How is Israel the guilty party?

Published 3:16 pm Friday, June 25, 2010

We may not live in an Islamic world — yet — but we do live with an Islamic worldview. Witness the uniformly Islamicized consensus that met Israel’s successful if costly defense of its Gaza blockade.

The blockade, by the way, is a defensive measure that Israel devised after Hamas terrorists were elected to govern Israel-ceded Gaza in 2005 and — no surprise to any student of jihad — decided to continue their charter-commanded war on Israel, raining down nearly 10,000 rockets onto Israeli civilians.

The rocketing, of course, was OK with the Islamicized consensus. What wasn’t OK happened on the night of May 31 when Israeli commandos, lightly armed with paintball guns and emergency sidearms, unexpectedly battled aboard the Mavi Marmara against trained fighters with ties to the Turkish government, specifically to the ruling AKP party of Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan, to maintain Israel’s lawful blockade.

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These hostile forces were organized by the Turkish terror-linked organization known as IHH (which purchased the boat from an AKP entity). They were armed with knives, axes, clubs, Molotov cocktails and more, and they formed a militant cadre barely camouflaged by the “humanitarian cargo” (including night vision goggles, bulletproof vests and nearly a million euros) and other “peace activists,” among whom were Muslim Brothers, Hamas partisans (at least one Hamas operative was later arrested), and members of the Turkish supremacist group BBP. At least five “passengers” publicly expressed their wish to become “shahids,” or Islamic martyrs. Three got their wish in the fighting that ensued after the ship refused to yield to the Israeli Navy. Some of the Israeli blockade-defenders were wounded, a few seriously; nine jihadist blockade-runners were killed.

An Islamicized world wrath came down on Israel. And with such force as to obliterate what remnants of the Western system — logic, morality, history – somehow still existed. Simultaneous to the instant apotheosis of blockade-running jihadis into ocean-going pacifists came an avalanche of rage so violent as to reverse the gravitational pull of global politics entirely. Or so it seems.

Thus, Islamicized international pressure weighs on Israel’s Netanyahu to justify, to apologize — and not Turkey’s Erdogan, who supports the jihadist outlaws. Outrage boils over at the defense of a lawful blockade to protect civilians from terrorist attack, and not at the Hamas attackers, or at the Turks and others who aid them — and, again, with the Turkish head of state’s support. While Israelis have reason to re-examine the efficiency of their strategy to maintain the blockade, the only so-called “impartial” international investigation required is not, as demanded, into Israel’s line of defense, but rather into Turkey’s destabilizing culpability in the aggression.

Pure and simple, this was an act of jihadist provocation, even an act of war. If the Western system were still functional, it would be Turkey called to account in the international arena, not Israel; it would be Turkey pressured to unmask itself as a fomenter of global jihad — not Israel for defending itself against it.

If.

But the Western system no longer functions; it takes its lead from “peace activists.” And so — and this is the tragedy of Western collapse — it is Turkey that the West appeases. There is no logic to this; there is fear. There’s no morality here; only dhimmitude. History, meanwhile, is ignored. We hide from the gravity of resurgent jihad in the Ottoman land of the last caliphate, deaf to the declarations of cultural and religious war that Erdogan, for one, has always made, from the 1970s, when he engaged in anti-Semitic agitprop with a play he wrote, directed and acted in known as “Mas-kom-Ya,” an acronym for Mason, komunist (communist), and Yahudi (Jew); to the 1990s, when he invoked jihad with the lines, “the mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets our bayonets and the faithful our soldiers”; to today, as he exhorts Turks in Europe to cultural conquest, declaring, “Assimilation is a crime against humanity.”

Sounds like the call of the marauder to me. But the United States, pondering “Who lost Turkey?” plugs its ears and scapegoats Israel, or, just as fantastic, blames Europe for a vestigial self-preservation instinct that prevents it from committing demographic suicide by admitting 78 million Muslims into the union.

Anything for “peace.”

(Diana West is the author of “The Death of the Grown-up: How America’s Arrested Development Is Bringing Down Western Civilization,” and blogs at dianawest.net. She can be contacted via dianawest@verizon.net.)