Erdogan Makes His Move in the Muslim Strongman Sweepstakes
In the words of a famous Muslim strongman, "When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature they will like the strong horse." And these days there's no stronger horse in the Muslim world than Turkey's Erdogan. In a bold bid to leave the Wahhabis and the Khomeinists in the dust, Erodogan is deploying a dastardly but highly effective weapon--flagrant Zionhass. Caroline Glick explains how it works:
Monday morning Turkey took its anti-Israel campaign to a new level. Beyond downgrading diplomatic relations with Israel; beyond suspending military agreements; beyond threatening naval war; beyond threatening to foment an irredentist insurrection of Israeli Arabs; the Turks decided to terrorize Israeli tourists landing in Istanbul airport.
Forty Israeli passengers, mainly businessmen who had landed in Istanbul on a Turkish Airlines flight from Tel Aviv, were separated from the rest of the flight passengers. Their passports were confiscated.
They were placed in interrogation rooms and stripped down to their underwear. Their carry-on bags were checked. And then they were lined up against a wall, forbidden to sit down or use the washroom.
Passengers who contacted the Foreign Ministry said they felt frightened and intimidated.
The ordeal went on for 90 minutes, until Turkish authorities returned their Israeli passports and permitted them to pick up their suitcases and exit the airport.
What were the Turks trying to accomplish by terrifying the Israeli tourists? They didn't need to threaten trade ties. Their Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu already took care of that over the weekend.
The victimized Israelis said the Turkish airport authorities wouldn't even answer their questions. Any time we asked them a question, the tourists said, the Turks ignored us.
It was as if they weren't even there.
And that's the thing of it. The Turks didn't harass the Israeli tourists in order to send a message to Israel. They have nothing more to say to us. We are non-entities to them. We're only good for attacking.
No, Israel wasn't the target audience the Turks were playing to on Monday. Their target audience was the Islamic world generally and the Arab world specifically. Turkey's influence in these arenas skyrocketed in January 2009 after Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan accused President Shimon Peres and Israel of mass murder as the leaders shared a stage at the Davos Conference.
Similarly Erdogan's domestic and pan-Islamic support levels increased steeply in the aftermath of the Turkish-supported pro-Hamas flotilla to Gaza in 2010. After nine Turkish government-supported IHH terrorists were killed aboard the Mavi Marmara when they tried to murder IDF naval commandos who had lawfully boarded the ship, the Arabs hailed Erdogan as a hero for bravely attacking Israel.
Given how well scapegoating Israel has served him, Erdogan clearly believes it is a no-risk strategy for raising his star from Cairo to Algiers...
2 comments:
What could be a clearer warning of the fate that may await the Jewish people, for a second time in less than a century, than the actions of Erdogan's Turkey? I just wish that more people would stop metaphorically kicking Hitler's corpse and writing the lebenty millionth treatise on what led to the 1942-45 Holocaust (which no amount of weeping and gnashing of teeth can undo at this point) and work against the Holocaust that--God, I hope I'm wrong--seems to be on the verge of happening in the near future, but which decisive action _now_ might yet forestall.
Apparently all of those "Never again!" exhortations that were so much in vogue in the 1970s referred very specifically to a Holocaust brought about by a Charlie Chaplinesque Austrian with blond minions named "Fritz" or "Heinz" or the like, in Central and Eastern Europe. Current events show that they were not meant to refer to other scenarios leading to the extermination of millions of Jews in places like, say, the Middle East, carried out by swarthier characters with names like, oh, "Mohammed," or "Bashir" or the like.
At a minimum, Americans who really care about the survival of Israel--and Israelis, because we're not talking abstractly here--need to work _hard_ against the re-election of Obama . . . I'll take anyone's bet that he would just "tsk, tsk" and wring his hands, while adopting a suitably lugubrious expression, should a mushroom cloud sprout over Tel Aviv.
Re "Never Again!" We know that when it comes to the desire of Jew-loathers to get rid of Jews, you can never say never.
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