Erdogan, standing before a portrait of another deeply moral statesman, Ataturk
Speaking of myopic moral equivalence, here is one from Haaretz, with thanks to Ali Dashti. But where are the Israeli suicide bombers? I know that Israel is accused of targeting civilians. I also know that Palestinian Arab terrorists tend to hide among civilians. But that is something we dhimmis are not supposed to notice.
Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan on Tuesday criticized Israel's Rafah operation, saying that although Turkey also suffered from terrorism and was fighting it, he did not see a difference between what terrorists were doing and Israel's demolition of homes and the damage it was bringing to civilians.Erdogan met with National Infrastructure Minister Yosef Paritzky, who said that the Turkish PM renewed offers to mediate between Israel and both the Palestinians and Syria.
Paritzky said the Turkish leader had been forthright in his criticism of Israel's assassination of two Hamas leaders and a recent huge raid on the Gaza Strip.
"The prime minister was very unhappy, to say the least," Paritzky told a small group of reporters.
"He claimed that the activities of the State of Israel do not promote peace...[But] he is willing to offer his services to mediate, negotiate and bring peace to the area."
Muslim but firmly secular Turkey has close economic and security ties with Israel, which regards Ankara as a valuable ally in the region, but has also traditionally supported Palestinian aspirations to statehood.
Erdogan, who had previously offered to mediate in the Middle East conflict, accused Israel in March of "terrorism" after the killing of Hamas leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin.
Speaking in a newspaper interview, he said then that the assassination had seriously damaged peace efforts and there was "nothing left to mediate".
But apparently none of the killings of innocent non-combatants ordered by Yassin damaged peace efforts, eh, Erdogan?
At the American Enterprise Institute in Washington recently, Erdogan was introduced by Richard Perle. A number of people in the Pentagon have been, out of the government, lobbyists for Turkey. They should be careful. Turkey did not permit the use of the Incirlik airbases. Turkey is not unswervingly faithful to the Kemalist constraints on Islam. Erdogan famously said that the "minarets are our bayonets, the mosques our barracks" and while his approach is, and must be -- as long as that EU application has not yet been rejected -- softly-softly, Kemalism is under steady assault.
The Turkish Army is another thing, but only so long as a Kemalist officer corps is firmly in charge. And if an independent Kurdistan comes into existence, or if there is a reaction after the EU rejects Turkey as a member, a reaction that ought to be directed against the Arabs and other Muslims who have "harmed the image of Islam" rather than against the suspicious Infidels (proper direction of that Turkish rage is a task for the farsighted and the subtle-- in Washington and Ankara -- for the only other likely outcome would be an upsurge in pan-Islamic fervor, and rage at Europe).
Erdogan's acceptance of the vilification and calumny against Israel, and its perfectly reasonable campaign in Gaza, its perfectly legitimate attempts to ward off the unending Jihad against it, is worrisome in every respect. The Ph meter for Kemalism should measure the depth of Turkish anti-Israel sentiment. To the extent that Islamic solidarity can be overcome, and the Jihad against Israel seen not as pan-Islamic but as purely Arab, to that extent, but only to that extent, can one judge Kemalism to still be vibrant and strong.
And without Kemalist constraints on Islam's practice, without a dominant secularist class, Turkey no longer has any claim on the West's, or America's, support, for it simply relapses into the umma al-Islamiyya, and becomes not part of the solution, but part of the problem. Secularist Turks must be vigilant and prepared to use all the means at their disposal, and to be as clever, various, and unrelenting in their support of secularism, as are those who wish, slowly but surely, to undue Kemalism. Any foolish parroting of Arab attitudes and Arab propaganda -- where is Erdogan finding out the truth of the situation in Gaza? The UN? The EU? Al-Jazeera? -- serves only to strengthen the Islamic partries and to weaken the secularists.
Turkey is not quite as important as it was during the Cold War. Bulgaria and Rumania, both non-Muslim and both grateful to the United States and not yet corrupted by France and other members of the EU they have just joined (historic memories of the devshirme may still outweigh the siren songs of the likes of Jacques Chirac), have offered bases. If the southern Sudan becomes indpendent, and there are ways to encourage such a development, American bases can be placed there. Those Turks who despise the more primitive Arabs -- which is to say, despise those fully in the grip of the belief-system of Islam -- would do well to understand the real danger to their own lives and interests were Turkey to abandon the constraints on Islam that Ataturk and his supporters worked so hard to impose all through the 1920s and 1930s. Islam keeps coming back, like Rasputin; it has to be tied down, for there is no way to reform its texts -- Qur'an, hadith, sira, or such commentators as Tabari, Suyuti, and the rest.
liars & heretics.
Blah blah blah....when will muslims get tired of blaming the Israelis for their problems...its getting so tiresome.
the only thing their really good at is making kebabs. so, get me a F kebab, turk!
It is erroneous to state there is a good Islam and bad Islam. I am not as impressed by Kemalism as Hugh is. Dhimmis were much better off under the Ottomans than the Kemalists. A Turkey that is outside of NATO could never have invaded Cyprus or in 1996 invaded the Imia islets(part of Greek territory) without causing a huge fiasco. Turkey's invading of the Imia islets was similar to Morocco's landing of troops on the Spanish Parsley islands.
I will give a background to the Imia dispute. From 1912 to the end of WWII Italy was in possession of the Dodecanese islands. During the closing phase of WWII, Turkey opportunistically negotiated to bargain posession of the Greek majority inhabitated Dodecanese with the British, in reward for declaring war on the Axis. This never worked out, Turkey declared war on the Axis opportunistically a few months before the end of WWII In Europe just to be on the Allied side, and never participated militarily. After WWII Greece gained control of the Dodecanese because the population was mostly Greek and to reward Greece for its contribution to the Allies. Now the thing is the Dodecanese comprises over 163 islands and islets, only 26 of which are inhabitated. Of course not every islet is mentioned specifically in the treaty handing their possession to Greece. This is what Turkey uses to dispute their status, that they are mentioned more as a group of islands without every little rock that only goats live on being mentioned specifically. How is this different, what Kemalist Turkey is doing, from the kind of aggression muslim Pakistan shows to India or the hostility of other muslim states to non-muslim neighboring states?
What do you think is more dangerous a Turkey receiving no surplus NATO equipment or one receiving? What do you think is more dangerous a Egypt being basically bribed with $1.3 billion in military aid to have cooler relations with Israel, or one more openly hostile to Israel, but with less military power to act on its ambition, with no military aid?
I would like to see all muslim countries restricted in what weaponry they have available to them. Muslim countries that kind of abandon some principles of Islam are more dangerous in my opinion than an isolated regime like Iran's. Hopefully Turkey keeps up this kind of behavior of accusing Israel of genocide(while covering up the Armenian genocide) to an extent that changes American policy toward Turkey. Hopefully this will encourage Israel to stop its official denial of the Armenian genocide, which it does currently to not alienate Turkey. I am surprised Israel has not lashed back by doing this already.
It is high time for Israel to recognize the Armenian genocide. Without any preconditions.
- speaking as an Israeli-American w/ many a treasured Armenian friend, both Eastern and Western.
An Armenian commensurate response, say from the Diocese of the Armenian Quarter in Jerusalem, would be just as welcome however. Regarding not only the Holocaust [to date unstated] but, paramountly, the nature of the current Jihad against Israel.
On the subject of Kemalism, it is ultimately half baked. Neither here nor there. To Greek American's point, it minimally allows the cover of 'secularism' to absorb, what we all know is, by them, considered Dar el-Islam.
And here here! on the Egyptian parallel to Turkeys western arms. I for one would like nothing more than to have my house on the Sinai [where the block letters of western Semitic (aka Hebrew), circa 2200-2800 BCE, still adorn quite a few copper hewn stones] together with mouth foaming mohammedans and their rusting soviet T-64s parked across the way on the "Reed" sea.
To Hugh's point, perhaps some things need a bit of time to historically work out. Kemalism, possibly at best, traded one sort of militant pride for another, this time couched in Western garb. At worst it is taqiya at play yet again, even if sub-consciously. I do, very much, like the litmus test proposed, God knows it is poignant. From Mahatir to the steps of nearly every MEALAC department in the US, we seem to have the same Ph level.
No one has to be a Dhimmi anymore, our eyes are open. And Turkey's good standing in Washington will soon enough be taking a long march south. They didn't make a lot of friends last year, the neos are probably still smarting from it. As far as AIPAC is concerned, they will be hearing from a number of us regulars. There are consequences to actions, much less craven words in lieu of actions.
One would hope, incidentally, that the Greek polity would [eventually] align consistently on the many issues as well; the obfuscated Jihad against Israel being rather close to my heart. Is it just the moribund nature of Europe today, or something a bit more far reaching? The things seen on Israeli TV are rather confusing on this particular matter. Perhaps they just quote the wrong ministers, and musical composers.
Turkey's treatment of the dhimmi has a good name only for their admission of the Sefardim in the 1490's. The rest of the story was over-taxation, devirsme, petty humiliations and the like punctuatwed by occasional massacres. For a short time during the 1980's, their courts upheld change in religion (the chief beneficiaries of which were returning Gastarbeiter who had become Evangelical Christians while in Europe), but Turkey now seems to be heading back to the dark ages.
Well, as for Greece, you can still go to jail for leaving the Greek Orthodox church, and the country's intellectual life is even more hostage to the left than any other. It's also one of the last lurking places of 1970's vintage New Left terror cells.
Frankly, I sometimes wonder if the modern West's having to put up with the current furor islamicus isn't a divine payback for it's having flipped the bird at Christianity a century ago.
Kepha,
per:
“Turkey's treatment of the dhimmi has a good name only for their admission of the Sefardim in the 1490's. “
You may be aware of the nature, or, perhaps, the cost, of that "admission." I'll summarize some of that for the rest of the readers here:
The Califate benefited greatly from the Sefardi Jews :
*It absorbed and overall educated population with many skilled craftsmen (sorely lacking in some Ottoman quarters).
*It benefited from free strategic knowledge of Western methods, including in some part military/sea going knowledge.
*It oversaw a massive inflow of Gold, Silver and Jewels into it's banks.
* It used Jewish men for cannon fodder in the Bulgarian Campaign, among many other campaigns. There is actually a very melancholy song in Ladino (Judeo Espanol) that speaks about an Enver Pasha (an Ottoman general) bringing death and destruction to a family when a pair of Jewish brothers were forced to fight for a merciless cause (= Jihad), for a country they knew little about, and a cause they certainly did not believe in.
-Not to excuse the historic horror of Ferdinand of Castile (nor his wife, nor the Portuguese expulsion, nor the Inquisition that followed), but all of the above provided the Califa with a needed inflow of men, know-how and material that promoted an ferocious war economy, an endless Jihad against Dar al-harb.
Some other factors need to be flushed out:
*how many Jewish souls where assessed by the Califa to be Janissaries?
*how much Jizia was paid since the reign of the Ottomans?
*who kept a great many Jews from living in their own land? Indeed, precluded them from even making a pilgrimage? Even as that land was under Ottoman control and was depopulated for obvious reason (Al Aksa importance being a modern phenomena tied to a recent Jihad)
*How many Jewish souls where forcefully converted in the Shabitai Zvi affair?
*Where was the government (= Turks) when the Muslim Arabs pogromed the Jews in Damascus, 1840 CE?
*Why did this pogrom and many smaller ones like it take place?
Pogroms are often rooted in the same causal phenomenon- a government taking sly recourse, libeling a minority to escape from public scrutiny, its failed policies. A pogrom is a give up. To the Ottomans, Jewish life, like all infidels, was cheap. They used and abused it.
I do not know where you are getting your info about leaving the Greek Orthodox Church is not allowed but you are wrong, Greece is very much a post-Christian country. The only reason why the Ottomans took in the Sephardim was to colonize areas depopulated by the Ottoman conquest of the Balkans and for them to form a counterweight to Christian dhimmi domination in commerce.
Some of Israeli Victims of Arab Muslim 'paletinian' Heinous Crimes
http://www.geocities.com/thepoweroftruth/VictimsOfArabMuslimPalestinians