The Sick Man of Europe

The massive Erdogan's tantrum has been building up pressure for a few years now. Anyone who declares himself surprised or caught off-guard cannot have been paying much attention. I have, though. Here are some reminders from past blogposts:

August 26, 2007

"The Turkish government is pressuring Israel in an effort to reverse an American Jewish organization's decision to recognize Turkey's massacre of Armenians during World War I as genocide.

A meeting between Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul and Israel's ambassador to Ankara, Pinhas Avivi, became "shrill," according to Foreign Ministry sources in Jerusalem. Gul expressed Ankara's "anger and disappointment" over the matter.

On Tuesday, the Anti-Defamation League announced that it recognizes the events in which an estimated 1.5 million Armenians were massacred as "genocide."

ADL's national director Abraham Foxman, said he made the decision after discussing the matter with historians and with Nobel Peace Prize laureate and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel."

January 29, 2009

Ben Dror Yemini had something to say, sometime ago, about the profoundly hypocritical and crazy audacity of the Turkish PM, here:

"Shameless Erdogan

Even the shameless Turkish leader Erdogan, joined the critics of Israel. Shameless, because it behooves him to keep his mouth shut. His country legislated laws that forbid mentioning the crimes perpetrated against the Armenians. If Israel had adopted the Turkish model, a third of all lecturers in the faculties of social sciences and humanities in Israeli universities would be imprisoned, because in Israel inflating the "Nakba" and other anti-Israel rhetoric actually lead to academic promotions...

Let's remind Erdogan of the tens of thousands of Kurds killed or slaughtered in the campaign to keep them quiet and subdued. Let us remind him of Leyla Zana and the short speech she made when elected to the Turkish Parliament. She didn't support terrorism. She didn't praise the lobbing of rockets from Kurdish to Turkish villages. She didn't call the Kurds "Shahids." Nothing like that. All she did was conclude her short speech with the words: "I take this oath for the brotherhood between the Turkish people and the Kurdish people." Her crime? She had made that "terrible" statement, only that final statement, in Kurdish. According to Turkish law, speaking that language is a crime. She lost her parliamentary immunity and was sentenced to 10 years of incarceration. When she wrote something from inside her jail, a further two years were added to her sentence.

Tell this to the Arab members of the Israeli Knesset. If judged according to your own laws, Mr Erdogan, they would all be rotting in jail. Now you are the object of their admiration. Hypocrisy has always been a quality some of them admire most. Now it's your turn, as well.

The shameless Turk quoted Gilad Atzmon. Who is Atzmon? Some answers, here.

Gilad Atzmon once compared himself (humble guy that he is) to Baruch Spinoza. I thought I might remind people what Spinoza thought of Turks:

“In this the Turks have achieved the greatest measure of success. They hold even discussion of religion to be sinful, and with their mass of dogma they gain such a thorough hold on the individual’s judgment that they leave no room in the mind for the exercise of reason, or even the capacity to doubt.”

I would think they are well-matched, the quoter and the quotee.

January 30, 2009

Mr. Erdogan reiterated that his frustration is with the Israeli government, and not with Jews."

And if you believe that, here is another reminder of how Erdogan's mind works in a similar matter that he finds vexatious:

September 05, 2010

"ANKARA, Turkey -- Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Tuesday threatened that some 100,000 illegal immigrants from Armenia might be extradited from his country. "There are around 170,000 Armenians living in our country. Of them, 70,000 are Turkish citizens and the rest are illegal immigrants who have been on Turkish territory for over 10 years. If the situation continues to develop like this, we will have to review our attitude towards them," Erdogan said in an interview with the Turkish service of BBC. The statement came after a US committee and Sweden recently approved resolutions to brand the 1915 killing of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire as genocide."

At this point we may well be in dire need of some comic relief.

So here it is. Prophetic, wasn't it?

______

Simply Jews has a post and I left a comment