(Pajamas Media) Victor Davis Hanson - The Turkish ambassador to the U.S. has a long op-ed in the Washington Post asking for Israel to apologize to Turkey for the Gaza flotilla incident, and urging the U.S. to pressure Israel to act accordingly. If anyone might be offering apologies, it should be Ambassador Tan, or at least an explanation for why a ship left a Turkish port headed for a planned confrontation, staffed in large part by the Insani Yardim Vakfi organization, which according to American and European intelligence chiefs is a terrorist organization with ties to al-Qaeda. Turkey currently quite illegally and against world opinion sponsors the occupation of Cyprus. The Turkish government has killed far more Turkish Kurds than the Israeli government has Palestinians; it has zero tolerance for foreign human rights organizations that have wished to investigate the treatment of Kurds in Turkish prisons. Turkish fighter aircraft are not always so careful to stay on their side of the Aegean. As far as the request that Americans pressure Israel, that is an odd wish from a society that continually broadcasts gruesome anti-American serials on its television channels, and now has chosen to reach out to the terrorist-sponsoring regimes in Teheran and Damascus that are responsible for a number of American deaths in Iraq. Most Americans sense that the end of Turkey's participation in NATO is only a matter of when, not if. Turkey wishes to reestablish its old Ottoman role as the more legitimate voice of the Sunni Muslim world.
2010-06-07 10:14:41Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive