Liberals call anyone they don’t like Hitler, so often that we have to remind ourselves that there really are monsters out there. One of them is Turkey’s strongman Recep Erdogan, who marked the remembrance day for the nearly two million Armenians butchered by the Turkish army and their auxiliaries at the end of World War I. Hitler declared in 1939 that he could kill the Jews because, “Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?” The Armenian genocide was massively reported at the time by U.S. and other foreign diplomats and comprehensively documented by historians. Despicably, Erdogan continues to defend the first great genocide of the 20th century.
Bloomberg News reported this morning:
Bloomberg) — Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan says
the deportation of Armenians by the Ottoman Empire in the early
20th century was “appropriate at the time.”
Erdogan made the comment Wednesday at a symposium where he
slammed France for marking what is widely regarded as a
deliberate campaign by the Ottoman Empire to exterminate
Armenians.
The “deportation of Armenian gangs who were massacring
Muslims including women, children and elderly people in the
Eastern Anatolia region was the most appropriate act at that
time,” Erdogan said. “No group or state has been able to prove
their claims on the Armenian issue with archive documents,”
Erdogan added, accusing the French of committing genocide in
Africa.
Imagine a German politician claiming that the deportation of Jews to concentration camps in 1940 was “appropriate at the time.” Erdogan is the closest thing to Hitler ruling a major country today.
Turkey is a rogue state in every respect. Erdogan helped to organize the mass migration of Muslims to Europe in 2015. Its secret services backed al-Qaeda and ISIS. It continues to help Iran flout U.S. sanctions. It has just bought Russia’s top-of-the-line air defense system, a blatant violation of its status as a NATO member. Last year I contributed to the Center for Security Policy’s book on Turkey, Ally No More, which can be downloaded gratis here.
How many times must Erodgan betray its allies, subvert American interests, and offend the civilized world before we kick it out of NATO?
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