Turkish Prime Minister Denies Israel’s Right to Exist

Turkish Prime Minister Denies Israel’s Right to Exist

By Daniel Greenfield

We’ve gone way past the illusion that this is about Turkey’s opposition to Israel’s blockade of Hamas or the Turkish ambassador feeling insulted or a sudden outbreak of concern for human rights by a regime with tens of thousands of political prisoners.

This is what it’s always about with Islamists. It’s about Israel’s existence.

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Wednesday described Zionism as a “crime against humanity.

Speaking in Vienna at a United Nations event devoted to dialogue between the West and Islam, Erdogan decried rising racism in Europe and the fact that many Muslims “who live in countries other than their own” often face harsh discrimination.

“We should be striving to better understand the culture and beliefs of others, but instead we see that people act based on prejudice and exclude others and despise them,” Erdogan said, according to a simultaneous translation provided by the UN. “And that is why it is necessary that we must consider — just like Zionism or anti-Semitism or fascism — Islamophobia as a crime against humanity.”

Erdogan might know something about antisemitism considering his Mas-Kom-Ya magnum opus.

In 1974, Erdogan, while serving as president of the Istanbul Youth Group of his mentor, former Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan’s National Salvation Party, wrote, directed, and played the leading role in a theatrical play entitled Maskomya, staged throughout Turkey during the 1970s. Mas-Kom-Ya was a compound acronym for “Masons-Communists-Yahudi” — the latter meaning “Jews.” The play focused on the evil, conspiratorial nature of these three entities whose common denominator was Judaism.

But let’s skip to the part where Erdogan embraces the Zionism is evil and illegitimate. The simple meaning of that proposition is that Israel has no right to exist.

It’s not a complete shift as Turkey voted Yes on UN Resolution 3379, but it abstained from UN Resolution 46/86 which repealed the infamous “Zionism is Racism” resolution. And Turkish leaders did not openly make such statement rejecting the very foundation of Israel’s existence… a statement that would be the equivalent of Netanyahu describing Kemalism as a great evil.

Diplomatic pressure on Israel to apologize to Turkey is senseless and misdirected. The issue is not the Mavi Marmara. Erdogan doesn’t support Hamas for humanitarian reasons, but for Islamist ones. And those same reasons lead him to conduct an ideological war on the Jewish State.

 http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/turkish-prime-minister-denies-israels-right-to-exist/