Turkish ‘Princess’ Vows That Islam Will ‘Break the Western Cross’
BY RAYMOND IBRAHIM
Republished below in full unedited for informational, educational, & research purposes.
Resorting to jihadist rhetoric, Esra, the daughter of Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan—who just gained another five years as president—recently attacked the West and Christianity.
In a tweet written, not in her native Turkish, but in Islam’s tongue, Arabic, the “first daughter” declared that “There is little left for the Islamic crescent to break the Western cross.”
This phrase is as universally understood by Muslims, as it is universally misunderstood by Westerners, and is, therefore, emblematic of Muslim continuity and Western confusion.
It has both a literal and figurative meaning.
Concerning the former, Muslims have been, quite literally, “breaking the cross” in keeping with their prophet’s commandment. Past and present, Muslims have destroyed and continue to destroy the crucifix—in cemeteries, in churches, on Christians—as a reflection of their animosity to the Gospel, specifically, that Christ was crucified, killed, and resurrected, three doctrines central to Christianity that Islam rejects.
Indeed, the June 2015 cover of the Islamic State’s magazine, Dabiq, featured a Muslim breaking a cross off a church steeple, with the words “Break the Cross” underneath.
More figuratively, “break the cross” has always meant “defeat Christianity”—another thing that Muslims, past and present, have been fervently striving for—including, apparently, the ostensibly “secularized” daughter of Turkey’s president, a “sociologist” by profession.
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In the past, Muslims managed, through violent jihad, to swallow up three-quarters of the original Christian world—including the Middle East, North Africa, and “Turkey” (Anatolia). They also temporarily conquered several other Christian territories (Spain, the Mediterranean, the Balkans), and continuously harried the rest (eventually even reaching Iceland for slaves and provoking a newborn American into its first war as a nation).
Back then, when Islam was a formidable force, Europeans fought tooth and nail to repulse the terrorists and safeguard their homeland’s faith and heritage.
Today, however, when Islam is weak and easily confined, the West finds itself bending over backwards to accommodate and take in more and more Muslim migrants—many of whom, rather than show gratitude, display Islam’s traditional contempt for and prey on “infidels.”
In short, whereas Muslims—including Turkey’s president and offspring—know well and strive to achieve the meaning of “break the cross,” Westerners, who for over a millennium had been on the receiving end of such animosity, until they managed to reverse the tide in the eighteenth century, are today, not only not doing anything about it, but facilitating it.
In this sense, the assertion that “There is little left for the Islamic crescent to break the Western cross” is more reflective of the state of Christianity in the West than of Islam.
Raymond Ibrahim, an expert in Islamic history and doctrine, is the author of Defenders of the West: The Christian Heroes Who Stood Against Islam (2022); Sword and Scimitar: Fourteen Centuries of War between Islam and the West (2018); Crucified Again: Exposing Islam’s New War on Christians (2013); and The Al Qaeda Reader (2007). He has appeared on C-SPAN, Al-Jazeera, CNN, NPR, and PBS and has been published by the New York Times Syndicate, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Financial Times, Weekly Standard, Chronicle of Higher Education, and Jane’s Islamic Affairs Analyst. Formerly an Arabic linguist at the Library of Congress, Ibrahim has guest lectured at many universities, including the U.S. Army War College, briefed governmental agencies such as U.S. Strategic Command, and testified before Congress. He has been a visiting fellow/scholar at a variety of Institutes—from the Hoover Institution to the National Intelligence University—and is currently the Distinguished Senior Shillman Fellow at the Gatestone Institute and the Judith Friedman Rosen Fellow at the Middle East Forum. His full biography is available here. Follow Raymond on Twitter and Facebook. For media inquiries, please contact communications@