Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy by Andrew C. McCarthy

Author:Andrew C. McCarthy [McCarthy, Andrew C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: International Relations/General, Political Science
ISBN: 9781594036446
Publisher: Blue Moon Books
Published: 2012-09-17T22:00:00+00:00

Targeting Israel

Although Erdogan had to wait until he was in a stronger position to challenge the deep state, he had no such reticence when it came to championing Muslim terrorists at Israel’s expense. He knew this would be broadly popular in Turkey. As his support base grew, he could more confidently set about cutting his opposition down to size.

In spring 2004, only a year into his premiership, Erdogan bitterly condemned Israel for the targeted killings of Hamas’s founders, Sheikh Ahmad Yassin and Abdel Aziz Rantisi. Hamas and its allies consider themselves in a state of constant war against Israel and were, at the time, executing numerous suicide bombings – in just the five-week span before Israeli forces retaliated, jihadists killed thirty-three Israelis and wounded 156 in four major attacks. When the IDF inevitably struck back, it carefully homed in on the two Hamas leaders, abjuring the Palestinian-style mass murder of civilians. Yet, Erdogan reacted to the deaths of Yassin and Rantisi by accusing Israel of “state terrorism.” The outburst stunned Israel, whose diplomats protested angrily.

Israel and the West would have to get used to being stunned by Erdogan’s affection for the Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestinian terrorist branch. Weeks later, Erdogan went out of his way to exacerbate the tension. With Israel’s deputy prime minister in Ankara, Turkey’s prime minister declined to see him, claiming to be too busy. Yet he managed to find time that same day to meet with Muhammad Naji al-Otari, the prime minister of Syria. It was a snub with teeth, informing Israel and the West that they were now dealing with an “Islamic democracy,” not the democracy they’d previously known.

It is an “Islamic democracy” that has its own ideas about “outreach.” After Hamas won the Palestinian election in January 2006, Erdogan acted swiftly to confer sovereign legitimacy on the jihadists and to undermine Bush administration efforts to continue marginalizing them (efforts President Bush and his State Department had themselves undermined by supporting the election – as “democracy” promotion – in the first place). Though American and European leaders insisted that Hamas would be isolated until they renounced terrorism and accepted Israel’s right to exist, Erdogan hosted Hamas’s leadership in Ankara less than a month after the election. Moreover, he continued to champion the terrorists even after, a few months later, Hamas switched from the democracy “train” to the coup express, brutally ousting Palestinian Authority forces from Gaza.

Erdogan’s reasoning in siding with Hamas over Fatah is easily gleaned. Hamas was created because the Muslim Brotherhood found Yasser Arafat’s leadership of the Palestine Liberation Organization too light on Islamic supremacism and too redolent of the Nasserite turn to secular Leftism. Previously, Islamists ardently supported the PLO because, if you wanted to destroy Israel, the PLO was the only game in town. With the 1987 emergence of Hamas, however, there arose an Islamic supremacist alternative that not only portrayed Israel’s elimination by violent jihad as an Islamic obligation but, furthermore, explicitly tied this effort into the Muslim Brotherhood’s global Islamization program.

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