[ad_1]
Marc Piasecki via Getty Images
Stretched out, in his underwear, with a beer in hand, Recep Tayyip Erdogan is determined to discover the Prophet under the veil of a curvy waitress who smiles with her buttocks exposed. “In private it’s nice,” reads the Charlie Hebdo headline. Here we go again, in French we say “surenchère”, it is the resurgence of the blasphemies of Paris against the Turkish president. The diplomatic crisis between Ankara and Paris heats up, yesterday in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, the photographs of Emmanuel Macron and the French flag were burned. Today, the cover of Charlie burns diplomatic relations.
Erdogan says he is offended not by “the ignoble attack on his person, but by the insult to the Prophet.” There will hardly be a response from the French government. President Macron spoke the other day at the solemn funeral of Professor Samuel Paty, who was beheaded by a young Chechen precisely for showing Charlie’s cartoons in class: “There is no turning back.” The president embodied the solemnity and the French myth on the occasion, collecting the solidarity of Angela Merkel and then all of Europe: “We will continue, for freedom and reason. In France, the lights will never go out. We will teach humor, distance, respect for others ”. Liberté, fraternité and cartoons.
Now it is necessary to understand what effect Erdogan’s call to boycott French products will have on the Arab world, his personal fatwa that Le Monde, in today’s issue, compares with the one pronounced in 1990 by Khomeini against the author of Salman Rushdie. of the Satanic Verses. But that was a theocratic regime, the Ayatollah was a religious authority throughout the Shiite world. Yesterday, an Iranian newspaper published on the front page a cartoon of a demonized Macron, pointy ears and hellish eyes. From caricature to caricature.
But Erdogan’s karma is quite different. Le Monde, in yesterday’s editorial, called the Turkish president an “arson sultan.” Relations between the two countries have been strained for more than a year for Syria and Libya, Turkey has made incursions into the eastern Mediterranean, between Greece and Cyprus, Paris has sent fighter jets in response to fly over the area.
According to French analysts, the Turkish president tends to multiply external conflicts to appear before the Turks as the architect of a new Ottoman power, while the Turkish economy is in crisis, the currency collapses and the project of cultural revolution loses speed and repression. against opponents grows. After Syria, Libya, Iraq and the eastern Mediterranean, Erdogan also made himself felt in the Caucasus alongside Azerbaijan in the conflict with Armenia in Karabach. And air defense missile tests are planned with S-400s bought by Putin in violation of NATO agreements.
But there is also something specific about the Turkish irritation towards France. The bill announced by Macron against religious separatism also plans to intervene on the presence of imams who teach Turkish in French public schools. A project with an effect that is not only symbolic.
So there is much more than cartoons, the relationship between France and the Arab world passes through the six million Muslims who live on French soil and also in business established with the elites of the Gulf. Chirac in 2003 kept France out of George Bush and Tony Blair’s offensive against Saddam Hussein. Again in 2015, Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu was sent by Erdogan to Paris on January 11, 2015 to parade on the Place de la République in tribute to Charlie’s cartoonists killed four days earlier. At the time, Turkey and most secular Arab countries had viewed that massacre as an attack on Islam. Davutoğlu was in the front row, alongside Hollande, Merkel, one step ahead of Matteo Renzi. Turkey is also in the front row today. Who will go after her?
[ad_2]
