Turkey is fun!

It will definitely be fun to observe the Turkey President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan will leave behind. The current “only-Zionists-and-traitors-don’t-love-Erdoğan” feeling may turn into a less tolerable one that illegalizes not loving Zeus’ 21st century Turkish-Islamist reincarnation attempt. But Turkey is always fun.

 Hannes Swoboda, the leader of the second largest group in the European Parliament, told Today’s Zaman that he felt cheated by Mr. Erdoğan’s (undemocratic) governance. In fact, the members of the 43 million or so-strong Turkish club that does not love Mr. Erdoğan should feel cheated by Mr. Swoboda’s disappointment: Did you really expect, Honorable MP, that you would not feel cheated by Mr Erdoğan? If so, what planet have you been living on in the last decade?

Western Europe’s intellectuals have not always been too good at facing realities which, particularly, they may subconsciously not like. As author Amos Oz once put it, “the walls of his grandparents’ Europe were covered with graffiti saying, ‘Jews, go to Palestine;’ now they say, ‘Jews, get out of Palestine.’” In that sense, Turkey has a “very European” foreign minister who is widely speculated to have emerged as a strong potential candidate for the seat Mr. Erdoğan will most probably choose to vacate. Ahmet Davutoğlu must be supported if he intends to take over, for he would be President Erdoğan’s perfectly honest and hard-working Ottoman Medvedev – provided that he no longer designs foreign policy.  

Meanwhile, the “empire” Mr. Davutoğlu longs for and is surely in a slow-motion remake hitting the headlines the world over – just like an empire being remade would. For instance, although they later denied it, Turkish authorities have “threatened” the world that they are considering abandoning the World Wide Web to establish their own web with a “ttt” protocol instead of the conventional “www” amid Mr. Erdoğan’s efforts to rein in global websites, including Twitter and YouTube. 

“Instead of www, a ttt system could be formed. Turkey and other countries could establish their own domains. Such a move would detach the Internet systems from each other. This is a controversial issue,” Communications Minister Lütfi Elvan was quoted as saying by daily Hürriyet. Never mind if European MP Andrew Duff immediately Tweeted that “The man [Mr. Elvan] is clearly an idiot.” Apparently, not all Western European intellectuals are too slow to grasp realities. But the empire makes the headlines.

Hürriyet columnist Ahmet Hakan suggested that a better protocol could be “rte.” He is right; but a more imperial idea could be three crescents and stars which Turkish engineers could invent, apply to future keyboards and lure billions of Internet users around the globe. 

Two more good pieces of news from the emerging empire… The Cabinet has reportedly endorsed plans for the design, development and manufacturing of the first “100 percent Turkish” passenger jet (that will go in tandem with the first “100 percent Turkish fighter jet”). That’s great news! Especially when one thinks of the possibility that the Turkish engineers who will build the first Turkish jet should have on board President Erdoğan during rounds of test flights. No doubt, that honor should belong to the president.

But the best news of the week came from a less important man. He is the chairman of Turkey’s first “cyber security and defense R&D center,” and spoke on the occasion of the graduation of the first students from this jewel of advanced science institute. A pro-Erdoğan newspaper heralded that “Turkish engineers will shake the whole world!” We are proud. But it would have been a better PR move if the Turkish cyber geniuses waited a little bit longer to break the wonderful news and let the recent tapping scandals, including Mr. Erdoğan’s “encrypted phone” and a top-secret Foreign Ministry meeting, subside somewhat. 

All the same, the first graduates of Turkey’s super cyber security engineers must already have shaken parts of the world, especially those who tapped, recorded and leaked dozens of pieces of explosive material since Dec. 17, 2013. If the clandestine men are not suffering fits of laughter now, when will they?