Earlier this week, Mitt Romney got into trouble for saying, “I like being able to fire people who provide services to me.” To comprehend why the political class reacted as if Romney had just praised Hitler, you must understand that his critics live in a world in which no one can ever be fired — a world known as “the government.”

(And a tip for you Washington types: Just because a person became rich without working for government doesn’t mean he is “Wall Street.” A venture capital firm in Boston that tries to rescue businesses headed for bankruptcy, for example, is not “Wall Street.”)

Romney’s statement about being able to fire people was an arrow directed straight to the heart of Obamacare. (By the way, arrows to the heart are not covered by Obamacare.)

Talking about insurance providers, he said:

“I want individuals to have their own insurance. That means the insurance company will have an incentive to keep you healthy. It also means if you don’t like what they do, you can fire them. I like being able to fire people who provide services to me. You know, if someone doesn’t give me a good service that I need, I want to say I’m going to go get someone else to provide that service to me.”

Obamacare, you will recall, will be administered by the same people who run the Department of Motor Vehicles. They will operate under the same self-paced, self-evaluated work rules that have made government offices the envy of efficiency specialists everywhere.

And no one will be able to fire them — unless they’re caught doing something truly vile and criminal, such as stealing from patients in nursing homes.

Oops, I take that back: Government employees who rob the elderly also can’t be fired.

The Los Angeles Times recently reported that, after a spate of burglaries at a veterans hospital in California several years ago, authorities set up video cameras to catch the perpetrators. In short order, nurse’s aide Linda Riccitelli was videotaped sneaking into the room of 93-year-old Raymond Germain as he slept, sticking her hand into his dresser drawer and stealing the bait money that had been left there.

Riccitelli was fired and a burglary prosecution initiated. A few years later, the California Personnel Board rescinded her firing and awarded her three-years back pay. The board dismissed the videotape of Riccitelli stealing the money as “circumstantial.” (The criminal prosecution was also dropped after Germain died.)

But surely we’ll be able to fire a government employee who commits a physical assault on a mentally disturbed patient? No, wrong again.

Psychiatric technician Gregory Powell was working at a government center for the mentally retarded when he hit a severely disturbed individual with a shoe so hard that the impression of the shoe’s sole was visible on the victim three hours later. A psychologist who witnessed the attack said the patient was cowering on the couch before being struck.

Powell was fired, but, again, the California Personnel Board ordered him rehired.

Now, let’s turn to New York City and look for any clues about why it might be the highest-taxed city in the nation.

For years, the New York City school budget included $35 million to $65 million a year to place hundreds of teachers in “rubber rooms,” after they had committed such serious offenses that they were barred from classrooms. Teachers accused of raping students sat in rooms doing no work all day, still collecting government paychecks because they couldn’t be fired.

In the aftermath of the death of North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-il, there was deep concern that the dictator’s chosen successor, his third son Kim Jong-un, would have a rocky time trying to consolidate his position. Now it appears that his path to power has been smoothed by an apparent agreement with the military to share the responsibility of governing the state until the younger Kim can consolidate his position with the military and the party.

Reuters is reporting that there will be “collective rule” in North Korea with Kim Jong-un at the head of a “ruling coterie” that will include the military with the younger Kim’s uncle and Kim Jong-il’s brother-in-law, Jang Song-thaek, acting as regent.

North Korean news reports indicate that the military has pledged allegiance to young Kim, which will strengthen his hand as he deals with other factions also interested in ruling the Stalinist state. Those factions include two brothers passed over for leadership, the powerful sister of Kim Jong-il and wife of Jang, Kim Kyong-hui, and an up-and coming-general, chief of the joint chiefs of staff Ri Yong-ho.

None of these individuals are likely to challenge Kim Jong-un in the near future. But the inexperienced Kim may find himself being pushed out by those with a stronger base of support in the military and the party, or who are simply more ruthless and willing to upset the status quo to seize power.

His two older brothers may resent being passed over, but Kim Jong-il made sure they were never able to build an independent base of power to challenge their younger brother. Perhaps the most serious rival to Kim is his uncle, Chang Song-taek. Married to the elder Kim’s sister, Chang is an important member of the Politburo and Vice Chairman of the powerful National Defense Commission. Reuters’ source believes that the military has agreed that he will wield power in a kind of regency with the younger Kim as something of a figurehead. Since no one knows precisely how the internal leadership dynamics function in North Korea, and since this kind of collective leadership has never been tried in a country ruled since 1948 by all-powerful dictators, Kim Jong-un’s position may be precarious indeed.

Chang may be satisfied with being the power behind the throne, or he may not. An analyst at Seoul University said of Chang that he “has played a considerable role during Kim Jong-il’s illness of managing the succession problem and even the North’s relations with the United States and China.” The Korean Economic Institute (KEI) speculates that Chang is China’s choice to succeed the elder Kim, adding, “These factors, including his involvement in economic projects and directing internal security matters, leave a possibility for Chang Song-taek to attempt to seize power himself.”

The military is the wild card in the succession drama. Perhaps fearing that his brother in law might make a play for power himself, the elder Kim placed the chief of the joint chiefs of staff, Ri Yong-ho, close to his son, according to an expert on the North’s powerful structure at the Sejong Institute. But the KEI believes that it “will remain to be seen if they [Chang Song-taek and Ri Yong-ho] and others are really trying to help him, rule by controlling Kim Jong-un from behind the scenes, or set him up for failure.” This kind of convoluted intrigue is common in totalitarian states and one misstep by the younger Kim may have deadly consequences.

Laughing all the way to the bank.

Labor unions claim to champion the Worker, confronting management in pursuit of “fair” compensation. However, the real enemies of organized labor have always been competing non-union workers.

We need look no further than the word “scab.” This pejorative reference to someone who crosses a picket line was coined for a single purpose, to coerce behavior through intimidation.

That’s the only way a union can function. The only way to prevent people from filling vacancies left by strike is to – well, prevent them. That is why conservatives tend to oppose organized labor, not because there is anything inherently wrong with collective bargaining, but because we detest coercion.

The case is vividly made in an ongoing development as instructive as it is amusing. The Huffington Post has been under strike for weeks, and nobody seems to notice.

[The] strike has been called by two legitimate unions: the Newspaper Guild (an affiliate of the Communications Workers of America) and the National Writers Union, Local 1981 of the United Auto Workers. The two unions, and hundreds of bloggers throughout the country, are trying to get a share of the riches pocketed by the owners of the Huffington Post via its sale to AOL, and, as important, set a standard for fair treatment in the future…

This strike can be won. But, the many bloggers who call themselves “liberals” or “progressives”–people who collect money from unions and/or ask for labor’s political endorsements–have to stop crossing the Huffington Post electronic picket line. But, they continue to work for–scab– at a workplace that is being struck and boycotted.

Part of the unions’ frustration stems from the nature of an “electronic picket line.” It’s a hell of a lot tougher to intimidate people when you can’t physically obstruct them, shout them down, or pay a “visit” to their house.

[A] campaign–to publicly identify and praise people who support the strike and publicly identify the scabs–is about to commence in earnest.

Why do the unions want to “identify the scabs?” So they can be effectively bullied into acting against their self-interest.

That’s perhaps the most amusing aspect of the story, leftists nakedly perusing self-interest. In shrugging off the strike, HuffPo bloggers are affirming a fundamentally conservative principle.

Here are three of the justifications from a few of the scabs I have spoken to or emailed with directly–all of whom have received labor money and/or labor political endorsements.

… I’ve determined that she [Huffington] is too important to me and I don’t care whether I’m scabbing or you call me a scab.

Ok, you are a scab.

I get five times as many people to read what I write about [X topic...] so I’m not going to do this.

“This” being honoring the picket line.

I’m an independent contractor who writes where I choose whether the place is organized or not.

Perhaps the lamest of the excuses I’ve heard.

Hilarious, isn’t it? What these HuffPo contributors are saying is, Listen, I’m getting value out of my consensual relationship with The Huffington Post. I’m  sorry you’re not. But that’s you’re problem.

Indeed, why should anyone refuse to work if the work benefits them? More to the point, why should anyone be kept from working if the work benefits them?

Next: What union coercion says tells us about their claims…

To love your country is to hate red ink.

Sounds like a Tea Party slogan, doesn’t it? This concise declaration of fiscal responsibility would look at home on many a conservative bumper or amid a sea of protest signs, but incredibly, it was uttered by Boston University history professor Andrew Bacevich as—I kid you not—a glowing endorsement of President Barack Obama’s April 13 speech on the federal budget. On the Daily Beast, Bacevich declares that the 44^th president has “expanded the operative definition of patriotism to encompass belief in balanced budgets”:

This is surely a good thing. So too is the president’s willingness to finger the essence of the problem: a widespread desire for an endless free lunch—people coveting government benefits without a willingness to pay for them.

Obama also performed a useful service in pointing out that any serious effort at deficit reduction will have to target the Big Four: Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and national security.

Regarding that last category, the president promises to reassess not only military missions and capabilities, but also America’s role in the world. In our post-unipolar moment, such a reassessment is long overdue. Yet to have more than cosmetic results, Obama will have to take on some very sacred cows and some very powerful interests.

I defy you to find a more surreal reaction to Obama’s remarks. We’ve previously discussed how Diamond Barry’s proposed budgets have been so bloated they call for new taxes by the trillions to sustain them. The president might have said on Wednesday that he wants to reduce the deficit by $4 trillion over the next twelve years, but as Mark Knoller of noted right-wing mouthpiece CBS News reports:

Budget totals issued by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) in February project 10 years of deficits totaling $7.2 trillion between 2012 and 2021. Another two years at that rate would bring the 12 year total to $8.6 trillion.

The Obama 12-year plan would cut the projected deficit total in half, but would leave another $4 trillion in deficits that would be added to the National Debt, which now stands at $14.27 trillion.

Separately, OMB expects the Debt to double over the next ten years to a mind-boggling total of $26.3-trillion in 2021. It’s estimated the Debt that year would cost U.S. taxpayers $928-billion in interest payments. Four trillion dollars in deficit reduction would reduce the Debt to just over $22-trillion, and still inflict $700-billion in interest on the federal budget.

If budget-balancing really is the new patriotism, then Obama falls short of the good, solid B plus range right out of the gate. By the way, Obama has decided signing statements aren’t evil anymore, and is using one to declare that he simply won’t abide by Congress’s vote to de-fund his czars. I don’t see how unilaterally disregarding spending cuts enacted by the legislative branch gets you points as a fiscal hawk. This is what Professor Bacevich considers visionary leadership aimed at cleaning up the mess we’re in?

If we assess Obama’s approach to “sacred cows” (and no, it’s not bold for a leftist to say we’re spending too much on defense, which isn’t the problem area anyway), then the grade drops further still. Consider his reaction to the substantive (if imperfect) plan proposed by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), which attempts to address Medicaid and Medicare. Did the Uniter-in-Chief applaud Ryan’s willingness to make tough decisions? Did our first post-partisan president offer to reach across the aisle to find common ground between their plans, while offering substantive, good-faith critiques of particulars he disagreed with? Er, not exactly:

But the way this plan achieves those goals would lead to a fundamentally different America than the one we’ve known throughout most of our history […] These are the kind of cuts that tell us we can’t afford the America we believe in.  And they paint a vision of our future that’s deeply pessimistic […]

Worst of all, this is a vision that says even though America can’t afford to invest in education or clean energy; even though we can’t afford to care for seniors and poor children, we can somehow afford more than $1 trillion in new tax breaks for the wealthy […] their vision is less about reducing the deficit than it is about changing the basic social compact in America.  As Ronald Reagan’s own budget director said, there’s nothing “serious” or “courageous” about this plan.  There’s nothing serious about a plan that claims to reduce the deficit by spending a trillion dollars on tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires.  There’s nothing courageous about asking for sacrifice from those who can least afford it and don’t have any clout on Capitol Hill.

The demagoguery is so thick you could cut it with a knife. The fact is, the Ryan budget returns discretionary spending to not-exactly stingy 2008 levels. And as the Wall Street Journal writes, his Medicare “cuts” are cuts “only in the sense of slowing the rate of growth,” and his healthcare proposals are meant to address government-distortion of the incentive structure: “By capping the Medicare subsidy, seniors would pay for the marginal costs of their care, promoting competitive insurance. That would in turn incrementally change how doctors and hospitals provide care, encouraging competition in price and quality.” And the tax cuts for the rich?

The Ryan budget outline by design does not provide many tax specifics, aside from an instruction to the Ways and Means Committee to propose a reform plan that would swap lower rates for fewer loopholes and special exclusions. This overhaul is not even a net tax cut—the instructions are to design a reform that is revenue neutral. It would hold tax receipts to their post-World War II average of between 18% to 19% as a share of the economy.

The liberal claim that this means a tax cut for the wealthy is based entirely on the fact that marginal tax rates would decline, even though the loopholes primarily benefit higher-income taxpayers. At any rate, Mr. Obama’s own deficit commission also favored lowering the rates and broadening the base for a more efficient and competitive tax code.

Mr. President, the only thing that embodies “a fundamentally different America than the one we’ve known throughout most of our history” is your vision. Your talk of what “we” can afford, what “we’ve” promised to this or that slice of the population, betrays your ignorance of a simple, quintessentially American truth: the people are not the government. Yes, we the people have a moral obligation to lend a hand to our young, our sick, and our downtrodden, but the role of our federal government is to protect our individual rights so we don’t have to watch our backs all the time, so we can focus on other pursuits, such as bettering ourselves and the world around us.

To recognize that the government can’t afford all the collective charity work our liberal betters think it should undertake is not to reject the individual’s obligations to his countrymen. Mr. President, you accuse conservatives of “changing the basic social compact in America.” America’s social compact is the United States Constitution, and we’re not changing a word of it—we’re simply reasserting it’s original, true meaning.

The most significant outcome of the Mavi Marmara incident is that there can no longer be any doubt that Turkey has joined the anti-Western bloc that includes Hamas, Iran and Syria. The Muslim country was once devotedly secular, an ally of Israel, and remains a member of NATO, but under the direction of Prime Minister Erdogan and the Justice and Development Party (often referred to as the AKP), Turkey has gone in the completely opposite direction with enormous strategic consequences.

“Unfortunately, the AKP government of Mr. Erdogan and the oil-rich regime of Qatar joined the regional bloc opposing the more traditional governments of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan and Morocco,” Dr. Walid Phares told FrontPage.

Erdogan’s turn to the other side is not the result of a single incident such as Operation Cast Lead or the Israeli raid on the flotilla, but is the culmination of an agenda long held by Erdogan and the AKP.

“In fact, it is not secular Turkey that we see moving against the U.S., West, Israel and Arab moderates. It is the AKP Islamist cabinet which is uncovering its long-term ideological agenda. The West should have projected this since 2002,” Dr. Phares said, referring to the year in which Erdogan’s party won a majority in the Turkish parliament.

Erdogan was imprisoned in 1998 for his involvement with the banned Welfare Party, which the Turkish government considered Islamist. Soner Cagaptay of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy describes the Welfare Party as the “motherboard of Turkish Islamists since the 1980s,” saying it was inspired by the Muslim Brotherhood. Erdogan was specifically punished for reading a poem at one speech with the lines, “The mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets our bayonets, and the faithful our soldiers.”

In 2001, he founded the AKP, which took a more moderate line, portraying itself as committed to separation of mosque and state but “faithful governance,” as Dr. Essam El-Erian, the chief of the Muslim Brotherhood’s political bureau, described the AKP’s “moderate Islamist” ideology. There was no anti-Western rhetoric and the party strongly supported membership in the European Union. The group won a large victory in the 2002 elections, resulting in Erdogan taking the post of Prime Minister.

Dr. El-Erian praised Erdogan’s victory, saying that it was the result of the “exposing of the failure of the secular trend.” El-Erian confirmed that the Muslim Brotherhood had close ties to the AKP, but the West treated Turkey as if nothing had changed. It wasn’t until Turkey steadfastly refused to allow U.S. soldiers to transit their territory to overthrow Saddam Hussein that the West began questioning the allegiance of Erdogan’s government.

The Erdogan government soon began a concerted effort to fuel anti-Israeli and anti-American sentiment, knowing that such feelings help the AKP politically and hurt its opponents in the secular military that have long ties to the West. The Turkish media consistently reported alleged U.S. atrocities, fanning the already massive anti-war sentiment. The outrageous claims can only be compared to the anti-Israeli propaganda seen in the Arab world and Iran, echoing similar themes such as the use of chemical weapons against civilians and the harvesting of organs from killed Iraqis.

The AKP won an even larger share of the vote in the July 2007 election and had even more dominance over the government. Since then, the ideology of Erdogan has become more apparent as Turkish opinion has become less hostile to anti-Western Islamism.  Shortly after the victory, Turkey’s moves towards Iran and other enemies of the West became more visible and aggressive.

Turkey began entertaining the prospect of Iran’s natural gas being delivered to European markets through its territory, and the two countries launched joint military attacks against Kurdish militants in northern Iraq. The Party of Free Life for Kurdistan, or PJAK, claimed it actually saw Turkish officers working alongside the Iranian military. Newsmax.com reported that eight Turkish officers were in Iran coordinating the attacks with the Revolutionary Guards.

In the spring of 2009, Moqtada al-Sadr, the Iranian-backed militia leader whose followers killed dozens of American soldiers in Iraq, met with Erdogan and Turkish President Abdullah Gul for “political consultations.” Most recently, Turkey has opposed sanctions on Iran and helped put together a deal with Brazil meant to delay any United Nations measures despite Iran’s lack of cooperation on the nuclear issue.

Erdogan’s government simultaneously became more anti-Israeli, particularly once the Israeli military offensive into Gaza began in response to the rocket attacks of Hamas. Erdogan went so far as to predict that Israel’s actions “would bring it to self-destruction,” saying “Allah will sooner or later punish those who transgress the rights of innocents.” He accused Jewish-controlled media outlets of “finding unfounded excuses to justify targeting of schools, mosques and hospitals.”

On January 29, 2009, Erdogan publicly confronted Israeli President Peres at the World Economic Forum over the Israeli offensive. When he was denied extra time to continue his criticism of Israel, he stormed out. Erdogan was a hero overnight in the Muslim world.

Soon after, an exhibit opened in a major state-controlled metro in Istanbul that included many viciously anti-Israeli and anti-American cartoons, portraying Israeli soldiers as massacring innocent people with American weapons. The AKP won the March 29 local elections, further cementing their hold and convincing Erdogan that he was politically safe to follow the agenda he held from the beginning. Later that year, Israel had to confront Turkey over anti-Israeli propaganda on prime-time state-controlled television.

In October, Turkey refused to allow Israel to participate in annual military exercises also involving Italy and the U.S. Instead, Turkey and Syria announced that they would hold their own joint exercises. The Turkish-Syrian alliance began shortly after Erdogan came to power, with Syrian President Bashar Assad visiting Turkey and a free trade agreement being signed.

Turkey has also moved closer to Sudan, refusing to describe the situation in Darfur as a genocide. Erdogan’s government also opposes the International Criminal Court’s indictment of President Omar al-Bashir for human rights violations. His defense of Bashir is that “no Muslim could perpetrate a genocide.”

Now, Turkey is taking center stage in the wake of the Mavi Marmara incident. Turkey is openly considering cutting off all diplomatic ties with Israel and is saying that its warships will escort future convoys to the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip. There are reports that Erdogan himself may actually join a convoy. Erdogan now openly says, “I do not think that Hamas is a terrorist organization…They are Palestinians in resistance, fighting for their own land.”

He was among the first to accept Hamas after it was elected in Gaza, and he is calling their rule a “democracy” based on elections alone. Democracy is much more than elections, but Erdogan, like the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamists, want to equate democracy with elections so as to give themselves legitimacy as they move against the other pillars of democracy. Professor Barry Rubin says that as the AKP won election victories, the Erdogan government “repressed opposition and arrested hundreds of critics, bought up 40 percent of the media, and installed its people in the bureaucracy.”

Today, the government has begun the country’s “largest-ever crackdown” on the military, prosecuting 33 current and former military officers for allegedly planning a coup to overthrow the AKP government in 2003 including the former head of the special forces. Those arrested have been accused of planning to carry out acts of terrorism including the bombing of mosques, which they deny. Given the military’s pride in acting as the guardian of Turkey’s secularism, it isn’t surprising that elements of the military would desire to see the AKP overthrown. However, this could be an Islamist attempt to weaken the military and paint them as dangerous and anti-Muslim.

Erdogan’s defense of the vessel owned by the IHH, a Turkish Islamist group tied to Hamas and other terrorist activity, is particularly insightful. Any true opponent of terrorism and radical Islamism would ban the group or at least officially investigate them. In 1997, the Turkish authorities raided the IHH’s office in Istanbul and made numerous arrests. IHH operatives were found with weapons-related materials and the French counterterrorism magistrate said that they were planning on supporting jihadists in Afghanistan, Bosnia and Chechnya.

“The essential goal of this Association was to illegally arm its membership for overthrowing democratic, secular, and constitutional order present in Turkey and replacing it with an Islamic state founded on the Shariah,” the French magistrate’s report said.

If the goal of the IHH is to establish Sharia Law in Turkey, and Erdogan’s government is describing them as a “charity,” what does that say about Erdogan’s plans? The Washington Post has raised alarm over this connection, noting the IHH leadership’s praise for Erdogan.

The West’s loss of Turkey has frightening strategic consequences. They are so frightening that the West refused to acknowledge the trend until it became undeniable in recent weeks. Professor Juan Cole, who already was a strident critic of Israel, bluntly states, “Strategically, if the U.S. had to choose between Turkey and Israel, it would have to choose Turkey.” The pressure on the U.S. to restrain Israel so as to court the stronger bloc has now become greater than ever.

The situation is even more precarious for other countries in the region previously bonding together to oppose Iran. Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and other countries in the Middle East and North Africa that are hostile to Iran’s ambitions now face an even more threatening bloc that has been enlarged by the defection of Turkey. The temptation for them to surrender the mantle of leadership to the Iranian-Syrian-Turkish bloc in order to save themselves will now reach unprecedented levels, regardless of whether Iran obtains nuclear weapons or not.

To make matters worse, Erdogan’s prestige as the preeminent challenger of Israel will lead to competition with Iran, sparking an escalation where each side tries to establish superior anti-Israeli and anti-Western credentials. Israel is now in its most isolated and dangerous situation since its birth in 1948.

I Support Justice, Not Jihad
By Mustafa Akyol

Recently Robert Spencer argued on Frontpage that I, once a "moderate Muslim," have joined the jihad against "infidels" and especially the state of Israel.

Well, not really. If I ever join an armed struggle one day, I will tell you. What I actually did was to condemn a particular action of the Israeli government: their bloody raid on the Free Gaza flotilla, an international group of NGOs that tried to bring in humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip, defying Israel's blockade.

The incident has become a global issue, as nine Turkish activists on the flotilla were killed by Israeli commandos. The two sides, as you can expect, have their own versions of the events. Mr. Spencer seems to accept and defend the Israeli narrative, and that is just fine. I, for my part, don't accept the Israeli narrative, and hope that a "credible, independent international investigation," as a recent New York Times editorial suggested, will show us what really happened.

Meanwhile, I don't think that the fact that some of the activists on board were "Hamas sympathizers" justifies Israel's attack. In Turkey we have a few million "PKK sympathizers," and although I regard the PKK (Kurdistan Workers' Party) as a terrorist organization, I don't regard those people as terrorists and thus legitimate targets. I understand that they just see the world quite differently.

I also don't accept that Israel has a right to put a blockade on the Gaza Strip -- a collective punishment on 1.5 million people -- for the terrorist actions of the radicals in that destitute part of the world. I actually think that the radicalism on the Palestinian side is only exacerbated by such brutal and humiliating policies of Israel, which include the occupation of Palestinian lands since 1967 and the building of illegal settlements on them. The latter recently infuriated even Joe Biden, who does not shy away from describing himself as "a Zionist."

I, on the other hand, am not a Zionist, but I certainly accept Israel's right to exist, in its internationally acknowledged pre-1967 borders. I also strongly support a two-state solution which will, hopefully, give peace and security to both the Jewish and the Palestinian peoples.

The bottom line, I guess, is that I am not "pro-Israel," as I believe Mr. Spencer is. I am rather trying to be pro-justice, and equally respect the rights of the both sides of the Middle Eastern conflict.

As for being a "moderate Muslim," I never recall calling myself as such. The only political-sounding term I prefer to use is "liberal," in the classical sense of the word. In other words, I do define myself as a "liberal Muslim," for I uphold individual liberty, and criticize some elements within the Islamic tradition that contradict this value -- things such as the ban on apostasy, the bans on "sinful" things, or the enforcement of certain religious practices.

I probably am "moderate," too, for I always prefer dialogue to confrontation and diplomacy to armed conflict. But if being a "moderate Muslim" means being uncritical of Israel, or any other government, in order to enjoy flattery by them and their supporters, then let me kindly return the badge.

Spencer responds:

Mustafa Akyol, oddly enough, seems in his note to equate “jihad” with “armed struggle,” and to ignore the jihad of the tongue, the jihad of the hand, the jihad of the heart, and the jihad against the lower self, all of which are abundantly represented in Islamic tradition. But for the record, I do not believe and did not intend to imply that Mustafa Akyol was going to blow himself up in a crowded restaurant in Tel Aviv, or hide explosives in his underwear and attempt to set them off on an airplane, or drive a bomb-rigged car into Times Square, or shoot soldiers on a U.S. Army base. I do not believe that he is ever going to take up arms in order to further the hegemony of Islamic law over the world — but that doesn’t mean that in endorsing the Jihad Flotilla, and accepting the Islamic supremacist Turkish government’s fantastic version of events, that he is not siding with the jihad against Israel, and hence with the larger global jihad of which the jihad against Israel is just one of many fronts, albeit the foremost.

For the dispute between Israel and the Palestinians is indeed a jihad — if it weren’t, Mr. Akyol would have had his two-state solution in 1948, when the Arabs rejected a Palestinian state and went to war with Israel instead, motivated by the jihadist intransigence that demands all the land of Israel as an Islamic waqf. That line of thinking is also why the Camp David Accords, the Oslo Accords, the Road Map, and all other attempts to “solve” the Israeli/Palestinian conflict have failed, and why all future such initiatives will fail unless they involve the destruction of Israel as a Jewish state and its incorporation into an Islamic Sharia state. That is the stated goal of the Hamas movement that runs the Gaza strip that was to be the recipient of this “humanitarian aid.”

The “radicals,” as Mr. Akyol calls Hamas and its ideological kin, are supported by the overwhelming majority of Gazans, who voted them into power by a large margin. The society they envision is not in any sense “pro-justice” except in the eyes of Sharia supporters and sympathizers, and given that Mr. Akyol acknowledges that “some of the activists on board were ‘Hamas sympathizers,’” it reflects poorly on the moral sense of the other “activists” that they made the trip at all in the company of such people.

Meanwhile, Mr. Akyol conveniently ignores the fact that what he characterizes as the “Israeli narrative,” to which he generously grants me permission to subscribe, is abundantly established by video footage showing that the “activists” attacked the Israeli soldiers first, and by the photographs showing that the weapons they used were anything but the harmless “kitchen utensils” he earlier characterized them as being. But it has already been abundantly established that the world will not accept Israeli evidence no matter how compelling, while swallowing Palestinian propaganda (which they are very skillful in packaging for the mainstream media) with eager credulity.

So I do not, by any means, expect Mr. Akyol to break ranks with the dominant mainstream, the overall objectives of which he accepts anyway. I do wonder, however, what would happen to this self-professed “liberal Muslim” if he himself were to visit Gaza and proclaim publicly his opposition to the Islamic death penalty for apostasy. He might in that event not find too many of the oppressed, starving, but inexplicably obese (indeed, one of the most obese populations in the world) people of Gaza not quite as “pro-justice” as he might have hoped.

[Editor's note: In our June 3rd issue of Frontpagemag.com, we ran a piece by Robert Spencer: Another Moderate Muslim Joins the Jihad: Mustafa Akyol.  Below is a rejoinder by Mustafa Akyol, followed by a response from Spencer.]

I Support Justice, Not Jihad
By Mustafa Akyol

Recently Robert Spencer argued on Frontpage that I, once a “moderate Muslim,” have joined the jihad against “infidels” and especially the state of Israel.

Well, not really. If I ever join an armed struggle one day, I will tell you. What I actually did was to condemn a particular action of the Israeli government: their bloody raid on the Free Gaza flotilla, an international group of NGOs that tried to bring in humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip, defying Israel’s blockade.

The incident has become a global issue, as nine Turkish activists on the flotilla were killed by Israeli commandos. The two sides, as you can expect, have their own versions of the events. Mr. Spencer seems to accept and defend the Israeli narrative, and that is just fine. I, for my part, don’t accept the Israeli narrative, and hope that a “credible, independent international investigation,” as a recent New York Times editorial suggested, will show us what really happened.

Meanwhile, I don’t think that the fact that some of the activists on board were “Hamas sympathizers” justifies Israel’s attack. In Turkey we have a few million “PKK sympathizers,” and although I regard the PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party) as a terrorist organization, I don’t regard those people as terrorists and thus legitimate targets. I understand that they just see the world quite differently.

I also don’t accept that Israel has a right to put a blockade on the Gaza Strip — a collective punishment on 1.5 million people — for the terrorist actions of the radicals in that destitute part of the world. I actually think that the radicalism on the Palestinian side is only exacerbated by such brutal and humiliating policies of Israel, which include the occupation of Palestinian lands since 1967 and the building of illegal settlements on them. The latter recently infuriated even Joe Biden, who does not shy away from describing himself as “a Zionist.”

I, on the other hand, am not a Zionist, but I certainly accept Israel’s right to exist, in its internationally acknowledged pre-1967 borders. I also strongly support a two-state solution which will, hopefully, give peace and security to both the Jewish and the Palestinian peoples.

The bottom line, I guess, is that I am not “pro-Israel,” as I believe Mr. Spencer is. I am rather trying to be pro-justice, and equally respect the rights of the both sides of the Middle Eastern conflict.

As for being a “moderate Muslim,” I never recall calling myself as such. The only political-sounding term I prefer to use is “liberal,” in the classical sense of the word. In other words, I do define myself as a “liberal Muslim,” for I uphold individual liberty, and criticize some elements within the Islamic tradition that contradict this value — things such as the ban on apostasy, the bans on “sinful” things, or the enforcement of certain religious practices.

I probably am “moderate,” too, for I always prefer dialogue to confrontation and diplomacy to armed conflict. But if being a “moderate Muslim” means being uncritical of Israel, or any other government, in order to enjoy flattery by them and their supporters, then let me kindly return the badge.

Spencer responds:

Mustafa Akyol, oddly enough, seems in his note to equate “jihad” with “armed struggle,” and to ignore the jihad of the tongue, the jihad of the hand, the jihad of the heart, and the jihad against the lower self, all of which are abundantly represented in Islamic tradition. But for the record, I do not believe and did not intend to imply that Mustafa Akyol was going to blow himself up in a crowded restaurant in Tel Aviv, or hide explosives in his underwear and attempt to set them off on an airplane, or drive a bomb-rigged car into Times Square, or shoot soldiers on a U.S. Army base. I do not believe that he is ever going to take up arms in order to further the hegemony of Islamic law over the world — but that doesn’t mean that in endorsing the Jihad Flotilla, and accepting the Islamic supremacist Turkish government’s fantastic version of events, that he is not siding with the jihad against Israel, and hence with the larger global jihad of which the jihad against Israel is just one of many fronts, albeit the foremost.

For the dispute between Israel and the Palestinians is indeed a jihad — if it weren’t, Mr. Akyol would have had his two-state solution in 1948, when the Arabs rejected a Palestinian state and went to war with Israel instead, motivated by the jihadist intransigence that demands all the land of Israel as an Islamic waqf. That line of thinking is also why the Camp David Accords, the Oslo Accords, the Road Map, and all other attempts to “solve” the Israeli/Palestinian conflict have failed, and why all future such initiatives will fail unless they involve the destruction of Israel as a Jewish state and its incorporation into an Islamic Sharia state. That is the stated goal of the Hamas movement that runs the Gaza strip that was to be the recipient of this “humanitarian aid.”

The “radicals,” as Mr. Akyol calls Hamas and its ideological kin, are supported by the overwhelming majority of Gazans, who voted them into power by a large margin. The society they envision is not in any sense “pro-justice” except in the eyes of Sharia supporters and sympathizers, and given that Mr. Akyol acknowledges that “some of the activists on board were ‘Hamas sympathizers,’” it reflects poorly on the moral sense of the other “activists” that they made the trip at all in the company of such people.

Meanwhile, Mr. Akyol conveniently ignores the fact that what he characterizes as the “Israeli narrative,” to which he generously grants me permission to subscribe, is abundantly established by video footage showing that the “activists” attacked the Israeli soldiers first, and by the photographs showing that the weapons they used were anything but the harmless “kitchen utensils” he earlier characterized them as being. But it has already been abundantly established that the world will not accept Israeli evidence no matter how compelling, while swallowing Palestinian propaganda (which they are very skillful in packaging for the mainstream media) with eager credulity.

So I do not, by any means, expect Mr. Akyol to break ranks with the dominant mainstream, the overall objectives of which he accepts anyway. I do wonder, however, what would happen to this self-professed “liberal Muslim” if he himself were to visit Gaza and proclaim publicly his opposition to the Islamic death penalty for apostasy. He might in that event not find too many of the oppressed, starving, but inexplicably obese (indeed, one of the most obese populations in the world) people of Gaza not quite as “pro-justice” as he might have hoped.

Last week, The Heritage Foundation’s second annual “Protect America Month” came to a close.  The program was designed to express commitment to America’s national security, advocate for increased defense spending, point out the constitutional basis for government’s role in protecting America, and to examine the threats to the United States.  John Ashcroft, former Attorney General of the United States, delivered the closing speech.

Attorney General Ashcroft began by asserting his belief that “the defense of America is tantamount to the defense of freedom.  And freedom is worth defending.”  He astutely reviewed his understanding of the definition of freedom, and how American exceptionalism plays a vital role in contributing and sustaining freedom around the globe.

He rejected the common argument that freedom and national security must be balanced.  Rather, freedom is the highest value with no parallel.  However, in order to maintain it, it must be secured.  Therefore, the two are not counterweights to each other.  Rather, national security protects America’s freedom, and ensures that freedom stays intact.

Ashcroft explained that the ability to engage in the pursuit of happiness increases freedom, while the provision of happiness by the government impairs freedom, and often comes at a high cost.  In other words, when needs are converted into rights, freedom shrinks.  Most importantly, the imposition of that which is not wanted constitutes the denial of freedom regardless of the virtue of that which is being imposed.

Freedom is under attack.  Nine years after September 11, 2001, Americans have become complacent.  Many have a false sense of security.  But the former Attorney General encouraged the audience not to surrender to the terrorist threat, and always be mindful of those who sacrificed their lives for the cause of freedom.

Ashcroft believes that the number one responsibility of the federal government is to protect its citizens.  The way he believes national security is enforced is through the rule of law, so that people are on notice of what they can and cannot do.

In analyzing habeas corpus doctrine, the use of military tribunals and indefinite detention, Ashcroft reviewed numerous Supreme Court cases including Hamdi, Quirin, and Eisentrager.  He also discussed the DC Court of Appeals case, titled Maqaleh v Gates.

When asked about his positions on specific policy and legal matters, he emphasized the reasoning process that should support these decisions.  They included the following:

• Be aware that policies send a message that can deter behavior or invite behavior;
• Determine if the conduct in question constitutes a war crime or merely violates a domestic criminal statute;
• Ensure that all three branches of government are acting within their appropriate constitutional limits;
• Know that the executive branch can make faster decisions to ensure the protection of America’s national security than can the legislative branch;
• Acknowledge the fact that military tribunals, while operating under different rules than federal courts, still result in outcomes that are fair and respect the true facts;
• In deciding whether a defendant should be tried in a military tribunal versus a federal court, determine your objective.   If national security information in involved, minimize the release of this information to our enemies;
• If a person with US citizen status is fighting against the US with America’s enemies, perhaps he should be treated as an enemy;
• Laws should be clear and certain.  If the geographical location of the occurrence doesn’t provide clear rules, then look to the circumstances surrounding the case;
• America should make sure that she runs prisons only in locations where she can maintain control of what occurs within them;
• Finally, Americans should distinguish between detention for the purpose of punishment and detention for the purpose of removing enemy combatants from the stream of battle.

The former Attorney General also noted that America’s reckless financial conduct will have grave national security implications for future generations who might be unable to finance their defense.  Moreover, if America reveals a lack of self-sufficiency to the world by becoming a debtor to the world, it signals America’s weakness.  Funding national security should be one of government’s main priorities.

America’s current Attorney General, Eric Holder, appears to have no clear rules guiding his decisions in reference to which defendants go to a military tribunal versus a federal court.  His decisions appear to be arbitrary and capricious.  Though he is the head of the Department of Justice, national security does not seem to be his paramount priority.  He refuses to acknowledge the Islamist ideological threat, favors the closing of the Guantanamo Bay Detention Center, opposes the Patriot Act (responsible for disrupting numerous terrorist plots in the US) and is critical of enhanced interrogation techniques.  Instead, he has stated that engagement in “dialogue” with the Muslim community is a priority for his Department, as is the prosecution of so-called “hate crimes.”  Though he is not an expert in Islamic theology, he nevertheless asserts with seeming authority the claim that that those who commit terrorist acts in the name of Islam behave in a way that is “un-Islamic” and contrary to Islam’s actual teachings.

By contrast, John Ashcroft led America through its toughest times after the largest terrorist attack on US soil following September 11, 2001.  He made fighting terrorism his number one priority.  He reorganized DOJ to ensure that suspected terrorists were prosecuted when the evidence warranted it.  Under his leadership, DOJ dismantled numerous terrorist cells throughout the US and over 150 plots throughout the world.  Ashcroft’s role in the execution of the War on Terror was one of the most difficult of any cabinet member.

Ashcroft’s speech at the Heritage Foundation expressed a love of freedom, an appreciation of American exceptionalism, an understanding of the threats to liberty, respect for the law, Judeo-Christian values, and a deference to “we the people.”  The Left, of course, has consistently expressed its venom toward John Ashcroft and the entire War on Terror. But Ashcroft’s speech reminded me of the time after September 11, 2001, when, however briefly, the country came together to face our common enemies.  Our government united us in the cause for freedom and our shared American values.  My, how things have changed.

PATTANI, Thailand - A drive-by bombing near a mosque wounded 23 people in Thailand's turbulent south in what police said Wednesday was an attack by Muslim insurgents.

Witnesses saw two men on a motorcycle throw an improvised explosive device at a government pickup truck in Yala town Tuesday evening, but the bomb missed the vehicle and landed just across the street from the mosque, Police Superintendent Col. Piyawat Chalermsri said.

Most of those hurt were Muslims. Two victims were in intensive care, including a 14-year-old girl in critical condition.

Thailand's southernmost provinces, the only ones with Muslim majorities in the predominantly Buddhist country, have been gripped for the past six years by a separatist insurgency that has claimed more than 4,000 lives.

Southern Muslims have long complained of being treated as second-class citizens, and the government has put more effort into suppressing the insurgency than dealing with the root causes of their disaffection.

In other words, they should play the dhimmi rather than meet violent intimidation with resistance.

Piyawat said he believed Islamist insurgents targeting the government were behind Tuesday's bombing. Surveillance video broadcast on Thai TV stations showed an explosion seconds after an army truck drove by a teahouse.

However, one analyst was skeptical about the government claim because no previous attacks had been carried out in that area of Yala, which is a wholly Muslim sector filled with people going to the mosque....

I didn't post this video only because it came in while I was very busy with preparations for the mosque rally, and by the time I was able to watch it it had already gone viral -- and indeed, you have probably already seen it. But the story now is that Israeli authorities have taken clueless dhimmitude to new heights by actually apologizing for this video, as if it is somehow wrong to mock the Palestinian propaganda machine that does, in fact, con the world. Or is it wrong to mock the self-indulgent rock stars who created "We Are the World"?

"Israel Apologizes for Music Video Mocking Gaza Flotilla," by Mara Gay for AOL News, June 8 (thanks to Pamela Hall):

(June 8) -- The Israeli government has apologized for circulating a satirical video that uses Michael Jackson's hit single "We Are the World" to mock activists from the Gaza flotilla.

"There's no people dying, so the best that we can do is create the greatest bluff of all," one refrain in the parody goes.

Last week nine people aboard the Mavi Marmara, one of six ships carrying aid to Gaza in defiance of Israel's blockade, were killed under hotly contested circumstances during an Israeli raid on the flotilla. In the video, Israelis dressed up as activists offer their own take on the incident through song.

"We con the world, we con the people," the song continues, in an apparent reference to Hamas and the activists aboard the flotilla.

The Israeli Government Press Office distributed footage of the music video to foreign journalists on June 4, but then sent an apology to reporters just hours later, insisting it had been an accident.

"The contents of the video in no way represent the official policy of either the Government Press Office or of the State of Israel," Israel's Government Press Office later told CNN....

Scanning news reports this week, I was surprised to learn that according to much of the press, Turkey had been Israel’s “staunchest ally in the Muslim world,” until the Gaza aid flotilla debacle. According to the Associated Press, the UK’s Daily Mail and other media, the Gaza aid flotilla crisis has irreparably damaged the “close” relationship between Israel and Turkey.

The fact is such reports are simply untrue and misleading. It was not the Gaza aid flotilla that irreparably damaged relations between Turkey and Israel. The relationship had already been under severe strain for the past seven years, since the now ultra-conservative Islamist AK Party led by Turkish Prime Minister Erodgan took power in 2002.

Indeed friendly relations between Turkey and Israel prior to the flotilla incident had already, for the most part, been over.

Turkey, the country that led the flotilla initiative, has shown absolutely no interest in continuing peaceful relations with Israel in the past year, resorting to hostile rhetoric and policies against the Jewish state. Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan barred Israel from annual military exercises on Turkey’s soil last year, while signing a military contract with Syria. At the World Economic Forum in Davos last year, the Turkish PM Erdogan verbally attacked Israeli president Shimon Peres about Gaza and stormed off the stage. In October 2009, Turkish national television aired a drama casting Israeli soldiers as sadists set to kill Palestinian children.

Not that Turkey’s human rights’ record is so squeaky clean. In 1974, Turkey invaded northern Cyprus, creating 160,000 Greek Cypriot refugees. Turkey still denies these refugees’ rights to return to their homes, as well as access and use of their property. Since the Turkish invasion, a large number of Turks have been brought to occupy the homes of the Greek Cypriot refugees, in violation of Article 49 of the Geneva Convention.

In 2009, the Orthodox Church of Cyprus launched legal action against Turkey for destroying 522 churches during the invasion. The Cyprus Church states that Turkey continues to destroy those remaining churches, converting them into “morgues, stables, night clubs, and chicken coops.”

But in addition to human rights abuses, it is those who Turkey counts as its friends, not its enemies, that should truly worry the West.

Turkey has announced that it would not join any sanctions aimed at preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons and has warmly welcomed Iranian president Ahmadinejad to its capital city. But in May, Turkey went a step further and actually attempted to forestall UN economic sanctions against Iran much to the chagrin of the United States.

Back in February, the Turkish daily, Today’s Zaman wrote that the Turkish State Minister, Cedvet Yilmaz stated that his government was committed to working on improving relations with its neighbor Iran. The driving force behind this commitment, indicated Yilmaz, were the mutual gas transfer projects, which both Yilmaz and Iranian Foreign Minister, Manoucheher Mottaki agreed will bring both countries to a “historical era.”

Turkey and Iran have signed a number of deals to facilitate the flow of gas through Turkey to Europe, including agreements to allocate some Iran’s South Pars gas field to the Turkish Petroleum Corporation, where Iranian gas will be trasported across Turkey.

The Turkey-Iran pipeline transfers natural gas worth around $2 billion every year. “We believe that the projects for the tansfer of Iranian natural gas to Europe via Turkey will give a momentum to relations between the two largest economies in the world,” Yilmaz has stated. Another Turkish government official, Zafer Caglayan, stated that bilateral trade with Iran has grown to $10 billion in the past eight years.

But its not only economic ambitions or a record of human rights abuses that Turkey shares with Iran. Turkey’s government has grown more and more totalitarian in recent years, seeking not only to control economic and political matters but also attitudes, values and beliefs of its population. According to a recent article in Forbes, Melik Kaylan reports that the ruling pro-Islamic AK party has over 100,000 Turks wiretapped, thousands arrested and questioned, and over 200 reporters, intellectuals, academics and military officers jailed, all accused of a military coup.

“If you try to talk over the phone to people in Turkey about their current government, they will likely refuse to do so. The ruling pro-Islamic AK Party is now tapping phones so liberally that everyone is paranoid,” writes Kaylan.

A Washington Post blogger writes about similar observations of the Turkish government regime. Professor Susan Brook Thistelwaite reports that “far more Turkish women are wearing headscarves and religious dress than a decade ago. As one Turkish businessman observed about his university-age daughter, ‘They want to put a headscarf on her mind.’ He is thinking about sending his daughter to the United States to complete her education.”

“Erdogan’s administration has severely undermined the independence of the media, of the judiciary, of the banking system and has abolished long-standing rules prohibiting religious dress on university campuses. It is now moving on to re-write school textbooks to revise the country’s secular history,” writes Thistelwaite.

Indeed, Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah presented the Turkish Prime Minister with one of the country’s most prestigious prizes, the King Faisal International Prize, also known as the ‘Arab Nobel Prize,’ in March.  The prize was given to Erdogan for “rendering outstanding service to Islam by defending the causes of the Islamic nation, particularly the Palestinian cause.” He received $200,000 in prize money.

The Palestinian cause has become a rallying banner for the Muslim world, serving as a means to distract the rest of the world from the human rights abuses that continue in countries like Turkey, Iran and Saudia Arabia, as well as from their growing economic power.

Indeed the humanitarian goods, among the weapons and arms, on the Gaza-bound flotilla should have gone to refugees elsewhere in the Middle East who have been displaced by Muslim powers. But then the incitement and hatred against Israel which unifies Muslims worldwide would have been lost.

Anav Silverman is a columnist and educator whose work has been published widely online and in print, both in Israel and internationally. She has appeared on Al Jazeera, BBC Radio, and CBS 2 and has contributed to BBC News, The Philadelphia Bulletin, Sderot Media Center, Front Page Magazine, Bangor Daily News, Maariv, The Jerusalem Post, Ynet News, and other publications.

Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu told his cabinet this week that “the world is beginning to become aware” of what really happened in the “flotilla incident” in which nine of the “activists” trying to break Israel’s naval blockade of Gaza were killed. Namely, that the “activists” on the Mavi Marmara—actually “martyrdom”-seeking jihadists tied to the terror-linked IHH organization with some sort of backing from the Turkish government—fell upon inadequately-armed Israeli soldiers with knives, clubs, iron bars, and guns and forced them to fight for their lives.

Is Netanyahu right that this accurate picture of the events is sinking in? True, Vice-President Joe Biden said Israel “has an absolute right to deal with its security interest…. It’s legitimate for Israel to say, ‘I don’t know what’s on that ship. These guys are dropping eight—3,000 rockets on my people.’” The Washington Post asked why Israel was taking all the blame and called for Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s role in the incident to be probed. Prospective Republican presidential candidates Sarah Palin and Liz Cheney both came out solidly in defense of Israel.

But, even if some understand that last week’s round of media and diplomatic Israel-bashing over the affair was again baseless and slanderous, it still appears to be too little, too late. There have already been reports, and concerns, in Israel that the next flotilla might be escorted by Turkish naval warships, or include Erdogan himself as one of the passengers. This week Iran, too, is getting into the act, with one report claiming Tehran is already planning to send two aid ships to Gaza, and Ali Shirazi, representative of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khameini within the Revolutionary Guards, saying that “Iran’s Revolutionary Guards naval forces are fully prepared to escort the peace and freedom convoys to Gaza with all their powers and capabilities.”

Bluff? Threats made to keep Israel off balance and keep the spotlight off Iran’s continuing progress toward nukes? It’s impossible to know at this point. But what is clear is that the radical bloc led by Iran—which also includes Syria, Hamas, Hezbollah and, increasingly, Turkey—feels all the more emboldened by its successes and by Western weakness. To those successes—which include, along with Iran’s unimpeded nuke program, the ongoing, extensive armament of Hezbollah—can now be added igniting another storm of Western fury at Israel over last week’s incident, which included the usual professions of “shock” by Western leaders, the usual pounding of Israel in the Western mainstream media, the usual cooperation by Western countries with anti-Israeli votes in the Security Council and the UN Human Rights Council, as well as the Obama administration’s repeated calls—steeped in contempt for Israeli democracy—for an Israeli investigation of the flotilla incident with “international components.”

The West will have to decide whether it wants to keep encouraging the radicals or finally start discouraging them. Regarding Turkey itself, Israeli analyst Efraim Inbar notes that “support in public opinion for [Erdogan’s] ruling Islamic party is in decline.” If that trend persists, as Inbar points out, a new government could well emerge in Turkey’s July 2011 elections—and that could be precisely why Erdogan is now trying to whip up the masses by upping the ante with Israel. When the result of the flotilla-ploy against Israel is that the West indeed turns in wrath upon the Jewish state, it paints Erdogan as a hero in many Turkish eyes and only bolsters the extremist, anti-Western proclivity.

More generally, one doesn’t have to have excessively fine instruments to detect the escalating saber-rattling against Israel by the Iranian-led bloc, with Turkey now adding its voice emphatically. An armed challenge to Israel’s blockade of Gaza could be the match that lights the fuse. Even if some Western leaders appear to regard Israel as a burdensome rogue, not really worth sticking up for, they would have to think about what such a Middle Eastern conflagration would mean for stability, oil availability and prices, and the like. The sides are heavily armed and the stakes are very high.

Standing up for Israel, imparting the sense that it has Western support, calms the winds and keeps war at bay. Raging against Israel for killing nine jihadists in self-defense is a way of telling the radicals that it’s open season.

P. David Hornik is a freelance writer and translator in Beersheva, Israel. He blogs at http://pdavidhornik.typepad.com.

Two weeks after delivering a blow to the U.S.-led efforts to strengthen sanctions against Iran by mediating a uranium exchange agreement involving the Islamic Republic and Brazil, Turkey once again has seized the international spotlight in the wake of the deadly clash between Israeli commandos and armed Turkish activists aboard the Gaza-bound flotilla. Turkey’s central role in both developments is no coincidence. It is a reflection of the current Turkish government’s determined efforts to shed the secular legacy of its predecessors, to consolidate power at home, and to align the country with the Islamic world – which means a collision course with America and, especially, with Israel.

The flotilla ship, the Mavi Marmara, originated from the Turkish port, Antalya and the majority of those killed and wounded in the confrontation with Israeli commandos were Turkish citizens. While Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan warns Israel “not to test its patience,” Turkey is leading the international chorus of denunciations against the Jewish state. While it may appear as if the latest controversy is one more bloody chapter in the long saga of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the deadly confrontation in the Mediterranean is in reality more about Turkey’s destiny and its upcoming and planned confrontation with Israel.

The ruling party in Turkey, the Justice and Development Party (AKP), seems to be driven by two main factors. On the eve of the upcoming national elections, the AKP is desperate to stave off defeat at the hands of the surging opposition. Under such circumstances, the AKP seeks to exploit people’s sense of patriotism and religious solidarity with Muslim Palestinians by forcing a confrontation with Israel. However, it would be wrong to attribute the behavior of the AKP government to Machiavellian instincts alone. The religious and political forces behind the AKP, long suppressed and dormant in republican and secular Turkey, believe in the idea of a transcendent Islamic identity and reject the concept of a secular nation state founded by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.

The objective of AKP Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is to do away with Turkey’s republican system. The actions of his administration have eroded Turkey’s standing with the West and now, with the flotilla incident, a fundamental shift has transpired in Turkish foreign policy. This shift did not occur overnight. In retrospect, the AKP’s refusal to grant passage to U.S. troops on the eve of the Iraq War in 2003 was the opening act of the distancing between Ankara and Washington. The result of the Turkish denial of invasion routes from the north, and hence, the forced concentration of U.S. military operations in the Shia-populated south, no doubt contributed to the rise of the insurgency in the Sunni Triangle and increased casualties. In 2005, Turkey itself became the victim of the anarchy in Iraq as the separatist Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) expanded its base in Iraqi Kurdistan and launched deadly attacks on Turkish targets. Ankara threatened Washington with the invasion of northern Iraq. Loath to wreck its relations with the long-standing ally, the U.S. accommodated the Turkish demand by supplying it with satellite intelligence and leaning heavily on the Kurdish authorities in the region to crack down on PKK. US-Turkish relations now seemed cordial on the surface. But the goodwill between the two nations evaporated rather quickly. A public survey in 2007 showed, for instance, that only nine percent of the Turks had favorable views toward the United States.

There is a proverb in Turkish: When you cannot beat the donkey, punch the saddle. It would be tempting to surmise that since Erdogan lacks the resources and capacity to pick a fight with the United States, Israel became the next obvious target. But the situation is more complicated. Unlike Islamic Iran, where Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini distinguished America and Israel as, respectively, the Great and Little Satan for decades, Turkey maintained a solid military alliance with Israel. Turning the “Little Satan” into an enemy in the Turkish public eye was no small feat. For years, the Israelis had been actively involved in the upgrading of Turkish fighter planes and weaponry. The two countries did not just share military technology; they had also shared common enemies. Just as Syria posed a threat to Israeli national security, the government of Hafez Assad laid claims to Turkish territories and harbored PKK leaders in its territories. Oriented toward the West, Turkey’s relations with other Arab countries were lukewarm at best. After all, most Turks never forgot what they regarded as the Arab betrayal of Ottoman Turkey during the First World War when many Arabs sided against the Turks and their German patrons and fought for the British in what they saw as a war of independence against Turkish domination.

The Erdogan government viewed repairing relations with the Arab world as essential to its domestic as well as global agenda. The key figure in the tectonic shift was the architect of the new Turkish foreign policy, Ahmet Davutoglu, who inaugurated a policy called “zero problems with neighbors.” On the surface, it looked as if Davutoglu was the faithful follower of Ataturk’s dictum – “Peace at Home, Peace in the World.” But having been brought up in a religious household and having been a product of the Islamic education system, Davutoglu’s intentions widely differed from those of the founder of the secular state. By establishing warm relations with their country’s autocratic neighbors to the East, the new Turkish government had, in fact, begun quietly steering Turkey away from the West. All along, the AKP leadership insisted on its strong desire to enter the European Union. But behind the scenes, both the European political elite and the Turkish leadership shared a similar objective: to keep Turkey away from Europe and, as the AKP hoped, to integrate Turkey with the rest of the Islamic community of nations. This way, the Europeans would be free, despite their public statements, from a secret fear – an EU with millions of Turks. In its turn, the AKP would get an eastward looking Turkey with autocratic tendencies and Islamist orientation. Bashing and isolating Israel was an integral part of the strategy that accompanied epic changes in Turkish politics.

To accomplish its objectives with regard to Israel, the Erdogan government took an unusual route. Abandoning the long-standing tradition of non-interference in the Mideast conflict, in 2006, Ankara took the initiative to mediate peace between Israel and Syria. As the negotiations went forward, the Israelis began to realize that the so-called mediation was in fact a cover by the Turkish Islamists to engage in deeper contact with Israeli enemies without provoking concern in the mass Turkish domestic public or in the West. How else could the leader of a secular republic and NATO ally justify shaking hands with the representative of Hamas? With the eruption of war in Gaza in 2008, the Erdogan government openly sided with Israel’s enemies by issuing severe criticism of Israel.

During this period, anti-Israel hysteria began to grip Turkish society. The Turks began boycotting Israeli goods en masse. In Ankara, the Israeli basketball team was run off the court by mobs shouting “Allah Akbar.” Israeli-Turkish hostility escalated further after the shocking confrontation between Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Shimon Peres at Davos where the Turkish leader called the Nobel Peace Prize winner a “murderer.”  In the ensuing months, a Turkish soap-opera TV series portrayed Israelis as bloodthirsty child-killers and lionized a fictional film secret agent who shoots and kills a treacherous-looking Israeli ambassador who is engaged in trading body-parts – classic anti-Semitic themes.

The recent incident in the Mediterranean has now greatly escalated tensions between Turkey and Israel. But the progression of events suggests something far more sinister and disturbing with regard to Turkey’s trajectory as a nation. In 1923, when Ataturk established the republic, he repudiated the expansionist ambitions of the Ottoman Empire in favor a peaceful, inward-looking nation state. Having seen his share of dreadful fighting, Ataturk did not wish his nation to become embroiled in territorial conflicts with its neighbors. To accomplish that task, he enacted reforms in politics and society that sought to make Turkey more like France rather than Egypt.

Ataturk’s philosophy of governance turned out to be a spectacular success. Since 1923, with the exception of the Cyprus invasion in 1974, Turkey has successfully managed to avoid being drawn into conflicts and thus saved the lives of millions of its citizens from the murderous currents of the 20th century. Turkey’s success in foreign policy did not just emanate from its peace-loving Kemalist philosophy, but was owed to the wise investment of its republican leadership in the alliance with the West, specifically with the United States. Without the support of Washington and its alliance with NATO, it is doubtful that Turkey would have succeeded in fending off pressures from the USSR to the north and Syria to the southeast. Moreover, its strong ties with the West also enabled Turkey to build a modern military that served as a potent deterrent against aggression. The Erdogan government clearly views this policy as the reduction of Turkey’s status as a global player and has decided to do away with it and replace it with a more aggressive, externally focused policy.

Even the Ottoman Empire, which the AKP government is clearly seeking to emulate, had turned westward after its defeats in the 18^th century — long before Ataturk’s radical push for cultural reformation. It should be noted that much of the Tanzimat reforms that brought changes to the Ottoman socio-political infrastructure were inspired by the imperial envoys’ observations in the capitals of Europe. During the Crimean War of 1853-56, the Turks fought side by side with the British and French soldiers against the Russian armies. Moreover, the goodwill between the Turks and the Jews dates back to 1492 when Sultan Bayezid II welcomed the Jewish refugees fleeing the persecution of King Ferdinand of Spain. According to renowned historian of Islam, Bernard Lewis, “the Jews were not just permitted to settle in the Ottoman lands, but were encouraged, assisted and sometimes even compelled.” The Ottoman leadership viewed the Jews as an industrious group whose economic success would bring generous revenues to the state treasury, and treated them with courtesy.

Erdogan’s brand of Islamism and anti-Semitism is not entirely new or original. It was always there within certain elements of the population. But coupled with an ideological zeal and thirst for power, it now threatens to undo most of the accomplishments of the Turkish republic. Erdogan and those around him do not wear turbans or mullah-style robes, but the illusion of a golden Islamic past under the first four caliphs in the 8th century has been drilled into them at the madrases they attended when they were young. Even more powerful than the ideological sympathy for Islamic solidarity is Erdogan’s desire to retain internal political power at all cost. He is an Islamist, but the most important feature distinguishing Erdogan from all previous heads of the Turkish republic is his drive to dismantle all checks and balances to his power. Erdogan’s increasing assault on the top leaders of the military that have long been viewed as the guardians of the Kemalist democracy, together with his “reforms” of the court system and of the constitution, has served the aim of keeping the AKP in power long enough to change the character of the Turkish state. In that sense, Erdogan’s struggle is mostly a domestic one – at this moment, at least.

In recent weeks, Erdogan has been especially alarmed by the rise of an opposition leader in the person of Kemal Kilicdaroglu. In the aftermath of the resignation of the disgraced leader of the Republican People’s Party, Deniz Baykal, who was videotaped having sex with one of his political aides, Kilicdaroglu has emerged as a promising leader and the new face of the Kemalist opposition. Affectionately called “The Turkish Gandhi” by the Turkish people, Kilicdaroglu inspires them with qualities rare for a Turkish politician. He is competent, humble and not corrupt. In the last congress of the party, just prior to the flotilla incident, Kilicdaroglu vowed to defeat the AKP in the upcoming national elections and form the next government. In the face of a serious internal political challenge, Erdogan believes he has found an easy formula of drumming up popularity at home by provoking Israel.

There is, however, a price to be paid for the sinister methods by which Erdogan has sought to manipulate pubic opinion. As the Islamist leader stokes the fires of hatred against the Jewish state, he is dragging Turkey further out of its safety zone and toward uncharted territory. Erdogan may reap personal dividends from throwing stones at Israel, but for a country with a substantial Kurdish minority that grows increasingly restless in its aspirations for independence, expressing outrage at the alleged oppression of the Palestinians may spell disaster. The segment of Turkish society that supports Erdogan’s policies vis-à-vis Israel might also start to recognize its own share of responsibility for the reckless actions of its government.

Perhaps some of the AKP’s ambitions emanate from the fact that for nearly a century, Turkey has not fought a major war. Not a single living Turk has a memory of the calamities that ripped the Turkish society apart in the beginning of the 20th century. Following the loss of millions of Turkish lives, leaders such as Ataturk developed a strong distaste for the type of adventurism that now characterizes the behavior of the Erdogan government on the international stage. Thanks to the wisdom of its traditional experience, the Turkish homeland has not come under an attack during its entire existence as a republic. The Turks will only keep the peace if they can keep the republic.

Askar Askarov received his Ph.D. in History from the University of Maryland in 2007. He is as an instructor at the Elliott School of International Affairs.

Turkey has been at the center of the now infamous flotilla incident involving a Hamas-connected Turkish “NGO” which attempted to run an Israeli naval blockade off the coast of Gaza. The flotilla was supported financially by Hamas and peopled primarily by their Turkish allies. It was purportedly seeking to transport 10,000 tons of humanitarian supplies to Gaza.  But in fact, Israel supplies Gaza with 15,000 tons of food, medicines, and related humanitarian support every week.  There seems to be more here than meets the eye.

Turkey remains a prime transit route for Southwest Asian heroin into Western Europe. International trafficking organizations that operate within the country, from Ankara to Istanbul and beyond, excel at evading narcotics blockades and interdicts. With all the focus on Turks sailing towards the Hamas seas, defying Israel’s determined effort to bar delivery of military weapons and material to the terrorist government that runs Gaza, one wonders how genteel Turkey’s own internal borders have been.  Does her treatment of religious and ethnic minorities model Western humanitarian values? Consider Turkey’s treatment of her Armenian, Catholic, and Kurdish minorities.

Adolf Hitler, a personal friend and ally of Grand Mufti Haj Amin el-Husseini, the founder of modern-day Palestinian Arab nationalism, said in 1939:  “Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?” Certainly not Istanbul.  For nearly a century, Turkey steadfastly has refused to acknowledge their barbaric genocide between 1915-1918 of 1,500,000 Armenian men, women, and children. Turkey will not apologize or even acknowledge the genocide they perpetrated, assuring that one of the most heinous war crimes of the twentieth century festers unresolved. American President Theodore Roosevelt contemporaneously wrote in 1918: “[T]he Armenian massacre was the greatest crime of the war, and the failure to act against Turkey is to condone it…[T]he failure to deal radically with the Turkish horror means that all talk of guaranteeing the future peace of the world is mischievous nonsense.”  British Prime Minister Winston Churchill said: “In 1915 the Turkish Government began and ruthlessly carried out the infamous general massacre and deportation of Armenians in Asia Minor…There is no reasonable doubt that this crime was planned and executed for political reasons.”  In 1981, Ronald Reagan urged in a Presidential proclamation that the lessons of the Nazi Holocaust never be forgotten “like the genocide of the Armenians before it, and the genocide of the Cambodians which followed it.”

Throughout the week, Israel has acknowledged and publicly regretted the loss of human life due to the flotilla incident, even as Israel has explained why she must continue blockading Gaza – namely, because recent experience has evidenced again and again that Hamas supporters will not stop trying to ship rockets, grenades, and anti-tank missiles to Israel’s bordering enemies to launch terror assaults against Jewish civilian communities. Meanwhile, Turkey still denies the Armenian Genocide ever happened.

As for the country’s Catholics, Bishop Luigi Padovese, a Roman Catholic bishop, was stabbed to death in Turkey on Thursday shortly before he was scheduled to depart for nearby Cyprus to meet with Pope Benedict XVI.  Three years ago, three missionaries’ throats were cut out in central Turkey. Their deaths were meant to send a message. The men were disemboweled, and “their intestines sliced up in front of their eyes. They were emasculated and watched as those body parts were destroyed…Fingers were chopped off…Noses and mouths and anuses were sliced open.” One was stabbed 156 times, another 99 times, and their “throats were sliced from ear to ear,” according to International Christian Concern, an American organization based in Washington, D.C.   There is no record of sorrow from Rachel Corrie backers or the IHH.

Under the Turkish Constitution enacted by Kemal Ataturk nearly a century ago, ethnic minorities were barred from expressing cultural distinctiveness in Turkey.  Thus, even as the United States is home to many foreign-language television and radio stations, the Kurdish language was absolutely banned in 1991.  Expressions of Kurdish nationalism continue to be repressed; Kurds in Turkey are restricted from giving their children Kurdish names. Turkey has moved closer to the governments of Syria and Iran in dealing with Kurdish nationalism.  In 1995, Leyla Zana, the first Kurdish woman ever elected to Turkish parliament, was sentenced to fifteen years incarceration for “separatist speech,” and her political party was barred. While she was incarcerated in Turkish prison, the European Parliament awarded her the Sakharov Prize in Human Rights. (By contrast, an Arab member of the Israeli Knesset was aboard the Gaza flotilla and returned safely to Parliament after the it was stopped.)  In the 1990s, the Turkish government was spending some $8 billion annually deploying 300,000 troops in southeastern Turkey to suppress Kurdish nationalism.  For numerical perspective, consider that President Obama announced last week that he is dispatching 1,200 National Guard troops to provide administrative support along the porous American border with Mexico.

Turkey killed approximately 25,000 Kurds in the mid-1990s, destroying some 3,000 Kurdish villages during the effort to repress Kurdish nationalism and producing more than 2,000,000 Kurdish refugees.  According to Minority Rights Group International, in a report funded by the European Union, as many as 40% of Kurdish women in Turkey are illiterate and nearly half the children of Kurdish refugees receive no education.  In addition, the government obstructs Armenian and Greek minorities’ school educational efforts.  The Turkish war against the Kurds is so visceral that it threatened Turkey’s willingness to join with American troops against Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda in neighboring Iraq. In an official EU 2006 “Progress Report” on Turkey’s fitness for acceptance in the European Union, it was concluded inter alia that “Turkey [still] needs to significantly improve the situation of fundamental rights in a number of areas and address the problems that minorities are facing.”

Now that the world has been talking Israel for the past week, slowly coming to understand more fully why Israel needs to protect her borders from Hamas state-sponsored terrorism in Gaza, it seems it’s time to talk Turkey.

Dov Fischer is a legal affairs consultant and adjunct professor of the law of civil procedure and advanced torts. He was formerly Chief Articles Editor of UCLA Law Review and writes extensively on political, cultural, and religious issues.  He is author of General Sharon’s War Against Time Magazine and blogs at www.rabbidov.com

Since I wrote in HUMAN EVENTS on May 14 about the plans to build a giant 15-story mosque and Islamic Center next to Ground Zero, the deceptions and Islamic supremacist intentions of the mosque organizers have become more obvious. Yet Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York and the New York political establishment refuse to listen to the will of the people.

This why the Stop Islamization of America (SIOA) June 6 rally against the proposed mega-mosque is so important. The Islamic supremacists must not be allowed to do a victory dance on the hallowed burial ground of Ground Zero. They must be exposed and shamed until they withdraw their plans for the mosque.

Bloomberg framed it as a freedom of religion issue: "I think it's fair to say if somebody was going to try, on that piece of property, to build a church or a synagogue, nobody would be yelling and screaming. And the fact of the matter is that Muslims have a right to do it, too.... What is great about America and particularly New York is we welcome everybody, and if we are so afraid of something like this, what does that say about us?... If you are religious, you do not want the government picking religions, because what do you do the day they don't pick yours?"

While I agree that that the government should keep its nose out of religion, also believe that if the mayor really believes government should stay out of it, he shouldn't publicly take one side. But the mayor already has chosen sides, before plans for this mosque became public.

SIOA has called on Bloomberg many times to remove Omar Mohammedi, a lawyer tied to the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), from New York City's Human Rights Commission. Bloomberg keeps him on. And before Times Square jihad bomber Faisal Shahzad was caught, Bloomberg offered his opinion: that the would-be car bomber was probably a right-winger who was upset about Obamacare.

This is why I believe petitions to the mayor are a waste of time. But the June 6 rally will show him that he is on the wrong side of the will of the people because the people of New York know that the mayor is wrong.

This mosque is not about freedom of religion. It's about insulting America and the victims of 9/11 and establishing an international symbol for Islamic supremacism in New York. The mega-mosque will be the rallying cry for the universal caliphate--a shrine to jihad at the cherished site of Islamic conquest....

Read it all.

The former speaker of Iran's Parliament, Gholam-Ali Haddad-Adel, says the Israeli assault on the Freedom Flotilla is "just the beginning of the end for Israel."

He made the remarks on Saturday during a meeting with Press TV correspondent Hassan Ghani, a Freedom Flotilla activist who was recently released by the Israelis.

Haddad-Adel said the attack "opened a new horizon to the world" and that the world can now see the true nature of the Israelis.

He added, "The Israelis showed that they are enemies of humanity, not only Arabs or Muslims, but every human being." [...]

"I believe that tomorrow will be another day for Israelis. They are condemned by the whole world. One of the results that we can gain from what happened is the point that before this massacre, the Israelis, the Americans, the British government, and the French government were claiming that Iran is the most important danger for the Middle East and for the whole world, although, they knew that we don't want to make bombs. After what happened to the Freedom Flotilla, everybody is asking whether Israel is the real danger for the world and for peace. Which is the real danger?

When Barack Obama was originally pushing his ginormous stimulus bill, like many conservatives, I pointed out that it wasn’t going to work.

Among other things, I noted history has shown that stimulus bills of this sort don’t get the economy moving, I pointed out that there wasn’t even that much Keynesian stimulus in the bill  —  and it didn’t escape my notice that a significant portion of the spending was backloaded. In other words, we were going to spend as much money as “FDR’s New Deal AND the war in Vietnam combined” for a stimulus bill that wouldn’t actually stimulate the economy.

That was my position. Now for reasons that will soon become obvious, let’s look at some of the things that Robert Reich, Clinton’s Secretary of Labor, was saying about the same time. Of course, he supported it.

As the buyer of last resort, the federal government must respond if that cycle is to be reversed. In my judgment, this will require a stimulus of about 6 and a half percent of gross domestic product, or a total of some $900 billion, spread over two years. That’s my estimate for the shortfall in private demand. But the federal government should stand ready to spend larger sums if necessary to get the economy back on track toward full capacity. The danger is not that the government will do too much; the danger is that it will do too little, too late. Without such action, I estimate that another 3 million jobs will be lost in 2009, unemployment will rise to 10 percent of the workforce by the end of this year, and under-employment – including people working part-time who would rather be working full time, and those too discouraged even to look for work – will reach 15 percent. Without federal action, next year could be even worse.

As we now know, the unemployment rate hit 10.2% and underemployment was still at 19.1% in May of this year. In other words, things turned out even more poorly than Reich’s “worst case scenario” predicted it would get WITHOUT the stimulus.

Read the whole thing at Right Wing News.

KANDAHAR (AIP): Taliban on Friday rejected consultative peace jirga's demand that the Taliban should lay down weapons and join the peace process, stressing that they would continue their resistance till the withdrawal of foreign forces from Afghanistan. Talking to Afghan Islamic Press (AIP) after President Hamid Karzai's address to the concluding session of the advisory peace jirga, Taliban spokesman Qari Muhammad Yousaf Ahmadi said, "Neither the offers of the jirga are acceptable to us nor the invitation of Karzai. All these efforts are aimed at prolonging the stay of foreigners." "The jirga is indeed a gathering of government supporters and agents of foreigners. Neither Taliban accept these jirgas nor justify their demands. If the jirga is really concerned about the welfare of Afghanistan, then it should first extend steps for withdrawal of the foreign forces," he stated.

War is deceit, and side effects may include short-term memory loss:

He added that "First the real cause of the Afghanistan war should be found. Everyone knows that war was started by the incumbent administration and with arrival of foreigners. The fighting would continue unless the foreigners leave Afghanistan." The Taliban spokesman repeatedly said if the incumbent government and the jirgas want an end to fighting in the country then foreign forces should leave Afghanistan, adding the withdrawal of foreign forces would remove the cause of war. "Taliban would continue their resistance and Jihad as long as the foreign forces stay in Afghanistan," he concluded. A consultative peace jirga was started in capital Kabul on June 02 which concluded today (June 04) after discussing mechanism for talks with Taliban for three days. The jirga urged both Taliban and Afghan government to hold talks for brining [sic] peace to Afghanistan. It also urged United States to make long term policies for Afghanistan.

Left-wing zealots and Ron Paul cultists frequently raise the prospect of dark Jewish conspiracies to bend the free world to Israel’s sinister will, but such conspiracy-mongering is awfully hard to square with the pervasiveness of Jewish support for the anti-Israel Left.  Today’s example is Fania Oz-Salzberger, an Israeli academic who, on The Daily Beast, incredibly enough claims Israelis should hang their heads in shame over their government’s recent skirmish at sea with aspiring Muslim terrorists:

Raiding ships in international waters (bound for Gaza, I know) loaded with food (and a large supply of knives, I know), and shooting a bunch of Israel-haters (who really went for the kill when the soldiers jumped onto the deck, I know), is not a part of my civil contract with my government. Security? No thanks; you have just stretched the concept a few nautical miles too far.

Here’s the thing: Unsavory protesters disguised as humanitarian “peace activists” do not deserve to be shot. If Messrs. Netanyahu and Barak think they can use my taxes and deploy my defense forces in this way, I can only hang my head in genuine embarrassment. The army in which I served, which will soon enlist my children, is only good for one thing: to fight those who are aiming a gun at me. Not those who dislike me, demonize me, or hope to see me dead. Only the gun-wielders.

The author alludes to the not-quite-altruistic motives of the Turkish flotilla crew, but the full extent of their “unsavory” background cannot be understated.  The flotilla had links to known financers of terrorisme, and many of the individuals aboard reportedly had their own jihadist ties.  We know they attacked first, and did so viciously.  Oz-Salzberger can pontificate all she wants about how the character of the “victims” is immaterial, but that’s obviously not true; it speaks directly to whether or not the Israelis have a right to control who brings what into Gaza, and whether or not they’re justified in keeping lethal force (and, er, not-so-lethal force) on the table.  Until the professor supplements the hand-wringing with germane facts, the answer remains a resounding “yes” on both counts.

Elsewhere at the The Daily Beast website, Andrew Roberts counterbalances the hysteria with sanity, pointing out that blockades are entirely legitimate military measures (also legal, by the way) and that the Gaza blockade pales in comparison to the devastation imposed by blockades during World War II, and reiterating the magnitude of the threat Israel faces:

Consider that Israel, at a total population of 7.3 million, is under one-fortieth the size of the USA, at over 300 million. Now consider that Hamas and Hizbollah have fired over 6,000 rockets into Israel since 2007. Now multiply 6,000 by 40, and try to consider what any American President—even Barack Obama—would not have done if Canada were to have fired nearly a quarter of a million rickets at America over the past three years, killing tens of thousands of innocent American citizens and ignoring every warning to stop? Blockade? There’d have been a full-scale invasion years ago, and anybody suggesting that under those circumstances America should start dealing “with both wings of the Canadian national movement without preconditions” would be rightly written off as an appeaser or traitor.

This is not, as Israel-hating smear-blogger Andrew Sullivan asserted, a case of Israelis killing people “because they don’t like them.”  Even if the passengers weren’t bad guys, they still made the decision to respond to a known blockade in a war zone with hostility—signs either of a death wish or grade-A Darwin Award material.  Nobody ignorant of the stakes, the dangers, and the potential consequences had any business there to begin with, and the IDF has too much on the line to coddle every idiot who gives indications they might be a threat, however inadvertent (which, again, these guys most certainly were not).  That the commandos were armed with paintball guns demonstrates the pains to which Israel goes to avoid needless deaths.

Never mind; Oz-Salzberger knows who the real victims are:

The Israeli-Egyptian siege of Gaza was wrong, and must end. All civilian goods should be allowed in, the seriously sick should be rushed to Israeli hospitals, and laborers and students must be searched, airport-style, and let through. Rocket-shooters deserve response by kind. The obnoxious Hamas cannot be pressured into disappearance by making Gaza’s hapless denizens suffer. An honest Israeli should apologize to every innocent Gazan, even if Gaza’s leaders and other Palestinian terrorists will never beg pardon for their numerous Israeli victims. Human decency is not a bargaining chip.

It’s an odd sort of “siege” in which the five ships prior to this one get allowed through without incident. The truth is that there’s no dearth of peaceful goods in Gaza (indeed, “When, earlier today, the IDF brought the cargo from the ships to Rafah to transfer it to Gazans, Hamas … refused the shipment”), but they’ve also got plenty of weapons.  (Dennis Prager has more insight on Jewish concern for Palestinian welfare—and how the Palestinians return the favor— that demands widespread attention.)

If this is what passes for an “Israeli patriot” on the Left, I’d hate to see their idea of an Israeli traitor.

_____

Hailing from Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, Calvin Freiburger is a political science major at Hillsdale College.  He also writes for the Hillsdale Forum and his personal website, Calvin Freiburger Online.