The Wayward Ottoman

Recep Tayyip Erdogan is on his lecturing tour again. After repeatedly condemning Israel for (nonexistent) human rights violations, the Turkish Prime Minister has been warning Bashar Assad of Syria to restrain himself in countering protests across his troubled land. Erdogan is a fine one to talk as he has conducted a brutal campaign of repression against indigenous Kurds in their ancestral homeland even sending Turkish forces to murder troops in Iraq. Erdogan has waged a campaign to purge the Turkish military of his political opponents who might resist Erdogan's Islamization of the country which conflicts with the Constitution under which Mustafa Kemal Ataturk formed modern Turkey as a secular republic. Erdogan did nothing to prevent the murder of the most prominent Turkish advocate of justice for the Armenians, and Erdogan gave a wink and a nod to systemic discrimination against Turkey's tiny remaining Christian population, fostering a climate wherein his Islamist fellow travelers knew that Turkey would countenance the slaughter of three men of the staff of a Christian publishing house. Bashar Assad needs to be removed but does not need to hear the braying of a fellow ruthless dictator like Erdogan who seeks the power of the Sultan.