What does Turkey’s destructive president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, have in common with the Saudis, Pakistanis, Iraq’s Sunnis and the conservatives of Germany’s Weimar Republic? They all thought that they could exploit and control fanatics. One might as well try to befriend poisonous snakes. To his credit, Erdogan initially facilitated the growth of Turkey’s economy. To his discredit, he has all but destroyed Turkey’s democracy, reignited the Kurdish conflict for his own political advantage, suppressed the media, imprisoned opponents on ludicrous charges or concocted evidence, and dismantled the modernizing constitution that was the primary legacy of one of the great men of the 20th Century, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. And he thrust Islamization upon a country that had been a model of tolerance in the Muslim world.
Turkey’s president pays the price for trying to befriend fanatics
