Last week, Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu gave the USA a stern lecture on its role in the Flotilla incident, and revelled in his own “with us or without us” moment:
“Psychologically, this attack is like 9/11 for Turkey. 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, between legal and illegal.”
That’s an impressive job of grandstanding by Davutoglu, but let’s not forget that in the “choice between right and wrong” and in the not so distant past, Turkey had few scruples when it leveraged its alliance with the US and Israeli security organisations to help them to track down and imprison the Kurdish leader Abdullah Ocalan.
Now Turkey wants the world to know that it is single-handedly taking on Israel and its oppression of a stateless minority. But when it comes to oppression of another stateless minority, Turkey’s brutal oppression and record of crimes against humanity against its Kurdish minority goes back a long way and, as far as brutality goes, takes some beating.
As Robert L Pollock explains:
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.
12 Comments
Excuse me, Faisal but this is something I wish I had known about sooner. How did you learn about the CIA and Abdullah Ocalan? Is it just from following the news, from a book or what? Thanks.
Check out the CIA dossier on Ocalan:
https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/csi-studies/studies/vol53no1/fiasco-in-nairobi.html
“11 Years Ago: How Israel’s Mossad Captured Kurdish Fugitive Abdullah Ocalan in Kenya”
http://www.afroarticles.com/article-dashboard/Article/11-Years-Ago–How-Israel-s-Mossad-Captured-Kurdish-Fugitive-Abdullah-Ocalan-in-Kenya/202576
“Deceit is not spelled with a P, moron.“
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=deceipt
corrected, thanks.
So basically the author is arguing that
1) Only states with perfect human rights records (of which there are none on earth) can condemn other states who murder their citizens in cold-blood
2) That it was OK for Israel to murder civilian Turkish citizens……. because after all Turkey treats some of its own citizens badly
3) By implication that were the roles reversed and someone had murdered Israeli civilians, Israel would not have the right to protest as it has a poor human rights record
OK.
Palestine(State captured with England’s help) is not the same like Kurdistan( Never exist).
Look history………..
i look history. it not matter that kurdistan never exist as nation-state. nation-state not really important till post-enlightenment anyway. iraq never exist as nation-state before sykes-picot treaty either. does mean should be dismantled? kurdish people have right self-determination just like others.
i’ve got nothing against the turks, you should know. but this whole business reeks of hypocrisy and domestic politicking. if turkey ever wants to join the eu (which i think would be an excellent idea) and realise its considerable potential, it’s going to have to get past these prejudices.
b’shalom
bananabrain
The important thing is that Israel has both the right to exist as the legitimate expression of the Jewish people’s right to self-determination – and (I should have to mention this?) as a place of safety for Jews after all that has happened to them as a people.
The sooner people in the region recognise not only the right to national self-determination for the Jewish people, but also recognise that these people have stood up and will never, ever be anyone’s victims again… then, sooner, rather than later, the peace that all honest people want will follow.
Amen.
One day, I hope and pray, we will all move past this nationalist obsession that grips us – but presently, it is a stopping place: hopefully, on the way.
Abu Faris, I totally agree.
so do i. the nation-state is a construct of the enlightenment before it realised that race was a chimera. the sooner we realise that society is both more complicated and more simple than this, the better.
of course, if there are any right-wing americans here, i’ll be told i’m talking about “one world government”. i saw that guy glenn beck on fox tv in israel and he made me absolutely furious. what a fecking snide sneering snake. i’ve never heard such self-righteous double-speak in all my life.
b’shalom
bananabrain
“By implication that were the roles reversed and someone had murdered Israeli civilians, Israel would not have the right to protest as it has a poor human rights record”
I think you’ll find that in real terms, whereas Israel has the right to protest, it lacks the forum.