No One Cares About Gaza

You might think that with all the wailing and gnashing of teeth over Gaza lately, the Palestinian suffering would move people like no other cause in the world, but if so, you would be wrong. Few activists, journalists, or diplomats genuinely seem to care what those people are going through.

Consider this: Hamas, not Israel, refuses to allow donated food and medicine in. If it's "collective punishment" when Israel restricts certain items, what should we call it when Hamas refuses all of the items? Few seem to have given it any thought. So far I haven't found a single person indignant about the Israeli blockade who has said or written a word about Hamas refusing to allow donated goods into the territory. Even those who actually donated and delivered the items are quiet about it.

And consider what Palestinian journalist Khaled Abu Toameh wrote at the Hudson New York website on Tuesday. He describes how the Hamas raid on several non-governmental and human-rights organization offices recently was largely ignored by the media, how Hamas banned municipal elections, how hundreds have been arrested for protesting its draconian rule, and how dozens of opposition leaders have been jailed or killed since the terrorist army seized power. "Under Hamas," he writes, "the Gaza Strip is being transformed into a fundamentalist Islamic entity resembling the regimes of the Ayatollahs in Iran and the Taliban in Afghanistan."

Read the rest in Commentary Magazine.

The Middle East is Now Even More Complicated

I'm still not exactly sure what's going on inside Turkey, but I'm pretty sure Tony Badran at NOW Lebanon is right about what its new foreign policy means for the Eastern Mediterranean.

Populism in the Arab world is second nature and despite its disastrous track record, it never seems to go out of fashion. Non-Arab regional players like Iran have understood this and have cynically used populism to their advantage. And so, when Turkey’s prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, declared recently that Gaza “is a historical cause for us,” one could be forgiven for snickering.

[...]

The appeal of sectarianism also puts the lie to Arab nationalism’s supposed secularism. As Turkey seeks to paint itself as Hamas’ patron, some Arab states have reasoned that this represents a Sunni counterweight to Iran’s patronage of the Islamist group.

But while such transnationalism finds assets in the fractured Levant, it creates problems for established states, namely Egypt, bordering Gaza, where the recent political developments played out. As much as Israel, Egypt finds itself a target of this Turkish resurgence -- not to mention Iran’s. It was only fitting that we were reminded the other day by Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah of the need for the ideas and values (such as “the culture of resistance”) of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s Islamic Revolution to be spread throughout the Arab and Islamic states. This also happened to follow Nasrallah’s hint of an operational capacity in the Red Sea.

Just as Iran’s Islamic Revolution was expansionist by definition, the AKP’s “neo-Ottomanism” also posits a Turkish-dominated realm. As the potential for Iranian-Turkish competition grows and the Levant once again assumes its historical function as a contested space between more powerful nations vying for regional influence, the Arab states are becoming ever more secondary, their populations easily manipulated by regional populist leaders like Erdogan.

Ten Years Ago This Would Really Have Shocked Me

But it doesn't surprise me very much now.

A survey conducted by the Boston Review in its May/June issue shows that nearly 25% of American non-Jews blame “the Jews” a moderate amount or more for the financial crisis.

Furthermore, a total of 38.4% of the non-Jews in the U.S. attribute at least some level of blame to the group.

Possibly most significant of all were the subconscious anti-Semitic tendencies revealed based on the way the questions were phrased to different groups.

Neil Malhotra, Assistant Professor of Political Economy in the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University, and Dr. Yotam Margalit of Stanford University, conducted the study. It was part of a survey of 2,768 American adults exploring responses and anti-Semitic sentiments vis-a-vis the economic collapse.

They found that Democrats were significantly more prone to blaming Jews than Republicans: while 32% of Democrats accorded at least moderate blame, compared to only 18.4% of Republicans.

Emphasis added.

UPDATE: I see now that this is a year old. It's new to me, though.

American Exceptionalism

While much of the world howls in passionate, cynical, and sinister indignation at Israel for the flotilla incident on the Mediterranean last week, only nineteen percent of Americans blame the Jewish state for what happened.

Only 26 percent of Democrats say it's Israel's fault, along with eleven percent of Republicans, making this a fringe position in both political parties.

An Aid Flotilla to Turkey?

Israeli activists are planning to send a humanitarian aid flotilla to Turkey with goods for the Kurdish and Armenian minorities.

I drove through Turkish Kurdistan years ago with my friend and traveling companion Sean LaFreniere and was absolutely appalled. When we crossed the border into Iraq, respect for human rights and the standard of living increased dramatically.

The Most Ridiculous Story of the Week

Hamas refuses to let humanitarian aid into Gaza.

Iran Threatens War in the Mediterranean

Yesterday, Ali Shirazi of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps said its naval forces "are fully prepared to escort the peace and freedom convoys to Gaza with all their powers and capabilities." Never mind the cynical use of the words "freedom" and "peace" from a repressive regime that steals votes and cracks heads. Breaking a blockade by force is a declaration of war and could, in this case, easily and instantly spark a region-wide conflagration.

More likely than not, Iran is just posturing. Ever since Ruhollah Khomeini seized power in the 1979 revolution, the Iranian government has been waging a relentless campaign to win over Arab public opinion with apocalyptic anti-Zionism and support for anti-Israeli terrorist organizations. And last week it was upstaged by Turkey and its prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, when howling denunciations of Israel almost everywhere in the world followed the now-infamous battle aboard the Turkish Mavi Marmara vessel. Even the president of the United States says Israel's blockade of Gaza is no longer sustainable, though at least he says it calmly. Not Iran, Syria, Hamas, or Hezbollah, but Turkey has been the toast of the Middle East's radicals for a week now.

The Turks have been slowly turning away from their alliance with the West since 2003. Erdogan, more recently, has not only been reorienting his country toward the Sunni Muslim world of which it's a part; he's also adopting the causes of the Resistance Bloc, led by Iran's Shia theocracy and the atheist non-Muslim Alawite clan, which rules Syria. He's been trying for years now to join Tehran and Jerusalem in setting the regional agenda, and he finally and unambiguously succeeded last Monday.

Read the rest in Commentary Magazine.

He Wanted to Become a Shahid

The flotilla passenger in the following video said he hoped to become a martyr—get himself killed, in other words—while running the Israeli blockade of Gaza earlier this week. Perhaps such deaths should be considered suicide, rather than murder, for the same reason we use the term suicide bomber.

That Wasn’t So Hard, Was It?

From the Jerusalem Post:

IDF forces piloted the Rachel Corrie to the port of Ashdod early Saturday evening after boarding the ship earlier in the day.

None were harmed in the military operation as the international activists on the ship cooperated with the boarding party. The activists went as far as lowering a ladder to the soldiers patrol boat to allow them to board, army sources have revealed.

The boarding of the Rachel Corrie containing activists and aid for Gaza was described by Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu on Saturday as a quiet operation. Netanyahu was quick to distinguish between the boat of Irish and Malaysian activists and the Turkish-sponsored Mavi Marmara which was boarded May 31 in an incident that left nine dead and scores wounded.

"The different outcome we saw today underscores the difference between peace activists who we disagree with but respect their right to express their different opinion and flotilla participants [on the Mavi Marmara] who were violent extremist supporters of terrorists," said Netanyahu.