Turkey’s Erdogan Makes Us Ask Once Again: Why is This Country in NATO?

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Recep Tayyip Erdogan doth bestride Turkey like a colossus. President since 2014 and before that, prime minister for eleven years, Erdogan has worked assiduously throughout this century to destroy Kemalist secularism and restore Turkey’s Islamic character. Erdogan has also made no secret of wanting to restore not just Islamic law, but the territories that the Ottoman Empire once ruled, including much of Eastern Europe and the Middle East. His present backing of jihadis in Syria appears to be part of that revanchist agenda. And along with all this, not surprisingly, goes a burning hatred of the U.S. and the West. So once again it must be asked: why is this country in NATO?

Erdogan has of late made no secret of his hostility toward his ostensible allies. Türkiye Today reported that Erdogan recently crowed during a speech in Ankara about the imminent demise of the West: “The West’s progress,” thundered the Turkish president, “built on blood, tears, massacres, and exploitation, has temporarily overtaken the human-centered civilization of the East. A day will come when this era of progress, which excludes the sacred and humanity, will close. As Western civilization collapses with a great clamor, our human-centered and divinely inspired civilization will rise again, stronger than ever.”

Now, you might have thought that as a NATO member, Erdogan would feel some loyalty to, if not kinship with, Western civilization. No such luck. He also was engaging in a massive exercise of projection. Erdogan claimed that Western civilization was “built on blood, tears, massacres, and exploitation,” but as The History of Jihad illustrates in abundance, that is actually true of Islamic civilization, which he terms “human-centered and divinely inspired.” Contrary to the picture Erdogan was painting, Europeans for centuries lived in constant fear of jihad warriors who had distinguished themselves for nothing more than their bloodlust. The existential threat that they posed to Europe was well known and never questioned until allegedly wiser heads in modern times decided that Islam was a religion of peace.

Today, the West collectively lost its historical memory, and decided not only to embrace, but to stake its future upon the unexamined and demonstrably false dogma that Islam is a religion of peace that is entirely compatible with Western secular societies. Erdogan is not among those who either offering or drinking this particular brand of Kool-Aid. He is well aware of the history of Islam and the West, and back in 2018, even predicted a renewed conflict between the two. When the Austrian government closed some Turkish mosques in what it said was a crackdown on “political Islam,” Erdogan declared: “These measures taken by the Austrian prime minister are, I fear, leading the world toward a war between the cross and the crescent.”

The desiccated leftist internationalists who lead Western Europe are horrified at such a prospect, and have already proven that they find no measure of appeasement and accommodation too low to stoop in order to head it off. But Erdogan, who has used the threat of more mass migration as a weapon against Europe more than once, has made it clear that he is unlikely to be satisfied with anything but full surrender. After all, in the case he was complaining about in 2018, Austria had shut down only seven mosques. There are many more in Austria. It shut them down for preaching political Islam, i.e., the idea that Sharia is the only legitimate form of government for Austria and the world.

Erdogan was essentially saying that Austria, and Europe in general, must accept either slow Islamization or fast Islamization. Either Europe allowed imams to preach Sharia and Islamic supremacism, leading to the slow Islamization of the continent, or it would face a jihad war aiming at conquering and Islamizing the continent.

The choice remains: surrender or be forcibly subjugated.

The Turkish president also claimed that “there is a clear, systematic, and more organized assault against the values that define us and our essence. The perpetrators of massacres in Palestine, Gaza, and other Islamic lands, who seek to exterminate Muslims, are evident. While covert and insidious enemies employ every means, the war in recent times is increasingly waged through social media.”

Erdogan knows that the way to gain traction with the West’s pusillanimous contemporary leaders is to play the victim, and so he is earnestly claiming victimhood status not just for the Palestinian Arabs, but for all Muslims. After striking this most fetching of poses, he will likely encounter no difficulty in getting Western European leaders to do his bidding.

Erdogan’s belligerent words about the West’s innocent collapse should be taken with the utmost seriousness, and result in a long-overdue realignment of our global alliances. But is anyone even paying attention to what he is saying? The entire world should be.