The virulent worldwide reaction to Israeli’s handling of the Gaza flotilla

The Turkish Government as Global Arbiter of Ethnic Violence [Victor Davis Hanson]

The virulent worldwide reaction to Israeli’s handling of the Gaza flotilla has been quite instructive. The bankrupt Greeks, for example, are taking a holiday from railing at the Germans to demonstrate in solidarity with the Turkish-organized Gaza effort, which puts them on the same side as those whose government supports the occupation of much of Greek-speaking Cyprus and its divided capital.

No one in Europe worried much about the constant shower of missiles from Gaza in the past. No one in Europe said a word when North Korea torpedoed and slaughtered South Koreans on the high seas. No one objected when the Iranians hijacked a British ship and humiliated the hostages.

We ourselves seem to be getting a sort of novel pass for executing scores of suspected terrorists — and anyone in their vicinity — in our new, stepped-up Predator drone assassinations.

But the Western and Islamic worlds have a preexisting furor at the Jewish state that can be tapped at will by almost any pro-radical-Palestinian group clever enough to do proper P.R. after a desired asymmetrical confrontation. The fallout from Sharon’s visit to the Temple Mount, the distortions around the 2002 terrorist storming of the Church of Nativity, the 2006 Lebanon war — over time, these incidents do their part, in weird fashion, to incur hatred for a liberal democracy while creating sympathy for a theocratic thugocracy like Hamas.

What explains this preexisting hatred, which ensures denunciation of Israel in the most rabid – or, to use the politically correct parlance, “disproportionate,” terms? It is not about “occupied land,” given the millions of square miles worldwide that are presently occupied, from Georgia to Cyprus to Tibet. It is not a divided capital — Nicosia is walled off. It is not an overreaction in the use of force per se — the Russians flattened Grozny and killed tens of thousands while the world snoozed. And it cannot be the scale of violence, given what we see hourly in Pakistan, Darfur, and the Congo. And, given the Armenian, Greek, and Kurdish histories (and reactions to them), the currently outraged Turkish government is surely not a credible referent on the topic of disproportionate violence.

Perhaps the outrage reflects simple realpolitik — 350 million Arab Muslims versus 7 million Israelis. Perhaps it is oil: half the world’s reserves versus Israel’s nada. Perhaps it is the fear of terror: draw a cartoon or write a novel offending Islam, and you must go into hiding; defame Jews and earn accolades. Perhaps it is anti-Semitism, which is as fashionable on the academic Left as it used to be among the neanderthal Right.

Perhaps there is also a new sense that the United States at last has fallen into line with the Western consensus, and so is hardly likely to play the old lone-wolf supporter of Israel in the press or at the U.N.

At this point, it doesn’t much matter — as this latest hysterical reaction reminds us, much of the world not only sides with Israel’s enemies but sides with them to such a degree as to suggest that, in any existential moment to come, the world either will be indifferent or will be on the side of the side of Israeli’s enemies.

Quite frightening, when you think of it.


Krauthammer

's Take [NRO Staff]
On the Israeli raid on the Gaza-bound flotilla:

The fundamental deception here is the use of the word "humanitarian." . . . Humanitarians don't wield iron clubs, and [they] would have killed the Israelis had the Israelis not drawn their pistols in self-defense.

But there‘s a larger issue here. What exactly is the humanitarian crisis that the flotilla was actually addressing? There is none. There’s no one starving in Gaza. The Gazans have been supplied with food and social services, education, by the U.N., by UNWRA, for 60 years, in part with American tax money.

Second, when there are humanitarian needs, the Israelis allow — every day — food and medicine overland into Gaza. The reason that it did not want to allow this flotilla is because, as the spokesman for the flotilla said herself, this was not about humanitarian relief. It was about breaking the blockade.

And the reason the Israelis have a blockade is because they only want to allow humanitarian supplies and not weaponry. Look, the proof of that is the fact that if you look at a map of Gaza, you'll see that Israelis only control three sides of this rectangle. There’s a fourth side on the Egyptian side. So it is an Egyptian-Israeli blockade.

The Egyptians have the same problem with Gaza. People accuse Israeli of the blockade [saying it’s because] because they're racist, they’re anti-Muslim, anti-Arab. The Egyptians are Muslim and Arab and they’ve gone to war three times on behalf of the Palestinians. So why do they have exactly the same blockade? Because Gaza is run by Hamas, a terror entity that wants to import weaponry and resume the war against Israel.

The man who made the announcement that we saw earlier, explaining the commando raid is the defense minister of Israel. He‘s not a right-winger. He‘s not Likud. He’s Ehud Barak, who’s the leader of Labor, the party of Yitzhak Rabin, Golda Meir, the party of the left, and the man who ten years ago this summer offered the Palestinians a peace agreement that would have
[provided] a Palestinian state, division of Jerusalem, and an end of the conflict.

The Palestinians said no. And Gaza two years ago declared war on Israel. That's why you have a blockade. . . .

If these people had wanted humanitarian aid, Israel offered to take the ships into Haifa, peacefully, unload all the stuff inside and to allow all the humanitarian aid immediately into Gaza, all the food and medicine. And it was refused because it was meant to be a provocation and to create an incident.