MELANIE PHILLIPS: A BURNING QUESTION
http://www.spectator.co.uk/melaniephillips/6530214/a-burning-madness.thtml
A burning madness Melanie Phillips
When Turkey’s President Erdoğan offered help to Israel during the recent terrible fire in the Carmel Forest which killed upwards of some 41 people, deluded western souls who stubbornly persist in their belief that inside every Islamist fanatic beats a heart of melting butter took this as a signal for great optimism. Apparently Erdoğan’s hitherto implacable hostility towards Israel, and consequent alliance with Iran in the cause of turning that hostility into genocidal reality, was miraculously consumed in the flames of the Carmel. Human tragedy was beating scimitars into fire-fighting planes (while rather more unpleasantly, others implied that this showed Israel had merely fabricated Erdoğan’s presumed hostility all along).
Of course this was, as ever, to pile prejudice upon stupidity and ignorance. A somewhat more hard-headed explanation, which actually takes account of the way the eastern mind works rather than viewing its activities through the (racist) prism of western attitudes, is provided here by Harold Rhode, formerly Turkish desk officer at the US Defence Department. And it’s all to do with Wikileaks.
Rhode points out that, throughout the Middle East, the belief in America’s diabolical power (and behind America, of course, that of its presumed puppeteers, the Jews) means that there is a virtually universal view that the Wikileaks revelations were deliberately released by the US government. From this bonkers premise a chain of false thinking led to Erdoğan’s apparently magnanimous gesture towards Israel:
Among the leaked documents is one in which the US Embassy writes about rumors that Erdoğan has multiple Swiss bank accounts in which he has more the $1 billion. As the Turks see it, Erdoğan must have been stunned by this revelation. Many believe that the US released this document in order to embarrass and humiliate him.
America had shown its power. Erdoğan therefore had no choice other than it submit to its dictates. How best to do that? A large number of Middle Easterners believe the Jews run America and the world. By this logic, now that America has thrown down the gauntlet, the best way for Erdoğan to redeem himself is to find a way to ingratiate himself to the Americans and Israelis. This, accordingly, would help him come down off of a branch onto which he dangerously had stepped.
The opportunity presented itself very quickly. When Israel proved unable to handle the huge fire that was blazing in its Carmel Mountains, Erdoğan jumped at the opportunity to send two Turkish planes to help the Israelis put out the fire. This humanitarian gesture would surely signal to the Americans and world Jewry that he was not as bad as they thought he was. This gesture, they reasoned, would help Erdoğan back into the good graces of the Americans and the Jews, who together, ‘behind the curtain,’ run the world.
Moreover, given past history, it is very likely that Erdoğan and his cohorts also have a lurking fear that America and the Jews might have other tricks up their sleeves, and most certainly fear this Sword of Damocles hanging over their heads.
… Another unintended consequence of the Wikileaks could easily be an improvement of US-Turkish relations. As an incentive from the American side, this might be the reason, many Turks believe, that the Americans also leaked a document according to which Armenia was facilitating weapons transfers to Iran, which used these weapons to kill American soldiers in Iraq.
This logic, to people who have worked and lived in the Middle East, makes perfect sense.
Question: who is the more cerebrally challenged – the Middle Eastern peoples who are brainwashed into believing in the US/Zionist all-powerful conspiracy, or the western intelligentsia who fail to find in this theory cause for serious disagreement, let alone profound alarm about the power and intentions of those in its demented grip?
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