Erdogan projects his own genocidal intent onto Netanyahu
Michael Rubin
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Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan minced no words. “I repeat my call for the Israeli leadership … to immediately end its operations amounting to genocide,” he declared even before Israel began its ground operations in Gaza. Hamas was “not a terrorist organization but a liberation and mujahedeen group that struggles to protect its land,” he explained. As for Israel, the Jewish state was acting as “a terrorist organization rather than a state.”
“We will tell the whole world that Israel is a war criminal,” he told a pro-Palestinian rally. “We are making preparations for this. We will declare Israel a war criminal.”
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If such moral inversion sounds familiar, it is because it is commonplace with Erdogan. The Turkish leader complains bitterly about the United States’s alliance with Syrian Kurds but forgets that the U.S. embraced the Kurds only after Erdogan provided assistance first to Syria’s al Qaeda affiliates and then to the Islamic State. As with Hamas, Erdogan and his lieutenants argued that these Syrian radicals were not terrorists. As the Kurds resisted the siege of Kobane, Erdogan allowed Islamic State fighters to transit through Turkey and even attack the Kurds from across the Turkish border.
Erdogan regularly embraces radical religious rhetoric. He has described himself as the “servant of sharia.” While Turkey’s partisans in Washington and Turkey’s diplomats urge a strategic alliance because Turkey is home to the second largest army in NATO, to his domestic audience, Erdogan describes the Turkish military as “the army of Muhammad” waging “holy war” against “enemies of Islam.” After the International Criminal Court indicted Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, Erdogan dismissed the charges. “A Muslim could not commit genocide; he is not capable of it,” he explained.
By Erdogan’s standards, then, anything Islamic extremist groups do is justified, while those who fight Islamism are the true suspects. This inversion is at play in Erdogan’s approach to the Jewish state. Israel’s sin, in Erdogan’s eyes, is it is a Jewish state. There is no scenario in which he could conceive Jews to be right if that meant any Muslim might be wrong.
The hypocrisy goes beyond Israel.
Prior to the formal declaration of the Turkish Republic, the Turkish army slaughtered more than one million Armenians and put to fire centuries-old Greek communities. Such genocide and ethnic cleansing differ from Turkey’s struggle to oust European armies following the 1920 Treaty of Sèvres. These were not battles, but rather the preplanned slaughter of entire Armenian communities across eastern Anatolia.
Likewise, the Turks’ burning of Smyrna (today’s Izmir) was a preplanned ethnic cleansing. Turks killed perhaps 125,000 Greek and Armenian civilians in the city over four days, a figure almost 20 times that which Turkey says Israel killed in Gaza. That the majority of those Israel eliminated in Gaza were Hamas fighters is not a distinction about which Erdogan cares. Those Turks killed inside today’s Turkey were Christians, and so, in Erdogan’s mind, not worthy of concern.
Certainly, Turkey is not the only country guilty of hypocrisy, but it distinguishes itself with its blatancy and continuity. Every accusation Erdogan makes about Israel is a crime that Turkey has committed against Kurds inside Turkey, in Syria, and in Iraq, and against Christians in Nagorno-Karabakh.
Consider Afrin, a Syrian district with a large indigenous Kurdish community that Turkey, both directly and by proxy, has ethnically cleansed. Turkish F-16s and drones continue to bomb Yezidi villages in Iraq. Just last month, the White House declared Turkey’s military action “undermines the campaign to defeat the Islamic State … and continues to pose an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States.”
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Turkey does not differentiate between toddler and terrorist; farmer, or fighter. By Turkey’s own account, it has eliminated thousands of Kurds in Syria since 2016. Some in Washington blindly repeat Turkey’s characterization of Syrian Kurds as Marxist, anti-American terrorists, but anyone who has observed the region firsthand disagrees. Northeastern Syria is not unlike Israel in its feel. For Erdogan, who considers Kurds corrupted Muslims, this is the sin. Erdogan may slam Benjamin Netanyahu. Both are arrogant, unpleasant men, but, when it comes to crimes against humanity, Erdogan sees his own reflection.
Michael Rubin (@mrubin1971) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.