Letter to Boston Herald

Hellenic Electronic Center (HEC) (A Non-Profit Organization Registered in the US with 44,000 Hellenes as members and 36 Hellenic associations in the US and abroad)

September 19, 2011

With regard to the September 18 editorial on Turkey, the Herald fails to mention that Turkish aggression has long been apparent in Cyprus where thirty seven percent of Cypriot territory has been under occupation since the Turkish invasion in 1974 which resulted in the ethnic cleansing of 200,000 native Greek Cypriots. Turkey has also systematically provoked Greece over the years in the Aegean as well as by violating Greek airspace with its planes.
Why is the Herald ignoring the traditional victims of Turkish aggression and racism? Turkish Genocide between 1915 and 1923 resulted in the mass slaughter of millions of Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks. The Greek population of the Orthodox holy City of Constantinople has been reduced to virtually no members as a result of decades worth of pogroms and state sponsored violence, even as the Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarchate struggles to survive against the official discrimination that prevents this ancient bastion of Christendom from operating its only theological Seminary.

Theodoros Karakostas, Boston,HEC Executive Committee

Turkey’s provocation, By Boston Herald Editorial Staff, Sunday, September 18, 2011 - Updated 1 day ago

The prime minister of Turkey, Recep Erdogan, is pur-suing a provocative policy that seems to aim at converting an alliance with Israel into hostilities while he makes nice with the United States. Erdogan has thrown a challenge at Israel that he can prevent from being taken up only by making sure the challenge remains just a possibility. That is the meaning of his pledge that any future humanitarian aid convoy to Gaza will be escorted by the Turkish Navy. No Israeli government can permit a breach of the blockade of Gaza, conceded by a United Nations committee to be completely legal.

If Turkey’s warships try to keep Israel from stopping an aid convoy, Israel will — one way or another — keep the Turks from doing that. If there is no convoy, of course — something that Erdogan can prevent, but not publicly at the cost of seeming weak — there can be no clash. Turkey has agreed to accept a U.S. radar station intended to track Iranian missiles and it is discussing with the United States the stationing of drone aircraft in Turkey for surveillance of the Kurdish terror organization PKK, surveillance that U.S. drones sometimes have carried out from bases in Afghanistan.

Israel’s foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman — admittedly a bit of a loose political cannon, albeit one with an important title — has said he would consider helping the PKK if there is any clash with the Turkish Navy (help that Lieberman cannot actually arrange on his own). Such a supremely foolish retaliation would gravely injure Israel, which cannot ever in good conscience support terrorists and hope for U.S. support, especially terrorists the United States is helping combat. The Turkey-Israel rift grows wider, but it is not insurmountable — unless the leaders of both countries make it so.
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