NZ attack comments: Turkish PM’s arrogance knows no bounds

ANALYSIS: Even by the level of bellicose that has come to define Turkey’s President, his latest remark about Aussie travellers heading home in coffins is staggering.

Comment: Even by the levels of arrogance and bellicose that has come to define Turkey’s President in recent times, his latest remark about Aussie travellers heading home in coffins like their Anzac grandfathers, is staggering.

But then Recep Tayyip Erdogan and some sections of Turkey has since 2013 been hell bent on driving out the sort of secular Western values and warmth its one-time Gallipoli hero Mustafa Kemal Ataturk offered 100 years ago.

Remember Ataturk’s famous phrase writ large at the gates of the Gallipoli peninsula about the Johnnies and Mehmets and all mothers wiping away tears and the common and inclusive suffering sentiment?

Well no more.

Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been condemned for his offensive comments.

It is now an invasion by an imperialist force that apparently is looking at doing it again.

Put simply, Erdogan wants to create a post-Kemalist era, a powerhouse of an Ottoman Empire at the geographical and metaphorical crossroads between East and West and to do that he needs to generate and espouse religious-based nationalistic fervour of hysterical proportions.

The massacre at Christchurch’s mosques last week, he said, were as much the actions of a crazy as it was representative of Anti Islamic Kiwis and Aussies.

Erdogan goes further and claims, and in doing so belittles, the tragedy as a crime again him personally, his religion and his people. Three Turks were injured in the shooting, 50 Muslims from 12 other nations were killed.

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Prime Minister Scott Morrison writes a message in a condolence book at the New Zealand High Commission in Canberra.

The emergence of Islamic State in 2013/14 gave Erdogan an enemy to instil a greater sense of nationalism in Turks, under the spectre of a threatening militant force, that allowed him to enact sweeping social reforms.

But the terrorists’ claimed to be acting in the name of the same God, albeit an extremist version, so in recent years he has had to turn again to his other great evil – The West - to rally domestic support.

And his immense domestic popularity has allowed him to dismiss the sorts of protests Prime Minister Scott Morrison generated on Wednesday as synonymous with the sort of ill will, weakness and Islamophobia he now seeks to paint us all.

The emergence of Islamic State gave Erdogan an enemy to instil a greater sense of nationalism in Turks.

This is a man who in recent years has changed names of streets and schools to further his desire to recreate an Islamic sultanate, made the building of mosques in districts mandatory and Ottoman Arabic language compulsory in certain high schools, restricted the sale of beer as he called for yoghurt to be the national drink of choice and even bizarrely suggested the nation dump that Western invention white bread and flour in favour of whole wheat grain pitta. Then there were the thousands of arrests of critics and opposition leaders and curtailing of press freedoms.

No one even seemed to mind when some of his Justice and Development Party (AKP) followers began using the C-word to refer to their leader – Caliph that is.

A member of the Muslim community is comforted by a passer-by near Al Noor mosque in Christchurch. Picture: Getty

The Ottoman Empire had claimed the Islamic caliphate from the 14th to the 20th Century and it was only after Ataturk created the republic in 1923 was it abolished.

For the past couple of years Anzac Day commemorations at Gallipoli have come to represent something else, an invasion and the anniversary an annoyance on the country’s calendar. Three years ago an Islamic centre of education was suddenly built at the intersection to the peninsula much to the amusement of the tiny local population. New roads would have been more helpful they say.

This is the subtext to Erdogan’s confidence, he no longer needs NATO, he doesn’t even want to join the EU any more.

Five years ago Turkey had risked sliding into the sort of ethnic and sectarian strife that has torn Iraq and Syria apart. But Erdogan discovered at the expense of history - or perhaps for it – he is willing to risk alliances and international relations and use whatever tragic event to misguidedly bolster his support and desire to recreate an empire in his image and name.