The ecumenical xenophobia of the Turks

There's quite an interesting survey on view at the Hurriyet site today. Done by Pew Research, the survey reveals that the foreign country Turks dislike the most is Israel. I suppose in a 98% Muslim country that remembers the Mavi Marmara, that should not come as a surprise.

So can we therefore conclude that the Turks see themselves aligned with Israel's enemies? Not at all; the foreign country they dislike most after Israel, is Iran, the arch-nemesis of all right-thinking Israelis!

Hmm... but surely they are more closely aligned with their NATO betters in Washington than with the grasping pretenders in the Kremlin.

Nope, wrong again! On the list of people the Turks don't like, Russia and the US are tied for third after Israel and Iran!

You gotta like that about them!

Desperate Erdogan wondering if he's next

Here's something worth reading.

Note the tinge of desperation as Erdogan wanly champions the imaginary obligations of the international community to intercede with the generals in Egypt and prevent the wholesale slaughter of the Morsi supporters who have been holding peaceful sit-ins in the streets.

Don't expect Hurriyet to spell out the irony of Erdogan's appeal to international law after being neck deep in fomenting the Syrian crisis for the past three years.

Truth is, the big boys have decided that the Muslim Brotherhood is expendable. That's evident by what has happened with the regime change in Qatar and the coup in Egypt. This anti-MB impetus also helps sideline Hamas while the US puts on the latest iteration of the Middle East Peace charade.

The supposed conversations that Erdogan has been having with his counterparts among the UN Security Council must have been awkward in the extreme.

It seems that Erdogan is the last to know that the world has turned a page, and that he is being hung out to dry.

True, he has clapped most of his US-trained high command into prison, but that may not be enough.

The US-sponsored "democracy activists" remain thick on the ground.

Turkey vows to smash Kurdish resistance in Syria

See the last paragraph in this article from Hurriyet.

That's not the kind of talk you would have heard from Ankara back when Assad still had a firm grip on the levers of power.

The Kurdish resistance in Syria is determined to carve out Kurdish enclaves in the face of the al-Qaeda led civil war in Syria. In the convoluted arithmetic of the "enemy of my enemy is my friend" doctrine this seems to be making the Kurds friends of Assad.

Which is just one more indigestible nugget on Erdogan's plate. He has stuck his neck out way too far on behalf of his fairweather NATO compatriots in facilitating the Syrian "uprising." At the same time he continues to fight a rearguard action against the "secularist" forces that permeate the "deep state" in Turkey.

Erdogan is slowly but determinedly painting himself into a corner. He is too Islamist for the secularists, too secular for the Islamists, and none of his allies trust him.

What better time to pick a fight with the Kurds in Syria!

Gaza attack wipes Syria off the news map

Click on any major American news site right now and chances are you won't even find a reference to the Syrian conflict. When the only democracy in the middle east decides, (and it usually needs to do this just before an election, coincidentally) to teach those implacable Palestinians one of their periodic good sharp lessons, all other news disappears.

Which is not to say it stops happening. In fact, if one visits news sites based in the region, there seems to be quite a lot going on.

The popular Turkish news site Hurriyet has a take on the Gaza strikes that readers here wouldn't imagine. In the first place they seem to assume, incorrectly, that the Israelis would never undertake such an adventure without the explicit approval of the US.

Secondly, the tone used by Hurriyet suggests that they see the US/Israel attack on Gaza as an attack on Islam, and take offence accordingly. They have gone from being the crucial conduit  keeping the Syrian insurrection going to being yesterday's news.

They further seem a little put out that only France among the NATO allies has joined Turkey in recognizing the new Syrian opposition coalition that the Americans themselves were pushing so hard for the past two weeks. Yesterday Obama seemed to say the US still doesn't trust the rebels.

Here's another reason the Turks are miffed. Regardless of how the Syrian insurrection unfolds for Assad, there is a de-facto Kurdish state being created right now all along Turkey's border with Syria. The Kurdish militias creating the new Kurdistan are allies of the PKK that the Turkish state has been fighting for years.

Erdogan is up a stump. In an attempt to ingratiate himself with his NATO pals he went along with their plans to destroy his one-time ally Assad. In doing so he's allowed his country to violate international law continuously for the past year and a half by providing safe haven and supplying the rebels operating in Syria. Not only is Assad not out of power, but Erdogan's NATO friends, with the exception of France, are clearly losing interest.

And in the meantime, his worst nightmare, an independent Kurdistan, is blossoming right at his door.

So in spite of what you see or don't see at Fox or CNN, Gaza is just one story from a Middle East in chaos, and probably one of the more predictable ones. A few thousand Palestinians and a few dozen Israelis will die, Netanyahu will be re-elected, and it will be business as usual in the Holy Land.

But it's that rapidly changing landscape all around it that we need to be watching.