West

The Turkish-sponsored Gaza flotilla clash is being seen by pundits as part of a larger rejection of the West by Ankara.

With all the ballyhoo about the alleged "existential" conflict between Israel and Iran, you might think that the news that Iran is trying to send an aid boat to Gaza, in the wake of the Israeli military attack on the Turkish aid boat that killed eight Turks and an American, would occasion a great wailing and gnashing of teeth in the American media.

Reported by Ziva Galili

Visiting Turkey and finding that Turkey has pulled away from its balance point between the East and the West.

Over the past week, there's been a lot of talk over how the West has "lost" Turkey. Even Defense Secretary Robert Gates seems to be buying into this line of thinking.

The fact that writing about Helen Thomas just a few days after she resigned feels like old news, tells you something about what's wrong with the media and our country today.

After a journalism career spanning almost seventy years, Thomas was taken down in less than two minutes. Which is the running time of the video where she made the remarks that forced her to resign her job, lose her book collaborator, her lecture agent and have a high school cancel a graduation speech she was scheduled to deliver.

I have been a Jewish Leader for the last 26 years. This is indisputably true because I have the plaques to prove it. I remember when I first met Thomas Friedman in Israel back then he told me that he never met a Jew in Israel who wasn't a "leader." He said he had yet to meet a Jewish Follower.

In trying to change direction and find "a better approach" to dealing with the long running crisis facing Gaza, the Obama Administration is confronting several deeply entrenched obstacles.

First came the clash at Davos in January 2009, when Turkey's Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan walked off the stage after an angry exchange with the Israeli president, Shimon Peres during a panel discussion on Gaza at the World Economic Forum. Then came the surprise uranium deal with Tehran, undermining Western pressure on Iran to come clean about its nuclear program, followed by the Israeli assault on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla, which sailed under Turkish flags, sending shockwaves throughout the world.

Originally published on The Hill

When several years ago I first met Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and had the pleasure to have two private conversations with him, he immediately struck me as the ultimate "purple" leader. As the Washington Post wrote recently, "Erdogan's Justice and Development Party has religious roots, but it also draws conservative entrepreneurs and liberals with its free-market policies."