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.

Read the rest here: Erdogan and the decline of the Turks

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.

Read the rest here: Why Erdogan’s Turkey is not a friend