Article published in The Daily Telegraph, 30 October 2020. © Richard Kemp
Yesterday, three days after Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan savagely condemned President Emmanuel Macron’s brave stand against radical Islamism in the wake of the jihadist beheading of schoolteacher Samuel Paty in Paris, there were violent attacks in France and at the French consulate in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. In Nice, a woman was beheaded and two others killed. In Jeddah a knifeman stabbed a guard outside the French consulate.
Erdogan, purportedly incensed by Macron’s intention to bring in legislation restraining the spread of radical Islamism in the wake of the schoolteacher’s murder, said the French president needed ‘mental treatment’ and called for the boycott of French consumer products. He likened France’s treatment of Muslims to the brutal repression of Jews in Germany before the Second World War.
Erdogan is a hard-line Islamist and he must have known the effect these words would have when uttered on the world stage. He may not have ordered the attacks in France but his incendiary bombast surely made them far more likely.
Erdogan’s AKP party is a reformatted version of the now banned National Salvation Party, which advanced a violent Islamist ideology. The AKP has a thin pro-Western and pro-democracy veneer, designed to camouflage an anti-democratic and de-secularising agenda.
This they have been fulfilling, locking up political opponents, undermining secular education, clamping down on public protests, seeking to harness the judiciary, controlling social media, marginalising the Western-influenced armed forces and throwing journalists into jail. In one of Erdogan’s most provocative acts, in Continue reading