Erdogan Channels Ottomans to Announce Imperial Desires

The Turkish government’s new ideology of conquest is now on total display. 

Their Ministry of Communication’s most up-to-date governing administration audio video, concentrating on the Turkish military, provides Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan as heir to the Ottoman and Seljuk dynasties and portrays Turkish conquerors praying in the Church of Hagia Sophia, the former Byzantine basilica that not long ago was converted into a mosque.

The Center East Media Investigation Institute (MEMRI) noted on September 1, “The clip cuts in between illustrations or photos of the Turkish military, such as special forces, tanks, fighter jets, assault helicopters, rockets, naval vessels, and images of gentlemen in Ottoman and Seljuk navy garb. The video clip also reveals the Turkish drill ships Fatih and Oruç Reis, which have just lately been drilling and seeking for normal gas in the Mediterranean Sea and the Black Sea.” MEMRI continues:

The songs functions the zurna, a wind instrument central in the standard Ottoman military band, providing the music a distinctly ‘Ottoman’ audio. The lyrics combine religious and nationalistic imagery and refer to the Kızıl Elma (‘Red Apple’), a notion from Turkish mythology that has occasionally been made use of to refer to earth domination and at other periods has referred to a distinct military services target by a Turkish state…

Some of the lyrics of the music video incorporate:

The objective of the Crimson Apple will be arrived at only with the lives [lost] on the way. The promised divine gentle and truth of the matter will unquestionably dominate forever. Only with the conquest of the Pink Apple will the environment come across tranquility and peace…

Could the audio of ‘Allah Akbar’ rise to the ninth heaven. Allah! Allah! We will not turn back! Strike so that the tyrant wails, may perhaps the seven worlds listen to our sound of freedom…

These insane Turks, for the sake of the crescent, will give their heads anyplace in the environment. Come, my Turkey, for the adore of Allah. Set a different stamp on heritage. O good nation, on behalf of the homeland, [you’ve come] to encourage the generations again…

This blood is Sultan Alparslan, who reared up at Manzikert, Osman I, at the founding. The sultan of the earth, who was specified superior information of conquests and the child heroes at Gallipoli. This very same blood will come from the ancestors. It is crafting legends all over again in resurgence. The earth is ready for ‘There is no god but Allah.’ The vacation spot is the Pink Apple, we will not despair. Like Alparslan who reared up at Manzikert, like our ancestors, who wrote background with victories, like our grandfather, who closed 1 age and opened a further, our aim is the Purple Apple. Forward march!

The Battle of Manzikert referred to in the movie transpired in the 11th century. Manzikert (today’s Malazgirt) was then a bulk-Armenian city in just the borders of the Greek Byzantine (Eastern Roman) empire. Beginning close to 1019, Turks commenced concentrating on and capturing Christian cities throughout Armenia and Asia Minimal and massacring their inhabitants. Historian Raymond Ibrahim files the mass murders, looting and other crimes committed by Seljuk Turks in Manzikert in his short article “Battle of Manzikert: The ‘Subjugation of Christianity by Islam.’”

A Muslim dynasty of Turkic descent, the Seljuks invaded components of southwestern Asia and the Center East from the 11th to 14th centuries. The empire they proven included huge lands this sort of as Asia Minor, Armenia, the Levant, Jerusalem, the Hindu Kush, Central Asia, and the Persian Gulf. Their advance marked the beginning of Turkish existence in the Middle East. The video clip declares Turkey and Erdogan heirs to the Seljuk dynasty. 

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Yet another invasion that Turkey has ordinarily celebrated for many years is the 1453 conquest of Constantinople by Ottoman Turks. Constantinople was the most significant and wealthiest city in Europe from the mid-5th to the early 13th century, and the Hagia Sophia was the religious middle of the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) empire, created by Justinian I in the 6th century. 

On May possibly 29, 1453, following a seven-week siege, the Ottoman military, led by Sultan Mehmed II, also recognized as Mehmed Muhammad the Conqueror, invaded and captured Constantinople. Hagia Sophia was then forcibly transformed to a mosque. 

Dionysios Hatzopoulos, a professor of classical and Byzantine studies, describes what occurred immediately after the town fell to the Ottoman Turks:

Doorways have been damaged, non-public residences ended up looted, their tenants ended up massacred. Retailers in the city markets have been looted. Monasteries and convents were broken in. Their tenants were killed, nuns had been raped several, to keep away from dishonor, killed themselves…

The wonderful doors of Saint Sophia ended up forced open, and crowds of indignant soldiers came in and fell upon the unlucky worshippers. Pillaging and killing in the holy put went on for hours. Identical was the fate of worshippers in most churches in the city. All the things that could be taken from the splendid buildings was taken by the new masters of the imperial capital. Icons have been destroyed, treasured manuscripts had been shed forever. Thousands of civilians were enslaved troopers fought in excess of young boys and younger ladies.

The Ottoman Empire, founded in 1299, lasted for about 600 years. Ottoman Turkey fully commited genocide in opposition to Greeks, Armenians and Assyrians from 1913 to 1923. The empire was officially disbanded with the establishment of the Republic of Turkey in 1923.

In 1930, Turkey formally renamed Constantinople “Istanbul” and reopened Hagia Sophia as a museum in 1935. The historic church was transformed back into a mosque on July 24 of this year. 

Inspite of the “secular” structure of the Turkish republic, the persecution of Greeks and other non-Muslims ongoing through the republican period. For illustration, in 1941-1942, all non-Muslim males ended up enlisted in the Turkish military—including the aged and mentally ill—and forced to do the job below particularly extreme problems in labor battalions. In 1942, a “wealth tax” was imposed to remove Christians and Jews from the economic system. In 1955, an anti-Greek pogrom rocked Istanbul, and in 1964 nearly all the remaining Greeks ended up forcibly expelled from the region.

According to Professor Alfred de Zayas, the 1955 Istanbul pogrom “can be viewed as a grave criminal offense less than the two Turkish domestic regulation and worldwide law. In the historic context of a religion pushed eliminationist course of action accompanied by lots of pogroms prior to, all through, and immediately after World War I within just the territories of the Ottoman Empire, which include the destruction of the Greek communities of Pontos and Asia Insignificant and the atrocities in opposition to the Greeks of Smyrna in September 1922, the genocidal character of the Istanbul pogrom gets to be apparent.” 

Istanbul’s present Greek Orthodox populace is believed to be around 1,500. Even with the Turks’ hundreds of years of atrocities towards Greeks and other Christians, the Turkish government demonstrates no indicators of regret and no willingness to apologize or compensate. On the opposite, Turkish officials normally specific possibly denial of or satisfaction in their own historic and recent crimes. Turkey’s cure of Christians demonstrates that they have engaged in perpetual jihad in opposition to Christians and other non-Muslims. And they are now pursuing intense regional growth and openly threatening Greece, France and some North African and Gulf countries. In a speech in Ankara on August 30, Erdogan reported, in portion:

As some historians have said, we are not a modern society that has an army—we are a country that is by itself an army… With Allah’s permission, there is no electricity that can stand in the way of this country.

We do not operate absent from a struggle. We will not be reluctant to sacrifice martyrs and wounded people in this struggle. For our independence and our foreseeable future, we will not keep back from roaring all with each other as 83 million people today and functioning more than the dams that get in our way, like a flood. 

The serious dilemma is this: Can individuals who oppose us in the Mediterranean Sea and about it take the possibility of the similar sacrifices? Do the men and women of Greece accept what will materialize to them due to the fact of their greedy and incompetent leaders? Do the people of France settle for the price tag they will pay since of their greedy and incompetent leaders? Are the brotherly peoples of some North African and nations around the world in the Gulf content with their futures rising darker as a end result of their greedy and incompetent leaders?

There are numerous explanations why Turkey is so blatantly intense the two in domestic politics and foreign coverage. Standard Turkish expansionism and nationalism, neo-Ottomanism and the perception in jihad and conquest in Islamic doctrine are key kinds. But a different purpose is that Turkey has never ever been held accountable by the worldwide community for any of the crimes it has committed during its heritage.

As Professor Zayas notes:

The awkwardness of the prevailing circumstance can be shown by a hypothetical case in point. How would the intercontinental neighborhood have reacted if the article-war German authorities had named streets immediately after Josef Goebbels and Reinhard Heydrich, the architects of Kristallnacht? What would the response of the worldwide group have been if, as a substitute of making ethical and material reparation, the German government had refused to render restitution and compensation to the victims and their survivors?

It’s an increasingly pressing concern.