In another sign of the growing importance Israel attributes to China in the battle against Iran’s nuclear program, OC Home Front Command Maj.-Gen. Yair Golan flew to Beijing Saturday night at the head of an Israeli military delegation, The Jerusalem Post has learned.

Golan will hold talks with top Chinese military and defense officials on a wide range of issues pertaining to Israeli security, including the Iranian nuclear threat. 

He will also meet with Chinese officials to discuss civil defense and will brief them on the recent nationwide Home Front exercise Turning Point 4 that was held in Israel.

Golan’s week-long visit comes two months after head of Military Intelligence Maj.-Gen. Amos Yadlin and head of the IDF’s Strategic Planning Division Maj.-Gen. Amir Eshel visited China as part of an Israeli effort to get Beijing to support new sanctions on Iran.

Ties with China are a sensitive issue for the IDF. In 2005, a crisis erupted between the Defense Ministry and the Pentagon, which accused Israel of selling American military technology to China.

The crisis was resolved several years later after Israel agreed to suspend all military sales to China and instituted new safeguards and supervision on defense exports.

Nevertheless, the IDF attaches importance to maintaining a solid relationship with China due to the role Beijing plays in stopping Iran’s nuclear program. In April, the spokesman for the Chinese military and Defense Ministry visited Israel as a guest of IDF Spokesman Brig.-Gen. Avi Benayahu.

Anti-Israel television for children: The Birds of Paradise band has released a new song in which children express their desire to be shaheeds (martyrs).

The song, sung by young children on the Birds of Paradise television channel, includes the lyrics, “When we die as shaheeds we’ll go to paradise. No, don’t say we’re young. This life has made us old. Without Palestine, what significance is there to our lives? Even if they give us the whole world, we’ll never forget her (Palestine).”

During the song, an older man appears. “Children, we must keep our religious commandments,” he sings. “There is no god but Allah, and Allah loves shaheeds.”

At the end of the song, the children sing, “Allah watch over the children of Palestine. Allah will make our prayers come true.”

Shaheeds and birds. The kid’s website

The channel has also produced other songs against Israel, such as “The lion cubs of Gaza” and “The upright ones – the return to Palestine.”

The songs are broadcast over the station which began operating in Bahrain in January 2008. It was established by Jordanian-Palestinian businessman Khaled Maqdad.

Maqdad, who formed the kids’ band of the same name in 1994, has raised funds over the years to set up the station, which specializes in broadcasting the band’s clips. In addition to the children’s songs, there are also an abundance of love songs to the homeland and songs praising “heroes like (Sheikh) Ahmad Yassin,” the wheelchair bound founder of Hamas whom Israel assassinated in March 2004.

“This is a private low-budget project,” Maqdad said in a past interview with the al-Jazeera newspaper Al-Shuruq. “The channel has captured the hearts of millions of children. It succeeds where the educational system has failed, such as multiplication table songs. It helps teachers work on it with the children.”

The recent Turkish-sponsored terrorist flotilla to Gaza is being seen by pundits as a trend towards a larger rejection of the West by Ankara. 

The Christian Science Monitor’s Robert Marquand writes from Paris that “there’s wariness here over Turkey’s emerging persona under an Islamic-rooted party and murmurs about whether it wants to reassert an old Ottoman Empire sphere of influence.”

Marquand notes that Turkey has taken the trouble to re-establish its diplomatic ties with Iran and tighten its ties with Syria and Brazil. Turkey and Brazil were the only two nations to vote on June 9 against strengthened sanctions imposed on Iran by the United Nations Security Council, in the ongoing battle against its headlong rush towards nuclear capability.

Ankara’s rejection of the West, he says, may be a reaction to a rebuff from Europe: Turkey’s application for membership in the European Union has been stalled repeatedly for some 18 years.

During a Belgian parliamentary debate several years ago, then-MP Herman Van Rompuy was quoted as warning his colleagues, “The universal values which are in force in Europe, and which are fundamental values of Christianity, will lose vigor with the entry of a large Islamic country such as Turkey.” Van Rompuy, who eventually became the country’s prime minister, currently also serves as the president of the European Union.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy is another opponent of Turkey’s application for membership in the EU, because the Middle Eastern nation is not geographically located in Europe. Another world leader who opposes Turkey’s membership is German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
Turkey’s long-standing dispute with Cyprus has also created additional difficulties in various negotiations, causing further delays.

Strategically located between the East and West, Ankara meanwhile presents an excellent opportunity for non-Western investors who are looking for a way in to the worldwide economic and political playing field. Disaffected by Europe’s rejection, Turkish leaders have instead begun to draw closer to their Muslim neighbors, cementing ties with Syria, Iraq and Iran.

But Europe is not taking the hint. Marquand reports that “Europeans have become more fearful of welcoming Turkey” following the clashes aboard the Mavi Marmara, when footage of demonstrators yelling “Death to Israel” on the streets of Turkey “looked un-European.”

Turks, meanwhile, blame “populist politicians in France, Germany, Austria and the Greek Cypriot government” for attacks on the member application process. According to Hugh Pope of the Istanbul-based International Crisis Group, “They use it for domestic political purposes to play on people’s fears, and this has done a great deal to make Turks angry towards Europe.”

The news that Afghanistan’s mineral wealth could exceed $1 trillion is an important opportunity for both Kabul and Washington to change the narrative from counterinsurgency to locally controlled sustainable development.
By doing so, the government of Hamid Karzai and the Obama administration can leverage a range of converging interests in South and Central Asia to put Afghanistan and the region finally on the only viable path to security — rising economic prosperity in the larger region.
Natural resources are both a blessing and a curse. For some countries strong government and civil society can manage them so the larger society benefits and profits are invested in the human resources of the country. The BP oil spill notwithstanding, this has been the case for the United States, Canada, Norway and the United Kingdom.
For many other countries, natural resource wealth has been a curse. The Democratic Republic of the Congo has been at war over its resources for more than 15 years. Angola’s oil wealth fueled a multidecade civil war, and Iraq’s strategic position at the heart of the Persian Gulf oil patch led to a dictatorship that was both sponsored by the United States and then destroyed by it.

Video: Afghanistan’s mineral wealth

Video: $1 trillion of minerals in Afghanistan

So the question is, how can the Afghans exploit this impressive inheritance while laying the foundation for a peaceful future? The first step is to not wait for the mining companies to start operating. This large a reserve estimate creates an immediate opportunity to use the mineral wealth as collateral to secure funding for key development activities that need to happen today. 

Done properly, borrowing against the nation’s mineral wealth provides a mechanism that helps Afghanistan avoid the unsustainable mining practices that in the long term might leave it worse off or ecologically damaged.
Where the money comes from is important. Instead of the traditional development agencies providing the funds and putting a counterproductive American face on development efforts, the Afghan government has the opportunity to seek loans backed by tangible mineral assets.
Instead of U.S. Agency for International Development or Defense Department funding and all the contractors and consultants that come with it, the Afghan government can to go to the Export-Import Bank or the Overseas Private Investment Corp. for funding.
To avoid corruption, Kabul should place those funds in a transparent national escrow account to be used for critical development programs.
Here too, the timing is good. In an annex to the Afghan government’s peace and reintegration program, released in April, the Karzai government proposed a major program that needs exactly this kind of stable, long-term funding. Called the Public Works and Agricultural Conservation Corps, the “Corps,” reminiscent of our own Depression-era Civilian Conservation Corps, would build on successful, locally focused and Afghan-owned efforts such as the National Solidarity Program and the Community Development Councils.
It would recruit, train, educate and pay insurgent-age young men to participate in small-to-medium scale civil engineering and agricultural development projects. By taking large numbers of young men, providing them with meals, pay, literacy and basic vocational training, the program would provide a powerful, Afghan-led alternative to the Taliban while thinning their ranks and improving the productivity of the Afghan nation as a whole.
The saying in Afghanistan is that the Taliban starts where the roads — the police pay — end. By focusing on the two core challenges facing the largely agrarian nation, roads and jobs, the Public Works and Agricultural Conservation Corps can turn the tide against the insurgents by demonstrating that the Afghan government is capable of meeting the short-, medium- and long-term needs of its people without endless American intervention.
In the medium term, using this advance on the nation’s mineral wealth can create the missing link in Afghan development: reducing dependence on donor funding while unifying the development agenda under the leadership of the Afghan government.
Today, the Provisional Reconstruction Teams and the military’s Commanders’ Emergency Response Program are providing the bulk of development funding in the country. The problem is that they are also creating a parallel government that only exacerbates corruption and confusion. By transitioning to a unified program using the Engineering and Agricultural Corps as the human resource foundation, the Afghan government can solve a number of problems with one design.
Ultimately, a sustainable, Afghan-centric approach to mineral development is also in the interest of the United States. Success in Afghanistan will be dependent on a growing Afghan economy being situated in and contributing to a prosperous South and Central Asia.
By Kabul tapping Afghanistan’s mineral wealth to fund its own economic development, the future of Afghanistan can be returned to the hands of Afghans — a condition that will only expedite the safe return of American troops.

If once only a small group of analysts recognized Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Islamist outlook, this fact is now obvious.  

As typical Islamist-leftist theater to delegitimize Israel, late May’s Turkishsponsored “Free Gaza” flotilla was tediously repetitious. As an illustration that Israelis don’t understand the kind of war they now must fight, the outcome was drearily predictable. But as a statement of Turkey’s policies and an augur of the Islamist movement’s future, it bristled with novelty and significance.

Some background: After some 150 years of faltering efforts at modernization, the Ottoman Empire finally collapsed in 1923, replaced by the dynamic, Western-oriented Republic of Turkey founded and dominated by a former Ottoman general, Kemal Atatürk. Over the next 15 years, until his death in 1938, Atatürk imposed a Westernization program so stringent that at one point he had rugs in mosques replaced by church-like pews. Although Turkey is nearly 100% Muslim, he insisted on a purely secular state.

Atatürk never won the entire Turkish population to his vision and, with time, his laic republic increasingly had to accommodate pious Muslim sentiments. Yet Atatürk’s order persisted into the 1990s, guarded over by the military officer corps, which made it a priority to keep his memory alive and secularism entrenched.

Islamists first acquired parliamentary representation in the early 1970s when their leader, Necmettin Erbakan, served three times as his country’s deputy prime minister. As mainstream Turkish political parties frittered away their legitimacy through a disgraceful mix of egoism and corruption, Erbakan went on to become prime minister for a year, 1996-97, until the military asserted itself and threw him out.

Some of Erbakan’s more agile and ambitious lieutenants, led by Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in August 2001 formed a new Islamist political party, the AKP. Just over a year later, it won a resounding 34 percent plurality of votes and, due to the vagaries of Turkish electoral regulations, dominated parliament with 66% of the seats.

ERDOGAN BECAME prime minister and, by dint of good governance, AKP won a very substantial increase in vote and reelection in 2007. With a renewed mandate and an increasingly sidelined military, it aggressively pursued elaborately fake conspiracy theories, fined a political critic $2.5 billion, videotaped the opposition leader in a compromising sexual situation, and now plans to alter the constitution.

Foreign policy, in the hands of Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, who aspires for Turkey to regain its former leadership of the Middle East, overreached even more blatantly. Ankara not only adopted a more belligerent approach to Cyprus but recklessly inserted itself into such sensitive topics as the Iranian nuclear buildup and the Arab-Israeli conflict. Most surprising of all has been its backing for IHH, a domestic Turkish “charity” with documented ties to al- Qaida.

If Ankara’s irresponsible behavior has worrisome implications for the Middle East and Islam, it also has a mitigating aspect. Turks have been at the forefront of developing what I call Islamism 2.0 – the popular, legitimate and nonviolent version of what Ayatollah Khomeini and Osama bin Laden tried to achieve forcefully via Islamism 1.0. I have predicted that Erdogan’s insidious form of Islamism “may threaten civilized life even more than does 1.0’s brutality.”

But his abandonment of earlier modesty and caution suggests that Islamists cannot help themselves, that the thuggishness inherent to Islamism must eventually emerge, that the 2.0 variant must revert to its 1.0 origins. As Martin Kramer posits: “The further Islamists are from power, the more restrained they are, as well as the reverse.” This means that Islamism presents a less formidable opponent might be the case, and for two reasons.

First, Turkey hosts the most sophisticated Islamist movement in the world, one that includes not just the AKP but the Fethullah Gülen mass movement, the Adnan Oktar propaganda machine and more.

AKP’s new bellicosity has caused dissension; Gülen, for example, publicly condemned the “Free Gaza” farce, suggesting a debilitating internal battle over tactics could take place.

Second, if once only a small band of analysts recognized Erdogan’s Islamist outlook, this fact has now become self-evidently obvious for the whole world to see. Erdogan has gratuitously discarded his carefully crafted image of a pro-Western “Muslim democrat,” making it far easier to treat him as the Teheran-Damascus ally that he is.

As Davutoglu seeks, Turkey has returned to the center of the Middle East and the umma. But it no longer deserves full NATO membership and its opposition parties deserve support.

Internet giant Yahoo! and the Apple computer firm have apparently decided to pre-empt those pesky Israel-Palestinian Authority negotiations and divide the holy city of Jerusalem on their own. 

Yahoo! — which runs the weather software application for the slick Apple iPhone — last month removed Israel’s capital city from its list of international locations from which to view weather conditions.
Instead, one must now choose between East Jerusalem or West Jerusalem in order to figure out what the weather is going to be in the city.
The latitude and longitude coordinates for both locations are exactly the same, as is the temperature and other weather details.
On the Yahoo! weather page, which is linked to The Weather Channel, one is offered two Middle East options when requesting weather information for Jerusalem – Jerusalem, Yerushalayim (IL), Jerusalem, and Palestinian Occupied Territories > West Bank, Jerusalem (PS). 

Clearly Yahoo! and Apple executives have decided to recognize the Palestinian State long before direct negotiations have even been contemplated by the parties themselves, let alone conducted to determine actual borders.
Israel’s Ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren, expressed his disappointment with the fact that “Jerusalem, which has been united for 43 years, has been divided by the computer giant and the popular search engine.”
Oren sent a letter of protest to both Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz and Apple CEO Steve Jobbs. He added that he and the rest of the Israel Embassy staff use the iPhone.

A report released this week by the Intelligence and Terrorism
Information Center (ITIC) said new details have emerged which show how
approximately 40 operatives from the Turkish Islamist IHH organization
carefully prepared a violent ambush on navy commandos last week on
board the Mavi Maramara ship, and acted with the full backing of the
Turkish government.

The IHH operatives were armed with knives, axes and other weapons,
communicated with one another using walkie talkies, set up a control
room onboard the ship, and maintained close ties with Turkish Prime
Minister Tayyip Erdogan, the report said.

In addition, the Mavi Maramara ship was purchased by the IHH from a
major shipping company owned by the Istanbul Municipality, which is run
by the ruling AKP party, it has emerged.

The ITIC said its report was based on an initial analysis of
statements taken from passengers onboard Mavi Marmara after it was
towed to the port of Ashdod last week, as well as findings from
computers seized by the IDF from IHH members.

“The operatives, who acted according to a clearly-defined internal
hierarchy, boarded the ship in the port of Istanbul without undergoing
a security inspection as opposed to the other passengers, who boarded
in Anatolia after a full inspection,” the report said.

“The IHH operatives’ preparations included handing out walkie-talkies
as they boarded the ship, taking over the upper deck, setting up a
situation room for communications, and a briefing given to the
operatives two hours before the confrontation by IHH head Bülent
Yildirim, who was on board the ship and commanded his men,” it
continued. 

Close relations between IHH and Erdogan
The men were armed large quantities of knives, axes, metal cables,
metal pipes used as clubs, wrenches, and other weapons, the report
said. “They were also equipped with box cutters which had been
prepared on the upper deck in advance,” it added.

“The passengers, including the IHH operatives, stated that there were
close relations between the organization and Turkish Prime Minister
Tayyip Erdogan and that the Turkish government was involved in
preparations for the flotilla,” the report asserted.

A journalist onboard the Mavi Marmara, described as having good links
with the heads of the Turkish government and Bulent Yildirim, head of the
IHH, had stated, “The flotilla was organized with the
support of the Turkish government and Prime Minister Erdogan gave the
instructions for it to set sail. That was despite the fact that
everyone knew it would never reach its destination,” according to the
report.

Files found in laptops seized from IHH members contained a letter
written in Turkish from IHH head Bülent Yildirim to Turkish President
Abdullah Gül. The letter requested Gal’s assistance in efforts to
release an IHH operative, named as Izzat Shahin, from an Israeli
prison.

Sahin was arrested by Israeli security forces in the West Bank on
April 27 on suspicion transferring cash to Hamas under the guise of
charitable aid. He has since been deported from Israel “at the request
of Turkish officials,” the report added.

Mavi Marmara purchased from AKP-run municipality of Istanbul
A second computer file showed that the “IHH purchased the Mavi Marmara
ship from a Turkish company called IDO… which was founded in 1987 by
the city of Istanbul.”

“[The] IHH acquired the Mavi Marmara ship from the AKP-run
municipality of Istanbul. It is not conceivable that the IHH’s Gaza
operation could have been carried out absent high-level government
sanction,” wrote Svante Cornell, a Swedish security expert who
specializes in Eurasia, in an article published on Monday.

Cornell, of Stokholm’s Central Asia-Caucus Institute, said the IHH was
“an example of how NGOs are used in the foreign policy sphere,”
adding, “The IHH operates joint projects with the Turkish Agency for
International Development, and is reported to have been used by the
government in order to shore up Turkey’s position in northern Iraq by
distributing aid to populations there. The IHH has its origins in the
Orthodox Islamic Milli Görüş movement, from which the AKP
organizationally split in 2001.”

“As such, the IHH is known as a dyed-in-the-wool Islamist movement,
which has been suspected and investigated repeatedly for alleged
involvement in arms shipment to Islamic forces in various conflicts,
such as Afghanistan and Bosnia. Leading former French counter-terror
magistrate Jean-Louis  Bruguière has repeatedly testified that the IHH
had ‘clear, long-standing ties to terrorism and Jihad’, including ties
to Al Qaeda in the late 1990s,” Cornell added.

Ely Karmon, a senior researcher from the Herzliya-based Institute for
Counter-Terrorism, told The Jerusalem Post that since coming to power,
the AKP party has worked repeatedly to assist the IHH. After being
elected into office in 2001, the AKP government ended a major legal
investigation into the IHH which had begun 1996 and examined
suspicions that the organization transferred weapons and other aid to
terrorist organizations around the world, Karmon said.

In January, the IHH helped organize a convoy to Gaza which became
stranded at El-Arish in the Sinai Peninsula after being denied entry
into Gaza by Egypt, “Turkey enacted major pressure on  Egypt to let
the convoy into Gaza. The Egyptians eventually agreed,” Karmon added.
An Egyptian soldier was killed during clashes between members of the
convoy and the Egyptian security forces.

Last week, the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI)  released
footage of statements made by Bulent Yildirim, head of IHH,  in Gaza
in February 2009.

During the speech, which was filled with references to “martyrdom,”
Yildirim said,  “All the peoples of the Islamic world would want a
leader like [Turkish prime minister] Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.”

Splash! Could that be the sound of Lord Mandelson hitting one of the Dolce hotel’s four pools? Or Robert Zoellick of the World Bank? Paul Volcker of the US Economic Recovery Advisory Board? Or merely the euro taking another dive?
That is the thing about the Bilderberg group’s top secret meetings: you never know quite what is going on behind the police checkpoints.
Across the world, secretaries to the rich and the powerful have blocked out the next three days in their bosses’ calendars for their annual gathering, this time at the Dolce in Sitges, one of Spain’s most exclusive resorts. 

Normally, every minute of their working lives is accounted for but, each year, a couple of hundred of the world’s financial elite and the more business-friendly members of the political class disappear from view; supposedly to save the planet from the dangers of parochialism, the nationalist genie.
It is all terribly confidential — breathe a word about it and you’re out of the club — but the Bilderberg watcher Daniel Estulin claims to have a copy of the agenda. The big question this time around is whether the euro will survive. “They are afraid that the countries in trouble will leave and the euro will fall apart,” said Mr Estulin. “The biggest nightmare is if EU members return to nationally orientated policies.”
That would certainly explain why the keynote address is being given by José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, the Spanish Prime Minister. The Piigs — Portugal, the Republic of Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain — are of concern to the Bilderbergers. After all, the club was set up in 1954 by a Polish exile, Joseph Retinger, to create a European bulwark against the spread of communism. It provided the germ of the European idea; Franco-German reconciliation, the entry of West Germany into Nato, the Maastricht treaty — all were cooked up in annual fireside chats.
Now, according to Mr Estulin’s information, the Bilderbergers are nervous that the erosion of the euro could nudge the world back into recession while public services cuts could trigger unrest and radicalise the political climate.
Plenty to talk about at the Dolce, then. The Bilderberg protesters, sure that they can smell a good oldfashioned capitalist conspiracy, will be holding fringe meetings in the town. The hunt will be on to find a chambermaid ready to ransack hotel litter bins for evidence that evil work is afoot. It has been easier to get nuggets of information out of Bilderberg since hotel staff started to read Dan Brown and talk about the illuminati.
Could it be, though, that the Bilderbergers are simply having fun, away from their spouses, on their annual jamboree? The secret of Bilderberg could be that there is no secret. Certainly, the hotel offers plenty of distractions for stressed CEOs: qi-gong courses, excellent fish, fine wines and bicycle tours.
Henry Kissinger, 87, the former US Secretary of State, and David Rockefeller, 95, the former chairman of the Chase Manhattan Bank, are the elder statesmen of Bilderberg — but the leaked invitation list reveals that the gathering is made up primarily of elderly white gents.
Remember Richard Perle, 68, George Bush’s erstwhile Prince of Darkness? He could perhaps form a Prince of Darkness sub-group with Lord Mandelson. Paul Wolfowitz, 66, formerly of the World Bank? Mario Monti, 67, EU commissioner for the single market between 1995 and 1999?
Only the possible attendance of George Osborne, 39, the British Chancellor, will reassure hotel staff that they are not dealing with a Saga Holidays tour. Other members of this clandestine coven include Queen Sofia of Spain and Queen Beatrix of Holland. No doubt their views will be sought on the Swedish royal wedding later this month. Is it right, for example, that a young princess should marry her personal trainer? Fortunately, the Dolce has a team of personal trainers on hand ready to chip into the debate.
Last year Bilderberg held its meeting at the Nafsika Astir Palace hotel in Greece and apparently failed to spot how close their host country was to melting down. Watch out, Spain!
The weather forecast is for three days of sunshine — time for the Bilderbergers to slink out of the shadows.

The Turkish organization IHH (a Turkish acronym for “humanitarian relief fund”), the force behind the boats attempting to reach Gaza, has a radical Islamic anti-Western orientation and a history of ties with and fund-raising for Hamas.  

A report by the Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center (ITIC) states that in addition to its legitimate philanthropic activities, IHH supports radical Islamic networks, including Hamas, and has supported global jihad elements. In fact, IHH’s “orientation is radical-Islamic and anti-American, and it is close to the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas’ parent movement. IHH supports Hamas and does not hide the connection between them.”    
Established in 1992 and active in supporting orphans, establishing schools, building mosques, supporting human rights, and the like, IHH has begun in recent years expanding its activities to European countries.
In practice, ITIC states, “besides its legitimate humanitarian activities, IHH supports radical Islamic terrorist networks. In recent years, it has prominently supported Hamas, [and there is] reliable information that in the past IHH provided logistical support and funding to global jihad networks.”
IHH supports Hamas propaganda campaigns in Turkey by organizing public support conferences there, at which senior IHH figures have expressed their support for Hamas and strategy of armed struggle, and their opposition to the policies of the Fatah-run Palestinian Authority.
ITIC further notes that IHH is a member of the Union of Good, an umbrella organization of more than 50 Islamic funds and foundations around the globe that channels money into Hamas institutions in the PA-controlled territories. In January 2008, Israel outlawed 36 associations belonging to the Union of Good, including IHH.
IHH also operates widely throughout Gaza. In January 2009, IHH head Bülent Yildirim met with Khaled Mashaal, chairman of the Hamas political bureau in Damascus, and Mashaal thanked him for the support of his organization.
In 2006, the Danish Institute for International Studies conducted a study on Islamic charity funds and support for terrorism. Over 20% of the study deals with IHH, and it found that IHH had connections with Al-Qaeda and global jihad operatives. In December 1997, Turkish authorities raided IHH offices in Istanbul, finding weapons, explosives, instructions for making homemade bombs, a flag with a jihad message, and documents indicating that IHH members were planning to take part in jihad activities in Afghanistan, Bosnia and Chechnya.
IHH purchased three ships – including the Mavi Marmaris – of the original nine slated to take part in the “humanitarian” effort to Gaza. Its participation in the flotilla is “part of the massive aid it gives Hamas and its desire to make propaganda capital for Hamas and itself,” ITIC states.  On May 21, Muhammad Kaya, head of IHH’s branch office in Gaza, said there was a plan to send flotillas to the Gaza Strip every month.
The ceremony marking the departure of the Mavi Marmaris from Istanbul was organized by IHH. Participating were Ra’ad Salah, head of the northern faction of the Islamic Movement in Israel, as well as Kazem Sawalha, a Hamas activist affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood who found refuge in Britain. The large crowd held flags of Turkey, the PA, Hamas, and other organizations affiliated with Hamas and radical Islam.

Dmitry Medvedev, the Russian president, said Moscow was bidding to help lead efforts to build a new world economic order after the old system collapsed in the global financial crisis.

Opening Russia’s annual economic forum in St Petersburg where hundreds of global chief executives have flocked, Mr Medvedev said the renewed interest in Russia this year was a sign of a changing world in which the institutions of the western-dominated world order had had their day amid thousands of corporate defaults and the threat of sovereign defaults.  

“What had seemed untouchable has collapsed. The bubbles that created the illusion of flourishing economies have burst,” Mr Medvedev said. “For Russia this situation is a challenge and an opportunity. We are living in a unique time. And we should use it to build a modern, flourishing and strong Russia … which will be a co-founder of the new world economic order and a full participant in the collective political leadership of the post-crisis world.”
Mr Medvedev insisted “Russia has changed” in the past year as it sought to pursue a course of “smart politics” that would leverage its competitive advantages in the raw materials sector, while shifting emphasis towards modernising the economy and focusing on boosting innovation over resources.
Acknowledging that the country still had a great deal to do to meet these aims, Mr Medvedev laid out a series of new initiatives that aim to boost its attractiveness as an investment destination. “Russia needs a real investment boom”, in order to achieve its modernisation goals, he said. To stimulate that, Mr Medvedev announced Moscow would introduce zero taxation on capital gains for companies working on long-term investments starting from January next year and said Russia was improving the legal system to provide better protection for businesses against the long arm of bureaucracy.
He added Russia had already simplified migration procedures to help attract “highly-qualified specialists” working in investment and high-tech sectors into the country.
Responding to criticism that Russia’s approach to building an innovation economy was driven from the top down and state interference could hinder development, Mr Medvedev said the state would concentrate its efforts on fostering a good business climate. “No matter how many state-owned companies we have, modernization will happen, above all, through private business. And only if there is competition,” he said. “The state should not tear down the apples from the tree of economics. What the government should do is help grow our apple orchard, develop our economic environment.”
Mr Medvedev said he was cutting the list of strategic enterprises five fold in order to reduce the role of the state in the economy and foster more private initiatives.