The Islamization of Turkey is a US project
The Islamization of Turkey is a long project, and the so-called neo-Ottoman discourse was also part of this Islamization. The project begun in the 19th Century and came to the forefront with the AKP government when it came to power in 2002. From the 1990’s to the 2000’s, the United States of America forced Turkish political actors to abandon Kemalism or republican thoughts, and to replace them with Islamism or a neo-Ottoman discourse. This has been a prolonged attack on the Turkish republic as well as on the Turkish nation, because Islamization culturally, politically, and in its foreign policy is substituting Turkish national and nationalist politics with another ideology.
That was a US project from the beginning, so in that sense it is not a new development, but it has, without question, gained a different level of intensity with the alliance between Saudi Arabia and Qatar. We think as a Patriotic party that our first goal as a country now is to defend our national unity. This also means that we should defend other countries’ national unity - a National constitution - above all, in Syria and Iraq. In that sense we do not at all support pro-American Islamization and our government’s position towards neighboring countries.
It is a part of a general US plan for the region, which is to dissolve the national states into smaller entities of ethnic and sectarian groups. For that you need regional actors that pursue Islamization in their own country, as well as with neighbors. So if Turkey follows the Islamist or İhvanist (like Muslim Brotherhood) ideology in the Middle East, this would be following US policy, and not for the benefit of our country or our neighbors.
Erdogan has actively promoted himself as the vice-President of the great Middle Eastern Project, but I don’t think he does this with the same energy as he did before, because the Turkish population and also the Turkish elites are starting to realize that this project will lead, in the mid term, to Turkey’s own division into ethnical and sectarian groups. So, as the project is losing ground day by day, Erdogan is more and more in his public discourse distancing himself from the project. And above all he himself seems to have been abandoned.
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