The government of Turkey has increased its anti-Christian rhetoric as President Erdogan prepares to revive Turkey as the great Ottoman protector and promulgator of Islam.
One of the ways that Turkey has been making small acts of “revenge” against her neighbor, Greece, is to target the islands surrounding Turkey in her possession or Greek possession and attempt to “Turkify” them. This was seen in Turkey building up a naval presence on small islands near disputed territory with Greece in February 2018.
Turkey is repeating her actions against on the island of Heybeliada. There is a major Greek Orthodox seminary there which was opened in 1844 and forcibly closed by the Turkish government in 1971. The government has offered to re-open it if the seminary agrees to be a part of the public University of Istanbul, which the church has refused. Now, the Turkish government is planning to construct a massive Islamic school right next to it:
Presidency of Religious Affairs Administration Services General Director Haydar Bekiroğlu has said that “Islamic Education Center” will be built on land of 200 decares in Heybeliada.
As part of the project, Bekiroğlu listed items such as ”International Theology Program Students, terror victim students from East and Southeastern regions, students studying at group A and B Quran Courses, providing course of belongingness and values to students from abroad”.
Including Sanatorium and Çam Port
Speaking to bianet, Architect Korhan Gümüş stated that the sanatorium and Çam Port are also on this land and said:“This matter is being politicized. This politics is of course a politics of tension remaining from past.
“People look at it in terms of religious antagonism, not İstanbul or Turkey.
“A halki seminary was built there in the past. Building Islamic Education Center right next to it gives the feeling of revenge.
“This is like old fears haunting us again in Turkey. It’s like these people don’t live in this country, there’s this fear that those people are spies of foreign countries. Shadow of such fears is falling upon cities.
“We’re inside the stage of political representation”
“Paradox is this. Struggle for the Atatürk Cultural Center, the grand mosque built in Taksim, struggle for Taksim. It is now taking place on a different level and we have to realize it.“We’ve increasingly started to live in an aquarium intensified within stage of political representation.
“This matter of memory was covered up in Yassıada by calling it natural heritage.
“Today, following the same reasoning might backlash.
“For this reason, before the project, we have to try to talk about this matter to learn how to deal with these ghosts that haunt us as to the heritage and history”. (source)
The reason the Turkish government is doing this is because, as Erdogan has made no secret of, he hates Christianity and even the few Christians that are left in Turkey he wants to see that they are eventually annihilated by Islam.
Turkey has openly said that they are building up their economy on the Germanic “manufacture and export” model, and with assistance from the Germans and Americans have become one of the most powerful militaries in Europe and the world.
While originally destroyed, Turkey, the historical bane of Christians and Christianity in the Middle East and Europe, has been revived to a great extent with the help of the USA in order to serve as a lever against the Russians. However, the Turks do not view history in the same way. The fact that the USA, a theoretically “Christian” country has helped them to rise again is, in the Islamic view, a proof of the superiority of Islam and that she will once again be revived to her historical position of power.
America and the Western world see this as a game of geopolitics, which they are indeed partaking of. Turkey sees this as a game, but also as a realization of Islamic prophecy and so emboldens her more to attempt to revive her past that, working with pagan, pan-Turkic nationalism and a Sufic form of Islam will once again bring Islam around the entire world. She has a long memory, and has not forgotten what she wants to become.
Five hundred years ago, Turkey was besieging Europe and assisting with the Protestant revolution in Germany as a part of her plans to conquer and spread Islam. She still remembers those as her “glory days.” For the USA, she can barely remember the 1950s, which was America’s “heyday” for many, and that memory is declining more with each passing day. Five centuries ago the USA did not exist, and with America’s generally dismal knowledge of history, it is hard to say what, if anything, people will remember of the past for those now and in the future.
That is OK as far as Turkey is concerned. She has been around for centuries, and expects to be around for centuries more. It took her almost seven centuries to fully conquer Anatolia, and she is in no rush, especially that while her imperial dreams were disrupted by the 20th century, that she is being actively rebuild gives her even more motivation to continue in the future as she has in the past.
And make no mistake, once Turkey is ready, she is going to do what she always did.
The question is now, will the “Christians” today be ready?
That is yet to be seen.