Who Lost Turkey? (Revisited) :: SteynOnline

Who Lost Turkey? (Revisited) :: SteynOnline:
"As they used to say way back when in the long Ottoman twilight, the Turk is the sick man of Europe. 
Following this weekend's Caliph-for-Life referendum, the Turk is sicker than ever. 
But he's no longer of Europe, and instead is exiting for a destination dark and catastrophic for almost all his neighbors.

Sultan Erdoğan - who, a mere 15 years ago, was banned from holding political office - has now succeeded in dismantling almost every defining element of the Kemalist republic. 
What replaces it will be a crude strongman state in service of Islamic imperialism. 
I have read a lot of commentary this morning, starting with Douglas Murray's "Turkish Democracy Has Just Died" and moving on to Yavuz Baydar's "The End Of Turkey As We Know It" via Alex Alexiev's "Who Lost Turkey?" 
And several readers have been kind enough to inquire where's my own "Who Lost Turkey?" piece. 
Well, the truth is I published it exactly ten years ago, to the day of Erdoğan's referendum. From the April 16th 2007 edition of National Review, "De-Boning Turkey":

The modern secular Muslim state – a country that gave women the vote before Britain did and was Israel's best friend in an otherwise hostile region – certainly, that Turkey seems to be being de-boned by the hour: it now has an Islamist government whose Prime Minister has canceled trade deals with Israel, denounced the Iraqi elections, and frosted out the US Ambassador because he was Jewish; a new edition of Mein Kampf is prominently displayed at the airport bookstore. In other words, the Zionist Entity's best pal is starting to look like just another cookie-cutter death-to-the-Great-Satan stan-of-the-month.

Important read.
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