With His Electoral Victory, Erdogan Is Set to Turn Turkey into the Global Leader of Islamic Extremism

Having claimed a victory in Sunday’s presidential election, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan is now entering his new term with the presidency’s powers enhanced by recent constitutional changes. Michael Rubin urges Washington to reconsider its historically friendly relationship with Ankara, and warns of the dangerous influence Turkey is trying to gain in the Middle East and beyond:

The partnership between Washington and Ankara was never arbitrary; it rested on shared values. The values the Turkish government now holds, however, are the antithesis of American democratic and liberal values. Erdogan has cracked down on the free press, imprisoned opponents, and engaged in hostage diplomacy. He unapologetically supports Islamist terrorist groups and threatens to betray U.S. military technology to Russia. . . .

The real problem with Turkey is not its relationship with the United States, however, but rather its relations with the world. Consider the case of Saudi Arabia: it grew tremendously wealthy in the 1970s on the back of the petrodollar and used that money to spread its intolerant and extreme vision of Islam around the world. . . . Saudi money, Saudi nongovernmental organizations, and Saudi-funded mosques are responsible for hundreds of thousands, if not more, deaths in conflicts from Paris to the Philippines and from Syria to Somalia.

That began to change not in the aftermath of the attacks on New York and Washington, but rather when al-Qaeda terrorists attacked inside Saudi Arabia itself. The Saudis quickly understood the blowback they risked. After all, al-Qaeda essentially follows a theology and worldview taught in Saudi textbooks. The kingdom could no longer ensure its own security by ensuring that its militants focused their efforts on conflicts beyond its borders. . . . [A]s Saudi Arabia pulls back from its past role as the number-one financier of religious radicalism, Turkey may take its place. . . .

Had Erdogan sought to control his border [with Syria], Islamic State [might] never have seized the territory it did. While Erdogan has justified his incursion into the Afrin district in Syria as necessary for counterterrorism, he has allowed radical Syrian Islamist groups to fill the vacuum left by largely secular Kurds ethnically cleansed from the region. Turkey is also reaching out and using its imams to proselytize a more radical vision among Muslims in Africa; a leaked phone call suggests it may even have supplied arms to Boko Haram. Turkey’s new Islamist drive also determines its growing relationship with Sudan, Qatar, and the Hamas-run administration of the Gaza Strip.

Read more at Washington Examiner

More about: Politics & Current Affairs, Radical Islam, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, U.S. Foreign policy

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society