Ever since the Israeli raid on a Turkish group's boat filled with aid for the Gaza Strip, there has been a lot of attempts in the press (FAIR Blog, 6/10/10), following Israel's lead, to label the Turkish humanitarian group IHH a supporter of "terrorism."

The latest salvo comes from a New York Times article (7/15/10) about the Turkish group having "extensive connections with Turkey’s political elite."

The Times reports:

On Monday, Germany banned the charity's offices, citing its support for Hamas, which Germany considers a terrorist organization. Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière said the charity abused donors' good intentions "to support a terrorist organization with money supposedly donated for charitable purposes." The newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung said that from 2007 the charity collected $8.5 million and transferred money to six smaller organizations, two belonging directly to Hamas and four with close ties to it.

The charity called the ban a "disgrace" and "misanthropic" and said it would challenge it in court.

It looks like the reporters on this story didn't do their homework. Numerous news outlets have noted that the German organization, which shares the Turkish group’s initials, is not connected to the Turkish group that co-sponsored the aid flotilla, meaning that Germany did not ban the Turkish group over "terrorist" ties. (The Turkish group's initials stand for İnsan Hak ve Hürriyetleri, or Foundation for Human Rights and Freedoms; the German acronym stands for Internationale Humanitäre Hilfsorganisation, the International Humanitarian Aid Organization.)

A report in Ha'aretz (7/12/10) states: "Despite sharing the name, the German IHH has no connection to the Turkish group that organized the flotilla"; the Financial Times (7/12/10) reports that "IHH Turkey and IHH Germany share the same roots, as they were founded as a single group in Freiburg, Germany, in 1992. But the group split in two five years later"; and a Turkish daily (Hurriyet, 7/16/10) states that "German authorities" say the group split in 1997 and "are now two separate entities."

The Times also relays the Israeli talking point that "the group has links to Al-Qaeda," despite the fact that independent journalist Max Blumenthal (MaxBlumenthal.com, 6/3/10) forced the Israeli Defense Forces to retract that false claim.

Thomas Friedman sure knows how to flip reality on its head.  In his New York Times op-ed column today, Friedman hops on the bandwagon (FAIR blog, 6/10/10) of bashing Turkey for "joining the Hamas-Hezbollah-Iran resistance front against Israel."

Friedman accuses Turkish Prime Minister Recip Tayyip Erdogan of no longer promoting democracy and instead being more focused on "praising Hamas instead of the more responsible Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, which is actually building the foundations of a Palestinian state."  Friedman says of Erdogan:

I'd love to see him be the most popular leader on the Arab street, but not by being more radical than the Arab radicals and by catering to Hamas, but by being more of a democracy advocate than the undemocratic Arab leaders and mediating in a balanced way between all Palestinians and Israel. That is not where Erdogan is at, though, and it's troubling.

Siding with the Palestinian Authority against Hamas would be a peculiar way of advocating for democracy in the Middle East, though.  In the 2006 Palestinian legislative elections, Hamas categorically defeated Fatah in what former President Jimmy Carter called "free and fair" elections (CNN, 5/17/09).  The U.S., EU and Israel rejected those results (New York Times, 6/8/06), and after Fatah's U.S.-backed attempt to overthrow Hamas in Gaza failed (Vanity Fair, 4/08), an "emergency government" composed of members of Fatah was installed (New York Times, 6/18/07). This "emergency government," still in place to this day in the West Bank, was not democratically elected and consolidated its power illegally (Electronic Intifada, 6/18/07).

In Friedman's alternate universe, the Turkish prime minister is not advocating for democracy because...he supports the democratically elected government in Palestine that Israel has been trying to overthrow by way of "economic warfare" (FAIR Blog, 6/14/10) instead of the unelected government approved by the United States.