Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s ideological family tree is inherently anti-Western– hence, anti-US and anti-NATO. This author’s most recent article, “NATO Family Picture in Madrid: This Will Not Be Erdoğan’s Last Blackmail,” was posted on July 7. Only 11 days later, on July 18, Erdoğan said that Turkey would freeze Finland and Sweden’s NATO membership bids if the Nordic countries do not come into line with Turkey’s “fight against terrorist organizations.”
“Tayyip [Erdoğan] is a Jew who pretends to be a Muslim,” wrote Yüksel Üstün, on his Facebook account in 2020. In November 2021, a criminal court sentenced Üstün with a fine of 7,000 Turkish liras ($385) for “insulting the president.” In the complaint, filed by Hüseyin Aydın, an attorney for President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the expression “Jew” (when applied to Erdoğan) was deemed “humiliating, damaging to honor and dignity.”
“Torture,” read a joint statement by Turkey’s Human Rights Association (İHD) and the Human Rights Foundation of Turkey (TİHV) “is still Turkey’s most important problem… Torture and other forms of ill-treatment in the streets and open areas, as well as in unofficial places of detention, have reached unprecedented levels in Turkey.”
Nato has formally launched the process to bring Sweden and Finland into its military alliance. But a key condition for Nato member Turkey is the handover of more than 70 people described by its president as terrorists.
The leaders of the two Nordic nations say they are taking the issue seriously, but ultimately extradition is up to the courts not politicians. So who does Turkey want and could they ever be deported to Ankara?
Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is at it, disrupting the region again. This time, he is threatening aggression not only against Greek islands, but also actually attacking the Kurds in northern Syria and Iraq as well as the Yazidis in their homeland of Sinjar, Iraq.
Turkey, reportedly on the verge of yet another military incursion into Syria, appears up to other fun and games as well.
While Russia’s invasion of Ukraine remains ongoing, two Nordic nations have applied for NATO membership: Sweden and Finland.
However, one NATO member, Turkey, said it is opposed to their NATO membership based on their alleged support of “terrorism”. On May 25, delegations from Sweden and Finland arrived in Ankara, seeking to address Turkish objections to their joining the military alliance.
Turkey will be known as Türkiye at the United Nations from now on, after it agreed to a formal request from Ankara.
Several international bodies will be asked to make the name change as part of a rebranding campaign launched by the Turkish president late last year.
“Türkiye is the best representation and expression of the Turkish people’s culture, civilization, and values,” Recep Tayyip Erdogan said in December.
The UN said it made the change as soon as it received the request this week.
After initial hesitation about the seriousness of Turkey’s objections, its president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has doubled down on his threat to veto Finland’s and Sweden’s applications for membership of Nato, saying there is no point in either country sending delegations to Ankara to persuade him otherwise.
On Wednesday, he also extended his demands from the two he outlined on Monday to 10, leading to claims that he is using blackmail.
STOCKHOLM (AP) — Sweden on Monday decided to join neighboring Finland in seeking NATO membership, ending more than two centuries of military nonalignment in a historic shift prompted by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The move drew strong objections from Turkey, a key NATO member who declared the two nations should not be allowed to join because they have been too lax in taking action against Kurdish militants. Countries can only join NATO if all current members agree.
Turkey’s “balancing act” during the Russian invasion of Ukraine is the result of the country’s Islamist leader’s two-decade long indoctrination of a generation of Turks to make them “pious.” President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan may or may not have raised pious generations, as he declared was his political mission, but he has definitely raised an anti-Western generation. That anti-Western sentiment once again makes Turkey the odd-man-out in NATO.
Western leaders shrugged it off when, in 2016, Erdoğan said in plain language that Turkey did not need to join the European Union “at all costs” and could instead become part of a security bloc dominated by China, Russia and Central Asian nations. Earlier, in 2013, Turkey had signed up as a “dialogue partner” saying it shared “the same destiny” as members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation — China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan) — which was formed in 2001 as a regional security bloc.
How many NATO members still buy Russian gas? Cui Bono?
While the world has been distracted by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Turkey, a member of the NATO alliance, has been busy harassing another NATO member, its Western neighbor, Greece.
Turkish military aircraft violated Greek airspace 90 times in one day, on April 15, and conducted three overflights of inhabited Greek islands, according to Greek media.
Turkish aircraft have, in fact, been violating Greek airspace almost non-stop since the beginning of the year.
‘Russian Oligarchs Are Welcome in Turkey’
Few people could imagine that on a cold March day in Turkey’s capital, Ankara, the presidential corps, after more than a decade of hostility to its neighbor Israel, would welcome Israeli President Isaac Herzog by playing Israel’s national anthem, Hatikva, with two presidential guards holding Turkish and Israeli flags on horseback. Pundits were quick to talk about a “reset in relations,” or a “historic visit.” Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said he now intends to host Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett in Ankara.
Turkey has for years been cooperating with jihadists in Syria and bombing Yazidis in Iraq. Yazidis, exposed to a genocide at the hands of ISIS in Iraq in 2014, are an indigenous non-Muslim minority in the Middle East who have for centuries faced persecution because of their religion and ethnicity.
U.S. President Joe Biden’s increasingly hypocritical policy on NATO’s increasingly difficult ally, Turkey, is badly zig-zagging between the U.S. leader’s self-declared advocacy for universal democratic values and Biden’s secret agenda, which he prefers dishonestly to hide: appeasing Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan behind closed doors and condemning Turkey’s democratic deficit in public. In less than two years Biden has swung from a pledge to oust Turkey’s autocratic leader to appeasing him behind closed doors.
Last month, the US Congress passed an amendment to the Fiscal Year 2022 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that could affect the status of the far-right, extremist group that operates both inside and outside Turkey: the Grey Wolves.
The amendment, introduced by Congresswoman Dina Titus (D-NV), requires that the State Department send a report to Congress on the activities of the Grey Wolves against the United States and its allies — including an assessment of whether the Grey Wolves meets the criteria to be designated as a foreign terrorist organization.
