Thank you Mr Pipes - my response

Submitted by Philip (United Kingdom), Mar 11, 2017 at 08:02

"Erdogan 'stole' the election"... did he steal it, or did he use Middle Eastern/Ottoman methods to win it? This is the ME after all, where elections are not strictly according to any 'Western'(?) rules...(Did Trump steal his election from the pop vote through the Electoral college? Half of all voting Americans seem to think he did... would this be grounds for a coup against Trump? the point I'm making is that electoral rules anywhere are subject to endless political manipulation/shenanigans, esp. in the ME where such behaviour is the rule rather than the exception).

"Erdogan rules despotically"; So did every Ottoman Sultan, and so did Ataturk. And every military coup leader post-war... This is the way things are done in the post-Ottoman ME.

"Military intervention has previously worked in Turkey"; when the Junta took over in Greece, once, post-war, from '67-'74, they were pilloried by the West for the entire time, because Greece was seen by western idiots as 'the birthplace of democracy'... the fact that it had been under 600 years of sometimes despotic, sometimes beneficial Ottoman rule, therefore not practiced in any kind of democracy, was lost/ignored in the West. in Turkey, 4 military coups were greeted in the West without a murmur...Why? because the West expects Turkey to be Middle Eastern, corrupt, despotic, so undemocratic, so subject to military coups, in order to keep NATO and Western interests alive, not to 'make the Turkish child better'. Erdogan is simply taking Turkey back from its Kemalist interlude (1922-200?) to its Islamic/Ottoman heritage of some 6-700 years. His victory as president mirrors the shift in popular sentiment better reflecting the fact that 95+% of Turks are Sunni Muslims. The kemalist secular pro-western military-supported tendency is on the way out with the rise of both Sunni and Shia Resurgences. Erdogan simply reflects this resurgence. And Mr Pipes' comment reflects Western Establishments' reaction to those Resurgences esp. within the Western nat security set-ups that still view a military-supported kemalist Turkey as essential to NATO, the ME, and the EU? while Erdogan and Turkish Muslims have another perspective followed by perhaps more than 50% of the Turkish pop? If not Erdogan, some other Muslim leader would be doing something very similar in Turkey.

Thank you.

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