Tell me who your friends are…(HD)I forgot the rest of this well-known phrase… But it probably went on to say “… and I’ll tell you what a nice gentleman you are.” (Before any reader rushes to correct me, he should type “Turkey journalists prison” and google it). At a recent meeting in Germany, Cem Toker, chairman of the Liberal Party, said: “Ahmet Davutoğlu should decide whether he is the foreign minister of Turkey, or the interior minister of Syria.” But why should he choose? Mr. Davutoğlu is probably the foreign minister of Turkey and the foreign and interior ministers of Syria, Iraq, Israel, Iran and half a dozen other countries in the Levant. He may also be the patron saint of the Palestinian territories, Somalia, Libya, Sudan, Tunisia and formerly Lebanon. And that portfolio is too heavy for one man. No doubt, Mr. Davutoğlu’s intro into Middle Eastern politics was impressive. His outro may not be equally so. I, for instance, would expect him, after his exhausting work over the past few months, to find at least one single positive response to his vigorous quest to convince Arab/Gulf/Muslim allies to (fully or not-so-fully) recognize the breakaway Turkish statelet in northern Cyprus. But perhaps he has been too busy befriending fellow Muslims. Over the past years the Turks have tried, sometimes successfully, to make bizarre friends in the former Ottoman lands: the eccentric Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, President of Iran; internationally-renowned peace and charity organizations Hamas and Hezbollah; the dictator in Damascus who they had mistaken for the Syrian Voltaire for about eight years; and Omar al-Bashir, Sudanese President, Nobel Peace Prize laureate, and the man wanted by the International Criminal Court on counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity.Read the rest here.
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