Let’s consider Iran and Saudi Arabia; imagine for a moment what life in either of these leading Muslim countries must be like. Both are in the grip of Islamist ideologies, rivals because the one is Shia and the other Sunni, but both have the common property of promoting fantasies so far removed from human reality that they have to maintain police states for the sake of enforcement. The costs are terrible.

Where Iran is concerned, it is hard to be accurate, but human-rights organizations identify at least 50 people who have been hanged in the month of June alone, and at least 30 more were hanged in May. Several victims have been hoisted for execution on a crane, and in public, too. A photograph on the web shows ten men in Ghezel Hesar prison standing side by side on a scaffold with a noose round their necks, in effect torturing before killing them. The victims are accused of drug trafficking or rape, though Abdolmalek Rigi, aged 26, was hanged like his brother before him supposedly for leading an armed Sunni group in this Shia dictatorship. Were the two brothers really guilty? Their confessions on television followed closely the model of Stalin’s show trials: The old Communist accusation of “enemy of the people” neatly morphs into “enemy of God.” Ayatollah Khamenei has just reprieved 81 political prisoners, but another 450 are said to be held in detention without trial. Babak Heshmat Saran is just one of them. A student, he went to demonstrate on the anniversary of last year’s stolen election, was picked up by the police, and has disappeared ever since.

It’s also not clear how many people have been publicly beheaded this year in Saudi Arabia. But daily existence brings its cruelties and absurdities, especially through the deranged view held there about the relationship between the sexes. A young woman at a college was taken ill. The ambulance men arrived, but were refused entry because they were men. While they were all prevaricating, the woman died. Elsewhere, the police arrested a group for having a mixed party, and sentenced 15 of them to prison and flogging. One woman, a minor, was sentenced to 80 lashes, enough to disfigure permanently, even to cause death. Saudi women are allowed to be in the company only of male relatives, but a sheikh who is also an adviser to the ruling family has found a way to get round this prohibition. According to his fatwa, women who come into contact with unrelated men have to breastfeed them, whereupon they are considered members of the family rather than potential lovers. The big disputed issues of the day in Saudi Arabia are whether the man should suckle directly, which might prove erotic, or whether the woman should express her milk for him into a glass, and what is to be done about women who do not lactate.

In previous times, the view here would have been that, if Iranian and Saudi despots set up a society that depends on murdering or denaturing their subjects and making laughingstocks of them, so be it, they’re the losers. That won’t do now. Iran and Saudi Arabia are extending their range and influence among us, and though their Shia and Sunni ideologies are at loggerheads, both are making universal claims that no free individual could possibly accommodate. Failure to confront them would leave civilization itself the loser.National Review

Mosab Hassan Yousef must have encountered nearly everything on his unlikely journey. But surely he never ran across anything as stupid as the American immigration bureaucracy.

Yousef is the son of Sheikh Hassan Yousef, a Hamas founder, and was groomed to follow in his father’s footsteps. At the age of 18, he purchased some machine guns and planned to join the terrorist organization’s militant wing. But he was arrested with the guns, and during a stint in Israeli prison, he had a change of heart — and joined Hamas as an undercover agent of the Israeli intelligence agency Shin Bet after his release from prison in 1997.

In that capacity, he prevented dozens of terrorist attacks, including suicide bombings and assassinations. Shin Bet agent Gonen Ben-Itzhak, who worked with Yousef for a decade, has broken his cover so he can testify in U.S. immigration court on the informant’s behalf. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz says he was the country’s “most valuable source in the militant organization’s leadership,” and credits him with the arrest of Fatah head Marwan Barghouti and Hamas members Abdullah Barghouti and Ibrahim Hamid.

In 2007, he came to the U.S. and applied for asylum. The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service denied his application in 2009, on the grounds that he provided material support to a terrorist organization. This is madness.

The department bases its argument on Yousef’s autobiography, Son of Hamas. In it, he reports that when Shin Bet agents showed him pictures of Hamas members who were suspected of involvement in a March 2001 bombing, he told the agents that he’d driven some of the members to safehouses. Of course, this is the kind of thing that spies do routinely — assist the enemy when asked, especially in small ways, so as not to blow their cover. Common sense indicates that our material-support rules don’t apply to support that’s provided — at the behest of a U.S. ally — within a broader attempt to bring down a terrorist organization.

If Yousef returns to the West Bank, he risks execution. Obviously, DHS doesn’t believe he’s a threat, or it would detain him; in fact, the FBI has advised DHS that Yousef is not a threat. He has converted to Christianity and has become vocal critic of Islam.

Yousef has a hearing tomorrow at which a judge will decide on his appeal for asylum. This shouldn’t be a complicated call for the judge or anyone else — Yousef deserves asylum. If our immigration system can’t distinguish between him and a true terrorist, it’s more witless and perverse than even we imagined. By the editors of National Review

Saudi royals are regularly hailed for their philanthropy. Their fans should take a closer look at the content of the kingdom’s 1–12 education.

Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah will be received by President Obama in Washington today, nearly two years after the deadline by which the kingdom’s educational curriculum was to have been completely reformed. As the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom wrote to the president last week, “This promise remains unfulfilled.”

According to Arab News, the U.S. ambassador to Riyadh, James Smith, described this White House visit as a “very important” meeting, directed toward coordinating efforts to confront terrorism. The test of its seriousness will be whether President Obama uses the occasion to personally press King Abdullah to finally keep his pledge of textbook reform.

Saudi textbooks teach, along with many other noxious lessons, that Jews and Christians are “enemies,” and they dogmatically instruct that various groups of “unbelievers” — apostates (which includes Muslim moderates who reject Saudi Wahhabi doctrine), polytheists (which includes Shiites), and Jews — should be killed. Under the Saudi Education Ministry’s method of rote learning, these teachings amount to indoctrination, starting in first grade and continuing through high school, where militant jihad on behalf of “truth” is taught as a sacred duty. These textbooks are used not only in Saudi Arabia but in Saudi-funded schools around the world.

King Abdullah has presided over some welcome counterterrorism measures, such as last month’s long-overdue fatwa — issued by the Saudi clerical establishment, the Council of Senior Ulema — condemning the financing of terrorism as a criminal act. But, as Treasury Undersecretary Stuart Levey, America’s top financial-counterterrorism official, reminded us in a recent op-ed, despite progress in thwarting the financing of al-Qaeda, “a more difficult strategic battle remains.”

Levey stressed the primary importance of directing our policy at preventing people from embracing violent extremism in the first place. He warned, “Among other things, we must focus on educational reform in key locations to ensure that intolerance has no place in curricula and textbooks. . . . [U]nless the next generation of children is taught to reject violent extremism, we will forever be faced with the challenge of disrupting the next group of terrorist facilitators and supporters.”

The primary “key location” is undoubtedly Saudi Arabia. The kingdom is not just any country with problematic textbooks. As the controlling authority of the two holiest shrines of Islam, Saudi Arabia is able to disseminate its religious materials among the millions making the hajj to Mecca each year. Such teachings can, in this context, make a great impression. In addition, Saudi textbooks are also posted on the Saudi Education Ministry’s website and are shipped and distributed by a vast Sunni infrastructure established with Saudi oil wealth to Muslim communities throughout the world. In his book The Looming Tower, Lawrence Wright asserts that while Saudis constitute only 1 percent of the world’s Muslims, they pay “90 per cent of the expenses of the entire faith, overriding other traditions of Islam." Continue here to Page 2 of the National Review....

(West Bank/Gaza) The Islamic and Liberal world makes a huge song and dance about boycotting Israel and Israeli goods. Numerous protests/days of actions and websites promote the understanding that they stand by their Islamic brothers when it comes to boycotting the evil Jews who allow freedom of expression, equality and free speech within their borders.

Well, it seems that the locals in Gaza and the West Bank have been tuning into Israeli TV in which to watch the World Cup, as Al-Jazeera Sport hasn't been airing the football matches playing down under in South Africa. The irony here is that while it costs $100 a month in which to subscribe to Al-Jazeera, it only costs $20 a month for the superior Israeli service.

I bet the liberals and Muslims in Europe are choking on their ethical tofu burgers at the news that Palestinians are paying Israel money in which to watch the USA play football. I suppose they could always blame the biased reporting of Al Jazeera for that.

Hat tip: Eye On The World

Fearless Iranians say their plans were canceled by big bad Zionists who imposed "restrictions".

TEHRAN, Iran (AP) - Iran will not be sending a blockade-busting ship to Gaza in defiance of Israeli warnings, an Iranian lawmaker said Saturday, citing Israeli "restrictions."

Mahmoud Ahmadi Bighash told the semiofficial ISNA news agency that instead of sending a ship, an Iranian delegation of lawmakers would travel to Lebanon and sail on one of the aid ships expected to head to Gaza from there.

The Iranian ship called "Infants of Gaza" had been expected to sail Sunday for Gaza carrying 1,100 tons of relief supplies and 10 pro-Palestinian activists but plans were canceled "due to restrictions imposed by the occupying Zionist regime," Bighash said.

Iran made the announcement Tuesday prompting Israel to warn its archenemy to drop the plan. More...

Hat tip: Eye On The World

Once again we hear of trouble, turbulence and turmoil in a political party that talks every other day about taking over the government in the next general elections. We will tolerate their nonsense no more. Yes, even if it means throwing out the baby with the bath water! Please, please PKR stop pushing your fanciful dreams about occupying Putrajaya when you are in such a pathetic and pitiful state with your prima donna politicians parading their shameless petty and puerile politics in public.

As a party you have become laughable, and as RPK predicts you could be facing your last days! Your political representatives are resting on their laurels and the increasing number of loudmouths and loose cannons are just longing to blast the party into oblivion! Your endless intra-party squabbles, spats and skirmishes and splintered groups sicken those of us who once supported, voted and stood steadfastly by you. The strong and solid support many of us showed you have now turned into scorn.

We are fed up of your internal feuding and festering that has resulted in a fragile and faltering coalition and a farcical government-in-waiting! Your foolhardy ways will only be a fast-forward to your self-destruction. All Umno needs to do is gleefully watch you finish off each other! We are tired of your MPs and Assemblymen’s threats to resign, their taunts to one another to quit and their theatrics and tantrums to be turncoats. Truly, we have never seen such a dysfunctional horde of politicians! We will not take any of you seriously nor treat the party with respect anymore!

We have had enough of your high-browed haughty leaders who hurl accusations and insults and humiliate one another and members of the coalition. Enough of your hypocrisy! You cannot get your own house in order and yet have high hopes about controlling Parliament House! Take a hike, PKR! Your disunity is disgusting. Your politicians delight in washing dirty linen and in denigrating each other in public. They are an absolute disgrace. Please have some dignity and decency, and dismiss yourselves. You do not deserve our confidence.

Your politicians are made up mainly of clowns who crap, crow, clamor for and cry aloud about change but cling on to their political charades, chicanery, claptrap and conspiracies, instead of collaborating at all costs in your professed commitment to bring about concrete change. We are not interested in the reasons and root causes of your grievances against each other. Two years and more after the last General Elections and you are still unable to get your act together. Yet you make grand claims of being ready to govern this nation. Get real, PKR!

At times you look like a bunch of incompetent idiots, no different from the several insolent imposters who chose to insult our intelligence by leaving the party to be independent of party discipline and the wishes of the people in the last General Elections, out of purely selfish interests and greed. Please spare us your excuses. The manipulative mainstream media and the maneuvering of key institutions of democracy by a desperate malevolent Umno are to be expected. But at the end of the day your erratic, eccentric and egoistic representatives are to be blamed. Enough is enough!

Instead of translating into reality the promise of a “revolution in the (country’s) political culture” you “reward” the rakyat with your never-ending rumblings, rancor, political roguery and now a “rebellion” in Selangor by your MPs. Is this what “reformasi” amounts to? Sheer “rubbish”! Yes, go for your weekend retreat PKR leaders. I hope you will prove me and many others wrong but my guess is that you will still be a party weak, wavering, wobbling, wandering and wanting to do each other in...as you chart your way into political wilderness!

The road to Putrajaya requires stomach, stamina, synergy, solidarity and the sacrifice of personal agendas for the larger national agenda. Sadly, this journey has been stymied by your somnolent, selfish, self-centered and supercilious political representatives, whom Bolehland can do well without.

28 June 2010
Martin Jalleh

The wake services will be held at No.3 Jalan Batu Bungkal, 30250 Ipoh on the 23rd of June and the 24th of June at 8.30 pm. Funeral service will be held at 9 am, before the Cortege leaves for burial, at the Tambun Christian cemetery at 10.00 am on Friday, the 25th June 2010. He will be deeply missed by:

Mother : Madam Sung Peng Chan
Brothers: Lam Weng Kong, Lam Weng Chong
Sisters: Lam Lai Meng, Lam Lai Mee
Wife: Alex Kuan Wun Sein
Son: Matthew Lam Tuck Joong
Daughters : Rachel Lam Xiu Min, Rebecca Lam Xiu Shan

Some news reports about Hamas from CNN and Al Jazeera, removed the gratuitous references to Israel as the source of all evil, and came up with a real news story of the type you are not likely to see or notice in the flotsam of anti-Israel bias:



It just goes to show that the facts are out there but it requires a lot of digging to find them.

Mr. President, this debate turns on one question: Was the flotilla humanitarian, or not? To answer this question, let us first examine the objective of the organizers, and then the means they used. Evidence of the organizer’s objective can be found in the path they chose, and the path they rejected.

Israel, which in the past 18 months has delivered over 1 million tons of aid to Gaza, offered to receive the flotilla’s cargo in the nearby port of Ashdod, and, after inspection, to deliver it to Gaza. The organizers, however, rejected this offer. Because they wanted to create a political provocation; they were looking for a physical confrontation.



Mr. President, is this a humanitarian path?

Further evidence can be found in their state of mind, as demonstrated by their own words. Before the ships sailed, supporters chanted “Intifada, Intifada,” and “Khaybar, Khaybar, O Jews, the army of Muhammed will return.” One of them declared that the aim of the flotilla was either of two “good things… achieving martyrdom or reaching Gaza.”

Mr. President, is this a humanitarian state of mind?

Let us also examine the means they used: metal bars, knives, axes, and even guns.

Mr. President, are these humanitarian means?

No. This operation was organized by an extremist group, the IHH, with extensive and documented ties to terrorist groups. Their objective and means had nothing to do with humanitarianism. Now, seated around me here are representatives of some of the world’s leading humanitarian organizations, from the International Committee of the Red Cross, the UN Refugee Agency, and the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Let us ask them: Are these the ways of humanitarians?

No, Mr. President, the resolution that is before us today — introduced by such countries as Iran, Libya, Saudi Arabia and Sudan — is an insult to the world’s real humanitarians.

Thank you, Mr. President. UN Watch

Note the hypocrisy of the OIC Nations, it is Israel, Israel and Israel, nothing on Kyrgyzstan, Muslim on Muslim slaughter, nothing mentioned, the deaths of hundreds will only be noticed by them when the "Juice" oops, Jews are involved. Rather the Zionists and their right of return. The "Juice" were Palestinians before the formation of Israel-edit.

UN Watch’s Hillel Neuer asked the U.N. Human Rights Council why it ignored the hundreds massacred this week in Kyrgyzstan and the humanitarian crisis there, and instead devoted the session to bashing Israel:



Mr. President, we meet under the agenda item targeting Israel. There are two things terribly wrong with this disproportionate focus. First, it is biased. After the item was adopted in 2007, the UK said “the practice of ‘singling out one’ risked undermining the Human Rights Council’s own principles.” France said it was “contrary to non-selectivity.” Canada noted that the Council breached its own principles-of universality, impartiality, objectivity, and non-selectivity. Targeting any UN member state, said Canada, was “politicized, selective, partial, and subjective.”

But Mr. President, there is something far more pernicious that ought to concern all supporters of human rights. On 20 June 2007, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon criticized “the Council’s decision to single out only one specific regional item, given the range of human rights violations throughout the entire world.”

These words were never more clear than today.

For the second time in this brief session, we have spent the entire day today discussing alleged violations of Israel, hearing various reports about redundant investigations, all of which are have pre-determined conclusions. Yet even as we meet, the international community is witnessing a grave and worsening human rights and humanitarian tragedy in Kyrgyzstan.

At least 200 have been slaughtered; 1500 injured; and 100,000 refugees seek to cross the border to escape the violence. The Red Cross warned just now that the humanitarian crisis that is “getting worse by the hour.” Witnesses report that women and children are being shot as they try to flee, and that bodies litter the city’s streets and many of its destroyed buildings. According to Dilmurad Ishanov, an Uzbek human rights worker in Osh, “They are killing Uzbeks like animals. Almost the whole city is in flames.”

Mr. President, we heard speeches today from Libya, Syria, Iran, Sudan, North Korea, Venezuela, the Organization of the Islamic Conference and the Arab League. I ask them: If all human beings are equal, why are you silent today for the victims of Kyrgyzstan? After you called an urgent debate and investigation for the so-called humanitarian flotilla, why do you not do the same for what everyone agrees is a humanitarian tragedy of colossal proportions?

Mr. President, this agenda item deafens our ears to the cries of human rights victims everywhere. UN Watch

(JPost) Geert Wilders, who leads the right-wing Party for Freedom (PVV) in Holland, said last week he believes Jordan should be renamed Palestine. The Jordanian government responded by saying Wilders' speech was reminiscent of the Israeli right wing.

"Jordan is Palestine," said Wilders, who heads the third-largest party in Holland. "Changing its name to Palestine will end the conflict in the Middle East and provide the Palestinians with an alternate homeland."

Wilders added that Israel deserved a special status in the Dutch government because it was fighting for Jerusalem in its name."If Jerusalem falls into the hands of the Muslims, Athens and Rome will be next. Thus, Jerusalem is the main front protecting the West. It is not a conflict over territory but rather an ideological battle, between the mentality of the liberated West and the ideology of Islamic intolerance," he said.

"There has been an independent Palestinian state since 1946, and it is the kingdom of Jordan." Wilders also called on the Dutch government to refer to Jordan as Palestine and move its embassy to Jerusalem.

The Saudis and the Jordanians crapped their pants and summoned the Dutch ambassador foran explanation.

The Saudi Al-Watan carried Jordan's response to Wilders' speech. The kingdom's embassy in Hague was outraged, and said the Dutch ambassador would soon be summoned to explain. Jordan's minister for media affairs and communications, Nabil Al Sharif, asked for clarifications. He described Wilders' declaration as "an echo of the voice of the Israeli Right" and "crows' screams".

Which yet again makes it crystal clear that neither the Saudis nor the Jordanians want a real solution to the conflict and want to keep the so-called "Palestinian issue" alive.

Gaza has been under Israeli blockade since Hamas took control of the Strip in 2007. The siege has forced Gazans to rely on supplies smuggled through tunnels that go underneath the territory's border with Egypt.On Thursday, the Israeli government announced its decision to let in some items, but Hamas dismissed it as "just propaganda". Al Jazeera's Nicole Johnston's reports from Gaza.

June 18, 2010 — In this footage, taken on board the Mavi Marmari on 30 May 2010, IHH leader Bulent Yildirim clearly instructs his followers to throw the Israeli commandos overboard when they land on the ship. His speech was made in Turkish and repeated in Arabic by a translator.

UN can't be bothered with this, it's busy with you know who? Israel! If only Israel was involved I believe our Great Leader would surely have organized an aid convoy. Unfortunately this violence is a "Muslim on Muslim" violence, so the 57 members of the OIC will not treat it urgently, unless of course Israel was involved.

OSH, Kyrgyzstan (AP) — Some 400,000 people have been displaced by ethnic violence in southern Kyrgyzstan, the United Nations announced Thursday, dramatically increasing the official estimate of a refugee crisis that has left throngs of desperate, fearful people without enough food and water in grim camps along the Uzbek border.

U.N. Humanitarian Office spokeswoman Elisabeth Byrs said an estimated 300,000 people have been driven from their homes but remain inside Kyrgyzstan. She said there are now also about 100,000 refugees in neighboring Uzbekistan. The last official estimate of refugees who fled the country was 75,000. No number of internally displaced has been available.

Violence erupted last week between the majority Kyrgyz population and minority ethnic Uzbeks. Kyrgyzstan's government has accused the country's deposed president of igniting long-standing ethnic tensions by sending gunmen in ski masks to shoot members of both groups. The government, which overthrew President Kurmanbek Bakiyev in April, accuses the leader of deep corruption and says that he and his supporters were attempting to shake official control of the south and reassert their control of the Afghan heroin trade in the area.

The official death toll on both sides is 189 but appears to be far higher. Many Kyrgyz were killed but the victims appear to have been predominantly Uzbeks, traditional farmers and traders who speak a distinct but separate Turkic language and have traditionally been more prosperous than the Kyrgyz, who come from a nomadic tradition. The ethnic cleansing blood bath could currently stand at 2,000 deaths. In the case of the Mavi Marmara only nine died, that too everyone knows that the nine very dead Turks wanted to be Shahids, Israel only obliged them. Compare 2,000 deaths of deliberate killing against nine accidental deaths, still no outrage. Oh yes, can you not say hypocrisy, the hatred for the "Juice" is complicit amongst the OIC. It has nothing to do with Zionism or Palestine. More.....

Well, gee, can you think of a reason for the West's islamophobia?

(Ankara) In the strange logic that passes for transparency in the Islamic world, Turkey today revealed how scientists have exhumed pieces of human bones allegedly showing massacre of Muslim Turks by Armenians in the eastern province of Erzurum. They then go on to bang their drum about how 9,553 people were massacred by Armenian gangs and how around 50,000 people in the surrounding provinces were butchered by Armenian gangs.

Anybody else find it strange how while the Turks will literally kill you if you mention the Armenian genocide, they have no problem inventing genocides in which to play the Islamic game of "I am a victim"? Which kind of explains why they have no problem promoting the deaths of 9 jihadists who wanted to die, as a genocide, yet remain very silent on how 93 Muslims were murdered while at the mosque a couple of days before the Mavi Marmara boat hit a few rocks. Hat tip: Eye On The World

Shown on Israel's Channel 2, this is the most accurate and up-to-date video presentation of what happened aboard the Mavi Marmara.

their ardent wishes for Martyrdom being fullfilled - edit. IsraelMFA — June 15, 2010 — Statements of Gaza Flotilla Members about Their Readiness to Die as "Shahid"s (Martyrs for the Sake of Allah)



Source: Terrorism Org

1. During and after the voyage of the flotilla, the flotilla members on board the Mavi Marmara publicly expressed their readiness to die on board the ship at shahids (martyrs for the sake of Allah). Their statements provided additional proof that some of the passengers, especially the hard core of IHH operatives, had prepared for a violent confrontation with the Israeli forces (one operative described it as preparing for battle). Alongside the practical preparations, which included organizing the operatives and getting weapons ready, the passengers also received religious and moral indoctrination from Muslim activists and clerics.

2. In the visual material photographed during and after the voyage of the flotilla a number of operatives confirm their desire to die as shaheeds. It is possible that some of such statements were boasts, rhetoric not necessarily meant to be acted on. However, in some cases, the statements apparently reflect a real intention to become shahids and some of the participants even said goodbye to their families (forever).

We have uploaded here a video of interviews of flotilla members:

A. Shaza Barakat, one of the women passengers about the Mavi Marmara, interviewed by Al-Jazeera TV two days before the takeover of the ship, said "Two good things will happen: either we'll die as martyrs or we'll reach Gaza".

B. One of the passengers interviewed during the voyage said he wanted to die as a shaheed. He said he had participated in two previous convoys and wanted to be a shaheed and twice he had been "unlucky." He was not, he said, afraid of 'those cockroaches' (Israelis) .

C. Hussein Urush, a senior IHH member and one of the organizers of the flotilla, interviewed by Al-Jazeera TV a few days after the takeover that all the passengers were prepared to die as martyrs and that the goal of the flotilla was to reach Gaza or die trying.

Even the UN admits the violence is "coordinated". But, since no Israelis involved, this is no problem for the Security Council and there are no calls for any international investigations.

OSH, Kyrgyzstan (AP) — U.N. officials charged Tuesday that organized gangs of masked fighters launched a series of coordinated attacks last week that sparked the wave of ethnic fighting in Kyrgyzstan. According to the Red Cross, the rampages, arsons and murders have killed several hundred people.

The southern part of Kyrgyzstan has been convulsed by days of rioting targeting minority Uzbeks, which has left the country's second-largest city, Osh, in smoldering ruins and sent over 100,000 Uzbeks fleeing for their lives to neighboring Uzbekistan. [...]

The International Committee of the Red Cross had no precise figure of the dead, but spokesman Christian Cardon said "we are talking about several hundreds."More... Hat tip: Eye On The World

Dear Spengler,
I'm the prime minister of a small Jewish country in the Middle East. No matter what we do, we get blamed for brutality. We tried to handle the Gaza blockade-runners like errant hippies, and boarded the Mavi Marmara with paintball guns. We have videos proving that our soldiers acted in self-defense and nobody seems to care. We've captured whole shiploads of Iranian missiles headed for Gaza. The French blew up a Greenpeace ship and nobody treated them this way. What can I do to get a fair hearing in the world?

Jittery in Jerusalem

Dear Jittery,

There isn't a lot you can do, except in the United States, where most people still believe in fairness, and a lot of people think that the Biblical reasons for your country's founding are valid. You might want to produce a brief television commercial showing some of the 7,000 Gazan patients treated each year at Israeli hospitals; the Israeli field hospital in Haiti manned by a 200-person relief team that was first on the scene after the earthquake; and other humanitarian aid provided by your country. And you might want to contrast this with footage of the effect of terrorist bombings and rocket attacks, as well as the video footage from the boarding of the Mavi Marmara. That won't make much of a different, because American support for Israel already is at a record high.

Your success, even your existence, is an affront to most Muslims. Polls show that only a fifth of Arabs would accept a Jewish state in the Middle East under any circumstances. That is because the return of the Jewish people to Zion, not to mention their military, commercial, scientific and cultural achievements, undermines Islamic triumphalism. Muslims ask themselves: How can the Koran be God's final revelation, if the perfidious Jews enjoy strength and riches, and their false prophets appear vindicated, while the faithful wallow in weakness and humiliation?

As for the Europeans, there isn't anything you can do to bring them around. They have abandoned the Christian faith that created Europe in the first place and have reconciled themselves to extinction. They abhor the idea of a Jewish state, because they abhor anything that calls to mind their own Judeo-Christian foundation. And they like to think of Jews as malefactors because it assuages their lingering guilt over the Holocaust. Worst of all, they wish to appease a growing Muslim population which over time will replace their own infertile people. The Europeans, in short, are a race of cowards for whom truth does not exist if it is inconvenient.

Your trading partners in Asia all have substantial Muslim minorities and have no reason to rile them up by supporting you. Most of them privately hope that you will succeed, but will not say so.

The Russians believe that America needs you as an ally in the Middle East. Unfortunately, the president of the United States seeks to reduce rather than aggrandize America's influence in the world; apart from his sentimental predilection for Islam, he is in principle against allies that strengthen America. Therefore the Russians will do everything in their power to wreck your relationship with Washington, the better to hurt America. If by chance you survive, they will be happy to buy your drones and sell you military aircraft.

My advice is to defend yourselves as you see fit. You only have to make sure to win. And remember: No good deed goes unpunished.

Spengler
Asia Times

Dear Spengler,
I'm the legitimate, internationally recognized representative of the Palestinian people and the prospective president of a future Palestinian state, but I get no respect. My security people got knee-capped and pushed off rooftops in Gaza when Hamas took over in 2007. Now even the Americans are talking about lifting the embargo on Gaza - not to mention the Europeans - which would make Hamas look like a legitimate representative of the Palestinians and leave me in the cold. What should I do?

Rattled in Ramallah

Dear Rattled,
You're suffering from a martyr gap with the competition. Hamas gets respect because its supporters are happy to commit suicide. As they keep saying, "You love life; we love death." The Turks sent a boat full of prospective martyrs eager to die at the hands of the Israelis, and managed to produce nine corpses. Hamas rocket attacks on Israel are designed to draw Israeli counter-attacks which produce corpses, civilian or not. The horror evoked by suicide hurts Western morale more than the fear of terrorism. Muslims perpetrated 1,944 suicide attacks between 2001 and 2008, not counting the efforts of Hamas, Hezbollah, and others to provoke Israel into counter-attacks that claim civilian lives as collateral damage. The West is founded on the notion of redemption, that is, the hope that in every human being there exists some inclination towards the good. Suicide is a real conversation-stopper. The West cringes in horror at thought that a combatant culture can field an arbitrarily large number of suicides.

All the evidence in the world that the prospective shahids on the Mavi Marmara intended to die won't cure the queasiness of Western stomachs. The fact of nine corpses on the deck overwhelms the sensibilities of Western liberals, no matter how they got there. Your problem is that you don't have enough corpses to lay out for the news media.

If you don't like how you're being treated, ask a few of your security people to kill themselves in front of your office every morning. If they won't do that, order them to kill some Hamas people in retaliation for all the murders of your people in Gaza. The first will get you sympathy, and the second will get you respect. If you can't persuade your people to do either, even after all the American training and weapons they've received during the past few years, you're out of options. Seek political asylum in another Muslim country - Kyrgyzstan, maybe.

Spengler
Asia Times

Dear Spengler,
I am prime minister of a Muslim country with 75 million citizens. Our empire once ruled the Muslim world and a great deal besides, and we very much would like to do so again. Recently I have asserted our leadership of Muslim causes, for example, breaking Israel's blockade of Gaza. What should I do next?

Anxious in Ankara

Dear Anxious,
Your problem is that the sort of rhetoric that plays well with the local audience makes you sound like an evil clown in the United States. Whatever Israeli commandos did on the Mavi Marvara, it's not a "war crime" or an act of "state terrorism", as your government proclaims. You need to work on your image in order to avoid the impression that your country is crawling with violence-prone barbarians with a paranoid chip on their collective shoulder. The world still remembers the murder of perhaps three million Armenian, Greek and Assyrian Christians between 1914 and 1925, not to mention the killing of as many as 40,000 Kurds by Turkish security forces during the 1980s and 1990s.

It doesn't help when two groups of ethnic Turks, the Kyrgyz and Uzbeks, slaughter each other in a former Ottoman province. When you expostulate about Gaza but say nothing about massacres in Kyrgyzstan, your credibility goes down the drain. It betrays a narrowly political motivation, rather than religious or even national concern. My advice: Announce that you will go to Kyrgyzstan to mediate between the warring ethnic groups. Stay there as long as possible.

Spengler
Asia Times

Dear Spengler,
I won the Nobel Peace prize for reconciling Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland. I'm presently on a ship in the Mediterranean trying to bring humanitarian aid into Gaza, but the Israelis won't let me. What should I do?

Baffled from Belfast


Dear Baffled,
Load your cargo onto camels and head for Kyrgyzstan. They need it more there.

Spengler
Asia Times

Turkey says that it doesn't trust Israel to investigate Turkish club-wielding humanitarians on a martyrdom mission, who told the IDF soldiers to "go back to Auschwitz", because they were civilians and Israel attacked them.

(JPost) Ankara does not trust the probe Israel is planning into the IDF raid on a Gaza-bound flotilla, Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu was quoted as saying Monday."We have no trust at all that Israel, a country that has carried out such an attack on a civilian convoy in international waters, will conduct an impartial investigation,"

AFP quoted Davutoglu as saying.He called for an investigation to be held "under the direct control of the United Nations... with the participation of Turkey and Israel." More...

No problem - just as soon as the investigation "under the direct control of the United Nations" into the Armenian genocide is complete. Hat tip: Eye On The World

Yesterday, Ahmadinejad declared that Iranian ships will be escorted by “volunteer marines” “to teach Israelis a lesson.”

Today, the Iran's Revolutionary Guards' deputy head, Hossein Salami, said there were no plans to do so. "Such a thing is not on our agenda," he was quoted as saying by the official IRNA news agency on Monday.

Pussies, ain't they?

TEHRAN, June 14 (Reuters) - Iran is sending aid ships to blockaded Gaza, state radio said on Monday -- a move likely to be considered provocative by Israel which accuses Tehran of arming the Palestinian enclave's Islamist rulers, Hamas.One ship left port on Sunday and another will depart by Friday, loaded with food, construction material and toys, the report said. The boats would be part of international efforts to break Israel's isolation of the Gaza Strip."Until the end of the Gaza blockade, Iran will continue to ship aid," said an official at Iran's Society for the Defence of the Palestinian Nation. [...]

A senior Iranian official said earlier Iran's elite Revolutionary Guards were ready to provide a military escort to aid ships heading to Gaza if Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei so commands.But the Guards' deputy head, Hossein Salami, said there were no plans to do so. "Such a thing is not on our agenda," he was quoted as saying by the official IRNA news agency on Monday.

(JPost) The announcement quoted Mohammad Ali Nouraee, an aid official, who said one cargo will be sent to Turkey, and then shipped to Gaza from Istanbul while the other will leave from the port of Khorramshahr. Hat tip: Eye On The World

One of my favourites lies in the past. The old USSR was one of the most racially bigoted societies in existence. Ask anyone from the Caucasus who lived and worked in Moscow, let alone any Black African students who attended the Lumumba University, in Soviet Days. Yet it used (quite rightly) to denounce racial bigotry in the Southern States of the USA.

You still meet veteran American Communists who boast (truthfully) that they were among the early campaigners for civil rights in the South. Good for them. Alas, they were also defending or ignoring Stalin's racialist mass deportations of Chechens, Crimean Tartars and Volga Germans (and indeed his anti-Jewish frenzy after World War Two). So I tend to dismiss their concerns as selective, self-serving, opportunist and without moral force.

Another of my favourite Leftist inconsistencies is the tangle they get themselves in over Islam and Israel. In their universe Islam is good where it challenges the conservative Christian monoculture of Britain and the USA. Islam is bad when it denounces homosexuality and demands the veiling of women, and generally opposes the sexual revolution which is the main concern and aim of the modern left. Islam is good when it pursues its unrelenting war against Israel. It's bad when, in the mythical form of 'Al Qaeda' or the more tangible form of the Taliban, it 'hates our way of life' and opposes the education of women, etc etc.

Islam's attack on Israel (in the Islamic world) often takes rather unpleasant forms. Muslim clerics say things there that would get them drummed out of civilised society here. But Israel is the country everyone in Europe loves to hate - while making it clear that this loathing has nothing, nothing at all, to do with the fact that Israel is a Jewish state. Good heavens no. The very idea. How could you even think such a thing? Anti-Semite? Me? Etc etc. Well, no doubt these protestations are true, which is why I try to popularise the word 'Judophobic' instead. Call someone an anti-Semite and he will instantly and huffily say that he's of course not Adolf Eichmann or that bad man in 'Schindler's List'. So he can't be against Jews, let alone an anti-Semite. The very idea.

And yet, and yet, the persistent question buzzes round my head, why is it that other countries can and constantly do horrible things, and there's not one tenth of the fuss there is if Israel does the same? And that Arabs can be massacred, tortured , imprisoned, you name it, and if it's done by other Arabs, nobody seems to mind.

But is there another reason?

I also heard one Arab 'activist' refer to to a Israeli prison as 'notorious'. I've no doubt it's not much fun. Prisons, what can you do? But by comparison with the standard prison in the Arab world, all of which qualify for at least five stars for notoriety (especially the beatings with electric cables in windowless cellars) I would imagine it is pretty soft. What do these people think would happen to a bunch of Israeli activists who turned up in a boat off (say) the Syrian coast, with a cargo of humanitarian aid for the hostage Jews of Damascus (whose passports are stamped helpfully with the word 'Jew' - remind you of anywhere?). My advice? Don't even think about it.

Then there's the general question of Gaza. I was interested to see the Egyptians opening up their border with Gaza, just for a few days. Normally it's rather more officially shut than the border (thorough which much aid does in fact penetrate) with Israel - though there are so many smuggler's tunnels underneath it that weapons and quite large cargoes constantly make it through. Why is this, since the Gazans are the Arab and Muslim brothers of the Egyptians? Surely they should welcome them with open arms and open borders. Yet they don't. And nobody asks why.

Indeed, Egypt (illegally, but to the protests of nobody) annexed Gaza after it captured it in the failed 1948 Arab war on the nascent state of Israel. And it held on to it without anyone much fussing about its squalor and deprivation, until 1967, when Israel captured it and illegally occupied it, a misdeed that (by contrast) the Jewish state has never been allowed to forget. For me, Israel would have been a lot better off if it had withdrawn from Gaza the moment the war ended in 1967. But that's hindsight. It is and always has been an important invasion corridor.

But I have a nagging suspicion that those who now adopt the cause of Gaza (and have swallowed whole the propaganda narrative of the 'Aid Convoy' versus the 'Wicked Zionists') are much, much more interested in undermining Israel's long-term right to exist than they are in the undoubted plight of the Gazans. And why, exactly is that? What is the reason for this selective outrage against one nation among dozens, by no means perfect but also by no means the most oppressive or violent or ill-run state in the world, let alone the Middle East? You tell me.

I believe the subsequent deaths aboard the Mavi Marmara are largely the result of failure of intelligence and planning, leading to panic and wild shooting. Israel had good reason to halt the ships when they ignored the instructions of its Navy, as any sovereign nation would do in parallel circumstances. I'd like to see what the Turkish Navy would do to a pro-Kurdish 'humanitarian convoy' heading for its coast, if they ignored instructions to halt. I suspect it wouldn't be pretty.

It emerges that these ships were not entirely peopled by pacifist vegetarian idealists from the Isle of Wight. For instance, one of these 'activists' is a lawyer who once represented a terrorist for free (his client was the interesting Kozo Okamoto, still in the Middle East and anxious not to return to his native Japan). Mr Okamoto took part in the 1972 Lod Airport massacre, in which 25 innocents were massacred.

Aboard were others who are active supporters of Hamas, the despotic and murderous Islamist rulers of Gaza. Hamas hurled their Fatah opponents to their deaths from the tops of high buildings when they took over, and recently imprisoned in disgraceful circumstances a British freelance journalist, Paul Martin (look it up) to a chorus of almost total silence from the British media and left-wing intelligentsia.

One of these legislators is reported to have said at a March 2010 conference, ‘A nation that excels at dying will be blessed by Allah with a life of dignity and with eternal paradise.’ He also said that his movement ‘will never recognize Israel and will never abandon the resistance,’ and that ‘resistance is the only road map that can save Jerusalem, restore the Arab honour, and prevent Palestine from becoming a second Andalusia.’

This is a most interesting statement. Andalusia, as Muslims call Spain, is the only territory Islam has ever permanently lost. The reference underlines the fact that the real issue in this conflict is not what everyone thinks it is. This has nothing to do with the 'rights' or 'freedoms' of the 'Palestinians', who would be oppressed and neglected by whatever Arab state (probably a Greater Syria) that arose on the ruins of Israel (and probably Lebanon and Jordan too). It is the Muslim belief that no territory, however small, should be conceded by Islam to be ruled by non-Muslims. Read the full article by Peter Hitchens here...

The so called intellectual and a leading ant semite says that, Secularism can never enjoy a general acceptance in an Islamic society. For Muslim societies, the acceptance of secularism means something totally different. As Islam is a comprehensive system of worship (Ibadah) and legislation (Shari'ah), the acceptance of secularism means abandonment of Shari'ah, a denial of the divine guidance and a rejection of Allah's injunctions. It is indeed a false claim that Shari'ah is not proper to the requirements of the present age. The acceptance of a legislation formulated by humans means a preference of the humans' limited knowledge and experiences to the divine guidance: "Say! Do you know better than Allah?" (Qur'an, 2:140)

For this reason, the call for secularism among Muslims is atheism and a rejection of Islam. Its acceptance as a basis for rule in place of Shari'ah is downright apostasy. The silence of the masses in the Muslim world about this deviation has been a major transgression and a clear-cut instance of disobedience which have produces a sense of guilt, remorse, and inward resentment, all of which have generated discontent, insecurity, and hatred among committed Muslims because such deviation lacks legality.

Secularism is (only) compatible with the Western concept of God which maintains that after God had created the world, He left it to look after itself. In this sense, God's relationship with the world is like that of a watchmaker with a watch: he makes it then leaves it to function without any need for him. This (baseless) concept is inherited from Greek philosophy, especially that of Aristotle who argued that God neither controls nor knows anything about this world.

This concept is totally different from that of Muslims. We Muslims believe that Allah is the sole Creator and Sustainer of the Worlds. One Who "...takes account of every single thing." (Qur'an, 72:28); that He is All-Powerful and All-Knowing; that His Mercy and Bounties encompass everyone and suffice for all. In that capacity, Allah revealed His divine guidance to humanity, made certain things permissible and others prohibited, commanded people observe His injunctions and to judge according to them. If they do not do so, then they commit Kufr, aggression, and transgression. Read it all in the Saudi Gazette

Saudi clerics issue fatwa okaying adult breast-feeding as way of circumventing Islamic law. Kissing cousins? Not quite. While it has been common for women to breast-feed their young male relations so that they may be allowed together alone later, two Saudi clerics recently advocated extending the practice to unrelated adult males.

As part of Islamic law, men and women are forbidden to be alone together, unless they are blood relatives or have established maternal relations, in order to prevent sexual contact. As a way to avoid breaking this rule — which can result in lashings or prison time — Sheikh Al Obeikan, adviser to the royal court and consultant to the Ministry of Justice, told Gulf News that women should give their breast milk to male colleagues, acquaintances or anyone with whom they come into regular contact. "The man should take the milk, but not directly from the breast of the woman," Al Obeikan said, according to Gulf News. "He should drink it and then becomes a relative of the family, a fact that allows him to come in contact with the women without breaking Islam's rules about mixing."

While Al Obeikan advises that milk should be pumped and then given in a glass, another Saudi sheik, Abi Ishaq Al Huwaini, argues that men should suckle directly. Soon after these proclamations, a Saudi bus driver allegedly asked a female teacher, whom he drives frequently, for her breast milk, according to AOL News. The teacher refused and is threatening to sue. This fatwa, which has sparked controversy and disapproval, has prompted some to call for stricter constraints on law making. Source: NY Daily News

It is hard to become much more influential than the doyen of the White House press corps, who is given a ceremonial front-rows seat at press briefings and press conferences. So when Helen Thomas suggested that the Israelis should leave their country and “go home” to Poland and Germany, this was not some obscure, eccentric anti-Semite, but a liberal insider who has come to enjoy iconic status and a sense of exemption from criticism.

Note that Ms. Thomas did not call for just a West Bank free of Jews. And she did not just wish for the elimination of the nation of Israel itself. Rather, Thomas envisions the departure of Israelis to the sites of the major death camps seven decades ago where six million Jews were gassed.

Turkey’s role in aiding and abetting the flotilla, and its subsequent anti-Israeli outbursts, were excessive even by the often sick standards of the Middle East — but not exactly new. State-run Turkish television has aired virulent anti-Semitic dramas like the 2006 Valley of the Wolves, in which a Jewish doctor harvests organs from captured Iraqi civilians. Former Turkish prime minister Necmettin Erbakan once claimed that the Jews had instigated World War I in order to create Israel. Israel, Erbakan further asserted, in full-blown Hitlerian prose, was a “disease” and a “bacteria” that needed to be eradicated. The current prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, talks of sending in the Turkish fleet to confront the Israeli blockade, says he is sick of Israeli lies, and warns that his new Turkey is not “a young and rootless nation,” as Israel presumably is (note the code word “rootless”). So speaks our NATO partner and EU wannabe. This week, in reaction to criticism from the West, Erdogan labeled such concerns “dirty propaganda” — note well, not just propaganda but a “dirty” sort.

In an odd way, Thomas’s sick suggestions and Turkey’s new Islamist and vehemently anti-Israel foreign policy will have a liberating effect on Israel. After all, if the ceremonial head of the White House press corps wants Israel’s citizens either gone or dead, there is a legitimate suspicion that things are not quite right in the capital of Israel’s staunchest ally. And if the most secular, democratic, and pro-Western Muslim country in the Middle East wishes to pick a fight to prove its Muslim fides, then there is not much hope that Israel is going to win over anyone else in that region.

Anti-Semitism as displayed by both Thomas and Turkey’s leaders is not predicated on criticizing Israel, much less disagreeing with its foreign policy. Instead, it hinges upon focusing singularly on Israeli behavior, and applying a standard to it that is never extended to any other nation. There are plenty of disputes over borders and land in the world. But to Helen Thomas or the Turkish government, Kashmir or the Russian-Chinese border matters little — although the chances of escalation to nuclear confrontation are far greater there than on the West Bank. Has Thomas ever popped off, “Why don’t those Chinese just get the hell out of Tibet?” or “Why don’t those Indians just get out of Kashmir?”

The Palestinian “refugees” — a majority of whom are the children, grandchildren, or great-grandchildren of people actually displaced in 1948 — compose a small part of the world’s refugee population. There are millions of refugees in Rwanda, the Congo, and Darfur. Well over a half-million Jews were ethnically cleansed from the major Arab capitals between 1947 and 1973, each wave of expulsion cresting after a particular Mideast war. Again, few care to demonstrate for the plight of any of these people. Continue to Victor Davis Hanson's article in 2 3 4 Next National Review

We've been had, boys and girls: the international community, the world press, Israeli intelligence, the United Nations, the lot of us. The existential drama off the Gaza coast turns out to be a Turkish farce, the kind of low comedy that in 1782 Wolfgang Mozart set to music in the opera The Abduction from the Seraglio, with Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan playing the buffo-villain Osmin and Turkish self-exiled preacher and author Fethullah Gulen as the wise Pasha Selim.

In the post-American world, where every wannabe and used-to-be power makes momentary deals with other powers it plans to kill later, one makes inferences with caution. But I've seen this opera before.

Gulen, who lives in Pennsylvania in the United States, was silent as a jinn in a bottle about politics until last Friday, when he told the Wall Street Journal that the Free Gaza flotilla's attempt to run the Israeli blockage of Gaza "is a sign of defying authority, and will not lead to fruitful matters". Erdogan's Islamists have run a two-year campaign of judicial activism against secular politicians, journalists and army officers, and secular critics long have alleged that Gulen is the clerical power behind the prime minister.

For the secretive Gulen to criticize the Turkish government in the midst of its public rage against Israel is an imam-bites-dog story. Gulen appears to have positioned himself as a mediator with Israel. Turkey does not want to end its longstanding relationship with Israel; it wants Israel to become a Turkish vassal-state in emulation of the old Ottoman model. The killing last week by Israeli commandos of nine activists on board the Mavi Marmara served numerous goals, and Gulen's grand return to Turkish politics appears to be one of them. The question that every commentator in the Turkish press asked over the weekend, in one form or other, was: When will this voice of Muslim moderation re-emerge as an open force in the ruling Islamist party?

There is every indication that the Turkish government dispatched the Gaza flotilla in order to stage a violent confrontation. The Erdogan government announced that it had carefully vetted the passenger list on the Mavi Marmara, which is to say that it knew that many of the passengers boarded with the intention of achieving "martyrdom" in a clash with the Israelis. They must have known this, for both the Turkish as well as the Palestinian press ran interviews with family members of some of the nine dead passengers explaining this intent.

The passengers' plans for martyrdom have been celebrated in the Arab press, and translated on the website of the Middle East Media Research Institute. The Turkish government also knew that the Insani Yardim Vakfi (IHH), the Islamic charity behind the Gaza flotilla, had ties to Hamas, for it had banned the IHH from charitable activity in Turkey a decade ago due to its connection to an organization that the previous secular government regarded as terrorist.

What explains Israel's apparent intelligence failure? Israel fields a small service tasked with operations in Iran, southern Lebanon, Gaza and Syria among other prospective enemies. The Mossad probably relied on counterparts in Turkish intelligence - with whom it has a long history of collaboration - to cover the passenger list on the Mavi Marmara. The often-unreliable Debka claims that "Turkish intelligence duped Israel", which in this case is likely. By stealth or by sloth, Israel was roped into the comedy.

The star of the comedy, at least for the Turkish media, is Gulen. The 78-year-old imam has lived in self-imposed exile for two decades, due to charges by Turkish prosecutors that he led a conspiracy to subvert the secular state. He presides over Turkey's largest religious movement, commanding the loyalty of two-thirds of the Turkish police, according to some reports. His movement - a transnational civic society movement inspired by Gulen's teachings - also controls a network of elite schools that educate a tenth of the high school students in the Turkic world from Baku to Kyrgyzstan. And it reportedly controls businesses with tens of billions of dollars in assets.

His movement has been expelled from the Russian Federation and his followers arrested in Uzbekistan by local authorities who believe his goal is a pan-Turkic union from the Bosporus to China's western Xinjiang province ("East Turkestan" to Gulen's movement).

In Mozart's Abduction, Belmonte and Pedrillo descend into the pasha's harem to rescue Kostanze; in last week's version, Israeli commandos descended onto the Mavi Marmara. And there is the stock villain of Viennese comedy, the Turk Osmin, played by Erdogan. The predictable occurs, and the prospective Shahidi become actual corpses. And Erdogan threatens Israel with terrible things, in emulation of Mozart's Osmin, who sings:

"First you'll be beheaded!
Then hanged!
Then spitted on hot stakes!
Then bound, and burned, and drowned, and finally skinned!"

This, one supposes, is supposed to frighten the children in the audience, who then will smile and clap when the Wise Old Man enters to urge moderation, caution and respect for authority, in the person of Gulen. The Islamic shift in Turkey has been underway for years. As Rachel Sharon-Krespin wrote in the Middle East Quarterly(Winter 2009):

As Turkey's ruling Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi, AKP) begins its seventh year in leadership, Turkey is no longer the secular and democratic country that it was when the party took over. The AKP has conquered the bureaucracy and changed Turkey's fundamental identity. Prior to the AKP's rise, Ankara oriented itself toward the United States and Europe. Today, despite the rhetoric of European Union accession, Prime Minister Erdogan has turned Turkey away from Europe and toward Russia and Iran and re-oriented Turkish policy in the Middle East away from sympathy toward Israel and much more toward friendship with Hamas, Hezbollah, and Syria.

We are now in a post-American world, at least where the Barack Obama administration is concerned, and Turkey like its neighbors is scrambling for position. What does Turkey want in a post-American world? The question itself seems stupid, for the obvious answer is: "Whatever it can get." It wants to become the dominant regional power rather than Iran, casting a wolfish glance at Iran's Azeri population, who speak Turkish rather than Persian. It wants to "mediate" the Israeli-Palestinian issue and is not squeamish about its prospective partners. It wants Palestine to be an Ottoman province once again. It wants to be the energy hub for the Middle East and the outlet for Russian and Azerbaijani pipelines. Continued here...

Israel is at war, and if Israel were to be defeated, much of the world would not shed wet tears. What would happen after such a defeat? No one can seriously doubt that Hamas has genocidal intentions. Abdallah Jarbu, Hamas’s deputy minister of religion, recently asserted that Jews “want to present themselves to the world as if they have rights, but, in fact, they are foreign bacteria — a microbe unparalleled in the world.” Jarbu thien offered this prayer: “May He annihilate this filthy people who have neither religion nor conscience.”

Jarbu is restating what Hamas’s Iranian sponsors have been saying for years. Kayhan, the newspaper that speaks for Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, recently called Israel a “cancerous tumor” that must be excised from “the Islamic Middle East.” The goal, Kayhan added, must be Israel’s “total annihilation from the political geography of the region.” Let’s stipulate that not all those who support the Gaza “Freedom Flotilla” would welcome a second Holocaust. But let’s acknowledge, too, that those who do not endorse genocide feel it unnecessary to distance themselves from those who do.

The American journalist Helen Thomas was videotaped last week saying that Israelis should return to “Germany and Poland.” What was shocking here was not Thomas’s anti-Semitism (long well known) but that she was echoing, with just a tad more subtlety, the message radioed last week from the flotilla’s Turkish flagship to the Israelis: “Shut up, go back to Auschwitz.” There also was this pro-terrorism message: “We’re helping Arabs go against the U.S., don’t forget 9/11.”

Despite such evidence, most media have been reporting that those aboard the flotilla were on a “humanitarian mission,” attempting to deliver needed aid. Few have mentioned that Palestinians already are the largest per capita recipients of foreign aid in the world. Israel itself delivers as much as 15,000 tons of aid to Gazans every week. More comes from the U.S. and Europe via the United Nations, which has a massive relief operation in Gaza — to which the Turks have contributed but a pittance, as my colleague Claudia Rosett has pointed out. A Washington Post reporter in Gaza last week noted that “grocery stores are stocked wall-to-wall with everything from fresh Israeli yogurts and hummus to Cocoa Puffs. Pharmacies look as well-supplied as a typical Rite Aid in the United States.”

The reporter added, however, that Gaza has become “a mini-welfare state.” That indicates that what is needed is not relief but development — not shiploads of free food but paying jobs. And that, in turn, requires investment in factories, businesses, and agriculture. Gaza lacks such investment because it is ruled by Hamas, which, again, is at war with Israel. Hamas leaders reject any and all steps that might lead to peace. Abdallah Jarbu has laid out the Hamas position clearly: “I condemn whoever believes in normalizing relations with [Israelis], whoever supports sitting down with them, and whoever believes that they are human beings. They are not human beings. They are not people.” Continue to Clifford May's article on page 2 of the National Review

Lost in the latest Middle Eastern controversy is the fact that the prospects for Israeli-Arab peace are steadily improving, and that the apparently impending defection of Turkey from the Western camp is a great opportunity. The predictable consequence of Europe’s treating Turkey like a shabby, swarthy mendicant knocking at its back door for 30 years — embracing it when an ally in the region was needed, but rebuffing it at other times — is the defeat of the Kemalist Western emulators by the Muslim Turkish nativists.

If the Turks, who are historically no more popular with the Arabs than the Persians (Iranians) are, are throwing in with the militant Islamists, this will severely erode Arab enthusiasm for continuing to carry on the struggle with Israel. Turkey is now playing footsie with the Islamic Brotherhood, which murdered Anwar Sadat and is the principal foe of the Mubarak regime in Egypt. Israel is no threat to these Arab powers, but Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Muslim Brotherhood are.

Obviously, if the Turks go any farther down this road, they will have to leave NATO, which probably should have happened in 2003, when they declined any cooperation in the Iraq War. The current NATO formulation, “a coalition of the willing,” in fact means those sufficiently needful of the American military guarantee (in practice, those countries with the most recent experience of Soviet domination) doing the least they can to accommodate American military initiatives and maintain Washington’s goodwill. Of the NATO countries, only the British acted more forcefully than that to support the Americans in the Iraq War.

Such a move by Turkey would facilitate the more important move of a revival of good relations with Russia, something the West has rarely enjoyed. Premier Vladimir Putin plays the nativist card pretty aggressively, too. But of all the major powers, rivaled in this only by India, Russia has the most serious indigenous-terrorist problem, largely due to Russian Muslims and fomented by Islamists in some of the former Asian republics of the USSR.

There is a long and not very creditable history of Western partitions with Russia, giving rise to much sorrow in the history of Poland, especially. A benign version of this tradition could be revived. Russia can take the two provinces of Georgia it effectively seized in 2008, and the eastern, Russian-speaking half of Ukraine; and Belarus and Moldova (if, as it appears, that is the desire of these countries) can return to affiliation with Russia, and the U.S. and Russia could agree on the treatment of the Asian republics. The Russians would be expected to cooperate in matters involving Iran and North Korea, and it would be possible to guarantee some level of annual oil-and-gas acquisitions from Russia.

There is no logical dispute between Russia and the West, and our anti-terrorist interests are almost identical. The return of Belarus, Moldova, the eastern half of Ukraine, and two provinces of Georgia would add about 45 million people back to the Russian population, and would be a dramatic accretion for Putin and Medvedev, putting them in the company of Peter the Great, Catherine the Great, Stalin, and the other great expansionists of Russian history. Western Ukraine and Georgia could join the EU and NATO.

The end of the Turkish attendance upon Europe would also be the end of Turkish and most other Muslim infiltration of Western Europe, and would facilitate the assisted departure from Western Europe of some of the millions of so-called guest workers, who, like some house-guests, are proving very reluctant to go home. If the European nationalities could just reenergize sufficiently to prevent further natural population decline, Europe’s apparent death wish could be replaced by a period of revitalization, as economic realities are going to force some retrenchment in the socialist Euro-state. Continue to Conrad Black's article on page 2 of the National Review

A Turkish Islamic group — the “Humanitarian Relief Foundation,” often associated by Western intelligence agencies with terrorist sponsorship — orchestrated the recent Gaza flotilla. It was hoping for the sort of violent, well-publicized confrontation with the Israeli navy that later followed. Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan immediately issued veiled threats to Israel. He then badgered the United States, Turkey’s NATO patron and ally, to condemn the Israeli interdiction.

While the world piled on in its criticism of Israel, there was also a sort of stunned silence over the actions of Turkey, without whose help the blockade-running flotilla would never have left a Turkish port.

Erdogan’s hysterics emphasized the Islamic transformation of a once secular Turkey that has been going on for well over a decade. In 2003, Turkey forbade passage to U.S. troops in their efforts to remove Saddam Hussein from Iraq. State-run Turkish television instead aired virulent anti-American dramas, such as Valley of the Wolves, in which our soldiers appear as little more than blood-crazed killers who dismember poor Iraqi civilians.

Lately, Turkey has reached out to Iran and Syria. Both habitually sponsor Mideast terrorist groups and have aided anti-American insurgents in Iraq. Turkey and Brazil recently offered to monitor Iran’s nuclear program, sidestepping American and European efforts to step up sanctions to stop Teheran’s plans for a bomb.

Erdogan’s anti-Israel attacks often match those of his newfound friends, Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Hezbollah’s Hasan Nasrallah. Former Turkish prime minister Necmettin Erbakan, remember, once blamed the Jews for starting the Crusades, and for instigating World War I to create Israel. He also described them as a “disease” that needed to be eradicated.

What is behind Turkey’s metamorphosis from a staunch U.S. ally, NATO member, and quasi-European state into a sponsor of Hamas, ally of theocratic Iran, and fellow traveler with terrorist-sponsoring Syria?

The Cold War is over. Turkey no longer guards the southeastern flank of Europe from the advance of Soviet Communism, lessening its importance within NATO. Its Anatolian Muslim population grows, while more secular European and Aegean Turks have lost influence. Turkey senses a growing distance between Tel Aviv and Washington, and thus an opportunity to step into the gulf to unite Muslims against Israel and win influence in the Arab world. Continue to Victor Davis Hanson's article on page 2 of the National Review

If Israel Is Not Evil, the World Is in Big Trouble. With the exception of the United States, nearly all the world’s nations have condemned Israel over the Gaza-flotilla incident, as have the United Nations and nearly all the world’s newspapers, radio and TV-news stations, leftist academics, and leftist organizations. Their characterizations of the Jewish state range from a society so evil that it should not be allowed to exist to a villainous nation that is responsible for a) the suffering of millions of innocent Palestinian men, women, and children and b) the lack of Mideast peace; and therefore c) the Muslim world’s anger at the West; and therefore d) Islamic terrorism itself.

Let’s hope the world is right. Israel is almost totally isolated. A visitor from another planet would have every reason to report back home that the greatest problem on Earth is the planet’s Jewish state. Although Israel is the size of the American state of New Jersey and smaller than El Salvador, and although its population is smaller than that of Sweden, Burundi, and Bolivia, it is the most censured country in United Nations history.

Let’s hope the world is right.

Though Israel is a thriving liberal democracy for all its citizens — including the one citizen out of five who is Arab (83 percent of whom are Muslim) — and has an independent judiciary and an independent press, though it signed an agreement establishing an independent Palestinian state, and though it returned to Egypt every inch of the Sinai Peninsula, a land mass larger than Israel itself with major oil reserves, the world deems Israel a villain.

Though Hamas runs a theocratic police state based on torture and terror, though it recognizes no freedom of speech and no freedom for any religious expression outside of radical Islam, though it seeks to annihilate the Jewish state, and though its state-controlled media depict Israelis and Jews as worthy of death, the world sees Israel, not Hamas, as the villain.

Let’s hope the world is right.

Here is a random sampling of world reactions:

“The EU condemns the use of violence that has produced a high number of victims among the members of the flotilla.”

“The President [of France] expresses his profound emotion in the face of the tragic consequences of the Israeli military operation. . . . He condemns the disproportionate use of force.”

“Spain unequivocally condemns the Israeli attack on the humanitarian flotilla and it does so as a country and as the acting president of the EU Council.” Continue to Dennis Prager's views in Page 2 & 3 from the National Review