Burak bekdil gatestone and company
The Turkish Sultan’s Dubious Charm Offensive
BESA Center Perspectives Paper No. 1,554, May 7, 2020
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Turkey’s Islamist strongman, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, knows he needs to win Western public opinion in order to achieve international legitimacy. But try as he might, his propaganda efforts are instantly undone by his routine authoritarianism.
In an article published in 2016, “Erdoğan: The World’s Most Insulted President,” this author suggested that the perpetually angry Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, president of Turkey, would do well to take a moment and consider why he is perhaps the most disrespected president on earth.
He is no more popular four years later. Between 2014 and 2018, some 17,500 people were sued for insulting Erdoğan, according to the Turkish Justice Ministry. In 2018 alone, some 26,000 new investigations were opened for an offense punishable by one to four years in jail. Of those suspects, hundreds are minors.
Not all these alleged insulters of Erdoğan are Turks, though most apparently are. In one sensational case filed in Germany, Erdoğan invoked an obscure German law, dating back to 1871 and still in effect in 2016, which had been used by the Shah of Iran and by Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet to silence dissidents in the 1960s and 1970s. The archaic law allows prosecution in Germany for insulting a foreign leader, but only with the consent of the government. German Chancellor Angela Merkel reluctantly granted her consent for the prosecution of German comedian Jan Böhmermann for insulting Erdoğan but promised that the law would be repealed.
As a rebuff to Erdoğan’s efforts to prosecute Böhmermann for having written an offensive poem about him, the British magazine TheSpectator held the “President Erdoğan offensive poetry competition” (2016), in which thousands of entrants competed to win the £1,000 reward. The winner was former London mayor and now British premier Boris Johnson, who prevailed with a limerick HomeDistinguishable English ReportsBurak Bekdil/Gatestone Institute: Turkey: Erdogan’s Galloping Despotism The summer peak of the crisis between Turkey and the United States, two NATO allies in theory, has been replaced by cautious pessimism. Few Turks today remember the days of massive Turkish protests against President Donald Trump and his administration, often exhibited in childish ways such as groups gathering to burn fake U.S. dollars or smashing iPhones in front of cameras. This is, however, an extremely fragile tranquility. On February 15, after keeping the position vacant since October 2017, Washington nominated David Satterfield, a career diplomat, as new ambassador to Ankara, an appointment that still needs to be confirmed by the Senate. In Ankara, a complex puzzle awaits Ambassador Satterfield. There are no signs that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan may rethink -- or even recalibrate -- his assertive neo-Ottoman foreign policy calculus. As the country awaits its critical local elections on March 31, his popularity is augmented by supportive masses who want to “Make Turkey great again.” A surprise defeat at the ballot box could be the beginning of the end of Erdoğan’s 17-year-old rule. One of Erdoğan’s regional policy priorities, as U.S. troops in neighboring northern Syria prepare to leave, is to prevent Turkey’s south from witnessing the emergence of “a Kurdish belt”. The U.S. troop pullout could expose Syrian Kurds, U.S. allies in the multinational fight against Islamic State, to the risk of a Turkish military incursion. While the U.S. supports the idea of a buffer zone in northern Syria to keep Kurdish militants and Turkish troops at a safe distance from each other, Erdoğan insists on sole Turkish control over the planned 20-mile-deep strip. The Turkish strongman also rejects a plan by the United States for a multinational force to police the area. Part of the Turkish-American puzzle is about a rigid plan by Erdoğan to make Turkey the first NATO ally to deploy the Russian-made S-400 ai Homeبيانات سيادية/Patriotic ReleasesBurak Bekdil/The Gatestone Institute: Europe Should End Its Planned Marriage with TurkeyTurkey: Erdogan’s Galloping Despotism
Burak Bekdil/Gatestone Institute/November 02/16Before Turks could digest so many undemocratic practices they had to face in one week, they woke up only to learn that scores of journalists at a newspaper critical of Erdogan had been detained. On October 31, police raided the homes of 11 people, including executives and journalists of Cumhuriyet newspaper, after prosecutors initiated a probe against them on “terrorism” charges.
“This is about … abolishing all universal values… The most explicit indications of it are the growing pressure against the Turkish press and the policies to destroy it. This is the process of the destruction of free thought.” — The Contemporary Journalists Association.
Both fascism and communism exercised a large influence on the Arab “Baathist” ideology — “resurrection” in Arabic, and which started as a nationalist, Sunni Arab movement to combat Western colonial rule and to promote modernization. In Iraq, the despotic Baathist regime survived 35 years, largely under the leadership of Saddam Hussein. In Syria, it is still struggling under the tyranny of President Bashar al-Assad. These days a non-Arab, but Islamist version of the Baathist ideology is flourishing in an otherwise unlikely country: candidate for membership in the European Union (EU), Turkey.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s increasing authoritarianism is killing Turkey’s already slim chances of finding itself a place in the world’s more civilized clubs and turning the country more and more into a “Baathist” regime.
In 2004 Erdogan’s government abolished the death penalty as part of his ambitions at the time to join the EU. Twelve years later, on Oct. 29, 2016, Erdogan addressed fans of his party, and said
“Make Turkey Great Again” Collides With the U.S.
Europe Should End Its Planned Marriage with Turkey
Burak Bekdil/The Gatestone Institute/November 27/16Lightly edited excerpt of article originally published under the title “Turkey: Lies, Cheap Lies and Cheaper Lies.”
Visiting Minsk, the capital of Belarus, in the first week of November for the opening of a mosque in a dictatorial country where there are 100,000 Muslims, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan accused Western Europe of “intolerance that spreads like the plague.”Erdogan described Belarus, which Western countries describe as a dictatorship, as “a country in which people with different roots live in peace.” In Erdogan’s view Belarus is tolerant and peaceful, but Western Europe is not. Merely because Belarus’s dictator, Alexander Lukashenko, agreed to open a mosque to lure some Turkish investment.
Back in Turkey, things look more Belarusian than Western European, a culture Erdogan despises. In August, an Istanbul court ordered Asli Erdogan, a prominent author and journalist, arrested on charges of membership in an armed terror organization. Asli Erdogan, a peace activist and novelist, worked for Ozgur Gundem, a pro-Kurdish newspaper. She has remained in prison since her arrest. The prosecutors demand an aggravated life sentence plus 17.5 years in jail for her.
How did the novelist “support terror”? This is from the indictment: “[I]n an understanding of a novelist, [the accused] portrayed terrorists as citizens in her columns.” The prosecutor’s “evidence” is four columns by Asli Erdogan. Mehmet Yilmaz, a columnist, suggested that Turkish law faculties, after this indictment, should be closed down and converted into imam schools.
Turkey’s incompatibility with the democratic culture of Western Europe is now too visible to