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ISTANBUL/ANKARA (Reuters) - Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan heads to the Gulf this weekend in an attempt to patch up the rift between Qatar and its neighbors, but the firm Qatari ally may find himself with little room to maneuver as a mediator.

Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Egypt cut ties and imposed sanctions on Qatar last month, accusing it of supporting terrorism. Doha denies the charges.

In what has become the region's worst diplomatic crisis in years, the neighbors have since issued more than a dozen demands, telling Qatar to close down Al Jazeera television, curb relations with Iran and shutter a Turkish military base.

Erdogan has said the demands are unlawful and has called for an end to the crisis, citing the need for Muslim solidarity and strong trade ties in the region.

"We will work until the end for the solution of the dispute between the brotherly nations of the region," he said in comments after prayers on Friday. "Political problems are temporary, whereas economic ties are permanent, and I expect the investors from Gulf countries to choose long-term ties."

While looking to defend Doha, Erdogan is also wary of alienating its neighbors. He will visit Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Qatar during the two-day trip that starts on Sunday.

The UAE was Turkey's seventh-largest export market last year, worth $5.4 billion, while Saudi Arabia was No. 11 and Egypt was No. 13, according to official data. Turkey also wants to sell defense equipment to the Saudis.

"This visit, in a way, would help to demonstrate that despite its positioning as a firm backer of Doha, Turkey still has the ability to dialogue with the other countries at the highest level, primarily Saudi Arabia," said Sinan Ulgen, a former Turkish diplomat and an analyst at Carnegie Europe.

Nonetheless, Ankara is negotiating from a "handicapped position", given its vocal support for Qatar, he said.

"In terms of how much Ankara can accomplish and how effective the potential mediation role that Turkey could undertake, the expectations are quite low in that regard."

The dispute has so far proven intractable and Erdogan has said Saudi Arabia should solve the crisis.

U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson shuttled between Gulf countries last week but left without any firm signs the feud would be resolved soon. On Friday, Tillerson said he was satisfied with Qatar's efforts to implement an agreement to combat terrorist financing, and urged Arab states to lift the "land blockade".

Qatar, while not a major trade partner for Turkey, holds strategic importance not least because of the military base established by Ankara after a 2014 agreement. Turkey says as many as 1,000 soldiers could eventually be stationed there.

There are also ideological ties.

Qatar's neighbors have demanded it end support for groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood, seen by Gulf countries as a threat to their dynastic rule. Erdogan, whose roots are in political Islam, backed a Muslim Brotherhood government in Egypt before it was overthrown in 2013.

"There has been diplomatic traffic before this visit. There have been high-level talks," a Turkish official told Reuters, speaking on condition of anonymity. "There is a climate in which some concrete steps can be taken."

On Friday, Qatar's emir called for dialogue to resolve the crisis, saying that any talks most respect national sovereignty. In his first speech since the ties were severed, a defiant Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani described his country as facing an unjust "siege".

That is a sentiment that Erdogan firmly shares.

"Qatar is being hard done by," the Turkish official said. "It is important for the whole region to eliminate this injustice."

Additional reporting by Daren Butler in Istanbul and Ece Toksabay in Ankara; Editing by Mark Trevelyan

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Backing Qatar, Erdogan may have little room to maneuver in Gulf visit - Reuters

ISTANBUL, Turkey Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Saturday denounced as excessive the use of force by Israeli security forces in deadly clashes over the Temple Mount.

I condemn Israels insistence on its position despite all warnings and the excessive use of force by Israeli forces against our brothers gathered for Friday prayers, he said in a statement.

Erdogan said that he was speaking in his capacity as the current chairman of the summit of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) whose chairmanship Turkey currently holds.

Clashes in Jerusalem between security forces and violent protesters a day earlier left three Palestinians dead. Later Friday three Israelis were stabbed to death in the West Bank by a 19-year-old Palestinian terrorist who said he was acting over anger over the Temple Mount.

Tensions have risen to boiling point over new metal detectors installed by Israel as security measures around the Temple Mount compound following the killing of two Israeli police officers by Israeli Arabs who came out of the compound armed with guns and opened fire.

Turkey and Israeli had last year ended a rift triggered by the IDFs boarding in 2010 of a Gaza-bound ship that left 10 Turkish activists dead.

But Erdogan, who regards himself a champion of the Palestinian cause, is still often critical of Israeli policy and his comments were among his toughest on Israel since the reconciliation deal.

Erdogan on Thursday had urged his Israeli counterpart Reuven Rivlin to swiftly remove metal detectors to end the tensions.

Rivlin for his part urged Erdogan to condemn the killing of the officers.

Erdogan reaffirmed in the statement that the restrictions were unacceptable and should be removed immediately.

I urge the international community to immediately take action to remove practices that restrict freedom of worship at Haram al-Sharif, he said, refereeing to the Temple Mount compound.

Times of Israel staff contributed to this article.

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Erdogan condemns Israel's 'excessive' use of force in Jerusalem - The Times of Israel

Wary of Sunni dominance of public life, Alevis are key stakeholders in the secular Turkish state, and yet have suffered under staunchly secular governments, too. They exemplify the parts of Turkey that feel most threatened by Mr. Erdogan secularists and minorities like the Kurds and Alevis while highlighting both the authoritarianism and religious nationalism that predated him, as well as the disparate nature of the coalition that opposes him.

Secularists talk about Erdogan as an Islamist, whereas Alevis often look at him as explicitly Sunni, said Howard Eissenstat, a Turkey expert at St. Lawrence University and nonresident senior fellow at the Project on Middle East Democracy, a think tank in Washington.

Under Mr. Erdogan, Mr. Eissenstat said, average Alevis feel theyre being pushed further to the edge. And yet throughout Ottoman and Turkish history, there has never been a moment when they felt utterly secure, Mr. Eissenstat added.

Incorporating Shiite, Sufi, Sunni and local traditions, Alevism is a strain of Islam that emerged in the medieval period. Contrary to common perceptions, Alevism is distinct from the Alawite faith followed by Syrians like President Bashar al-Assad.

For some members, Alevism is simply a cultural identity, rather than a form of worship.

Practicing Alevis, however, read from the same Islamic texts as mainstream Muslims, but worship in a cemevi, or prayer hall, rather than a mosque. Men and women pray alongside one another, and unlike observant Sunnis are not expected to pray five times a day.

By some metrics, the Alevis are safer now than at many points in their history. For centuries they have been the victims of pogroms, both during Ottoman times and under the secular Turkish republic. Hundreds of Alevis were murdered in sectarian violence in the tumultuous years that preceded Turkeys 1980 coup, and dozens were killed during the 1990s.

Under Mr. Erdogan, however, there has been no mass sectarian violence against Alevis. In fact, Alevis were among the minorities whose rights Mr. Erdogan initially promised to strengthen. In 2007, for instance, he began what was termed an Alevi opening, a yearlong effort to discuss the improvement of Alevi rights.

Some even viewed the opening as part of a broader attempt to challenge the monocultural and monoethnic national identity promoted by the countrys founders, who saw the ideal citizen as Turkish and not Kurdish and, despite their secular leanings, Sunni not Alevi.

We are all citizens of the Turkish republic, Mr. Erdogan said to a group of Alevis in January 2008. We are all hosts of this country, siblings without discrimination between you and us.

Nearly a decade later, sitting in the hills outside Osmancik, Mr. Gormez and his Alevi friends complained about the Sunni takeover of Osmanciks cemevi. But they also conceded that in terms of pure security the overall situation has improved in the years since the pogroms of the 1970s, when Alevi villagers built barricades outside their homes to defend themselves.

Now, said Servet Unal, a retired civil servant sitting beside Mr. Gormez, we are comfortable.

But beyond the matter of their physical safety, the plight of Alevis in Mr. Erdogans Turkey is more complex, as the participants at a recent Alevi rally in the city of Sivas showed.

Twenty-four years ago, Sivas was the site of a brutal massacre of Alevis by a mob of Sunni fundamentalists who burned down their hotel. The police did not intervene.

On a recent Sunday in July, thousands of Alevis completed an annual march through Sivas in remembrance of the dead. In that sense, things have changed: The police here lined the streets to protect the marchers. But in their chants and interviews, many marchers said that they felt under as much social pressure as they have felt in decades past.

The government still doesnt accept Alevism as a legitimate belief, said Turgut Oker, the head of the European Alevi Federation, and an organizer of the march. Erdogan is completely trying to make Turkey more Sunni.

Take the cemevi, Mr. Oker says. The number of these Alevi prayer centers has increased under Erdogan from under 300 in 2000 to over 900 in 2013. But their construction owes more to Alevi activism than to government acquiescence.

Despite repeated censure from the European Court of Human Rights, the Erdogan government still refuses to classify cemevis as official places of worship. That makes them ineligible for the tranches of money provided to the Directorate of Religious Affairs for the construction and maintenance of Sunni mosques. The directorates budget was an estimated $1.8 billion in 2016 more than most ministries.

And where Alevis have managed to build cemevis, the state has often constructed mosques nearby (or in Osmancik, installed a mosque in the cemevi itself). The implication is that while the state may tolerate Alevism as a cultural identity, it recognizes only the Sunni mosque as a place of Islamic worship.

A cemevi is not a place of worship, it is a center for cultural activities, Mr. Erdogan argued in 2012. Muslims should only have one place of worship.

Then there is the gradual Sunnification of the education system. Over the past 15 years, Mr. Erdogan has increased the number of religious schools that emphasize the teaching of Sunni doctrine. In some places parents no longer have the option of sending their children to secular schools.

Alevis have also reported discrimination in the workplace, particularly within state institutions. Few Alevis currently fill key roles in the state apparatus, such as governors or police chiefs. And although there is no concrete evidence of an official policy of bias, Alevis in low-level positions in the civil service regularly claim that the system is gamed against them, says Aziz Yagan, an academic who researches the subject.

Yunus Laco, an Alevi who applied this year for a state position, received some oddly sectarian questions in his oral examinations.

They asked me: Are you an Alevi? Mr. Laco said. Is there anyone in your family who prays five times a day?

Mr. Laco did not get the job.

All these anxieties are exacerbated by the sense that Mr. Erdogan has largely pursued a Sunni-friendly foreign policy supporting Egypts Muslim Brotherhood, a conservative Sunni movement, as well as Sunni rebels in Syria.

The spillover from the Syrian war has also alarmed Alevis. Rightly or wrongly, some Alevis interpret Turkeys admission of around three million Syrians most of them Sunni as another attempt to dilute Alevi influence.

Mr. Erdogan hardly calmed these fears by naming a major new bridge in Istanbul after an Ottoman sultan notorious for his persecution of Alevis.

For Mr. Eissenstat, the academic, the experience of Alevis under Mr. Erdogan illustrates that the presidents conception of Turkish nationhood, which fleetingly seemed to include room for diversity, is ultimately just as chauvinistic as his predecessors.

The case of the Alevi suggests that the A.K.P. always lacked the imagination to account for Turkeys real diversity, he said. It has embraced the idea that there is really only one true way to be part of the Turkish nation.

Follow Patrick Kingsley on Twitter @PatrickKingsley.

A version of this article appears in print on July 23, 2017, on Page A10 of the New York edition with the headline: Group Fears Becoming Second-Class Muslims in Erdogans Turkey.

Read more:
Turkey's Alevis, a Muslim Minority, Fear a Policy of Denying Their Existence - New York Times

By Nancy Powell

If there was one takeaway from Thursdays CBLDF: She Changed Comics panel, it was the critical role that women play in advocating for the key social and cultural issues in todays world, and that these women as writers, artists and historians act as the collective voice to challenge the status quo.

Betsy Gomez (She Changed Comics) moderated a roundtable discussion of women who have created and continue to create some of the most important works in comics today. The panelists included Joyce Farmer (Special Exits, Tits & Clits), Caitlin McCabe (She Changed Comics contributor), Thi Bui (The Best We Could Do), and Newberry Honors and Eisner Award-winning writer Jennifer Holm (Babymouse series, Squish).

Gomez started off the hour-long discussion by asking each woman how she came into comics. Farmer read comics with her father and found comics to be an easier medium to communicate ideas than writing. Farmers $1 per week allowance allowed her to buy five candy bars and five comics.

McCabe had a more unconventional childhood; she grew up in a family that encouraged the reading controversial materials, including comics, and so enamored was McCable of the medium that she went on to earn a Masters degree in the subject matter. Bui discovered comics at an older age, concentrating mostly on women-written or women-centered comics.

Like Farmer, Holms father shared with her and her brothers his love of comic strips, such as Prince Valiant and Flash Gordon, from his youth. I wanted the girl version of Peter Parker, a teenage version that I could relate to,

Gomez then asked each of the panelists to share their experience of creating comics. Farmers Abortion Eve in 1973 as a way to distribute information about birth control birth control before Planned Parenthood took off. Her anti-Catholic stance on birth control made the comic unsaleable, and the comic was not well received because it did not fit into the underground comics genre. As history would play out, Abortion Eve is being reproduced in full by the University of Pennsylvania and has since increased in relevance as a result of the ongoing debate on womens reproductive rights.

But Farmers first comic, Tits & Clits, found itself on the banned books list after a Laguna Beach, California bookseller, Fahrenheit 451, got in trouble for selling it. Farmer was advised by the ACLU that she could potentially lose everything if she continued to publish the title, and while the suit was thrown out on account of its violating free speech, the effect of that experience was traumatizing. Censorship damages the creativeness of people who are working, Farmer said.

Buis call to creativity occurred in response to her anger about the incorrect stereotypes of the Vietnameses role in the Vietnam War. At the time, she was also trying to figure out her own origins, so The Best We Could Do became as much a project that was personal as it was a historical journey. Comics were my revenge against Hollywood. I didnt have a Hollywood budget, but I had pens, and I could draw, remarked Bui.

On the other end of the spectrum, Holms involvement with comics was family business; her brother Matt was an illustrator, which made collaboration easy. The comics you read as a kid stay with you forever, recalled Holm, who found plenty of opportunity to become involved in a medium she loved by writing kids comics. They [publishers] are open to taking risks on graphic novelist and women. It may not be Marvel material, but Scholastic snapped it up. Childrens publishers are willing to take risks, and they really helped the whole movement start.

McCabe used her scholarship in the genre to advocate for notable, but lesser known, female comic book writers as a contributor to She Changed Comics. Comics scholarship is really importanthow it impacts our lives, how it makes us feel, and how it makes us represent ourselves.

Gomez final question revolved around the issue of censorship, specifically regarding the overrepresentation of women on the censorship lists. Bui felt that people used censorship as a weapon to shut down important voices. McCabe went further to highlight the point that women comic book creators do not represent the status quo, and any challenges to the status quo could scare people. Holm punctuated the point by citing the popularity and performance of bestselling, questionable titles co-authored by women, such as This One Summer by Mariko Tamaki, Drama by Raina Telgemeier, and Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi.

Farmer ended the discussion by pointing out an obvious fact; that these five women were sitting in a panel and discussing the success of their own careers, a defiant contradiction to naysayers questioning womens impact on the medium. And each of the panelists confirmed, through personal experience and in their discussion of upcoming projects, that they continue to push the boundaries on important cultural and social issues.

See more here:
Women Comics Creators Talk Censorship, History and Social Relevance at CBLDF: She Changed Comics SDCC '17 - Comics Beat

The Kentucky Tourism Development Finance Authority gave $18 million in tax breaks to fund a $92 million Noah's Ark theme park.

The creationists behind a tax-payer subsidized replica of Noahs Ark in Kentucky are lashing out at the media for reporting on the parks tax evasion.

MEDIA AND BLOGGERS OUT OF CONTROL RE: ARK, wrote prominent creationist Ken Ham, in all capital letters.

Ham was responding to news that the Ark Encounter theme park lost $18 million in tax breaks after a deed transfer in which the for-profit LLC Answers in Genesis sold the park to a non-profit in an attempt to avoid paying local public safety taxes to Williamstown, Kentucky.

Ham quoted CCO Mark Looy, who said, We are saddened that the City Council did not extend the courtesy of discussing this ordinance with us before passing it and taking it public, and was not willing to negotiate further.

However, the Ark has burned enough bridges in town that the City Council may have been left with little choice.

They cant be trusted to do the ethical thing, so at this point, the City Council is squarely within their rights to institute rules without contacting Ken Ham first, Hemant Mehta explained. They tried to work together. Ken Ham tried taking advantage of them as hes done many times before with all the tax breaks hes received. What more is there to negotiate?

Not only has Ark Encounter evaded local taxes, but Ken Ham has blamed Williamstown for dreadful attendance at the theme park. Ham has also blamed atheists for tax-payers getting fleeced by the project.

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Media 'out of control': Owner of Ark theme park trashes press for reporting he's ducking taxes - Raw Story