Turkey Still Getting away with Murder -- The Next Iran?

Turkey in World War I carried out mass murder of Armenians who were numerous, even in the majority, in several areas of what is now the Turkish Republic. What is less known is that hundreds of thousands of ethnic Greeks and Assyrians --both Christian peoples-- were also slaughtered and driven from their homes during that war. After the war, when the new regime of Kemal Ataturk had taken over from the Ottoman Empire which --under the leadership of the so-called Young Turks, the Committtee for Unity and Progress -- had carried out genocide during the war, the new regime too carried out genocide and ethnic cleansing. For this service to Islam, so it was seen in Turkey at the time, Ataturk was given the title of Ghazi, glorious victor in jihad, in a holy war.* These post-war massacres and expulsions took place mainly in 1922, as from Smyrna. Before WW I, millions of non-Muslims who were not Turks lived in what was then called Asia Minor, or Anatolia or Turkey in Asia. By 1923, this large population was almost all gone. The Armenians were almost totally gone while some tens of thousands of ethnic Greeks still lived in Constantinople, known today under its Turkish name, Istanbul, and thousands of Assyrians kept on living in the southeast.

Turkey never had to pay for its crimes during WW I and the 1920s. It was believed to contain oil, petroleum, and for that reason or others, it was thought best not to bother or harass the Turks with accusations or punishments for their crimes. And when Ataturk imposed or tried to impose some secularizing reforms later in the 1920s, his position became firm in most Western public opinion. He was an admired figure in the West, including the USA. Turkey as such was admired too [a popular American song around 1950 featured the line: It's nobody's business but the Turks']. His successors in the late 1930s and in the 1940s were wise enough to keep out of WW II, although pro-German sentiment was strong. Hence, the new, supposedly secular Turkey was accepted into NATO in 1952 at the same time as Greece. Yet old habits die hard. In 1955, while both Turkey and Greece belonged to NATO, tens of thousands of ethnic Greeks were driven out of Istanbul and taken in by Greece.** Here we had a NATO member state performing ethnic cleansing on people who shared ethnicidentity with the people of another NATO member state. And NATO did nothing about it. Indeed, the Turks got away with murder both figuratively and literally.

With the rise to power of Rejep Tayyip Erdogan in late 2002, Islamist, jihadist inclinations were once again overt in the Turkish Republic. Ambitions of Ottoman imperial revival, called neo-Ottomanism, were revived and Erdogan's Turkey took a special interest in the Islamist, jihadist Hamas movement that took over the Gaza Strip in 2007. In 2010 he joined forces with Western partisans of Hamas and the Arab anti-Israel cause, including the American feminine outfit called Code Pink. They organized a so-called "Free Gaza" convoy of seven boats to supposedly bring needed goods to Gaza kept out by Israel's partial blockade of Hamas-ruled Gaza. This was a pretense for a  pro-Hamas undertaking. The supposedly needed goods in Gaza carried by the convoy included medications near to or past their expiration dates and assorted equipment, much of it what some Turkish businesses were willing to get rid of. The largest of the seven boats was a Turkish ferry that customarily crossed the Turkish straits.

As the convoy approached the coast of Gaza, Israel's navy warned it not to go further. Since the warning was not heeded, Israeli commandos landed from a helicopter on the ferry boat, the Mavi Marmara. But they were not prepared for the reception they got from the scores of jihadis on the craft, Turks and others. They were attacked with knives and clubs and a few guns. When more commandos got involved, the jihadis were overcome and ten Turkish jihadis were dead, one of them a dual Turkish-US citizen, Although the jihadis were violating a legitimate blockade, President Obama acted and spoke as it were Israel doing wrong. The story of the convoy and Obama's interference is a long, detailed one that will be skipped for now.

In following years, Turkey has claimed ownership of Greek territorial waters and successfully interfered in oil and gas exploration in those waters by Italian companies working with the Greeks. Likewise, Turkey has interfered in oil and gas exploration in Cypriot territorial waters, whereas it had already occupied northern Cyprus in 1974. About a month or so ago, Turkish warships chased away from Cypriot waters an Israeli scientific research ship working in cooperation with the Greek Cypriot Republic of Cyprus authorities.

Again, Turkey, falsely seen as a democratic Western country, has been getting away with murder. But  its offenses have gotten much less attention in the American press than they deserved. The commentator Yohanan Visser argues that Turkey is the next Iran. Here is part of his article bringing the story up to date:

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF), for the first time ever, added Turkey to the list of security threats in the annual national security assessment.
At the same time the IDF doesn’t see a confrontation with the Turkish army in 2020.
The addition of Turkey - a country that maintains diplomatic relations with Israel and once was an ally of the Jewish state - to the list of security threats is related to the bellicose actions by Turkish dictator Recep Tayyip Erdogan in the Middle East the IDF said in the assessment.
Erdogan routinely denounces Israel for its policies toward the Palestinian Arabs and uses to compare [= often compares] the country to Nazi-Germany while also threatening Israel over a plan to build a pipeline in the Mediterranean Sea that would bring Israeli gas from the Leviathan gas field to Europe.
The Turkish leader last month signed a memorandum with Libya about the linking of their so-called economic zones in the Mediterranean Sea.
The deal that was clearly meant to prevent Israel, Greece and Cyprus from realizing their plan for the construction of the pipeline and to claim the expected gas reserves in these zones.
"Other international actors cannot conduct exploration activities in the areas marked in the Turkish-Libyan memorandum. Greek Cypriots, Egypt, Greece and Israel cannot establish a natural gas transmission line without Turkey's consent," Erdogan said after Israel signed the gas pipe deal with Greece and Cyprus.
The Turkish Foreign Ministry later summoned the Israeli ambassador in Ankara to tell him that the construction of the gas pipeline required Turkey’s approval and that there was no need for the pipe since there is already a similar pipe line from Azerbaijan to Turkey and from there to Europe. [Israel National News, 15 January 2020]

It may be needless to say, but if anyone is not aware, there is no legal substance to Turkey's claim to ownership of the maritime territory of the eastern Mediterranean or to hegemony over it. But apparently NATO is still letting Turkey, now under the Islamist tyrant Erdogan, get away with murder.

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References
For more info on the expulsions of 1922-23, see:
Ernest Hemingway, "On the Quai at Smyrna" and the epigraph to Chapter II, both in the collection In Our Time
George Horton, The Blight of Asia
Marjorie Housepian, The Smyrna Affair

** For info on the pogroms and expulsion of the ethnic Greeks from Istanbul [Constantinople] in 1955:
Called Eylul Olaylari in Turkish, these pogroms took place on 6-7 September 1955, and were staged by the government of Adnan Menderes.
Pappas Post [here]
wikipedia in English [here]
wikipedia in Hebrew [here]
Alfred de Zayas, the events according to international law [here]
Kathimerini [newspaper] [here]
youtube, still photos from the events [here]
Aykan Erdemir in Politico.eu [here]
Greek Reporter [here]
European Journal of Turkish Studies [here]
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* On Ataturk's victories as Islamic victories & on the title of Ghazi, see:
Albert Avakian, "Pouvoir et Islam en Turquie  de 1919 a` 1960," Revue d'Histoire de la deuxie`me Guerre Mondiale et des Conflits Contemporains (vol 35, no. 137; 1985), pp90-91
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Previous posts on Emet m'Tsiyon on modern Greek-Turkish events & the indulgent Western policy towards Turkey
http://ziontruth.blogspot.com/2011/02/more-on-us-pro-islam-pro-arab-policy.html

http://ziontruth.blogspot.com/2007/10/gem-of-absurdity-from-walt-mearsheimer.html
http://ziontruth.blogspot.com/2010/06/euro-hypocrites-forget-turkish-mass.html

http://ziontruth.blogspot.com/2018/01/mahmoud-abbas-tells-european-union-that.html
http://ziontruth.blogspot.com/2005/10/bolsheviks-for-jihad-genocide-stalins.html

Mahmoud Abbas Tells European Union that He Wants All of Israel, including west of the Green Line

“We are keen on continuing the way of negotiations,” Abbas said. “We are determined to reunite our people and our land.” [here & here emph. added]

The above is what Mahmoud Abbas told Federica Mogherini, High Commissioner for Foreign Affairs of the European Union and the foreign ministers of the EU states on Monday this week [1-22-2018 & here] in Brussels.

This phrase "to reunite our people and our land" seems to be a euphemism for the Arabs' taking all of the State of Israel including the land that Israel held between 1948 and 1967. In other words, it is a masked refusal to accept Israel in any borders. Now, Abbas and the PLO as a whole and Hamas and the other Palestinian Arab terrorist and political groups believe that all of the Land of Israel belongs to them as well as to Islam. To confirm that consider the word "reunite." If something has to be reunited, that means it was once united but is no longer. They know that they already control part of "palestine" [= the Land of Israel roughly speaking]. And what they don't control must be reunited with what they already control, Abbas implies.
And reuniting "our people" means bringing the dispersed Palestinian Arabs living in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and elsewhere with the status of refugees, back together in one state comprising the whole land of Israel, probably to be ruled by the Fatah and other factions that run the zones of Judea-Samaria now under PA/PLO rule.

The PLO Charter by the way speaks of the whole land that they call "palestine" needing to be "liberated"  from Israel. Likewise the PLO's Declaration of a State of Palestine of November 1988. These were obviously  rejections of peace. But maybe Mogherini and her staff are too ignorant or too stupid or too insensitive to the subtle Arab use of rhetoric to understand Abbas' real meaning. If they did understand Abbas' meaning would they have encouraged him and said they support him on the Jerusalem issue? She said:

“I want to reassure President Abbas of the firm commitment of the European Union to the two-state solution with Jerusalem as the shared capital of the two states,” Mogherini said during the meeting. [here & here]                                        

Let's leave aside the stupidity and impracticality of the notion of one city as the shared capital of two states. Did Mogherini understand that Abbas had just told her that he does NOT support the two-state solution, that he and those he represents are claiming the whole country?

Speaking of refugees, it is curious that the so-called "international community" --no doubt Mogherini is part of it-- seems to forget what happened in other situations where there were refugees on an ethnic basis. How is it that precisely the Europeans forgot that many Greeks were driven out of Anatolia, Turkey of today, and almost nobody in Europe but the Greeks themselves care about Greek rights and claims to the Smyrna [now Izmir] region from which most or nearly all Greeks were driven out? The total number of Greeks driven out is estimated at more than 1,100,000 while another 600,000 to one million were slaughtered in the period of 1914 to 1922 [some researchers put the numbers higher or lower]. Greece accepted more than one million refugees in the 1922-23 period and the Norwegian Fridtjof Nansen negotiated an agreement between both Greece and Turkey to accept the principle of population exchange rather than go to war. As part of this agreement, Turkey agreed to let Greece expel some 400,000 Muslims living in northeastern Greece, Thrace, and take them in on Turkish territory. This was in exchange for the 1,200,000 or 1,500,000 Greeks that Ataturk and his army had already driven out of Anatolia, what is now Turkey.

For his services in the cause of mutual ethnic cleansing, Nansen received the Nobel Peace Prize. But that was not the end of Turkish-perpetrated ethnic cleansing. In 1955, while both Turkey and Greece were members of NATO, the Turkish government incited a pogrom in Istanbul, previously Constantinople (a Greek-speaking city before the Turkish conquest of 1453), that ended with the expulsion by the mob of tens of thousands of ethnically Greek Turkish citizens. The Turks got away with it. Somehow NATO let them get away with it.

How is it that the Europeans, including the wonderful folk at EU headquarters in Brussels, Mogherini and her staff, have forgotten that once upon  a time, a man got a Nobel Peace Prize for promoting the principle of population exchange?
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For more info on the expulsions of 1922-23, see:
Ernest Hemingway, "On the Quai at Smyrna" and the epigraph to Chapter II, both in the collection In Our Time
George Horton, The Blight of Asia
Marjorie Housepian, The Smyrna Affair
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What does Fatah, Abbas' faction, mean by "our land"?
It seems that they mean the whole country from the river to the sea, from the Jordan to the Med.
See here.
More EU hypocrisy related to covering up for Abbas [here], for his claims on the reasons for the Shoah.
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Other relevant articles:
Fiamma Nirenstein on Abbas' speech in Ramallah on 1-14-2018 [Italiano qui -English  here]

More on the US pro-Islam, pro-Arab Policy

US policy in the Middle East in the 20th century followed in the footsteps of British Middle Eastern policy, and can be seen as a continuation of it. It was no accident that the British upper crust called the American elite "our American cousins." Indeed, this was often true in a literal sense as many titled Britishers married rich American men and women. Therefore, cousins were found on both sides of the Atlantic.

British policy announced a pro-Islamic turn in 1920 when the Supreme Command of the WW One allies, the Entente powers, ordered the Greek army to stop advancing in Anatolia, and thereby to stop defeating the Turkish army. There is reason to believe that Britain was the leading power pushing for the order to the Greeks to stop. In that same year, British officers in Jerusalem --in what was then officially called Occupied Enemy Territory Administration-South-- encouraged Haj Amin el-Husseini to instigate anti-Jewish riots in order to discourage Great Power approval of the Jewish National Home principle at the San Remo Conference. This British encouragement for Arab violence against Jews in Israel was not at that time the official policy out of London but seems to have been a local initiative of British officers in the country, some or all of whom had been influenced by the notorious Tsarist forgery/plagiarism, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Later, the London policy towards the Jewish National Home followed the local initiative and became hostile to the Jews, encouraging Arab hostility to Jews in the country. In other words, the Arabs became a tool of London for its own anti-Jewish hostility.

Back in Anatolia, in 1922, naval ships of the UK, US and other Western Great Powers watched as Ataturk's new Turkish army drove the Greeks of Anatolia and Smyrna into the sea at the Smyrna port, although Greek boats of all sorts were allowed to pick up refugees. Meanwhile, the powers did not oppose renewed massacres of Armenians in the city [see George Horton, Marjorie Housepian]. The new revolutionary Soviet Union also sided with the Turks in those years, thereby taking the same stance as the Western capitalist powers.

In other parts of the British Empire, the British encouraged Muslims against non-Muslims, and Arabs against non-Arab Muslims. In India, the UK encouraged Muslim demands for a separate state ["pakistan", which had never existed before] against the aspiration of the Indian National Congress for a unified India. In the former Ottoman Empire, the UK saw to it that the vilayet [province] of Mosul, inhabited not by Arabs but by Kurdish Muslims , Assyrian Christians, Jews and smaller ethno-religious groups, be transferred to the new, British-sponsored Kingdom of Iraq and taken away from the new Turkish Republic. Some say that this was because oil had been discovered in and around the city of Mosul, which would be more under British influence as a part of Iraq --then under a British mandate-- than as a part of Turkey. In Iraq, the British winked at the massacre of thousands of Assyrians in 1933 at the hands of the Iraqi Arab army.

During WW2, the UK violated its mandate to foster development of the Jewish National Home by severely limiting the number of Jews to be allowed to immigrate into the Jewish National Home when the Jews most needed a home. This was the notorious 1939 White Paper policy. More generally, UK foreign minister Anthony Eden came out in support of pan-Arab nationalism by calling for formation of what became the Arab League. Eden's speech came on 29 May 1941, just three days before the notorious pro-Nazi pogrom against Jews in Baghdad [1 & 2 June 1941]. Hence, it would have been only natural for Eden to keep British troops outside Baghdad at that time from intervening to stop the massacre of the Jews. Be that as it may, British troops there at that time did not intervene.

When the Jewish underground in Israel was fighting for independence and to have the UK let Jewish Holocaust survivors into the country, the UK continued to refuse to honor its commitments under the mandate. Although Pres. Truman had called for 100,000 Jewish Holocaust survivors to be allowed into Israel by the UK in 1946, by 1947 the US State Dept and other USGovt agencies were encouraging the Arab war effort against the as yet unborn Israel. Here the US slipped into the role of continuing the British anti-Jewish, pro-Arab, pro-Muslim policy.
The UK in Israel supported Arab forces against the Jews, fighting the Jews directly in Yafo [Jaffa] and in Jerusalem.

In 1952, British and US operatives encouraged and helped Nasser and his pro-Hitlerite "Free Officers" to overthrow the parliamentary monarchy of King Farouq. Mubarak belonged to the regime put in place by Nasser and the "Free Officers" in 1952. In that year, American mainstream publications celebrated the fall of King Farouq by explaining that the rebels were against Farouq's "corruption." In Iraq, in the 1960s and 1970s, the USA supported the Arab national socialist Ba`ath Party, the crowning glory of which was Saddam Hussein. After Israeli aircraft had destroyed the Iraqi Osirak atomic development facility [1981], the US administration wanted to denounce Israel for this defensive action, although it did not because public opinion was with Israel. The US also formally "recognized" the PLO in November 1988, although high level contacts with the PLO had gone on for decades.

In early 1979, the Carter Administration --its foreign policy directed by the Sorcerer's Apprentice, Zbigniew Brzezinski-- helped the Islamist fanatic Ayatollah Khomeini, take over Iran. Was Zbig unaware of Khomeini's fanaticism and bigotry? It was no secret to specialists on Iran at that time where Khomeini stood. Likewise, James Clapper, Obama's director of national intelligence [Intelligence?], knows where the Muslim Brotherhood stands and pretended it was something else. Interestingly, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter's national insecurity advisor has also been an advisor to Obama. Zbig's grand theory was and --apparently-- still is to build up Islamic fanaticism. No doubt in pursuit of this purpose, Obama sent Zbig to Damascus in February 2008, months before his election. Zbig was probably supposed to tell Junior Assad that if Obama were elected, then the Assads would have a friend in the White House. The fact that Damascus and Assad's very own mouth are world centers of Judeophobic agitprop and hate indoctrination, did not deter either Zbig or Obama.

These facts among others are the background to Obama administration efforts to put the Muslim Brotherhood in power in Egypt. I think that the disciples of Zbig succeeded all too well in Iran. We don't need another Khomeini, this time in Egypt. But stopping Obama's goal from being realized needs constant criticism of Obama for the dangerous course that he is taking.

Sources
Mitchell Bard, The Arab Lobby (New York: Harper Collins 2010) [a lengthy excerpt is found here]
Isaiah Friedman, British Pan-Arab Policy, 1915-1922 (2009) [see synopsis here & here]
Martin Gilbert, Exile and Return (London 1978)
George Horton, The Blight of Asia [Horton was the US consul in Smyrna in 1922]
Marjorie Housepian, The Smyrna Affair
Lord Kinross, Ataturk; A Biography of Mustafa Kemal (1965)

Richard Meinertzhagen, Middle East Diary
Jacques de Morgan, The History of the Armenian People (Boston: Hairenik Press 1918)
Horace Samuel, Revolt by Leave (London)
E K Sarkisian & R G Sahakian, Vital Issues in Modern Armenian History (Watertown, MA: Armenian Studies 1965)
Shlomo Slonim, "The 1948 American Embargo on Arms to Palestine," Political Science Quarterly, (Fall 1979)
Bernard Wasserstein, Britain and the Jews of Europe, 1939-1945.
_ _ _ _ _ _. The British in Palestine: The Mandatory Government and the Arab-Jewish Conflict 1917-1929. (British Historical Society)
Meir Zamir [see several online articles by Zamir on British policy in the 1944 to 1948 period in HaArets & Jerusalem Post]
William Ziff, The Rape of Palestine

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One Jerusalem on the changes in Egypt [includes link to Victor David Hanson].
2-24-2011 At least one mainstream journalist, Arnaud de Borchgrave, talks common sense about the Muslim Brotherhood. If he could only get the ears of Obama, Hilary, James Clapper, and the other fantasy mongers in the Administration [here]
Another MSM journalist, Jeffrey Goldberg, also gives helpful info about the MB's hatred of Jews, specifically Qaradawi's explanation that Muslim hatred of Jews is rooted in Islam and that Muslims must kill all Jews before Judgment Day can come [here]. For those unfamiliar with Islamic lore, this article demonstrates that hatred for Israel is rooted in Islam's hatred for Jews and has nothing especially to do with "settlements" or "occupation."