Israel Matzav

Why Turks get all excited about 'Palestinians'

Why do the Turks get so excited about the 'Palestinians' where they pretty much don't care about other Muslims? This article in Turkey's Hurriyet is mostly spot-on.

But why do the Turks have the “Palestine fetish” even though most of them can’t point the Palestinian territories out on a map? Why did they not raise a finger when, for instance, the mullahs killed dissident Iranian Muslims? Why did the Turks not raise a finger when non-Muslim occupying forces killed a million Iraqi Muslims? Why did we not hear one single Turkish voice protesting the deaths of 300,000 Muslims in Darfur? Where were all these Turkish protestors when Israel was bombing Lebanon or when the Chinese police were using disproportionate force against their ethnic kin, the Uighurs?

How many Turks protested when there was civil war in Algeria? How many volunteered for humanitarian aid missions for Sudan? Why were the protests too thin during the Serbian atrocities against Muslim Bosnians? What makes nine Gaza martyrs more sacred than all the other martyrs?

Part of the explanation is that the Turks feel in solidarity with the Palestinians for exactly the same reasons why other nations feel in solidarity with the Palestinians: the intellectual drive to ally with the underdog. But that does not explain the whole picture.

Another part is the political indoctrination Turkey’s Islamists, communists and liberals and (even to a certain degree) ultra-nationalists went through in the early 1970s. These otherwise hostile groups in their ideological battles always united in pro-Palestinian rhetoric and (sometimes violent) action. The legend of the “Palestinian cause” has always been kept alive in the Crescent and Star.

But still there is a big blank in the picture. Why, really, is there no one around when Muslims in different countries are brutalized or killed, yet “every Turk is Palestinian” without or without death (say, the blockade on Gaza per se)? Whether we name it or not, whether we like it or not, whether it goes contrary to what the Islamist propaganda machine has been trying to persuade the West with the nice tag “Alliance of Civilizations,” the annoying explanation is that the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is perceived by millions of Muslims (and very powerfully in Turkey) as a war of religions.

Anyone curious why do the Turks, when they take to the streets for political demonstrations, carry placards written in Turkish, but in the case of Palestine the protest tools are often decorated with Arabic and Quranic scripts?

Subconsciously (and sadly) the Muslim-Turkish thinking tolerates it if Muslims kill Muslims; does not tolerate it but does not turn the world upside down when Christians kill Muslims; pragmatically ignores it when too-powerful Christians kill Muslims; but is programmed to turn the world upside down when Jews kill Muslims.

Turkey sounds just like the rest of the UN, doesn't it?

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 8:45 PM