By Harut Sassounian
Publisher, The California Courier
There is nothing wrong with being proud of one’s nationality, ethnic origin or religion. However, when that pride becomes so fanatical, reaching the level of absurdity, then we are dealing with someone who has lost all sense of reality.
Turkish political analyst Burak Bekdil acknowledged in his article published by BESA Center Perspectives: “The Turkish-Islamist psyche is susceptible to…the pitfalls of honor, fatalism, conspiracism, bombast, publicity, and confusion.”
Over the years, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has made many bizarre statements that raise suspicions about his mental sanity.
Here are some examples of Erdogan’s nutty statements.
In 2014, Erdogan told a group of Latin American Muslims visiting Istanbul that Muslim Pilgrims discovered America several centuries before Christopher Columbus: “It is alleged that the American continent was discovered by Columbus in 1492. In fact, Muslim sailors reached the American continent 314 years before Columbus in 1178. …In his memoirs, Christopher Columbus mentions the existence of a mosque atop a hill on the coast of Cuba. A mosque would look perfect on that hill today.” Of course, Columbus never said such a thing in his memoirs.
In another outlandish claim, Pres. Erdogan announced that Turkey will send a spaceship with a Turkish astronaut to the moon in 2023 on the centennial of the Republic of Turkey. He speculated that a female astronaut may be a part of the Turkish space team. It would be interesting to see how Turkey, a bankrupt country, could spend billions of dollars on such a far-fetched adventure, not to mention its lack of space technology. Maybe this whole topic is a hoax to divert the people’s attention from their woes and empty pockets to gazing at the moon and stars! A skeptical Turk sarcastically said: “We cannot go to the supermarket, so how will we go to space?” Another Turk remarked, “We were not able to distribute masks [for COVID] to citizens, so how do we go to space?”
Before Erdogan can fantasize about going to space, he should worry about the collapsing Lira, millions of unemployed Turks, and a huge percentage of his people suffering from abject poverty. According to Turkish sources, 34 million Turks are on the verge of starvation. In the first six months of this year, 1.6 million Turkish families had their electricity and gas cut off because they could not pay their bills.
Turkish analyst Burak Bekdil wrote that he “grew up in classrooms filled up with mottoes like ‘A Turk is worth the world,’ ‘Turks have had to fight the seven biggest world powers,’ and ‘A Turk's only friend is another Turk.’ Our textbooks taught us that the supreme Turkish race dominated the entire world for centuries; that the Ottoman Empire collapsed only after a coalition of world powers attacked it; that we lost WWI because we had allied with the Germans, who were defeated (not us); and that one day, we will make the entire planet Turkish. We were taught that an Ottoman warrior could keep on fighting even after having been beheaded by the [Byzantine] enemy.”
As a result, Bekdil explained...
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