With Friends Like Obama-Backed Islamists, Who Needs Enemies?

By Barry Rubin

A developing story out of Turkey perfectly parallels the article I wrote recently about how Pakistan continues to get massive U.S. aid despite failure to cooperate much of the time on anti-terrorist activity, the involvement of some government officials in concealing Usama bin Ladin, and its imprisoning a Pakistani who helped get bin Ladin.

In Tunisia and Libya, governments fail to help against those responsible for the murder of four U.S. officials in Benghazi. In Turkey, now the government—despite President Obama praising it lavishly, exempting it from economic sanctions on Iran, and saying its prime minister is his hero and role model—has refused to help catch a leading architect of the September 11 attacks. And it is not comforting that the U.S. government has begun training radical Islamists to fight more effectively and kill people better (my next article--BR).

Sulaiman Abu Gaith was taken into custody, based on a CIA tip, in Ankara after arriving in Turkey from Iran. (Although the U.S. government is clearly aware that Iran is giving refuge to many al-Qaida leaders it has not pressed or publicized the point.)

Turkey merely deported him to Jordan on grounds that he had arrived travelling on a false passport. The rationale for not turning over Abu Gaith was that he had not committed any crime within Turkey. Jordan then extradited him to the United States where the capture was extolled as a victory but the refusal of Turkey to help was ignored in official terms.

Note that we are not talking about here merely Hamas or Hizballah but al-Qaida, a group that Egypt, Turkey, and Libya, have no interest in helping because they are Islamist clients. The only rationale for helping al-Qaida is either that these regimes want to hurt the United States or they are more afraid of al-Qaida than of the United States. Or, perhaps, they know that the Obama Administration will let them have their cake and eat it too, in other words there will be no cost for refusing to cooperate with Washington against its enemy.

Secretary of State John Kerry, on his visit to Turkey, did condemn Prime Minister Erdogan’s recent outburst of hatred comparing Israel and Zionism to Nazism. 

Also on the positive side is that the Obama Administration has helped persuade the Egyptian regime to cut off the flow of weapons to the Gaza Strip. Many of the weapons sent across in previous months were advanced U.S. equipment given to the Libyan Islamist rebels.

But this act of Kerry's is just a false front on U.S. policy. Erdogan and his government, party, and the media that it controls has been slandering and inciting to violence against Israelis and often Jews for years. Only because this specific statement was featured in the U.S. media did Kerry speak. No doubt, the issue will soon be forgotten as Erdogan goes on to make scores of other slightly less blatant statements along the same lines. Will U.S. policy toward Turkey change because of Erdogan's antisemitic remarks plus his economic and diplomatic assistance of Iran, promotion of an Islamist regime in Syria, backing for Hamas and Hizballah, and other anti-American actions? Absolutely not.

If the United States cannot depend on its new “allies,” despite the supposed popularity of Obama and its policies in those places, then how can they be said to be allies at all? And why is the United States giving them so much money and diplomatic support?

What happens when Islamist terrorists who have been armed, trained, and/or diplomatically helped by the Obama Administration kill Americans? Oh, wait! That's already the true secret of what happened in Benghazi.

This article is published on PJMedia.