(Video) ‘Valley of the Wolves – Palestine’ tells story of Turkish agent’s revenge campaign against IDF soldiers following takeover of Gaza-bound flotilla. Turkey’s most expensive production yet slated to be major box office hit
Eldad Beck
Published: 11.09.10, 20:03 / Israel News
VIDEO – The already tense relations between Israel and Turkey are about to get even more strained. Turkish TV stations and cinemas have began showing trailers of a violent, anti-Israel film focusing on a fictitious Turkish revenge campaign in response to the killing of nine flotilla activists by the IDF last May.
The film, “Valley of the Wolves – Palestine” will be released in January 28. It is being promoted as an anti-Zionist feature which is meant to raise awareness to “the Palestinians’ terrible suffering” and shows Israel as a bloodthirsty regime. The $10 million production is the most expensive film ever made in Turkey.
Initial Report
Next Turkish blockbuster revisits Marmara / Ynet
New film in ‘Valley of the Wolves’ series tells of secret agent out to avenge deaths of Turkish civilians
Full story
The film’s trailer shows a Turkish secret agent brutally murdering IDF soldiers in an attempt to take out the Israeli officer who planned the raid on the Marmara and oversaw it. Israelis are depicted as a nation of murderers seeking to build “greater Israel” on the bodies of Palestinians.
The film is the third is a series of features considered to be the Arab world’s answer to “Rambo.” The series is abundant in nationalistic-racist violent content and is directed against Turkey’s enemies – The Kurds, Jews and Americans.
The first installment, “Valley of the Wolves – Iraq,” was released four years ago and sparked outrage in the Jewish world. It depicted Jewish doctors harvesting the organs of Iraqis and transferring them to Israel for transplants. The series’ films, which are hugely popular in Turkey, are based on a television series which has already prompted a crisis in Israel-Turkish relations.
‘Valley of the Wolves – Palestine’ trailer
Last January, Israel summoned the Turkish ambassador to Israel for a reprimand after Ankara refused to remove the series from the air. Deputy Foreign Minister Daniel Ayalon met with the ambassador who was seated in a lower chair in a humiliating gesture.
Murdering IDF soldiers
Production on “Valley of the Wolves – Palestine” began before May’s raid on the Turkish flotilla. The screenwriters used the incident to their advantage and incorporated it into their story.
The film presents the Turkish version of the deadly raid, showing Marmara passengers fleeing as IDF soldiers shoot at them and emerge unharmed. The hero, former Turkish special agent Polat Alemdar embarks on a revenge campaign after the raid in order to kill the Israeli commander who oversaw the operation, Moshe Ben-Eliezer.
Alemdar is seen murdering dozens of Israeli soldiers, who are showed abusing innocent Palestinians, throughout the film. In one of the scenes, the Turkish agent discovers how “Moshe burns down villages and kills children.”
In the film’s website, the producers noted that the feature will “turn the world’s attention to Palestine, where people are facing one of humanity’s biggest dramas.”
“Our hero acts for the rights of the oppressed,” director Zübeyr Sasmaz said. “We’re talking about things people don’t want to hear,” his brother, Necati Şaşmaz who stars in the film, said. “Up until now we have seen only Western heroes such as Rambo and James Bond. For the first time in the history of cinema there is an undefeatable protagonist from the Middle East.”
The trailer has already received enthusiastic responses from viewers in various websites, including YouTube. One talkbacker commented: “The Israelis will flip when this is made. Let the Jewish dogs die. I bless whoever made this film. Israel will pay for it. It is a murderer.”
The film has been widely covered by the Turkish media, as well as by international press. Al Jazeera and various German media outlets have been covering the production and have aired several pieces on it.
Like its predecessors, the film is slated to be a huge success at the box office.
Aviel Magnezi contributed to this report
via Marmara raid – the Turkish version – Israel News, Ynetnews.
Paris – Turkey will not begin to restore relations with Israel unless it apologises for its “savage attack” on a Turkish protest vessel, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on Wednesday.
“Israel will apologise. And Israel will have to pay compensation. And then we can start negotiating,” Erdogan told France 24 television, according to the Paris-based news network’s translation from the Turkish.
Turkey was once Israel’s closest military and diplomatic ally in the Middle East, but ties began to deteriorate when Ankara criticised Israel’s January 2009 military assault on the Palestinian territory of Gaza.
Relations then plunged into more-or-less open hostility in May of this year after Israeli naval commandos stormed a Turkish-registered protest ship, the Mavi Mara, part of a flotilla carrying activists and relief supplies to Gaza.
Nine Turkish activists were killed in the operation.
Israel says its boarding party opened fire when it was attacked with knives and iron bars. Turkey says the naval operation was illegal and that commandos fired on defenceless civilians.
‘Savage attack’
“Let me say clearly that it is Israel who is responsible for the current state of our mutual relationship, and nobody should interpret it in another way,” Erdogan said in the France 24 interview.
“How can you forgive attacks from the air and from the sea against a ship sailing under the Turkish flag and carrying passengers from all around the world who wanted to help other people?
“I consider it a savage attack to act like this in international waters. There is no other explanation to this,” he said.
“Did they find any weapons? No. And they attacked these defenceless people from the air and from the sea. So there is no excuse whatsoever for such an attitude,” he declared.
Turkey’s spat with Israel has undermined the broader Middle East peace process, by ending Ankara’s role as a mediator between Israel and some of its Palestinian and Syrian opponents.
Last month, Damascus said that only Turkey could act as an intermediary in any indirect peace negotiations between Syria and Israel.
Furkan Dogan, a 19-year-old US citizen of Turkish descent, was aboard the Mavi Marmara when he was killed by Israeli commandos. (Photo: freegazaorg; Edited: Jared Rodriguez / t r u t h o u t)
The report of the fact-finding mission of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) on the Israeli attack on the Gaza flotilla released last week shows conclusively, for the first time, that US citizen Furkan Dogan and five Turkish citizens were murdered execution-style by Israeli commandos.
Source: truth-out
The circumstances of the killing of at least six of the passengers were in a manner consistent with an extra-legal, arbitrary and summary execution. Furkan Doğan and İbrahim Bilgen were shot at near range while the victims were lying injured on the top deck. Cevdet Kiliçlar, Cengiz Akyüz, Cengiz Songür and Çetin Topçuoğlu were shot on the bridge deck while not participating in activities that represented a threat to any Israeli soldier. In these instances and possibly other killings on the Mavi Marmara, Israeli forces carried out extralegal, arbitrary and summary executions prohibited by international human rights law, specifically article 6 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.
Source: Human Rights Council Report, Page 38, Item 170
Turkey has set up a commission to carry out its own investigation into Israel’s raid on Gaza-bound aid ships which left nine Turks dead, the foreign ministry said Thursday.
The Turkish ship Mavi Marmara was part of an aid flotilla raided by Israeli soldiers on May 31
The commission, which will work under the prime minister’s office, will “investigate the attack and the treatment the activists faced” before writing a report on its findings, the ministry said in a statement.
The report will be presented to the international inquiry set up by the United Nations earlier this month to look into the Israeli operation, it added.
The Turkish commission will include bureaucrats from the foreign, justice, interior and transport ministries as well as officials from the maritime agency.
The statement did not say when the commission would finish its report.
The May 31 raid by Israeli commandos on the flotilla of six ships in international waters triggered international criticism of Israel and plunged bilateral ties with Turkey into a crisis.
In June, Turkish prosecutors also launched an investigation against top Israeli leaders, which could result in them pressing charges, among them murder, injury, attacking Turkish citizens on the open seas and piracy, according to press reports.
Israel has set up two internal investigations into the raid, but Turkey has dismissed them, expressing doubt over their impartiality.
Ankara says it is confident the UN commission will shed light on the incident, but Israel has threatened to pull out of the probe if the UN commission insists on grilling Israeli soldiers.
Israel says its commandos resorted to self-defence after they came under attack from the activists on board. The activists say the soldiers fired as soon as they boarded the vessels.
The ever loving leader of Muslim brotherhood who has been quite famous for his words “I am Arafatian”.
We’re discussing it not the first time and not because of just one person – Arafat, a former Palestinian leader, although corrupt and dishonest and many others like him from top to the bottom ranks of Hamas, PLO and other groups who have engaged in training, cooperating with and helping Armenian terrorist groups of ASALA, JCAG, etc, products of which were not just limited to deaths of Turkish diplomats and civilians in 1970-80s but went well beyond terror activities in Karabakh in early 1990’s culminating in much harsher exterminations of Turks en masse in Khojaly genocide, Aghdaban massacre, Malibeyli and Gushchular massacres, etc. Islam has nothing to do with it. This is about people who claimed they fought for Islam.
Yusif Babanly <yusif@azeris.com>
Board of Directors
Azerbaijani American Council (AAC)
14781 Memorial Dr., # 19
Houston, TX 77079
aac.texas@azeris.com www.aac.azeris.org
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recognize the past injustices and learn from them. Arafat/PLO in fact assisted and trained Armenian ASALA terrorist militants in Syria and Lebanon in 1970-80s to kill Turks. You can research more about this on Internet. here is at least one source:
p.57: …ASALA was conceptualized in 1973 by Yasser Arafat’s deputy, Salah Khalaf (also known as Abu Iyad), and one of Khalaf’s Armenian aides…. The liason between ASALA and the PLO in due course led to Syrian interests in ASALA, and the two developed close working relations. ASALA operatives made frequent use of Syrian territory, in particular, the ASALA agent who shot up the airport in Ankara on August 7, 1982, killing ten and injuring seventy-one, traveled this way. When ASALA split after the PLO left Lebanon, the more radical and violent elements reconstituted their headquarters in Damascus in 1983-84 ad rebuilt their bases in the Bekaa Valley….
One of the prominent ones trained by PLO and later connected to Abu Nidal organization was ASALA terrorist leader Monte Melkonyan. He was responsible for multiple terrorist attacks against Turkish targets in Europe in 1980s. He also terrorized Azeri Turks in Karabakh during the war before he got killed in the battle with Azeri forces in June 1993.
What Arafat/PLO were doing are certainly not something to generalize on all Palestinians. Yet we should remember and learn from this experiences to prevent them from repeating in the future.
Best, Javid Huseynov [javid@azeris.com]
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Sevgili Filistinli Arap dostlarimizin yakin tarihde Turklere ve Turkiyeye neler yaptigi gizli kalmasin , Yazik oldu mavi marmarada onlar icin sehit olan candaslarimiza. Politika ugruna hayatlari sona erdi veya erdirildi … Turkish forum
Yasser Arafat: “We admire Armenians in all things but one”
By Times.am at 10 August, 2010, 5:32 pm
By Minas Kaynakjian, Hetq.am
The other day on Armenian TV, there was a program dealing with the two visits of Yasser Arafat to Armenia back in the 70’ and 80’s. Arafat would spend several hours in Yerevan on his way from Beirut to Moscow for consultations with the leaders of the Communist Party.
Before parting he laid a bombshell at the feet of his Armenian hosts on his second such visit.
According to the program, the Armenian elite at the time hosted their famous guest with all the trappings of Armenian hospitality. The two sides were quick to make parallels between the two peoples, Armenians and Palestinians. Arafat even went so far to confess that he even exhorted his people to be more like Armenians – in terms of their industriousness and love of country.
Arafat is alleged to have told the Armenians that there was one thing he would never tell his people to copy from the Armenian experience. The Armenian delegation at the VIP transit lounge became anxious and more than a bit concerned. What did the leader of the Palestinian national movement have in mind?
Arafat got up and said that Armenians, after being evicted and exiled from western Armenia, took foreign citizenship and started to accumulate wealth and property in their newly adopted countries. This, he pointed out, lead Armenians to forget about the country they had lost, western Armenia. Palestinians, he stressed, would never become citizens of any Arab nation they were living in for this very reason.
Is there any truth in what Arafat said? Have Armenians given up on the dream of returning to their occupied homeland for the very reasons cited by Abu Ammar? Has the accumulation of material wealth and property in foreign lands served as a substitute for the lands that 95 years ago constituted the bulk of the Armenian homeland?
A number of interesting recent incidents lend informal support to this thesis.
We have the results of a 2009 Gallup Poll in Armenian suggesting that Armenians yearn to leave Armenia, many for good. It would appear that Armenians would prefer to migrate than to stay and build a new nation. Any notion of re-establishing an Armenian presence to the west of the Araks River, given this reality, remains the purview of fanciful imagination.
I constantly read many Armenians, supposed political experts, talk about the need to support Armenian claims to the ‘lost lands” in various international tribunals based on the Treaty of Sevres – a dead diplomatic document to be sure. There have been many in the diaspora, over the years, clinging to such ridiculous hopes. They have inculcated the youth under their sway to do the same.
Now I read that young people in Armenia are being similarly brainwashed as well. In Yerevan, they will be marching on the 90th anniversay of the Treaty of Sevres calling on the embassies of the United States, France and italy to “remember” their promises made to the Armenian people in 1920. These are the same Great Powers that conveniently sold Armenia down the drain in the face of a resurgent nationalist Turkey. It seems we haven’t learnt any lessons from the past.
The organizers of such events would do better to tell the youth to march on the Presidential Palace and have Sargsyan declare Armenia’s recognition of the NKR.
Why some still cling to such myths is baffling. To urge young people to take part in such foolish folly is even worse. It displays just how lacking Armenians are when it comes to drafting a political program based on the realities of the day.
When it comes to drafting a comprehensive national political platform, we Armenians, either in the diaspora and the RoA, have not yet been able to agree on what it is we want and are willing to struggle for. We have no set of defined national goals and thus seemingly flip-flop on a host of issues due to the political exigencies of the day.
Then too, we lack any national leaders, with the vision and drive to rally the people. Do we need an Armenian Arafat? Sure, Arafat was a petty despot in his own right and his Fatah movement bilked the Palestinian people out of millions, but what if we could conjure up someone like him, stripped of the negative tendencies.
Levon Ter-Petrosyan wouldn’t do. He puts people to sleep with his analyses that stretch for hours at a time. He also doesn’t believe that democratic change should come from below, from the people in the street. “Go home and do not worry. We will take care of everything”. This was LTP’s advice to the people at every post 2008 rally. The people have no part to play in the movement; it’s those at the top who know best. This ain’t democracy.
Serzh Sargsyan? The current president and drafting a national strategic plan of action seem mutually exclusive. The man just lacks the vision and personal drive.
When was the last time any Armenian public leader actually addressed the people, setting out their vision of where they wanted to take the nation in the next ten years? The only time you’ll see our “leaders” make such a half-hearted attempt is after winning the next in a series of fraudulent elections. No wonder the people are apt to disbelieve what their leaders say and no wonder such officials lack the legitimacy to steer Armenia into the brave new world of the 21st century.
We need someone, or a group of ‘someones’, who will speak out on the pan-Armenian issues of the exodus from the RoA, diaspora repatriation, the rebuilding of the national economy, participatory democracy and the rule of law, halting the environmental pillage of Armenia, a foreign policy based on justice and national interests, the reunification of Artsakh with Armenia, and pooling the resources of Armenians worldwide in the cause of nation-building.
Who then? The nation awaits your list of potential candidates.
JERUSALEM — A macabre legal wrangle is under way over who should pay the hospital bill for an American art student who lost an eye after being struck by a tear-gas canister fired by an Israeli border police officer at a Palestinian-led protest in the West Bank.
Enlarge This Image
Ann Heisenfelt/Associated Press
Emily Henochowicz at her home in Potomac, Md., on July 1. Ms. Henochowicz, a 21-year-old art student, lost her eye after being struck by a tear-gas canister fired by an Israeli police officer at a protest in the West Bank on May 31.
Related
The Lede Blog: Gaza Protests Will Continue; American Hurt in West Bank (June 1, 2010)
The Lede Blog: Three American Subplots in Flotilla Drama (June 3, 2010)
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Mohamad Torokman/Reuters
A battle has ensued over who will pay Ms. Henochowicz’s medical bills, which total about $10,000.
The student, Emily Henochowicz, 21, was injured on May 31 after she joined Palestinian and foreign activists protesting that morning’s deadly raid by Israeli naval commandos on a Turkish boat trying to breach the blockade of Gaza. Israeli security forces fired tear gas to disperse the demonstration after a few Palestinian youths threw rocks.
Witnesses at the protest, by the Qalandiya checkpoint near Ramallah, said that a border police officer had fired the tear-gas directly at the demonstrators, rather than into the air in line with regulations. The Israeli police have begun a criminal investigation.
But the lawyer representing Ms. Henochowicz, Michael Sfard, recently received a letter from the Israeli Ministry of Defense rejecting any demand for compensation or payment of hospital costs. The reason, the ministry stated, was that the protest was violent and that the tear-gas canister was not fired directly but had ricocheted off a concrete barricade.
Ms. Henochowicz, who is Jewish and is a student at the Cooper Union in New York, arrived in Israel in February for what was supposed to be a six-month student exchange. Her father was born in Israel to Holocaust survivors whom he described as “ardent Zionists.”
Speaking by telephone from her home in Potomac, Md., this week, Ms. Henochowicz said it was “upsetting, when someone gets an injury, not only to have to deal with the physical consequences of something you did not do to yourself, but the economic consequences as well.”
Ms. Henochowicz, who was treated at Hadassah University Medical Center in Ein Kerem, had her left eye removed and suffered fractures that required the insertion of titanium plates. She returned to the United States in early June, where she is continuing to visit doctors and specialists.
But more than the cost of the treatment in Israel, which amounted to about $10,000, there are clearly legal principles and interests at stake.
The student’s father, Dr. Stuart Henochowicz, said by telephone that he had not yet explored the question of whether his daughter’s insurance would cover the bill, because he was under the impression that it would be paid by the Ministry of Defense.
On Tuesday, the ministry stated that according to preliminary checks, the border police dealt lawfully with the “violent protest at Qalandiya,” and that the firing of tear gas was justified. While expressing sorrow over Ms. Henochowicz’s injury, the ministry added that it did not cover hospitalization expenses in circumstances such as these.
The ministry said it had acted similarly in the case of Tristan Anderson, an American severely wounded by a tear-gas projectile in 2009. The ministry said that Mr. Anderson had filed a suit in the Tel Aviv District Court, where the issue of hospital expenses would be settled.
Mr. Sfard, the lawyer, said that from the start he told Dr. Henochowicz, who flew to Israel from the United States to be at his daughter’s bedside, “not to touch his wallet or to sign any check.”
In a letter to the ministry, Mr. Sfard wrote, “It is insolent and preposterous to expect someone who was shot by the security forces, whether unintentionally, negligently or with criminal intention, to fund her own medical treatment.”
Yuval Weiss, the director of the medical center in Ein Kerem, said the hospital was “not a party to the argument.”
“It makes no difference to us who pays, as long as somebody does,” he said. “We cannot work for free.”
After her arrival in Israel, Ms. Henochowicz, who came to Jerusalem’s Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, got involved with the pro-Palestinian International Solidarity Movement after meeting activists at a demonstration in Sheikh Jarrah, an East Jerusalem neighborhood where settlers have won court cases and evicted several Palestinian families from their homes.
From Sheikh Jarrah, Ms. Henochowicz frequented the regular Palestinian protest spots in the West Bank like Bilin, Nilin and Nabi Saleh. The late May protest was her first at Qalandiya. “I did not know what it would be like,” she said.
The demonstration came hours after Israel’s raid on an aid flotilla. Violent clashes broke out on the Turkish boat and nine activists — eight Turks and an American-Turkish youth — were killed.
Ms. Henochowicz said she was not standing near the stone throwers. She was holding a Turkish and an Austrian flag when she was struck.
Avi Issacharoff, an Israeli journalist from the newspaper Haaretz, was watching the demonstration. “The police fired a tear-gas grenade, and then another and another,” he wrote in June “I remember that what surprised me was the volley of grenade fire directly aimed directly at the demonstrators, not at the sky. After the fourth grenade, if I am not mistaken, a shout was heard about 100 meters away.”
Unusual for a foreign activist in a conflict where battle lines are often starkly drawn, Ms. Henochowicz says she feels a certain affinity with both sides. She said she had wanted to help the Palestinians, but because of her background, she said she also felt “very attached” to Israel “in lots of ways.”
She added, “If I did not really care about what was happening in the country, I would have hung out on the beach all day.”
Dr. Henochowicz said he found the whole episode “hurtful,” and was upset that no Israeli officials made any contact with him or his daughter during the five days they were at the hospital.
Israel’s ambassador to Washington, Michael B. Oren, has since visited the family’s home in Maryland, Dr. Henochowicz said.
If it was an accident, “Why didn’t they come to the hospital and talk to me?” he asked.
A version of this article appeared in print on July 28, 2010, on page A4 of the New York edition.
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Past Coverage
NEWS ANALYSIS; Cheer, Then Gloom, on Mideast Talks (July 15, 2010)
U.S. AND ISRAEL SHIFT ATTENTION TO PEACE PROCESS (July 7, 2010)
Tax-Exempt Funds Aiding Settlements in West Bank (July 6, 2010)
Tax-Exempt Funds Aiding Settlements in West Bank (July 6, 2010)
