{"id":19649,"date":"2010-06-09T23:00:39","date_gmt":"2010-06-09T21:00:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.turkishforum.com.tr\/en\/content\/?p=19649"},"modified":"2013-12-10T13:03:14","modified_gmt":"2013-12-10T11:03:14","slug":"erdogans-troubling-friends","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/2010\/06\/09\/erdogans-troubling-friends\/","title":{"rendered":"Erdogan&#8217;s Troubling Friends"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong><span class=\"removed_link\" title=\"http:\/\/frontpagemag.com\/2010\/06\/09\/jihadi-turkey-rising\/\">This article first appeared at <\/span><\/strong><em><strong><span class=\"removed_link\" title=\"http:\/\/frontpagemag.com\/2010\/06\/09\/jihadi-turkey-rising\/\">FrontPage Magazine<\/span><\/strong><\/em><strong><span class=\"removed_link\" title=\"http:\/\/frontpagemag.com\/2010\/06\/09\/jihadi-turkey-rising\/\">.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n<p><span class=\"removed_link\" title=\"http:\/\/frontpagemag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/06\/Iranian-President-Mahmoud-Ahmadinejad-L-shakes-hands-with-Turkish-Prime-Minister-Recep-Tayyip-Erdogan-in-Tehran-on-October-27-2009.jpg\"><\/span><\/p>\n<p>In 1974, when Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan was president of the Istanbul\u00a0youth group of the MSP\u00a0(the Islamist National Salvation Party), he wrote, directed, and starred in a play\u00a0called\u00a0<em>Mas-Kom-Ya,<\/em> which addressed subversive elements in Turkish society: masons,\u00a0communists and\u00a0<em>yahudi<\/em> (Jews). This very same performer has managed to convince gullible\u00a0Western politicians that\u00a0Turkey\u00a0is committed to EU membership. Equally convincingly, he has played to the Arab gallery since his AKP (Justice and Development Party) came to power in 2002.<\/p>\n<p>Erdogan\u2019s tirade against Shimon Peres during a panel discussion at last year\u2019s\u00a0World Economic Forum in Davos \u2013 \u201cyou know very well how to kill\u201d \u2013 earned plaudits all around the Arab world. The Lebanese daily\u00a0<em>Dar A-Hayat<\/em>suggested that Erdogan should restore the\u00a0Ottoman Empire\u00a0and be the Caliph of all\u00a0Muslims. By some accounts, this has been identified as the driving force behind\u00a0Turkey\u2019s expansionist foreign policy, which has been dubbed \u201cneo-Ottoman.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>This new course obviously played out in Turkey\u2019s role in the Gaza flotilla incident. According to Debka (an open source intelligence website) the flotilla was personally\u00a0sponsored by Erdogan, and according to the same source, he is even\u00a0prepared to sail aboard the next flotilla himself. Some awareness of the\u00a0consequences must have been know, as a week before the flotilla sailed,\u00a0Ankara\u00a0threatened\u00a0Israel\u00a0with reprisals if it was impeded.<\/p>\n<p>The connection between the flotilla\u2019s organizer, the Turkish-based IHH (Foundation for Human Rights and Freedoms and Humanitarian Relief), and Hamas is well documented, and it created a stir when Hamas leader Khaled Mashal was officially invited to\u00a0Ankara in 2006.<\/p>\n<p>Ankara\u2019s support for\u00a0Iran\u2019s nuclear program, ostensibly for peaceful purposes,\u00a0is likewise a cause for concern in the Western world, and President Abdullah G\u00fcl has admitted in an interview with\u00a0<em>Forbes <\/em>magazine that \u201cit is their final aspiration to have\u00a0a nuclear weapon in the end.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Turkey\u00a0and\u00a0Syria\u00a0have agreed on a long-term strategic partnership and Erdogan continues to defend\u00a0Sudan\u2019s president, Omar al-Bashir (who is on the International\u00a0Criminal Court\u2019s wanted list) with the claim that \u201ca Muslim can never commit genocide.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Also alarming is the secret meeting between Prime Minister\u00a0Erdogan and a Sudanese financier, Dr. Fatih al-Hassanein, during an Arab League summit in\u00a0Khartoum\u00a0in 2006. Dr. al-Hassanein is believed to have ties with al-Qaeda\u00a0and other Islamist movements (e.g. in\u00a0Bosnia).<\/p>\n<p>What has caused another stir is the friendship between Prime Minister Erdogan and a\u00a0Saudi businessman, Yassin al-Qadi, who, according to the U.S. Treasury and the\u00a0United Nations Security Council, is a major financier of Islamic terrorism. Erdogan\u2019s\u00a0advisor and co-founder of the AKP, C\u00fcneyd Zapsu, was also al-Qadi\u2019s partner.<\/p>\n<p>Erdogan defended al-Qadi publicly on Turkish television, declaring: \u201cI trust him the same way I trust my father.\u201d And a case against al-Qadi was dropped when in 2006\u00a0the Chief Public Prosecutor decided: \u201cAl-Qadi is a philanthropic businessman and no connection has been found between him and terrorist organizations.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The truth is beginning to catch up with Erdogan. Last week, in an interview\u00a0given to the\u00a0<em>Wall Street Journal, <\/em>Fethullah G\u00fclen, who, although a resident\u00a0in the\u00a0USA, is reckoned to be\u00a0Turkey\u2019s most influential religious leader, criticized the\u00a0Gaza\u00a0flotilla. He also commented: \u201c.. some people in the\u00a0United States\u00a0consider Turkey\u00a0as sitting at the epicenter of radicalism.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>It is now up to the hot-tempered Mr. Erdogan and his government to dispel this image \u2014 or to continue confirming it.<\/p>\n<p><strong><em>Robert Ellis<\/em><\/strong><strong><em> is a regular commentator on Turkish affairs in the Danish and international press.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This article first appeared at FrontPage Magazine. In 1974, when Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan was president of the Istanbul\u00a0youth group of the MSP\u00a0(the Islamist National Salvation Party), he wrote, directed, and starred in a play\u00a0called\u00a0Mas-Kom-Ya, which addressed subversive elements in Turkish society: masons,\u00a0communists and\u00a0yahudi (Jews). This very same performer has managed to convince gullible\u00a0Western [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":83,"featured_media":782330,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[62,844,2293],"tags":[1770,1018,9795],"class_list":["post-19649","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-iran_","category-news","category-robert-ellis","tag-mahmoud-ahmadinejad","tag-recep-tayyip-erdogan","tag-robert-ellis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19649","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/83"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19649"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19649\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/782330"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19649"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19649"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19649"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}