no propaganda please Loc: moon orbiting the third rock from the sun

Turkey: Erdogan's Campaign against the West

by Giulio Meotti
November 9, 2019 at 5:00 am

"Europe is a cultural continent, not a geographical one... It is its culture that gives it a common identity. The roots that have formed it, that have permitted the formation of this continent, are those of Christianity. [...] In this sense, throughout history Turkey has always represented another continent, in permanent contrast with Europe. There were the wars against the Byzantine empire, the fall of Constantinople, the Balkan wars, and the threat against Vienna and Austria. That is why I think it would be an error to equate the two continents." — Pope Benedict XVI, Le Figaro Magazine, 2007.

In Germany, Turkey controls 900 mosques out of a total of 2,400. These Islamic centers not only serve members of the Turkish diaspora, but also stop them from assimilating into German society. Speaking with Turks in Germany, Erdogan urged them not to assimilate, and called the assimilation of migrants in Europe "a crime against humanity."

Erdogan has also been expanding Turkey beyond its borders – starting with Cyprus, the Greek Islands, Suakin Island (Sudan) and Syria.

Mosques, migrants and the military are now Erdogan's new weapons in his threats against the West.

Mosques, migrants and the military are now Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's new weapons in his threats against the West. (Photo by Chris McGrath/Getty Images)

Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan "has earned the title of Caliph" according to Turkish journalist Abdurrahman Dilipak.

Erdogan is the head of NATO's second-largest army; he has spies throughout Europe through a network of mosques, associations and cultural centers; he has brought his country to the top of the world rankings for the number of imprisoned journalists and has shut the mouth of German comedians with the threat of legal action. By keeping migrants in Turkish refugee camps, he controls immigration to Europe.

The worse Erdogan behaves, the greater his weight in Europe. In a 2015 meeting, Erdogan reportedly was "openly mocking" European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker and other "senior European leaders", as Juncker asked Erdogan to consider how he was treated "like a prince" at a Brussels summit.

According to Stratfor's George Friedman:

"Turkey now is the 17th largest economy in the world, it is larger than Saudi Arabia, it has an army and military capability that is probably the best in Europe, besides the UK and they could beat the Germans in an afternoon and the French in an hour if they showed up."

Turkey's 2018 military budget increased to $19 billion, 24% higher than 2017, according to a report by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. Erdogan has placed Turkey's military -- once a bastion of Turkish nationalism and secularism -- under his political authority. While Europe is pacifist and refuses to invest in its own security or, like Germany, support NATO's budget, Turkey is belligerent.

Ever since his Justice and Development Party (AKP) became Turkey's dominant political force in 2002, for Erdogan, elevating the public role of Islam has been more than a slogan. At public gatherings, the Turkish president has made the "rabia", a hand gesture of four fingers raised and the thumb hidden, to protest the o*******w of Egypt's Islamist then President Mohamed Morsi by Egypt's military. Erdogan evidently sees himself as a global Islamic leader with national e******ns to win. Through four million Turkish Muslims in Germany and vast communities in the Netherlands, France, Austria and beyond, Erdogan does indeed have enormous influence in Europe.

As a leader of the Ummah [Islamic community], Erdogan challenged the leader of Christianity. In 2006, Pope Benedict XVI delivered a famous lecture at Germany's University of Regensburg, where he diagnosed Islam as inherently flawed. During his address, the Pope quoted a 14th Century Christian emperor:

"Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached".

The Muslim world erupted in anger. In an apology tour of Erdogan's Turkey, Benedict XVI reversed his firm position of just two years before and supported Turkey's joining the European Union. The year before becoming Pope, then-Cardinal Ratzinger had said that Turkey should never join the European Union. "Europe is a cultural continent, not a geographical one," Ratzinger said to Le Figaro.

"It is its culture that gives it a common identity. The roots that have formed it, that have permitted the formation of this continent, are those of Christianity. [...] In this sense, throughout history Turkey has always represented another continent, in permanent contrast with Europe. There were the wars against the Byzantine empire, the fall of Constantinople, the Balkan wars, and the threat against Vienna and Austria. That is why I think it would be an error to equate the two continents."

Ratzinger said the something similar in another instance, that "Turkey in Europe is a mistake":

"The European continent has its own Christian soul and Turkey, which is not the Ottoman Empire in its extension but still constitutes its central core, has another soul, naturally to be respected".

Both Benedict and Erdogan understood that Islamic Turkey has been the nemesis of Christian Europe -- from October 7, 1571, when Europe inflicted a catastrophic defeat on the Ottomans at the Battle of Lepanto, until September 12, 1683, when Europe again defeated the Turks at the outskirts of Vienna, the city they had historically tried to capture as a base for the conquest of the rest of Europe.

It was in the half-century that followed the fall of Constantinople in 1453 -- the great Eastern Christian center, whose collapse marked the end of the Byzantine Empire -- that Christian Europe started to expel the Ottoman Turks from the continent. Now it seems as if Erdogan, by other means, is trying to pursue a historic Turkish revenge on Europe. Erdogan is seemingly using this ideology of conquest to cement his internal and external power.

Erdogan's most powerful tool in his relations with Europe has been migrants. "You cried out when 50,000 refugees were at the Kapikule border", Erdogan said in 2016, referring to the border with Bulgaria. "You started asking what you would do if Turkey would open the gates. Look at me — if you go further, those border gates will be open. You should know that".

Last month, during his military operation against the Kurds, Erdogan repeated the same threat:

"Hey EU, wake up. I say it again: if you try to frame our operation there as an invasion, our task is simple: we will open the doors and send 3.6 million migrants to you."

Europe, unable to control its own borders, is stalling.

Since he came to power, Erdogan, in a building spree, has reportedly built 17,000 mosques (one fifth of Turkey's total). The largest is located in Camlica, the Asian shore of Istanbul. From Mali to Moscow, by way of Cambridge and Amsterdam, Erdogan is ceaselessly active in "diplomatizing" his religion. The "biggest mosque in the Balkans" is Turkish and is located in Tirana, Albania. "The largest in West Africa" was built by Erdogan in Accra, Ghana. "The largest in Central Asia" he built in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. The "largest mosque in Europe" will be his new Turkish mosque in Strasbourg. He is planning to open Turkish schools in France.

Erdogan has empowered Turkey's Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet), which now has 120,000 employees and a budget the size of twelve other ministries combined. In 2004, with 72,000 employees, the Diyanet was about half that size. This is the religious network with which Erdogan has a foot in European affairs.

In Germany, Turkey controls 900 mosques out of a total of 2,400. These Islamic centers not only serve members of the Turkish diaspora, but also stop them from assimilating into German society. Speaking with Turks in Germany, Erdogan urged them not to assimilate, and called the assimilation of migrants in Europe "a crime against humanity". He apparently wants them to remain part of Turkey and the Ummah, the global Muslim community.

Last year, Austrian authorities announced the closure of several Turkish-controlled mosques after "children in a Turkish-financed mosque re-enacting the first world war battle of Gallipoli." According to The Guardian:

As many as 60 Turkish imams and their families face expulsion from Austria and seven mosques are due to be closed under a clampdown on what the government has called "political Islam".

Austria's chancellor, Sebastian Kurz, said the country could no longer put up with "parallel societies, political Islam and radicalisation," which he said had "no place in our country".

Erdogan, however, knows that against Europe, numbers are on his side. "Make not three, but five children. Because you are the future of Europe," Erdogan told the Turkish diaspora. Eurostat, the official statistics agency of the European Union, shows that in terms of birthrates, Turkey is ahead of Europe. In one year in Turkey, more than 1.2 million children were born, while only 5.07 million children were born in all of the EU's 28 member states. What would Europe look like if 80 million Turks joined the EU?

Already in 1994, when Erdogan was campaigning to become the mayor of Istanbul, he talked about "the second conquest of Istanbul". (The first conquest was the defeat of Christian Constantinople in 1453.) According to the exiled Turkish novelist Nedim Gürsel, Erdogan, when he was mayor of Istanbul, took it upon himself to commemorate the Turkish conquest of Constantinople. "Celebrating a conquest that took place more than five centuries ago may seem anachronistic, I would even say absurd, to European leaders", Gürsel writes. "For Erdogan, the capture of Constantinople is another pretext for challenging the West and giving back to its people its repressed p***e". Last January, Erdogan chose the tomb of an Ottoman forebear to pledge a victory over Syria.

"You will not turn Istanbul into Constantinople", Erdogan said after the Christchurch massacre. Erdogan is obsessed with history and takes it far more seriously than Europeans do. "We will change Hagia Sophia's name from a museum to a mosque", Erdogan said earlier this year. The Hagia Sophia, built by the Byzantine Emperor Justinian I in AD 537, was for 900 years the greatest cathedral in Christendom – until 1453 when the Ottoman Empire defeated the Byzantines and took over Constantinople; then it became one of Islam's greatest mosques. In 1935, President Mustafa Kemal Ataturk turned it into a museum; Erdogan has pledged to turn it back into a mosque, and recited a Muslim prayer in the formerly Christian site.

Erdogan has also been expanding Turkey beyond its borders – starting with Cyprus, the Greek Islands, Suakin Island (Sudan) and Syria. "We are a big family of 300 million people from the Adriatic to the Great Wall of China", Erdogan said in a recent speech from Moldova. The borders of Turkey, he stated in Izmir, span "from Vienna to the shores of the Adriatic Sea, from East Turkistan (China's autonomous region of Xinjiang) to the Black Sea".

To expand his country's influence, Erdogan is also using Turkey's military. "Not since the days of the Ottoman Empire has the Turkish military had such an extensive global footprint", the journalist Selcan Hacaoglu reports. The Turkish-American political scientist Soner Cagaptay titled his new book, Erdogan's Empire.

Mosques, migrants and the military are now Erdogan's new weapons in his campaign against the West.

Giulio Meotti, Cultural Editor for Il Foglio, is an Italian journalist and author.

JFlorio Loc: Seminole Florida

As soon as this despot took over I was telling people we should boot Turkey out of NATO. This guy is just another West hating jihadi.

woodguru

Interesting...the right won't believe it because of Trump's ties to Erdogan, this is how ridiculous the partisanship is, it controls what people will believe.

JFlorio Loc: Seminole Florida

I'm of the right troll and believe it totally. You are such a liar, why don't you exit OPP and go to a forum where they haven't figured you out yet.

no propaganda please Loc: moon orbiting the third rock from the sun

And I posted the article and am a conservative through and through, and also a devout Christian .

JFlorio Loc: Seminole Florida

Wooddodo is nothing but a cowardly troll. He gets attention on OPP so he's hooked.

Zemirah Loc: Sojourner En Route...

I've been aware of their enmity since the beginning of the Iraq war in 2003.

Ever since militant Islamist, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his Justice and Development Party, (AKP) took power in Turkey in 2002, they have operated as our enemy. Under the AKP government, Turkey's influence has grown in the formerly Ottoman territories of the Middle East and the Balkans, based on the "strategic depth" doctrine (defining Turkey's increased engagement in regional foreign policy issues), also called Neo-Ottomanism.

On March 1, 2003, the Turkish parliament rejected a resolution authorizing the
deployment of U.S. forces to Turkey to open a northern front in a war against Iraq.
The powerful Turkish military had not actively supported the government’s position before the v**e, and President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan had suggested that the resolution would be unconstitutional.

For a long time, Turkey had claimed serious concerns about the prospect of a second
Gulf war, and these affected the v**e in parliament and the negotiations with the
United States for the troop deployment. Concerns included fear that a war would
lead to an independent Iraqi Kurdish state and inspire the revival of Turkish Kurdish
separatism.

The parliamentary resolution that was rejected would have enabled a U. S. deployment of troops, planes, and helicopters to Turkey. The United States would have provided Turkey with a $6 billion assistance package, some of which could have been used to support $24 billion loan guarantees. Until the funds were available, the Administration would have provided a bridge loan of $8.5 billion. A memorandum of understanding would have dealt with Turkish troops in northern Iraq and their coordination with U.S. forces.

After the war began, the Administration only wanted access to Turkey’s airspace, which was finally granted on March 21, 2003, and to prevent Turkish forces from interfering in
northern Iraq. Turkey agreed to provide food, fuel, and other non-lethal supplies for
U.S. troops in northern Iraq. The United States would give Turkey $1 billion in aid,
with which it could leverage $8.5 billion in loans.

The Turkish parliament’s failure to authorize the troop deployment strained bilateral U.S.-Turkish relations. It also lost the substantial aid package that had been tied to acceptance of the U.S. deployment, although a smaller one was appropriated.

Turkey, as a NATO partner should not need to be purchased.

Their failure to allow us to unload our troop ships in their ports made it impossible for our soldiers to move down through Iraq from the north to meet up with troops coming up from the south. As a result much of Iraq never considered themselves defeated, and the war lasted twice as long as it should have if our original strategy had been employed.

http://www.congressionalresearch.com/RL31794/document.php

https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/view/turkey-after-the-iraq-war-still-a-u.s.-ally

Lt. Rob Polans ret.

Agreed. The pope is no better, but he's different everyone loves or h**es him, no middle ground.

bggamers Loc: georgia

How come every subject that comes up u slap Trump in there or did u not get the message he pulled out and left Russia in charge God help them if they piss in the wind Russia will disintegrate them if Putin is even serious about policing the borders