Roberto de Mattei
Corrispondenza Romana
March 28, 2018
For years now the Turkish President, Recep
Tayyip Erdoğan has been officially celebrating May 29th 1453 which
saw the conquest of Constantinople by Mohamed II, along with the date of August
26th 1071, when the Seljuks
of Alp Arslān defeated the Byzantine army at Manzikert and founded the
first Turkish State in Anatolia.
Let’s imagine for a moment that the
European Union made a proposal to celebrate solemnly the victory of Lepanto in 1571 and the
liberation of Vienna from the Turks in 1683. The mass-media world-wide,
controlled by “the powers that be” who run world politics, would protest with
all their might against this provocative act and Islamophobia. But the European Union would never take upon itself
such an initiative as in the act of its constitution, The Treaty of Lisbon of
December 13th 2007, it definitively renounced every reference to its
historical roots. And while Edrogan claims the Ottoman identity with pride -
which defines itself as against Christian Europe - the European Union has
replaced the reference to its Christian roots with the ideology of multiculturalism
and the reception of immigrants.Islam’s attack against Europe over the course of the centuries, has developed along two directive lines, led by
two different peoples: the Arabs from the South-East and the Turks from the
South-West.
The Arabs, after their conquest of North-Africa, invaded Spain and went beyond the Pyrenees, but were stopped by Charles Martel at Poitiers in 732. From then on they withdrew progressively, and were expelled definitely from the Iberian peninsula in 1492. The Turks after subduing the Byzantine Empire and part of the Hapsburg’s, were stopped at Vienna in 1683 by John Sobieski and at Belgrade in 1717 by Eugenio di Savoia.
The Arabs, after their conquest of North-Africa, invaded Spain and went beyond the Pyrenees, but were stopped by Charles Martel at Poitiers in 732. From then on they withdrew progressively, and were expelled definitely from the Iberian peninsula in 1492. The Turks after subduing the Byzantine Empire and part of the Hapsburg’s, were stopped at Vienna in 1683 by John Sobieski and at Belgrade in 1717 by Eugenio di Savoia.
Today, the advance of Islam
follows the same directions. To the South-West it is promoted by countries such
as Saudi Arabia and Qatar, who finance “The Muslim Brotherhood” and the building of an extensive network of
Mosques all over Europe. To the South East, Turkey is demanding entrance into
the European Union, threatening, if not, to inundate our continent with
millions of immigrants.
Erdogan’s plan is actually
the most dangerous as his objective is to become the “sultan” of the new Ottoman
Empire which is displaying all its power from the Middle East to Central Asia. The
Turkish Empire, between 1299 and 1923, ended up spanning a vast territory,
which reached Caucasia and the portals of Italy and Austria from the North
African coasts. Erdogan’s aim is to make
Turkey the leading country of an even vaster area, which stretches to the East
of the Caspian Sea, where five new republics originating from the dissolution
of the Soviet Union - Azerbaijan,
Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Kirghizstan – make up the nucleus of a
community where the Islamic religion is founded on a Turkish-speaking-ethnic
identity. It has been since the 1990s that
the Turks started to present to their “200
million co-nationals” of the Turkish-speaking States in the East, the necessity
of building “a community of States stretching from the Adriatic to the Great
Wall of China” according to the motto of their then President, Halil Turgut Özal (1927-1993), who loved to talk about the advent of “a
Turkish century”.
Erdogan has recaptured these ideas, developed over the
last decade by his Foreign Minister Davutoğlu, until his dismissal in
2016. The founder of modern, secularized Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk saw
Islam as a destabilizing factor. His
successors, from Özal to Erdogan, think the opposite i.e. that Islam can be an
element of integration and social cohesion. The education system is one of the
mainstays of Erdogan’s plan, in the
extending of the Sharia - (even outside
the Turkish borders) through the Minister of Religious Affairs, Divanet – as well as the imposition, through the
Minister of Education, of its linguistic
identity, eliminated by the Kemalist revolution. The re-Islamization of these territories,
by way of building mosques and the support
offered by the Imams in their maintenance, is accompanied by cultural
investments to re-introduce the study of the Ottoman culture in schools and
universities.
Referring to the times of the Ottoman Empire, Erdogan has asserted: “Those
who think we have forgotten the lands from which we withdrew in tears a hundred
years ago, are mistaken. Every time the occasion arises we say that Syria, Iraq
and other places on the geographic map of our hearts, are no different from our
homeland. We will be fighting until there is no foreign flag waving in any place
where an ‘adhan’ [the Islamic call to
prayer in mosques] is recited. What we have done until now, is nothing compared
to the even greater attacks we are planning for the coming days, inshallah (
if Allah wills).”
The primary objective announced by Erdogan is the re-conquest of the
Greek Islands in the Aegean Sea. The Turkish leader said that in 1923, Turkey “”sold
off” the Greek Islands which “were ours” and where “we still have our mosques
and sanctuaries”. As a deadline, Erdogan
indicated the year 2023, the hundredth anniversary of the Turkish Republic and
the Treaty of Lausanne, which had established the borders he is now is asking a
revision of. These are not only words. In 1974 Turkey occupied manu militari a part of the island of
Cyprus and today, under the pretext of the “war on terrorism” , has taken over
a wide strip of Syrian territory along the borders of the two countries
But the gravest threats concern the future of Europe, which Erdogan envisages subject to his Empire. “Europe will be Muslin, if it is the will of Allah”, announced his party’s (AKP) Deputy, Alparslan Kavaklioglu, repeating what Erdogan himself openly declared: “Muslims are the future of Europe. The fortune and wealth of the world are moving from the West towards the East. Europe is going through a period which can be called extraordinary. Its population is decreasing and aging. It has a very old population. So, some people are coming from abroad to find work. But Europe has this problem: all the new arrivals are Muslims. They come from Morocco, Tunis, Algeria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria and Turkey. The people from these countries are Muslims. We have reached the point that the most common name in Brussels and Belgium is Mohamed. The second most widespread name is Melih, the third, Aisha.”
But the gravest threats concern the future of Europe, which Erdogan envisages subject to his Empire. “Europe will be Muslin, if it is the will of Allah”, announced his party’s (AKP) Deputy, Alparslan Kavaklioglu, repeating what Erdogan himself openly declared: “Muslims are the future of Europe. The fortune and wealth of the world are moving from the West towards the East. Europe is going through a period which can be called extraordinary. Its population is decreasing and aging. It has a very old population. So, some people are coming from abroad to find work. But Europe has this problem: all the new arrivals are Muslims. They come from Morocco, Tunis, Algeria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria and Turkey. The people from these countries are Muslims. We have reached the point that the most common name in Brussels and Belgium is Mohamed. The second most widespread name is Melih, the third, Aisha.”
Erdogan knows that
Brussels, the capital of the European Union, is the city where Islam is already
today the major religion, one citizen in three is Muslim, and the most common
name at the registry among the new residents is Mohamed. His weapon, just like the Muslim Brotherhood’s,
is the demographic conquest of Europe in the coming decades. But even at present, if Turkey entered Europe,
it would be the first nation of the Union, for its population, including also
its citizens already residing in the European continent. It should be remembered in fact, on the level
of numericals, the Turks are the second community in Germany, The Netherlands,
Austria, Denmark and Bulgaria. And Erdogan is exhorting them not to lose their
identity. “The Turks abroad, should remain Turks apart from their citizenship”
the sultan proclaimed, going as far as to define assimilation a “crime against
humanity”.
Confronted with
Erdogan’s arrogance, Europe not only does not react, but is silent. It is
silent on the violation of human rights in Turkey; it is silent on the invasion
of Syrian Kurdistan; it is silent on the naval block imposed on the ENI
platform in Cyprus; it is silent on the threats against the Greek Islands. And regarding the declaration of the
proximate Islamisation of our continent, not only is the European Union silent
but also the Church. Erdogan’s strength
is this incriminating silence.
Translation:
contributor Francesca Romana
