Radical Muslims often use terrorism as a means of advancing their aspirations of world domination, all while presenting themselves as victims of persecution to cover up being the source of growing violence worldwide. This has never been more evident at in the current conflict between the "Muslim world" and France.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, has launched a crusade against his French counterpart, Emmanuel Macron, accusing him and France of discrimination and persecution of Muslims, which he says is akin to the persecution of Jews in pre-Holocaust Europe.
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The self-proclaimed "new sultan of the faithful," Erdogan is leading the call for a boycott of French products over cartoons in French media that depicted the Prophet Muhammad – something the 1.5 billion Muslims who believe in see as a gross affront – and a statement by the French president defending them.
Iran rushed to join Turkey's harsh criticism of Macron and France, as did Qatar, Kuwait and Jordan, and to a lesser extent, Saudi Arabia and Egypt.
The pretext for the anti-French campaign is a statement Macron made during a memorial service for Samuel Paty, a middle-school teacher who was murdered by beheading on Oct. 16 by Abdoullakh Abouyedovich Anzorov, an 18-year-old Muslim Russian-born refugee of Chechen descent.
Paty's crime? He showed his class some of the controversial cartoons about the Prophet Muhammad, published in satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo – the same cartoons over which 12 of the weekly's employees were murdered in 2015.
This massacre and other terrorist cases linked to it are now at the heart of a high-profile trial held in Paris.
It is important to present things as they are: Paty's brutal murder is the problem - not the reactions to it. Trying to flip the narrative in an attempt to present the reactions to the murder as a cause of Muslim extremism is a criminal distortion of reality, which aims to divert the discussion from the root of this evil.
Only a dangerous manipulator like Erdogan could take Macron's moving speech and twist it into a reason to spar over the honor of Islam. Nothing in what the French president said warranted the incumbent it sparked on the part of Erdogan.
Macron mounted the appropriately emotional defense of the values of freedom, which are at the basis of the French republic. And it wasn't his statements that bothered Erdogan, but the fact that two weeks before Paty's horrific murder, Macron began promoting a bill designed to fight political and radical Islam in France.
Macron's explicit condemnation of the barbaric assassination, and the fact he named radical Islam as responsible, reflected his resolve to curtail the extensive freedom of action enjoyed by radical Muslims in France. Some say this determination comes too late but Erdogan's hysterical reaction suggest that the "sultan from Ankara" recognizes that the change in French policy is a threat to foreign elements' ability to influence Muslim communities in Europe.
Since coming into power 17 years ago, Erdogan has been busy setting fires on behalf of the radical Islamist interests he represents.
Ignoring his pyromaniac character has allowed him to establish his political status in Turkey and the Middle East, and whenever there is any threat to the stability of his regime, he sets fire in other regions. At the moment, Turkey has stakes in the fighting in Syria, Libya, and Nagorno-Karabakh, and it is involved in maritime disputes with Greece and Cyprus – not to mention Erdogan's threat to resume the flow of "refugees" to Europe at any given time.
I hope that the Europeans finally understand who they are dealing with and how they need to deal with him.
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