fanatics Archives

By Ara Toranian

There is only one people, the Turks, and Erdogan is their prophet. This is essentially the impression left by the sensational Erdogan meeting in Strasbourg on October 4. In front of 12,000 fanatical Turks, waving national flags and thousands of punctuating the master sentences with “Allahu Akbar” chanted in unison, Turkish President has made two hours the full range of his Islamic-nationalist directory. Claiming the largest Ottoman victories and being in the line of sultans or rulers 1915, it landed in Turkish conqueror of modern times, urging his troops to invest the French political ground to serve the exceptional destiny of their country who “is behind them, which does not forget! “. All wrapped in a religious bath, came with a mufti of the country to say the prayer. Guaranteed result: the jubilant crowd gave a standing ovation as a “rock star” to use the expression of AFP.

This delusional speech, underpinned by the sacrosanct crusade against terrorism, however, has not made a single reference to Daech Islamic State against which Ankara is supposedly went to war. It is now a long time since the Turkish President justified his entrance into the Western coalition in Syria by the need to fight against “terrorism”, referring back to back, in a way also totally unacceptable and inappropriate and Daech PKK. As if one could put it on an equal footing jihadist barbarism and a national liberation movement, which was also negotiating with the Turkish authorities before they unilaterally break the truce, seeing the chaos on their border south a historic opportunity to end the Kurdish resistance. Objective which they engage in leisure since August (more than a thousand Kurds killed), causing at most a few timid Western remarks on the priority targets … Nothing to do with the outcry has led the first Russian strikes Syria on objectives that were not clearly identified as belonging to the sensu scrito Islamic state. Double standards? Would that be possible ?