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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, “Turks are hungry for fairy tales about the good life they did not get to enjoy over the past century, but believe they deserve. Any feel-good news propaganda, even Erdogan's famous ‘The West, including the Germans, are jealous of us!’ tirade, finds millions of receptive listeners in Turkey's post-modern marketplace of absurdity.”

In an article titled, “‘Jesus Was Turkish’: the Bizarre Resurgence of Pseudo-Turkology,” Luka Ivan Jukic wrote in NEW/LINES Magazine: “You would be forgiven for not knowing that former U.S. President Barack Obama was a Turk. Or that Jesus Christ and the Prophet Muhammad were, likewise, of Turkic origin. You would be forgiven for not knowing that Russia is really a great Turkic nation, that Kazakhs and the Japanese are genetically identical or that the legendary English King Arthur was, you guessed it, a Turk. You would be forgiven because none of this is true. Yet in countries from central Europe to Central Asia and everywhere in between, supposed historical facts like these and the theories they support have made their way from the minds of overzealous and pseudo-academics into national school textbooks, popular culture and, indeed, official government ideology.”

In 1932, the Turkish language Institute invented the fake “Sun Language Theory” which claimed that “the Turkish language was the source of all human language and therefore all human civilization,” Jukic wrote. “Linguists from the Institute claimed that language had been invented by sun-worshipping proto-Turks in Central Asia as they babbled at the sun.” Furthermore, the Turkish History Thesis claimed that “Turks had brought civilization to China, Europe, India and elsewhere when they migrated from the Eurasian Steppe.” These pseudo-theories found their way into Turkish textbooks and popular books, brainwashing several generations of Turks. Most adherents of these pseudo-scientific claims are the followers of Pres. Erdogan.

There is no super race. All people are equal. They are all God’s children. While claims of superiority may satisfy a vain human inclination, no one should treat other races as inferior.