They Are On To Us! Contact The Mother Ship!

From the WSJ: The Sick Man of Europe--Again Islamism and leftism add up to anti-American madness in Turkey.

Consider the Islamist newspaper Yeni Safak, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's favorite. A Jan. 9 story claimed that U.S. forces were tossing so many Iraqi bodies into the Euphrates that mullahs there had issued a fatwa prohibiting residents from eating its fish. Yeni Safak has also repeatedly claimed that U.S. forces used chemical weapons in Fallujah. One of its columnists has alleged that U.S. soldiers raped women and children there and left their bodies in the streets to be eaten by dogs. Among the paper's "scoops" have been the 1,000 Israeli soldiers deployed alongside U.S. forces in Iraq, and that U.S. forces have been harvesting the innards of dead Iraqis for sale on the U.S. "organ market."

It's not much better in the secular press. The mainstream Hurriyet has accused Israeli hit squads of assassinating Turkish security personnel in Mosul, and the U.S. of starting an occupation of Indonesia under the guise of humanitarian assistance. At Sabah, a columnist last fall accused the U.S. ambassador to Turkey, Eric Edelman, of letting his "ethnic origins"--guess what, he's Jewish--determine his behavior. Mr. Edelman is indeed the all-too-rare foreign-service officer who takes seriously his obligation to defend America's image and interests abroad. The intellectual climate in which he's operating has gone so mad that he actually felt compelled to organize a conference call with scientists from the U.S. Geological Survey to explain that secret U.S. nuclear testing did not cause the recent tsunami.

Never in an ostensibly friendly country have I had the impression of embassy staff so besieged. Mr. Erdogan's office recently forbade Turkish officials from attending a reception at the ambassador's residence in honor of the "Ecumenical" Patriarch of the Orthodox Church, who resides in Istanbul. Why? Because "ecumenical" means universal, which somehow makes it all part of a plot to carve up Turkey.

Perhaps the most bizarre anti-American story au courant in the Turkish capital is the "eighth planet" theory, which holds not only that the U.S. knows of an impending asteroid strike, but that we know it's going to hit North America. Hence our desire to colonize the Middle East.

What do you say to that? Maybe we shouldn't be sending troops over to the Middle East. Perhaps battalions of psychiatrists would be more useful.