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Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish president, said Saturday that Israel has been “openly committing war crimes for exactly 22 days,” but there have been no calls for a ceasefire from the West.
He told pro-Palestinian protesters in Istanbul that Ankara is gathering information to “present Israel to the world as a war criminal.”
Israel has continued to pound Gaza with missiles all last week and the rhetoric from Tel Aviv has been belligerent and showed no signs of cooling.
Riyad al-Maliki, the Palestinian Authority’s minister of foreign affairs, criticized the silence from the West.
“Doesn’t the wholesale killing offend you?” he asked, according to The New York Times.
The paper also noted that Antonio Guterres, the head of the UN, “tried to thread the needle,” and said, “The grievances of the Palestinian people cannot justify the appalling attacks by Hamas” but “those appalling attacks cannot justify the collective punishment of the Palestinian people.”
TRENDPOST: The paper accurately said Guterres has tried to “thread the needle” because the feelings of pro-Israelis cannot be hurt by strong language. They are a protected class and you will be fired or otherwise destroyed if you speak out against the Gaza genocide. (See “PROMOTE ISRAELI PROPAGANDA OR ELSE: ONLY ONE SIDE PERMITTED DURING ISRAEL WAR” 24 Oct 2023, and “UNIVERSITIES THAT ALLOW FREE SPEECH LOSE MILLIONS FROM PRO-ISRAEL DONORS” 24 Oct 2023.)
Norman Finkelstein, the political scientist who has studied the Israel-Gaza relationship for decades, compared the Hamas attack on 7 October to the Nat Turner slave rebellion on 21 August 1831. Turner was joined by other slaves who rampaged through Southampton County in Virginia and brutally killed 55 people.
“2.2 million people were immured, were caged in a concentration camp for two decades, half of those people are children. The water, 97 percent of the water is poisonous in Gaza. About half of the population is classified as having severe food insecurity,” Finkelstein said, noting that the Hamas attack was an atrocity.
He compared the men who attacked with Hamas to the slaves in the rebellion.
“Young men [Hamas invaders] who were born in a concentration camp, with the rage inside them because of the chasm between who they were, who they aspire to be, and the reality that to their last breath they will be confined to a concentration camp,” he said.
He continued, “On top of being born into a concentration camp, periodically, periodically, that diabolical regime would announce, with no shame—with no shame—that satanic regime would announce it is going to mow the lawn in Gaza. Do you know how pathological – how totally sick it is to talk about mowing the lawn in a concentration camp?”
Erdogan the Peacemaker?
Erdogan has called for an immediate ceasefire and an international peace conference to end the hostilities in Israel.
“With our humanitarian, political, and military presence, we are ready to be one of the guarantors of the Palestinian side. We call on those countries that have a will [for peace] to assess our proposal. We are also proposing the International Palestine-Israel Peace Conference in which all influential actors in the region will participate,” he said.
Erdogan said he met briefly with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York and the two shook hands. He has since canceled a meeting with the prime minister in Israel after the Gaza bombardment.
“I shook his hands once only. I had good intentions. If they continued with good intentions, we would have better relations, but unfortunately, they abused our goodwill,” he said, according to The Daily Sabah.
He said Hamas is not a terrorist group, but rather a group fighting for liberation.
“We have a stance based on principles. We openly said that we cannot tolerate (acts of violence) toward Israeli civilians. We have no problem with the state of Israel, but we never approved of Israel’s cruelty more fitting to an organization rather than a state. Since Oct. 7, Israel has been carrying out bloodiest, most repulsive, most safe attacks against innocent people in Gaza,” he said.
Col. Douglas MacGregor (ret.), has said that Turkey is a major power in the region, with NATO’s biggest army.
“They’re ferocious fighters and they are fully committed to ending the afront of Sunni Islam,” he said.
MacGregor noted that Erdogan came forward early on and offered to mediate “and I was hoping that Washington, if not Israel, would take it seriously, and accept his offer.”
“Now, what he has done, setting aside his words, is he set the stage for eventual Turkish military intervention into this regional conflict. He’s warning the Israelis and he’s warning us… ‘You’re going to get a full-scale war.’ That’s the message. I hope we get it.”
TREND FORECAST: Absent the mainstream media reports as the Israel War rages on, we had noted many of the criminal acts Israel was committing against Palestinians following the election of Benjamin Netanyahu as Prime Minister and what the mainstream media called his far-right extremist government. And we had warned, with 39 weeks of protests against Netanyahu’s Judicial Reform act in what the Israeli media called a “civil war,” as Gerald Celente had forecast, when all else fails, Netanyahu would take the nation to war and the Israelis would forget about Judicial Reform and support war. And that’s what he did and that’s what happened.
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