Turkey is massively expanding its naval presence in the Mediterranean, causing high levels of fear in Greece. Israel is also afraid of Turkey and has placed its naval on the Mediterranean as well. As we read in RFI:
Turkey is undergoing an unprecedented naval expansion, positioning itself as one of Europe’s largest naval powers.
…
“We must have a strong and effective navy to live in peace on our lands,” said President Recep Tayyip Erdogan after commissioning the latest of six planned submarines.
Along with a new helicopter carrier, frigates and over a dozen warships under construction, this is part of Erdogan’s push to bolster the Turkish navy.
“It fits Erdogan’s political agenda of exerting influence overseas, from Qatar to Somalia to Libya,” said Serhat Guvenc, a professor of international relations at Kadir Has University in Istanbul.“For the navy, it means a greater role in the defence of the country – no longer just territorial, but forward defence from overseas.”
Turkey has been flexing its naval muscles. It used to be that Turkish soldiers would go to sea and come back home the same day. This has all changed and now Turkey is working like a serious naval force:
“Turkish sailors used to sail off to sea, but they would come back on the same day to their home bases and spend the night in their homes. That’s no longer the case,” Guvenc says.
“The Turkish navy is evolving into a major regional power.”
Turkey’s military presence abroad includes bases in Qatar, Libya and Somalia, with naval agreements in place. Ankara claims its expansion addresses growing threats around the region.
“When you look at the conflicts in the Black Sea, the Mediterranean, and the Red Sea, they are all around Turkey,” said Mesut Casin, a Turkish presidential adviser and professor at Yeditepe University.
He also pointed to Turkey’s NATO role: “The naval modernisation benefits NATO and the security of Western allies, especially in terms of oil and navigation security.”
Ankara has been quick to flex its new naval muscles. Four years ago, Turkish warships allegedly targeted a French NATO vessel enforcing an arms embargo on Libya.
Both Israel and Greece are concerned about Turkey’s naval actions. The Israelis are worried that Turkey could use Turkish Cyprus as a base from which to attack Israel:
Greece, with longstanding territorial disputes with Turkey in the Aegean and Mediterranean, has voiced particular concern. Israel, too, has raised alarms over Turkey’s naval growth, including military drones deployed in Turkish-controlled northern Cyprus.
“Some of Turkey’s naval moves, like the UAV base in Northern Cyprus, could be aimed at Israel,” said Gallia Lindenstrauss, a senior researcher at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv.
“This doesn’t mean again there will be a direct confrontation, but it does mean that it is something that the Israeli army has to calculate for.”
Greece is also modernising its navy in response to what it sees as the Turkish threat. Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis recently reaffirmed the need for a “deterrent power” against Turkey.
Meanwhile, Israel’s growing naval presence in the Eastern Mediterranean, including the deployment of advanced naval assets and joint military exercises with regional partners, is adding to Turkish concerns.
“The Turkish military has begun to feel concerned about the deployment of its [Israel’s] nuclear missile capable submarines in the Mediterranean,” said naval expert Guvenc.
“As long as they were in the Red Sea or Indian Ocean, it wasn’t a problem. But once they shifted to the Mediterranean, it became a potential threat.”
Guvenc is warning that escalating regional suspicions risks spiraling out of control.
“It’s a vicious circle. Turkey builds a new navy to address threats, and now its neighbours feel threatened by Turkey’s naval growth. This is how arms races start, and they don’t tend to end well.”
These are all signs of future conflict between Turkey and Greece, and Turkey and Israel. Erdogan recently said that there needs to be a coalition against what he deemed as Israeli expansionism:
Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan said on Saturday Islamic countries should form an alliance against what he called “the growing threat of expansionism” from Israel, drawing a rebuke from the Israeli foreign minister.
He made the comment after describing what Palestinian and Turkish officials said was the killing by Israeli troops of a Turkish-American woman taking part in a protest on Friday against settlement expansion in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.“The only step that will stop Israeli arrogance, Israeli banditry, and Israeli state terrorism is the alliance of Islamic countries,” Erdogan said at an Islamic schools’ association event near Istanbul.
He said recent steps that Turkey has taken to improve ties with Egypt and Syria are aimed at “forming a line of solidarity against the growing threat of expansionism,” which he said also threatened Lebanon and Syria.
The president of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has expressed his desire to deploy troops into Gaza to protect the Palestinians from Israel, as we read in Politico Europe:
Turkey’s leader is threatening to send the NATO heavyweight’s troops into Israel to intervene on behalf of Palestinians in an escalation of rhetoric that raises fears of wider regional conflict.
President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan told a meeting of his ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) in the northeastern city of Rize on the Black Sea that Turkey “must be very strong so that Israel can’t do these ridiculous things to Palestine.”
“Just like we entered Karabakh, just like we entered Libya, we will do [something] similar exactly to them,” Erdoğan said.
“I believe that the Turk must be the only lord, the only master of this country.
Those who are not of pure Turkish stock can have only one right in this country,
the right to be servants and slaves.”
— Mahmut Esat Bozkurt
After Israel launched its war against Gaza as a response to the October 7th massacre, Erdogan made a hint as to his desire to invade Israel:
“We are such a great nation and state that our strength, our problem, our struggle is not only limited to our borders. … From now on, we will continue on our path with the motto that we may suddenly knock on your door one night.”
Turkey wants to establish a new order against the established one: an Islamic order led by Turkey. This was expressed by Nejat Ozden, the vice-chairman of ASSAM — a front group for Erdogan’s paramilitary organization, SADAT. Once Israel began bombing Gaza, Ozden wrote that what is needed is an Islamic Union: “The Idea of Islamic Union is the search for a way of salvation and resurrection of the Islamic world from its weakness, helplessness and inferiority complex in the face of Westerners. In this respect, the Islamic Union, or in other words, the Islamic Union proposal, is an alternative to the current order in one aspect, and reactive in another aspect. It aims to improve the situation of Muslims against the West.”
In 2021, Erdogan proposed the creation of an international peacekeeping force to enter Israel to protect Palestinians, stressing the need for “the international community to give Israel a strong and deterrent lesson”.
And regardless of the fact that Turkey has been in a rivalry with Iran, both of these countries will unite in the case of a war with Israel. In November of 2023, Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan and his Iranian counterpart Ibrahim Reisi discussed in a phone conversation about how they both have a common stance against “Israel’s brutality in the Palestinian territories”.
In Turkey, there is even a love for Adolf Hitler. An example of this was seen in Suleyman Sezen, an AKP (Erdogan’s party) city councilman at Samsun’s Atakum District. In October of 2023, he prayed for the soul of Hitler and praised the German Reich leader who committed the biggest genocide of the Jews:
“Historically, everybody has been angry with Hitler, and called him a racist. Hitler said: ‘You will curse me for every Jew I did not kill.’ This is true. Once again I pray for God to bestow mercy and grace upon Hitler. [I pray for this] because of the Jewish Zionist Israel – those people who are spreading confusion throughout the world, and emerge from under every rock and from behind any evil.”
Suleyman Sezen
There is another group that is hated in Turkey besides the Jews, and that is the Syrians.
On September 18th of 2023, Turkish historian Umit Dogan posted for his over 341,000 followers on Twitter a tribute to Djemal Pasha, the Ottoman governor of Syria in the beginning of the 20th century, known by local Arab populations as “the butcher.” On the post (shared 13,000 times with over a million views), Dogan writes: “Djemal Pasha, who was said not to have breakfast without hanging 20 Arabs every morning.”
The hatred has escalated into mob violence. For example, on June 29th of 2019, a mob drunk off rage demolished and vandalized shops and apartments belonging to Syrian refugees in the working-class neighborhood of Ikitelli in Istanbul. What stoked up the mob was a false rumor that spread around that a 12-year-old Syrian refugee attacked a 12-year-old Turk. The story was told to the mob’s ears by various social media pages, such as the WhatsApp group, the “Ikitelli Youth Movement,” and by various groups on Twitter and Facebook with the hashtags “#Idon’tWantSyriansInMyCountry” and “#SyriansGoAway!”
There are nearly four million Syrians living in Turkey, and they have held the status of guests (even if they have been there for over ten years). With their condition as guests, they are pretty much prevented from applying for Turkish citizenship. Turkish law permits children born in the country who cannot gain citizenship through their parents to become Turkish nationals. But this clause has almost never been enacted for Syrian children born in Turkey. Granted, 223,881 Syrians had become Turkish citizens as of the end of 2022, but this was under the 2016 policy of Erdogan which bestows citizenship on foreigners who provide an “outstanding service in the social or economic arena.” “There are highly qualified people among [the Syrians]; there are engineers, lawyers, doctors,” Erdogan said in 2017. “Let’s make use of that talent. … Instead of letting them work illegally here and there, let’s give them the chance to work as citizens like the children of this nation.” This angered the nationalists who accused Erdogan of trying to get more Syrians to become citizens to give his AK Party more voters.
The Syrians of Turkey are—for the most part—stateless, and if the bloodthirstiness of the Turkish nationalist becomes policy, what protections would they have? Turkey has already had anti-Syrian mob violence. In 2021, mobs looted Syrian shops and homes in Ankara; and in In September of 2022, a gang of Turks fatally stabbed a Syrian teenager who was accepted to study medicine in Antakya.
The animosity towards Syrians is reflected in the hatred for the Arabic language. Turkish nationalist Umit Ozdag, who has been at the helm of the anti-Syrian movement and has made a party bent on deporting all Syrian migrants, funded a dystopian film called “Silent Invasion,” which is about a Syrian party that wins the 2042 Turkish elections and declares Arabic to be the official language.
Umit Ozdag at the center in nationalist rally
In the state of Mersin, there was a campaign to purge billboards written in Arabic; similar calls for the removal of Arabic billboards took place in Izmir, Adana, Istanbul, and Kayseri. Ghazwan Koronful, lawyer and director of the association Free Syrian Lawyers, stated that “there is no willingness to accept or integrate [Syrians] into the Turkish society.” Moreover, Koronful suspects that the policy of deportation and forcing Syrians to return to their home country might still be in its beginning stages: “In my opinion, within five years, the number of Syrians remaining in Turkey will only be approximately 500,000 [out of the 3.6 million currently in the country], and most of them will be naturalized citizens, university students, and businessmen.”
Turkey’s immense absorption of Syrian migrants has been amongst the least popular policies of Erdogan’s AK Party. In one 2019 study, the amount of people who said that they were “not pleased with” seeing Syrian refugees in Turkey was 59.8%. Those who were questioned said that the reason behind their dislike for Syrians was their “inclination to crime,” (even though the crime rate amongst Syrians is far lower than that of Turkish citizens). In a study done in 2020 by the Istanbul Political Research Institute, 10.5% of Turks in Istanbul defined Syrians as “the most important problem” in the city, and 75% of the interviewees believed that the Turkish government treated Syrian refugees better than Turkish citizens. Those who said that they were “concerned” about the sight of Syrians topped the list with 47%. 36% of the respondents said that they did not consider the Syrians in Turkey to be victims of war. In another survey from 2021, two-thirds (67.1%) believed that Syrians “disturb social peace and morality by engaging in violence, theft, smuggling, and prostitution”. 70.6% of Turks surveyed said that Syrians would “harm our country’s economy”. 40% of Turks surveyed believed that Syrians were “dangerous people who will cause us a lot of troubles in the future” and “burdens on us”
There has been a growing hatred against Syrians in Turkey, an animosity that says: “Syrians are living better than Turkish people”. When the majority feel that a minority is being treated better than them, ideologues and politicians take the opportunity express this hatred and gain the following of the masses. Another thing that happens is that false stories spread to manipulate the masses and stoke up their animosity. The minority deemed as a threat is dehumanized to the level of animals. For example, in Turkey there was a false story that went viral which claimed that 225,000 Syrians gave birth in Turkey. The widely circulated story got comments online such as, “they are like cats, they don’t wait neither for March nor for July, they do,” and “they can compete with cats and dogs in fertility”. There was another false report in Turkey that went viral, which stated that people who share videos, news, or photographs exposing Syrian refugees online would get prison sentences. Even though the claim was false, many Turks bought it and expressed their rage in the comments, such as: “you enjoy yourself in your thousand-room palace and we bear the burdens of these dirty Syrians.” Turkish comedian Sahan Gokbakar wrote to his 3.7 million followers on Twitter: “Health, shelter and all our material resources should be used only for our own people, not for foreigners.” While there was some criticism, the post got more than 280,000 likes.
This way of thinking, and the propaganda that stokes it, has led to grizzly murders. In November of 2021 Kemal Korukmaz murdered three Syrian migrants by burning them alive. According to Rudaw, Korukmaz “admitted that he had no enmity with the Syrian workers, that he did not know them, and that he burned them just because they were Syrian refugees.” Kemal Korukmaz stated that about a year before the murder, notes started to be left in a cigarette box in his car, the doors of which he left unlocked, and in these notes, it was written: “Continue your duty” and finally “Start your duty and clean” and he started to think that the Syrians needed to be purged.
The International Organization for Migration asked 636 Turks questions about their thoughts on Syrians, and nearly half of them saw the Syrians as a “less talented race”. The racism in Turkey is like something out of the 19th century southern United States. One Syrian, Issa al-Karim, who became a Turkish citizen, recounted how his children (also citizens) were not allowed to be in their class photo because “it was limited to native Turks only.” There is a strong feeling amidst the Turks that the influx of Syrians will cause arabization in their country, and this fear is something that was alive and well in Turkey going back to the First World War. There is even a belief, pushed by firebrand politician, Umit Ozdag, that the Syrians (who Ozdag says are doing a “silent invasion” of the country) will eventually cause a civil war within Turkey.
Ozdag called the flow of Syrian refugees a “strategically engineered migration”—a renewed imperialist plot, resurfacing a century after Turkey threw the British and Greeks out after World War One. But this time, Ozdag says, the imperialists are using the Arabs to undermine Turkey. “If these [refugees] stay here, in 10 years the borders of the Middle East will begin from Turkey’s northwest. We planned everything to not let that happen,” Ozdag told Foreign Policy. To block any more migrants, Ozdag wants there to be placed anti-personnel landmines along the borders, basically pushing for the killing of all border-crossers. This mentality is echoed in Turkish border security which has injured, and even killed, hundreds of Syrian migrants. On March 11th of 2023, Turkish border officers brutally tortured eight Syrians who were trying to cross the border, killing one adult man and a boy. On March 13th of the same year, A Turkish border officer shot and murdered a 59-year-old Syrian man as he was plowing his field near the border. Hugh Williamson, Europe and Central Asia Director at Human Rights Watch, reported:
“Turkish armed forces and gendarmerie, responsible for border security, are indiscriminately shooting and mistreating Syrians along the Syria-Turkey border. Hundreds of deaths and injuries have been recorded due to these actions, which have occurred regularly in recent years. …Arbitrary killings of Syrians are part of a pattern of atrocities by Turkey’s border officials that the government has failed to effectively prevent or investigate.”
In Turkey we can see a desire to destroy both the Jew and the Syrian, and thus here lies another sign of the coming destruction of the Semitic race.