“Old Sick Man” of Europe is being resurrected to Dominate.
The Wannabe The Ottoman Caliphate Turkish Prime Minister
Is bonding together the Arabs, Persians, Assyrians, and Medes
Into Weak Clay and Strong Iron Toes Of The Great Daniel Statue
June 13, 2010
http://www.tribulationperiod.com/
The Ottoman Empire or Caliphate was named for Osman I (1259–1326), a Turkish Muslim prince in B ith
ynia who conquered neighbouring regions once held by the Seljūq dynasty and founded his own ruling line c. 1300. Ottoman troops first invaded Europe in 1345, sweeping through the Balkans. Though defeated by Timur in 1402, by 1453 the Ottomans, under Mehmed II (the Conquerer), had destroyed the Byzantine Empire and captured its capital, Constantinople (now Istanbul), which henceforth served as the Ottoman capital.
Under Selim I (r. 1512–20) and his son Süleyman I (the Magnificent; 1520–66), the Ottoman Empire reached its greatest peak. Süleyman took control of parts of Persia, most of Arabia, and large sections of Hungary and the Balkans. By the early 16th century the Ottomans had also defeated the Mamlūk dynasty in Syria and Egypt; and their navy under Barbarossa soon seized control of much of the Barbary Coast.
Beginning with Selim, the Ottoman sultans also held the title of caliph, the spiritual head of Islam. Ottoman power began to decline in the late 16th century. Ottoman forces repeatedly besieged Vienna. After their final effort at taking the Austrian capital failed (1683), that and subsequent losses led them to relinquish Hungary in 1699. Corruption and decadence gradually undermined the government. In the late 17th and 18th centuries the Russo-Turkish Wars and wars with Austria and Poland further weakened the empire, which in the 19th century came to be called the “sick man of Europe.” Most of its remaining European territory was lost in the Balkan Wars (1912–13). It sided with Germany in World War I (1914–18); postwar treaties dissolved the empire, and in 1922 the sultanate was abolished by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, who proclaimed the Republic of Turkey the following year.
Begin Series of Excerpts from the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs/Daily Alert
June 11, 2010
Excerpt 1 – Jerusalem Post
Turkey’s Erdogan Wins Raucous Reception from Arab Leaders
Herb Keinon
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan received a thunderous reception from Arab leaders at the Turkish-Arab Economic Forum that opened Thursday in Istanbul, a day after voting against UN sanctions on Iran. Basking in the new stature he has gained in the Arab and Muslim world as a result of his confrontational posture toward Israel, Erdogan questioned Washington’s international dominance, and continued to unleash invective against Israel. Turkey and 20 Arab nations also issued a joint statement expressing “grave concern and condemnation for the Israeli aggression” in the flotilla incident.
(Jerusalem Post)
Excerpt 2 – UK Financial Times
The Gaza Flotilla
Israel Had No Other Choice
Christopher Caldwell
As the flotilla leaders themselves acknowledged, they had a military objective: to break the blockade of Gaza that Israel imposed in 2007. Under the circumstances, the raid was neither stupid nor botched. It successfully repelled an attack on Israel’s borders, albeit at considerably higher cost than Israel would have wished. There is a blockade of Gaza because Hamas, the Islamist party that runs
Gaza, wants Israel destroyed. In recent years, it has launched thousands of rockets at cities in the Israeli south.
(Financial Times-UK)
Excerpt 3 – Foreign Policy
Guilty Until Proven Guilty
David Brog
On April 28, 2003, a crowd of Iraqi civilians gathered outside U.S. Army headquarters in Fallujah to protest the occupation of their city.
As tension grew, U.S. soldiers began firing upon the crowd, killing at least 13 Iraqis and wounding more than 70. U.S. troops insisted that they fired only to defend themselves from gunfire coming from the crowd. The protesters claimed that they were unarmed and never fired at the soldiers. The odds are that you never even heard of this incident, or of the tens if not hundreds of incidents like it, in which civilians have been killed as U.S. soldiers fought in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past decade. But the odds are overwhelming that you have heard – repeatedly – of an Israeli operation last week aboard a Gaza-bound ship. Israel’s naval commandos, several of whom were beaten to within an inch of their lives, responded with lethal force, killing nine people.
The term “double standard” does not sufficiently capture this phenomenon. It’s not just that the Israelis are being held to a different – and immeasurably higher – standard than the rest of humanity. Israel is now being judged in the absence of any objective standard whatsoever. As Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said last week, it seems that Israel is now “guilty until proven guilty.”
Many of those who are horrified by Israel’s blockade of Hamas-controlled Gaza never once questioned the U.S. blockade of Saddam-controlled Iraq throughout most of the 1990s, although America’s enemies protested the U.S. blockade in terms almost identical to those now used to protest Israel’s blockade of Gaza. Today Israel’s soldiers are in the dock. But tomorrow it will be our own. The writer is executive director of Christians United for Israel. (Foreign Policy)
Excerpt 4 – FrontPageMagazine
When Will the West Learn Arab Psychology?
Nonie Darwish
As we now know, video footage has proven that the Gaza flotilla jihadists initiated the violence against Israeli soldiers.
However, what matters to Islamist crisis seekers is that the news for several days all over the world blames Israel as a bloodthirsty rogue nation that inflicted an unjustified massacre on peaceful, unarmed humanitarians. Muslim street demonstrations are staged for Western audiences. Western culture is extremely moved by this big Islamist show – the cries, the tears, the pleading, the yelling, the covert threats and, above all, the mass mania. Over nothing, hoards of people in the Middle East can be easily incited to go into a fit of rage and run into the streets seeking vengeance against a Christian or a Jew who supposedly dishonored Islam.
When will the West learn Arab psychology? Whenever West Bank and Gaza news becomes secondary or is overshadowed by more pressing issues such as the economy, oil leaks, and perhaps more urgent human suffering around
the world, Islamists immediately get in gear to create a crisis. In their mind, nothing should be more urgent than destroying Israel.
Muslims know exactly what they should do to stop the blockade against Gaza. First, they should be sincere with themselves that they want peace with Israel and adopt a live and let live view. After that, major players in the region such as Turkey, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Syria, etc. must pressure Hamas to end the barrage of missiles against Israel and link their financial support to Palestinian willingness to accomplish peace with Israel. (FrontPageMagazine)
Excerpt 5 – The Australian
The Flotilla’s Terrorist Cheer Squad
David Burchell
Of all of the sad, tawdry features of the Gaza flotilla incident, surely none is sadder or tawdrier than the immediate assumption, leapt upon by so many people of good intentions, that the Israeli state is in the business of killing unarmed civilians for the pure sadistic pleasure of it. This view of Israel as a kind of devil-state, the spirit of evil made incarnate in the world, has been around in educated opinion since at least the late 1960s, when it buttressed enthusiasm for the Palestine Liberation Organization. Since the PLO and its more militant siblings (Black September, Carlos the Jackal, the Entebbe hijackers) were not easy folks to like, it followed that Israel’s motivations had to be made even blacker. Two generations of militants taught themselves that intoxicating Manichean logic, according to which the blacker one paints one’s spiritual enemy, the more sheer awfulness one can tolerate in one’s friends.
Of all of the signs of the moral decomposition of the progressive intelligentsia in my lifetime, none is more depressing or more shameful than the furtive, dishonest embrace of Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood’s terrorist arm, by thousands of otherwise intelligent, thoughtful people who probably imagine themselves as friends of civilization and basic human decency.
It was observable, first, in those supposed friends of the Palestinian people who began to speak with pity – and then soon enough with admiration – of Palestinian suicide-bombers, even as they heard fervent mothers speak of strapping their teenage sons into suicide-vests.
Last week’s sorry debacle on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean is the triumphal moment of the Hamas Solidarity Movement. Except that no single person among that sea of beatified faces appears to have the moral courage to utter those simple, if rather horrible words: Viva Hamas! Victory to the throat-slitters! Go the child-bombers! (The Australian)
Excerpt 6 – Wall Street Journal Europe
Turkey
Turkey, Hamas and the PKK: Erdogan’s Double Standard on Terrorism
Editorial
The Middle East’s regional superpower has again deployed its air force to bomb a rebel group considered by some to be terrorists and by others to be freedom fighters. The attacker is the Turkish air force, which on Monday bombed PKK positions in northern Iraq for the second time in a month. The PKK has been fighting Ankara for more than 25 years to carve out an independent Kurdistan.
Tens of thousands of Turks have been killed in the fighting. So it is with good reason that Turkey will neither recognize nor negotiate with the PKK, much less accept the legitimacy of its cause.
Israel has enemies similar to the PKK, including Hamas and other Palestinian terror groups, and it has dealt with them in similar ways. Successive Israeli governments have also accepted the legitimacy of a Palestinian state, which is more than can be said for the Turkish government’s attitude toward an independent Kurdistan. (Wall Street Journal Europe)
Excerpt 7 – RealClearPolitics
The New Wannabe Ottomans
Victor Davis Hanson
Erdogan clearly identifies more with the old transnational Ottoman sultanate than with Kemal Ataturk’s modern, secular and Western nation-state. Indeed, he has bragged that he is a grandson of the Ottomans and announced that Turkey’s new goal was to restore the might of the Ottoman Empire. And so, like the theocratic Ottomans of old, Erdogan’s Islamic Turkey fancies itself a window on the West, absorbing technology and expertise from Europe and the U.S. in order to empower and unite the more spiritually pure Muslims across national boundaries.
Turkey’s new ambitions and ethnic and religious chauvinism are antithetical to its NATO membership.
The U.S. should not be treaty-bound to defend a de facto ally of Iran or Syria, which are both eager to obtain nuclear weapons. European countries foresaw the problem when they denied Turkey membership in the now fragile European Union, fearful that Anatolian Islamists would have unfettered transit across European borders.
In response, the U.S. should make contingency plans to relocate from its huge air force base at Incirlik – a facility that Turkey has in the past threatened to close.
We should brace for new troubles in the Aegean region and Cyprus, as a bankrupt and often anti-American Greece is now alienated from both the U.S. and northern Europe – and yet increasingly vulnerable to a return of Ottoman regional ambitions. (RealClearPolitics)
Excerpt 8 – Ynet News
UN Must Investigate Turkey
Zvi Mazel
In the so-called “peace flotilla” episode, Israel behaved with the utmost transparency. But nobody knows exactly what went on in Turkey – how the operation was planned and what part the Turkish government played in its implementation.
After the IHH, a militant Turkish organization, announced its intention to send several vessels to breach the Gaza blockade and embarrass Israel, Israel immediately contacted the Turkish government, since the operation was planned from that country, but Turkey refused to act. According to reports in the Turkish press, some terrorists on the Marmara had declared before setting out that they intended to become “martyrs.” Two of them even filmed a video clip according to the well-known tradition of Islamist extremists.
There is indeed an urgent need to set up an international commission of inquiry to determine the role of Turkey in planning and facilitating the event. According to the CIA, IHH is a terrorist organization with links to al-Qaeda and Hamas. The commission of inquiry should investigate why Turkey let the IHH operate openly on its soil and why it did not arrest its leaders. It will have to check the nature of the relationship between the Turkish government and IHH, especially while that organization was reinforcing its links with Hamas. It will have to clarify what Turkey did in recent months to assist IHH in planning and carrying out the operation. Also to be scrutinized is the way IHH secured its funding. Was the Turkish government one of the contributors? The writer, a Fellow of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, is Israel’s former ambassador to Romania, Egypt and Sweden. (Ynet News)
FAIR USE NOTICE: This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more detailed information go to:
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml.
You may use material originated by this site. However, if you wish to use any quoted copyrighted material from this site, which did not originate at this site, for purposes of your own that go beyond ‘fair use’, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner from which we extracted it.