Erdoğan,a big winner in the Gaza confrontations
Erdoğan could not have wished for a better timing for what has been happening on the Gaza border.
First, it gave him yet another opportunity to sing his old singsong “Israel a terrorist state” and “the IDF terrorist army”.
Second and far more importantly, it provided him with fresh bloody empirical evidence that may tempt him to propose the creation of an ‘Army of Islam’ to destroy Israel at the forthcoming international meeting of the 14th Summit conference of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) made of 57 member states.
The evidence for this potential development is based on an article published in the Turkish daily Yeni Şafak (New Dawn), one of the mouthpieces of the Islamist regime and on its website titled What if an Army of Islam was Formed Against Israel? (cf. Meira Svirsky, Editor of the Clarion Project in a piece of news analysis titled ‘Army of Islam’ Proposed to Destroy Israel, dated March 27 past›
Svirsky reports that the proposal is supported by impressive statistics on the military manpower, material resources; the geographical distribution of these resources among the member states of the IOC; an interactive map of how the proposed military source would proceed and the estimate defence budget that would be available to such an army.
According to Svirsky, the source of the article has been reported to be the Turkish International defence and consulting company SADAT (the name of the firm translates as princes, lords, especially the descendants of the Prophet Mohammad). The company was founded by a retired general and Erdoğan’s senior adviser on military affairs.
She reports that to date Erdoğan has not denounced the proposed plan (or otherwise commented on the article) nor has the article been covered in the mainstream media (that is, what’s left of it that is not beholden to the government and whose proprietors and writers are not already in jail and in some instances serving life sentences on the bogus charges having to do with Gülen).
Svirsky then suggests that,” …we can assume that Erdoğan was [and is] using the article as a trial balloon, waiting to see if this plan, a fulfillment of his deepest yearnings, garnered protests from the powers that be (much less notice for them).” (Her article does not end on this point.)
All of which raises, among others, the following three questions:
The first, to which Israel must and will undoubtedly attend thoroughly in the forum of international public political and military opinion on an urgent basis, is: Could the IDF have handled the situation, dangerous as it was, without resorting to live ammunition to restrain and beat back the crowds? And, if the question, can answered in the affirmative by authoritative military opinion why did Israel fail to do so?
The second concerns the NATO countries: When will they get off the proverbial collective part of their anatomy and read the riot act to Turkey, in the light of the nature of its involvement in the Syrian war; the Afrin horrors and the horrors promised to be inflicted to the rest of the Kurds south of the Turkish border and other behaviour patterns egregiously unbecoming of its membership?
The third is actually a set of questions concerning the European Union’s current dealings with Turkey and how it proposes to and ultimately will deal with Tukey’s core demands in the light of the country’s internal problems and its behaviour pattern on the international stage. Readers interested in delving into these may wish to start by taking a look at Serkan Demirtaş, Turkey, EU to meet a tough summit in Varna, in the Turkish daily Hürriyet (freedom, liberty, independence),English Edition, Istanbul, March 26,2018 and, Asli Aydintaşbaş, The discreet charm of hypocrisy: An EU-Turkey Power Audit, Policy Brief, European Council of Foreign Relations, March 23,2018, www.ecfr.eu/publications
I am not sure what NATO is liable to or for that matter can do, if anything at all.
On the other hand, to use an edited version of what has already been said, I fear the major players of the EU will carry on along the road of the decline of their respective civilisations by taking the eight simple steps that will squander it all. (cf. Brandon Marlon, The Decline and Fall of Modern Civilization:8 Simple Steps to Squandering it All, The Algemeiner, January 22,2015…