Tuesday, July 29, 2014
Gaza Flotilla Terrorists Set Sail Again
July 29, 2014 by 16 Comments
Arnold
Ahlert is a former NY Post op-ed columnist currently contributing to
JewishWorldReview.com, HumanEvents.com and CanadaFreePress.com. He may
be reached at atahlert@comcast.net.
Apparently
more than willing to pour gasoline on an already raging fire, an
anti-Israeli Turkish relief organization, IHH Humanitarian Relief
Foundation, is organizing a “Freedom Flotilla II” to bring
“humanitarian” supplies to the Gaza strip. The IHH is the organization
responsible for the last attempt to break the Israeli naval blockade of
Gaza in a self-inflicted disaster that saw nine Hamas-affiliated
terrorists killed by Israeli commandos, who were attacked when they attempted to board the Mavi Marmara. IHH chairman Bulent Yildrim warns that this time, the flotilla will be accompanied by Turkish Navy vessels to “protect us from any potential attack.”
As of now, no firm date has been set for this
latest effort to incite a violent confrontation with the Jewish State,
but Yildrim insists that once the necessary permit from the authorities
in Ankara is approved, the activists will set sail. Yildrim is inviting
activists who participated in the 2010 trip to join the cause. The
military component is based on a demand by Yildrim that the Turkish
government provide protection for its own citizens.
The move reflects the increasing
deterioration of Turkish-Israeli relations, already severely damaged by
the 2010 attempt by the Freedom Flotilla I to challenge Israel’s right
to block weaponry from entering the Gaza strip.
After the incident aboard the Mavi Marmara, a 2011 UN report by
the Palmer Commission concluded Israel was within its legal rights to
form the blockade. The report further noted that the naval blockade “was
imposed as a legitimate security measure in order to prevent weapons
from entering Gaza by sea and its implementation complied with the
requirements of international law,” that “the flotilla acted recklessly
in attempting to breach the naval blockade,” and that there were
“serious questions about the conduct, true nature and objectives of the
flotilla organizers, particularly IHH.”
And while the report also concluded that
Israel’s boarding of the Mavi Marmara was “excessive and unreasonable,”
it noted that “Israeli Defense Forces personnel faced significant,
organized and violent resistance from a group of passengers when they
boarded the Mavi Marmara requiring them to use force for their own
protection.” The panel further recommended that those involved “should
consult directly and make every effort to avoid a repetition of the
incident.”
That isn’t likely to happen. After the incident and subsequent report, Turkey ejected Israel’s
ambassador and recalled its own, but refrained from severing economic
ties. But on July 19, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan accused Israel
of “barbarism that surpasses Hitler,” regarding its military incursion
into Gaza. He further insisted the Jewish State was guilty of using
“disproportionate force” that has “derailed efforts to normalize
Turkish-Israeli ties,” according to the Associated Press. Erdogan is
running for the presidency in elections that will be held next month.
In an interview with The Jerusalem Post,
Harold Rhode, a senior fellow at the New-York-based Gatestone Institute
and a former adviser on Islamic affairs in the office of the American
secretary of defense, insisted that the “real issue” in the current
conflict is the effort by Turkey and Qatar to throw their support behind
the Muslim Brotherhood and its spawn, Hamas. “Erdogan has been
associated with the Muslim Brotherhood long before he was prime
minister,” Rhode said further explaining that Erdogan “is doing whatever
he can to help Hamas.”
One could make the case the Obama administration is doing the same thing. According to the Times of Israel that nation’s unanimous rejection of
Secretary of State John Kerry’s cease fire plan was so ferocious, it
was kept quiet in order to avoid “an open diplomatic confrontation with
the United States.”
Kerry followed up that visit with one to
Paris, where he talked with representatives of none other than Qatar and
Turkey, while representatives from Israel, the PLO and Egypt remained
uninvited to the table. That would be the same Qatar and Turkey that
Israel TV Channel 2’s Middle East analyst Ehud Ya’ari referred to as
“Hamas’s lawyers,” and the same nation of Qatar that signed an $11
billion arms deal with
the Obama administration that will provide them with Apache attack
helicopters, as well as Patriot and Javelin air-defense systems.
Last Friday, Deputy State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf insisted Kerry’s
regular contact with Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu was
necessary because Davutoğlu “is a key player in the region and has some
leverage he can bring to bear on the situation. They have a relationship
with Hamas. I mean, they can, you know, have conversations that we
can’t.”
What conversations are those? On Twitter,
Davutoğlu stated that he would talk to “Palestinian parties with the aim
of ensuring that merciless attacks targeting our Palestinian brothers
come to an immediate end.”
Two days later, the Obama administration disputed the
idea that Kerry was pushing a Gaza cease fire plan promoted by Qatar
and Turkey. An administration spokesman also disputed the notion that
Kerry’s rejected plan was a formal proposal, characterizing it as a
draft framework presented for Israeli input and commentary.
President Obama demonstrated an equal amount
of contempt for the realities of an Israeli nation that must not only
deal with a missile threat exacerbated by a new secret arms deal between Hamas and North Korea, but a system of tunnels so
extensive and sophisticated, they represent an existential threat to
Israel’s survival. In a phone call to Netanyahu, Obama called for “an
immediate,
unconditional humanitarian ceasefire that ends hostilities
now and leads to a permanent cessation of hostilities.” The White House
further revealed that the president “reiterated the United States’
serious and growing concern about the rising number of Palestinian
civilian deaths and the loss of Israeli lives, as well as the worsening
humanitarian situation in Gaza.”
In other words, the Obama administration
couldn’t care less about leaving Israel completely vulnerable to a
tunnel system that could render the Iron Dome, the nation’s most
effective defensive weapon, obsolete. On Monday, a senior IDF official
claimed Israel was in possession of all the attack tunnels, but that contention was disputed by Hamas spokesman Mushir al-Masri who claimed Israel has reached “only a fraction” of them. “We are convinced that our people are on the brink of liberation,” Masri added.
It is a liberation that IHH intends to
facilitate with the possible aid of the Turkish government—and perhaps
Obama’s blessing as well. Among the Kerry proposals that reportedly
“horrified” the Israeli Cabinet, aside from the idea that Israel accept
Hamas’s demands for the opening of border crossings into Gaza, and the
opening of a post-war funding channel for Hamas (while the vast network of terror tunnels with exits located in Israel was ignored) was the construction of a Gazan seaport.
The maliciousness of such an idea cannot be overstated. When Israel unilaterally ceded Gaza to the Palestinians in 2005, it signed an Agreement on Movement and Access with the Palestinian Authority. It gave the Palestinians full
control over their borders, permitting imports and exports, and
included an approval for building a seaport. It was only after Hamas
launch a murderous coup against the PLO in 2007 that Israel—as well as
Egypt–reimposed border restrictions aimed at keeping the U.S.-designated terrorist
group from arming itself. The naval blockade was reinstated, and its
necessity was made evident as recently as last March. That’s when
Israel seized a
ship carrying M-302 surface-to-surface missiles that were flown to Iran
from Syria before being loaded aboard the ship headed for Gaza. At the
time the IDF revealed this was not the first arms-smuggling ship it had
intercepted, but one “distinguished by the lethality and quality of its
cargo.”
That reality apparently did nothing to
dissuade the Obama administration. During a joint appearance with Kerry
last week, Khalid bin Mohamed al-Attiyah of Qatar insisted Gaza
“deserves” its own seaport, even “if it’s under international
supervision.” The utter impotency of such supervision was laid bare on
July 18, when the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine
Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) discovered 20
Hamas-owned missiles in one of their very own Gazan schools—and
returned them to Hamas two days later. Israel’s Ambassador to the UN Ron
Prosor illuminated the reality of international monitoring, at least
with regard to Israel. “For years, we told you about the thousands of
rockets that Hamas was smuggling into Gaza,” he said. “We were met with
silence. Time and again we called on the international community to
condemn the rocket fire and we were met with silence.”
The silence surrounding the true nature of
IHH is also deafening. Despite its self-promotion as solely a
humanitarian organization, Carnegie Endowment analyst Henri Barkey illuminated its
greater agenda. “It’s an Islamist organization as it has been deeply
involved with Hamas for some time,” he explained. Barkey’s contention
echoed a 2006 report by
the Danish Institute for International Studies characterizing IHH as
one of many “charitable front groups that provide support to al Qaeda”
and the global jihad. France’s former top counterterrorism judge,
Jean-Louis Bruguiere, noted that
his own investigation of IHH in the 1990s revealed they “were basically
helping al-Qaida when bin Laden started to want to target U.S. soil,”
he said.
Even more important, information acquired in
2011 by Israel’s Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information
Center (ITIC) revealed that Erdogan actively supported the first
flotilla. “Without (IHH’s) support, he would not have been elected prime
minister,” the ITIC report declared, further noting that a fourth of
senior IHH staff members had served, or were serving, in senior position
in Erdogan’s AKP political party.
Prior to the first flotilla’s interception by Israel, Yildrim made his organization’s genuine intentions clear, vowing to “break
the siege,” adding if Jerusalem “will be in Muslim hands, the whole
world will to be in Muslim hands…. The present rulers of Jerusalem are
the Jews, the Zionists. All the suffering and the evil in the world
today is a result of that. Therefore Jerusalem must be liberated.”
This is the reality behind the first attempt
to break the Israeli blockade. If the Turkish Navy supports Freedom
Flotilla II, war between Israel and Turkey becomes a real possibility.
If such hostilities come to pass, one is left to wonder which side the
Obama administration will support. Demanding that Israel cease
hostilities even as Hamas retains the capability to threaten the Jewish
State’s existence—and even after Israel unilaterally agreed to five cease fires Hamas either rejected or violated—sends a troubling message.
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