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Several years ago I visited a synagogue in Istanbul, one of the few remaining in all of Turkey. It had been firebombed a few weeks earlier – in response to some recent incident between Israelis and Palestinians. But because of security and a thick outer wall, it was relatively unharmed. Inside, ten elderly, eccentric Jewish Turks were gathered, the bare number needed for a minyan. We spoke for a short while about what it was to live as a religious minority in a big Muslim country. But I will never forget the atmosphere in that tiny congregation – wary, but...

Campaigning in Renfrewshire, he said the nationalists want an SNP vote in the general election in order to "force" a second poll. Launching the SNP's "women's pledge", Nicola Sturgeon said this election was "not about independence". Meanwhile the Lib Dems set out plans for green laws and the Scottish Conservatives focused on jobs. As the penultimate weekend of campaigning got under way, SNP leader Ms Sturgeon joined female activists and actor and campaigner Elaine C Smith in Glasgow to launch the party's women's pledge, which commits the SNP and its members to delivering policies that promote equality... As part of...

A future Labour Government is committed to outlaw the scourge of Islamophobia by changing the law and making it an aggravated crime, according to the Party’s Leader Ed Miliband. “We are going to make it an aggravated crime. We are going to make sure it is marked on people’s records with the police to make sure they root out Islamophobia as a hate crime,” Miliband told the Editor of The Muslim News, Ahmed J Versi in a wide ranging exclusive interview. “We are going to change the law on this so we make it absolutely clear of our abhorrence of...

One of the more interesting aspects of this flood of human misery is that it is not entirely spontaneous. Jihadi groups are doing their best to encourage it. ... That would not be surprising. In 2004 Europe agreed to pay Muhammar Gaddafi four billion pounds a year in exchange for a promise to halt people smuggling to Europe. Experts have also drawn links between the massive rise in would-be migrants and a so-called ‘deal in the desert’ struck by Tony Blair in 2004 – which saw the late Muammar Gaddafi agree to crack down on human traffickers as well as...

One of the messages the EU heads of state and government are expected to deliver at their extraordinary summit today (23 April) is that the Union cannot absorb any more mass arrivals of migrants, as they risk undermining it economically, and destroying it politically. The meeting will take place today at 1600, following public outrage after 900 migrants died on Sunday, when their boat sank on its way to Europe from Libya. Diplomats said that the summit will come up with four main messages. The first is that the EU is ready to save lives. Indeed, leaders are likely to...

The world’s newest microcountry wants to become its foremost tax haven. Liberland, which sits on 2.7 square-miles of land along the Danube River between Serbia and Croatia, was founded earlier this month and plans to have only voluntary taxes. "We don’t want the state to take money from the people," Vít Jedlička, a native of Prague and Liberland's new president, told Business Insider in a phone interview. "We want to have voluntary taxes." Elected into office by a three-person committee, Jedlička says he started Liberland to “turn the concept of a state upside down.” After working as a financial analyst...

[This is from the International Edition of SCMP] China has won the bid to co-produce a multibillion ($3Billion) long-range air and missile defence system in Turkey, in what is its largest and most advanced arms sales to a NATO country. The Turkish defence minister announced the decision to approve the US$3 billion bid by China Precision Machinery Import and Export Corp, rejecting rival offers from Russian, US and European firms. The winning Chinese FD-2000 system beat the Patriot, the Russian S-400 and the French-Italian Eurosam Samp-T, it was announced on Thursday. [snip]

Turkey's push to carve out an independent foreign policy and purchase arms from countries outside of NATO is raising concerns among members of the defensive military alliance, Emre Peker reports for the Wall Street Journal. "Turkey is recasting itself as a nonaligned country in its rhetoric, which is making NATO very uncomfortable," a Western official in Brussels told the WSJ. Ankara's decision to purchase missile-defense technology from China, as opposed to from NATO member states, is the most visible break between Turkey and the rest of the NATO bloc. Turkey chose to purchase from Beijing due to a matter of...

THE BBC has backed down and given Ukip leader Nigel Farage his own TV slot to answer audience questions after an Express.co.uk investigation discovered Thursday's debate was a political fix. He will take audience questions in a 30-minute programme called Election 2015: Ask Nigel Farage. The discussion, held in Birmingham, will air after the News at 10 and will be chaired by journalist Jo Coburn. It will be held at the same time as a Question Time special featuring the Tory, Labour and Liberal Democrat leaders who will take turns answering questions from the same audience in Leeds. A Ukip...

TEL AVIV – Egypt is accusing Turkey of providing more than 10,000 Turkish passports to members of ISIS, the Islamic State, to facilitate travel of fighters across the region. An Egyptian intelligence official who asked not to be named told WND his country delivered a report to the U.S. documenting the astonishing claim. The official further charged that Istanbul is serving as the “headquarters” for ISIS planning. “Turkey continues to allow free passage to Iraq and Syria to IS fighters,” the official added. If the Turkish passport charge is true, it would present a worldwide ISIS travel threat. Already, there...

A couple of years ago it was reported that Turkey was helping fund the building of a $100 million dollar mega mosque in Lanham, Maryland. In fact Erdogan visited the mosque when he was here in May of 2013, promising to come back for the opening. Well that time has apparently arrived and now Erdogan and Obama will be together at the mosque for the big opening ceremony: ANADOLU AGENCY – The presidents of Turkey and the U.S. will open the Turkish-American Culture and Civilization Center in Maryland, Turkey’s foreign minister said Sunday. Mevlut Cavusoglu, on a three-day visit to...

Turkey, via their Deputy Prime Minister, is putting the word out on the street that it is open to a restoration of ties with Israel, even acknowledging that it is NOT Turkey’s place to criticize the recent Israeli election: snip Wow. The admitted refusal to criticize Israel over the election is definitely a change of pace for Turkey. I mean, when has Erdogan ever missed an opportunity to openly bash Israel? He was just ripping Netanyahu in January for just showing up to the Paris march against ‘radical Islam’, accusing him of killing 2500 Palestinians in the war last year....

Turkey has criticised United States Secretary of State John Kerry for suggesting that negotiations would have to be opened with President Bashar al-Assad to end the conflict in Syria. Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu told the state-run Anatolia news agency on Monday that all Syria's current problems, on the fourth anniversary of the start of the uprising in March 2011, were caused by Assad’s government. "What is there to be negotiated with Assad?" Cavusoglu was quoted as saying at the end of his visit to Cambodia. "You are going to have what [kind of] negotiations with a regime that has killed...

A large international conference of Holocaust deniers recently took place in the heart of London, Britain's Daily Mail reported on Saturday. "This is the biggest and most significant meeting of Holocaust deniers that Britain has ever seen. It is a very worrying development," the paper quoted Gerry Gable, an expert on the extreme Right who aided the news outlet's undercover investigation of the event, as saying. The event was held under a veil of secrecy at London's Grosvenor Hotel in a room draped with the Union Flag. A spokesman for the hotel said the room booking was made online and...

EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini arrives in Cuba today (23 March) in a bid to spur sensitive talks aimed at normalizing ties with the Communist island state. The visit comes as previously icy relations between Cuba and the West are thawing, following the dramatic rapprochement between Havana and Washington over the last few months. […] In 2014, the EU launched its normalization process with the Americas’ only communist nation to encourage the country to pursue reforms allowing for private initiatives without having to change the one-party political system. The negotiating sessions earlier this month, initially scheduled for January, had...

Sixteen EU states have said products made by Israeli settlers should be marked in shops so that European consumers can decide whether to boycott them. The group - which includes France, Italy, Spain, and the UK - made the appeal in a letter to EU foreign relations chief Federica Mogherini on Monday (13 April). They said “EU-wide guideline on the labelling of settlement produce/products … is an important step in the full implementation of EU longstanding policy in relation to the preservation of the two-state solution”.

Posters telling Muslims not to vote in the election were plastered across an area of Cardiff yesterday. They read: 'Democracy is a system whereby man violates the right of Allah.' Posters were stuck on lampposts and bus stops across the Grangetown suburb telling the Muslim electorate: 'Islam is the only real workable solution for the UK'. Cardiff Council have begun removing the posters, dubbed 'chilling' and 'threatening' by locals. The full message on the poster reads: 'Democracy is a system whereby man violates the right of Allah and decides what is permissible or impermissible for mankind, based solely on their...

The commander of the US army in Europe has warned that Nato must remain united in the face of a "real threat" from Russia. "It's not an assumption. There is a Russian threat," Lt-Gen Frederick "Ben" Hodges said. "You've got the Russian ambassador threatening that Denmark will be a nuclear target if it participates in any missile defence programme. And when you look at the unsafe way Russian aircraft are flying without transponders in proximity to civilian aircraft, that's not professional conduct." Gen Hodges spoke to the Telegraph on the sidelines of a military debriefing after an exercise to move...

Just like with Germany-in-general (and Gunter Grass in particular) Sweden's obsessive liberalism -especially regarding minorities/immigration- could be understood as enduring societal guilt for their forefathers' close collaboration with the Nazis while cowardly claiming to be 'neutral'... Sweden's role as Nazi Germany's key iron ore supplier has been dismissed -as Swiss banking often was- as mere 'commercial' transactions, but it's hard to explain-away new information in a just-released book detailing how the Swedish government assisted the Wehrmacht's invasion of neighboring Norway by offering Sweden's national railways to ferry troops and equipment north, which were then used to defeat the British at Narvik (leading...

The depth of Greece's financial woes have been laid bare as official figures showed the country has fallen further into the red following the election of its Leftist government. Greece's primary budget surplus, which excludes its debt interest payments, shrunk to just over €1bn during January and February, compared to €3.17bn over the same period in 2014, according to figures from the Ministry of Finance.