Islam > Erdogan still trying to recreate the Ottoman Empire with himself as Caliph, but he has to go through Israel

 

Erdogan’s Excellent Adventure:

An ‘Islamic Alliance’ to Destroy Israel

Sep 9, 2024 4:00 pm By Hugh Fitzgerald

Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been busy re-Islamizing Turkey and removing the last vestiges of Kemalism. He has changed the Turkish Army, replacing Kemalist generals who favor secularism with Islamist officers. This new officer corps, instead of being wary of soldiers who are “too pious,” as their predecessors had been, now promote those “pious soldiers” up through the ranks. Erdogan has jailed Turkish academics, lawyers, university rectors, and journalists who are opposed to his re-Islamizing program and to his despotism. Erdogan has built more than 20,000 new mosques during his more than 20 years in power. And he has built about 1,800 Imam Hatip schools, serving ten percent of the pre-university population, which provide a rigorous religious education along with training in secular subjects. Under Erdogan’s rule, the graduates of these Imam Hatip schools can expect favorable treatment when they apply to university, or for jobs, especially in the government bureaucracy. Erdogan himself attended an Imam Hatip school, and sees them as a way to forge a “pious generation” in largely Muslim Turkey. He has continued investing in the schools, building more of them every year.

And now this anti-Ataturk has called for the 57 Muslim nations to form a military alliance against Israel. It’s not a new theme for him. A few years ago, he spoke of a possible future war between the “crescent and the cross,” and left no doubt as to which side Turkey would be on. In fact, it was clear that he expected that Turkey would be the natural leader of the forces of Islam and he, as the leader of Turkey, would lead the entire group. More on his latest invoking of a pan-Islamic alliance to defeat Israel can be found here: 

Turkey’s Erdogan: Islamic countries should form alliance against ‘Israel’s growing expansionism'

Jerusalem Post, September 7, 2024:

Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan said on Saturday Islamic countries should form an alliance against what he called “the growing threat of expansionism” from Israel.

He made the comment after describing what Palestinian and Turkish officials said was the killing by Israeli troops of a Turkish-American woman taking part in a protest on Friday against settlement expansion in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

The only step that will stop Israeli arrogance, Israeli banditry, and Israeli state terrorism is the alliance of Islamic countries,” Erdogan said at an Islamic schools’ association event near Istanbul.

Perhaps Erdogan has been asleep for the past eleven months. When 6,000 Hamas operatives smashed into Israel from Gaza on October 7, they proceeded to rape, torture, mutilate, and murder 1,200 Israelis and kidnap another 251. This started a war that Israel did not want and did not expect. What he calls “Israeli arrogance” and “Israeli banditry” is simply the stout resolve of the Jewish state to defend itself and to prevent another genocidal attack by Hamas in the future. There has been no “state terrorism” by the IDF, which makes colossal efforts to minimize civilian casualties. As the main part of that effort, already by March the IDF had dropped nine million leaflets, sent sixteen million messages, and made fifteen million robocalls, all to warn civilians away from areas, and buildings, that were soon to be targeted. Does that sound like “banditry” and “state terrorism” to you?

He said recent steps that Turkey has taken to improve ties with Egypt and Syria are aimed at “forming a line of solidarity against the growing threat of expansionism,” which he said also threatened Lebanon and Syria.

“The threat of expansionism”? What can Erdogan be thinking of? Israel has no desire to be in Gaza; every last Israeli was pulled out of the Strip in 2005. And right now, just as soon as a permanent ceasefirecan be achieved, the Israelis are looking forward to withdrawing from every part of Gaza except, possibly, the nine-mile-long strip on the Gaza-Egypt border, known as the Philadelphi Corridor, where they might remain to prevent renewed arms smuggling by Hamas. No one in Israel wants to stay in Gaza a moment longer than necessary. And in Lebanon, similarly, Israel has no desire to “expand” into southern Lebanon. Its only goal is to inflict so much pain on the terror group Hezbollah that it will stop firing rockets into the Galilee, thus allowing 60,000 displaced Israelis to return to their homes in the north. Nor does Israel want to “expand” into Syria. All it wants is to prevent Iran from using Syria as a waystation in its transshipment of weapons to Hamas. Erdogan can prate all he wants about the “danger” of “expansionism” by the Jewish state, but he knows it is nonsense. The real power that is expanding, not in land area but in its ever-deepening hold on its proxies in the region, is Iran, which supplies weapons, and money, to Hamas in Gaza, to Hezbollah in Lebanon, and to the Houthis in Yemen, and to the Kata’ib Hezbollah, a Shiite militia in Iraq.