DEBKA.

Turkish special forces

Dawn Thursday, June 3 found Israel and Turkey facing glaring at each other on the brink of a military clash in the fevered aftermath of the Israeli commando raid of a Gaza-bound aid flotilla on May 31. Israel had acceded to Ankara’s demand to release the hundreds of activists taken off the boats at Ashdod port.
But without waiting for their release, Turkey jumped the gun. As DEBKA-Net-Weekly‘s military sources report exclusively, on Tuesday and Wednesday (June 1-2), Ankara consigned substantial military strength to its three big forward bases in the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC): The international airport of Ercan, east and slightly south of Nicosia; the village of Lefkoniko in the Famagusta District; and Salamisis on the eastern coast, north of Famagusta.
Deployed on the island and in its ports at present are Turkish Air Force F-15 and F-16 fighter jets, Hercules C-130 cargo planes loaded with small paratroop units, as well as war ships, frigates, destroyers and marines in full battle gear dropped by landing craft early Wednesday at Turkish naval bases in Famagusta, Kalecik and Kyrenia.
Just 48 hours after Israeli naval troops commandeered the six “Freedom Flotilla” ships and diverted them from Gaza to Ashdod, Turkey had transformed Northern Cyprus into a vast aircraft carrier, primed to explode into action to attain two goals:

Determined to break Israel’s Gaza blockade

1. To break the Israeli Air Force and Navy’s blockade of the Gaza Strip
2. To exact revenge in the Mediterranean arena for Israel’s commando action against the Turkish-led convoy which ended in 9 deaths and 40 injured in the battle on the Turkish Mavi Marmara, and hundreds in Israeli custody with their vessels.
Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan told President Barack Obama on the phone Tuesday, June 1, shortly before midnight Washington time, that if the United States did not punish Israel, Turkey would do so, because “[Israel] can’t wash its hands of its perpetrated crimes in the Mediterranean.” Turkey, he said, is obliged to defend its citizens and national honor.
As they talked, the US early warning station atop Mount Troodos, the highest point in Cyprus – which in recent years has been sweeping airwaves across the Caucasus and Central Asia rather than the Middle East – transmitted to the White House images of Turkish seaborne military movements and the steady build-up of military strength, apparently in tactical array for engaging Israel in military action.
The reports the White House received from Israel were not rosier.
Confronted with Turkish might massed in and off Northern Cyprus less than 150 kilometers from its shores, Israel girded up for a possible military encounter. Its Navy, Air Force and Special Forces went on alert, followed Wednesday, June 2, with the mobilization of reserve units – initially the command structures of an armored division and the armored infantry corps. They were put on standby for the immediate call-up of combat troops; Israel’s military chiefs calculated that a military engagement with Turkey, once begun, might rapidly spin out of control and draw Syria, the Lebanese Hizballah and the Palestinian Hamas in Gaza into the fray in Ankara’s support.
Very soon, Israeli warplanes and spy drones were circling over Northern Cyprus and the eastern Mediterranean transmitting data on the Turkish forces piling up there, while at sea, warships formed into two arcs, one facing the Turkish concentrations on and around Northern Cyprus and the other sealing off the Gaza Strip and shielding the big Israeli ports of Haifa and Ashdod.

Obama’s conciliatory efforts dwarfed by events

Wednesday morning, Israel began airlifting diplomats’ families from the embassy in Ankara and the consulate in Istanbul, along with the staffs of its defense missions and trading firms. The embassy and consulate were ordered to shred and burn classified materials and remove hard disks from their computers for shipping out or wipe them permanently. Security personnel made arrangements to disappear across nearby borders at a moment’s notice in the event of a flare-up.
Seeking to defuse the tension, President Barack Obama made several calls to Jerusalem as well as Ankara on the critical Tuesday and Wednesday of this week, only to hear Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu say that Erdogan’s military movements left Israel no option but to stand ready for a showdown.
“If Erdogan stops massing his army against Israel,” Netanyahu told Obama, ‘Israel will stand down too.”
But the harder Obama strove for calm, the faster the military drums beat on both sides.
Inside Turkey, the prime minister mustered all the machinery of his Muslim-oriented Justice and Development Party to whip up furious street demonstrations across the country demanding revenge against Israel.
They were fueled by Erdogan’s enraged speech to parliament Tuesday accusing Israel of a bloody massacre. “From now on, it is no longer possible to turn a blind eye on the lawless behavior of the current Israeli government,” he said, adding he did not advise anyone to test Turkey’s patience.
He came to the legislature from an emergency cabinet meeting with the military’s second-ranking general, the defense minister and national intelligence directors.

Israelis see themselves as unfairly demonized

A few hours later, Erdogan told Obama that Israel’s next actions would determine where his country stood, throwing the ball back in Netanyahu’s court. But by then, it was judged in Washington and Jerusalem that the Turkish premier had painted himself into a corner from which he could not back down any time soon.
The US president saw his efforts overtaken and overshadowed by galloping events.
If the Turkish prime minister, or any one else, expected Israel to be contrite, they were wrong. While upset by the way the raid was handled, Israelis saw themselves unfairly demonized internationally for carrying out a legitimate defensive operation against the belligerent Hamas. International censure, they said, was misdirected against the injured party and they accused Ankara if sending out a convoy of phony “peace-lovers” to put Israel in the wrong on behalf of its enemies.
Anxious to take the flotilla incident off world headlines, Netanyahu promised the US president to speedily deport the hundreds of foreign activists questioned and jailed after they were taken off the boats at Ashdod port. And indeed, by Wednesday night, most were bound for the international airport on buses and flown out, while 124 citizens of Arab and Muslim countries left through neighboring Jordan.
The prime minister cause a domestic outcry by resisting demands from the state attorney, the military and the public to bring to justice the activists filmed on the Marmara’s deck beating up Israeli soldiers.
Members of the Istanbul-based IHH- Insani Yardim Vakfi were described by other passengers as having organized the ship’s routine on military lines and being armed ready for the Israeli raiders.
Netanyahu told the US president that the group had been formed by the IHH of a hodge-podge from various international jihad movements, including al Qaeda’s branches in Turkey, Bosnia and Bulgaria (See HOT POINTS of June 2 below).

A clash would be a nightmare for Obama

He accused the Erdogan government of generously bankrolling this group and arranging for donations of $1.8 million for the purchase of the Mavi Marmara, the intended spearhead of the convoy for breaking the Gaza blockade. The Istanbul authorities were instructed, he said, to let these terrorists board the ship and sail out of port without passports or any other identifying documents.
Sponsoring Islamist terrorists and letting them loose against Israel may make Erdogan look good in Damascus and Tehran, Netanyahu said, but is not something we can accept.
As we write this, DEBKA-Net-Weekly‘s Washington, Jerusalem and Ankara sources do not see Obama managing to dampen the flames, although a military clash between Israel and Turkey would be a nightmare for him as he approaches his second year in office.
Jerusalem is therefore under heavy pressure to again give ground to Ankara’s demands, including letting the Irish-flagged Rachel Corrie go through to the Gaza Strip early next week. This ship was left behind by the main convoy because of technical troubles and has made a detour to Istanbul to gain Turkey’s blessing for its voyage to finish the flotilla’s failed mission to break the Gaza blockade.
The flare-up of hostilities between two of America’s most important Middle East allies – in defiance of the US president’s efforts to rein them in – would diminish his authority and reflect badly on America’s standing in more than one part of the world.

Turkey, a time bomb in the heart of NATO

At the outset of the crisis, the Turkish prime minister said he was determined to invoke not only the UN Security Council for condemning Israel but also NATO for collective action against the Jewish state for attacking a member nation. He was not mollified by the watered down UN condemnation.
So far, Erdogan has not followed through on his demands of NATO. But should Ankara decide it was expedient to freeze its participation in NATO operations as a means of extorting alliance backing for its moves against Israel – up to and including military action against the Jewish state – the strain could prove overwhelming: NATO unity already fraying over its members’ refusal to send more troops to Afghanistan might well buckle completely.
In direct contrast, the rival alliance taking shape between Turkey, Iran, Brazil, Syria and other radical anti-American nations, with Russia standing by in the wings, would profit from a military showdown between Turkey and Israel. It would most likely scuttle the fragile US-sponsored proximity talks scarcely broached by Israel and the Palestinians and knock down the keystone overarching Obama’s Middle East strategy.
The rejectionist Hamas would be able to celebrate another tactical victory along with its sponsors in Tehran and Damascus.
But the Turkish prime minister has not yet burned all his bridges to the West, although for now he cannot afford to sharply apply the brakes on the momentum he has sent rushing towards a clash with Israel without losing face at home. He would be accused of failing to follow through on steps for defending national honor and this would nullify four years of strenuous efforts to raise his country to the highest level of esteem in Muslim eyes.

Erdogan’s dilemma, Netanyahu’s quandary

Because other countries, preferably America, have not come forward to punish Israel, Erdogan cannot be seen to shirk the “incalculable consequences” he publicly threatened. He therefore instructed Turkey’s armed forces to go forward with preparations for military action, while at the same time keeping an eye on Washington and Jerusalem.
Netanyahu’s choices are just as tough as those faced by Obama and Erdogan.
He spent his first year as head of government investing heavily in preparing the country for a military showdown threatened collectively by Iran, Syria, Hamas and Hizballah. Never in their wildest dreams did he or his generals imagine that this confrontation with the radical Muslim bloc would kick off with Israel’s longstanding military partner in Ankara.
Wednesday, the Israeli prime minister declared in a live television speech – and later to foreign correspondents – that ending the Gaza blockade would open the door to Iranian ships bearing hundreds of heavy missiles for Hamas and the establishment of an Iranian port on the Mediterranean.
At the same time, he must deal with Erdogan’s ultimatum to end the blockade altogether – or face the music.
It is clear to the Israeli prime minister that the music he would face at home for surrendering to Ankara could finish him for good politically. He would lose the respect of the country and its armed forces if he were seen to be climbing down on the cardinal tenet of Israel’s defense doctrine against terrorism by opening the floodgates for heavy Iranian hardware to flood Hamas-ruled Gaza.

» Mainstream Media Doesn’t Let Facts Get In The Way Of Their Anti-Israel Narrative – Big Journalism.

It must be insanely frustrating to do media outreach or public diplomacy for Israel.

It’s not only that media outlets seem to have an endless supply of anti-Israel storylines that they just mix and match regardless of context, from lurid descriptions of imagined atrocities to old standbys about Palestinian dispossession. It’s also that journalists and editors seem to pick their themes with something approaching reckless abandon, throwing against the wall one thinly sourced anti-Israel libel after another. If something sticks they congratulate themselves on brave journalism. If a smear is debunked they just shrug and move on.

The problem isn’t so much a resistance to specific facts, though the BBC has indeed been conspicuously ignoringIsraeli evidence that contradicts their preferred take on reality. It’s just that being wrong is a functionally costless proposition if the error works against Israel, so journalists can publish an endless stream of sensational accusations with minimal concern for their veracity. All they need is a quote, which anti-Israel partisans are more than willing to provide, and that qualifies as fact-checking.

The reports surrounding Israel’s Monday raid on the Mavi Marmara ship stands as a veritable textbook on how that coverage plays out in real time.

The flagship of the Gaza “Freedom Flotilla,” transporting ostensibly humanitarian aid to Iran’s ostensibly impoverished proxies in the Gaza Strip, was part of the ostensibly nonviolent fleet seized by Israeli naval commandos. The ship was contacted by Israel and asked to unload its cargo for inspection, the captain explicitly declared the fleet’s intention to breach Israel’s blockade of the Gaza Strip, and the Israelis dispatched commandos to intercept it.

That was when the gentle humanitarians on the Marmara executed a carefully planned ambush, attacking the Israeli commandos with knives and metal pipes while the soldiers waited 40 minutes for permission to use live fire. Meanwhile they tried to defend themselves with paintball rifles, while one commando after another was brutally assaulted. Several ended up in the hospital in critical condition. One has reportedly been beaten beyond recognition.

That much we know because the IDF released a torrent of video and audio proving it, much of it posted to YouTube before Americans were awake on Memorial Day. But they still weren’t fast enough to beat the first wave of articles, most of which conveyed fantastic tales of innocent humanitarians getting sprayed with gunfire by bumbling, blundering IDF thugs. That those tales turned out to be wrong has done very little to dampen the media’s enthusiasm for anti-Israel propaganda.

Even before the raid, Reuters had pointedly juxtaposed Israel’s concerns about the fleet with a reminder that “a Turkish human rights group is one of the organizers.” That organization was the International Humanitarian Fund (IHH), which a later Reuters article outlined as an international charity group whose members “don’t have anything against Israel.” Except the IHH is actually an Al-Qaeda linked terrorist organization according to multiple countries, Turkey included. As for their members’ lack of concern with the Jewish State, the characterization squares poorly with videotapes of flotilla members chanting genocidal antisemitic war chants before departing.

Just a few hours after news of the raid broke, the New York Times had already published an article with prominent quotes declaring that “it was inconceivable” that the flotilla passengers had used live fire against the commandos. A video subsequently published by the IDF showed not only that it was eminently conceivable, but that Israeli commandos walked into a lynching party. The overhead and close up videos were incontrovertible, though fringe conspiracy theorist are certainly working on explaining how the IDF manufactured them.

Stephen Walt of Walt and Mearsheimer fame took to his Foreign Policy blog to denounce Israel’s attack on an“unarmed ship.” Elsewhere the AFP quoted a flotilla leader stating flat out that “nobody had a weapon.” So the IDF produced tape of protesters detonating stun grenades and stabbing commandos, plus an entire videocarefully cataloging all the arms that were on the unarmed ship.

According to quotes in Al Jazeera and the International Herald Tribune, the flotilla jihadists didn’t anticipate any violence. Except the IDF showed them writing up wills, preparing gasmasks, bringing night vision goggles and bullet-proof vests, and arming themselves with metal pipes, rods, slingshots, and broken bottles.

The Washington Post’s musings over whether Israel had violated international law or committed piracy were answered as soon as someone bothered to read international law or look up the definition of piracy.

The “crippling Israeli siege” of the Gaza Strip is neither particularly crippling nor exclusively Israeli.

And so on.

None of which has slowed down the anti-Israel invective. The new tactic is simply to assert over and over again what a disaster the raid was, with the hope being that it eventually becomes exactly that. The Huffington Post has naturally been leading the way, mixing ominous declarations of a “botched raid” with unseemly headlines about how Barney Frank is ashamed “as a Jew.” The Los Angeles Times editorial about “Israel’s self-inflicted wound” is another fine example of the genre.

Ditto for the Associated Press’s analysis of how Israel’s “bloody, bungled” operation has strained Israeli/US ties.And of Bloomberg’s description of how the Israeli raid has ruined Israeli/Turkish relations. And of the NYT’s discovery that the raid has undermined Israeli/Palestinian proximity talks. Meanwhile the US/Israeli special relationship was already heading for a collapse and if anything has recovered ground during this crisis. And the Israeli/Turkish relationship has been over for months as a result of Turkey’s strategic decision to pull away from the West. And the only thing that Palestinians and Israelis agree upon is that the proximity talks have always been a waste of time. But somehow all of these are still more tenable than the demonstrable lies that dominated the news cycle for the first few post-raid days.

So the Israelis have a right to feel a little bit frustrated. They’ve been pouring millions of dollars into documenting their excruciatingly careful military operations, building on lessons stretching back a decade. In April 2002, after a string of horrific suicide bombings, Israel invaded the “the martyrs’ capital” of Jenin as part of Operation Defensive Shield. The fighting was brutal and flood-the-zone media coverage of a “massacre” immediately ensued. Fabrications of murders and atrocities – entire families bulldozed, thousands dead, etc – became ubiquitous. By the time the true facts came out and it was proven that only 52 mostly combatant Palestinians had died, the libels had hardened into conventional wisdom.

Israelis became determined not to let anti-Israel media feeding frenzies get ahead of facts ever again, with the assumption being that media outlets simply couldn’t simply lie in the face of evidence.

They were half-right: journalists gave up the easily disprovable lies, and moved on to incoherent arguments. Instead of trying to sustain new story lines, they just fell back to older talking points.

Two days before the Gaza flotilla raid, the Wall Street Journal quoted a senior Israel military official saying that “it makes no difference what we do, or how careful we are… whatever we do, they’ll all be against us, they’ll condemn us.”

No kidding.

Israel\’s Netanyahu maintains defiance amid criticism over Gaza blockade.

Defiance has been a signature of Netanyahu’s career, and despite the expectations of some commentators that he would be more conciliatory during his second go-round as prime minister, that has not been the case over the 14 months since he returned to power. Even when it has meant publicly feuding with the Obama administration, Netanyahu has seemed to embrace the fight — a strategy that thus far has paid off for him politically.

The latest showdown, coming this week after Israeli commandos killed nine activists in a melee at sea, has renewed focus on Israel’s policy of blockading Gaza as part of a strategy to weaken the Islamist Hamas movement. Despite U.S. pressure on Israel to change course in Gaza, Netanyahu has given no indication he is willing to do so in any fundamental way.

That stance echoes the Israeli strategy last year, when it filibustered U.S. calls for a freeze on settlement construction in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Although Israel and the U.S. ultimately reached an understanding on the issue that required Israeli concessions, the Obama administration was first forced to make an embarrassing retreat from its initial demand for a complete freeze.

Although Israeli politicians have traditionally paid a price at home for tangling with U.S. presidents, Netanyahu has not been damaged politically by his challenges to Obama, who is generally unpopular in Israel.

“If you look at Bibi in the last 15 months, you see one main line that directs him in his international and domestic behavior, which is his political situation in Israel,” said Yaron Deckel, a political commentator for Israel Television, using Netanyahu’s nickname. “You saw it with the Jerusalem crisis with the U.S., when he preferred his coalition to Obama. And now you see it with the international community when he defies it but keeps his public support in Israel.”

With Israel under fire abroad, Netanyahu used his first extended remarks on the flotilla crisis to launch an attack on the world.

“Once again, Israel faces hypocrisy and a biased rush to judgment. I’m afraid this isn’t the first time,” he said.

Without even a faint nod to the international community’s concerns about Israel’s actions — which have led to calls for an international inquiry, ambassador recalls and deep damage to relations with Turkey — Netanyahu insisted Israeli policy toward the Gaza Strip would not change as long as it is controlled by Hamas.

“Israel simply cannot permit the free flow of weapons and war materials to Hamas from the sea,” he said. Hamas has close links to the government of Iran, and Netanyahu said the international community “cannot afford an Iranian port in the Mediterranean.”

Still, there were also signs that Netanyahu may be tempering his tough rhetoric with pragmatic steps to help ease this crisis.

By focusing on the need to stop the flow of weapons and war materials to Hamas “from the sea,” Netanyahu may have been signaling a readiness to allow more freedom of movement and goods across land — something the United States has insisted on since the flotilla incident.

Netanyahu has long been regarded, particularly abroad, as a hard-liner who is reluctant to make peace with the Palestinians. But when necessary, he has been willing to make pragmatic, tactical conceWhen Netanyahu first clashed with the Obama administration last year, he insisted there would be no settlement freeze as a precondition to peace talks with the Palestinians. Then in the fall, he agreed to a 10-month pause in the West Bank.

Mona Charen: \’Humanitarian\’ ship as theater of war | PoconoRecord.com.

The effort to destroy the Jewish state has many fronts. One front is in Iran, where the maniacal regime that has repeatedly promised to “wipe Israel off the map” marches inexorably toward a nuclear bomb. Another is in Gaza, from which Hamas has lobbed 10,000 missiles into Israeli cities. Yet another front, the most insidious, comprises the propaganda arm of the Palestinian movement. And this front thrives for only one reason — the complicity of the world press and the so-called “international community.”

It was the propaganda arm that staged the “Freedom Flotilla.” But there have been many previous productions: The propaganda arm was responsible for the photo-shopped images of damage to Lebanon during the 2006 war, the staged “death” of 12-year-old Muhammad Al Durrah, the “massacre” at Jenin, and the “war crimes” in Gaza. In each and every case, the “news” of Israeli atrocities was broadcast far and wide by organizations like Reuters, AP, CNN and AFP. The United Nations has offered its imprimatur to every libel. The truth seemed always to have a case of laryngitis.

Today, in the wake of the confrontation between Israeli soldiers and the provocateurs aboard the Gaza flotilla, the remarkably incurious world press is providing exactly the sort of headlines on which the organizers knew they could count. “Flotilla Attack Is Israel’s Kent State” screamed the Huffington Post. Agence France Presse carried a banner quoting the Turkish foreign minister to the effect that “Israel has lost all legitimacy.” Every news outlet I checked docilely described the flotilla as “humanitarian.”

Don’t members of the press ever resent being so used?

Fact: Israel imposed a blockade of Gaza to prevent weapons from reaching the radical Islamic regime there that continues to make war on Israeli civilians. Egypt, too, has blockaded the strip, hoping to choke off weapons to Hamas, which it views as a threat.

Fact: Humanitarian relief is delivered to Gaza from Israel on a daily basis. During the first three months of this year, 94,500 tons of supplies were transferred to Gaza from Israel, including 48,000 tons of food products; 40,000 tons of wheat; 2,760 tons of rice; 1,987 tons of clothes and footwear; and 553 tons of milk powder and baby food for the strip’s 1.5 million inhabitants. Representatives of international aid groups and the United Nations move freely to and from the Gaza Strip.

Fact: Upon learning of the intentions of the Gaza flotilla, the Israeli government asked the organizers to deliver their humanitarian aid first to an Israeli port where it would be inspected (for weapons) before being forwarded to Gaza. The organizers refused. “There are two possible happy endings” a Muslim activist on board explained, “either we will reach Gaza or we will achieve martyrdom.”

Fact: The flotilla ignored multiple instructions from Israeli navy ships to change course and follow them to the Israeli port of Ashdod.

Fact: On board one of the ships, according to Al-Jazeera, the “humanitarian” Palestinians sang “Khaybar, Khaybar, oh Jews, the army of Muhammad will return” — a reference to the 628 massacre of Jews in Arabia at the hands of Muhammad.

Fact: The flotilla’s participants included the IHH, a “humanitarian relief fund” based in Turkey that has close ties to Hamas and to global jihadi groups in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Chechnya and elsewhere, and which has also organized relief to anti-U.S. Islamic radicals in Fallujah, Iraq. A French intelligence report suggests that IHH has provided documents to terrorists, permitting them to pose as relief workers. Among the other cheerleaders — former British MP and Saddam Hussein pal George Galloway, all-purpose America and Israel hater Noam Chomsky, and John Ging, head of UNRWA, the U.N.’s agency for Palestinian support.

Fact: When the family of Gilad Shalit, the Israeli soldier who was kidnapped during a cross border raid by Hamas in 2006, offered to support the flotilla if they would agree to ask Hamas to permit international agencies to visit their son, they were rebuffed.

Fact: When Israeli commandos rappelled down ropes to the deck of the Mavi Marmara, they were assaulted and beaten with metal poles and baseball bats by the Palestinians on board. (It’s available on

theisraelproject.org).

Some commentators sympathetic to Israel complain that the Israelis were late getting their explanation of events to the press. That’s probably true, but almost irrelevant. There is a jerking of knees around the world whenever and wherever Israel is forced to defend herself. This eagerness to repeat the Palestinian version of events, to assume the very worst about Israel, and to ignore the history of blatant and outrageous lies by Israel’s enemies — amounts to joining them.

Israel, Disarmed – Opinion – PatriotPost.US.

By Charles Krauthammer (Archive) · Friday, June 4, 2010

WASHINGTON — The world is outraged at Israel’s blockade of Gaza. Turkey denounces its illegality, inhumanity, barbarity, etc. The usual U.N. suspects, Third World and European, join in. The Obama administration dithers.

But as Leslie Gelb, former president of the Council on Foreign Relations, writes, the blockade is not just perfectly rational, it is perfectly legal. Gaza under Hamas is a self-declared enemy of Israel — a declaration backed up by more than 4,000 rockets fired at Israeli civilian territory. Yet having pledged itself to unceasing belligerency, Hamas claims victimhood when Israel imposes a blockade to prevent Hamas from arming itself with still more rockets.

In World War II, with full international legality, the United States blockaded Germany and Japan. And during the October 1962 missile crisis, we blockaded (“quarantined”) Cuba. Yet Israel is accused of international criminality for doing precisely what John Kennedy did: impose a naval blockade to prevent a hostile state from acquiring lethal weaponry.

Oh, but weren’t the Gaza-bound ships on a mission of humanitarian relief? No. Otherwise they would have accepted Israel’s offer to bring their supplies to an Israeli port, be inspected for military materiel and have the rest trucked by Israel into Gaza — as every week 10,000 tons of food, medicine and other humanitarian supplies are sent by Israel to Gaza.

Why was the offer refused? Because, as organizer Greta Berlin admitted, the flotilla was not about humanitarian relief but about breaking the blockade, i.e., ending Israel’s inspection regime, which would mean unlimited shipping into Gaza and thus the unlimited arming of Hamas.

Israel has already twice intercepted weapons-laden ships from Iran destined for Hezbollah and Gaza. What country would allow that?

But even more important, why did Israel even have to resort to blockade? Because, blockade is Israel’s fallback as the world systematically delegitimizes its traditional ways of defending itself — forward and active defense.

(1)Forward defense: As a small, densely populated country surrounded by hostile states, Israel had, for its first half-century, adopted forward defense — fighting wars on enemy territory (such as the Sinai and Golan Heights) rather than its own.

Where possible (Sinai, for example) Israel has traded territory for peace. But where peace offers were refused, Israel retained the territory as a protective buffer zone. Thus Israel retained a small strip of southern Lebanon to protect the villages of northern Israel. And it took many losses in Gaza, rather than expose Israeli border towns to Palestinian terror attacks.

But under overwhelming outside pressure, Israel gave it up. The Israelis were told the occupations were not just illegal but at the root of the anti-Israel insurgencies — and therefore withdrawal, by removing the cause, would bring peace.

Land for peace. Remember? Well, during the past decade, Israel gave the land — evacuating South Lebanon in 2000 and Gaza in 2005. What did it get? An intensification of belligerency, heavy militarization of the enemy side, multiple kidnappings, cross-border attacks and, from Gaza, years of unrelenting rocket attack.

(2)Active defense: Israel then had to switch to active defense — military action to disrupt, dismantle and defeat (to borrow President Obama’ s description of our campaign against the Taliban and al-Qaeda) the newly armed terrorist mini-states established in southern Lebanon and Gaza after Israel withdrew.

The result? The Lebanon war of 2006 and Gaza operation of 2008-09. They were met with yet another avalanche of opprobrium and calumny by the same international community that had demanded the land-for-peace Israeli withdrawals in the first place. Worse, the U.N. Goldstone report, which essentially criminalized Israel’s defensive operation in Gaza while whitewashing thecasus belli — the preceding and unprovoked Hamas rocket war — effectively delegitimized any active Israeli defense against its self-declared terror enemies.

(3)Passive defense. Without forward or active defense, Israel is left with but the most passive and benign of all defenses — a blockade to simply prevent enemy rearmament. Yet, as we speak, this too is headed for international delegitimation.

But, if none of these are permissible, what’s left?

Nothing. The whole point of this relentless international campaign is to deprive Israel of anylegitimate form of self-defense.

The world is tired of these troublesome Jews, six million — that number again — hard by the Mediterranean, refusing every invitation to national suicide. For which they are relentlessly demonized, ghettoized and constrained from defending themselves, even as the more committed anti-Zionists — Iranian in particular — openly prepare a more final solution.

(c) 2010, The Washington Post Writers Group

IDF: Mercenaries to blame for violence.

Photo by: Courtesy

By YAAKOV KATZ

06/04/2010 05:06

Army says some 50 well-trained passengers were recruited in Turkey.

We had no choice, commando who killed 6 tells \’Post\’.

Robert L. Pollock: Erdogan and the Decline of the Turks – WSJ.com.

By ROBERT L. POLLOCK

Israeli special forces and their commanders were apparently shocked to find their boarding attempt on the Mavi (“Blue”) Marmara met with violence. They should not have been. I have no doubt that the Turkish “peace activists” aboard the ship regarded Israeli troops as something akin to the second coming of Hitler’s SS.

To follow Turkish discourse in recent years has been to follow a national decline into madness. Imagine 80 million or so people sitting at the crossroads between Europe and Asia. They don’t speak an Indo-European language and perhaps hundreds of thousands of them have meaningful access to any outside media. What information most of them get is filtered through a secular press that makes Italian communists look right wing by comparison and an increasing number of state (i.e., Islamist) influenced outfits. Topics A and B (or B and A, it doesn’t really matter) have been the malign influence on the world of Israel and the United States.

For example, while there was much hand-wringing in our own media about “Who lost Turkey?” when U.S. forces were denied entry to Iraq from the north in 2003, no such introspection was evident in Ankara and Istanbul. Instead, Turks were fed a steady diet of imagined atrocities perpetrated by U.S. forces in Iraq, often with the implication that they were acting as muscle for the Jews. The newspaper Yeni Safak, Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan’s daily read, claimed that Americans were tossing so many Iraqi bodies into the Euphrates that local mullahs had issued a fatwa ordering residents not to eat the fish. The same paper repeatedly claimed that the U.S. used chemical weapons in Fallujah. And it reported that Israeli soldiers had been deployed alongside U.S. forces in Iraq and that U.S. forces were harvesting the innards of dead Iraqis for sale on the U.S. “organ market.”

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Associated Press

Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan (left) has distanced himself from allies such as the U.S. and curried favor with the likes of Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

The secular Hurriyet newspaper, meanwhile, accused Israeli soldiers of assassinating Turkish security personnel in Mosul and said the U.S. was starting an occupation of (Muslim) Indonesia under the guise of humanitarian assistance. Then U.S. ambassador to Turkey Eric Edelman actually felt the need to organize a conference call to explain to the Turkish media that secret U.S. nuclear testing did not cause the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. One of the craziest theories circulating in Ankara was that the U.S. was colonizing the Middle East because its scientists were aware of an impending asteroid strike on North America.

The Mosul and organ harvesting stories were soon brought together in a hit Turkish movie called “Valley of the Wolves,” which I saw in 2006 at a mall in Ankara. My poor Turkish was little barrier to understanding. The body parts of dead Iraqis could be clearly seen being placed into crates marked New York and Tel Aviv. It is no exaggeration to say that such anti-Semitic fare had not been played to mass audiences in Europe since the Third Reich.

When I interviewed Prime Minister Erdogan (one of several encounters) in 2006, he was unabashed about the narrative.

Erdogan: “I believe the people who made this movie took media reports as their basis . . . for example, Abu Ghraib prison—we have seen this on TV, and now we are watching Guantanamo Bay in the world media, and of course it could be that this movie was prepared under these influences.”

Me: “But do you believe that many Turks have such a view of America, that we’re the kind of people who’d go to Iraq and kill people to take their organs?”

Erdogan: “These kind of things happen in the world. If it’s not happening in Iraq, then its happening in other countries.”

Me: “Which kind of things? Killing people to take their organs?”

Erdogan: “I’m not saying they are being killed. . . . There are people in poverty who use this as a means to get money.”

I was somewhat taken aback that the prime minister could not bring himself to condemn a fictional blood libel. I should not have been. He and his party have traded on America and Israel hatred ever since. There can be little doubt the Turkish flotilla that challenged the Israeli-Egyptian blockade of Gaza was organized with his approval, if not encouragement. Mr. Erodogan’s foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, is a proponent of a philosophy which calls on Turkey to loosen Western ties to the U.S., NATO and the European Union and seek its own sphere of influence to the east. Turkey’s recent deal to help Iran enrich uranium should come as no surprise.

Sadly, Turkey has had no credible opposition since its corrupt secular parties lost to Mr. Erdogan in 2002. The Ataturk-inspired People’s Republican Party has just thrown off one leader who was constantly railing about CIA plots for another who wants to expand state spending as government coffers collapse everywhere else in the word. What’s more, Turks remain blind to their manifest hypocrisies. Ask how they would feel if other countries arranged an “aid” convoy (akin to the Gaza flotilla) for their own Kurdish minority and you’ll be met with dumb stares.

Turkey’s blind spot on the Kurdish issue is especially striking when you recall that Turkey nearly invaded Syria in 1998 for sponsoring Kurdish terrorism. Kurdish separatist leader Abdullah Ocalan then bounced around the capitals of Europe, only to be captured in Kenya and handed over to the Turks by the CIA. Turkey’s antiterror alliance with Israel and the U.S. couldn’t have been more natural.

Yet Prime Minister Erdogan was one of the first world leaders to recognize the legitimacy of the Hamas government in Gaza. And now he is upping the rhetoric after provoking Israel on Hamas’s behalf. It is Israel, he says, that has shocked “the conscience of humanity.” Foreign Minister Davutoglu is challenging the U.S: “We expect full solidarity with us. It should not seem like a choice between Turkey and Israel. It should be a choice between right and wrong.”

Please. Good leaders work to defuse tensions in situations like this, not to escalate them. No American should be deceived as to the true motives of these men: They are demagogues appealing to the worst elements in their own country and the broader Middle East.

The obvious answer to the question of “Who lost Turkey?”—the Western-oriented Turkey, that is—is the Turks did. The outstanding question is how much damage they’ll do to regional peace going forward.

Mr. Pollock is the Journal’s editorial features editor.

If This Is A “Tragedy” Then What The Hell Is Sri Lanka Or The Daily Muslim Killings In Pakistan And Nigeria? Or, As Vice President Biden Put It, “What’s The Big Deal Here?.

The New Republic