Fresh from a tete-a-tete with his Russian, Iranian, and Chinese counterparts, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey arrived in the United States on Saturday.
On Tuesday, Erdogan will address the United Nations General Assembly. According to his office, his schedule will be busy: “President Erdogan will likely to receive representatives of U.S.-based Turkish nongovernmental organizations and of Jewish organizations, and attend the event to be held by the Turkiye-U.S. Business Council.” Jewish community leaders who meet with Erdogan are naive to do so. He considers them useful idiots to launder his image. He seeks both to restore the legitimacy shredded after his bodyguards attacked dissidents in the heart of Washington, D.C., and to use photo-ops with prominent Jews to give cover for his support for terrorist groups such as Hamas.
Erdogan is not the first world leader to embrace such a cynical strategy. Nearly 40 years ago, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein sent Nizar Hamdoon, a charismatic young diplomat, to the U.S. While the State Department had designated Iraq a terror sponsor in 1979, it lifted the designation two years later as the Reagan administration sought to paint Saddam as a moderate in comparison to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini next door in Iran. However, relations were frosty. Iraqi Jews understood the terror their co-religionists faced. On Jan. 27, 1969, the Baathist regime hanged nine Jews in the center of Baghdad as a jeering crowd of one-half million looked on. Saddam’s regime also sponsored various Palestinian terrorist groups such as the Abu Nidal Organization and the Palestine Liberation Front (famous for the 1985 Achille Lauro cruise ship hijacking in which American Jew Leon Klinghoffer was singled out and killed).
Hamdoon offered a different face. He hosted dinner parties in honor of Jewish congressmen and feted Jewish community leaders. “It was an amazing evening, very interesting discussions, everyone very relaxed,” one guest told the Washington Post. “Here’s Steve Solarz, a Jewish congressman from New York, with pro-Israelis around him, talking with an Arab from Iraq.” Such parties were neither innocent nor motivated by altruism. Rather, Saddam wanted to sidestep accountability for dictatorship and terror sponsorship. Most important, he wanted access to American weaponry.
In a way, antisemitism also underlaid the Iraqi dictator’s strategy. He courted American Jews because he believed that, behind Washington’s formal power structures, they pulled the strings. In effect, rather than dismiss Protocols of the Elders of Zion as a noxious conspiracy, Saddam and Hamdoon embraced it and sought access to those they considered the real decision-makers.
Erdogan is no different. Shortly after Erdogan took office, an article I wrote upset him. Rather than reach out to me as an American policymaker through the Turkish Embassy as normal, he instead complained to the Turkish Jewish community, who passed his words on to me. Two decades of so-called engagement with the Jewish community has no more changed Erdogan’s policies than Saddam’s. Just three years ago, Erdogan called Israel “the spirit of Hitler.” While Israeli officials justified the restoration of full relations with Turkey on a promise by Erdogan to restrict Hamas activities inside Turkey, Erdogan violated that promise. Istanbul now has become the antisemitic terrorist group’s financial and operational hub.
Nor are Jews the only target of this Turkish strategy. Aykan Erdemir, the director of international affairs research for the Anti-Defamation League, has chronicled repeatedly how Erdogan uses photo-ops with religious leaders from minority Christian communities to shield himself from the consequences of religious abuses back home.
It is fine to engage with sincerity, but Jewish community leaders are making themselves window-dressing for an unrepentant antisemite trying to launder his image but unwilling to reform his actions.
Michael Rubin (@mrubin1971) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential. He is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
