Faux-tilla

flotilla

Little by little, the truth about the so-called humanitarian flotilla that attempted to run the Israeli naval blockade of Gaza is coming out.

It is now widely known–at least to those not so deeply invested in Israel hatred that they are immune to the obvious–that the flotilla was a provocation financed and orchestrated by the Turkish government and carried out by an extremist Turkish islamic group called the IHH.

As a just-released report by the Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center tells us:

“The IHH operatives’ preparations included handing out walkie-talkies as they boarded the ship, taking over the upper deck, setting up a situation room for communications, and a briefing given to theoperatives two hours before the confrontation by IHH head Bülent Yildirim, who was on board the ship and commanded his men.

The revelations also bring into question Turkey’s status as a member of NATO and therefore an “ally” of the United States. You may recall that the U.S. invasion of Iraq to depose Saddam Hussein was rendered much more difficult and dangerous by Turkey’s refusal to allow staging from their territory.

Some enterprising students in Israel have come up with a brilliant device for highlighting Turkey’s hypocrisy and duplicity in the whole flotilla affair.

Although most of the recent talk regarding flotillas has revolved around ships sailing toward Gaza, at least two plans have emerged for “reverse flotillas” – from Israel toward Turkey – to highlight what organizers have labeled the Turks’ “shameless hypocrisy” in their criticisms of the Jewish state:

The most ambitious of the two plans has been devised by members of Israel’s National Student Union, who this week announced their intention to set sail toward Turkey, in an effort to bring humanitarian aid to the “oppressed people of Turkish Kurdistan” and to members of the “Turkish Armenian minority.”

This is delicious. The Turks have been oppressing their Kurdish minority for decades. The Eastern end of Turkey was formerly Kurdistan and therefore, by the standards of Helen Thomas and other Israel-bashers, it is occupied territory. Of course the Turks have been much more brutal to minorities under their rule than than the democratic and civilized Israelis would ever contemplate.

The Turks have worked hard to erase the historical memory of their genocidal actions against ethnic Armenians in the early years of the 20th Century. If you’re not acquainted with that horror, you can get an overview here.