Turkey's 9/11

Petra Marquardt-Bigman
The Warped Mirror
14 June '10

It wasn't some feverish activist who claimed that the Israeli raid of the Mavi Marmara was like "Turkey's 9/11". It was Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu over breakfast with reporters in Washington.

Obviously enough, Davutoglu's comparison was cynical and offensive, all the more so if one takes into account that Turkey can claim to be the "most anti-American country in the world." Apparently, this suits Turkey's Islamist government just fine, since media outlets close to the ruling AKP and Prime Minister Erdogan have accused the US not only of committing all sorts of atrocities in Iraq, but also of causing various natural disasters.

It doesn't take a big leap from this kind of anti-American conspiracy theories to antisemitic tropes, and thus, "praise of Hitler, Holocaust denial, and passages from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" are also part of the output of Turkey's Islamist media. So it was hardly surprising to see a sign at a recent demonstration in Istanbul that announced: "Legendary leader Adolf Hitler, our patience is running out, we need your spirit."

In a somewhat different way, the Nazis and the Holocaust were also once again a favorite reference point in the commentaries published by Western media outlets, where pundits vied with each other to bemoan that, unlike the enlightened rest of the world, the Jewish state has failed to grasp what a wonderful morality lesson the Holocaust offered particularly for Jews. To quote just one of many examples, Henry Siegman, currently at the University of London, put it this way:

If a people who so recently experienced on its own flesh such unspeakable inhumanities cannot muster the moral imagination to understand the injustice and suffering its territorial ambitions - and even its legitimate security concerns - are inflicting on another people, what hope is there for the rest of us?"

Perhaps one should appreciate that this is actually refreshingly honest: writing about Gaza, Siegman decries Israel's "territorial ambitions", and then, perhaps faintly realizing that this is utter nonsense, he throws in the "security concerns" that are supposedly "legitimate", but apparently not legitimate enough to be actually defended.

(Read full article)

If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.
.