Powered by WebAds

Sunday, June 06, 2010

WaPo rips Turkey

The Washington Post rips Turkish Prime Minister Recip Tayyip Erdogan for his country's role in the flotilla of fools last week (Hat Tip: Memeorandum).
The relationship between Mr. Erdogan's government and the IHH ought to be one focus of any international investigation into the incident. The foundation is a member of the "Union of Good," a coalition that was formed to provide material support to Hamas and that was named as a terrorist entity by the United States in 2008. In discussions before the flotilla departed, Turkish officials turned down offers from both Israel and Egypt to deliver the "humanitarian" supplies on the boats to Gaza and insisted Ankara could not control what it described as a nongovernmental organization.

Yet the IHH has certainly done its best to promote Mr. Erdogan. "All the peoples of the Islamic world would want a leader like Recep Tayyip Erdogan," IHH chief Bulent Yildirim proclaimed at a Hamas rally in Gaza last year. And Mr. Erdogan seems to share that notion: In the days since an incident that the IHH admits it provoked, the Turkish prime minister has done his best to compete with Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Hezbollah's Hasan Nasrallah in attacking the Jewish state.

"The heart of humanity has taken one of her heaviest wounds in history," Mr. Erdogan claimed this week. He has had next to nothing to say about the slaughter of Iranians protesting last year's fraudulent elections, but he called Israel's actions "state terrorism" and a "bloody massacre" and described Israel itself as an "adolescent, rootless state." His foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, said in Washington on Tuesday that "this attack is like 9/11 for Turkey" -- an obscene comparison to events in which more than 2,900 genuinely innocent people were killed.

Mr. Erdogan's crude attempt to exploit the incident comes only a couple of weeks after he joined Brazil's president in linking arms with Mr. Ahmadinejad, whom he is assisting in an effort to block new U.N. sanctions. What's remarkable about his turn toward extremism is that it comes after more than a year of assiduous courting by the Obama administration, which, among other things, has overlooked his antidemocratic behavior at home, helped him combat the Kurdish PKK and catered to Turkish sensitivities about the Armenian genocide. Israel is suffering the consequences of its misjudgments and disregard of U.S. interests. Will Mr. Erdogan's behavior be without cost?
You bet it will be without cost, at least as levied by the United States. That's 'smart diplomacy,' Obama style. Suck up to terror fomenting regimes and make no demands in return. 'Engagement' as an end in itself.

As critical as I and others may have been of George W. Bush, I believe he would have made the right choice between Israel and Turkey. Obama doesn't even see that a choice must be made.

What could go wrong?

2 Comments:

At 10:34 PM, Blogger Sunlight said...

It will be without cost to Turkey from the U.S. govt, maybe. However, some people who have actually lived outside the U.S. (even in Turkey) are watching closely and understand what this all means. The minute the military guardians of Turkish secularism let this Erdogen run and hold office after the election, many of us knew that was the end. When he ran interference for the genocidal Saddam Hussein by letting the 4th ID congregate and then not deploy from Turkey, that was the next (unsurprising) step. And now this. Turkey is going back to the 7th century, where the machete was king. Also not unexpected to anyone who has been watching the slide. What I don't understand is why Obama wants to do the same thing in the U.S. It's some other planet.

 
At 11:17 PM, Blogger Juniper in the Desert said...

What makes me so livid is how they ahve hi-jacked OUR LANGUAGE!

The union of good, means evil, the religion of peace, means war!

But Freud understood.

Sunlight, O bama is an islamofascist.

 

Post a Comment

<< Home

Google