Mar 19, 2015

On March 16, A Haber, a Turkish “news channel” that acts more like a propaganda outlet for Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his incumbent Justice and Development Party (AKP), broadcast a sensational “documentary.” Titled “The Mastermind,” the two-hour film was billed as an expose of the great international conspiracy targeting Erdogan’s “New Turkey.” It was also a sequel to "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion," the early 20th century anti-Semitic hoax claiming to describe a Jewish plot for global domination.

Erdogan himself introduced the very term "mastermind," or "ust akil," to Turkish political language some five months ago, as I explained in Al-Monitor. No wonder the A Haber documentary (available here in full) begins with Erdogan telling his followers in a speech: “Don't be misled. Don't think that these operations are against my persona, our government, our party. Friends, these operations are rather directed against Turkey itself — its unity, its peace, its economy, its independence. And as I have said before, behind all these steps there is a mastermind. People ask me, ‘Who is this mastermind?’ Well, you have to figure that out. And actually, you know what it is.”

It is implied that the documentary is a response to Erdogan’s call, that it has “figured out” the identity of the mastermind, which many Erdogan supporters already know: It is “the Jews.” Theirs is the mind, the documentary tell us, that “rules the world, burns, destroys, starves, wages wars, organizes revolutions and coups, and establishes states within states.”

To explain why Jews do all these horrible things, the documentary goes back 3,500 years, right to the time of Moses. It describes the Exodus from Egypt, lists the Ten Commandments and mentions the Ark of the Covenant. Turkish academic Ramazan Kurtoglu then explains that Jews are very angry today because the Ark of the Covenant is lost. That is why, he argues, when the United States occupied Iraq in 2003, the real plan was to search for the old manuscripts that would help the Jews find the Ark. (It is hard to understand why “Jews” would dislike other people because their ark is missing; you just have to trust the documentary on that.)

The film then jumps to three “important figures,” or three great Jews, who supposedly left their mark on world history. The first is Maimonides, a “rabbi” who allegedly argued that “Jews are masters, other human beings are slaves.” The second is — guess who — Charles Darwin, who the documentary confidently describes as Jewish. (This is of course wildly inane and ignorant, for Darwin was born and raised a Christian.) Then comes Leo Strauss, the American political thinker whose ideas inspired the neoconservatives.