Erdogan’s final solution to the Kurdish question

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The Kurds are the only secular pro-Israel forces in an overwhelmingly Islamist, pan-Arab-infected environment. If the Kurds are to be empowered and invigorated that could stimulate a significant change in the Middle East towards democracy and initiate a new era of cooperation and mutual understanding between Israel and the Middle Eastern populations—one that deviates from the anti-Jewish apocalyptic narration that presided over the Middle Eastern politics for many decades.

But it seems that the Western powers, as much as they appear theoretically anti-Islamists and pro-democracy, in practice everything they have been doing since the 1970s has winded up in the creation of a chaotic medieval order in the MENA region. That’s in part due to the oil bonanza and the evergrowing market of arms deals that generate a tremendous profit for the European and American arms industry, but also because modern Arab medievalism provides the Western academia with a rare, dense and vivid field of experience on the lifestyle of medieval societies—where absolute rulers wielded unlimited powers over their subjects, societies that languished under the chains of the all-powerful Islamic churches and Muslim “pops,” mature individuals who believed fervently in Jins and Afarites, public beheadings overseen by the strict Shariah jurisdictions, minorities obliterated, thinkers and philosophers subjected to inquisitions, tortured, crucified, their books burned, and separated from their wives—that otherwise can’t be found outside the historical accounts and archaeological findings.

Once, a prominent Egyptian novelist who is now self-exiled in the U.S., and while I was attending one of his online Arabic classes in literature, said that when he taught Dostoyevsky and Chekhov to his Western students, they were grappling with the atrocities and misfortunes related by those great novelist of the Russian empire in their works, because their (the students) relaxed modern way of life and their civilized societies had long forgotten the struggles of the French Revolution and the famines and plagues that used to hit London and other European capitals time and again. The Egyptian novelist added that Russia of the 19th century, when flogging was a lawful punishment, was pretty much akin to Egypt of the 21st century. Those well-off students haven’t got the chance to see people living in the graveyards of Cairo. The filthy hospitals. The squalid of starvation. The long queues for food stamps. They haven’t seen a whole Coptic community living in the Zabbaleen neighborhood— the infamous trash town.

All the sufferings of the Middle East and North African countries are rooted in the Islamist ideology, in a holistic system of thought that need to be erected and replaced by an enlightened and universalist one. 

The Kurds provide a chink of light in the dark Middle Eastern tunnel. They have never given themselves up to Islamism, or to the pan-Arab destructive impulses; their brave rebellious women never believed in their inferiority to men; they never regarded democracy as blasphemy, or revealing their hair as obscenity, however, now the West with its useless and cynical leaders, and the Americans under the presidency of a petulant and immoral president are turning them in. At the drop of a hat, they were cowardly handed over to the bloodthirsty sword of their arch-enemy; to the talons of an Islamist predator that would devour them and won’t hesitate to commit another Armenian-like genocide.

Alongside its moral duties toward the Kurds—a nation that is about to face an imminent genocidal kismet—there is a political interest that ought to prompt Israel to seize the opportunity and forge a strong alliance with the Kurds in times when all the parties are standing by and watching the massacre unfolding before their very eyes. 

In many occasions, Turkish president Recipe Tayyip Erdogan criticized the treaty of Lausanne that established the borders of modern Turkey for living the once vast empire too small. Driven by a sense of irredentism to take back all the territories that were part of the Ottoman Empire, from Aleppo to Mosul, and from Mecca to Jerusalem all the way to Greece—he has now, with the unstated authorization from the Trump administration, officially launched the irreversible march towards a Reconquista in reverse.

Turkey’s real intentions are beyond securing its boarders or bringing an indoctrinated pro-Turkish Syrian refuges back to Syria. Erdogan is undoubtedly preparing his nation and the Arab revolutionaries spearheaded by the Muslim Brotherhood for a sacred mission, and every step he takes is building up to the next one. That mission, in its most advanced point, seeks to take over the Al-Aqsa Mosque; for now the direct goal is to succeed in implementing the Kurds’ Final Solution.