Hans Rustad I USA diskuterer man who lost Turkey? Tyrkerne selv, ifølge Robert L. Pollock i Wall Street Journal som nylig besøkte Tyrkia med Douglas Feith.
Pollock fant en anti-amerikanisme av det mest overtroiske, paranoide slaget.
Han husker tilbake fra en utstilling i 1980 da han møtte den samme anti-amerikanismen fra venstresiden. Kanskje ikke så overraskende. Men nå smelter den venstreorienterte tradisjonen sammen med et politisert islam. De gamle 2_kommentarstreampartiene som pleide å holde med USA, har forfalt.
It’s this combination of old leftism and new Islamism–much more than any mutual pique over Turkey’s refusal to side with us in the Iraq war–that explains the collapse in relations.
And what a collapse it has been. On a brief visit to Ankara earlier this month with Undersecretary of Defense Doug Feith, I found a poisonous atmosphere–one in which just about every politician and media outlet (secular and religious) preaches an extreme combination of America- and Jew-hatred that (like the Turkish artists) voluntarily goes far further than anything found in most of the Arab world’s state-controlled press. If I hesitate to call it Nazi-like, that’s only because Goebbels would probably have rejected much of it as too crude.
Consider the Islamist newspaper Yeni Safak, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s favorite. A Jan. 9 story claimed that U.S. forces were tossing so many Iraqi bodies into the Euphrates that mullahs there had issued a fatwa prohibiting residents from eating its fish. Yeni Safak has also repeatedly claimed that U.S. forces used chemical weapons in Fallujah. One of its columnists has alleged that U.S. soldiers raped women and children there and left their bodies in the streets to be eaten by dogs. Among the paper’s “scoops” have been the 1,000 Israeli soldiers deployed alongside U.S. forces in Iraq, and that U.S. forces have been harvesting the innards of dead Iraqis for sale on the U.S. “organ market.”
It’s not much better in the secular press. The 2_kommentarstream Hurriyet has accused Israeli hit squads of assassinating Turkish security personnel in Mosul, and the U.S. of starting an occupation of Indonesia under the guise of humanitarian assistance. At Sabah, a columnist last fall accused the U.S. ambassador to Turkey, Eric Edelman, of letting his “ethnic origins”–guess what, he’s Jewish–determine his behavior. Mr. Edelman is indeed the all-too-rare foreign-service officer who takes seriously his obligation to defend America’s image and interests abroad. The intellectual climate in which he’s operating has gone so mad that he actually felt compelled to organize a conference call with scientists from the U.S. Geological Survey to explain that secret U.S. nuclear testing did not cause the recent tsunami.
Never in an ostensibly friendly country have I had the impression of embassy staff so besieged. Mr. Erdogan’s office recently forbade Turkish officials from attending a reception at the ambassador’s residence in honor of the “Ecumenical” Patriarch of the Orthodox Church, who resides in Istanbul. Why? Because “ecumenical” means universal, which somehow makes it all part of a plot to carve up Turkey.
Perhaps the most bizarre anti-American story au courant in the Turkish capital is the “eighth planet” theory, which holds not only that the U.S. knows of an impending asteroid strike, but that we know it’s going to hit North America. Hence our desire to colonize the Middle East.
It all sounds loony, I know. But such stories are told in all seriousness at the most powerful dinner tables in Ankara. The common thread is that almost everything the U.S. is doing in the world–even tsunami relief–has malevolent motivations, usually with the implication that we’re acting as muscle for the Jews.
Hvor lite europeiske medier skriver om islams status i Tyrkia, til tross for medlemskapsforhandlinger. Særlig etter at de slo hånda av USA. Det burde interessere oss i høyeste grad. Igjen må vi få høre det av frittalende amerikanere.
