What if it’s not just Islamism that caused Turkey to set Israel up with the IHH Gaza Flotilla? What if the reasons for the delegitimization of Israel went further than demagoguery and the whipping of the anti-Israel crowd to keep Erdogan and his party in office?
What if it’s really Turkey’s economic future at stake?
The discovery of enormous natural gas fields off the coast of Israel will turn Israel into a gas-exporting nation. Another gas-exporting nation? Why, Turkey. But the Israeli find, well, it’s a game-changer. Israel can compete with Turkey for gas exports to India and elsewhere. And perhaps that’s a large part of the sudden anti-Israel turn for Turkey. Delegitimize Israel, work the boycott angle, do everything you can to prevent this from happening:
The creation of an energy corridor from Israel to the Indian subcontinent would mean that Israel would have to retrofit the existing 150-mile oil pipeline linking the Red Sea port of Eilat with the Mediterranean port of Ashkelon. Once this pipeline commences operation, Russian and Caspian natural gas could reach the Asian markets as well.
Ironically, the biggest casualty of such an energy corridor will be none other than Turkey, which now enjoys an unchallenged status as an energy bridge between East and West. Energy transit fees are an important source of income to the Turkish economy.
Mind you, I am not an analyst and I don’t play one on TV. I simply put facts together. And these facts are starting to add up to a little more than just Islamist demagoguery by the man who wants to be the new Ottoman emperor. Turkey is fighting to maintain its energy monopoly. That would make Erdogan a hell of a lot smarter than I thought.
Lebanon and the Palis are laying claim to the fields, too, and I wouldn’t put it past them to attack any drilling and pumping operations.
This is going to be very interesting.
-ls/cm
Russia has already made a decision to keep the gas pipeline short of Israel because it says that it doesn’t make sense financially because of Israel’s own gas discoveries. http://israelmatzav.blogspot.com/2010/06/russia-scraps-gas-pipeline-to-israel.html
Glad to see your blog is non-Israel bashing. It shows good taste and great good sense.
We had been planning to visit both Israel and Turkey this summer. Now I have no idea where we’ll end up. :/
You have to love the inconsistency of the Turkish government and its head nitwit Ergodon and the blather and oral vuvuzuela noisemaking of the antisemites (particularly those who don’t want consider the Pals their pals:
According to CNN on June 21, the Turkish army was using recently purchased Israeli-built HERON drones. (Watson and Comert) This was apparently announced by the “top general” of the Turkish army. Maybe if he or his family needed medical care (or potato batteries) they would sneak into Israel like the other fine folks do.
This seems another example of sleight-of-hand taking things not very important and loudly diverting attention from things that are important (like honor killings and Saudi arrests of mixed-sex partiers?) Or President 44 going to Ohio to dedicate a highway (paid for by taxpayers elsewhere), getting his sycophants to cheer him, and diverting attention from employment disasters and the Gulf disaster (whose tarballs will plague me for a long time)and his thoroughly inept handling of both.
Erogdon the phony and President 44 the Treif Naif.
From what I read, in places like StrategyPage, the Turkish Army sees itself as the keeper of the Kemalist flame of secularism. The Army has large numbers of pro-Israel officers. Erdogan treats it like an enemy.
The detente between Iran and Turkey is due to the mutual antipathy to the Kurds and a desire to make points with the Arabs by howling at Israel and the USA. In the long run the two countries are on a collision course. They both want to be the regional top dog, so their interests will clash in the future, especially (and all the sooner) if the USA removes itself from the region. They will return to the hostile relationship and periodic wars the Ottomans and the Safavids (Persia’s rulers) had for 400 years. Indeed, even before Islam the Byzantines and the Sassanids were fighting each other over the same region, Iraq and Syria, for six centuries or more. In the Middle East, internatiional relations precedents go back a long way, and have a way of recurring repeatedly with new actors playing old parts. Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose.
Egypt can hardly be indifferent to such a conflict (Egypt fought the Ottomans over the Levant in the 1830s and ’40s, and only British intervention saved the Turks). The only things which stand in the way of a (really another) massive, intra-Muslim bloobath are the USA as regional order-maker and the existence of Israel, which Egypt would have to go through to intervene in a war in the Levant or Mesopotamia.
All too many Muslims want both those features removed. Muslims, beware what you wish for, lest you receive it.
“You have to love the inconsistency of the Turkish government and its head nitwit Ergodon”
Has there *ever* been an antisemite that didn’t have to go into proctological contortions to justify their mendacious, malicious drivel?