The United States has a major problem in Turkey, which under increasingly authoritarian Islamist rule, has become a primary player in undermining U.S. policy in the Middle East, not to mention a growing antagonist of Israel.
I have posted on Turkey’s Islamist government before. The ploy recently to announce a farce agreement (along with Brazil) to reprocess some Iranian nuclear materials as a means of helping Iran avoid international sanctions, was a deliberate attempt to undermine the United States efforts against Iran.
Now, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Islamist political party along with the Turkish government helped organize the flotilla trying to break the Israeli military blockade of Gaza.
Let’s be clear, this flotilla had nothing to do with humanitarian supplies, which could have been shipped by land. The flotilla, if successful, would have opened the door to military supplies to Hamas concealed in later shipments.
Iranian desire to turn Gaza into the equivalent of the Hezbollah missile arsenal was the real purpose of the flotilla, with European useful idiots tagging along. That Turkey played a leading role as proxy for Iran in breaking the blockade is yet another sign that Turkey’s growing alignment with Iran is a harbinger of bad things to come.
The flotilla was a collective human shield operation in which civilians, including reportedly including an 18 month old child, were put on the ships either to dissuade the Israelis from stopping the ships, or alternatively, to create an international incident. Prior to the flotilla launching, the leader of Hamas announced that it would be a triumph regardless of whether the flotilla landed or was stopped by Israel.
And it worked. While the exact death toll is not known as of this writing, when the Israelis attempted to board the ships, they were attacked and at least several passengers were killed.
Turkey is threatening reprisals because one of the main ships boarded, and reportedly some of the dead, were Turkish. Turkey is fast becoming a front line state in the proxy war against the West being waged against Israel.
Under its Islamist government, Turkey has become an anti-American and anti-Israeli provocateur in the Middle East. We better own up to the problem, before it is too late, if it is not already too late.
Update: Carl at Israel Matzav, who posts videotape of Israeli warnings to the ships (and also the video below), puts it this way:
Turkey has recalled its ambassador to Israel. Good. It’s time to stop the bluff that Turkey has anything but warlike intentions toward us.
Bottom line: These people committed an act of war – arguably on behalf of the Turkish government.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buzOWKxN2co]
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Related Posts:
Another Dangerous Moral Equivalency
Another Warning on Turkey’s Islamist Slide
Turkey is Lost to Islamists
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Comments
America, as run by this completely insane administration, will not see Turkey, particularly a heavily Islamic Turkey, as a problem (but perhaps as a solution to the "Israel problem" BO has?).
Without America to take the lead, all of Europe is already getting this all wrong. I fear for Israel.
TURKEY IS PART OF THE AXIS OF ISLAMISM – WITH IRAN, AL Q, TALIBAN, HAMAS AND HIZBALLAH.
THEY DELIBERATELY TOOK PART IN THE FLOTILLA IN ORDER TO TURN IT INTO AN INCITING INCIDENT FROM WHICH THEY COULD INVOKE NATO ARTICLE 5.
THEY ARE NO LONG ER PART OF THE WEST.
THEY SHOUL,D BE THROWN OUT OF NATO.
Possibly, the US has a problem because the violent words and actions of their ally, and the creation of a de facto Kurdistan in northern Iraq on Turkey's border, has alienated and destabilized a formerly largely secular and pro-Western Muslim nation.
As bad as the twentieth century wars were, the wars of the twenty first will be worse. President Obama needs to put the bust of Winston Churchill back in the Oval Office.
The Koran is a book of war.
On another point: you have to wonder at what point the Israelis are going to get fed up with the lack of support from Washington and start taking matters into their own hands…
The US is systematically abandoning all of its traditional allies one by one. We now live in a "borderless" country led by "citizens of the world" that officially seeks "multiculturalism" while preaching that the American culture is the oppressive force. It begs the question: Who is "us" these days? If "us" is everyone else, then who is "them"? Somehow we have allowed ourselves to become linguistically invisible in our own country while becoming the enemy.
With only tyrants as allies, we better save ourselves because there is no where to run. Our country has been taken over by pod people.
BTW, can anyone still seriously argue that Turkey belongs in the European Union? Luckily, the EU won't be around much longer other than as a logo printing Monopoly money.
Really, you don't think Israel could have handled a bunch of unarmed people without violence? 1976 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Mairead Corrigan-Maguire of Northern Ireland is a terrorist? You don't think people in gaza are actually suffering because of Israel's actions? What's the solution mr professor at Cornell Law? You think the continued settlement building is not wrong? Do palestinians have any rights at all?
Blog, here's another source from another blog:
http://directorblue.blogspot.com/2010/05/idf-flotilla-refused-security.html
Read it, the people in the flotilla were most definitely not "unarmed."
This really saddens me. I was in Turkey during the last elections when the Islamist government won the elections. I have friends in Turkey that are western loving liberal people. They were very upset by the election outcome. Many of them were women and they were afraid of changes that might take place that would limit their rights. Many of the strongest defenders of liberal government in Turkey are women because they stand to lose the most if Islam becomes the law of the land. I will not give up hope on Turkey yet. I think Turkey is a lot like the USA is right now. There are deep divisions. The AKP party, much like the Democrats in the USA, is running things differently than previous administrations and alienating traditional allies. AKP won 46.6% of the vote in 2007 but only 39% in 2009. I can only hope that they continue to loss support.
Pasadenaphil, I don't think Turkey wants to be in the EU anymore. They spent decades liberalizing their government and economy. They adopted measure after measure to try and join the EU. The Europeans still kept them at arms length and rejected them. The actions of the Europeans are part of the reason why Turkey is looking to strengthen ties with countries like Iran. The Europeans rejected Turkey. Of course, they were going to start looking for friends in other places.
jameserictodd said…
I agree with everything you said. I guess my point has more to do with the absurdity of having non-elected elites impose supranational organizations. It is a stretch to begin with just to perceive Europe as an assembly of nations. Anyone who has traveled Europe can tell you that people there are regional almost to the point of being tribal.
To pretend that Turkey, form where the Byzantium empire once dominated Europe, could ever be accepted as a European country ignores the provincial realities. Tempting Turkey with EU membership and then denying it to them has caused irreparable harm. What were the European elites thinking?
All of these foolish attempts to globalize the world are doomed to fail. What has NAFTA accomplished for North America other than to poison American culture while destroying Central and northern South America with drug cartels and citizens who now feel they are entitled to the rights of American citizenship?
There are very good reasons why cities, states and nations matter. We aren't ready for world government and never will be, especially one that is imposed without first establishing a democratic consensus.
pasadenaphil – "The US is systematically abandoning all of its traditional allies"
America has done no such thing. We are still here, slowly awakening and slowly responding to overturn the marxist coup.
But in the meantime, our America hating muslim marxist is busy destroying the West and America, while aiding his pals.
The marxist coup has us weakened and with a fever. Unlike Honduras, we let our coup infestation grow, making it more painful to cut out the diseased parts later. We are on our sickbed, but we'll be back. (We could use allies to help us, but they're all down with their own sicknesses just now.)
We hope that our allies are able to stand on their own until we get back up; that we all come through this, and beat the disease swarm.
Nathan, as to your point about taking action- that's the tricky part here: if the Israelis delay action, it buys Iran and other hostile nations more time to grow more powerful in the region (which Obama doesn't mind because he can vote "present" on it), but if they do take action, then the UN, et al will condemn it and gang up, and Obama will agree in so many words. Obama won't even condemn a boycott that hurts his own citizens in a deep recession- there's no way he would support unilateral action by the Israelis, whom he views as being nothing more than a burden to him.
Related story: the GuardianUK is now reporting that the US has been, "[S]ending a succession of envoys to engage with Hamas but lacks the bravery to talk to the Islamist movement openly, it's leader, Khaled Meshal, said in an interview with the Guardian. Meshal praised President Dmitry Medvedev of Russia for meeting him in Damascus and the Syrian President…He told Medvedev that the US was also talking to him. 'I thanked him for that meeting and told him the Americans contact us, but are not brave enough to do so openly'….Meshal said the tectonic plates in the Middle East were shifting, with Iran, Turkey and Syria emerging as regional powers…"
I think that we can safely say that when it comes to foreign policy, Obama isn't simply the clueless bumbler who believes in appeasement, the way that some view him. This is all being done by strategic design.
@Nathan, wow eye-opening, thank you.
I lived in Adana, Turkey from late '77 to early '79 and breaks my heart that Turkey no longer resembles the country I lived in. The Turks I knew back then were modern and secular. They were our friends and allies. Those days are gone.
I thought that those guns looked like paint ball guns. Please tell me you're kidding. If that was the case, then I have absolutely NO sympathy for the Israelis. If you're going to drop your commandos into what anyone above the age of 5 will tell you will be a hostile situation, and you arm them with paint ball guns, then the people running things not only need to be fired, but criminally prosecuted. Regardless of whether they were armed with paint ball guns or not, the operation was such a disaster, that a bunch of highups in the Israeli structure there should be fired anyway.
When dealing with Islam, there is no room for games.