Beware Turks Bearing Gifts
“The mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets our bayonets and the faithful our soldiers.”
-Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan
After last week’s unfortunate Gaza Flotilla crisis, orchestrated by members of a Turkish Islamist group, with reported ties to Hamas and Al Qaeda, on a Turkish vessel carrying a Turkish flag, and which has resulted in a chilling of relations. With the Turks now announcing intentions to cut defense agreements with Israel the question is inevitably going to be asked, “Who lost Turkey?”
This refrain, popular today in American Foreign Policy circles, makes clear that a one time ally has been irrevocably lost to us. And the Flotilla incident does indeed establish that beyond any shadow of a doubt.
It is now clear that the Mavi Marmara, a Turkish vessel purchased by the radical Islamist charity IHH from the government of Istanbul for the flotilla, was filled with terrorists armed with weapons, bullet-proof vests, night-vision goggles, and envelopes stuffed with euros to prepare for this ambush. The “aid” supplies, they were carrying, consisted of concrete and metal rods, often used in the creation of Hamas fortifications and Qassam rockets, expired prescription medicine, not in short supply in Gaza, which the Israelis deliver on a regular basis into Gaza. When the goods were inspected in the port of Ashdod and the Israelis were about to deliver them, the Hamas-led government in Gaza rejected them. The IDF has been able to identify, and name, specific individuals involved in terrorist activities who were aboard the ship.
The goal was clearly Jihad, not humanitarian aid, and it has always been clearly Jihad.
As IHH leader, and flotilla organizer Hussein Orush told Qatari TV, “Everybody wanted and was ready to become a martyr… Our goal was to reach Gaza or to die trying.”
This is not surprising rhetoric, when one puts it into the context of IHH’s Islamist pedigree. Take for instance IHH founder Bülent Yildirim who warned that any government which does not support Hamas ought to be overthrown, following this decree with the declaration, “”Last night, everything in the world has changed, and everything is progressing towards Islam. All the peoples of the Islamic world would want a leader like Recep Tayyip Erdoğan,” a statement which Barry Rubin calls , “…a direct pledge of allegiance to Turkey’s prime minister, the man behind the operation.”
Fouad Sobhi, an Arab writing in a Palestinian daily newspaper, asks whether Turkey’s behavior wasn’t motivated by the desire to distract from internal dissention: (Translated by the blog, Elders of Ziyon):
My question here is why did the the [sic] organizers of the vessels refuse to accept the Egyptian offer to transfer their aid through the Egyptian border?? Why did they insist on moving towards Gaza despite the dozens of warnings issued to them by the Israeli and Egyptian authorities?? Is there a relationship between what has happened in the Mediterranean Sea and conflicts and internal disputes in Turkey between Prime Minister on the one hand, the army and the opposition on the other?? Did the system in Turkey want to dismiss what is happening inside with their internal conflicts and divisions by playing the religious feelings of Muslims and Arabs and criticism of Israel with guns and try to become the Savior of the Palestinian cause??
The Washington Post also sees Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s hand behind this engineered crisis, in an editorial, which points out:
What’s remarkable about [Erdogan's] 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.
Not so remarkable, actually. Rather Turkey’s descent into Islamism was neither sudden, nor unpredicted. It is instead the logical conclusion of a policy which has steadily aligned Turkey with the Anti-western alliance led by Tehran. It should be remembered that Turkey’s flirtation with Hamas did not begin during the Mavi Marmara incident, or even in the lead up to it, but rather was manifest as early as 2006, when the Hamas leadership had an official visit to Turkey.
Indeed since the AKP’s first election in 2003, it has been marching inexorably towards Islamism, clashing with the country’s bulwarks of secularism. It has especially targeted the military and judiciary, arresting and replacing, and threatening its opponents when the opportunities presented themselves.
They have done so, confident that they are in the ascendance. And a December 2009 survey held in Turkey revealed that they may be right:
59 percent of those surveyed said non-Muslims either “should not” or “absolutely should not” be allowed to hold open meetings where they can discuss their ideas. Fifty-four percent said non-Muslims either “should not” or “absolutely should not” be allowed to publish literature that describes their faith.
These numbers unfortunate, although are not particularly surprising. As Mark Steyn reminds us of, Turkey’s demographic future:
Today’s Young Turks are men who think as Mr. Erdogan does. That doesn’t mean Turkey is Iran or Waziristan or Saudi Arabia, but it does mean that the country’s leadership is in favor of more or less conventional Islamic imperialism…Some Western “experts” like to see this as merely a confident, economically buoyant Turkey’s “re-Ottomanization.” But the virulent anti-Semitism emanating from Mr. Erdogan’s fief has nothing to do with the old-time caliphate and is all but undistinguishable from the globalized hyper-Islam successfully seeded around the world by Wahhabist money…”
This new, young Turkish demographic has been forced fed an increasingly anti-Israel, anti-western media diet. In 2004, the book “Metal Storm” which portrayed an American invasion of Turkey, led by a fictional president and real life American Cabinet members Condoleezza Rice and Donald Rumsfeld, and part of the plot included a Turkish agent nuking Washington D.C was a Turkish best-seller. In 2006, Valley of the Wolves, featured American actors Billy Zane, and Gary Busey, depicted the American military massacring innocent Iraqis, and Jewish-American doctors selling their organs to rich patrons in New York and Tel Aviv. Just this year, a television feature on Turkish State-Run media which featured Israeli agents kidnapping children led to a diplomatic row between the two countries.
While the West has grown increasingly accustom to this kind of propaganda being distributed throughout many of the Arab states but its permeation of Turkish airwaves should have been recognized as a warning sign.
And hasn’t long-time secular Turkey’s repeatedly rejection in its efforts to acquire E.U status played a part in Turkey’s turn to the east as well? The Europeans have repeatedly delayed Turkish efforts at integration into the European community, a factor which Turkish President Abdullah Gul asserted in May of this year stressed played part in their turn eastward:
“They are at a point where they need to decide whether the Union is a closed entity, whether the current borders of the EU will define it for eternity, or whether it should plan 50 years ahead and think of its grandchildren, the future,” he said of the E.U.
The integration of Secular Turkey into a Western European framework perhaps may have prevented the rising ascendancy of the AKP, with its new preference for Tehran to Brussels.
Because of demographic, the increase in anti-western propaganda, and rising Turkish frustration, to suddenly awake after the events onboard the Mavi Marmara and ask, “When did Turkey become an enemy,” is incredibly myopic. Erdogan’s AKP did not disguise its intentions when Turkey stood with Brazil and Iran to announce a nuclear deal meant to undercut U.S efforts. Nor did when it began its realignment moving closer to Syria and seeking alliance with Iran. It was, after all, Ayatollah Khamenei who urged the Turks to take a more active role in the Palestinian issue.
Turkey now shares a leading role with Iran against Israel. Both have threatened to offer military escorts to blockade-breaking ships headed to Gaza, which would be an act of war against Israel. And Turkey has had the add benefit of being regarded, not as a rogue nation, but as a Western ally, which has enabled it to focus world attention on Israel, and not Iran, when it comes to the Non Proliferation Treaty.
At home, the Islamist government of Turkey has raided synagogues, and threatened to deport minority Armenians if the U.S congress went through with a plan to memorialize the Armenian genocide.
One lesson of the Mavi Marmara, is that Israel, and also the United States, can no longer take for granted the intentions of its once old friend Turkey. The other lesson of the Mavi Marmara, which should especially be ringing loudly in the ears of the State Department, is that there are no moderate Islamists. As the AKP took power in Turkey, we were reassured that they were not the Khomeinists of Iran, they were moderate Turks, even when the evidence began to make clear that this was no longer the case. There is no value in the Western world flirting with Islamist parties like the AKP or the Muslim Brotherhood. If any lesson should be gleaned from this unfortunate event, it is that they have their own agendas. Sooner rather than later, they will turn. They will turn against the United States as well as Israel, no matter how cooperative they were before. And they will line up with the anti-democratic, anti-western bloc in Tehran.
In 2007, looking at Turkey’s stealth Islamization by the AKP, Edward Luttwak highlighted an AKP slogan. Democracy, they say, is “a bus we can ride, until we reach our station.”
The Mavi Marmara should be regarded as the signal that the AKP, and Turkey are preparing to get off the bus.