New York Daily News
July 28 2014
Erdogan’s odious anti-Semitic slander
Turkey denies its own genocide and accuses Israel
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s anti-Semitism is getting the better of him.
Once again, the Turkish prime minister has trotted out the Hitler
analogy in relation to Israel and what it has done in Gaza. “They
curse Hitler morning and night,” he said of the Israelis. “However,
now their barbarism has surpassed even Hitler’s.”
Erdogan’s Hitler fetish is both revolting and inaccurate. Hitler
murdered an estimated 6 million Jews, not to mention millions of
Poles, Russians, Gypsies and, as a group, homosexuals; the Israelis
have killed in the current Gaza operation more than 1,000
Palestinians. The difference between murdered and killed — the former
on purpose, the latter mostly what’s called “collateral damage” —
ought to be clear to anyone whose mind is not addled by anti-Semitism.
Israel has gone out of its way to try to avoid civilian deaths. It has
often — maybe too often — not succeeded. But it has warned civilians
with telephone calls and text messages and even dummy bombs hitting
the roof. This, I point out, is far more than President Obama has done
when American drones kill terrorists in Pakistan or wherever. Hamas
militants are also terrorists and they hide, as every guerrilla army
has ever done, among the people.
The loss of civilian life is awful, but it is no Holocaust. It is,
though, an opportunity for anti-Semites, latent or otherwise, to
express their bigotry. Their implied statement is that the Jews had it
coming — see how they act now! Their bigotry overpowers their logic
and they deliriously lose all sense of proportion — 6 million versus
1,000 or so in Gaza — and they conflate the killer with the killed. It
is repugnant.
For Erdogan, the handier and closer to home reference would have been
what the Turks did to the Armenians. This genocide — the very word was
coined by Raphael Lemkin to encompass what happened to 1.5 million
Armenians during and after World War I — has been roundly denied by
the Turkish government. In a dizzying feat of irrationality, the head
of that government brushes past the crimes of his own nation to point
an accusatory finger at the victims of another nation.
Erdogan’s remarks are merely the reductio ad absurdum of the
anti-Israel argument. Some accuse Israel of a hideous lack of
proportionality without pausing to say what the proper proportion of
death and destruction should be. Would Hamas have ceased firing
rockets into Israel if Israel had bombed less? Somehow, I think not.
Would Hamas have blown up its own tunnels if Israel had ceased its
attack after, say, a week? Again, no.
After the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, did the U.S. go into Afghanistan
to kill exactly 2,977 Al Qaeda and Taliban, an eye for every eye
extinguished on that infamous day? Israel is a small nation of only
about 8 million people, more than a fifth of them Arabs.
Proportionality is a luxury beyond its reach.
It is clear that much of the world has grown weary of Israel. Its
persistent settlement of the West Bank is surely cause for
indignation. Yet there is an edge to the outrage that is elsewhere
lacking. When did thousands gather in Europe to protest the Syrian
slaughter — not just the government’s abhorrent bombing, use of gas
and repression, but the torture and murder of about 10,000 activists
and dissidents? It was a mass murder that the Syrian government
studiously archived — photos and such — which surely deserves the Nazi
analogy that comes so easily to the tongue of Erdogan and others. No
matter. Silence.
I take psychiatric theories with a grain of salt, but the effort of
Erdogan to make the victim worse than the victimizer is not only false
and tasteless, it is psychologically intriguing. It does more than
blame the victim. It tends to exonerate the criminal. History is
repeating itself — not, as Marx said, as either tragedy or farce, but
in Erdogan’s telling as pornography.
http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/erdogan-odious-anti-semitic-slander-article-1.1883338