The Turkish organizer of the soi-disant “Freedom Flotilla,” Bülent Yıldırım, addressed a Hamas Rally in Gaza back in 2009, in which he declared that “All the Muslims of the World Will March to Gaza.” Well, apparently he couldn’t wait to do it by land, so he chose to do it by sea, and that is how the brouhaha that was so very much in the news recently came to be. Bülent Yıldırım chose to put some highly questionable people on board the fifth of the six ships travelling – the others contained those people who bear the strangely vague name, but one we are all supposed to be impressed withal, of “activists.” But the “activists” on the Mavi Marmara were of a special sort, for they were members of an Istanbul-based “Foundation for Freedoms and Humanitarian Relief.”
Well, that certainly sounds perfectly innocent and even admirable, and we would not be suspicious, would we, had we not, over the past decade or so, run across all kinds of groups with similar names that turn out to be in up to their necks in support for violent Jihad. And if we have our antennae out, we are not wrong, for none other than France’s formidable former head of anti-terrorism efforts as an investigating magistrate, Jean-Louis Bruguiere (now thankfully a consultant in Washington), says that this group, known by its acronym IHH, has “clear, long-standing ties to terrorism and Jihad.” When he investigated the group in the 1990s, “they were basically helping Al Qaeda when bin Laden started to want to target U.S. soil.”
And some members of a terrorist cell, the Fateh Kamel network, named after an Algerian-Canadian, had ties to Al Qaeda. Ahmed Ressam, the man who had brought explosives with him in order to blow up Americans, was a follower of Fateh Kemal, the man linked to the same I.H.H. so deeply involved in preparing and manning the Mavi Marmara. “IHH had a role in the organization that led to the plot” [of Ahmed Ressam to kill Americans as a way to usher in the new century], Bruguiere says. So when the same I.H.H. turns out to be behind the Mavi Marmara incident, we have a right not to allow the people on that ship to pose as innocent victims of disproportionate force. They were people who had prepared, plotted, organized, and were not about to be stopped in their mission, which was to do what they could to make it much more difficult, if not impossible, for Israel to have a checkpoint at sea, to prevent the arrival of Iranian arms of the kind that Iran, in the Karine A and Karine B, tried to deliver previously not to Hamas but to Hezbollah. “¨”¨
So let’s start our understanding of the “Freedom Flotilla” by focusing on the one ship, out of six, where there was any incident at all: the Mavi Marmara, which had on board the I.H.H., already linked to Al Qaeda plots against America. That did not stop it, however, from operating with impunity in the midst of Istanbul, capital of our “ally” Turkey, which continues to be a member of NATO, though whether or not “in good standing” is a matter for each of us to judge.
The point was to either to evade the Israelis altogether and show them to be impotent, or to create an incident, and out of that incident to weaken the ability of Israel to maintain, with the same assurance and effectiveness, the checkpoint at sea or, as some inaccurately call it (and those “some” include many Israelis), a “blockade.”
Five of the six ships were filled with people of another sort of viciousness. These were the regular “activists,” that is, anti-Israel activists, who seem strangely to have few or no other places in the world about which they ever feel like activistizing. For in truth, nothing interests them so much as those whom those Gazan Arabs (the Fast Jihadists of Hamas) and those “West Bank” Arabs (the Slow Jihadists of Fatah) have in their sights, and wish to destroy — not the Gazan Arabs or the “West Bank” Arabs, about whom they are truly and deeply indifferent, but rather the Israelis, or as many of those “activists” clearly see them, “the Jews.”
For if you examine the history of these activists, what do you find? How many of those “Peace Activists” who were on board an earlier flotilla, and how many of those “Peace Activists” now on board the Malaysian-owned (but described as “Irish”) “Rachel Corrie,” have ever taken their “peace activism” anywhere but to places having to do with Israel, and have ever been concerned with anything but trying to force Israelis not to do what they intelligently and reasonably must to survive the permanent Jihad against them?
How many have gone to the southern Philippines to express solidarity with, or even interest in, the Christian farmers routinely kidnapped and killed? How many have shown up in Bangladesh to protest the killings of Buddhists in the Chittagong Hills area, or of Hindus all around the country? How many of those “Peace Activists” have gone to southern Thailand to express their hopes for “peace” in a place where Muslims have been decapitating Buddhist monks, schoolteachers, farmers? How many of those “Peace Activists” have expressed solidarity with the tormented and threatened and persecuted and sometimes murdered Christians of Pakistan? How many of those “Peace Activists” care about why Bishop John Joseph killed himself, to bring attention to the calvary of the Christians in Pakistan? Two? One? None?
How many of those “Peace Activists” tried to get Turkey to end its sinister blockade of Christian Armenia, which considering that Muslim Turks (and Muslim Kurds, and even Muslim Arabs who helped themselves to straggling women and girls in the Syrian Desert) killed Armenians in a mass-murder, some not unreasonably call a genocide? How many of those “Peace Activists” have arrived in Egypt to bring the world’s attention to the suffering that the Copts must endure? How many have gone to Iraq to bring to the world’s attention the suffering of Assyrians and Chaldeans and Mandeans and Yazidis at the hands of Muslims? Any? None?
How many of these “Peace Activists” have gone to the southern Sudan, at any time during the past three or even four decades of slow but relentless mass murder of black African Christians and animists in the southern Sudan? How many have gone to Darfur over the past few years, to express their sympathy with the non-Arab black African Muslims who have been subject to rapes and looting and mass-murder by the Arabs of the government-backed Janjaweed? Any? None?
How many have shown up in Nigeria to stand up for the Christians now being subject, as they have been since the late 1960s (which is why the Biafrans declared their independence — because of what Col. Ojukwu called the “Jihad” being waged against the Christians of Nigeria), to the persecution and murder at the hands of northern Muslims, especially in the northern states where Shari’a is steadily being imposed and Christians are naturally suffering. Any? None?
Let’s get a complete accounting from all of those “Peace Activists” who have shown themselves so very concerned with the mighty empire of Israel, and all of its terrible acts of violence and aggression, and also shown themselves so eager to play up the miseries of the local Arabs, the soi-disant “Palestinians,” who are the shock troops of the Jihad against Israel. Let’s ask for the names of those who have ever, ever, even once, shown any interest in any of those who have been the victims of Muslim aggression, from sub-Saharan black Africa, from Nigeria to the Sudan (and many other places too), and in the subcontinent, in Bangladesh and Pakistan and Kashmir (where 400,000 Kashmiri Pandits were driven out by Muslims), and in Thailand, and in the Philippines, and in Indonesia, where Christian churches have been destroyed by the thousands, Christian schoolgirls decapitated, and one-third of the Christians living in East Timor were killed by Muslims before the Australian troops arrived to save those who had managed to survive.
That, then, is what we should all think of when we think of those “Peace Activists” on this, and all the other, ships designed not to help Gazan Arabs in any way except to make it more possible for them to receive advanced weaponry in order to continue their never-ending Jihad against Israel. For that “peace activism” is all about war making on Israel, and it never has been about anything else. All the indignant denials and the holier-than-thou protests of these people, given their real records of un-involvement in situations of real and unjustified misery, and of their complete absence of interest in all the places where Muslims have made life hell for non-Muslims, in black Africa and in Asia, we are entitled to regard those “Peace Activists” with suspicion and contempt.
But they are not the really the point here. The point here is something much more ominous: the transformation of Turkey, under Erdogan, by him and by his supporters, and the role that the Mavi Marmara and the I.H.H. play, as both a symptom of that change, and as an instrument to bring about further change in Turkey. Turkey is being drawn ever further away from the secularism that Kemal Ataturk so desired and worked systematically to support. Erdogan is the anti-Ataturk, though he proceeds without as yet daring to attack the memory or figure of Ataturk directly, and won’t do so until he feels he has completely beaten the last remaining bastions – the professors and university rectors, journalists, members of the magistrate, and the officer corps of the army – of Kemalism.
Little more than a week has gone by since the violence erupted. The hardened Turks of the I.H.H. formed a lynch mob. They began beating IDF soldiers with iron rods, and stabbing them, and then shooting them with two pistols they had taken off of their initial Israeli victims as they lay helpless. They even threw one of them over the side, where he then landed not in the sea but on a lower deck. Even though the hysteria lingers on in some Arab and Muslim quarters, reasonable people all over the world can now see, if they choose to, exactly what happened. They can view the videos taken by the I.D. F. They can eavesdrop on all the conversations between the Israelis and those on the Mavi Marmara, who refused to halt, despite all the polite requests, even at times imploring by the Israelis to comply with the order to stop and let them inspect the cargo.
And by now, too, everyone has had their most hysterical and vicious say – not only the Muslim media, but also, and not unexpectedly, the most famous Western sources of Islamic apologetics, such as the BBC and The Guardian, who always present a point of view that is viciously anti-Israel and, at the same time, carefully philo-Islamic, always offering apologetics for Muslims in the world, and in Great Britain. There is no need today for Lord Haw-Haw, for dozens of Lord Haw-Haws already broadcast, not from Radio Berlin, but from Bush House, right in the center of London, for the BBC.
The business about “humanitarian aid'” kept being mentioned, though when Hamas finally rejected most of that “humanitarian aid” – consisting mostly of old clothes and outdated medicines – that rejection was not widely reported. Nor did one ever hear that the greatest source of “humanitarian aid” – that is, food and necessary medicine – is and has always been Israel itself, which does not impose a blockade in any normal sense of that word. For every week between 10,000 and 15,000 tons of supplies are sent into Gaza from Israel itself. And it is Israel that supplies the Gazan Arabs with their electricity, their water — all that is needful, that is. Israel supplies this to people who spend their time trying to think of ways to make war on Israel, to inflict damage and misery on the very Israelis who supply them with that electric power, that water, that food, those medicines, and even, when necessary, for particularly delicate operations, with medical care. Somehow this never gets in the news, for it would cause those charges against Israel to simply blow up in the faces of those making them.
And why is such “humanitarian aid” necessary? Gazan markets are full. Oh, it’s true, there are items that the Gazan Arabs smuggle in through tunnels. They smuggle in, for example, DVDs to stock the DVD rental stores. They smuggle in laptops. They have even been known to smuggle in top-of-the-line automobiles, such as Mercedes. But what does that tell us about the nature of the “devastation” that the Gazan Arabs, we are told, must endure? They live, in fact, far better than most Arabs save for those in the oil-rich Gulf. They certainly live better than most Egyptians, and indeed when Gazan Arabs spilled out into the Sinai and went shopping in Egyptian border towns, they were reported as being “amazed” at how “poor” the Egyptians were. And compared to, say, hundreds of millions of Indians who live on a dollar a day, or to the hundreds of millions of Chinese who are virtually slave-laborers working for a pittance in many factories, or compared to the poor in rural and urban Brazil and elsewhere in Latin America, or compared to hundreds of millions of black Africans, the Gazan Arabs – who live on the permanent international dole of UNRWA, one supplemented by all kinds of aid from “activists” and others – they are doing not at all badly. But they are the object of selective and diseased sympathy, not because their lot is so unusually bad (it isn’t), not because they have tried so very hard to build up an economy and have been foiled by the dastardly Israelis (they haven’t, and the Israelis haven’t), but because they are the declared enemies of the Jews of Israel. I have no doubt, and you should have no doubt, that if Israel and Jews were not involved, these particular “Peace Activists” would be nowhere in sight, would have not the slightest interest in the state or fate of the Gazan Arabs.
After all the cascades of lies, and niagaras of nonsense, some of us, even many of us, can resume sailing smoothly along that river which is fed only by the streams of translucent truth. And as the water clears, the statements coming from Erdogan and Ahmadinejad make perfectly clear that the “flotilla” incident had nothing to do with humanitarian aid, but rather with attempting to deprive Israel of its use of the checkpoint-at-sea so that, at a later date, the Islamic Republic of Iran could send the weapons to Hamas-ruled Gaza that it has been trying for years in so many different ways, using so many different routes – from the Karine B to a route through the Sudan – to supply to Hizballah, and has managed to do so. And look at the list of some of freedom-lovers who were found on board the ships of the “Freedom Flotilla,” with their descriptions:
American and British citizen and Hamas activist Ken Auakip, born in 1969. His objective was to reach the Gaza Strip in order to establish and train a Hamas commando unit.
Moroccan-born French citizen and Hamas activist Ahmad Aomimon, born in 1959.
Fatima Mohammadi, born in 1979 of Iranian descent, lives in the United States and is active in the “Viva Palestine” organization. She tried to bring prohibited electronic components into the Gaza strip.
Turkish citizen Hassan Aeinsi, born in 1982, member of a Turkish charity trust, regularly transfered financial aid to the Palestinian Islamic Jihad;
Turkish citizen Hussein Aurosh, assistant to the IHH organisation, who was supposed to arrive in the Gaza Strip to assist the transfer of members of Al Qaeda via Turkey.
Peaceniks all.
There is little embarrassment over all that nonsense, over all those lies, over the refusal to wait, even a day, for the evidence provided by the Israelis that is so pellucid, and so irrefutable. For in the minds of those who hate Israel the truth has no bearing. And those who claim not to be animated by antisemitism should be asked why then do they exhibit such a great interest in the welfare of those who have not disguised, ever, their intent to destroy the single Jewish state. Permanently imperiled Israel is surrounded on all sides, save that of the sea, by those who would destroy it if they could. Those who would destroy it are supported by a vast hinterland of other Arabs and beyond them, other Muslims, including the Islamic Republic of Iran. Those who tell us they are not animated by antisemitism show a criminal indifference to the plight of that permanently imperiled Israel, a country resurrected, so amazingly, by those who had suffered either from the Nazis or from Islamic anti-Semitism. They gathered in a land that had over the centuries been made desolate and barren, and reclaimed it through work. And now this country so small that it can hardly be made out on a world map and its people are the object of fantastic hatred that is completely uncalled-for, save that Islam calls for it. Israel faces, forever, populations that are fifty or one hundred times greater, controlling land areas that are a thousand or ten thousand times greater if we go beyond the members of the Arab League, and which can count on dozens of trillions of dollars in oil revenues for decades to come, and on the trillions of dollars that have been, are being, will be spent, on armaments for those oil-rich Muslim members of OPEC — armaments that may well be sent to other Arabs closer to the front with the hated Infidel nation-state of Israel.
Muslims who take Islam seriously cannot abide the notion that a tiny Infidel nation-state, no matter what its size, should exist on land once possessed by Muslims, even if those Muslims were largely indifferent to that territory, and even if that same territory, once inhabited entirely by Jews, came again into their possession. It did not do so, as some find it so easy to claim, through seizure, but through many decades of patiently buying up the less than ten percent of the land that was privately owned, almost all by absentee landlords in Amman, Beirut, and Constantinople. The 90 percent that had been controlled by the Turkish government for many hundreds of years passed, as it was intended by the League of Nations to pass, to Mandatory Palestine and then to the successor state to the Mandate for Palestine which had been created for the exclusive purpose of creating the Jewish National Home, that is, Israel.
Even that intention of “breaking the blockade” invites a critical scrutiny that it cannot survive. The word “blockade” is a way to describe Israel’s refusal to allow any more smuggling attempts, like the two that had already been intercepted, of ships laden with Iranian missiles (and with those who knew how to train others to use them). Perhaps you have already forgotten the Karine B. that I mentioned just above. If so, do refresh your memory. But if you have forgotten, you would not be alone, for not a single report on television, on the radio, in the world’s newspapers, in the statements of “outrage” and “concern” issued solemnly by various frauds who rule over us, or you, or them, was ever mentioned the Karine B, and its cargo, the tons and tons of rockets and other advanced weaponry – though it was all, once seized, carefully catalogued and put on display by the Israelis. No, the Karine B simply has sailed away on the Lethe, and no one has seen it since. But it should have been mentioned, again and again, and the many other intercepted cargoes too. The Karine B and other attempts by Iran to supply Hamas to Israel’s south are a kind of bloody mass-murdering bookend to the tens of thousands of rockets and missiles that Iran provided to Hizballah before the Israel-Hizballah War. Then there were the tens of thousands of rockets resupplied to Hizballah, even more, much more, than before, under the noses and turned-blind-eyes of the U.N. forces. Those forces have done nothing to stop the hideous resupply, though that was the whole point to their deployment to Lebanon, and the reason that Israel agreed in the first place to withdraw – a U.N. guarantee that its forces would prevent such re-arming by Hizballah. Not a thing has been done in Lebanon to prevent such re-armament.
And it is clear that the Arabs and the Muslims are piling up deadly weaponry wherever they can — north, south, and east of Israel — as they prepare someday, soon or late, to go in for the kill. For the Infidel nation-state of Israel cannot be permitted to permanently exist. It prevents many Arabs and Muslims from having a good night’s sleep. It offends them. It upsets them. They don’t want to be permanently offended by the thought that a sliver of territory belonging once to Dar al-Islam is now possessed by Infidels and, still worse, by Jews, figures of contempt and hatred. It spoils the view. It spoils everyone’s dinner. It cannot be allowed.
So off it is to Gaza, to break what everyone calls a “blockade” but is really just Checkpoint At Sea, a Checkpoint-Sur-Mer. And as cars or trucks or buses are checked by American soldiers in Iraq and by American and Canadian and German and other NATO forces in Afghanistan, the ships in this flotilla were to be checked for weapons being smuggled into Gaza, or for material that can be used to fortify terrorist installations. However, the Israelis offered to those on the “Rachel Corrie” that followed to allow the delivery of previously-forbidden cement – a concession that they ought not to have made, for any reason, even for the purposes of convincing the “Rachel Corrie” captain to bring his ship properly, without violence, to port. But other cargo is allowed, and this business of “humanitarian aid” being brought by “activists” continues. “Activists”! What a word! It is so vague, so floating in a moral ether, and yet so useful because it appears, misleadingly, to carry with it some stamp of moral approval, when it does nothing of the kind. It is a word that without more means nothing and deserves no respect but, rather, arouses suspicion for the absence of further information.
Israel is in a state of war with Hamas, and with those who wish, like Hamas, to destroy Israel but perhaps differ with Hamas in being a little more patient and cunning, and willing to differ on tactics and timing, but of course not on ultimate goals. A real blockade is a standard weapon of war, even a war of self-defense. Blockades have been famously used by the Union side during the American Civil War, by the English against the French, by the English against the Germans during two World Wars, and the Germans against the English, too – both sides can carry out blockades. And in the area of Gaza, the British “blockaded” the Jews of Palestine, preventing them from getting any weaponry in the run-up to the 1948 war, while the same British government supplied weapons of all kinds, and officers too, to the regular armies of three of the five Arab states that invaded Israel after its independence was declared – Egypt, Jordan, and Iraq. Indeed, it was the British-officered and British-supplied Arab Legion, under Glubb Pasha and Alec Kirkbride, that was the most effective Arab force in the 1948-49 war.
And from the end of World War II, and for many years following, there was the most notorious British blockade of all. British cabinet minister Ernest Bevin, a thoroughgoing antisemite, who was constantly warning Jewish refugees that they should not “attempt to jump to the head of the queue” for otherwise they might cause “antisemitism” (!), was perfectly wiling to prevent ships carrying Jewish survivors of the camps and of Nazi-occupied Europe from arriving in Palestine, lest the swelling ranks of Jewish refugees help the nascent state of Israel and antagonize the Arabs. English soldiers not only turned back such ships, but on several occasions boarded them and beat to death American veterans of World War II who had volunteered to help the Jewish refugees get to Palestine. That is a blockade of which those who presume – wrongly – to speak for Great Britain when they denounce Israel for its security measures, whether represented by the self-righteous and nauseating David Miliband, or by the equally-hostile-to-Israel triumvirate of Cameron-Clegg-Hague (with Clegg deep in Ernest-Bevin territory), ought to be constantly reminded.
Nor does the term “humanitarian aid” fit the case, when that “humanitarian aid” consisted mostly of out-of-date medicines and old clothes, and that “aid” was regarded as so dispensable that the Hamas government even refused to accept it. But even had it all been brand-new packages of top-of-the-line medicines and clothes and home goods presented in baby-blue Tiffany boxes, that would have made no difference. For the next convoy, or the next, will of course ostentatiously have medicines, and operating rooms. This will allow the world to forget that Israel’s hospitals are where, for many decades, Arabs inside Israel and other Arabs from all over the Middle East come for treatment. That treatment is often free, especially for the most intractable or impossible-to-cure cases or surgeries: heart operations, brain operations. Those patients benefiting from the advanced Western medicine offered by “the hated Jews” includes “West Bank” Arabs and Gazan Arabs.
The real point, as some of those on board those ships admitted, was to “break the blockade.” That was done, as the Turkish supporters of Hamas, the members of the Hamas-and-Al-Qaeda-linked I.H.H., admitted. Their effort was never about humanitarian aid but about breaking what we all – including the Israelis – inaccurately and lazily call a “blockade” but what was, in reality, a checkpoint. For a blockade in wartime keeps everything out. But here the Israelis keep nothing out that others wish to ship in — except deadly weapons and the deadly personnel who use them, or teach others to use them.
That is what American soldiers, and now Iraqi soldiers, are doing in Iraq. It is what is done by NATO forces in Afghanistan. It is what is done all over the world, where checkpoints are set up to search for weapons and dangerous characters, and once the inspection is over, everything else can proceed. But the checkpoint itself is vital to the defense of Israel. It is even more vital as Iran builds up and builds up, without being stopped by any of Israel’s allies, and with those allies insisting that Israel itself do nothing to defend itself against that Iranian nuclear project, as it has defended itself – and, as an unintended but obvious beneficiary, the entire Infidel world – when it attacked the Osirak Reactor and set back for many decades Saddam Hussein’s nuclear ambitions, and when it attacked the North-Korean supplied nuclear plant in Syria, and when it fights against terrorists that threaten it but threaten as well Infidels everywhere.
Those Infidels still don’t understand how the worldwide Jihad is the sum of all the local Jihads. The solemn distinctions made between Muslim terrorist groups is silly, for they all have the same essential goals and are impelled by the same Islam-prompted goals and hatreds.
The Mavi Marmara incident was attempted so that, from then on, ships with deadly weapons could go to Gaza without fear of having to pass through an Israeli Checkpoint-At-Sea. And that would mean that Iran would have a free hand to send Karines C, D. E. F, G, all the way to Z, and then we can call on some other alphabet if need be – so as to stockpile as many weapons with Hamas as have been stockpiled with Hizballah. Israel would have to be insane to allow such a thing. No country on earth, in the same situation, with the same steady buildup of arms, would permit such a thing. And it is intolerable for countries whose governments know better to pretend that they don’t know what this “flotilla” was all about, or that Israel alone was the main supplier of “humanitarian aid” to Gaza, aid which it had no obligation to supply and which, if this disgusting farce of outrage and denunciation goes on much longer, should come to an end, and Israel should also cut off all electric power, all water, all everything. Let the “activists” around the world take on the burden of Gaza, beyond the billions those Infidels are now supplying to keep the Slow Jihadists of Fatah happy, that is, the warlords of Fatah who take their huge cuts as Arafat did before them. Those they rule over enjoy the rest without having to work too hard, and certainly not as hard as almost any other group without vast oil resources anywhere in the world.
Apparently, you see, the glad idea has gotten out that the Infidels of this world owe the Muslims a living, lest they be unhappy or discontented with those Infidels. Among those Muslims who need support, it is those local Arabs, those “West Bank” Arabs, carefully called the “Palestinians,” who most need and deserve such aid from non-Muslims around the world. But why?
As we all know, the Israelis for weeks before the Turkish ship, the Mavi Marmara, set sail, implored the Turkish government to prevent it from joining that fatal flotilla. But not only did the Turkish government do nothing to stop it, but it was clear that the regime of Erdogan was fully behind the Mavi Marmara and its I.H.H. outfitters and sponsors, despite the I.H.H. link to Hamas and Al Qaeda. A week after the incident, Erdogan declared that he was fully in support of the government of Hamas as “democratically-elected” in Gaza, though one doubts that he would ever come out, whatever he really thinks, and declare his support for Al Qaeda. No, there he will prudently draw the line.
And thus those I.H.H. members, the ones who were truthfully in charge of the Mavi Marmara, set off on the high seas for their Jihad by Sea. And they all clapped, and they sang, and spirits were high, as they set off, that is, to participate in the Jihad against Israel by creating, so they hoped, an incident, and then an outcry, that would ultimately force Israel to stop checking for deadly weapons and terrorists knowledgeable in their use. They would now be allowed to arrive in Gaza. And this is what they sang and clapped to with such sinister merriment:
Yes, it’s an incident in the life of Muhammad, the one about the Jews of Khaybar, who hardly knew Muhammad existed, and were tilling their fields. But Muhammad wanted the wealth that through their daily labor they had accumulated, and he wanted their women (and indeed, having killed her husband and her father and her brother, helped himself to the most beautiful of the Jewish women, and made her his concubine, that is, his sex-slave), so he organized an attack on them. And that attack on the Khaybar Oasis was what inspired those men on the Mavi Marmara, who sought to be “martyrs.”
Again and again Israel asked governments not to allow this dangerous mission to proceed. But Erdogan would not stop it; Erdogan rather likes the I.H.H., does not see what is wrong with a true-blue Islamic group. He not only would not stop the Mavi Marmara, though he surely knew the “activists” aboard were in fact led by a group of trained and hardened I.H.H. men, Hamas supporters all, itching to harm Israelis, and with no intention of letting things be resolved “peacefully.”
Five of the six ships allowed their cargo to be inspected without incident. And later still, the “seventh ship” in the flotilla was invited to dock in Ashdod. This was the late-arriving Malaysian-owned boat wrongly described as “Irish” because it left from Ireland and had Mairead Maguire, who long ago was awarded a Nobel Prize from supposedly bringing “peace” to Northern Ireland, aboard as the Celebrity Activist. It could have been Noam Chomsky, or Vanessa Redgrave or so many others who come to mind, but Mairead Maguire fit the bill for this trip. This ship was even permitted to make sure its cement – a dual-use product that not only can build roads, but also bunkers for terrorists – would be taken, and not by the Israelis, to Gaza. Listen to this Israeli offer here: http://www.youtube.com/user/idfnadesk
The Mavi Marmara was the sixth ship in the original group of six ships (the seventh, or “Irish” Malaysian ship, came a few days later). It was the one paid for, staffed by, fanatical Muslim supporters of the I.H.H., and with, as well, a larger group of Muslims who were paid to go on board. Apparently, in the pockets of some, ten thousand dollars were found. Whether they were doing it for the money, or the money was simply an extra benefit for fanatics, is unclear. But the real leaders were the ones who had organized the attack and were prepared to meet the boarding Israelis and either beat them to death or hold them and then deliver them to Hamas as a present. The videos clearly show Israelis being set upon, beaten by large metal clubs, and stabbed too, and one soldier being thrown to a deck far below. The whole thing clearly was akin to that lynch mob in Ramallah that grabbed those two Israeli reservists who had taken a wrong turn, and murdered them, slit them open, and ran to the windows of the building in which they had killed them to lift their bloodied hands frenziedly, to be shown to the frenzied crowd of Arabs – “Palestinians” – below. You can see a large number of videos, without the fauxtography of Reuters, such as this one:
Only a fool could avoid understanding what went on, what the murderous mob did to each Israeli soldier who, his paintball gun at the ready, rappelled down the rope.
And the bars and roads and pipes and knives were all at the ready, and so too were those who held them, those who upon leaving port had chanted about what the Muslims had done, and would in essence do again, to the “Jews of Khaybar” and those who had told the Israelis to “go back to Auschwitz.” And once other Israelis, in helicopters above hovering above, saw what was happening below, instead of dropping down on the deck armed with loaded paintball guns, they came with real guns to save their threatened fellow soldiers. They stopped the approaching lynch mobs by firing at those in the front, those who were doing the beatings, those who would not obey orders to stop. And nine of them were killed. Would it be any different anywhere in the Western world, if a lynch mob of, say, Muslims, attacked the French police in Marseilles or the British police in Manchester or Bradford or London itself? If the heads of fellow policemen were being smashed in by a hydrophobic maddened mob, would police or other security services be expected merely to watch, or merely to use a paintball gun? What? Of course the only way to deal with such a situation was just as the Israelis did, saving their own lives and those of their fellows.
And it is absurd and disgusting for Erdogan to demand an apology. In a rightly-ordered world, the chanceries of the West, and morality itself, would put Erdogan in the dock, he and the members of the I.H.H., and demand that he now distance himself from the I.H.H., and consequently from Hamas, and from Al Qaeda, and do so unambiguously, and furthermore denounce those murderous Turks who chant about the “Jews of Khaybar” and tell Israelis to “go back to Auschwitz” and “remember 9/11.” That is what Erdogan should be asked. He should be further asked why he thinks the West’s non-Muslims should endure Turkey a moment longer in NATO, if the Turkey that joined NATO is no longer, having been slowly strangled by Erdogan and his supporters over the last few years.
Someday, not in the distant future, what the Israeli soldiers faced on the deck of the Mavi Marmara will not be hypothetical for others, if things continue in the West on their present appeasing course. Nine Turks were killed instead of being able to kill Israelis. These were what the French call the purs et durs, the most hardened, the most fanatical, the most desiring of becoming “martyrs” – Shahids – by dying in the act of killing Infidels. How do we know this? Oh, we know it because the families of at least three, and perhaps more, proudly said so. They proudly told Turkish newspapers that their relatives had gone off wanting to die as Shahids. What does any of this have to do with “activists” who are bringing “humanitarian aid” and “breaking” a non-existent blockade – that is, attempting to run through a checkpoint at sea without halting? The ship was paid for, outfitted, staffed by, the I.H.H., with what some call “activists” – a strange and curious word, for it has no adjective attached. We do not know, without more, what these “activists” were activisting about, what it was that moved them. After all, there are “activists” who supported the Bolsheviks, and Lenin’s early bloodbaths; there were “activists” who continued to support Joseph Stalin even after everything about him was known. There were “activists” who supported the Fascists and Nazis, as well as those who opposed them. Yet we are expected to take, and many do take, the word “activist” to necessarily describe not someone bent on evil, but someone bent on good. And for reasons that escape me, people who exhibit common sense in their own private lives fall to pieces, lose all skepticism, when they are confronted by those who claim to be doing good as “activists,” claim to be helping those who need help.
Really, why is any “humanitarian aid” needed to be sent to Gaza? This is a place dedicated to one cause, and only one cause: the destruction of the only state, a very tiny state, that the most persecuted tribe in human history, the Jews, can call their own. It is a state that gets its electric power, its water, and much of its food and medicine from the 15,000 tons that come to it, shipped from Israel every week. This should be a source of constant comment. Alone among the powers of the earth, Israel continues to keep alive a place that is simply not economically viable, and becomes less so every year, as its inhabitants insist on having families of 9, 10, 12, children apiece. This is reported, but no one ever dares to suggest the truth about those who are as poor at keeping themselves alive as Muslim Arabs. Those Arabs have two main sources of support – the oil revenues that they have done nothing to deserve, and the aid not from rich fellow Muslims but rather from Infidel nations that have fallen into the trap of supplying those Muslim peoples who forgot to be born with oil or gas reserves, and the arrival of Infidels to discover and produce and distribute it.
Then after all the declarations, and all the resolutions, and all the cascades of nonsense and lies, all perfectly predictable of course, there finally came, little by little and thence to more, the information one needed.
We know, for example, and there are videos you can find online to see, that the Israeli commandos were armed not with “machine-guns” – as Mustafa Akyol hysterically proclaimed – but with paintball guns drawn and ready, that is, guns that shoot paintballs. Yes, it amazed me, too. It sounded like something to me out of Monty Python. And on only one ship, the Mavi Marmara, did the Israelis have to use force. And they did so only when the first arriving soldiers were grabbed and beaten with rods and stabbed with knives, and one of their number thrown from the top deck to one far below. And the only thing stopping the lynch mob from killing them immediately, or later, was the use of deadly force by other Israeli soldiers. What should they have done? Nothing? Allowed themselves to be lynched as well? Would that make sense? Is there an army or a police force in the world, or any group of men who if they could defend themselves from a mob by shooting at those most immediately threatening, lunging at them, would not fire at them? Don’t be ridiculous. And don’t allow others to allow themselves to be ridiculous either.
As is well known, Hamas is an organization whose charter dedicates the members of that organization to the destruction of Israel, as an Infidel nation-state existing on land that was once part of Dar al-Islam. It is more fanatical than Fatah, whose warlords run with indispensable support from Israel, for the writ of Mahmoud Abbas does not run much beyond his office in Ramallah, though he would like to think otherwise. Hamas is dedicated to making immediate war on Israel, and through violence. In this, it differs with Fatah (the main constitute of the PLO) and the Palestinian Authority, not in the final goal – the elimination of the intolerable affront to Arab and many Muslim sensibilities, the Infidel nation-state of Israel – but only in the means to that goal.
Israel’s size is irrelevant, for as Arabs so tellingly put it in their metaphorical expressions, Israel is a “knife in the heart of Arabdom” or, in the alternative, a “cancer” in the body of Arab Muslims, otherwise so very healthy. You don’t “partly remove” a knife. You don’t “partly excise” a cancer. You remove that knife entirely, you destroy every last cell of that cancer. That metaphor is a metaphor that expresses the desire of most Arabs, and of many Muslims too, to eliminate entirely the Infidel nation-state of Israel, and to deny the Jews, a small people, their right to their resurrected ancient commonwealth. Others, including both non-Muslims (Copts, Assyrians, Chaldeans, Maronites) and non-Arab Muslims (Kurds, Berbers) are also to be denied a state of their own, so that there can be one vast uninterrupted Arab Muslim domain, as Arafat used to enjoy saying, “from the Atlantic to the Gulf.”
The Turks who attacked the Israelis on the Mavi Marmara were a subset of the Turks of Turkey. They were not necessarily – not yet at least – representative. For they were not merely supporters of those we like to call the “Islamic party” of Erdogan but were also members of, or were led by hardened members of, the I.H.H. They sailed off singing about “Ya Khaybar” and “Yahud”; when they were engaged by the Israelis who asked them repeatedly to halt, they answered “Go back to Auschwitz” and “Remember 9/11.” They were determined to engage in an act of war – that is, to prevent Israel from preventing weapons from reaching a declared mortal enemy, Hamas, supplied by another declared moral enemy. They wanted to do so by creating the conditions in which Israel would be subject to such pressure that it would have to give up this indispensable weapon of self-defense, close down its checkpoint or turn it over to others who, because they are not Israelis, would not or could not properly do the job, as the tens of thousands of missiles now in Hizballah testify. Israel is being asked, after all of its unhappy experience with “peace keepers” from the U.N. and elsewhere, to entrust its security to others. This cannot and will not do. Those who think Israel is being unaccountably stubborn are either fools or viciously indifferent, or perhaps secretly delighted in the mounting danger to Israel from all sides – a level of danger that no other people, and no other country, has ever had to live with.
Those who allowed the ships to be inspected, those who did not try to kill Israeli soldiers, were let go. It was only when the soldiers of I.H.H tried to murder the Israel soldiers who came not to fight but to inspect (one hopes that paintball mistake will never be repeated), that the violence began. The I.H.H. soldiers are the ones responsible for the violence, and the nine men who wanted to be Shahids have gotten their wish.
But what was the Checkpoint-At-Sea brouhaha really about? It turns out it was not about Israel at all. It was about Turkey, and it was about Islam, and it was about the ignorance and pusillanimity of the West. For it is Turkey’s government and the supporters of Erdogan who have over the past few years displayed, nakedly, their hatred of Israel, a hatred that is based on Islam. There is now competition, indeed, between Iran and Turkey, Shi’a Iran and Sunni Turkey, to see which one can outdo the other in being a threat to Israel. The competition has taken the form, in Gaza, of Turks trying to end a checkpoint (“blockade”) so as to enable Iranian weapons, at a later point, to get through, once Israel is prevented from exercising its right to prevent those weapons from getting through. Erdogan, like Ahmadinejad, doesn’t think Israel has a right of self-defense, just as in the end he doesn’t think it has a right to exist, though he has had to reveal this slowly, slowly, given the power of the secularists in Turkey, now being undone, and especially in the Turkish army, where some of the officers have had contact with, and not unfriendly relations with, Israeli counterparts over the years.
Turkey today is not the Turkey that the Americans and other Western governments thought they were dealing with. Turkey today is run by Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who once received a ten-month prison sentence (he served four months) for inciting religious hatred (i.e., hatred against non-Muslims) when he recited a poem that included these lines: “The mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets our bayonets and the faithful our soldiers…”
Turkey is an “ally” of America that would not let the Americans use their own base in Turkey for use against Saddam Hussein. It is a country where the most popular movie in Turkish history, “Valley of the Wolves,” depicted American soldiers in Iraq as “worse than Nazis” (a sentiment echoed by a member of the Erdogan government, and the head of the Turkish parliament described this antisemitic anti-Christian film as “magnificent”) and in which a sinister “Jewish doctor” harvests organs from “murdered Iraqis” to supply clients in Los Angeles, New York, and Tel Aviv. This Turkey is a place where the regime has been on a relentless campaign to put pressure on, to undermine, to falsely accuse, all those who uphold secularism, from businessmen with media interests to generals accused of plots that were clearly regime set-ups, to journalists who dare to defy the Islamic Party and Erdogan, to the university rectors and professors who try to prevent the incursions of those who take Islam seriously and are trying to untie all the knots that were tied long ago by Ataturk, when that farseeing patriot tried, for the sake of Turkey, to systematically constrain Islam — a force he knew could only hold Turkey back, and Turks down. The outrageous attack by Erdogan on Shimon Peres, the running interference by Turks under Erdogan for Iranians under Ahmadinejad, the courting of Syria and other Arab states by Erdogan, all have to do with Turkey and the Assault on Kemalism, and the Return of Islam To Turkey.
All kinds of policy-planners think Turkey is still the country that supplied 5,300 troops for the Korean War, when now it is clear that when there is a clear conflict between Islam and the West, Turkey is not part of the West, but has decided to side with fellow Muslims. This means that Turkey is now a member of NATO whose presence may not be of any help, but is likely to represent a security threat. This might change, in the next year, for it is possible that Erdogan may lose the election. The secularists rightly despise and fear him. But even the Alevis, who in recent months have been set upon by militant and aggressive Sunni Muslims and who are regarded as not fully Muslim (the Turkish Alevis are akin to the Syrian Alawis, and in Syria the Alawis protect themselves by monopolizing the officer corps and keeping the Ikhwan permanently – so Bashir al-Assad fondly hopes – repressed), may wish to halt a regime that is emboldening Sunni fanatics to attack Alevis.
And what if the Erdogan regime were not to be returned to power? It doesn’t matter, really. We should have learned from the past few years that no country that is full of Muslims can be relied on, for there is always the threat that Islam will return. It is a lesson that should have been learned with the Shah, and the replacement of the Shah by Khomeini. Just before the Shah fell, the Americans were proposing to help him with nuclear projects. Had he fallen just a few years later, it may be that Iranian nuclear weapons would have fallen into the hands of the Khomeini regime. Some now suggest that if the West – America and Israel – refrain from attacking the Islamic Republic of Iran’s nuclear project, than that will allow the regime to fall apart, to be replaced by another, better regime. But the point is that Muslim states, no matter what the regime, cannot be allowed to acquire weapons of mass destruction because even a friendly regime, or friendlier regime, can be replaced by another. And even within that regime or country, there will be a large number of Muslims eager to take control, and possibly to pass to others, that weaponry. Think of the nightmare for American and Indian and other Infidels that the Pakistani nuclear weapons now present. Really, were it not for those nuclear weapons, we would not be spending another trillion in what is called Af-Pak, and could let these places sink into the swamps of their own Islamic making. They would thereby provide a salutary spectacle for the rest of the world as to what Islam does to countries, when oil wealth is not present, or Infidel aid no longer forthcoming.
Turkey may still be a member of NATO, but is it, or should it be? Does this make sense, given the mighty contests between the West and Islam that are obviously to come? The ruler of Turkey, the head of its anti-Kemalist regime, has declared his support for the rights of Hamas, as a “democratically-elected government.” How do we know this? He has just said so. He has said he himself may be on a future “blockade-busting” convoy to Gaza. He has not backed away, not an inch, from his demand for an “apology from Israel,” when it is his regime that is embracing the I.H.H. Turkey should be asking pardon from not only Israel, but from the entire Infidel West, including fellow members of NATO that surely realize that Turkey will be of no help in suppressing the forces of Jihad, and now has become, inside NATO, a security threat to all the other members of NATO.
That is what the Gaza flotilla was all about. Turkey, and the Return to Islam. First it was Iran in 1978-79, when Khomeini was allowed to conduct his Revolution from the safety of France, of Neauphle-le-Chateau, by the accommodating and at the time blind-to-reality French. Khomeini was allowed to take power because such people as Gary Sick (the “expert on Iran” who never understood Islam, and was deeply hostile to Israel) and Zbigniew Brzezinski (ditto), National Security Adviser to President Jimmy Carter (double ditto, and in spades), did not prop of the Shah and help him to crush – vainglorious and blind as he was – the Khomeini revolt and leave someone decent, say Shahpour Bakhtiar, in real charge. And with Khomeini came the Return of Islam in a big way.
Over the past thirty years, Turkish secularists might have used Iran as an awful example of what the Return-to-Islam means for art, science, culture, human freedom, the rights of women, the rights of everyone. But they blandly continued to assume that they, all the right people, would forever be able to keep the forces of Islam constrained, because those forces were, to them, in Istanbul, represented by their pious and primitive domestic servants, whose beliefs and ways of thought they could simply not take seriously. And they left things up to the army, as the guarantor of last resort for Kemalism. Erdogan and his Muslim militants cleverly used the demands of the E.U. to bring “greater freedom” and “democracy” to Turkey to weaken the very forces, such as the army and the judiciary, that had over seventy years held Islam in check, through the constraints that were definitely not “democratic.” Nonetheless, they made the possibility of lives under something other than the totalitarianism of Islam possible, and helped to create a thinking class in Turkey. Iran, in other words, was not used as a monitory example, and is a warning, now, only to the Iranians themselves. Many of them have learned, to their sorrow, what Islam in practice, and more Islam in practice, really mean.
Israel, one hopes and expects, will continue to defend itself through these most reasonable of actions: preventing a buildup of Iranian arms. And the countries of Western Europe are on the verge of admitting Muslim Turkey to the E.U. Now we learn that other Muslims are granted Turkish citizenship because they are Muslims, which means that if Turkey were to be admitted to the E.U. , the entire Muslim world is potentially admitted along with it. That cannot and must not happen. Erdogan’s behavior, and his success in undermining Kemalism, show one thing: Kemalism and all such efforts are temporary.
And judging by the behavior of the Erdogan regime, in attempting to deprive the Jews of the right of self-defense in a world where the proud upholders of variously-sourced antisemitisms so marvelously join hands across the sea and across the corridors of power, the Turks of the I.H.H, are not, alas, alone.