Category: America

Erdogan and the Israel Card

by Steven J. Rosen
Wall Street Journal
June 10, 2010

The deaths of nine Turkish citizens in the Gaza flotilla incident would have brought a severe reaction under any circumstances. What is nonetheless striking in this incident is the unbridled anger and fiercely hostile reaction of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the Turkish public. Mr. Erdogan said Israel was guilty of “state terrorism” and a “bloody massacre.” His foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, said “This attack is like 9/11 for Turkey,” comparing it to a premeditated act of aggression that took 2,900 lives.

Mr. Erdogan does not always display such reactions to allegations of human rights violations. Last year, he defended Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, indicted by the International Criminal Court for killing half a million Sudanese Christians and non-Arab Muslims. In March 2010, he denied that Turks ever killed Armenian civilians. He labeled a U.S. congressional resolution on the Armenian deaths “a comedy, a parody.” He said that the Turkish military garrison stationed in Cyprus since 1974 is “not an occupier” but “[ensures] the peace.” On tens of thousands of Kurds killed by Turkish security forces from 1984 to 1999, he says nothing.

Could it be that there is something more to Mr. Erdogan’s rage against Israel than just a spontaneous reaction to the loss of life here?

Turkish elections, 13 months away, hold the answer. Backing for Mr. Erdogan’s party has fallen to 29%, the lowest level since it won power in 2002 and far below the 47% it scored in July 2007. So Mr. Erdogan decided to play the Israel Card.

He tested this tactic in January 2009, in a confrontation with Israeli President Shimon Peres at Davos. Mr. Peres asked him in front of the cameras: “What would you do if you were to have in Istanbul every night a hundred rockets?” Mr. Erdogan shot back, “When it comes to killing you know very well how to kill.” Thousands of Turks applauded Mr. Erdogan’s performance, greeting him with a hero’s welcome and a sea of Turkish and Palestinian flags upon his return home to Ataturk Airport.

Mr. Erdogan’s anger at the Israeli blockade is even more popular among his countrymen. In fact, 61% of Turks surveyed in one poll did not find his rage sufficient. “The public is in such a state that they almost want war against Israel,” the pollster commented. “I think this is widespread in almost all levels of society.” Mr. Erdogan has become a hero in the Muslim world, where he is seen as the “new Nasser,” in the words of one Saudi writer.

The truth is that friendship toward Israel was always limited to the Turkish secular elites, including the military chiefs. Turkey is fertile ground for Mr. Erdogan’s demagoguery because many ordinary people are raised to dislike Israel and—dare it be said—Jews. In April 2010, the BBC World Service Poll found negative views of Israel among 77% of Turks.

Jews as a people fare no better than the Jewish state. In the 2009 Pew Global Attitudes survey, 73% of Turks rated their opinions of Jews as “negative.” Meanwhile, 68% of Turks rated their opinions of Christians as “negative.”

Turks don’t like the United States much more than they do Israel. The same BBC poll found negative views of the U.S. among 70% of Turks, one of only two countries where perceptions of the United States actually worsened after the election of Barack Obama (positives fell to 13% from 21%, and negatives increased to 70% from 63%).

Nor is it the case that anti-Americanism in Turkey is primarily a response to U.S. support for Israel. Many Turkish citizens view the U.S. as anti-Muslim and see the war on terror as an anti-Muslim crusade across the Middle East. Turks resent the rich “imperialist” superpower and believe that the U.S. invaded Iraq for oil.

Islamists and the Turkish left suspect that the U.S. and NATO propped up a succession of Turkish governments backed by the military. Others believe that the U.S. supports the Iraqi Kurds and may plan to create a Kurdish state in Iraq. And most remain convinced that members of the U.S. Congress who vote for Turkish genocide resolutions do so under the influence of Armenian-Americans, who are more numerous than Americans of Turkish origin.

Anti-American feelings in Turkey exist independently of anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism, but these three phenomena are mutually reinforcing and convergent. More disturbingly, parallels to these trends pervade much of the Muslim world. What the flotilla incident demonstrates is that igniting this tinderbox of hostility toward Israel, Jews and America does not take much of a spark.

Mr. Rosen is the director of the Washington Project of the Middle East Forum.

https://www.meforum.org/2668/erdogan-and-the-israel-card

June 10, 2010
ISRAEL: Exodus 2010 = MAVI MARMARA – HISTORY REPEATS

(Parts of this article were published in Ma’ariv, Israel’s second largest newspaper.)

Sayin Dr kayaalp Buyukataman

Bu e-mail’i bir dost gondermis. Cok enteresan bir yazi. Paylasmak istedim.

Haberlesmelerimizin devami dilegi ile.

huseyin celik [[email protected]]

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Exodus 2010

by Uri Avnery, June 07, 2010

On the high seas, outside territorial waters, the ship was stopped by the navy. The commandos stormed it. Hundreds of people on the deck resisted; the soldiers used force. Some of the passengers were killed, scores injured. The ship was brought into harbor; the passengers were taken off by force. The world saw them walking on the quay, men and women, young and old, all of them worn out, one after another, each being marched between two soldiers…
The ship was called Exodus 1947. It left France in the hope of breaking the British blockade, which was imposed to prevent ships loaded with Holocaust survivors from reaching the shores of Palestine. If it had been allowed to reach the country, the illegal immigrants would have come ashore and the British would have sent them to detention camps in Cyprus, as they had done before. Nobody would have taken any notice of the episode for more than two days.
But the person in charge was Ernest Bevin, a Labor Party leader, an arrogant, rude, and power-loving British minister. He was not about to let a bunch of Jews dictate to him. He decided to teach them a lesson the entire world would witness. “This is a provocation!” he exclaimed, and of course he was right. The main aim was indeed to create a provocation, in order to draw the eyes of the world to the British blockade.
What followed is well known: the episode dragged on and on, one stupidity led to another, the whole world sympathized with the passengers. But the British did not give in and paid the price. A heavy price.
Many believe that the Exodus incident was the turning point in the struggle for the creation of the state of Israel. Britain collapsed under the weight of international condemnation and decided to give up its mandate over Palestine. There were, of course, many more weighty reasons for this decision, but the Exodus proved to be the straw that broke the camel’s back.

I am not the only one who was reminded of this episode this week. Actually, it was almost impossible not to be reminded of it, especially for those of us who lived in Palestine at the time and witnessed it.
There are, of course, important differences. Then the passengers were Holocaust survivors; this time they were peace activists from all over the world. But then and now the world saw heavily armed soldiers brutally attack unarmed passengers, who resist with everything that comes to hand, sticks, and bare hands. Then and now it happened on the high seas – 40 km from the shore then, 65 km now.
In retrospect, the British behavior throughout the affair seems incredibly stupid. But Bevin was no fool, and the British officers who commanded the action were not nincompoops. After all, they had just finished a World War on the winning side.
If they behaved with complete folly from beginning to end, it was the result of arrogance, insensitivity, and boundless contempt for world public opinion.
Ehud Barak is the Israeli Bevin. He is not a fool, either, nor are our top brass. But they are responsible for a chain of acts of folly, the disastrous implications of which are hard to assess. Former minister and present commentator Yossi Sarid called the ministerial “committee of seven,” which decides on security matters, “seven idiots” – and I must protest. It is an insult to idiots.

The preparations for the flotilla went on for more than a year. Hundreds of e-mail messages went back and forth. I myself received many dozens. There was no secret. Everything was out in the open.
There was a lot of time for all our political and military institutions to prepare for the approach of the ships. The politician consulted. The soldiers trained. The diplomats reported. The intelligence people did their job.
Nothing helped. All the decisions were wrong from the first moment to this moment. And it’s not yet the end.
The idea of a flotilla as a means to break the blockade borders on genius. It placed the Israeli government on the horns of a dilemma – the choice between several alternatives, all of them bad. Every general hopes to get his opponent into such a situation.
The alternatives were:

To let the flotilla reach Gaza without hindrance. The cabinet secretary supported this option. That would have led to the end of the blockade, because after this flotilla more and larger ones would have come.

To stop the ships in territorial waters, inspect their cargo, and make sure they were not carrying weapons or “terrorists,” then let them continue on their way. That would have aroused some vague protests in the world but upheld the principle of a blockade.

To capture them on the high seas and bring them to Ashdod, risking a face-to-face battle with activists on board.

As our governments have always done, when faced with the choice between several bad alternatives, the Netanyahu government chose the worst.
Anyone who followed the preparations as reported in the media could have foreseen that they would lead to people being killed and injured. One does not storm a Turkish ship and expect cute little girls to present one with flowers. The Turks are not known as people who give in easily.
The orders given to the forces and made public included the three fateful words: “at any cost.” Every soldier knows what these three terrible words mean. Moreover, on the list of objectives, the consideration for the passengers appeared only in third place, after safeguarding the safety of the soldiers and fulfilling the task.
If Benjamin Netanyahu, Ehud Barak, the chief of staff, and the commander of the navy did not understand that this would lead to killing and wounding people, then it must be concluded – even by those who were reluctant to consider this until now – that they are grossly incompetent. They must be told, in the immortal words of Oliver Cromwell to Parliament: “You have sat too long for any good you have been doing lately…. Depart, I say; and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!”

This event points again to one of the most serious aspects of the situation: we live in a bubble, in a kind of mental ghetto, which cuts us off and prevents us from seeing another reality, the one perceived by the rest of the world. A psychiatrist might judge this to be the symptom of a severe mental problem.
The propaganda of the government and the army tells a simple story: our heroic soldiers, determined and sensitive, the elite of the elite, descended on the ship in order “to talk” and were attacked by a wild and violent crowd. Official spokesmen repeated again and again the word “lynching.”
On the first day, almost all the Israeli media accepted this. After all, it is clear that we, the Jews, are the victims. Always. That applies to Jewish soldiers, too. True, we storm a foreign ship at sea, but turn at once into victims who have no choice but to defend ourselves against violent and incited anti-Semites.
It is impossible not to be reminded of the classic Jewish joke about the Jewish mother in Russia taking leave of her son, who has been called up to serve the czar in the war against Turkey. “Don’t overexert yourself,” she implores him. “Kill a Turk and rest. Kill another Turk and rest again…”
“But mother,” the son interrupts, “what if the Turk kills me?”
“You?” exclaims the mother. “But why? What have you done to him?”
To any normal person, this may sound crazy. Heavily armed soldiers of an elite commando unit board a ship on the high seas in the middle of the night, from the sea and from the air – and they are the victims?
But there is a grain of truth there: they are the victims of arrogant and incompetent commanders, irresponsible politicians, and the media fed by them. And, actually, of the Israeli public, since most of the people voted for this government or for the opposition, which is no different.
The Exodus affair was repeated, but with a change of roles. Now we are the British.
Somewhere, a new Leon Uris is planning to write his next book, Exodus 2010. A new Otto Preminger is planning a film that will become a blockbuster. A new Paul Newman will star in it – after all, there is no shortage of talented Turkish actors.

More than 200 years ago, Thomas Jefferson declared that every nation must act with a “decent respect to the opinions of mankind.” Israeli leaders have never accepted the wisdom of this maxim. They adhere to the dictum of David Ben-Gurion: “It is not important what the Gentiles say, it is important what the Jews do.” Perhaps he assumed that the Jews would not act foolishly.
Making enemies of the Turks is more than foolish. For decades, Turkey has been our closest ally in the region, much closer than is generally known. Turkey could play, in the future, an important role as a mediator between Israel and the Arab-Muslim world, between Israel and Syria, and, yes, even between Israel and Iran. Perhaps we have succeeded now in uniting the Turkish people against us – and some say that this is the only matter on which the Turks are now united.
This is Chapter 2 of “Cast Lead.” Then we aroused most countries in the world against us, shocked our few friends, and gladdened our enemies. Now we have done it again, and perhaps with even greater success. World public opinion is turning against us.
This is a slow process. It resembles the accumulation of water behind a dam. The water rises slowly, quietly, and the change is hardly noticeable. But when it reaches a critical level, the dam bursts and the disaster is upon us. We are steadily approaching this point.
“Kill a Turk and rest,” the mother says in the joke. Our government does not even rest. It seems that they will not stop until they have made enemies of the last of our friends.
(Parts of this article were published in Ma’ariv, Israel’s second largest newspaper.)

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EXODUS: THE TRUE STORY

Buy Tickets

ISRAEL, 2009
HEBREW, FRENCH WITH SUBTITLES
79 Min
DIRECTOR: ITZIK LERNER, URI BORREDA

NORTH AMERICAN PREMIERE

APRIL 18 – 3:20PM CINEPLEX ODEON SHEPPARD CENTRE
APRIL 25 – 6:00PM BLOOR CINEMA

The Exodus 1947 was an ancient American riverboat called the President Warfield that was refitted to carry 4,500 Holocaust survivors to Palestine. The only obstacle was the British navy boats that patrolled the seas in search of Jewish ships carrying such immigrants. When the Exodus was spotted in the Mediterranean, British warships kept it under close surveillance and eventually rammed the ship. They forced the passengers onto three British prison ships and transported them to detention camps in Germany. This film follows three of the passengers and tells the story of their harrowing experiences through their memories, as well as those of French and British witnesses.

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June 9, 2010
Chomsky on Israel: “Sheer Criminal Aggression, with no Credible Pretext”

Noam Chomsky on Israel and the Gaza Flotilla Attack: “Sheer Criminal Aggression, with no Credible Pretext”

CHICAGO, Illinois – June 2 – Professor Noam Chomsky, renowned foreign policy analyst and bestselling author of Hegemony and Survival and most recently of Hopes and Prospects (Haymarket Books) offered the following statement to Egypt’s Al-Ahram regarding Israel’s justification for it’s attack on humanitarian aid boats headed for Gaza and the broader context regarding the economic blockade which the activists aboard the ships were attempting to break. Chomsky, who is Jewish, was recently detained at the Israeli border and barred from entering the West Bank for a planned speaking engagement, provoking an international debate, and outrage over the issue of free speech in Israel.

Hijacking boats in international waters and killing passengers is, of course, a serious crime. The editors of the London Guardian are quite right to say that “If an armed group of Somali pirates had yesterday boarded six vessels on the high seas, killing at least 10 passengers and injuring many more, a Nato taskforce would today be heading for the Somali coast.” It is worth bearing in mind that the crime is nothing new.
For decades, Israel has been hijacking boats in international waters between Cyprus and Lebanon, killing or kidnapping passengers, sometimes bringing them to prisons in Israel including secret prison/torture chambers, sometimes holding them as hostages for many years.

Israel assumes that it can carry out such crimes with impunity because the US tolerates them and Europe generally follows the US lead.
Much the same is true of Israel’s pretext for its latest crime: that the Freedom Flotilla was bringing materials that could be used for bunkers for rockets. Putting aside the absurdity, if Israel were interested in stopping Hamas rockets it knows exactly how to proceed: accept Hamas offers for a cease-fire. In June 2008, Israel and Hamas reached a cease-fire agreement. The Israeli government formally acknowledges that until Israel broke the agreeement on November 4, invading Gaza and killing half a dozen Hamas activists, Hamas did not fire a single rocket. Hamas offered to renew the cease-fire. The Israeli cabinet considered the offer and rejected it, preferring to launch its murderous and destructive Operation Cast Lead on December 27. Evidently, there is no justification for the use of force “in self-defense” unless peaceful means have been exhausted. In this case they were not even tried, although—or perhaps because—there was every reason to suppose that they would succeed. Operation Cast Lead is therefore sheer criminal aggression, with no credible pretext, and the same is true of Israel’s current resort to force.

The siege of Gaza itself does not have the slightest credible pretext. It was imposed by the US and Israel in January 2006 to punish Palestinians because they voted “the wrong way” in a free election, and it was sharply intensified in July 2007 when Hamas blocked a US-Israeli attempt to overthrow the elected government in a military coup, installing Fatah strongman Muhammad Dahlan. The siege is savage and cruel, designed to keep the caged animals barely alive so as to fend off international protest, but hardly more than that. It is the latest stage of long-standing Israeli plans, backed by the US, to separate Gaza from the West Bank.

These are only the bare outlines of very ugly policies, in which Egypt is complicit as well.

June 9, 2010
Veteran White House Correspondent Helen Thomas Retires After Anti-Jewish Remarks

WASHINGTON – Longtime Washington journalist Helen Thomas abruptly retired Monday as a columnist for Hearst News Service following remarks she made about Israel that were denounced by the White House and her press corps colleagues.

The 89-year-old Thomas, dean of the White House press corps, has long been a fixture in Washington and has been lauded as a pioneering journalist who has covered presidents since 1960.

Known for her confrontational questioning, Thomas apologized for comments that were captured on video and have spread widely on the Internet. On the May 27 video, Thomas says Israelis should “get the hell out of Palestine,” suggesting they go to Germany, Poland or the U.S.

Hearst announced her retirement, effective immediately, shortly after White House press secretary Robert Gibbs called her remarks “offensive and reprehensible.”

The White House Correspondents Association also issued a rare statement, calling her comments “indefensible.”

“Many in our profession who have known Helen for years were saddened by the comments, which were especially unfortunate in light of her role as a trail blazer on the White House beat,” said the statement, signed by journalists who are officers of the association.

Thomas had been scheduled to speak at the June 14 graduation of Walt Whitman High School in the Washington suburb of Bethesda, Md., but Principal Alan Goodwin wrote in a Sunday e-mail to students and parents that she was being replaced.

“Graduation celebrations are not the venue for divisiveness,” Goodwin wrote.

Thomas wrote on her website that “I deeply regret my comments I made last week regarding the Israelis and the Palestinians.”

She added: “They do not reflect my heart-felt belief that peace will come to the Middle East only when all parties recognize the need for mutual respect and tolerance. May that day come soon.”

The national director of the Anti-Defamation League, Abraham H. Foxman, said Sunday that Thomas’ apology didn’t go far enough.

“Her suggestion that Israelis should go back to Poland and Germany is bigoted and shows a profound ignorance of history,” Foxman said in a statement. “We believe Thomas needs to make a more forceful and sincere apology for the pain her remarks have caused.”

Thomas began her long career with the wire service United Press International in 1943, and started covering the White House in 1960, according to a biography posted on her website. She became a columnist for Hearst in 2000.

http://www.newsmax.com/InsideCover/helen-thomas-retires-jews/2010/06/07/id/361258, 07 Jun 2010

June 8, 2010
PRESIDENT OBAMA WORKING TO STOP CRISIS

news from israeli intelligence

Turkey, Israel near clash after terror cell exposed on flotilla. Israel flies embassy families out
DEBKAfile Exclusive Report June 2, 2010, 7:21 AM (GMT+02:00)

Turkish terrorists beat up Israel troops

debkafile reports: Early Wednesday, June 2, US president Barack Obama stepped into the fast-deteriorating flotilla crisis to stop it from spinning out of control. In secret phone calls, he asked Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu to release all the remaining passengers without delay as well as the six ships. He then tried to reason with the incandescent Turkish prime minister Recep Erdogan, who had just branded the Israeli raid a “bloody massacre.”
Offering deep condolences for the loss of life aboard the flotilla, the US president said better ways must be found to bring humanitarian aid to the people of Gaza without undermining Israel’s security. He supported the UN Security Council’s call for “a credible, impartial and transparent investigation” of the event, but refused to condemn Israel or take the inquiry out of its hands.
debkafile reports from Ankara that Erdogan declined to be talked round, declaring that if America did not punish Israel for insolently “trampling on human honor”, Turkey would.

Overnight, Israel began evacuating diplomats’ families from Turkey. Diplomatic and consular staff were left in place in Ankara and Istanbul and told along with security firms to stand by for departure.

Netanyahu called the second security cabinet meeting in two days after the first on Tuesday approved the continued blockade of Gaza against all attempts to break it.

Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad again threatened Israel with destruction for any action it may take anywhere and its Western supporters with international trial as war criminals.
Israel is preparing for Ankara’s next steps that would defy President Obama’s bid to find a way out of the crisis between the two former allies. In Jerusalem, Erdogan’s accusations were deemed an unfounded and unjustified assault considering the evidence that he had consorted with terrorists, including an al Qaeda offshoot, to bring Israel under pressure in support of the Palestinian extremist Hamas.
This evidence released by the IDF Monday night, June 1, described how the Turkish Marmara, the flotilla’s lead vessel, had been commandeered by terrorists indirectly supported by the Ankara government’s subsidy to the Turkish Insani Yardim Vakfi – IHH, which is listed by the American CIA as an al Qaeda-linked Islamist terrorist organization with bases in Turkey, Bosnia and Bulgaria.
Those passengers attested to more than a hundred members of terrorist organizations aboard acting like a quasi-military group with a command hierarchy, whose leader forced the other four or five hundred passengers to fall into line behind them. The group was split into sub-sections, each in charge of a section of the ship before and after it set sail from Istanbul. Its members were all armed with an assortment of chains, iron bars and knives as well as night goggles and gas masks.
Although they appeared to hail from different terrorist organizations from various countries, they were all ordered to say they belonged to the IHH.
The group kept the ship to a strict military regiment, including round-the-clock guards in the different sections of the Marmara.

When the ship was brought to Ashdod port and the passengers removed early Tuesday, the IHH members were found without identification papers of any kind. Either the Turkish authorities at Istanbul were instructed to let them embark aboard the Marmara without documents or they threw them overboard before the ship docked at Ashdod. Each had an envelope stuffed with thousands of dollars.

debkafile’s intelligence sources disclose that, when first brought in, the Turkish terror activists refused to answer questions. By Tuesday nightfall, a few began talking and admitted to being members of IHH and its ties with al Qaeda’s Balkan outfit. Throughout the interrogations, Israel intelligence was in contact with colleagues in Western services for help to identify them by means of fingerprints and other physical features.
Our counter-terror sources report that Israel must now decide whether to prosecute some of the activists, including Israeli Arabs, on board the Marmara, on charges of collaborating with an international terrorist organization.

During Tuesday, Israel began deporting the 679 passengers – including 128 for Arab and Muslim countries through Jordan. The rest will be flown out within 48 hours. Three Turkish jets were due to collect them Wednesday. Eight Israel trucks brought assistance products from the ships to Gaza Tuesday; another 10 will make deliveries Wednesday.
Israel intelligence agencies too have questions to answer – principally, how they missed spotting the terrorist presence aboard the putative aid-for-Gaza convoy and let a naval force undertake the mission to divert the ships to Ashdod, without preparing them for a violent confrontation with a determined, well-organized group of violent men.

June 7, 2010
Israel worried by new Turkey intelligence chief’s defense of Iran

Israeli sources believe Hakan Fidan aided in orchestrating an intentional change in relations between Israel and Turkey.

By Amir Oren

The Israeli defense establishment – and especially the Mossad’s foreign relations department, which maintains ties with Turkey’s national intelligence organization (MIT ) – is concerned over the recent appointment of Hakan Fidan as head of that organization, and the implications of that appointment vis-a-vis Turkish relations with Israel and Iran.

Ten days ago, Hakan Fidan, 42, a personal confidant of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, assumed the post of head of MIT, which combines the functions of the Mossad and Shin Bet security force.

Israeli security sources believe last week’s the Mavi Marmara incident reflects an intentional change in relations between Israel and Turkey – orchestrated by Erdogan, along with Fidan and Foreign Minister Ahmed Davutoglu.

There is no concrete information, however, regarding Fidan’s involvement in the incident or his ties with IHH, the group that organized the flotilla.

In meetings between Mossad officials and others in the local political-security establishment, it was noted that Fidan has close ties with Erdogan’s Islamist party, and that during the past year he was deputy director of the prime minister’s office and played a central role in tightening Turkish ties with Iran, especially on the nuclear issue.

Fidan’s appointment at MIT will help strengthen Erdogan’s control over certain civilian elements in the Turkish intelligence community, both in terms of determining foreign and defense policy, and also vis-a-vis members of the senior military echelons, who are considered to be a central threat to the Islamist party’s power.

To date intelligence ties between Israel and Turkey have been good, in parallel to the good relations between the Israel Defense Forces and the Turkish military, and their respective intelligence services.

In April the last head of MIT, Emre Taner, retired after a five-year stint. Erdogan appointed Fidan as acting head then, but he only formally took over late last month. Fidan served in the Turkish military for 15 years, until 2001, but was not an officer.

MIT has extensive authority, in both internal security and foreign intelligence gathering. Its chief answers directly to the prime minister, although the law obliges him also to report to the president, the chief of staff and the country’s National Security Council.

Fidan completed a B.A. at the University of Maryland, and he completed his master’s and doctorate in Ankara. His dissertation was a comparative analysis of the structure of U.S., British and Turkish intelligence organizations.

After his military service, Fidan served in the Turkish embassy in Australia, and last year he represented Ankara in the International Atomic Energy Agency, where he defended Iran’s right to carry on with its nuclear program for “peaceful purposes.”

With Davutoglu, Fidan formulated last month’s uranium transfer deal between Turkey, Brazil and Iran.

Apparently, he supports the idea of splitting MIT’s authority into an internal and an external intelligence organization, like in Israel, Britain and the United States. It is reported that he intends to concentrate on “institutional” tasks and to work with an independent security service, one of whose main purposes is to deal with the Kurdish PKK organization – partly to deflect criticism of his appointment.

In Israel there is concern Fidan’s appointment will have a two-pronged effect: on one hand, that exchange of intelligence between the two countries will be harmed, and on the other, that Israel will have to limit the transfer of information to Turkey, out of a concern that it may be passed on to enemy organizations or states.

, 07.06.10

June 7, 2010