Turkey is Not a Thanksgiving Turkey

The war of words that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron are exchanging has raised political rhetoric and tempers in Hong Kong. In the city’s 25,000-strong French community, which is Asia’s largest, it is a topic of conversation at luncheon, cocktail and dinner gatherings, notably after Erdoğan upped the ante and called on Muslim nations to boycott French products.

“Never give credit to French-labelled goods, don’t buy them,” Erdoğan said. Some Muslim countries—Bangladesh, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Qatar, Jordan and Kuwait—have responded with anti-French protests and boycotts.

Denouncing France’s treatment of its six million Muslims— immigrants from former French colonies who now make Europe’s largest Muslim population—as a “lynch campaign similar to that against Jews in Europe before World War II,” Erdoğan urged European leaders to “tell the French president to stop his hate campaign.” The majority of Muslims in France is said to have been marginalized and subjected to systematic racism.

At the root of all this is Macron’s steadfast stand for the French citizen’s right to freedom of expression and Erdoğan’s unflinching faith in Islamic values. This friction came to a head five years ago in January 2015 when two well-armed Islamists charged into the Paris office of the French satirical publication Charlie Hebdo and killed 12 people and injured 11 others. Last month, Islamists stabbed three people to death in the church, Notre-Dame basilica, in Nice.  A fortnight before an Islamic terrorist beheaded with a cleaver a French middle-school teacher, Samuel Paty, in a Paris suburb because the teacher, conducting a class on freedom of expression, showed his students the controversial Charlie Hebdo cartoons, one of which portrayed Prophet Muhammad naked with his genitals exposed.

While the right to freedom of expression regardless of minority sentiments is the contentious crux of the issue, Macron has declared that France “will not give up our cartoons.”

“What is the problem this perso1`n called Macron has with Islam and Muslims? Macron needs mental treatment,” retorted Erdoğan, while France withdrew its ambassador to Turkey.

The tension between the two countries is not confined to religion alone.  A subject I discuss at length in my book Custom Maid Knowledge for New World Disorder, pages 16, 185-188, 244, 248,340, 611-617 (see the free chapter download at the bottom of the page).

The historical conflicts between them bubble up to the surface at any discussion about French-Muslim relations. “The Turks are Turkeys and should all be killed for American Thanksgiving,” said a Frenchman I was discussing French colonial history with at a birthday party. “Turkey is not a Turkey,” I said and pointed out the French political mess that Syria and Lebanon have inherited, which has resulted in the wars there and dragged in Turkey as a peacekeeper in Syria. A flood of war refugees has since moved to Turkey. Now, refugees from anywhere seeking asylum in the affluent parts of Europe, head to Greece, an EU member, through Turkey that has land and sea border with Greece. Thus, Turkey now has the world’s largest refugee population, more than four million.

Turkey is also uneasy with the support France lends Greece in its territorial dispute with Turkey as well as the dispute over oil and gas reserves in the Aegean and Mediterranean seas. In August, France sent a navy flotilla to the Eastern Mediterranean to support Greece in its efforts to chase away Turkish vessels.

Turkey has hydrocarbon research and drilling vessels in both Aegean and Mediterranean seas. Greece, Cyprus and the EU led by France demand these vessels be removed. The EU recognizes the waters as belonging to Greece and is threatening to issue the sanctions Cyprus and Greece are seeking against Turkey.

Turkey and Greece are also at loggerheads over their political differences regarding the divided island of Cyprus. Besides, they have political and military differences over Libya, where Turkey has secured port access on the Mediterranean for its ships and navy in the growing energy dispute.

To make matters worse, the fighting between Armenia and Azerbaijan in the disputed Caucus Mountainous region of Nagorno-Karabakh, an ethnic Armenian enclave that is part of Azerbaijan under international law, has pitched Turkey, supporting Muslim Azerbaijan, against Christian Armenia, that the EU and France support.

As Turkey celebrates its 97th anniversary of the proclamation of the Republic of Turkey – and the centennial anniversary of the year in which the Turkish parliament, the Grand National Assembly, was formed, Erdoğan is trying to position himself as the pious political and economic leader of the Sunni Muslim world, not just in the Middle East, but across the globe. Similarly, Macron is trying to position himself and France as the enlightened secular European leader.

Both countries are also competing on the economic front in former resource-rich French colonies in Africa, where France has deployed more than 5,000 military personnel with combat aircraft, logistic vehicles and drones.

Erdoğan is rebuilding a 21st-century Ottoman political and economic Turkic Erdoğan Empire – and the Catholic French Crusaders be damned – French wine and products are being replaced by Turkish wines and delights.

Happy Thanksgiving Weekend.

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Illustration: Mark Caparosa

Download free chapters of Custom Maid Knowledge for New World Disorder, and read pages 16, 185-188, 244, 248,340, 611-617.