"You weep for the dead in Ukraine, why don't you speak out in defense of these babies killed in Gaza? Oh, West, I cry out to you, do you want to start your crusade against the Crescent again? If you are making such efforts, know that this nation is not dead."
Turkish President Recep Erdogan speaking at the Great Palestine Rally in Istanbul on October 28, 2023.
That’s the President of Turkey, a member of NATO, responding to Israel's actions in Gaza and Western support for Israel by threatening a new holy war between Islam and the West. It is 2023, but this guy is thinking a whole lot about 1453, the year the Turks took Constantinople and Mehmet the Conqueror rode his horse into the great church of Hagia Sophia.
"We are faced with the remaining ambitions of those who avenged the 1453 conquest of Istanbul. Remember, we don't forget those who wrote 1453 on the walls, do we? We will not leave this country to these marauders. We are faced with modern versions of those who tried to destroy our nation by provoking Armenians in Eastern and Southeastern Anatolia and Greeks in the Aegean, Marmara, and Black Seas. We face the unpaid bills of those who cut us apart politically, geographically, socially, and economically over the past two centuries. We will not allow those who stole the sword of the infidels to overturn the truth by failing to realize this simple truth out of carelessness or trying to cover it up with treachery out of tolerance."
In case you were still not getting his drift, Erdogan added specific references to a whole bunch of cities that don’t fall within the territorial boundaries of modern Turkey but used to be parts of the Ottoman Empire before 1918.
“A century ago, for this nation and this country, Gaza was what Adana is. Just like Edirne is to Skope, Kirklareli is to Thessaloniki, Mardin is to Mosul, and Gaziantep is to Aleppo. Gaza was an inseparable part of the [Turkish] homeland's territory.
[Regarding the loss of our lands], where have we come from, and where are we now? They separated us from all these lands that are as much a part of us as our blood, our life, and our love.”
Skope is in Macedonia. Thessaloniki is in Greece. Mosul is in Iraq and in the heart of the semi-autonomous Kurdish region of Northern Iraq. Aleppo is in Syria. This is the President of Turkey saying that all of these cities, now within the boundaries of independent nation-states, belong to the Turks and celebrating the rise of a newly powerful and assertive Turkey.
This is a guy talking about challenging the existing political structure of the entire Middle East.
Those who understand Vladimir Putin know that at the heart of his invasion of Ukraine was a desire to reconstitute the old Soviet Union. Putin pines for the old days. He wants to go back to the Cold War when the Soviets had broad shoulders and the world feared them.
Erdogan is at heart no different. Attaturk put Turkey on a path to Westernization and secularization in the wake of the First World War. Erdogan wants to roll all that back. He wants Istanbul to be the heart of a new Ottoman Empire, the epicenter of the Middle East and the Islamic world.
Lest you underestimate the extent to which Turkey has taken a hard turn away from the West and toward an expressly Islamic and “Ottoman” view of the world, consider this. Earlier this month, Ali Erbaş, president of Turkey's Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet), stood in Hagia Sophia, with a sword in hand, lamenting that "babies, children, and old people, are murdered indiscriminately in a brutal manner" in Gaza and that the world is "simply observing this genocide." He went on to incite “the Ummah”, which would be all Muslims everywhere, to support Hamas and the people of Gaza.
Just for emphasis, this is the top religious official in the Turkish government standing in what used to be the greatest church in Christendom, holding a sword, and calling for what sounds a whole lot like holy war.
Many in the United States Government and throughout the West have chosen to simply ignore developments in Turkey for a very long time. They have squinted their eyes, imagined a secular, increasingly European Turkey, and tuned out the real implications of what is happening on the ground there. The time has long since passed for that kind of myopia.
Washington may want Erdogan to be Attaturk. He has a different role in mind.
He imagines himself as Recep the Conquerer.
There will be a regional war, is the attack by Hamas on Israel the smoldering fuse to kick this war off? Turkey is a NATO ally,(?) with nukes, and we have no leadership.
President Brandon seem to be all over the map on this conflict, I pray we don't loose thousands of young Sailors and Marines through his incompetence.
You bet your boots.