Erdoğan and His Arab “Brothers”

After the infamous Mavi Marmara incident of May 2010, Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and then foreign policy tzar Ahmet Davutoğlu (later PM and now an Erdoğan opponent) pledged to internationally isolate Israel. This was intended to help them advance their Islamist agenda and augment an emerging unity in the umma, preferably under Turkish leadership. A decade later, pragmatic Arab states are lining up to normalize relations with Israel, leaving state actors Iran and Turkey as well as non-state actor Hamas in a punishing position of international isolation—exactly where Turkey wanted to push Israel.

 
Neither the Ottoman nor the modern Turkish language has ever been short of racist proverbs denigrating Arabs and their culture. No more, said Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the Islamist leader who has been at the helm in Turkey since 2002. He made it a habit to publicly refer to Arabs, including his then regional nemesis Syrian president Bashar Assad, as “my Arab brothers.” His goal was to build a Muslim-Arab pact, a modern umma under Turkish leadership as in Ottoman times, to challenge Israel in the region and, more broadly, Western civilization. In 2010, Turkey’s state broadcaster TRT even launched an Arabic language channel, TRT Arabi. Sadly for Erdoğan, his attempt to fuse Islam and anti-Zionism seems to have fallen apart.

 
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Πηγή: besacenter.org