A Profile In Courage: Turkey Takes A Stand For Justice | Sabbah Report

2009 10 15 }
A Profile In Courage: Turkey Takes A Stand For Justice

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http://sabbah.biz/mt/wp-content/uplo...yahu_obama.jpgBy Dr. Alan Sabrosky*
There is always something compelling about a "David and Goliath" confrontation. Most of us prefer winners to losers, and almost everyone feels a thrill when the underdog takes a stand and prevails.
This is the surprising situation now unfolding in the rising drama of the Goldstone Report on Gaza. Goliath -- in this instance, Israel plus the US in its usual role of Bibi Netanyahu's "Uncle Tom" -- assumed that broad threats and a predictable US veto on the UN Security Council would kill that report. And last week, that seemed likely to happen.
But David -- in the form of Turkey's forthright Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan -- isn't buying that at all. His courageous stance has a good chance of not only bringing the Goldstone Report dramatically into view so publicly that even the Jewish-dominated US mainstream media cannot ignore it, but also opening the political sewer that is Israel's oppression of the Palestinians for all the world -- especially the American public to see.
Genesis in Gaza
The genesis of this, of course, was Israel's brutal assault on Gaza in the weeks before Obama assumed office, and its subsequent condemnation not by the UN Security Council (its American puppet-patron prevented that), but in a report prepared by a UN Human Rights Council commission headed by a respected Jewish jurist from South Africa, Richard Goldstone.
Yet even before that report appeared, Erdogan had already clashed with Israel over its assault on Gaza, walking out from a debate with Israeli President Shimon Peres in January 2009. He has continued his criticism of Israeli actions in Gaza and against Palestinians since that time, excluding Israel from participating in a recent NATO exercise, and this week continuing his condemnation of Israel for using incendiaries against civilians and harming children during the Gaza onslaught.
Turkey's position is potentially critical here. As a long-standing member of NATO and a secular Moslem country having formal diplomatic relations with Israel, it cannot easily be dismissed by its critics as an anti-Semitic rogue. Erdogan's position on this issue is popular at home, and evidentally supported by the Turkish military. He also makes no bones about calling Israeli and US actions what they are, something so much of the world -- and especially most Arab countries, whose leaders ought in their own self-interest to know better -- take great pains to ignore, or even to facilitate.


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