How Turkey became a petri dish for Islamist politics

Maclean's ^ | 28 July, 2016 | Adnan R. Khan

[MtnClimber]

In December 1997, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the current Turkish president but at the time the mayor of Istanbul, recited a famous poem by Turkish nationalist poet Ziya Gökalp during a speech in the eastern Turkish city of Siirt. One line read: “The minarets are our bayonets, the domes our helmets, the mosques our barracks, and the faithful our soldiers.” At a time when Turkey’s strictly secular military still held sway over Turkish politics, the militarized reference to Islam was interpreted as a threat to the secular order established by modern Turkey’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. Erdogan was arrested, sentenced to four months in jail and handed a lifetime ban from politics (which was later lifted). Less than two years later, another Islamist leader in Turkey, Fethullah Gülen, found himself in a similar predicament. In June 1999, he was caught on tape giving a sermon to his followers which appeared to outline a secret long-term plan to take over the levers of power in the country. “You must move in the arteries of the system, without anyone noticing your existence, until you reach all the power centres,” he is reported to have said. Gülen, who was in the U.S. at the time, was charged in absentia for “attempting to establish an Islamist state.” He remains in self-imposed exile in Pennsylvania. On July 15, these two Islamist leaders found themselves on opposite sides of a bloody coup attempt. A relationship that had begun on such a similar footing lay shattered alongside Turkey’s democratic order. When it was over, Erdogan had triumphed. The populist leader harnessed the power of faith and an undercurrent of radicalism in a way Gülen could not, nor would have wanted. And in the process, he has pushed Turkey down a dangerous and potentially destructive path.

[MtnClimber]

And Hillary was running weapons collected from Khadaffi’s stockpiles and rounded up in Benghazi to be run through Turkey to arm the Syrian rebels fighting Asaad who are known as ISSIS.

[Uncle Sam 911]

Obama’s disaster in Turkey will make Libya, Syria and Egypt look like a picnic.

[justa-hairyape]

You got that right. And flooding NATO countries with muslims through Turkey has already doomed NATO. The Russians won’t have to fire a shoot and are probably happy eastern Europe forms a safe quaranteen zone. Just watch what Erdogan does. He is closing all military schools.