It’s been a great month for US arms manufacturers: Just two weeks after the United States and Qatar – “the world’s largest funder of terror”, according to former President Shimon Peres – signed an $11 billion arms deal, the IsraelDefense website said Thursday that Washington has inked another multi-billion dollar deal for American firms, this time to provide Turkey with an advanced air defense system.

The deal comes at a time when Turkey appears to have re-defined its identity as a Muslim-majority democracy, as well as its role in the Middle East and the Islamic world. Although the Turkish republic, founded by Kamel Attaturk in 1923, has existed as a democracy for 90 years (with three military coups to restore democracy when the country teetered, in 1960, 1971 and 1980), Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has directed the country towards an Islamist path since coming to power in 2002.

The evidence of Erdoğan’s effort to Islamize the Attaturk Republic has been clear for years: After being banned from Turkish politics for five years in the late 1990s and early 2000s for promoting anti-Israel-democratic ideas, he has used his elections to redefine Turkish politics and international relations.

He has purged both the judiciary and the military, giving many Turks and international observers the clear feeling that he is looking to solidify a one-party, one-leader system. More journalists are in Turkish jails today than any other country on earth – not because it is formally illegal to criticise Erdoğan or the government in the local press, but rather because journalists and editors have learned to self-censor if they want to survive. Under Erdoğan’s leadership the country has moved steadily away from the democratic republic envisioned by Attaturk and steadily towards the dark Islamic republic envisioned by enlightened groups such as ISIS and al-Qaeda.

Internationally, too, Erdoğan has redefined Turkey’s interests. Under Erdoğan’s leadership, Turkey has completely abandoned a thriving relationship with Israel in favor of relationships with some of the darkest regimes on the planet: Iran, Hamas, Syria, Libya.  Even Turkey’s relationship with the United States has not been immune: In mid-July he said he “no longer speaks” to President Barack Obama, in protest of the latter’s supposed lack of support for Palestinians in Gaza.

The $4 billion missile defense deal is significant not only in light of Erdoğan’s Islamist leanings, but also because of Turkey’s wider geo-political stance. The deal, which has been delayed four times over the past year, mainly due to Erdoğan’s domestic political needs as he completes his term as prime minister and runs for president, is also relevant because American and European companies have been competing for the air defense contracts against competitors from Russia and China – the geo-political equivalent of a slap in the face to Washington and Brussels.

In that sense, then, the deal stands to re-cement Ankara’s standing in the West, and also to reassure President Obama and European leaders that Turkey has not ‘changed sides’ – at least, not completely.

Finally, the deal is critical as the United States heads to mid-term elections amidst signs of economic slowdown. Last month, Raytheon-Lockheed announced layoffs in Rhode Island and Massachussetts. Furthermore, many large weapons-producing states, such as Alabama, are not naturally Democratic support bases. Taken together, inking the Turkey deal was a clear economic interest for the United States, and a political interest for President Obama and the Democratic Party.

All of which suggests, however, that the choice of short-term financial gain over longer-term political interests is unstable at best. For Prime Minister Erdoğan, Turkey’s path is clear. Nothing illustrates this better than Erdoğan’s outrageous comparisons of Israel to Nazi Germany and Jewish Home MK Ayelet Shaked to Hitler. Especially in light of the current deal, the silence from the administration on growing state anti-Semitism in Turkey is deafening.

But President Obama’s silence on Turkish anti-Semitism cannot change the fact that the administration recognises both the possibility that Turkey could bolt the NATO stable, and also that that move would be a political earthquake. In that light, the current move is a desperate attempt to curry favor with an shaky ally on the way out, at the expense of a solid one that is firmly in the American orbit.

Turkish Deputy Prime Minister Bülent Arınç told reporters after a cabinet meeting on Monday that Turkey will observe three days of mourning. The mourning period is intended as a show of support for Gaza’s resistance against Israel. The three day period begins Tuesday, July 22.

Arınç, who is also the government spokesman, said Ankara “curses the massacre” and ruthless mass punishment by Israel against the Palestinian Arab people.

Turkey is one of the most outspoken critics of Israel over the war in Gaza.  Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has accused Israel of “barbarism surpassing Hitler.”

Erdogan also pledged that Turkey would remain hostile to Israel so long as he was in office.

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has sought in the last days to portray himself as the leading global defender of the Palestinian cause, slamming Israel’s actions in the Gaza Strip as a “genocide” of the Palestinians, according to the Daily Star.

Turkey “will strongly support the reconciliation agreement and offer all humanitarian aid” for the Hamas-Fatah unity government that was announced Wednesday,  Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu told Gaza’s de facto prime minister Ismail Haniyeh.

Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan became a fan of Hamas five years ago, at the same time relations with Israel deteriorated. Israel has made amends with Turkey, but the slow return to more normal ties has not affected Erdogan’s support for Hamas. He has stated several time in the past three years he will visit Gaza but has yet to make good on what is seen by Hamas as a promise and by Israel as a threat.

Qatar, whose ruler visited Gaza last year and presented a fat check of hundreds of millions of dollars to Haniyeh. Not surprisingly celebrated the announcement of unity.

Turkish Internet users have been getting past Turkish Internet Service Providers (ISPs), thanks to an Israeli Internet start-up called Green Team. While Green Team’s goal is to provide solutions to enable safe access to the Internet for kids, schools and families, the service provider also offers a free, alternative DNS (domain name service) that does not block Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other social media. Turkish users have been utilizing different methods including using the different DNS’s provided by Green Team to access Twitter, YouTube and other social media.

Back in March, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan banned Twitter from Turkey. “We now have a court order. We’ll eradicate Twitter. I don’t care what the international community says. Everyone will witness the power of the Turkish Republic,” Erdogan stated at a campaign rally in Bursa on March 20, a day before the ban was officially placed.

When incriminating audio recordings revealing government corruption in Erdogan’s inner circles began appearing on social media sites, Erdogan began taking government actions barring users, stating that his enemies were using those sites against him. Erdogan’s party, Justice and Development Party won in local elections on Sunday, following the Turkish PM’s clampdown on the press and the Internet as well as corruption claims.

Green Team CEO David Allouch told The Times of Israel that his company had noticed significantly more traffic on their servers than usual – with most of them originating from Turkey this past week.

“On Tuesday we noticed there was a lot of traffic on our servers, more than usual,” GreenTeam CEO David Allouch told The Times of Israel. “A check of the IP addresses connecting to us showed that most of them originated in Turkey — with about 100,000 connections from Turkish users over a 24-hour period.”

The traffic spike occurred because Turkish Internet service providers had banned connections to an open server run by Google the previous day. But now that the word is out, Allouch will continue to help out the Turkish users, saying that he believes that his company has an obligation to help them, if they are turning to Green Team. “Starting Thursday, we will set up an alternative DNS server without filtering restrictions, specifically for use by Turkish users.”

In the meantime, Turkey’s highest court challenged the Twitter ban, ruling on Thursday that the government’s block on the on-line messaging service is constitutional, violating freedom of expression and individual rights to citizens.

In Sunday’s vote across Turkey, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s increasingly Islamist and imperialistic “Justice and Development” AK party appeared to receive an overwhelming majority of the votes cast.

The elections were for heads of localities, but the party makeup of those running is seen as a referendum on the future of Turkey.

This is the first national election since the anti-regime riots last year, during which thousands of people were injured and nearly a dozen died. The vote also took place in the immediate aftermath of the government banning both Twitter and YouTube, and threats to also ban Facebook.

The two challenging parties, the center-left Kemalist Republican Party (CHP) and the right wing Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), were out in force across Turkey. Turkish television news, NTV, reported with 46 percent of the votes tallied, Erdogan’s Islamist AKP had won 44.9 percent of the vote, with CHP receiving 26.53 percent of the votes and MHP 15.53 percent.

Istanbul and Ankara, Turkey’s two largest cities, both voted for Erdoğan’s AKP, while a majority of those living in Turkey’s third largest city, Izmir, voted for the CHP.

“The Turkish People voted for Islamism, the Turkish People voted for sharia. This was nothing but a referendum for the regime. The Islamist policies will grow more than ever,” was the message received by The Jewish Press from a Turk who fled his home country to seek refuge in Europe from Turkey’s increasingly paranoid and regressive regime.

“There was no voter fraud, there was no corruption, there were CHP and MHP inspectors at all the ballot boxes,” wrote the disconsolate Turkish ex-patriot.

Term limits prevent Erdoğan from running for prime minister again, but there is widespread speculation he may run in this summer’s presidential election. Others speculate there may be an effort to overturn the limitation on the number of terms a prime minister can serve.

According to a Voice of America report, voting was generally peaceful across the country, but fights and riots broke out in two villages in the southeast of Turkey, near the border with Syria. Eight people were killed and more than a dozen were injured.

Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon has approved allowing the entry of  570 truckloads of construction materials, electrical equipment, telecommunications and plumbing materials into Hamas-controlled Gaza for construction of a Turkish hospital on the ruins of the destroyed Jewish community of Netzarim.

Turkey initiated the project three years ago without any coordination with Israel at a time when both countries’ relations were in the deep freeze.

The government of Prime Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who keeps a door open to Iran by embracing the Hamas terrorist government, had no problem in getting around Israel’s restrictions on “dual-use” equipment that also is used to build rockets and factories for weapons used to attack Israel. It simply used tunnels to smuggle equipment for  the 160-bed complex that is to cover 34 acres.

Ya’alon’s announcement came a day after  the Turkish deputy prime minister was quoted as saying that Israel is about to sign on the dotted line to pay millions of dollars to families of terrorists who tried to kill Israeli Navy commandos in the clash on the Mavi Mamara ship four years ago.

It is nice to know that Hamas finally is using the ruins of Gush Katif communities for something other than terrorist training camps. It needs a hospital to care for terrorists who are wounded by Israeli soldiers when they attack Israel with rockets or try to blow up Israeli soldiers at the security fence.

The Israeli government did not ask former residents of Netzarim for permission to bless Turkey’s grand humanitarian gesture.

If there is one place in the world that it is difficult for even President Shimon Peres to think that there will be peace, it is Gaza. Peres was his usual smug self with his head in the clouds when he assured everyone that expelling Jews and withdrawing Israel’s military eyes and ears from Gaza would bring peace and quiet.

After Hamas attacked Ashkelon, and then Ashdod, and Rehovot, the same Shimon Peres as President of the State of Israel, made a fool of himself by saying, in public no less – and this is a paraphrase but very close to the original quote –  “ I can’t understand why Hamas would so such a thing after all that we did for peace.”

The number of Israelis who trust Hamas is close to zero. The more Mahmoud Abbas and the entire Palestinian Authority regime proves to even Israel’s bleeding heart media that the Arabs have no interest in peace with Israel, the more the expulsion wrenches the stomach.

Hamas needs the hospital for Gaza civilians, many of whom have no problem hating Israel while at the same time begging for medical care at Israel’s hospitals. Some of the patients even change their minds after  medical care and realize that Jews actually are human beings and  not apes and pigs depicted by  Muslims preachers.

The idea of a hospital sounds great, but as awful as it is to think, hate is hate and it is a two-way street. Here is the response of one former Netzarim resident to The Jewish Press: “When the hospital is full, it should be blown up.”

That could be the ugly end to this ugly story, but a look at the reasons for the Israeli government’s second marriage with Turkey makes this article even uglier.

Turkey and Israel were great friends for years, carrying out joint military exercises and enjoying a healthy flow of goods and merchandise in two directions. Tens of thousands of Israel tourists flocked to Turkey’s resorts.

All of that changed when Erdogan got on his high horse during the Operation Cast Lead counter-terrorist campaign more than five years ago.

Israel is likely to sign soon on the dotted line and pay millions of dollars to families of terrorists who were “victims” of Israeli soldiers who preferred to kill rather than be killed in the Mavi Mamara clash on the high seas four years ago, Turkey’s deputy prime minster said Tuesday.

A compensation agreement may be signed after local Turkish elections March 30, according to Bülent Arınç and reported by Turkey’s Hurriyet News, but local election results in favor of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s could go to his inflated head and encourage him to up the ante.

The exact amount of money has not been announced, but Turkey previously floated the sum of one million dollars for each family so Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu can believe President Barack Obama will work with Turkey on behalf of Israel in the event of an attack Iran, in which case using Turkish air space could be crucial.

Obama’s ability to manipulate Turkish-Israeli ties also gives him diplomatic patsies in a region where the United States has lost all respect and whose influence can only be measured in dollars.

After a deep freeze in relations, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu suddenly announced a year ago that Israel indeed was so sorry it had to use force to kill nine Turkish civilian terrorists, one of them with dual American citizenship, who kidnapped at least three Navy commandos and knifed and shot others.

The commandos, in accordance with international law as later affirmed by the United Nations, boarded the Mavi Mamara to prevent it from continuing to Hamas-controlled Gaza, where an embargo is in place to prevent terrorists and arms from reaching shore.

Netanyahu’s apology came almost momentarily after Obama, during his first and probably last visit to Israel as president, convinced Netanyahu to make a 30-minute telephone call to Erdoğan to express his sorrow.

The reconciliation has been stuck because of lack of agreement on how much Israeli taxpayers’’ money will be used to buy off Turkey.

Welcome to Chelm.

Once there is an agreement after the elections, which are occupying the Turkish government’s attention at the moment, Israel and Turkey will resume diplomatic ties and restore their ambassadors, Annc said.

The compensation deal needs approval by the Turkish parliament.

Annc cited President Obama’s involvement, saying, “The lion’s share in the success belongs to Mr. Obama. President Obama used his influence on Israel and appealed for a compromise.”