Will the West Stand Up to Turkey?

Despite its role in provoking Israel and turning the Mavi Marmara incident into an international crisis, Turkey has been let off the hook by Western leaders.

At the height of the war between Israel and Hezbollah in July 2006, George W. Bush was caught telling Tony Blair in what was thought to be an off-the-record conversation during the G8 Summit in Saint Petersburg that the war would not have escalated had Syria put pressure on Hezbollah "to stop doing this shit."  Bush and Blair didn’t know they were being taped but they certainly knew that Hezbollah, acting as Iran’s proxy and with Syria’s support, was responsible for the war.

By contrast, Turkey has so far been off the hook despite its attempts to turn Gaza into another Southern Lebanon.  Erdogan is personally responsible for the death of his co-citizens aboard the "Mavi Marmara."  He is the one who sent out his jihadist organization Insani Yardim Vakfi (or IHH) to militarize Gaza under Turkey’s aegis.  Far from scolding him and from asking him to "stop doing this shit," Western leaders have fallen in the trap of his "humanitarian" propaganda.  Worse, they still treat Turkey as if it hadn’t become an Iranian surrogate.

For the past eight years, Erdogan has been provoking Israel.  His strategy has consistently been the same: encouraging jihadist attacks against Israel, reacting hysterically to Israel’s responses, and "warning" the West that letting Israel get away with its "crimes" would have the effect of pushing Turkey into Iran’s arms.

In 2004, Erdogan called Israel a "terrorist state" after we eliminated Sheikh Yassin.  In February 2006, he hosted Hamas leader Haled Mashal in Ankara.  In January 2009, he staged a temper tantrum at the Davos Conference calling Shimon Peres an expert killer.  In October 2009, the Turkish state television channel started airing a fiction series showing Israeli soldiers intentionally murdering Palestinian children.  In November 2009, Erdogan declared that he’d rather meet with Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir (accused of war crimes and genocide by the International Criminal Court) than with Benjamin Netanyahu.  In March 2010, Erdogan claimed that the Temple Mount, Hebron and Rachel’s tomb were never Jewish sites. The list goes on.

With the "Mavi Marmara" affair, Erdogan has crossed a new threshold.  He is now setting Turkey on a military collision course with Israel while blaming Israel for the consequences of Turkey’s provocations and while convincing the West that it will lose Turkey if dares to blame it for its troublemaking.  This deceiving stratagem has been working superbly thanks to the cowardice or blindness (or both) of the free world’s current leaders.

President Obama called Erdogan to express "his deep condolences for the loss of life and injuries resulting from the Israeli military operation."  Obama didn’t have anything to say about the fact that Turkey was trying to help Hamas import missiles and that the IHH terrorists tried to kill Israeli soldiers.  As for President Sarkozy, he denounced what he called Israel’s "disproportionate" use of force despite the fact that the Israeli soldiers started using their weapons only to save their lives from the armed mob that tried to lynch them.

Jimmy Carter and Valéry Giscard d’Estaing propped-up Khomeini in Iran, thinking that he would appease the "anger" of the Iranian people towards the West.  How brilliant indeed.  Obama and Sarkozy are making the same mistake with Erdogan.  Talk about killing two birds with one stone: Turkey can count both on American chickens and on French pigeons.  Turkey is making a disproportionate use of hypocrisy, and it works.  Until the West has leaders worthy of that name, Israel has no choice but to fight alone and win.