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Wednesday, April 03, 2013

After the apology: Turkey insults Netanyahu and Israel

(Hat Tip: Joshua I). You will recall that Turkey considered it an insult when then-Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon published a picture of the Turkish Ambassador to Israel with his head lower than Ayalon's.

The poster was put up in the streets by the municipal government of Ankara (Turkey).
Billboards placed on Ankara streets displayed a small and sad-looking photo of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu alongside a larger, smiling photo of his Turkish counterpart, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. The billboards, addressing Erdoğan, read: “Israel apologized to Turkey. Dear prime minister, we are grateful that you let our country experience this pride.”

Daniel Pipes thinks that maybe the apology to Turkey wasn't such a bad idea after all.
Indeed, the Turkish gloating has been so conspicuous and extended that it may have prompted to a healthy sense of reality. So long as the Mavi Marmara incident hung over their relations with Ankara, Israelis and others could believe that an apology for the incident would magically undo the past decade. The illusion could persist that the Turks, however unreasonably, just needed to put this Mavi Marmara unpleasantness aside and things would revert to the good old days.
Now that Israelis humiliated themselves and Erdogan is rampaging on, some are awakening to the fact that this apology only made matters worse.

...

Boaz Bismuth of Israel Hayom colorfully notes that Israelis “didn’t expect to feel that only several days after Israel’s apology, Erdoğan would already be making us feel that we had eaten a frog along with our matzah this year.”
Perhaps, after all, the apology was a good thing. For a relatively inexpensive price — some words — Israelis and others have gained a better insight into the Turkish leadership’s mentality. They don’t suffer from mere injured pride; they are Islamist ideologues with an ambitious agenda. If the misguided apology makes this evident to more observers, the results possibly could make this into a net plus.
Hmmm. 

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