Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, US President Donald Trump's "very good friend," as the American president has described him, continues to host and provide refuge to Hamas mass murderers, who keep planning terrorism and attacks against us from Istanbul and Ankara. Yesterday, we learned that dozens more such attacks, which could have ended in major disasters and many casualties, were recently thwarted by Israel, fortunately.
On this matter, Erdogan is thumbing his nose not only at Israel but also at Trump. That is hardly surprising. Trump, after all, does not spare the Turkish president expressions of admiration and affection, just as he often lavishes strange expressions of admiration and friendship on other sworn enemies of the State of Israel.
Mojtaba Khamenei, for example, whom Trump, unbelievably, expressed sorrow over after he was harmed and called a "brave man"; the Emir of Qatar, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, who according to Trump is a "fantastic and brave man," despite the fact that he and his regime have for years provided financial, political and ideological support to the Palestinian Nazi terrorist organization Hamas, and, just like Erdogan, hosted its offices and headquarters; and also Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa, the jihadist known as al-Jolani, who continues to butcher his own people, yet Trump sees him as a "true leader and a fighter ... a tough guy with a very strong past ... a true leader ... pretty amazing." Trump, hard as it is to believe, is assigning him the task of dealing with Hezbollah instead of Israel.
Foretelling the end
Trump's "good friend," Erdogan, has during the years of the war managed to call directly for Israel's destruction (March 2025), define Israel as a "terror state" and "a threat to all humanity," compare us to Nazis and publicly wish for our annihilation. The Turkish megalomaniac even made clear that Israel's end was near, and that "the atomic bombs it possesses will not save it."
Unlike in the past, the Turkish president no longer bothers to deny the ties between his regime and the Hamas attack planners operating from his territory. And perhaps that is no wonder, when this is a man who was in contact before and after the massacre with the architects of Oct. 7; a man who expressed respect for the late Sunni religious authority Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who issued a religious ruling permitting suicide attacks against Israelis; and a man who had close ties with Qazi Hussain Ahmad, the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood in Pakistan, who rejected the very legitimacy of Israel's existence. Erdogan also met with two of the most prominent subversives among Israel's Arab citizens against the very existence of the Jewish state, Sheikh Raed Salah and Kamal Khatib, leaders of the outlawed Northern Branch of the Islamic Movement in Israel.
Since Oct. 7, Erdogan has treated us as an enemy, and the obvious question is: Why do we not treat him as such? Why is someone who hosted, and still hosts, arch-terrorists on his soil, some of them deportees from the Shalit deal, who direct terrorism against us from there, still not formally defined in Israel as an enemy? Why is someone who turned Istanbul and Ankara into a home and safe haven for Hamas headquarters or offices, and into an oxygen pipeline for the economy of the Palestinian Nazi terrorist organization, still not considered our clear enemy?
Why should we not see him, too, as part of the network of "and their helpers" of the modern Nazis, who massacred, raped, beheaded, abused, abducted and murdered us on Oct. 7? Why not expose his ties to the murderous organization as well in the upcoming trial of the Nukhba terrorists?
Erdogan, in whose country the Israeli and US flags, and the portraits of Netanyahu and Trump, are burned in the streets, exactly as in Iran, defines Hamas terrorists as mujahideen, holy warriors, and admires the "martyrs" of the Palestinian Nazi terrorist organization. In his speeches, he notes the commitment to "defend Islam" and describes the need for an "alliance of Islamic states" to act against Israel as a "religious duty." Only recently, he prayed that "al-Qahhar," one of Allah's names, meaning "the destroyer" or "the subduer," would devastate and destroy Zionist Israel, "the one created by Satan."
Trump's America knows this reality well. Nevertheless, in Erdogan's case too, it struggles to internalize that hatred rooted for generations in religious fanaticism cannot be extinguished with firehoses of money, just as the DNA of Iran's Revolutionary Guards cannot be changed in the same way. We, unlike Trump, must behave and speak differently, and make sure the entire world knows who the real Erdogan is.
