-3 Days Since Friday – And Now the Turks are Churning

By Sherwin Pomerantz

Now that Netanyahu and Abbas are back in their respective home cities, it’s worth taking a look at one of our less pleasant neighbors at the moment, Turkey.

In today’s Zaman, the main Turkish daily published in Istanbul, the paper listed 174 names, apparently acquired through Facebook, of the 10 Israel Defense Forces soldiers who boarded the Mavi Marmara in May 2010 as it was trying to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza. The names were gathered by IHH, the organization that organized the flotilla.

Ramazan Ariturk, a lawyer for IHH, the Humanitarian Relief Foundation based in Turkey was quoted as saying “We have presented a list of Israeli soldiers who gave the order for and who were involved in the attack on the Turkish flotilla to the Istanbul prosecutor’s office. Currently we are waiting for the prosecutor’s office to issue an order for (their) arrest.

The move came as the Istanbul Chief Prosecutor’s Office appealed to the Turkish Intelligence Organization (MİT) in order to obtain information on the identities of the IDF soldiers involved in the raid which left nine Turks dead last year. According to Zaman, an affirmative answer from MİT would allow the prosecutor to open court cases against Israeli officials including the President, Prime Minister and former IDF Chief of Staff Gabi Asheknazi as well as the soldiers involved in the raid.

The charges would include “willful murder and torture” and “limiting freedom” of the passengers, the paper reported.

This is, of course, the same country that has, as part of its history, a significant record of atrocities which neither admits to nor been tried for.

These include:

• The Batak Massacre of 1876 when the Turks slaughtered thousands of Bulgarians simply because of their ethnic background.
• Dersim, where between 7,000-90,000 were killed, although no one can be sure as many of the bodies were destroyed beyond recognition.
• The Armenian genocide where 1,500,000 million were killed in 1915
• The Christian Genocide of 1912-1924
• Turkish atrocities in Cyprus in 1974
• The killing of 40,000 Kurds from 1984-2002 by the Turks.
• War crimes against Greeks during the War of Independence which involved the systematic torture, massacre and ethnic cleansing of several million Hellenes (Greeks) perpetrated by the Turks in Asia Minor, Constantinople (now called Istanbul by the Turks), Eastern Thrace, Imvros, Tenedos, Macedonia, Cappadocia and Pontos. Most of the victims were massacred between 1895 and 1955. The present estimate is that some 2,000,000 Greek children, men and women of all ages were killed during that period.

So this “moral” society which is now offended at the death of 9 of their citizens who were trying to break a legal blockade of Gaza by Israel (the recently issued Palmer Report of the UN stands by Israel’s claim that the blockade is lawful) bears no responsibility at all for the massacre of millions of people in the country’s earlier attempts at ethnic cleansing.

Article 301 of the Turkish penal code even makes it a crime to refer to the Armenian Genocide as genocide. So much for morals.

It is a given that when bad people murder a whole population, good people must respond. When time passes and we look back on people who murdered a whole population, we must never allow that transcendent evil to be denied or downplayed because of diplomatic or political considerations. It is simply wrong and immoral to do so. But it is even more offensive when the society involved in such activities then points the finger at others for grievances much less serious and which occurred because of baiting by people who claim to be on a humanitarian mission but whose goals are transparently belligerent.

The famed lawyer Louis Nizer once said “When man points a finger at someone else, he should remember that four of his fingers are pointing at himself.” The Turks need to internalize that concept.