Europe's next door threat

The caricature of a megalomaniac politician

Victor Angelo

 

My text of last week on Islamist radicalism provoked several reactions. The Portuguese friends, who have always lived in Portugal, although with many tourist trips in the curriculum, were surprised by my description of the intolerance in certain schools and in some segments of French society. This is a situation that does not occur in Portugal. Here nobody intimidates anyone by mentioning Infante D. Henrique, Mouzinho de Albuquerque or the atheist José Saramago. Friends living in the Europe of immigration - in Belgium, for example - have recognised in my chronicle situations that are familiar to them. The rejection of values that we consider fundamental and life in social silos are commonplace. They added that it takes courage to talk about these things, in a balanced way and without falling into primary and racist recrimination. I have also received messages from former co-workers, who live out their Muslim faith in many parts of the world. For them, the problem lies in the mockery, the caricatures, their interpretation as an instrument of the Europeans' onslaught against Islam.

I remembered then that at the ceremony to honour Professor Samuel Paty, President Emmanuel Macron said that France would not give up the cartoons. I understand that position. What others see as an unforgivable offence is for us a simple expression of freedom. Religion is a subject like any other. In Europe, the collapse of the idea of blasphemy began in 1789 with the French Revolution.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan clung to Macron's statement about the drawings to treat his French counterpart as mentally ill. He said it repeatedly, so that there would be no doubt about the insult. For Erdogan, the drawing of a bottom end in the air is more shocking than the inhumane persecution of millions of Muslims by the Xi Jinping regime. He does not get nervous, he says nothing about it.

We live in unique times, with one head of state harassing another, from an allied country. Erdogan's hostility towards Macron is nothing new. It began right after the French president's term began in 2017. There are several points of friction between them, starting with the French opposition to Turkey's accession to the EU and continuing in Libya, Syria, in support of Greek sovereignty in the Mediterranean Sea and more and more. There is also enormous tension within NATO, where France accuses Turkey of holding back the organisation's strategy when it comes to regions in which Ankara is directly involved.

On top of all this, I can guess that Erdogan wants to break the alliance that exists between Paris and Berlin. He is investing against France knowing that Germany, where more than four million people with Turkish roots live, does not have much room for manoeuvre to take a stand in solidarity with France. By attacking this pillar of the EU and maintaining the recurrent threat of opening the gates to a new wave of migration to Europe, similar to that which occurred in 2015, Erdogan's Turkey constitutes the most important risk to the survival of the European project.

At the December European Council it is absolutely necessary that the leaders of the member states take a tough stance against the Turkish president. In international politics, there are only two possible positions before a bully: give in and end up paying a high price, or else confront him with all the necessary diplomatic arsenal.

Salman Rushdie warns us that "fundamentalism is not about religion, but about power". Erdogan sees himself as the leader of Sunni Muslims and the guardian of the faithful in the face of the so-called European attacks. He combines megalomania with fanaticism. In collusion with the radicals of the Muslim Brotherhood and with the financial support of Qatar, Erdogan has established in several European countries a series of associations which, under the guise of religion, culture and humanitarian action, promote totalitarian interpretations of the Koran and its image as a defender of the faith.

One of the tasks of the European security services is to monitor these associations and their most influential members. It is, however, an almost impossible mission. Monitoring every potentially violent extremist, to be done properly, requires around twenty officers, twenty-four hours a day. The real answer must therefore be political and shared by all European countries. 

(Machine translation of my opinion column of today, published in the Portuguese newspaper Diário de Notícias, Lisbon)