Na ocasião, lamentei o fato de nenhum articulista nacional ter atinado para o relativismo barato com que Erdogan trata a vida humana e questionei a hipocrisia do governo turco - que descreve o episódio ocorrido na última segunda como "Terrorismo de Estado", ao mesmo tempo em que faz vista-grossa para os mais de 400 mil mortos no Genocidio de Darfur. Um país que tem a pretensão de resgatar a glória do Império Otomano e se tornar um líder para o mundo islâmico, não pode sair por aí chamando a atenção das pessoas para um conflito onde os muçulmanos são os algozes.
Do dia 26 de fevereiro de 2003 até a presente data, os janjawid - milicianos recrutados entre os baggara, tribos nômades africanas de língua árabe e religião muçulmana - mataram aproximadamente 450 mil pessoas não-árabes em Darfur. O governo sudanês, liderado por Omar Al Bashir, nega publicamente que apóia os janjawid, mas fornece armas, assistência e até participa de ataques conjuntos o grupo miliciano. Bashir já foi repreendido pela ONU, pela União Europeia, pela Human Rigth Watch... Só não foi repreendido pelo governo turco, que é chefiado pelo humanista Erdogan. Já imaginaram como seria desastroso para o presidente turco emitir um veto ou mesmo uma reprimenda aos muçulmanos do Sudão? Por essas e outras eu continuo afirmando que a consternação dos turcos não passa de demagogia. Istambul está fazendo política com a vida de civis inocentes enquanto o mundo permanece em seu silêncio obsequioso; repousando como Inês de Castro, "no sossego de seus anos".
Felizmente, ainda existem jornalistas interessados em mostrar os fatos como eles realmente são. Hoje de manhã, o Financial Times publicou um excelente artigo sobre o episódio envolvendo a ajuda humanitária turca:
Israel had no other choice
By Christopher Caldwell
"Botched" and "stupid" are adjectives that have been applied all week to the events of Monday, when Israeli soldiers killed nine passengers and wounded dozens more on the Mavi Marmara, the Turkish flagship of a six-boat convoy. The boats, sponsored by a Turkish charity with ties to Islamist radicalism, had a humanitarian objective: to deliver aid to Gazan ports. But as the flotilla leaders themselves acknowledged, they also had a military one: to break the blockade of Gaza that Israel imposed in 2007. When participants in a conflict blur the line between civilians and combatants, good options disappear. Under the circumstances, the raid was neither stupid nor botched. It successfully repelled an attack on Israel’s borders, albeit at considerably higher cost than Israel would have wished.
There is a blockade of Gaza because Hamas, the Islamist party that runs Gaza, wants Israel destroyed. In recent years, it has launched thousands of rockets at cities in the Israeli south. One can argue over whether quarantining Hamas is wise, reasonable, proportionate or effective. But this is a separate question from whether Israel has the right to enforce a blockade in a war zone. Those complaining loudest about the Israeli raid tend to mix the two up and to say that because a) Israeli’s blockade of Gaza is unjust, and b) the passengers of the Mavi Marmara oppose the blockade of Gaza, therefore c) in any encounter between Israel and the passengers of the Mavi Marmara, Israel is in the wrong and the passengers are in the right. This is an unreasonable viewpoint. It is also a blueprint for escalating violence. Imagine the dangers, if, during the cold war, non-governmental organisations from the Soviet bloc had sailed flotillas into US waters to protest about racial conflict, or into British waters to protest against IRA internment.
Israel has provided evidence that its soldiers were in mortal danger when they abseiled on to the decks of the Mavi Marmara – high-quality video footage, which was released within hours. The government has shown that the passengers brought gas masks and had pre-fabricated propaganda videos. The Guardian reports that three of the dead Turkish citizens were seeking "martyrdom" through the operation.
But the intentions of those on the boat – whether humanitarian, as the organisers said (publicly), or terroristic, as the Israelis say – have nothing to do with the justice or injustice of the raid. Protecting borders is about sovereignty, not sentiment. The fact that, say, a door-to-door evangelist wants to save your soul rather than rob you does not give him the right to enter your house. Where intentions do matter is in assessing the relevance of whether the boat was in Israeli or international waters. The explicitly stated intention of the activists to violate the Israeli blockade almost certainly renders the precise location of the boat less important.
The insistence, even among Israel’s friends, that Israel behaved stupidly rests on the idea that it had other options. The American journalist Thomas Friedman and the Israeli novelist David Grossman both faulted Israel’s leaders for not acting more "creatively". But creativity has its limits. A post on foreign affairs website Stratfor.com on May 26, almost a week before the encounter, laid out the alternatives ominously and accurately. Let the boat through, and you have issued an invitation to Iran and others to re-arm Hamas. Stop the boat and you have an "incident". In retrospect, Israel sent its soldiers on to the Mavi Marmara too lightly armed (some with paintball guns) for the mob that met them. Yet this was the right decision at the time, made to avoid even accidental violence.
If there is one attitude that some of Israel’s sincerest friends share with the extremists who have added comments to many of the Mavi Marmara videos on YouTube, it is that perfection and omniscience are both to be expected from the Jewish state. (They should have deployed their Secret Boat-Stopping Machine!) The extremists, though, take perfection to be a precondition of the state’s legitimacy.
Israel has been held responsible for the actions of others – notably, this week, for the deterioration in its relationship with Turkey. This view is promoted cynically by Suat Kiniklioglu, a spokesman for Turkey’s ruling AK party, who says the incident has "irrevocably damaged Turkish-Israeli relations at the bilateral level", and naively by the New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, who warns, "Israel’s storming of a Turkish-flagged vessel in international waters was a huge setback to efforts to win new sanctions on Iran".
The deterioration of Turkish-Israeli relations has proceeded steadily since Recep Tayyip Erdogan brought the AK party to power. Mr Erdogan wants a more Islamic Turkey, and in this he speaks for his country’s democratic majority. One cannot re-enter the good graces of the Muslim world with a trusting, or neutral, attitude towards Israel. Turkey’s growing hostility to Israel is a cause, not a consequence, of the Mavi Marmara incident. The promised United Nations investigation will provide a chance to examine the claims of foreign minister Ahmet Davutoglu that the NGOs organising the flotilla were beyond Ankara’s control.
The most alarming thing this week was not the raid. It was the way internet opinion fell in behind activist opinion, and then the opinions of political and journalistic elites fell into line with the web. That Israel has lost the battle for public opinion is unfortunate. More troubling is that that battle was lost before the facts of the case had even emerged.
Destaque para o texto em que o autor diz: "A deterioração das relações turco-israelenses ocorre desde que o premiê turco, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, trouxe o partido AK para o poder com a plataforma de tornar o país mais islâmico. Não se pode reaver as boas graças do mundo muçulmano com atitude confiante, ou neutra, em relação a Israel. A hostilidade crescente da Turquia em relação a Israel é uma causa, não uma consequência, do incidente do Mavi Marmara".
É uma pena que não existam jornalistas em nosso país com tamanha lucidez.
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