Pipes: Islamist Turkey Overreaches

Daniel Pipes writes that Turkey's support for the Gaza flotilla is an abandonment of the nation's secular origins and warns that the government may overreach in their push for a stridently Islamist foreign policy.

If Ankara's irresponsible behavior has worrisome implications for the Middle East and Islam, it also has a mitigating aspect. Turks have been at the forefront of developing what I call Islamism 2.0, the popular, legitimate, and non-violent version of what Ayatollah Khomeini and Osama bin Laden tried to achieve forcefully via Islamism 1.0. I have predicted that Erdoğan's insidious form of Islamism "may threaten civilized life even more than does 1.0's brutality."

But his abandonment of earlier modesty and caution suggests that Islamists cannot help themselves, that the thuggishness inherent to Islamism must eventually emerge, that the 2.0 variant must revert to its 1.0 origins. As Martin Kramer posits, "the further Islamists are from power, the more restrained they are, as well as the reverse." This means it might be the case that Islamism presents a less formidable opponent, and for two reasons.

First, Turkey hosts the most sophisticated Islamist movement in the world, one that includes not just the AKP but the Fethullah Gülen mass movement, the Adnan Oktar propaganda machine, and more. AKP's new bellicosity has caused dissension; Gülen, for example, publicly condemned the "Free Gaza" farce, suggesting a debilitating internal battle over tactics could take place.

Second, if once only a small band of analysts recognized Erdoğan's Islamist outlook, this fact has now become self-evidently obvious for the whole world to see. Erdoğan has gratuitously discarded his carefully crafted image of a pro-Western "Muslim democrat," making it far easier to treat him as the Tehran-Damascus ally that he is.

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