Trying To Turn Turkey Into An Islamic State

This article is based on a Wall Street Journal Article and a Wall Street Journal Editorial from today’s Wall Street Journal.

If you have been reading this website for a while, you are familiar with what has been going on in Turkey recently and how it relates to the end of the Ottoman Empire. So please forgive me for repeating myself, but this is relevant to today’s events.

On 29 October 1923, the Republic of Turkey was proclaimed. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, a Turkish Army officer, was the first President of Turkey. His goal was to set up a secular state rather than an Islamic state. The Ottoman Empire, which Turkey had been part of, was an Islamic Caliphate. Ataturk was looking toward the future and felt that it was in Turkey’s best interests to become a secular state aligned with the West. Ataturk banned the growing of beards by men and the wearing of headscarves by women. He banned the call to prayer by muezzins, abolished the Turkish script and replaced it with the Latin alphabet. In response to the secularization of Turkey, Hassan al Banna founded the Ikhwan al-Muslimin, the Muslim Brotherhood, in Egypt with the goal of forming a new Islamic caliphate.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been in office since 2014. From 2003 to 2014 he was the Prime Minister of Turkey. During his time as Prime Minister and during his time as President, he has attempted to move the country back to an Islamic state. He has purged military leaders that opposed him, and moved his diplomatic ties away from Israel and toward the Arab countries in the region. In June, the election in Turkey undermined his control of the nation and the direction in which he was going. The Justice and Development Party (AKP) lost its majority in parliament.

The article in the Wall Street Journal states:

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan called the snap election on Monday but didn’t set a date.

On Tuesday, Mr. Erdogan tasked his handpicked successor Ahmet Davutoglu with heading an interim administration. Mr. Davutoglu heads the biggest bloc in parliament, the Justice and Development Party or AKP. He will run the government through the vote and until the next national assembly is seated.

In the last election in June, voters delivered Turkey’s first hung parliament since 2002. Following two months of fruitless coalition talks, Mr. Davutoglu failed to form a government.

Mr. Erdogan then broke with political custom and refused to offer the main opposition party the chance to cobble together its own coalition.

The Wall Street Journal editorial states:

Now Mr. Erdogan seems to hope that an electoral do-over will flip enough marginal seats back to the AKP to restore the party’s simple majority. Politicians in parliamentary democracies often resort to such a tactic, sometimes to good effect. But Mr. Erdogan’s bad faith since his June defeat suggests this is another attempted power grab. The same goes for his efforts to demonize, falsely, the HDP as the political arm of militant Kurdish separatists who have been staging terror attacks inside the country.

All of this is happening as Ankara finally seems to have gotten serious about the Islamic State menace. In the meantime, Turkey’s economy is faltering and peace talks with Kurdish separatists have collapsed. Turkey could use a leader capable of taking his electoral lumps and working within the parliamentary system. Too bad Mr. Erdogan is mainly interested in boosting his own power.

Turkey never really reached its goal of a totally secular state. A friend of mine who worked with a Christian church in Turkey a few years ago told me that it would have been unwise to put a sign in front of the church designating it as a Christian church. Theoretically there was freedom of religion, but it was also suggested that Christians keep their heads down.

We have to find our allies where we can in the Middle East, but we need to remember that the only Middle Eastern country that truly practices freedom of religion is Israel. Israel is the only ally that we can actually count on in that region of the world.

The Part Of President Obama’s Trip To Israel That Was Not Widely Reported

When President Obama traveled to Israel, the American press hailed it as a new beginning–a do-over of the way President Obama had treated Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu during the President’s first term. President Obama did say a lot of the right things when he spoke to Israel–he seems to understand to some degree that in order for Israel to survive, they may have to attack Iran. But there is another part of the story.

On Friday, Paul Mirengoff at Power Line reported:

Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu apologized today to Turkey for an Israeli raid on a Gaza-bound flotilla. The apology is, of course, the handiwork of President Obama. Indeed, Netanyahu made the call during an airport meeting with Obama shortly before Obama mercifully left Israel.

The apology is a humiliation for Israel, which had nothing for which to be sorry. Netanyahu’s statement — which he wisely resisted making for three years — will not improve Israeli relations with Turkey. Relations are poor not because of the flotilla incident, but because Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan, a good friend of Obama’s, is an Israel-hating Islamist.

Prime Minister Erdogan has been systematically moving his country away from its previously secular government into a Muslim state. He has cancelled military operations with Israel (which used to be routine) and condemned the State of Israel whenever possible.

The article at Power Line cites some of Prime Minister Erdogan’s recent statements:

How much does Erdogan hate Israel? Daniel Pipes reminds us that last month, Erdogan stated: “Just like Zionism, anti-Semitism and fascism, Islamophobia must be regarded as a crime against humanity.” And three days ago, Erdogan stood by his claim that Zionism, the principle upon which Israel is founded, constitutes a crime against humanity.

He really does not sound as if he wants to make friends.

Andrew McCarthy posted an article at PJMedia on Saturday which provided more information on the flotilla that was the source of the problem:

The lowlight of President Obama’s Middle East trip is his strong-arming of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu into a humiliating apology to Turkey’s Islamic-supremacist government over Israel’s defense in 2010 of its blockade of Hamas-controlled Gaza. The blockade was subjected to a terrorist offensive camouflaged as a humanitarian flotilla. The spearhead of the siege was the Mavi Marmara, a vessel controlled by a Turkish jihadist organization, the IHH, that is a part of the Union of Good, a formally designated terrorist organization under American law. Due to President Obama’s close relations with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Obama administration has resisted congressional calls to designate the IHH itself as a terrorist organization – sparing itself the embarrassment of noticing the intimate collusion of Erdogan’s ruling Islamist party and the jihadist group.

President Obama is not a friend of Israel. He may pose as a friend, but his actions show that he is not a friend.

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