Turkey’s security cabinet, which is chaired by and at the recommendation of President Recep Erdogan extended Turkey’s “state of emergency” for another three months. This makes fifteen months that Turkey has been in a “state of emergency” since the “failed coup attempt” last year:
Government spokesman Bekir Bozdağ on Monday stated that Turkey’s cabinet approved the recommendation of the National Security Council which held a meeting earlier the same day, chaired by President Tayyip Erdoğan, to extend a state of emergency after last year’s failed coup for another three months.
Fifteen months have passed since the state of emergency was declared on July 20, 2016 following the failed coup attempt. (source)
In response, Erdogan has ordered over 1200 people last week alone, the supermajority of them with alleged ties to Fethullah Gulen, rounded up and arrested. It is likely that most of these people will be imprisoned indefinately without trial, tortured, or executed:
Turkish security forces detained 1,210 people over the last week for suspected links to terrorist groups or last year’s failed coup, the interior ministry said on Monday.
A total of 947 of those were detained for suspected links to the Fetullah Terrorist Organization (FETÖ) network of U.S.-based ringleader Fethullah Gülen, whom Ankara holds responsible for a failed coup in July last year.
A total of 249 people were martyred and more than 2,100 injured in the coup attempt perpetrated by FETÖ.
Another 205 were detained for suspected ties to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which has carried out a separatist insurgency against Turkey for three decades. More than 40,000 people have been killed in the conflict.
Forty-nine people were detained over alleged links to Daesh and nine others were held for suspected ties to “leftist terrorist groups”, the ministry said. (source)
Meanwhile this is happening, Erdogan is expanding his reach in his fight against “Gulenism” well beyond the reach of Turkey’s own borders. According to a recent story, Erdogan is asking the Albanian government for the extradition of a Turkish citizen living in Albania, Muhammet Aydogmus, to Turkey to face trial for “leaking state secrets about Erdogan and his family” as part of the “Gulenist” movement:
Albanian police are considering Turkey’s request to extradite a man suspected of leaking secret state documents and private information about President Recep Tayyip Erdogan (pictured) and his family.
The Turkish national, Muhammet Aydogmus, was detained 9 October in the Albanian city of Durres, along with his wife and two children. According to Balkan Insight, police said they were attempting to travel to Italy using false passports.
Turkey claims Aydogmus is a member of the Hizmet movement directed by the exiled Muslim cleric Fethullah Gulen, whom Ankara accuses of masterminding the bloody July 2016 coup attempt.
Erdogan’s government has jailed thousands of suspected Gulen followers and fired tens of thousands of state employees it claims were corrupted by the teachings of the U.S.-based preacher, whose followers run a worldwide network of private schools.
Erdogan took the anti-Gulen struggle to the Ottoman Empire’s old Balkan lands last week, winning the backing of his Serbian counterpart, Aleksandar Vucic.
Speaking in Novi Pazar, the main city in the mainly Muslim Sandjak district in Serbia, Erdogan again denounced what Turkey styles the Fethullah Terrorist Organization, or FETO: “We will root out the traitorous FETO network from the Balkans just as we did in our own country.”
“I am aware of the fight against FETO Mr. Vucic is engaging in,” he said, as quoted by the Turkish daily Yeni Safak.
Erdogan began his visit the previous day in Belgrade, where Vucic promised “there will be no cooperation with followers” of Gulen, RFE/RL reports. (source)
Likewise recently, a Turkish national living and working as a teacher in Pakistan and his family were arrested and deported back to Turkey at the insistence of Erdogan under the claims they are part of the “Gulen” movement:
A Turkish teacher and his family who were abducted in Pakistan last month have been deported from the country in defiance of a court ruling, a source and a lawyer said Monday, sparking fears for human rights.
Kacmaz Mesut, his wife and two young daughters were picked up in September by plain-clothed officers, blindfolded and bound before being loaded into trucks and taken away, eyewitnesses have said.
Lawyers petitioned the courts on behalf of the missing as fears swirled they were targeted for allegedly having ties to an exiled preacher, Ankara blames for last year’s coup attempt.
The father of the family, Kacmaz Mesut, was a former director of PakTurk International Schools and Colleges, private schools popular in Pakistan allegedly backed by US-based Turkish preacher Fethullah Gulen’s Hizmet group.
Ankara accuses Gulen of masterminding a coup attempt against Erdogan’s government in 2016 — an allegation the cleric strongly denies — and is seeking his extradition from the US.
Pakistani officials refused to comment in the wake of the family’s disappearance.
But a friend of the family who spoke said on condition of anonymity Monday — as he feared for his own security — said Turkish police had flown to Pakistan to take custody of them.
“Kacmaz Mesut, his wife and two young daughters were handed over to Turkish police at Islamabad airport on Friday night,” he said.
“I spoke on phone with Kacmaz Mesut’s daughters who confirmed that they have reached Istanbul, but their parents were still in custody while they have been handed over to relatives,” he continued.
The daughters, aged 14 and 10, also said that Turkish police manhandled their father during the flight, he added.
Usama Malik, a lawyer for the family, confirmed the deportation and said it had gone ahead despite a ruling by the Lahore High Court directing authorities not to take any action while the petition was still pending. (source)
As all of this was happening this week, there was a major development the previous week when Turkish government officials arrested Metin Topuz, a Turkish employee of the US consulate in Istanbul in a move unprecedented in modern times. The move has added strain to US-Turkish relations, but Erdogan has defended his actions, saying the man was a “known Gulenist” and that he is asking for the US to extradite Gulen to Turkey from the USA in order ‘better’ US-Turkish relations:
When they met last month in New York, President Trump hailed what he called his “personal relationship” with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and said the United States and Turkey were “as close as we have ever been.”
Erdogan called Trump “my dear friend Donald.”
Close observers of Ankara and Washington would have been forgiven for rolling their eyes. For the past several years, the ties between them have repeatedly frayed to near the breaking point, only to be temporarily patched. On Sunday, they snapped.
Following the arrest last week of Metin Topuz, a Turkish employee of the U.S. Consulate in Istanbul, the United States announced that it was immediately suspending the issuance of non-immigrant visas in Turkey. Ankara quickly responded with identical restrictions, suddenly upending the plans of countless Turkish and American tourists, students, businesspeople and others who did not already possess the necessary travel documents.
While the Turkish government provided no information about the Topuz arrest, the Daily Sabah, a pro-government paper, said in a Monday editorial that he was accused of “facilitating the escape” from Turkey of “known Gulenists” — followers of a U.S.-based Turkish cleric, Fethullah Gulen, whom Turkey accuses of being behind a July 2016 coup attempt.
That report and others provoked John Bass, the outgoing U.S. ambassador to Turkey, to post a 4½ -minute video on the embassy site to “explain” the visa suspension decision. Topuz, who worked in an office coordinating with Turkish law enforcement and “ensuring the security of American and Turkish citizens,” was the second such U.S. diplomatic employee arrested this year, Bass said, raising questions “about whether the goal of some officials is to disrupt the long-standing cooperation between Turkey and the United States.”
Without guarantees of Turkey’s respect for “the principles of rule of law that all modern democracies follow,” he said, the United States could not be sure its facilities were safe. He expressed hope the suspension of new visas at U.S. facilities in Turkey would not last long but offered no prediction.
Turkish prosecutors also said Monday in a vaguely worded statement that they had summoned yet another consulate staffer to testify. The statement mentioned that the staffer’s wife and son had been detained on Gulen-related allegations but did not say what charges, if any, the staffer faced.
Other than Bass’s video, neither the State Department nor the White House made any comment Monday on the Turkey situation. Erdogan, traveling in Ukraine, called it “saddening.”
But the administration’s sharp action appeared to mark a turning point in what Soner Cagaptay, a Turkish American political scientist at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and author of a book on Erdogan, “The New Sultan,” called the long-standing idea “that the U.S. would cut some slack for Erdogan and look the other way” in the belief that its relationship with Turkey was bigger than the Turkish president. (source)
What you are seeing happen here is not something new or unique, and our message at Shoebat.com about Erdogan remains as we have been warning for a long time. The essence of the plan itself has not changed. Erdogan still sees himself as a god who wants to be worshipped, Erdogan is continuing to purge anybody he thinks might be an enemy to him, and Erdogan is using the Gulen movement as a false front to deflect scandal away from himself while consolidating his own power.
Fethullah Gulen
The reason why Erdogan is so obsessed with destroying people who associate in any way with the Gulen movement is because Gulen’s movement is very critical of Erdogan’s attempts to crown himself Sultan. He is the only potential impedance to Erdogan’s rise to the power of Turkey’s Ottoman days, and in true form of any Ottoman Sultan, he will accept nothing less than absolute control over his entire “empire” and will mercilessly crush anybody who he thinks could possibly stand in his way. He already destroyed the previous Turkish PM, Ahmet Davutoglu, and he has even attempted to murder his own children in order to blame it on his political rivals:
Twitter whistleblower Fuat Avni claimed on Monday that President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has ordered the intelligence agency head to stage a false assassination plot against his son Bilal Erdoğan in order to blame the Gülen movement.
Avni, a government insider who has been revealing plots by Erdoğan and his associates, said Erdoğan gave instructions to Hakan Fidan, the head of the National Intelligence Organization (MİT), to stage an attack to inflict light injuries on Bilal in what looks like an assassination attempt. Erdoğan will use the assault to associate the Gülen movement with terror and violence.
The Gülen movement, also known as the Hizmet movement, is a civic, peaceful and volunteer-driven movement inspired by Turkish Islamic scholar Fethullah Gülen. The movement emphasizes science, education, moderation and interfaith culture. Gülen, who has been critical of Erdoğan and the government over pervasive corruption, has been targeted by Erdoğan since the graft investigations that went public in December 2013. (source)
Turkey’s ultimate goal is to get Fethullah Gulen himself, and he is using all means of pressure that he can by attempting to destroy anybody who associates with the Gulen movement around the world. Gulen is still alive, and at the moment, has permanent residence status in the USA but lacks formal citizenship with any nation, as Erdogan stripped Gulen of his Turkish citizenship and he is not a formal US citizen, which the US has so far refused to grant him:
Gülen procured a green card in 2001. Gülen’s application for permanent residence status in the US was controversial. Gülen first based his claim to residency on his status as an “alien of extraordinary ability” in the field of education – the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services categorically rejected it. As lawyers representing the Secretary of Homeland Security observed, Gülen has no degree or training in education and had authored no scholarly works. To the contrary, they argued, the evidence submitted by Gülen indicates that, far from being an academic, he seeks to cloak himself with academic status by commissioning academics to write about him and paying for conferences at which his work is studied. But, over the objections of the FBI, of the State Department, and of the Department of Homeland Security, three former CIA operatives intervened and managed to secure a permanent US residency for Gülen. CIA National Intelligence Council former vice chairman Graham E. Fuller, former CIA official George Fidas and former US Ambassador to Turkey Morton Abramowitz wrote endorsement letters for Gülen’s green card application in 2008. His application ultimately won approval. (source)
Erdogan has been pressuring the USA for years to get them to extradite Gulen to Turkey. This became a major public issue since last year, and since then the above pressure on the Gulen movement and its followers worldwide is actually an attempt to pressure the USA to send him to Turkey for trial. Since Gulen is a permanent resident but does not have US citizenship, Gulen is for the most part protected unless, per immigration and naturalization law, the government issues an order explicity stripping him of his citizenship.
Which brings up the big question: Will Trump submit to the Ottoman tyrant Erdogan’s demands, strip Gulen of his visa and extradite him to Turkey?
Just last month, Trump met with Erdogan and called him a “great friend” and praised him for his administration of Turkey, despite all of the rampant corruption, support of Islamic terrorist, and genocide of Christians that Turkey has either committed or taken part in. This is not the first time this has happened, as last year Trump met with Erdogan and praised him as an ally and encouraged further US-Turkish collaboration:
But there is one plus in Trump’s policy which many hate: Russia. When it comes to Russia most republicans threaten with the sixth fleet and all sorts of sanctions. Trump wants none of it. Russia got Crimea which will set the stage to invade Turkey in the future.
As we noted, this is because the US approaches its foreign policy “goals” from the lens of its conflict with Russia in terms of the particular economic interests that guide the USA at the movement. As I have used the analogy of a prostitute before, America prostitutes herself for the necessary materials to run her empire, which come primarily in the forms of crude oil and rare earth minerals. She does not care who she befriends or who her enemy is, because as long as he has those materials she is indifferent to the political situation of other nations. Since America’s largest rival is Russia, she wants to take as many of those resources away from Russia and deprive her of political leverage in the same way that Erdogan wants at all cost do efface the mere memory of Gulen from the earth. This was likewise, as we have noted in our ongoing series on the rise of National Socialism, the impetus behind operation Gladio and the reason why the US immediately began to support National Socialism after the Second World War even though we just fought a war against the national socialists. For the American government’s perspective, they could care less about the political alliegances, and only care in so far as National Socialist groups as transmitted through a myrial of social, political, and cultural fronts could act as a “hedge” against the Russians. This was the rason why the Americansand NATO built the Turkish army, since knowing that Turkey and Russia are ancient enemies, they could use Turkey as one of several means through which to “check” Russia.
Turkey’s perspective today as it was centuries ago when the founder of the Ottoman Empire, Othman (also Osman or Ottoman, depending on which language you use) dreamed that he would found an empire that would bring Islam to the ends of the earth. Turkey, once the most Christian nation on Earth, has been near completely purged of Christianity and as we have been warning will attempt once again to bring its massacre of Christians during the 20th century back to full realization today, except this time with better weapons and more efficient means of garnering the same evil results. Just as Turkey was the bane of Christendom and worked with Protestant Christians, particularly Calvinist allies in Germany, Holland, and Hungary as part of the Turco-Calvinist alliance to attack the Catholic Church, so once again are we seeing the reemergence of a Turco-Aryan union in which Germany, Turkey, and Japan are in the midst of an economic and arms race on the same team against the world as they are preparing for a Third World War that, under the name of pan-Asianism and encouraged by the rise of new technologies, will attempt to take power over the world as a unified and master race hailing from the same mutually shared bloodlines and suppress all “inferior” races and peoples in their pursuit of endless power.
Erdogan’s dream today is Othman’s dream of yesterday. It has not changed one iota in its essence, only in the tools and means used to realize it.
Now, on the issue of whether or not Donald Trump will submit himself to the will of Erdogan, one does not know what he is going to do. He has not said that he is going to turn Gulen over, but he also has not spoken in support of Gulen. Whatever happens to Gulen certainly is also going to go far beyond the direct control of Trump, for as we have noted, he is just the operator of a large political and economic machine that has been constructed over centuries by financiers and industrialists who wield more power than the president and politicians themselves.
Gulen’s case needs to be monitored VERY closely. This is not just an issue of “some Muslim guy getting deported because he made somebody angry,” but it is a case that has long-standing complications for ALL people, especially the USA.
If America were to extradite a man who has gained permanent residence status on the basis of Erdogan’s baseless claims, it would automatically set a precident all over the world, that anybody who Erdogan demands arrested and is originally of Turkish citizenship can and should be deported to him. This would strike fear into Turkish people of good will who do not like Erdogan all over the world.
Likewise, if this deportation was to take place, it certainly would not stop Erdogan, but only would embolden him, except this time to ask for actual citizens of non-Turkish background who have in some way “violated” Turkish laws to be extradited to Turkey. I am not saying the USA would do this in such a situation at the current moment, but if Erdogan knows that he can get a person who is for all intensive purposes a citizen extradited on the basis of his will, why not try for an actual citizen who is not Turkish?
This is fundamentally a power play in which Turkey is trying to assert herself on a global scale in the same manner as the USA. When the USA “demands” that someone is extradited, almost always other nations comply. Turkey is attempting to do for their context what the USA has done for decades, and if there are plenty of cases of questionable or politically motivated charges when the USA does this, one can be assured that Turkey will be far less noble in their intentions and much harsher in their intended punishments.
Turkey is being a big bully right now, but is a dangerous bully because Erdogan’s requests are being taken seriously. If ridicule is one of the most powerful weapons that a man has against his enemies, and given the tyrannical obsession that Erdogan has with his image and equal desire for power, he doesn’t need to be taken seriously. He needs to scorned, mocked, and called out for his sick desire for imperial power because he is leading Turkey down a path to return to her genocidal ways of old.
This video, produced in Germany in 2016 mocking Erdogan, set off a diplomatic controversy known as the Bohmermann affair in which Turkey pressured the German government to press charges against the comedian who made the video, Jan Bohmermann, for “insulting Erdogan.”
While the charges were eventually dropped, the fact that Erdogan successfully convinced another major nation to prosecute one of its own citizens for politically motivated reasons on behalf of another nation says much about what Erdogan’s goals are. Again, this is not to ignore or make light of the entire German-Turkish alliance, or to say that Germany in “innocent” in this “controversy,” because as we have noted, the entire series of affairs that have been going on over the last several years is nothing but a show to prepare for war.
Certainly as we have mentioned there are VERY large financial, industrial, and intellectual interests which are backing him as well as Angela Merkel and Trump. The unholy union of individuals comprising organizations such as TUSIAD, the Max Planck institute, the various German and Turkish banks, Soka Gakkai, and other groups are so obsessed with power they would attempt to start a third world war so they could indulge their dreams of empire and power at all costs with respect to none. But none of these groups are just “monoliths” that are faceless, such as the “radio host” Alex Jones likes to call them but refuses to name specific names, groups, places, and times outside of those well known, generically accepted, and long since past immediate relevance for the most part. All of these groups are made of individual people with personalities and lives, and we have attempted at Shoebat.com to go into as much detail as possible about them because to understand them is to understand how the events of today will shape the world of tomorrow.
Erdogan is one of those men shaping discourse around the world. So is Trump. Regardless of who tells or does not tell either man what to do, their actions nevertheless will have long-standing consequences around the world. If Trump submits to Erdogan’s requests to return Fethullah Gulen to Turkish custody, he will have succeeded in undermining the fundamental fabric of trust and law that much of the USA and many other nations are build on by making himself the servant of a tyrant, setting a world precident like none other for years to come and further advancing Erdogan’s Ottoman dream.
Authority is something that is acquired both by force and respect. Force is clearly necessary to acquire power, but at the same time if one’s power is not recognized and on some level accepted and submitted to by those under the one who is seeking power, then barring some clear method of absolute separation, there will always be a level of conflict between the two. One must submit to the other, and not per se in a way that is undignified, but that recognizes the claims of authority of another.
Erdogan knows that he is not as powerful as the USA or even many other nations. However, he is still powerful and dangerous and not afraid to follow through on his actions. He wants power, and he is asking those who have the ability to grant global legitimacy to his power incessantly for what he wants. He is the “squeaky wheel” that keeps asking for grease, which is recognition of his Ottoman Dream. The USA is one of the few countries who can grant this to him. They have already done it by several ways, for as we have noted the USA built Turkey’s army as part of Operation Gladio, and the USA also directly collaborated with Turkey to fund and protect ISIS. Having supported major political goals within Turkey that are to Erdogan’s desire, it is now for him to ask for the recognition of his Ottoman desires as a part of formal and global policy to reassert herself as a major world power.
Watch this carefully, because Erdogan is going to keep trying until he gets what he wants. The question is, will Trump submit to Erdogan’s desires?
We shall see…
