Turkey

It's amazing what you learn about yourself when you start publishing about Turkey's links to terrorist groups.

Is Saudi Arabia’s crown prince joining a long line of absolutist rulers in the Middle East?

Almost two years ago, the American Presbyterian minister Andrew Brunson was taken hostage by the Turkish government. The charges against him—“political or military espionage” and “support for a terrorist group”—are absurd. Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan wants the Islamic cleric Fethullah…

It's Trump's economy against the rest of the world—and as of now, America is winning.

To judge from Western newspapers, the elections on June 24 in Turkey brought a crisis for democracy. The “crisis” is that Turks will continue to be governed by Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the perennially popular Islamist former mayor of Istanbul, for whom they voted overwhelmingly, and not by Muharrem…

Athens

The 6-year-old child who cried in front of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has become a global sensation. Erdogan spotted the weeping girl wearing a military uniform during an address at his party’s congress last week, brought her onto the stage, and told her that if she died as a martyr,…

When Secretary of State Rex Tillerson meets with Turkish officials tomorrow, he’ll have plenty of unpleasant topics to discuss. At the top of Turkey’s list of grievances is American support for the YPG, or the People’s Protection Units, a Kurdish-Syrian militia that has wreaked devastation on ISIS…

The Trump administration did not condemn Turkey last week after the country’s military began attacking Kurdish forces in northwestern Syria. White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders exemplified the administration’s response: “We hear and take seriously Turkey’s legitimate security…

The recent assault by Turkey’s military on Kurds in northwestern Syria has presented a conundrum for the administration: Turkey is our (strained) NATO ally while the Kurds have been one of America’s most important friends in the region, with Kurdish forces fighting valiantly alongside Americans in…

Former national security adviser Mike Flynn pleaded guilty Friday to knowingly making false statements to the FBI, making him the senior most Trump administration official to be charged in connection with special counsel Robert Mueller’s wide-ranging probe.

White people love Subarus. Google's spy cars have documented the "street view" of much of the United States (and the rest of the world). But what are some applications of all of this data scientists could use? Google's folks decided to analyze the types of cars parked on the street to see if they…

Kurds in northern Iraq control their own land, maintain their own military, and share a common culture and language. They also have an overwhelming desire to separate from Iraq and become an independent state. But can a de facto nation become a real country if it isn’t recognized by the diplomatic…

Election officials from the Kurdistan Regional Government announced Wednesay that last weekend’s referendum on independence passed, overwhelmingly. With a turnout of 72 percent of more than 4.5 million eligible voters, nearly 93 percent voted in favor of realizing the Iraqi Kurds’ longstanding…

The people of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq voted today in a referendum on independence from Baghdad. It could take a few days to tally the votes, but there can be little doubt about the result. The Kurds have struggled for self-determination for a century. In January 2005, the non-governmental…

On his last day in New York for the United Nations General Assembly, President Trump held his final bilateral meeting of the week with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey. It was the leaders’ first one-on-one meeting since Erdogan’s trip to Washington in May. Here’s how Trump introduced…

United Nations Watch—President Trump’s first address to the United Nations General Assembly was a bit of a hodge-podge. At times, it sounded as if it were a message to Americans that Trump would be defending them and their interests even if (and especially when) those interests contradicted the…

A century ago today, Captain T.E. Lawrence helped capture the city of Aqaba and became the legendary Lawrence of Arabia. Sent by the British army as a military advisor, Lawrence convinced Emir Faisal I, leader of the Arab Revolt, to attack the Turkish stronghold by way of the Nefud desert, which…

A dozen men accompanying Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to America last month have been criminally charged for attacking protesters who had gathered outside the Turkish ambassador's home in Washington D.C.

The diplomatic crisis in Qatar saw a new development Wednesday as Turkey's parliament passed legislation permitting the deployment of troops to a Turkish military base in Qatar. The legislation was drafted prior to Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain severing ties with Qatar,…

Thursday's NATO Summit provides an opportunity for the alliance to get tough on its putative Turkish ally. Under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey's destabilizing policies in Europe and the Middle East have made it appear less an ally and more a Russian Trojan horse. To keep Turkey on track,…

Enes Kanter of the Oklahoma City Thunder shrank his nearly 7-foot-tall frame into the red dot on Indiana Jones's map this offseason. Since his team was eliminated from the NBA playoffs last month, the Turkish center said he went from countries in the Asia-Pacific to eastern Europe, and eventually…

In this episode of THE WEEKLY STANDARD Confab, Michael Warren joins host Eric Felten to talk about another week dominated by the Trumpiest of tempests. Will the appointment of a Special Counsel calm the waters? Then Philip Terzian comes by to tell us about outrage over Turkish security men beating…

When the Turkish strongman Recep Tayyip Erdogan spoke at the Brookings Institution in Washington in March 2016, a handful of Armenian-American pickets appeared on the sidewalk beside Massachusetts Avenue, holding signs aloft and chanting about Erdogan's burgeoning Islamist dictatorship and the…

The history of the twentieth century is littered with the carcasses of failed revolutions. Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Mussolini, and Hitler all tried to master modernity—to curb or accelerate it—and all failed. After the attacks on September 11, 2001, it appeared the most consequential revolutionary of…

Social media seethed with outrage earlier this week after the American president made a phone call to congratulate the head of a NATO member on an important vote. On Monday Donald Trump reached out to speak with Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan about the referendum that exchanges Turkey's…

The photos of the assassination of the Russian ambassador to Turkey in Ankara shocked many people. Jerry Saltz, the senior art critic for New York magazine, was mesmerized by their artistry.

President-elect Donald Trump said Monday night that the assassination of the Russian ambassador to Turkey earlier that day in Ankara was the work of a "radical Islamic terrorist."

The Russian ambassador to Turkey has been reported dead after a shooting Monday in the country's capital of Ankara, according to Turkey's Anadolu news agency.

Turkey's Islamist president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, appears as the sole person in his country's politics who knows what he wants. Erdogan seeks absolute power and acts against all obstacles to his ambitions. He is eager to identify new "enemies" whose purported conspiracies he believes justify his…

Phew! "Turkey sends tanks into Syria ...," CNN headlined on Thursday. "The goal is to crush ISIS." It's about time Turkey joined the war against Islamist terror. Some had suspected Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan of having a soft spot for ISIS, even of letting his country be used as a supply…

In the last days of July, German chancellor Angela Merkel rushed back to Berlin from her summer vacation to tell her countrymen how strong they were. She had done the same thing a year earlier, when Europe faced a wave of refugees from the war in Syria, joined by migrants from Iraq, Iran, and…

The coup against the Turkish government has reportedly been put down. It's almost a day after a faction of the Turkish military attempted to topple the government by closing bridges, sending tanks out in to the street, firing missiles at protestors from helicopters, and arresting a number of…

Turks understand statistics better than the rest of us, or at least they seem to have a more practical statistical bias. I say that because today a bird pooped on me, and after I texted my wife the news she quickly responded by congratulating me and then telling me to buy lottery tickets.

Is tiny, pro-Western, landlocked, democratic, free-market, Christian Armenia (pop. 2.9 million) a threat to its neighbor, Turkey (pop. 75 million)? According to the government of Turkey, and its autocratic Islamist president Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Armenia's "alliance" with Russia is lethal to…

Istanbul

Istanbul

Even before Vice President Joe Biden met with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Ankara last week, the Turks were displeased. The day before, Biden had granted interviews only to opposition media and slammed the government for stepping on freedom of speech. “That's not the kind of example that needs…

Istanbul

Istanbul

Today, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg confirmed that Russia has violated Turkish airspace for a second time. On Saturday, a Russian plane crossed into Turkish airspace near the Syrian border, and in response the Turks scrambled two F-16s. In a subsequent incident, Ankara said that a…

The Third Reich has surely been the subject of more books and articles than any other topic in European history. Although it is certainly possible to imagine new discoveries of relatively minor features of Nazism or of the Nazi period, it is difficult to imagine someone uncovering facts about…

Istanbul

Too Islamist-friendly for NATO, too pro-European for Russia, too pro-Sunni for Iran, and too pro-democracy for Saudi Arabia, Turkey can’t seem to manage lasting alliances. It’s an issue that figures to play a role in the Turkish parliamentary elections on June 7.

“Oh, Khatcher agha, the killers have come.” Those words were spoken to my grandfather, Khatcher Matosian, with a tap on the back so that he would redirect his gaze. He and relatives had been peering from the rooftops of their Armenian village in central Turkey after hearing about the Ottoman…

Towards midnight one night last week I walked miles down the pitch-black European shore of the Bosphorus, the 15-mile channel that splits Istanbul and Turkey in half. To any watcher of TV news, that will sound nuts. Fifteen million people have converged on Istanbul in recent decades, cramming into…

President Obama made an amnesty joke at the annual turkey pardon today at the White House. He also, as a joke, used the same language he used to justify his executive amnesty order talked about the legal authority he had to pardon the turkey, which is traditionally done by presidents the day before…

Vice President Joe Biden just returned Sunday from a three-nation trip that concluded with a 48 hour visit to Turkey. The vice president, his wife, and his entourage arrived in Turkey via Ukraine Friday evening around 7:30 local time for meetings with President Erdogan and other government…

During his visit to Washington this week, Israeli defense minister Moshe Ya'alon has spent part of his time criticizing Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority, warning about the dangers of a bad nuclear deal with Iran—and highlighting the problems with Turkey.

Only 12 years ago, the Republic of Turkey was correctly seen as the model of a pro-Western Muslim state, and a bridge between Europe and the Middle East. A strong military bond with the Pentagon undergirded broader economic and cultural ties with Americans. And then, starting with the 2002…

Reuters is reporting that:

For over a year, Germans have expressed mounting outrage at revelations of American espionage in their country. The opportunity to shake one’s head and wag one’s finger, especially at uncouth Americans, is one that many Germans enjoy, and Washington’s eavesdropping on Chancellor Angela Merkel’s…

When Joe Biden addressed the John F. Kennedy Forum at Harvard's Kennedy School in Boston last Thursday night, he said that the "international order that we painstakingly built after World War II and defended over the past several decades is literally fraying at the seams right now." Thanks to some…

Stories on President Obama’s strategy-for-the-Islamic-State speech this evening have made it plain that the military approach is going to be a combination of U.S. airpower and various Iraqi and Syrian proxies on the ground.  “Obama’s ISIL Strategy to Emphasize Coalition Effort,”…

In my quest to write an article about my family vacation to Turkey and thereby write off part of the cost, I came up with an observation I deemed worthy of David Brooks or Malcolm Gladwell. It turned out to be dead wrong.

The WEEKLY STANDARD  podcast with senior editor Lee Smith on Hamas's attack tunnels, Operation Protective Edge, the Iranian factor, and what the media gets wrong about Israel's involvement in Gaza.

Istanbul

The government of Turkey has pulled the plug on Twitter and the White House is not happy.  As Mario Trujillo of the Hill reports:

First question asked, supposedly, in situation rooms when there is … well, a situation: Where are the carriers?

The Turkish press is reporting that a man attempted to hijack an airplane and demanded to be flown to Sochi, the site of the winter Olympics. 

In his ponderously titled book Contributions to the Correction of the Public’s Judgement Concerning the French Revolution (1793), the German philosopher and political leader Johann Gottlieb Fichte took time out from his defense of the Reign of Terror to compose what has been called by Daniel…

It is the pièce de résistance in feast that includes, in my family’s case: smoked turkey with oyster stuffing, Smithfield ham, Brussels sprouts, green beans, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, and various other basics. For desert there will be pies: pecan, apple, pumpkin, shoo fly, and coconut cream.…

A recent spate of newspaper articles suggests a concerted media campaign targeting Turkey’s foreign intelligence service, the MIT, its director, Hakan Fidan, and almost surely his boss as well, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. In a piece published by the Wall Street Journal and another by the…

Two weeks of protests across Turkey that have left four dead and more than 5,000 injured have observers wondering whether Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is facing an Anatolian Spring. Is Turkey’s Islamic ruler weathering a crisis similar to the revolutionary climate that sent Arab protesters…

The AP reports:

During President Obama’s trip to Israel last month, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan to apologize for the “operational mistakes” that in May 2010 led to the deaths of nine Turks who attacked Israeli commandoes after they boarded the…

Last week’s suicide bombing outside the U.S. embassy in Ankara, carried out by a Marxist Leninist group known as DHKP-C, drew condemnation from across the Turkish political spectrum. But the timing of the attack and the subsequent comments could not have come at a more awkward moment for Turkey.…

The Associated Press reports:

The Washington Free Beacon reports:

On November 29, Albania was the sole Muslim-majority country in the United Nations to be counted among the 41 abstainers from the proposal to admit Palestine as a non-member observer. Certain Islamists were displeased, to say the least. In particular, Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan,…

They squabble, scrabble, and squawk. They peck at the last windfalls, out under the fruit trees, until they’re—I don’t know, drunk maybe on the hard cider of the apple mash or rendered hyperactive by some mad avian sugar rush, and then they strut through the yard, chests puffed out, spoiling for a…

At this year's annual turkey pardoning event at the White House, President Barack Obama took a jab at Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney.

President Barack Obama spoke on the phone with the Islamist leader of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, about the Israel's retaliatory strikes on the terrorist group Hamas in Gaza, according to the White House.

After almost a week of exchanging fire with Syrian troops across its southern border, Turkey finds itself embroiled on another, albeit related, international front. Wednesday the Turkish air force scrambled two jets to intercept a Syrian passenger jet flying from Moscow to Damascus. The plane, said…

The New York Times reports from Antakya, a Turkish town close to the Syrian border, that one of Turkey’s minority populations supports the regime of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. “As Syria’s civil war degenerates into a bloody sectarian showdown between the government’s Alawite-dominated troops…

Turkish rulers, from Ottoman times to the present-day neo-fundamentalist regime of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, have never been comfortable with the Alevi Muslims. Counting a quarter of Turkey’s current domestic and diaspora population of 80 million, Alevis emerged in the 16th century as eastern Anatolian…

Connoisseurs of tea leaves will note that President Obama, in his statement today on Armenian Remembrance Day, was very careful to avoid use of the word "genocide" in describing the massacre of 1.5 million Armenians by the Ottoman Turks during the First World War. The killings, he explained, were…

Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has a habit of shifting positions toward his country’s neighbors, while pursuing the “soft Islamist” political agenda of his Justice and Development party (AKP). Erdogan’s Turkey was a close ally of Assad’s Damascus clique until the Syrian massacres, and…

In an article today in NOW Lebanon, Tony Badran reports that Hillary Clinton “dismissed a number of forward leaning options on Syria” proposed by Turkish foreign minister Ahmet Davutoğlu to the White House. “What this means,” writes Badran, “is that Washington, which at one point subcontracted its…

Rick Perry ain't backin' down on his tough Turkey talk.

Palestinian news sources reported earlier this month that Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan promised $300 million to the Gaza-based terrorist organization Hamas. If true, this pledge would cover nearly half of Hamas’s reported $769 million budget next year, and would make Turkey its…

One way to gauge the present state of European unity is to know that Turkey, which has energetically sought membership in the European Union for the past decade, is now having second thoughts about the enterprise. According to the German Marshall Fund, in 2004, three-quarters of Turks thought EU…

An interesting bit from White House reporter Tangi Quéméner's latest pool report from the G-20 in Cannes, France:

Russia and China’s October 4 veto of a U.N. -Security Council resolution on Syria elicited a strong response from U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice. “The United States is outraged,” said Rice, “that this Council has utterly failed to address an urgent moral challenge and a growing threat to…

The soft-Islamist Turkish government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Justice and Development party (known by its Turkish initials as the AKP) has expansive foreign-policy ambitions. In addition to its embrace of the Hamas regime in Gaza and accompanying criticism of Israel, Ankara…

In Newsweek, Eli Lake reports that “Obama Sold Israel Bunker-Buster Bombs.” Actually, as the story notes, it was George W. Bush who ordered the bombs toward the end of his second term. Former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert wanted them delivered in 2007, but Bush told him to wait until…

Jerusalem—Jeffrey Goldberg reported last week that former defense secretary Robert Gates thinks that Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu is “ungrateful” for all that Washington has done for Israel. The purpose of the story, leaked by senior administration officials, is to blame Netanyahu for…

A bipartisan group of members of Congress has written a letter to Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, asking to "help work out a mechanism with Israel to allow legitimate humanitarian assistance to go to Gaza without provoking a needless confrontation."

Turkey is a member of NATO, and as such might have been expected to participate fully in the military campaign to curb Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi’s brutal repression of his rebellious subjects. But from the beginning of international talks on Libya, the “soft-Islamist” Ankara government of…

Speaking to more than 10,000 supporters in Duesseldorf on Sunday night, Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan was once again the source of some controversy across Germany when he called on his “compatriots” – many of whom hold German passports and were born there – to strongly resist…

Foreign leaders, rivals and allies, often find it useful to take anti-American positions, but Turkish prime minister Recep Tayip Erdoğan has taken the rarest of steps in threatening to sue the U.S. State Department in both national and international courts for defamation. At issue is the…

Lee Smith writes in Tablet:

On September 12, Turkey’s voters approved a package of 26 amendments to the country’s long-established secularist constitution. The amendments presented to the voters comprised of reforms to the Constitutional Court, strengthening of labor rights, and enhancement of women’s status, among other…

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