Grey Wolves are also popular in Germany. There are serious reports that they make efforts to infiltrate politics / army / police forces. It's simple: These are fascists.
Erdogan is a dangerous man. He once recited an Islamic poem including the lines [0]:
> "The mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets our bayonets and the faithful our soldiers..."
I am sure Germany has to be very careful in dealings with Erdogan, since Germany has such a large amount of Turkish migrants and thus they could quite easily destabilise the country.
A few years ago in The Netherlands the Turkish people started large scale protests due to a Turkish minister being denied entry. The Turkish people clearly identified themselves as Turks first and foremost, since they were carrying the Turkish flags during their protests [1].
Turkey maintains a strong kind of grip on its Turkish citizens abroad using state-funded Diyanet mosques [2] and allowing dual citizenship [3] - children born from Turkish countries living in a foreign country receive the Turkish citizenship by default.
Gray Wolves and ultranationalists predate Erdoğan and his own movement. The two have been at odds with one another but - being the clever politician that he is - he has allowed himself recently with those ultranationalists.
For a while Erdoğan brought in reforms for Turkey's Kurdish population, far beyond what any previous Turkish government, including the ultrasecular ones, had done. Of course he turned his back on them in the end and went back to what comes natural in Turkey, which is to vilify Kurds, Armenians, Greeks and pretty much everyone else.
I think the world is progressively realising that islamists are taking over the muslim world. What is unhelpful is that many confuse islamists and jihadists, which are a tiny fraction of islamists. Erdogan is a muslim brother.
You can do the exercise (I did) of going through every muslim country on the map, from Morocco to Indonesia, and lookup the recent political history of that country on wikipedia. In every single of these countries, no exception, either:
- the Islamists are in power or one of the largest political parties (Iran, Saudi Arabia, Marocco, Turkey, Pakistan, etc)
- the Islamists were one of the largest political forces but have been banned (doesn't mean they are not present) (Jordan, Algeria, etc)
- the Islamists are one of main the parties to a civil war (Libya, Syria, Yemen, etc)
I don't know what can be done in the west. I see this as a kind of repeat of communism. It's an idea which time has come. You don't get people to change their mind by force. They need to experience why it sucks before turning against the idea (in that respect Iran is probably leading the way, where the islamists seem to increasingly lose support of the population). And it doesn't mean it's a homogenous block (neither was communism).
> You can do the exercise (I did) of going through every muslim country on the map, from Morocco to Indonesia, and lookup the recent political history of that country on wikipedia. In every single of these countries, no exception, either:
> - the Islamists are in power or one of the largest political parties
Do you consider Central Asian countries muslim ones? (At least until very recently) these countries (especially, Uzb.) brutally supressed any Islamic attempt at gaining any sort of power. I read elsewhere Uzb. now is trying to "liberalize" its politics with respect to "religious freedom" among others.
I think the right word is "infiltrate". Not just army and police, but sports clubs, refugee centers, city halls, everything.
It is the long arm of Ankara and if they were Russians or North Koreans, they would have been proscribed by the German authorities a long time ago. Unfortunately, their dangerousness was not recognized early enough, so they were allowed to expand. What to do with this cancer now, that is the question.
They are trouble in Turkey too, key institutions in the country are often a battleground of infiltration between sects and just before the Gulenists, the dominant force in the police was the Grey Wolves. Since the exodus of the Gulenists, the rumors are that Grey Wolves are back in town.
Whoever wins, it usually results of abusing their position for political and financial gains and we learn about what happened after the institution changes hands(For example, only after the battle between Erdogan and the Gulenists, evidence came into light of the police involvement of the assassination of an Armenian Journalist, probably intended as a political manipulation).
Germany should be very careful, having loyalty to an external charismatic leader and acting as an organisation within an organisation is unfortunately commonplace among Turks. They are not majority but tend to be the more passionate ones.
They seem to have at least some influence in the Turkish community in Sweden as well. The former Swedish minister for housing Mehmet Kaplan was ousted for having association with them.
