Guest arti­cle by Crethi Plethi, a blog that cov­ers in-depth infor­ma­tion on Israel, Middle East Affairs and Islam. I chose to fea­ture this post because it has  sig­nif­i­cant impli­ca­tions for Israel, the West and all peo­ple who dream of one day liv­ing in a free and demo­c­ra­tic soci­ety.

In the after­math of the Gaza war, the friend­ship between Turkey and Israel is declin­ing more and more. It seems that Turkey, under the influ­ence of Erdogan’s Islamic Party (AK), has made the choice to join her Islamic allies. This implies also that Turkey is turn­ing away from West­ern democ­ra­cies and its West­ern val­ues, while still press­ing for mem­ber­ship with the Euro­pean Union. What it really means is that the Euro­pean Union is sub­vert­ing into a leftist-Islamic Union, where Turkey almost feels at home with its left-Islamic val­ues and anti-Israel bias. While Erdo­gan and his party (AK) is praised by west­ern lead­ers as an exam­ple for mod­er­ate Islam in a mod­ern Turkey, the real­ity is that Erdo­gan him­self objects to the phrases “mod­er­ate Islam” or “mod­er­ate Mus­lim.” (Here and here). “There’s only Islam,” he says.

This is no sur­prise, because Turkey has a long Islamic tra­di­tion and the Ottoman Empire ruled over what was all of North Africa, Mid­dle East, Per­sia and Europe to the gates of Vienna for more than 400 years. Let us not for­get that Turkey once was part of the great Byzan­tine Chris­t­ian Empire with Con­stan­tino­ple as its cap­i­tal. After the fall of the city, Sul­tan Mehmet turned the Hagia Sofia, at that time the largest cathe­dral in the world, into a Mosque. Yet it’s of much sig­nif­i­cance that Turkey’s polit­i­cal change is hap­pen­ing now, because Israel has lost an ally in the Islamic world, while Israel already has vir­tu­ally no allies at all in the Mid­dle East. Partly because Egypt (another frag­ile basis of friend­ship) crit­i­cizes Israel even more openly, despite the peace treaty Pres­i­dent Sadat (assas­si­nated by the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood in 1981) signed with Israel in 1979. The same goes for Jor­dan. When the cards are down they both will line up with their “Mus­lim friends” in order to get a piece of the cake (that is, Israel). And so is Turkey.

Simul­ta­ne­ously with the estrange­ment between Turkey and Israel, the Turks seek rap­proche­ment with Ahmadine­jad of Iran, who openly calls for a new Holo­caust. Tell me who your friends are, and I’ll tell you who you are. At the same time, Turkey deep­ens its ties with Syria, opens the bor­der between the two coun­tries and trains Lebanon’s Spe­cial Forces. Lebanon, who can­not be trusted, as long as Hezbol­lah con­tin­ues to play a major role in Israel’s north­ern neighbor’s pol­i­tics and mil­i­tary.

Let us not for­get that Turkey is play­ing a hyp­o­crit­i­cal game. It con­demned Israel for its Gaza War, while Turkey would never accept that their ter­ri­tory would be rock­eted for years with thou­sands of mis­siles from a hos­tile ter­ri­tory, and not show any mil­i­tary response. See how Turkey responds to the Kur­dish PKK fight­ers with mil­i­tary reprisals even into Iraqi Kur­dis­tan. Right or wrong, it denied the Kurds the right to have a home­land. They are called ter­ror­ists by Turkey, but is it not true that Kur­dis­tan has been (in var­i­ous forms) an inde­pen­dent coun­try and is it not a fact that the Kurds, over the cen­turies, had to deal with cen­sor­ship and repres­sion of their cul­ture and their lan­guage? Is his­tory, cul­ture and lan­guage of a peo­ple not a basis for a home­land in their own coun­try? (see Flags of Kur­dis­tan). Turkey also com­monly for­gets that they them­selves cre­ated a holo­caust by killing between 800,000 and 1.5 mil­lion Arme­ni­ans dur­ing (and after) World War I. And what is there to say about the Kur­dish civil­ian casu­al­ties through the ages until now? How dif­fi­cult this is for Turkey is shown by the fact that Turkey has never acknowl­edged the fact that they com­mit­ted war crimes against the Armen­ian peo­ple and their denial of the Kurds rights to have a home­land. This is also a stum­bling block for mem­ber­ship in the Euro­pean Union. And what about Cyprus? When will Turkey get out of Cyprus and leave the Cypriot peo­ple to rule their own coun­try again? As a minor­ity (Kurd, Armen­ian, Greek, Chris­t­ian or Jew) in Turkey you had bet­ter watch your step. No, Israel is bett­ter as a com­mon enemy than a dis­tant friend, Erdo­gan must have thought. This makes him a show­case in the Mus­lim world and opens the doors to strengthen the (eco­nomic) ties with his Islamic Allies.

This whole con­tro­versy since the Gaza war was fur­ther fueled by two Turk­ish TV soaps about the Gaza war and about the so-called Israeli ‘occu­pa­tion’. In these TV series, Israel and the Israeli army are described as bru­tal and ruth­less occu­piers. Israeli sol­diers shoot babies and chil­dren in many scenes. What effect this has on Turk­ish pub­lic opin­ion goes with­out say­ing, but even apart from the bias and lies, these images are very indoc­tri­nat­ing and insult­ing for Israel as well. There is much to do about the Israeli action dur­ing the Gaza war, but the role of Hamas remains silent, even in the Gold­stone Report of the UN. I think there is one impor­tant point neglected in the whole dis­cus­sion about Oper­a­tion Cast Lead: “The nature of the Israeli soldier.”

Israel is still a young state (founded in 1948) and con­sists mainly of Jew­ish immi­grants from all parts of the world. The Arab res­i­dents of Israel live in the most demo­c­ra­tic coun­try in the Mid­dle East. As for the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, the sit­u­a­tion is dif­fer­ent because of the bias of the Pales­tin­ian Author­ity and the ter­ror­ism of Hamas and other Islamic groups. This war is being waged by Islamic fun­da­men­tal­ists, and the ter­ror­ist net­works in these areas keep their grip on the sit­u­a­tion and aim at destruc­tion of the Israeli State. Note that this is not only directed towards Jews, but also against Pales­tin­ian Chris­tians, mod­er­ate Pales­tini­ans, other Mus­lim groups and the Fatah party of Abbas.

How­ever, the think­ing and actions of the Israeli sol­dier is fun­da­men­tally dif­fer­ent from their Mus­lim coun­ter­parts and or ter­ror­ists. See how the Basiji (a para­mil­i­tary move­ment in Iran) have helped Pres­i­dent Ahmadine­jad to sti­fle Demo­c­ra­tic calls for free­dom. The proof is clear: demon­stra­tors were beaten up by Basiji thugs, young men and women were arrested and raped in prison, many were killed. Arrested demon­stra­tors were sen­tenced to death. Only by vio­lence in the name of Islam could Ahmadine­jad break the demo­c­ra­tic opposition.

Have you heard Turkey cry out in favor of the reformists? Com­pare that with Israel and its mil­i­tary supremacy in the region. If Israel really had a geno­ci­dal char­ac­ter (as many Pales­tine sup­port­ers claim these days in com­pair­ing Israel with Nazi Ger­many), than they already would have put an end to the Israeli-Palestinian issue. Instead, Israel wants peace, but not at the cost of their own exis­tence. Mean­while Hamas, if they had the same mil­i­tary sta­tus and capa­bil­ity as Israel, would have attacked and killed, slaugh­tered, mur­dered, and raped all the Jews in Israel years ago. Israel “Juden­frei”. The dif­fer­ence between Hamas, Hezbol­lah, Syria, Iran and Israel is obvious.

The Arab cul­ture is steeped in Islam. It is more than just a reli­gion, it con­trols every aspect of daily life as well as pol­i­tics. Many of the so-called “mod­er­ate Mus­lims” resid­ing in the Nether­lands (or Europe) would be killed in Arab coun­tries just as Jews would be killed, if they would express their free­doms the same way as enjoyed in west­ern soci­eties or speak out against Islam. While they are able to call Islam a “reli­gion of peace” in the Nether­lands, they would be killed by the Basiji, by Hamas, by Hezbol­lah as apos­tates if they demanded more free­dom and rights for women, homo­sex­u­als or opposed Islam. We know how it fares with the rights of minori­ties (includ­ing Jews and Chris­tians), women and chil­dren, of mod­er­ate Mus­lims, homo­sex­u­als, Sun­nis in Shi­ite coun­tries (Iran) and Shi­ites in the Sunni coun­tries (Iraq). The mod­ern Mus­lim in the Nether­lands could not live in the Arab world under the Hamas, Hezbol­lah or strict Islamic law in Saudi Ara­bia or Tal­iban with­out adjust­ing to Shari’a law and Islamism. What weight gives this knowl­edge than to their words: “Islam is a reli­gion of peace.” If there are no Jews or Chris­tians (or West­ern troops) to be killed, they kill each other instead as apos­tates or ‘ene­mies of Islam.’

But not so the Israeli sol­dier. He thinks like a ran­dom Dutch, British or Amer­i­can sol­dier. He is edu­cated in Inter­na­tional Law and keeps in mind to the best of his capa­bil­ity, while enter­ing a war zone, the Geneva Con­ven­tion. Every Israeli sol­dier has also been edu­cated in the IDF’s own tra­di­tional eth­i­cal code – ruach tza­hal, “the spirit of the IDF.” (You can down­load a copy here). The vast major­ity of Jew­ish peo­ple in Israel have a dif­fer­ent pic­ture about the value of human life than the vast major­ity of Mus­lims in the (Arab) Islamic world. The for­mer Jew­ish immi­grants (from the West­ern democ­ra­cies) have taken many of the val­ues with them, based on Judeo-Christian val­ues, into Israel. Hamas thinks, acts and fights based on their Islamic tra­di­tions and beliefs, based on the Quran, the Prophet and Islam. (Read Hamas’s Char­ter.) We all know where this kind of reli­gious fanati­cism leads; human life does not count and even their own chil­dren are sac­ri­ficed in the name of Allah.

Hence, the gen­uine out­rage of the Israeli gov­ern­ment about the series on Turk­ish tele­vi­sion insin­u­at­ing that the Israeli sol­diers are delib­er­ate mur­der­ers of Pales­tin­ian chil­dren. Israel exer­cised more restraint in their attacks on Hamas mil­i­tants in the Gaza war then ever expe­ri­enced in the West. Israel takes the offi­cial posi­tion to stand by the Geneva Con­ven­tion, also in con­trast with Hamas. But Israel not only has to deal with an enemy like Hamas, who delib­er­ately fights and launches rocket attacks from civil­ian areas, and uses chil­dren as shields if nec­es­sary. Israel also has to deal with the hate cam­paign in the West­ern world and the United Nations, who ignores the dif­fi­cult posi­tion in which Israel finds itself. And that’s now also the case with Turkey. In show­ing their true face, they are no friends of Israel any­more. There’s more behind it than we think.

This is the real Turkey, Erdogan’s Turkey, an Islamic Turkey. This is the revival of the Islamic “Ottoman Empire”, who were respon­si­ble for the down­fall of the Byzan­tine Empire, the fall of Con­stan­tino­ple and the Islamic con­quest of eastern-Europe. Despite all efforts, how­ever mod­ern and sec­u­lar Turk­ish peo­ple may want to be, its Islamic back­ground and Erdogan’s Islamiza­tion of Turk­ish soci­ety and pol­i­tics dri­ves her away from the val­ues of the Euro­pean Union and Israel. Turkey as a sec­u­lar state is about to end. For many Turks, this is a bad dream as well.

Photo Credit for Hagia Sofia:  BEHROUZ MEHRI/AFP/Getty Images