VILNIUS: US President Joe Biden thanked his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Tuesday for his “courage” in dropping opposition to Sweden’s entry to NATO.
At a meeting during the NATO summit in Vilnius, Biden celebrated the conclusion of a major diplomatic push to get Erdogan to stop blocking Sweden’s application.
“I want to thank you for your diplomacy and your courage to take that on. And I want to thank you for your leadership,” Biden told Erdogan.
Frustration had been mounting in Western capitals at Erdogan’s obstruction of Sweden, which required unanimous approval from NATO members in order to complete its entry bid into the alliance, launched, along with Finland, in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine last year.
Biden spoke with Erdogan from Air Force One for nearly an hour on Sunday in a bid to break the impasse and avoid an embarrassing failure at the Vilnius summit. Erdogan abruptly dropped his opposition late Monday on the eve of the NATO get-together.
For months, Erdogan insisted on a crackdown in Sweden against members of Kurdish movements outlawed in Turkiye, something the Swedish government says it has now done.
But speculation mounted over what other concessions Turkiye extracted to give its green light.
Erdogan had demanded at the last minute that approval for Sweden in NATO would depend on Turkiye being able to renew stalled membership talks with the European Union.
Another long-standing demand from Turkiye for the purchase of modern US F-16 fighter jets seemed to get a boost in the wake of the decision on Sweden.
Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, stressed Tuesday that the US president has “been clear and unequivocal for months that he’s supported the transfer of F-16s,” seeing this as in the interests of NATO.
“He has placed no caveats or conditions on that in his public and private comments over the past few months. And he intends to move forward with that transfer in consultation with Congress.”
A US official told AFP that the White House is now “actively engaging” with Congress, where there has been significant opposition to allowing the sale.
Sullivan said “we will work with the Congress on the appropriate timing for getting” the warplanes to Turkiye. But he could not “speculate on the precise day it’s going to happen.”
Although NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg and Sweden’s Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson were heavily engaged in the negotiations with Erdogan, Sullivan stressed “significant recent” US involvement.
As for the effort by Erdogan to link Turkiye’s EU aspirations with the Swedish-NATO question, Sullivan said Biden has “long” supported Turkiye entering the European Union.
However, that would take “discussions of the necessary reforms and steps relative to democratic resilience that every prospective applicant to the European Union goes through.”
“So, as far as we’re concerned, these issues are not connected,” he said.
Biden thanks Erdogan for Sweden decision, backs F-16s sale
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Biden thanks Erdogan for Sweden decision, backs F-16s sale
- Another long-standing demand from Turkiye for the purchase of modern US F-16 fighter jets seemed to get a boost in the wake of the decision on Sweden
French publisher recalls dictionary over ‘Jewish settler’ reference
- The entry in French reads: “In October 2023, following the death of more than 1,200 Jewish settlers in a series of Hamas attacks”
- The four books are subject to a recall procedure and will be destroyed, Hachette said
PARSI: French publisher Hachette on Friday said it had recalled a dictionary that described the Israeli victims of the October 7, 2023 attacks as “Jewish settlers” and promised to review all its textbooks and educational materials.
The Larousse dictionary for 11- to 15-year-old students contained the same phrase as that discovered by an anti-racism body in three revision books, the company told AFP.
The entry in French reads: “In October 2023, following the death of more than 1,200 Jewish settlers in a series of Hamas attacks, Israel decided to tighten its economic blockade and invade a large part of the Gaza Strip, triggering a major humanitarian crisis in the region.”
The worst attack in Israeli history saw militants from the Palestinian Islamist group kill around 1,200 people in settlements close to the Gaza Strip and at a music festival.
“Jewish settlers” is a term used to describe Israelis living on illegally occupied Palestinian land.
The four books, which were immediately withdrawn from sale, are subject to a recall procedure and will be destroyed, Hachette said, promising a “thorough review of its textbooks, educational materials and dictionaries.”
France’s leading publishing group, which came under the control of the ultra-conservative Vincent Bollore at the end of 2023, has begun an internal inquiry “to determine how such an error was made.”
It promised to put in place “a new, strengthened verification process for all its future publications” in these series.
President Emmanuel Macron on Wednesday said that it was “intolerable” that the revision books for the French school leavers’ exam, the baccalaureat, “falsify the facts” about the “terrorist and antisemitic attacks by Hamas.”
“Revisionism has no place in the Republic,” he wrote on X.
Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack on Israel resulted in the deaths of 1,221 people, with 251 people taken hostage, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures.
Authorities in Gaza estimate that more than 70,000 people have been killed by Israeli forces during their bombardment of the territory since, while nearly 80 percent of buildings have been destroyed or damaged, according to UN data.
Israeli forces have killed at least 447 Palestinians in Gaza since a ceasefire took effect in October, according to the Hamas-run health ministry.
