Prime Minister Erdogan As Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan returns home from his visit to his biggest western fan, President Barack Obama, only to prepare for a controversial pilgrimage to Hamas-controlled Gaza, Turkey’s educational system is being mocked internationally. A spoof in “The Scientific American” focuses on revelations that Istanbul textbooks have pictured Charles Darwin as “a hook-nosed Jew” who consorted with monkeys. Writer Steve Mirsky offers the counter-revelation that Darwin’s “On the Origins of Species” (1859) was really first titled: “L’Chaim: The Whole Megillah!” Perhaps Turkey’s increasingly “religious” public schools should have taught instead that Darwin was “the first Islamist.” Certainly Prime Minister’s Erdoğan’s stealth evolutionary blueprint for transforming Turkey from a secular republic into a Muslim state suggests that—in Turkey at least—Islamism may be the “survival of the fittest.” For a detailed analysis see my report, “From Ally to Nemesis: How Erdoğan’s Islamists Hijacked Atatürk’s Nation and Put It on A Collision Course with Israel and the U.S.” (Simon Wiesenthal Center, October, 2011). In North America and Western Europe, the public knows little about what’s happening in Turkey except it’s avoided the worst of post-2008 global economic turmoil, and is a good place to vacation—unless you are an Israeli, given rocky Turkish-Israeli diplomatic relations since the Turkish “Mavi Marmara,” the flag ship of the so-called “Gaza Freedom Flotilla” was understandably interdicted in 2010 by Israeli commandos. Attempts by Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu to repair relations by belatedly apologizing to Ankara have proved unproductive so far. Today, Turkey’s economy does not look quite as good, and Turkey’s Syrian border looks horrible, compared to a few years ago when Erdoğan visiting Egypt was greeted like a Neo-Ottoman Sultan. Even so, it is important to understand what Erdoğan has accomplished in just over a decade and its implications for the global situation of Jews as well as Israelis. Turkey’s Islamization was indeed a gradual, evolutionary process with roots going back to the 1950s. Then, Prime Minister Adnan Menderes, founder of the Demokrat Party, went too far by hinting that the Turkish Parliament might reinstate Shariah law. He was executed by the Army colonels who organized a 1960 coup. Subsequently came Necmettin Erbakan— a product of Milli Görüş or the “National Vision” Movement, promising to redeem Turks both at home and abroad from the corrupting influence of western values. Seemingly on the verge of consolidating a new Islamist era, Erbakan as Prime Minister in 1996 overplayed his hand by paying an official visit to Iran’s Islamic Republic at the same time as his followers began to lobby for a re-Islamization of Turkey. Again, the Army intervened decisively, forcing Erbakan’s resignation. Last came Erdoğan, who entered politics as a follower of Erbakan’s extremist youth movement—producing and starring in a play, “Mas-kom-Ya” (the Masonic-communist-Jewish Conspiracy)—but learned to downplay hardcore Islamist commitments in order to present his Justice and Development Party (AKP) in its 2002 election victory as a tolerant center-right party defending the right of Muslim female college students to wear headscarfs. Domestically, Erdoğan slowly purged secularists from the Turkish army, judiciary, and media. Unlike Egypt’s current Muslim Brotherhood regime, he avoided telegraphing his punches by pushing early on for radical Islamization. Also in foreign policy, the evolution was slow and deceptive—punctuated by high visibility outreach to the European Union and even a 2005 state visit to Israel before Turkey gradually reoriented toward the Arab world and the Islamic Republic of Iran. Events such as the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the 2010 Flotilla were excuses for, rather than causes of, this foreign policy reorientation. Nor should Turkey’s cordiality to Jews in the centuries following the extension of hospitality to those expelled from Spain in 1492 be exaggerated. The Ottomans protected Jews but also discriminated against them. The regimes of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and his successor, Ismail İnönü, were more friendly until pivoting from a pro-Allied alliance in 1939 to pro-Germany neutrality in 1941, when İnönü parroted Hitler’s anti-Semitism by having the official Turkish press accuse Jews of selling olive oil adulterated with machine oil to naïve Turkish consumers. The 1942 “varlik vergist” or “wealth tax” targeting especially, though not exclusively, Jews, some of whom were deported to labor camps in “Turkey’s Siberia.” Things got better only after the Turks shifted back toward the Allies in 1943. There should be no doubt that today’s Islamist Turkey is hostile to Jews—not just “Zionists.” On November 15, 2003, two car bombs targeted Beth Israel and Neve Shalom synagogues in Istanbul, with follow-on attacks targeting the British Consulate and a British bank. The toll in the synagogue bombings was 20 killed and over 300 injured. Even while Prime Minister Erdoğan was paying a symbolic visit to Yad Vashem in 2005, the monthly publication “Aylik,” organ of the Turkish jihadists who claimed responsibility for the 2003 Istanbul synagogue bombings, ran 18 pages of anti-Semitic materials combining Quranic, Nazi, and Holocaust Denial motifs. Among the articles: “The Cift’s Castle.” Cift is a Turkish pejorative meaning “filthy Jew.” Turkish media were rife with bizarre conspiracy theories that both Atatürk—hated by Islamists for his secular reforms—and Massaud Barzani, leader of the Kurdish Democratic Party, were “secret Jews.” Turkish anti-Israel, anti-Jewish sentiment—now enflamed by government-controlled media—has only become more virulent since then. In 2011, Erdoğan accused Israel of “hiding behind the Nazi Holocaust” to persecute Palestinians. The Obama Administration’s invitation to Turkey to serve as co-director of America’s new Global Counterterrorism Forum (GCTF)—despite the Turkish regime’s undisguised support of the terrorism practiced by Hezbollah and Hamas—is ill-conceived. Washington’s attempted mediation of an Ankara-Jerusalem rapprochement has also collapsed. Visiting the tomb of Atatürk in 2009, President Obama declared that his “greatest legacy is Turkey’s strong and secular democracy.” Atatürk must be spinning in his grave.