What fact do you suppose is better known: (a) that Nidal Hasan has been incarcerated since he killed 13 American soldiers and wounded several others while screaming, “Allahu Akbar!” in the 2009 Fort Hood massacre, or (b) that his victims were denied Purple Heart medals by the U.S. government?

Obviously, by leaps and bounds, the answer is (a). And for this reason, among several others, it is patently disgraceful that the Obama administration and its minions in the hyper-politically correct Pentagon brass are denying those soldiers shot by Hasan the military honors they are due — long overdue, actually – from having been wounded by an enemy operative in a wartime terrorist attack.

Speciously, military prosecutors are arguing that granting Purple Heart awards to the wounded victims would somehow prejudice Major Hasan’s upcoming trial because it would be tantamount to a branch of the government rendering a judgment that he is a terrorist and therefore already criminally culpable. The White House’s hacks at the Defense Department — both uniformed and non-uniformed — are reportedly trying to run this same jive by lawmakers, several of whom are incensed by the slight to the wounded. If they are capable of shame, administration officials ought to be ashamed by this frivolous claim, which dishonors not only Hasan’s victims but also the military justice system itself.

It has always been the proud boast of the military justice system that a truly innocent person has a better chance of being acquitted there than in the civilian system. That is because military trials are typically decided by panels of commissioned officers. For them, there is a solemnity about following orders that is unmatched by cross-sections of the general public who serve as petit jurors in civilian trials.

The military judge will instruct the panel that the case is to be decided solely based on the evidence presented in court – specifically, whether it establishes the elements of the offenses charged against Hasan. The jurors will be directed that they are not to decide the case based on outside publicity or any findings already made by other government officials – including in probes by the armed forces. In the trial, it will be for the panel alone, based on its assessment of the testimony and other evidence presented in court, to decide whether Hasan is guilty. There is a presumption in both the civilian and military systems that juries follow those instructions. We can have full confidence that, in the military system, the panel will honor the instructions of the court.

The administration-driven suggestion that the panel hearing Hasan’s case will be swayed by the awarding — or, for that matter, the non-awarding — of Purple Hearts is a slander on the military justice system. It is tantamount to saying we should presume that officers of the United States armed forces will defy their orders – which would itself be a profound offense under the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

Put law and honor aside for a moment, though. The Purple Heart argument is risible as a matter of common sense. Until a few days ago, no one was even thinking about Purple Hearts, much less that there was a controversy over them. Yet virtually everyone who knows anything about the Fort Hood jihadist attack knows that — like many aggressors charged with murder in American courts — Hasan has been detained without bail because of both the dangerousness he manifestly poses to the community and the flight risk his palpable guilt implies (notwithstanding his paralysis). Furthermore, there has been far more publicity about the fact that Hasan’s attorneys represented that Hasan was prepared to plead guilty on at least some of the charges than about the Purple Heart issue.

It is thus absurd to suggest that the award of Purple Hearts to Hasan’s victims would be incurably prejudicial to the military court’s ability to give Hasan a fair trial but, somehow, that his pretrial detention for four years and his desire to admit guilt would not.

This is the second installment of a two-part series on the terrorist campaign, supported by Turkey’s Islamic-supremacist government, to break Israel’s blockade of Hamas-controlled Gaza. Part I ran yesterday here on Ordered Liberty and can be accessed here. As further discussed in the introduction to this series (here), Israel, under pressure from the Obama administration, has apologized to Turkey for defending itself against the aggression of a purported “peace flotilla” which, under the direction of Turkish jihadists aboard the Mavi Marmara, provoked a violent clash with Israeli forces in 2010.

In late January 2010, shortly after the triumphant return of AKP legislators and IHH activists from Gaza, the IHH announced plans for yet another joint caravan with the Free Gaza Movement. This time, the venture would be a springtime “Freedom Flotilla” of several boats to challenge what IHH described as Israel’s “illegal blockade” of Gaza and “a mockery of international law.” (IHH’s apparently abridged version of that corpus omits the part about self-defense, the natural sovereign right that is the venerable foundation of international law.)

Bulent Yildirim, the IHH president who enjoys close connections with the AKP (Turkey’s ruling Islamist party), foreshadowed the violence to come. Passengers, he asserted, would defend themselves if Israeli forces confronted the flotilla. He vowed to “break the siege,” further declaring that “[i]f al-Quds [Jerusalem] will be in Muslim hands, the whole world will to be in Muslim hands…. The present rulers of Jerusalem are the Jews, the Zionists. All the suffering and the evil in the world today is a result of that. Therefore Jerusalem must be liberated.” Yildirim futher predicted that Israel would not dare interfere with the flotilla because attacking one of the ships would be “the same as attacking a Turkish consulate.” Still, palpably spoiling for a fight, he later sniped, “We are sailing to Gaza as human shields.”[1]

The purported “Freedom Flotilla” was, in fact, ardently supported by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Islamic-supremacist government in Turkey. Put aside for a moment that several regime officials were active participants in the prior convoy that provoked murderous rioting in Egypt (related in Part I of this series). On May 12, 2010, Erdogan met in Istanbul with representatives of the European Campaign to End the Siege of Gaza – a Muslim Brotherhood-dominated outfit that had its own ship in the flotilla. After the meeting, members of the group reported Erdogan’s vow that Turkey intended to end Israel’s blockade.[2] Three days later, on May 15, Faruk Celik, an AKP government minister in attendance at a conference held “for the sake of Palestine,’ publicly expressed support for “the ship IHH intends to send to the Gaza Strip.”

Though capable of ferrying over a thousand passengers, the Turkish vessel at the head of the flotilla, the Mavi Marmara, was sold to IHH for only $1.15 million by the AKP-controlled Istanbul City Municipality Transportation Corporation. In Part I of this series, while noting IHH’s intimate ties to AKP, I pointed out that Ali Yandir, the senior manager of Istanbul City Municipality Transportation Corporation, just happens to be an IHH trustee.[3]

Less than a week before the flotilla’s launch, IHH vice president Yavuz Dede convened an organizers’ conference in Istanbul. Minutes of the meeting, later found on a laptop aboard the Mavi Marmara, stated that, though Erdogan’s “Government did not announce openly support for the mission at first,” flotilla organizers “in the last few days [were] getting direct support from PM [i.e., Prime Minister Erdogan] and other ministers.” Organizers were also advised, in discussions described as “f2f” (i.e., face-to-face), that “if we have any difficulties, gov [i.e., the government of Turkey] will extend what support they can.”[4]

Besides supplying a vessel for the flotilla, the Istanbul City Municipality Transportation Corporation provided IHH with support that was even more crucial. As the AKP governmental entity responsible for operation of Turkey’s ports, it is charged with carrying out required inspections. Most of the 500 Turkish citizens who participated in the flotilla were subjected to full, customary inspection upon boarding the Mavi Marmara in the port of Antalya on May 26. Days earlier in Istanbul, however, 40 voyagers were permitted to board the ship without inspection, along with the Mavi Marmara’s 29 crew members.

These 40 were hardcore IHH operatives under the direction of Yildirim. They included Osman Atalay, who, as explained in Part I, is the founder of IHH and a veteran of the jihad in Bosnia. The 40 formed a disciplined group, according to an officer of the ship crew: setting up a situation room for IHH coordination; posting guards at passageways to prevent ordinary passengers from reaching the upper decks, which the IHH operatives controlled. Many of them had walkie-talkies, and some wore stickers identifying them as Khares Amni – “security protection.” Their luggage included flares, night-vision goggles, 150 bulletproof vests and 200 gas masks, as well as several dozen slingshots. Some weapons were brought along and many others were collected or improvised onboard the Mavi Marmara. The eventual arsenal was found to include 200 knives, 20 axes, 50 wooden clubs, paint rollers from which sponges had been removed (the better to be used as weapons), and 100 assorted iron bars, metal shafts, and metal cables sawed off from the ship’s railings.

There was a well publicized reception before the Mavi Marmara shoved off from Istanbul to pick up the other Turkish passengers in Antalya, after which the boat would cruise on to Cyprus to meet up with the flotilla’s five other ships. At the Istanbul festivities, IHH leader Yildirim made a point of thanking AKP for its support, while Seracettin Karayagiz, an AKP parliamentarian, exclaimed, “The Israeli weapons cannot be more powerful than human determination. Israel kills a thousand people, and after that they stand up and claim there is Islamic terrorism. We can’t accept that.”

Prime Minister Erdogan could have stopped the flotilla’s Turkish contingent – at least, the IHH operatives who were patently spoiling for a fight. The Israeli government implored its counterparts in the AKP government, at very high ministry levels, to prevent the flotilla from departing, with the understanding that arrangements would be made to transport any real humanitarian aid into Gaza.

Yet, the AKP did not merely decline to impede IHH; Erdogan’s government abetted the operation. It did so knowing full well that there would inevitably be a confrontation with the Israeli Defense Forces, which were certain to confront the flotilla. In fact, while Erdogan’s minions were encouraging the IHH agitators, Turkey’s intelligence agency discouraged several AKP Parliament members from joining the voyage, as they’d hoped to do. The AKP wanted both strategic success and deniability: to provoke an altercation, to lure Israel into a no-win trap of either abandoning the blockade or being roundly condemned for defending it; but to do so with a minimum of graphic proof that Erdogan had orchestrated a forcible challenge to the blockade – an act of war.

As the fleet neared Gaza, there was chanting on the Mavi Marmara: “Khaybar, Khaybar, ya Yahud, Jaish Muhammad saya’ud” – meaning, “Oh Jews, remember Khaybar; the army of Mohammed is returning!” This was an allusion to a seventh century massacre and expulsion by Muslims of a Jewish tribe in Khaybar, a town in what today is Saudi Arabia. Palestinian news carried reports of a woman passenger asserting, “We await one of two good things: to achieve martyrdom or to reach the shore of Gaza.”

Late on the night of May 30, with the flotilla within a hundred nautical miles of Gaza, the Israeli navy verbally admonished the ships that they were approaching “an area of hostility which is under a naval blockade.” The announcement emphasized that “the Israeli government supports delivery of humanitarian supplies to the civilian population of the Gaza Strip.” The navy thus invited the flotilla to divert course and enter Israel’s Ashod Port. There, any authentic humanitarian aid would be inspected and then transferred into Gaza “through formal land crossings.” Flotilla passengers were assured that they would be allowed to observe the inspection, after which they could safely head back home.

The flotilla ignored these entreaties and kept provocatively advancing. In the early morning hours of May 31, with the flotilla now 70 nautical miles from the coast, Israeli navy vessels approached. IDF personnel were able to board five of the six ships, whose pro-Palestinian activists, having made their point, offered little resistance.

Things were very different on the Mavi Marmara. IHH operatives prepared for battle: donning their vests and masks, readying their weapons, and denying to non-combatant passengers any access to the main deck – which was strewn with bolts and screws to make for unsure footing when IDF forces came aboard. Pursuant to Yildirm’s instructions, IHH operatives were to prevent IDF personnel getting on the ship, and to throw into the sea any who did manage to land.

At about 4:30 a.m., commandos aboard Israeli speedboats attempted to board the Mavi Marmara, but their grappling hooks were thrown back at them by IHH operatives. Minutes later, the IDF deployed helicopters from which commandos rappelled down to the ship, using three “flash bang” stun grenades, but no gunfire, to facilitate their descent. Hoping a show of force would allow them to take the ship without causing any loss of life, the commandos were primarily armed with paint-ball guns. They also carried side-arms loaded with live ammunition for use only if self-defense required it.

When they began landing on the deck, they were shot at and savagely beaten by IHH operatives wielding clubs, knives and slingshots. One Israeli participant in the raid provided this chilling account:

My commander was the first soldier that rappelled down from the helicopter to the ship. When he touched ground, he got hit in the head with a pole and stabbed in the stomach with a knife. When he drew out his secondary weapon – a handgun (his primary weapon was a regular paintball gun: “Tippman 98 custom”) – he was shot in the leg. He managed to fire a single shot before he was tossed from the balcony by 4 Arab activists, to the lower deck (a 12 feet fall).

He was then dragged by other activists to a room in the lower deck were he was stripped down by 2 activists. They took off his vest, helmet and shirt, leaving him with only his pants and shoes on. When they finished they took a knife and expanded the wound he already had in his stomach. They cut his ab muscles horizontally and by hand spilled his guts out. When they finished they raised him up and walked him on the deck outside. He was conscious the whole time…. They wanted to show the soldiers their commander’s body so they will be demoralized and scared.

Luckily, when they walked him on the deck a soldier saw him and managed to shoot the activist that was walking him down the outside corridor. He shot him with a special non-lethal bullet that didn’t kill him. My commander managed to jump from the deck to the water and swim to an army rescue boat (his guts still out of his body, and now in salty sea water). That was how he was saved. The activists that did this to him are alive, now in Turkey, and treated as heroes.

As powerfully illustrated by both video recordings of the raid and eyewitness accounts, the Israeli commandos returned live fire only after the Islamist operatives attacked with lethal force. In the exchange, nine Israeli soldiers were wounded, including two who were shot. Nine members of the IHH contingent were killed, and a total of 55 other passengers were injured to one degree or another in the melee.

This is the first installment of a two-part series on the terrorist campaign, supported by Turkey’s Islamic-supremacist government, to break Israel’s blockade of Hamas-controlled Gaza. Part II will run here on Ordered Liberty on Monday. As further discussed in the introduction to this series (here), Israel, under pressure from the Obama administration, has apologized to Turkey for defending itself against the aggression of a purported “peace flotilla” which, under the direction of Turkish jihadists aboard the Mavi Marmara, provoked a violent clash with Israeli forces in 2010.

Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the Muslim Brotherhood’s top sharia jurist, has notoriously issued fatwas calling for suicide bombings against Israel and violent jihad against American troops and support personnel in Iraq. One of his many important Qaradawi enterprises is the Union for Good (sometimes translated as the “Union of Good”), a coalition of Islamic “charities” established after the outbreak of the second Palestinian Intifada against Israel in late 2000. The Union for Good has long been formally designated as a foreign terrorist organization under American law. To provide it with funding or other assistance is deemed material support to terrorism, a serious crime.

Nevertheless, a Turkish “charity” known as the Humanitarian Relief Foundation or IHH (İnsan Hak ve Hürriyetleri ve İnsani Yardım Vakfı) is a member organization of Qaradawi’s Union for Good. In truth, IHH is a jihadist organization camouflaged as a global do-gooder – much of the camouflage coming courtesy of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Islamist government in Turkey, and of the United Nations, which has recognized IHH as one of hundreds of “humanitarian” Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs).

Founded in the early Nineties by Osman Atalay, a Turkish Islamist who fought in the jihad in Bosnia, the outfit has longstanding ties to Muslim Brotherhood satellites across the world. Its connections to Turkey’s Islamic supremacist political parties, particularly the Refah party and, later, the AKP, are so intimate that the Turkish press has referred to IHH, tongue firmly in cheek, as a “GNGO” – as in, Governmental Non-Governmental Organization. It claims to have an annual budget of about $100 million. Whatever the true amount is, the IHH priority is Islamization, not charity. And it doesn’t just work the financial end; as we shall see, IHH operatives also dabble in the jihad’s grislier aspects.

In a rare exhibition of bipartisan clarity, the United States Senate voted overwhelmingly in June 2010 to recommend that the Obama administration investigate IHH in anticipation of formally designating it as a terrorist organization. No wonder: IHH has received funding from the Success Foundation, an organization headed by the now-convicted terrorist financier Abdurahman Alamoudi. It has also gotten donations from the International Islamic Relief Organization, a Saudi “charity” whose leaders have included Osama bin Laden’s brother-in-law, Mohammad Jamal Khalifa, and two of whose branches are formally designated as foreign terrorist organizations under American law. IHH uses some of the money it raises to subsidize the families of Hamas suicide bombers.

Moreover, as the Wall Street Journal has reported, a French terrorism investigation in the 1990s determined that IHH has provided logistical support (such as phony travel documents, safe haven, and possibly firearms) to terrorists. Jean-Louis Bruguiere, the French investigative magistrate who handled the case, contends that the IHH was complicit in the jihadist “Millennium plot” to bomb Los Angeles International Airport in late 1999, and was “basically helping al Qaeda when bin Laden started to want to target U.S. soil.” A French intelligence report further asserts that IHH phone records show repeated calls in 1996 to an al Qaeda guesthouse in Milan. The Obama State Department will not confirm IHH’s al Qaeda ties, but it has acknowledged that IHH officials have consulted with senior Hamas figures at rendezvous in Turkey, Syria and Gaza over the last several years. In May 2011, IHH added its voice to other Islamist groups in Turkey’s “Islamic democracy” by denouncing the U.S. military’s killing of Osama bin Laden, labeling it “American terrorism.”

Despite this record, or, more accurately, because of it, the IHH membership list reads like a Who’s Who in Erdogan’s AKP. [The AKP is the ruling Islamist “Justice and Development Party]. IHH’s former chairman, Eyup Fatsa, is an AKP member of Parliament, and is believed by Israeli intelligence to have forged the alliance between IHH and AKP in the late Nineties. According to the New York Times, the IHH-AKP roster also includes IHH founder Zeyid Aslan, a member of the Turkish Parliament who heads the Turkey-Palestine Interparliamentary Friendship Group; Ahmet Faruk Unsal, who served five years in Parliament after being elected in the AKP victory of 2002; Mehmet Emin Sen, the former AKP mayor of a township in Anatolia; Murat Mercan, a senior party official and chairman of the Turkish Parliament’s foreign affairs committee, and, Ali Yandir, the AKP official who runs the Istanbul City Municipality Transportation Corporation – a bureaucratic connection of considerable significance, as we shall see when we get to the Gaza flotilla controversy.

IHH often coordinates with Prime Minister Erdogan’s office and campaigns vigorously for him, shoring up critical support from Turkish Islamists, particularly in the merchant class. In addition, the organization has received awards for excellence from AKP government officials, including Bulent Arinc, formerly the speaker of Parliament and now Erdogan’s deputy prime minister. As nicely captured by Turkey’s widely read daily, Hurriyet News, “There can be no mistake that the Erdogan government is morally and politically behind this group.”

The lowlight of President Obama’s Middle East trip is his strong-arming of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu into a humiliating apology to Turkey’s Islamic-supremacist government over Israel’s defense in 2010 of its blockade of Hamas-controlled Gaza. The blockade was subjected to a terrorist offensive camouflaged as a humanitarian flotilla. The spearhead of the siege was the Mavi Marmara, a vessel controlled by a Turkish jihadist organization, the IHH, that is a part of the Union of Good, a formally designated terrorist organization under American law. Due to President Obama’s close relations with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Obama administration has resisted congressional calls to designate the IHH itself as a terrorist organization – sparing itself the embarrassment of noticing the intimate collusion of Erdogan’s ruling Islamist party and the jihadist group.

Nevertheless, the 2010 effort to break Israel’s blockade of Hamas (also a designated terrorist organization) was part of a long-term, ongoing, Islamic-supremacist campaign to break the blockade – an act of war against Israel. The Turkey-driven campaign figures prominently in Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy – my new book recently published in paperback by Encounter Books (after initially being available only as an eBook), which thoroughly details why the Islam-supremacist ascendancy in Turkey and Egypt prove the “Arab Spring” democracy narrative to be a fraud. As Spring Fever documents, Erdogan’s government and party, which vigorously backs Hamas, helped design the campaign, supported its prior voyages, orchestrated IHH’s purchase of the Mavi Marmara, jointly plotted the flotilla with IHH, arranged for approximately forty IHH jihadists to board the Mavi Marmara without inspection, ignored Israel’s pleas to prevent the blockade from embarking, and stridently condemned Israel when – as foreseeably as it was intentional – the flotilla’s provocation resulted in a violent confrontation with Israeli defense forces. Turkey’s feigned outrage, which even the pro-Islamist United Nations declined to affirm, is especially risible in light of (a) Erdogan’s open and notorious support of Hamas (which our NATO “ally” denies is a terrorist organization), and (b) Turkey’s own siege, partitioning, and occupation of northern Cyprus.

Two sections of Spring Fever deal with Turkey’s aggression against Israel. What follows here on Ordered Liberty beginning this evening is a two-part series culled from those sections. The first describes IHH: its roots in both terrorism and the Turkish regime, as well as its key role in the anti-blockade aggression. The second is an account of the Mavi Marmara incident.

Despite years of Erdogan’s bombast, the Israeli government — until Friday — steadfastly refused to apologize for exercising its sovereign right of self-defense from the flotilla offensive and from the Hamas terrorism that the blockade has righteously curtailed. The Obama administration’s collaboration with the terror-abetting Turkish government shames our nation and undermines America’s commitment to the rule of law, under which supporting Hamas and the Union of Good are serious felonies. It is abominable that President Obama chose to pressure the Netanyahu government to besot itself by apologizing to Turkey under these circumstances, and just days after Erdogan outrageously called Zionism a “crime against humanity.”

Israel will come to regret this capitulation.

Also read: 

Terror Flotilla Part I: Turkey and the Terrorist IHH Organization – Champions of Hamas

Spring is about to begin and my book, Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy, has just been published in paperback — originally, it was available only as an eBook. To mark these occasions, and more importantly, to elaborate on why the “Arab Spring” is really the ascendancy of Islamic supremacism (as Spring Fever foretold and as each day’s news confirms), Ordered Liberty will be running some excerpts in the coming days. Here is the first:

“Thank God almighty, I am a servant of sharia.” It was 1994, and Recep Tayyip Erdogan was proud to proclaim his Islamist roots in his native Istanbul, where he served as the mayor – or, as he customarily described himself, the city’s “imam.”

Erdogan’s star was rising in Turkey’s political firmament, thanks to his mentor, Necmettin Erbakan, trailblazer of the country’s modern Islamist politics. In fact, it was as president of the Istanbul Youth Movement, the shock troops of Erbakan’s “National Salvation” party, that Erdogan first made his mark. The main vehicle for his renown was a 1974 theatrical production called Maskomya. It was both virulently anti-Semitic and, this being Turkey, sadly popular. The prodigy, then twenty years old, not only wrote and directed the play but performed the lead role, as well. As Andrew Bostom recounts, “Mas-Kom-Ya was a compound acronym for ‘Masons-Communists-Yahudi’ – the latter meaning ‘Jews.’” In Erdogan’s telling, the common denominator of these evil, conspiratorial groups was Judaism.

Where Islam Meets the West

Turkey is a plenary Muslim country of 74 million. Yet, it does not have a plenary Islamic history. It lies on the fault line between East and West. With a rich, unique history, and one foot planted in Europe, the Turks are not an easy fit in the global ummah that Erdogan, now in his third term as Turkey’s prime minister, is undertaking to lead. Indeed, the relative success of Turkish society and its growing stature among Muslims, though publicly celebrated by Arabs, is, privately, a bitter pill for them. Historically, Saudis, Egyptians and other Arabs, Islam’s primus inter pares and notoriously arrogant about their Muslim authenticity, have been wont to look down their noses at the Turks.

The Ottoman legacy to which modern Turkey is heir was, by the empire’s demise in World War I, substantially Eurocentric and largely detached from the everyday affairs of the Arab Middle East. Yes, the population has always featured a strong Islamist plurality, traditionally concentrated in the rural areas. Most urban centers, however, have been secular, Euro-minded strongholds – including much of Eastern Thrace, where the Western half of Istanbul is located. And then there are Turkey’s ethnic minorities, most notably the contentious, largely unassimilated Kurds.

This is not to say that Arab countries are strangers to ethnic and sectarian diversity. As we’ve seen, they feature varying Islamic sects and non-Muslim minorities. They tend, though, to be much more attitudinally homogenous, especially in their animus toward the West. Kemalist Turkey, by contrast, saw itself as part of Europe and its future inclined toward the West. The majority of Kemalists continued to identify themselves as Muslims, but Kemalist cultural secularism bred an indifference to Islamic doctrine’s supremacist injunctions and an outright hostility to its sharia framework for society. We should pause, then, to consider how remarkable is the advance of Islamic supremacism in Turkey under Erdogan’s cunning stewardship. Comparatively speaking, the Islamist march through the Middle East is sure to be much smoother.

Ataturk’s secularization project, repressive of Islamic doctrine and unabashedly hostile to public displays of Islamic culture, could only have happened in Turkey. This is not to suggest that it was a mean feat to muffle Islam in a nearly 100 percent Muslim country where tens of millions of the citizens are Islamists. In fact, a herculean effort was required – and even with that, the project ultimately failed: Erdogan & Co. needed far less time to revert Turkey to the Islamist camp than the Kemalists took to secularize it.

The point is that Ataturk’s temporary achievement could never have happened in “one of the Arab Spring countries” (as even al Qaeda emir Ayman al-Zawahiri has fondly taken to calling them). So inscribed is Islam on the DNA of Arab lands that strongmen from Nasser to Arafat to Saddam, despite their secular inclinations, always appreciated the imperative of paying at least lip-service veneration to Islam – and of ostensibly pursuing their agendas within the Islamic framework, not against it – and certainly not by supplanting it.

So how did Erdogan pull off his Islamist coup and provide what is now a template for the “Arab Spring”? He followed the Muslim Brotherhood playbook, a how-to manual for weak but shrewd minorities seeking to strengthen their hands. He was also extraordinarily fortunate in both the self-defeating disarray of his domestic adversaries and the flat-footed fecklessness of his Western admirers. Prominently included among the latter are Bush and Obama administration officials, who have lauded him as a “democrat” while he has dismantled Western democracy, piece by piece.

Every time I think the Obama administration can no longer leave me speechless, they come up with a new low. From the indispensable Sam Tadros, writing at the Weekly Standard:

On Friday March 8, Michelle Obama will join John Kerry at a special ceremony at the State Department to present ten women the Secretary of State’s International Women of Courage Award. The award, says the press release, is given to “women around the globe who have shown exceptional courage and leadership in advocating for women’s rights and empowerment, often at great personal risk.”

Five of these awards are being given to women from Muslim-majority countries, underscoring the unique plight of women in those countries. The only problem is that one of the women to be recognized is an anti-Semite and supports the 9/11 attacks on the United States.

Samira Ibrahim, as the State Department’s profile describes her, “was among seven women subjected by the Egyptian military to forced virginity tests in March 2011.” The press release further notes that Samira “was arrested while in high school for writing a paper that criticized Arab leaders’ insincere support to the Palestinian cause.” Apparently, the State Department is unaware of her other convictions.

On Twitter, Ibrahim is quite blunt regarding her views. On July 18 of last year, after five Israeli tourists and a Bulgarian bus driver were killed a suicide bombing attack, Ibrahim jubilantly tweeted: “An explosion on a bus carrying Israelis in Burgas airport in Bulgaria on the Black Sea. Today is a very sweet day with a lot of very sweet news.”

Ibrahim frequently uses Twitter to air her anti-Semitic views. Last August 4, commenting on demonstrations in Saudi Arabia, she described the ruling Al Saud family as “dirtier than the Jews.” Seventeen days later she tweeted in reference to Adolf Hitler: “I have discovered with the passage of days, that no act contrary to morality, no crime against society, takes place, except with the Jews having a hand in it. Hitler.”

Ibrahim holds other repellent views as well. As a mob was attacking the United States embassy in Cairo on the eleventh anniversary of 9/11, pulling down the American flag and raising the flag of Al Qaeda, Ibrahim wrote on twitter: “Today is the anniversary of 9/11. May every year come with America burning.”

Disgusting. And I wish I could be as generous as Sam in assuming the State Department is guilty merely of incompetent vetting. This is the kind of thing they could have found out in about five minutes of background checking. The blunt fact is, this administration has consorted with anti-American Islamists from Day One.

My friend Ginni Thomas interviewed me recently about the Benghazi debacle and how ought to think about its ramifications. First installment is here.

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.

At Frontpage, Ray Ibrahim alerts us to the murder of Chokri Belaid, a leading member of the secular opposition to what the BBC takes pains to call the “moderate Islamist-led government” of Tunisia. As you’d expect, Ennahda,the ruling Muslim Brotherhood party, flatly denies any involvement in the assassination, in which one of their most influential detractors was gunned down on his way to work. But neither the Brothers nor the BBC sees fit to mention that, in the days before Belaid was killed, prominent sharia jurists publicly proclaimed fatwas calling for his murder.

As Ray elaborates, the same pattern is manifest in Egypt, where influential sharia jurists, so instrumental to the election of a Brotherhood government and the imposition of a sharia constitution, are now calling for the killing of politicians who oppose the ruling Islamists.

As the suppression of speech and political activity gradually suffocates the Middle East under Brotherhood rule, I am betting that the Islamist rulers will be absolved. That is not just because they control the prosecutorial authorities. It is because of the phenomenon I describe in Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy (my e-Book which is just now being published in paperback). While the West obsesses over law and politics, Islamists seek to dominate the culture. It is culture that pulls politics and law along, not the other way around.

When Islamists take over a government as the popular choice of the people, and especially if they manage to have sharia enshrined in their new constitution, this reflects a societal desire to make sharia the norm. Once that happens, it does not really matter what the civil laws on the books say. Those laws may appear to protect life and limb for everyone, but that is just for Western consumption. In reality, the Islamist government effectively signals to its like-minded Islamic supremacist supporters in the society that the state will turn a blind eye to their private and at times brutal enforcement of sharia standards. The Islamic supremacists take it from there. No need for the politicians to do the dirty work; the Islamists in the mosques and the streets take care of that. The culture, unleashed, takes care of that.

Benghazi: The Definitive Report is not very definitive.

The new and much hyped book by special-0perations vets Jack Murphy and Brandon Webb begins with the promise to “name names and hold accountable those who acted cowardly and those who erred by seeking to protect their political careers at the expense of human lives.” There is not much rain after that big wind, though. The authors’ admiration for the awesome valor displayed by those who laid down their lives for their country pours off every page. Especially gripping is their account of the bravery of Ty Woods and Glen Doherty, the former Navy SEALs who were killed on September 11, 2012, only after saving dozens of Americans. But on the accountability side of the ledger, the authors mostly don’t name names or grapple with the major questions, bending over backwards to help President Obama avoid accountability. And where they offer searing criticism, there is not much hard evidence to back it up.

This is not to say that their allegations are necessarily wrong. We just cannot say, er … definitively. The Murphy/Webb investigative method is to conduct interviews with their network of governmental sources (in the military, intelligence, diplomatic and law enforcement communities) who remain anonymous. The authors stitch together the narrative, and we must trust that they’ve grasped the big picture, asked the right questions, not been played by witnesses who are settling scores or motivated by other biases, filled in the blanks with reasonable inferences rather than supposition, and been willing to challenge not only their sources but also their own predispositions.

One name they do name, and quite controversially, is John Brennan, President Obama’s top counterterrorism adviser at the time of the Benghazi massacre and now his nominee to become CIA director. Brennan, the authors claim, is conducting “a secret war across North Africa.” A principal aim of this war, allegedly waged with the president’s rubber-stamp approval but without his active supervision, is to vanquish al-Qaeda-aligned militant groups. Against these jihadists, Brennan is said to direct ”his own unilateral operations … outside of the traditional command structure.”

Messrs. Murphy and Webb also identify Mr. Brennan’s point man as Admiral William McRaven, commander presently of U.S. Special Operations and formerly of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC). Brennan, the authors say, hatches the plans and McRaven then mobilizes JSOC assets like SEAL Team Six and Delta Force. These special ops experts proceed to execute lethal anti-terror missions that are “off the books” — as in “not coordinated through the Pentagon or other governmental agencies, including the CIA.”