Archive for June 20, 2010

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Why Turkey’s change of attitude toward Israel is important and ominous

June 20, 2010

Why Turkey’s change of attitude toward Israel is important and ominous | San Francisco Examiner.

By: Bruce McQuain
Special to The Examiner
06/19/10 11:25 PM PDT

Syrian President Bashar Assad said Israel’s attack on the Gaza aid flotilla has increased the chances of war in the Middle East, in a BBC interview on Wednesday. Assad said that Syria was working to prevent a regional war but he added that there was no chance of a peace deal with the current Israeli administration, which he called a “pyromaniac government”.

The rhetoric keeps ratcheting up as if various Arab factions are trying to talk themselves into testing Israel again. It’s been a while, but the in the past the results have been uniformly bad for the Arab nations.

But there has been a recent change. Turkey is now talking tough as well. And, add in Iran’s attempt to ingratiate itself with the Arab world and suddenly it’s a little different ballgame.

Turkey’s inclusion against Israel in the rhetorical wars now being waged has encouraged many Arab pundits to hail the Turks and Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan as the much awaited “leader” of the movement against Israel. One writer hailed him as “more Arab than the Arabs” while criticizing Arab leaders as too passive.

There have been huge pro-Turkey rallies in Gaza, Beruit and Damascus. Recently, text messages from viewers displayed on Al-Jazeera TV during a June 4th Erdogan speech in Konya, some of which said: “Erdogan, you are king of the Arabs,” and “Son of the sultans, you have restored the glory of the Ottomans.”

Hizbullah considers Erdogan the new rock star of anti-Israeli leadership, and some Gazans are naming their children after him.

What Turkey and Erdogan have apparently managed to do, according to one writer, is bring those who have rejected Hamas and Hizbullah because of their Iranian ties on board in a unified “Islamic” effort to confront Israel:

“Unlike the Palestinians and many Arabs who support Nasrallah, large groups had yearned for a leadership unconnected to Iran or the new jihadi Shi’a… They rejected Hamas and accused the Palestinian jihad movement of being an instrument of Shi’ite Iran. Now Turkey has emerged to compensate for the incapacity of the leaders of the Arab regimes.

“Erdogan [has emerged as a figure] whose portrait can be displayed in homes, on billboards, and on cars. When all is said and done, the integration into the resistance movement of those who [had] hesitated is now being achieved through the gate of Islam.

Turkey seems to have finally rejected the west and put to rest its desire to be a part of it. Although it retains NATO membership, it appears to have no further interest in the EU. Turkey also appears to be again casting its eyes in the direction of its past glory – the Ottoman Empire. Certainly it isn’t pretending it would again rule over all of its former territories, but Turkey seems to feel it could be a major if not the major influence in the area of the Middle East. One sure way to work toward that goal is to take on Israel.

While it publicly claims it is still a secular nation ruled by secular institutions, this latest situation with Israel and Turkey’s reaction are all Islamic and designed to appeal to the Islamic world in general and the people of the Middle East specifically.

This is one of the conflicts that is brewing on the horizon. It is a new twist in a very old situation. But it promises real trouble if not addressed and defused quickly.

Of course, that will take leadership, not apology tours. I’m not sure that the US is up to the job. And I think the reason we’re hearing all this from Turkey now is they sense that is the case.

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Why Israel and the U.S. Are In Crisis

June 20, 2010

American Thinker: Why Israel and the U.S. Are In Crisis.

By Pamela Geller

//
“Israel is a fundamental part of the West. The West is what it is thanks to its Judeo-Christian roots. If the Jewish element of those roots is upturned and Israel is lost, then we are lost too. Whether we like it or not, our fate is inextricably intertwined.”
Former Spanish Prime Minister José María Aznar wrote that in the Times of London. It is powerful, magnificent. And I wish him great success with his “Friends of Israel Initiative,” but I am deeply disturbed by the direction the narrative is taking, such that friends of Israel such as Aznar now feel as if they must once again make the case for the legitimacy of Israel.
Why debate “Israel’s right to exist” or “Israel’s right to defend itself?” Why not debate France’s right to exist, or Iran’s, or Germany’s?
How did it come to this?
There are definite points in history when things are on the cusp of real change. More specifically, there are defining moments, when the direction of history can go either way.
When José María Aznar was Prime Minister of Spain, the world was a wholly different place, as recently as 2004. He served at a time when men, not appeasers, shills and tools for jihad, were driving the bus. There was Bush, the inestimable John Howard (Australia), Blair (no great shakes but light years ahead of brick brain Brown), and one of the best of the group was Aznar.
Yet this group did not seize the moment. They thought they had time and reason on their side. They did not. They blew it. “The greatest threat to mankind and civilization is the spread of the totalitarian philosophy,” Ayn Rand wrote. “Its best ally is not the devotion of its followers but the confusion of its enemies.” To fight it, we must understand it.
Yet Bush described Islam as “a religion of peace” in the wake of the Islamic jihadi attack on America. It wasn’t that Bush was a shill for jihad, it was just that he was uninformed and worse, not curious. He had whispering in his ear the stealth jihadist Grover Norquist and his band of Muslim Brotherhood brothers propagandizing the nonsensical meme that it was “just a few fringe extremists” who “hijacked” the religion — as well as the planes. Ten years and 15,511 Islamic attacks later catastrophically demonstrates what a turning point that window of opportunity really was.
Grover Norquist is a powerhouse with deep pockets. Many Republicans are in his pockets and in his debt. Norquist’s ties to Islamic supremacists and jihadists have been known for years. Just six weeks after 9/11, The New Republic ran an exposé explaining how Norquist arranged for George W. Bush to meet with fifteen Islamic supremacists at the White House on September 26, 2001 — to show how Muslims rejected terrorism.
On the afternoon of September 26, George W. Bush gathered 15 prominent Muslim- and Arab-Americans at the White House. With cameras rolling, the president proclaimed that “the teachings of Islam are teachings of peace and good.” It was a critically important moment, a statement to the world that America’s Muslim leaders unambiguously reject the terror committed in Islam’s name. (Read more here.)
Game over.
A second historic crossroad was in the summer of 2006, when the jihadist terror group, Hezb’Allah (party of god) attacked Israel. For the first time in recent history, Israel had the tacit support of the US and two Arab countries to rout the barbaric Islamic jihadist group in Lebanon. Apart from their aim of promised Jewish genocide, Hezb’Allah followed in Arafat’s bloody footsteps in Lebanon and destroyed what once was a prospering, thriving Christian nation.
In the summer of 2006, they attacked Israel, kidnapped and killed Jewish soldiers (torturing them in ways unimaginable), and went to war.
The UN and the international community did nothing and said nothing when the bodies of those kidnapped soldiers were returned two years later:

Rabbi Yisrael Weiss, former Chief Rabbi of the IDF, who was present during the transfer of the fallen soldiers, said that “the verification process yesterday was very slow, because, if we thought the enemy was cruel to the living and the dead, we were surprised, when we opened the caskets, to discover just how cruel. And I’ll leave it at that.”
Israel should have destroyed them. Instead, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert went to the United Nations, which was then and is now largely controlled by the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) and sought a resolution, the conditions of which have never been met by the soldiers of Allah. This was another historic turning point. Bush and Co. expected Israel to hold up her end in the strategic alliance in the war on the global jihad. The US was in Iraq and Afghanistan doing just that. A defeat of the Iranian proxy Hezb’Allah would have been a crushing blow to the mullahcracy in Iran. What a Sun Tzu move.
But Olmert hesitated, and the coalition of the willing suffered a grave loss. It was a TKO in the bout between the two camps duking it out in the Bush White House: the struggle between Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Bolton, etc. vs. Colin Powell, Armitage, Nick Burns, and Steve Hadley, etc., had been finally decided, and things would never be the same again. Individualism lost to collectivism. Reason lost to irrationality. American sovereignty lost to international law.
What followed was inevitable: the relentless anti-American six-year Bush-bashing campaign in the media succeeded. Bush lost Congress, Rumsfeld resigned, Bolton did the same and Cheney went on mute.
The lights dimmed in the west as Atlas shrugged.
And now we come to this, as Aznar expresses it: “For Western countries to side with those who question Israel’s legitimacy, for them to play games in international bodies with Israel’s vital security issues, for them to appease those who oppose Western values rather than robustly to stand up in defence of those values, is not only a grave moral mistake, but a strategic error of the first magnitude.”
And so we must now robustly stand up in defense of Israel, America, and Western values.
We must be as passionate in fighting the forces of evil as they are in destroying the good.

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