Infamous Turkish Islamist strongman Recep Tayyip Erdogan has apparently been aggrandizing the video of the horrific New Zealand mosque shootings for personal political gain back home. The infamous Islamist and Muslim Brotherhood ally is currently attempting to rally his party, AKP (“Justice and Development Party,” in English), ahead of local Turkish elections later this month.
BBC reports:
Mr Erdogan said part of gun suspect Brenton Tarrant’s manifesto was to keep Turks from Europe.
New Zealand Foreign Minister Winston Peters told Turkish officials showing the video was “unfair” and endangered his country’s citizens abroad.
Friday’s attack on two mosques in Christchurch left 50 people dead.
The attacker live-streamed video of the killings and it was widely shared and downloaded as social media firms raced to take the footage down. …
Sunday’s rallies were aimed at galvanising support among [Erdogan’s] conservative power base ahead of a local election at the end of this month.
The prime motive was to condemn global Islamophobia — along with the West’s response to it — and to criticise political opponents inside Turkey as weak.
Mr Erdogan pointed to specific mentions of Turkey by the suspect in his manifesto.
The president said the suspect had visited Turkey twice and wanted Turkish Muslims removed from Turkey’s European territory on the western side of the Bosphorus.
New Zealand Foreign Minister Winston Peters has, as the BBC notes, been consistent in his condemnations of Erdogan’s airing the horrific video. “Anything of that nature that misrepresents this country — given that [the suspect] was a non-New Zealand citizen — imperils the future and safety of the New Zealand people and our people abroad and it’s totally unfair,” Peters said. “We had a long dialogue on the need for any other country, or Turkey for that matter, to ensure that our country, New Zealand, was not misrepresented.”
As The Daily Wire noted just yesterday, Erdogan has also been in the news this week for the resurfacing of a controversial meeting he held in New York City in 2017 with then-Minnesota state representative Ilhan Omar. Under Erdogan, Turkey has undergone a sizable — and, many fear, irredeemable — shift away from secular democracy and toward Islamist dictatorship.
Under Erdogan today, Turkey has become the number one jailer of journalists in the entire world. Although the modern Turkish state was founded by the famously pro-secularization Atatürk following the post-World War I demise of the Ottoman Empire, Turkey under Erdogan — though it remains a NATO state — has abandoned its secularist history and has drifted quickly toward Islamism.
Erdogan has worked hard to position himself as the Muslim world’s number one supporter of the Palestinian-Arab cause — a task perhaps made easier by the reform-minded current Saudi leadership’s desire to downplay Palestinian aspirations in order to curry clandestine favor with Israel and thereby better work to jointly thwart the two nations’ mutual enemy, Iran. Today, Erdogan’s Turkey staunchly supports the Hamas Sunni supremacist terrorist regime in the Gaza Strip. Under Erdogan, Turkey has also greatly warmed its ties with Qatar — a tiny peninsular nation that disproportionately funds much of the Middle East’s Sunni Islamist extremism.