In his most recent verbal assault against Israel, Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan has characterized Zionism as a crime against humanity along with anti-Semitism, fascism, and, of course, Islamophobia. Isn’t leaving homophobia off such a list itself a crime against humanity?
Prime Minister Netanyahu has issued this concise response: “This is a dark and mendacious statement the likes of which we thought had passed from the world.”
Netanyahu is constrained by the conventions of diplomacy. Almost as concise but more to my taste is the less constrained response of the head of the Conference of European Rabbis, Pinchas Goldschmidt, in an email to Reuters: “The irony of these comments will not be lost on the families of those slaughtered during the Armenian genocide, a crime still not recognized by the Turkish government.”
Andrew McCarthy’s new book devotes substantial attention to the deep thoughts of Erdogan. Andy puts Erdogan’s noxious emission in context here, though not the kind of context that excuses the offense. Let’s give Andy the last word for the moment at somewhat greater length:
I think “crime against humanity” has become a verbal tic for Turkey’s Islamic-supremacist Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
In Vienna, at one of the UN’s nauseating “dialogues” between Islam and the West (you know, those conferences where Western leaders explain how much they admire Islam and Islamic leaders reciprocate by explaining how much they, too, admire Islam), Erdogan pronounced Zionism a “crime against humanity,” which he placed on a par with anti-Semitism. The latter is a subject Erdogan knows a thing or two about.
As I recount in Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy (just released in paperback this week), Erdogan first burst on the scene almost 40 years ago as the 20-year-old writer-director-star of a theatrical production called Maskomya. As Andy Bostom edifies us, Mas-Kom-Ya is short for Masons, Communists, and, yes, Yahudi — Jews. In Erdogan’s telling, these were evil subversive groups whose common denominator was – all together now! — Judaism.
Spring Fever documents Erdogan’s application of “crime against humanity” label to calls for Muslims in Europe and America to assimilate in the Western societies where they’ve chosen to live. He also said it was a “crime against humanity” for Israel to defend itself in 2008′s “Operation Cast Lead” after over 3000 rockets and mortar shells were fired into Israeli territory by Hamas — the international terrorist organization that Erdogan’s Turkey lavishly funds and whose leaders he receives as dignitaries.
In this week’s Vienna speech, Erdogan reached unprecedented epistemological buffoonery when he explained that not only Zionism but Islamophobia is a “crime against humanity.” Either he does not know what a crime is or he does not know what a phobia is, but since a rational mental state is required for the former the latter doesn’t qualify. Or maybe Erdogan knows exactly what crimes and phobias are, but as an Islamo-fascist he figures such niceties should never get in the way of a good smear. Oh, almost forgot, Erdogan also said fascism was a “crime against humanity.” Between his invocation of anti-Semitism and fascism, we see that Erdogan at least knows how to project.
In 1975, a year after Maskomya had its run, Erdogan’s fellow Islamic-supremacists engineered the passage of U.N. General Assembly Resolution 3379, declaring that Zionism was a form of racism. The condemnation by the United States of this blatant act of anti-Semitism was unequivocal. The late Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then the U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., asserted, “The United States … does not acknowledge, it will never abide by, it will never acquiesce in this infamous act.” Even the fraudulent enterprise that is the U.N. eventually felt compelled to buckle under forceful American leadership (much of it provided in the Bush 41 State Department by a young assistant secretary named John Bolton). The noxious “Zionism equals racism” resolution was finally repealed in 1991.
Now, Erdogan has seen racism and raised it to a crime against humanity, but we’ve thus far heard no Moynihan-like condemnation from the Obama administration.
Notwithstanding that the prime minister’s claim to fame is imprisoning uncooperative journalists and political opponents on trumped up charges, President Obama has described Erdogan as one of his most “trusted friends” among world leaders. Although Erdogan is a top provider of material support to Hamas, a serious felony in the United States, Obama recently said of him: “The bottom line is that we find ourselves in frequent agreement upon a wide range of issues.” And, indeed, it is Erdogan who has been prodding Obama to repeat the administration’s Libya debacle by overtly supporting the Syrian “rebels” — the jihadist-rife, Muslim Brotherhood-dominated opposition seeking to topple the Iran-backed regime of Bashar al-Assad. It appears Obama and his second-term foreign policy team are poised to give Erdogan his way.
Sigh. Maybe for just a few minutes, Obama could pretend that Erdogan was a Republican and that anti-Zionism was the sequester…
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