Andrew Bolt
Mustafa Kemal Ataturk forced modern Turkey to be secular and West-looking. His heirs even make Turkey an Israeli ally and NATO partner, but how dangerously it’s now sliding into another radical Islamic state:
TURKEY’S Prime Minister says he doesn’t view radical Palestinian group Hamas, Israel’s arch-foe, as a terrorist organisation.
“Our problem is not with the Israeli or the Jewish people. Our problem is with the oppressive Israeli administration which commits state terror,” he said.
The new Caliph? Â Turkish PM Erdogan a hero with Islamists!
“Hamas are resistance fighters who are struggling to defend their land. They have won an election,” Recep Tayyip Erdogan said yesterday in a speech broadcast live on television.
“I have told this to US officials… I do not accept Hamas as a terrorist organisation…”
The United States and the European Union blacklist Hamas as a terrorist group despite its victory in Palestinian elections in 2006.
Mr Erdogan made the remarks in an angry tirade against Israel after Monday’s raid on a flotilla carrying aid to the Gaza Strip, which claimed the lives of nine Turks …
The Wall Street Journal wonders how much the Turkish Government was behind an Islamist plot to make a pariah of Israel:
So the Prime Minister of Turkey calls Israel “a festering boil in the Middle East that spreads hate and enmity,” while his foreign minister compares Monday’s Israeli naval raid on a flotilla of ships headed for the Gaza Strip, in which nine passengers were killed, to the attacks of September 11, 2001…
A child points his finger and shouts religious slogans during the funeral of a victim of the Israeli naval commandos raid at the Beyazit mosque in Istanbul, Turkey, Friday, June 4, 2010.
Yet the more facts that come to light about the flotilla, its passengers and their sponsors, the more it seems clear that Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Ergodan’s government, far more so than Israel’s, must be held to account for Monday’s violent episode… The Turkish accounting should begin with a full explanation from the government of its relationship with the IHH, an Istanbul-based Islamic “charity” that purchased three of the six boats used in the flotilla from the city government, sent hundreds of its activists along with it, and reportedly has ties to Turkey’s ruling Islamist AKP Party.
That attitude conforms with the general pattern of Mr. Erdogan’s foreign policy. For all his denunciations of Israel’s alleged brutality in Monday’s raid, he was among the first foreign leaders to congratulate Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for his “victory” in last year’s presidential election.
Links:
The IHH—the Turkish acronym for the “Foundation for Human Rights and Freedoms and Humanitarian Relief”—has widely reported links to Hamas, the terrorist group that runs Gaza and most directly threatens Israel. Moreover, in the 2001 Seattle trial of Ahmed Ressam, the would-be Millennium bomber, French counterterrorism magistrate Jean-Louis Bruguiere testified that the IHH had played an “important role” in Ressam’s plot to bomb LAX airport on New Year’s Day, 2000, and that there was “a rather close relation” between the bomber and the Turkish group…
Yet knowing all this, the Turkish government made no effort to prevent the flotilla from setting sail. The government also seems unembarrassed that the IHH belongs to a Saudi-based umbrella group of Islamic charities known as “The Union of the Good,” which the U.S. Treasury designated a terrorist organization in November 2008. On the contrary, Mr. Erdogan has been outspoken in his calls for the world to recognize Hamas, even as his relations with the more moderate Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas have been notably cool.
UPDATE
Charles Krauthammer:
The whole point of this relentless international campaign is to deprive Israel of any legitimate form of self-defense.The world is tired of these troublesome Jews, six million — that number again — hard by the Mediterranean, refusing every invitation to national suicide.For which they are relentlessly demonized, ghettoized and constrained from defending themselves, even as the more committed anti-Zionists — Iranian in particular — openly prepare a more final solution.
UPDATE 2
An interview with the sergeant who killed six of the people on board the Mavi Marmara:
Looking to his side, he saw three of his commanders lying wounded – one with a gunshot wound to the stomach and another with a gunshot wound to the knee. A third was lying unconscious; his skull was fractured by a devastating blow with a metal bar…He pushed the wounded soldiers up against the wall of the upper deck and created a perimeter of soldiers around them to begin treating their wounds, he said. He then arranged his men to form a second perimeter, and pulled out his 9 mm. Glock pistol to stave off the charging attackers and to protect his wounded comrades.The attackers had already seized two pistols from the commandos, and fired repeatedly at them. Facing more than a dozen of the mercenaries, and convinced their lives were in danger, he and his colleagues opened fire, he said. S. singlehandedly killed six men. His colleagues killed another three.
