Author: Helena

The ‘oddity’ of American mainstream discourse

The WaPo’s main house neocon, Jackson Diehl, had a typically arrogant op-ed today in which he huffed and puffed about Malaysian opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim in these terms:

    His transition from pro-American democrat to anti-Israeli zealot is sobering…

Matt Yglesias picked up on that and added this wise commentary:

    As best I can tell from Diehl’s column, Anwar hasn’t stopped being “pro-American” or a democrat, so it’s difficult to see what the nature of the “transition” is. Indeed, if I’m understanding Diehl correctly what he’s saying about Anwar (and also about Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan) is that he’s heated up his rhetoric on Israel precisely because as a democrat seeking political reform in Malaysia under difficult circumstances he needs to be responsive to public opinion.
    In terms of “pro-American,” it’s always difficult to know what people mean by this term. Clearly, though, Malaysia is very far away from Israel and not the kind of country that’s engaged in global power projection. I would think that we would therefore judge the pro-Americanness or not of a Malaysian politician primarily in terms of his attitude toward regional issues in Southeast Asia…

His bottom line was,

    certainly it would be odd to make Israel the… the main criterion by which we judge a politician.

I beg your pardon, Matt? In just about all of the U.S. mainstream political discourse this is still exactly the criterion by which politicians all around the world get judged. You should surely know that.
Indeed, the situation is ways beyond “odd.” It’s downright lunatic. Not to mention extremely destructive of the true interests of our country’s people.
Still and all, it’s good that Matt Yglesias called Diehl out on his rampant Israel-first-ism.

Obama and Erdogan’s 75-minute talk at G-20

Today’s Zaman has an intriguing description of the 75-minute meeting that Obama held with Turkish PM Rejep Tayyip Erdogan on Saturday, the eve of yesterday’s G-20 meeting in Canada.
It’s an election year in the U.S. (as indeed it is every other year… ) and Obama is under a lot of pressure from the powerful pro-Israel lobby AIPAC to distance himself from longtime NATO ally and Afghanistan war contributing nation Turkey. See e.g. this pathetic piece of anti-Turkish propaganda sent around recently by AIPAC media director Josh Block.
So I suppose it’s not totally surprising that, as TZ noted, the Ehite House tried to keep the Obama-Erdogan meeting ” a low-profile event… It released a considerably brief statement after the one-hour, 15-minute meeting and offered no photo opportunities… White House officials who were briefing the press concerning Obama’s bilateral meetings as the Erdoğan-Obama meeting was taking place didn’t mention this meeting at all.”
Too bad Obama doesn’t have more backbone, though, given the completely scurrilous (and often borderline racist and/or Islamophobic) nature of the anti-Turkish campaign and also Turkey’s role– did I mention this yet?– as a long-time NATO ally and weighty, successfully democratizing, majority Muslim nation at the crossroads of Europe and Asia.
TZ parsed the very brief comment the White House did eventually make about the meeting, and the reported contents of the meeting that it gained from participants, very carefully indeed:

    The fact that the adjective “strategic” was not used before the word “allies” in the White House statement was… noteworthy. Yet, the expression “model partnership,” first introduced by Obama during an April 2009 visit to Turkey, was used during the discussions between Erdoğan and Obama, Today’s Zaman learned.

Regarding the crisis in Turkish-Israeli relations provoked by Israel’s extremely lethal May 31 raid against the Turkish aid ship Mavi Marmara, the TZ reporter wrote:

    the US side expressed uneasiness over the recent course of affairs regarding [Turkish-Israeli] relations and said Washington would continue to lend support for the resolution of bilateral problems between the two countries.
    Erdoğan, meanwhile, thanked Obama for his administration’s contribution to Israel’s release of activists on board [the aid flotilla]…

That first point is interesting given that, as I reported here, recent high-level Turkish visitors to Washington were pleading publicly (though in a dignified way) for U.S. help in healing Turkey’s rift with Israel. However, it still doesn’t look as if Obama was promising to do very much to help.
Maybe after the November elections?
The other issue that recently harmed Israel’s formerly fairly robust ties with Turkey was Ankara’s role– along with Brazil– in winning Tehran’s support for a fuel-swap agreement that when implemented would remove 1,200 kg of 19%-enriched uranium from Iran and replace it with medically specific fuel rods that can’t be used in any realistic nuclear weapons program.
On that, TZ reported that during the Obama-Erdogan meeting,

    The US side didn’t offer “any new mission” to Ankara regarding the Iran issue and didn’t encourage the Turkish side to continue its mediation efforts between Tehran and world powers, sources said.
    In [the G-8 meeting that prceded the G-20 meeting in] Toronto, the leading eight industrial democracies praised Brazil and Turkey’s diplomatic overtures to Iran, even though they had been rejected by other members of the international community. Brazil and Turkey were the only two members of the UN Security Council to vote against the most recent set of sanctions on Iran.

TZ quoted an excerpt from the G-8 group’s final communique that included this:

    We… welcome and commend all diplomatic efforts in this regard, including those made recently by Brazil and Turkey on the specific issue of the Tehran Research Reactor,” a final communiqué by the G-8 — the United States, Canada, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and Russia — said.

The dumbing down of (paper) ‘Foreign Policy’

I’ve long been a fan of ‘Foreign Policy’ magazine– back to the days when my dear (late) friend Bill Maynes was the editor. It got more zip and texture with the redesign introduced by Moises Naim when he became editor. Now, they have a new-ish editor, susan Glasser, and new ownership… yes, it’s gone from being owned by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace to being owned by (gasp!) the WaPo.
And it shows.
The latest issue– the “Bad Guys Issue”– is almost completely sophomoric. reducing the complexity of international relations to a question of “bad guys” is really inane. And the whole of the piece by Ghanaian citizen George B.N. Ayittey titled, “The Worst of the Worst: Bad dude dictators and general coconut heads” follows along completely with the childish, content-less name-calling of the title.
U.S. citizens live in a large country that– along with China– is the only one that is big enough that even in today’s world a dream of autarky, isolationism, and provincialism can still seems plausible. And in the U.S. one big result of this has been that many otherwise involved citizens are deeply ignorant about the rest of the world. A publication like Foreign Policy should set out to help educate them (us)– at least, not simply to mindlessly perpetuate old myths to the effect that most of the world’s problems are due to “the bad guys”, the “coconut heads”, etc.
What a tragedy to see what the paper edition of the FP has become.
Luckily, several parts of the fairly independently run website are a whole lot better.
I’m just off to see what Steve Walt has been writing there recently… And then, on to see what’s new on the Middle East Channel. I think Bill Maynes (RIP) would enjoy the online version of the mag much more than this present dead-tree version.

NYT finds Jewish terrorism ‘romantic’??

Deborah Solomon, a longtime writer for the NYT Magazine, conducted the ‘Q&A’ piece published in today’s paper with Israel’s opposition leader, Kadima party head Tzipi Livni. The piece as edited and published carries this exchange:

    Q: Your parents were among the country’s founders.
    A: They were the first couple to marry in Israel, the very first. Both of them were in the Irgun. They were freedom fighters, and they met while boarding a British train. When the British Mandate was here, they robbed a train to get the money in order to buy weapons.
    Q: It was a more romantic era. Is your mom still alive?
    A: No. She died two years ago…

Let me stress the fact that– as is made very clear in the print version of this article, as of all of Solomon’s weekly interviews– this one was ‘edited’ before publication.
In other words, it is not only Deborah Solomon who finds it quite acceptable to describe the Jewish terrorism perpetrated by Livni’s Irgun-affiliated parents as straightforwardly ‘romantic’. It was also the people who edited her interview.
The word ‘romantic’ is not even placed in quotation marks in either the print or the online version of the interview, which would have conveyed a sense it was being used with some ironic distance.
As Matt Duss notes over at Think Progress,

    While Livni may prefer to think that the Irgun weren’t terrorists, and Solomon would like to help, it’s worth noting that both the New York Times and the World Zionist Congress saw things very differently at the time. On December 24, 1946, the Times reported “The World Zionist Congress in its final session here strongly condemned by a vote early today terrorist activities in Palestine and ‘the shedding of innocent blood as a means of political warfare‘” by the groups Irgun and the Stern Gang.
    I very much doubt that the civilians who were murdered by the Irgun at the King David Hotel, nor those massacred and ethnically cleansed at Deir Yassin and Jaffa, nor the hundreds killed in various other Irgun attacks look upon that era as particularly romantic. Their memories deserve far better.

Check out the rest of the great links Matt provides there, too.
But also– even more importantly– please join me in writing either a Letter to the Editor at the NYT, or a strong but politely worded protest to their “Public Editor” (Ombudsman), Arthur S. Brisbane to express your displeasure at the newspaper’s apparent whitewashing of the (decidedly un-‘romantic’) Jewish terrorism of the 1940s.
You can reach Mr. Brisbane by e-mail or by phone at (212) 556-7652. Letters to the Editor go here.
(Oops, sorry about the earlier HTML mistake on those email addresses, and thanks to the kind reader who pointed them out.)

Boarding the ‘Mavi Marmara’, 1947 edition

    An anonymous friend who served with the Royal (British) Navy in the eastern Mediterranean in 1947-48 sent me some notes about how the Royal Navy set about the mission of boarding blockade-running ships that were heading for the coast of Palestine in the tense period between late 1946 and the implementation of U.N.’s Partition Plan for Palestine in May 1948.
    During those months, the whole of Palestine was still under the control of Britain under the system of ‘mandates’ that the infant U.N. had inherited from the League of Nations. In the eastern Mediterranean, the R.N. was acting to enforce a ruling from the League of Nations/U.N. that restricted Jewish immigration to Palestine. As the author of the following recollection writes, these U.N. restrictions “were being flouted with the tacit support of America, and Britain’s war on ‘terrorism’ in those days was focused on U.S.-funded Jewish terrorism in Palestine.”
    Of greatest note in the account that follows is the sharp contrast between the rules of engagement that the R.N. detachments had (and the training they were given, to enable them to act within them) back in 1947-48, and the ROEs the Israeli naval commandos used during their assault on the Mavi Marmara on May 31.
    In both cases, the boats had many civilian passengers who were determined to repel the boarding-parties. The difference lies in the way the naval units sent to board the boats dealt with that resistance.
    So now, read on…

Regarding the bruhaha about the brutal Israeli boarding of a blocade-runner to Gaza, you might be interested in how we (Royal Navy) dealt with (US-funded) illegal immigration to Israel in 1947-48. Every ship on the “Palestine Patrol” (frigates, destroyers) had two designated ‘boarding parties’ (1 officer and 14 men) drawn from the existing ship’s-company, all of whom received two weeks ‘training’ in “boarding” – i.e. jumping from the deck of one’s own ship onto the deck of another ship, while underway in all kinds of weather (we had make-shift hinged boarding ramps) and then (if necessary) engaging in hand-to-hand combat. The only kind of weapon carried by the sailors was a two-foot, weighted ‘crowd-control’ truncheon, which they were trained to use as a ‘prod’ (and not as baton – which could do serious harm), and we were taught how to proceed as a ‘phalanx’. The officer (and he alone) carried a service revolver for use if a life was at risk (e.g. decapitation – a real case) The ships were crammed full (over-full) with Jewish refugees who (understandably) did their best to ‘repel borders’, including lying on the deck and thrusting upwards with knitting needles, or just throwing boarders over the side. There was usually a third ship astern, picking up such castaways.
Once aboard the ‘illegal’, the aim was not to beat up on the migrants but to gain control of the wheelhouse and the tiller flat (hence the ‘phalanx’) and thus gain ‘navigational’ control. One then had effective control of the ship, if not its occupants. Control of the engine room would come later. Depending on the circumstances, several boarding parties might have to be put aboard. I had been the boarding officer of our ship (one of four frigates redeployed from the Pacific for this mission), but I was recalled to UK for courses in August ’47, so I have no direct knowledge of the Exodus foray. which involved five RN ships or more. It was, however, said that of the many sailors who attempted to board (jumped), a significant number were thrown overboard by the migrants, and the 50 or so who did manage to retain a foothold, had to fight for five hours to finally gain navigational control of the ship.

A great resource on the Hamas women

Kudos to Conflicts Forum, which a few months ago published (PDF) a very informative study by the Hebron-area journalist and researcher Khaled Amayreh on the role of women in Hamas.
Amayreh’s study is in two parts. The first consists of interviews with three of Hamas’s female MPs: Sameera al-Halayka from the Hebron area, and Jamila Shanti and Huda Naim from Gaza. The second is Amayreh’s own analysis of the significant role women have played in bolstering Hamas.
In my 2006 article “Sisterhood of Hamas”, I had some good material from some time I spent with Shanti and other Hamas women right after the January 2006 elections. But this 26-page paper from Amayreh is much richer than the material I was able to get during that rushed reporting trip.
There’s a huge amount of really important material in this study. So many westerners still seem to have the completely erroneous idea that all Islamist movements are just like the Afghan Taliban in the very repressive way they treat women. Nothing could be further from the truth! All women in Palestine have access to basic good education– and Hamas and its supporters fully support the right of all females not only to study but also to work in paid jobs and in voluntary societies, and to participate fully in local and national politics. (Hence, the “phenomenon” of female Hamas MPs, like the three whom Amayreh interviews.)
At one point, Amayreh has this exchange with Halayka:

    Q: Have you sought to learn and benefit from Muslim women activists outside occupied Palestine?
    A: On the contrary, it was women activists from outside occupied Palestine that sought to learn from us. In the aftermath of elections, we were contacted by women organizations, Palestinian (mostly those functioning among expatriate Palestinian communities) and non-Palestinian, enquiring about the modalities we used in our activism. It is true that our situation is unique because of the Israeli occupation and cannot in that sense be copied. However, it is clear that women’s groups can learn much from us in terms of empowerment and activism as well as Islamic education.

He has these exchanges with Shanti:

    Q: You have been active in Hamas’ women’s department for many years. How would describe the status of women within Hamas? Do they take you seriously?
    A: Irrespective of western stereotypes, I can say that Hamas – a movement I know very well – is a moderate Islamic movement that adopts a comprehensive approach to society. This is probably the reason why Hamas has been able to receive widespread support from people. Hence, I can say that Hamas’ philosophy stems from Islam which gives women their rights and dignity. So, it is only natural that the status of women within Hamas is very advanced as women are considered a fundamental component of the movement. In fact, I can say for sure that women are more representative in Hamas than they are within any other Palestinian political movement. Take for example colleges and universities in occupied Palestine and you will find that a clear majority of the supporters of the Islamic student blocks are women. Similarly, it is widely believed that a majority of those who voted for Hamas in the 2006 elections were women. It is true though that formal representation of women within Hamas is still smaller in proportion to their proportion in the population. However, we view this as an evolutionary and cumulative process, which means that we will continue to make progress toward a more equitable representation of women within the
    Islamic movement.
    … Q: How did you cope with the mass arrest by Israel of Hamas’ Legislative Council members?
    A: That was a real burden as more than 40 MPs were arrested as an act of political vendetta. But the bigger problem was the harassment of our sister MPs both by the Israeli occupiers and the PA. You know the sisters Mariam Saleh and Muna Mansur were both arrested by the Israelis and Samira Halaika was also harassed. This meant that Hamas in the West Bank became nearly voiceless which placed on us an additional burden here in the Gaza Strip since we had to make up for our colleagues who had been arrested and detained…
    Q: How would you evaluate your experience in politics in the past five years?
    A: We have been able to learn much in terms of working with the media. We have also acquired new skills in dealing with the public in ways that differ from our previous activities in the field of daawa (inviting people to Islam). In our new capacity as MPs, we have had to be constantly available to help people in every conceivable aspect. We also have gained a profound understanding of the judicial and legislative systems. For example, we had to have a thorough grasp of the laws, bylaws, regulations and norms pertaining to parliamentary processes. This has helped us assert ourselves as effective MPs. Nonetheless, the paralysis of parliamentary life following 2007 has not allowed us to reach our potentials.

And he had this exchange with Naim:

    Q: What role have Islamist women played in the resistance?
    A: The resistance is more than just shooting and fighting. Strengthening our society against Israeli infiltration and manipulation is also a form of resistance. In fact, Islamist women and Palestinian women in general, have played an extremely important role in securing and protecting the internal front without which the resistance front would collapse. But there are, of course, many women who played an active role in the resistance, such as Reem al Rayashi and Fatema al Najar who were martyred, and Ahlam Tamimi who was imprisoned for life. Nonetheless, the main role of Islamist women has been to shield and fortify our society against moral decay.

I’m sorry I hadn’t known about this paper earlier. (Khaled, why didn’t you send it to me? You know I’m interested in the topic!)
Anyway, go read the whole thing. As I said, it’s a great resource.
CF has also, more recently, published another study on Islamist women. This one is “A Study on Women in Islam: An Islamic Vision of Women From the Viewpoint of Contemporary Shi’i Scholars in Lebanon”, by Amira Burghul (PDF). It looks mainly at texts written by Imam Mousa al-Sadr, Ayatollah Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah and Imam Sheikh Muhammad Mahdi Shams al-Din.

Swedish dockworkers follow Oakland’s BDS lead

Following the amazing lead given by citizen activists and dockworkers/longshoremen in Oakland, California at 5 a.m. on Sunday, today dockworkers in Sweden announced they will try to institute a week-long ban on loading or unloading Israeli ships and cargoes coming to or from Israel. (HT: Ray J.)
The statement from the head of the Swedish port workers union linked to above, said (in Google translation):

    The Swedish port workers’ position is not an isolated incident. We are acting in parallel with the dockers unions in South Africa and Norway, in a first international action for two obvious requirements against the State of Israel: 1. Raise the blockade of Gaza. 2. [The establishment of] an independent international inquiry into the violent and the boarding of Freedom [Flotilla].

It is true that the Oakland stoppage lasted only 24 hours, and this one is planned to last only seven days. So these actions will not bring Israel’s international trade (which is distorted heavily toward the export of military goods) grinding to a halt. But the symbolism itself is immensely important. It shows that the BDS call has moved significantly beyond the few college campuses where it started, and into much broader reaches of western society.
It also shows that the strong support Israel nearly always enjoyed among the left and labor movements in the west has eroded a lot.

Turkey, Israel, the U.S.

Several strongly pro-Israeli members of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives have stepped up their campaigns against NATO ally Turkey over the past week, in a campaign that has been quietly orchestrated by the big pro-Israel organization AIPAC. (See, for example, the ‘Related Materials’ linked to on this page of the AIPAC website.)
First prize for anti-Turkish rabble-rousing has to go to Rep. Shelley Berkley (D- Nevada), who told a press conference convened Tuesday to discuss the recent flotilla murders incident that “Turkey is responsible for the nine deaths aboard that ship. It is not Israel that’s responsible.”
The Jerusalem Post reported that Berkley also “pointed to Turkish funding and support for the expedition.”
The always-excellent M.J. Rosenberg has more details about the anti-Turkey campaignhere. He also notes that, “The bash-Turkey movement did not start with the flotilla incident. It began when Turkey spoke out against Israel’s bloody invasion of Gaza in 2009.”
Luckily, however, Turkey’s currently-ruling AKP (Justice and Development Party) sent a high-powered delegation over to Washington for most of the past week, where they worked hard to get Turkey’s side of the story heard. Some details about their meetings are here. The Middle East Institute conference that I live-blogged Friday morning (here and the next four posts) was just one of the team’s engagements.
During the morning, as reported in those live-blog posts, conference participants heard from Adana deputy Ömer Çelik, the AK Party’s chairperson for external affairs, İbrahim Kalın, the chief foreign policy adviser to Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and Turkey’s ambassador in Washington, Namik Tan. The three men went to great lengths to refute some of the most damaging accusations that AIPAC and others have launched against the Turkish government, and to explain its position.
As they all noted, the current disagreements are not only over the flotilla murders incident, but also over Turkey’s role, along with Brazil’s President Lula Da Silva, in brokering the May 17 enriched uranium exchange agreement with Iran, and in voting against the latest round of sanctions that the Security Council imposed on Iran.
Here are some of the crucial points the three men made– both in the open session of the conference and in a smaller press gaggle held in conjunction with it:
1. The men strongly denied that the Turkish government had played any role in organizing the aid flotilla. Kalin told the press gaggle: “We advised them not to go but this was an international NGO initiative and we couldn’t prevent them.”
2. Like many of the other governments from whose ports boats sailed to join the aid flotilla, the Turkish government gave a thorough pre-sailing inspection to the passengers and freight on the Mavi Marmara and the other two boats that sailed from Turkish ports, to ascertain that no weapons were on board and to register the names of passengers.
3. In an additional attempt to forestall violence, the Turkish government also coordinated directly with the governments of the U.S. and Israel while the boats were preparing to sail. In the press gaggle, Kalin said, “We discussed it with the U.S. and the Israelis. Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak was on the phone with our foreign minister many times before sailing and we understood they would act very differently from way they did act with the boat.”
Celik said of the Mavi Marmara:

    It had been thoroughly checked before it sailed. If Israel had concerns about the ship it could have informed Turkey and Turkey would have taken necessary measures.
    Before the ship sailed Israel didn’t say anything. The Israeli forces could have disabled the steering and towed the ship to Israel.

4. On allegations that the Turkish government favors Hamas over the (western-supported) Fateh Party and its leader Mahmoud Abbas, Celik told the press gaggle:

    I’m not here to defend Hamas but all the parties do need to be at the table. We have excellent relations with all parties inside Palestine. [Hamas head] Khaled Meshaal has visited Turkey only once, right after the 2006 elections, which Hamas won, while Mahmoud Abbas has been to Ankara God knows how many times including very recently and stretching back to the time that he and Israeli President Shimon Peres visited Ankara together in the lead-up to the Annapolis Peace conference and they addressed our parliament together.
    The reason we insist Hamas needs to be at table is we don’t want anyone pushed out of the table when they represent half of the Palestinian people.

He also said that Turkey has used its relationship with Hamas to continue pushing Hamas towards support for the two-state solution. “It took the Hamas people a long time to come to the idea of the two-state solution, but they did,” he said. He cited Meshaal’s recent interview with Charlie Rose as evidence for this.
5. On claims that Turkey’s current policies are motivated by anti-semitism or anti-Israeli feelings, Celik said,

    We always want to have good relations with the American Jewish community. But if the Jewish community wants to change our behavior on issues of importance to us we can’t accept that. We have a long history of good relations. We invited all the Jewish community representatives here in DC to come and meet with us. Some came and some didn’t come. Those who didn’t come made a mistake.
    .. Remember that we gave our support to Israel’s OECD membership. Turkey is Israel’s only true friend in region.
    Friends do not threaten each other. If they threaten each other, then they’re not friends.
    Israel’s friends should ask “What is the cost to Israel to lose Turkey’s friendship?”

6. At points throughout the conference, the three men noted that not only is Turkey a longstanding member of NATO, and its only majority-Muslim member, but also that it currently has troops deployed alongside American troops in Afghanistan and in the waters off Somalia. I can note (which the three Turkish speakers graciously did not) that Israel is not a NATO ally, and has no troops risking their lives in risky, US-led NATO deployments anywhere in the world.
7. One last note came in the panel discussion that I missed a lot of, due to the press gaggle. There was a question near the end that I did hear, as to whether Turkey is now seeing an intensification of the years-long struggle between its secularizers and its Islamists (of whom, the AKP are a politically moderate but very politically successful part)– with the suggestion that the current uproar among Turkey’s 74 million people over the flotilla murders is somehow being manipulated by the AKP and other Islamists.
The answer was given by Cengiz Candar, a very pro-American Turkish journo whom I’ve known a bit for decades, who is also extremely secularist in his views. His answer was, basically, that the “secular-Islamist struggle story” inside Turkey is old news, and no longer particularly intense; and that Turkish people’s feelings about the flotilla murders have nothing to do with that divide. That was interesting. It reminded me of some conversations Bill and I had when we were in Turkey last summer, when several people who are strongly associated with the secularizing stream in Turkish society said they thought the AKP was doing a generally excellent job in governing the country– including on issues of minority rights for ethnic and religious minorities, women’s rights, and so on.
… Bottom line: Turkey, which is an important and “emerging” power in the Middle East in its own right, as well as a crucial U.S. ally, looks as though it is not about to back down in the face of attacks and intimidation from the rabidly nationalist Netanyahu-Barak government in Israel or their politically powerful backers in the U.S. political system.
What I also heard from the Turkish leaders and representatives who spoke at the conference, though, was that they were eager to overcome the current, sharp disagreement with Israel; that they recognized that, given the strong emotions aroused among the peoples of both Turkey and Israel by the flotilla raids, it would be hard for the Erdogan government and the Netanyahu government to overcome this agreement on their own– and that therefore they strongly wanted help from the U.S. administration in mediating and de-escalating this conflict.
The three men repeatedly made the case that (presumably in comparison with what some political forces inside Turkey are urging them to do) the demands they are making of Israel with respect to the flotilla are modest. “Israel must apologize for those killings, and accept the international inquiry as called for by the U.N. Secretary General,” said Amb. Tan.
Of course, in any kind of a similar case of a civilian vessel being attacked by the military forces of another state while on the high seas, many much weightier demands could also be made.
We could also note that one of those killed in the Israeli raid was a Turkish-U.S. dual national, Furkan Dogan. Ibrahim Kalin confirmed at the conference that the Turkish autopsy found that Dogan received four bullet wounds in his head and one in his chest. “This was not shooting in self defense, this was unjustified killing,” he said.
Thus far, however, the U.S. government has done nothing to try to bring Dogan’s killer to any form of account. (Are some U.S. citizens more equal than others, I wonder? Especially, if some of them happen to be Muslims?) And at a broader level, there are no signs at all that the Obama administration is prepared to do anything at all to help Turkey’s anguished government and people win the apology from Israel and the “credible, international inquiry” that they say they so urgently need.
Last Sunday, as we recall, the Obama administration came out with strong support for the (navel-gazing) Israeli-dominated whitewash body constituted by the Israeli government.
No word of any U.S. support for Turkey’s request for an Israeli apology for the killing of nine of its citizens and the wounding of many more.
I am ashamed of my government.

Turkey conf live-blog #4

Turkish Amb. Namik Tan:
The U.S. needs to rely more on alliances and soft power than it has until now.
Turkey is a country with many friends in its region and around the world and with a booming economy… The highest growth rate in the OECD. The only government that didn’t have to intervene in the financial sector during the recent crisis. Construction sector second only to China’s… Pipeline projects, etc.
The alliance between Turkey and the U.S. is extremely powerful. It acts at the economic and cultural levels and is very important for both parties, including in defusing the idea of a clash of civilizations.
… We have now been moving to strengthen and modernize our strategic relationship with the United States.

Continue reading “Turkey conf live-blog #4”