Erbakan was influential in the development of two political parties, the National Salvation Party (NSP) and Refah (Welfare) with strong ties to the Muslim Brotherhood over the course of his political career. Beginning with his time as a youth leader for Erbakan’s NSP in the early 1970s, Erdogan was weaned on the Brotherhood’s ideology and its tactics— the latter of which explains his patient, savvy push for sharia in Turkey today.
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Simply put, he learned from the masters.
He also learned from personal experience. Erdogan and other outspoken Turkish Islamists in the Welfare Party camp were arrested after the 1997 coup. Erdogan served four months in jail for inciting religious hatred after he publicly recited a poem boasting, “The mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets our bayonets and the faithful our soldiers. . . .”
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That declaration may explain why Erdogan’s government is today engaged in a mosque-building frenzy throughout Germany and Austria, both home to large Turkish expat populations.
It wouldn’t be until a decade after his release from prison that Erdogan once again began making bold public statements revealing his true colors. He learned, just as Egypt’s Muslim Brothers did during the Nasser era, that moving to push an Islamist agenda before the timing is right (or “ripe” as Fethullah Gülen might say) can be disastrous. So the AKP—which was founded on the ashes of Erbakan’s banned Welfare Party—went incrementalist.
And it has worked brilliantly. Under Erdogan’s watch, Turkey has commenced a slow, steady march to sharia, sharply reoriented its foreign policy away from NATO and the West and toward the Islamic Middle East, and turned viciously against Israel, a former ally. Yet Erdogan retains solid popularity among the Turkish public (he’s been reelected twice since 2002). This has dire implications for Turkey’s immediate future, warns Middle East authority Daniel Pipes:
Having outmaneuvred the “deep state,” especially the military officer corps, in mid-2011, the AKP adopted an increasingly authoritarian cast, to the point that many Turks fear dictatorship more than Islamisation.
They watch as an Erdogan “intoxicated with power” imprisons opponents on the basis of conspiracy theories and wiretaps, stages show trials, threatens to suppress a costume television soap opera, seeks to impose his personal tastes on the country, fosters antisemitism, suppresses political criticism, justifies forceful measures against students protesting him, manipulates media companies, leans on the judiciary, and blasts the concept of the separation of powers. Columnist Burak Bekdil ridicules him as “Turkey’s elected chief social engineer.” More darkly, others see him becoming Turkey’s answer to Vladimir Putin, an arrogant semi-democrat who remains in power for decades.
Freed of the military’s oversight only in mid-2011, I see Erdogan possibly winning enough dictatorial power for him (or a successor) to achieve his dream and fully implement the sharia.
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On top of his despotic power moves at home (which include imprisoning journalists critical of his AKP at an alarming rate), Erdogan has become an absolute thorn in the side of the West on the international scene as well. He has become a key ally of the Iranian regime, supporting the mullahs’ nuclear weapons program and opposing international sanctions against it. He has also aligned himself with Iran’s main proxy, Hezbollah, meeting with delegations from the terrorist paramilitary organization in Beirut and defending it against charges of involvement in the 2005 assassination of Lebanese Prime Minster Rafic Hariri.
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,
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Erdogan even reportedly allowed Iran to transfer weapons to Hezbollah in 2006 during the Second Lebanon War against Israel.
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But the AKP honcho has struck up a particularly close relationship with another Iranian proxy (and the Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestinian branch), Hamas—not surprising, given that Erdogan is an MB acolyte who shares Hamas’s naked animosity for Israel. In 2006, Erdogan became the first world leader to host Hamas official Ismail Haniyeh after the terror group won elections in Gaza. He later backed Hamas against Israel during 2008’s Operation Cast Lead, calling Israeli airstrikes (which came in response to eight years of ceaseless rocket bombardment of Israeli cities and towns by Hamas terrorists in Gaza), “a serious crime against humanity.”
A short time later, Erdogan precipitated a heated exchange with Israeli President Shimon Peres at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, barking at the then-eighty-five-year-old head of state, “President Peres, you are old, and your voice is loud out of a guilty conscience. When it comes to killing, you know very well how to kill. I know well how you hit and kill children on beaches.”
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Erdogan then stormed off the stage in a dramatic flourish that made him the darling of Islamists worldwide. That reputation was only enhanced in May 2010, when a Turkish government–supported flotilla of six ships (manned by a leftist/Islamist coalition of anti-Israel fanatics) attempted to break Israel’s lawful, UNRECOGNIZED blockade of Hamas-controlled Gaza.
One of the ships, the
Mavi Marmara
, contained some very interesting cargo. Dozens of hardcore jihadists from the Turkish “charitable” organization, the Humanitarian Relief Foundation (IHH), were on board, spoiling for a fight with the hated Jews. The IHH has been described by former federal terrorism prosecutor Andrew C. McCarthy as, “a jihadist organization camouflaged as a global do-gooder. . . . Founded in the early Nineties by Osman Atalay, a Turkish Islamist who fought in the jihad in Bosnia, the outfit has longstanding ties to Muslim Brotherhood satellites throughout the world.”
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IHH, according to McCarthy, “often coordinates closely” with Erdogan’s office and helps build his base of support among Turkish Islamists.
It’s unclear whether Israel was aware of the heavy terrorist presence aboard the
Mavi Marmara
. After the ship refused orders to turn back and continued advancing on Gaza, a team of Israeli naval commandos boarded it—armed only with paintguns and sidearms with live ammo (for use only in self defense). They were immediately set upon by heavily armed passengers waiting on deck and viciously attacked. Some of the Israelis were stabbed, and others were bludgeoned with pipes. At least one was thrown overboard. Locked in a struggle for their lives, the Israeli commandos fought back, killing nine of their Turkish attackers (including one Turkish-American U.S. citizen). But the saga of the Gaza flotilla—an enterprise supported by Erdogan’s government
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—was only beginning.
Erdogan reacted to the deaths of the nine jihadists aboard the
Mavi Marmara
with predictable fury, calling Israel a “terrorist state,” demanding an apology and recalling the Turkish ambassador to Israel—all calculated moves that would only enhance his rock star standing in the eyes of the Arab world. He later expelled Israel’s ambassador to Turkey, downgrading the former allies’ diplomatic relations to the lowest possible level, and blocked Israeli participation in a 2012 NATO summit.
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Erdogan went even further at a UN forum in Vienna in February 2013, calling Zionism “a crime against humanity,” and comparing the movement for a Jewish state in Israel to “fascism” and, oddly enough, “anti-Semitism.”
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Israeli leaders were furious over the remarks, but Islamist hearts fluttered with delight once again as Erdogan continued to stake his claim as pseudo-caliph and mouthpiece for the Muslim ummah. Despite the vicious stream of anti-Zionist insults emanating from Ankara, President Obama continued to pressure Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to apologize to Erdogan for the
Mavi Marmara
incident. In March 2013, after meeting with Obama in Israel, Netanyahu called Erdogan, with Obama also on the line, and apologized. Erdogan’s reaction was to decline reestablishing full diplomatic relations with Israel and announce that he would promptly be traveling to Gaza to meet with Hamas.
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Check and mate. A few lessons for Bibi here which, in his gut, he surely already knew before even picking up the phone: 1) Islamists only mend fences with each other. Infidel apologies only embolden them. 2) Turkey is gone as an Israeli ally. And it’s not coming back anytime soon. 3) Never trust President Obama to have Israel’s best interests at heart. Always rely on him to side with Islamists.
On the positive side, the Obama White House rightly condemned Erdogan’s slander of Zionism as “offensive and wrong.”
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It was a brief and fleeting dollop of sanity in what has been an enthusiastically pro-Erdogan policy on the part of the Obama administration. The Obama administration views Turkey as a model of “Islamic democracy” and cultivates ties with the AKP. In the process, Erdogan has struck up a cozy relationship with Barack Obama. The two have been chums ever since Obama visited Turkey during his first overseas trip as president in 2009. They’ve become so close that Obama talks to Erdogan more than to any world leader other than British Prime Minister David Cameron.
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At the 2011 G-20 meetings in France, Obama greeted his European counterparts with handshakes but, tellingly, gave Erdogan a warm hug.
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Obama’s public embrace of Erdogan sent a clear message to Israel and the world that the U.S. government, under Obama, would not only tolerate, but celebrate, a proudly Islamist anti-Semite. To further hammer home that point, during a joint press conference with Erdogan in March 2012, Obama called the budding modern-day Sultan, “an outstanding partner and an outstanding friend” with whom he was, “in frequent agreement upon a wide range of issues.” Obama added, “I also appreciate the advice [Erdogan] gives me, because he has two daughters that are a little older than mine—they’ve turned out very well, so I’m always interested in his perspective on raising girls.”
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One of Erdogan’s daughters, Sumeyye, is apparently a real chip off the old block: a headscarf-wearing Islamist politician who belongs to her father’s AKP party.
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Think about that for a second. The president of the United States—leader of the Free World—taking parenting advice from and publicly embracing a man who once said, “Democracy is like a train that takes you to your destination and then you get off. ”
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Next stop, Grand Sharia Station. President Obama’s man in Ankara has also defended the murderous Sudanese dictator, Omar al-Bashir—whose Islamist regime has slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Christians and Muslims alike in south Sudan and Darfur—by arguing, “A Muslim couldn’t do such things. A Muslim could not commit genocide.”
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Non-Muslims who’ve borne the brunt of 1,400 years of Islamic jihadist campaigns may beg to differ with Erdogan’s assessment.
As for those large Turkish expat communities abroad, Erdogan laid down the gauntlet during a 2008 speech in Cologne, Germany, telling an audience of twenty thousand cheering Turkish immigrants that, “assimilation is a crime against humanity.”
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He repeated that message in a 2011 address to ten thousand German Turks in Dusseldorf, reminding them that while they are part of Germany, they also belong to what he called, “our great Turkey.” Much like his Ottoman forebears, Erdogan would clearly like to extend his domain beyond the Middle East and into Europe—which explains his disturbingly successful attempts to exercise influence over Turkish immigrant communities in places like Germany and Austria.
Erdogan’s government is even making inroads in the United States through major outreach to Native American tribes. It sounds like a bizarre pairing on the surface, but the AKP is going to great lengths to forge business and cultural ties with this long-suffering group. And it’s working. In 2011, a bill was introduced in the House by Republican Congressman Tom Cole (who has Native American ancestry) that would grant Turkish-owned companies preferential treatment when it comes to Native American tribal area projects. Marc J. Fink of the Middle East Forum noted the proposed bill—which ultimately failed—with concern:
The bill was the culmination of a curious multi-year effort by Turkey to ingratiate itself with Native American tribes: tribal students now study in Turkey with full scholarships; Turkish high officials regularly appear at Native American economic summits; and dozens of tribal leaders have gone to Turkey on lavish all-expense paid trips.... Is it really in America’s national security interests to have thousands of Turkish contractors and their families flooding into America’s heartland and settling in semi-autonomous zones out of the reach of American authorities ? Especially if their intent is to form intimate business and social ties with a long-aggrieved minority group?
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Of course not—and that’s exactly the point. It’s all part of Erdogan’s strategy to reestablish Turkey as a global player and regional giant while at the same time spreading Islamist ideology far and wide. And Muslims across the Middle East and North Africa—many of them starved for a new caliphate led by a bold leader who will take on Israel and the West—are taking notice. Erdogan was greeted by adoring crowds during a strategic, September 2011 solidarity tour of Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt—three “Arab Spring” countries where his Islamist allies were newly ascendant. He received a hero’s welcome from thousands of cheering Egyptians as he arrived at Cairo airport in a public spectacle that the Muslim Brotherhood helped organize.
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Erdogan used his Egypt stop to once again lambast Israel (always the surest way to win an impressionable Islamist’s heart) and called on Egypt’s new Brotherhood overlords to cultivate a secular Islamic democracy similar to what his AKP has supposedly established in Turkey. Muslim Brotherhood leaders ended up perturbed by Erdogan’s advice on governance and more than a bit unnerved by the confident swagger of their non-Arab guest. “We welcome Turkey and we welcome Erdogan as a prominent leader,” Essam el-Erian, deputy leader of the Brotherhood’s ruling Freedom and Justice Party, huffed. “But we do not think that he or his country alone should be leading the region or drawing up its future.”
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