by Burak Bekdil, BESA Center
In 2018, the Turkish police began to raid onion wholesalers on suspicion that they were artificially raising onion prices and trying to “illegally overthrow” the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Pro-government headlines included “Police find onions in onion storehouse,” which in America would be a headline from The Onion. At around the same time, Erdogan claimed the US was plotting to economically damage Turkey just as his government signed a deal with US management consultant McKinsey to help Ankara implement a new medium-term economic program.
Back in 2014, the Turkish president caused loud laughter when he claimed that Muslim sailors had reached the American continent in 1178 (314 years before Columbus) and that Columbus said in his memoirs that he had seen a mosque atop a hill on the coast of Cuba. Not much has changed since then. In June 2020, Sabah, a fiercely pro-Erdogan daily, claimed that an ancient site in Thessaloniki, Greece, built 300 years before Muhammad, was a mosque.
One of Erdogan’s deputies, Ali Ihsan Yavuz, became the joke of the year after he and party officials failed to prove their allegations of election fraud when they lost Istanbul to an opposition candidate in 2019. “Even if nothing [illegal] happened,” he said, “something happened.”
Before the same round of municipal elections in March 2019, a district mayor from Erdogan’s party said: “If we lose Esenyurt [district elections] we will lose Islam; we will lose Mecca and Jerusalem.”
