Archive | 2023/05/14

Przedstawia pierwszy turecki samochód elektryczny, woduje pierwszy turecki lotniskowiec, podnosi pensje o połowę. Erdogan idzie po wygraną

Przedstawia pierwszy turecki samochód elektryczny, woduje pierwszy turecki lotniskowiec, podnosi pensje o połowę. Erdogan idzie po wygraną

Marcelina Szumer-Brysz


Wnętrze Błękitnego Meczetu. (Fot. Cezary Aszkiełowicz / Agencja Wyborcza.pl)

Turcja przed wyborami: Chrześcijańskie mozaiki sprzed trzynastu stuleci? Zatynkować. Unikat w skali świata? Trzecia kadencja jest ważniejsza.

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– Bak, bak – zaczepia mnie w autobusie miejskim mężczyzna w średnim wieku, ubrany w narodowe barwy tureckie. Czerwona koszulka z półksiężycem i gwiazdą, takaż czapka. Podsuwa mi ekran smartfona, z którego przemawia Recep Tayyip Erdogan, turecki prezydent. Bez dźwięku, podziwiam zabawną pantomimę, mój towarzysz wniebowzięty.

– Wygra? – pytam. – Oczywiście! – odpowiada facet. Czekam na typowy w takich sytuacjach wykład o zasługach prezydenta, pewnie na ekranie zaraz zobaczę turecki samochód elektryczny, którego wielka premiera miała miejsce półtora miesiąca przed wyborami, a którym na trasy już ruszyli tureccy ministrowie, albo scenę z inauguracji pierwszego tureckiego lotniskowca, który właśnie zaczął służbę. Ale nie, facet ani myśli rozmawiać o wyborach. Pokazuje mi amerykańskiego poszukiwacza złota, potem ogromny grzyb z tropikalnego lasu. I nie przestaje się uśmiechać.

Mniej optymistyczny jest sprzedawca zasłon na sobotnim bazarze. Wzdycha, wzrusza ramionami, nie przekonuje go żaden kandydat – wierni wyznawcy Erdogana, podobnie jak zwolennicy jego głównego (jest jeszcze dwóch) kontrkandydata Kemala Kiliçdaroglu, na ogół ochoczo podejmują rozmowę, a partyjne barwy prezentują z dumą taką samą jak barwy klubów piłkarskich.

Wiem, na kogo nie zagłosuje starszy sprzedawca, gdy w uliczce pojawiają się dwie wolontariuszki z logo rządzącej AKP. Minę ma taką, że dziewczyny nie podchodzą. Upatrzyły sobie turystę, kupującego na sąsiednim straganie podróbki koszulek Hugo Bossa. Tłumaczy, że jest cudzoziemcem, nie może głosować, ale dziewczyn to nie zraża. – Dla każdego jest miejsce na spotkaniu z prezydentem. Nasz prezydent zaprasza każdego.

Wyciągnął rękę do Kurdów. Na chwilę

– Chyba że jest gejem, „krzyżowcem” albo wyborcą HDP – prycha Nursel, nauczycielka z Izmiru. Przez 20 lat głosowała na kemalistów, ale w ostatnich wyborach oddała głos na partię prokurdyjską. Gdyby jej były lider Selahattin Demirtas nie siedział w więzieniu, w wyborach prezydenckich zagłosowałaby na niego, bo jest pewna, że by wystartował i odniósł zwycięstwo. Zdaniem Nursel ani CHP, ani AKP nie mają oferty dla osób o liberalnych poglądach. Wieczne odwoływanie się do dziedzictwa Atatürka, to – jej zdaniem – trochę za mało, by zaskarbić sympatię wyborców, którym na sercu leżą prawa mniejszości i kobiet. Kurdyjscy deputowani zajęli się wszystkimi tymi problemami i umieścili je w programie wyborczym. Ale nie wiadomo, ilu kandydatów dotrwa do wyborów na wolności.


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Brian Mast: ‘Proud’ to be only congressman to have worn US Army and IDF uniforms

Brian Mast: ‘Proud’ to be only congressman to have worn US Army and IDF uniforms

MENACHEM WECKER


Rep. Brian Mast (R-Fla.) volunteering on a military base near Tel Aviv in January 2015. Credit: Courtesy.

“You gotta get your hands dirty,” he told JNS. “Complaining about what’s going on with the attacks in Israel is not the same thing as going there and helping.

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The anti-Israel activists draped in Palestinian flags in the tony Beacon Hill neighborhood who yelled at and taunted the U.S. Army veteran and his family in Boston’s Public Garden couldn’t have known that they’d be partly responsible for shaping one of Israel’s staunchest defenders in Congress.

But this wasn’t just any man upon whom they chose to pick.

“It’s not hard to figure out that I’m a veteran. I don’t have any legs, and I wear a hat that says ‘Army Ranger,’ so most people with half a mind can put two and two together,” Rep. Brian Mast (R-Fla.) told JNS.

At the time, Mast had retired in 2012 after a dozen years of service as an explosive specialist who lost both legs to a bomb in Afghanistan in 2010. He was studying at Harvard University, and he and his then-pregnant wife, Brianna, and their two sons (they now have four children) would go to the picturesque Public Garden in the evenings so the kids could ride their bikes and play in the grass.

The protesters, who showed up weekly or so, decided to yell things like “You’re the big Satan” and “You’re a pawn” at Mast, the congressman told JNS. Mast, who is Christian, hadn’t followed Israel closely at the time, although he saw references on the news.

Rep. Brian Mast (D-Fla.) Credit: U.S. House of Representatives Photo

The jeers represented the “first catalyst” for the congressman’s decision to connect much more deeply with the Jewish state.

“These people, who were out there to protest Israel, all of a sudden wanted to pick a fight with me, which is just fine. I don’t mind getting into verbal or physical confrontations with other people,” Mast, 42, a fourth-term congressman representing Florida’s 21st District, told JNS.

“It was the first time this fight had really ever been thrown at my feet in that way, where people were trying to drag me into what I was seeing in the news,” he said.

Mast found their verbal assaults hypocritical. He told JNS that he had said of the attacks on Israel in one of his Harvard classes, “If it was Mexico or Canada or some Caribbean country firing rockets into America, then guys like me would go and kill them, and every American would be proud of us for doing so.”

He came home after enduring the taunts one night and told his wife, “I don’t know what it’s going to look like, but I’m going to find a way, and I’m going to go and show my support for Israel. I’m going to go out there and find a way to fight against this hypocrisy.”

‘Complaining is not the same thing as helping’

The congressman is fairly active on social media, where he has often come to Israel’s defense. “I’m proud to be the only member of Congress who has worn both the uniform of the United States Army and the uniform of the Israel Defense Forces, and I’ll continue to stand for the strongest partnership possible between our two countries,” he tweeted earlier this month.

In May 2021, after Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) accused Israel of terrorism for defending itself against Hamas, Mast read dozens of examples of Hamas terrorist attacks into the Congressional Record. Two days later, he tweeted: “I served alongside the Israeli military after losing my legs, and so, it’s personal to me when Hamas attacks Israel and House Dems actually defends the terrorists.”

“In the military, we have a dark and morbid sense of humor.”

But that’s getting ahead of the story. Back in Boston in 2014, when “Operation Protective Edge” was unfolding in Israel, Mast had a philosophy that recognized the vast gulf between social media and real life.

“I’m not going to say I don’t participate in Facebook and Twitter and things like that. Sure, I do. That world is a virtual, fake world of not real work. And I’m not trying to take away from influencers, but it’s not real,” he told JNS. “Complaining about what’s going on with the attacks in Israel is not the same thing as going there and helping.”

“You gotta get your hands dirty. You gotta get involved in real life,” he added.

With his wife’s blessing, Mast contacted every advocacy group he could, including the Israeli consulate in Miami, to find a way to volunteer in uniform on an Israeli military base. He got his chance in January 2015, on a base outside Tel Aviv, “to show support for the freedom Israel represents throughout the Middle East and the world,” per his congressional website.

He arrived back stateside just in time for his wife to give birth to their third child.

‘Get my hands dirty’

The Masts have four children—all named for references familiar to those who grew up in the 1980s—Magnum (“Magnum, P.I.”), Maverick (“Top Gun” and the 1994 film “Maverick”), Madalyn (3-year-old Madeleine McCann, who was abducted in 2007) and Major (“me being in the military and looking for an ‘M’ name”).

Volunteering on the base near Tel Aviv was his first time in Israel. “I can’t sit here and pretend that I had this longstanding dream of going and walking the footsteps of where David killed Goliath or be baptized in this river. It wasn’t this longstanding dream for me,” he said. “When a fight is laid in front of me, I’m going to fight it. And I’m not going to fight it in a virtual way. I’m going to find a way to get my hands dirty and make a real tangible difference.”

“One of the most important things that I realized, as we were sitting there to have these Shabbat dinners, every family was waiting for a son or daughter or a grandson or a granddaughter to come home.”

In Israel, word spread quickly that a legless U.S. Army veteran was on the base, and people flocked to meet the celebrity visitor.

“I was working very hard, waking up very early every morning. Eating in the chow hall with the troops. Putting on my uniform. Going out there and working,” he said. “But it became somewhat of a national event. I’m not trying to oversell it. A lot of people read about it and knew there’s this injured American service member over here serving in our military. What’s this all about?”

An “endless stream” of “people with access” found its way to him. “I had visits with Yitzhak Rabin’s family,” he said, referring to the former Israeli prime minister and defense minister who was assassinated in 1995. “I had people coming from other bases.” He visited Beit Halochem, House of the Warrior, “their place for wounded warriors like myself.” He played wheelchair basketball and shot pool with fellow injured soldiers. “Had that exchange, that fellowship with them,” he said.

He connected particularly with Israeli colleagues who had also been bomb techs (in Yahalom). “There’s immediate kinship because bomb tech is a very small world of people,” he said. “Working with some of these people and realizing that we had served with some of the same units throughout the years in different places.”

And on weekends, he saw families host “lone soldiers,” young people in the IDF who don’t have family in Israel. They invited him to join them on visits to Yad Vashem and elsewhere.

“One of the most important things that I realized, as we were sitting there to have these Shabbat dinners, every family was waiting for a son or daughter or a grandson or a granddaughter to come home for Shabbat,” Mast said. “That was really one of the biggest ways that I realized how much service over there touches every single family—unlike the way that it does here in America, where we have a very small percentage of people that serve.”

That taught him the most important lesson that he took away from Israel. “They don’t war. They don’t want to have rockets fired at them. They don’t want to go into shelters. They don’t want to hear sirens,” he said. “They want their kids to grow and have families and survive. As much as I hope all four of my kids serve in the military, I don’t want to see them have to go to war.”

Mast credited former President Donald Trump (he supports him in the upcoming presidential election, although he said he remains friends with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis) with moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, “something so simple, but that so many politicians were so afraid of for so many years.” He also praised the 2020 Abraham Accords and called the Iran nuclear deal, which the Trump administration nixed in May 2018, “just absolute garbage.”

Bringing military service to the Hill

Asked how his service in the military—for which he earned a Bronze Star Medal and a Purple Heart, among other commendations—informs his work on the Hill, Mast told JNS: “I guess it does in every way.”

“You can’t separate the person and their experiences in life from the way that they advocate for policy.”

One doesn’t join the military if one worries about personal sacrifice or is motivated by personal gain.

“If you’re thinking about what you’re going to get out of it—how you’re going to get rich or famous, a book deal or a movie or whatever, it doesn’t work that way,” he said.

Mast goes after things “tenaciously,” he told JNS, “just as hard as I would go after anything in combat.” That doesn’t always make him many friends, “but that’s the way I do it.”

The best way to tell the difference, generally, between colleagues who have and have not served is their sense of humor, according to Mast.

“In the military, we have a dark and morbid sense of humor. We can make fun of the fact that I don’t have any legs or the ways that I lost them, or where I can tell someone to stick a prosthetic foot or a host of different things that it seems like everybody else in the world gets all bent out of shape for and doesn’t realize how to take a joke,” he said.

“The best jokes are the most inappropriate,” he quipped.


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Murals Across Israel Show Solidarity With ‘Women, Life, Freedom’ Protesters in Iran

Murals Across Israel Show Solidarity With ‘Women, Life, Freedom’ Protesters in Iran

Shiryn Ghermezian


Hooman Khalili speaking at the unveiling of one of his mural in Netanya, Israel. Photo: Michael Stevens

A fifth mural was recently completed in Israel that features aspects of both Israeli and Iranian culture while also showing support for the nationwide, anti-government protests led by women that is currently taking place in Iran, the Iranian designer behind the art told The Algemeiner.

The murals produced, funded and designed by Hooman Khalil in collaboration with local Israeli artists include in Hebrew, English and Farsi the phrase “Women, Life, Freedom,” which has become the unofficial slogan of protesters in Iran who took to the streets after the September 2022 death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish woman who died while in the custody of Iran’s morality police. Each mural also depicts different women killed by Iranian authorities, including Amini. Khalili’s first mural was unveiled in Jerusalem in January and was completed by Israeli artist Ana Kogan. Khalili has since designed murals in Nazareth, another in Jerusalem outside the Museum for Islamic Art and two in Netanya.

“All of these murals are ultimately doing one thing: they are reminding the world that the Persians have been the friends of the Jews for 3,000 years. I do as much as I can to unify both cultures in one mural,” Khalili, 48 told The Algemeiner. “In all the murals you’ll see the flag of Jerusalem, because all my murals are pointing back to Jerusalem, you’ll always see a woman riding a lion with a sword in her hand, because it’s a women-led revolution, [and] you’ll always see the flag of Iran with a lion with a sword in his hand, with the sun rising in his back, [which is] the Zorastrian symbol.”

Khalili was born in Iran but left his birth country with his mother when he was 3 years old. His father remained in Iran and the artist has not seen him in 45 years. He currently lives in California and works as a creative director for a boutique hotel. In November of 2022, he helped create a mural in San Francisco, California, in support of the Iranian protesters. A picture of the mural went viral on social media and was seen by the Vice Mayor of Jerusalem Fleur Hassan Nahoum, who then contacted Khalili and asked him to design murals in Israel in support of the people of Iran fighting for human rights.

The first mural in Netanya, unveiled in late March, depicts Niloufar Aghaei, a nurse whose eye was deliberately shot out by the Iranian regime as punishment for joining the anti-government protests. The bird covering Aghaei’s eye in the mural is the nightingale, which is the official bird of Iran. Iranian Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi visited the mural during his recent trip to Israel.

The latest mural in Netanya, done by Israeli graffiti artist Benzi Brofman and unveiled on May 1, features an image of Ghazal Ranjkesh, a protester whose eye was also shot out by Iranian authorities. In that mural, the bird covering Ranjkesh’s missing eye is the hoopoe, the national bird of Israel.

The next mural will be unveiled in June in the Druze village of Beit Jann in northern Israel, Khalili told The Algemeiner. His goal is to complete 18 murals in total across Israel that unify the Israeli and Iranian cultures, and show solidarity with the protesters in Iran. Three of the already completed murals also say “it’s time for the Esthers of the world to rise up,” a reference to the biblical Jewish Queen Esther, who lived in ancient Persia and risked her life to save the Jewish people.

“This is a woman-led revolution,” Khalili said about the anti-government protests taking place in Iran and it’s connection to Queen Esther. “If you think about the story of Esther, her bravery, the way she was able to put her life on the line to save the Jews — this is a time for Israel and Iran to become friends again, for the woman of the world to lead, like they did during the time of Esther, and for all of us collectively to give a voice to the Persian people who have no voice.”


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