Hagia Sophia is almost certain to be declared a mosque soon. As I explain below, this is an integral part of Erdogan’s desire to restore the Ottoman caliphate. European leaders seem neither to know or care about the significance and implications of that. “Top Court Declares Hagia Sophia a Mosque,” by Jules Gomes, Church Militant, […]
Don’t Romanticize the Kurds
Uninformed savants across the political spectrum have pilloried President Trump for his eminently rational decision to draw down the U.S. troop commitment (initially, only 25, as it turns out!) to the Syrian morass (whose “dynamic” has remained largely unchanged since the late 1940s). Most of the ire directed at Mr. Trump has to do with […]
Hugh Fitzgerald: In Erdogan’s Turkey, Kemalism is Temporary, Islam is Forever
The Ottoman Empire, the Sick Man of Europe in the nineteenth century, finally was put out of its misery by military defeat in World War I, to be replaced by the enlightened despotism of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, a war hero at Gallipoli, who established a provisional government in Ankara as the head of the Turkish […]