The Ottoman Empire Revivalist Campaign

 On July 10, 2002, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. declared

The resurrection of Hagia Sophia is the harbinger of the Masjid al-Aqsa's freedom. The resurrection of Hagia Sophia is the footsteps of the will of Muslims all over the world to exit the interregnum...The resurrection of Hagia Sophia is the symbol of the re-rise of our civilization sun.

Moreover  The President of the Jerusalem Islamic Foundations Council, Sheikh Abdulazim Selheb, Masjid al-Aqsa Imam Sheikh Ikrime Sabri and Sheikh Kemal al-Hatib, the vice-president of the northern wing of the 1948 Palestine Islamic Movement, 

expressed their satisfaction with the opening of Hagia Sophia as a mosque.

Selheb was told by Erdogan

Masjid al-Aqsa is under occupation. The occupation state is trying to Judaize the first kiblah of Muslims and the holy city of Jerusalem. However, I tell the invaders from here that you will not be able to achieve this as long as the ummah has such men."

This is all part of the Ottoman Empire revivalist campaign, to restore that grand enterprise. First was the Mavi Marmara, then the sponsoring of Hamas, then support for Jerusalem property purchases and now directly aimed at the Temple Mount. 

We have been warned.

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Three-Thousand Year Old Temple Reportedly Destroyed

But it wasn't in Jerusalem so you may not have read or heard about it:

AIN DARA, Syria (A.W.)—Both the Syrian government and the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights war monitor confirmed on Sunday that Turkish shelling of Syria’s Afrin region has seriously damaged the Ain Dara Iron Age temple.

Reuters has circulated that Ain Dara, an iron age temple with remains of large carved basalt blocks and wall reliefs, 

Credit

was hit with shells and that the Syrian government’s antiquities department called for international pressure on Turkey “to prevent the targeting of archaeological and cultural sites”.

And Turkey was so upset with Israel in 2007 when it was fixing the external entrance to the Temple Mount and archaeological excavations were done under Turkish supervision and 24-hour cameras. And Erdogan is increasing his demands to retake the site as in Ottoman times.

As we know: if it involves Jews it makes the news.

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And Israel Apologizes?

.

For further reading:-

Barry Rubin.

Michael Koplow.

At EOZ.
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Who Is Hugging Erdogan Now?

Who, you ask?

Who would hug Turkey's Islamist anti-Israel saber-rattling leader?

Well, take a look:-

Story here.

Give us a hug, Barack?

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Daniel Pipes On Turkey As A Rogue State

Here's one of several of his points.  Turkey is:

Looking for a fight with Israel: In the tradition of Gamal Abdel Nasser and Saddam Hussein, the Turkish prime minister deploys anti-Zionist rhetoric to make himself an Arab political star. One shudders to think where, thrilled by this adulation, he may end up. After Ankara backed a protest ship to Gaza in May 2010, the Mavi Marmara, whose aggression led Israeli forces to kill eight Turkish citizens plus an ethnic Turk, it has relentlessly exploited this incident to stoke domestic fury against the Jewish state. Erdoğan has called the deaths a casus belli, speaks of a war with Israel "if necessary," and plans to send another ship to Gaza, this time with a Turkish military escort.

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The Dumbbell

Go on, create a regional crisis.

Send this to you local Turkish diplomatic mission:



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A Very But Very Testy Horse

Erdogan gets balled but as far as I can tell, this horse was not Israeli (maybe actually Arabian):

(Kipppah tip: RA)



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You're Not Really Going to Trust This Man, Are You?

This man:-



He wants to hold on to Iran's uranium reserves in a:-

...uranium swap proposal that Iran intends to submit to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)...Iran signed the nuclear swap deal on May 17th after three days of mediation involving Turkey and Brazil. Under the deal, Iran will send 1,200kg of low-enriched uranium to Turkey, in exchange for 120kg of more highly-enriched uranium within a year.

This is what he says about Israel:

“No one should test Turkey’s patience. Our hostility is as strong as our friendship. It is a serious harm to lose Turkey’s friendship,” he said.

Calling Israel’s raid on the ships carrying aid to the Gaza Strip a “bloody massacre”, Erdogan said: “The bloody massacre deserves every kind of curse. This massacre is against the international law, the conscience of humanity and peace. Israel must end its blockade of Gaza and be punished for the attack on the aid ships. We will go till the end. Turkey is not a young state, or a tribal state. No one should test Turkey’s patience,” he said.

And more:-

In 2004, Erdogan called Israel a “terrorist state” after we eliminated Sheikh Yassin. In February 2006, he hosted Hamas leader Haled Mashal in Ankara. In January 2009, he staged a temper tantrum at the Davos Conference calling Shimon Peres an expert killer. In October 2009, the Turkish state television channel started airing a fiction series showing Israeli soldiers intentionally murdering Palestinian children. In November 2009, Erdogan declared that he’d rather meet with Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir (accused of war crimes and genocide by the International Criminal Court) than with Benjamin Netanyahu. In March 2010, Erdogan claimed that the Temple Mount, Hebron and Rachel’s tomb were never Jewish sites. The list goes on.

Catholics should be wary:

A Roman Catholic bishop was stabbed to death in eastern Turkey on Thursday, a day before he had planned to travel to Cyprus for the visit of Pope Benedict XVI...In recent years, several priests have been attacked in Turkey; one was shot to death in 2006 amid widespread Muslim anger over the publication of cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad.

Of course, Argentina needs to be careful, too:-

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan canceled a trip to Argentina on Sunday [May 30] after Buenos Aires authorities halted the display of a bust of Turkey's founder, a move Turkey blamed on Armenian lobbyists.

The row over the statue, due to be unveiled in a park, comes during a high-profile trip to South America by Erdogan. Turkey's Foreign Ministry said in a statement the two-day visit, which was to have begun Sunday, had been canceled, and it hoped Argentina would take steps to remove the shadow cast on Turkish-Argentine relations.

Davos and David

That's the Davos Conference and that's David Ignatius of the Washington Post.

He recalls:-

I had just “moderated” a heated discussion of the Gaza war at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. The session became a minor international incident when I told Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan that, because we had run out of time, he could not have another round of comments responding to Israeli President Shimon Peres, whereupon Erdogan walked off the stage. In the aftermath, I received many outraged messages complaining I had censored Erdogan and sided with the Israelis.

For someone who has spent much of his career trying to operate in the middle of the Middle East conflict and working hard to avoid any appearance of bias, it was an unpleasant situation. Trust me, you would not like to examine the e-mails I got or read the articles in the Turkish press about the incident. There are several explanations I could offer about what happened: that we were 15 minutes late, that each of the speakers, and especially Peres, had abused the time limits, and that the organizers had signaled it was time to end the event.

But that only obscures the larger point. At Davos, I found myself in the middle of a fight where there was no longer a middle. My efforts to do what moderators do—let everyone talk for a while and then find a few inches of common ground—blew up in my face...

...Talking about Hamas’s rocket attacks on Israeli civilians, the normally placid Peres was almost shouting at Davos, angrier than I had ever seen him. Erdogan, in turn, was hot with indignation, voicing a rage that is felt across the Muslim world, and furious that I didn’t give him time to express those feelings fully. It’s understandable, what happened. But it’s not a debate that anyone can “moderate.”