Barack Obama’s friend, Rashid Khalidi, is passing the hat around[warning: jihadist website] among the fashionably loony crowd in New York to buy and outfit a boat for their next attempt to get arrested by the Israelis.
We turn to you to help make the U.S. boat, The Audacity of Hope, a reality. We must raise at least $370,000 in the next month. These funds will be used to purchase a boat large enough for 40-60 people, secure a crew, and cover the licensing and registering of the boat. In addition, the funds will subsidize some other costs of sending a U.S. delegation. We can make this happen together. For example, with 370 people giving $1,000, or with 3,700 people giving $100, we will have raised our full amount.
Yes, you read that right. The title of William Ayers’ Barack Obama’s book is to be the name of a terrorist ship specifically intended to violate international law. That does take some audacity. The chutzpah of splodydope.
We have already received donations ranging from $10 to $10,000. So, give what you can and give generously. From the deck of The Audacity of Hope, we will be in a powerful and unique position to challenge U.S. foreign policy and affirm the universal obligation to uphold human rights and international law. Let us act now because every moment counts and every dollar counts. Together we will contribute to the great effort to end the blockade of Gaza and the illegal occupation of Palestine.
Funny how they don’t mince words when they think no one else is listening.
And FWIW, look at the list of signatories. Half of them are Jewish names.
And in other Palestinian news:
What Was That that Some Blogger Used to Say? Palestinian Child Abuse?
Since the race-obsessed former anti-Jihadi blogger with an obsession with Pam Geller doesn’t do “Palestinian Child Abuse” threads any more, we need to fill in the void. So without any further ado, we have this piece of
***Palestinian Child Abuse***
Brought to you by the same Religion of Pieces that seems to be calling the shots at that place that used to be anti-child abuse.
This was from a viral email, so there’s no source link, but there is a description:
This is a garbage truck captured by the Israelis in Gaza (no doubt supplied to them by western aid).
The note on the holes in the front of the box reads: “The truck is set up to fire 9 Kasem rockets and then drive off innocently. ” The pink sign on the door says: “In case of traffic violations, please contact the Palestinian Authority.”
Remember all those Gazans, who are touted by the world press as being in “dire economic straits” due to the blockade imposed by Israel? Yep! They’re in such dire economic straits, they’ve gone ahead and opened yet another shopping facility full of goods imported from:
• France! (No surprise there.)
• Turkey! (Imagine that!)
• The United States! (No doubt, courtesy of الرئيس أوباما and the Demo☭rats.)
More photos here.
Wouldn’t it be a hoot if this place were open 24/7? Such is the hypocrisy of the MSM and the Paleostinians. NOTE TO IDF: Please schedule an after-hours Grand Opening DEMOLITION!
The media will always romanticize and sanitize the genocidal enemies of the Jewish state. Just as blithering idiots such as Patty Murray will vapidly claim that Osama Bin Laden is popular because he builds day care centers (he does not by the way), they will always point out that Hamas provides social services to Gazans.The goal is to humanize the most murderous and totalitarian ideology since the defeat of National Socialism and the implosion of the U.S.S.R. in order to demonize Israel so that its physical annihilation will be heartily approved with no guilt attached. We have seen CNN and BBC reporters admit that they have shed tears at the deaths of the hideous Yasser Arafat and Sheikh Fadlallah and I am sure that Christiane Amanpour felt the same way only she is too smart to admit it – unlike Helen Thomas and Octavia Nasr.
It’s nothing new for Western intellectuals to lavish attention and admiration on the resistance forces aligned against Israel, whether it’s Hamas or Hezbollah or even organizations like al-Qaida that are less interested in Israel than in killing and maiming Western civilians. Last week, when CNN’s former Middle East editor, Octavia Nasr, tweeted[1] that she respected the late militant cleric Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah, the cards were out on the table for all to see. But usually the pro-resistance vibe is more subtle, as when Nasr’s defenders demanded a more nuanced understanding from knee-jerk Americans who were shocked by Nasr’s support for a suicide-bomb-sanctioning man of faith. After all, Fadlallah was a relatively pro-feminist radical Islamist cleric—and if his talk about Israel was genocidal, well, that’s just part of the package when dealing with a complex place like the Middle East.
Media consumers in the United States are by now well aware that Hezbollah and Hamas provide “social services” for their communities. For the writers and television personalities who push such supposed palliatives on their audiences—“Yes, they do chant ‘kill the Jews!’ and they do act on their rhetoric, but they also educate poor kids in clean, well-lit schools (please ignore the slogans painted on the walls)”—respect for the resistance is a polite way of indicating one’s tolerance for murderous anti-Semitism. The issue is whether this attitude is in danger of seeping into the mainstream of the U.S. public. Poll numbers show that U.S. support for Israel is consistently high—in February Gallup found[2] that a near-record 63 percent of Americans were more sympathetic to the Jewish state than to the Palestinians. But ideas can change, and it’s intellectuals who often lead the way. Remember that Israel was a popular cause among the intellectual classes until the 1967 war. It is true that the American people and the bulk of their intellectual class are far apart on the subject of Israel, but all the massive and popular evil of the last century started among a small ideological elite.
A common explanation for the turning away of the intellectuals from Israel is that the Jewish state forfeited the world’s sympathy once it was no longer perceived as the underdog in its conflict with the Arabs. Israel’s sin, in this reading, is that it didn’t lose. However, this would suggest that intellectuals misunderstand a uniquely American concept: The underdog does not win the pity of the chorus because he is crushed by his tormentors; rather, he is the champion who perseveres because the stubborn stars that rule his nature will not permit him to choose otherwise. Perhaps his friends will abandon him, and maybe his family, too; neither his wife nor children signed on for such an arduous journey. If he intends to follow this hard path, he may well travel alone. Such is the stuff of big-ticket American heroism. It is odd that the American intelligentsia cannot recognize in Israel the likeness of our literary models, Melville’s Ahab, Fitzgerald’s Gatsby, Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne. Rather, the intelligentsia is more like Hester’s hypocritical neighbors. If Israel is portrayed as the Dirty Harry of nations, then its accusers are the tepid bureaucrats mistaking cowardice for compassion, who chide Clint Eastwood’s Callahan.
In reality, of course, Israel isn’t all that heroic. No one and nothing is. Israel’s men and women of honor do not accomplish Homeric deeds in south Lebanon or Gaza to the beat of martial songs, like the resistance; instead they ride the bus home on the weekend to see their parents, go out drinking with friends, and pick up the wrong guy or girl in a smoky bar with awful pop music. “Our warriors,” says one former tank driver, “are Jewish boys who are bossed around by their wives.” And yet during the war with Hezbollah four years ago, the country’s incompetent political and military leadership sent too many of those Jewish boys to their deaths, without sufficient training or a strategy for victory. It seems like almost every day there is news that another of Israel’s chief political leaders is under investigation for corruption charges, which is to say the system is rotten and the system works. To say that Israel is normal is to say that it is, like all democracies, mediocre.
[..]
Some journalists shed tears[5] when Arafat died, others are smitten[6] by the beauty of Islamist militants: The “green eyes” of Hezbollah’s deputy Naim Qassem “are framed by thick, dark lashes and he has long elegant hands.” Saddam Hussein, we are told[7], did much to advance the rights of women. In Cairo I knew a former CNN producer whose first affair with an Arab intelligence officer was in Saddam’s Baghdad—a great city, she explained, if you didn’t mind the constant surveillance and widespread torture.
A Gazan woman with an infant dying from a genetic defect that causes failure of the immune system took the child to Israel for expensive life-saving treatments. Individual Israelis donated money to help save the boy’s life.
It was such a heartwarming story about how the two peoples might be able to come together someday that an Israeli journalist started filming it as a documentary.
Imagine the filmmaker’s surprise when the woman explained to him that she hoped her desperately ill baby would grow up to murder Israelis someday.
Nevertheless, this idyllic situation developed into a deep crisis that led to the severance of the relations and what appeared to be the end of the filming. From an innocent conversation about religious holidays, Raida Abu Mustafa launched into a painful monologue about the culture of the shahids – the martyrs – and admitted, during the complex transplant process, that she would like to see her son perpetrate a suicide bombing attack in Jerusalem.
“Jerusalem is ours,” she declared. “We are all for Jerusalem, the whole nation, not just a million, all of us. Do you understand what that means – all of us?”
She also explained to Eldar exactly what she had in mind. “For us, death is a natural thing. We are not frightened of death. From the smallest infant, even smaller than Mohammed, to the oldest person, we will all sacrifice ourselves for the sake of Jerusalem. We feel we have the right to it. You’re free to be angry, so be angry.”
And Eldar was angry. “Then why are you fighting to save your son’s life, if you say that death is a usual thing for your people?” he lashes out in one of the most dramatic moments in the film.
“It is a regular thing,” she smiles at him. “Life is not precious. Life is precious, but not for us. For us, life is nothing, not worth a thing. That is why we have so many suicide bombers. They are not afraid of death. None of us, not even the children, are afraid of death. It is natural for us. After Mohammed [her sick infant] gets well, I will certainly want him to be a shahid. If it’s for Jerusalem, then there’s no problem. For you it is hard, I know; with us, there are cries of rejoicing and happiness when someone falls as a shahid. For us a shahid is a tremendous thing.”
AFP – An online video game launched on Tuesday lets you play the role of a Gaza student who must negotiate a web of Israeli obstacles in order to attend university in the occupied West Bank — but you can’t win.
The game, developed by an Israeli rights group with EU funding, walks players through the restrictions that remain in place despite Israel’s recent decision to allow greater amounts of consumer goods into the Hamas-run enclave.
[...]
Players begin by choosing characters on the website (www.spg.org.il), either a student, an ice cream manufacturer trying to export to the West Bank, or a man deported to Gaza whose family still lives in the occupied territory.
There are several options, including appealing to the Israeli military, petitioning the supreme court, or travelling via Egypt and Jordan, but in the game all of them lead to failure.
Hey, I’ve got a great idea! To make it really lifelike and make sure to tell all sides of the story (which is what they want, of course!) they should add some characters.
Last night I attended a protest outside where certain Gaza ‘flotilla’ (aka terror armada) passengers were speaking in Brooklyn, at the House of the Lord Church in Brooklyn. It should be noted that this ‘church’ actually believes in liberation theology, and claims that Jesus was an African, rather than Jewish.
About 40 people of mixed background came to the protest in Brooklyn, on Atlantic Avenue. It should be noted that the Blind Sheikh was based out of the Masjid al-Farooq Mosque, at 554 Atlantic Avenue. This ‘church’ was at 415 Atlantic Avenue. So this protest occurred deep in the heart of Radical Islam.
In any case, the pro-jihadis had this clown singing ‘peace’ songs. It was quasi-comical. Of course, I also was handed the newspaper of the Communist Worker’s Party. Red/Green Alliance strikes again.
Some of the protesters (i.e., the good guys) started singing “We Con the World” while wearing clown wigs, which is the song popularized by the group Latma. It was quite appropos.
Some observations of the event:
A person running for City Council happened to be half a block from the ‘flotilla’ event. I asked him if he was pro-Israel, and he said yes. I then asked him if he backed Israel specifically in the ‘flotilla’ bruhaha, and he said “Well, it is complicated.” And then he went into a long story. I replied that it is not complicated at all and it is about Israel’s right to self defense. I then informed this would-be City Councilman (a Dem, of course), that I will not support him.
There was someone from Brazilian TV there, and I told him on camera that what I am most troubled by is language desecration, and I fear for the future over the misuse and defamation of the word “peace.” I told the same to a Columbia School of Journalism reporter.
More evidence of the red/green alliance – al-Awda NY sponsored this event, and you had communists handing out the Communist Worker’s Party newspaper. Al-Awda is linked to extremely unsavory jihad groups, as documented here.
I saw Turkish flags at this event. Never before have Turkish flags flown at such pro-jihad events. This is an extremely troubling trend.
At the event, the so-called ‘peace activists’ were screaming that Zionism is racism.
Overall, it is my considered opinion that peace is not possible while we buy into these false narratives, and claim that those who wish for the destruction of another are ‘peaceful.’ We must fight the war on the English language that the press has bought into, hook, line, and sinker.
And on a final note, I want to say that the pro-jihadis were really…pathetic. I mean, a tired, sad-looking man, singing a hippy-dippy ‘peace’ song, while wearing a jihad scarf? Come on! The only tragedy of this all is that we take these people seriously, and actually treat them like they have a substantial opinion, rather than the farces that they are.
Once we cut off the teat of the Western largesse to our jihadi adversaries, and stop treating the jihadis and their sympathizers as people worth listening to, real peace is possible.
President Barack Hussein Obama will address the nation tonight about the BP oil spill. He will use this speech to Demagogue BP and Push for Cap-N-Trade.
The president will also press for the passage of legislation to move the nation away from fossil fuels, the one piece of his ambitious domestic agenda that has stalled, but it’s unclear what that legislation will ultimately look like.
The president said recently that he wants legislation that puts a price on carbon, and vowed to help round up the votes for it in the Senate.
Democratic Senate aides said this week that there is little appetite for pursuing ambitious legislation to combat climate change this year, and predicted a smaller package that directly addresses the oil spill is more likely.
Another item of interest is that the Obama regime pressured Israel to speed up the Gaza Flotilla and include an International component.
The Obama administration, led by National Security Advisor Jim Jones, was heavily involved in the Israeli government’s decision to appoint an “independent public commission” to investigate the Gaza flotilla incident and pushed Israel to speed up the process in order to head off any attempts for increased pressure at the United Nations.
Over the last week, there were a flurry of high-level interactions between top administration officials and their various Israeli interlocutors. A State Department official told The Cable that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spoke with Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak and that Deputy Secretary Jim Steinberg, Special Envoy George Mitchelland others were working the phones as well. Barak also spoke with Vice President Joseph Biden, who was traveling in the region.
But in last couple of days, the final details were worked out between the White House and Prime Minister’s office, specifically by Jones and Israeli national security advisor Uzi Arad, according to an Israeli official. The National Security Council was much more involved than the State Department, with NSC Director Dan Shapiro in Israel to help and Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren playing a role as a go-between as well, the official said.
The message Obama officials delivered was twofold. First, they wanted to make sure Israel appointed international members to the commission who were credible. William David Trimble from Northern Ireland and Ken Watkin, a former judge advocate general of the Canadian Armed Forces,will be on it.
Bill Maher, who is a radical totalitarian Progressive, typifies the attitude of the Leftist elites. He mocks average Americans and feels superior to us. However when it comes to Israel, he’s actually spot on. I have seen him many times defend Israel against lies from his fellow Progressives. In his latest show, he counters LGF ally Racheal Maddow’s support of the Palestinians with a truthful statement.
The media is stupid, but where I disagree with him is that support for the Arabs is because they are perceived as victims. They support the Islamic-Imperialists because of their Progressive Ideology that views Islam as a kindred 3rd World Revolutionary movement. I will give credit to Bill Maher for having his eyes open on this issue, but he still refuses to admit the evil nature of Progressivism.
The Prime Minister of the Genocidal and Imperialist nation of Turkey Recep Tayyip Erdogan has delusions of grandeur. He envisions Turkey once again being at the forefront of Jihad. To get the support of the Islamic world, he has aligned his nation with Iran and Al-Qaeda. His initial target is Israel aince he feels the Turkish military can deal with the IDF. He is setting himself to be the new Suleiman the Magnificent. Reality is a different story altogether as Erdogan really is living out a fantasy, one which can cause the deaths of thousands.
Erdogan’s hysterics emphasized the Islamic transformation of a once secular Turkey that has been going on for well over a decade. In 2003, Turkey forbade passage to U.S. troops in their efforts to remove Saddam Hussein from Iraq. State-run Turkish television instead aired virulent anti-American dramas, like “Valley of the Wolves,” in which our soldiers appear as little more than blood-crazed killers who dismember poor Iraqi civilians.
Lately, Turkey has reached out to Iran and Syria. Both habitually sponsor Mideast terrorist groups and have aided anti-American insurgents in Iraq. Turkey and Brazil recently offered to monitor Iran’s nuclear program, sidestepping American and European efforts to step up sanctions to stop Teheran’s plans for a bomb.
Erdogan’s anti-Israel attacks often match those of his newfound friends, Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Hezbollah’s Hasan Nasrallah. Former Turkish Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan, remember, once blamed the Jews for starting the Crusades, and for instigating World War I to create Israel. He also described them as a “disease” that needed to be eradicated.
Erdogan is a danger to world and it’s time to stop sugar coating Turkey.
Addition by Bob in Breckenridge:
I’m certain all the GOP Senators will support this, but let’s see how many of the libs support his resolution, or if that dirtbag POS lib from Nevada, Harry Reid (“This war is lost…”), will even allow this to be brought to the floor of the Senate-
U.S. Senator John Cornyn (R-Tx) has proposed a resolution supporting Israel’s right to defend itself and condemning last week’s actions by the Turkish-sent six-ship flotilla that wanted to break Israel’s blockade on Gaza.
The text is blunt in condemning Hamas for rejecting Israel’s right to exist, for its “human rights abuses” against its own citizens in Gaza, and for its opposition to peace efforts in the region. It also condemns Iran for supporting Hamas.
Moreover, the measure urges Turkey – which funded the flotilla and whose Prime Minister Tayyip Recep Erdogan is now threatening to personally join the next one – to “recognize the importance of continued strong relations with Israel.” The bill also expresses American lawmakers’ “profound disappointment with the counterproductive actions of the United Nations regarding this incident.”
[...]
Somehow, a number of people at the Blogmocracy were smelling fish when Killgore Trout became aware, out of a blue sky, of some Reuters fauxtography. Our instincts were correct. Here is Killgore’s diary breaking the story that Mr. Johnson ran with a few hours later. Note that the LGF clock is on Pacific Daylight Time.
So, we have Killgore uploading this, with no attribution to anyone, at 7:05 a.m. PDT. Meanwhile over at Elder of Ziyon, this will be shown to have been there:
“Suzanne” lives in the Netherlands, and the actual time zone of the EoZ site isn’t clear, but since times increase as you go east, it’s impossible that this wasn’t posted hours before the Killgore diary. The only way this could be possible is if EoZ was in East Asia somewhere.
As far as I can tell, credit for breaking this story belongs to someone named “Suzanne” somewhere in the Netherlands. Can we prove that Killgore didn’t discover this independently? No. But you decide.
The Turks, under the Muslim Brotherhood linked AKP and the Fascist Erdogan, have become a force for trouble. At one time, via it’s membership in NATO and alliance with Israel, Turkey was a pillar of stability. Now it is angling itself as a leader of Dar Al Islam. As their Ottoman forefathers, they are in Jihadi mode and have Israel in their sights. Turkish PM Recep Tayyip Erdogan is now threatening to go to Gaza in the next Flotilla and will have Turkish warships escort. This is a recipe for a conflict between a NATO nation and Israel. Mark Steyn gives a great analysis of the situation..
Foreign policy “realists,” back in the saddle since the Texan cowboy left town, are extremely fond of the concept of “stability”: America needs a stable Middle East, so we should learn to live with Mubarak and the mullahs and the House of Saud, etc. You can see the appeal of “stability” to your big-time geopolitical analyst: You don’t have to update your Rolodex too often, never mind rethink your assumptions. “Stability” is a fancy term to upgrade inertia and complacency into strategy. No wonder the fetishization of stability is one of the most stable features of foreign-policy analysis.
Unfortunately, back in what passes for the real world, there is no stability. History is always on the march, and, if it’s not moving in your direction, it’s generally moving in the other fellow’s. Take this “humanitarian” “aid” flotilla. Much of what went on — the dissembling of the Palestinian propagandists, the hysteria of the U.N. and the Euro-ninnies — was just business as usual. But what was most striking was the behavior of the Turks. In the wake of the Israeli raid, Ankara promised to provide Turkish naval protection for the next “aid” convoy to Gaza. This would be, in effect, an act of war — more to the point, an act of war by a NATO member against the State of Israel.
Erdogan and the AKP are a menace who seek to make Turkey at the forefront of Jihad. They are Neo-Ottoman and we must be aware of what we are dealing with.
Update: The Imam involved in the 9/11 ground zero Islamic Center is also linked to the Gaza Flotilla.
The imam behind a proposed mosque near Ground Zero is a prominent member of a group that helped sponsor the pro-Palestinian activists who clashed violently with Israeli commandos at sea this week.
Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf is a key figure in Malaysian-based Perdana Global Peace Organization, according to its Website.
Perdana is the single biggest donor ($366,000) so far to the Free Gaza Movement, a key organizer of the six-ship flotilla that tried to break Israel’s blockade of the Hamas-run Gaza Strip Monday.
Anyone who claims that what happened on Monday would damage relations with Turkey are naive. The Turks have been going downhill for several years now, ever since Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his reactionary band took over.
by Robert L. Pollack
Israeli special forces and their commanders were apparently shocked to find their boarding attempt on the Mavi (“Blue”) Marmara met with violence. They should not have been. I have no doubt that the Turkish “peace activists” aboard the ship regarded Israeli troops as something akin to the second coming of Hitler’s SS.
To follow Turkish discourse in recent years has been to follow a national decline into madness. Imagine 80 million or so people sitting at the crossroads between Europe and Asia. They don’t speak an Indo-European language and perhaps hundreds of thousands of them have meaningful access to any outside media. What information most of them get is filtered through a secular press that makes Italian communists look right wing by comparison and an increasing number of state (i.e., Islamist) influenced outfits. Topics A and B (or B and A, it doesn’t really matter) have been the malign influence on the world of Israel and the United States.
For example, while there was much hand-wringing in our own media about “Who lost Turkey?” when U.S. forces were denied entry to Iraq from the north in 2003, no such introspection was evident in Ankara and Istanbul. Instead, Turks were fed a steady diet of imagined atrocities perpetrated by U.S. forces in Iraq, often with the implication that they were acting as muscle for the Jews. The newspaper Yeni Safak, Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan’s daily read, claimed that Americans were tossing so many Iraqi bodies into the Euphrates that local mullahs had issued a fatwa ordering residents not to eat the fish. The same paper repeatedly claimed that the U.S. used chemical weapons in Fallujah. And it reported that Israeli soldiers had been deployed alongside U.S. forces in Iraq and that U.S. forces were harvesting the innards of dead Iraqis for sale on the U.S. “organ market.”
The secular Hurriyet newspaper, meanwhile, accused Israeli soldiers of assassinating Turkish security personnel in Mosul and said the U.S. was starting an occupation of (Muslim) Indonesia under the guise of humanitarian assistance. Then U.S. ambassador to Turkey Eric Edelman actually felt the need to organize a conference call to explain to the Turkish media that secret U.S. nuclear testing did not cause the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. One of the craziest theories circulating in Ankara was that the U.S. was colonizing the Middle East because its scientists were aware of an impending asteroid strike on North America.
The Mosul and organ harvesting stories were soon brought together in a hit Turkish movie called “Valley of the Wolves,” which I saw in 2006 at a mall in Ankara. My poor Turkish was little barrier to understanding. The body parts of dead Iraqis could be clearly seen being placed into crates marked New York and Tel Aviv. It is no exaggeration to say that such anti-Semitic fare had not been played to mass audiences in Europe since the Third Reich.
When I interviewed Prime Minister Erdogan (one of several encounters) in 2006, he was unabashed about the narrative.
Update – Michael Rubin also agrees that Turkey under Erdogan is under no circumstances to be considered a friend.
by Michael Rubin
Speaking in the aftermath of Israel’s botched raid on the Gaza flotilla, veteran American diplomat Aaron David Miller commented: “Overnight, the Israelis have boosted Hamas’s stock; accelerated the international community’s efforts to pressure and isolate Israel; undermined [Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud] Abbas, prompted a crisis with the Turks.”
Miller may be right on the first three counts, but he has it backward when it comes to Turkey.
Turkey in 2010 is not the same Turkey as a decade ago. Gone is the pro-Western and diplomatically responsible foreign partner familiar to those engaged in the Arab-Israeli peace process. In its place is a regime whose public rhetoric increasingly resembles that of the most hardline Arab states.
The conventional wisdom in Washington and Jerusalem was wrong: Turkey’s Islamist prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, is not interested in preserving his country’s relationship with Israel. Instead, he is determined to bolster Turkey’s standing in the Arab and Muslim worlds at Israel’s expense.
Erdogan at first maintained Turkey’s relationship with Israel, even as he reached out to Syria and Iran. Western diplomats accepted Turkey’s explanation that it simply wanted good relations with its neighbors. Many State Department officials hoped Turkey could be an intermediary in Israel-Syria peace talks. Western officials often saw in Turkey only what they wanted to see.
But in recent years Erdogan has shown his true colors, ratcheting up the hostility toward Israel and extending a friendly hand to Hamas. The Turkish government’s behavior during the recent flotilla affair is consistent with the path Erdogan has forged.
The Turkish government voiced its clear support for the Gaza flotilla’s effort to break Israel’s blockade of Hamas. In light of Turkey’s mounting hostility toward Israel, it is not surprising that Israeli commandos came under fierce assault on a ship owned by a Turkish Islamist charity allied with Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party.
Turkey may be an overwhelmingly Muslim country but, prior to Erdogan’s 2003 accession to the premiership, it cultivated close relations with Israel for reasons both historical and practical. Turks have traditionally trusted Jews over Arabs: While Arabs rebelled against the Ottoman sultan, Palestine’s Jews did not. Moreover, both Turkey and Israel are democracies, even if imperfect ones, surrounded by autocracies; both shared mutual enemies in Syria and Iran; and both faced terrorist threats, Israel from Palestinian groups and Turkey from the Kurdish PKK.
A loud and angry mob of pro-Arab demonstrators outside the Israeli consulate in Los Angeles on Tuesday became even more enraged when one, lone Jewish high school student with a yarmulke and a large Israeli flag marched fearlessly alongside them.
The young man seemed to be unmoved by the angry curses hurled at him by the American-Arab crowd. Though protected by a line of policemen, it appeared he could be attacked at any moment.
Reporters asked him afterwards about his unusual presence, and he explained, “I came out because I want to defend Israel…They (the soldiers attempting to divert the flotilla ships) were attacked, and they had the right to defend [themselves]. These people [on the boats] were not humanitarians; their ship was armed with knives, batons, and all kinds of things to attack the Israelis with. There is a naval blockade on Gaza, and they [the soldiers] were just doing their job of enforcing it… Hamas is a terrorist organization trying to kill Israelis.”
Asked if he is affiliated with any group, he said, “Just Judaism and Israel, that’s it.”
