Turkish FM Davutoglu Threatens to Attack Israel - Media Stays Mum

Evelyn Gordon..
Commentary/Contentions..
04 February '13..

This weekend, a NATO member threatened to attack one of America’s major non-NATO allies–and nobody in Washington even appears to have noticed. According to the Turkish daily Hurriyet, Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu lambasted Israel’s reported airstrike on an arms convoy inside Syria and warned that “Turkey would not stay unresponsive to an Israeli attack against any Muslim country.” He also lambasted Syrian President Bashar Assad for failing to launch retaliatory strikes against Israel himself and charged that Assad must have “made a secret deal with Israel.”

Granted, Turkey isn’t really going to attack Israel, nor is Assad likely to do so in response to Davutoglu’s taunts–which is why most Western media outlets, even had they noticed the story, would have dismissed it as non-newsworthy. But they’d be wrong. The failure to report this constant drumbeat of anti-Israel incitement–not just in Turkey, but also in other countries–may be the biggest single reason why so many Americans, including senior policy-makers, consistently misread the Middle East.

Consider, for instance, what Davutoglu actually told his countrymen via the press briefing quoted in Hurriyet. First, he told them Israel is the kind of criminal state that attacks other Muslim countries for no good reason: He didn’t bother mentioning that the reported target was a convoy ferrying sophisticated weaponry to Hezbollah, a terrorist organization openly dedicated to Israel’s eradication. Second, he told them Israel is the kind of criminal state that makes secret deals with Assad, a leader who has slaughtered over 60,000 of his own citizens. Nor is this unusual: Officials from the ruling AKP party produce a constant stream of anti-Israel (and anti-Jewish) incitement. Indeed, as we know from WikiLeaks, even former U.S. Ambassador to Turkey James Jeffrey concluded that Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan “simply hates Israel.”

Helen Thomas, Turkey, and the Liberation of Israel

The world cares deeply about refugees, disputed territory, and divided cities — when Israel is involved. Otherwise, otherwise.


Victor Davis Hanson
National Review Online
11 June '10

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.

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