Leonard Fein foolish to blame Israel for turkey

Leonard Fein, noted jewish leftist, blames israel for the problems with Turkey in his Forward column recently. Of course it is always blame Israel. The guy has no clue. After the Turks killed 1.5 million Armenians in 1915, the Ottoman Empire fell apoart after WW 2. The military took over, installing a pro Western, secular muslim state. . That has changed. Tuyrkey is now in the Islamic camp. Fein has it 100% backwards, as the left always does on Israel. Turkey wants the Islamic camp-that is why it allowed the extremist muslim group to purposely incite violence.

Observations from Daily Alert from Council president's major jewish organizations:

Turkey's Islamic Revolution Paid for by Wealthy Islamists - Michael Rubin (Commentary)

* Turkey has changed. Gone permanently is secular Turkey, a unique Muslim country that straddled East and West and that even maintained a cooperative relationship with Israel. Today Turkey is an Islamic republic whose government saw fit to facilitate the May 31 flotilla raid on Israel's blockade of Gaza. Turkey is now more aligned to Iran than to the democracies of Europe.
* Outside of public view, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Abdullah Gul, now his foreign minister, presided over an influx of so-called Green Money - capital from Saudi Arabia and the oil-rich Persian Gulf emirates, much of which ended up in AKP party coffers rather than in the public treasury.
* Between 2002 and 2003, money appeared in Turkey's financial system for which government reporting cannot account - an amount that increased from approximately $200 million to more than $4 billion. By 2006, Turkish economists estimated the Green Money infusion into the Turkish economy to be between $6 billion and $12 billion. Some Turkish intelligence officials privately suggest that Qatar is today the source of most subsidies for the AKP and its projects. Thus, Turkey's Islamic revolution was bought and paid for by wealthy Islamists.
* Erdogan equated degrees issued by Turkish madrassas - Islamic religious schools - with ordinary high school degrees. This bureaucratic sleight of hand enabled madrassa students to enter the university and qualify for government jobs without ever mastering or, in some cases, even being exposed to Western fundamentals. When such students still fumbled university entrance exams, the AKP provided them with a comparative bonus on their scores, justifying the move as affirmative action.
* As a NATO member, Turkey is privy to U.S. weaponry, tactics, and intelligence. Any provision of assistance to Turkey today, however, could be akin to transferring it to Hamas, Sudan, or Iran. Does President Obama really want to deliver the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter to a hostile Turkey, as promised, in 2014?
* As mayor of Istanbul, Erdogan quipped, "Democracy is like a streetcar. When you come to your stop, you get off."

The writer is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute

Nathan Guttman Forward
An e-mail blast sent out by The Israel Project, a pro-Israel advocacy group whose target audience is journalists covering the Middle East, highlighted Turkey’s military actions against the Kurdish minority in Northern Iraq, pointed to a report about the beheading of a Turkish Catholic leader and, under a photo of Erdogan shaking hands with Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, listed events marking “Turkey’s changing posture towards Israel and the West.”
The American Israel Public Affairs Committee distributed an e-mail promoting a video depicting Erdogan alongside Ahmadinejad and Syria’s Bashar Al-Assad as “The Three Terrors,” a takeoff on the famous Three Tenors — Domingo, Pavarotti and Carreras.