Person of the week: Recep Erdogan: First the Jews, then the Christians

Person of the week: Recep Erdogan
First the Jews, then the Christians

By Wolfram Weimer
October 31, 2023, 9:56 a.m

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The Turkish president praises Hamas terror and incites against the West. With martial words he positions himself as a military leader of the Muslim faith. Is NATO’s second largest army intervening on Hamas’s side in the war against Israel?

It feels like a declaration of war. The Turkish president is using the celebrations for the 100th birthday of the Turkish Republic to proclaim an Islamist manifesto. Western diplomats took their breath away at the weekend because Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s call for religious war could not only dramatically expand the conflict in Israel. There is also a threat of a historic turning point for the West’s relations with Turkey. Like an antagonist to the Western-oriented founder of the state, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, who created the modern, secular, democratic Turkey in which religion was pushed back from public life, Erdogan styles himself as a modern religious warrior who is working on the return of the neo-Ottoman Empire.

His words are hard to beat in terms of clarity. Erdogan declares Israel a “war criminal”. He defends and heroizes the radical Islamic terrorist organization Hamas as a “group of liberators” that defend their country. Not a word about the fact that Hamas launched a major attack on Israel on October 7th, slaughtering around 1,400 people with great brutality and kidnapping more than 200 people as hostages.

“A hundred years ago Gaza was like Adana”

But the Turkish president is taking three remarkable steps further. On the one hand, he accuses “the West” of being the mastermind behind the “massacre in Gaza.” The West is using Israel as a “chess piece” for its interests, wants to plunge the Middle East into chaos and is deliberately keeping Turkey small and is even responsible for the Turkish economic crisis. On the other hand, he announced that Turkey would support its fellow Muslims. “We will remain successful and victorious. No imperialist power can prevent this,” he said. Erdogan is effectively threatening military action against Israel. With a troop strength of around 450,000 active soldiers and 380,000 reservists, Turkey is NATO’s second largest armed force after the USA. An order to march on Israel would trigger a military conflagration in the Middle East. But Erdogan sees himself as the heir to the Ottoman Empire and speaks openly about the scenario: “Some people may see Gaza as a distant place that has nothing to do with us,” he said on Saturday. “But a hundred years ago, for this nation, Gaza was no different than Adana.” In fact, Gaza once belonged to the Ottoman Empire as part of an administrative province of Syria.

Thirdly, Erdogan is threatening an even bigger war. He warns that the West should be careful about intervening further in the conflict. “Does the West want another battle between crescent and cross?” he asked in his speech on Saturday. “If you undertake such an effort, know that this nation is not dead.” Erdogan presents himself as the leader of a global, historical culture war; he wants to benefit from the new mass consciousness of Muslims and positions himself as the military leader of his faith. For the first time, he openly acknowledges that Turkey’s foreign policy serves this strategic goal, admitting: “Just as we showed the same determination in Libya and Karabakh, you know that we are also steadfast in the Middle East.” Ankara’s military operations in Syria, Somalia, Libya and Azerbaijan follow a neo-Ottoman plan of faith-driven expansion. More than 60,000 Turkish soldiers are already active in foreign missions, most recently in Azerbaijan, where they were involved in the ethnic cleansing and expulsion of Armenian Christians from Nagorno-Karabakh.

“Harbingers of the liberation of the Al-Aqsa Mosque”

Erdogan had no fear of contact with Islamist extremists in Syria and Egypt. Now he wears a scarf in public with the Turkish and Palestinian flags on it. The message: We are on the side of Hamas.

For Erdogan, the demonstrative culture war against Jews and Christians is a growing part of his political agenda. In 2020, he had already demonstratively turned Hagia Sophia into a mosque in order to specifically humiliate the West. The church is a cultural monument of Christianity, the most important place of worship for the Orthodox for 1,123 years, 89 emperors were crowned here and 125 patriarchs shaped the history of Christian Byzantium. From Athens to Moscow the horror was enormous. But Erdogan joked about an Islamic “resurrection.” At the end of his campaign in May, he visited the Hagia Sophia in a highly publicized manner to perform his last evening prayer before the elections and to show the Turks what his religiously aggressive program means. His propaganda newspapers praised the provocation as a “harbinger of the liberation of the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, the Muslims leaving the phase of the interregnum.” Free yourself from the “tyranny of the crusaders”.

Erdogan wants to visit Germany in mid-November and meet Chancellor Olaf Scholz. After the threats from Ankara, this is somewhat sensitive. The federal chairman of the Young Union of Germany, Johannes Winkel, is already calling on the Chancellor to withdraw the invitation to the Turkish head of state: “If Germany still has some self-respect, now is the right time to disinvite Erdogan. Otherwise the much-vaunted ‘reason of state’ will degenerate Calendar saying,” he told the “Bild” newspaper. But Scholz will have to talk to Erdogan because the migration crisis is shaking Germany and Turkey is a key country. In October alone, 9,000 people from Turkey applied for asylum in Germany. The Turks have thus overtaken the Syrians as the largest group of applicants.

At the same time, Erdogan has been blackmailing Europe for years with the “migration weapon,” as Brussels diplomats warn. If the EU does not comply, he will open the borders and send hundreds of thousands more refugees to Europe. He pays dearly for the role of the EU’s bouncer. The EU has already committed €10 billion to support refugees and host communities in Turkey. According to new data from the EU Commission, more than 2.6 million refugees in Turkey were receiving monthly cash aid from Europe directly supported via a debit card system. But the religious warrior Erdogan does not talk publicly about this humanitarian aid.