By Jed Babbin, The American Spectator:
A longtime U.S. ally has become openly hostile to the West. So what now?
Among NATO’s most serious problems is Recip Erdogan, the president of Turkey. He is more than a political nuisance, because he threatens both the commitment of NATO’s members to defend each other and the Westernized composition of the nation he leads.
In the last half of the 19th century, under the Ottoman Empire’s last caliph Abdulmejid, Turkey was known as “the sick man of Europe.” Abdulmejid’s government was corrupt, dissolute, and entirely vulnerable. That third element led to the Gallipoli Campaign, which, in 1915-1916, saw troops from Australia and New Zealand under British command thwarted in their attempt to land and seize control of the Dardanelles.
One Turkish officer, Mustafa Kemal, found himself at the center of the invasion force. His counterattacks and ability to hold ground were the reasons the invasion failed.
After the war, when the Ottoman Empire fell and Abdulmejid’s reign ended, Mustafa Kemal became the leader of Turkey who was not as much followed as worshiped. In 1934, Mustafa Kemal became known as “Ataturk,” father of Turks. He remade the Islamic Ottoman state into a secular, non-Islamic nation aimed at joining the Western world.
Eighty-three years later, Turkey is led by a man whose principal goal is the re-creation of the Turkish Islamic state, Recip Erdogan.
Erdogan is not a dictator imposed by a military coup (though Turkey has had its share of them). He is highly popular, despite his many despotic actions, primarily because the Turks seem to have forgotten the reason for Ataturk’s success.
If you examine Erdogan’s past, it is no surprise that he is an Islamist. Erdogan is the product of a Turkish imam-hatip school. These are Islamic religious schools that aren’t quite the “madrassas” we’ve heard so much about since 9/11, but they are much like them. The imam-hatip schools reserve 30 percent of their students’ time for religious instruction. They teach Sunni Islamic law — Sharia law — as the exclusive legitimate source of authority. Those schools teach the political ideology we refer to as radical Islam…
To read the rest of the article visit The American Spectator.
