You see what happens, Hamas . . .

“Don’t be silly,” I reassure Itzik, as we sip on our sachlabs on Rothschild, early last Thursday evening. “Nothing will happen in Tel Aviv.”

It might as well be the cue for the siren.

There are a surreal couple of seconds, during which the occupants of adjacent tables exchange puzzled, yet pregnant, glances: “Is it . . . ? What now . . . ?”

I jump up, as if stabbed with a shot of adrenaline. The dogs bark. We dart inside the café, my spanking new Galaxy S II abandoned alongside the sachlab. Clive Dunn has only been gone a week, and I have already forgotten his famous advice (though discovering that it is true, no one “like[s] it up ’em”). It is the first time I have experienced a siren not marking the commencement of Shabbat or a Holocaust/Remembrance Day.

We all huddle together at the rear of the café. A 60-something female hears my accent and, as if encouraging a boy to consummate his transition to manhood, asks me if it is my “first time”. I nod sheepishly. She imparts advice that I am in no state to listen to.

A distant boom. Perhaps two. And, within half an hour, I am home, packed, and on Highway 1 . . . on my way to the capital. I am ‘caught’ by my neighbours in the act of attempting to wheel my bag quietly out of the building. “I am not escaping,” I protest. “I have a fortieth birthday party in Jerusalem!” And it is true. But I don’t expect them to believe me. And I don’t think they do.

I tease Itzik – a Tel Aviv real estate agent who has continually belittled my second home in Jerusalem – from the car, telling him that he won’t be getting a key (‘forcing’ the coward into having to stay, instead, with his father in Petach Tikva).

And Itzik is the first to call me, gloating, the following early evening, within seconds of the siren sounding in the capital. I have darted into the stairwell, where the neighbours are quickly gathering, before shooting back in for my flatmates. My Orthodox neighbour overcomes her fear of Stuey and Dexxy, whom, until now, she has refused to even pass on the stairs. “Shit,” I exclaim, in an attempt to lighten the tension, “I left the back window open.” But the attempt at humour is lost.

I meet an American woman on Saturday who is considering taking refuge in London. Who am I to judge? I still do. And I delete an old law school friend from Facebook after he publishes this photo (right) with the caption: “Address this, Mark Regev . . .”

In fact, the next time I hear a Palestinian talk about ‘his’ olive tree, I will make it my job to find said plant, uproot it, and stick it up his . . . well, in a place that it will get no light. These people attach no value to human life, never mind olive trees.

Make no mistake, when Hamas talks about an “end to the Occupation” (which, in principle, I am also in favour of ending), it is talking about an end to Israel. And, if it was up to me, I would bring those fuckers [complaints, please, to John Fisher – he doesn’t approve of the asterisk] to their knees before even agreeing to listen to talk about a ceasefire.

There is a wonderful feeling of togetherness here at present. I had been putting the finishing touches to a blog critical of Israelis. But I can’t publish it now. These are special people. And they are giving their all for our People . . . and – if the world would only open its eyes – for the values that civilised people everywhere hold dear.

To the residents of the south, we should have empathised more fully with your sacrifice and suffering, and with the intolerable circumstances under which you have had to live this past decade. To former Defence Minister Amir Peretz, respect for promoting – when few believed in it (or you) – Iron Dome. And to the soldiers awaiting your orders on the edge of Gaza, though it looks unlikely now that you will receive them, chazak ve’ematz.

Once again, however, I leave the last words to the great – though oft misunderstood – Walter Sobchak . . .

CLICK HERE

Hamas would have done well to heed the lesson of Mr. Sobchak – as, from now on, would Iran and even Egypt (which, respectively, have supplied and allowed unhindered passage of the missiles used to attack us) – though I sincerely hope that the IDF has been picking its targets rather more calmly and prudently!

[See also Airstrike on Gaza: Israel’s Right of Self-Defence, F*ck you, too and Days of Awe, Heroes and Whores . . . sadly, all still as relevant today as they were nearly four years ago.]

Corrie verdict: A crushing blow for human rights

Last week was a singularly horrid one for all of us who know that it is our universal, inalienable right to kneel in front of armoured bulldozers without getting our new keffiyehs (they are so cool!) dirty.

And my heart wept for Craig and Cindy Corrie on Tuesday after the Haifa District Court ruled that their 23-year old daughter, Rachel – and not the IDF – was responsible for her own death under the tracks of of a Caterpillar D9 in Gaza in March 2003.

It was an outrageous injustice, and sets a horrible precedent. Whatever next . . . environmental activists running across the M1 to protest motorway widening – rather than drivers not looking out for them – having to shoulder the blame for getting splattered across it?!

“This was a bad day not only for our family, but a bad day for human rights, for humanity, for the rule of law, and also for the country of Israel,” announced Mrs. Corrie after the verdict.

How right you are, Mrs. C. And you and your husband should be congratulated for your objective concern for the plight of the poor, defenceless Palestinians against the mighty Israelis – the result, no doubt, of a deep understanding of the Arab-Israeli conflict, as opposed to any prejudice or suspicion on your part regarding the rich, powerful Jew – even though it led to your own daughter’s horrible, needless death.

Objectivity: the Corries in Rafah, January 2006

Rachel was a fine American. Okay, she burnt the flag (who hasn’t?!) But, in writing of the natural rights of man, Hobbes, Locke and Paine surely could not have had in mind any act more noble than the “shielding” of Islamofascist rocket squads and suicide bombers by interfering foreigners who couldn’t find useful work placements during college (see also Time for the Hurndalls to stop their sniping) and who had always heard that Arabs . . . well, everyone really, are nicer than Jews.

Rachel Corrie burning a mock US flag in Rafah, a month before her death

Grooming in the Green: Just imagine it

A gang of nine Jewish males from Golders Green – eight English-born and one Israeli – has been convicted of grooming underage non-Jewish girls for sex, the vulnerable teenagers having been lavished with salt beef sandwiches (on rye) and latkes, and plied with Palwin No. 10, at kosher restaurants across North-West London.

One can just imagine the response of the BBC and Guardian etc ”PC Brigade”, springing to the defence of Anglo-Jewry, protesting that the crimes had nothing whatsoever to do with race or religion . . .

Yeh, right!! We’d have a modern-day blood libel on our hands! And we wouldn’t even get to Nick Griffin. We wouldn’t need to, with . . .

• A now happily (for us) retired former MP and Mayor of London accessing his impressive stash of Zionist/Jewish/Israeli – they are, after all, interchangeable – stereotypes to “make sense” of the case;
• A weekend magazine feature on the ultra-Orthodox Jewish male’s attitude towards The Shiksa, with, among the interviewees, perhaps, a Haaretz ‘journalist’ who once saw some charedim kerb crawling in the Diamond Exchange district (as he was exiting a strip club);
• A Saddam-saluting Jock, foaming at the mouth, claiming the guilty verdicts should surprise no one, seeing as Diaspora Jewish males merely follow the example set for them by the IDF, with their war crimes against the poor, peace-loving Palestinians;
• A half-page Guardian ad taken out by an assortment of self-loathing writers, actors and other luvvies (vying, perhaps, to become the UK’s new Number One Self-Hating Jew), pledging to have circumcision reversals (foreskin regrafts) to distance themselves from a religion that “allows” such crimes; and
• The dishonourable (and dishonest) Member for Manchester Gorton once again cynically exploiting the memory of his poor late grandmother (see here), telling the House of Commons that “she did not die at the hands of the Nazis for Jews to do a thing like this.”
  

  Who needs the BNP?

But a gang of nine Muslim men – eight Pakistani and one Afghan – grooming, abusing, assaulting and/or raping up to 47 (that is forty-seven) vulnerable girls in Rochdale, every single one of whom was white, has, we are being told (though not, thankfully, by the only UK newspaper to consistently tell it as it is), nothing to do with Islam or its followers, or with its or their attitude towards females and, especially, non-Muslim females.

Nothing whatsoever.

[Related posts: World Trade Center set for suicide bomber memorial and The lesson of 9/11: Don't dare upset the Muslims.]

From Jew-obsession to the mechanics of murder

“The Muslim faith has nothing to do with the insane acts of this man.”

So opined the French President, last week, following the latest acts of cold-blooded murder by a hate-filled Muslim, including once again – almost a year to the day since the Itamar infanticide – of three Jewish children, this time aged 3, 6 and 8.

“Nothing to do with”? Are you sure, Mr. Sarkozy?

How much Islamofascist terror must we endure before we stop having to listen to such PC bollocks, and before we stop putting ever so delicate Muslim sensibilities before the hard truth? When, instead, is the Muslim community and its hate-inciting imams going to be told to put their murderous, bloodthirsty house in order?

Respect, my arse: Ken & George

And, while telling things as they are, it is not only Muslims who are to blame for such atrocities. Much of the Islamofascist’s fuel, and the climate in which he is allowed, even encouraged, to operate, is provided by the Israel-only bashers – the George Galloways, Ken Livingtones, Jenny Tonges, even the sad, bitter nothings like Gert Meyers (see previous link), of this world – who, by relentlessly demonizing and attempting to delegitimize the Jewish state with their hateful, hypocritical agenda (while remaining largely silent, for most recent instance, about the slaughter in Syria), provide fertile ground for the murder of Jews.

Don’t even dream, however, of calling the Israel-only basher an anti-Semite. He, of course, has nothing against Jews (some of his best friends . . .), merely opposing Israel, which –  by pure coincidence only – just happens to be the Jewish state. Neither is it by virtue of their conflict with the Jews that the Israel-only basher gives the Palestinians his sole, undivided attention (to the exclusion of Syrians, Kurds, Iranians, Coptic Christians, Sudanese, Eritreans, Equatorial Guineans, Zimbabweans, Burmese, Tibetans, North Koreans, Cubans): it is just that the Palestinians are, intrinsically, far lovelier and cuddlier than every other persecuted people.

Having lunch in Jerusalem’s Machane Yehuda market, a couple of weeks ago, I struck up conversation with a nice non-Jewish couple from Colorado, visiting Israel for the first time. “I hope you don’t mind me asking,” said Jim, while we were still on our soup, “but why do so many people hate the Jews? I just don’t understand it.” I went through the list – jealousy and Jesus being the only reasons that seemed to make any sense (and, then, not much) – before concluding with my own view, that it is just part and parcel of, though a sickness in, the human condition.

In the week that saw John Demjanjuk go to meet his diabolical maker – the very same, no doubt, as of his fellow auto mechanic Mohammed Merah – I couldn’t help but wonder whether the millions spent on attempting to bring an incontinent Ukrainian peasant to justice would not have been better earmarked for more effectively countering the deadly lies of the Israel-only bashers, and for providing proper security for Jewish communities around the world.

Toulouse victims z"l: (clockwise) Rabbi Yonatan Sandler (30), sons Gavriel (3) and Aryeh (6), Miriam Monsonego (8)

Why I am not full of the joys of Spring

You will forgive me, I hope, for not jubilantly swinging my misbaha over my head in celebration of the Arab Spring.

Israeli Embassy, Cairo, last Friday

After months of endless “Allahu akbars” (can’t they come up with anything new?) and the exaggerated, mindless firing into the air of automatic weapons, I – unlike many others it would seem, especially the depressingly naive correspondents of the western news media and the ever-Muslim-fawning BBC – am filled not with hope, but with concern . . .

Concern that liberty, democracy and equality, as well as respect for human life, won’t come to these people in a thousand springs.

And the best judges of this are not Ashkenazi, Haaretz-reading liberals – who believe that inventing, dreaming about, and intellectually masturbating over, a false reality makes them, somehow, more worthy human beings – but Jews who grew up in, and subsequently were forced to flee, one of the countries now ‘enjoying’ its Spring.

Sexpot: Ashrawi (on BBC's Breakfast with Frost)

One such, an Egyptian-born relative, would always remark, whenever having to hear Hanan Ashrawi – the Palestinian Christian sexpot – twist and deceive on British television: “If they get their own state, they will cut her hands off.” (And I must confess to having rather enjoyed the image.)

Concern, too, that these people are motivated not by love, or even the longing for a better future, but by hate and the desire to settle old scores.

The ‘new’ (liberated from the yoke of the tyrant Mubarak) Egyptians, outside the Israeli Embassy in Cairo last Friday (photograph above), were calling not only for the abolition of the Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty and the expulsion of the Israeli Ambassador:  “Jews, remember the Battle of Khaybar, the Army of Muhammad is already here . . . Oh Zionists, please be patient, there’s an Egyptian digging your grave.” Nice.

I was raised in an environment in which the worst intolerance ever encountered was the occasional less than flattering name for “the other,” usually by an elderly relative, in Yiddish.

Another people, on the other hand, raises many of its young to believe that Jews are the descendants of apes and pigs, in a conspiracy to control the world (funny that, I have never known a pig to aspire to anything beyond estate agency), and must be destroyed.

If you don’t believe me, take a look at Palestinian and Arab schoolbooks and newspapers (the cartoon on the right appeared in the widest-circulating Egyptian daily), listen to some of their delightful clerics (here and here), or enjoy their enchanting version of Sesame Street (and I haven’t even touched upon the latest filth spewing forth from Tehran).

So please excuse me if I am not filled with optimism and joy about the fall of Mubarak, Gaddafi, or even, imminently, of that vile weasel Assad.

Mark my words (though I do hope they prove to be wrong): this is not good.

[Please visit http://www.justgiving.com/mike-isaacson/ . . . only £500 to go!]

Whose catastrophe is it anyway?

Driving past the Tel Aviv Cinematheque on Sunday evening, I witnessed the kind of scene which, though no longer new to me, never fails to sicken me anew: on this occasion, a demonstration by around a hundred keffiyeh-wearing Israelis to mark Yawm al-Nakba, or Day of the Catastrophe, on which Palestinians mourn the birth of Israel, in 1948.

Last week, meanwhile, on Yom Hazikaron (Memorial Day), this country remembered its 22,867 fallen soldiers and 3,971 victims of Palestinian terror. And immediately following the thought that most of the crusty-leftie protesters looked like they could do with a good bath . . . alright, and the fleeting one, too, of plowing my Focus into the shameless bastards, I couldn’t help but ask myself: “Allah, whose Nakba?!”

I have no inclination to regurgitate here the details of our two Peoples’ claims to this Land. We are, however, two Peoples. And with two claims. And they both have their merits.

But the Palestinian “catastrophe” as I see it, and it predates 1948, is that neither the Palestinians nor their leaders have – conversely to the attitude of the large majority of Israelis towards them – never truly accepted any aspect of the Zionist narrative, or that there is even another party with a legitimate claim to, at least a share of, this Land.

This explains how the ‘moderate’ Palestinian leadership in the West Bank could sign an agreement, two weeks ago, with the Islamofascists in Gaza, the leader of whom had, a mere two days earlier, condemned the killing of Osama “the holy warrior.” And it is why even Israelis (like me) who favour a two-state solution do not believe that the 1967 borders represent the true extent of the vast majority of Palestinians’ claims and aspirations.

The reason that there will never be peace in this Land, therefore, is not our minority of nutters . . . but their majority of them.

Indeed, we Israelis, if we were so inclined, could commemorate our own “catastrophe”: that, in addition to our almost 27,000 fallen soldiers and murdered civilians, we have been cursed with neighbours – Palestinian and Arab – who are, at worst, capable of slaughtering babies in cold blood and, at best, completely backward-looking and incapable of moving on . . . as evidenced by their endlessly self-pitying, all-consuming, fixation with the Nakba and the past.

Israel’s present government has certainly not covered itself in glory: Bibi’s ‘leadership’ has been characterised only by mind-boggling inaction, making the country – at a time when its international image was already at an all-time low – appear completely uninterested in even attempting to resolve this horrible, tragic mess. Indeed, over the last two years, it has almost been as if Israel hasn’t even had a government.

But, even ignoring its appalling crime figures, one only has to roam the streets of Jaffa to witness the Arab aversion to progress: decrepit buildings without communal electricity (cut-off for failure to pay bills) and surrounded by garbage (usually discarded by residents’ children). Then, for contrast, walk a matter of minutes to the beautiful tayelet (beachfront promenade) recently developed by the Tel Aviv-Jaffa Municipality through Ajami, one of Jaffa’s most crime-ridden areas.

Of course, the same folk who have always criticised Israel’s supposed neglect of Arab neighbourhoods are now claiming that the tayelet is part of a strategic Judaization, even ethnic cleansing, of them. Though there is no pleasing the Jew/self-hater.

“The Arabs,” Abba Eban famously once said, “never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.” And, whilst some may currently be enjoying a Spring, others – including the Palestinians and their leadership (now, officially, semi-Islamofascist at least) – are still stuck in deepest, darkest Winter.

"Murderers in Uniform," reads the sign at Sunday's demonstration

Itamar infanticide: The difference between us and them

As news filtered through, yesterday morning, of the slaughter by Palestinians of five members of the same family – two parents and their children, aged 11, 4 and 3 months – an Israeli friend, Itzik, remarked merely “chayot” (animals). Benny Gantz, the new IDF Chief of Staff, used the term “chayot adam” (beasts).

The knife attack, late on Friday evening, was perpetrated in the home of Udi and Ruth Fogel, in the West Bank settlement of Itamar (near Nablus). Their three other children survived: two were asleep in the house at the time, while the third returned home to discover the bloodbath. (Full story)

I am not religious or a Settler. And I support Palestinian statehood. Still. Yet I cannot help but feel that Palestinian Muslims – even Muslim Arabs generally (perhaps all Muslims?) – are just not like us: if it is not stating the bleeding bloody obvious (it is not, I am sure, to the Israel-only bashers), they just don’t have the same moral code, or attach the same value to human life.

I arrived at this uncomfortable conclusion a year before 9/11, as I witnessed – ‘live’ on television, from my office in Tel Aviv – the brutal public lynching in Ramallah. There was something so viscerally shocking about that event – this Israel Channel 2 footage requires no translation – that it left an even greater mark than the spate of suicide bombings that ‘greeted’ my Aliyah, in January 1996.

Before all the knee jerks start screaming “What about Baruch Goldstein?”, his massacre – however appalling – was qualitatively and circumstantially very different from the one on Friday evening. Moreover, the Israeli government of the day – unlike the Palestinian Authority, yesterday – was swift and unqualified in its condemnation of it, as were all but the most extreme of Settlers. And it was certainly never celebrated on the Israeli street . . .

Party time in Gaza: sweets for Hamas policemen in Rafah, yesterday

On the streets of Gaza, however, yesterday, sweets were handed out to rejoice the slaughter of the infants. And stopping at a petrol station (on the Tel Aviv-Jerusalem highway) manned by Israeli Arabs, yesterday afternoon, Itzik and I each wondered the very same thing: what exactly were their feelings about the events of the previous evening?

Call me a racist, but no sane Jew, or other human being, could even force himself to stab a baby – or any child for that matter (the expression “cold blood” is entirely superfluous in such circumstances) – to death (never mind while he or she was asleep) however much he believed in his cause. There is, however, a long history of Palestinian acts of premeditated – cf. collaterally-caused (the distinction, morally, is an extremely significant one) – infanticide (even in Itamar).

Prime Minister Netanyahu has blamed this latest atrocity on Palestinian Authority incitement against Settlements and their inhabitants, and also on the international delegitimization of this country (we are in the middle of the seventh annual Israeli Apartheid Week . . . though some folk must look forward to and enjoy it so much that it has been extended to a fortnight).

To my mind, however, the horror of Friday evening has a far simpler explanation: the essential difference between us and them. That is something which most Israelis – including even PC Brigade members (though they would never admit to it) – instinctively know. And it is the reason why, whatever concessions Israel makes to the Palestinians, there may never be peace in this Land.

Fogel home after the attack. Inset: Hadas (3 months), Elad (4), Yoav (11), Udi (36), Ruth (35).

Time for the Hurndalls to stop their sniping

So, Taysir Hayb will be a free man next month. The IDF Sergeant, found guilty of manslaughter after shooting British “peace activist” Tom Hurndall in 2003, is to be released after serving five years of his eight-year sentence.

But the Hurndall family’s “anger and shock” at Monday’s announcement is not, says Sophie Hurndall, Tom’s sister, directed at the soldier who fired the bullet, but rather at the IDF and Israel as a whole: “To be honest, it’s about the system. Not the man himself. This man who shot Tom was the same age as him. He is both the victim and the killer. He is part of a system that proactively encouraged soldiers to target civilians.”

That is bollocks, Ms. Hurndall (as anyone who has served in the IDF can testify).

I was back in England at the time of the shooting of Tom Hurndall (right), in the Gaza town of Rafah, at the height of the Second Intifada, in April 2003. I was also there throughout his nine-month coma, until his death, aged just 22.

And, during the Hurndall family’s protracted UK media campaign against Israel, I was continually forced to question my capacity for empathy for feeling so little about their obvious (and natural) suffering. In fact, the only thing that the Hurndalls’ campaign did move me to do – although, in the end, I didn’t (for which I am now glad) – was to drop a letter into their north London home (close to mine), with my condolences, but also telling them that Tom had absolutely no business being there in the first place.

And this week’s comments by Sophie Hurndall – who works for Medical Aid for Palestinians – have only served to remind me of just how I felt (or, rather, didn’t) seven years ago. No, my heart has not softened with the years.

While I, of course, take no joy in the tragic death of Tom Hurndall, the time has come for his family to take a good look at themselves, too, and to ask certain painful questions about the decisions and actions of their son and brother, and about how they may have influenced or prevented them:

• What right did Tom Hurndall have to interfere with IDF operations – his declared goal was to blockade tank patrols – at the height of the Second Intifada, in the then war zone of Gaza?
• Did he possess any comprehension whatsoever as to the entirely justified purpose of those operations (i.e., to protect Israeli citizens)? Or did he, maybe, view Hamas and Islamic Jihad as some kind of benevolent presence that Israel could simply ignore? Perhaps, for him, Jewish lives – as opposed to Palestinian ones – were just unimportant?
• Why did he choose to be a “peace activist” in the only democracy – or, at least, the only country that can reasonably claim to be one (as even Israel’s enemies could not deny) – in the entire Middle East? Why not in one of the many Islamofascist, or other, tyrannies the world over?
• And, anyway, as a self-proclaimed “human shield” – purportedly of children (endangered only because they themselves are used as such by Palestinian militants) – did Hurndall not succeed in his stated purpose?

Without in any way condoning the actions of Sergeant Hayb (right), to whose intent only he was privy, one wonders how long Tom Hurndall would have survived in Iraq or Afghanistan, for example, attempting to impede the operations of British or American forces there: How long would it have taken before an irate – or, perhaps, ever so slightly unhinged – squaddy,  in the “pressure cooker” of a war zone (which Gaza was no less), thought “F*ck this! I have had quite enough of this interfering little prick”?

To me, Tom Hurndall – like Rachel Corrie just before him – is not the hero that he is so often portrayed to be. He was, rather, a very misguided young man, appearing to suffer from the misapprehension – even more popular these days, and shared by his family – that Israel’s war against Islamofascism is a gratuitous rather than strictly necessary one, and that Hamas and Islamic Jihad militants are, somehow, not really dangerous.

“We have had to deal with cover-ups and lies and a total lack of accountability throughout, and this is in line with that – it’s symptomatic,” continued Sophie Hurndall on Monday.

Bollocks, once again.

Sergeant Hayb was tried and convicted (if following several months of pressure from the Hurndalls). Would Tom Hurndall’s death in Iraq or Afghanistan (as described above) have resulted in a similar outcome? I very much doubt it. And under an Islamofascist dictatorship, such as the one Hamas is establishing in Gaza, the Hurndalls would still be trying to discover how and why their son ‘disappeared’, and whether he is still alive . . . while, all the time, his dismembered body was lying at the bottom of some well.

Of course, the fact that Sergeant Hayb is a Bedouin rather than a Jew has all been rather inconvenient for the Hurndalls, forcing them to modulate their rhetoric to the media over the past seven years.

On the other hand, the Jewish state is a much larger, easier, and – in these dark days – popular target than the particular motivations and reactions of a 20-year old, non-Jewish soldier.

http://www.justgiving.com/melchettmike

Making us sick: An open letter to a Turkish MP

Dear Mr. Kiniklioğlu,

I write in response to your op-ed article, This Israeli Government Has Gone Too Far, in last Wednesday’s International Herald Tribune.

“It makes yer sick . . .” So a dear, late uncle of mine would commence his not infrequent tirades against the hypocrisy and double standards of the international community and media in its treatment of Israel. And, after reading your ill-thought-out piece, I have not been able to get Uncle Stanley’s words out of my head.

As Deputy Chairman of External Affairs in Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) and Spokesman of your parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee, I would have expected you to know at least a little of your own country’s human rights record, however uncomfortable the facts.

From the opening, however, of your article’s second paragraph – “I have many friends in Israel . . .” (the equivalent of the anti-Semite’s familiar “Some of my best friends are Jews . . .”) – I feared the worst. And your description of the raid on the Gaza flotilla and of its “peace activists” – they of the delightful “Go back to Auschwitz” call – flies in the face of all the evidence, which clearly shows an attempted lynch of IDF soldiers.

How would Turkey respond to another country daring to interfere with its treatment of the Kurds? And how would your soldiers respond to beatings with iron bars, to having their weapons grabbed and turned on them, and to being thrown off the deck of a ship? Would Turkey provide the “independent investigation”, “apology”, “compensation” and “punish[ment]” which you now demand of Israel?

Your reference to the war which Israel “unleashed” in Gaza totally ignores its cause: eight long years of Hamas rocket attacks (still continuing). Turkey has hardly been a model of restraint when it comes to its Hamas, the Kurdish PKK. Moreover, conditions in Gaza make it seem like The Ritz compared to Turkey’s savagely neglected Kurdish hinterlands.

Turkey is not one-tenth of the democracy that Israel is (and after only 62 years of existence). Seeing as your Masters in International Relations would appear to have excluded them from its syllabus, here are just a few of the uncomfortable details:

• In 2008, Turkey ranked second (after Russia) in the list of countries with the largest number of open human rights violation cases at the European Court of Human Rights (source, and see this table).
• In addition to thousands of “disappearances”, by the close of 2008, a total of 2,949 people had been killed by unknown perpetrators and 2,308 by extrajudicial executions in the, primarily Kurdish, southeast and eastern regions of Turkey (source).
• Turkish politicians, trade unionists, journalists and human rights activists (genuine ones!) have been convicted merely for having used the word “Kurdistan” (source), while Turkey has a long history of deaths at demonstrations due to excessive police force, with 13 killed during a PKK funeral as recently as March 2006 (source).

For details of Turkey’s “cultural genocide” of the Kurds, its invasion, occupation and ethnic cleansing of northern Cyprus, and – most heinous of all – its extermination of up to one a half million Armenians, see here, here and here.

Where do you find the gall, Mr. Kiniklioğlu, to lecture Israel (or any country for that matter) about “blatant disregard for international norms and law”, to quote Amnesty International – whose website dedicates one hundred webpages solely to Turkey (and, then, only going back to 1994!) – or to moralise about what “the conscience of the Turks” can or cannot “carry the burden of”? What contemptible hypocrisy and sanctimoniousness!

The feebleness of your argument (if indeed there is one) is reflected in your desperate, shameful references to how the Turks “welcomed the Jews escaping from the Inquisition in Spain in 1492” and to how your “diplomats have risked their lives to save European Jews from the Nazis” (according to my research, a total of three Turks have been honoured by Yad Vashem).

You conveniently (cunningly?) omit to mention, however, the self-interest inherent in the Sultan’s and Atatürk’s aforementioned actions, and the subsequent huge contribution – especially commercial – of Turkish Jewry to your country. You also overlook, inter alia, Turkey’s racist 1942 Wealth Tax, its role in the Struma disaster of the same year, and the no less than three terrorist attacks on Istanbul’s Neve Shalom Synagogue.

Have you forgotten, too, the hundreds of Israeli search and rescue workers who risked their own lives in order to save Turks in the aftermath of the 1999 Izmit earthquake?

You seem to consider that Turkey has been doing Israel a huge favour, all these years, by accepting arms supplies and upgrades, together with military intelligence and know-how, from our vastly superior army and air force.

No, it was not “the Israeli raid”, as you mischievously (duplicitously?) suggest, that “was a turning point for Turkish attitudes towards Israel” or which “crossed a critical threshold” . . . but rather your prime minister’s and party’s decision to realign Turkey with the terrorist states of Syria and Iran (you disingenuously also throw into your article mention of “the tension surrounding Iran’s nuclear program”, in which Turkey is now an accomplice). In such circumstances, writing that “Turks regard the current Israeli government as unfriendly” would be akin to Hitler having said that about the Russians, following the German invasion of the Soviet Union!

It is worrying that the International Herald Tribune sees fit to publish such dangerous, ill-thought-out drivel, merely by virtue of its author being a member of his country’s parliament. Had you submitted the same as part of an undergraduate degree in Politics at a British university (or even at a former polytechnic), it would have received a straight “F”.

To give you some idea of the strength of feeling here about your country’s double standards, an Israeli artist friend of mine – by no means a right-winger – related to me over coffee yesterday morning how he had walked 45 minutes to the Turkish Embassy in Tel Aviv merely to “give it the finger” (literally). And I, too, give you the finger, Mr. Kiniklioğlu, together with your vile, knuckle-dragging nation of hypocrites.

If you have anything to say in your defence – as to why you believe that your sickening hypocrisy and double standards should not earn you June’s Mook of the Month (with your reputation, from Web searches of your name, being forever associated with mookness) – I invite you to post it to http://melchettmike.wordpress.com/2010/06/06/making-us-sick-an-open-letter-to-a-turkish-mp/.

Yours sincerely,

melchett mike

[I have e-mailed this post to Mr. Kiniklioğlu via the contact page of his website.]

Raid on Terrorist Flotilla: Footie Songs Say It Best

“No one likes us, no one likes us, no one likes us, we don’t care.
We are Millwall, super Millwall, we are Millwall from the Den.”

Strangely enough, this ostensibly inane football song (full rendition) was reverberating in my head throughout yesterday, as I watched and heard the world reaction to the IDF’s storming of the terrorist flotilla.    

Even if the execution of the raid was ill-conceived (and I fear it was), it was justified (see my previous post, Dirty seamen stain Dunkirk weekend). But, for sustained, exaggerated and unfair criticism and singling-out by the media, one can easily substitute “Millwall” with “Israel”. And like the demonization of white, working class, Cockney football fans – an easy target for the press – that of the Jewish state has also created a siege mentality amongst its citizens and supporters. 

The fans of my football team, Leeds United, also have much of this mentality (incidentally, we have also had – and I was there – our own bitter experience of the Turks [see photos below]). But, when it comes to international Islamofascism, working class football fans appear to have a far better, more intuitive sense of right and wrong than the so-called “liberal”, Guardian-reading elite who so patronise them. Indeed, many of the friends and acquaintances I have made through my years of following Leeds United have remarked to me how much they respect and admire Israel for dealing with Fundamentalists in a way that they wish their own government would. 

Christopher Loftus (top) and Kevin Speight, RIP, hacked to death in the centre of Istanbul in April 2000. Their killers still roam free.

My inner voice was also chanting, yesterday, the words that we Leeds fans direct at our team when, as so often, it underperforms. “What the f*ck is going on?!” was not, however, aimed at the Israeli government or our brave young soldiers, but at the horrible media bias assailing my senses. Anyone who knows anything about Turkey can well imagine (if he/she can bear to) its reaction to another country daring to send aid to the Kurds – who are forbidden even to give their offspring Kurdish names – or supporting Kurdish claims for an independent state. But I won’t regurgitate my contempt for these sickeningly hypocritical knuckle draggers – it is all here, here, and here – only to say that Israel’s (former?) strategic cooperation with Turkey, a marriage of convenience, is no less a cause for shame than that with apartheid South Africa.  

The scenes from the deck of the boarded vessel were a horrible reminder for Israelis of the October 2000 Ramallah lynching (this Israeli Channel 2 footage requires no translation). And, by yesterday evening, as I became even more incensed by the double standards of the international reaction – and, especially, that of the Arab tyrannies and the two-faced Turks – I found succour in the soldier’s song, also appropriated by football fans: “F*ck ‘em all! F*ck ‘em all! The long and the short and the tall . . .” 

I ended a pretty horrible day with an adapted rendition of “If you hate Leeds United, have a go” (to the tune of She’ll Be Coming Round the Mountain). 

The terrorists had “ha[d] a go”. Nine (do we have a minyan yet?) are on their way to their 72 (I prefer them younger myself) Virgins. And I, for one, am not going to mourn them or apologise. 

Yes, f*ck ‘em all!