BY CHRISTINE DOUGLASS-WILLIAMS
SEE: https://www.jihadwatch.org/2023/05/biden-tells-turkey-to-allow-sweden-into-nato-if-it-wants-us-f-16s;
Republished below in full unedited for informational, educational, & research purposes.
As America attempts a quid pro quo with Turkey despite its demands (it wants fighter jets as a reward for allowing Sweden to join NATO), another question is whether America should be selling fighter jets to Turkey at all, considering how they may be utilized by Turkey’s hostile President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Reuters reports:
U.S. President Joe Biden said Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan in a call on Monday repeated Ankara’s desire to buy F-16 fighter jets from the United States, while Biden told him Washington wanted Ankara to drop its objection to Sweden’s joining NATO.
The exchange took place when Biden called Erdogan to congratulate him on his victory in Turkey’s presidential election on Sunday.
“I spoke to Erdogan. I congratulated Erdogan. He still wants to work on something on the F-16s.
Erdogan’s ambitions are troubling. He seeks to revive the Ottoman Empire and has declared that Turkey has nothing that contradicts the Taliban’s beliefs. Turkey oppresses the Kurds. NBC published a report, “Turkey’s attack on Kurds in Syria betrays those doing the fighting against ISIS — and dying.” Erdogan bullies Greece, and is doggedly determined to enforce Islamic blasphemy laws globally — hence his blocking of Sweden from NATO over the burning of a Qur’an by Rasmus Paludan. In fact, Turkey has demanded that Swedes must fight those who “target Islam’ if it wants to join NATO.”
Turkey has no place in NATO, to begin with. Nor should it be further armed by America in exchange for Turkey acting in NATO’s interests and expanding that alliance to include Sweden, as opposed to Turkey attending to Islamic interests. Nonetheless, the Biden administration, which has been marked by its repeated counterproductive actions, including leaving billions of dollars worth of American military equipment in Afghanistan at the Taliban’s disposal, is advancing a quid pro quo arrangement with the likes of Erdogan, while denying that the deal is actually being framed in such terms. America hardly needs to be arming more Islamic enemies.
Perhaps Biden et al hope that any deal brokered by America to bring Sweden into the NATO fold might somehow ease America’s sunken reputation while boosting sales for Lockheed Martin. The issue is far from settled among American lawmakers, some of whom support the Biden strategy, despite Biden’s historical efforts to sell fighter jets to Turkey even prior to the Sweden-NATO issue. According to Congressman Gus Michael Bilirakis in 2021:
Turkey’s illegal and unfettered actions are indicative of President Erdogan’s transformation of Turkey to a rogue state led by a leader with a nationalistic philosophy, Neo-Ottoman ambitions, and a complete disregard for following international law.
A year later, in 2022, Bilirakis and Rep. Chris Pappas lead bipartisan opposition to a Biden administration proposal to sell weapons to Turkey.
Appeasement of enemies only weakens America. But that has been the strategy of the Biden administration on every front. Only now it is using the Sweden-Turkey-NATO stalemate opportunistically to further the same appeasement strategy.
Meanwhile, no matter what the Biden administration decides, Erdogan is already looking at other options from China and Russia.
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BY ROBERT SPENCER
SEE: https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/robert-spencer/2023/05/29/bidens-handlers-think-they-have-a-nato-ally-in-erdogan-but-erdogan-has-other-ideas-n1698829;
Republished below in full unedited for informational, educational, & research purposes.
Old Joe Biden’s congratulatory message to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan upon his highly questionable (hey, what election isn’t these days?) reelection was boilerplate from whoever writes his tweets, but nevertheless, it revealed yet again the growing gap between the world views of the two men. That gap has serious geopolitical implications that go all the way back to the anniversary that was observed on the day after the Turkish strongman’s reelection: May 29 marked 570 years since the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks and the extinguishing, after over two thousand years of continual existence, of the Roman Empire.
Biden’s Twitter wonk wrote on Sunday afternoon: “Congratulations to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Türkiye on his re-election. I look forward to continuing to work together as NATO Allies on bilateral issues and shared global challenges.” (Türkiye is what the nation of Turkey has renamed itself so as to minimize comparisons with a certain Thanksgiving bird. Yes, really.) Biden’s mouthpiece is blandly pleased about the prospect of the U.S. “continuing to work together as NATO Allies” with Erdogan’s Turkey, but Erdogan and his supporters have a very different set of priorities.
To celebrate Erdogan’s victory, his followers gathered in Istanbul’s Hagia Sophia mosque and screamed “Allahu akbar,” which does not mean “God is great,” as the Western establishment media routinely claims, but rather, “Allah is greater,” that is, greater than your god. It is a declaration of supremacy with immense implications. Hagia Sophia was built in the year 537 and stood for nearly a thousand years as the grandest and foremost cathedral in the entire Christian world. Then on May 29, 1453, the Ottoman Turks finally succeeded in entering Constantinople, which Islamic jihadis had been trying to do for nearly eight hundred years. Amid unfathomable bloodshed, Sultan Mehmed II had the Islamic profession of faith proclaimed inside the great cathedral and was converted to a mosque.
Hagia Sophia then stood for centuries as the Ottoman Empire’s statement of the superiority and supremacy of Islam over Christianity. By the early twentieth century, however, the Ottoman Empire had become “the sick man of Europe.” After siding with Germany and Austria-Hungary in World War I, it disintegrated altogether. Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the strongman of the newly constituted secular Turkish Republic, attributed the empire’s decline and fall to Islam, which he called “this theology of an immoral Arab” and dismissed as “a dead thing.” In 1934, Ataturk converted Hagia Sophia into a museum, and so instead of being a symbol of Islam’s triumph over Christianity, it became a symbol of secularism’s triumph over Islam.
Erdogan, however, could not and did not stand for that. As the New York Times noted Thursday, he “has reoriented Turkey’s national culture, promoting a nostalgic revival of the Ottoman past.” In 2020, he reconverted Hagia Sophia into a mosque, making into a revived symbol of Islam’s superiority to Christianity, and a new symbol of Islam’s triumph over secularism. During the just-concluded presidential campaign, Erdogan crowed about his conversion of Hagia Sophia: “The entire West got mad – but I did it.” The re-mosquing of Hagia Sophia was the centerpiece of Erdogan’s program of neo-Ottomanism. And now, the Times opined just before the election that an Erdogan electoral victory would mean that “his neo-Ottomanism will have survived its strongest test in two decades.”
The Times, however, assumes that Erdogan’s neo-Ottomanism is all about rallying nationalist sentiment in order to get votes. It is actually of much greater significance. Erdogan’s neo-Ottomanism is an integral aspect of his stance toward his neighbors. In February 2018, he declared his desire to reconquer the lands the Ottoman caliphate once ruled: “Those who think that we have erased from our hearts the lands from which we withdrew in tears a hundred years ago are wrong. We say at every opportunity we have that Syria, Iraq, and other places in the geography [map] in our hearts are no different from our own homeland. We are struggling so that a foreign flag will not be waved anywhere where adhan [Islamic call to prayer in mosques] is recited. The things we have done so far [pale in comparison to the] even greater attempts and attacks [we are planning for] the coming days, inshallah [Allah willing].”
Related: Muslims Scream ‘Allahu Akbar’ as Hagia Sophia Officially Becomes a Mosque
Erdogan’s Ottoman revanchism has important implications for the NATO alliance. Turkey is increasingly belligerent toward Greece, a fellow NATO country that Erdogan considers to be a rightful part of the Turkish domain. Erdogan’s daughter recently proclaimed that “the crescent will win over Cross of the West.” In Nov. 2022, a Turkish TV channel displayed a map of the projected “Turkish Sphere” in 2050. It included Arabia, Egypt, Libya, Greece, Iraq, Turkmenistan, and more. In Sept. 2022, Erdogan’s interior minister, Suleyman Soylu, declared: “We want to root out America….We don’t need the USA. We do not need a Europe that is unaware of our religion, culture, and belief… We must dismantle the USA.”
Biden’s handlers and NATO’s top dogs should consider all this carefully, but they won’t. They should also ponder the lesson of May 29: great empires that were once thought to be invincible can and do fall. Are they foolish, and ultimately self-defeating, enough to continue to think they have a friend in an increasingly open enemy such as Erdogan? Once again, they won’t even consider the possibility.
