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On 25/09/2019 at 17:42, Monkeys Fist said:

Naga Munchetty 'breached BBC rules' with Trump comments https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-49825570

 

This is fucking bullshit. 

 

 

More bullshit about the above bullshit. 

BBC gives more detail on Naga Munchetty ruling https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-49837511

 

 

 

 

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2 hours ago, ewerk said:

When you’re linking to the tweet I don’t think there’s any need for the ‘apparently’. ;) 

 

I mean, it's so insane that I can't actually believe he said it. I want to believe his account was hacked or something.

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Part of me wonders if Trump putting the whims of one US citizen over that of justice and his country's relationship with a long term ally may encourage the people who think that we're going to get some kind of awesome US trade deal that we're really just going to be shat upon from a great height. But it probably won't.

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In an outburst unusual even by his standards, President Trump explained one reason why he could not regard the Kurds as long-term partners: their failure to help the US and its allies in the Normandy landings.

“The Kurds are fighting for their land,” he told reporters. “As somebody wrote in a very powerful article today, they didn’t help us in the Second World War, they didn’t help us with Normandy as an example . . . But they were there to help us with their land, and that’s a different thing.”

In spirit, he seems to have been making a technical point about the difference between a longstanding alliance, such as the West’s with Turkey, and short-term co-operation with countries or local forces with which the West has a passing common interest

 

His comments were immediately ridiculed, however, with critics pointing out that as of D-Day the Kurds, a landlocked, mountainous people living in the Middle East and Central Asia, were not well endowed with Marines and landing-craft.

Moreover, Mr Trump was wrong in any case. The Kurds did help the British, US, and Allied efforts in Normandy, albeit obliquely.

 

The raw facts were pointed out quickly by Akil Awan, an academic at Royal Holloway, University of London: the Kurds played a key role in the British occupation of Iraq during the Second World War, fighting alongside British troops who stepped in to block a pro-Nazi coup.

Britain had been given responsibility for Iraq after the First World War under the Sykes-Picot agreement and, while the country won notional independence in 1932, London continued to keep a close strategic eye on it. It maintained a military presence, particularly on the RAF Habbaniyeh air base west of Baghdad, where fox-hunting British officers were supported by the so-called Iraqi Levies

 

This force, first raised to support British rule at the end of the First World War, contained Iraqis of all sects and ethnicities but was dominated by minorities, particularly Assyrian Christians, Kurds and Yazidis.

When a pro-Nazi politician seized power in 1941, the British invaded from Basra in the south. RAF Habbaniyeh was surrounded by pro-Nazi Iraqi forces, but the RAF, supported by contingents of the Iraqi Levies, broke out, pushed back and eventually reversed the coup.

 

Dr Awan estimates that by 1942 Kurds made up 25 per cent of the fighting force of the Levies, and certainly in records from a year later ten of the 44 companies were said to be Kurdish.

The Iraqi front was, of course, a long way from Normandy, and Hitler’s crack Panzer divisions were not involved. But there was a reason why Iraq was so strategically important: oil was the main driver of western interest in Iraq from 1918 onwards.

Not for nothing did Britain demand — and win — control of the key northern Iraqi city of Mosul, which Sykes-Picot initially gave to French-controlled Syria. With major wells unveiled in the 1920s in nearby Kirkuk, the city the Kurds regard as their spiritual capital, the Kurds came to play a central role in world history for the first time, even if it was one from which they benefited little.

The Americans and the British did benefit however, not least as they fuelled the landing craft on June 5, 1944

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Holy shit. I know that theory has been going around and Trump’s sort have been encouraging it but how is the President of the USA making that sort of accusation not the main headline on every news show? 

Is his presidency so fucked up that this doesn’t even register?

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On 10/12/2019 at 04:37, ewerk said:

Holy shit. I know that theory has been going around and Trump’s sort have been encouraging it but how is the President of the USA making that sort of accusation not the main headline on every news show? 

Is his presidency so fucked up that this doesn’t even register?

:yes :(

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  • Andrew changed the title to President Biden

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