Mideast Muslims’ love-hate relationship with Satan

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan thinks that it is a Western hypocrisy to militarily engage radical Islamist militants in Mali while not bombing the Evil Man of Damascus. Of course, with the same logic, one may question the honesty over the Turkish “let’s-bomb-Damascus-now” hysteria, indifference to Mali and compassion for Sudan’s president, Omar al-Bashir, who is wanted for genocide and crimes against humanity.

As U.S. President Barack Obama said this week, “there are thousands who are currently being killed in Syria but there are also thousands who are currently being killed in the Congo.” Why, really, has Mr. Erdoğan not even once mentioned the tragedy in the Congo?

Mr. Erdoğan once famously remarked that “he went to Darfur himself and saw no genocide there,” hence, no war crimes whatsoever. Interestingly, the prime minister’s foreign policy czar has not gone to Syria since the civil war broke out, but speaking in Davos last week, he called on the international community to declare the Syrian regime’s bombardment of its citizens a war crime.

You see, gentlemen, you need not see it yourself to know that there are war crimes somewhere on earth. For instance, I did not go to Uludere myself but I know that Turkish fighter jets bombarded Turkish citizens there and killed 34 people, mostly teenagers.

It is so amusing that the Turks have had a genuine but bizarre passion about encouraging the United States to strike Syria, and now France. It is bizarre indeed, especially when you think that Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu’s masterpiece, “Strategic Depth,” was pilloried for the idea of “warding off the major powers from our backyard.” It must be a simple twist of fate that Mssrs. Erdoğan and Davutoğlu and their cheerleaders in the media now want major powers right in our backyard with their warplanes and bombs and rockets.

Why, really, are Sunni Muslims, who for decades dreamed of the day when they would victoriously oust the “Satan” and the “imperialist West” from the Middle East, now inviting the same Satan and the imperialist West to a bomb party in Syria?

At this pace of hypocrisy, one might even imagine the Arab League appealing to Israel to bomb Damascus. In fact, that would be the ideal scenario for the Sunni pact: Get rid of Bashar al-Assad and, as a bonus; sit back and watch the Zionists and the “perverted Shiite Iranians” bomb each other, preferably with nuclear weapons; and meanwhile redesign Syria under the rule of a coalition of various shades of Islamists/jihadists.

We probably have a new set of rules for the increasingly unpleasant game in this increasingly unpleasant part of the world:

Rule #1: “We can ward off major powers from our backyard” is a dream;

Rule #2: “Without the major powers in our backyard, Muslims in this part of the world would live happily ever after” is a bigger dream;

Rule #3: “The biggest obstacle to peace in the Middle East is Israel” is a lie;

Rule #4: “Israel – only Israel and not Muslims – is killing Muslims in the Middle East” is a bigger lie;

Rule #5: “Various degrees of sectarian war among Muslims, from cold, to tepid, to warm, to hot,” are a fact, and,

Rule #6: “You just cannot ward off the Satan and the imperialist West from your backyard and call them back to hit your enemies with their military might at your convenience” is a bigger fact.