zionism, even though Rome, like old mainline Protestant churches, is officially amillennial on the book of Revelation. 

Per the bullshit above, though, Abbott would turn a blind eye toward a Kiryeas Joel in Tex-ass. 

RIP Ed Brayton

I already said RIP to the co-founder of Freethought Blogs at my Philosophy of Socratic Gadfly site but wanted to speak here as well, with expansion of some of the political ideas I wrote about there, both where I agree and where I disagree.

Basically, the political issues of disagreement reflected some of the same tribalism of Gnu Atheism, with which Ed had a conflicted, but yet enabling, relationship. Let's dig in.

I've long since stopped following "movement" skepticism or most "organized" atheism, especially anything that tilts Gnu-ish. I knew Brayton had been in somewhat declining health for some time, indeed, even from when he split off from the Freethought Blogs he co-founded with P.Z. Myers.

And now I see he died the early part of August, three days after his last blog post. Unfortunately, his dying reportedly was not as pain-free as he had hoped.

My take? He'll be missed to a degree, but not as much a degree as many paeans would have you believe.

I wrote about problems at FtB when Ed was still large and in charge. Tolerance of social justice warriors, above all Stephanie Zwan and "husband" Greg Laden, which sent Laden the rabid pit bull after me when I joked, with roles reversed, of him and his "wife."

The big thing I have against Ed, per the link above, is this, and that's Ed getting into bed with PZ in the first place. And, the loonies he let stay there far too long. And the hypocrisy a year before that. Per the first link in the graf, he and PZ were both cheap asses to the late Leo Lincourt in not paying his surely reasonable price to make FtB better as a website. And, I have no doubt Leo's price was reasonable, and that FtB would have looked like what Patheos, and Ed's eventual "Dispatches from the Culture Wars," did look like.

Probably what I'll miss most about him is what most of us miss about ourselves later in life: The could have beens. That would mainly be, in Ed's case, a FtB that never had P.Z involved in the first place. Can't say you weren't warned, Ed, from this small corner of the blogosphere; as I noted, from the start, you were turning over too many of the keys to PZ. Had that been the case, Greg Laden and Stephanie Zwan might not have been part of FtB, as well, and the problems never would have reached that point. In other words, a secular humanist version of Panda's Thumb or something.

Patheos wound up kind of fulfilling that, but not really. The Patheos "nonreligious" vertical doesn't have some of the broader secular humanism and civil liberties focus Ed did himself, and that he surely originally intended for FtB. Nor does it have a personal "face."

Leo and I used to talk about looking for the sweet spot in the center of a triple Venn diagram between non-Gnu atheism, or a modernized secular humanism, on one circle, a broad-focus skepticism that looked beyond Skeptics™ (I first met Leo online in the old Skeptics' Circle blog circle), and a non-conspiratorial leftist politics. Ed wasn't lefist, but his civil libertarianism would have halfway checked the box on the third circle. He could have checked, pretty much, the first and second circles had he done things differently. Picture something like the Venn at left, which is a snapshot of my takes on philosophy, atheism and secularism, and true skepticism.

But, he had his good points, and he wasn't fully a Gnu, and he called out Islamophobia in people like Dawkins and Harris, which is why some weren't fans of him at all. And, in today's day and age, calling out Islamophobia is a big deal. Contra some full-on Gnus who disliked him, his battles against things like Islamophobia were battles for social justice. And fact based. If you don't like being challenged that Islamophobia is real, and not just an excuse word for Islamic bad behavior, you can go fuck yourself. And, that too, I think was part of what was being him running away from PZ again.

I also, per this piece, apparently had disagreement with Ed on something related to the Seth Rich conspiracy theory. Can't remember what it was, but I think it was twosiderism, in that he believed not only Trump wanted Putin's help, but Putin gave it. Nope.

It was probably related to his thinking being confined to within the duopoly parties, and being a Dem tribalist there, as he showed in discussing American exceptionalism. And, that's one of the areas I want to expand on. Joe Biden is just as much an American exceptionalist, in his own way, as is Donald Trump. Especially at the national level, most members of both duopoly parties are.

If I am correct, all the faults of the Green Party aside (and all the things I reject about the Libertarian Party), it's a shame that a sharp thinker couldn't work more outside the duopoly box in general, and on particular things like the 2016 election, outside the twosiderism box.

Guess Ed hadn't familiarized himself with Idries Shah.

This is clearly an Idries Shah issue:

Yes, yes, Electoral College straitjackets and other issues, but I'll continue to look for third sides, either on duopoly politics in general, or on things like Russiagate that transcend duopoly, and third party, lines.

I've said before that being an atheist is no guarantor of either moral or intellectual superiority. Ed was above average on both, but again, nothing was guaranteed.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali doubles down on her Islamophobia

Ayaan Hirsi Ali/Guardian photo

Islamophobic wingnut Ayaan Hirsi Ali's "Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation" is probably even more over the top than Ayaan Hirsi Ali's two memiors. That’s not to mention that I'm skeptical of people who feel they need to write multiple memoirs before the age of 45. “Nomad: From Islam to America,” was nothing more than a PR screed. That’s not to mention that her first memoir, "Infidel," was not a memoir at all, but a huge pack of lies, as Alternet notes.

I read "Infidel" before all the untruths were exposed, and before she had gone so far down the Islamophobia road of lumping all Muslims together. I found her interesting, and semi-compelling. But, my eyes were eventually opened.

She's pretty much owned up to most of those mistruths, but not told why she told them in the first place. We'll see if she, beyond basic Islamophobia of calling all Muslims the equivalent of the Devil's spawn, gets manifest in Nomad.

That said, three reviews, from pandering to critical, will illustrate the problems with the new book.

First of all, it’s interesting that the Daily Beast first quotes Bernard Lewis, himself a cultural Christianist. It’s also interesting that the Daily Beast, generally thought of as a more liberal site, would run this fawning of a review. Then, that reviewer, Tunku Varadarajan, carefully elides around her actual childhood history vs. her original story about it. Given the background of Varadarajan, currently at the Hoover Institution, no surprise, though.

Nicholas Kristof ain't much better, and perpetuates his own stereotypes, especially on the "three problems" he claims Ali identifies in Islam Substitute "Buddhist" or "Hindu" for "Muslim," or for "African" as an ethnos (my neologism to replace "race" for super-ethnic level groupings) and imagine what people would say. I'm just surprised he didn't work in more explicit neoliberal platitudes, or his pointillist paintings of a bright neoliberal world abroad that, like actual pointillist paintings, fade into random dots on a close-up look.

The LA Times review gets it right: That she's lumping all of Islam together. Kind of like Gnu Atheists do with Christianity as well. (Surprisingly, Gnus haven't called all Jews fundamentalist and I'm not sure why.)

Given her avowed atheism, Hirsi Ali's solution comes as a surprise. 

"The Christian leaders now wasting precious time and resources on a futile exercise of interfaith dialogue with the self-appointed leaders of Islam should redirect their efforts to converting as many Muslims as possible to Christianity," she advises.

Bingo on the "surprise." It would be like d'Holbach or Diderot decided that Martin Luther hadn't worked and they needed to write a book about the reformation they thought Christianity needed.

And, it clearly puts her in the cultural Christianist world along with Lewis and others.

I disagree with Brandeis disinviting her from a speaking gig, while acknowledging that it has the right to do that. But atheist and secular humanist groups should not invite her in the first place.

Molly White: Why we can't have nice things in Texas

Rep. Molly White official photo with Texas Tribune photo

Just 10 days after freshman Texas Representative Molly White decided to be deliberately and highly inflammatory (pun lead-in highly intended) for the seventh annual Texas Muslim Capital Day, with a Facebook post that basically "invited" Muslims in Austin to pledge allegiance to Israel, we have the fallout, as shown in the picture at left.

Early Friday morning, an Islamic center in Houston was severely burned. Helped out by a ... deliberately and highly inflammatory accelerant. With the additional fact that this fire was started on a Friday, which is, of course, Muslims' holy day.

Fortunately, it happened early in the morning, before anybody was there for prayers, or the educational center had students. Also fortunately, the Houston Fire Department knocked the fire down before it could total the complex.

Fire officials caution that it could have been caused by a homeless person seeking warmth, as an alternative possibility to being a deliberate arson. However, I find the homeless theory not very likely. It was in the upper 40s for the low Friday morning, at or slightly above average.

Update, Feb. 16: An arrest has been made. It's too early to say whether we have someone with an anti-Muslim motive, or a homeless person, as a 55-year-old, a bit scruffy, and riding a bike, could theoretically fit the homeless angle, though (and not to sound stereotyping) homeless people don't often seem to own bikes. According to Houston's ABC station, he does have some previous criminal record, beyond trespassing that would be associated with homelessness. One Tweet claims that the Houston Fire Department has reported him as "transient," but I've not seen that in news stories.

I mean, "Christian activist" Christine Weick asked for a mosque to be captured. Burning one isn't far removed.

And, how could any "patriotic" American not take offense at the rabble-rouser Muslims at the capital, and try to force them to change their ways, or suffer punishment? Indeed, how could anybody why thinks we actually have 51 states in the US not think otherwise?

Right, Molly? Per my Tweet to her:

@MollyWhiteTX Last I checked, Israel's not part of the United States.
— SocraticGadfly (@SocraticGadfly) January 29, 2015

As for how Molly White played out the denouement to Texas Muslim Capital Day, which I blogged about here?

White eventually responded to critics who accused her of being unethical and ... inflammatory:

"As law-abiding American citizens, we all have the privilege and the right to freedom of speech granted to us by the First Amendment," she wrote. "... As a proud Texan and American I fully denounce all terrorist groups or organizations who’s [sic] intent is to hurt and destroy the great state of Texas and our nation.”

Let's see if she means it.

Given that, I've already posted on her Facebook page, asking her if she will indeed call on all Texas non-Muslims to denounce anti-Muslim violence. Including a retired Houston firefighter who Tweeted (via Kos) that firemen should let the site burn.

Somehow, I doubt she will.

As of Feb. 16, she has yet to comment about the Houston fire on either Facebook or Twitter, though she had time to have her staff take down my comment on her Facebook page. And, she had time after Muslim Capital Day to cut a video complaining about being misunderstood, though she's not found time to cut any similar video since the fire.

If this turns out to be a homeless man letting a warming fire get out of control, even then, White could still express her condolences to the community of the Islamic center. A lot of people in her boat would find that good PR, if nothing else.

That said, Texans who know history know that this is nothing new. The Texans that spat on, jostled, and otherwise assaulted Adlai Stevenson shortly before JFK's visit were the progenitors of the likes of Molly White. Tea partiers have been here for a long, long time. With a long, long history of violence.

Where are the moderate Muslims? About everywhere but in the #TxLege

They're all around. Contra people who claim they're not.

But, that's not stopping wingnuts, in the general public, in the media, and in the Modern Wingnut Hall of Fame Texas Legislature, above all, Molly White, per my Tweet, from continuing to see Sharia Agenda 21 everywhere. (Doorknob, I love being snarky.)

@MollyWhiteTX Last I checked, Israel's not part of the United States.
— SocraticGadfly (@SocraticGadfly) January 29, 2015

First, have a certain percentage of Muslims committed vicious attacks, sometimes against other people for their religion, and claiming the reasons for their attacks are based on Islam?

Absolutely.

Besides those Muslims, there's plenty other people who are, or claim to be, motivated by religion for gruesome behavior.

So are people, in part motivated by Hinduism, who invented the practice of suicide bombing in Sri Lanka.

So are "good Jews" like Meir Kahane, and the Dr. Baruch Goldstein he inspired to massacre Muslims.

So are allegedly peaceful Buddhists killing Muslims in Burma.

So, too, were the Christians of the Crusades, including those that committed cannibalism. (No, not an urban legend.) And, I could dig up white nationalism groups in America that have claimed Christian impetus, too.

Or, just mention the Ku Klux Klan.

As I have emailed and Facebooked various people, multiple websites recounted all sorts of moderate Muslims condemning the Charlie Hebdo attacks.

Like here, and here.

Going beyond one email I sent out?

A number of Texas media outlets are in or near what the New York Times, the Houston Chronicle (warning — autoplay video) and other media have called the most ethnically diverse county in Texas, if not the nation, too, I'm sure there's plenty of Muslims in a county 19 percent Asian and 21 percent African, with a few of those being modern African immigrants, too. City-Data, which is usually out of date on some such things, lists two Muslim worship centers in the county. There's probably more than two.

And, the media, and and viewers, listeners adn readers in greater Houston, and to its immediate west-southwest, could probably find plenty of moderate Muslims within them.

That said, this attitude is by no means isolated.

All you have to do is look at those in attendance at Texas Muslim Capitol Day. Like the Muslims that wingnut state Rep. Molly White wanted to take an oath of allegiance to the US Constitution, when she obviously is violating the spirit of her own oath of allegiance, running over the First Amendment like fishwrap.

As well as seeming to think that Israel is part of the United States.

It's clear that a lot of people like to wear blinders.

Did you know, Molly or others, in your fearmongering about Sharia, that in Kiryas Joel, New York, since you're so Israelophilic, ultraorthodox Jews have been allowed to do the Jewish equivalent of Sharia?

It should also be noted, per the relevant link, that this year was the seventh such Texas Muslim Capitol Day. It's not like this is a "Sharia Surprise" sprung out of nowhere.

Oh, and like the Christian activist from Michigan who proclaimed Jesus' name over the Capitol as though conducting an exorcism, and now wants Franklin Graham to ... well, to kidnap a mosque, there's plenty of immoderate Christians around, too.

That said, as I Tweeted, doesn't Christine Weick seem vaguely like Sarah Palin after dipping into the meth jar?

As for CAIR? No, it's not perfect. It has, in the past, skirted at the edges of terrorist related connections, but it is not a terrorist group, and eventual sealing of documents in the Holy Land Foundation legal case means the US government doesn't see it as such.

And, I'll take Wikipedia on CAIR over ultrazionist Jews or teaparty fundamentalist Christians trying to redefine it.

Another #SamHarris fail: #Muslim profiling by #TSA at airport

Sam Harris is, more and more, becoming a parody of a scientist, or certainly, a parody of a social scientist. He talks about his secular liberal friends, but between his Islamophobia and his cluelessness about human nature and free will (not to mention his cluelessness about philosophy and his practicing of scientism), I'm surprised Faux News hasn't given him a gig yet; after all, his "they look Muslim and so they scare me" is the same schtick that helped get Juan Williams booted from NPR, then welcomed with open arms at Faux.

Having read his latest argument for Muslim profiling, which is largely and easily shot down by Bruce Schneier to the satisfaction of most people not named Sam Harris and his pseudo-liberal Gnu Atheist fellow travelers, I think I have to agree with Facebook friend Michael McRae:

the more I read of Harris, the more I think he develops his opinions half baked based on how he feels things should be rather than how they are.

And, I'll add that he's willing to stack the deck, too. Anybody who is supposed to be as educated as he is, and will claim with a straight face, as he did in "The End of Faith," that Buddhism is just a psychology clearly is cutting corners. (And, no, don't try to claim that I'm wrong; whether an individual soul or a "life force," if something metaphysical is being reincarnated based on metaphysical guiding principles, it's more than just a psychology.)

But, back to the argument between Harris and Schneier. First, based on previous emails, Harris seems to whine that it's bad pool for Schneier to have brought up Tim McVeigh or the Unabomber. And why? AFTER 9/11, we had the tax protester Andrew Joseph Stack in Austin, Texas, highly akin to the likes of McVeigh, fly a private plane into the Austin IRS office. Before 9/11, we had the Libyans bombing the Lockerbie plane for nationalistic reasons, albeit not while flying.

And, of course, as Harris  knows but refuses to rationally discuss, the religiously Hindu Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka, not Muslims, invented the modern idea of suicide bombings. Here's his irrational dismissal:

And I am not proposing a mere correlation between extremist Islam and suicidal terrorism. I am claiming that the relationship is causal. There are many ways to see this, and not too many ways to credibly deny it (though Robert Pape keeps at it by skewing his data with the Tamil Tigers).

So, it's causal. But, it's not ONLY causal for extremist Muslims. We just happen to be the U.S., with huge numbers of airplanes, not Sri Lanka.

That said, Harris is, arguably, either clueless or deceived about the reality of American airport security in general and the Transportation Security Agency in particular, as Schneier readily points out:

 Your intuition on the efficacy of an airport profiling system is wrong.  The psychology of security is complex, and there is a great deal of of research about how our brains systematically get security decisions wrong.  This is an example of that.  Profiling at airports gives us less security at greater cost.

Harris then tries to conflate behavioral and ethnic profiling, only for Schneier to bust him again:

You can disagree, but I assure you that the Israelis understand the difference between ethnic profiling and behavioral profiling.  Yes, they do both together, but that doesn’t mean you can confuse them. 

Beyond the competency level of the TSA in general is the American idea of solving problems with technical fixes rather than spending money on human operations. We could possibly do real profiling, like Israel, but the U.S. Congress would refuse to spend the necessary money to do that intense of personal screening albeit while not profiling on religion. Let's also not forget that, again speaking of people, the NSA possibly, and the CIA possibly, could have prevented 9/11. The NSA could have done that with other cases, if it had the people to pay for all of the data sorting that's needed. Harris and Schneier both appear not to focus on this issue, but it's an additional part of the puzzle.

Anyway, back to the looking Muslim. Anybody who has followed revelations about al-Qaeda in general, and who knows that what Harris is getting at is "looking Arab," also knows that Osama bin Laden was recruiting non-Arab, non-Arab-looking Muslims for exactly this reason. And, as far as names falling under "sounding Muslim"? Jose Padilla didn't look Muslim and "Jose Padilla" doesn't sound that way. Neither does "Richard Reid."

Worldwide, off the top of my head, I'd say that a solid one-third of Muslims are of non-Arab ethnicity, to a degree that they wouldn't look Arab. I include Indonesians, Uighurs in China, Turks in Turkey and Turkic people in central Asia, sub-Saharan blacks and more.

And, because Islamophobia runs so strong and deep among A-list Gnu Atheists, Sam Harris' vapid maunderings show, or hint at, the degree of intellectual bankruptcy among Gnus. It's a long read, but, if you want to see how clearly Harris refuses to admit he's wrong, consistently moves goalposts and other things, read his whole blog post.

To put it another way,  he's engaging in what Dan Dennett has repeatedly, in other areas of human mentality, called "folk psychology." And, as Dennett also noted, folk psychology is often wrong. (Of course, Dennett himself is a Gnu who lied about why he and Richard Dawkins devised the word "bright," but that's another story altogether.)

More proof Sam Harris is a #neocon

Anders Breivik, self-photo

I've blogged before about how famous "Gnu Atheist" Sam Harris, with the intensity of his Islamophobia, how that seeped into his book "The (IM)Moral Landscape," including authors in his bibliography and more, are clear signs he's some sort of neoconservative. (His stance on other aspects of moral issues, outside of Islamophobia, kind of gives tangential credence to that, too.) I blogged about P.Z. Myers trying to claim Harris isn't a religious conservative, which Zed continues to refuse to accept.

More circumstantial proof is now in. Harris tries to defend Norwegian bomb/shooting suspect Anders Breivik against claims he's a Christian fundamentalist.

Here's an extract from Breivik's 1,500-page manifesto that seems to be pretty clear evidence he's a fundamentalist.

When I initiate (providing I haven’t been apprehended before then), there is a 70% chance that I will complete the first objective, 40% for the second, 20% for the third and less than 5% chance that I will be able to complete the bonus mission. It is likely that I will pray to God for strength at one point during that operation, as I think most people in that situation would….If praying will act as an additional mental boost/soothing it is the pragmatical thing to do. I guess I will find out… If there is a God I will be allowed to enter heaven as all other martyrs for the Church in the past. (p. 1344)

If a Muslim bomber/shooter said that, Harris would be mad-dog foaming at the mouth.

Instead?

Here's Harris trying to explain this all away:

(T)he above passages would seem to undermine any claim that Breivik is a Christian fundamentalist in the usual sense. What cannot be doubted, however, is that Breivik’s explicit goal was to punish European liberals for their timidity in the face of Islam.

Harris then goes on to show how he and Breivik have further neocon backgrounds.
I have written a fair amount about the threat that Islam poses to open societies, but I am happy to say that Breivik appears never to have heard of me. He has, however, digested the opinions of many writers who share my general concerns—Theodore Dalrymple, Robert D. Kaplan, Lee Harris, Ibn Warraq, Bernard Lewis, Andrew Bostom, Robert Spencer, Walid Shoebat, Daniel Pipes, Bat Ye’or, Mark Steyn, Samuel Huntington, et al.
The last four are clear neocons, sometimes virulent. So is Lewis. Kaplan's on the fence. Warraq? Has other issues at times. I've not read too much of the others.

Sam Harris, you have now fallen into an even lower circle of any Dantean secular hell consignments that could exist.

Update: Andrew Sullivan uses his old term "Christianist" for people like Breivik. That said, without naming names, he has a word or two for the Sam Harrises of the world:

A pseudo-believer, he nonetheless favors the arch-authoritarianism of the Old Catholicism rather than contemporary Protestantism (just like the atheist neocons). He loathes all transnational institutions and reads at times like an incarnation of Richard Hofstadter's brilliant description of the "pseudoconservative". He is also Christianist in the new way. There was a time when the extreme Christian right in America was anti-Semitic; now the extreme right is fanatically pro-Israel as a vanguard against the real foe, Islam. And not Islamism, but Islam. They have long since dispensed with that critical distinction, leaving George W. Bush's scruples in the dust.

Sully, while I disagree with you a fair amount on some things, I couldn't have said that one better myself.

Scooter Libby is nuts about Turkey

And, not in a good sense.

While I agree that Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan needs some degree of eye kept on him vis-a-vis "Islamist" issues, Libby's history telling is selective. The constitutional reforms had been pushed long before Erdogan came to power. Northern Cyprus? A reaction to EU and US one-sidedness toward Greece.

What Libby doesn't like isn't that, but a once-pliant "client state" flexing its muscles, all because of a clusterfuck he supported and lied about. (Speaking of that, his end-of-column tagline has not a word about his criminal history, or his not-officially-charged-but-criminal-in-spirit history.)