Unlike the gangs allegedly behind the ships targeted in the Caribbean, groups backed by Turkey’s leader engage in what federal law defines as terrorist activity.
Unlike the gangs allegedly behind the ships targeted in the Caribbean, groups backed by Turkey’s leader engage in what federal law defines as terrorist activity.
I t may induce vertigo, but let’s try to take President Trump on his own terms.
In the past ten months, he has killed more than 210 people in unauthorized aerial strikes on approximately 63 vessels in the waters off South and Central America. Evidently, we’ve decided not to talk about this killing spree, which disgraces our nation.
It will persist, nevertheless. In Trump’s immunity case, the Supreme Court advised the president that he is immune from prosecution. During the court arguments at the time, the idea that a commander in chief might order assassinations of dubious legality for political reasons was merely fodder for hypothetical questioning. Now, it is actually happening. The final ruling in Trump v. United States held that such orders are official acts, beyond the reach of indictments or wrongful death actions. As Alexander Hamilton put it in discussing the Constitution’s grounds for impeachment and removal of a president, such violations of the “public trust” — such “POLITICAL” offenses—are in the purview of Congress to address. In today’s post-constitutional Republican Party, it is passé to speak of the public trust or of Congress’s erstwhile duty to check executive malfeasance. It’s not Obama or Biden wielding power imperiously, so the killings are met by silence — and the occasional attaboy!
But remember our premise: We’re taking Trump on his own terms. The president claims the power to employ lethal military force against vessels suspected of trafficking illegal narcotics because he has designated some Latin American criminal gangs as foreign terrorist organizations (FTOs).
Mind you, the Trump administration has not proved that any of the boats was ferrying narcotics, nor has it identified the dead, much less established their connections to Tren de Aragua or other notorious drug-trafficking gangs. We have a government that is regularly compelled to dismiss cases it has had ample time to investigate because it was mistaken about the strength of the evidence, yet we are to believe the same government is somehow batting a thousand in brief encounters on the high seas.
Unless you buy that, you can be certain that the 210 killed include people either innocent of drug dealing or unconnected to the designated gangs. Even if this weren’t the case, (a) drug trafficking is a crime, not an act of war; (b) the Trump administration knows this, which is why it has not tried to detain survivors as enemy combatants; (c) many of the vessels that have been moving drugs were not enroute to the United States, casting doubt on whether there was even a federally prosecutable drug crime; (d) the definition of terrorist activity in federal law — which must be met for a legitimate FTO designation — does not include drug trafficking; and (e) even a legally legitimate FTO designation does not authorize the use of lethal force against the designee or its alleged operatives (rather, it enables the government to freeze assets and prosecute the FTO’s material supporters).
The reality is that the killings of the boat operators are utterly unjustifiable in law. But taking Trump on his own imperial terms, fine: He designated them as foreign terrorists so he gets to kill their supporters.
Here’s my question, then: How is Trump conceivably considering giving F-35 stealth combat aircraft to the regime of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, one of the world’s leading state sponsors of designated foreign terrorist organizations?
Erdoğan is a creation of the Muslim Brotherhood. A dozen years ago, I described his rise, his sharia supremacist conquest over Mustafa Kemal’s secular Turkish government, and his sabotage of NATO from within, in a short book called Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy. If I may say, it has stood up quite well.
As the Ottoman caliphate lay in ruins after World War I, Turkey turned to Kemal, its hero of the Gallipoli campaign, to forge a new republic — hence his honorific, Atatürk (father of the Turks). Like virtually all Turks, Kemal was a Muslim, but he grasped that to prosper, Turkey would have to turn westward. That would require suppression of sharia’s political system and legal framework for society.
Consistent with Western norms of religious liberty, Kemal did not outlaw Islam as a creed. But of course, that’s the conundrum of the clash of civilizations: The West grants space for religious belief, but while it happily seizes that space, Islam does not accept that the spiritual and secular realms can be separate. Sharia supremacism is backed by 14 centuries of authoritative scholarship; in Muslim majority countries, creedal Islam will always breed an insurrectionary element that abhors Westernization and its Judeo-Christian underpinnings. Hence, Atatürk’s secular regime relied on a deep state — the leadership of the armed forces, as well as elements of parliament and the judiciary — to check Islamist agitation.
Hassan al-Banna, the Egyptian schoolteacher who founded the Muslim Brotherhood, was a Kemal contemporary. Looking at the same broken world, he drew the opposite conclusion: The caliphate had collapsed due to its straying from sharia, and Islam would rise again only by its rigorous application. For the Brotherhood, Islam is destined to dominate and never content to be subordinated.
Erdoğan is a product of that fundamentalist Sunni tradition, now arguably its most powerful figure on the global stage. He first came to public attention in Turkey as leader of the Istanbul Youth Movement — a protégé of Necmettin Erbakan, trailblazer of Turkey’s Brotherhood-fueled National Salvation Party (NSP). In 1974, when he was 20, Erdoğan gained renown by writing and staging a virulently antisemitic theatrical production, Maskomya — a portmanteau of Masons, communists, and Jews, in which Judaism was framed as the unifying, corrupting ingredient.
Four times in its history, the Kemalist deep state executed coups to quell rising sharia supremacism and other threats to the secular state. One of these occurred in 1980, when the armed forces shut down Erbakan’s NSP for championing a sharia agenda incompatible with Turkey’s constitution. Erdoğan promptly followed his mentor into the new Refah (Welfare) Party, which Turkish scholar Soner Cagaptay described as “an explicitly Islamist party, which featured strong anti-Western, anti-Semitic, anti-democratic, and anti-secular elements.”
This period of Turkish history launched a transformative population shift. In 1980, less than half of Turks lived in the urban areas that were Kemalist strongholds; sharia supremacism was stronger in the rural areas. By 2000, two-thirds of Turks lived in the cities — and today it is nearly 80 percent. The demographic shift has been an Islamist coup, enabling sharia supremacists to organize and capture parliamentary seats in a regime consciously structured to keep them out of power. (The structure broke down because the secularist parties fractured.)
Thus was Erdoğan elected mayor of Istanbul in 1994, though he preferred to call himself the city’s “imam,” proclaiming, “I am a servant of sharia.” More significantly, the Refah Party managed to win the parliamentary election in 1995 with just 21 percent of the vote, raising Erbakan to prime minister.
Alarmed by the sharia supremacist turn, the deep state mobilized again in 1997. This episode became known as the “postmodern coup,” however, because the armed forces refrained from dissolving parliament — fretting that Turkey would be ostracized by its increasingly progressive and Brotherhood-friendly NATO allies in Europe and the Clinton administration. Erbakan was forced to resign, and the regime rolled back his sharia initiatives (e.g., Koran schools, non-enforcement of the headscarf ban, promotion of tarikat Islamic societies). Moreover, a number of sharia-supremacist rabble-rousers were prosecuted. The latter included Erdoğan, who was convicted of inciting religious or racial hatred. At a raucous rally, he gave a fiery speech that included reciting lines from a poem called “Soldier’s Prayer”: “The mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets our bayonets, the faithful our soldiers.”
It cost him the mayoralty and four months in prison, but it made Erdoğan a figurative martyr and real political star. He opportunistically broke with Erbakan and, following the Muslim Brotherhood playbook, formed the “Freedom and Justice” Party (AKP). It was a stealth sharia supremacist party (not so stealthy anymore), feigning allegiance to the secular order — under the guise of “socially conservative” but “pragmatic” reform — to avoid being banned.
In the chaos and fracturing of Turkish politics in 2002, the AKP swept into power with just 34 percent support. With his confederates installed in parliament, the law was changed to allow Erdogan to become prime minister despite his conviction for anti-regime activism. Ever since, he has ruled Turkey as an authoritarian bent on destroying the secular system from within — promoting sharia, suppressing the media, imprisoning political dissenters. He has remained in power by forcing changes to the Kemalist constitution, including his installation as president — a position made sweepingly powerful by gobbling up parliamentary authorities. And does anyone think he’s leaving in 2028 when is “term” is up?
Since taking power, Erdoğan has energetically provided material support for designated foreign terrorist organizations. Consistent with his roots, he facilitated the Muslim Brotherhood’s Middle Eastern branches, including the mothership in Egypt. You’d think that might upset President Trump since, just eight months ago, he made quite a show of designating the Egyptian Brotherhood as an FTO — and as we’ve seen, Trump deems such designations as a pretext for military attacks. Here’s what the president’s State Department said about it:
The Muslim Brotherhood, founded in Egypt in 1928, has developed into a transnational network with chapters across the Middle East and beyond. Relevant here, its chapters in Lebanon, Jordan, and Egypt engage in or facilitate and support violence and destabilization campaigns that harm their own regions, United States citizens, and United States interests. For example, in the aftermath of the October 7, 2023, attack in Israel, the military wing of the Lebanese chapter of the Muslim Brotherhood joined Hamas, Hezbollah, and Palestinian factions to launch multiple rocket attacks against both civilian and military targets within Israel. A senior leader of the Egyptian chapter of the Muslim Brotherhood, on October 7, 2023, called for violent attacks against United States partners and interests, and Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood leaders have long provided material support to the militant wing of Hamas. Such activities threaten the security of American civilians in the Levant and other parts of the Middle East, as well as the safety and stability of our regional partners. . . . It is the policy of the United States to cooperate with its regional partners to eliminate the capabilities and operations of Muslim Brotherhood chapters designated as foreign terrorist organizations[,] . . . deprive those chapters of resources, and thereby end any threat such chapters pose to United States nationals or the national security of the United States.
How exactly is the Trump administration eliminating the capabilities of designated Muslim Brotherhood chapters by providing F-35s — some of our top-line aerial combat capabilities — to Erdoğan, the Brotherhood’s essential patron?
Over the past quarter-century, a top Erdoğan priority has been material support for Hamas, the Brotherhood’s Palestinian jihadist branch that has been a designated FTO under American law since 1997 — among the first FTOs, right after enactment of the designation process. During the second intifada, Erdoğan condemned Israel’s targeted assassinations of Hamas’s founders, Sheik Ahmed Yassin and Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi. Then in 2006, when Hamas won the Palestinian election and the Bush administration, in conjunction with our European allies, tried to isolate the jihadists to pressure them to renounce terrorism, Erdoğan thwarted the effort. First, he ostentatiously hosted Hamas leadership in Ankara right after the election; then he openly supported Hamas when it brutally ousted Palestinian Authority forces from Gaza. As if we need reminding, it was Hamas’s domination of Gaza that enabled it to wage continuous jihad against Israel — with Erdoğan’s approbation — culminating in the atrocities of October 7, 2023, and the ongoing war.
Erdoğan has also indulged the activities of Turkish-based jihadist abettor, the Humanitarian Relief Foundation (IHH), which poses as a charity while working in tandem with Muslim Brotherhood satellites. The IHH is a member of the Union of Good, a designated FTO founded by the late Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi — the Muslim Brotherhood icon and close confidant of Erdoğan, to whom Qaradawi referred as “the current caliph of Muslims,” with Istanbul as “the capital of the Islamic caliphate.”
A bipartisan group of 87 senators wrote the White House a letter in 2010, urging that the IHH be individually designated as an FTO, but the Brotherhood-friendly Obama administration declined. As I detailed in Spring Fever, with support from Erdoğan and the AKP, the IHH organized a 2014 flotilla to support Hamas by attempting to break Israel’s blockade of Gaza. In the resulting firefight, nine Israeli naval personnel were wounded, and nine jihadists were killed. Naturally, Erdoğan (echoed by Qaradawi) condemned Israel for a “bloody massacre” against ships he said were merely transporting “humanitarian aid.”
It is worth stressing that, unlike the drug gangs Trump claims are behind the ships he’s blowing up in the Caribbean, the designated FTOs ardently supported by Erdoğan actually engage in what federal law defines as terrorist activity. Yet, Trump is killing the former operatives while he considers arming Erdoğan with F-35s — fighter aircraft from which Erdoğan’s regime was excluded because he made a separate air defense deal with Russia, which is endeavoring to unspool NATO while persisting in its brutal war of aggression in Ukraine. Meanwhile, Trump’s lawless striking of ships in the Caribbean, not to respond to a military threat but to advance a policy preference (drug interdiction on waters the U.S. claims to control), can only discredit his condemnation of the Iranian regime for striking ships in the Hormuz Strait, not in response to a military threat but to advance the regime’s own policy preference (trade interdiction on waters Iran claims to control).
Maybe this makes sense to someone. It makes no sense to me.