Turkey – A radicalizing bridge to radical Islamic countries?

So the Prime Minister of Turkey calls Israel “a festering boil in the Middle East that spreads hate and enmity,” while his foreign minister compares [ the May 31] Israeli naval raid on a flotilla of ships headed for the Gaza Strip, in which nine passengers were killed, to the attacks of September 11, 2001. For good measure, the Turks have also wagged their finger at the Obama Administration for not immediately denouncing Israel’s actions.

Yet the more facts that come to light about the flotilla, its passengers and their sponsors, the more it seems clear that Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Ergodan’s government, far more so than Israel’s, must be held to account for [the] violent episode. Maybe that’s something the U.N. Human Rights Council, which on Wednesday [June 2] condemned Israel for an “outrageous attack” and voted 32-3 to set up a “fact-finding mission” (with the U.S. in opposition), might get around to investigating, though we wouldn’t hold our breath.

The Turkish accounting should begin with a full explanation from the government of its relationship with the IHH, an Istanbul-based Islamic “charity” that purchased three of the six boats used in the flotilla from the city government, sent hundreds of its activists along with it, and reportedly has ties to Turkey’s ruling Islamist AKP Party.

The IHH – the Turkish acronym for the “Foundation for Human Rights and Freedoms and Humanitarian Relief” – has widely reported links to Hamas, the terrorist group that runs Gaza and most directly threatens Israel. Moreover, in the 2001 Seattle trial of Ahmed Ressam, the would-be Millennium bomber, French counter-terrorism magistrate Jean-Louis Bruguiere testified that the IHH had played an “important role” in Ressam’s plot to bomb LAX airport [Los Angeles] on New Year’s Day, 2000, and that there was “a rather close relation” between the bomber and the Turkish group.

“The IHH is an NGO,” said Judge Bruguiere, “but it was also a type of cover-up… in order to obtain forged documents and to obtain different forms of infiltration for mujahedeen in combat.” In an interview this week with the Associated Press, the judge said he did not know whether IHH was still in the terror business, but he added that “they were basically helping al Qaeda when [Osama] bin Laden started to want to target U.S. soil.”

Nor is that all. In a 2006 study for the Danish Institute for International Studies, terrorism analyst Evan Kohlmann noted that Turkey had known of the IHH links to terrorism for at least a decade.

“Turkish authorities began their own domestic criminal investigation of IHH as early as December 1997, when sources revealed that leaders of IHH were purchasing automatic weapons from other regional Islamic militant groups. IHH’s bureau in Istanbul was thoroughly searched, and its local officers were arrested. Security forces uncovered an array of disturbing items, including firearms, explosives, bomb-making instructions, and a ‘jihad flag.’ After analyzing seized IHH documents, Turkish authorities concluded that ‘detained members of IHH were going to fight in Afghanistan, Bosnia and Chechnya.’…

“An examination of IHH’s phone records in Istanbul showed repeated telephone calls in 1996 to an Al-Qaeda guesthouse in Milan and various Algerian terrorist operatives active elsewhere in Europe – including the notorious Abu el-Ma’ali, who has been subsequently termed by U.S. officials as a ‘junior Osama Bin Laden,’” the Danish study said.

No wonder that Israel was not prepared to let this flotilla break its blockade of Gaza. As Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Wednesday [June 2], “this was no Love Boat,” and Israel is entirely within its rights to prevent Hamas from linking with groups suspected of supplying arms and money to terrorists. Israel had also gone out of its way to give Turkey fair warning, with Al Jazeera reporting that the Israeli government “held a meeting with ambassadors of the European countries participating in the convoy and Turkey to tell them it would not allow the Freedom Flotilla ships to dock at Gaza.”

Yet knowing all this, the Turkish government made no effort to prevent the flotilla from setting sail. The government also seems unembarrassed that the IHH belongs to a Saudi-based umbrella group of Islamic charities know as “The Union of the Good,” which the U.S. Treasury designated a terrorist organization in November 2008. On the contrary, Mr. Erdogan has been outspoken in his calls for the world to recognize Hamas, even as his relations with the more moderate Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas have been notably cool.

That attitude conforms with the general pattern of Mr. Erdogan’s foreign policy. For all his denunciations of Israel’s alleged brutality in [the May 31] raid, he was among the first foreign leaders to congratulate Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for his “victory” in last year’s presidential election. He’s also had no trouble getting close to Syria’s Bashar as-Assad, despite the U.N.’s investigation into Syria’s role in the 2005 assassination of Lebanese premier Rafik Hariri.

So much, then, for the notion that Jerusalem has needlessly junked its friendship with Ankara for the sake of stopping a mere ship of fools. That “friendship” had already been degraded by a Turkish government that appears to have an ingrained hostility toward the Jewish state, remarkable sympathies for nearby radical regimes, and an attitude toward extremist groups like the IHH that borders on complicity.

All of this should concern the Obama Administration no less than it does the leadership in Jerusalem. The president has invested considerable efforts in courting Mr. Erdogan, his government and Turkish public opinion. The reward has been a Turkey that conducts a diplomacy of obstruction when it comes to Iran, along with a diplomacy of provocation when it comes to Israel.

Whatever this might achieve for Mr. Erdogan politically in the short run, in the long-run it means a Turkey admired only by neighboring despots, one that no responsible country can trust.

(This article appeared in the op-ed column in the June 4-6 edition of The Wall Street Journal Europe).