BREAKING NEWS:
Hamas Rejects German Mediator’s Offer on Shalit
JERUSALEM—Hamas [has] rejected an offer to free captive Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit made by [a] German mediator, a deal which the Israeli government had accepted.
Hamas political bureau deputy chief Mousa Mohammed Abu Marzouk called the offer “unjust” and said the German mediator “endorsed the unfair and unjust positions of the Zionist government.… There is no chance that the German mediator will return, because he is not carrying out his duties and is failing in his mission.…”
A German government spokesman confirmed on Monday that Israel had accepted the mediator’s proposal.…
“This proposal was harsh; it was not simple for the State of Israel,” Netanyahu said Sunday in a statement released after the weekly Cabinet meeting. “However, we agreed to accept it in the belief that it was balanced between our desire to secure Gilad’s release and to prevent possible harm to the lives and security of the Israeli people.…”
June 25 marked the fifth anniversary of Shalit’s capture in a cross-border raid near Gaza. (JTA, June 28.)
JUNE 28, 1941: THE YASSI MASSACRE—
“THAT SUNDAY”
Baruch CohenIn loving memory of Malca, z’l
In memory of the victims of the Yassi Pogrom
“Besides Germany itself, Romania was thus the only country which implemented all the steps of the destruction process from definition to killings” (pg. 485).
“Witnesses and survivors testifying to the manner in which the Romanian conducted their killing operation speak of the scenes unduplicated in Axis Europe” (pg. 486).
Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews
“The Judaic religion is a satanic fatally criminal and perverse faith. The murderous satanic character of Yid religion…logically and unavoidably breeds nomadic and parasitic Judaism the way we see it now around the world.”
A.C. Cuza—Leader of the Romanian Christian Party,
1924 “Shvut”—Tel Aviv University, 1963From Diaspora Research Institute Centre
for the History of Jews in Romania, Tel Aviv, 1993
In Romania, the killings of Jews began in June 1940 with the retreat of the Romanian army from territories ceded to Soviet Russia. The extermination policy of Romanian Jews, which had been latent in Romania since the 1920s, was received enthusiastically by civil and military administrators, as well as the infamous fascist Iron Guard movement.
On June 11 and 12, 1941 the Romanian and German governments signed several accords in Munich and later in Berchtesgaden. Romania not only became a most devoted ally of Germany, but unconditionally supported Hitler’s Nazi Germany.
On the eve of Saturday, June 28, 1941, the chilling cry of air sirens could be heard throughout Yassi. The government claimed it was a “false alarm”. Later in the day, however, the sky was set ablaze by rockets, signaling to the public to begin the pogrom against the Jews. The following day, Duminica Aceia, the Sunday That Was, would unfold as the bloodiest day in the history of Romanian Jewry.
The Yassi Jews were forcibly gathered and brought to the police headquarters where they were fired upon at random. Within twenty-four hours, a proud, creative, and culturally rich Jewish community was destroyed. Yassi was the cradle of Yiddish theatre, yet in a matter of moments the internationally renowned Abraham Goldfarb Yiddish Theatre was no more! Of the 35,000 Jews who lived in Yassi, an estimated 10,000-12,000 were brutally maimed or murdered. An additional 2,420 Jews were crammed into two death trains, the horrors of which continue to this day to echo in the souls of the few who managed to survive.
“By the number of its victims, by the bestiality of the means used to torture and kill, by the vast scope of the pillaging and destruction, by the vast scope of the public authorities to whom the life and property of the citizens were entrusted,” writes Matatias Carp in his book Cartea Neagra: The Black Book, “the Pogrom of Yassi marked at the local level the crowning of an accursed, injurious effort which violated the Romanian conscience for a period of three-quarters of a century, and it opens at the worldwide level the most tragic chapters in history. It became the signal, not only to the Romanian Antonescu’s government, but also to all fascist Europe or massacres which during the following years were to kill six million Jewish people.”
Curzio Malaparte, an Italian journalist for the Corriere dela Sera, at the time reported that “there were groups of Jews in the street followed by soldiers and inhabitants of city arrived with sticks and iron bars, groups of gendarmes firing weapons into the doors and windows of Jewish homes.” As Malaparte writes in his book Kaput, “packs of dogs ran up gendarmes, and soldiers armed with guns were watching over them seeking to separate the corpses and put them at the cage of the streets.”
The Romanian government’s policy regarding the Jews was clear and deliberate, as noted by I.C. Butnaru in his book The Silent Holocaust: “Ion Antonescu, Romania’s Fuhrer, clearly stated [that] ‘It makes no difference to me that we’ll go down in history as barbarians. The Roman Empire performed a series of acts of barbarian according to our present standards and nevertheless it was considered the most significant political establishment. There has not existed a more favorable moment in our history. If it is needed, shoot all of them with machine guns.”
Such are the terrible recollections of the notorious “Sunday That Was,” the day of the Yassi Pogrom!
Zakor! Remember! Never again! Never forgotten!
Itgadal V’itkadash.
(Baruch Cohen is Research Chairman for the Canadian Institute for Jewish Research.)
Sources:
Butnaru, I. C. The Silent Holocaust: Romania and its Jews. New York: Greenwood Press, 1992
Hieberg, Raul. The Destruction of the European Jews. Chicago: Quadrangle Paperback Books, 1967
Matatias, Carp. The Black Book – Cartea Neagra: Vol 2. Bucharest: Diogene, 1996.
STEALTH ISLAMISM IN TURKEY
Barry Rubin
Jerusalem Post, June 13, 2011
The elections in Turkey [held June 12] marked a revolution. When Iran’s revolution happened and the Islamists took over in 1979, everyone knew it. In contrast, Turkey’s revolution has been a stealth operation. It has succeeded brilliantly, while Western governments have failed shockingly to understand what’s going on.
Now we are at a turning point—an event every bit as significant as the revolutions in Iran and Egypt. Of course, it will take time, but now Turkey is set on a path that is ending the republic established by Kemal Ataturk in the 1920s. The Turkey of secularism and Western orientation is finished. The Turkey that belongs to an alliance of radical Islamists abroad and at home has been launched.
Here are the election numbers: The stealth Islamist party, Justice and Development (AKP), received almost exactly 50 percent of the vote. Under the Turkish system, this will give it 325 members of parliament, or about 60% of the seats. On the opposition side, the social democratic Republican People’s Party (CHP) got about 26% of the vote and 135 seats. The right-wing Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) took 13%, giving it 54 seats. There are also 36 independents, all of them Kurdish communalists. Eleven parties didn’t make the minimum 10% barrier (they received only about 1% or less each).…
The outcome is…overwhelmingly bad…[as] the AKP’s percentage of voters keeps rising. Most of the people who back the party don’t want an Islamist regime, and don’t think of the AKP in those terms. It rather seems to them to be a strong nationalist party respecting religious tradition that is making Turkey an important international power and is doing a good job on the economy.
The AKP got almost—remember that, almost—everything it wanted. It increased voter support more than any other party, and will be in power for four—and perhaps many more—years, infiltrating institutions, producing a new constitution, intimidating opponents, altering Turkish foreign policy, and shifting public opinion against Americans and Jews to a larger degree.
The only point on which the AKP seemingly fell short is that it didn’t get the two-thirds of parliament needed to pretty much write Turkey’s new constitution any way it wanted.
But so what? Deals with a few willing parliamentarians from other parties could provide the five additional votes needed for submitting an AKP-authored constitution to a referendum. The government can offer individuals a lot, including what I will delicately call personal benefits for their support. And given the way the parliamentary elections went, the AKP can almost certainly win that referendum.
In short, the AKP is entrenched in power, and can now proceed with the fundamental transformation of Turkey.
The AKP has become famous for the subtlety of its Islamism, disguising itself as a “center-right” reform party. Some people in the Arab world are starting to talk about this as a model. Notably, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt is fascinated by the strategy. Yet as the Islamist party gains more and more power and support—Turkey has demonstrated this—it becomes more ambitious, daring and extreme.
This would include:
• A constitution that would take the country far down the road to a more Islamist society.
• A more presidential style of government, empowering the mercurial (a nice word for personally unstable and frighteningly arrogant) Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan to become chief executive.
• A government that can infiltrate, take over and transform the remaining hold-out institutions, especially the armed forces and courts, along with the remainder of the media that has not yet been bought up or intimidated by the Islamists.
• A government whose policy is to align with Islamists like Iran, Syria (not Islamist but part of the Tehran-led alliance), Hamas, Hezbollah and perhaps the Muslim Brotherhood.
• A government against US and Western interests.
• A government that, to put it bluntly, hates Israel, and many of whose members hate Jews.
• For Israel, the end of any dreams of restoring the alliance with Turkey, or even normal diplomatic relations.
This is the regime that sponsored the first Gaza flotilla and is now behind the second. From an Israeli perspective, Turkey’s government is now on the side of our enemies.
It is hard to state these unpleasant realities, and many will not want to face them. There will be no shortage of soothing analyses and encouraging talk about Turkish democracy succeeding, moderate Muslim politics, and how “great” it is that the army’s political power is destroyed.
Don’t be fooled.
This is a [occurrence] for the United States and Europe, as well as for the prospects of stability and peace in the Middle East. And it isn’t great news for the relatively moderate Arab states either. It is the end of the republic as established by Ataturk in the 1920s and modified into a multi-party democracy in the 1950s.
Yet how many people in the West actually appreciate what’s happening? How many journalists will celebrate the election as a victory for democracy? Lenin once reportedly remarked that he would get the capitalists to sell him the rope with which to hang them.
The AKP has gotten the West to provide that rope as a gift.
(Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs Center and editor of Middle East Review of International Affairs [MERIA] Journal and Turkish Studies.)
LANDSLIDE ISLAMIST VICTORY IN TURKEY
Ryan Mauro
FrontPage, June 13, 2011
Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan and his Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP) won a landslide victory in [the June 12th] elections. The Islamists won half of the vote, leaving them short of the two-thirds majority they sought in the parliament, which would have allowed them to rewrite the constitution unobstructed. However, the AKP’s huge victory means the Islamists will still control Turkey and oversee the writing of a new constitution.
The election actually results in a slight loss for the AKP. The party currently holds 331 of the 550 seats in parliament, and is projected to now only have 325. The Islamists must win the support of only five non-AKP seats to put up a draft constitution for a referendum. The popularity of Prime Minister Erdogan and his party means that such a referendum is very likely to pass. The AKP may not have the two-thirds majority that would have allowed for a unilateral writing of the constitution, or even enough to unilaterally submit a draft for a referendum, but not much stands in its way.
“Elections taking place today are likely to be the last fair and free ones in Turkey. With Turkey’s leading Islamist party controlling all three branches of the government and the military sidelined, little will stop it from changing the rules to keep power into the indefinite future,” wrote Dr. Daniel Pipes of the electoral results.
In September, 58 percent of Turks voted in favor of a referendum that paved the way for a new constitution. Tellingly, Iran endorsed the referendum. A key objective was to undermine the power of the military that has acted as a vanguard of secularism. It asserts civilian control over the military and increased the power of the president and the parliament over the judiciary. Both the presidency and the parliament are controlled by the AKP.
The Erdogan government’s reforms were welcomed in the West because they make Turkey more democratic structurally, but these reforms have coincided with disturbing crackdowns on political opponents. The government has blocked many websites, including YouTube, without having to explain why. Over 60 journalists have been imprisoned for what they’ve written. Two of them were arrested in March and have still not been informed of the charges against them. As Dr. Barry Rubin points out, the Erdogan government has “repressed opposition and arrested hundreds of critics, bought up 40 percent of the media, and installed its people in the bureaucracy.”
There has also been a concerted effort to decrease the political influence of the military. Over 160 current and former military officers have been charged with involvement in an alleged coup plot in 2003. It has been called the “the largest-ever crackdown on Turkey’s military.” The government claims that elements of the military sought to carry out attacks, including the bombing of mosques. Those arrested have also been accused of planning to foment conflict by provoking Greece to shoot down a Turkish military aircraft. Top officials including the former commander of the First Army and former leaders of the air force, special forces and navy have been arrested. Erdogan’s opponents allege that the arrests are politically-motivated.
Erdogan was originally a member of the Welfare Party, which has been called the “motherboard of Turkish Islamists.” He was arrested for his involvement in the party. He later formed the AKP, which has been praised by the Muslim Brotherhood for “exposing of the failure of the secular trend.” Erdogan’s foreign policy has become increasingly hostile to the West as his party has grown in power.
His National Security Council removed Iran and Syria as designated threats, but labeled Israel as a “major threat.” Erdogan opposed the International Criminal Court’s indictment of Sudanese President Omar Bashir because, in his words, “no Muslim could perpetrate a genocide.” He has received an award from Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi, and has dragged his feet in confronting him. Erdogan said in June 2010, “I do not think that Hamas is a terrorist organization.… They are Palestinians in resistance, fighting for their own land.”
Erdogan has brought Turkey closer to Iran. In December, Ahmadinejad addressed the Economic Cooperation Organization in Turkey and declared that an “Islamic World Order” must replace the secular capitalist world order. Turkey has opposed U.N. sanctions on Iran, and Erdogan and President Gul met with the Iranian-backed militia leader Moqtada al-Sadr in the spring of 2009 despite the American and Iraqi blood on his hands. Turkey has denied reports that the Iranian regime secretly donated to Erdogan’s campaign.
Turkey has held joint military exercises with Syria and has been accused of having a joint military campaign with Iran against Iraqi Kurdish militants. Fortunately, Erdogan has turned on Syrian President Assad in the wake of his violence against his people. Turkey is hosting meetings of the Syrian opposition, but Erdogan may be trying to assist the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood.
Erdogan has become increasingly confrontational towards Israel, with the 2010 Gaza flotilla incident as the prime example. The extremist IHH group behind the ambush of Israeli soldiers has strong ties to the Erdogan government and the AKP. A French counter-terrorism magistrate determined that the IHH’s goal is “overthrowing the democratic, secular and constitutional order present in Turkey and replacing it with an Islamic state founded on the Shariah.” The Israeli Defense Forces now has photos of IHH members with guns onboard the Mavi Marmara.
Erdogan’s AKP will now begin working on a new constitution. Turkey’s fate will soon be decided, and the Islamists are in the driver’s seat.
SYRIAN CRISIS WARMS TURKEY-ISRAEL TIES
Marc Champion & Jay Solomon
Wall Street Journal, June 25, 2011
Unrest in Syria is triggering early signs of a thaw in relations between Israel and Turkey, as Ankara adapts its assertive foreign policy to meet fallout from the Arab Spring.…
In the latest sign, Turkish newspapers published an interview with Israel’s Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon in which he called for reconciliation with Ankara and praised Turkey’s Syria policy, appealing to a common interest in the stability of a country both Israel and Turkey border. “The leadership demonstrated by Prime Minister [Recep Tayyip] Erdogan over the issue of Syria was very, very encouraging. This should be noticed and appreciated in the region,” said Mr. Ayalon, who became infamous in Turkey after he humiliated Ankara’s ambassador on camera last year.
Mr. Ayalon’s comments followed surprisingly warm letters of congratulation to Mr. Erdogan for his June 12 re-election, from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli Knesset.
Turkey, for its part, pressed a Turkish charity not to send the Mavi Marmara, the Gaza-bound aid ship on which Israeli commandos last year killed nine passengers, for a repeat voyage later this month.
That is a significant change from a year ago, when Turkey’s relations with Israel and then the U.S. chilled in the wake of the Mavi Marmara clash and Ankara’s decision to vote against a U.S.-backed resolution to impose new United Nations Security Council sanctions on Iran.
It also appears Syria’s crackdown has pushed Ankara and Washington into closer cooperation. U.S. officials said Turkey’s Prime Minister Erdogan and President Barack Obama have discussed Syria twice by phone during the recent crisis and have developed a similar view on how to handle President Bashar al-Assad.
U.S. officials said Washington in many ways is now following Ankara’s lead on Syria, as Turkey tries to persuade the regime to change, but not necessarily to leave power. “The president and Prime Minister Erdogan have a very close relationship,” said a White House official. “They talk often and get a lot of interesting things done.…”
Turkey and Israel remain at odds, however, over the Palestinian issue.… Mr. Erdogan [recently] called Israel’s treatment of Gaza “inhumane” at a news conference in Ankara with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. He also pledged to support Mr. Abbas’s bid to secure UN recognition in September—a move Israel and the U.S. oppose.
An Israeli diplomat acknowledged relations with Ankara remain difficult. “There are things going on behind the scenes, but when it comes to heads-of-state meetings, we are not there. It is more quiet diplomacy,” he said.
